Put the Blame Where It Belongs: Bush, Reagan, Kissinger and the Real History of the Rise of ISIS

By Paul Rosenberg

April 4, 2016

If you think it’s a bit crazy when elite conservatives try to blame Obama for the rise of Donald Trump, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Check out Damon Linker’s establishment apologia, “The Marxist roots of Islamic extremism,” unfurled in the wake of the Brussels bombings, which seeks to stand history on its head, burying the actual anti-Communist roots of al Qaeda’s genesis, and replacing them with their exact opposites. It’s yet another case of envious reversal [I’ve written about this before here and here], which conservatives so often employ to cast themselves either as victims of liberals’ illiberalism, or else as liberalism’s true champions—touting anti-gay discrimination as “religious freedom,” for example. Although Linker is a conservative, he’s not writing as one in this instance—he’s writing on behalf of bipartisan elitism, in the name of liberalism no less—you know, the good old-fashioned John Locke, Adam Smith, just-don’t-read-them-too-closely kind. But the envious reversal is still in full force.

To be fair, writers are not responsible for headlines, and Linker’s argument is broader than that—it’s a sweeping defence of the Western elite status quo. But it is a crucial part of what he’s arguing, and it helps illuminate much of what’s wrong with the rest of what he has to say, as well as what’s wrong with a much wider chorus of status quo voices. So let’s take out the headline absurdity first, and then survey Linker’s argument more generally, to see what we can learn.

Linker warms to his subject, citing “totalitarian forms of political argument—and specifically the tendency of those influenced (sometimes unknowingly) by Marxism to embrace the goal of “heightening the contradictions,” but his real concern isn’t political argument—it’s actions:

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there haven’t been a lot of doctrinaire communist revolutionaries running around. But that doesn’t mean that the idea of heightening the contradictions has disappeared. On the contrary, it has spread like a virus to other forms of anti-liberal political extremism.

Radical Islam, for example, is a highly potent mixture of motifs drawn from the Muslim past and Marxist-Leninist ideas imported through the writings of such polemicists as Sayyid Qutb and Abul Ala Maududi.

Groups like ISIS and al Qaeda don’t think they can defeat the West through terrorism, Linker argues; they want to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash, which will radicalize persecuted Muslims to join in further terrorism:

Attack, crackdown, worse attack, more draconian crackdown, on and on, with the West eventually weakening enough that a resurgent Islam can rise as a triumphant global power.

Make things worse to make things better: a classic case of heightening the contradictions.

Some of what Linker says here is true, particularly what he says about the aims of ISIS and al Qaeda, which has been pointed out repeatedly by terrorism experts, as well both leftist and libertarian critics of U.S. interventionism. What’s utterly false is the flimsy core of his argument, that Marxism is responsible for ISIS and al Qaeda, when the truth is almost entirely the opposite.

It’s well-known that al Qaeda grew out of the U.S.-funded proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, a war designed to give them their own Vietnam. ISIS, in turn, came out of our invasion of Iraq and subsequent actions, including the destruction of the Iraqi army. In the article linked to where Linker claims a Marxist heritage for “such polemicists as Sayyid Qutb and Abul Ala Maududi,” we find nothing more detailed to substantiate the claim. There is some truth in it, but as Mahmood Mamdani makes clear in his book “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror,” it’s equally true that their ideas gained a foothold in large part because they were useful in the Cold War fight against Soviet Communism. Moreover, the U.S. turned to supporting terrorism as a Cold War stratagem before things got started in Afghanistan.

A summary of some of Mamdani’s key arguments can be found in this like-named essay, where he cites 1975 as a turning-point year: America’s defeat in Indochina, the collapse of the Portuguese empire in Africa, and the shift in Cold War focus to apply the Nixon Doctrine, that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars,” in Southern Africa, both to prop up apartheid South Africa, and to partner with them:

South Africa became both conduit and partner of the U.S. in the hot war against those governments in the region considered pro-Soviet. This partnership bolstered a number of terrorist movements: Renamo in Mozambique, and Unita in Angola. Their terrorism was of a type Africa had never seen before. It was not simply that they were willing to tolerate a higher level of civilian casualties in military confrontations — what official America nowadays calls collateral damage. The new thing was that these terrorist movements specifically targeted civilians. It sought specifically to kill and maim civilians, but not all of them. Always, the idea was to leave a few to go and tell the story, to spread fear. The object of spreading fear was to paralyze government.

There was nothing Islamic here, even in pretence, much less was there any thread of Marxist influence on the U.S./South African side. It was pure Nixon/Kissinger realpolitik. Nothing intellectually deeper than that.  And what began in South Africa in the mid-’70s then spread:

In another decade, the centre of gravity of the Cold War shifted to Central America, to Nicaragua and El Salvador. And so did the centre of gravity of U.S.-sponsored terrorism. The Contras were not only tolerated and shielded by official America; they were actively nurtured and directly assisted, as in the mining of harbours.

The shifting centre of gravity of the Cold War was the major context in which Afghanistan policy was framed. But it was not the only context….

The grand plan of the Reagan administration was two-pronged. First, it drooled at the prospect of uniting a billion Muslims around a holy war, a Crusade, against the evil empire…. Second, the Reagan administration hoped to turn a religious schism inside Islam, between minority Shia and majority Sunni, into a political schism. Thereby, it hoped to contain the influence of the Iranian Revolution as a minority Shia affair.

It was a strategy Nixon and Kissinger would have been proud of, both “realist” and intoxicated with visions of limitless power:

This is the context in which an American/Saudi/Pakistani alliance was forged, and religious madrasas turned into political schools for training cadres. The Islamic world had not seen an armed Jihad for centuries. But now the CIA was determined to create one. It was determined to put a version of tradition at the service of politics. We are told that the CIA looked for a Saudi Prince to lead this Crusade. It could not find a Prince. But it settled for the next best, the son of an illustrious family closely connected to the royal family. This was not a backwater family steeped in pre-modernity, but a cosmopolitan family. The Bin Laden family is a patron of scholarship. It endows programs at universities like Harvard and Yale.

The CIA created the Mujahidin and Bin Laden as alternatives to secular nationalism. Just as, in another context, the Israeli intelligence created Hamas as an alternative to the secular PLO.

Secular nationalism isn’t Marxism, of course. But throughout the Cold War era the two were inextricably linked as perceived threats with much in common—including figures like Iran’s Mossadegh and Guatemala’s Arbenz, the first two targets of CIA coups under Eisenhower, who were not Marxists themselves but were willing to engage with them independently of American control. In addition, Marxist ideas about the exploitative logic of international capitalism helped provide a framework secular nationalists could draw upon in resisting Western domination. At any rate, it was anti-communism, above all, that linked secular nationalism and Marxism together as its enemies, and then lit the fires of terrorism in response.

This is material, real-world history of where ISIS and al Qaeda came from. It came not from communism, but from anti-communism—our anti-communism. It was not these shadowy others, but as Jung would have it, our disowned shadow projected onto the others, which gave birth to the terrorist threat we now face. The thread of Marxist influence Linker calls out can surely be found, if one looks hard enough. But they only came together in the way that they did, in actual attacks on the West, because of this much broader, powerful dynamic put in motion by exactly opposite-minded people, like Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan, fighting their shadowy inner demons out on the world stage.

So much for the argument that terrorism has Marxist roots. But, as always, there’s a larger purpose. Marxism is being demonized once again for the same old-fashioned reason: to shut up gripes about things as they are. As Linker would have it, “Anti-liberalism is having a moment. And it’s happening at all points of the political spectrum”—everything from “suicidal religious fanatics” to “anti-liberal forms of nationalistic populism” (Trump, Le Pen, etc.) and “an anti-liberal left (think the socialist Jacobin magazine)” which “has risen from the dead to challenge the liberal order, using concepts and categories derived from the Marxist tradition of social theory.” Hence, the terrorism-is-Marxism’s-fault argument is Linker’s ace in the hole in defending the rotten status quo as “the liberal order” against a wide-ranging grab-bag of others.

One of the most basic things wrong with Linker’s way of describing things is his underlying belief in simplistic, ahistorical, true forms of things. Immediately following the above, he says “True liberals have plenty to say in response to the critics that increasingly encircle them.” But what does “true liberals” mean; setting aside that it’s coming from a conservative intellectual? Linker assumes it has a clear, forthright meaning, and he’s hardly alone in that. He quickly mentions “the importance of upholding such liberal norms as equal respect for individual rights and tolerance of disagreement.” Of course, the Bush administration’s war on terror made a mockery of claims to respect individual rights, and Obama’s drone assassinations of U.S. citizens has taken this breach of liberal norms even further. But that’s the thing about true forms—they free us from having to think, care about, or even notice the grimy little details of actual people’s real lives.

On the other hand, Marxism has a true form as well—defined by “the goal of ‘heightening the contradictions,’” and it’s the citing of this goal which Linker uses to tar “Islamic extremism” and other anti-liberals—even Tea Party Republicans—as the creatures of evil Marxist roots. Linker makes a play for framing things in terms of historical grand theory. The idea of “heightening the contradictions” had its inadvertent origins in Hegel, describing historical progress as “a dialectical process in which social, cultural, intellectual, and economic contradictions emerge and resolve themselves, only to produce new contradictions, crises, and resolutions, and so on down through the centuries and millennia.” As Linker notes, “Hegel thought that this process ultimately culminated in the modern liberal nation state,” and Marx disagreed—arguing that there are still more contradictions—specifically class-based economic ones—yet to be resolved.

Whole bookshelves have been written about this disagreement, but one point seems important to underscore here: The liberal state Hegel was defending then looks nothing like liberal democracies as we know them today.  It’s a backwards, archaic artefact that almost no one alive would vote for today. Indeed, throughout most of the 19th century in Europe, democracy itself was seen as inimical to the sort of “liberal order” that Hegel was defending, and Marxists, along with other socialists, were a driving force in opposing, and ultimately defeating that view. Other significant aspects of “the liberal order” as we know it today were utterly foreign to Hegel: women’s suffrage—much less holding elective office—and gay rights, for example. Not to mention the rights of racial and ethnic minorities, though there’s still tremendous variation in exactly what this means across all the different political jurisdictions that claim to be part of this “liberal order.”

In short, there’s a great deal of messiness involved in the simplistic notion of a “liberal order” that Linker seeks to defend, along with a similar messiness in the Marxist tradition, and a good deal of overlap between them. If “the liberal order” of today is being challenged by an array of “anti-liberal” forces, as Linker would have it, there’s nothing terribly new or surprising in that. All sorts of things “we” now strongly support and identify with were not long ago seen as dangerously other. That’s the whole point of dialectics, without Hegel’s self-satisfied assumption that now we’ve reached the end of the line.

The real task before us is not to pass judgment on things based on artificial labels, which is what status quo warriors demand that we do. We have to get down into the grimy details, where the rosy tales the elite keep peddling to us increasingly fall to pieces, and very rightly ought to be challenged—whether in Flint, Ferguson, Gaza, or the fast-food joint just down the street. Bernie Sanders is not “challenging the liberal order” in the same way that Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen or ISIS do, and simplistic efforts to lump them all together only further undermine the credibility of those, like Linker, who claim to shed light and speak for reason. Nor is the heterodox Jacobin magazine simplistically “anti-liberal left,” as if to erase self-identified left-liberals, whose very existence Linker’s taxonomy cannot admit.

In early March, Nando Vila wrote a very telling analysis of the Sanders/Clinton divide, exactly the opposite of the sort of obfuscating “analysis” Linker provides. Vila explains that the underlying divide between Clinton and Sanders is an ideological one: Clinton wants to perfect the existing meritocracy, “breaking down barriers” to individual achievement. Sanders wants to create a substantially more equal distribution of rewards for all. Neither of them is a Marxist or even some other sort of “anti-liberal,” though Linker or others like him would dearly love to tar Sanders as such. But Sanders does represent a fundamental break with the elite consensus that Linker masks with his “liberal order” rhetoric. As Vila writes: “You can make the case that the 2016 election is dominated by the public’s realization that the bipartisan and unquestioned faith in the meritocracy is collapsing.”

There are many reasons for this, but they surely include the incompetence and corruption of the elites—the presumed cream of the crop in the meritocracy. It’s the past 15 years of elite rule, more than anything, that has heightened the contradictions in the meritocracy’s sales pitch. And the more they try to change the subject (“the liberal order”), the more they blame-shift onto others (“The Marxist roots of Islamic extremism”), the more the public’s faith in meritocracy is shaken.

Linker is right in one respect: We do live in perilous times. But a great deal of what is driving that peril is the relentless elite refusal to take a good, long, hard look in the mirror. It’s not just their hair that needs fixing. It’s their shadow.

Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English.

Source: salon.com/2016/04/03/put_the_blame_where_it_belongs_bush_reagan_kissinger_and_the_real_history_of_the_rise_of_isis/

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/islam-and-the-west/paul-rosenberg/put-the-blame-where-it-belongs--bush,-reagan,-kissinger-and-the-real-history-of-the-rise-of-isis/d/106878

Terrorism Will Not Stop By Lighting Candles

Terrorism Will Not Stop By Lighting Candles

By Shishir Gupta

Apr 01, 2016

At the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit dinner hosted by US President Barack Obama on Thursday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi hit the nail on the head when he said that terrorism has become “globally networked but “we still act only nationally to counter this threat”. He added: “The reach and supply chains of terrorism are global; but genuine cooperation between nation states is not”. The PM’s statement came a day after China and Pakistan blocked the entry of banned Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar into the 1267 sanctions list of the United Nations for links with al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

Azhar, an Islamic jihadist ideologue, has been targeting India since he was released in exchange for hostages in the Indian Airlines IC-814 hijack at Kandahar, Afghanistan, on December 31, 1999. Even though Pakistan admitted that the JeM was involved in the attack on the Pathankot air base on January 2, the Chinese veto shows the clout Azhar has in the Pakistani establishment, particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence that supported him indirectly at Kandahar.

Cut to the Brussels bombing on March 22: One of the accused — Abderrahman Ameroud — served a seven-year prison term for helping two Tunisian-born Belgium nationals — who lived in the Muslim-dominated Molenbeek area of the city — to assassinate Afghan Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Panjshir Valley two days before the 9/11 attacks in the US.

Massoud’s assassination was carried out at the behest of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in support of the Pakistan-sponsored Taliban that ruled Afghanistan in 2001. Massoud was its arch rival. Bin Laden threw a lavish party for Azhar in Taliban-occupied Kandahar after his release.

Pakistan’s footprint in Massoud’s assassination is evident as the attackers were issued multiple entry visas by its embassy in Brussels and even the meeting with the commander was arranged thanks to Islamabad’s shadowy friends in Afghanistan.

These incidents show that terrorism is the same across the world but is marketed under different brand names. The ideology of the terror groups is more or less the same but the new groups are much more rabid, violent and extreme in their actions. This attitudinal change is best exemplified by the Islamic State (IS) through beheading, rape and mass murder.

The prime minister has exposed the fault lines in the fight against terrorism by asking for a global response as the terror-hit European countries used to preach human rights and pacifism to India when New Delhi sought their support in the fight in the past two decades during counter-terrorism (CT) dialogues. Even when the Chinese were told before the attacks in Xinjiang province that the East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM) jihadists were being trained in Pakistan, the Indians were politely told that it was an issue between two all-weather friends. Pakistan, which was forced into jihad in 1979 over the fear of the erstwhile Soviet Union seeking a warm water port in Karachi after annexing Afghanistan, has also become a victim of terror.

With the world’s largest NGO, the United Nations, ineffective and irrelevant in the fight against terrorism, the time has come for the big powers to bury their hatchets and start sharing financial and intelligence information on the terror groups with other governments.

With the terror-training universities shifting out from the Af-Pak area to Iraq and Syria, the big powers must push for reconciliation between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. It is this rift that is tearing West Asia apart and aiding terror groups.

Modi will get an opportunity to address the issue during his April 3 visit to Saudi Arabia as India has good ties with both countries. Saudi Arabia can play a constructive role in the war against terrorism by not exporting its brand of puritan Wahhabi ideology along with Zakat donations and radicalising other countries.

This concern was highlighted by Kyrgyzstan President Almazbek Atambayev when he told Modi last year that accepting Zakat donations from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan has been banned in his country.

Many believe that the radicalisation of Muslims in Belgium was initiated at the behest of Wahhabi imams from Saudi Arabia who preached at Brussels Grand Mosque, which was constructed in 1967 as part of an oil deal with the House of Saud. The unemployed and marginalised Muslim youth in Europe, particularly in France and Belgium, turned to radical Islam in order to assert their identity even at the cost of harming the global diversity of the religion.

There are no free lunches in this fight against terror for economically driven societies and eradicating it cannot be the responsibility of a few countries. This virus can be eliminated only when all countries — cutting across ideological and religious lines — are prepared for a long haul in the frontline trenches. State-sponsorship of terrorism for political objectives must cease as a first step in the war against terror. Each thread in every terror investigation must be pursued to its logical conclusion. The answer to terror does not stop by lighting candles after carnages. It only begins.

Source: hindustantimes.com/analysis/terrorism-will-not-stop-by-lighting-candles/story-

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/islam-and-politics/shishir-gupta/terrorism-will-not-stop-by-lighting-candles/d/106841

The Dirty Old Men of Pakistan

By Mohammed Hanif

April 1, 2016

Memoona, the victim of an acid attack in a family feud in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2011 Credit Insiya Syed/Reuters

IN the world we live in, there is no dearth of pious men who believe that most of the world’s problems can be fixed by giving their women a little thrashing. And this business of a man’s God-given right to give a woman a little thrashing has brought together all of Pakistan’s pious men.

A few weeks ago, Pakistan’s largest province passed a new law called the Punjab Protection of Women against Violence Act. The law institutes radical measures that say a husband can’t beat his wife, and if he does he will face criminal charges and possibly even eviction from his home. It proposes setting up a hotline women can call to report abuse. In some cases, offenders will be required to wear a bracelet with a GPS monitor and will not be allowed to buy guns.

A coalition of more than 30 religious and political parties has declared the law un-Islamic, an attempt to secularize Pakistan and a clear and present threat to our most sacred institution: the family. They have threatened countrywide street protests if the government doesn’t back down.

Their logic goes like this: If you beat up a person on the street, it’s a criminal assault. If you bash someone in your bedroom, you’re protected by the sanctity of your home. If you kill a stranger, it’s murder. If you shoot your own sister, you’re defending your honour. I’m sure the nice folks campaigning against the bill don’t want to beat up their wives or murder their sisters, but they are fighting for their fellow men’s right to do just that.

It’s not only opposition parties that are against the bill: The government-appointed Council of Islamic Ideology has also declared it repugnant to our religion and culture. The council’s main task is to ensure that all the laws in the country comply with Shariah. But basically it’s a bunch of old men who go to sleep worrying that there are all these women out there trying to trick them into bed. Maybe that’s why there are no pious old women on the council, even though there’s no shortage of them in Pakistan.

The council’s past proclamations have defended a man’s right to marry a minor, dispensed him from asking for permission from his first wife before taking a second or a third, and made it impossible for women to prove rape. It’s probably the most privileged dirty old men’s club in the country.

Some of us routinely condemn these pious old men, but it seems they are not just a bunch of pampered religious nuts. In fact, they are giving voice to Pakistani men’s collective misery over the fact that their women are out of control. Look at university exam results; women are hogging all the top positions. Go to a bank; there is a woman counting your money with her fancy nails. Turn on your TV; there is a female journalist questioning powerful men about politics and sports.

One of these journalists recently was grilling a famous mufti opposed to the bill. Bewildered, the mufti said: Are you a woman, or are you a TV journalist? She was professional enough not to retort: Are you a mufti, or just another old fart?

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Three decades ago, most Pakistani women who had paid jobs worked at menial tasks, and the others were confined to traditional professions like medicine or teaching or, occasionally, law. There was a small and brave women’s movement. Women were writing novels and making movies, but they were few in number. Now they are flying planes, heading companies, policing the streets, climbing mountains and winning Oscars and Nobel Prizes. There are millions of women across the country running little beauty parlors from their homes, employing other women and gaining a measure of independence.

But for every bank teller, there are still millions of women who are farmhands or house help. For every TV journalist, there are many more women who live in half-slavery, scrubbing and cleaning, and shouldering the heavy burden of protecting and raising their kids.

Let’s not just blame the mullahs and muftis. Misogyny is way older than any religion. Even people who have never seen the inside of a mosque or the Sufis who want to become one with the universe wouldn’t think twice before treating a woman as something between a pest and a pet goat.

Some members of Parliament stayed away when this bill was being passed in the Punjab assembly. They probably represent a majority. Some of us even call ourselves feminist. “See, I have never stopped my sister from going to school, never given my girlfriend a black eye. That makes me a feminist, right? But we must protect our families. You don’t want a family-loving feminist man going around with a GPS tracker, do you?”

What really scares the so-called feminist men is that a lot of women are actually quite bored with talking about being a woman. They talk about their work. A film director talks about bad actors. A development worker talks about idiotic funding patterns. A maid talks about her cellphone and the quality of detergents.

There’s a woman in my neighbourhood who walks fast. She is always carrying two kids in her arms. Not infants but 3-, 4-year-old sturdy kids, heavy weights. She walks fast. Probably you have to walk fast when you are carrying two kids. She doesn’t expect a lift from the many cars passing by. She can’t afford a cab. She is walking toward her bus. Always with the two kids in her arms and a bag around her shoulder. She gives Quran lessons at people’s homes.

I don’t think all those pious men, or anyone else, can tell that woman with the two kids how to walk her daily walk. If someone asks her how it feels to be a woman in this society, she’d probably answer, “Can’t you see I’m working?”

Mohammed Hanif is the author of the novels “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” and “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti,” the librettist for the opera “Bhutto” and a contributing opinion writer.

Source: nytimes.com/2016/04/03/opinion/sunday/the-dirty-old-men-of-pakistan.html?emc=edit_tnt_20160401&nlid=71783194&tntemail0=y

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/islamic-society/mohammed-hanif/the-dirty-old-men-of-pakistan/d/106844

Frankenstein of the Madrasa: Jihad Has Made the Pakistan State Powerless Before the Monster It Has Created

By Khaled Ahmed

April 2, 2016

Moment of hope: February 29, Pakistan finally hanged the policeman Mumtaz Qadri who riddled Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer with bullets in 2011. Moment of despair: March 3, a mammoth gathering mourned Qadri and buried him as a “martyr”. The state cowered as the clergy, empowered to act like warriors over many years, and condemned the Supreme Court for allowing the hanging, instead of beatifying Qadri as a blasphemer-killing saint.

The court had observed that the governor had not blasphemed, and that, even if he had, Qadri criminally took the law into his own hands and must hang for it. Five years after the killing, the masses that gathered to mourn Qadri called him a “defender of Islam” and cursed the state. At Qadri’s funeral, the mourners were around 1, 50,000, frighteningly disciplined, as directed by their religious leaders. The 39 Barelvi parties, blasphemy-obsessed, were there in strength; the Deobandi Jihadi seminaries, empowered by training for assaults on India and Iran, blessed it.

There was an English-Urdu divide over the event. Urdu fulminated against the hanging in the opinion of the columnists known to be aligned with religious parties. One recalled the pre-1947 hanging of Ilm Deen “Shaheed”, who killed a Hindu publisher in Lahore for writing an insulting book on the Holy Prophet, reflecting that the Islamic state of Pakistan had followed the example of the secular (pagan) British Raj. Another regretted that the government had not heeded his advice to indefinitely postpone Qadri’s hanging as he had overwhelming support from the legal community. The post-hanging furore was unprecedented as the mob gathered for funeral prayers in Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh, where Pakistan had shot and killed two of its prime ministers, Liaquat Ali Khan and Benazir Bhutto.

The Supreme Court had snubbed all signs of the neutering of the state in the face of an empowered clergy and ignored what had happened last year when half a dozen persons trying to observe the murder anniversary of Taseer were thrashed by “unknown” persons in the presence of a bunch of scared policemen. Pakistan President Mamnoon Hussain had signed the death warrant without anticipating the reaction from the multitudes that immediately took to the street and blocked all traffic in most big cities at pre-designated choke points. The cry went up: Don’t touch the blasphemy law that targets non-Muslims and doles out death verdicts against them to make them realise they live in an Islamic state.

How could the state forget it had fostered the clergy into becoming Jihadi, an act of empowerment that gives them executive power to challenge the state’s lawmaking on the touchstone of Sharia that only they are supposed to interpret? In 2009, the state watched as seminaries distributed the 130-page monograph by al-Qaeda ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri, titled The Morning and the Lamp, which challenged Pakistan’s constitution and called for the state’s undoing.

Everybody knew that jihad had castrated the state and it was powerless to defy the Frankenstein of the madrasa. Then why did it hang Qadri? It knew that the growing middle class represented by the clergy and the lawyers loved Qadri for having killed a secularist who had sided with a poor illiterate Christian woman condemned to death for blasphemy by a judge after condoning the poor girl’s “entrapment” by a local mosque cleric?

Another act of “un-Islamic” derring-do was committed by Lahore’s Punjab assembly the same week that stirred the madrasa cauldron of Pakistan even more. It passed the Protection of Women Law to prevent violence against them. It sought to punish men — no reference to “husbands” as that could offend against their Quranic right to physically punish wives — who raped and thrashed women and subjected them to coercion. The husband, the permitted tyrant in the lives of Muslim women, was only implied.

But there was a catch in the law that gave a handle to the clergy already offended by the army’s bombing of the Taliban in North Waziristan. The new law implied that a woman could be located “outside the house” during the offence. The clergy says the place of the Muslim woman is in the house; she can’t go out without a male guardian from the family called a “Mehram”. The Taliban had thrashed women flouting the law on the streets of Kabul.

Mufti Naeem of Jamia Binoria of Karachi, the nursery of most Islamic killers, fulminated against Punjab. Maulana Fazl ur Rehman came to Multan in south Punjab to condemn the law favouring women and said, “The religious parties have few votes, but it doesn’t mean they can’t topple the government. They can’t allow society to become secular”. The message was clear: Pakistan was on the edge of an abyss, it had to draw back and not think of changing the nature of the state.

The horrible scenario in the Iraq-Syria battlefield first unfolded in Pakistan. No one in the Middle East took note of it; no one analysed Pakistan. Pakistan, sunk in denial, was not able to undertake self-analysis. Foreign reporters were kicked out for predicting Pakistan’s endgame. Today, Pakistan is surprising itself on a daily basis.

Source: indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/mumtaz-qadri-madrasa-deobandi-jihadi/99/print/

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/islam,terrorism-and-jihad/khaled-ahmed/frankenstein-of-the-madrasa--jihad-has-made-the-pakistan-state-powerless-before-the-monster-it-has-created/d/106845

Islamic Extremism Is Not the Root Cause of Europe’s Terror Problem

By Joshua Holland

March 30, 2016

 “If you tell a typical Frenchman that third-generation immigrants in the banlieues don’t have running water—if you tell him that many are illiterate and have no hope of finding a job or being a productive member of French society—he simply won’t believe you,” says Akbar Ahmed, a former Pakistani ambassador to the UK and now a professor of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, DC. “He’ll insist that they’re French citizens with the same opportunities as everyone else.”

Ahmed and his team are working on the first comprehensive, continent-wide study of Muslim communities in Europe. “Thirty percent of the population of Marseilles are immigrants,” he says. “They have no central mosque; they live in ghettos and most are unemployed. They don’t have decent schools. And exactly the same conditions exist in Belgium. They have very poor education, very poor lifetime prospects. Social rejection is the norm—they are not considered part of the fabric of their society—and this is enough to drive any community up a wall.”

Up A Wall, And For Some, Into The Hands Of Radical Islamism

The contrast between Muslim communities in Europe and the United States is stark and telling. American Muslims tend to be prosperous, well-educated and deeply invested in their country. As a group, they’re politically active and comfortable living in a pluralistic society, and there’s no evidence that they embrace extreme religious views or commit acts of violence at a higher rate than Christians or Jews.

But in Europe, life on the economic and social margins creates fertile ground for radicalization. None of this is news to sociologists, or unknown to counter-terrorism experts on either side of the Atlantic. But European politics constrain the conversation. Ultra-nationalist parties are on the rise across the continent, and political leaders who call for addressing the profound social problems that are fuelling Europe’s home-grown extremism are accused of being “soft on terrorism,” or “coddling extremists.” The problem is “not the radicalization of Islam, but the Islamisation of radicalism.” —Olivier Roy

As a result, there’s a lot of focus on radical theology, and not enough on the conditions that allow it to take hold. European law enforcement, says Ahmed, “are analyzing this through the prism of theology. They’re studying the Koran for explanations, but what we’re seeing is nothing more than disaffected, disenchanted, illiterate young people who are not adjusting to society. Look at these young idiots who are blowing things up—they’re looking at ISIS videos with a beer in one hand and a joint in the other.”

In a telling incident in 2014, two Britons who pleaded guilty to terror charges purchased a copy of Islam for Dummies before travelling to Syria to fight with ISIS. Olivier Roy, a professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and the author of Globalized Islam, writes that what Europe faces today “isn’t about religion or politics,” it’s a “youth revolt.” The problem, Roy argues, is “not the radicalization of Islam, but the Islamisation of radicalism.”

The unemployment rate among Muslim immigrants in Europe is estimated to be as high as 40 percent, depending on the country. A report last year by the British think tank Demos found that Muslims in the UK “are disproportionately likely to experience poverty,” “lack the networks, social capital and soft skills that can facilitate access” to the middle class and face “discrimination in recruitment processes.”

In a 2010 study led by David Laitin, a Stanford University political scientist, fake résumés were submitted to French businesses with names that suggested the applicants were either Christian or Muslim immigrants from Senegal. Their qualifications were equal, but the resumes with a typically Christian name listed past work with a Catholic relief organization and the ones with the Muslim name cited similar experience with an Islamic charity. Even though both hypothetical applicants were immigrants from the same country, the ostensible Christian was two and a half times more likely to be called in for an interview. Laitin’s team also “found that second-generation Muslim households made about 400 Euros less a month than ethnically and socioeconomically similar Christian families,” according to a press release.

Even a tiny fraction of people within these marginalized communities can wreak havoc. Jean-Charles Brisard, a French terrorism expert and author of The New Face of Al-Qaeda, tells The Nation that Western Europe faces as many as 6,500 home-grown extremists out of a population that the Pew Research Centre estimates at 19 million. In many European countries, prisons have basically become factories that manufacture extremists. There’s a pipeline that begins with petty crimes in immigrant slums, runs through the judicial system, and leads to Islamist terror groups. This has been a serious problem for a long time. But Michael Birnbaum reported last year for The Washington Post that in France, despite the fact that there are “Osama bin Laden posters hanging on inmates’ walls,” authorities are just beginning to tackle the issue, and their “efforts [remain] minuscule compared with the scope of the problem.”

And identifying individuals within these communities who may be at risk of radicalization isn’t easy. Matt Apuzzo recently reported for The New York Times that, “despite millions of dollars of government-sponsored research…there is still nothing close to a consensus on why someone becomes a terrorist.”

Security failures have been a real problem—police and intelligence agencies have repeatedly failed to interrupt plots by individuals who were on law-enforcement’s radars. “The security services are overwhelmed,” says Brisard. “All of the countries don’t feel the same level of threat, and the European Union has been unable to provide the EU members with the tools they’ve been asking for for years.” Information sharing between national police forces continues to be a problem for the EU, and some member states are opposed to the idea of tighter border controls between European countries. Efforts to create a uniform database of air travelers’ information and to track potential terrorists’ electronic communications have been stymied for years because of concerns about civil liberties.

But for all of the focus on security, it’s important to understand that improvements in this area alone won’t solve the problem. There will never be enough personnel to surveil every disaffected young person who might pose a threat, and short of turning Europe into a massive police state, it’s impossible to harden every soft target—today, troops surround the Louvre, but there aren’t enough soldiers to guard every restaurant and disco in the EU. Brussels was under the highest state of alert when four individuals successfully attacked an airport, which are among the most secure targets in any country.

In an open society, this isn’t a problem that can be solved with a European Patriot Act—a proposal that has little political support—which is all the more reason to address the problems by preventing radicalization before it starts. “The most fundamental question is, How do we create conditions for individuals not to be radicalized?” says Brisard. “How do we identify people at risk? The UK has been trying to implement some pilot programs locally, but unfortunately, on this key issue, these small local programs have not been reproduced at the national level.” Most of those programs are symbolic. Interfaith leaders visit community centres in marginalized communities and organize sporting events for young people. They promise greater cooperation between officials and local community leaders, take some pictures, and then go home.

For Akbar Ahmed and others, broken communities are the source of the problem, and only by healing them can the problem be solved. ISIS is haemorrhaging territory in Iraq and Syria, and is likely to be defeated in the coming years, but Europe will continue to suffer serious terror attacks until its elites face up to what’s causing a small but deadly fraction of its citizens to lash out with violence. “When we talk of long-term solutions, that mean education, jobs and investing in the communities,” he says. “And without those long-term solutions, I fear the situation is only going to get worse.”

Source: thenation.com/article/islamic-extremism-is-not-the-cause-of-europes-terror-problem/

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/islam-and-the-west/joshua-holland/islamic-extremism-is-not-the-root-cause-of-europe’s-terror-problem/d/106843

Death from Kabul to Brussels

By Fahad Suleiman Shoqiran

1 April 2016

Media outlets have recently circulated footage of right-wing protests in Europe, which is in a state of war amid attacks and threats against it that have changed perceptions of identity, coexistence and integration.

Belgium, which throughout its history has been an example of ethnic coexistence, was ferociously attacked last week. It is one of the countries that hosted the biggest number of refugees from North Africa and Turkey. Its constitution is fair to Muslims, and it has set many laws to facilitate their lives there. Nonetheless, Belgium - a symbol of European diversity, and host to major institutions such as the EU and NATO - was struck in the heart.

History of Terror

Since the mid-1990s, fundamentalist groups from other countries began to take root in Belgium. Meanwhile, following the U.S. war on Iraq in 2003, the transformation that Al-Qaeda wanted was represented in the domination over fighting groups in the Arab Maghreb.

The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat managed to revive trust with Al-Qaeda following the misunderstanding between the latter’s late leader Osama bin Laden and the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria during his stay in Khartoum, particularly in 1994 after the group’s leader Djamel Zitouni refused to participate in the war against the Algerian regime.

The terrorist attacks against Belgium represent a culmination of two decades of arrangements and deals between armed groups whose presence extends from Afghanistan to the Maghreb.

Back then, Zitouni had recruited 3,000 fighters. Bin Laden took this into consideration as he had failed to mobilize as many fighters for Al-Qaeda at the time. After the group submitted to Al-Qaeda in the summer of 1998, bin Laden changed its name to the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, and integration began with the famous negotiations between Hassan Hattab and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The rapprochement formed the basis for uniting several organizations under the name Al-Qaeda in the Arab Maghreb. All this fundamentalism that had been circulating since the 1990s until 2009 found its way to Europe, with Belgium being used as a launch pad for activities in other countries. An example is the Tarek Maaroufi cell, which assassinated Afghan political and military leader Ahmad Shah Massoud on Sept. 9, 2001.

Al-Qaeda embraced sympathetic students, and gained influence in communities that it considered potential providers of sleeper cells. With the onset of the Syrian crisis, there was contradictory data regarding the number of Belgians belonging to groups there, particularly the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Al-Nusra Front. Belonging to these groups, and fighters’ return to their countries, contributed to recruiting and mobilizing more people.

Transformation

The Paris attacks in 2015 and the recent Brussels attacks expose a different dimension to terrorism, linked to crime, drugs and sex. Paris-attack suspect Salah Abdeslam was a thief who drank alcohol and was addicted to hash, according to his sister in law. One of those involved even owned a pub.

This transformation has complicated the work of security institutions, and resulted in a wave of criticism against Belgian intelligence. The attacks in Belgium marked an ISIS victory that threatens other European countries, and perhaps even the United States.

The Syrian conflict influenced the planning of the terrorist attacks against Belgium. However, they represent a culmination of two decades of arrangements and deals between armed groups whose presence extends from Afghanistan and Chechnya, through Iraq to their biggest operation base in the Maghreb.

Perhaps this is only the beginning of the war, as French President Francois Hollande said. Sixteen years ago, what happened in Kabul began from Brussels. The situation is now more dangerous as terrorist groups are more powerful.

The night before he was killed, Massoud had an appointment with Belgian journalists. Prior to the meeting, his friend Massoud Khalili read out to him as usual the poetry of Hafez Shirazi. They had a habit of randomly choosing a page from a book of a collection of Shirazi’s poetry.

Khalili read: “Enjoy this night which we will spend together. Days pass by, months go by and years come to an end, and you will never get to live this night again.” Nine hours later, Massoud’s brain was scattered on the carpet after an Arab-Belgian man set off explosives hidden in a camera.

Source: english.alarabiya.net/en/views/2016/04/01/Death-from-Kabul-to-Brussels.html

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/radical-islamism-and-jihad/fahad-suleiman-shoqiran/death-from-kabul-to-brussels/d/106848

Muslim Mothers Fight 'Toxic' Merchants of Terror

Photo: Graduates of Mother School and their trainers pose for a photo in Vienna. ─ AFP

UK Urged To Give Asylum to 100 Women Who Fled ISIS Captivity in Iraq

Factors Pushing Lankan Muslim Women to Seek Work in Middle East

Remembering Zaha Hadid: The World’s Most Famous (And Controversial) Female Architect

"She Who Tells a Story” Exhibition Lets Muslim Women Tell Crucial, Relevant Stories

Police: New York Woman in Headscarf Lied About Being Slashed

Compiled by New Age Islam News Bureau

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/islam,-women-and-feminism/new-age-islam-news-bureau/muslim-mothers-fight--toxic--merchants-of-terror/d/106850

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Muslim Mothers Fight 'Toxic' Merchants of Terror

AFP, Apr 1st 2016

VIENNA: There were small signs that her son was changing: He prayed more and swapped jeans for traditional long tunics.

"But I wasn't worried. Not for one second did Syria enter my mind," Fatima Ezzarhouni told AFP.

And yet that's where the young man was headed in June 2013 when he left his home in the Belgian city of Antwerp, a day after his 18th birthday, to join militants.

Almost three years on, Ezzarhouni gets the occasional phone call from her son confirming he's still alive, but never revealing his exact location.

"I have this feeling that I will never see him again," said the 44-year-old, fending off tears.

"But at least now I know I'm not alone anymore."

Ezzarhouni is one of the newest members of a global project that fights militancy not with soldiers, but mothers.

The so-called Mother Schools teach Muslim women how to spot early signs of radicalisation in children or develop coping mechanisms if the intervention comes too late.

After completing the 10-module course, the graduates then go on to train other women.

Race against recruiters

The Vienna-based Women Without Borders (WWB) organisation created the initiative in close cooperation with anti-terrorism experts of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), also headquartered in the Austrian capital.

Though independent, the WWB receives funding from various Austrian ministries, the European Union and the US State Department.

"Women are so well placed to work in the security arena because this is a mission about safeguarding their families," WWB founder Edit Schlaffer told AFP.

"They are in direct competition with recruiters, those toxic influences from mosques who step in when children reach adolescence and tell them: 'You're wonderful, glory is waiting for you, join us in building the caliphate.'"

Although there are other female-run programmes targeting radicalisation in various countries, the WWB project is the only truly global one.

The first school opened in 2012 in Tajikistan ─ an breeding ground for militants next to Afghanistan ─ before branches were rolled out in other nations plagued by violence, such as Pakistan and Nigeria.

In February, WWB organised its first training session for the new initiative in Indonesia, home to the world's largest Muslim population.

Although most practice a moderate form of faith in this southeast Asian country, the militant Islamic State group (IS) has provided a potent rallying cry for radicals. Hundreds are thought to have joined the militant group in Syria and Iraq.

"We heard from other mothers whose children were recruited by extremists. We could see what their strategies are, which is very relevant," Mother School participant Khotimun Susanti told AFP in Jakarta.

"Indonesian women are not used to speaking out... so we learnt that we need to develop this culture of openness."

Schlaffer stressed that a key part of the programme focused on current affairs.

"I've met mothers in Indonesia who thought their sons had gone off to work as foreign labourers in Syria. They had no clue where Syria was. When I told them it was a war zone, they broke down," she said.

'Mothers of courage'

The project is now also taking root in Europe where terrorists have been spreading fear with a string of attacks, the latest hitting Brussels on March 22.

While schools in Austria and Belgium are already up and running, new ones will open in Britain and Sweden later this year.

Ezzarhouni said she first heard about the initiative from another Belgian mother, Saliha Ben Ali, whose 19-year-old son Sabri died in Syria three years ago.

"Sabri's radicalisation was very fast, it happened in three months and we didn't see the signs," said Ben Ali, a social worker from the city of Vilvoorde, near Brussels.

"Four days after he had left, he sent his first message: 'Please mum, don't be angry. I came here to help Syrian people because nobody helps them.'"

Both Ezzarhouni and Ben Ali recently attended a Mother Schools workshop in Vienna, which united Muslim women from around the globe to share their experiences and receive training on engaging their communities back home.

Participants included the first 15 graduates from Austria's own Mother School.

The women all belonged to the country's 30,000-strong Chechen community, which has lost dozens of young people to IS.

"It's not a secret that our community has been hit hard by the radicalisation of youth," said Maynat Kubanova, a Chechen journalist and trainer at the Austrian school.

"Parents brought their children from Chechnya to Austria to save them from war. Now they lose them to a foreign conflict. The shock sits deep. But that doesn't mean that we are without power and just have to wait for recruiters to snatch our children away."

This determination to fight what Kubanova called "an invisible enemy" was palpable among those taking part in the workshop.

At the end of the three-day gathering in Vienna, many swapped contact details and hugged each other to say goodbye.

"These women have given me hope," said Ezzarhouni.

"There are many people who see us as mothers of terrorists. But we are mothers of courage."

dawn.com/news/1249305/muslim-mothers-fight-toxic-merchants-of-terror

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UK urged to give asylum to 100 women who fled Isis captivity in Iraq

Friday 1 April 2016

Campaigners have called on the British government to grant asylum to at least 100 women and girls who escaped after being kidnapped and raped by Islamic State militants in northern Iraq.

Isis fighters have abducted thousands of girls from ethnic minority communities in northern Iraq and forced them into sexual slavery since overrunning the area in 2014.

Although many hundreds have managed to escape or have been rescued, according to Kurdish regional authorities, they are often deeply traumatised and face uncertain futures on returning to their communities.

Jacqueline Isaac, a lawyer and campaigner who works with escapees in refugee camps in northern Iraq, has called on Britain and other western countries to offer asylum and psychological support to 100 girls.

“We’re not talking about letting in thousands of refugees, we’re talking about 100 young girls that need care that they may not be able to get there [in northern Iraq] because of lack of resources and the culture,” she said.

“It’s very hard for a girl there to get what she needs and thrive because of what she has been through. Even though the Kurdistan regional government and the locals are doing a great job to try to support them, there is still that culture that is ingrained in the society that says if you have been raped or lost your virginity, you don’t have as much value.”

Isaac said the majority of the girls were Yazidis, a religious minority that Isis had targeted in northern Iraq, but added that Christian, Shia Muslim and Turkmen girls had also been enslaved.

A UN report published in January said up to 3,500 people were currently being held as slaves in Isis-controlled territory in Iraq, the majority of them women and children. At least 18,000 civilians had been killed and more than 3.2 million displaced since January 2014, it said, describing the violence against civilians as “staggering”.

Germany has taken in at least 1,100 formerly enslaved young women from northern Iraq as part of a project that offers them specialised psychological support when they arrive, Agence France-Presse reported last month. Prof Jan Ilhan Kizilhan, a German doctor working in Baden-Württemberg state, which financed the programme, told the agency he believed that 1,200 other women would benefit from similar programmes, not counting the numbers still in captivity.

Isaac told the Guardian that she had interviewed more than 100 escapees in Iraq and Germany about their experiences, ranging in age from nine to their early 20s. She said many had described witnessing family members being killed before they were bussed to locations where they had been categorised according to age, marital status and perceived attractiveness, before being allocated to different groups of fighters.

Isaac, an Egyptian-American who is the vice-president of humanitarian organisation Roads of Success, gave evidence last year to the US Congress on abuses against women in Iraq. The Republican-dominated House of Representatives voted unanimously in March to declare that Isis atrocities against Yazidis, Christians and other minority groups amounted to genocide.

This was followed by the US secretary of state, John Kerry, who said the group was “genocidal by self-proclamation, by ideology and by actions, in what it says, in what believes and in what it does”.

A spokesman for the Home Office said the British government was “at the forefront” of the humanitarian response to the crisis and had pledged £2.3bn to help refugees in the Middle East. He added that it was a longstanding government position that someone could not apply for asylum from outside the UK.

theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/01/uk-grant-asylum-women-held-captivity-isis-northern-iraq

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Factors Pushing Lankan Muslim Women to Seek Work in Middle East

Apr 1, 2016

P.K.Balachandran

BATTICALOA: A complex set of economic and social factors are pushing Muslim women from Batticaloa district of Sri Lanka to seek work as house maids in the  Middle East, despite low pay, harassment bordering on cruelty in the work place, and the possibility of being amputated, stoned to death  or beheaded under Saudi law.

Interviews with returnees reveal that the inability of families to meet expenses related to education and housing, and to give dowries for marriageable daughters is the root cause of migration.

"Added to this is the system in which recruiting agents give their prospective clients LKR 1.5 lakhs to LKR 3 lakhs as salary advance to encourage them to migrate.The advance helps the women meet their immediate pressing expenses and creates an obligation to migrate," pointed out Rahini Baskaran of the NGO, Migrant Workers' Protection Network.

"The agents target women in indigent families; women whose husbands had either died or had abandoned them; and women married to violent, alcoholic and irresponsible men.The women are shown sympathy and given financial help, so that over time, they do as told," Rahini said.

Dowry is essential for marriage among Muslims  in East Lanka, even though the Koran sanctions only brideprice which is paid by the groom.And often, a house is demaded as a dowry.

"In Varittirachenai, 90 percent of women have gone abroad only to collect money for dowries. If a woman has five daughters, she may have to go to the Middle East a number of times to marry off all," Rahini said.

When the returnees were asked if they were maltreated by their Arab employers, the reactions were mixed.

Maleeha (28) of Maruthamunai said: "Not all Arab women are unkind. Much depends on the behavior of the maids too."

Her 75 year old mother, Fathima Maraikar, who had been a migrant in the 1980s, said the girls of today do not show the restraint her generation did.

"There is a vast cultural change," she said.

But Fathima Majeed (41) of Sainthamaruthu said she had heard cries of maids being tied up and beaten in her neighbourhood in Riyadh.

"My land lady used to show me pictures of the beheading of Rizana. These pictures used to frighten me," Fathima said.

25 year old Rizana Nafeek of Muthur in East Lanka was beheaded in 2013 for allegedly killing an infant under her care.

Najeeba Nagoor (32) said the landladies were very suspicious. "I could not even dress up or put on a bit of make up. If I did, they'd ask if I was trying to attract the men in the house!"

m.newindianexpress.com/world/640175

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Remembering Zaha Hadid: the world’s most famous (and controversial) female architect

April 2, 2016

Mark Lamster, Architecture Critic Follow @marklamster Email mlamster@dallasnews.com

April 1, 2016

My first serious engagement with the work of Zaha Hadid came in 1995, with an exhibition of her projects, all but one of them speculative, in the soaring waiting room of New York’s Grand Central Terminal.

This was an ideal place for such an encounter, Grand Central being the city’s unmatched exemplar of architectural complexity, spatial drama, and public spectacle. Those qualities defined Hadid’s work over a career that moved from the relative obscurity of the architectural avant-garde to the heights of international celebrity. Upon her death earlier this week in Miami at the age of 65, she had made herself the most famous female architect the world has yet known.

Hadid was born in Baghdad in 1950, the daughter of a liberal executive, and studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut. “Never in my upbringing was there a feeling that women are different from men,” she said in 2008.

An interest in geometry brought a shift to architecture, and in 1977 she earned a degree from London’s prestigious Architectural Association School of Architecture, then a center of radical experimentation. There she studied under the Dutch iconoclast Rem Koolhaas, joining his firm, OMA, upon graduation.

Hadid first achieved notoriety, at least within the narrow confines of the architectural profession, by winning a 1983 design competition for The Peak, a private club that would have been nestled into the hills of Hong Kong. It was never built, and couldn’t have been. It didn’t matter. Her fantastical drawings, “exploded isometric” views of abstract planes shifting through space, suggested a remaking of Russian constructivism. “I almost believed that there was such a thing as zero gravity,” she said.

This was the Hadid I discovered gliding through the cavernous space of Grand Central. I was a young book editor at the time, and my immediate reaction was to try and put that work between covers, a project that never came to fruition. But my enthusiasm was hardly unusual; while Hadid’s built work is polarizing, her early paper projects are universally admired. If nothing else, history will remember her as one of the great visionaries of modern architecture.

That show found her on the cusp of true stardom. In less than a decade, she transformed herself from an architect of speculations with little built work to a winner of the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor.

Hadid’s first built work, completed in 1994, was a fire station for the campus of the furniture maker Vitra, in Weil am Rhein, Germany. With its plunging concrete lines, it seemed a physical (and visceral) manifestation of her paper work.

Though she never wavered from a core dedication to an architecture of purely formal invention, her buildings became more fluid. If her drawings were characterized by orthogonals plunging through space, as she began to build in earnest, and as digital tools liberated architects from the straight line, she developed a signature style of swooping, sculptural forms, often in dazzling white.

Among her most significant works are the Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Germany (2005), the MAXXI museum in Rome (2009), the Guangzhou Opera House (2010), the Riverside Museum in Glasgow (2011), and the Heydar Aliyev Center (2012) in Baku, Azerbaijan. Her only completed building in the United States is the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, in Cincinnati (2003), though she has several under construction, including a residential tower in Miami.

Building so much and so fast, and without a straight line in sight, led to persistent questions of craft and workmanship in her projects.

She was also a prolific designer of products: from tables and benches (one is on display in the garden of the Dallas Museum of Art) to women’s shoes.

Hadid profited by the emergence of social media, but was punished by it as well. Images of her work, spectacular in two dimensions, spread virally on the internet, enhancing her stature. But that cut two ways.

A public campaign, led by several of Japan’s most respected architects, led to the scrapping of her proposed stadium for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Her design for Qatar’s Al Wakrah Stadium, commissioned for the 2022 World Cup, was compared unfavorably to the female anatomy. More significantly, she seemed tone-deaf in responding to accusations about unsafe working conditions on the job site.

In 2014, she took the respected New York Review of Books critic Martin Filler to court over his accusations that she was culpable for human rights violations in the Al Wakrah project. She won an apology, but was still dogged by the idea that she was too eager to lend her talents to anyone willing to enable her visions, and never mind their politics.

It didn’t help that she could be combative with the press and her professional colleagues, a large woman with a large ego. She could also be charming. She dismissed much of the unflattering coverage of her life and work, with considerable justification, as born of gender bias. “If I was a man they wouldn’t call me a diva,” she said.

Many women — and men — consider her conviction and dedication to her principles an inspiration.

But the nature of her legacy remains an open question. There is a reasonable argument to be made that no architect of commensurate prominence has been cut off in the prime of their career since the death of Eero Saarinen, in 1961. The work she did complete is so idiosyncratic and so financially intensive that it is hard to imagine a “School of Hadid” developing in her absence, not least because her brand of formalist practice is considered almost entirely passé among younger designers. Sustainability, contextualism, modesty, resilience, craft — these are not attributes one associates with Hadid or her work, though they define architecture in the present day.

Hadid had her own imperatives, and from those, she would not deviate.

artsblog.dallasnews.com/2016/04/remembering-zaha-hadid-the-worlds-most-famous-and-controversial-female-architect.html/

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"She Who Tells a Story” Exhibition Lets Muslim Women Tell Crucial, Relevant Stories

Roger Catlin

April 1, 2016

WASHINGTON - Although it was organized by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts three years ago, the landmark exhibition "She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers From Iran and the Arab World" could not be more immediate in its impact.

At a time when fear of international terror is coinciding with election-year condemnations of entire cultures, what could address the divisive issues more directly than Boushra Almutawakel's portrait of a confident young woman whose hijab is an American flag? Created shortly after 9/11, the work is one of a series in the exhibition, which opens April 8 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, that deals with the sociological complexity of such headgear in the 21st century.

The exhibition, inspired by the Arabic word "rawiya," meaning "she who tells a story," also addresses the balance of everyday life amid conflicts and challenging Western stereotypes. Here's how it adds up:

12: Number of artists represented in "She Who Tells a Story."

84: Number of pieces in the show.

13: Number of the most images by any photographer in the exhibition, reached by Shadi Ghadirian and Newsha Tavakolian, both of Iran. Tavakolian also is represented by a six-screen video from her "Listen" series.

6: Number of imaginary CD covers devised for singers prohibited from recording albums in Iran because they are women, from Tavakolian's "Listen" series.

15: Number of years after the 1979 Iranian Revolution when artist Shirin Neshat revisited her native country, producing work incorporating elements of the veil, gun, text and gaze.

14: Number of years that have passed since the West Bank incursions depicted in Rula Halawani's series "Negative Incursions," which look like printed negatives or the view from soldiers' night-vision goggles.

9: Number of images in Boushra Almutawakel's "Mother, Daughter, Doll" series, showing the artist, her oldest daughter and the daughter's doll wearing a progression of veils such that in the last image, they are completely obscured.

18: Number of days in the Egypt uprising of January 2011, whose news photographs of Tahrir Square and its brutal aftermath are rendered by Nermine Hammam into colorful postcards and Japanese screens.

60,000: Approximate number of verses in "The Shahnameh," the 1,000-year-old epic Persian poem that inspired Neshat's "The Book of Kings," a series of works depicting Arab Spring protesters.

150: Length, in inches, of the largest work in the exhibition - Lalla Essaydi's triptych "Bullets Revisited #3," in which the gold-colored embellishments surrounding reclining women are actually bullet casings.

10: Number of women depicted riding in a motorboat on the Mediterranean in non-restricted areas near Israel during a class trip, in a work from Tanya Habjouqa's "Women of Gaza" series.

3: Other museums where "She Who Tells a Story" has been on view: The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

16: Number of weeks "She Who Tells a Story" will be at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/arts-theater/article/Female-photographers-tell-important-stories-in-7223712.php

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Police: New York woman in headscarf lied about being slashed

Thomson Reuters Apr 1st 2016

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A woman in a headscarf who reported being slashed across the cheek by an attacker who called her a terrorist has admitted she lied, police said on Friday.

The 20-year-old woman inflicted the wound on herself and was taken to Bellevue Hospital for care, police said.

SEE ALSO: New York nanny reportedly in coma after pushing baby stroller out of path of car

Anti-Muslim bias crimes in the United States have tripled since attacks by Islamic militants in Paris in November and shootings by Muslim extremists in San Bernardino, California, in December, say Muslim advocacy groups.

About 80 percent of the victims in such incidents are women, Council on American-Islamic Relations officials say.

At the same time, New York authorities are grappling with an uptick in stabbings and slashings, up 22 percent compared to the same period in 2015, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said.

The most recent violence occurred Friday morning when a man was slashed in the face during an attempted robbery at a subway station near the World Trade Center. The victim suffered minor injuries, police said.

About 80 percent of the victims in such incidents are women, Council on American-Islamic Relations officials say.

One day earlier, the woman, who has not been identified, told police that she was attacked with a sharp object as she walked near in lower Manhattan.

The woman said she was slashed across her cheek by an attacker who called her a terrorist and fled, according to police who received a 911 call at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday.

But further investigation, including a review of several surveillance cameras in the area near Wall Street, showed that the incident did not occur, said police.

"She slashed herself and recanted her initial account of the incident," said Officer Sophia Mason, a department spokeswoman.

It was not clear whether police would file any charges against the woman for making a false claim.

On March 22, Bratton said there have been 916 stabbings and slashings reported in the city since January.

In response, police have begun a separate classification for such crimes.

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