Interview in the monthly Swarajya

(Paper version of Swarajya, May 2016)

·        While Swarajya has published articles exposing how Marxist historians hound peers who disagree with them out of academic institutions, we have got news from different sources that you are finding it difficult to get employed even in Belgium. Is it true? If yes, what precisely is the objection of your detractors? Can you name the people who have raised objection to your appointment in a Belgian university? Did you receive regret letters from Belgian academic authorities, explaining why they couldn’t appoint you? Did they communicate verbally to you why they thought you were unemployable?

After giving this matter some thought, I have decided against offering much detail here. Firstly, I am not privileged to know the details of decision-making instances that lead to my own exclusion. Even if sending an official “regret letter”, they would not give in writing the real reason behind their decision (as anyone experienced with job applications knows).

Secondly, eventhough no law was broken, going into this still has the character of an allegation, and that requires proof. Some cases of deliberate exclusion or disinvitation were simply obvious, but my standards of proof are higher than that. Thus, recently I missed an appointment at a Belgian university and in that rare case I was unofficially but fully informed of the details by an insider (of course I was vetoed for reputedly being too embroiled with Islam criticism), but now that this crown witness has died, it would only be my word against theirs; which would not be good enough. So, I simply want to close this chapter. Let’s not bother, everybody has his problems, and these career hurdles are mine. In fact, I have had quite a bit of luck in my life, including help from individual Hindus whenever the need arose (air tickets paid, hospitality etc.), so any fussing about this boycott against me would be disproportionate. Let’s just assume I missed those opportunities because I was not good enough. Or because of Karma, whatever.  

The topic in general is important, though. The Leftist dominance of the Humanities departments in India, often amounting to total control, results from the wilful and systematic “ethnic cleansing” (to borrow Madhu Kishwar’s term) of any young scholar suspected of pro-Hindu sympathies. Exceptions are the people who entered on the strength of ideologically neutral work, or of initially toeing the line, but coming out with pro-Hindu convictions only after getting tenure.

This cleansing of enemies stems from the old Marxist mentality: a war psychology treating everyone with a different opinion as an enemy inviting merciless destruction; and a boundless self-righteousness rooted in the belief of being on the forward side of history. As an ideological wave, Marxism is waning even in India, but that attitude is still rife among the anti-Hindu forces, both in India and among Western India-watchers.

·        We refer to the established historians in India as Marxist historians, not to their knowledge because they look at this country through the Marxist lens of “class conflicts”. You refer to them sarcastically as “eminent” historians. Please explain your choice of words.

“Eminent historians” is what they call one another, and what their fans call them. When they don’t have an answer to an opponent’s arguments, they pompously dismiss him as not having enough “eminence”. So when Arun Shourie wrote about some abuses in this sector, he called his book Eminent Historians. It is also a pun on an old book about prominent colonial-age personalities, Eminent Victorians.

“Eminence” in this case refers to their position and relative glory. The Communists always made sure to confer position and prestige, as opposed to the Sangh Parivar, which fawns over people with position but doesn’t realize that those people have only acquired their position by toeing the anti-Hindu line. In a way, you have to concede that the Left has honestly fought for its power position. Half their battle was already won by the Hindu side’s complete absence from the battlefield.

One example of the Sangh’s ineptness at playing this game. In 2002, the supposedly Hindu government of AB Vajpayee founded the Chair for Indic Studies in Oxford. The media cried “saffronization” and, as usual, portrayed the BJP as a wily party fanatically committed to Hindu causes. However, the clueless time-servers at the head of the BJP nominated a known and proven opponent of Hindu Nationalism, Sanjay Subrahmaniam, who thus became the poster-boy for “saffronization”. This way, they hoped to achieve their highest ambition in life: a pat on the shoulder by the secularists. That pat on the shoulder, already begged for so many times, remained elusive, but the tangible result was that they too had conferred even more prestige on an “Eminent Historian”, all while denying it to their own scholars (if any).

·        What would you tell your peers who say that the “Out of India” Theory (OIT) is a fringe theory?

Of course it is a fringe theory, at least internationally, where the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) is still the official paradigm. In India, though, it has the support of most archaeologists, who fail to find a trace of this Aryan influx and instead find cultural continuity. As for the situation abroad: most scholars assume the invasionist paradigm, but only very few also argue in an informed manner for the invasionist theory, not many more than those who argue against it. But anyway, this “fringe” aspect doesn’t impress me at all. When Copernicus put the sun rather than the earth in the middle of the solar system, he was in a minority of one, very “fringe” indeed; but he won the day.

·        What is the evidence against the Aryan Invasion Theory?

First of all: that there is no evidence in its favour. Archaeologists have spent a century of well-funded excavations for a trace, any trace, of the Aryans moving into India. Even the invasionists concede that “as yet” no such thing has been found. The new genetic evidence, while still immature, generally goes in favour of emigrations from India and, while leaving room for immigrations too, is emphatically failing to pinpoint an invasion coinciding in time with the hypothetical Aryan invasion.

Meanwhile, the written record emphatically points to an emigration scenario. That the Iranians lived in India and had to leave westwards is reported in the Rg-Veda, a text thoroughly analysed and shown to support an “Aryan emigration” by Shrikant Talageri. It can equally be deduced from the Avesta. Even earlier migrations are mentioned in the Puranas. These are of course very mixed and unreliable as a source of history, but it is a bad historian who discards them altogether. Their core, later fancifully embellished, consists in dynastic lists. Keeping that ancestral information was the proper job of court poets, and they devised mnemotechnical tricks to transmit it for many generations. In this case, it too does convey a basic scenario of indigenousness and emigration.

Finally, there is the linguistic evidence. Many Indians believe the hearsay that it has somehow proven the invasion. It hasn’t. But permit me to forego discussing those data: too technical for an interview.

  

·        Of late, the Marxist historians have revised “invasion” to “migration”. They say that there might not have been a war when the so-called Aryans arrived here, but they have no doubt that the ancestors of today’s north Indians, especially the upper castes, by and large migrated from central Asia into India. In other words, the Marxists say that we Indians were originally not Indians—invasion or no invasion! Does this “revision” satisfy you?

Exasperated at not finding a visible trace of this invasion, conformist scholars have theorized an alternative that doesn’t require such visible remains: a migration under the radar. Often, when they try to give details, they still mean a military invasion rather than a gradual migration, since they bring in the military advantage of horses and chariots to explain how such a large and civilized Harappan population could be overrun by a handful of outsiders.

But even if they genuinely mean a migration, it still amounts to the same scenario as an invasion, viz. the Vedic Aryans came from abroad and the natives took over the language and religion of the intruders. So, anyone who thinks that the migration theory is a breakthrough away from the invasion theory really shows he doesn’t understand the issue. “Migration” effectively means “invasion” but avoids the burden of proof that the more dramatic term “invasion” implies.

To be sure, it doesn’t much matter who came from where. The so-called adivasis (a British term coined in ca. 1930) or “natives” of Nagalim in the Northeast have settled in their present habitat only a thousand years ago; which is fairly recent by Indian standards. So, ironically, they are genuine “immigrants” or “invaders”, yet no Indian begrudges them their place inside India. Many countries have an immigration or conquest of their present territory as a proud part of their national myth: Madagascar, Romania, the Siberian part of Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, etc. If the Indo-Aryans, or indeed the Dravidians (theorized to have come from Iran or even Central Asia), had really immigrated, that would then have been a pre-Vedic event, at least 3500 years ago, and that time-span ought to have been enough for integration into the national mainstream.

So this Homeland debate ought to have been a non-issue, only of interest to ivory-tower scholars. But different non- or anti-Hindu forces decided to politicize it. Abroad, these were the British colonialists, White supremacists in the US and Europe, and among them the Nazis, who considered the AIT as a cornerstone and eloquent illustration of their worldview. Inside India, first of all the Christian missionaries, then followed by the non-Brahmin movement, the Dravidianists, Nehruvians and Ambedkarites, followed in turn by their Western supporters. The AIT was used to break up Indian unity and pit upper castes against lower castes, non-tribals against tribals, and North-Indians against South-Indians. After this massive politicization, the partisans of Indian unity finally decided to give some feeble support to the fledgling Out-of-India Theory (OIT). Yet, scholars rejecting the OIT because of its alleged political use have no qualms about espousing the AIT, politicized since far longer, in many more countries, and not as a pastime of a few historians but as the basis for government policies.

·        On the one hand, the unaffiliated or apolitical Indian student loves your theories; your passages are quoted widely in debates on ancient Indian history. On the other, you do not seem to get along well with the so-called right-wing historians of this country either. You have written a blog against them. Please comment.

Well, I have nothing but good to say about some Indian researchers, both naturalized ones like Michel Danino and natives like Meenakshi Jain or Srikant Talageri. But then, there are others too. Certainly the name PN Oak rings a bell? In the second half of last century, he spread all these theories that the Taj Mahal was a Shiva temple; that the Kaaba was built by Vikramaditya as a Shiva temple; that the Vatican (originally the Roman “Poets’ Hill”) is really “Veda-Vatika”; that my mother tongue, Dutch, is the language of the Daityas (demons), etc. The bad thing is that numerous Hindus have run away with these stories, and even some NRI surgeons and engineers of my acquaintance believe in diluted versions of the same. In a less extreme manner, this disdain for historical method is widespread among traditionalist Hindu “history-rewriters”. They frequently put out claims that would make legitimate historians shudder.

Many of these rewriters thought that with Narendra Modi’s accession to power, their time had come. I know, for instance, that many of them have sent in proposals to the ICHR. None of these was accepted because they ignored the elementary rules of scholarship. Any student writing a thesis knows that before you can develop your own hypothesis, you first have to survey the field and assess what previous scholars have found or theorized. But these traditionalist history-rewriters just don’t bother about the rest of the world, they are satisfied to have convinced themselves. Their horizon is not larger than an internet list of like-minded people.

In itself, it is no problem that their knowledge and method leave much to be desired. People can learn. Unfortunately, they are too smug to do that. They actively misinform Hindus by claiming that the Aryan Invasion Theory has long been discarded. They also do a lot of harm to the bonafide historians with whom they get juxtaposed. So it is true that I have lost patience with them.

·        Since the Narendra Modi government came to power in 2014, has there been an effort to revise the subject of Indian history in academic curricula, which, many in India believe, is politically motivated? Has the Government of India approached you with the request of being a part of any such initiative? If yes, how is the project going?

No, there has been no such request at all. However, I myself have sent in an application to the Indian Council of Historical Research, but that has run into technical difficulties, mainly to do with my foreign passport. So, the situation is and remains that institutionally, I have nothing to do with the Indian history scene.

The version of history taught by the Nehruvians was politically motivated. The feeble Hindu attempt to counterbalance this (“saffronization”) in ca. 2002 was confused and largely incompetent. Humbled by this experience, the BJP today is not even trying to impose its own version. Contrary to the Nehruvians’ hue and cry, allegations about the BJP’s interference in history-teaching or more generally in academe are simply not true.

Here we are only talking of changing some lines in the textbooks, and even that seems a Himalayan effort to the BJP. Yet, what is really needed is a far more thorough overhaul. Except for some scholars without any power, nobody is even thinking about this very needed long-term job.

·        If no, could the reason be that RSS-affiliated historians and you are not particularly fond of each other and this government is influenced by the Sangh?

Any Sangh-affiliated historians would not need me to arrive at their positions or to devise a policy if called upon to do so by the present Government. But again, I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting the distorted history propagated by the Nehruvians. I would welcome it if it happened, but so far the BJP, still begging to be recognized as “secular”, only has its eye on “development”.

I am happy to report that there are some as yet insignificant private initiatives, though. Once they achieve results, there will be more to say on them.

·        Would you say or agree that the Government of India, regardless of the political party that runs it, would be uncomfortable appointing or commissioning an academic who is perceived as being anti-Muslim?

Certainly.  Though it never had any problem with anti-Hindu candidates to even the highest post. Long ago, it even managed to appoint to the chair of the Constitution Commission, no less, a man who had expressed his outspoken aversion to both Hinduism and Islam: Dr. BR Ambedkar.

·        Does the genesis of your problem with anti-left historians in India lie in the fact that on the issue of Babri Masjid, if you do not agree with the left, you do not agree with the right wing either? If it is something else, please explain the problem.

On Ayodhya, there has never been a conflict with any non-Left historian. To be sure, I have my disagreements on some minor points, but they have never been the object of a controversy. So: no, on Ayodhya I may have minor and friendly differences of opinion with “right-wing” historians, but no serious quarrel. In that debate, the long-standing quarrel has been with the Eminent Historians, their supporters in media and politics, and their foreign dupes. They were on the wrong side of the history debate all along, and it is time they concede it.

In the case of the Eminent Historians, it is also time for the surviving ones to own up their responsibility for the whole conflict. The then PM, Rajiv Gandhi, was on course towards a peaceful settlement, allotting the site to the Hindus and buying the militant Muslim leadership off with some typically Congressite horse-trading. Not too principled, but at least with the virtue of avoiding bloodshed. It is the shrill and mendacious declaration of the Eminent Historians in 1989, amplified by all the vocal secularists, that made the politicians back off.

Not only have they falsely alleged that no Rama temple ever stood on the contentious site: their more fundamental lie was to bring in history at all. Ayodhya belongs to the Hindus not because it was their pilgrimage site a thousand years ago, nor because of “revenge” for a temple destruction effected eight hundred or five hundred years ago, but because it is a Hindu sacred site today. No Muslim ever cares to go to Ayodhya, and in spite of being egged on by the Eminent Historians, enough Muslim leaders have expressed their willingness to leave the site to the Hindus. This whole controversy was unnecessary, but for the Nehruvians’ pathetic nomination of the Babri Masjid as the last bulwark of secularism.

·        If all the archaeological findings from Ayodhya are arranged chronologically, what story of the disputed plot of land comes to the fore? Did a temple of Lord Rama stand there, which Babar’s general Mir Baqi demolished to build the mosque? Or, did Mir Baqi find ruins on the spot, which were a mix of a dilapidated Muslim graveyard and remains of a temple of an even older generation?

That a Hindu temple was demolished by Muslim invaders is certain, on that we all agree. But there is less consensus around, or even awareness of, the fact that this happened several times: by Salar Masud Ghaznavi in 1030 (the rebuilt Rajput temple after this must be the one of the excavated pillar-bases), by Qutbuddin Aibak’s troops in 1193, and by Mir Baqi on Babar’s behalf in 1526.

What it was that was replaced by Babar’s mosque, is not fully clear. I speculate that in the rough and tumble of the collapsing Delhi Sultanate, Hindus had managed to take over the site and started worship there eventhough the building they used was a mosque imposed on the site. That was exactly the situation in 1949-92, and I think it also applied towards 1526. Babar destroyed a Hindu pilgrimage centre, a Hindu presence at the site, but not the Rajput temple from the 11th century of which the foundations were excavated in 2003.

Was the temple’s demolition just an odd event, or was it the necessary materialization of an ideology, repeated many times and in many places? When Mohammed Shahabuddin Ghori and his lieutenants conquered the entire Ganga basin in 1192-94, they destroyed every Hindu temple they could find. Only a few survived, and that is because they lay out of the way of the Muslim armies, in the (then) forest, notably in Khajuraho and in Bodh Gaya. But all the Buddhist universities, all the temples in Varanasi etc. were destroyed. Ayodhya became a provincial capital of the Delhi Sultanate, and it is inconceivable that the Sultanate regime would have allowed a major temple to remain standing there.

So, the narrative propagated by the Sangh Parivar, that Babar destroyed the 11^th-century temple, cannot be true, for that temple was no longer there. When Babar arrived on the scene, Hindus may have worshipped Rama in a makeshift temple, or in a mosque building provisionally used as a temple, but the main temple that used to be there, had already been destroyed in 1193. See, Ayodhya’s history becomes more interesting once you discard the lies of the Eminent Historians as well as the naïve version of the Sangh Parivar.

The controversial part lies herein, that the persistence of the temple all through the Sultanate period would have implied a certain tolerance even during the fiercest part of Muslim rule. In reality, the demolition of Rama’s birthplace temple was not an odd and single event, but a repeated event in application of a general theology of iconoclasm imposed by the Prophet.

·        Was it a temple of Lord Vishnu rather? Or, were they quite a few temples of one or more deities built in different periods by different kings?

In her book from 2013, Rama and Ayodhya, Prof. Meenakshi Jain has detailed all the scholarly evidence and the debate around it, including the embarrassing collapse of the Eminent Historians’ case once they took the witness stand in Court. She shows that the Rama cult has already left traces more than 2000 years ago. Attempts to make Rama worship a recent phenomenon were just part of the sabotage attempts by the Eminent Historians. Also, the site of Ayodhya, though probably older, is at least beyond doubt since Vikramaditya in the 1^st century BC. All indications are that the disputed site was already visited by pilgrims as Rama’s birthplace since well before the Muslim conquest.

So, this was a long-standing pilgrimage site for Rama. Against the utter simplicity of this scenario, anti-Hindu polemicists of various stripes have tried all kinds of diversionary tactics: saying that Rama was born elsewhere, or that the temple belonged to other cults. This Vishnu-but-not-his-incarnation-Rama theory, or the claim of a Shaiva or Buddhist origin, came about as some of those diversionary tactics; they are totally inauthentic and artificial. Alright, among historians we can discuss every possible hypothesis. But from the very relevant viewpoint of Islamic iconoclasm, all these distinctions don’t matter: all those sects were false, leading men astray, away from the one true religion, and therefore they all, and certainly their idols and idol-houses, were to be destroyed.

·        Whatever be the story, which community do you believe has a greater right of ownership over that disputed site?

The community that holds the site sacred. Muslims go through all this trouble to travel to far-away Mecca, why don’t they go on a cheap and easy pilgrimage to Ayodhya instead? It seems they have made their choice. So let us respect their choice, and also the choice of the Rama worshippers who do care for Ayodhya, by leaving the site to the latter. Case closed.

·        Do you hate Muslims or Islam?

No, I do not hate Muslims. They are people like ourselves. Having travelled in Pakistan and the Gulf States, I even dare say I feel good in Muslim environments. And if I desire the liberation of Muslims from Islam, that is precisely because I like them. Suppose you discover that a friend of you still believes in fairy-tales: wouldn’t you consider it your duty to set him straight and confront him with the true story, precisely because he is your friend?

But then, perhaps the writer of the Quran “hated” the unbelievers when he wished them godspeed to hell.

And I do not “hate” Islam either. If a teacher uses his red pencil to cross out a grammatical mistake in a pupil’s homework, we do not say that he “hates” the mistake. He simply notices very dispassionately that it is wrong. The use of the word “hate” in this case stems from an attempt to distort the debate and misrepresent the argument by means of emotive language. The belief that someone heard the word of God, dictating the Quranic verses, is just one of the many irrational and mistaken beliefs that have plagued mankind since the beginning.

·        You have been on record saying at a function in Goa in late 2014 that a general impression must be created that being a Muslim is “uncool”! Representatives of some Islamic countries reportedly walked out of the venue in protest of your statement. Would you explain what happened at that event?

We had been given to understand that it was going to be a Hindu thinkfest where the only constraint on our free discussion was going to be the truth. Satyameva jayate! The offer of first-class airplane tickets (which I refused as unnecessarily luxurious) should already have alerted me to a different agenda: a glamorous diplomatic show. Arriving on-site, and seeing some high-profile Muslim guests from West Asia (what were they doing at an “India Ideas Conclave”?), I proposed the organizers to change the topic from what I had been invited for: the roots of religious terrorism. Thus, an evaluation of the BJP Government’s record from the angle of its Hindu reputation seemed to me an excellent topic that as yet no one was scheduled to talk about. But no, they insisted I talk about the roots of Islamic terrorism, then colourfully illustrated by the frequent video reports of beheadings by the Islamic State, apart from the more usual bomb attacks. Even when I warned them that I was not going to parrot the diplomatic white lies churned out by Obama and Cameron (and, very recently, in my presence, by Narendra Modi speaking in Brussels), viz. that jihad “has nothing to do with Islam”, they still persisted.

So they got what they had bargained for. I detailed the justification for all of the IS’s actions from the Quran and the Prophet’s precedents. The reaction of the Hindu audience was very warm and enthusiastic. Finally someone who didn’t try to shift the blame to the victims, as the Nehruvians always do. A few foreigners were not so happy, and neither were the BJP organizers. They had preferred a diplomatic lie to the truth, so I had spoiled their show, intended to prove how nice and “secular” those ugly Hindu Nationalists really were.

On the panel there was also the advocate of “moderate Islam”, Sultan Shahin. I liked him as a person, and I also understand that the stand he took was risky. For Muslims, it is more dangerous to stray from the orthodox line than for non-Muslims to even criticize Islam. I have to knock on wood here, given the attacks on the Satanic Verses translators and the Danish or French certoonists, but still Kafirs (Pagans) have more leeway than Muslims who risk being treated as apostates. So, I concede the bravery of “moderate Muslims”. But all the same, they are wrong.  They are probably being truthful when they swear that they themselves would never countenance such terrorist violence. But that is because of their normal inborn human feelings, not because of (but rather, in spite of) their later conditioning by Islam. They try to reconcile their human tolerance with the religion they have been taught by their beloved parents. It is humanly understandable, and I sympathize with them, being myself an apostate from my home religion, Catholicism. But alas, I cannot spare them the difficulties inherent in outgrowing your native religions. And I can testify that the end result is worth these steps on the way.

As Taslima Nasreen has said: “What the Muslim world needs is not moderate Muslims but ex-Muslims.”

Making Islam uncool? I have been part of a massive walk-out from the Church. For intellectuals, the decisive reason was the dawning insight that Christian belief was irrational. But for the masses, it was mainly that it was no longer cool to be a believer. People started feeling embarrassed for still being associated with this untenable doctrine, and are none the worse for having left the beliefs they were brought up in. I wish Muslims a similar evolution, a similar liberation. I do not wish on them anything that I have not been through myself.

·        How do you view the recent terrorist attack on Belgium? To what extent is migration from Islamic countries responsible for terrorism on European soil?

As Ché Guevara said, a Guerrilla fighter is among the masses like a fish in the water. In this case, the Jihad fighters had found safety and comfort in the Muslim community. So the demographic Islamization of some neighbourhoods in Brussels (due to our own silly policies) has indeed played a role. But I expect you to retort that there were also other factors, and that is true.

·        How do you react to the Muslim refrain that the terrorists in their community are a creation of America and NATO’s flawed foreign policy and interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc?

It is simply not true that Ghaznavi or Aurangzeb took to Jihad and iconoclasm in reaction to British colonialism or American bombings. They were inspired by an older source, viz. the Prophet’s precedent, Islam. However, it is true that many contemporary Jihad fighters have indeed been fired up by a specific circumstance, viz. Western aggression against Muslim countries.

Assenting to Quranic lessons about Jihad is one thing, but actually volunteering for the frontline of Jihad it quite another. In most people, it needs a trigger. The illegal invasions of Iraq or Libya, or footage of an Afghan wedding bombed from American jets, provided such a trigger. I am very aware that being bombed is just as unpleasant for wedding guests in Kandahar as for commuters in Brussels or Mumbai. Right now, even little Belgium has five bomber planes in Iraq as part of the US-led war effort against IS. These bombers must already have killed, along with some Jihad fighters, more civilians than were killed in the terrorist attacks in Brussels.  

In Belgium, I have drawn some attention with my defence of the Syria volunteers: young Muslims grown up in Brussels or Antwerp and going to fight for the Islamic State. Our politicians call them “monsters”, “crazy” and other derogatory names, but in fact they are pious idealists. They may be misguided in their beliefs, and I dare say they are, but they do have the courage of their conviction. Without any pressure on them, they volunteer for putting their lives on the line in the Syrian desert. You cannot deny them bravery and self-sacrifice.

The Western invasions and bombings in Muslim countries have brought nothing but misery, and I have opposed them all along. What the Muslim world needs, is not more civil wars, sectarian wars, foreign military interventions, which all serve to polarize the minds, to freeze them in existing antagonisms. What it needs is a thaw. Here again, I speak from my own experience: the post-war climate of peace and prosperity in Europe has allowed a genuine cultural revolution, an emancipation from the stranglehold of Christianity. The Muslim world will only evolve if it attains a modicum of peace and stability.

Note that the military interventions have nothing to do with Islam criticism, nowadays slandered as “Islamophobia”. On the contrary. Without exception, all the politicians ordering interventions in Muslim countries have praised Islam, calling it “the religion of peace” that is being “misused” by the terrorists. Not a single word of Islam criticism has ever crossed their lips. A legitimate Islam critic like the late historian Sita Ram Goel has never harmed a hair on the head of a Muslim. Islamophiles such as these politicians, by contrast, have killed many thousands of innocent Muslims.

·        How would you advise Indians to fight terrorism?

Security measures and repression are not my field nor my favourite solution, but I understand that sometimes they are necessary. So I want to spare a moment to praise the men in uniform who risk their lives to provide safety. However, this approach won’t go very far and won’t provide a lasting solution if it is not accompanied by a more fundamental ideological struggle. That is what I am working on.

Read more!

Why Brussels?

(Daily O, Delhi, 25 March 2016: "Why ISIS targeted Brussels")

 

22 March is henceforth an iconic date in Belgian history. Bomb attacks in the departure hall of Brussels Airport and at the Maalbeek underground station near the European Parliament building killed dozens of people. I have been hundreds of times at these locations, and must count myself fortunate that I was’t there at the wrong time.

Is there a reason why Brussels was singled out for bomb attacks claimed by the Islamic State? Yes, there was, and we in Belgium felt it was only a matter of time before such a thing would happen – though the actual event still came as a shock. In fact several reasons.

Militants of the Islamic State, the self-styled Caliphate, are acutely aware of Islamic history, and that contains one reason, dim to us but very vivid to them. IS statements about the attacks identify the victims as “crusaders”, and Belgium is indeed strongly identified with the crusades. The First Crusade was led by the proto-Belgian earl Godfrey of Bouillon, who became the first King of Jerusalem in 1099; his equestrian statue adorns the highest place of Brussels, next to the Royal Palace. The Crusader elite corps of the Knights Templar had a tactical alliance with the Assassins, a Shiite militia dedicated to fighting the (Sunni) Caliphate. Today, the neo-Caliphate (IS) is continuing that thousand-year-old struggle against both Shiites and Crusaders.

The second reason is the symbolic value of Brussels as containing the headquarters of both the EU and NATO, incarnations of armed infidelism. The Caliphate is at war with these entities, and Belgium is among the Western nations bombing the Iraqi part of the Caliphate. Many Leftists have transferred their old sympathy for Cuba and Vietnam to the Islamic challengers of Western imperialism. Therefore they tend to minimize the seriousness of terrorism by alleging, not incorrectly, that even a small country like Belgium has already killed more Arab civilians (apart from Caliphate fighters) than have died in any of the terrorist attacks on Madrid, London, Paris or now Brussels. Being killed on the way to work by a sudden bomb explosion is exactly as bad in Mosul as it is in Brussels, so “Belgians shouldn’t complain”.

The third reason is the relative laxity of the Belgian authorities. Within Belgium itself, when compared to the second city, Antwerp, the administration of Brussels counts as undisciplined, chaotic and corrupt. The over-all Belgian standard is not so good either, as the security forces are badly underfunded. For decades, whenever budget cuts have been considered, the army has served as a milch-cow. Soldiers are not expected to complain, but the result is that today they are ill-equipped to deal with the terror threat.

Within the calculations of the IS strategists, the fourth reason, at least explaining why it happened now, is that it had to happen fast. Last week, Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of the cell that carried out the Paris attacks in November, was arrested in Brussels. The Belgian Government was triumphant and expected to extract important information from the terrorist. For the very same reason, IS feared that its plans for further actions would become known, so it preponed the bomb attacks that have now taken place. That explains why they targeted easily accessible places: IS showed that it could fast adapt to the constraints of the new situation and still achieve a very tangible and sensational result.

But the most controversial and politically charged, is the fifth reason. Using Brussels as a staging-ground for preparing attacks in Madrid, Paris or Brussels itself is fairly easy, because the militants can always count on a large population of sympathizers. As Ernesto Ché Guevara wrote, a guerrilla fighter is among the masses like a fish in the water. In the Muslim neighbourhoods of Brussels, there is a strong anti-System feeling, and even moderates will never betray a member of their own community. Take the case of Salah Abdeslam, whom it took four months to catch. He had not been roaming as a fugitive, but lived in hiding with an extremist family in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek. His brother, who lived nearby, had told the police he hadn’t heard of Salah and feared he was dead. Yet, he and many in the neighbourhood knew Salah’s whereabouts, but nobody spilled the beans.

The Belgian population frowned when it learned of this display of disloyalty. This form part of a long-running and far-reaching debate on immigration, ethnic relations, religious pluralism and the secular state. At any rate, in a realistic assessment, Brussels had it coming. Belgium’s Home Minister, Jan Jambon, had warned last week that the latest catch of a terrorist did not mean that the terror threat had died down. He was proven right sooner than he expected.

 

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The gentle cure for intolerance

(The following paper was summarized during the India Foundation’s India Ideas Conclave in Goa, 19-21 Dec. 2014. When it started, I felt that the topic was too heady for the audience, or at least for the intent of the organizers, so I quickly wrote a second speech comparing the Narendra Modi Government’s performance with the Hindu agenda, a logical topic for this conclave yet conspicuously missing. But the chairman of my session insisted that I speak about Islam, as this would match the other papers well. With this, he can hardly complain.)

 

 

 

This is meant to be an Ideas Conclave. It follows that I should not try to please you with diplomatic niceties or electoral platitudes. Instead, we speakers have all been invited to brainstorm about hard data and the mechanisms behind them, to think issues through and fearlessly go wherever logic takes us, and stir your intelligence with sharp and novel insights. This remains true even for such a touchy subject as religious intolerance.

Allow me to start with an anecdote. As you know, Mahatma Gandhi, whatever his faults, was a staunch Hindu. Yet, when I stayed at the Mahatma Gandhi Peace Foundation in Delhi, I sat in on a conversation in which these Gandhians were debating whether Hinduism should continue to exist at all. Some thought it could perhaps still correct itself, others wanted to cut out the cancer of Hinduism altogether. And indeed, it is considered normal to question Hinduism’s very right to exist. Hindus are perfectly used to seeing their religion belittled, accused and insulted day and night.

Therefore, it is nothing new if I apply a similar treatment to Islam. Indeed, in this paper I will argue that the answer to the question why the latest wave of “Islamist” atrocities has happened, is very simple: Islam. I will show that Islam itself is guilty. I have been given to understand that the two other speakers will advocate a different opinion on the same topic, so if you don’t like my point of view, you still have theirs to comfort you.

 

The Islamic State

Today, we get a rare show of religious intolerance in the form of the Islamic State. Even more than the Taliban, al-Qaida and Boko Haram, the new-fangled Caliphate represents our worst nightmare of Islam. Ever since TV brought its images of sensational events and acts of war into our very homes, we have not yet been treated to such explicit intolerance of a type we thought relegated to the past. While murder remains a fact of life, the formal beheading of (Yezidi and Assyrian) Infidels and of (Shiite) Heretics has become exceptional, a throw-back to the witches’ trials and religious wars of centuries ago. While exploitation remains a world problem, the actual taking of slaves to auction them off at the slave-market is eerily premodern.

To be sure, for Indians it is not such an otherworldly fantasy. Their republic was born in 1947 in massacres unleashed by the militants and supporters of the Pakistan movement, finally killing a million or so and putting many millions to flight, most of them Hindus (including Sikhs). Many of you will remember the East Bengal genocide of 1971, where officially 3 million, according to scholars at least a million, were killed, most of them Hindus. In sheer magnitude, this death toll completely dwarfs anything that the Taliban or the Islamic State have done so far.

The grim advantage that the Islamic State now enjoys, however, is the omnipresence of internet reporting, which they themselves promote with their youtube videos of beheadings and other atrocities. Uniquely in-your-face. Another sensational novelty is the official re-institution of slavery. Numerous victims of earlier rounds of violence have effectively been exploited as slaves, particularly as sex slaves (remember Pakistani General Tikka Khan in the Bangladesh war of 1971 justifying his soldiers’ rape campaign openly: “If we cannot hold East Bengal, we will make sure that the next generation of Bengalis consists of bastards”); but a formal institution of slavery, complete with slave markets and the official fixing of auction prices, that is truly a return to the premodern age. This we hadn’t seen in our lifetimes.

Countries around the world take an extraordinary interest in the onward march of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The reason is that some of their own youngsters go there as military volunteers, or in the case of girls, as volunteers to render sexual services to those warriors. Some come in the news because they have been recognized on internet videos as executioners or bystanders during beheadings; others because their death in battle is reported; yet others because they are disappointed and have managed to get back home. The authorities are very concerned with what these returning warriors might do in their homelands, or what the sympathizers who never left but who support the Islamic State might do.

 

What motivates the Islamic militants?

It is but normal that we feel an urge to do something about these atrocities committed in the name of Islam. Often our actions do not match our emotional revulsion, though. The initial talk of “bringing our girls back” in the case of the hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in early 2014 has petered out, and at this time they have not been brought back. At any rate, any thought of either remedying a condition that has just arisen, or preventing that it can happen again in the long run, raises the question: why do the mujahedin do all this?

For the mujahedin themselves, it is very simple: they do this in conformity with the commandments of Islam. If we take 11 September 2001 as a cut-off date, we have had since then hundreds of testimonial videos in which suicide-bombers and other terrorists set out the Islamic reasons for what they are about to do. When Mohammed Bouyeri killed Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, he not only added a death threat to apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali on a paper pinned in Theo’s corpse, but also explicitated that Islam made him do it. Statements by terror movements such as Boko Haram, Hamas, the Taliban and Islamic State are very explicit about their Islamic motivation. The first thing Boko Haram did when it abducted the schoolgirls, was to forcibly convert them to Islam.         

By contrast, our politicians, both Indian and Western, assure us that these atrocities have extraneous causes and are foreign to Islam. Thus, it is said that these are unemployed youngsters, often high-school drop-outs, losers in our society who see risking their lives in military operations as a shortcut to becoming important or at least someone respected. Yes, that is the route to success or at least to a meaningful life which marginalized young men have always chosen. But then why do non-Muslims not do the same thing? Why do they settle for less than becoming beheaders? And why do we also find well-to-do Muslims among the mujahedin, such as the late lamented billionaire Osama bin Laden?

No matter just how exactly the politicians and their media allies beat around the bush, about one thing they are all in agreement: it has nothing to do with Islam. Out of the dozens of big names I could quote here, let me settle for the eloquent judgment of British PM David Cameron: the Caliphate warriors are “monsters, not Muslims”. And since these warriors only want to emulate the Prophet, Cameron’s words amount to saying: “The Prophet was a monster, not a Muslim”. Mind you, I would never say such a thing (indeed, even in the secrecy of my thoughts I don’t consider Mohammed a “monster”), but Cameron comes very close to asserting just that.

Unfortunately, Cameron and many of his ilk don’t respect Muslims. Personally, I take Muslims seriously: if they say Islam made them do it, I take them at their word. But Islam-lovers like Cameron or US Secretary of State John Kerry overrule the Muslim perpetrators’ own testimony when it does not suit them. They have invested heavily in a rosy picture of Islam, and they are willing to lie and even to kill for it.

Yes, they are ready to kill Muslims in order to uphold their delusion. Indeed, John Kerry has said, justifying the armed attacks on the Caliphate, that one of the US war aims was “remedying the distortion of Islam” which he imagined the Caliphate’s orthodox Islam to be. This leads us to the paradox that Islamophiles are ready to kill Muslims in order to defend Islam.

 

What must not be done?

Several false trails are abroad, are even popular, nay, even espoused with firmness and fanaticism, which are given as solutions for religious intolerance.

The violent approach is at any rate the wrong one. Islamophile Western politicians have, between them, killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali and Syria, all while making statements calling Islam “great” and a “religion of peace”. Their only justification towards the Muslim world is that they are merely killing “monsters, not Muslims”, a lie which no sane Muslim will swallow. What the Muslim world needs, is a thaw. The present polarization, aggravated by every new Western intervention, freezes men in their beliefs and prejudices. In order to grow, they need some peace and stability. By contrast, the Western interventions in Iraq and Libya have only destabilized these countries, engendered a plethora of warring militias, and enthroned sectarian rivalries culminating in the Islamic State.

Along the same lines, many Hindus who want to get out of the Gandhian stereotype of the “meek Hindu” fall into the other extreme, throw their weight around and try to act tough: “Muslims should be taught a lesson!” While I recognize that in emergencies, physical methods may be necessary (the Army’s defence of Kashmir, the police’s re-empowerment in the no-go areas that have come up in places like Mewat or Moradabad, the organized Hindu self-defence against the rise of Muslim aggression in West Bengal), they will not go very far and will soon land into abuses if they are not informed by a more fundamental doctrinal strategy. So, my focus is to inform an elite capable of understanding Islam as an ideological problem, essentially as a mistake, and then let these insights percolate to the masses.

We have no reason to go down the violent path. We make a clear distinction between Islam as an ideology and Muslims as human beings. They are its captives, its abductees, but of course they are people like the rest of us. (This distinction is always and insistently blurred by the Islamophiles who, no matter how thoroughly you refute their allegations, go on claiming that Islam criticism amounts to “spreading hatred against 2 billion Muslims”.)  Among your friends there are nice Muslims? Well of course there are, the indoctrination in Islam sits lightly on numerous nominal Muslims, who remain human beings after all, and only after that, succumb in various degrees to the doctrine in which they have been raised. Their goodness is part of their general human heritage and says nothing about Islam.

In physicist Steven Weinberg’s words, “good people will do good and evil people will do evil; but for good men to do evil – that takes religion”. Or in other words, religion is like alcohol: some drunken drivers reach home safely anyway, some teetotallers still manage to be a danger on the road, but for most people, alcohol will affect their driving negatively. In the case of Islam, more followers than in other doctrines are swayed by it into acts of fanaticism against others.

 

Sameness

An intellectual approach which appeals to post-religious atheists and secularists is the line that “all religions are the same”, that they all equally lead to fanaticism and terrorism. This is obviously untrue, and I am confident that I won’t be contradicted by the numerous victims of Jain terrorism. Nothing in other religions compares with the wave of Islamic violence that currently affects dozens of countries.

Note also the potential for religions to develop, e.g. Christianity gradually renounced its practice of violent persecution and of slavery, which it voluntarily abolished after having imbibed the spirit of the Enlightenment. Or consider Hinduism, which in its early history developed the institution of caste, and more recently has started eliminating caste. But such evolutions are more difficult in the case of a religion closely bound up with a law system deemed to be valid until Judgment Day, as Islam defines its Shari’a. Thus, the Islamic world has never abolished slavery but was forced to do so by an outside world that had outgrown it. (The antics of the Islamic State show how this abolition has been but skin-deep.)

The converse approach is the idea that all religions are good, and true, and noble. And yes, even Islam, a very late composite of elements from existing religions plus a few personal innovations by the Prophet, has to contain worthwhile points. But the fact that no religion equals zero, doesn’t imply that they all evenly equal one. There may be equality before the law between human beings, but there is no conceptual equality between doctrines, nor spiritual equality between paths. Just as in science one theory may be plainly wrong while another one fits all the available facts, one religion may be a false trail while another, though still imperfect, may essentially be right.

In particular, the second of the two points of the Islamic creed, that Mohammed was the messenger of God, is demonstrably untrue. Most religions don’t think of themselves as true or not: truth is for philosophy and scholarship, religion is about devotion and surrender. Yet Islam insists on being the true religion, while others are false. Alright then, let us judge Islam in terms of truth and falsehood. There is nothing in Mohammed’s collection of messages, the Qur’ân, that couldn’t have been said by a 7^th-century Arab businessman, including clumsy superstitions typical of the childhood of mankind. Some parts may be OK as literature, but there is nothing divine about it. If we keep this in mind, we have made a great stride out of the confusion arising as soon as the word Islam is uttered. 

 

What is to be done?

In the case of the Islamic State’s attraction of youngsters, even from India, authorities the world over wonder how to deal with it. We should not combat the consequences, viz. the youngsters’ involvement in jihad, but the cause of this involvement, their prime motivator, Islam itself. In every generation, some youngsters will not settle for a syrupy version of their chosen ideology but insist on the radical version. That radicalism is a normal phenomenon and need not be punished, unless they have committed war crimes, and in that case, they can be punished under existing laws.

The current crisis situation only highlights the more general problem how to undo the impact of Islam on its followers. But followers of Islam as such must not be punished either, nor persecuted or discriminated against. This is useless and counterproductive, as the survival of repressed religions under Communist regimes should teach us, and it just goes against what we stand for. Freedom of religion should of course also count for Muslims, let there be no doubt or lack of clarity about that.

But I do propose that Islam should be phased out, as should any delusionary belief. The violent aspects of Islam make this need more pressing, but ultimately it is of wider application. Indeed, I will draw upon my own experience as an apostate from Catholic Christianity. I am but a representative of a whole generation that turned Western Europe from predominantly Christian to predominantly secular. Changes of religion do happen, even on a collective and continent-wide scale. There is no reason why they could not happen in the Muslim world.

About the homecoming of Muslims from their exile, their thraldom to Islam, my thoughts are admittedly incomplete, and I am only making a beginning here. If all the secularists in India had not wasted the past decades with defending religions (except for Hinduism), but instead started deconstructing their favourite religions, we would have been a lot closer to a solution. But the guilt and at the same time the ridiculousness of the Indian secularist scene are topics for another occasion. Fact is, some work remains to be done, and I welcome input from others. Here, however, are a few stray ideas that may be helpful.

 

Ideas on apostasy from Islam

·         The first thing to do is that we ourselves are clear about the nature of the Islam problem. Before we can even think of telling the Muslims how we view Islam, we ought to understand it for and amongst ourselves. Just a few days ago, I saw a TV debate in which a BJP spokesmen called the Caliphate warriors “heretics”, implying that they do not represent the true Islam. Sometimes this can be excused as an electoral gimmick or a diplomatic platitude, to be expected among politicians. But I know from experience that most Hindus are serious about such pseudo-expert notions. As a wise Hindu told me, “the typical Hindu always thinks he knows everything about everything”, and so he will pretend to tell Muslims what “real Islam” is. In this case, he will tell the accomplished Islamic theologians behind the jihad movements that they have it all wrong and that these are “heretics”. On the contrary, all that the Islamic State makes headlines with, has been done by the Prophet himself, who started wars of conquest, took hostages, ordered rape, took and sold slaves, had his critics murdered or formally executed, and discriminated between Muslims, other monotheists and real Pagans. Everything the Caliphate does, can be justified if brought before an Islamic Court, unless the judges are willing to state that Mohammed’s behaviour was un-Islamic and illegitimate. You cannot find a single Islamic Court, Mosque or Madrassa where it is held that “Mohammed was wrong”. The typical Hindu attitude to Islam is “under-informed but over-opinionated” wishful thinking. So we will have to convince them and other non-Muslims about the true nature of the Islam problem first.

·         Telling Muslims what we think of Islam is intellectually quite alright, but humanly we have to keep in mind that it is delicate to offend people’s cherished convictions. It should only be done, as it were, in self-defence. There is no need to “attack” Muslims with your opinions, it is only when they themselves give you as valid their own (or at least, Islam’s) opinions, that you may counter them. Only when they take the initiative to call your religion false, should you respond by questioning their own. This is but a matter of politeness and sensitivity, but also a premise of the eternal dharma: speak gently, and only confront others with a harsh truth when they ask for it.

·         When we approach the Muslim community, let us keep in mind how Christianity imploded in Europe. Since the 18^th century, an elite of freethinkers left the Church but had little influence among the masses. After the Industrial Revolution, a large part of the working class also left the Church. But the real breakthrough took place around 1970, a generation after World War 2, when education was democratized and nobody who had gone to school could take the defining dogmas of Christianity (hereditary sin as the cause of mortality, Jesus as sole incarnation of God, virgin birth of Jesus, salvation from sin and mortality through Jesus’ death and resurrection) seriously anymore. It was no longer cool to be Christian, the defining beliefs were ridiculed. As soon as enough people had left the Church, the force of conformism, of doing like the others, which had so far retained people inside the Church, now started working inversely. Those with little conviction, who had only gone because of the neighbours, now stayed away because of the neighbours. So now only a marginal percentage goes to church. This is what will have to be achieved regarding Islam.

·         The magnitude of the task should not be underestimated. Thus, the comparison with European Christianity’s implosion is valid but with the nuance that in Europe, the change in worldview was facilitated by the high degree of individualism, which was both intrinsic to the culture and reaching a new high in the post-WW2 welfare states. In Islamic society, family and community ties tend to be stronger, and they in turn tend to stabilize religious identity. Another reassuring argument among non-Muslims is that the oil wealth is finite, so that the financing of Islam worldwide by the Arab monarchies is bound to come to an end. Arabs oil sheikhs know this too, and they prepare to switch to providing solar power to cold and cloudy Europe from the Arab desert. Other scenarios may develop, and we cannot count on an implosion of Islamic finances to solve the problem for us. People like to believe anything that implies we do not have to actually do anything, but often wrongly.

·         In the case of Christianity, it is the young who have convinced the old. Numerous are the families I know, where the first one to stay away was a rebellious son. Then other youngsters rebelled, and finally their parents followed suit. Aged people who once were devout Christians, and who –- you would think -– would take consolation from their faith in their declining years, openly confide: “Oh, how they fooled us in our youth!” Similarly, we have to focus on the young Muslims, whose self-liberation from Islam will then start taking along most of the older people. As for the older ones who stick to their childhood beliefs: we will just tolerate that, as we always have, because it is impossible and undesirable to pressurize them out of their beliefs. Thoughts are free, opinions are perfectly permitted, so if people insist on believing that the voice Mohammed heard carried a message from God, well, let them. But such a belief should not be promoted. We should finally get serious about India’s Constitutional provision that requires the promotion of the scientific temper. If we expose the Muslim youth to the scientific way of thinking, they will become sceptical of the defining dogmas of Islam.

·         While in Europe, many people have left religion altogether, it will be said that Indians are a religious nation, and that the only alternative to Islam is another religion. Indeed, even in Europe, many ex-Christians dabble in various alternative religions, including elements of Hindu-Buddhism. Well, in the case of India, you already have every possible alternative in place. For Indian Muslims, the alternative religion is all around them. For most people, the Ghar-wâpasî (“homecoming”), the return to their ancestral religion, will do. Moreover, it allows for the introduction of positive ideas and attitudes: far more than a critique of negatives, these will convince Muslims that there is a better world outside Islam.

·         Now, more concretely, expose youngsters in their education and via the general culture to the demythologizing information about Islam. This can be done not so much by the media which Westerners use, such as Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum or Robert Spencer’s Jihadwatch, but the forums of ex-Muslims like faithfreedom.org by Ali Sina (pseudonym of a Canadian Iranian) or islam-watch.org by Ibn Warraq (pseudonym of a British Pakistani), or work by Anwar Sheikh, Taslima Nasrin, Afshin Ellian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other ex-Muslims. Respond positively to the demand of Muslim youngsters to pay more attention in schools to Muslim thinkers, but then tell them the whole story rather than the streamlined hagiography, e.g. the racist judgment by Ibn Khaldun on Blacks, or the account by the Moroccan globe-trotter Ibn Battuta of slavery in the Delhi Sultanate, or the motto of the Algerian Berber singer Lounès Matoub (murdered in 1998 by jihadis): Ni Arabe ni Musulman , “neither Arab nor Muslim”. There is nothing intrinsically Islamic in our Muslims, nothing they cannot outgrow.

·         Muslims will ultimately have to do it themselves, they will outgrow their Islam in a natural process. But this process should not be hampered by any artificial hurdles we put in its way. Let us at least not give Islam the extra advantages that it now enjoys to prolong its existence.

(More controversial statements came about only during question time. My response there, and to some objections uttered afterwards, will be presented in a forthcoming contribution.)

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