Surfing Behind the Wall

The failure of conspiracy theory, of conspiracy theory, of....

2012-02-21T06:50:00.001-08:00

I’VE never been the greatest believer in conspiracy theories. The problem I have is that they’re just too convenient to be true. Zionists, for example, cannot be behind every bush. In conspiracy theory-speak, events slot in seamlessly and everything occurs according to plan.

In this model, the conspirators are given almost divine qualities. It’s like an idolatry of fear. For example, the Bilderbergers – a sinister bankist group which meets behind closed doors every year – might plot and plan world events, but to assign dread power to them would be unwise.

I’m sure that their agenda has had to deal with more failures than successes. There are just too many people on earth right now who don’t want to be enslaved by rapacious bankers promising utopia, but actually delivering interest dependency.

The Occupy Movement is the tip of an ice-berg that is seriously threatening the corporate Titanic. Islamic finance, which offers a much fairer and equitable economic model within the system, has been a threat for years.

There is also just too much public cynicism of authority today. The poor, the majority of us, no longer trust bankers and politicians, whose public identities seem to have merged. Governments, whose primary task is to look after the people, are now solely focused on the fiscus.

As a journalist I’ve seen enough conspiracy theory imploding on itself to realise that actual events can conspire against conspiracy itself. For what the conspirators always forget is that where’s there’s push, there’s pull.

Take the Iranian situation: Iran is seen as a threat because it is pursuing the development of nuclear technology. A map of the region showing US bases in the region and the Gulf, quickly indicates that Iran is under siege – and not Israel, the US or any other Shi’ah paranoid Gulf State.

The push in Iran against the conspiracy script has been going since 1979 when the country kicked the US (bank friendly) Shah out of power. Imagine the gloomy faces at the Bilderberg table that year!

With that failed conspiracy, the conspiratorial masters had to come up with another one. That was when Martin Indyk, former US Israeli ambassador, coined the term “dual containment”. The consequence was the war between Iran and Iraq, a terrible conflict that cost millions of lives.

Of course, the Iran-Iraq scenario is much more complex, but what the bankers ultimately lost was control of Iranian oil reserves, and the sympathy of Iranians. If that wasn’t enough, Iraq’s Saddam Hussain – formerly a willing client dictator – had started to think for himself.

So when he began to talk about sweet Iraqi crude not being pinned to the US dollar and its banking system, his number came up. The proxy colonisation of Iraq now became an actual one when US forces, with its embedded media corps, rumbled into Baghdad.

And whilst the faceless bankers did make a royal mint out of Iraq’s invasion, it did have unintended consequences; collateral costs for which innocent Americans will have to pay for generations to come. Everybody knows that billions of dollars disappeared in a dark vortex of corporate looting in Iraq.

President Barak Obama’s strategic retreat from Baghdad (as with Kabul) is purely a financial one. For after years of occupation, the US hawks (and the bankist conspirators) can no longer afford to face the spiralling costs.

Combine a failed imperialist exercise with the collapse of the developed world’s financial markets, the Federal Reserve frantically printing fresh-air money to save the US economy and the Euro debt crisis, and you get failed conspiracy agenda on a grand scale.

I believe that the complexity of world events is far beyond the reach of even a scheming committee with a low moral IQ such as Bilderberg, or any 33rd Degree Mason. Man may indeed plan, but as all Muslims know, Allah plans best. If we push, Allah can pull. If we pull, Allah can push.

This touches on an absent component of the ethos of the so-called global conspirators. Their morality – if one can even call it that – is based on a vacuous expediency driven by profit, power, self-righteousness and greed. They accord themselves through their inbred arrogance, quasi-divine attributes. Their light is actually darkness.

It’s a Dajjalian metaphor, for sure. The market place becomes heaven. The realms of the human soul and spirituality are denied currency. Strangely, literalist extremists of various bents have bought into this totalitarian model, the ends justifying the means, laundered with selectively quoted scripture.

And lest anyone try to deny this, there are more than enough examples in scripture and history to prove my point that conspiracy – or totalitarian “agenda push” – denuded of spiritual imperative will always be doomed to abject failure. What about communism?

To be fair, “agenda push” can be a profitable exercise, yes, but without sincerity, prophetic value, a sense of social inclusiveness and an eye to human benefit, it loses all grace and profit.

It’s really easy to understand. Imagine if the ancient Babylonians, for instance, had built the Tower of Babel to house homeless people, instead of arrogantly trying to reach Heaven. Surely if Nimrod had not thought of himself as untouchable, a simple gnat would not have brought him down?

Indeed, history has been unkind to conspiracy. And, in the same vein, I believe the future will be equally harsh. Anti-Christs, Messiahs, bankists and secrete societies plotting in dark rooms will all be cruelly exposed on the altar of hard truth.

New Zealand is world’s most “Islamic” country

2012-02-13T06:59:00.000-08:00

HOW “Islamic” are Islamic countries? This was a question asked by two George Washington University researchers, Scheherazade Rahman and Hossain Askari, in the Global Economy Journal of 2010.

And whilst the paper is already two-years old, its pioneering approach and its Islam-West paradigm do make it compulsory reading for anybody interested in world affairs.

This is because the Arab Spring, calling for political rights in the Muslim world, and the Occupy Movements directed against bankism in the West, have thrown into sharp focus the questions asked by the paper.

In their abstract, the authors discuss the post 9/11 era. They observe a developing global curiosity in relations between faith, finance, politics and human rights. Where exactly does faith fit in the picture?

The researchers point out the deficiencies of academics such as Bernard Lewis (who first coined the term “clash of civilisations”) in trying to understand this relationship between religion, economics and society.

The biggest problem, they say, is that Islam tends to be judged by what those labelled as Muslims do, and not by the actual message of Islam.

The central question, then, was whether self-declared Islamic countries – as determined by membership of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) – embraced policies founded on true Islamic teachings.

To measure “Islamicity” the authors had to create their own paradigm. This was done by examining the necessary scaffolding required for an Islamic state, and by developing an index to measure the standards.

Over 208 countries were measured under four categories: economics, legal and government capacities, human and political rights and international relations.

The central assumption was that daily decisions made by individuals in society were governed to some degree by their belief systems, which fed into other values.

However, measuring Islamicity – as the authors soon discovered – was not so easy. Of the 57 member states in the OIC only seven (Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iran, Mauritania, Pakistan, Oman and Yemen) declared that they were Islamic states, with a mere 12 saying that Islam was their state religion.

In the study the 208 countries (Muslim and non-Muslim) were compared to a subset of Islamic ones. Western indices, such as the UN Human Development Index and Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, were related to Islamic principles.

The authors outlined four Islamic constructs that had to underpin the notion of a successful Islamic state: Walayyah (compassion through wisdom and justice), karamah (the acknowledgement of human dignity), meethaq (the recognition of the sovereignty of the Creator) and khilafah (responsible viceregency and trustee-ship).

Although they did not mention it, the above fundamentals would have been further bolstered by Imam al-Ghazali’s six famous social principles: the right of religion, the right to wealth and property, the right of one’s progeny, the right to personal dignity and the right to receive justice.

Implicit in this blueprint are the values of a caring society marked by legislative justice, the fair distribution of wealth and genuine leadership.

Economically, said the authors, Islam’s legal systems called for free markets, but not according to the current Western capitalist model. For example, fiqh demanded risk-sharing and disapproved of taxation of imports and exports. It also prohibited monopolies, hoarding, speculation and price manipulation.

The authors concluded that institutions proposed by Islam relating to governance, social solidarity, cooperation and justice were inherently designed to achieve economic development and growth.

The results of their research, which they do emphasise is “preliminary”, does make for interesting reading, though.

This is because the Islamic states fared badly. New Zealand, said to have more sheep than humans, came out as number one, with the US – slated as the world’s top democracy– rated only 25th.

China, usually seen as a rapacious economic powerhouse, was a surprising 27 and India, with its ramshackle democracy, came in at 89. Israel, the bête noire of the Islamic world at 61, was rated higher than the Islamic states, but the occupied West Bank and Gaza (giant blots in the Israeli copybook) were 207.

The top rated Islamic state was Bahrain at 64, though recent events there would probably have seen its rating plummet. Iran was a lowly 163 (only three slots away from Afghanistan). Of the countries declaring Islam as their state religion, Malaysia was highest at 38.

Of the Arab Spring countries, Tunisia was 83. Egypt was 153 and Libya 196. Perhaps what the ranking here predicts is that Tunisia could make the critical transition from dictatorship to democracy quicker than the others.

Of course, one has to bear in mind that these rankings are pre-Arab Spring, but Syria at 186 and Yemen at 198 are somewhat predictive of crisis as Iraq, Sudan and Somalia languish in this region of the graph.

Africa, the Cinderella of all continents, came out poorly – though there were some exceptions. The highest ranking African country was Mauritius at 42. Mauritius has a significant Muslim minority, and as a small Indian Ocean island punches far above her weight.

Namibia was next at 45, South Africa at 50 and Ghana at 53. Significantly, South Africa ranked higher than the self-declared Islamic states. What is interesting for us is that, apart from China, we are the highest rated of the BRIC countries.

The authors conclude that their “very preliminary” results show that Islamic states are not as Islamic in their practice as one would expect. However, the prominence of developed countries tending to place higher on the Islamicity Index has to be taken into proper context.

The relationship between faith, finance and polity is a complex one. The lack of development in Islamic countries cannot be attributed to religion alone.

The age-old problems of developing countries, such as unskilled government, bad economic policies, aid dependency, systemic corruption, lack of social equity and broken-down health care systems have little to do with Holy Law.

It is, in fact, as the authors say, the shortcomings of the governments and their respective policies – and not religion – that accounts for the litany of dismal failures that bedevil the Middle East and Africa, even those countries blessed with oil and natural resources.

The Orion scandal - a call for traditional values

2012-02-07T05:57:00.001-08:00

THE Muslim Judicial Council-Orion story has, without doubt, become something of a community soap opera. Initially hallmarked by the MJC’s ineptitude in dealing with media, it has devolved into a wider question of organisational accountability.

Why the MJC did not nip the Orion scandal in the bud is a pertinent question: for had it responded with alacrity from the get-go, it’s hardly likely that the organisation would have been publicly embarrassed by Debora Patta on e-TV’s 3rd Degree.

At the heart of the Orion saga is its fraudulent re-labelling of non-halal products as halal. This was exposed on YouTube by two former business partners of Orion who have maintained that CEO Patrick Gaertner owes them money.

In the video we are treated to pork hearts, and kangaroo and water buffalo meat being re-labelled halal. Expired chickens are also given a new shelf life, and milk powder unfit for human consumption is relabelled as being fit for human consumption.

The South African National Halal Authority (SANHA), the Red Meat Industry Forum, the South African Meat Industry Company and the MJC made a successful High Court application against Gaertner.

However, the notion that the MJC Halal Trust might have certified pork products does not hold water. Nor did any Muslim retailer buy the re-certified Orion products.

The Cape-based MJC Halal Trust, that has borne the brunt of public anger since Orion’s duplicity was exposed, says it only certified 18 consignments of imported chickens that were shipped into South Africa by Orion.

Since the furore erupted, the MJC has entered the social media domain, issued a public apology, opened its books, gone on a road-show and instituted an official inquiry into the halal process. According to its audited accounts, the Halal Trust turned over about R8 million in the last financial year.

But as the MJC drags itself off the bottom of a trough, there are bigger questions. Other community organisations such as the Muslim Consumer Forum (painfully mindful of the MJC’s chequered past) have gone on active campaigns against the organisation.

Their criticism (and in some cases strident calls for the MJC to be disbanded) have to tempered with the fact that the MJC is the deep well from which the community has drunk for over six decades.

It’s the equivalent of trying to bulldoze the ANC off the road. Well-embedded institutions hold real power, and the influence of their groupthink should never be under-estimated.

What needs to be understood is that it’s not always necessarily the institutions that are at fault per se, but rather the content of their halls and the collective ethos that they may reflect as a result. Who is to deny that the original notion of establishing an Islamic judiciary in 1945 was not a noble one?

But how then, does one explain the sustained indignation against the MJC – an indignation that extends far beyond its latest crisis? Surely the point is that whatever might be questionable within the MJC is as equally questionable within the community?

Both are related. Who, for example, sustained the divide on the admittedly clumsily handled moon issue of the 80's and 90's?

I believe it is only classical tradition that can ultimately address the question, which boils down to the parlous state of most Islamic community institutions that are so riven with conflict, egotism and incompetence today. If anything, the MJC is but a symptom of a far greater social malaise.

With political structures falling short on human ethics everywhere, today it is left to religious ones to pick up the moral slack. In Africa in particular religious leaders enjoy more credibility than the political demagogues.

As a result, its priests and imams enjoy huge responsibilities, sometimes far beyond their capacity. But it is they who have to set the Qur’anic (or Biblical) tone for socio-economic justice, using reasoned discourse and the model of prophetic conduct, whether it be Jesus or Muhammad (SAW).

Very briefly, there are several areas where there needs to be focus, especially in our community, if things are going to improve organisationally in the future.

The first is that organisations have to be motivated by true intentions of sincerity – and that this has to be accompanied with an ethos of inclusivity, an inclusivity that embraces unity in diversity, as opposed to uniformity without diversity.

Or, as one of my teachers has said: “the more you elevate Allah and his Messenger with sincerity, the more you sweeten things around you”.

The second is that the grace of others has to be acknowledged. The hydra of jealousy, or hasad, that customarily surrounds those who are successful in our community, needs to be cast aside for genuine appreciation.

When it comes to the scholars we have to remember it is they who keep us out of the fire by teaching us Qur’an and how to pray, and it is they who marry us and bury us – and at the most elevated level, it is they who should be happy to stand behind when merit actually demands that they should stand in front.

Thirdly, the responsibility of our religious leaders and ourselves to guard our tongues, especially on matters we are ignorant of, is paramount. Belief and Sacred Law is a grave business. All the schools of thought have to be respected, and seriously considered.

Fourthly, it was never the Sunnah – the practice of the Prophet (SAW) – to mention names and to personalise matters on pulpits or public platforms. Rather, the focus should be on issues in the sense that the player must follow the ball, and not the man.

Fifthly, all of us should not be so hasty to assume the mantle of infallible authority through our ignorance. Islam cannot “say” on matters, for to do so is to arrogantly assume divinity itself.

Sixthly, we have completely lost the tradition of transmitted knowledge and the humility that goes with it. With respect: how many of our current ‘ulama, for example, have really sat – or still sit – at the feet of other Shaikhs? This is a learning tradition as old as Islam itself.

Sayyid Habshi, the author of the famous Risalat ul-Jami’ah was an ‘alim in his own right, but he still attended the classes of Imam ‘Abdullah ‘Alawi al-Haddad for forty years. The late Imam Farid Manie was happy to learn from Shaikhs twenty years younger than him; this after having spent several decades at the feet of his mentor, Shaikh Mahdi Hendricks.

Finally, we have to turn to the science of Tasawwuf, not in the sense of sitting on a dreamlike Sufic cloud, but in the practical sense that its primary focus is a reigning in of the nafs, the undesirable human attributes that govern our major senses.

Tasawwuf is all about discipline, and the central question is that if those who lead us – no matter where – can’t discipline themselves, then what hope can the greater community have that it will not be led by the nose?

Surfing Behind the Wall: The MJC-Orion fraud halal crisis – “a real disgrace”

2012-01-24T23:08:00.000-08:00

Surfing Behind the Wall: The MJC-Orion fraud halal crisis – “a real disgrace”

The MJC-Orion fraud halal crisis – “a real disgrace”

2012-01-24T23:02:00.000-08:00

THE MJC-Orion fraud halal saga is without doubt, the most emotionally-charged story I’ve had to deal with in over 20 years of covering community issues. I’ve never seen such collective anger directed at an organisation.

The Cape Town-based Muslim Judicial Council, the MJC, has really been feeling the heat. The community is angry because of MJC bungling of PR; this after 3rd Degree journalist Deborah Patta’s questions of its role at Orion with regards to pork products being classified “halal” did not meet adequate response.

At the heart of the matter is a YouTube video portraying Orion workers de-labelling pork products and re-labelling them as halal. The MJC Halal Trust certified some of Orion’s products, and thereby hangs the tale.

Orion is a cold storage facility, not a processing or slaughtering one – and according to the MJC – the Halal Trust’s involvement was no more than the certifying of 18 frozen chicken consignments at a cost of about R16, 000 to Orion.

Orion’s re-labelling of other products (such as kangaroo and buffalo meat) was brought to an end by the High Court. This was when the South African National Halal Authority (SANHA), the Red Meat Industry Forum, the South African Meat Industry Company, and other parties, made a successful application against Patrick Gaertner, Orion’s CEO.

Gaertner, who was evasive in the face of detail and contrite when it was convenient, claimed he’d been set-up. On 3rd Degree, Tobias Lombard – one of the men who filmed the YouTube video and who claimed Gaertner owed him R1 million – accused Orion’s chief of being fully aware of his company’s halal fraud.

That SANHA, a commercial competitor of the Halal Trust, led the litigation is interesting. But given the antagonistic, cut-throat nature of the multi-million rand halal industry, SANHA’s intervention is perhaps not surprising.

The MJC Halal Trust might have certified only pre-packaged chicken consignments, but its lethargic reaction to what was seen as a crisis in the community in terms of certifying pork as halal created suspicion with Patta and her producer, Barbara Friedman. 3rd Degree had originally delayed broadcast hoping for the MJC to respond to its questions.

Struggling to get a commitment for an interview, Patta and her crew arrived at the MJC offices to doorstop deputy-president, Shaikh Achmat Sedick. After being assured by a harried spokesman that the president and deputy-president were off ill, the e-TV crew discovered that their cars were in the parking lot.

With this tableau played out on national television, the Muslim community suffered what Mufti AK Hoosain of Channel Islam in Gauteng has described as a “real disgrace”, a PR disaster in which Muslims were “caught with their pants down” in front of South Africa.

Stunned by the public outrage, the MJC moved swiftly to give itself voice on social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, a refreshing change from its thoroughly moribund website and usually condescending PR.

The organisation did itself absolutely no favours, though, when Voice of the Cape radio station’s jumu’ah broadcast at St Athans’ Rd mosque in Athlone was allegedly commandeered by an MJC official. This caused a ruckus after the prayers, and serious concerns amongst Voice of the Cape stakeholders.

As the Facebook threads grew longer the clamour rose. Some respondents (particularly from PAGAD and the National Consumer Forum) called for the MJC – founded in 1945 as a judiciary – to disband.

A week after the broadcast, the MJC mustered a press conference at its Cashel Avenue headquarters. At the conference, MJC president Maulana Igshan Hendricks finally promised that the MJC would grant Deborah Patta a “one-on-one” interview.

The media was assured that the Halal Trust had never certified pork. Orion’s labels were fraudulent. The Halal Trust’s books were audited, were available for scrutiny and the organisation had “good standing” with SARS. Seventy-five percent of Halal Trust funds were ploughed back into MJC social projects.

During the press conference, a handful of PAGAD and National Consumer Forum members picketing outside the building were involved in a scuffle with MJC security guards. Police arrived but did not make any arrests.

Finally, whether the MJC has managed to rise out of the ashes of its worst-ever PR disaster is the big question.

Farid Esack, head of religious studies at the University of Johannesburg, believes that the MJC will bounce back. He told the Cape Times that it was not unlike the ANC. No matter how many times it blundered it would rise again due to its deeply-rooted history. Social media commentators feel that the MJC will have learnt the futility of arrogance towards the media.

The broader halal issues, of course, have not gone away. The South African halal industry has become a parody of itself for the sake of very big money, or as Mufti AK Hoosain says: “scholars for dollars”.

Indeed, for when items regarded as pure and uncontaminated by their very nature such as coffee and water are accorded Halal certification, then one has to seriously interrogate our scholars’ basic understanding of Sacred Law.

And whilst no-one denies notoriously underpaid imams and officials their financial due, all the Halal bodies will surely have to come up with credible ways to empower the largely impoverished communities that ultimately pay for the Halal process.

Áshura: the right to know the difference

2011-12-12T08:30:00.000-08:00

ON our community calendar there’s what I call a series of “seasons”. And like spring, summer, autumn or winter, they have their moods. One such “season” is Muharram, which marks the beginning of the Islamic year.

This is because it is a sacred month in which major events occurred, especially on the 10th day: for example, the creation of Adam and Eve and the escape of the Bani Isra’il from the Pharaoh.

However, its wider significance is often eclipsed by the martyrdom of Hussein, the son of Sayyidina ‘Ali, the noble Prophet’s cousin. His passing (in 680 CE) on the 10th of Muharram is lamented for ten days by the Shi’ah sect, and is called “‘Ashura”.

Hussain’s slaying – also lamented by Sunnis, but without the ritualistic dramaturgy of the Shi’ah – is an event hallmarked by the intrigue that characterised the politics of the era.

For instance, this is why Sayyidina ‘Ali – condemned for being too lenient in punishing the assassins of his predecessor, ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan – was forced to lead an army against A’isha bint Abu Bakr, one of the Prophet’s (SAW) wives, at Basra.

Historically, the problem has always been that the Prophet (SAW) left no indications as to what political system Muslims should adopt after his demise. It was a “consensus of the elders” that had elected the first Caliph, Abu Bakr.

It was this decision that led to a measure of dissent amongst ‘Ali’s supporters. Their view was that Abu Bakr, and the succeeding Caliphs ‘Umar and ‘Uthman, should not have accepted office ahead of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, a blood relative of the Prophet (SAW).

The Shi’ah quote the Hadith of Khumm, related after the final Hajj, which has the Prophet (SAW) passing the mantle of Commander on to Sayyidina ‘Ali, and Sayyidina ‘Umar pledging allegiance. Sunni scholars do not accept this interpretation of the Hadith.

Nevertheless, ‘Ali became the fourth Righteous Caliph, but he was handed a poisoned chalice: those who had been associated with the assassination of ‘Uthman supported him becoming Caliph.

So when ‘Uthman’s kinsman in Damascus, Mu’awiyyah, refused to accept ‘Ali’s rule, a schism arose in the Islamic realm. In public interest Sayyidina ‘Ali submitted to arbitration. He was assassinated by Ibn Muljam, a Kharijite, who claimed that ‘Ali had committed apostasy by allowing human intervention.

“Kharijite” originates from the Arabic root word “kharaja”, and means “seceder”, or one who “goes out”. Their belief was that jihad was a sixth pillar of Islam; and that if a Muslim sinned he became an infidel or a kafir.

Scholars such as Sayyid ibn Zaini Dahlan consider the offshoot of the Kharijites to be the modern Salafi-Wahhabis, the disciples of Ibn ‘Abd ul-Wahhab, the 18th century Saudi cleric. Kharijite (and Wahhabi) opposition to the Shi’ah spans over 1,300 years. For their ilk the Shi’ah are kafir and their blood halal – a view contrary to Sunni legal thought.

After Sayyidina ‘Ali’s demise, Mu’awiyyah became the Caliph. And as the centuries passed, the Shi’at ul-‘Ali (the party of ‘Ali) grew into a sectarian doctrine. There are historians such as Tabari who say Shi’ism was introduced by Abdullah ibn Sabah, a Yemeni Jew, who embraced Islam and declared ‘Ali divine.

Ibn Kathir also refers to this, but the question of Ibn Sabah is an academic minefield.

Shi’ah culture was definitely strengthened by the slaying of Hussain at Karbala. This was after Mu’awiyyah died and his son, Yazid, took power. Hussain’s elder brother, Hasan, had already retired from public life. Today, the Shi’ah curse Yazid and the Salafi-Wahhabis praise him. The Sunni ‘ulama, seeking balance, say that he had good and bad qualities.

Like his father, Hussain was caught up in events beyond his control. The citizens of Kufa, unhappy at Yazid’s Caliphate, wrote a letter to Hussain, requesting him to come to the city as their leader. But whilst he was en-route, Kufa switched allegiance to the Ummayads.

Hussain encountered Yazid’s forces at Karbala outside Kufa. After a 10-day siege during which time he refused to pledge allegiance to Yazid, his small party was slaughtered – Hussain dying with his infant son in his arms. His head was cut off and delivered to Yazid in Damascus.

The poetic lamentations about Karbala, recited during ‘Ashura, are famous in Shi’ah lore, as are the self-flagellations of Shi’ah devotees.

I’ve already said that calling the Shi’ah kafir has never been the Sunni way. The Shi’ah perform the Hajj. But during the ‘Ashura season, when emotions run high, there has to be a more level-headed community understanding of Shi’ah belief.

Yes, there is divergence, and in the spirit of adab i-ikhtilaf (the ethics of argument) surely it would be better to face these differences than to indulge in pulpit bashing or, worse still, killing the messenger by targeting the media?

Briefly, there are key points where Sunnis differ with the Shi’ah. But surely, the goal of confronting these differences should be comprehension rather than conflict, and critical empathy rather than emotion-soaked enmity?

The primary sticking-point for the Sunni world is that the historical Shi’ah imams, leading up to the end-times Mahdi, are regarded as infallible. Sunni theology only accords perfection and lack of sin to prophets. It does not agree that mere humans can enjoy the same status.

Whilst there are some similarities to the Sunnis in the application of Shi’ah Sacred Law, Sunni theologians do not agree with the rationalistic Shi’ah view that the Qur’an was “created”. In Sunni theology, the Qur’an was inherently “uncreated”.

Shi’ah aversion of Traditions transmitted by A’isha, Sayyidina Abu Bakr, ‘Umar and ‘Uthman, is problematic for Sunni Hadith scholars. The edict of temporary marriage, or mut’ah, permitted by Shi’ah fiqh seriously troubles Sunni jurists.

Finally, the fact that taqiyyah, the disguising of one’s true beliefs, is obligatory in Shi’ism is an anathema to the four prominent Sunni schools of legal thought, which only permit such dissembling if one’s life is at stake.

Obviously, space does not permit more than a cursory look at some complex questions, but it has to be said that the paranoia about Shi’ism during Muharram is baffling. Surely the right to know the difference, on an intellectual level, should be the preserve of every Muslim, Shi’ah or Sunni?

Al-Shabab - Taliban of the Horn

2011-12-08T05:53:00.000-08:00

WE never came across Al-Shabab forces in Mogadishu, but reminders of their presence was everywhere – from the bullet-ridden pasta factory to the IDP camps dotted around the city. Fighters had only been forced out by AMISOM forces a month before, and there were still pockets of resistance.

The crump of mortars and volleys of gunfire we heard every night in our compound reminded us just how close the conflict still was, as did the grenade blast around the corner at the Medecins Sans Frontieres offices.

Public spaces were safer, but our armed technicals would get jittery if we stopped to get out of our vehicles. They had good reason. In urban areas, Al-Shabab had become faceless.

Two weeks before our arrival a car loaded with explosives had been defused at Banadir Hospital. Several NGO’s worked there. Foreign fatalities would have been disastrous for the Transitional Federal Government (the TFG).

However, we did locate a group of Al-Shabab fighters in Mogadishu, albeit a group of defectors who were being “rehabilitated”.

We found them at a rudimentary camp near to the “pink house” where Al-Qaeda suspects were held by the Somali National Security Agency (the NSA) under the aegis of a covert US military command.

We arrived unannounced. The rehab camp, in operation for about three months (and its location no secret to anyone in Mogadishu), was a series of nondescript cement buildings amongst the dunes.

The somewhat surprised camp commander, Abdurahman Omar Osman, welcomed us. He made a call to get authorisation for us to visit. Permission was granted, the only condition being that we couldn’t interview the camp inmates, some 213 people.

That was disappointing. I knew that these ex-Al-Shabab fighters would have been processed by the NSA. Their security threat would have been zero, and their personal accounts would have made great human interest stories.

An Associated Press journalist had been briefly allowed to interview some of these Al-Shabab defectors, but – for whatever reason – the instruction was that SA journalists could not.

The defectors gathered around us as we chatted, and I could see that Al-Shabab – which means “the youth” – was an apt moniker. These were all very young men, some hardly old enough to have facial hair.

They were all Somali. Neither did they look like cold-blooded killers guilty of the beheadings, amputations and bombings for which Al-Shabab had become feared. They looked more like the hungry, jobless kind of adolescents you could see on any corner in East Africa.

Their ages ranged from 9 to 45 years, said Osman. The majority of Al-Shabab’s 14,000-strong force was under 25, and conscripting children younger than 15 years – which Al-Shabab actively did – was a war crime.

The 9-year old boy, Liban Mohammed, had been interviewed by AP, saying he’d been conscripted as a “spy”.

We moved out of the hot sun and settled down in Osman’s office, an echoingly empty room with a desk, a computer and a few plastic chairs. We asked him why these young men had defected.

“They are forced into things. They are told that music and TV are forbidden, and that they have to beat women …they also find that the killing is too much…that what they are doing is wrong,” explained Osman in halting English.

In reply as to why Somalis joined Al-Shabab, Osman said that Al-Shabab lured the unemployed and uneducated with promises of opportunity, but that fighters had also been kidnapped from schools and villagers.

He added that the defectors told him they’d been ordered to prevent people in the drought-stricken villages and towns (who paid Al-Shabab taxes) from fleeing the famine, and that the men had sometimes been shot.

The idea of the rehabilitation camp, the brainchild of a former Interior Minister, was to re-integrate Al-Shabab fighters into Somali society. The long term plan was to teach the youth job skills, but a lack of funding was hindering the process.

Back in central Mogadishu I questioned our translator, Abdi Nasser, about Al-Shabab (whose leadership had pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda in 2009). He said the organisation was currently divided into three and was not as homogenous as people thought it was.

He told me that originally about 90% of Somalis had supported Al-Shabab after the Ethiopian invasion of 2006 and the defeat of the Islamic Courts Union.

“People initially supported Al-Shabab because they thought they were good Muslims who would create order. But now after the all killings people realise Al-Shabab is extremist, and try to avoid it,” he said.

I asked Abdi Nasser how Al-Shabab rule had affected the citizens of Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital.

“Under them Mogadishu was a horrible place. Very dangerous. Now we’re sitting together; then it was very hard to sit and chat. They (Al-Shabab) were killing the people, even slaughtering women and using young kids as soldiers.”

He added sombrely that if AMISOM were to leave, Al-Shabab would be back in Mogadishu the next day. Abdi Nasser, a businessman, was understandably cynical about Somali politics, but said that he could only hope for the best from the TFG.

I also spoke to Abdi Harari, a 35-year old TFG soldier who’d been in uniform since 1999, and asked what he thought about fighting his own countrymen.

“They (Al-Shabab) have no mercy. They will kill me if they catch me. But when we capture them, we don’t kill them. One of our troops was captured by Al-Shabab and the leader told the man’s very own cousin to execute him.”

What was so appalling from the above – and so many of my interviews in Somalia – was the constant mention of death, this apart from the horrific attrition of the famine. Al Shabab, once a beacon of hope in a country desperate for solutions, had become yet another grim political reaper.

This underlined the biggest failing of Al-Shabab’s fundamentalist Salafi-Wahhabi ethos – its inherent neo-fascism, something that rushed into the political vacuum created by the meddling of Ethiopia and the US in the name of the “war on terror”.

In the hands of the remaining uneducated and illiterate, their angry black-and-white universe enables the blood of the other, “the infidel”, to become halal – and for the Sacred Law to become an ass.

This is why the Afghan Taliban could ban singing canaries, marginalise women educators, forbid music, amputate at will, justify suicide bombing and indulge in the cultural terrorism of dynamiting the Bamiyan Buddhas.

This is why, in exactly the same vein, Al-Shabab could declare three-cornered samoosas haraam; why women wearing bras could be whipped in public, and why school bells could be banned. This is why Al-Shabab could justify killing fellow Somalis in public suicide bombings.

This is why Al-Shabab could smash Sufi shrines and zawiyyahs – and in a disgusting act of irreverence – dig up the bodies of the Shaikhs. This is why a 13-year old gang-rape victim could be buried up to her head in a football stadium and stoned to death for adultery.

This article ends the series on Somalia.

Where's the beef? Halal meat scandal rocks the community

2011-11-23T05:49:00.000-08:00

THE three minute video on YouTube is often out of focus; it pixellates when there is lots of movement. But one thing is clear. Something fishy is afoot in a Cape Town refrigeration plant, where we are shown boxes on an assembly line.

When the cameraman zooms in on a label we can see that it reads “pork”. As the video moves on, workers are seen again – this time using a heat gun to remove labels. Generic halal signs are then pasted on to the boxes, and we see that they now say “veal hearts”.

Amazed, I’ve watched this video several times, and freeze-framed it to make sure what I’ve just seen. Whether this YouTube vignette is proof enough for criminal conviction is another question, but it has certainly caused a major furore.

This is because Orion Cold Storage, a Muizenberg-based refrigeration company, stands accused by two unidentified informants of relabeling imported meat products – including pork – as halal and passing them on to the unsuspecting consumer.

In an urgent High Court interdict it was alleged that Orion had also relabelled expired broiler turkeys from Shoprite Checkers; that it had relabelled animal feed milk powder as being fit for human consumption; that it had sold kangaroo meat as halal chuck-and-blade and that it had marketed water buffalo as beef.

The story was broken by Voice of the Cape and Eye Witness News, immediately raising temperatures in a community still reeling from the Hajj visa scandals.

Orion Cold Storage MD, Patrick Gaertner, replied that he’d been “set-up”, claiming that one of the “informants” (whom he did not name) was an unrehabilitated insolvent and former employee. The other, he claimed, worked for an opposition company (which he also did not name).

He said he valued his Muslim customers and that he intended to prove that he’d been subjected to “blackmail”. Gaertner also claimed that he had been threatened.

An interim interdict was lodged at the High Court against Orion by the South African National Halal Authority (SANHA), the Red Meat Industry Forum, the South African Meat Industry Company and other parties.

The application was supported by the Muslim Judicial Council and its Halal Trust (MJCHT), which had certified 18 containers of chickens imported by Orion. Gaertner had also claimed (before the hearing) that he’d enjoyed a “close” relationship with the MJCHT.

Shaikh Achmat Sedick, Deputy MJC president, had replied on Channel Islam that the MJCHT had not operated inside Orion’s plant. It was not a slaughtering facility, and the MJCHT had only checked the Halal credentials of poultry consignments from Denmark and Brazil.

He said the MJCHT had no responsibility for goods in Orion’s freezers, and had not certified any other Orion products. Maulana Ebrahim Adam, a spokesperson for the MJCHT, said on Voice of the Cape that Gaertner’s claims of a close relationship with the MJC were exaggerated and untrue.

In an affidavit Orion denied that it had altered any labels, claiming that the videotaped incidents were orchestrated without knowledge of management. A haggard-looking Gaertner said that the informants were untrustworthy and undertook to work closely with the MJC.

He told the judge he would welcome the MJCHT being at his premises to assure the public that his procedures were halal-compliant, and pledged that labels would not be changed on imported goods. The judge made this undertaking an order of the court, and that if the company did not comply, it would be in contempt.

Attorney for the applicants, Amish Kita, told the media outside court that the outcome of the interdict would not prevent his clients from ensuring that Orion be criminally investigated for fraud.

Spokesperson for the National Islamic Halal Trust (NIHT), Maulana Abdul Wahab Wookay, said that the Orion saga emphasised the need for uniform Halal standards between countries. He added that his organisation did not accept imports at face value, and that NIHT had been so “stern” that 85 butchers in the Gauteng region no longer imported meat.

He proposed a national Halal meat trader’s summit to iron out the problems, especially with butchers who imported dubious meat products.

However, as the dust begins to settle on the Orion saga, it becomes evident that there is much more to the court application than meets the eye. It has to be asked, for example, why Orion, a Cape Town company under the geographical domain of the MJCHT, had to be taken to court by SANHA, a Gauteng-based body, with no connections to Orion.

SANHA, reportedly the most reluctant of the parties of the National Halal Forum, could indeed claim “public interest” in this case which has certainly evoked much community ire, but it’s not enough to convince those in the know that the upstaging of the MJCHT might just have been on the cards.

Both organisations will vehemently deny this, but they are commercial rivals who’ve been locked in a longstanding multi-million rand turf war that has seen products such as bottled water, toothpicks, coffee, pasta, wet-wipes, sugar, lentils, mixed nuts, spices, breakfast cereal, canned fish and even sago being certified Halal.

The Orion case is also a neat distraction from the real issue, where God-given ibahah (initial permissibility) is turned on its head to prey on the fears of a Halal- ignorant public who don’t know any better.

The other point, made vociferously by the National Consumer Forum, is that the paying public sees no direct benefit whatsoever from the proceeds of the Halal certification, and that a regulation of the regulators is long overdue.

The blonde lady & surfing the other side of apartheid

2011-11-15T05:12:00.000-08:00

This piece was written for the 35th anniversay edition of Zig-Zag Surfing Magazine

I can’t believe that Zig-Zag is 35 years old. That’s a lot of pages.

Wasn’t it only yesterday that the mag was pasted up in a garage, and we shot pics in Kodachrome 64? I can still remember those first muddy black and white “action” shots, and the ultimate luxury, a grainy double-page colour spread.

But it was an era in which it was a privilege to grow up surfing. The waters were less crowded, False Bay sharks were mellow and there was genuine camaraderie in the line-up.

In my part of the woods, Johnny Paarman had earned the moniker, “Iceman”. In the power zones he was fearless and unbeatable.

I also pioneered surf photography down south, swimming at giant Sunset for the first time and getting my sinuses flushed with kelp.

Those were the days when Pierre de Villiers and Peter Button had just ridden a spot called Dungeons near Hout Bay.

“It gets bigger than the Crayfish Factory,” I remember Pierre telling Davey Stolk with typical understatement. Pierre and Peter used to hike over the mountain and then paddle out. Thank God I never swam at Dungeons. My sinuses.

But I think some of my most cherished memories are of the mid 80’s when South Africa was living through turbulent times. Of course, we carried on surfing. That’s what surfers do.

Many of my surfing mates were on the other side of the apartheid fence. Catching waves came against the background of police harassment and prejudice. But, hell, it was still fun.

It all started when Davey Stolk and I befriended people such as Shani Nagia, Ahmed Collier, Mogamad Davids, Tahir Davids, Faeez Abrahams and Rafiq Bagus. Rafiq, who won the SASU title before Cass swept the boards, was a street-wise survivor like Stolk.

In fact, I challenge anybody – even today – to throw Stolk or Bagus from the top of a building. By the time you’ve caught the lift to the ground floor, they’ll both be wiping the butter off their feet.

Another indomitable character was Ahmed Collier, father of Cass Collier – a talented athlete and fearless big wave rider, who went on the ASP Tour without surfing a single heat in SA against a white competitor.

Cass definitely got his balls from his father. Ahmed never stood back for anyone, and it was he who first paddled out at Long Beach, breaking all the racial taboos and really getting in your face if you didn’t like it.

Shani had started Wynberg Surf Club, the backbone of non-racial surfing, and later SASU, which was aligned with the anti-apartheid body, SACOS. Shani – still an unheralded and unrecognised figure – would also be one of the leading forces in surfing unity.

By 1984 Wynberg made contact with surfers in J-Bay, Port Elizabeth and Durban. The Jappie family in PE, the Jeggels’ in J-Bay and Terence Naidoo in Durban were the stalwarts.

SASU held national champs in J-Bay, Cape Town and Durban, and I remember Cheron Kraak of Billabong being the first sponsor. It was at Kitchen Windows that Cass Collier and Steven Jeggels first showcased their talents.

Stolk and I joined Wynberg, much to the shock and chagrin of the establishment, but we both felt that we were right. Black surfing was on the rise, and black surfers weren’t allowed to surf on white beaches. We felt we could make a difference.

The Cape Flats, where most of the surfers came from, was burning. Stolk and I got caught in the middle. We realised the seriousness of the anti-apartheid uprisings when we saw people dying in the streets.

But there was a funny side too. This is because the Security Branch started to take a keen interest in Wynberg Surf Club and its members, some of whom were the sons of a famous UDF activist, Essa Moosa.

The Branch took to following us around. We got to recognise a certain officer Mostert, who sported a bristling Voortrekker beard. He was relentless. Late one night he managed to collar one of our members, Addie.

He took him to a police station, and started slapping him around, as was the usual custom.

“Where is the fokkin guns? We know you donnerse fokkers has buried them on the beach?” thundered Mostert, who was trying to catch Rafiq for public violence.

“What does you discuss at your secret meetings on the waves?” he asked.

“Uh, we talk about J-Bay,” answered Addie innocently.

In their paranoia the Security Branch had thought we were about to launch a military attack on the Western Cape. But even when it became obvious that Addie (and the club) were not part of an Umkhonto Isizwe unit, Mostert still didn’t give up.

“And who’s that blonde lady with you?” he asked. This time Addie was really perplexed. Blonde lady? But his interrogator was insistent. It was then that that Addie realised Mostert was referring to me. In the 1980’s I still had hair.

True to form, Mostert pitched up at my work early one morning, but I managed to escape. As usual I was late, and Mostert – his usual impatient self – was leaving as I arrived. Ah yes, those were the days.

The Russell Tribunal: I think Israel is an apartheid state

2011-11-02T07:04:00.000-07:00

LIKE so many interested in the course of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, I will be keenly watching the Cape Town leg, which is the third of its hearings on Palestine.

With its brief to examine the superiority of international law in solving the Palestinian conflict, those eminent personalities standing before the jurors will be more than well-versed in what they have to say about apartheid as crime against humanity in the Israeli context.

Initiated by Lord Bertrand Russell in 1966, the original Russell Tribunal was originally founded to look at war atrocities in Vietnam. The Tribunal was supported by a host of intellectuals and academics. Its first chairman was the French philosopher, Jean Paul-Sartre.

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine, employing the same principles as similar tribunals in Vietnam and South America, had already sat in Barcelona and London on the question of European Union and corporate complicity with Israel.

The Russell Tribunal enjoys no legal status, and has been described by its officers as a “tribunal of the people,” one which examines instances of injustice and violations of international law that are not dealt with by the international community.

For pro-Israeli lobbyists the Russell Tribunal is seen as an annoyance, a pesky distraction capable of making a noise, but incapable of executive decisions.

As a journalist, Palestine and the Middle East has been one my beats, and I’ve been there on assignment on numerous occasions covering a variety of issues over the past 15 years. My conclusion – after having interviewed hundreds of people from all sides of the conflict – is that Israel, basically an ethnic island in a sea of Arabs, is an apartheid state.

Having made that bald statement, let me qualify my view. This is because Russell Tribunal naysayers will immediately assume that I’m drawing cosy parallels and vehemently deny that comparisons can be made between apartheid South Africa and contemporary Israel.

The point is hardly the comparison, but that as South Africans we are better positioned than most to understand the layered nuances and emotions of institutionalised racism. And whilst Israel is a different place to South Africa, the similarity is in the naked intent of political power – to subjugate another people in the name of an ideological, ethnic agenda.

It is our empathy and understanding – as well as our practical experience of a hard fought for peace process – that we bring to the table as South Africans.

There is, of course, the fact that apartheid has gone on to enjoy a generic definition via the Rome Statutes of the International Criminal Court. The South African model no longer applies. Today apartheid is regarded as an inhumane act in the context of it being a crime against humanity.

The Rome Statutes are confined to violations of international law committed after 2002. And so for the purpose here, without venturing into the complexities of Middle Eastern history, I’ll confine myself to a small sample of what I’ve witnessed since 2002 – things that I would consider worth examination by those who argue so passionately that Israel is not guilty of apartheid.

But, to a brief comparison: when I first landed in Tel Aviv in 1997, fresh from years of covering the anti-apartheid struggle and the TRC, I was shocked.

For a brief moment Israel was like a post-traumatic stress flashback to South Africa. Communities surrounded by guns, pimply teenage conscripts with power beyond their wisdom, prickly attitudes – and the mind-numbing bureaucracy – reminded me of home in the 1980’s.

However, there was a vital difference to South African apartheid. This was a point repeated to me to me by Ribbon Mosholi, International Relations Manager for the ANC, who visited Palestine late last year.

She was initaially shocked too, saying she had never thought she would come across another system like South Africa. During South African apartheid people had been banned and put under house arrest. In Palestine people were not banned, but a whole nation.

And that is the most critical divergence between South African and Israeli apartheid. Rather than confining those of other races into group areas, Israeli apartheid has essentially focused on denying the existence of a people.

To put it bluntly, it’s Erez Israel – a greater racially defined Israel – or bust. Israeli political scientist, Professor Ilan Pappe, has gone so far as to call Zionism a policy of Palestinian “ethnic cleansing”.

That is why Gaza is such a huge issue. If confining a population the size of Mitchell’s Plain (or Soweto) into an area equivalent to the Cape Point Nature Reserve, and then completely sealing it off to starve, is not a form of institutionalised racism, then what is?

The pro-Israeli lobby also has to ask itself questions about operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009. I was shown pictures in a medical report of flechettes (limb-cutting devices) found in explosives that had killed and maimed civilians.

What about the phosphorous bomb, banned by international convention, which landed in the courtyard of a Gaza school? I’m in no way justifying Israeli civilians being targeted, but asymmetric response with internationally sanctioned weaponry is obscenely beyond the law.

What needs to be answered too are the concerns of municipal officials I spoke to from Nablus and Gaza about over a million people having their water periodically cut off during the summer months; this done against the background of Palestinian West Bankers not being allowed to dig wells.

They wanted to know why the illegal settlements, which consist of about 40% of the current West Bank population, used 80% of Palestinian water resources.

Then there has to be investigation into the “unrecognised” towns and villages deliberately denied water, electricity and municipal status. There are plenty of these in the Galilee and Negev regions if anybody wants to look for them.

People such as the esteemed Judge Richard Goldstone have argued that Israel is not an apartheid state. And yes, there may not be “Jews only” signs on Haifa’s park benches, but what about Palestinians who have to travel on separate roads to settlers, and West Bankers (carrying ID documents not dissimilar to the dompas) who cannot enter Jerusalem?

After 2002 I saw the construction of the West Bank Wall, or “Apartheid Wall”, which has completely destroyed the fabric of Palestinian life.

Five metres higher than the old Berlin Wall, the “Apartheid Wall” was declared an unlawful construction by the International Court of Justice in 2004, and has stripped away swathes of Palestinian territory. I defy anyone to argue that the West Bank Wall is not an instrument of forceful racial separation.

At the end of the day, the issue is not whether the Russell Tribunal enjoys executive powers or not. The issue is that the Russell Tribunal is an opportunity for civil society to see things in Israel for what they really are without the camp Zion-isms, the political absolutisms and the crude distortions that currently bedevil its fretful landscape.

The Gilad Shalit Release: Weighing up the Positives

2011-10-31T06:49:00.000-07:00

THE Gilad Shalit deal, Shalit’s safe conduct home from Gaza after six years of incarceration in exchange for over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails is – without doubt – one of the more fascinating chapters of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

But it has to be understood in context, something that has been lacking in the current discourse surrounding the event.

For when Gilad Shalit, a teenage member of an IDF armoured brigade, was captured in 2006 by the Al-Qassam Brigades who’d burrowed under the Gaza wire, the Levant was still in the control of dictators such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, men who acted as mediators between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

These were Arab leaders who would unquestioningly see to US and Israeli interests. In 2006 perceptions were completely different to what they are now. A hard bargain from Hamas would have had little truck in Cairo, whose leadership would have seen Hamas with the same jaundiced eye as its own Islamic Movement.

When Shalit was captured in 2006, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had already overseen the end of the ‘Arafat era, and had ensured the death knell of the Oslo Accords by persisting with illegal settlement building on the West Bank.

With Hamas on the post 9/11 US list of terror organisations and PA President Mahmoud Abbas officially declared persona non-grata by Sharon, Israel had earned – as former aide Dov Weisglass would have put it – its “no-one to talk to certificate”.

But this was to prove a brief respite for the Israeli hawks, so reluctant to engage with peace or Palestinian statehood. Sharon was cut short by his stroke and a much weaker man, Ehud Olmert, would take his place.

In January 2006 Palestinians (on the urging of President Bush) were sent to the polls and defied the script by voting Hamas into power. The covert arming by Bush (as revealed in Vanity Fair) of the PA strongman in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, did not result in the expected overthrow of Hamas.

By July of that year, Israel under Olmert had invaded Lebanon in response to niggling incidents in southern Lebanon. The IDF lost several of its crack troops at the hands of Hizballah, whose intensity of challenge – and incessant rocket fire into Israel – was something it had not been fully prepared for.

In spite of Lebanese infrastructure being destroyed and one million people displaced, the Arab street rejoiced in what it perceived was victory. Israel, the invincible, had been humbled by Hizballah.

This, I think, was the turning point in the region – the event that planted the seed for the Arab Spring. I was in Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon during the war. For the first time ever, I saw the Arab world cursing its leaders in the streets.

And when Benjamin Netanyahu, carping at Ehud Olmert, told the BBC that he should have razed Lebanon’s cities to the ground, I saw people laughing. For those who had little left to lose after decades of dictatorships, failed nationalisms and disastrous wars, the feared Zionist entity had become a joke.

For Gilad Shalit in his cell somewhere in Gaza this would have meant little. But in the larger scheme of things it was a big moment. The plates had shifted under the ground and an earthquake was imminent.

For Israel, who shares long borders with Egypt, Mubarak’s fall this February was an unexpected blow. The murderous hand of Gaza’s Operation Cast Lead in 2009 and the Mavi Marmara killings in 2010 had proved disastrous, and now in 2011 Israel’s go-to man in the Middle East had gone.

According to the Middle East Monitor’s, Dawud Abdullah, the diplomatic role of Egypt with regards to Israel and the US changed to a less subservient one after Mubarak’s departure.

Egyptian mediation became more attuned to Arab interest, and with the aid of Turkey, Hamas and Fatah met in Cairo in April. This was followed by the PA’s campaign at the UN to get official recognition for a Palestinian state.

Facing a restless Israeli constituency, Netanyahu had to confront demands for Gilad Shalit’s release. Always a politician, though, his move was well considered. Opinion polls in Israel showed 79% approval of Shalit’s release, in spite of the clamour saying he’d capitulated to terrorists.

Then there was the fine print for the release of the first 477 Palestinians, 42% of whom would be deported and 11% of whom would face some form of house arrest.

There were also unfulfilled expectations. Marwan Barghouti (FATAH) and Ahmad Sa’adat (Palestine Front for the Liberation of Palestine), the most prominent inmates of Israeli jails, were left out of the deal.

Both are seen as major role players in Palestinian politics and integral personalities to any future peace process. There are those in FATAH who feel that Barghouti, a popular youth figure, could be its next leader.

Whilst Netanyahu basked in the euphoria of the release of Shalit, and tried to play down the Israeli negatives, Hamas, FATAH, Islamic Jihad and the PFLP also claimed victory. Their cadres came home to heroes’ welcomes.

Unfortunately, Gilad Shalit’s release – a positive event – has evoked intransigent response in Zionist quarters. This has clouded the issue. Melanie Phillips of the British Daily Mail, for example, told her readers that Shalit’s release had marked the “end of the peace process”.

By dealing with Hamas the Israeli government had sidelined Mahmoud Abbas, she claimed, describing Palestinian celebrations as an “obscene joy” and that Israel faced “genocidal Arab rejectionism”.

But as Wadi Abu Nasser, head of a Haifa think tank, pointed out to me last week. Israel did not deal directly with Hamas, but through German and Egyptian mediators. As for the peace process, there was no peace process. Oslo had been extinguished by Sharon.

However, there are several lessons to be learnt from Gilad Shalit’s exchange. The first is that if you negotiate with an enemy that you don’t necessarily have to like, the sky doesn’t fall in. The second is that genuine political compromise is measured by its positives, because there will always be unfulfilled articles of desire.

Thirdly, Israel is no longer in the untouchable position it was in the Middle East before the Arab Spring. The landscape has changed, and the nascent Arab governments – facing daunting challenges – will be expected to be far more demanding with regards to the peace process and international law.

Indeed, if any victory be granted in the Gilad Shalit deal, it is by a nose length the Palestinian one.

Mogadishu, 2011: the Obvious Wages of War.

2011-10-24T06:43:00.000-07:00

The Hajj visa selling scandal: Public Protector must intervene

2011-10-20T07:17:00.000-07:00

South African Hajj pilgrims might well be up in arms about the illegal sale of visas and the alleged corruption of certain tour operators, but historically, Hajj rip-offs are as old as the Hajj itself, a sacred Abrahamic ritual.

Wherever people have journeyed to Mecca, carrying their precious silver, gold or cash, there have been predators waiting in the shadows. To visit Mecca during the lunar month of Dhul Hijjah is only incumbent on a Muslim once in a lifetime, but its hardships are legend.

Chronicles by mediaeval authors such as Nasir Khusrow, Ibn Battuta and Ibn Jubair talk of the dangers of Hajj travel, and relate heart-rending stories of people being robbed of their belongings and money en-route.

Hardly a century ago, the Hajji could not enjoy the guarantee of a safe return home. For most pilgrims, the Hajj would take several months of arduous travel by sea and land.

And if concerns about physical safety weren’t enough (Ibn Sa’ud only chased away highway robbers on the Jeddah-Mecca road in the 1920’s) there would be the challenges of malaria, bubonic plague, yellow fever, TB and cholera.

Air travel, inoculation and air-conditioned buses have certainly reduced the discomfort of the Hajj. But with it have come different challenges. Safety, comfort and the affordability of air travel have meant that more people can visit Mecca.

This is borne out by figures released by the Saudi Press Agency. In 1950, 100,000 pilgrims gathered on the plains of Arafat, the locus of the Hajj. By 1983 this number had increased to one million pilgrims.

In 1988 this led the Organisation of Islamic Countries (the OIC) to pass a resolution on Hajj quotas to ensure that the Saudi infrastructure could cope. This agreement, which allows a country to only send one pilgrim for each 100,000 persons, restricts the total Hajj quota today to about 2½ million – which is its limit.

Indonesia, the biggest Muslim country on earth, has a quota of 221,000.

For decades South Africa, with a Muslim minority population, existed under the Hajj radar. A special Saudi dispensation to South African Muslims during apartheid was that they could get visas on entry to the country.

This meant that the South African Hajj was not regulated, and each year an average 8,000 South Africans would perform its rites. By the early 1990’s our Hajj industry had grown to be worth more than R220 million annually.

In 1994 with the advent of diplomatic accord after apartheid, the South African Hajj landscape began to change. The South African Hajj and ‘Umrah Council (SAHUC) – recognised by the Saudi Hajj Ministry – was established to act as a regulatory body to liaise with the Hajj authorities.

Formed with the best of intentions by a former ANC parliamentarian, SAHUC was met with scepticism by the community, especially the Hajj agents who saw their turf threatened. Many slated SAHUC – whose executive members came from community organisations – as being incompetent.

Hajj numbers, however, stayed up. It was only in 2004 that South Africa was obliged to accept a quota, 3,500 pilgrims. In addition to these new restrictions, travel agents had to lodge sizeable deposits in Saudi Arabia, and abide by a code of conduct under which they had to be accredited by SAHUC.

Hajj totals were cut by half, and SAHUC instituted an online application system designed at grading pilgrims according to first time needs. The system was swamped and just over 10,000 applied for Hajj. Glitches in the system caused suspicion, allegations of nepotism and widespread dissatisfaction.

This led to the formation of an organisation called Hajj Watch, one that claims SAHUC is illegally constituted, has no mandate to represent pilgrims and should be disbanded.

With demand now outstripping supply by over 50%, smaller Hajj agents struggled to meet their commitments. The multi-million rand industry went into a tailspin. The attrition rate amongst Hajj operators would be high. Many went out of business or had to merge with bigger companies to survive.

For pilgrims all was not entirely lost as the Hajj Ministry would usually grant South Africans a further 1,500 visas just before the Hajj. This would bring the total up to 5,000 – but would still be 3,000 short of the average figure.

The additional visas, I was informed by Saudi authorities, came from poor sub-Saharan countries unable to fill their quotas.

But this year many prospective South African pilgrims were shocked. The Hajj Ministry – also having to deal with the logistics of a Mecca under re-construction – had strictly applied OIC diktats.

The OIC and the Saudis estimate that there are 2½ million Muslims here, and so the 2011 Hajj quota was 2, 500, the lowest ever. The additional quota of 500 was also the lowest ever too, and it left SAHUC facing an angry constituency, as it only met the needs of 10% of those waiting in the Hajj queue.

One can then imagine the fury of those in line when news broke that 11 Hajj operators had been fingered in a “highest bidder gets served” visa scandal. Hajj visas are issued free by the Saudi embassies and their sale is illegal. Visa corruption is the scourge of many a Hajj mission.

What has to be noted about visa selling locally is that it has been going on for years, even reportedly within the inner circle of SAHUC. In 2004 I exposed a visa tout on Voice of the Cape radio, as well as other cons by certain Hajj operators.

But with Hajj being a seasonal thing, passions soon wane after it passes. And that, combined with SAHUC’s constitutional limitations in punishing miscreants, has always been the problem in rooting out the offenders.

And never more urgent has the call been for agencies such as the Public Protector to intervene in the Hajj, a sacred South African Muslim institution that is not only riven with widespread dissatisfaction, but alleged malpractice.

Hajj crisis: yearning for the traditional values

2011-10-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

WHEN I first went to Makkah in the 1980’s I bought a ticket via Thomas Cook – no SAHUC, no agents, no problems. But then things were a lot simpler. The most direct air route to Jeddah was via Nairobi, where you hoped your transit would be brief.

We were then the world’s number one nasty nation, and Kenyan immigrations treated South Africans like dirt. We were not allowed to enter the country, and I once remember being stranded at the airport without food for 36 hours.

But challenges of that era aside, the process of getting to Makkah seemed so uncomplicated. I would simply book my ticket and go. Visas were obtained on entry to Saudi. Accommodation, which was cheap, was negotiated upon arrival.

I can recall staying in Aisha Bewley’s Bayt – the Arabic for “residence” – a stone’s throw away from the Makkah Haram for 10 riyals a night. Granted, it was a small room – but it had an air-con and a bed.

I use the word “Bayt” with fondness because that’s what we used to call accommodation in the Holy Cities. There was no such thing as a “hotel” with satellite TV, dinner buffets and obliging Bangladeshi butlers.

In fact, I’m probably the last generation able recall the old ways of Makkah and Madinah; an era when the locals, people like the late Sayyid Safi, were such gracious hosts. You felt you were a guest of Allah in the true sense of the word.

The old buildings were still standing, and the Wahhabis had not yet managed to flatten all the ziyarah places. In Madinah I can still recall walking a few blocks from the Haram, and discovering quaint old mud houses amongst palm groves filled with birds – and a magical world that reminded me of the Qur’an.

The neem trees hadn’t even been planted at ‘Arafat, and the Wahhabi muftis hadn’t yet put up the funny green boards saying it was against the Prophet’s (SAW) wishes to climb Jabl Thawr.

If I sound wistful, it’s not because I’ve airbrushed my travels to create a glossy, postcard of yesteryear. Indeed, there were challenges. The Wahhabi morals police would think nothing of smashing your cameras – or as I once witnessed, dragging a woman out of a phone booth during the adhan.

Reciting the Qasidah Burdah, or the magnificent Dala’il Khairat, in Madinah was enough to get the askaris – as we called the Haram guards – rushing to tear up your book. I heard lots of bida’h, shirk and kufr in those days – and once had my hands slapped when making du’ah at the Prophet’s (SAW) grave. I just ignored the askari and lifted my hands again.

But if I have to comment on my nostalgia, it’s because what I yearn for is the more soulful, traditional values of the Hajj and ‘Umrah. This is something that many Saudis have totally forgotten in their indecent haste to transform Makkah and Madinah into “Allah Vegas”.

I would argue that crass materialism and interest-based market forces have permeated into the very cloth of the Ka’bah. Many of our so-called Hajj agents and certain SAHUC office bearers, currently caught up in visa and other obscene scandals, are mere symptoms of this end-time malaise.

Mimar Sinan, the famous Turkish architect who renovated the Haram in the 16th century, was so in awe that he refused to build anything higher than the Ka’bah. Yet today Saudi developers boast about a multi-million dollar clock, a monstrous wart looming 1,000 metres over the Haram.

It seriously begs the question: where’s the spiritual respect, the old-fashioned adab towards the sacred environment?

Indeed, the same developers have kept quiet for years about the ecological havoc they’ve wreaked in the Holy Cities. Sewage now flows into Makkah’s oldest cemetery, the Jannat ul-Ma’ala. This is where Khadijah, the wife of the Prophet (SAW), lies buried.

How many pilgrims visiting Makkah nowadays know that the same developers, deaf to the ears of experts, damaged the well of Zamzam when rock-blasting? The BBC conducted chemical tests on Zamzam last year and discovered that it now contains arsenic.

The fact that residence near the Sanctuaries is only now for the pockets of the usurious elite is equally scandalous. The wealthy dwell around the Ka’bah in six-star, timeshare comfort. The rest of us exist on its periphery. Where is the egalitarianism of the pilgrimage now?

In 2004, when the Saudis last allowed me to enter the country, I could see all of this beginning to happen. The dust and destruction of engineering Armageddon had just started, and I remember desperately wishing that this time round, the developers would try and tastefully blend the past with the future.

Unfortunately, my hope for urban aesthetics was a vain one. The first thing to go was the historic Ottoman fort. This put huge pressure on the birthplace of the Prophet (SAW), a building demolished by ibn Sa’ud in the 1920’s, turned into a cattle-market and then rescued in the 1950’s by philanthropist, Shaikh ‘Abbas Kattan.

To this day no archaeologist has ever been able to dig at the site. This is the very last vestige of the old, sacred Makkah – now threatened by the unsympathetic concrete and marble expansion of the Haram.

Indeed, the house of Sa’ud enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the only regimes in history to have overseen its own cultural genocide, and to have consciously obliterated its sacred spaces in the name of a religious demagogue, ibn ‘Abd ul-Wahhab.

Today in Makkah and Madinah there is nothing to remind future generations of what was before. The ancient ziyarah spots, which could have been preserved in an environment-friendly modern renovation, have all gone.

The places where the Prophet (SAW) and his noble Companions prayed, fought battles, slept, brought up children, drank from wells and witnessed miracles to found one of the world’s greatest civilisations are blessed historical footprints that have been swept away forever, and we are all the poorer for it.

Al-Shabab: the Taliban of the Horn

2011-10-13T06:52:00.001-07:00

Part One, the Birth of the Islamic Courts Union

TWO weeks after we’d left Mogadishu, the wall next to which I used to make my satellite broadcasts in our compound was damaged in a bomb blast. A mere block away on Kilometre 4, the city’s most notorious junction, an Al-Shabab suicide bomber had driven an explosive-laden truck into a government building.

The attack was directed at the Ministry of Education, where parents and students had gathered to get news of bursaries offered by Turkey. Its prime minister, Recep Erdogan, had recently visited Transitional Federal Government head, Shaikh Sharif Ahmed, a former Islamic Courts Union member – and now Al-Shabab’s number one enemy.

The explosion had killed 70 and injured at least 100 – all innocent civilians, and the perennial victims of Somalia’s conflict.

Shaikh Ali Mohammad Raghe, Al-Shabab spokesperson, had warned his fellow countrymen to stay away from Transitional Federal Government institutions. He had warned of further attacks. Everybody in Mogadishu knew that he was deadly serious.

For during our brief stay in the capital of 2 million people AMISOM (African Union) troops had defused three IED’s (Independent Explosive Devices) and disarmed a 13 year-old suicide bomber.

Nightly clashes

The nightly clashes we heard from our compound were also a reminder that the battle for the capital was ongoing, as was the grenade blast near the Medecins Sans Frontieres office down the road.

Madina Hospital, where Gift of the Givers surgeons had worked miracles in a makeshift surgery, was overwhelmed with casualties. This bombing – the latest in a litany of Al-Shabab terror attacks – came after it had been driven out of Mogadishu by AMISOM forces in August.

Somalia is said to be one of the most perilous places to work on earth, with 32 journalists and numerous aid agency workers killed on the job since 1992.

We used to drive past the Ministry of Education, which is also near to the spot where only a week prior to our visit in late September, a Malaysian TV journalist, Noramfaizel Mohd Nor of Bernama TV, had lost his life.

Ironically, he’d not died at the hands of Al-Shabab – renowned for its antipathy towards westerners and its proclivity for killing fellow Somalis – but rather the nervous trigger finger of an AMISOM gunner atop a South African Casspir.

According to eyewitness reports, the journalist’s militia had swerved in front of the Casspir. And in a jittery part of town where questions have to be asked later, the Ugandan soldier had opened fire.

But this is Mogadishu, a dusty seaside city – once known as the “white pearl” of the Indian Ocean – reduced to rubble by 20 years of strife. In its edgy streets where killers do roam free, it’s the AK47 that gets respect. With its ever-ready militias and all sorts of shady gunmen, Mogadishu is like the Wild West on steroids.

But in spite of a lack of effective government, life does go on in Somalia. It is this indomitable spirit that has sustained Somalis, many of whom have found Islam the most coherent way to endure war, political failure and famine.

Somalia is a clan based society. Siad Barre – who grabbed power in a 1971 coup – was able to ruthlessly exploit the clans, and bring the country to its knees by 1991, leaving a power vacuum filled by warlordism when he was ousted.

However, it has to be remembered that Somalia is an African country, and that its traditional Islam is African. The lingua-franca and culture of Somalia is not Arabic, in spite of its proximity to the Arabian Peninsula.

Until Al-Shabab’s Salafi-Wahhabis tore it apart, Somali Islam enjoyed a tolerant status rooted in Sufism via the Qadiriyyah, Salihiyyah and Ahmadiyyah Orders. Kismayo, the southern port city now occupied by Al-Shabab, was known as a Sufi centre.

Clan life then, was a tapestry of tasawwuf, tradition and customary law. Called “Xeer”, Somali customary law is – interestingly – not entirely contradictory to Shari’ah. Totally indigenous, its approach is polycentric, and is based on patriarchal consensus and conciliation.

The major difference is that in a Shari’ah court the victim of murder, for example, will have a choice of the penalty, legal retribution or blood money. Under Xeer, the clan elder – and not the victim – will determine the response. Xeer also entreats just treatment of women and children, and looks at family matters, the handling of resources and the disbursement of charity.

An interesting aspect of Somali clan life is that whilst clan elders might have been swept up into the maelstrom of Somali politics, the clans themselves had internal mechanisms of social order – mechanisms which would not have been political.

This is something that is not understood sufficiently by analysts of the Somali compass. For when the first Islamic Court appeared in northern Mogadishu (a Sufi stronghold) in the 1990’s, the response was not a political one.

Civilians caught in the crossfire

Civilians caught in the crossfire of anarchy were merely looking at a non-political solution to what was a social problem. The initial focus of the courts – which then sprung up all over Mogadishu – were primarily aimed at order and harmony.

Another neglected aspect is the role of the ‘ulama, whose attempts at conciliation over the past two decades have not been given fair due. Few remember the efforts of the scholar, Shaikh Muhammad Moallim, in trying to get General Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi to lay down arms in 1991.

The Islamic Courts of Mogadishu were clan-based, but decided to merge in 2004, their control extending over the city and into the countryside. Tensions rose when the Sufi-orientated movement, Ahl us-Sunnah wa’l Jama’ah, found itself at odds with the hard-line Salafi-Wahhabis.

In the meantime, the rise of Islamic consciousness on the Horn of Africa had started bleeping on the “war on terror” radar in Washington. A throwaway line by Usama Bin Laden to journalist Peter Bergen – that al-Qaedah had been present in Somalia since 1993 – saw the Bush regime creating a new frontier in Somalia.

In 2006 Ethiopia – claiming that it was a besieged Christian nation – invaded Somalia to crush the ICU and ruin the fragile peace. This invasion, backed by Bush, saw 600,000 inhabitants in Mogadishu being displaced. It also saw the creation of yet another Somali power vacuum – a vacuum into which Islamic extremism would rush to become an even bigger player.

Giving Hope to Somalia

2011-09-22T06:48:00.000-07:00

Shafiq Morton accompanied Gift of the Givers on its most recent aid mission to Mogadishu

FROM the air, the Somali coastline is postcard pristine. Waves curl over coral reefs, and dunes lead to sandy beaches. As our plane dips towards Mogadishu, the Horn of Africa’s most troubled city comes into view. As we prepare to land, our pilot skims over the heaving swells. It’s an exhilarating way to arrive, but as we taxi, the gloss disappears. A shot-up Russian Ilushin, its wings broken, is abandoned on the side of the runway. Beyond the fence, I see a bubble of plastic huts – the camps of those who’ve fled famine and Al-Shabab. Urbanisation has now ensnared Somali’s rural poor. The airport building is a basic structure without air-conditioning. It was built by the Chinese during the ignominious reign of General Muhammad Siad Barre, the man who started the rot in the Horn when he grabbed power via a coup in 1969.General Barre’s 21-year contribution to Somalia – once one of the most democratic of African states – was to divide it along clan lines, to fight a losing war with Ethiopia and to impose Cold War Marxism. Having courted the Soviets, the Americans and the IMF, General Barre was deposed in 1990. His departure left a vacuum, briefly filled by Farah Aideed, and then by warlordism, the brief rule of the Islamic Courts Union (until Ethiopian intervention in 2006) and the Salafist absolutism of Al-Shabab (after the ICU).The US’s ill-fated intervention in 1993 – relating to drought relief and nervousness about the security of the Gulf of Aden – was immortalised in the movie Black Hawk Down. We arrived in Mogadishu a month after AMISOM (African Union) forces, aided by South African, French and Scandinavian “advisors” employed by Bancroft Global Development, had chased Al-Shabab out of the city.Manned by 10,000 Ugandan and Burundian forces, AMISOM is an AU success story. Forget about international conspiracies (of which there are many). Forget about romantic notions of Al-Shabab being the heroic vanguard of the Somali underdog. Formerly the military wing of the more moderate Islamic Courts Union, Al-Shabab – which means “the youth” – has become part of the Somali problem. AMISOM chasing it out of the city has done a huge favour for the locals.My observation, based on numerous interviews with Mogadishu residents, is that Al-Shabab will be remembered for chaos and carnage. Whenever I mentioned Al-Shabab to those I spoke to, all I heard was “kill” and “bad”.This was corroborated by concrete evidence: the boy whose right arm was hacked off by his commander just because he had doubts; or the soldier who told me of a cousin who’d been forced to slit the throat of another family member.Stories of Al-Shabab bullying refugees fleeing the famine in the south were rife, from rape and plunder, to abductions.Rising out of the ashes of the ICU – which was an effort by businessmen to restore law and order in the 2000’s – Al-Shabab’s clumsy efforts to “Talibanise” Somalia, an African country boasting a tolerant Islam based on the traditions of tasawwuf, or Islamic spirituality, has been a disaster. Allegedly infiltrated by foreign mujahidin, Al-Shabab pledged allegiance to Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Usama bin Laden’s mentor, and over-ran the country with bloodthirsty vigour. Declared a “terrorist “ organisation by the US and Britain, Al-Shabab destroyed Sufi shrines, captured young boys to serve in its ranks, and terrorised the population with its distorted interpretation of Shari’ah, or Sacred Law.AMISOM, the only counter to Al-Shabab, is backed by the UN. AMISOM is an implementation of the Djibouti Accord (a peacekeeping initiative aiming for elections by August next year). All parties in the Somali mix – except for Al-Shabab – have representation on the 550-strong Transitional Federal Government (TFG) based in Nairobi. From afar, this may all seem crazy, interventionist and somewhat surreal. However, the Somali Assembly is a bombed-out ruin, and there is no infrastructure in Mogadishu. Here food and guns reign supreme. We had to travel everywhere accompanied by heavily armed militia.I would also learn from reliable UN and AMISOM sources that violence had dropped in the city by over 80% since their intervention in August, and that Mogadishu was coming to life again. In fact, during our stay three IED devices were successfully defused by AMISOM, and a 13 year old suicide bomber was intercepted. But, as interesting Somali politics may be, my story here is more about the South African mercy mission by Gift of the Givers, a Pietermaritzburg aid agency that has mobilised R40 million worth of aid for Somalia in a mere 47 days. Mogadishu – once an attractive and tree-lined seaport city – lies in ruins, bombed to its foundations by over two decades of conflict. With many of its own citizens Internally Displaced Persons (IDP’s) due to recent action against Al-Shabab, Mogadishu was in trouble.With no disaster relief, and most hospitals dysfunctional or closed for years, the flood of famine IDP’s flocking to the city for help since April had put it under unimaginable strain. War and famine had run into each other. International NGO’s, mostly conspicuous by their absence, had put those present (such as Medecins Sans Frontieres) under severe pressure. It was into this breach that Gift of the Givers stepped, giving hope to Somalia’s needy.We flew into Mogadishu with a large contingent of medical staff. Their brief was to work at Banadir Hospital, one of the few functioning health care centres in Somalia.After a few days at Banadir, GOG director Dr Imtiaz Sooliman received an offer from a hospital superintendent at Forlanini Hospital in the Abdi Aziz district north of Mogadishu.The hospital, recently liberated from Al-Shabab, had been standing empty for three years. Much to his surprise, Dr Sooliman was offered full control of the hospital, the only surviving structure in the neighbourhood.His team split up and moved in, putting up a fully functional operating theatre in less than a day. It was there that many miracles occurred. And whilst five month old Nasreen Siyad – weighing less than two kilograms – survived, there were those who didn’t.After having set up at Forlanini, GOG’s was asked by another hospital – Madina – to offer orthopaedic services. Again, the team went into action, the surgeons performing their first operation in a matter of hours.If that wasn’t enough, Saint Martini – another hospital in Mogadishu – had opened its doors for the first time in 20 years and desperately needed orthopaedic surgeons. With his crew on the ground already stretched to its limits, Dr Sooliman flew in another medical team.With most Somalis not having seen doctors in decades, the medics were under pressure. One doctor I spoke to said he’d seen a new patient every three-and-a-half minutes. At Forlanini alone, 600 people were seen a day.Somalia has thousands of people with high velocity bullet wounds and in theatres without lights, air-conditioning and running water, our surgeons saved many lives. Then there was the feeding. The IDP camps are big, and people live under bright plastic huts built out of twigs. Immaculately clean, considering the abject conditions, 30,000 people were being fed three wet meals a day, and would soon be drinking water from a well dug by South Africans.As I stood in the hot sun covered in dust, I acknowledged that I had a lot to think about. South Africans, via Gift of the Givers, had truly opened their hearts to Somalia, and seeing the smiles on the faces of once starving children, I realised that the impact had been immense.

Syria: A Question of Competing Narratives

2011-08-19T06:50:00.000-07:00

IT is much easier to understand Syria, currently stricken with political revolt, in the light of history. Since time immemorial, a host of empires have decamped on its soil. Damascus, watered by the Barada River, is one of the oldest capitals in the world.

Sharing a 900 km border with Turkey, the gateway to Asia, it is no stranger to conflict or colonisation: conquered by the Pharaohs, Alexander the Great, Nebuchadnezzar, Hulugu Khan, Tamerlane, the Crusaders, the Ottomans and the French, Syria’s soils have often run with blood.

But Syria has also been a place of peace and prosperity. Ibn Jubair, a tenth century traveller, wrote that Syria was a land of blessing. According to his diaries it was a land of civility and culture abounding in fruits and holy men.

Today the holy men may have gone to ground, but a visit to modern Syria – a country buffeted by post-colonial coups, pan-Arabism and Ba’thism – will reveal that it’s graced with fertile valleys, water, gas, oil, a pristine coastline and ancient historical sites.

But with nearly 2,000 civilians killed and over 3,000 “disappearances” since the events of March, tourists and investors are staying away.

President Bashar al-Assad, the son of strong-man Hafez al-Assad, has welcomed the Arab Spring to his fiefdom by unleashing tank brigades upon his citizenry. After four decades of iron rule, Syrians don’t want to be lorded over by yet another Assad.

With journalists banished from Syria and a media blackout, one is confronted with competing narratives. Assad’s regime has blamed intellectuals, the disadvantaged and militant groups for his troubles.

His spokesmen have argued that the violence has been manufactured abroad and is implemented by armed gangs, and that the Syrian people want government to restore security.

There has been lots of diplomatic spin too. Foreign Minister, Walid Moualem, has promised a Syrian democracy by December, and a new constitution by March next year. This reassurance (given to South Africa, Brazil and India) has been deemed “illusory” by Human Rights Watch.

The other narrative – the one of the Syrian street – has had to rely upon social media to get its message out. This story has revealed, mostly via cell phone footage, ongoing human rights abuses by Assad’s security forces, now deemed crimes against humanity by many in the international community.

And whilst the refusal of the military to shoot civilians in Egypt and Tunisia toppled its dictators quickly – and relatively painlessly – the role of Assad’s security forces in putting down public dissent has cast a pall upon the Arab Spring (as has Western meddling in Libya and the Gulf Co-operation Council’s clampdown in Bahrain).

Fouad Ajami, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, has observed that Syria has been locked in a stalemate, where “an irresistible force” has clashed with an “unmovable object”.

And whilst Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution gained real impetus after 26 year-old Mohammed Bouazizi immolated himself in frustration at Ben Ali’s corruption, Syria‘s defining moment was the death in detention of the 13-year old Hamza Ali Al-Khateeb.

He was arrested for singing anti-Assad songs in the village of Jiza during April. When his parents retrieved his corpse a month later – not only was his body riddled with cigarette burns, contusions and bullet wounds – but his neck had been broken, and his penis cut off.

Ramzy Baroud, editor of the Palestine Chronicle, says that this only serves to highlight why progress will only be made in Syria without the old symbols of power. We are dealing with a popular uprising led by civil society wanting complete change.

He says that Syria can’t be held hostage by familial considerations, one-party rule and colonial sectarian classifications forever. Baroud believes that Arab criticism had been traditionally muted on Syria until now because the country had been under genuine threat from Israel and the US, especially after 9/11.

But Syria’s strategic friendship with Iran, its support of the Kurds on the Turkish border, its long involvement in Lebanon, its aid to Hizballah and its refuge to Hamas leaders were aimed as much at stilling internal conflict, as they were at showing that Syria was a regional player, he says.

However, Syria’s role was always “theoretical”. The truth is that the crafty Hafez al-Assad wanted a popular regional profile, but without problems back home.

Imam Abdul Hadi, a Syrian exile who lectures at the London School of Islamic Studies, feels that no-one should doubt the ruthlessness of the Ba’thist regime. He recalls that as a 16 year-old in 1982 he’d witnessed the massacre of over 20,000 people in his home town of Hama when Hafez al-Assad cracked down on the Islamic Brotherhood.

He feels that the recent condemnation of Syria by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, known for his cautiousness in Foreign policy, is a critical moment in the Arab world. The Saudis’ condemnation has been followed by harsh words from US president Barack Obama and other leaders.

Hadi agrees with Baroud, and other Mid East commentators, that Syria has to avoid the pitfalls of Libya where any margin in the conflict could be used as an excuse for western, or even regional, intervention.

This is something that would taint the Syrian revolt. Western pressure on Syria had always been more about specific policy regarding Israel, than the human rights abuses of the Assad regime.

Unfortunately, it seems as if the meddling may have already begun. Al-Manar television, the mouthpiece of Hizballah, reported this month that two local gun smugglers had been intercepted by Lebanese military intelligence trying to ship assault rifles to Syria.

The Lebanese media was quick to point out that the men had a connection with assassinatedLebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri – reportedly a favourite of Saudi Arabia and the US – and that Salafi fighters with Lebanese papers facilitated by the smugglers had been allegedly captured by Syrian authorities.

However, Al-Manar was silent on another allegation – made to me by Imam Abdul Hadi – who said that people in Hama had told him over the phone that they’d identified Hizballah operatives supporting Assad’s regime.

According to Baroud, the Syrian government is deliberately mixing up regional and national narratives, this while civilians continue to endure the wrath of a single family backed by the Ba’thist party. But there is only one way to read the future of Syria, he says.

“The Syrian people deserve equality and social justice, free from empty slogans, self-serving elites and corrupt criminals. What Syria and its courageous people deserve is a new dawn of freedom.”

Muslim Community Media: a Ground Plan

2011-08-15T01:47:00.000-07:00

Muslim Community Media: a Ground Plan

The Muslim Community Media Trust

MY article in the pre-Ramadan edition of Muslim Views (Muslim Community Media: Is it My Final Crossroads?) has, I hope, led to some introspection about the lot of those who work within our community, especially the media.

In it I confronted the harsh realities that community media faces, and the even harsher economic challenges for those and their families who work within it.

Whilst some who read the article felt it better that I – a loose cannon – should finally retire, others tactfully asked whether it was that bad in the community media. Unfortunately, the answer is, yes.

So how bad is it? Well, the combined take home pay (sans benefits) of our two most senior journalists – with 70 years on the coalface between them – is still less than that of a reporter of five years’ experience in the mainstream. Do the Maths.

And for those who might clamour that community media is all about volunteers, of course, it is – as well as training, empowerment and education – but there has to be a professionally skilled corps at the centre to keep the wheel turning.

The point I’ve made many times is that in the Western Cape, at least, Voice of the Cape, Radio 786 and Muslim Views have to compete with the mainstream, which demands standards. Interns and volunteers have to fit into the skilled structures, and not the other way round.

I’m sure few will disagree that a thriving Muslim media is absolutely essential to our wellbeing as a community. Whilst providing a social stage, it opens us up to local and international audiences.

But where do we go from here?

My suggestion is that a waqf – a trust – be set up to ensure the long-term survival of community media. This waqf, which I will call the Muslim Community Media Trust (MCMT), will act as a central, independent body.

The fine print of how it will be run will have to be left to the experts in this field, but I don’t think it would be out of place to suggest that the MCMT – a national body – be responsible for administration, collection and disbursement.

The main function of the MCMT will be to augment the salary bills of Muslim media houses, freeing them to face running costs with less anxiety.

These funds will be allocated on a pro-rata basis – so a radio with 25 permanent staff members and 300,000 listeners will be entitled to a larger proportion than one, for example, with five staffers and 20,000 listeners.

Whilst my suggestion is that the monies should be spent on human resources first, should the media houses need funds for special development projects, the MCMT should have the mandate to grant an exception – but only if the better interest is served.

Naturally, the MCMT would have to embody the highest principles, and media houses would have to first qualify for the grants.

A successful application would have to be based upon criteria such as good book-keeping, audited audience surveys, compliance of licence conditions, consistent turnover, competent management, a proper business plan and appropriate labour practices.

Muslim media houses will not be allowed to have sole dependency on the MCMT, and as I’ve said above, will have to have proven records.

My instinct also tells me that each media house will have to administer their MCMT funds in a separate account served by officers who must have specific skills in the accounting, legal and HR professions. These people would not be allowed to be Trustees or Directors of the media houses in question.

This leads to some of the hard questions: how do we form the national MCMT? How much is needed? Who will be the players? And, how do we raise the funds?

It’s not a cop out, but I leave ideas and debate about the constitutional formation of the MCMT to those who know more than me. My suggestion is that it is served by competent professionals in our community, of whom there is no shortage.

As for funds, I’m looking at R5 million annually.

And before I’m shot down in flames of derision, let me explain. Is R5 million a lot of money? Yes, it is, and yes, it isn’t. In terms of social and human investment it’s priceless – offering empowerment, stability and peace of mind for our community media, as well as enabling us to create institutions. In terms of a bank balance, I agree, it’s a challenge.

But I cannot emphasise enough the need for a stable local media, and the critical role that it has to play. If one considers how much money the Zionist lobby spends on its agendas, R5 million (about 800,000 dollars) will pale by comparison.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a question of spending wisely on our most precious resource, human resources. And to crunch a few numbers, I estimate that R5 million is enough to double the pay annually of 48 of our journalists, managers and admin staff.

So who will be the players? Again, that’s something that would have to be open to discussion, but most likely Voice of the Cape, Radio 786, Muslim Views, Al-Qalam, Radio Islam, Radio IFM and Radio Al-Ansaar.

Channel Islam, to my knowledge, is commercial – but even media review agencies with a proven reputation, such as the Media Review Network, could be considered under this aid umbrella.

And the money?

Here’s a golden opportunity for the multi-million rand Halal industry to finally do something for us, the consumer who bankrolls it. It would be a perfect trade-off. But the best option, I suspect, would be to create a platform for national corporate social responsibility – again the realm of those more qualified than myself.

In conclusion, all that I’ve formulated is an idea – agree or disagree with me – but, surely, if we do nothing, we all stand to lose?

The Root Causes of the Somali Famine

2011-08-08T06:51:00.000-07:00

THE 21st century has brought with it tremendous technological progress, but allied with predatory capitalism, has offered selective benefits.

Extreme rich-poor divides bedevil most developing countries that provide raw materials for this technology, and in failed states such as the DRC and Somalia, poverty has only deepened.

This century has also seen some of our worst natural disasters; many brought on about by the combined forces of man and nature. In Pakistan, 20 million people were directly affected by the floods of September last year.

Rampant deforestation of the Indus highlands could not absorb the heavy rainfall and an unseasonal early snow melt, which resulted in huge volumes of water gushing into the Pakistan lowlands.

Even in the Far East one has to ask how much less the impact of the Indonesian tsunami could have been had the mangrove swamps not been destroyed to build beachfront hotels?

And now in the Horn of Africa, 20 million Somalis are being affected by famine and drought. It’s alarming to think that in less than 12 months, 40 million people in the poorest parts of the world have been displaced by environmental disaster.

However, to understand these disasters we have to look at them in a wider context. This is because they are inevitably the consequence of more complex happenings. Global warming is a scientifically recognised phenomenon, but that doesn’t help us to understand the social, human perspective.

Science only deals with actions in a box called a paradigm, and can only look at events relating to that paradigm via a laboratory benchmark. To understand global warming and the Somali famine, man (and not science) has to be placed at the centre of things.

Our perspective is historical, because it is history that sheds the most light on causation. The truism is: nothing on this earth happens in isolation, and everything is inter-connected – from the strands of human thought over the ages to the dust of the Western Sahara blowing across the Atlantic.

The Somali famine, the symptom of a greater social and environmental mechanism, has its distant roots in the Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries; religious wars that witnessed hundreds of thousands of people dying, and Mamluk armies finally driving the Franks back to Europe by 1290.

This encounter with the Islamic Orient – then the world leader in the arts, sciences, economics, music, medicine and philosophy – saw the birth of the European Renaissance.

And whilst life in the Sahel continued as before, and the universities of Timbuktu still produced some of the world’s finest scholars, events were already stirring that would begin to affect sub-Saharan Africa in unimaginable ways.

The Knights Templar of Jerusalem, the forefathers of modern Western banking and the Masonic movement, brought many ideas back home. Scholars such as Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon drank deeply from Islamic sources, but not before many of the Templars – in a mediaval sub-plot – had been executed by King Philip of France on Friday 13, 1307.

The adoption of the scientific method caused conflict with the church. Its leaders saw themselves as direct heavenly intermediaries. The idea of reason being superior to revelation was not only an anathema to them, but a threat to their political and economic grip on power.

Medieval scientists such as Galileo clashed with ecclesiastical authorities, and the rise of the Catholic Inquisitions in the 13th and the 16th centuries ensured that doctrinal tyranny reigned supreme. This in turn engendered a reaction against the church, with science often at odds with clerical authority.

This separation of science and religion is described by the late Maulana Fazlur Rahman Ansari as the “tragedy” of Western civilisation. Western civilisation was the “child” of Islam. But, as he says, it was a “disloyal child” as its progress, except for technology, was hostile to the moral direction that Revelation could give it.

This dichotomy became epitomised by the injunction of giving unto “Caesar what was due to Caesar and to God what was due to God”. With religion – and more importantly, its morality – divorced from economics, government and knowledge, it was a slippery slope to rampant materialism.

This materialism was accelerated by the Industrial Revolution that stirred in the late 18th century due to the invention of the steam engine. The iron and steel, textile, agriculture and transport industries were revolutionised overnight.

With the rise of industry and its need for workers and finance, it also heralded the era of “bankism”, the predatory exploitation of interest.

The urbanisation of Europe had begun, often accompanied by the discontent of the poor, who found life in the city largely dehumanising. Poor living conditions, low wages and exploitation dogged their existence, nothing new in terms of urbanisation today.

But what really changed the human landscape was the means of production. Mass production needed energy and that energy came from coal that pumped smoke and toxins into the air. London, for example, became infamous for its pea-soup smog.

It does not take rocket science to realise that from here on in, the global environment was never going to be the same again – and as technology got smarter, and its by-products messier, the destruction of everything around us just picked up speed. With his machines, man was now master of all he surveyed – without due consideration.

The advent of colonialism in the 19th century merely accelerated this process worldwide. To say that Africa was its worst victim is an understatement, if not a cliché. Already seen as a rich harvesting ground for slaves, the continent became the primary source of the developed world’s raw materials.

And whilst some of our ills in Africa are self-inflicted, it’s fair to say that the effects of climate change – due to the industrial revolution – are not. Indeed, the story of Africa is that the poorest of the world's poor are its worst victims.

Of course, the Somali situation has not been helped by the fact that it has been a failed state for 20 years. But its chronic underdevelopment is equally the result of colonial meddling and international fudging.

The calamity of starvation and disease in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel has been only added to by institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. Niger suffered a famine in 2006 after the IMF instructed the government to sell off its food reserves to service its loan.

But in Somalia, as children perish like flies from preventable diseases, the ongoing disaster is that people are dying of thirst above water aquifers. But the biggest tragedy, by far, is that those who contributed most to this crisis on the edge of the world’s largest growing desert will probably never pay back their debt.

Civil society: scoring a coup on the arms deal, Ncgobo and Malema

2011-08-01T06:08:00.000-07:00

SOUTH AFRICAN civil society scored three important coups for the country recently. The judiciary and the media both survived challenges. And the multi-billion rand arms deal, something that has haunted us since the 1990’s, was given a new lease of life.

News that head of the Hawks, Anwar Dramat, had sent his people to meet European investigators is a dramatic about turn – especially after the unit had stated last year that further prospects of arms deal investigations were slim.

However, an admission by defence company SAAB of Sweden that its former British partner, BAE systems, had paid R24 million in bribes to South African officials has thrown new light on the case.

Already a victim of political cover-up, sleazy corporate suppression and legal obstructionism, the arms deal’s ultimate fate is inextricably linked to both the openness of the media and the autonomy of the judiciary.

For sans an independent judiciary and a free press, communities can have no measure of public oversight, or accountability, on things such as shady arms deals. When justice and information become compromised, nations become tied to the coat-tails of their political masters.

The point is that a functioning democracy is a human system, and if unchecked, will be continually vulnerable to human frailty. Correction will always be fundamental to the democratic process.

Public vigilance is the most vital element of clean government, and in South Africa, it is played out against the backdrop of the Constitution. In a functioning democracy, a judicial system separated from the state is the one that protects its citizens most effectively.

With regards to the judiciary we had the decision of Chief Justice Sandile Ncgobo not to accept an extension of his term at the Constitutional Court.

Chief Justice Ncgobo had initially agreed to the extension of his term. But after public outcry that his re-appointment via the President’s office – and not parliament – would be unconstitutional, he wisely decided to step down.

Saying that he feared impending litigation would compromise the integrity of his office and the judiciary as a whole, he said he had to “protect the office of the Chief Justice”.

His resignation closed the gate on the alarming precedent of President Zuma appointing judges. It also pre-empted unsavoury civic action highlighting the bungling of the President’s men, as well as the prospect of the Chief Justice being thrown out of his own court.

The coup for the media was when the City Press newspaper was able to successfully defend an urgent interdict in the South Gauteng High Court.

The interdict was to prevent it from publishing details of a secret trust fund used by ANC Youth League president, Julius Malema, to bankroll a lifestyle not proportionate to his party salary. According to the report, Malema had used the trust fund to accept monies in return for political favours.

Judge Colin Lamont found that City Press’s story was in the public interest. Malema was a public figure, and South Africans were entitled to full disclosure on the matter of high-profile personalities.

But whilst developments in the arms deal and the Ncgobo story were distinguished more by principle than personality, the Malema saga has been defined more by personality than principle. And because of that, there are some important caveats.

This is due to Julius Malema being a larger-than-life figure, which makes him a soft target. As a reckless populist he is easy to hate, easy to like and easy to lampoon; with him there appears to be no middle ground.

For Afriforum, a white Afrikaner organisation, Malema falls into the “easy to hate” category due to his singing of “Kill the Boer” – and it is they who’ve laid charges of corruption against him with the Hawks.

In terms of his Ratanang Family Trust named after his 5 year-old son, Malema is the symptom (some would even say a victim) of a far greater malaise: the virus of money and cronyism that has so badly infected the ANC’s ranks.

Malema’s statements to the Mail and Guardian that people don’t care about his money, but more his political conscience, is merely reflective of the arrogant materialism of his seniors; people who years ago lost touch with the grinding poverty of ANC voters, 60% of whom a Markinor poll reveals are unemployed.

Malema’s further justification that he is a private citizen with no access to taxpayer’s money reveals, in a bizarre Freudian way, that it’s okay to take money from elsewhere as long as it’s not government.

But in the heat of legal battle will Malema’s followers, quick to rise to victimisation because of Afriforum, be allowed to remember this?

In Malema’s case the frustrating thing is that the lines between politics and law will be blurred. Or, as political analyst Aubrey Matshiqi points out, politics will enter the stage “dressed in drag” and “disguised as all sorts of noble intentions”.

Or to put it another way: if Malema stands in the dock, will he reduce his appearance to a political circus? Will t-shirted supporters, supplied with a free lunch, be ululating before the television cameras like they did at Zuma’s rape trial?

The other drawback, due to the inevitable glare of publicity, could be the further diminution of national debate on poverty, job creation and wealth distribution – something to which Malema has contributed only kindergarten clichés and virulent hate-speech.

But when all is said and done, the ensuing investigation by the Hawks and the process of law must be allowed to follow its natural course. Malema, like any South African citizen, is innocent until proven guilty.

The triumph here is not the possible humiliation of a public figure, but rather the fact that the media – unfettered by the Protection of Information Bill – has been allowed to shine a light in a dark room, and that officials such as Malema have to be held accountable for what they do.

Pitfalls aside, it should send a resounding message to corrupt and greedy officials that if the guppies can be caught, so can the big fish too.

Ramadan: a reminder of our frailty

2011-07-27T08:16:00.000-07:00

TODAY over a billion Muslims around the globe, having sighted the first crescent of the moon, will begin to fast in the Holy Month of Ramadan.

From just before the first thread of dawn to just after sunset, they will be compelled to abstain from food, drink, sex, vainglorious talk and gossip. At the same time, they will be obliged to remember those less fortunate than themselves.

The Ramadan charity – or fitrah – is an essential component of the lunar month, and those who’ve fasted will have to ensure that a poor person will be given enough alms to eat for a day.

Those unable to fast – such as diabetics, heart patients, the elderly and the ill – will have to pay a fidya, or compensation.

For those who cannot pay fitrah or fidya, a payment of what they can afford suffices. This is based on an Islamic maxim says that faith is judged according to intention, and also that believers should not be taxed beyond their endurance.

Apart from the known physical benefits of fasting, Ramadan is regarded as the most spiritual month of the Muslim calendar. Fasting was practised by all the Biblical prophets, and it was institutionalised as a pillar of Islamic belief by Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century.

Ramadan is derived from the ancient Arabic word “Ramada”, which refers to the scorching heat of the Arabian Desert. According to classical scholars, the hunger and the thirst of Ramadan burns away ego, pride and arrogance.

But what Ramadan commemorates more than anything else is the arrival of the Qur’an, the divine constitution of Islam. This was when a young Muhammad, enjoying a solitary retreat in a mountain cave above the city of Mecca, was visited by the Archangel Gabriel in the form of a man.

It was the 27th night of the month of Ramadan, and already spooked by mysterious voices addressing him in the name of peace, Muhammad was embraced by Gabriel. The Prophet was to later relate that he felt as if the air was being crushed out of his body.

“Read! Read in the name of Your Lord,” said Gabriel to an astounded Muhammad, an unlettered man. This would be Islam’s first Revelation. Later on, as the Qur’an’s 114 chapters began to flow from his tongue, it would become his unique prophetic miracle.

But for the Prophet Muhammad, an already overpowering moment would become even more emotionally overwhelming when Gabriel would transform into his heavenly shape after the Revelation.

Traditions relate that Gabriel’s luminescent, jewel-studded wings covered the skies, stretching from one horizon to the other. Terrified out of his wits, a quaking Muhammad ran down the mountain into the arms of his wife, Khadijah, and asked her to cover him with a blanket.

Khadijah – who was Muhammad’s single partner for over 20 years – was destined to become not only his first convert, but the Prophet’s greatest comforter and Islam’s most celebrated matriarch.

Further significance is added to Ramadan because in its last ten nights, on odd dates, there is the hidden secret of the “Night of Power”, a night that promises spiritual insight and munificence for those who can discover it.

“The Night of Power is better than a thousand months,” says the Qur’an.

As Ramadan is the month of the Qur’an, mosques from east to west, and from north to south, will be reciting it during special evening – or tarawih – prayers.

The recital of the Qur’an from cover to cover in Ramadan, its text unchanged since its words fell on the Prophet’s tongue, is probably one of the greatest acts of collective remembrance on the face of the earth.

The Holy Month, as we’ve already said, imposes social responsibility upon the Muslim. During Ramadan a Muslim’s conduct towards others has to be beyond reproach; fasting is regarded as an act of devotion for which the Creator has reserved his own special rewards.

It is said that one of the Creator’s greatest joys is watching his subjects break their daily fast; and it is also said that those will gain spiritual benefit who offer food to guests, travellers, orphans and the underprivileged.

Imam Ghazali, a great 12th century scholar, once proclaimed that if a fasting man did not modify his behaviour, his soul would be as good as unconscious. His abstention from food and drink would be mere hunger – in other words, his fasting would be worthless.

Fasting in Ramadan, which is ordained to move a Muslim towards compassion, is a collective activity based on family, community and an optimism that one’s fast will be accepted by the Creator.

It is precisely this communal activity, this mass introspection as it were, that gives Ramadan its devotional impetus. And in Africa, a continent which is over 60% Muslim, there are many things for South African Muslims to consider.

In sub-Saharan Africa we are undeniably the basement people of the world; poverty, exploitation, famine, climate change and conflict are our daily realities. And very frequently – not even a stone’s throw from our groaning tables – there are hungry, cold people shivering in unheated shacks.

And as the first pangs of hunger and thirst gnaw at our stomachs this month, it will be the moral duty of us all to empathise – even if for 12 hours – the lot of those millions in Africa who have to survive on less than a dollar a day.

Ramadan is indeed a fleeting, but frightening, reminder of our human frailty on the face of this earth.

Reaching Discontent

2011-07-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

Reaching Discontent: Author Hagler. Publisher Mirador Publishing, London, 2010.
REACHING Discontent is a rip-roaring, blood-soaked adventure story featuring Iron, a Cape Flats English teacher and former professional boxer, who is forced to use his skills to defend his honour, and to face some apartheid government ghosts.

One is called the Minister, an unpleasant piece of work from his past, and chillingly reminiscent of real-life South African security police torturers. The Minister has survived the struggle politically, and is now a player in the drug trade.

Iron falls foul of a dissembling principal and a corrupt school committee member when they try to exonerate a bully called Chohan, who has been selling drugs. Iron sticks to his guns, but when Chohan is killed in the streets of Athlone, Iron’s life changes.

Suspended from his job, under threat from psychotic forces in the drug trade, gang leaders and corrupt politicians, he calls on his best friend Heed, a martial-arts expert, to help him.

The narrative doesn’t let up for a second, and we face a series of well-choreographed fights, rollicking adventure and gripping suspense set in the heart of Cape Town’s Muslim community.

However, if you’re squeamish, some of the fight scenes might make you recoil – it’s not Jackie Chan with a giggle, and if you read Reaching Discontent, you will feel fists and feet thudding into flesh.

But that is to be unfair to the book, for Reaching Discontent is a much more than its street fighting. It’s a well-crafted, lavishly descriptive novel. The author’s depictions of working-class Cape Town from the Bo-Kaap to Belhar provide an evocative backdrop.

Reaching Discontent is unapologetically reflective of its Muslim ethos. For behind all the intrigue, Iron is a believing Muslim. But there’s no ingratiating self-justification. For like Rayda Jacob’s characters in Confessions of a Gambler, Iron is a believable person who has to face his faults and foibles.

His love-interest, Mazida, is a true love-interest, and is not just a one-dimensional bimbo with a doekie. Iron remains celibate in the narrative, and Mazida’s self-assured femininity is a foil to his troubled soul.

If I were to criticise Reaching Discontent, it would be on a technical level. I feel, for example, that the typesetting of the chapter intros is too bland. I was initially confused by some of the transliteration of our Cape Town vernacular, but soon realised that a New Zealand audience (the author now lives there) had to be catered for.

Reaching Discontent is a significant contribution to a growing genre of community based South African literature. It’s a riveting fireside read and young and old should enjoy this promising local work.

Muslim community media: my final crossroads?

2011-07-06T07:53:00.000-07:00

AS you read your copy of Muslim Views during Ramadan, and as you listen to your favourite Muslim radio station, I want you to sit back and reflect as to how the newspaper arrived in your hands, and as to how the radio got to your ears.

If you weren’t an advertiser or sponsor, you probably paid for nothing. SABC licence fees are for the SABC only, and Muslim Views is distributed free of charge.

In other words, you are the recipient of a freebie. Without contributing one cent, you have a dedicated community monthly newspaper and a radio station at your beck-and-call 24-7.

Admittedly, our media outlets have been social institutions more than corporations with corporate interests. But – and this is the question right now – can they run on fresh air forever?

With shrinking ad-spend and steeply rising running costs, the hard truth is that Muslim community media in South Africa – the most vibrant in the sub-continent – is under huge threat.

Given burgeoning price rises for things such as transport, electricity and food – it’s my harsh prediction that Muslim Views, Voice of the Cape (and Radio 786) will struggle to survive the next five years, let alone the next decade, without serious losses in revenue.

Recent political trends have not been kind either: this is because our community media will be the most vulnerable to the sinister Protection of Information Bill.

Then there is the issue that community media is also forced to pay commercial rates for broadcast signals and other basic services – in fact, everything that it does.

The market-place makes no distinctions, and our media opposition are the mainstream outlets. Our radio stations and newspapers are fruits of democracy, yes, but its bosses have to fight to water the orchard.

Proudly independent, but solely reliant on the open-handedness of generous advertisers, Islamic media survival is testimony to behind-the-scenes tenacity, gritty management and the dedication of its workers.

It’s been a service that has energised, informed and educated the community. It has exposed injustice, reported on history and been part of history – and in the case of Muslim Views, is one of the longest surviving “alternative” media outlets in the country.

Our radio stations – their shared frequencies a broadcasting anomaly – have made massive strides, but without the tools – human resources, technical and training – it will be difficult to progress further.

The biggest problem, by far, is seeing to human resources, the most costly part of any enterprise.

And therein lies the rub: if one can’t afford competitive salaries, or at least – decent wages – it’s difficult to maintain a core of professionals to keep the wheels turning. Staff turnover rockets and productivity suffers, as each time people have to be trained.

These are the stark realities that a community media manager has to face.

And in the post 9/11 era I’m sure nobody needs a reminder of what a critical role dedicated Muslim media has to play. We’re in a position to report on a world view that doesn’t always get good press.

But the situation becomes a lot more serious when one begins to realise that, as budgets shrink, our community media will not be able to offer people the prospect of careers any more. Unable to support themselves, or their families, the professionals will be forced to move on.

This means that standards will drop, and with no experienced people to deal with sensitive issues – potential PR disasters loom for the local Muslim ummah.

I’ve been a “professional” in this milieu for more than 20 years (40 years experience in media and education) and have, unfortunately, reached a dead-end. And when I say this, I say it with all respect: I’m not pointing at anybody’s manager or trustee, but a situation.

Working proudly as a Muslim journalist I’ve won national and international awards, most of them in the name of Muslim Views, or Voice of the Cape. But today, it deeply distresses me that I have to admit defeat.

I’ve enjoyed it, loved every minute of the job, and given it my all – but the thought of the very real burdens that my family has had to carry with me, haunts my conscience. For how much longer can I subject them to it?

I know that I’m not alone in my sentiments, and I hope that as you listen to the radio, or page through Muslim Views, that you appreciate all those who’ve made the sacrifices.

New Palestinian unity - but how will Israel respond?

2011-06-30T08:14:00.000-07:00

AS Europe reels from its debt disaster, and the Arab Spring turns into an exciting summer, Israel faces a crossroads.

With its political house stagnating in a quagmire of right-wing coalitions, its leadership now finds itself out-of-step in the region, and besieged by imaginary demons such as Iran – a country whose aged air-force it could wipe out in ten minutes.

The Middle East has changed, and as Israel’s point men in Arab states such as Egypt’s Omar Suleiman disappear, obstacles to peace and progress on the Palestinian situation melt away too.

This leaves Israeli hawks, such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, facing a dilemma: for how much longer can they bluff and bristle that Palestinian leadership can’t be negotiated with?

This is because the divided Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, agreed to a unity deal in May this year. Largely brokered behind the scenes, it was a deal that would see the establishment of a caretaker government with an eye to presidential and parliamentary elections.

After the elections – and this is probably what spooks Israel too – is that there would be a concerted effort to open and rebuild Gaza, its infrastructure and economy shattered by years of attrition and siege.

This Egyptian-brokered pact has not received much international publicity, but its potential long-term effects could be far-reaching. With Israel having refused to talk to a divided Palestinian leadership, the ball will very soon be bouncing invitingly in it’s court – particularly in light of Hamas’s presence at the table.

Brokered by Egypt with the co-operation of Syria and significantly, Turkey, the conciliation between the two parties ended a destructive four-year stalemate, one which began when Hamas stunned Israel by winning the 2006 parliamentary elections.

With Israel proclaiming it would not work with a Palestinian government that included Hamas, an organisation whom it regarded as “terrorist”, sanctions and a Western-led boycott were instituted.

Things were further complicated by the Bush regime’s covert meddling in Gaza by supplying arms to Fatah, and Fatah security forces refusing to take orders from Hamas. A stand-off in Gaza resulted. President Mahmoud Abbas suspended Hamas’ government in 2007, and created an emergency one on the West Bank.

The Egyptian deal – apart from ending the Palestinian political impasse – has seen Khalid Meshaal, Hamas’s leader in exile, formally agreeing that the organisation would recognise Israel’s 1967 borders. This is an idea that had been floated from various Hamas platforms since the days of Shaikh Ahmad Yassin.

Meshaal’s stamp of approval is, effectively, recognition of the state of Israel – something demanded vociferously by Israel and the US as a pre-condition for settlement talks.

In addition, Meshaal agreed that Hamas – like Fatah – would abide by international law, the UN Charter and UN Resolutions on Palestine. To this effect, Robert Fisk of The Independent quotes Munib Masri, one of the chief intermediaries, as saying that Meshaal had also made undertakings on the nature of Palestinian resistance.

Resistance, Meshaal had said, would only be seen in the broader “national interest of the country” and would have to be ethical. In other words, there would be no more rocket attacks on civilians from Gaza.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s reaction was predictably brusque, and he brushed aside any suggestion of positive developments. He said he would not talk to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as long as Hamas was in government.

But in 2011 the Arab street, that sociological chestnut, is no longer prepared to accept Israeli bluster. There are no longer pliant despots ruling in Cairo, Tunis and other capitals willing to enforce unpopular US-Israeli policy under the counter.

The clichés are fast being swept aside, and there are few Palestinians or Arabs anywhere, for example, who will agree today that the notion of pushing Israel into the Mediterranean will solve the Palestinian conflict.

Talk may be of resistance (resistance justified by international law), but it is no longer that of quixotic jihad or regional war. Israel, thrust into the midst of the Arab world by political events of the 19th century, is now seen as a political reality that has to be dealt with realistically.

What Tel Aviv’s policy makers have to appreciate is that the crude sabre-rattling days of Gamal Nasser, Saddam Hussein and the Islamists have gone. Sentiment from Amman to Ankara is that Mid East security will best be served by sound economic policy, military disengagement, political diplomacy and Palestinian enfranchisement.

Israel may indeed be the only Middle Eastern state with nuclear power, but in the region old-fashioned Cold War psychosis no longer has any intimidatory effect. The Arab world that has lost the terror of its own bloodthirsty dictators has also lost its fear of Israel.

It’s a new mindset, and one that must confound Tel-Aviv’s security establishment. Its hasbara of international jihad, Islamic terror and incompetent Palestinian leadership have become as anachronistic as the idea of an Arab Sheikh buying a new Cadillac just because his ashtrays are full.

But there is a fine distinction that has to be made here: Palestinians will recognise Israel as a political entity, but not as an ethnic state. This, apart from being racial exceptionalism, will deny the historical identity of Muslim and Christian Arabs within its borders.

This notion of a non-ethnic pluralistic state, of course, sends right-wing Israel into paroxysms about assimilation with Arabs, some passionately arguing that this could lead to the second Holocaust.

This is arrant nonsense. Nearly half of the Israeli Jewish population has Arab roots. Of course, what these people fail to understand is that it is not their Jewish identity that is under question, but rather, secularly-inspired Zionism, a late 19th century ideology of ethnic exclusivism.

In other words, what needs to be understood is that opposition to Israel is not, and never has been, anti-Semitic. Zionism is an oppressive political system that has denuded Judaism, not only of its Messianic expectation, but also of its dignity as a great monotheistic faith.

The great yearning in the Middle East is not for Jews to leave, but to cast off the cloak of Zionism, or ethnic exclusivism. Even Hamas, the bête-noire of Israelis, has declared that a distinction has to be made between Zionism and Judaism.

That the Egyptian deal has quietly changed the landscape of fractured Palestinian politics, and given it new focus, is undeniable. But whether it will have any meaningful impact upon Tel Aviv is, tragically, questionable.

The Chilling Shadow

2011-06-15T04:50:00.000-07:00

THE Protection of Information Bill or “Secrecy Bill” – its surreal passage through parliament now extended for a further two months – is an Orwellian creation befitting Animal Farm and 1984 as well as being a chilling shadow of the Apartheid era.

As an attempt to re-write the clumsy Access to Information Bill of 1982, the Secrecy Bill comes across as an exercise in political paranoia.

It’s a crude cut-and-paste overkill on the issue of government information, or as Public Service Minister Richard Baloyi would have us believe, “open content”.

Sifting through its legalistic gobbledegook, and its sinister clauses that promise to silence public review of government forever, a simple question is at its core: how should the state classify and de-classify information?

Of course, the question is relevant, but the answer – in the form of the current Secrecy Bill – is a draconian ass. In its present sweeping form the Secrecy Bill empowers public officers (from Director Generals to the President) to “classify” information.

The problem is that the Bill’s application is so broad: anything such as Home Affairs corruption or unauthorised Ministerial hotel bills, police crime stats, dirty arms deals – and even Schabir Shaik’s golf handicap – could be classified as secret, and buried away from public sight for 20 years.

Not only that, a whistleblower, an investigative journalist, a trade union official or any concerned South African citizen releasing “classified” information in the public interest can be jailed up to 25 years, with no option of a fine.

Even those privy to the information without acting on it, and who don’t report it to the police, will be liable for prosecution. This would lead to some interesting scenarios should a whistleblower post “classified” information on Facebook or Twitter, or should someone read the story in a newspaper.

On the other hand, a public official who abuses the Secrecy Bill to camouflage corruption, mismanagement or incompetency will only be liable to pay a fine, or at worst, face three years behind bars.

The carte-blanche powers that would be vested in the Ministry of State Security, which would have oversight in terms of the Secrecy Bill, are frightening. Like Big Brother, it would have to be in over 1,000 government departments at the same time.

Understandably condemned by a raft of NGO’s and public bodies, the Secrecy Bill’s most recent critic has been COSATU, which appears to have only realised the import of the Bill at the eleventh hour.

The voice of concern of ANC stalwarts such as Ronnie Kasrils needs to be noted too. For they would be able to tell ANC hacks, so forgetful of their Freedom Charter heritage, that the anti-apartheid movement spent decades fighting the kind of totalitarianism the party now wants to impose.

Opposition to the Secrecy Bill from ANC ranks may well reflect tensions from within; but it does begin to point towards the Secrecy Bill’s architects, who given the arms scandal and other issues, appear to be – like the President himself – extremely sensitive to public scrutiny.

But what has been so shocking about the Secrecy Bill has been its authors’ nagging inability to understand the basic principles of freedom of speech. Its fancy preambles about democracy are betrayed by the contradictory clauses that follow.

The Ad Hoc Committee in parliament may have changed “national interest” (a term that can mean absolutely anything) to a slightly more specific, but still hugely vague, “national security”. However, it doesn’t answer why “national interest” was considered as a viable legal term in the first place.

Other terms in the Secrecy Bill, such as “hostile activity”, beggar the imagination as to what exactly they could be.

The total absence of a public interest defence clause, the very bedrock of whistle-blowing, is a baffling oversight. Its omission sends an arrogant and ominous message to all South Africans, the employers of the politicians, who have a right to see competent legislation passed by those whom they voted for.

But as one observes the Ad-Hoc Committee in action, ruling party members as coherent about the Secrecy Bill as the Mad Hatter, it becomes obvious that as the one hole is sealed in the Bill, it begins to ship water through another.

This is exactly what happened to Apartheid lawmakers in 1950 when they passed the Suppression of Communism Act, a piece of legislation so wide that even the judges of the time had difficulty in applying it.

This was followed by the Terrorism Act of 1966 and the Internal Security Act of 1974. By 1990, those dealing with state information, or matters of public interest and protest, were governed by over 100 laws.

If the Secrecy Bill is passed, there is no guarantee that as it falls over its own feet the ANC government will not just ram through more and more legislation – exactly as the National Party did for 46 years – to cover the loopholes.

The sheer folly of the flight-path of the Secrecy Bill is seen in the words of an ANC MP, Vytjie Mentor. When discussing international examples of information classification, she argued that Zimbabwe was a good example.

This is a country where freedom of expression and the press are restricted by law to the point of absolute strangulation, in spite of the country’s Constitution promising otherwise. Mentor should not only be red-carpeted and disciplined by the Party Whip for foolishness, but also told to write out our Constitution 1,000 times.

For many, the Secrecy Bill has been portrayed as an issue between the government and the media. The truth is that the Secrecy Bill is not just about the media, but the right of all South Africans to know what those in power do in their name.

It’s an issue that cuts right across socio-economic and political lines. Every South African stands to be affected by it. And if the Secrecy Bill is passed in the form that some of our leaders insist, every one of us should have reason to fear for the future.

Itheko

2011-06-15T04:42:00.001-07:00

The poem below was an answer to a challenge by colleague Irfaan Abrahams. “Write a poem for the inaugural Cape Slave in Cape Town hosted by Itheko Athletics Club,” he said.

Sure.

Except I forgot that I gave up trying to write verse over 20 years ago, realising that my attempts at poetry were usually pathetic.

The call is itheko, itheko

As far the eye can see

Amongst the clouds
I am infinity

I’m a sparrow hawk in a thermal
Gliding over the spirit of a Muslim saint

I think of the China Sea in full-moon
A trade wind ruffles its silver reefs

Dreams of my forefathers
Imprisoned, exiled for their beliefs

Whipped on by the South-Easter
White horses parade in Table Bay

Servants only to the elements
As the gale drops, they ride away

I’m Robben Island
I’m its shore

I’m the kelp-filled Atlantic
I’m its swell-filled roar

I’m the Tana Baru
My bones call to prayer

From the dungeons of the Castle
To the Lodge in Adderley Street

I’m more than just a
Minstrel, dancing on my feet

Bought under a tree
I was never sold

As a person I was always worth
More than my master’s gold

From the Grand Parade
To the Company Gardens

Your chains have never chained
Your whips have never whipped

The call is itheko, itheko

“The Big Occasion”

As far the eye can see
Amongst the clouds

I am infinity

Defending the Saints

2011-06-13T06:38:00.000-07:00

THE other day on the Voice of the Cape radio station a maulana condemned a well-known Shaikh, a man regarded as a Grand Shaikh of the Naqshbandi Sufi Order.

His central beef was that this Shaikh had supposedly claimed amongst other things – via a website – that he was the Sultan ul-Awliya’, the Chief of the Saints. This is something that the Shaikh has never done.

Curiously, the Shaikh under fire, Shaikh Naazim ‘Adil al-Haqqani of Cyprus, has a famous invocation (also widely available on the internet) that has him asking to be “no-one and nothing”.

These are certainly not the prayers of a man claiming to be king. It’s unfortunate that the speaker concerned had not cross-checked his sources.

Since time immemorial, those close to Allah have had their characters and reputations darkened by clouds of toxic envy. Called hasad, it impairs for those near to it, the vision of the pristine truth that lies behind.

That’s why Cain slew Abel, and why Shams Tabriz had to leave his beloved companion, Maulana Jalal ud-Din Rumi. That’s why during the Abbasid era, Imam Ahmad ibn ‘Isa had to lead the family of the Prophet (SAW) from Baghdad to Yemen.

That’s why the Andalusian luminary, Ibn al-‘Arabi, was branded a “kafir”; why Sayyid Muhammad al-Maliki of Makkah was called a “deviant” by Shaikh Bin Baz, and how the great woman saint, Rabi’ah al-Basri, became a victim of fitna, or malicious gossip.

Indeed, the scenario is a familiar one, and the white-bearded Shaikh Naazim ‘Adil al-Haqqani – who is well into his eighties now – has been no stranger to personal abuse.

Shaikh Naazim, who has millions of followers, exudes a charisma that attracts people to him. This is enough to infuriate anyone made uneasy by such success – such as the Wahhabis (who detest Sufis), and certain Indo-Pak Deobandis (many of whose founding fathers were, ironically, Naqshbandi).

It is also a truism that whilst good attracts good – like bees to the stamen of the flower – it equally arouses the undesirable passions of the human heart.

To this effect, Shaikh Naazim is a Sayyid, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) from both the Hasani and Husseini lines. He also enjoys lineage to the 12th century Iraqi spiritual colossus, Shaikh Abdul Qadir Jilani (ra).

In a world obsessed with status, it’s a pedigree many would metaphorically die for. In the wrong hands, the prophetic and saintly DNA of Shaikh Naazim would be a ticket to great wealth and power.

And as we’ve already said: much as Shaikh Naazim serves as an axis for good, he equally has to suffer the slings and arrows of jealousy.

But the central point here is that Shaikh Naazim was inappropriately maligned on a public platform, and that the doubt created around his character needs to be removed.

I’m not a Naqshbandi, and so consider myself in an interesting position to defend him. As much as I love and respect Shaikh Naazim, he is not my Grand Shaikh.

However, I did get to know him on two different occasions. The first was in 1997 when his deputy, Shaikh Hisham Kabbani, invited me to come to the USA.

I was asked to be his photographer for an international conference, and to cover Shaikh Naazim’s campaign at the United Nations and Capitol Hill to lobby for better US awareness of the Balkans crisis and the Chechen war.

I also had the opportunity to interview Chechen leader, Aslan Maskadov, who would be later assassinated by the Russians. Maskadov, who was a follower of Shaikh Naazim, remains one of the most principled political figures I’ve met.

The second time I had the privilege of Shaikh Naazim’s company was when he visited South Africa in 2000.

In the US I stayed with his entourage, and as a photographer, was often a fly on the wall to Naqshbandi leadership. But not only that: I witnessed first-hand how a man of Allah conducts himself 24-hours a day.

In three weeks I never saw him miss one waqt, or prayer time, even when on travel. I never saw him skip the pre-dawn, or tahujjud, prayer – even if it meant sleeping two hours a night. He was twice our age, but his energy exhausted us.

I never saw him utter words of anger, turn anyone away or refuse hospitality in a crowded schedule. And not once in three weeks did I ever see him entertain any delusions of grandeur.

His consistent utterance was that he was a servant of Allah. I saw UN officials fall at his feet, a CNN journalist become Muslim at his hands, a crack addict say his kalimah shahadah, a Malaysian prince kiss his forehead and a member of Congress embrace him, but he would just tell them that he was their servant.

He possessed a wicked sense of humour, and once when we were climbing into a Washington taxi he laughed and said: ”Brothers, get your asses in.”

We were surprised, but only when he pointed out a sign on the taxi that had the abbreviation “Taxi Ass’n” did we realise what was amusing him.

I remember him looking at the Statue of Liberty in New York and saying, with a mischievous glint in his eye, that the headquarters of the jinn was in the head of Lady Liberty. Of course, he wasn’t serious.

I heard his dawn sohbas, or inspirational talks, his jumu’ahs and his public speeches. Not once did I ever hear him deviating in principle from Qur’an and Sunnah.

Unfortunately – and the truth has to be spoken – there were some around him who would unnecessarily exaggerate, or attribute things to Shaikh Naazim that I knew he would not be happy with.

Sometimes a Shaikh’s worst enemies are his own followers, those who still have to learn the niceties of Tasawwuf, which is a spiritual science based on Shari’ah, or Sacred Law. For Shaikh Naazim’s enemies this was fodder for their enmity, and they would forage upon it mercilessly.

In Cape Town, I saw a continuation of his enduring devotion. And whilst I’ve often observed his vast intellectual capacity, his approach – in tune with Prophetic Tradition –has always been to be accessible to whatever audience he has addressed.

“Sidi Yusuf, are the Angels smiling or not?” he once asked Shaikh Yusuf Da Costa, turning to us and saying that that indeed, they were smiling because the Prophet (SAW) smiled as part of his adab, or conduct, towards Allah’s Creation.

In fact, if I were to summarise the status of Shaikh Naazim I could do no better than to recall the Hadith related by Tirmidhi and Abu Dawud that if the Muslim is pleased with Allah, with Islam as his faith and with Muhammad (SAW) as his Messenger, then Allah will be pleased with him.

Municipal Elections - Reflecting an ANC Identity Crisis?

2011-05-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

TO foreigners we must sometimes appear to be a strange nation. Warm and hospitable one day, we are capable of unspeakable violence against each other the next.

We were able to host the World Cup, our banking system is the match of any developed country, and yet, a five-star tour bus – travelling from a five-star hotel – can as easily disappear into a pothole outside a squatter camp on the way to the airport.

These crazy contrasts are what I think it means to be South African. We’re a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and medium-size nation that sometimes doesn’t know itself.

We have 11 official languages, but double that number is spoken on a daily basis by about 20 nationalities now resident in our country. Thirty or so tongues in a population of 45 million indicate diversity – a ratio of one language for every 1.5 million people.

Of course, we know that more than 1.5 million speak Zulu, for example, but the crude maths does make a point.

Indeed, if anything, the idea of a “rainbow nation” – an axiom coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu – has in 2011 become a confused smudge of rich-poor and racial divides.

This was brought home strongly to me after the IEC announced the results of our recent municipal elections. The DA had made significant inroads in urban areas, winning a clear majority in the Cape Town metro.

The ANC, a big church, found itself under pressure for lack of service delivery in the poorer Black areas, and for neglect of its Indian and Coloured wards in others. In spite of this, the party still managed to win a 62% national majority.

Perhaps one could argue that the ANC was “lucky”. Cope, the first ANC breakaway party, had proven to be more a coalition of clashing egos than a focused opposition challenging the status-quo, and the fragmentation of ANC branches around the country.

How many ex-Cope voters went back to the fold of the ANC (or the DA) after the party’s public shenanigans, is an open question. The more likely scenario is that the ANC’s ever-loyal voters were hopeful, once again, for effective local government.

But one thing is very clear from the elections: serious self-introspection is something that the ruling party needs to countenance, especially if it wants to halt a perception that it is fast becoming an identity party in which minorities perceive themselves to be in the political wilderness.

What I’m talking about here is the ANC’s inability to reign in those who shoot it in the foot by indulging in racial identity politics on the local and national stage.

Even if GCIS head, Jimmy Manyi, said coloureds should “leave” the Western Cape for work in jest, or even if his statement was taken retro-actively out of context by the DA, he should surely have known better than to venture into such sensitive territory on a public platform.

The jibes from certain party representatives, following Minister Trevor Manuel’s critical response to Manyi in the media, sent a negative message to those affected by Manyi’s sentiments that employment equity – a burning issue in the Western Cape – was over-subscribed by coloureds.

Leaders such as Julius Malema also need to realise that calling white opposition leaders "cockroaches" is as obscene as the dreaded "k" word.

He needs to know that belittling other population groups (and no, I’m not referring to "Kill the Boer") was never the way of Nelson Mandela or Walter Sisulu, who were both once members of the ANC Youth League.

He needs to know that reducing political discourse to its its lowest common denominator - as he often does - is not debate, but semantic thuggery.

But in South Africa today, a growing lack of comprehension of what really constitutes a democratic majority is, by far, the most urgent political question that young people like Malema need to fully understand.

It was, I believe, the biggest deciding factor in the destiny of the 2011 municipal elections; elections where national issues came on to the table. The communities who felt marginalised by Malema and Manyi either withheld their votes, or supported another party.

That is why wards such as Mayfair in Johannesburg and Rylands in Cape Town went from being ANC strongholds to DA ones.

Those of us who can recall the United Democratic Front will remember that during the anti-apartheid struggle, democracy was never defined by group identities. In the spirit of non-racism and non-sexism, every person was equal and every belief was equal.

Political identity was not determined by your face, but by your principles. Democracy was understood as a principled collective demanding representative governance. Policy and perspective was debated as principle, not identity, which allowed for the equal participation of all players.

Therefore, what the ANC needs to understand is that increasingly – due to the irresponsible utterances of Malema and his ilk – Indian, Coloured and White voters are seeing the ANC as an exclusive “Black” majority party, a contradiction of the truly democratic values it originally stood for.

Befitting Democracy

2011-05-24T06:58:00.000-07:00

WHAT could our 2011 municipal elections have to do with the North African political earthquake, or, recent events in places such as Cote d’Ivoire or Uganda?

As I watched the results unfold at the Independent Electoral Commission’s results centre in Bellville South last week, I realised that the answer was “everything”.

Described by political analyst Prof Adam Habib as “world class”, he said in an interview that our local elections were a model of participatory democracy. Our 2011 municipal election set the bar at the highest notch, not just for Africa, but for the rest of the world.

Like so many commentators, Prof Habib measured the IEC as one of our most treasured national institutions.

He agreed that one of the hallmarks of our local electoral process was that nominated independent candidates only had to submit a list of 50 signatures, and to pay a small deposit. This meant that they would not be overly disadvantaged against the more muscular parties, such as the DA or the ANC.

Of course, most of us will concur that the playing fields in politics will never be perfectly level, but a fighting chance is – well – a fighting chance. Voters in some wards were spoilt with a selection of more than 20 candidates, something unimaginable in a big democracy such as the US.

For me, Election Day in South Africa means that I get to see the smiling face of my nation; the same one that graced the 2010 World Cup and created the “gees” that enchanted so many millions of people.

However, as South Africans self-absorbed in our daily struggles, we do otherwise tend to be hugely self-critical too. Hence the paradox that the ANC – still with a whopping 62% majority – will beat itself up about the results, and possibly even depose the President in a year’s time.

In South Africa this dynamic of public self-introspection is more profoundly noticed, because when elections do occur in other parts of the developing world, they have a poor record. When stuffed ballots, bribery and corruption are the bane of the honest voter there is only room for anger.

It is no wonder that the electoral process can often become overwrought, leading to frustration and even bloody violence. This year’s Nigerian presidential ballot, only considered “free and fair” by Nigerian standards, resulted in 800 deaths.

The stand-off in Cote d’Ivoire between former President Laurent Bgabgo, and Alassane Outtara, is as a sharp lesson for Africa as the Middle East is – where its tinpot dictators, unchecked for decades, cannot comprehend that their time is up.

Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni – entrenching himself as President for life – was recently re-elected against a background of discontent. And if Robert Mugabe – already President for life – goes to the polls any time soon, it’s guaranteed that his Zanu-PF thugs will beat up opposition voters.

Contrast this against South Africa (three Presidents since 1994) and another shining, but forgotten example, Somaliland (two successful democratic elections) and the picture is clear: those aspiring for a genuine political voice on our continent will obviously look to its best examples.

Whilst Somaliland (a breakaway territory of colonial Somalia) battles for international recognition on the Horn of Africa, South Africa’s positives are the envy of the continent. We are the only African welfare state, and our ARV roll-out for Aids sufferers is probably the most extensive in the world.

And whilst basic service delivery for the poor is a burning question, it can’t be denied that millions of houses have been built, electrified and supplied with running water. Yes, it’s not perfect (and our Gini-Co-efficient ranking is a disgrace) but if you’ve been living for 50 years in a post-colonial slum in central Africa, our post-apartheid era doesn’t look too bad.

In fact, my own experience is that right across the African and Arab world, the victory of the anti-apartheid movement – and the iconic status of Nelson Mandela – have been beacons that have lit up people’s hopes, and in difficult times, bolstered their courage.

For the international community, “Madiba Magic” is not about us winning the World Cup, but rather the values of honest political struggle, personal sacrifice and national reconciliation. And even in 2011 people haven’t forgotten this – as I was reminded by a Khartoum-based journalist just last week.

But where we have the most impact is through our imagery. As much as freedom in Egypt will now be about Al-Jazeera’s depiction of Tahrir Square, South African elections have been about the wire-service queue pictures – wide-angle shots of shadowed lines snaking around shacks.

It has become a cliché; but this imagery is still figuratively powerful. It’s powerful not because the poor are seen to be voting, but because our polling stations are not guarded by tanks, armoured cars and guns. Troops do not patrol barbed-wire perimeters, combat rifles at the ready.

The normality of it all is, ironically, abnormal for the many countries who watch us on their television screens via satellite.

But let it be said: with all the good cheer about South Africa, there is a stern caveat. Voters have expectations, and South African voters now have high ones. Politicians will have to stand and deliver against an uncertain climate of global economics, and a highly limited tax base.

The only answer to this is jobs, jobs, jobs and more jobs – not created by government (which doesn’t have the capacity) but by the ingenuity of South Africans themselves.

Finally, the Malema’s of this world need to understand very quickly that their foul-mouthed identity politics merely nurtures a culture of entitlement; a culture of entitlement every bit as repulsive as that of the Afrikaner Nationalists who held this country to ransom for 46 years.

They need to realise that in a true democracy, the majority can only be defined by principle, and never by race.

The Halal Industry: a Call for Common Sense

2011-05-16T01:08:00.000-07:00

THE other day I wrote an article about the halalisation of our consumer space by Halal bodies. They were more concerned, I suggested, in making a fast buck than acting in public interest.

The piece, which appeared in a mainstream publication, was a response to complaints by non-Muslims that they had to pay for the Halal certification process.

For those who might not be aware: the retailers who fork out hundreds of thousands of rands annually for the Halal certification of toothpicks, water, fish, coffee, milk or nuts merely pass on their expenses to the consumer.

To say that there’s a growing of cynicism in South Africa of the multi-million rand Halal certification industry is an understatement.

With Halal traditionally centred on the slaughter of meat, and pork derivatives in foodstuffs, it truly boggles the mind that our scholars could suspect that a humble cashew – halal for thousands of years – would now suddenly rub shoulders with piggy en-route to market.

To this effect, an American scholar has even argued that as shocking as it may sound to us, the Halal industry is making a mint out of pork.

In my article I argued that some of our scholars had perverted the very foundation of Shari’ah, or Sacred Law. I said that they had rendered upside down the maxim that the ‘asl (source) of things was their ibahah (permissibility).

In this surreal world, Allah’s Halal Creation has to be deemed inherently impermissible so that some Halal mufti can arrive godlike on the scene with his rubber stamp to deem them permissible.

We have to remind ourselves too that ghuluw, or extremism, was something detested by the Prophet Muhammad (SAW). He would happily dine at the tables of Jews and Christians without inspecting their kitchens, or peering into their pots.

I also argued in my article that had these bodies created public institutions, poverty relief programmes or educational opportunities out of their profits – which they have not to any meaningful degree – we could forgive the Halal industry for taking our money.

I made the point, too, that public interest had to be served here; the benefits accruing from the Halal industry could not be exclusively Muslim, as non-Muslims paid for the certification as well.

Response on Facebook, and other social media platforms, indicated that I had touched a nerve. Some people felt I had attacked particular organisations, and actually named them. This I had not done.

So before I proceed further, let it be said that my aim was to interrogate the principle of the matter. I’m not interested in names, organisations – or the mad-hatter conspiracies surrounding them.

And I seriously don’t advise the indulgence of shoe-fitting. We are dealing with broad issues here that are better dignified by being discussed in a neutral space. Labels only serve to specify, personalise and emotionalise the thrust of the argument.

I have to say, as well, that my critique in no way suggests that Halal certification be done away with. Far from it. We need the Halal process, but what I’m calling for is some commonsense.

The word “Halal process” is used here deliberately. For halalisation in the market place is indeed a process, from the moment the meat is slaughtered – or the product manufactured – to the time it reaches the consumer’s shopping basket.

Historically, the Muslim market-place was governed by the institution of hisbah – the protection of personal honour and public safety. In this scenario a muhtasib, a qualified official, would police corruption and monitor the professional guilds.

He would also check on the ethics of business practice, inspect the quality of goods and ensure that there was no profiteering at the expense of the poor.

“Halal” in this application was far more embracing than just the make-up of the goods on display. It dealt with every facet of commercial life.

Amongst the traditional scholars who’ve studied the role of the muhtasib are Imam al-Ghazali, Ibn Taimiyyah and Imam Taqi Ad-Din as-Subki. The muhtasib played an institutional role in Islamic society from the 8th to the 19th century.

According to Imam al-Ghazali, the muhtasib had to be an accredited scholar – in fact, a Qadi. His duties, which focused on public morality and economic activity, even covered environmental issues. In the modern sense, the muhtasib would be something in between an attorney general and an ombudsman.

Perhaps our Halal sultans, the lords of the supermarket shelves, should be obsessing less on the obscure details of how a particular product is manufactured. They should be indulging more in the spirit of hisbah, and questioning the morality of how things are marketed and sold – and how excessively rising prices, for example, affect the consumer.

For how halal can an over-priced product be if it contains carcinogenic substances and artificial hormones? How halal is clothing that has involved the use of child- labour? How halal can something be if its sale is the consequence of excess interest?

It could be argued – somewhat simplistically I know – that where Muslims live as minorities (as we do in South Africa, the US or Europe) our judiciary bodies’ primary role should be to play the role of a modern-day muhtasib. These responsibilities are enormous.

Hisbah requires large doses of wisdom, as much as it does knowledge of the application of Sacred Law and social custom. It is not a job for the faint-hearted.

The “morals police” of so-called Islamic countries are, for example, an insult to hisbah. Yobbos patrolling the streets and markets with nightsticks and guns are definitely not muhtasibs.

Each society enjoys its own unique customs, and juridicial opinions applicable to Cairo may not be as suitable for Cape Town. But where there’s universality of application is the market-place. That’s where the principles, as reflected in the Qur’an, become the most comprehensive.

And for as long as something with a halal stamp on it is sold to me by a liar, a thief or a cheat – or the goods have been produced by damaging the environment – I will not buy that product. Stamp or not, I will not consider it halal.

Fisk: Bin Laden was a "Has Been"

2011-05-10T06:19:00.000-07:00

ROBERT FISK, the Beirut-based correspondent for The Independent, knows his way around the geopolitics of the Middle East better than most.

But more than that, Fisk speaks with the rare authority of having been there. Over the last three decades he has covered most of its major conflicts.

His political nous is also honed by a critical understanding of colonial history, a rare quality in today’s world of event-driven, embedded journalism. His books, Pity the Nation and The Great War for Civilisation, are classics of the genre.

My brief encounters with Fisk (in radio interviews) have revealed that he can be abrasive. He is a dogmatic man who does not suffer fools.

For somebody who must be pestered day and night by all manner of people, I’ve found him to be extremely generous with his time – but, understandably, wary of being exploited for his views.

I remember some years ago he put the phone down on me as we were going live on Voice of the Cape’s Drivetime. After the show I sent him an angry e-mail in which I accused him of being inconsiderate to our listeners.

To be honest, I didn’t expect a reply. But reply Fisk did. He said he gave time to community broadcasters across the world, but when he heard we were a Muslim broadcaster (via the station ID) he’d had to bail out.

Nothing against Muslims, he said, but he didn’t know us. He couldn’t risk being used to further potentially hidden agendas. I then realised that we’d been remiss not to adequately inform him about VOC, and having done that, he graciously agreed to do the interview.

I read later that Fisk had even walked out on a lunch with diplomats in Beirut. It was during the civil war and it was an act that saved his life. Agents for one of the factions in the conflict had told him afterwards he’d been monitored, and that any public bonhomie with a hostile foreign entity would have put him into his grave.

This principled awareness of a reporter’s role is what has sustained Fisk’s career. To be able to reflect the truth you need access to all sides of the story, and to be fair and consistent, you can’t afford to belong to any camps.

Fisk’s generosity of spirit, and nuanced understanding of events, would come to the fore in dramatic fashion in Afghanistan when an enraged mob would set about him after the US post 9/11 invasion.

Fisk was injured in the attack, and could so easily have basked in self-pity. Instead, he penned one of his most moving frontline dispatches, saying that he understood exactly why he – a symbol of the west – had been assaulted.

If I were a lecturer, I would make all my students read that piece. It’s not only informative journalism; it’s also a great instance of humanity.

It’s for all these reasons that I take commentary by Robert Fisk seriously. And when it comes to Bin Laden, I pay attention, because he is the only English-speaking journalist to have interviewed him three times.

Bin Laden’s demise, ten years after 9/11, has evoked a polarised response across the globe – from the Taliban threatening to avenge his death to the triumphalism of President Barack Obama.

There was also extensive comment about Bin Laden’s location in the heart of Pakistan, and an outcry about the nature of his “sea burial” and the refusal by Pakistan and the US to show his body.

But if you speak to Fisk – which I had the privilege of doing on air recently – these are merely distractions to more pressing international issues, such as the Middle East political earthquake.

After crustily accusing me of sounding like “an American radio-show host” when I used the cliché “icon of terror” for Bin Laden, he told me that the al-Qaeda figurehead was a “has been”.

He was a “middle-aged nonentity” who had never done anything. Bin Laden had wanted a Caliphate across the Middle East, but he’d completely failed in everything he tried to do.

“I would love to ask him what he thought of Egypt,” he said.

According to Fisk, al-Qaeda had become irrelevant and that Pakistan – who always knew where Bin Laden was located – had possibly felt he had no more use. He suggested that Bin laden had been betrayed for reward.

When asked about Bin Laden’s funeral at sea, and fears of a shrine being erected at his grave, Fisk answered that his marine entombment was “as creepy” as al-Qaeda and Bin Laden.

“Bin Laden was a Wahhabi, a man who didn’t even support the idea of a marked grave, so how do we understand that? It’s fairly obvious that it (Bin Laden’s death) was an execution mission, and perhaps we were not meant to see that,” he said.

On the question of Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, being pro-Taliban (and al-Qaeda sympathetic) he replied that open US support of India in Kashmir had caused huge resentment in Pakistan.

“I’ve been told by various sources, some even in the Pakistani military, that US policy on Kashmir is unpopular, and seen as about as biased against Pakistan as Israeli policy is against Palestinians,” he said.

The US saw India as a bulwark against China, and this foreign support of Indian Kashmir was a deep-rooted, if not sufficiently appreciated issue in Pakistan.

“The sentiment of the Pakistani generals is: (for Kashmir) let the US bleed in Afghanistan via the Taliban,” commented Fisk.

And, finally, how did he feel about the demise of Bin Laden?

“Well, he was responsible for thousands of deaths, so there you go. He probably got his just desserts. But then, just desserts are not the same as justice, are they?”

Bin Laden's Death: Surprise and Cynicism

2011-05-02T11:46:00.000-07:00

PRESIDENT Barack Obama’s announcement that the US’s most-maligned figure, Usama bin Laden, had been killed in a covert operation 50 kms north of the Pakistani Capital, Islamabad, has caused surprise and cynicism in the Muslim world.

There are many Muslims, in capitals such as Cairo and Tunis, who regard it as ironic that the rallying icon of the “War on Terror” for a neo-conservative American president, George Bush junior, has provided the fuel to re-ignite the fading career of Barack Obama, a neo-liberal.

The surprise has been that it has taken ten years to locate Bin Laden, who in 2001 had just enough time to flee his Tora Bora mountain hideout in Afghanistan before US forces destroyed it with Tomahawk missiles.

That he was discovered by Pakistani intelligence, living a comfortable suburban life in the leafy rural town of Abbottobad, is another surprise. The stereotype of him huddling in dark cave in Waziristan was finally proved to be a myth.

Also surprising was that an Arab, a foreigner, could live undetected in a Pakistan rural community. The question is: how long did he stay there? In small towns, where gossip travels fast, secrets are extremely difficult to keep.

Part of the answer definitely lies with the Pakistani intelligence service. Its operatives have been known for their alliances with the Al-Qaedah sympathetic Taliban, whose Pashtun identity enjoys blood ties amongst Pakistanis, and Peshawar’s Afghan refugee camps.

The cynicism in the Muslim world is based on several factors, not least the timing and the nature of Bin Laden’s demise. By not bringing the Al Qaedah leader to legal justice, the US has done itself no favours.

Whilst not denying Bin Laden’s bloodthirsty legacy, many argue that two wrongs do not make a right.

Then there is the issue of his burial. By dumping his body at sea – in an obvious attempt to prevent his grave from becoming a shrine – the US authorities have insulted the dignity of the Muslim dead, even a man of terror such as Bin Laden.

It will be puzzling to mainstream Muslims that the US was unable to realise that the extremist Salafi-Wahhabi sect, to which Bin Laden belongs, does not permit shrines. They seem to have forgotten that Al Qaedah was responsible for the dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas.

But with the US in the midst of an economic crisis, and led by a Democrat forced to seek favour with Republicans, the demise of Usama bin Laden – the world’s most-wanted bogey man – is a huge, morale-boosting victory.

And whilst the Muslim world – a world threatened more by Al Qaedah’s rigid extremism than the West ever has been – does not regard Usama bin Laden’s passing as insignificant, it does perceive Obama’s triumph as being symbolic.

For many, Bin Laden has been the ghost of an ill-contrived and erroneously perceived clash of civilisations – a man created by the CIA during the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, and re-invented in another role after that.

The fact is that the international Islamic community has had to bear the brunt of an Islamophobia caused by 9/11 where Islam, and all Muslims, were unfairly seen as adherents of terrorism. This in turn informed the perception of a conspiracy that the US was locked in a war with Islam.

And whether one liked it or not, Bin Laden was able to touch the nerve of many poor, disenfranchised and down-trodden people.

However, in recent years, Al Qaedah’s profile has diminished considerably. Its last major accredited act of terror was London 2005, and the involvement of Bin Laden and his second-in-command, Dr Ayman Al-Zahawiri, more distantly ideological than hands on.

Then there are the uprisings that have spread across North Africa and the Middle East. In spite of leaders such as Hosni Mubarak and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi blaming Al Qaedah for their woes, evidence on the ground has pointed more to social movements yearning for democracy.

The final question surrounding the death of Bin Laden are the multitude of myths that now have to leave the shadows of his being. The abstract nouns of the “War on Terror” need some serious scrutiny. Al Qaedah, for example, was never the multi-continental organisation it was so often said to be.

Al Qaedah was always an idea. It was a tragically literalist, fundamentalist one in which the world could be conveniently divided into a domain of Islam and a domain of Unbelief, and that the domain of Unbelief had to be conquered so that Islam – a victim of secularism and colonialism – could be the victor.

The world needs to know that Al Qaedah’s worldview – a total travesty of the Islamic creed – was always an unwelcome extremism that for a brief historical moment, managed to hijack one of God’s most beautiful faiths.

Halal Certification, the Industry of Doubt

2011-04-28T06:29:00.001-07:00

THE “Halalisation” of our consumer space continues unabated. In previous articles on this topic I’ve discussed Halal toothpicks and Halal water, both legal anomalies guaranteed to make classical Islamic scholars roll in their graves.

My recent discovery in a local supermarket that milk and yoghurt have now been certified Halal, or permissible, saw me whistling with amazement. The Prophet Muhammad, the Islamic exemplar, used to drink goat’s milk fresh from the udder.

Our contemporary Halal certification mafia, who’ve totally reversed the natural order of divine permissibility, have made legislative nit-picking a money grabbing art, rebuffing even the teaching of the Prophet.

This is because there are no known records of Prophet Muhammad ever asking the goat, the camel, the cow or the farmer whether their milk was Halal or not.

Halal certification in South Africa (and elsewhere in the Muslim world) has become a billion dollar industry. A recent international Halal conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, attended by hundreds of representatives, confirms this.

The sad truth is that the Halal industry preys mercilessly upon the ignorance of its subjects, and its fears. I have seen this in the Far East, the Middle East, the Indo-Pak, the US, Great Britain and now South Africa.

However, Islam’s legal schools of thought reveal that the understanding of Halal matters is based upon common sense. The corpus of Halal legislation was never designed for obscurantist scholarship, but practical application.

The tragedy here is that the Muslim – and non-Muslim – customer has to pay for this sometimes unnecessary service. The retailer simply passes on whatever costs he accrues in the accreditation process.

At the root of consumer Halal legislation is the procedure of slaughtering meat in a prescribed way and ensuring that no impurities – such as pork – come into contact with any foodstuffs.

When it comes to meat, for example, the conditions are easy to follow. The slaughterer has to be a believer who can pray, the animal has to be killed mercifully, the throat slit with a sharp knife and the blood – containing impurities – bled out of the animal.

Here again, Prophet Muhammad’s example is hugely illustrative. He used to dine with Christian and Jewish hosts, and it’s widely reported that his concern was always the meat. Yet if it was slaughtered by a believer – whether Christian or Jewish– he would not ask any further questions and eat.

And unlike some of today’s muftis, he would not rudely go into his host’s kitchen to peer into pots and to interrogate the make-up every single item in the pantry. Encountering products such as Halal certified spaghetti, coffee, peanut butter, dried fruit – and even nuts – is an affront to the Prophetic adage of “ease over difficulty”.

The Prophet operated on the principle that should be guiding our Halal bodies today – the inherent permissibility of things. One of the maxims of Fiqh (the application of Shari’ah or Sacred Law) is that Halal precedes Haram; that permissibility comes before impermissibility.

This is something that the Halal moguls have conveniently forgotten. A well-known verse in the Qur’an (36:38) says: “Be, and it is”. This command is an affirmation of the permissibility of existence, not its impermissibility.

It does not say, for example, “Be, and it is impermissible”.

Yet, in a frantic rush for money, our Halal certifying despots turn doubt into a lucrative industry. Everything is deemed impermissible by them until proved otherwise. Their inverting of the divine order of things is a serious breach of orthodox theology.

It’s the grave equivalent of turning to God and saying: “My Lord, I don’t trust you. Allow me to check your Creation first.”

Yet these same men, who read the same Qur’an as everyone else, seem to be unaware that its pages are resplendent with soaring verses extolling the virtues, graces and generosity of Creation.

They seem to forget that whilst the material world may be indeed regarded as transient, Muslims are enjoined to savour it with moderation. And to this effect, classical scholars such as Imam al-Ghazali will tell us that doubting the fruits of Creation has never been, and should not be, part of the Muslim psyche.

And yet, the doubts are allowed to fester, and cash-strapped South Africans of all ilk have to pay for Halal certificates on a host of products that don’t need certification.

This would have perhaps been a little more palatable had these Halal certifying bodies invested their millions back into the communities they obsequiously claim to serve. But this has not happened.

The Islamic credo that public interest must serve public interest, regardless of creed, has been betrayed.

The educational, artistic and cultural institutions that these monies should have funded simply don’t exist. There are no major university scholarships anywhere in South Africa offered in the names of any of these bodies.

Considering that it’s our money ultimately funding the Halal certification process, as South Africans we should be vociferously demanding some kind of social delivery in return for our investment. And until such time as one sees this, we can only conclude that self-interest and greed are at play here.

Arab Uprisings: The Clash of Civilisation Myth Falls

2011-04-14T06:13:00.001-07:00

THE grand myth of the “Clash of Civilisations”, the clarion call of neo-cons and fundamentalists everywhere, has fallen.

It fell during the Arab uprisings earlier this year when tyrants such as Ben Ali and Mubarak were toppled, and the bloodthirsty rule of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi overturned.

The neo-con mantra that the Arab strongmen had to stay in power because Arabs weren’t mature enough to think about things such as freedom of speech, civic liberty and democracy has been blown away.

The real reason why the strongmen had to keep their jobs – oil interests and Israel – has been rudely exposed like bare buttocks at a black tie function. The overthrow of despotic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya was clearly never in the imperial script.

Even Israel’s intelligence service MOSSAD, everybody’s go-to agency in North Africa and the Middle East, could not predict that the Arab world was going to explode.

Bernard Lewis, the octogenarian academic and author – who coined the unfortunate cliché “The Clash of Civilisations” in a 1990 essay entitled “The Roots of Muslim Rage” – must also be scratching his head in amazement.

Lewis’ simplistic view, obfuscated by academic suaveness, was that every Arab state was a Lebanon waiting to happen. Samuel Huntington, who plagiarised from Lewis three years later, wrote that if “central power” weakened, the Arab states would collapse.

For too long, I feel that Lewis’ deceptively genteel grammar has hidden the face of his Orientalism. For example, am I the only one to extrapolate from his writings the contention that “terrorism” is in our Muslim DNA because of the 13th century Hashishin (or Assassins)?

Lewis’ view – again never directly stated in such clear terms – is that Christendom and Islam are destined to be in a perpetual wrestling match for world power, the two opposite corners – east and west – stamping, clashing and flattening the grass like rival bull elephants.

But with Ibn Taimiyyah’s famous 12th century Mardin Declaration (or fatwa) being re-interpreted by modern scholars, it has become clear that Islam can’t be seen in terms of two different existents: Dar ul Islam (the abode of Islam) and Dar ul-Harb (the Abode of War).

Not even Ibn Taimiyyah, the watering hole of Salafi-Wahhabism and Islamic extremism, separated the world into territories of belief and hostility. Indeed, it was Ibn Taimiyyah who ruled that Muslims could live peacefully as minorities during the time of the Mongol invasions.

This is a critical point – one that often sticks in the throat of the Muslim extremist, Christian fundamentalist, Revisionist Zionist or political neo-con – a person who prefers his world to be in reflected as black-and-white, rather than sweeping technicolour.

Indeed, it was Cairo’s Tahrir Square that eloquently put the lie to Lewis’ idea of civilisational discord, a space where I’m sure he believed east would refuse to meet west. This was when Al-Jazeera showed Coptic Christians protecting Muslims at their Friday prayer, and on the following Sunday, Muslims doing the same for the Copts.

With no central power – the manufactured bogey of the neo-con political conservatives – it was evident for all to see that Egypt was moving to the centre, and not dissolving into sectarian chaos like Lebanon in the 1980’s

I was told by Anas al-Tikriti of Britain’s Cordoba Foundation (who visited Cairo in February) that during the uprising churches had been guarded by Muslims, and mosques by Christians. There was not one incident, he said.

These simple gestures in places such as Tahrir Square go way beyond their spontaneity or symbolism; they signify active tolerance and human togetherness. They provide a living example, a common Abrahamic principle as it were, of noble public conduct where east and west do not clash, but join hands – a juncture where Isaac embraces Ishmael.

Further evidence, if one is not yet convinced, can be found in the United States – ironically the wellspring of the “clash” theory – where Pastor Terry Jones, the celebrated Qur’anic pyromaniac, finally succeeded in torching a Qur’an earlier this month.

The be-whiskered Jones stole the international limelight last year when he threatened to have a mass bonfire of the Holy Book outside his parish. Whilst Muslim indignation boiled, it was the Christian community that openly condemned him, and strongly advised him, to desist from his southern-fried madness.

For Jones, at least, fate worked in reverse. Instead of people lighting bonfires around the country, several churches sponsored a “read a Qur’an day” and interest in the Holy Book itself spiralled, translations selling out at many US bookstores.

The Kairos Palestine document, penned by the Palestinian Christian community in late 2009, is yet another example of the “clash” myth being destroyed. With Hamas a central player, the dynamics of the Palestinian struggle have been frequently pigeonholed as “Islamic terror”. The falsehood of it aspiring for world domination, via the subjugation of Israel, has been an easy lie.

The Palestinian Kairos document, a Christian “word of faith, hope and love”, puts the Middle Eastern conflict into the universal light where it rightfully belongs. Originally written in Arabic, the lingua franca of the east, it is currently being introduced to the western church where the mother tongue is predominantly English.

Perhaps the problem with Bernard Lewis and his ilk is that whilst not intentionally ignoble, they have become entrapped by sub-conscious prejudice within their own culturally determined and colonial frames of reference.

Their single biggest failing has been their inability to understand that “isms” of any nature arise out of historical and political circumstances, inside and outside of their respective belief systems. I think the point is that good men of faith, east and west, have always seen “the other” unconditionally, and not through themselves.

Bethlehem

2011-04-13T06:24:00.000-07:00

I HAVE NEVER visited Bethlehem during normal times. I have never seen the city crowded with tourists. In fact, I have probably seen more Israeli soldiers at its checkpoints than pilgrims in Manger Square.

My first visit was in 1997, just after Israel had sealed off the West Bank and Gaza in response to the Ben Yehuda mall bombing in Jerusalem. We had tried to enter the city, but concrete barriers and truculent soldiers had barred our way.

After driving around, we were directed to a track that bumped through a stony field. Our driver went a short way, but then turned back, saying he could not risk damaging the suspension of his commercial mini-bus.

Bethlehem is only 10 kilometres south of Jerusalem, so we returned to the Strand Hotel to wait to for nightfall. We would take a taxi as far as we could on a side road, and using the cover of darkness, sneak past the blockade.

After sunset, we drove from Jerusalem towards the city. Our driver had done this trip many times before. He turned off his headlights, and we nudged along a bumpy track until a hole and pile of rocks blocked our way.

“Be quiet,” said our driver, “don’t let the soldiers hear you!”

Waiting about 100 metres from us in the darkness was our ride into Bethlehem. We crept through a field and slipped into the awaiting vehicle. I was in the passenger seat and as we approached a Palestinian roadblock, found myself staring at the muzzle of a gun.

The rest of our journey into Manger Square was less heart stopping. There was little traffic and the Square itself was empty. In fact, there was nothing to see, as to our disappointment, the Church of the Nativity was closed.

Our visit did, however, invite curiosity. Postcard sellers emerged from the shadows. We were invited for tea at a souvenir shop, its owner opening his doors for us. It sold all the usual olive wood rosaries, chocolate box icons and silver bric à brac on its crowded shelves. I was impressed by a mother-of-pearl model of the Dome of the Rock, but even with bargaining, it was beyond my pocket.

Bethlehem, which is situated on the mountainous West Bank has been inhabited since the Stone Age. It was called Ephrath in the Book of Genesis. It was the birthplace of David and is where he was anointed king by Samuel.

Genesis3 also mentions the burial near Bethlehem of Rachel, wife of Jacob, mother of Benjamin. Her rock tomb has been renovated by the Mamluks, the Ottomans and Sir Moses Montefiore, who built a dome over it in 1841.

Revered by all faiths, its caretaker from 1948 until the 1980’s was the Islamic Waqf Authority. Today, Rachel’s tomb is under Israeli control.

Known in Arabic as Bait Lahm (the City of Meat) and in Hebrew as Bait Lehem (the City of Bread), Bethlehem is distinguished as being the birthplace of Jesus. It was Saint Helena who built the Church of the Nativity in 333 CE over the site of a Roman temple dedicated to Adonis.

The Church of the Nativity is Christianity’s oldest existing building, and has been a monastic centre for centuries. Saint Jerome translated the Bible into Latin from Greek in a nearby cave.

In 614 CE the Persians invaded Palestine, but spared the Church of the Holy Nativity due to a mosaic of the Magi, or the Three Wise Men. According to Scripture, these men had followed a star that had led them to the birthplace of Christ. The Church was saved because the Three Magi – called Kaspar, Melchior and Balthazar – were Zoroastrian priests held in the highest regard by the Persians.

When Caliph ‘Umar arrived in Bethlehem in about 638 CE he decreed that the Church of the Nativity be preserved for Christian worship. In 1099 the Greek Orthodox were removed from their Sees by the Crusaders. During the Ottoman era, custodianship of the church was disputed by the Catholic and Greek churches.

The United Nations Partition Decision of 1947 put Bethlehem under the ambit of Jerusalem’s corpus separatum. In other words, Bethlehem was part of Jerusalem’s international zone. Jordan held control of the city until it was occupied by Israel in 1967, and in 1995, Bethlehem fell under the control of the Palestinian Authority in compliance with the Oslo Accords.

Since 1948, Bethlehem has changed in character from being a Christian city to a Muslim one. Apart from emigration being the option of many Christian Palestinians, the conflict has seen the predominantly Muslim refugee camps of Bait Jibrin, A’ida and Deheisheh springing up outside the city.

My second visit to Bethlehem was in early June 2002, right after ‘Operation Defensive Shield’ and the 39-day siege of the Church. This was when Israeli forces had entered Manger Square in pursuit of gunmen. About 200 people were forced to take refuge in the Church, resulting in a standoff that attracted international headlines.

Much had changed since my visit five years previously, not least of all, the construction of the Gilo checkpoint, one of the 69 permanently staffed checkpoints amongst 500 or so Palestinian barriers dotting the West Bank.

Gilo opened at 5 am and closed at 7 pm. For the 2,000 Palestinians who had to cross it daily, it was a soul-destroying experience. What had been a ten-minute taxi ride into Jerusalem, now took more than two hours each way. For those fortunate enough to work in Israel, it meant queuing at 4 am to get to work by 7 am.

Due to the capriciousness of the young conscripts manning the checkpoint, this did not always happen. People we spoke to said crossing the Gilo checkpoint was more tiring, more stressful – and sometimes even more time consuming – than their job. Settlers on the West Bank used separate roads that bypassed the checkpoints.

We approached Gilo at about 10 am. Women in black hijab with shopping bags and an old man were waiting to be processed. As foreigners with passports, it took us about 20 minutes to get through the metal detectors and turnstiles. I saw the old man fidgeting for his identity papers as a soldier in a bulletproof glass booth barked out orders in Hebrew.

On the other side, we caught a taxi to town – or what was left of it. The main road into Bethlehem was like a set from Frank Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’. Israeli tanks had flattened pavements, wrecked vehicles, ripped out telephone lines, knocked over lampposts and left gaping potholes in the tar. Some buildings had been shelled, others flattened. Even trees had been destroyed.

We stopped at a house where two young boys were sweeping up the debris of their living room. A shell had punctured the front wall and smashed into the opposite one. Another family showed me bullet holes in their front door.

“We were just sitting at home and these soldiers started firing at us,” said a young man.

On a rise above me I saw a house covered with camouflage netting. It was flying the Star of David. “What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s an Israeli lookout point,” replied our taxi driver, who said that the family living there had been evicted.

We also visited Yasser ‘Arafat’s headquarters. F16 fighter jets had reduced it to a series of concrete pancakes, twisted steel and piles of rubble under which were flattened cars. Glass and porcelain crunched underfoot.

Israel, claiming that it was hitting back at suicide bombers during ‘Operation Defensive Shield’, had attacked civic infrastructure and private homes, as well as detaining – without charge – scores of people. Yet in Bethlehem there were no military targets as defined by the Geneva Convention. The city harboured no hostile forces – other than a few resistance fighters armed with aging Kalashnikovs.

Locals such as the 22-year-old Amjad Adnan Sa’ada, who bred birds for a living, could tell me that on 17 June 2001, during the height of the intifadah, an Apache helicopter had fired a missile at his house. He had escaped with severe shrapnel injuries, but two of his uncles and a cousin – all of them innocents – had died.

Muhammad Shehadeh, a local activist, could recount that on 26 May 2002, Apache helicopters had fired several missiles at his house, destroying it completely.

According to international law, military attacks on civilians were illegal. Collective punishment – à la Operation Defensive Shield – was a major breach of its statutes.

Our next stop was the house of a Palestinian martyr, the 32 year-old Musa Abdullah, who had passed away on 22 May. We parked outside his second-floor apartment. Sayyid Walid had been given money in South Africa to donate to a deserving family, and apparently after consultation, Musa Abdullah’s widow had been chosen.

I had visited martyrs’ families in southern Lebanon before, and was not relishing the encounter. Even though there was pride attached to martyrdom, my experience was that for those affected it never diminished the harsh realities of loss and grief. The shock of death, especially when unexpected, was hardly made less bearable by its elevated status.

On a wall outside the apartment was a poster of Abdullah, a thin young man with a moustache.

His wife, a woman in her late 20’s, opened the door with an infant on her hip. The sparsely decorated living room had a picture of the Dome of the Rock on the wall. A piece of tinsel and a red plastic Hibiscus were draped over the frame.

She told us that her husband had gone to the shop during a curfew break (Palestinians had been confined to their houses) to buy bread. On his way back, carrying bags of circular loaves, he had been confronted by an Israeli army patrol. They had told him to lift his shirt to see if he was wearing an explosive ‘suicide belt’. But as he did so, he had been shot dead.

While we chat, his 14-year-old son blusters in Arabic that he also wants to die a martyr. But all I see is his mother biting back her tears. She is close to collapse. Our visit to her has been more than she can bear, and it is with relief that I bid salam.

Our next stop is Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity with its lowered door, the Door of Humility. Apart from engendering a sense of reverence as one entered the church, I was told it had prevented excitable Mamluk horsemen from galloping into the nave.

As we approached the entrance, vendors selling trinkets, beads, rosaries, crucifixes and keffiyahs swarmed around us. Manger Square was empty and they were desperate for business. “Here’s a special present for you,” said one persistent salesman, as I tried to swat him off.

Us South Africans were definitely not going to transform the city’s economy in one short visit, and I felt sorry for these people. Their livelihoods had been destroyed through no fault of their own.

Inside the church it was dingy. There were no pews in the nave, its oak roof supported by a double row of veined columns with efflorescent capitals. I viewed the original mosaic floor through a trapdoor. At its Greek Orthodox altar, marked by a glittering iconostasis, I saw bearded priests.

The grotto of the Nativity, which was accessed by a flight of stairs to the right of the Greek altar, had a rock ceiling stained with soot. It was a syncretism of Orthodox and Catholic tastes. In the grotto’s rectangular space there were three altars.

The spot where it was believed Jesus had been born to Virgin Mary was marked by a fourteen-pointed silver star. ‘Hic se Virgine Maria Jesus natus est’ said an inscription. My high school Latin told me that it proclaimed Jesus had been born there.

Above the marble-encased star a thicket of lamps hung in a tangle of chains – six placed by the Greeks, five by the Armenians and four by the Catholics. To my right was an altar said to be where Jesus had been ‘adored’ by the Three Magi. Another altar, the Altar of the Manger, was used by the Catholics. The walls of the grotto were draped with red curtains.

We proceeded to the mosque of ‘Umar across the square for the post midday prayer. Bethlehem’s mosque was not as historic as it sounded. Although it commemorated the presence of the Caliph in Bethlehem, I was told that its current structure had been built in 1947. I was also informed that during the siege of the Church of the Nativity, Israeli forces had imprisoned and beaten its imam, accusing him of ‘encouraging Hamas’.

After the prayers we were invited to lunch. As we sat down to grilled chicken and salads, we heard a racket from a loud hailer outside. It was attached to the roof of a car that was driving slowly through the neighbourhood.

“Don’t worry, it’s just the announcement of a wedding,” laughed our host, Abu Ahmad, who said that Abu Ahmad’s son next door was getting married to the daughter of Abu Ahmad a block away. The room collapsed in a heap of mirth and giggles emanated from the kitchen when Isma’il asked how much a Palestinian wife would cost him.

The West Bank is one of the oldest inhabited areas on earth, and our hosts told us that frenetic settlement building was fast destroying its heritage. “So much has been destroyed or lost already,” sighed Abu Ahmad, who added that countless prophets had trodden its soils.

“The settlers are stealing our land, pilfering our water and chopping down our olive trees. They even colonise our history. But Bethlehem is our home,” he said, “it’s the only place in the world where you can celebrate Christmas on three separate days.”

The People of the Prophet

2011-01-20T07:26:00.000-08:00

The poor will be the people of Paradise.

The Prophet Muhammad (SAW), who was born poverty-stricken – and who lived a life of poverty out of choice – made a prayer that he would be raised amongst the poor on Resurrection Day.

Of course, Islam has never scorned honourably earned wealth. The Prophet (SAW) did not see material poverty in its negative sense as a virtue. Zakah (alms tax) and sadaqah (charity) were institutions set up to redress the rich-poor divide.

And the Prophet (SAW) did exhort his Companions, in spite of his own invocation, to seek refuge from the “evils” of poverty.

However, poverty still does have a place of honour in the Islamic afterlife – especially for those placed lowest on the social ladder. The axiom is that their forbearance in the immediate realm will offer them riches in the next.

Scholars say there are two basic levels of poverty: the first is the poverty of the soul, a state of spiritual nihilism, which exists equally in the hearts of the rich and the poor. It can be the rich man pleasuring himself to death, or the poor man committing murder.

This poverty is a disconnecting of the soul from its Creator and His ethical values, and the adoption of an absolute, one-eyed materialism.

The second category is the material poverty of the body, where there is a struggle to survive or sustain oneself. This is something most of us fear. When someone in such a situation cries out for help we give. We give not only out of compassion, but because we pray that it won’t be us.

We instinctively know that stripped of the worldly comforts of shelter, clothing, food and sustenance, the faithful will have nothing but God to rely upon. And this is not a romantic notion. There can be nothing more devastating and more humbling than the loss of livelihood.

The ultimate state of the God-fearing poor, then, is that there is nothing except Allah, simply because there is nothing.

It’s for good reason, I think, that the Qur’an declares a loss of property, family or income as one of man’s greatest tests. Fortunately, through Ayyub (as), or Job, we are given hope that God, in his Infinite Mercy, will give us back what He takes away.

Over the years whilst covering a number of events such as famine, war, flood – and apartheid – I have thought a lot about the poor, because most times my stories have had to deal with the lot of the poor.

Whilst making me appreciative of what I have, it has also taught me that the human spirit is often more resilient than we think it is. That has been the most humbling lesson. My experiences – as harrowing as they’ve been – have not been about despair.

This is something that Dr Imtiaz Sooliman of Gift of the Givers aid organisation has discussed in interviews. Whilst dire circumstances can bring out the worst in human nature, it more often than not, brings out the best of human nature.

And predictably in a world where the majority of us are poor, it’s the poor who are tested the most. I’ve often thought about what I’ve seen others endure, because I don’t think I would ever be able to cope with their kind of adversity.

And perhaps that’s why I’m in the role of an observer, because Allah does promise in the Qur’an that He also won’t test us beyond our endurance. We all have our roles to play in the grand scheme of things.

But just think of the Jahalin Bedouin, chased off the land twice since the Nakba; or the 80 year old Palestinian woman, whose Jerusalem house was demolished by the Zionists. Her amazing response was that the Jews could do anything to her, but they weren’t going to shake her love for God.

I also remember the impoverished couple in a Lebanese refugee camp who’d lost their three sons in the civil war. I’d noticed their faded portraits on the wall. It was Allah’s will, they told me without bitterness when I asked them.

In the Sindh area of Pakistan – where Sufism oozes out of the soil – chivalry would come before the pangs of hunger. “Give water to my neighbour first, he’s more thirsty than me,” said one man, who himself had not eaten for days when an aid team approached him.

In the Sahel sub-Saharan country of Niger, villages had no running water and no electricity. Donkey carts were the predominant form of transport; women washed clothes in puddles and farmers placidly ploughed their fields with oxen.

The countryside was clean and unpolluted, not because of first-world environmental standards, but because the people couldn’t afford to buy goods to litter.

In one village the people were so poor the women used to share a dress to go to town. In spite of their lot, Niger’s women – like those of Pakistan and so many poor countries – are always proudly and colourfully attired.

But I think the biggest lesson I learnt from Niger was that there are people on this earth who have nothing between them and their grave except the clothes they are wearing.

In Sufistic terms these are the truly unveiled people – souls that have no other choice but to rely upon the mercy of God, and that if there is no immediate respite in the long term, it is God who knows best.

I have so many more examples: the mufti of Kosovo travelling to the United States with a plastic packet as his luggage; the sublime purity of the people of Banda Aceh; the light shining in Imam Dawud Lobi’s face in Langa; a turbaned Sudani going on pilgrimage telling me that his turban is his funeral shroud; the Pakistani mother in the Punjab with her child sheltering between her muddy legs.

In Cape Town I just have to think of the early Muslim slave runaways and the Sufi teachers such as Shaikh Nur ul-Mubeen and Tuan Sayyid Ja’far hiding in the mountains surrounding Cape Town. Thousands of kilometres from home, with no hope of ever going home, they kept their faith and left their pristine values behind when they passed on.

Nobody is poorer than a slave, but just look at their rich legacy today – a thriving Muslim community at the foot of Africa.

It is precisely this kind of scenario that drives my optimism, in spite of the pessimistic global-warming tableaus of the world crying out around us. The heedless rich may have messed up the earth, but the poor – the people of the Prophet – are those who’ve always kept it pure.

The Gentile Project

2010-11-11T05:43:00.000-08:00

OUR BUS TURNED LEFT PAST HAIFA’S headland. A ship steamed towards its harbour, its decks weighed down with containers. Decades ago they would have been crammed with immigrants in search of a promised land.

But now, as I saw modern condominiums lining the shore, I could have been anywhere in the world. How had it come to this? How had a community, scattered across the world in a Diaspora, been able to colonise and create Israel, a modern state named after the prophet Jacob?

I remembered a book, Islam and its Discontents, written by the Franco-Arab scholar, Professor Abdelwahab Meddeb. Modern Zionism initially had nothing to do with Judaism, he said. The first notions of a Jewish homeland had originated in Protestant circles.

I remembered too the writings in Bitter Harvest by the Christian Palestinian historian, Sami Hadawi. He had argued that a Christian fundamentalist misinterpretation of the Old Testament was the source. He had questioned the premise that Abraham had been bequeathed a homeland exclusive to the sons of Isaac.

Hadawi had pointed out what he felt were its contradictions. God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis could never have been made to Jews alone. Ishmael was also the seed of Abraham, and God’s undertaking had to apply as equally to Christians and Muslims, as it did to Jews.

Had not the Hebrew Revelation said in Genesis?

…and in thee (Abraham) shall all families of the earth be blessed.

He had also argued that Israelite tenure of the Holy Land had never been unconditional. The covenant between God and the Israelites had been strictly dependent upon their obedience. Had Moses not warned the Israelites that if they did not obey Divine Law, a Diaspora would befall them?

There were no mentions in scripture anywhere of a third Israelite return to Judea. There was no basis in Old Testament or New Testament sources to justify a modern, ethnic Jewish state in Palestine, Hadawi had argued.

He had also added that Israel itself was a metaphor; there was an Israel ‘of the spirit’ and there was an Israel ‘of the flesh’.

I could not help but note that this view corresponded to voices within Orthodox Judaism, such as the Neturei Karta, a grouping that has largely been marginalised by the sweep of contemporary political Zionism.

These anti-Zionist Jews believe that their Creator, and not man, has the final say in the status of Israel: in other words, the present Jewish state has not come into being by fulfilling any injunctions of the Holy Books.

Three Oaths

I was told that the Haredim, the biggest Orthodox group within Israel, had had to do some nifty egg-dancing between the contradictions of classical Judaism and political Zionism. And this was best illustrated, I soon discovered, through the Three Talmudic Oaths located in the Tractate Ketuvot.

Derived from the angst and melancholy of the Babylonian exile in 587 BCE, and a message sent by Jeremiah to the elders, the Three Oaths were said to be the result of three divine vows between Heaven and Earth, and between the Creator and the Jew.

The first was that Jews should not descend upon the Holy Land by force; the second was that they should not rebel against host governments; and the third was that they should not prolong the coming of the Messiah by their sins.

When I researched the Three Oaths, I walked ingenuously into a theological firestorm.

In one reading I was informed that the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Holocaust had fully abrogated the Three Oaths. The modern state of Israel, I was hotly told, had not come into being by a Jewish betrayal of the Oaths, but rather, by a non-Jewish complicity.

On the other hand, Neturei Karta had said that the Three Oaths, and the Diaspora, were obligations intended to expiate Jews from the sins that had caused the Creator to exile them in the first place. Only when the Shekhina, the Divine Presence, descended upon Zion would the Diaspora end.

This view, of course, clashed with another one I encountered in the halls of Judaism. The Messiah would only come once Jews had lifted their own hands in the creation of a Jewish state, and the reconstruction of the Third Temple.

I retreated to the calmer realms of Professor Abdelwahab Meddeb where, according to him, the contemporary Jewish Zionist thesis had only gained momentum at the beginning of the 19th century after it had circulated in Protestant circles.

Shalom Goldman, professor of Hebrew and Middle Eastern Studies at Emory University, is a Jew who agrees with Meddeb. Zionism, he writes, is the Jewish implementation of an idea that had been developing in Christian quarters for over 300 years.

The Egyptian scholar, Professor Adelwahab Elmessiri, corroborates Meddeb’s findings. He identifies Lord Shaftesbury and Laurence Oliphant, both early British Zionists, as being pioneers of the modern discourse.

Country without a nation

Shaftesbury was an Evangelist who had actively promoted the idea of an ethnic Jewish homeland. In July 1853 he had declared: “There is a country without a nation; and now God in his wisdom and mercy directs us to a nation without a country.”

Laurence Oliphant, who supported Shaftesbury’s views, authored The Land of Gilead in 1880. His book, which encourages Jewish settlement, often reads like a blueprint for the Nakba.

Other 19th century British personalities to support a Jewish homeland were Lord Lindsay, Sir George Gawlor, John Derby, Alexander Keith, Charles Henry Churchill and the author, George Eliot.

My own research led me to the 12th century and to the cell of the Calabrian mystic, Joachim of Fiore. His reading of the Book of Revelation had him claiming that the earth would experience three epochs, or dispensations. The return of the Jews to Zion would set the table for the coming of the final dispensation, and the rule of the Messiah.

This would see Jews being peacefully converted to Christianity instead of being damned. His motif of Jewish ‘salvation’ – one that would come to characterise modern Evangelism – contradicted the mainstream church’s view that Jews had been condemned to eternal exile.

I also arrived at the door of Martin Luther, the 16th century Protestant reformer. Salvation was by faith – his faith – and when Jews had politely declined to fall at his feet, a disillusioned Luther had condemned them to hellfire.

His strident views are the first mass stirrings of modern evangelism, and an ominous harbinger of the Nazi Holocaust.

The 17th and 18th centuries had their voices for a Jewish homeland too. Amongst them was the British MP, Sir Henry Finch, who spoke about ‘the world’s greatest restoration’. Napoleon Bonaparte was another who supported the idea.

But behind all the apocalyptic verbiage of those rooting for the creation of a Jewish homeland, there lurked a world view that implied Jews did not belong in Europe.

It was a jingoistic kind of Orientalism derived from the Middle Ages. It was the same outlook that had perceived the Saracen, or the Arab, as much of an unwelcome resident of the Holy Land as the Jew was of Europe.

I might be accused of cynicism. But it has to be noted that historians such as Robert the Monk, Guibert of Nogent and Baldrick of Bourgeuil – who recorded events of the First Crusade – felt that Arabs were a ‘vile and abominable race’ fit only for ‘extermination’.

This European anti-Semitism, extending to Jewish communities as well, had been preceded by a band of Crusaders massacring Jews living along the Rhine.

Cannibalism

In the winter of 1097 famished Crusaders had roasted and eaten the flesh of the townsfolk of Mara’rat al-Numan on the Orontes River. They had reported that the children were particularly delicious. This group had believed that Arabs and Jews were the natural enemies of Jesus Christ.

Both Arabs and Jews were massacred in Jerusalem in 1099. Jerusalem was re-conquered by Saladin in 1187, and while Jews were sheltered by the Caliphs of the Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman dynasties, Diasporic communities living outside the Islamic realm were often persecuted.

Yet in spite of this, the Rabbis clung to their traditional beliefs. The Diaspora was by Divine Decree. It took the Dreyfus affair in France to inspire a secularist Theodore Herzl to write Der Judenstat in 1896, and to found the World Zionist Congress in 1897.

The British Balfour Declaration of 1917, supporting the idea of Jewish state in Palestine, and colonial opportunities afforded by the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1923, were to open the political door further.

The Ottoman Empire, which was regarded as the ‘sick old man of Europe’ at the start of the 20th century, had caught the attention of Britain, France and the Russian Czar. Turkey was at the juncture of Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

At stake were new colonies, lucrative trade routes, oil deals and control of the Suez Canal. To keep her Russian and French rivals at bay, the British had supported Istanbul. However, after the Ottomans had sided with Germany in the 1914-18 war and the Armenian genocide had reared its ugly head, the British Foreign Office had been forced to change tack.

Max Dimont, author of Jews, God and History, writes that this brief Ottoman dalliance with Germany had nearly derailed the Zionists. The Turks had declared Zionism illegal, had hung ‘allied (war) sympathizers’ for treason, and had deported 12, 000 Jews from Palestine for not being Turkish citizens.

Ironically, the Arab world was destined to be an unwitting tool of Zionism’s survival. The pan-Arabist camp had long hankered to topple the Turkish Caliphate. In 1917 a young British army officer, T.E. Lawrence, was directed to co-ordinate the Arab Revolt.

For putting the Turks to flight in Syria, Jordan and Palestine, the sponsor of the uprising, the Meccan-based descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, Sharif Hussein ibn ‘Ali, was promised a pan-Arab Caliphate from Palestine to Yemen. This was done via the McMahon-Hussain correspondence.

Arab goodwill

But Arab goodwill towards Britain had already been betrayed by the Sykes-Picot Accord between France, Britain and Russia. This pact had divided Bilad al-Sham, the greater Middle East region, into chunks of post-Ottoman colonial real estate such as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

For the Arab world previously unused to nation-state boundaries, and more accustomed to the loosely autonomous Turkish vilayets, or provincial sanjaqs, Sykes-Picot was to prove a shattering blow. When the Meccan Sharif claimed his pan-Arab throne, the British simply hurrumphed and looked the other way.

The weakening Turkish Caliphate was five years from its demise, and there was now a leadership vacuum in the Arab realm. Who were the independent Arab leaders?

The Wahhabi Ibn Sa’ud in the untamed Najd signed an agreement with the British, but did not take part in the 1917 uprising. Ibn Rashid of the Shammar region was pro-Turkish, as was Imam Yahya in semi-autonomous Yemen. Greater Syria and Iraq, though, were rudderless.

The Meccan Sharifs found themselves losing influence. Towards the end of 1918, Sharif Faizel Husseini (the second son of the Sharifian patriarch) met with T. E. Lawrence and entered into an agreement with Chaim Weizmann.

The Weizmann-Husseini agreement, as it was briefly known, stated that ‘all necessary measures’ should be taken to ‘stimulate the immigration of Jews’ to Palestine. Attached to the document was a curious Arabic codicil – almost an afterthought – written by Faizel in his own hand and signed by Weizmann:

Provide the Arabs obtain their independence as demanded…I shall concur in the above articles. But if the slightest modification or departure be made, I shall then not be bound by a single word of the present agreement…

Peter Mansfield in The Arabs claims that the Sharifs were prepared to give the Balfour Declaration a try to ‘help the progress of the Arabs’. Dr ‘Azzam Tamimi of the London-based Institute of Islamic Political Thought, accuses Sharif Faizel Husseini of self-interest.

The agreement – widely scorned in the Arab realm – was never tested, and was soon a worthless scrap of paper. After being granted the throne of Syria in 1920, Sharif Faizel was summarily unseated by the French. As a sop, he was sent to rule Iraq, it taking the deaths of 10, 000 restless Iraqis to get him into power.

Described by T. E. Lawrence as a ‘brave, weak, ignorant spirit’ trying to do the work for which only ‘a genius, a prophet or a great criminal was fitted’, Sharif Faizel died in 1933.

He was a Franco-British puppet that had been foisted upon a country of which he was not a native. It was an arrangement that could not last. In 1958 his son, Sharif Faizel II, was killed in a military coup. Army rule would in turn be toppled in 1963 by the Baathists, from whose ranks would emerge Iraqi strongmen such as Saddam Hussain.

Balfour

With Arab territories west of the Jordan falling under European dominion, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 merely compounded the humiliation. The dream of Arabs enjoying hegemony over the lands of the Prophet in the 20th century became as remote as the prospect of an Eskimo caliphate in Hawaii.

The memoirs of British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George mention that the Balfour Declaration was a gesture to Chaim Weizmann for his work on developing acetone, a chemical essential for manufacturing cordite. Cordite, used in fuses, had previously been produced by Germany – now at war with England.

Robert Fisk observes that both the Balfour Declaration and the McMahon-Hussain correspondence were instruments of British ‘political expediency’. The one was the result of the British needing Arabs to fight the Turks, and the other was the result of Britain needing Jewish patronage.

The Washington Report offers another take on how the Balfour Declaration came into being. It refers to the Zimmerman Note, a secret contingency brief dispatched from the German war cabinet to its Mexican ambassador in 1917.

According to The Washington Report, Germany had to keep the United States neutral at all costs, but failing that, a call had to be made for the restoration of Mexican sovereignty over New Mexico, Arizona and Texas.

This encrypted note was intercepted and sent by German Zionists to the British, who allegedly used it to persuade President Woodrow Wilson to declare war against Germany in 1917, and to tip the scales in favour of the allies.

Another view is that Sir Mark Sykes, co-architect of the Sykes-Picot Accord, had pushed long and hard for the Balfour Declaration. In this version, Chaim Weizmann was waiting outside cabinet for a decision when Sykes came out to tell him: “Chaim, it’s a boy!”

Whatever the instrument of the Balfour Declaration, the outcome by 1918 was that Arab leadership had been duped. The McMahon-Hussain correspondence promising a pan-Arab Caliphate, and described by the Israeli historian Tom Segev as ‘evasive and amateurish’, conflicted not only with the Sykes-Picot Accord, but now also the Balfour Declaration.

Spectre of Zionism

So for its support of Britain in unseating the Turkish Ottomans, the Arab world would not only be visited by yet another colonialist, but also the spectre of Zionism.

As Karen Armstrong has said: ‘The dispossessed, uprooted and wandering Jew’ would soon be replaced by ‘the homeless, uprooted and dispossessed Palestinian’.

For those living west of the Jordan, this would mean displacement and disruption at the hands of the Zionists on a massive scale; first after 1948 and then 1967, when Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and Syria’s Golan Heights and Egyptian-administered Gaza would be occupied by Israeli forces.

Today more than 5 million Palestinians are in what the late Professor Edward Said calls a ‘shattat’, or a scattering. More than half a million are exiled overseas in Europe and the United States; a million reside under sufferance in the 1948 territories, and about 3 million lives in Gaza and the West Bank.

Furthermore, over 50% of Jordanians (about 2 million) are of Palestinian descent. In Lebanon, half a million are still stateless refugees while the rest of the refugee population (another half million) is spread through Syria, Iraq and other Arab states.

We stopped at a traffic light. Everything seemed so reassuringly normal. Unlike in the old South Africa, I could see no signs of petty apartheid. ‘Jews only’ boards were not stenciled on to park benches. Our driver turned into a side road, and halted at the gates of a holiday resort. We were now at the site of Tantura village in the Haifa region, and as I was to discover, yet another hapless victim of the 1948Nakba.

Israel: Strange White Men

2010-11-09T05:52:00.000-08:00

AS WE TRAVELLED ALONG THE BRIGHT Mediterranean coast, it belied the dark, cynical undertow of contemporary Israeli politics. Whilst most Israelis yearned for secure borders, Palestinians demanded liberation and national identity from within the same space.

There was definitely no evidence of the idealistic Herzlian vision of Israel being a walled-in refuge for Jews, as well as a liberal European island of tolerance and enlightenment. The lofty mirage of that idyllic homeland had long since disappeared.

Ever watchful of critical scrutiny – expediently seen to threaten Israel’s very existence – Zionist PR men had been obliged to make use of offshore pressure groups to hasbara, or obfuscate, Israel’s consistent human rights abuses, and cavalier disregard of international law.

The task of continually re-inventing Israel1 to evade its detractors had chiefly fallen on the shoulders of the United States, Israel’s most faithful ally since 1967. Zionist pressure groups representing less than 1% of the country’s 300 million people – and certainly not all its diverse five million Jews – had put up camp at Capitol Hill.

It is AIPAC (the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) that spearheads Israel’s massive PR offensive. AIPAC is said to be influential way beyond its numbers. Former Republican congressman, Paul Findlay, says that AIPAC drummed him out of office in 1983 for not toeing the line on Israel.

Author and attorney Jeff Gates describes AIPAC as being a ‘foreign agent’ that dictates United States foreign policy.

Jeffrey Blankfort, former editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin and radio show host, told me it was AIPAC who persuaded Congress not to punish Israel for selling military technology to apartheid South Africa during the sanctions era.

Candidates in primary and general elections in the United States are vetted by AIPAC office bearers for their views on Israel. Those regarded as sufficiently pro-Israel by AIPAC are granted campaign funding via ‘bundlers’, which are designated groups of funders.

AIPAC is also the brains trust behind the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) which it founded in 1985. More ‘academic’ in outlook than AIPAC, it was set-up by Martin Indyk, a former United States ambassador to Israel.

It was Indyk who framed the policy of ‘dual containment’ for Iran and Iraq during the Clinton administration.

Indyk, a vice-president and director of the Brookings Institute, now serves on the board of the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy. Haim Saban, the centre’s funder, is an Egyptian-born Israeli. He is an avowed Zionist and media mogul who made his millions at Fox Media.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has been described by Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American Islamic relations (CAIR) as an institute that finds the worst possible quotes from the Arab world, which it translates into English.

On its board of directors is Steven Emerson (of Jihad in America fame). Its panel of advisors includes Professor Bernard Lewis (the original author of the term ‘clash of civilisations’), John Ashcroft, Ehud Barak and Paul Bremer.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA) was founded in 1982. It claims to monitor the American press. If it detects what it perceives as anything unbalanced, it calls the journalist or writes letters to the editor offering ‘factual’ information.

CAMERA’S claims of neutrality are compromised by messages of support from people such as Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, whose objectivity on Israel has been openly questioned. In his book The Case for Israel, he suggests that Israel has a good human rights record.

The Palestinian Media Watch, an Israel-based organisation, was established in 1996 by the American-born Itamar Marcus. He is described by Wikipedia as ‘an Israeli political activist’.

The PMW focuses on the demonisation of Israelis and Jews, especially in the Palestinian education system. The PMW website is totally devoid of any balance; it does not examine Arab anti-Semitism in the Israeli curriculae.

The Middle East Forum is headed by Daniel Pipes, regarded by scholars and commentators such as Tariq Ramadan and James Zogby as an Islamophobe. On its website the MEF claims to work ‘intellectually, operationally and philanthropically’.

Pipes, an avowed political conservative and campaigner against what he calls ‘radical Islam’, gained notoriety through Campus Watch. This organisation was accused of ‘McCarthyism’ when it tried to black-list academics whom it considered anti- Israel.

Daniel Pipes is said to maintain a close relationship with Steven Emerson of MEMRI and is an active blogger.

Another renowned Israeli lobby group is the Anti-Defamation League. The late Dr Alfred Lilienthal, author of the Zionist Connection, claims that the ADL is the ‘most influential organisation’ in the United States. He accuses it of working closely with the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, ‘and sometimes with the FBI or the CIA’.

One group – hardly in the lobbyist category one must add – enjoys the dubious distinction of being rated as violent and extremist by the FBI. It enjoys the sorry record of having committed six murders and 18 terrorist attacks on United States soil alone.

More successful and enduring than any Islamic jihadist group, the Jewish Defence League was the spiritual home of the Hebron killer, Dr. Barusch Goldstein, and Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose political party, Kach, was even banned in Israel.

Another grouping to play a role, particularly in security affairs, has been the neo-con influenced Jewish Institute for Security Affairs (JINSA). It has been directly linked to former United States vice-president, Dick Cheney, and former Deputy Under-Secretary of Defence, Douglas Feith.

But all the above pales into insignificance if we consider the measure of Christian Evangelical support in the United States for Israel. Sometimes dubbed the ‘Kosher Nostra’, this group has the clout to stop the President it votes for in his tracks.

When President George Bush11 criticised Israel for its 2002 incursion of the West Bank, he received 100, 000 e-mails from the Evangelical lobby reproaching him. And when he mooted the Road Map, 50, 000 postcards saw him retreating from fully endorsing a Palestinian state.

This same group sent President Barak Obama nearly 30, 000 e-mails in March 2010 just before his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Indeed, as the late Reverend Jerry Falwell told CBS in 2003:

There are 70 million (sic) of us. And if there’s one thing that brings us together quickly it’s whenever we begin to detect our government becoming a little anti-Israel.

Christian-Zionist author Paul Merkley explains further13. Christian-Zionists are not knocked off their perches when Israel is denounced for rough treatment of Palestinians. Nor is it their concern when a politician gets caught for corruption, or when Mossad pulls off a dirty trick.

No, the Christian Zionist does not have to re-work the ethical Arithmetic when bad news appears, says Merkley. For the Christian-Zionist it is a requirement of faith to ‘prefer the blessing of Israel above all passing things’.

Across the Atlantic, Great Britain – the home of the Balfour Declaration – has played a leading European role in the international Israeli lobby since the 19th century and the petitions of Lord Shaftesbury, the famous Anglo-Zionist.

The Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), the Conservative Friends of Israel and Liberal-Democrat Friends of Israel all serve Israeli interests. The LFI has done this since the 1950’s. There is also the All-Party Britain Israeli Parliamentary Group and the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) that focuses upon the media.

For decades now, Zionist spin doctors and bribed shills across the world have callously played upon Holocaust guilt and paranoia to elicit international support. This lobby knows full well that no public figure enjoys being labeled anti-Semitic. By spuriously linking anti-Semitism to any criticism of Israel, it can bully opinion makers into silence.

Or as James Zogby of the Arab American Institute observes: the Zionist adage is to give the impression of being everywhere, and to say the same the thing everywhere.

The Zionist ‘behind every bush’ conspiracy in the Muslim and Arab world is a direct, if not unfortunate consequence, of this ‘let’s be everywhere’ dogma. The contemporary flames of Jewish anti-Semitism are fanned by the very myth-making of the Zionist lobby.

Zionist influence in the corridors of the United States political establishment is pervasive. Gush Shalom’s Uri Avnery once quipped that if the Israeli government ever wanted an American law to annul the Ten Commandments, at least 95 Senators would rush to sign the bill.

Jews taking issue with the programmes of AIPAC, the ADL, the LFI and other groups are attacked by these lobbyists for being self-loathing. Or, as Abraham Weizfeld complains: the Zionist lobby forgets about other Jews.

Jews in the United States, Britain and Europe do not unquestioningly support Israeli policies. Yet this is the impression that organisations such as AIPAC, the ADL and the LFI have created.

The truth is that Jews in the Diaspora have their voice of concern about Israel played down. Jewish clamouring for peace between Israelis and Palestinians is completely ignored by the lobbyists. As Not in My Name founder Steven Feuerstein has declared:

We criticise Israel because of, not in spite of, our Jewish values.

Even though the Zionist administration may appear to wag the President’s tail (Lilienthal cites a Pentagon joke that memos always have to be typed in triplicate with a copy going to Tel Aviv) it cannot hide that today’s Israel is an extremely costly project for the American taxpayer.

The World Policy Institute reports that in a decade from 1996 to 2006, this small country of about six million received more than 17 billion dollars in direct military aid alone.

Israel’s aid benefaction is legend, and the country receives more aid dollars from Congress annually than all of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa combined. In fact, this tiny nation receives more aid from the United States and its Diasporic community than any other country in the world.

The late Yeshayahou Leibowitz, a renowned figure at the Hebrew University, and a former editor of the Hebrew Encyclopaedia, once fretted that Israel would collapse due to its reliance on Uncle Sam.

Yet this is what fuels the Zionist project. Those in the Diaspora must pay unconditionally for the protection of the nuclear-powered Zionist state – a David surrounded by a non nuclear-powered Arab Goliath, with Persian Iran now the bogey.

The former French Marxist Roger Garaudy, who turned Muslim and wrote The Founding Myths of the Israeli Policy, argues that the crux of the problem is the secular Zionist movement. It created a militaristic, nationalistic Jewish state at the expense of an Arab one in the very centre of the Arab world.

This was achieved, he says, purely through historical subterfuge, and not by fulfilling any Biblical prophecy. The truth of it – old-fashioned colonialism – was simply wished away by generating the founding fable that a wild, virgin soil was tamed by a superior civilisation.

Garaudy argues, with statistical proof, that before 1948 Palestine was a far cry from being an empty, barren land.

But this did not prevent Moshe Auman of the Israeli Academic Committee on the Middle East penning a 24-page essay entitled Land Ownership in Palestine 1880-1948. His document, in which author Mark Twain is prominently quoted, points to the savagery of the Arab natives and the bleakness of the country.

However, Mark Twain is about as reliable as Monty Python would be for writing a biography on the life of Christ. Twain’s accuracy of account in his 1867 Middle East travelogue, Innocents Abroad, is typified by his claims that he took a sword and tried it on a Muslim who ‘clove in twain like a doughnut’.

The Independent’s Robert Fisk in his Pity the Nation, comments that Auman’s real intent was to manufacture consent that Palestinian Arabs were backward, undeserving tenants of their land.

Auman is contradicted by one of the early Zionists, Asher Ginsberg, who toured Palestine in 1891 and observed that it was difficult to find uncultivated ground anywhere. The idea that a person could come and claim as much land as he wanted was not the case, he reported, using his Hebrew moniker, Ahad Ha’am.

No person epitomised the loftier ideals of Zionism more than Eliezer Ben Yehuda, and yet no person showed the rank disappointment of discovering that Palestine was an Arab homeland more than him.

Ben Yehuda, who revived ancient Hebrew as a modern language, could only describe his arrival on Palestinian soil in 1882 with feelings of dread. To him the Arabs were a fortified rampart that impinged upon his sacred dreams. He eventually left the Holy Land, saying that Jews should have a homeland, but not in Palestine.

Yet on the 15 June 1969, the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir still had the temerity to tell the British Sunday Times that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. “It’s not as if we came and threw them out and took their country…they didn’t exist,” she proclaimed.

This contrived thesis of ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’ has been indubitably, the most enduring Zionist myth. It does not warrant further comment – other than to observe that our apartheid-era history books, also worshipping the idol of nationalism, were imbued with exactly the same kind of doctrinal flatulence.

We had to believe that white men had tamed the wild, unpopulated southern African shores with their ships, ox wagons and blunderbusses. Only when the indigenous Nguni, Khoi or San tribes – boasting centuries of cultural tradition – met up with their European interlopers as naked, caterwauling savages did they enter the pages of history.

This separatism is fixed in a one-eyed worldview that automatically asserts the inherent supremacy of one culture over another. Its arrogance is often subliminal, the perpetrators peculiarly unaware of their insensitivity. This Orientalism is well exemplified by two 19th century English settlers who tried to walk across the Australian outback.

As they lay at death’s door choking in the sand, a group of well-fed and watered Aborigines shook their heads in amazement. Why had these strange white men refused their help?

People often comment that creed is at the centre of the impasse in Palestine. Religious zealotry is indeed a component of the conflict, but the real battle is about land. And despite the religious zealots, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is firmly in the political frame.

Moses Hess, regarded as the first Jewish intellectual to discuss political Zionism, was a contemporary of Karl Marx. He also predicted Germany’s intolerance of Jews. As a secular philosopher, his interest was neither the Torah nor the Talmud. He suggested that Jews should create a socialist commonwealth in Palestine. Hess’s work only gained currency after his death in 1875.

Theodore Herzl, author of the foundational political Zionist document, Der Judenstat, admitted quite happily in his diaries that he was agnostic and did not enjoy religious impulse. He even refused to circumcise his son.

Max Nordau, co-founder of the World Zionist Organisation with Herzl, went on to say that he found the Torah ‘rather repulsive’ and that Herzl’s book would replace it.

In the beginning the most determined opponents of political Zionism were not Arabs or Palestinians, but Jews. The Orthodox Rabbis of Europe’s ghettoes and rural shtetls fought tooth and nail against the idea from its birth.

Judaism’s greatest scholar, Maimonides, had listed 13 principles of Jewish faith in the 12th century; the 12th principle was that Jews had to wait for the promised Messiah. According to the Rabbis this had to occur before the ingathering of all Jews in the Holy Land.

What political Zionism did was to remove the concept of Messianic expectation from Judaism.

For the Rabbis it was a heresy of the highest order, and over 100 prominent Rabbis across the Jewish world condemned Zionism. In 1942 publications such as the New York Times were still arguing in their columns against the establishment of a Zionist state.

This led to fears expressed by people such as Hebrew University academic Professor Judah Magnes that Zionism would become the idol of the Jewish people. In other words, the proto-national identity of the modern Jew in Israel would see him worshipping not God, but the state.

Chicago University history professor, Bernard Wasserstein, writes that the greater part of Jewish immigration to Palestine was not motivated by Zionist conviction, but by circumstance.

Professor Wasserstein concludes that most arrivals re-invented themselves as Zionists only when they got to Palestine. And in the mould of nationalist myth-making, invested their own and their forefather’s presence in Israel with a retrospective meaning that was at odds with historical reality.

Even the ancient yeshivas, the religious institutions of Jerusalem, were not interested in Zionism, their focus more on the sacred stones of the city and their quasi-mediaeval lifestyle of prayer, reflection and waiting for the Messiah.

When Herzl visited Jerusalem in 1898 the chief Rabbi of the city, Rabbi Shmeul Salant, ordered that he be declared an unbeliever.

The shift from the sacred to the secular so condemned by the Orthodox Rabbis at the turn of the 20th century – and then, ironically, the Zionist use of the sacred to justify the secular – is precisely where Roger Garaudy believes today’s conflict has its roots.

He writes that with Zionism developing primarily as a nationalist-colonialist movement, its followers could so easily have settled in Uganda or anywhere else in the world. The Russian, Leon Pinsker, who penned Auto-Emancipation in 1882, was yet another who initially favoured territorialism.

The open question is whether an African or South American Zionist homeland would have created as much turmoil as Israel has done in the Middle East. Nonetheless, Palestine became the sentimental Zionist favourite.

As we have already mentioned, Christian fundamentalism has hugely bolstered this Zionist sentimentality. Its support of the Zionist cause, predicated by mediaeval Protestant writings, is based on the Book of Genesis where God is said to proclaim that those ‘who bless Israel’ will be ‘blessed’ themselves.

These fundamentalists, today known as Dispensationalists, claim that all Jews must return to Israel to build the Third Temple. This is so that the Messiah can appear.

The political mobilisation of this group began in 1973 in the United States. Ironically it was not the issue of the Messiah, but rather legalised abortion, that stirred it into action.

Menachim Begin, who signed the Camp David Accords with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, invited one of its figureheads, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, to Israel in 1978. In 1979 the Israeli government gifted him a million-dollar Lear Jet as a tribute for bringing Christian pilgrims – and donations – to the Holy Land.

In the same year Falwell founded the Moral Majority. With its pro-family, pro-life, pro-defence and pro-Israel policy, it helped Ronald Reagan into office in 1980. The Dispensationalist’s belief – that Jesus would only reappear when there was a Jewish state from the Nile to the Euphrates – suited the Israelis too.

But what was really important to Israel was Falwell’s constituency: millions of Evangelicals supporting West Bank expansionism as opposed to 100, 000 Zionist lobbyists. What was left out of the picture, though, was Falwell’s conviction that the anti-Christ would be Jewish, and that Jews would one day have to submit to Jesus Christ.

Living in Dar ul-Shahadah

2010-08-25T06:58:00.000-07:00

IN a world filled with acronyms and post-modernist quests for self-identity, we have to ask ourselves: what exactly is Dar ul-Shahadah?

Dar ul-Shahadah – the safe abode of Islamic witness – is a term coined by contemporary thinkers such as Professor Tariq Ramadan and Ebrahim Rasool. Ramadan, a grand-son of the Islamic Brotherhood’s Hassan al-Banna, is the most recognised voice of Muslim Europe.

Rasool, a son of the Cape Town soil and South African ambassador in the US, is a former provincial premier, parliamentarian and presidential advisor. A product of the anti-apartheid movement, he was in a group that broke away from the Muslim Youth Movement to form the Call of Islam in the 1980’s.

Directed by activists such as Faried Esack and Imam Hasan Solomon, the Call of Islam believed that South African Muslims should join the anti apartheid movement. They felt that Muslims should openly identify themselves with the objectives of the Freedom Charter.

Not everybody agreed with the Call of Islam’s integrationist principles at the time, and judging by recent events when Rasool was accosted at Gatesville mosque, there are today a confused few who still appear to have problems. But before we tackle that issue, Dar ul-Shahadah needs a little more definition.

Both Ramadan and Rasool say that as Muslim minorities in non-Muslim societies, we should have no conflict with our hyphenated existence of being Muslim-European, or Muslim-South African.

Ramadan says that European Muslims have to develop a ‘European Islam’, and Rasool asserts that as South African Muslims with a three-hundred year legacy, we can already lay claim to a distinct community profile.

For not only is Dar ul-Shahadah a safe abode of Islamic witness, it’s a space that signifies public identity and civic accountability. It’s a space where a new application of Sacred Law, the Fiqh of Minorities, shows up the exciting dynamism of Islam as it marches into the 21st century.

It’s a space where if our Islam is not threatened, and if we have civic freedoms, our responsibility is to be an upright citizen. As John Donne writes, “no man is an island”.

But being an upright, participatory Muslim citizen doesn’t mean pseudo-patriotism, two-piece suits, or agreeing with the west or supporting Israel. Nor does it mean that we have to stifle critical political engagement, or that we have to apologise for our values. Far from it.

It means that as franchised members of a society we’re an integral part of its diverse and challenging whole. We have to embrace it and become part of it. In Dar ul-Shahadah we live in a benign, as opposed to a threatening, space.

Having travelled to the Muslim world and to Europe, I can say that in South Africa we have one of the most evolved models of Dar ul-Shahadah. Our access to government and civic freedoms are the envy of all I’ve met. We’re one of the few Muslim minority communities who can actually have our destiny in our own hands.

I can remember interviewing Merve Kavakci, a Turkish MP. She was taken by the irony she could wear her scarf in South Africa’s parliamentary assembly, but not her own. Then what about Switzerland, the so-called bastion of political neutrality? Are minarets banned in the suburbs of Cape Town like they are in Zurich? And the veil? Is it forbidden in South Africa?

These are just some of the serious questions that those who tried to shout Rasool down during a Friday talk at Gatesville need to consider. The former premier, who was addressing the topic of Mandela Day, was accused of being responsible for legalising shebeens and gambling in the Western Cape.

That the accusations were as spurious as Monty Python’s dead parrot merely being asleep, need no further comment. Nor does their disgraceful conduct in the mosque. But what does need further comment is the hackneyed innuendo of state illegitimacy emanating from this group, many of whom were once associated with PAGAD.

PAGAD was founded on the principle of reducing Cape Town’s pressing problem of gangsterism and drugs. But when the masses abandoned the organisation as its leadership imploded, PAGAD became waylaid by a messianic obscurantism from which it has never recovered.

With a reactionary leadership on the ground besieged by reactionaries from within, PAGAD retreated into a “them” and “us” laager. We were either for or against PAGAD. There were no grey areas in between.

And it didn’t take too long before the association of unbelief, of being kaafir, was made on those public figures who disagreed with PAGAD’s modus operandi – murder and chaos cloaked with religiosity.

The calling of people kaafir enabled the inference that their blood was now “halal”. It manufactured consent for the bombing of the homes of people such as Shaikh Nazeem Mohamed, then president of the Muslim Judicial Council, and UCT’s Professor Ebrahim Moosa.

PAGAD’s extreme polarisation of principles (there’s only room for those Muslims who agree with them) reflects, by default, the ideas of the Egyptian polemicist, Sayyid Qutb. He wrote that there could only be a Dar ul-Islam or Dar ul-Harb, the House of Islam or the House of Hostility.

With Qutb we can immediately see the pitfalls. Where is there a genuine Dar ul-Islam today? The last Caliphate, the Ottoman one, collapsed in 1923. For most reasoned commentators Dar ul-Islam is more a hypothetical concept, but in Qutb’s eyes it’s a revolutionary reality in which jihad and the overthrow of even secular Muslim leaders is compulsory for all Muslims.

Military jihad may be relevant in Islam, but it’s certainly not one of its pillars – something that Qutb and his ilk so strongly suggest. The greater jihad, as the Prophet (s) told his Companions on the way back from a battle, is the one of the human soul.

The obvious lack of a middle road here contradicts the Qur’anic ideal of “ummatan wasatan” (the way of moderation) and the Prophet’s (s) well-known exhortations against extremism.

The grouping that attacked Rasool seem to have lost the plot of what it means to live in Dar ul-Shahadah. Do they want to impose their dictatorial, ill-formulated “Dar ul-Islam” upon all of us, no questions asked? A “Dar ul-Islam” where the blood of those who disagree with you becomes permissible? An “Islamic” system where the ends can always be twisted to justify the means?

When I think back on the infamy and terror of the PAGAD era, the alternative becomes too horrifying to contemplate.

Throwing Rocks at the Moon - The Question of Halal Water

2010-05-06T06:52:00.000-07:00

It’s getting serious. I mean really funny. Or do I mean serious? No, funny. No, serious. The pessimism of certain scholars that we’re inherently wrongdoers, and that we have to be protected from their fears, has now reached epidemic proportions in the Muslim world.

No longer can we, the silent majority, be allowed to think for ourselves. Or at least that’s the impression I get. For nowadays whenever a missionary ecclesiastic exhorts me, for instance, to avoid “strange women” I’m always tempted to ask: could it be a reflection of the preacher’s own weaknesses?

It might be anecdotal, but I work at a radio station surrounded by women. Were I to literally apply the aphorism (and literal is what these preachers want) of “lowering my gaze” I would frequently crash into the walls and fall down the stairs.

To assume the worst of human nature and their Creator, as these Islamo-evangelists usually do, reflects a distrust that is disturbing. How many times have we been told that God becomes what we think of Him, and that people become (in our suggestive minds) what we think of them too.

I have no problem with anyone assuming that I’m a good-for-nothing (I probably am). But for me to presuppose the same of someone else? I would have to regard that as arrogance on my part. For who am I to judge? And so, if anyone wants to call me “judgemental” on the issue of halal water, let’s just say: I’m protesting.

The story begins when I was travelling on the Cape Town-Johannesburg route the other day. Sitting in South African Airways economy with my knees around my ears trying to slurp gravy with a fork 30, 000 feet above Kimberly, I noticed that the toothpicks were no longer halal.

You could imagine my surprise. I’d written an article about these toothpicks (kosher on one end, halal on the other). No longer could I feel safe removing raisin residue from my teeth after consuming things such as Woolworth’s halal hot-cross buns, or the stringy chicken of my airline meal.

However, my curiosity was aroused when I ordered some sparkling water from the stewardess. After taking a few exploratory sips, something caught my eye. Not only was this water kosher, it was halal. I now took a healthy slug. I could drink this beverage with a conscience as clear as the spring from which it had gushed.

But hang on Shafiq, I thought, this was unflavoured water. Water was H²O – the sum of two oxygen atoms and one hydrogen atom. No porcine influences or impurities here. Water emanated as rain from clouds. Every droplet – traditions said – was accompanied by an Angel on its way to earth. And once on earth, it filtered through sand and rock into streamlets, springs and mighty rivers.

Water was an act of God – the very source of life, the nourishment of the DNA of Adam. Water was what held the primal clay together into which the halal human soul was blown. Water’s causality was halal; its consequence was halal; its consumption was halal; its chemical constitution was halal – so where could it be haram?

Absolutely baffled that doubt – or shakk – had befallen the inherent permissibility of water, I consulted the law books. What would classical application of Sacred Law tell me?

I decided to consult the Shafi’i legal stream of thought. In Cape Town we are followers of this great scholar’s school. I accessed Imam Shafi’i through the 14th century work of Shaikh Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, his exposition based on the earlier 7th century interpretations of Imam Shafi’i’s pupil, Imam Nawawi.

What I learnt in summary was that 216 litres of water (two measured Iraqi barrels) did not become impure by mere contact with filth, but only so through a tangible change in taste, colour or smell. Foliage, bloodless creatures and even tea leaves (which could discolour water) did not constitute filth.

If the body of water was less than 216 litres it could become impure by contact with filth. But if indiscernible to the naked eye, and if the unobservable contact was unknown to the user of the water, it was not regarded as impure. Ignorance, scholars say, is not a sin.

I’m not a legal eagle, but if one considers that springs can produce thousands of litres a day, I struggle to see where impurities could linger. And before bottling, the water is filtered anyway – usually through reverse osmosis.

Manufacturers have to meet stringent international standards, even without halal and kosher bodies poking around their plants. Poisoning customers is not good for business.

As for the question of animal products in artificial flavourants or chemical additives: fructose, aspartame, citric acid, sodium benzoate, acesulfame K and CO² do not indicate that an unclean animal (a possible source of legal doubt) died for the cause.
So what could have the halal certification bodies been doing? If their sole purpose wasn’t to make money, which some would suggest, then their interest in bottled water can only be defined as a hair-splitting fanaticism.

Why fanaticism?

Well, it is fanaticism because the very principle of Islamic law (permissible before impermissible) has been turned on its head. The reversal of this axiom in Islamic law by modern halalisers is absolutely astonishing. Everything in the world, if these zealots are to be believed, is now haram until proved halal!

In other words, following the above logic, the water bubbling out the Franchshoek escarpment in divine ecstasy was not halal until a human inspector deemed it so.

With regards to this extreme legal absurdity, it was the noble Prophet (s) who proclaimed that Islam was a powerful thing, and that if we made it difficult, it would make itself difficult for us. It seems like we’ve arrived. I wait expectantly for the day when halal bureaucrats certify the gum on postage stamps.

But the upshot of it all, and the very grave reality, is that the seeds of insecurity have been sown in the mind of the South African Muslim consumer; a consumer facing growing lists of products deemed legally doubtful. First a trickle, and now an onslaught, the sultans of halal now tyrannise the supermarket shelves.

Of course, I’m not against halal certification. It is necessary, and it has its place. But surely there should be an urgent call for balance right now? Surely reason and responsibility should be the watchwords, rather than the current culture of theological pettifogging?

A’isha, the wife of the Prophet (s), once said that if the messenger of Islam had a choice, he would always choose the easier option. And while on his final pilgrimage, the Prophet (s) told his Companions to select pebbles the size of peas for pelting the Devil, one of the symbolic rites of the Hajj.

His biggest fear, he said, was ghuluww – or extremism. He did not want Muslims to be destroyed by extremism as other nations had been done before him. And so, small stones had to be used for the pelting. This Hadith, this Prophetic saying, contains such a powerful metaphor, but its underlying message of moderation in thought and deed appears to have got lost somewhere.

And unfortunately, it seems as if certain players in the burgeoning halal industry have picked up rocks rather than pebbles, and are now throwing them – not even at the devil – but the moon.

Jerusalem: The Stations of the Cross

2010-04-13T06:39:00.000-07:00

“JUZ? You wanna juz now?” asked the shopkeeper with a knowing smile. Outside the Hashimi Hotel across the narrow street was a small cafe that squeezed oranges. I had discovered that it also juiced carrots. Fresh, sweet carrot juice had become my staple.

Carrot juice, which is full of beta-carotene, is a natural anti-oxidant – something that I needed to boost my immune system. The pollen, pollution and dust of a dry Mediterranean summer were beginning to clog my sinuses. A nagging post-nasal drip was fast inflaming the back of my throat.

Having naturally medicated myself, I felt much better. If one does not stray too much into the fatty zones of international fast food, the digestive system – the source of most ailments – adapts happily to locally grown foods, which help to cleanse the body of its phlegmatic humours.

I must say I enjoyed olives, or spooning chopped tomato, mint and cucumber salad onto my plate, or dipping coarse bread into olive oil and humus. The very thought of falafel, flame-grilled kebabs, kubbi, stuffed brinjal and schwarma did make the mouth water. But on this morning, Mediterranean cuisine was not on my ‘menu’. And lest it be said otherwise, I eat to live – I do not live to eat!

The Hashimi was close to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was my intention to follow the route of the Christian pilgrimage. And although it was not a Friday, the day when the Franciscan monks would lead their weekly ceremonial procession, I was going to follow the Via Dolorosa from its beginnings near the Lion’s Gate to its climactic end, Christ’s empty tomb in the Holy Sepulchre.

Its stations defined by faith, The Via Dolorosa – literally the ‘Way of Sadness’ – is a route that marks fourteen Stations of the Cross, all which commemorate sacred incidents believed to have befallen Jesus on his way to Cavalry. The Hashimi is near to the Seventh Station, and so I retraced my steps back to the First Station.

Jerusalem was empty. A youthful figure sliding out of the shadows near the Lion’s Gate was mightily peeved when I said I did not want his services for 25 US dollars. I had a pamphlet and Bradt’s Palestine with me – and really – I was hardly going to get lost along the Via Dolorosa, the most famous thoroughfare in the Old City.

Station One, which marks where Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus, is said to have occurred where the school of ‘Umar now stands. It is about 300 metres west of the Lion’s Gate, and the crucifixion pageants usually started from within its courtyard, once the moat-encircled Roman fortress of Antonia.

The school was closed (my luck) and so I wandered past Station One, where Jesus picked up the cross, to the chapels of Condemnation and Flagellation. In Pontius Pilate’s era, they would have been part of the Antonia fortress.

These chapels stood partially over an old Roman pavement, the lithostratos. The Chapel of Flagellation, a 20th century building built over the ruins of another mediaeval structure, had been designed by the famous Italian architect, Antonio Barluzzi.

The Roman pavement, the lithostratos, ran west under the Via Dolorosa and reappeared again in the basement of the Ecce Homo convent. This now sub-terranean thoroughfare, which dated back to Hadrian in the 2nd century CE, provided interesting evidence of Roman street life.

On a previous visit I had seen these ancient stones, their striations cut for wagon wheels and the markings of games clearly marked on their weathered surface. Down in the Ecce Homo basement I could almost hear the urban din of Roman times – a cart laden with hay clip-clopping past children quietly playing hop-scotch, and off-duty soldiers throwing knuckle-bones in a boisterous circle.

I passed under the Ecce Homo arch, a place where Pontius Pilate had said ‘ecce homo’, as Jesus had passed by. However this arch, also built by Hadrian, was more a symbolic juncture than a historical site where a Roman governor had uttered that there was Jesus.

The Via Dolorosa made a sharp turn to the left. I stopped at the Third Station. A grey wrought-iron gate, centred with a small mediaeval cross, was the foreground to a white wall relief showing Jesus falling under the cross. This was the Polish chapel. A few metres on, a carving of Mary comforting her son topped a door that led into a tiny Armenian church.

Inside this building was an interesting 5th century mosaic, on which there were a pair of footprints in stone. These were said to be the Virgin Mary’s. But why super-impose an outline of a pair of sandals upon them? It was like adding glasses to Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, or giving the statue of David a pair of y-fronts.

The road took another sharp turn uphill, this time to my right. Here was
Station Five, the spot where Roman soldiers had been forced by Simon of Cyrene to help the now weakening Jesus carry his cross. An old doorway, with ‘Simon Cyrenao Crux Imponitur’ carved on its lintel, faced me. Also fixed in the wall was a left palm-print, said to have been made by Jesus when he leant to support himself.

Opposite Station Six the wares of a silver shop tumbled on to the pavement in a shiny cascade of censers, decorative coffee pots, devotional candelabras, crucifixes and rosaries. Called the Church of the Holy Face, Station Six belonged to the Greek Catholics.

It marked where St Veronica had wiped Jesus’ face, his features becoming imprinted in the cloth. The problem was that this station reflected the events of a 14th century tradition, but it did not detract from another tasteful Barluzzi chapel in what had been a Crusader monastery.

Station Seven brought me back to my starting point from the Hashimi. It remembered where Jesus had fallen, and another Franciscan chapel marked spot X.

Station Eight was a Greek Orthodox monastery and on its wall was a Latin cross marked with the Greek word ‘nika’. This was where Jesus stopped to console the wailing women of Jerusalem, telling them not to weep for him but for themselves.

I found Station Nine by turning off Suq Kahn el-Zeit and ascending a set of steps to the Coptic Patriarchate, which was actually on the eastern side of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. A column marked where Jesus had fallen for the last time.

Retracing my steps, I entered the Suq Khan el-Zeit road again and turned right past the Alexander hospice into the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I had arrived. The last four Stations of the Cross lay inside this basilica that was not a soaring cathedral, but rather a clutter and tumble of mediaeval masonry.

Restored in some places, Christianity’s holiest building was equally a patch-work of pitted lime-stone, moss and weeds. The truth was that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre had always been bedeviled by denominational turf wars. The Greek Orthodox, the Franciscans, the Armenians, the Ethiopians, the Copts and the Syrian Orthodox all jostled shoulder-to-shoulder for devotional real estate.

The Ethiopian church, representing an ancient Abyssinian sect, was the one that had lost most of its rights. Its cowled monks now lived on the roof. Just to lift a trowel or to raise scaffolding in this complex, I was told, could spark off a major conflict. A ladder left on a window ledge had remained in the same place since 1852.

Henry Stedtman of the Bradt Travel Guide had written that the visitor to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was always caught between ‘reverence and revulsion’. However, I certainly did not feel revulsion as much as I felt empathy. It reminded me more than anything else of the human frailty of our 15 year-old post-apartheid democracy in South Africa.

As a structure it was just as partly-repaired, yes. As a multi-cultural, multi-racial people we were as noisy, fractious and uneasy as the monks, yes. But in spite of all the tumult, the experience was as intoxicating and energising as it was confusing. And not unlike the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where its gate-keepers had always been a neutral Muslim family, I think that to really understand something so complex, you just had to be a part of it.

I stood in the courtyard on the threshold. This part of the Old City had been a sacred site for over two millennia. As a Christian monument it had stood, despite being destroyed twice, for 1, 600 years. Its history was as old as Second Temple Jerusalem.

Interestingly, when the Byzantine Empire had risen to ascendancy with its new capital, Constantinople, Jerusalem had not been a major metropolis at all. Two centuries after Hadrian had razed the Temple and expelled the Jews, Jerusalem had grown into a quiet Roman provincial town called Aeolia. The governor of the district had resided in his marble palace at the coast in Caesarea.

But the Christians had not forgotten, even if it meant that the Bishopric of Jerusalem had become a backwater. It took Emperor Constantine’s endorsement of the Christian creed in the 4th century, and the conclave of Nicaea in CE 325 shaping its Trinitarian ethos, to revive a sacred interest in Jerusalem.

And whilst Constantine’s interest in Christianity appears to have been tempered by political expediency (he was only baptized on his deathbed) he did take a keen interest in its affairs, and provide generous funding. And whatever his personal or political shortcomings, Constantine’s role in establishing modern Christianity is undoubtedly one of his greatest contributions to history.

The Byzantine Empire’s official sanction of Christianity saw its devotional focus shifting from grottoes, catacombs, caves and private dwellings to official buildings and public spaces. From now on, one of mankind’s greatest civilisations, a civilisation renowned for its engineering and construction skills, would be responsible for church architecture.

The polytheists had their temples and altars, and Christianity needed to have a spiritual centre to where its Bishops and believers could gravitate to contemplate upon resurrection and salvation. Christ’s empty tomb, the epitome of his dramatic life events, was the ideal place. It was left to Constantine’s mother, Helena, to travel to the Holy Land to rediscover Christianity’s sacred locations.

Already aged, but fired up with an energy belying her 80 years, she was destined to become the pioneer of Christian monumental archaeology. Described by the ecclesiastical chronicler Eusibius as an extremely devout lady, her ultimate odyssey was a search for the true cross, the very wood upon which the body and limbs of Christ had been nailed in the Final Passion.

Israel: When the Gun Turns

2010-02-05T05:48:00.000-08:00

If you're a budding student of surrealism, I would recommend Israel. It will prove to be your greatest project. I can assure you that Israel's bizarre political landscape will provide you with material beyond your wildest dreams.

Described by the Oxford dictionary as an “expression of the sub-conscious mind through imagery”, surrealism communicates its meaning through absurd, irrational and capricious nonsense. It is a metaphor in which nothing is what it seems.

And if we weren’t addressing one of the modern era’s most vexing conflicts, we would all be laughing by now. For the issue of Erez Israel, the “greater” Israel, is a serious one.

For those of us who might need reminding, Israel was the political end-result of a project; a project initiated by European Jewish secularists at the end of the 1800’s to create a Jewish homeland.

Whilst this aspiration (called Zionism) was initially seen as a noble end in itself, its means – the Palestinian people being displaced at the point of a gun – has become, as Nelson Mandela once said, one of the world’s biggest unresolved questions.

This is because for its most ardent and unbending disciples, Zionism in the 21st century has morphed into a golden calf. This is why in its inviolable, idolatrous name Gaza can be bombed and besieged, and why helicopters can murder Hamas leaders from the sky.

Zionist reasoning is that if you question Zionism, you strike at the heart of a mythical, homogenous “collective Jew”. That this “collective Jew” is an emotional red-herring, and that the idol is actually nationalism – and not Judaism – should be clear to all of us.

Nationalism by definition is a blind groupthink in which morality is suspended for the sake of a greater cause – in this case, power over Palestinians who pose a threatening counter nationalism by just existing.

This idolatry of Zionist nationalism was the biggest fear of Professor Judah Magnes at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University in the 1950’s, who actively warned against Zionism becoming an idol of the Jewish people.

And as Chicago University’s Bernard Wasserstein noted almost 40 years later: Israel was founded on nationalism, and not religion. Religion, he says, only came into the Zionist frame after 1948 when Israeli nationalism had to be bolstered.

Yet it was the protagonists of this same secular ideology, atheists such as Israel’s first Prime Minister Ben Gurion, who incongruously insisted on declaring a “Jewish” (read religious) state in 1948. It was the equivalent, I was once mischievously informed, of a Mufti declaring an Islamic state in Ireland without believing in the Shari’ah.

However, Judaism as a great monotheistic faith is not the problem in the Middle East. Modern political Zionism, incapable of acknowledging its injustices and blind to its faults, thoroughly ridicules the sublime human values of Judaism. It is belligerent Zionism that opens the door to the unwelcome spectre of anti-Semitism.

Nonetheless, it is agreed now by most diplomatic players on the Levantine chess-board that Israel is a political reality. Even Hamas concedes this, although Likud’s constitution still doesn’t recognise a Palestinian state. But then again, that is just Israel.

However, as one of the world’s smallest countries with the best equipped army in the Middle East – and as the largest beneficiary of US aid – nuclear-powered Israel is a revelation of modern political science.

For how many nation-states in the 21st century can boast of four parallel legal systems within its territories?

Israel can. Israelis are governed by secular law, but issues of personal law are seen to by the Orthodox Rabbis. Israel’s parliament, the ever fractious Knesset, exists without a constitution to guide it.

Then there are the occupied zones. They are governed by military law, or as in the case of the old city of Hebron – where you have an occupation within an occupation – by military and civil law combined.

So when Hebron’s xenophobic settlers indulge in their sport of harassing Palestinians, the army has to stand by. This is because I’m told it has no jurisdiction over the settlers, who are governed by civil law. Palestinians, regulated by occupational military law, are far easier to arrest.

The fourth legal system – or what’s left of it – exists in the pockets of land still governed by the Palestinian Authority.

The final anomaly is the fact that Israel is the only modern nation-state in the world today without properly defined borders. The West Bank Barrier, the Apartheid Wall, is but the most recent example of an insidious territorial creep that has consumed Palestinian land for decades.

What prompted all these thoughts was when I started going through my photo archives the other day. After several trips to the region in the last decade or so, I have an eclectic mix of images, and decided to try and sort them out.

I hadn’t seen my pictures for years, but what kept appearing in the dusty negatives were frames of people wielding guns. I wondered why I had not previously been aware of this. Image after image revealed just how many Israelis – especially radical settlers – openly carried weapons.

With 1948 Israel and 1967 Palestine so geographically compact, and with seven different climate zones and so much to see, your visit often results in a sensory overload.

Perhaps that’s why I hadn’t taken too much note of the firearms. That and the fact that we South Africans, having only just abandoned Apartheid, were still probably desensitised to political violence.

Noticeable amongst my negatives, though, was the lack of arms in the Palestinian camp. The PA’s rag-tag platoons and Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades could not hold a candle to Israeli firepower.

And if ever the disproportionate nature of Israel’s hostility against Palestinians was seeking for definition, here it was in my files.

So what was the point of it all? Terry Crawford-Browne, an observer for the World Council of Churches to Palestine, put it this way: the guns (and checkpoints) were there to make Palestinian life as miserable as possible.

In other words, the military’s role was not just to fend off weakling Arab regimes. The army’s job was to enforce an occupation – to execute a spider-web of laws used to justify Zionist Apartheid, and ultimately in places such as East Jerusalem, to effect ethnic cleansing.

But here lies the rub. As Zionism becomes more and more unpalatable in the post Cast Lead era, and pressure against occupation and siege starts to bear, who will the IDF listen to? The doves, or the hawks?

In recent years a host of Israeli analysts have pointed out that a right-wing settler minority has quietly worked its way into the senior ranks of the IDF. The army has been taken over by extremists, said Gush Shalom’s Uri Avnery bluntly to me in an interview last year. The beast was in the belly.

If we consider that a 2002 Ha’aretz poll revealed over 70% of Israelis would be prepared to sacrifice West Bank settlements for peace, grave problems loom for Israeli leaders. This is because there is the very real prospect of factions in the IDF ignoring official orders.

For once, Palestinians could be spectators as ill-tempered Israelis turn their guns on each other – the one party wanting peace, and the other one abjectly fearing it. Indeed, when the gun turns in Israel (on the occupied West Bank) life is really going to be interesting.

Mecca – Dreaming of Dante's Inferno

2009-12-24T07:26:00.000-08:00

IT was on the 29th of Ramadan that I had the dream. It woke me up at 4, 06 am exactly, and I could not go back to sleep. It was a disturbing dream, but strangely, I hadn’t woken up in a muck-sweat, my heart pounding with fear.

I was clear-headed and calm, but I definitely needed to think about what my mind’s eye had just seen. There are dreams we remember, and dreams that we don’t – even after we are roused from deep slumber by them. This was one that I was going to remember.

The scholars say that “true dreams” – dreams of ilham, or inspiration – have symbolic relevance. They can only be properly interpreted under strict conditions. A person must have ceremonial ablution before going to sleep; the dream must be before dawn, and the dreamer must be of sound mind – and so on.

Now, I’ve always enjoyed listening to accounts of other people’s dreams – but I’ve never regarded my own as having any grand import. I do not rate myself as being gifted with sights of the great unseen, nor the favour of true dreams. To be honest, if I had a true dream I’d probably die of fright.

Apart from paying little heed to my own sub-cortical activity – psycho-babble for dreaming – my interest in other peoples’ dreamworlds has always been inspired by Ibn Sirin’s approach. If Ibn Sirin – the most celebrated dream-psychologist in Islam – could dismiss most of those who petitioned him, then someone like me had even more reason for caution.

The dreamworld is a jungle of symbols and its path is laid with numerous snares where sometimes the reverse is true, and sometimes isn’t. Therefore, I don’t interpret dreams.

But there are self-explanatory dreams when a specialist does not have to be consulted. For example, a person may be blessed to see a deceased relative, or spiritual adept. If that person is in the Garden of Bliss, they will appear as happy, larger-than-life figures with the glow of youth. They will deliver messages that are clear and unambiguous.

My own dream had a clear and unambiguous message too, but so stark that if I’d seen it unveiled in all its reality, I probably would have had a heart attack. It all started the day before when an old lady whom I love and know well – who has visited Makkah for over 50 years – asked me about the Jabl Omar project in the Holy City.

A travel agent in Makkah had phoned her about the multi-billion dollar scheme – one that will reportedly see 15 million pilgrims (those who will be to afford it, that is) staying in a marble, treeless expanse of Las Vegas-style hotels looming 40 stories over the Haram.

On the drawing board, the scheme is on a scale beyond impressive. Mountains will be moved and almost a whole city razed to the ground. The logistics are stupendous.

But logistics – and the real need to accommodate pilgrims aside – Makkah is still a Haram, a sanctuary that has to be respected. No human being or living thing can be violated within its precincts. Not even a tree should be cut down in the Haram, not a piece of dust of its sacred history disturbed. It is meant to be a place of peace where every believer – rich or poor – can enjoy a safe haven.

The first place of worship on earth was built in Makkah by Adam. It is a city beloved to Ibrahim, who prayed for it, and it was closest to the Prophet’s heart until he was forced, much against his will, to leave it. Makkah is the centre of the spiritual universe, the Ka’bah mirrored in each of the Seven Heavens until it reaches the foot of the Heavenly Throne.

So if I condemn the Jabl Omar project for being crass, I beg forgiveness. Makkah should be a place of beauty, not a centre of rampant materialism as it is threatening to become. Why should Makkah be the domain of the financially privileged and spiritually insensitive?

This is because the future Makkan megapolis stands to exclude the poor (just one night in Ramadan near the Haram in 2012 will set you back over R10, 000) and the very legacy of Islam itself. As I write this, one of the Holy City’s last-remaining historical monuments – Muhammad’s [SAW] birthplace where Asiyah (the wife of the Pharaoh) and Maryam (the mother of Jesus) were his midwives – is under threat of demolition.

With over 300 sacred heritage sites having already been destroyed in Makkah and Madinah by the Wahhabi sect, who dominate religious discourse in Saudi Arabia, this development has been a great boon. This is because in their reductionist Islam, visiting historical sites is shirk, or polytheism. All sacred sites have to be destroyed, just in case we might worship them.

These natives from the Najd region, some of whom the Prophet [SAW] explicitly refused to bless, have dragged Islam from the world back into the desert – the very antithesis of Muhammad’s [SAW] metaphor of co-existence. And so when the “reformist” ideologue, Ibn ‘Abd ul-Wahhab, made a familial pact with Ibn Sa’ud in 1747, he sparked the modern era of Islamic extremism.

Today, it looks as if the Wahhabi vendetta against the Prophet’s family, the Bani Hashim, and his Companions in the Holy Cities behind this veil of “progress” is almost complete. The traditional ziyarah – the visit by pilgrims to these heritage sites commemorating the life of the Prophet [SAW] – are now just sad memory.

No such thing as integrated urban planning in the petro-dollar universe of Bani Sa’ud: it’s just demolish and rebuild. No consideration for culture, ecology, or ancient buildings. Dr Sami Angawi, Jeddah architect and environmentalist, quotes a Prophetic Hadith that we should preserve Makkah’s old buildings “for they are the ornaments of the city”. But his is a voice in the wilderness.

For in Makkah, the ornaments – including the old Ottoman fort in the Ajyad district – have all been mindlessly obliterated without as much as a nod to the ummah, the world Muslim community who should really have a say in these matters. Surely the old could have been blended with the new – the past informing the present?

The house of noble Abu Bakr, from where the Prophet [SAW] fled to Madinah, is today the Hilton. The house of Khadijah, the mother of the Prophet’s children, has a public toilet built over it. And, according to Dr ‘Irfan Ahmad al-‘Alawi of the Islamic Heritage Foundation, the Jannat ul Ma’la – Makkah’s historic graveyard – has been flooded with effluent.

Another victim has been Hajr’s well of Zamzam. With no meaningful environmental impact studies countenanced by the authorities, indiscriminate blasting and digging has splintered the eye of the well so badly that Zamzam – an Abrahamic spring that has flowed unceasingly for thousands of years – now has to be filtered.

“I didn’t know about the development,” said the old lady, “S…. said that you would know.”

Call it a dream of “connectivity”, if you will, but in the early hours of the 29th of Ramadan I was not experiencing Laylut ul-Qadr, the mystical Night of Power “worth a thousand months” hidden in the last 10 days of Ramadan, but something more resembling Dante’s Inferno.

My dream begins with a friend and myself walking from Bab us-Salam across the mataf towards the Ka’bah. The imagery is not quite right, but my heart tells me it’s the Ka’bah. My first response is one of amazement – I did not expect to be back in Makkah. My second response is anxiety – I’m not in ihram, the two white sheets obligatory for pilgrimage.

There is a clear path to the Ka’bah, something that also amazes me, but a third person – who claims to have performed the Hajj with me, although I don’t recognise him – beckons us towards a ladder leading up to the first level of the Holy Mosque. “You can see the Ka’bah better from up there,” he says.

As we climb the ladder it begins (dream-like) to disintegrate, but we manage to scramble up. As we prepare to pray, I notice that the Haram’s walls have become like a steep, eroded donga. We can’t find a level place anywhere.

A member of our party decides to scout the area towards Bab ul-Fath; maybe we can pray there. But he comes back with strange, disturbing news. People are sitting there, he says, chained to wooden benches. They can’t move or make tawaf around the Ka’bah, and we can’t make salah because they have their goats with them, and they’re covered in their animals’ urine and faeces.

At that moment, I look over the mataf, but I see no marble, no recognisable Ka’bah – even in my imagination. All that I see is a pit of crumbling bricks and walls that have been stripped of all decoration. It is at that point I wake up.

I have since thought long and hard about my dream. Should I reveal it, or should I not? But in retrospect, this dream is not about condemning the Saudis, but more about ourselves. Wahhabis are still Muslims; they are still part of our community – and as such – I think we bear joint responsibility for what is happening in Makkah.

The Jabl Omar project – its megaliths snatching at the sky like the open jaw of a crocodile – is a reflection of what we have become. We have happily, and blindly, embraced a global culture of consumption and mass communication – a culture that is amorally secular, atheist, and ultimately empty. This is the idol of profanity, lacking all values except its own.

Indeed, we have forgotten that a visitor to Makkah is a guest of God; Allah is his host and not an Egyptian hotel manager, Saudi official or travel agent. Makkah, the En-Nobled City, can never be about timeshare, leisure or class status. Makkah is not about consumption or communication, but Divine values that wholly transcend the worldly.

Rediscovering Mali and Timbuktu

2009-12-17T07:22:00.000-08:00

Mali and its ancient Saharan city, Timbuktu, are the grist of legend. In the European imagination “Timbuktu” was the very symbol of a savage and inaccessible place. Mythologised by 18th century Orientalist writers, usually quoting secondary sources, Timbuktu became Africa’s prime victim of prejudice. In reality, Timbuktu was a well-known destination, and the Sahara a continental highway.

Situated at the northernmost tip of the 4, 000 km long Niger River, Timbuktu was for hundreds of years one of the world’s most intellectually advanced cities. For in the 12th century, when Europeans were struggling to write their names, Timbuktu’s scholars were studying Mathematics, Astronomy, Philosophy, Chemistry, Medicine and the Islamic Sciences.

And in the early 14th century, West African navigators were already exploring the Mississippi River – their arrival on American shores across the “darkness and fog” of the Atlantic Ocean preceding the great Muslim Chinese Admiral, Xheng-He, by a hundred years. Xheng-He himself arrived in the Americas long before Christopher Columbus.

West Africa’s biggest nation-state

Today Mali is West Africa’s biggest nation-state. It straddles the Sahel, a sub-Saharan region stretching 4, 800 kilometres from Senegal to Somalia. Sahel, which means “shore”, is the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. It is the world’s biggest desert, and growing.

Global warming, resulting in erratic rainfall and severe sandstorms, is causing the more temperate savannah belt south of the Sahel to disappear – scientists report that even the coral reefs of the West Indies are being clogged up with Saharan sand blown up in the intercontinental jet streams.

Over 10,000 years ago the Sahara was well-watered and was resplendent with lush forests, rich grasses and herds of wild animals. In those days the Niger River flowed northeast from the rocky highlands of Guinea into a large inland lake. Another river, fed by the lake, flowed southwards towards the Atlantic and the coastal delta in Nigeria.

As the Sahara began to dry up from about 4,000 BC, and the lake started to evaporate, these rivers joined up to form what is the unique “boomerang” course of the Niger. It is at the tip of this curve extending north into the Sahara desert – called the “Niger bend” – that Timbuktu was built. This made the city a strategic focal point for traders and empire builders alike.

Niger River a causeway

Whilst the Sahara was no obstacle to those who traversed it in caravans from the Horn of Africa and beyond, the Niger River was an important causeway for West African commerce and culture. Archaeologists are only now beginning to discover evidence of high-density urban centres that existed along the Niger’s banks thousands of years ago.

African history cites the existence of three major West African empires: Ghana, Mali and Songhay. Modern Ghana, which is due south of today’s Mali, was already enjoying trade links with Middle-Eastern and European centres at the time of Christ.

With its independent city-states united under one ruler by CE 300, the Ghanaian kings would control the trans-Saharan trade routes for 700 years. These caravans would take 40 days to reach West Africa from Arabia. The chief trading commodities were salt and gold, and they were as precious in their era as gas and oil would be today.

Salt and gold

Salt was extracted from the Sahara in the north and the gold was mined at secret locations in Ghana to the south. Salt was utilised for the preservation and spicing of food and was so valuable it was used as financial currency. Up until Roman times, soldiers and government servants were often paid in salt – hence the term “salary”.

Ghana had contact with Islam as early as the 7th century when Muslim merchants made their way across the desert. Islamic historians record that Islam spread in Africa through cultural exchange and commerce. They write that Islamic influence was so dominant in Ghana that by the 8th century Arabic had become the written language of the local Soninke people.

By the 11th century the long-standing Ghanaian kingdom had begun to disintegrate into smaller groupings as the Almoravids (or Murabitun), the Berber tribes inspired by ‘Abdullah ibn Yasin, a religious teacher and zealous Maliki, established their kingdom from North-West Africa into Spain.

The Mandinka

The Mande people, later known as the Mandinka, broke away from Ghana and it is through them that the ancient Mali Empire rose to prominence. One of their rulers was Sundiata, the legendary “Lion King”, whose rule saw him introducing cotton to Africa. He consolidated the gold-salt trade and established the Mali kingdom, one that extended during his reign across the Sahel for 2,000 kilometres.

From 1200 to 1500 ancient Mali rose to be one of the world’s major economic and cultural powers. At its zenith in the 14th century, Mali’s territories were only smaller than those of Genghis Khan.

The most famous Mali ruler is Mansa Musa, who came to the throne after his uncle, Abu Bakr, did not return from a journey to the America’s. Accompanied by an army and over 100 ships, Abu Bakr sailed over the horizon never to return. Evidence of Abu Bakr’s expedition is that Mandinka customs have been discovered in Brazil.

It was under Mansa Musa that Mali’s cultural life flourished. In cities such as Timbuktu and Jenne universities were established. So renowned were these madrasahs that an Arabian scholar, Abdur-Rahman at-Tamimi, discovered he was not qualified to sit in the company of Timbuktu’s Shaikhs.

Mansa Musa’s famous Hajj

Mansa Musa ruled from 1307 to 1337 and came to the notice of non-African chroniclers when he performed his famous Hajj of 1324. Travelling with a staggering 180 tons of gold (worth billions of rand today), thousands of slaves and hundreds of camels, he depressed the price of gold in Egypt and transformed the economy of the towns he passed through.

On his return from Hajj he brought scholars, libraries and architects back to Mali. At the peak of Mansa’s rule, Timbuktu’s trade in books was third only to the city’s business in gold and salt. In 1353 the famous traveller, Ibn Battutta (himself an African), passed through the region and wrote about it in his “Rihla”.

After Mansa Musa’s death, his heirs struggled to keep his vast kingdom united. It began to fragment until a Songhay strongman, Sunni Ali Ber, conquered Timbuktu in 1464. He hailed from Sokoto in present-day Nigeria. He is cited in the local “tarikhs”, or historical accounts, as the only African ruler to wage 32 wars and win 32 victories.

As an avowed African traditionalist he was not Muslim, but he did develop the army, raise awareness of African culture and pioneer new agricultural techniques. After he passed away in 1492, he was succeeded by his son, Sunni Baro. He was soon overthrown by one of his father’s former generals, Muhammad Toure, who would be known as “Askia the Great”.

Askia Muhammad was a pious Muslim, and he had become concerned at the marginalisation of Mali’s ‘ulama by Sunni Ali Ber and Sunni Baro. Askia Muhammad consolidated his realm, and as Christopher Columbus was sailing across the Atlantic with Arab maps in search of Asia, Africa was enjoying another prosperous era in an Empire now much bigger than Europe.

Songhay Empire

At its peak, the Songhay Empire encompassed the Hausa states as far south as Kano (in present-day Nigeria) and much of the territory that had belonged to the Ghanaian and Mali Empires in the east. Askia Muhammad’s policies resulted in a rapid expansion of trade with Europe and Asia.

However, by the late 16th century the Songhay Empire began to decline. A Moroccan army under Pasha Mahmud ibn Zarqun sacked Timbuktu, taking one of its most famous scholars, Ahmad Baba, into captivity. In the 17th century the rise of the European powers, and their opening of the West African sea route, saw the gradual disappearance of the Saharan caravans.

In 1893 the French arrived and by 1898, Mali and much of West Africa – unused to nation-state borders – had become colonised as “French Sudan”. In 1960 Mali achieved independence, but suffered from long periods of political instability and drought. Only in 1992 did the country experience its first truly democratic election.

Today, Mali is a country of great ethnic diversity. In the 20th century it has had to face the daunting trials of military coups, IMF stricture, endemic corruption, modernisation, democratisation, poverty, climate change and diminishing arable land.

South Africa Mali Project

In 2001 South Africa’s President, Thabo Mbeki, conducted an official visit to Mali. It resulted in the “South Africa-Mali Project”, primarily designed at preserving some of Mali’s ancient manuscripts stored at the Ahmad Baba Institute in Timbuktu – but described by University of Cape Town academic, Dr Shamil Jeppie, as far beyond just that.

“For the South African and Malian governments it is also a project of continental and global importance that speaks to the future,” he wrote in “The Meanings of Timbuktu” (an HSRC and CODESIRA publication), adding that the “South Africa-Mali Project” had arisen organically amongst two African states without third-party or international intervention.

And perhaps more significantly, as Dr Jeppie has also noted, Timbuktu will regain its rightful place in history as a centre of paper and books, something giving the final lie to the enduring myth that Africa was always a primeval continent of ignorance.

So who is Ben Lategan anyway?

2009-11-30T07:22:00.000-08:00

THE rumour that Usama bin Laden (remember him?) fled Afghanistan to South Africa after 9/11, bought a bakkie, travelled to Beaufort West and assumed the name Ben Lategan is highly exaggerated.

More likely is the scenario that he fled together with his inner court to northwest Pakistan where – if he is still alive – skulks in a cave, or in the protective embrace of the mountainous “Taliban” tribes that President Parvez Musharraf, the CIA and the ISI have never been able to bribe, subdue or sideline.

Of course, there is also conspiracy – which in the case of Bin Laden is strong – that he was seen in a Gulf clinic receiving medical treatment after 9/11; that the Americans permitted him to escape, and that the neo-con warmongers in the White House actually allowed 9/11 to take place.

Whatever the truth (and who in the “war on terror” is ever going to tell it anyway) bin Laden has become a ghost, who together with Saddam Hussein is a tattered historical icon of George Bush’s miserable presidency. That the mujahidin – whose corps became later known as al-Qa’idah (or the “Base”), were originally recruited by Saudi Arabia and trained by the US to fight Russians – has been long, long forgotten.

I mean, wasn’t it Ronald Reagan – a Cold War Republican propounding apartheid was a better deal than communism – who proclaimed on the White House lawns that the mujahidin fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan reminded him of America’s founding fathers?

The point – the irony – is that Usama bin Laden, and his fellow mujahidin, were actively recruited by the country that ended up hunting them down as “terrorists”. America’s greatest ally, the Saudi monarchy, was the most complicit, conveniently dispatching many of its angry young Wahhabi dissidents to Afghanistan via the CIA.

These mujahidin, who also originated from other parts of the Muslim world, proved to be doughty fighters. Unafraid of death on the battlefield, they thoroughly spooked the heroin-addled Russian conscripts with their bravado.

Interestingly, one of the figureheads of the war was the Palestinian ‘Abdullah ‘Azzam, the father of the “Afghan Arabs”, and said to be an influence on bin Laden. ‘Azzam was later assassinated in Peshawar (allegedly by the bin Laden camp) for issuing a fatwa that once the Russians were ejected from Afghanistan, a Muslim could no longer take sides.

There is also speculation that MOSSAD, fearing jihad being imported to Palestine, were part of the plot – it’s a case of pick your conspiracy theory.

Bin Laden’s role in Afghanistan was always destined to be different to that of the rank and file. The mujahidin agenda – chiefly drawn up by the US – needed royal endorsement, a big Saudi name and preferably a prince or two, to bolster the initiative.

Unfortunately (for the “conflict engineers” that is) not one of the thousands of pampered Saudi princes wanted to crease his Armani thawb or soil his sandals in the cause of US jihad. The mantle then fell to Usama bin Laden, a son of one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent businessmen – and a trusted friend of Washington.

The fall of the Soviets in 1989 was seen as a victory for Islam (and the end of the Cold War), papering over the cracks in Afghanistan, and the fallout of US interference in Iraq and Iran. For no sooner had the guns fallen silent, than there were several thousand mujahidin with nowhere to go.

Bin Laden – the wealthy benefactor – was the man who looked after many of them, al-Qa’idah originally being just a data-base of those who’d fought in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, the jihad genie then popped out of the bottle. Much of the resultant Islamic “militancy” – deriving from the mujahidin’s “reformist” Wahhabi code – in central Asia and beyond can be ascribed to the US, and her allies such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. They gave their proteges the impression they could defeat superpowers.

But the real turning point came in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Usama bin Laden approached the Saudi monarchy, saying that al-Qa’idah was prepared to defend Saudi Arabia, and sort the Iraqis out. For contrary to Bushspeak, there was no love lost between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qa’idah figurehead.

That bin Laden’s offer was spurned is history. President Bush senior rallied an international alliance to defend Kuwait, and US forces landed on Saudi soil. This enraged bin Laden, who saw this as not only a slap in the face for the mujahidin, but an insult to Muslims – how could infidel boots tramp on hallowed Muslim soil?

Bin Laden, who had not been antagonistic to the Saudi monarchy up until then, changed his views. He also turned on the US, issuing his infamous death fatwas (in spite of not being qualified to make religious judgements). From then on, al-Qa’idah became seriously political, its agenda targeted at what it regarded as “rogue states” such as the US.

And this is a dimension of so-called “militant Islam” that is so often overlooked. More often than not, when faced with honest academic inquiry, most Islamist agendas boil down to political, rather than religious issues.

For example, the recent rise of the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt and Palestine has been chiefly because of the abject failure of Arab nationalism. That this has been a predominantly peaceful and law-abiding phenomenon has been completely ignored.

What has also been disregarded is that the aspirations of the movements have been specific to their communities only. Hamas has said time and again that its struggle is against Zionism, not the rest of the world. Hizballah has also stated that its agenda is local, not international. The Egyptian Brotherhood has no interest in liberating other countries.

But where al-Qa’idah differs significantly is that it is a trans-national “consciousness”, a paradigm that sees the world through the flaky prism of “them or us” – a revolution against dark forces. For unlike other movements, al-Qa’idah has no defined membership, no national borders, no written charters and few– if any – links with those who often claim to act in its name.

But how does one understand al-Qa’idah – or the abstract noun that operates under its umbrella? That, God-willing, will be the topic of our next column in which we will thoroughly examine the mutant ‘aqidah, or credo, of the man that is the ghost of Usama bin Laden.

Copyright Shafiq Morton

The Cave of the Seven Sleepers

2009-11-16T06:28:00.000-08:00

The Cave of the Seven Sleepers
The Ashab ul-Kahf

IT was a hot August afternoon in ‘Amman and Salim, sipping from his ever-present bottle of water, was driving Nader and me to one of the city’s greatest archeological treasures, the Cave of the Seven Sleepers. It is situated about 10 kilometres from the modern Jordanian capital and is next to the modern mosque of the village of Rajib on the road to Sabah.

According to the Jordanian archeologist, Rafiq ad-Dajani, “Rajib” is a localised version of the word “Raqim”, which is the word used in Surat ul-Kahf (The Chapter of the Cave) in the Qur’an that was revealed while the Prophet Muhammad (s) was in Mecca. It is generally believed to mean “inscription” and I had heard Jordanians calling the place Kahf ul-Raqim, the Cave of the Inscription.

Caves have played a significant and deeply symbolic role in divine history. In Jerusalem, for example, there is a grotto below the Dome of the Rock where the prophets Abraham and Zacharias are said to have made their devotions. This cave, rich in allegory, is called the “Well of the Souls”.

A cursory look at the stories of the prophets will reveal that they are strewn with spelaeological references. Abraham’s distinguished nephew, Lot, lived in a cavern near Bab udh-Dhra1 on the shores of the Dead Sea after the overturning of Sodom and Gomorrah. The prophet Ilyas (Elijah) hid in a cave in Samaria from King Ahab and the wiles of Queen Jezebel. While there, he passed on his spiritual secrets to his successor, al-Yasa’ (Elisha) – the youth from Sidon.

There is a version of the Qisas al-Anbiyyah (the Stories of the Prophets) that tells us Abraham, the great father of the prophets, was born in the same “Cave of Light” that Nuh (Noah) and Idris (Enoch) were brought into the world. This cave is said to be near Damascus at a place called Barza.

The authors of the Qisas say that Abraham was miraculously transported with his mother to this retreat, which was four days travel from his native city of Ur, so that the dictator Nimrod could not kill him. At the time the Babylonian tyrant was slaughtering all newly-born infants, terrified by a dream in which he had seen himself eclipsed by Prophetic light.

The bodies of many of the illustrious prophets have also been interred in caves. Shortly after Prophet Muhammad’s (s) death, his Companions located the unsullied bodies of Hud and Danyal (as) in underground chambers. Abraham (as) and his son Isaac lie in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron as does Yusuf, or Joseph, whose body historians believe was taken from Egypt to Palestine by Yush’a, or Joshua (as). Jews believe that the Cave of the Patriarchs is the portal to Heaven.

Then there is a tradition related by the Prophet Muhammad (s) about three men from previous times who took shelter in a cave for the night. A storm broke out, causing a rockfall to seal them inside. Each man indulged in tawassul, invoking the favour of his Creator through the stations of his good deeds and Allah – the most Merciful –opened the mouth of the cave by degrees until the men were able to escape being entombed.

Muslims, of course, will remember the cave of Hira on Jabl Nur (the Mount of Light) above Mecca where the Prophet Muhammad (s) performed seclusion and received his first Qur’anic revelation. Jabl Thawr is another locale resplendent with metaphor. It was near the summit of this mountain outside the Noble City that the Prophet (s) hid from the pursuing Quraish with Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, his most trusted Companion.

Some Shaikhs say that the Prophet (s) bestowed Abu Bakr (ra) with spiritual gifts during their time in this cave. The miracle of the spider-web, the pigeon’s nest and the mature acacia tree that grew overnight – and screened the men from their pursuers’ line of vision – is well known.

The tale of the Ashab ul-Kahf, however, is thematically representative of one of mankind’s oldest allegories – a scenario where a person falls into a supernatural slumber and then awakes years later largely unaware of what has happened. The prophetic historian, Ibn Kathir, reports that the prophet ‘Uzair (Ezra) and his donkey slept for one hundred years before being awoken, and that another messenger of Allah, Aramiyyah (Jeremiah), went into a similar repose for seventy years.

But back to the Sleepers of the Cave – where research reveals that historians cite versions of it in Greek, German, Jewish, Norwegian, Indian, Chinese and Slav traditions. In Europe, Catholics commemorate the event on the 27 July and in Sweden and Germany, it is believed that if it rains on that day, seven further weeks of rain will follow. The Orthodox Church honours the date towards the end of October.

The historian, Edward Gibbons, encounters the saga of the Sleepers in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” at the end of Chapter 33. Even the American author, Washington Irving, borrows from the sleeper’s theme in his 1820 novel, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in which the white-bearded Rip van Winkle is the central character.

During Byzantine times the tradition was known as the “Sleepers of Ephesus” and was a popular tale. In written form it can be traced back to the fifth century and the quill of the Syrian, James of Sarugh. It was brought to western eyes in Latin by a church deacon called Theodosius in 525 CE.

Gregory of Tours

Gregory of Tours, who gave a full account of the event in his “Gloria Martyrum” (the Glory of the Martyrs) a few years later, penned the better known version. Christian scholars concur that the first written account of the tradition must have been authored within a single generation of the event itself.

The Scriptural story mentions several popular youths who during the third century were employed at the royal palace in Ephesus, one of the outposts of the Roman Empire. This was during the brief reign of Decianus or Daqyanus, a tyrant who like the archetypal Nimrod and the Pharaoh, had insisted his subjects indulge in polytheism.

The tradition relates that after discovering the monotheistic belief of the city's key personnel, Daqyanus demands that they renounce their faith. There is an imperial standoff when the youths refuse to do so. Regarding the Companions as “special cases”, the Emperor delays a decision on their fate, and giving them a brief ultimatum, leaves Ephesus on business.

The God-fearing companions then give away their property to the poor except for a few silver coins and seek the refuge of a cave attended by a faithful dog. Upon returning from his journey, Daqyanus inquires after the young men who in the meantime have fallen into a deep sleep.

The persistent Emperor sends soldiers to find the youths and when it is reported to him that they are reposing in a cave, he sadistically orders his troops to seal them inside. Shortly afterwards two citizens of Ephesus, Theodore and Rufinus, write an account of the incident on a tablet and hide it amongst the stones – hence the cave being called Kahf ul-Raqim, the Cave of the Inscription.

Instead of dying a slow and agonising death, the young men remain in a heavenly slumber for about two hundred years. This until a shepherd looking for a shelter near the grotto proceeds to remove the rocks sealing the entrance. The activity is said to disturb the youths and they wake up, thinking that they have only been asleep for a short while.

They then decide to send one of their number, Yamliha (other sources cite Iamblicus, Malcus or Diomedes), to the nearby town to buy bread. Their companion is instructed to be careful and courteous, and not to attract any undue attention. Yamliha is dumbfounded to discover a changed landscape and that monotheism (previously outlawed) appears to be openly practised.

Of course, the desire of the Sleepers that they remain anonymous is wishful thinking. People disappearing for centuries, simply rubbing the sleep out of their eyes and then returning as if nothing had ever happened, cannot expect to pass unobserved.

Hidden treasure

Not surprisingly, the youth causes a great commotion when he tenders his now antique silver coins (with Daqyanus’ head on them) in the village bakery. People think he has discovered a hidden treasure and, since it is unlawful not to report any such finds to the authorities, Yamliha is dragged before the proconsul to explain who he is.

To his great distress, Yamliha cannot find any witnesses to prove that he is a prominent citizen of Ephesus. Finally, in fear and horror, he falls to his knees and pleads: “In God's name, tell me what I ask! Where is Emperor Daqyanus now, who yesterday was in this city?”

Marinus, the local bishop who had joined the curious throng, answers him: “My son, in the whole earth there is no Emperor called Daqyanus, only in olden times was there such a one.”

It soon becomes apparent to the crowd that something extraordinary is afoot. After much explanation, officials accompany Yamliha to the cave and find his wondrous tale the truth when the other youths appear, their faces described as being as fresh as “flowers at dawn”.

Some renditions of the story relate that the Raqim, the tablet describing the martyrdom of the Seven, is also discovered.

The Emperor, Theodosius II, is said to be overjoyed at the news of the Sleepers’ miraculous awakening. He had been facing a strong challenge to the creed of resurrection and the miracle of the Ashab ul-Kahf had eloquently silenced its detractors.

Most medieval versions of the story next relate that the Sleepers pass away after having met the Emperor. The joyful Byzantine monarch, desirous of building golden tombs for them, is told in a dream to bury them in the cave.

The Qur’an further mentions that there was debate as to whether a building or church be built over the cave. And here, the generic Arabic word “masjid” is used, with the majority deciding a place of worship (a masjid) be constructed over the Sleepers.

By 1600 CE, the tradition – once the spiritual cornerstone of the Unitarian Church – had been thrown into the trashcan of mythology by the Catholic Cardinal, Caesar Baronius. Legend or not, however, Christian accounts of the event show remarkable convergence with the Qur’anic version.

Interestingly, the English Qur’anic translator and scholar, Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, emphatically locates the story within Jewish lore, as the Qur’anic Revelation had been an answer to questions posed by Rabbis to Muhammad (s). He writes:

"There is no reason whatsoever to doubt the truth of the tradition, which connects this chapter (Surat ul–Kahf), with three questions set by Jewish Rabbis..."

Pickthall continues:

"That being so it would be rash to identify the story with that of the Christian Seven Sleepers; it must belong, as the story of the ‘Two-Horned One” actually does, to Rabbinical lore".

While the Qur’an tantalisingly suggests that previous scholars conclude that there could have been three, five or seven sleepers (plus the dog), it does add somewhat cryptically:

"Those who know (the truth) about them are very few".

Today, though, consensus seems to be that there were Seven Sleepers. The great Prophetic scholar ibn Abbas (ra) reports that Sayyidina ‘Ali, the final of the four rightly guided Caliphs and one of the spiritually adept5 mentioned above, told him there were Seven Companions. The Qur’an also says that the Sleepers could have tarried in the cave for 300 solar years (or 309 lunar years) but that ultimately only Allah, the Omnipresent, really knows.

Direct response to a question

In fact, as we have indicated, the verses referring to the Cave (9-26) were sent down in direct response to a question by Jewish Arabs. In verse 23 Allah Himself tells the Muslims not to be lead astray from the truth of His message by impudent, uninformed scholars on how many had sojourned in the Cave.

In fact, Sayyidina ‘Ali (ra) reported to ibn ‘Abbas that Seven Companions plus the dog had resided in the Cave. He goes on to mention the names of the young men as: Yamliha, Makthalina, Mashlina, Marnush, Darbanush, Zazanush and Kaferstatyush.

As officers of court, Yamliha, Makthalina and Mashlina had sat on the right hand side of the King and Marnush, Darbanush and Zazanush on his left side. The name of the person, a shepherd, who had led them to the Cave, was Kaferstatyush.

The dog in the narrative is called Qitmir and there are scholars who say that he, together with the likes of the she-camel of Salih (as) and the pigeon of Noah, will be amongst the animals of Paradise. The symbolism of the watchful and faithful canine, sleeping with his forepaws stretched out towards the mouth of the cave, has inspired extensive commentary.

Ibn ‘Abbas also notes that the names of the Ashab ul-Kahf possess rukya, or spiritually protective capacities, for those who firmly believe in the Power and Oneness of their Creator. The Companions of the Cave are so beloved to Allah that invocation through the goodness of their names (obviously without worshipping them)will give relief from fire and oppressive authority. It will also cool the fever of a child, or ease a difficult pregnancy.

Scholars of tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis) unanimously confirm that because Surat ul-Kahf comments directly on the famous story, it abrogates all previous speculation about it. For Muslims, at least, the Holy Book confirms beyond any reasonable doubt that the event (whether Christian or Jewish in tradition) is not myth, and did actually happen.

Suddenly, Nader interrupted my train of thought. He pointed through the car window to a honeycomb of holes exposed in a limestone embankment cut away for road construction. “Shafiq, look, those are two thousand year-old Byzantine tombs.” Evidently, the whole neighbourhood had once been a burial ground.

The famous Cave is situated on a hill that is now on the outer fringes of ‘Amman’s ugly urban sprawl. There were few people around as we entered the dusty precincts of the Ashab ul-Kahf. The stumps of massive square stone pilasters indicated that a large Byzantine structure, presumably a church, must have once incorporated the Cave as a focal point of devotion.

A prayer-niche – a mihrab – and a small stone pulpit were built into the remains of an outer southern wall, but were not convincing in proportion. They seemed to be an architectural afterthought, possibly when the basilica was probably later changed into a mosque. In some ways, the structure was faintly reminiscent of the Grand Ummayad masjid in Damascus, also a converted Byzantine church.

On the roof of the Cave were the remnants of another mosque, the stubs of two weathered pillars framing its ancient, now knee-high prayer niche that today commanded a view over a truck yard, some ugly flats and the distant, shimmering countryside.

Upon returning home and further researching the matter, I discovered that the Jordanian archeologist, Rafiq ad-Dajani, and his journalist colleague, Muhammad Taisir Zibyan, concurred. In their famous dig of 1961, which re-established the importance of the site, they had found Byzantine coins dating back to the Emperor Justinian (517 - 527 CE).

More significantly, after removing soil debris from the roof of the cave, they had unearthed a mosque that had hitherto been hidden from view by centuries of silt. Apart from the prominent mihrab, they located the foundations of a small minaret, four Byzantine pillars, and an inscription stating that the mosque had been renovated by the son of Ahmad ibn Tulun.

According to their findings, this one-hundred square metre Byzantine church had probably been converted into a mosque by the Ummayad Khalifah, ‘Abd-ul Malik ibn Marwan, the same man who had built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in 685 CE.

Interestingly, the mouth of the Cave pointed south towards the Qiblah, or Mecca. The indented mihrab of the mosque on top of its roof confirmed this. I wrestled with my camera bag for a wide-angle lens. It was quite something to consider that the Seven Sleepers had faced Makkah long before the Prophet (s) had been ordered to change his prayer direction from Jerusalem.

Of course, there are those who will disagree that the Cave is located in Jordan. The Qur’anic translator, Yusuf ‘Ali, claims that it is in Turkey and argues that Ephesus, near the modern Turkish city of Izmir, is the place. His viewpoint, however, does not find much favour in the Arab-speaking world.

Whether this can be ascribed to the Arab’s inherent dislike of anything Turkish – as a consequence of having being colonised by the Ottomans – or the Turks preferring to honour Ephesus as the site, is difficult to ascertain. If the latter was the case, then the ‘Amman location would have been largely neglected for over five centuries.

Ephesus (or Tarsus) was formerly a sacred city and commercial centre that had housed one of the Grecian era’s Seven Wonders of the World, the spectacularly colonnaded temple of Artemis where the statue of the multi-bosomed moon goddess, Diana, had once attracted worshippers.

It is recorded that Saint Paul had spent three years preaching his gospel in Ephesus before moving on to Macedonia, and that the marauding Goths sacked the city in about 260 CE. It can be argued that during Byzantine rule Ephesus was regarded as of little importance. On the other hand, when the Sleepers defied the Emperor Daqyanus, ‘Amman (or Philadelphia) had been part of the Roman Decapolis for over a hundred years.

In 1928 an Austrian archeologist, Franz Miltner, discovered what he believed were the tombs of the Seven Sleepers in the floor of an old church in Ephesus. Yusuf ‘Ali, who published his first translation of the Qur’an in 1934, could have been convinced by Miltner’s claims.

He quotes the verse in Surat ul-Kahf that says:

"You would have seen the sun, when it rose, declining to the right from their Cave, and when it set, turning away from them to the left while they lay in the open space in the midst of their Cave..."

The venerable ‘Ali – who travelled to Ephesus – writes that if the youths lay facing north, the sun would not be able to penetrate the Turkish cave. His study is a thorough one, right down to the latitude of Ephesus, 38 degrees north. Yet the cave in Jordan, the one outside which I was standing, was nearly 1, 000 kilometres from Ephesus and faced southeast.

Long shadows

It was only when I returned to South Africa and processed my photos that I thought about the matter again. We had visited the Ashab ul-Kahf in mid afternoon and in one picture, the pillars near the mouth of the Cave were beginning to throw long shadows across the ground.

Looking towards the mouth of the Cave, the sun was starting to fall to my left shoulder, the western arc of the sunset. It was then that it struck me! If I faced the Cave, the sun would move from my right as it rose overhead and then drop to the left as it sank towards the horizon. This seemed to fit comfortably into the Qur’anic description.

But, it was not going to be as easy as that! I had also read opinion that located the Cave near Petra some 200 kilometers south of ‘Amman. This was probably because Petra (or Betra) is often known in Arabic as “Raqim.” The Nabateans, descendants of the people of prophet Salih (as), had carved huge tombs and inscriptions into the cliffs and caves of the red-hued wadi Musa. However, when I later visited Petra none of the local Badu seemed to be too impressed by the idea of the Seven Sleepers residing there.

Ephesus, on the other hand, had always been a popular destination for pilgrimage as St Paul had preached in the city. A ninth century writer even notes that visitors to the Turkish cave had been shown “seven incorrupt bodies”. A Russian pilgrim, Abbot Daniel, following the same route three centuries later had observed the same. These are curious details not included in ‘Ali's meticulously researched footnotes.

Nevertheless, it did make me think of a scriptural maxim: “faith without works is dead.” Certainly, to enhance spiritual focus, it would have been perfectly natural for Christianity to nurture a place of remembrance for the Sleepers, those pious youths who so dramatically reinforced the creed of the Resurrection.

And, even if Ephesus (or anywhere else) proved to be a disputed location, so what! Hussain, the illustrious grandson of the Prophet (s), is lovingly canonised in Cairo, Kufa and Mazaar Sharif. Shaikh Yusuf of Makasar, the great Indonesian saint, has graves in Cape Town, Sri Lanka and Lakiung. The prophet Yusha’ or Joshua (as) has three shrines (or maqams8) in Jordan, one on the Golan Heights and one in Palestine. If anything, the mercy and memory of these remarkable personalities has been enhanced.

In the case of the Sleepers it was so widespread a narrative that it should not come as a surprise to us that Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and even Tunisia, lay claims to the tradition as well. A cave in Damascus on Mount Qaysun, or Salera Hill, is situated in a profoundly historical neighbourhood. To this effect, an article in the Afghan Voice entitled “Folklore and Folk Music” notes that in order to reinforce their belief, rural people will often “localise” their religion.

The author writes that the story of the Sleepers in Afghanistan is a good example. While the accepted site of the cave may be in Jordan, or even elsewhere in the Middle East, one also exists near Maimuna in Afghanistan. It is watched over by a group calling themselves the sa’adat (the descendents of the Holy Prophet). Their story is oral tradition at its enchanting best. It is paraphrased thus:

Several young men

Several young men seeking heavenly truth are put into a divine repose by Allah to await the arrival of the final Revelation. They slumber on for 600 years until the archangel Jibril informs the Prophet Muhammad (s) about the pious Sleepers.

The Prophet (s) then orders his four closest Companions to “fly” to the cave. In the meantime, the Sleepers are awakened in preparation for the big moment. At a local bazaar they become bewildered when no one wants to accept their antiquated money.

The subsequent arrival of the Holy Prophet's noble Companions clears up the Sleeper's confusion as they are instructed in the tenets of Islam. They are offered the sanctuary of Madinah but instead look at each other and say: “What have we to offer when we have gained so much? Allah has preserved us to learn the true Message, so all that remains is Paradise.”

In so doing, the devout youths return to their cave with their faithful dog, and Allah in His wisdom, puts their bodies back to sleep and transports their souls to Paradise. The Companions occult themselves back to the Prophet (s) and inform him of the miracle they have just witnessed. He asks of them: “How many Sleepers were there?”

While the noble Prophet’s audience listens in wonderment, ‘Ali (ra) says there are four, Abu Bakr maintains there are five, ‘Umar insists there are six and ‘Uthman quietly reports that there are seven. To all of this the pensive Muhammad (s) simply replies:

“The ways of Allah are wondrous, and only He knows how many Sleepers there are. Only He knows when one will awaken. The world is full of seekers and only Allah knows their number and when they will arise.”

Imbued with entertaining mysticism and poetic licence, Afghani lore certainly does no harm to the central tradition.

From Yemen comes another compelling account of the Ashab ul–Kahf. On the slopes of Saber Mountain near Taiz is a village called al-Miqab where locals believe the Seven Companions resided. Chenini in Tunisia is yet one more appealing rural locality endowed with its own tradition of the Sleepers who grew to four metres in size.

“Shafiq, where must I stand?” Nader, who had by now got used to the eccentricities of travelling with a dreamy photographer, was already posing for a picture. A keen amateur photographer himself, he was becoming quite an expert at finding me camera angles.

We were now at the entrance of the Cave. To one side was an olive tree that had been planted amongst the ancient ruins. It had apparently regenerated from a much older stump. A weathered decorative frontage and sculpted pillars framed the doorway. The Cave itself was situated on a gently sloping ridge just below the expansive summit of one of ‘Amman’s innumerable hills.

Location of cave

If one considered that Kahf ul-Raqim was 10 kilometres south of the city, locating this particular cave in Roman times would have been almost impossible. It must have cost the despotic Daqyanus much in resources and men to find the youths.

Another cave very similar to the one in ‘Amman can be found near Umm Qais, an ancient Roman town that is called Gadara in the Bible. In this northwestern corner of Jordan is an underground chamber where Jesus is believed to have sheltered from the Romans. It is relatively unspoiled and gives one a good idea of how well camouflaged the Sleepers’ Cave would have been over 1, 600 years ago.

Entering the cool interior of the Cave I noticed that three barrel-vaulted recesses had been carved into the limestone. The rock was worn smooth and sometime in the past the chamber had been whitewashed, the remaining painted areas flaking off walls blackened by the smoke of ancient oil lamps. Now electrical fluorescent tubes illuminated the scene.

In the east and west recesses were sealed waist-high stone sarcophagi with Byzantine motifs. One had the old Christian octagon carved into its side, a sign that is frequently mistaken for the six-sided Star of David.

My notebooks (and photographs) remind me that there were four tombs and that the second crypt to the right had two holes crudely gouged into it. On top of it was a worn tablet with indistinct Kufic lettering. I noticed that it looked as if the tombs had been sealed in more recent times, ostensibly to prevent the overly inquisitive from prying them open.

And here was a conundrum – I could only see four graves or, at least, four large sarcophagi. Most Jordanian guidebooks confidently say there are eight tombs, even the information board in the cave! My brow furrowed. The sarcophagi were big – perhaps big enough to house more than one body?

I approached the tomb with the openings at its head and could see that a light bulb was theatrically illuminating the inside of the crypt. I bent down and in an eerie Masonic tapestry, saw several battered skulls on top of a pile of old bones.

Were these the remains of the Seven Sleepers, or just of those wishing to be interred near the Ashab ul-Kahf as a final blessing? It is agreed amongst Islamic scholars that a unique phenomenon of anyone blessed with Prophethood, sainthood, or genuine martyrdom, is that Allah forbids nature to decompose their corpse.

Eastern Christianity happily accords with this. Coptic monks will attest that the bodies of their ancient holy men entombed in their monasteries are whole and undefiled, and even after hundreds of years, still emit the sweet smell of musk.

In all likelihood, and considering the above-mentioned opinion of Islamic scholars, the bodies of the Companions of the Cave should still be as fresh as the day they passed away. The Qur’an itself declares that the Companions had been increased in Divine guidance through their faith, imbuing them with the kind of spiritual rank associated with sainthood.

Were the Seven still somehow in this Cave? I did catch a whiff of a heavenly fragrance as I stood up from the crypt, but then, a visitor could have placed ‘itr, or perfume, there. On the other hand, Brewer's Book of Phrase and Fable casually notes that the bodies of the Sleepers were taken by the Crusaders to the French city of Marseilles and then interred in a stone coffin in “Victor's church”.

There is another theory that the Seven Sleepers will awaken during the last days of the earth and will join forces with the Mahdi (an imam from the bloodline of Muhammad) and Jesus to fight the evil squads of Dajjal, the one-eyed anti-Christ. If this is the case, then scholars assert that the Sleepers could be in an “occultation” like Jesus, whom the Qur’an declares was not crucified but taken up to Heaven.

There is evidence, however, that the Prophetic Companions must have known something about the Cave. The early scholar ibn ‘Abbas (ra), who relies strongly on the accounts of ‘Ali (ra) and according to the Qur’anic exegete Qurtubi – his own experiences – is the most widely reported source. The fifth Caliph, Mu’awiyyah, is said to have been advised by ibn ‘Abbas not to look for the Sleepers' in case he incurred the wrath of Allah by disturbing them.

There is some mystery added to this, though, as a later Abbasid Caliph, Wathiqah (842 –847 CE) sent emissaries to seek out the cave, but with little success.

I asked Nader exactly why he thought this Cave was believed to be the maqam of the Sleepers. He explained that he had read the writings of the famous historian, al-Waqidi, who recorded that one of the Prophetic Companions, Sa’id ibn ‘Amr, had been sent by the Khalifah ‘Umar (ra) to join another famous Sahabi, ‘Ubaidah ibn Jarrah, who was then commander of the Muslim forces in Sham.

According to the account, Sa’id ibn ‘Amr wandered a little off his route and reached the district of Sabah one evening, encamping there for the night. He woke up for the dawn prayer and afterwards as he watched the sun rise over the hill, began to shout the takbir in a loud voice, “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! (God is Great, God is Great!)”

“This is Raqim Mountain, I know this is Raqim Mountain!” the excited Sa’id ibn ‘Amr is said to have proclaimed to his stunned fellow travellers. After taking them to the site of the Cave, the story then relates that the Sahabi then reached a city that many scholars assert is now modern ‘Amman.

Muhammad Taisir Zibyan, who researched and wrote about the matter forty years ago, further mentions that another Prophetic Companion, Ubada ibn Samit, located the Cave. This happened during the caliphate of Abu Bakr (ra) when ibn Samit was sent as an envoy to the Roman Emperor. In addition, the famous scholar Qurtubi mentions in his Qur’anic exegesis that ibn ‘Abbas (ra) visited the site of the Ashab ul-Kahf.

One of Salahuddin’s generals, Usama ibn Munkiyyaz, also writes about making salah in the cave of the Ashab ul-Kahf with thirty horsemen. In his memoirs entitled “I’tibar” he talks about a narrow opening in the chamber that he did not enter.

In the eastern transept of the Cave in ‘Amman is a small passage that ascends upwards to the roof of the grotto like a chimney. Zibyan is of the opinion that this is what ibn Munkiyyaz was referring to.

Serious interest revived

To my astonishment (at the time) Nader had told me that this historical site had been neglected for many years, even by the Muslims, and that only in 1963 had serious interest in it been revived when Dajani and Taisir had completed their famous dig. He said that the Jordanian government was now reviewing plans to renovate the entire complex.

I secretly hoped that this project would not become a monument to bad taste and spoil the unique spiritual character of Kahf ul-Raqim. On the positive side, though, cautious and considered restoration would preserve the Cave and its archeologically priceless environs for future generations. Ugly, modern buildings were already beginning to encroach on the site. How much had been destroyed already?

In a region where the journalist, historian and activist Sa’ud ibn Mahfudh estimates that there are nearly a 100, 000 ancient historical sites (many still unexplored), Jordanians are somewhat blase, if not sometimes downright dismissive, of their archeological heritage.

I remember visiting an old Ummayad palace located on the highway to the Queen Alia airport and noticing that its missing stones were to be found in the walls of nearby houses. This, of course, is nothing new. Civilisations are frequently built on, or with, the ruins of others before them. The Sulaimaniyyah masjid in Istanbul, for example, “borrowed” a column from Baalbek.

Inside the Cave – standing in the fajwah, or the space where the Sleepers would have rested – I began to think about the incredibly deep significance of the story of the Sleepers. In classical Qur’anic scholarship the mufasirin have discussed it at great length. Any ayah, any verse in the Qur’an is subtly layered with many levels of interpretation, and in this regard, the mystical Surat ul-Kahf is one of the most profound.

To this effect, a learned Shaikh once told me that each letter of the Qur’an was like a drop of dew. To us it would be a lifeless, tiny transparent bead of water – but for the pious each spherule would be a universe of colour and energy.

Numbers also enjoyed significance, and the deep symbolism of seven and the consensus that seven slept in the Cave sprang to mind. For Christianity the number has much resonance: the Seven days of Creation, the Seven Wise Men, the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Champions of the Faith are but a few obvious examples.

In Judaism the number seven enjoys weight as well. Rosh Hashana occurs in the seventh month of the Judaic calendar, Sukkot is a seven day festival, great Jewish historical events are said to be seven, Sabbath is on the seventh day of the week, and the Menorah (the traditional gold candleholder) has seven branches.

But, by acknowledging the authenticity of the story of the Seven Sleepers, the Qur’an allows it to be taken to unprecedented heights of metaphor. There are seven words11 in the utterance of faith “la ilaha ilallah Muhammadur Rasulullah,” seven major veils between the believer and Allah, seven verses in the opening chapter of the Qur’an, and seven gates to Heaven and Hell. The pilgrim circumbulates seven times around the Ka’bah, walks seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwah, pelts the jamarat (the devil’s pillar) seven times and, even the human body has seven members.

Before I could get further entangled in my thoughts, Nader touched me on the elbow. “Come let’s go to the mosque, it’s almost time to pray ‘Asr.” We strolled to the mosque, and on the way stopped briefly to admire an ornate Byzantine tomb carved into the limestone. As we entered the mosque precincts, I noticed that in the toilet and ablution area, worshippers were competing for space with the imam’s chickens.

Copyright Shafiq Morton

If music be the food of love, play on

2009-11-16T05:26:00.000-08:00

HAVING been involved in Muslim radio for some time, I am often asked about the permissibility of music in Islam – and if permissible, to what degree. I am always surprised by these questions because music has been part of the Islamic ethos ever since the Prophet Muhammad (s) condoned the singing of songs, the beating of drums (and even dancing) at a wedding feast attended by his young wife, A’isha.

What is interesting here is that while the Prophet (s) may not have participated, he verbally approved of the above. It could be argued, then, that music in Islam evolved the very moment that the Prophet (s) intimated certain forms were permissible.

There are also scholars who argue that the Prophet (s) avoided instrumental music, but not because he thought that it was forbidden, but because he feared that it could affect his receiving of the Revelation. It seems to have been a matter of taste, because another prophet who also received Divine Revelation, Dawud (as), was renowned for his musicality.

Aboriginal traditions indicate that in the Americas, Africa and Europe, music originated with the human voice. Associated with ritual, it then progressed to instrumentational accompaniment. In Islam, as we will discuss later, the voice is the key – the Mercy of the 700 tongues given to the first prophet, Adam (as), by Allah Himself.

The common English word for melodic sound is “music”, but it is interesting to see that “music” is derived from the Arab word “musiqa”, which in turn is derived from the Greek. Linguistically, there are further links: for example, the modern guitar – a cousin of the Arabic “‘ud” – takes its name from the Persian “tar” (which is “awtar” in Arabic).

Music is, to put it simply, the art of combining sounds with a view to beauty, form, expression and emotional pleasure. Historically, music has always found its roots in devotion, a dynamic expression of consciousness that often reflects the inner longing of humankind for divine ecstasy.

Maulana Aqtab Siddiqui, an English Sufi, states that music is simply the longing of the human heart for the sounds of Angels, for the sweetness of the Afterlife. An old story relates that the prophet Ibrahim (as) bequeathed his vast herds of animals to the Angel Jibril just because he wanted to hear the singing of Heavenly Beings.

Professor Seyyed Hossain Nasr, one of the illustrious scholars of our time, writes that traditions of music in the Islamic cosmos are amongst “the richest in the world”. In fact, most strains of modern music: gospel, jazz, flamenco and even urban rap and hip-hop can trace their roots back to historical Muslim societies.

The ecstatic ululation of gospel (originating from Muslim African slaves) is little different to the states found in the ritualistic Middle Eastern Hadrat. The repeated patterns of jazz are hardly dissimilar to the melodic chants of introspective Sufi tariqahs. The modern-day choruses of the Ummayad flamenco (la-ilai-la-ilai) are distinct remnants of the kalimah, which articulates: la-ilaha-illallah (there is no god except God).

Even the pomp and splendour of military marching bands, with bagpipes and rolling drums, can trace their origins back to the red-robed Janissary forces of the Ottoman Empire.

And lastly, rap and hip-hop (deriving from all of the above) represent the “secular Qasidah” of the city ghetto, a sound that older generations frequently criticise as being semantically degrading and musically discordant, without ever bothering to read into its desperate metaphor.

But if music is permissible in Islam, how does one deem it Islamic? Perhaps the finest response comes from Imam al-Ghazali, the giant polymath and Sufi of the 12th century. He wrote that music inflamed the passions. However, if music drew the person nearer to Allah it was beneficial, but if it didn’t, it was detrimental. It has to be noted that Imam Ghazali was wise enough not to lay down absolutes!

Over the years I have learnt that Imam Ghazali’s approach has been the most appropriate. Too often, issues of halal and haram (especially in music) have been pre-determined by pure like or dislike, rather than any juristic principle. And too often, when assailed with new sound, the most convenient Muslim response has been to cry haram – even though the music may not be alien to Islamic theology.

I can remember airing Ahmed Tijani’s beautiful CD, The Names of Allah, on Voice of the Cape and being accused of playing “gospel”. It was as if I had betrayed Islam. Later, Tijani visited South Africa. He gave an on-air rendition of the Fatihah from the Qur’an that could have been delivered by a Mississippi Baptist choir: “Is that gospel, now?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

To its great credit, our Muslim Judicial Council has desisted from issuing a fatwa on music. I like to think that its wise men have silently conceded to Imam Ghazali, thus leaving the door ajar that was left open by the Prophet (s) for Muslims to develop the lingua-franca of spiritually uplifting, and permissible music through ijtihad, or informed collective thought.

I agree with Seyyed Hossain Nasr who argues that as an Islamic art form, music falls under the category of Mercy and Beauty, and that Allah has written beauty upon the face of all things. The Prophet’s (s) Hadith that “Allah loves Beauty” serves to reinforce this idea. The lingua-franca of music is its beauty, or as the violinist, Yehudi Menuhin, commented when he heard Iranian classical music: “This music is the ladder between the soul and God.”

It is this connection to the Divine, through beauty and ecstasy, that Islamic music gains its currency. And the premier instrument is the Qur’an – an amazing compendium of metre, rhythm and rhyme – that almost “sings” its deeply profound message as it moves like a heartbeat from verse to verse. The miracle of the Qur’an is witnessed in as much the human voice, which is a Mercy from Allah, as it is in its words and message.

This is perhaps why the music of the masjid, the place of worship, is the human voice and the Qur’an; and why the market-place, the material world, expresses its awareness of Allah through the voice and instrument, its melodic timbre drowning out the jarring sounds of the dunya so that the senses can savour beautific splendour.

But what about contemporary music? Whilst music is historically devotional, it can also reflect the zeitgeist, or spirit, of a society. A good example is the Beatles’ 1960’s hit, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. It is a pleasant enough song, but – without criticising Lennon and McCartney – it does subconsciously reflect secular nihilism: a soul floating in a universe so stripped of sacred meaning that it can only fixate on whimsical objects.

The lyrics of a verse go: “newspaper taxis appear on the shore/waiting to take you away/climb in the back with your head in the clouds/and you’re gone”. But where to? I think the point is that there is no destination.

Those who pour scorn upon the musical tastes of our children four decades after Lucy in the Sky need to pause a little in their thoughts. If young peoples’ music is characterised today by obscenity, anger and angst then we should be taking note. Are we not willingly co-opted role players in a greedy generation that has, in its rush for wealth, declared war on God’s Creation – and in the process, poisoned His skies, polluted His oceans and sterilised His soil?

Perhaps the solution lies in a genuine return to the discipline of Islamic arts so that the subtle veils of the deepest realities of Islam can be fully lifted. Or, as Seyyed Hossain Nasr says: “Today more than ever before, the understanding of Islamic art is an indispensable key for the comprehension of Islam itself”. To that, I say amen: if music be the food of love, play on.

Copyright Shafiq Morton

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2009-11-13T05:27:00.000-08:00

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