Understanding Isis

Shakir, Wahiyib, the one man who shows his face.
An ISIS "enforcer".
Photo courtesy www.telegraph.co.uk

WHO exactly is ISIS or Da’ish – or to give it its latest acronym – the IS?  The Islamic State in Syria (or the Levant), which governs a self-proclaimed Caliphate in the conflict-torn zones of Syria and Iraq, lays claim to a holy war against imperialism.

Due to its distorted understanding of Shari’ah, over 100 of the world’s top Islamic scholars (including the Muslim Judicial Council) have roundly condemned ISIS. Even Al-Qaeda has disowned the organisation.

To say that ISIS is a disturbing development in a region already teetering on the brink of apocalyptic disaster is an understatement. ISIS’s chillingly staged YouTube clips have assaulted all standards of decency.

And whilst ISIS has elicited justifiable denunciation, this doesn’t really explain who it is. This is because reportage on ISIS is occurring without any contextual framework.

For this, we first go to the 7^th century when a group in Iraq broke away from the Islamic mainstream. Known as the Khawarij – literally “those who go out” – this sect embraced a stark and simplistic theology in which a merciful deity became a vengeful one.

Interestingly, the Prophet Muhammad [pbuh] had predicted the rise of the Khawarij. He even said that its offspring would emerge in our times, and that their understanding of religion would not descend below their collar bones.

The Khawarij believed that anyone who did not subscribe to their worldview was an unbeliever, a sinful kafir who could be killed.The early Caliphs had to put down the Khawarij by force.

In the late 18^th century, Muhammad’s [pbuh] prophecy would bear fruit when a central Arabian scholar, Ibn Abd ul-Wahhab, would claim to be a renewer of Islam. He would preach that his view was the only authentic one, and that anybody disagreeing with him was an unbeliever whose blood was halal.

Spurning over 1,000 years of classical knowledge, he was duly ignored as a crackpot until Ibn Sa’ud – a chieftain craving political power – realised he could harness ‘Abd ul-Wahhab’s rabid discourse to unite the disparate Bedouin tribes.

Ibn Sa’ud rallied the Bedoiun tribesmen, known as the “ikhwan”, under the banner of neo-Kharijism, or Wahhabism. It was tactically convenient, because anybody disagreeing with him could be put to the sword.

The Wahhabis over-ran the Middle East, smashing historical tombs, vandalising libraries and dismembering thousands of Shi’ah and Sunnis in Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula. 

The Ottomans, who then ruled the Levant from Istanbul, sent Egypt’s Ali Pasha to deal with the Wahhabis. When his forces razed the Sa’udi capital Da’riyyah (modern-day Riyadh) to the ground in the 1830’s, there were wild celebrations in Cairo.   

It was only after the fall of the Caliphate in 1923 that the Wahhabis were able to regroup and conquer the Arabian Peninsula.The emergence of the Sa’udi monarchy in the 1930’s witnessed the conquest of the Sharifs, Prophet Muhammad’s descendants, who’d ruled western Arabia for centuries – and who, to this day, resent the Sa’udi dynasty.

The self-declared Sa’udi monarch, ‘Abd ul-‘Aziz, had to face a restive constituency as his ikhwan were suspicious of modernity. The Sa’udi saving grace was oil wealth; it allowed dissident energies to be diffused into the marketing of Wahhabi ideology worldwide. But not even this was enough. In 1979 there was a rebellion in Mecca.  

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Reagan administration’s harnessing of the mujahadin, saw Saudi Arabia co-operating with the Pakistani secret service and the CIA. Hundreds of militants, who would otherwise have filled the prisons, were conveniently dispatched to fight communists.

In Pakistan, the Saudis bankrolled thousands of Wahhabi religious schools, which would in turn spawn the Taliban. The US and Saudi-sponsored mujahidin, whom Reagan ironically compared to the country's founding fathers, were destined to form the core of Al-Qaeda after the Afghan conflict.

This narrative is a missing link, for after the war Shaikh Abdullah ‘Azzam – the godfather of the Afghani jihad – was assassinated for refusing to issue a decree that the holy war be expanded beyond Afghanistan. Ideologically, it marked a critical turning point, for a suspect in ‘Azzam’s killing was Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, destined to be one of Usama bin Laden’s closest confidantes.

The internationalisation of the Wahhabi jihad is well known, but its underlying reason for focusing on the US is less acknowledged. This happened when Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait in 1990. Usama bin Laden offered to settle the matter with Al-Qaeda, but was spurned by the Royal family, who went with the American alliance.

The sight of US boots, on what Al-Qaeda regarded as holy soil, became a bridge too far. It marked a rift between Bin Laden and the Saudi state, and the extremist Wahhabi genie was effectively let out of the bottle.

Al-Qaeda (initially a database of foreign Afghan fighters) never went beyond being an ideological franchise played for its propaganda value. Few, if any, of the Wahhabi groups in Asia, Africa and the Levant ever had direct contact with Al-Qaeda central.

More significantly, these movements flowed into political vacuums caused by dictators and imperialist meddling. Iraq is a case in point where former US pro-consul, Paul Bremner, will go down in history as the primary purveyor of Iraq’s woes.

Bremner arrived after the invasion and fired some 250,000 Baathist forces, some of whom were competent bureaucrats. By obliterating the organs of state, and indiscriminately destroying its infrastructure without even a wink at transitional justice, Bremner summarily flushed Iraq down the toilet.

With Gulf States sponsoring jihadist groups due to fears of a “Shi’ah crescent” descending upon them from Syria and Iraq, the picture is almost complete. Disgruntled Baathist elements – some of them Saddam’s killers – have joined the jihadist groups, which have coalesced under ISIS.

Essentially a group of the disaffected led by the vengeful, ISIS is said to number no more than 100,000 men. But it does have money, arms, territory and media savvy. And that is what makes it a formidable foe right now. ISIS has thrown down the gauntlet, and from here on in, it’s a case of fasten the seatbelts.

Taj Hargey: a rebel without a pause

That Dr Taj Hargey, the well-known gunslinger of Islamic contumacy, is back in town is more than obvious. He has been feted by talk show hosts, has garnered headlines and got social media buzzing.

His establishment of an ‘open mosque’ in Wynberg that he says will welcome all – irrespective of gender, shade of belief and sexual proclivity – may look good on paper, but the baggage that it carries via Hargey and his ‘religious revolution’ is decidedly overweight.

The pity is that those who’ve entertained his bombast about liberality have no institutional memory of him. Hargey – a native of Cape Town – may have a doctorate in religious studies, but his is a career that has been plagued by conflict and controversy.  

Hargey, no academic slouch, earned his first degree in History and Oriental Studies in Durban and his doctorate at Oxford before moving back to Cape Town to lecture at UCT. He also opened a bookshop in Claremont.

That was in the 1980’s when the Cape-based Muslim Judicial Council was fighting a bitter, drawn-out case in the High Court with a sect called the Qadianis, or Ahmaddiyyas. They were objecting to being labelled as unbelievers by then MJC president, Shaikh Nazeem Mohamed.

The Qadiani sect, regarded as apostate by Sunni scholars worldwide, was founded in India in 1889 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmed of Qadian. Scholars say he claimed to be a manifestation of prophethood – a violation of the central Islamic creed that Muhammad is the final messenger.

The conflict is that whilst constitutionally, the Qadianis do enjoy rights to practice their beliefs, Sunnis balk at the insistence of the Qadianis that they are Muslims, when according to their doctrinal evidence, they are not.

Dr Hargey became embroiled in controversy when he stepped into the dock as an ‘expert witness’ in the MJC-Ahmadiyyah case. Rumours that he was selling pro-Ahmadiyyah literature in his shop are believed to have contributed to his leaving UCT for the US.

In the US he ran into trouble collecting money to establish an anti-apartheid newspaper. An investigation by the Austin Business Journal revealed it never went beyond being a title. Hargey was criticised by media experts at the time for claiming it would be South Africa’s first Black-owned publication.

The story, also run by the Cape Town-based South in April 1990, revealed that Hargey’s business card listed the address of an NPO, the Open House Cultural and Welfare Society at 221 Landsdowne Road, in Cape Town. 

Directors listed by Hargey on its letterhead did not check out. One was identified as Mandla Tyala, a South African journalist studying under a Harvard Fellowship. A surprised Tyala denied being a director.

When confronted, Hargey said the person was actually a Moses Tyala who was travelling in the Ciskei. Another person, a Cape Town man, who was listed as the society’s treasurer also denied any involvement with the society.

Hargey’s next port of call was Britain where he formed the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, becoming its self-appointed imam. He was declared a heretic by a local publication, the Muslim Weekly, and Hargey successfully sued it for defamation in 2009.

It was in Britain that Hargey carved out a reputation for his disavowal of the niqab, the face veil, supporting moves for its banning and even expressing approval of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempts to prohibit it.

And whilst Hargey’s observation is correct that the veil is a ‘Persian invention’, it is his ardent revulsion of it that proves the blatant contradiction of his calls for true religious liberality and non-sectarianism.

Hargey has infuriated British Muslims by labelling the Indo-Pak and Arabic communities as tribally archaic. He has said that British mosques are filled with ‘Neanderthals’ harking back to the 7^th century.

However, it is his posing on the fringes of Islam as a mainstream practitioner that is perturbing. Hargey’s spurning of Hadith (validated prophetic axiom) which underpins Islamic law together with Qur’an, confines over 1,400 years of classical endeavour to the dustbin, and is more reflective of extremism than moderation.

His insistence on conducting marriage ceremonies of Muslim women to non-Muslim men (Muslim men can marry Christians and Jews) has been regarded as gratuitously provocative. His religious justification, for an issue better resolved in a civil court or by Islamic legal experts, is spurious in terms of him saying the Qur’an does not broach the subject.

Hargey’s determination to establish his religious revolution in Cape Town, widely regarded as having one of the most tolerant of Muslim communities, has perplexed many. Cape Town’s mosque platforms are amongst the freest in the world and women, for the most part, can pray in its 150-plus mosques and serve on the committees.

Hargey’s missionary zeal for an ‘open mosque’ is by far his clumsiest contradiction. Mosques, by their very nature, are places of open worship. People do not stand at the doors asking patrons about their sexuality, ideology or identities. Islam is not a confessional faith, but one of private intimacy between the individual and the Creator.

By actually identifying congregants as Sunni, Shi’ah, gay or Sufi in the name of liberality and non-sectarianism, Hargey is calling for unnecessary social discrimination that in turn can only lead to the danger of unwanted social tensions. It is an article of faith that Muslims are enjoined not to look into another’s heart.

The question of gender equality, of women being involved in mosque activities, is an old chestnut. The prophetic model was one of interaction. Many of the top Islamic scholars of the Middle-Ages proudly listed women teachers, who were prominent in Andalusian universities well before the European Renaissance, in their certificates.

Finally, it is hoped that cool heads will prevail in yet another contrived Taj Hargey saga. What he has suggested is nothing new. Al-Quds mosque in Gatesville and Claremont Main Road mosque are but two institutions which have had an open door policy for as long as he has been controversial.

Indeed, Cape Town may not be perfect, but it’s certainly 100% better than say, Kabul or Karachi, where everybody knows Dr Taj Hargey will not dare to set foot.

March for Gaza, Cape Town, August 2014

Over 100,000 people marched for Gaza through the streets of Cape Town in the biggest ever human rights march in the Mother City. Archbishop Desmond Tutu addressed the crowd before departure. The protest - attended by Jews, Christians and Muslims and organised by the National Coalition for Palestine - called for peace and for the South African government to take a more proactive stance on Israel. At the march were Ahmed Kathrada, and Mandla Mandela, grandson of Nelson Mandela.

 

Photos: Copyright Shafiq Morton

Moonsighting, Cape Town, July 2014

Gaza, the 21st century Warsaw Ghetto?

AS the Gaza death toll mounts, and as politicians scurry for peace talks, there is a lot for South Africans to ponder on. This is because for those who have moral scruples, Israel is – according to the 1973 UN Convention and the 2003 Rome Statutes – guilty of the international crime of apartheid.   

Ultimately, there has to be legal accountability for this, a fate that Israel has deftly avoided through the veto powers of its greatest ally since 1967, the US, and its own refusal to acknowledge the International Criminal Court.  

In the UN a vote on whether to investigate war crimes in Gaza was passed 29-1. There were limp-wristed European abstentions and the US – unconscionably – was against it. This should be a sober reminder of how certain countries, including Israel, quietly connived with South Africa during the dark apartheid years.  

This is something that as South Africans we have an institutional memory of. Did not the world’s most powerful nation regard our very own anti- apartheid activists, including Nelson Mandela,  as ‘terrorists’ deep into the 1990’s? Did not Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the Cold War hawks, deem apartheid as a lesser evil than communism? 

And in 2014, pandering to Israel’s major industry of manufactured paranoia, are these governments not cynically deeming that chaotic, militaristic secularism – vis à vis Egypt, for example – is the devil they’d rather know than Muslim-friendly regimes ruling from Cairo and Gaza City?  

And before local Zionist apologists (who benefitted from South African apartheid) get ready to bellow how comparisons can’t be made between South African and Israeli apartheid, we need to understand that Israel qualifies as an apartheid state on two critical questions within the conventions and statutes: intention and execution.  

South Africa created the model. The Afrikaner Nationalists, voted into power by a white minority in 1948, ensured that 80% of the indigenous population would be confined to less than 10% of the land in an act of economic and political domination, a domination based on race.  

Zionism (ironically an avowedly secular movement) intended to create a Jewish state, also based on racial domination. A master plan was executed that saw Zionists annexing nearly 80% of the land in defiance of the UN Partition Decision. Facts speak: over 500 Palestinian villages and 10 urban centres were ethnically cleansed with two-thirds of the indigenous population displaced.  

The incremental theft of Palestinian land has continued ever since, enhanced by the building of settlements in the illegally occupied West Bank. To deny that this hasn’t expressed the intention of naked dispossession and racial domination – as some do – is very naïve.  

Further confirmation is the ‘Security Barrier’, an eight metre-high monstrosity that meanders for over 600 kms through the West Bank like a concrete tapeworm. Considered an illegal construction by the International Court of Justice in 2004, it encircles Palestinian towns and cities, and cuts off Palestinian access to land.   

This is further exacerbated by the Absentee Property Law, which decrees that Israel can confiscate ‘unused Palestinian land’ on the other side of the wall. In this case, apartheid is legislated – something that the Afrikaners perfected. 

Of course, there can be no argument when it comes to degrees. Our monstrous experiment in racial domination came to an end in 1994. Israel’s pogrom has continued , and in the same way South Africa’s apartheid regime destabilised neighbouring states such as Angola and Mozambique, Israel has done exactly the same to Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. 

By far the most tragic victim of all this has been Gaza, a fingernail of a territory bordered by Egypt and the Mediterranean. Once renowned for its fruit trees and ancient cultures, Gaza has become an Israeli house of slaughter. 

About 40 kms long and about 10 kms wide, it is one of the world’s most densely populated areas. Eighty percent of its population has refugee origins and 70% have to rely on aid to survive. Some commentators have even ventured that Gaza is the ‘Warsaw Ghetto’ of the 21st century.  

Granted, it is an extremely uncomfortable association – the Nazi progroms against Warsaw’s Jewish inhabitants were absolutely horrendous and unjustified – but surely that should nag at the conscience of those who, in possession of the world’s most lethal weapons, have been killing unarmed Gazan civilians since 2008? 

Cut off from Israel since 2007, punished for having elected Israel’s whipping-boy Hamas in 2006 and only partially open to Egypt through the Rafah border, Gazans are confined in an open-air prison they cannot leave. There is Israeli sanction on even the most basic of commodities like cement, fertiliser and even musical instruments.  

In other words, the new Israeli apartheid is called ‘containment’ – herd people into confined areas and make life so unpleasant that they want to leave. As more and more bodies are dragged out from the rubble of Gaza, it is evident Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has through Operation Protective Edge, taken Israeli ‘containment’ to an entirely new level of barbarism. 

As the Norwegian doctor, Dr Mads Gilbert at Shifa hospital told me angrily last week: “…the Israelis have become more ruthless than ever, they’re killing whole families and knocking out whole apartment blocks. I tell you, ISIS is here in Israel!” 

Or as an emotional UNICEF official told me after a UN School had been bombed by the IDF. “I doubt whether there is any compassion left for the people of Gaza.” 

These are strong statements from normally sanguine people. 

Back in post-apartheid South Africa we have a lot to be grateful for, in spite of fears surrounding corruption, crime and poverty. Thankfully our townships, once ‘little Gaza’s’ due to their being easily contained during the apartheid era, were never bombed for days on end from the sea and air by US provided munitions.  

But given the massive extent of the carnage in Gaza, it’s a small consolation right now. For not only do the people of Gaza need our prayers, they need our help to become human by putting Israel in the dock for its war crimes.