Drain Pakistan's tribal swamps, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad

Drain Pakistan's tribal swamps

By Imtiaz Gul

6 Sept 2009

Baitullah Mehsud, icon of Pakistani terrorism, is gone. His spokesman Maulvi Omar sits in jail after a tribal lashkar or army delivered him to the military on August 18. The fate of two of Mehsud’s potential successors - Hakimullah Mehsud and Maulvi Fazlullah of the Swat region is still shrouded in mystery. Two of Baitullah’s second-tier commanders were arrested from near Islamabad and Rawalpindi around August 16. And the avowed enemy of the Pakistani security establishment - the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) that Mehsud cobbled together in December 2007 - apparently stands in disarray. Hakimullah appears to have won the vicious contest for succession and the militants, too, have accepted him as the new emir. But Hakimullah’s silence suggests the TTP is still struggling to recover from the shock elimination of its supreme leader, Baitullah Mehsud. It is also not certain if Hakimullah himself is alive, or his lookalike brother is presented as the new chief to prevent further fissures within the TTP.

So what does this mean? A terminal blow to the militant forces entrenched in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) region? Does it mean Pakistan can reclaim these regions from men who adore Osama bin Laden and abhor the US and its allies? Will the Pakistani government be able to cleanse the area of militants and follow through on promises of effecting good governance and instilling a sense of political participation among FATA’s four million inhabitants? FATA’s people currently chafe under the draconian 1901 Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), which advocates collective punishment and has been described by some activists as human rights abuse by the state.

http://newageislam.com/drain-pakistan-s-tribal-swamps/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/1758

Islam Attracting Many Survivors of Rwanda Genocide, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad

Islam Attracting Many Survivors of Rwanda Genocide

Jihad Is Taught as 'Struggle to Heal'

By Emily Wax

Washington Foreign Post Service

Monday, September 23, 2002; Page A10

It wasn't the kind of jihad that has been in the news since Sept. 11, 2001. There were no references to Osama bin Laden, the World Trade Centre or suicide bombers. Instead there was only talk of April 6, 1994, the first day of the state-sponsored genocide in which ethnic Hutu extremists killed 800,000 minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates.

"We have our own jihad, and that is our war against ignorance between Hutu and Tutsi. It is our struggle to heal," said Saleh Habimana, the head mufti of Rwanda. "Our jihad is to start respecting each other and living as Rwandans and as Muslims."

Since the genocide, Rwandans have converted to Islam in huge numbers. Muslims now make up 14 percent of the 8.2 million people here in Africa's most Catholic nation, twice as many as before the killings began.

Many converts say they chose Islam because of the role that some Catholic and Protestant leaders played in the genocide. Human rights groups have documented several incidents in which Christian clerics allowed Tutsis to seek refuge in churches, then surrendered them to Hutu death squads, as well as instances of Hutu priests and ministers encouraging their congregations to kill Tutsis. Today some churches serve as memorials to the many people slaughtered among their pews.

http://newageislam.com/islam-attracting-many-survivors-of-rwanda-genocide---/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/1193

Reach out to humanity,establish peace, Islamic Society, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic Society

Reach out to humanity,establish peace

DIONNE BUNSHA

Our aim is quite specific: to do things based on the UN Charter, the Declaration of Human Rights. The people we produce have a kind of mission that’s related to what is in those documents. For example, a young man who graduated last year went back to Kenya, and was given a job as the acting National High Commissioner for Human Rights. That was right before the events we all know of. So here was a student suddenly catapulted into a central position on a major world human rights issue. This, I think, is perhaps a little bit special.

We also try to reach out to the world. We are doing curriculum building programmes in different universities across the world, trying to find ways to offer this programme of study in different ways to people who can’t or won’t come to our Costa Rica campus. We are also trying to do distance education.

Much of the content is similar to what’s going on in other universities. We get professors and visiting professors from other universities. They go back, refresh their thinking and then teach in their own courses. So it’s great.

http://newageislam.com/reach-out-to-humanity,establish-peace/islamic-society/d/574

What is wrong with Arabs?, Islamic Society, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic Society

What is wrong with Arabs?

By: Khalid Batarfi

Indeed, this is hardly unique to Arabs. All over the world and throughout history national pride and cultural passions have driven nations to violence and folly. As Yale’s Donald Kagan has written, “The common practice of calling such motives ‘irrational’ reveals how narrow the professional understanding of what matters to people has become in our day.” He goes on: “The notion that only economic benefits, power and security are rational goals is a prejudice of our time, a product of the attempt to treat the world of human events as though it were the inanimate physical universe, susceptible to scientific analysis and free to ignore human feelings, motives, and will. Such an approach is no more adequate to explain current behavior than to explain the actions of human beings throughout history.”

http://newageislam.com/what-is-wrong-with-arabs?/islamic-society/d/483

Lecture 4: The Human Ego – His Freedom and Immortality, Books and Documents, NewAgeISlam.com

Books and Documents

Lecture 4: The Human Ego – His Freedom and Immortality

Yet it is surprising to see that the unity of human consciousness which constitutes the centre of human personality never really became a point of interest in the history of Muslim thought. The Mutakallimënregarded the soul as a finer kind of matter or a mere accident which dies with the body and is re-created on the Day of Judgement. The philosophers of Islam received inspiration from Greek thought. In the case of other schools, it must be remembered that the expansion of Islam brought within its fold peoples belonging to different creed-communities, such as Nestorians, Jews, Zoroastrians, whose intellectual outlook had been formed by the concepts of a culture which had long dominated the whole of middle and western Asia. This culture, on the whole Magian in its origin and development, has a structurally dualistic soul-picture which we find more or less reflected in the theological thought of Islam.4 Devotional Sufism alone tried to understand the meaning of the unity of inner experience which the Qur’«n declares to be one of the three sources of knowledge,5 the other two being History and Nature. The development of this experience in the religious life of Islam reached its culmination in the well-known words of Hall«j - ‘I am the creative truth.’ The contemporaries of Hall«j, as well as his successors, interpreted these words pantheistically; but the fragments of Hall«j, collected and published by the French Orientalist, L. Massignon, leave no doubt that the martyr-saint could not have meant to deny the transcendence of God.6 The true interpretation of his experience, therefore, is not the drop slipping into the sea, but the realization and bold affirmation in an undying phrase of the reality and permanence of the human ego in a profounder personality.

http://newageislam.com/lecture-4--the-human-ego-%E2%80%93-his-freedom-and-immortality/books-and-documents/d/217

Indonesia stops short of full apology to East Timor: No one will be prosecuted for murder, torture, Islam and Human Rights, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam and Human Rights

Indonesia stops short of full apology to East Timor: No one will be prosecuted for murder, torture

Jul 16, 2008

Associated Press

The atrocities could be constituted as "gross human rights violations in the form of crimes against humanity," the team wrote in a 300-page report presented yesterday to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his East Timorese counterpart, Jose Ramos-Horta.

Indonesia "bears institutional responsibility," the commission said, and should apologize.

"We convey our deep regret over what happened," Yudhoyono said after signing a joint statement accepting the team's findings and expressing "remorse."

"Let us not forget those who were victimized during this dark period in our past," he said.

East Timor voted overwhelmingly to end 24 years of often-brutal Indonesian rule in a 1999 referendum that triggered a burst of killing, looting and burning by Indonesian soldiers and their militia proxies that killed at least 1,000 people.

http://newageislam.com/indonesia-stops-short-of-full-apology-to-east-timor--no-one-will-be-prosecuted-for-murder,-torture/islam-and-human-rights/d/235

Pakistan Senate body calls for closure of Guantanamo Bay prison, Islam and the West, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam and the West

Pakistan Senate body calls for closure of Guantanamo Bay prison

By Iftikhar A. Khan

July 20, 2008

The committee underlined the need for coordinated efforts to find if there was any woman detained in Bagram or the Guantanamo Bay.

They asked the ministries of interior, foreign affairs and human rights to take up the matter with the US intelligence agencies.

Secretaries to the ministries of interior, law and justice and human rights and senior officials of the foreign ministry informed the committee about the steps taken to trace the woman reportedly tortured at the Bagram detention centre.

The committee was informed that the interior ministry had approached the ministry of foreign affairs to take up the issue with the US officials and authorities at the Bagram military base.

Foreign ministry officials informed the committee that the matter was being pursued vigorously. Senators Mushahid, Mohammad Abbas Komaili, Mohammad Ali Durrani, Hafiz Abdul Rashid, Nasar Khan and Dr Mohammad Said attended the meeting.

http://newageislam.com/pakistan-senate-body--calls-for-closure-of-guantanamo-bay-prison/islam-and-the-west/d/266

GOING TO 'OUR KIND' OF CHURCH, Islam and Pluralism, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam and Pluralism

GOING TO 'OUR KIND' OF CHURCH

By Elizabeth T. Andrews

American Reporter Correspondent

Cartersville, Ga.

What colour is God? What is the colour of a human heart? Does a conviction have a colour? Is faith black or white? Was Jesus an Oriental? Why do Caucasians need to believe he was Caucasian? Do black churches have crucifixes with a black Jesus hanging on them? Are we all guilty of making God in our own image? Is God a black man? A white woman?

I have spent an adult lifetime trying to get a fix on what part the fearful, arrogant individual ego plays in our choice of friends, our choice of spouses or lovers, our choice of a career, and the spiritually flawed choice of secretly thinking God is white, God is black, God is a Jew, Allah is a Muslim.

I'm convinced simple fear of all things different is the underlying cause of our disease called group-itis, but to date a definitive answer has escaped me and I have finally accepted my own arrogance in thinking a neutral universe owes me a box full of answers marked: "For Elizabeth. The whole truth and the only truth. Go tell it on the mountain."

http://newageislam.com/going-to--our-kind--of-church-/islam-and-pluralism/d/101

Karachi A Virtual War Zone, Islam and Sectarianism, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam and Sectarianism

19 Aug 2011, NewAgeIslam.Com

Karachi A Virtual War Zone

By ANITA JOSHUA 19 Aug. 2011 The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says Karachi is in the grip of a multisided wave of insecurity driven political, ethnic and sectarian polarisation. Even by Karachi's own standards, the recent spate of ethnopolitical violence has been brutal and prolonged. For well over a month now, Pakistan's largest city and commercial capital has been on the boil, with 318 people killed in July alone. And, according to a body count done by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), 1,138 people were killed in the first six months of this year. http://www.newageislam.com/islam-and-sectarianism/karachi-a-virtual-war-zone/d/5281