Recent articles in the Huffington Post have argued that Muslim students are dodging issues of ‘campus radicalisation’, because Muslim speakers of various affiliations have been invited to speak on campus. As a member of – Hizb ut-Tahrir [The Liberation Party] – who has been invited to participate in numerous debates and events at universities, I such arguments as a clear admission of defeat. Rather than engaging Muslim speakers and students in direct debate, time and again we have seen liberal activists put their efforts into getting talks cancelled and speakers barred.

Last week on Thursday 17th February, I was due to speak at a debate on the financial crisis, however the event was called off by the University of Westminster, who cited the “threat of violence” breaking out due to actions by secular activists, and an inability to protect the speakers and attendees.

If these are the types of tactics that liberal fundamentalists resort to in British universities today, then it’s a poor look out for intellectual discourse on campus – resembling the tactics of fascists who cannot win their case through argument; and who cannot find a legal basis to criminalise the arguments being propagated.
In February 2010 the University of Westminster also decided to cancel a discussion on the “Swiss Minaret Ban” which I had been invited to speak on. On this occasion the other speaker was a respected academic and head of the Swiss think-tank ReligioScope – Jean-Francois Mayer.

Dr Mayer, who had traveled from Switzerland specifically for the event, was surprised that a University would take such steps. Fortunately, an alternative venue was found and the event proceeded successfully, although many Westminster students who planned to attend could not because of the short notice.

The above and this weeks cancelled debate are merely some of those that I personally have been involved in, there are numerous others, sadly too frequent to list here. Ironically the Universities’ Academic freedom working group published guidance notes in February of 2011 which were supposed to outline how universities would minimise their interference student events, in line with their legal responsibilities under the Education Act (1986).

Due to the previous cancellations and interference in past debates, the student society which invited me were scrupulous in following all of the University’s administrative policies. I was given the go ahead to speak, and like the other participants signed the speakers’ guideline document.

Similarly any five minute conversation with the Metropolitan Police could easily confirm that there has never been violence at any of the hundreds of lectures, debates, vigils or peaceful protests organized by, or involving speakers of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the UK over the past 25 years.
It seems ridiculous that a serious debate on a key global topic was cancelled due to a tiny handful of disgruntled secular activists (hardly on the scale of the student demonstrations over university fees).

The title of the debate: Economic Future: The Real Solutions? Capitalism? Islam? Socialism? – indicated that a spectrum of views would be represented on the panel, in order to examine relevant alternatives.
It is not unusual that I was asked to speak since I have just edited a booklet on the Gold Standard as well as edited another three years ago on the global financial crisis. I have also debated with Norman Lamont, Matt Frei, representative of the World Bank and others on issues pertaining to Islam and economics.

In a world in which Western economies have stalled, unemployment is growing, discontent spreading, and bankers still protected and seemingly above the law; surely opportunities to debate the various options open to governments, policy makers and the public must be pursued vigorously? Yet the University of Westminster chose to close its doors. Why?

The only rational explanation for the canceling of this type of event lies with the growing liberal intolerance of alternative thought. Rather than participate and defeat opposing ideas, UK universities are under increasing government pressure to silence Islamic political and economic thought, particularly with interest in real change in the Middle East high on everyone’s agenda.

This is a stance shared by the FBI, who it was recently reported, have decided advocacy of a Gold Standard currency is a criteria for ‘extremism’. So by their standards this would indeed have been campus radicalization, as would have organizing a speech on the same subject by Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul or Lord Rees-Mogg!

Rather than risk losing the game it seems liberal fundamentalists and spineless university administrators have decided to take the ball away. The longer they persist in such tactics, the more they will be ridiculed for their protestations of cherishing freedom for all.

Jamal Harwood is a regular contributor to New Civilisation.  He is a lecturer in Finance, and a member of the UK Executive Committee of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain.

“…the UN emerged chiefly as a result of an agreement among the great powers led at that time by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. They concluded that the founding of a world organization was in the interests of their respective states. One should ask why they concluded this and then set those reasons alongside the idealism.”– Mark Mazower

The recent double veto by Russia and China against the UN resolution calling for Assad’s removal has attracted much international criticism and has again exposed the role of the UN as a colonial tool for helping major powers to protect their interests in the Muslim world. The latest tussle at the UN is in many ways, a re-run of the Iraq vote in 2003 and demonstrates vividly the division of major powers on safeguarding their material interests in Syria.  Back then, Russia and France vetoed Anglo-American efforts to seek international legitimacy for their invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam’s regime.

This time, China and Russia have joined forces to secure their strategic interests through the prolongation of Assad’s regime, while America, France and Britain are vehemently opposed. Both camps are exploiting ‘humanitarian’ language to conceal their ulterior motives and justify their respective positions at the UN.  However, the saddest aspect to this continuing saga is the unstinting support offered to the undemocratic UN by the rulers of the Muslim world. Somehow these rulers believe that by seeking UN legitimacy and by beseeching major powers, the problems of the Muslim Ummah (nation) can be resolved. Yet, history teaches us the exact opposite.

Since the birth of the UN in 1945, it has been used by the great powers to cement their hegemony all over the world. No people have suffered more at the hands of the UN than the Muslim Ummah.  The West have used the UN to divide the Muslim lands such as the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan, dismemberment of Bosnia and the separation of East Timor from Indonesia. Furthermore, the UN is used by the America to plunge a dagger deep into the heart of the Ummah by creating Israel in 1948, and supporting its existence by issuing 58 vetoes since 1972.

On the behest of Western powers, the UN has played a pivotal role in isolating Muslims from each other. In the 1990s severe sanctions were imposed against Iraq, Sudan, Iran and Afghanistan. These sanctions led to the death of millions of Muslims. When asked on 60minutes about the death of half a million Iraqi children. The US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said,” I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.” Furthermore, the West used the UN to justify the invasion of Somalia, and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Other major powers possess a notorious record of killing Muslims by making a mockery of the UN. The UN has done little to stop the killing fields of Chechnya, or the indiscriminate massacre of Muslims in East Turkmenistan (Xinjiang province in China). Both Russia and China have repeatedly prevented the UN from investigating such atrocities.

Given the UN’s criminal record against the Muslim world, its hostile efforts to suppress Muslim unity and its inability to restrain American hegemony, it is unimaginable why the rulers of the Muslim world blindly submit to the UN and hold it in such great esteem. Any sane ruler with a modicum of common sense should have realised by now that severing ties with the UN would give them a better chance of fighting imperialism and protecting the honour of the Muslim Ummah.

Today, the bitter irony is that while the rulers of the Muslim world pledge their loyalty to the UN, major powers realise UN’s limitations and still pursue their nefarious agenda to subdue the global Islamic revival. In the case of Syria – America and Britain (just as they did in 2003 in Iraq) are exploring alternative means of bringing down Assad’s regime. They have solicited the support of Qatar and Turkey to protect their interests in Syria.

The only source of protection from the aggression of major powers and their instrument of international tyranny— the UN—is in the emergence of a powerful Islamic State. In actual fact, it was the Ottoman Caliphate’s march towards Europe that spurred European nations to conclude the Treaty of Westphalia and international law was born. The Ottoman Caliphate stood firm against international law with such resoluteness, that for many years it was able to demand warring countries to sign up to peace treaties on its terms and without surrendering the Ummah’s resources, or compromising Islamic values.

Abid Mustafa is a political commentator who specializes on Muslim affairs and global issues

The case of Hamza Kashgari is one that I think most people in the West simply don’t understand.

Even those who are not hostile to Islam find it hard to reconcile European notions of free speech – established after many battles with the religious establishment – with cases like this one, where a Saudi writer and poet has been extradited from Malaysia at the request of the Saudi regime after being accused of insulting the Blessed Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him.

Kashgari appears to have posted the disparaging and offensive remarks on Twitter in a month when Muslims around the world remember his birth.

Thankfully, it’s been reported that Kashgari has retracted them, removed them from the web and apologized for making them, all of which ought mark the end of the matter.

Yet there has been much focus on the remarks of the Saudi ‘king’ calling for his arrest and that he was even extradited by Malaysia to face a possible death sentence. It’s been said that Abdullah al Saud has simply used this case for political reasons, and the outrage he has expressed is little more than hypocrisy by the regime.

It’s a pretty safe allegation to make, given that hypocrisy in this regime is more abundant than oil and sunlight in the ‘kingdom’ they dominate. Other than the fact that the regime doesn’t govern, run its economy or foreign relations according to the standards of God and His Messenger, it is infamous for its ill treatment of pilgrims who spend their life’s savings to visit the Prophet’s mosque out of heartfelt love. The accusation of playing politics may also be true, since the regime has been very concerned about growing disquiet, both from a younger generation and from its Shia community. It’s argued that by arresting Kashgari, Abdullah ibn Saud can send a strong signal to dissident voices.

Yet, this affair does draw a sharp distinction between Islamic standards and secular liberal standards – and it is important not to gloss over this aspect, for various reasons I will discuss.

Islam is a belief system that has encouraged accounting political authority since its earliest days. Even the Prophet faced questions and scrutiny by the people he ruled over. His closest companions, who succeeded him in political authority as Caliphs, faced (sometimes harsh) questioning by citizens in the state – men and women, Muslim and non-Muslim. The accounting of authority is considered not so much a right but a duty in Islam. The questioning of scholars is a norm – since there is no priesthood in Islam. Moreover, Islam – in its so-called golden age encouraged intellectual inquiry, debate and scrutiny.

So how is it, secular commentators may ask, that an insult to the Prophet can be a capital offence.

Yet it is important for people to know that this response is not some fringe or aberrant opinion. According to any orthodox reading of Islam, in an Islamic state (for the record, the Saudi ‘kingdom’ lacks legitimacy as an Islamic state) someone proven to have insulted the blessed Prophet and who did not retract what they said would indeed be punished by execution.

In his beautiful book about the status of the Prophet of Islam, known as ‘Al Shifa’, (the full title translates as ‘Healing by recognition of the Rights of al-Mustafa), Qadi Ayyad ibn Musa (1083-1149) – an Islamic scholar and judge from Granada in Andalusia, Spain – not only addresses characteristics of the Prophet – but also mentions the verdict on those who disparage him in any way.

One may certainly criticise the cynical false allegations of blasphemy in places like Pakistan that we may have come across. Or we can criticise vigilantism, where emotional people might act as judge and executioner without the legal authority to do so – for the rule of law in Islam is extremely important. Indeed, the Prophet explicitly said “Nobody has the right vested in him to establish anything from the Hudood without the Sultan (authority of the State).” [Baihaqi]

So the magnitude of the sin of any insult to the Prophet is without question; and the prescribed punishment from the judicial authority (if proven and the person did not retract and repent) is well established in Islamic law.

So why discuss it.

Firstly, a frank explanation of Islamic values gives a more honest engagement between Muslims and non-Muslims, which is important at a time when some Muslims may feel uncomfortable about responding to these issues for fear of being labelled ‘extremist’. There is, amongst some Muslim commentators, a desire to speak out positively for the Prophet but a reluctance to discuss capital punishment in liberal societies, fearing a backlash on these issues [which rather illustrates how liberal societies can be as supremacist as they sometimes accuse others of being].

Secondly, for a Muslim hearing the orthodox Islamic view on this issue, it is a sobering reminder of the magnitude of the offence according to Islam. Even if we don’t live in a land where there is an Islamic legal authority to try and punish anyone found guilty of the offence, being reminded of the standard laid down for centuries steers us away from the kind of flippant manner of addressing the Prophet’s of Allah that has become so common in secular Europe. Indeed, the Kashgari case shows how secular values, globalised via satellite and internet, have had an affect on individuals in the Muslim world; all the more likely because states like the Saudi state are intellectually arid from an Islamic perspective and tend to deal with people by discipline and not with stronger arguments, when individuals mimic a western discourse.

Thirdly, secularists love to use such issues to twist or erase any Islamic law or value that contradicts secular liberal norms that dominate the world today. Such attempts have been made before, and will be made again, but should not go unchallenged, and the traditional Islamic standard should be presented – and indeed Islamic values as regards respect for the Prophets should be championed.

If people understood the Islamic framework on the limits of speech (and every society and value system has a limit), they might see that it addresses something that secular Europe has lost; and which some people mourn the loss of.

When Western Europe developed its attitudes to ‘free speech’ in response to the hegemony of the Catholic Church, arguments about theology were seen as a challenge to political authority, so defiance of the papal authority became integral to people speaking their mind; and people fought for a right to question beliefs.

But, what started in this way went far beyond what was first envisaged. Over several decades challenging papal authority shifted to denigration of God and His messengers; and eventually to a situation where to insult others is a badge of pride. Humour is built around it; politicians thrive on it; and yet others will argue that disrespect has grown in society – and antisocial behaviour along with it. People in Europe respect the Prophet Esa [Jesus] as the source of their moral viewpoint and legal system on many issues (even if they don’t think of him as a prophet) – but they don’t think twice about ridiculing, parodying and mocking his name and cannot see how it undervalues that morality and legal system that has underpinned social relationships for centuries.

The Islamic Shari’ah welcomes intellectual inquiry and debate, and political accountability. It allows humour, art and cultural expression. But it draws a red line at the sanctity of God and His messengers – all of them, not just the Prophet Muhammad .

Muslims ought to celebrate that a red line separates the legal and moral standard for society, the Lawgiver and His messengers – from those who execute those legal and morals – the citizens and their rulers.

Dr. Abdul Wahid is a regular contributor to New Civilisation. He is currently the Chairman of the UK-Executive Committee of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain. He has been published in The Times Higher Educational Supplement and on the websites of Foreign Affairs, Open Democracy and Prospect magazine. He can be followed on Twitter @abdulwahidht or emailed at abdulwahid@newcivilisation.com 

But Santorum also won in Colorado (Romney won in 2008) and Missouri , riding a wave of distrust of Mitt’s conservative credentials and showing Romney’s one-percenter Achilles heel. Romney’s win in Maine last week was Pyrrhic, as there were no delegates, and he just edged out maverick Ron Paul. Romney and Santorum have each won four states, while Newt Gingrich has won only a measly South Carolina.

Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator and favourite of evangelicals despite his papism, has hammered the former Massachusetts governor as being too moderate to satisfy conservative Republicans who distrust him on social issues such as abortion and gay rights which he has condoned in the past. Rick told CNN that the wealthy Mitt, a former venture capitalist, “had a great career in the private sector, but we’re not running for CEO of the country. We’re running for someone who can lead the country.” Romney was not the best candidate to take on Obama, who is “oppressing and taking away our freedoms, our political freedoms”.

Santorum smacks of populism, the little guy’s candidate, thumbing his nose at the rich and (horror of horror) capitalism itself. Hey, which party is this guy in? Never fear. Santorum is just making noises. He intends to gut social security, is a fan of deregulation and torture, and a hawk on Iran: “Islamic fascism rooted in Iran is behind much of the world’s conflict,” and “effective action against Iran” would require America’s fighting “for a strong Lebanon (what?), a strong Israel, and a strong Iraq”. Mind you that was in 2006 and he was opposed to actually attacking Iran, so this newspeak may indicate … nothing at all.

The bitter disillusionment of progressives in the past four years, under the absolute best the Democrats can come up with, once again confirms that there is no real difference anymore between the Republicrats. This is because left and right have been banished from the political dictionary, replaced by what has been called the “radical centre”. This oxymoron has been explored in many (mind-numbing) treatises to describe the post-Soviet era political playing field.

This latest Great Game features a unipolar empire asserting its financial and military hegemony on a newly “flattened” playing field (as coined by Thomas Friedman to evoke the joys of globalisation). The empire’s team captain is no longer a left wing or right wing, but an “extreme centre”, a term which entered the US/UK political lexicon with Ross Perot’s Reform Party in the 1990s. These extreme centrists claim to be drawing on the best of both sides in a “post-liberal, post-conservative, post-socialist world”. UK Liberal Democrat leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg wears the label proudly: “For the left, an obsession with the state. For the right, a worship of the market. But as liberals, we place our faith in people. Our politics is the politics of the radical centre.”

So socialism is apparently not concerned with people, who are advised to put their faith in “liberals”/ radical centrists/ extreme fullbacks/ whatever. This bandying about and repackaging of ideological catchwords is the bane of our “postmodern” world, where there are no longer any truths, only interpretations. What we are left with are the Santorums on the “right” and the Obamas on the “left” fighting over divisive social issues, such as gay marriage, abortion, anti-piracy copyright laws, and just how minimal should be state support for health and education, where no candidate (except the court jester Paul) is allowed to question the fundamentals of the system.

And what is this playing field really? Karl Polyani in the 1950s clearly saw that capitalism, by turning labour, land and money itself into commodities, was creating a soulless system which would need strong state control to prevent its inhuman nature from destroying the world. This advice was irretrievably lost over the past two decades with the fusion of left and right in the oxymoronic “extreme centre”, extreme in its implicit embrace of neoliberalism (which has very little to do with Clegg’s idol John Stuart Mills), where traditional solutions such as socialism or paternalistic conservatism are excluded.

Foreign (read: military) policy is also excluded, as the empire requires strict obedience by both its postmodern NATO halfbacks and its neocolonial goalkeepers, so that its market authoritarian team wins. The game has proved to be lethal for all concerned, with a change of strategy no longer possible via the electoral process, now the plaything of the so-called radical centre. According to Tariq Ali, democracy “is being hollowed out” in the West under neoliberalism, which is hostile to “even social democratic parties”.

Whether the Obamas and Santorums, both supporters of the spectacularly failing tactics of Team Empire, are “deeply” bad to begin with or merely corrupted by the lure of power and money is moot. They are blinkered by cheerleader Thatcher’s “TINA!” (There Is No Alternative). She meant “no alternative to capitalism” – bad enough – but to make matters worse, AIPAC et al have made sure that “and Israel” was added to the equation, making the enemy teams all those who protest the rigged game in the Middle East.

The Republican strategy to attack a Teflon Obama (besides gay/abortion charges) has been to suggest, as did Romney after New Hampshire, that Obama doesn’t believe in American greatness, and that of course Mitt et al do. That cheerleading is as close as a US politician gets to foreign policy these days. But that has been the tired Republican cheer since Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter.

Wiley and politically very correct Obama has both begun the withdrawal from the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, and covered his flank by bumping off Osama Bin Laden and quite a few other “enemies”. Given the radical agreement among Republicrats on the essentials of empire strategy both at home and abroad, there is almost no scenario over the next six months where a Republican can trump this. The chauvinistic cheers fall on deaf ears.

Paul and to a lesser extent Santorum are better positioned to go for Obama’s one usable weak spot — his role as the big business/ banker darling. As Paul will never get the nomination, we can only hope that Santorum does and that Paul runs as an independent, making the 2012 presidential elections mildly interesting. But Obama is again trying to outflank Santorum, this week calling for a tax raise on the rich. Way to go, Team Empire.

The perennial Ralph Nader’s voice-in-the-Democratic-wilderness alone points to the only way out of the crisis: “If you agree that your Republican counterparts in Congress are the most craven, corporatist, fact-denying, falsifying, anti-99 per cent, militaristic Republicans in the party’s history, then why are you not landsliding them?” Well, it should be obvious by now, Ralph.

Sadly, following the US primaries, we can only conclude they have very little value for Egyptians now reconstructing their political system after a century and a half of colonialism. Hence, the startling events of the past few weeks in Cairo: even as the army, parliament and revolutionaries all attack each other as traitors, they all support the arrests of National Endowment for Democracy funded “activists”, in the first place, the Independent Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House.

In a recent Gallup poll, 74 per cent of Egyptians called for an end to all foreign financing of NGOs and 71 per cent called for an end to all US aid. In a front-page caricature in Al-Akhbar, a seedy Uncle Sam points a Foreign Aid pistol to a confident young Egyptian who calls to his Dignity cannon, “Let’s defend ourselves.” Apparently Egyptians have had enough of US political coaching.

Canadian Eric Walberg is known worldwide as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia. A graduate of University of Toronto and Cambridge in economics, he has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s. He has lived in both the Soviet Union and Russia, and then Uzbekistan, as a UN adviser, writer, translator and lecturer. Presently a writer for the foremost Cairo newspaper, Al Ahram, he is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Global Research, and Al-Jazeerah. His articles appear in Russian, German, Spanish and Arabic and are accessible at his website ericwalberg.com. His Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games  is available at http://claritypress.com/Walberg.html or through Amazon.

It will not be long before Bashar al-Assad will sit naked and battered, haemorrhaging to death on the curb of history like other uninhibited despots before him. As his regime hurtles chaotically out of control amidst an ever-reddening blur of desperate savagery, allies are solemnly administering Last Rites, predators and victims are circling for a feast they have long yearned for, and the many lies, secrets and bones buried in the family mausoleum are finally about to be dug up.

Amongst the secrets is one already mentioned in popular circles by the late singer, Ibrahim Qashoush. A few months ago, Qashoush stood on a platform in central Hama and sung in support of the uprising like he usually did. However, one of his lines was a late addition: ‘O Maher [Al-Assad, the brother of Bashar] you are a coward; an agent of the Americans’. Though apparently inconsequential, a few days later Qashoush was found dead with his throat slit open.

Such secrets pertaining to the agency of the Assad family are already obvious to those who know the regime most intimately. The minoritarian Assad regime has long deployed and exploited fraudulent notions of pan-Arabism and political resistance only to mandate its existence. For beyond the popular sloganeering, the Assad regime is deeply intimate and at ease with its alleged enemies.

The Assads’ blatant historical cooperation with the United States of America on key strategic issues and latent agreement with Israel are easily demonstrated. And these forty years of treachery to the ‘Arab and Palestinian cause’, supposedly the cause de celebre of Damascus, have left visible remnants in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and, of course, Syria that are visible to all.

Case One: Israeli-Syrian Peace Negotiations and Mutual Confidence

The Golan Heights, a plateau of great strategic importance at about a fifth the size of Lebanon, has been occupied by Israel right throughout the tenures of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian military, however, has not engaged the Israeli Defence Forces in an attempt to liberate its own occupied territory since 1973. Instead, an agreement in 1974, signed by the government of Hafez al-Assad, has allowed Israel to extend a de facto annexation over the Golan Heights with no challenge.

Furthermore, Hafez Al-Assad had even promised Benyamin Netanyahu to give up parts of Syrian territory to Israel in a prospective peace deal. Far from ‘liberating Palestine from the river to the sea’, as Al-Assad once claimed he’d do, he offered to give up the Hermon to Israel so that the Jewish state might keep an eye on its eastern border. Netanyahu, in statements documented by Israel’s leading paper Yedioth Ahronoth, says: “He gave me the Hermon. I must say that I was surprised, but he gave me the Hermon and I was pleased.”

Such concessions, which contradict the apparent commitment to ‘liberating Palestine’ and instead seek to achieve peace and recognise Israel, are a historical forte of the Assad regime. The 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, which the Syrian government participated in and followed up with direct talks with Israel right throughout the 90’s, was a precursor to flirtation and talks between the two parties the following decade.

Between September 2004 and July 2006, the Syrian and Israeli representatives reached a ‘formulation for peace’ through secret talks. The Assad regime was willing to sacrifice Hamas, its alleged ally, in an attempt to appease Israel in the agreement. These negotiations continued unhindered under Turkish mediation between 2008 and 2010, despite Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2009 that led to the death of more than a thousand civilians in Gaza.

This willingness on the part of the Assads to make peace with Israel, normalise relations with it and recognise its existence paints an image contrary to the popular rhetoric of the Syrian regime. And it is for this very reason that Israel’s leading security and political officials have expressed great concern at the thought of the Assad regime collapsing.

For example, Amos Gilad, the Director of Political-Military Affairs at the Israel Ministry of Defense, stated that the removal of Assad would be a ‘devastating crisis fοr Israel.’ Similarly, Israel’s prominent daily newspaper, Ha’aretz, ran an editorial immediately after the start of the Syrian uprising declaring Assad to be ‘Israel’s favourite dictator of all’ and that ‘it seems Assad has wall-to-wall support here, as though he were king of Israel’.

Such sentiments have also been expressed by the Syrian regime itself. Rami Makhlouf, President Bashar al-Assad’s cousin and one of his confidants, waved the stability card at Israel during his May interview with the New York Times when he stated: “If there is no stability here, there’s no way there will be stability in Israel.” As such, only through the survival of the Assad regime can Israel maintain its stability and security, creating a relationship in diametric contradiction to the grand claims of the Syrian regime and its supporters.

Case Two: The Gulf War and Syria’s Cooperation with the United States

During the 1991 Gulf War, the Assad regime chose to actively support the US-led campaign that resulted in the death of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Despite the fact that Saddam Hussein was fighting a coalition led by the West and lobbing scud missiles at Israel, Hafez al-Assad still opted to side with the United States of America and send in troops to support the campaign. Singlehandedly, such should have been sufficient to nullify the regime’s pan-Arab and resistance credentials forever.

Furthermore, the Syrian regime cooperated with the United States of America in Lebanon. President Bush Senior and subsequent presidents entrusted the Syrian regime with controlling and occupying Lebanon for fifteen years following the Taef Accord to end the Lebanese Civil War. The security agencies of both countries also cooperated extensively during the war in subduing Palestinian resistance groups and arming militias loyal to their mutual strategic interests.

This cooperation between the US and Syria also extends to intelligence, the most notable recent case being that of Maher Arar, who was transferred between Syrian and American hands under the charge of being a member of Al-Qaeda. Ironically, this process took place during the tenure of George Bush, who allegedly designated Syria as part of the ‘Axis of Evil’, and had supposedly cut off relations with Damascus after the assassination of Rafiq Al-Hariri in Lebanon in 2005.

Such cases demonstrate a heightened level of confidence and trust between Washington and an autocrat who has demonstratively and apparently done nothing but denounce the United States of America. Of course, the real relationship between the Assads and American administrations of the past four decades was beyond strong; one manifestation of which is in the confidence between Bashar al-Assad and John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an ardent pro-Israel senator.

Kerry, Congress’s point man on engaging the Syrian regime, met Assad six times in two years and called him, along with Hillary Clinton, a reformer even after the violent crackdown in March of 2011. Assad even found a confidant in Kerry according to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal recounts how‘Kerry described how the Syrian leader bemoaned the growing conservatism in Syria’ and the fact that Assad’s wife ‘had to wear a head-scarf when visiting Damascus’s historic Umayyad mosque’.

Assad’s strong relationship with American senators, House representatives and diplomats is further demonstrated in cables released by Wikileaks. In a meeting in March of 2009, just five weeks after the end of the Gaza War, Assad met American diplomats and denounced Hamas as ‘uninvited guests’ akin to the Muslim Brotherhood his father massacred in 1982. And in contrast to such enmity towards resistance forces, Assad emphasised that he ‘saw two key common interests between Syria and the US: peace in the region and combating terrorism’ and that the two administrations ‘shared a common interest on 70 percent of the issues at hand’.

Case Three: A Bloody Contribution to the Palestinian Cause

One of the great ironies of the Syrian regime’s history is that its mechanised divisions have murdered Palestinians above all. In 1976, the Syrian military invaded Lebanon to assist right-wing Christian forces, who happened to be allies of Israel, against the Palestinian forces led by Yasser Arafat. A few weeks later they again lined up alongside racist Christian militias, such as the Guardians of the Cedars, to commit unspeakable atrocities in the Tel az-Za’atar refugee camp.

Over three thousand Palestinian refugees, essentially the most downtrodden and oppressed of any community in the Middle East, were slaughtered in cold blood by Syria and the Christian, Israeli proxies in Tel az-Za’tar. To add insult to injury, the camp was then bulldozed and its refugees relocated and scattered all over Lebanon, many to be eventually slaughtered by the Syrian-Israeli double-agent Elie Hobeika and his militia in the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Bashar al-Assad recently revived his father’s fetish for Palestinian blood by using gunboats and ground troops to attack a refugee camp off the Syrian coast in August, 2011. Dozens were killed and over five thousand people were forced to leave according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

Conclusion

The Assads might not have been blatant and direct allies of the West and Israel like some other forces in the region over the past four decades, but they were definitely complicit to the international, West-dominated political order. They were without doubt in agreement with the United States of America on strategic issues and in active, serial cooperation with Israel. All the while, they upheld a popular façade of resistance and anti-Americanism. As Israel’s foreign minister said in November 2010, ‘Assad is enjoying the best of both worlds’.

While the regime may have funded resistance groups for an array of purposes, its own artillery has only found the flesh of those in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. Not a single bullet has been fired over the Golan Heights or at Israel for forty years, and that remains a supreme reality that supersedes all the rambling propaganda the regime is now putting out.

So when the brave people of Syrian rip down the imaginary curtain once and for all, the resistance paradigm in the Middle East will not be compromised. In fact, the seeds for a genuine and authentic challenge to Israel will be taking form and re-shaping the Levant forever. This is the beginning, not the end.

Abdul-Latif Halimi is a student based in Melbourne, Australia with an interest in the affairs of Syria

Moazzam Begg – The witchunt on Abu Qatada simply reiterates the British Government’s relationships with dictatorships – past and present

Democracy is a system which is built on the idea of sovereignty of the masses. In its essence, it is an idea based on the sovereignty of the human mind. It envisions a system where the human mind determines the laws, regulations, and systems which should organize and govern human societies. However, this “ideal” conceptualization of democracy ran against some practical characteristics of human societies. Human intellect has an individualistic characteristic in the sense that human beings differ with each other about their interpretations of different events and realities based on different individual perceptions (of reality), experiences, and priorities. So, the idea of sovereignty of the human mind posed a real question:  Who gets to define what the human mind is thinking? Human history has seen many thinkers presenting numerous ideas about the political, social, and economic organization of human societies. So, which of these ideas should be “sovereign”? Moreover, who from amongst the human beings gets to decide which ideas are “sovereign” and which are not? What is the practical framework according to which this “sovereignty” of ideas is determined? These practical limitations in the implementation of democracy led to redefinition of the idea of sovereignty of the masses and that of the human mind in the context of practicality. As it seemed impossible to take the opinion of each and every individual in the formation of laws and regulations in a country, the idea of “representative sovereignty” was conceived. What it meant was that a “representative” would represent the thinking of certain segment of the population, thereby, concentrating the collective human will and thinking in a select group of individuals. This idea of “representative sovereignty” also led to the creation of the framework which would define what ideas—and laws based on these ideas—would be “sovereign”; those which enjoy majority. So, with the idea of “Representative sovereignty” emerged the idea of “Sovereignty of the majority”.

Although democracy claims sovereignty of the masses, in reality, democratic institutions are built on the idea of “representative sovereignty”, so the sovereignty of the masses actually translates into or is taken to mean “the sovereignty of legislative assemblies”. In “Representative Sovereignty”, the representatives of the people make laws and policies according to desires and whims of the people, thus, realizing the sovereignty of the masses—as the masses get to decide which laws should be implemented. But, this is as far as the theory goes. In reality, the representative of the masses does not actually represent the thinking of the masses, but he or she actually thinks on behalf of the masses. So, it is actually the legislator who comes up with the ideas, laws, and regulations which should govern the masses and not the other way around. So, for all practical purposes, the “sovereignty of the legislative assemblies” is actually the “sovereignty of the political elite (read legislators)”. All the legislator has to do is to seek approval for his/her ideas or proposed laws and regulations from his/her respective constituency and claim to represent the masses. So, in democratic polity, the masses exercise indirect sovereignty while the legislators enjoy direct sovereignty. Moreover, the people do not actually play a direct role in the making of laws and regulations, rather, a legitimizing role. It is important to realize this point:  Democracy is not bottom up as the common perception has it; rather, it is top down with some modifications. That modification is the legitimizing effect. The lawmakers make the laws and then convince the electorate to accept it. It can be argued that if the electorate rejects the lawmaker’s opinions and votes him/her out of the legislative assembly, then, the electorate is indeed sovereign. However, in this case, the electorate will be choosing between two different lawmakers, and if it chooses one over the other, this means the electorate has merely chosen the ideas or laws suggested by one lawmaker over the ideas and laws suggested by another lawmaker. In no way during the exercise has the electorate actually been involved in the direct process of law making. Add to this the vast resources available to the legislators in the form of electronic and print media, party platforms, and political rallies, and it is quite obvious how biased this arrangement is towards the political elite to suggest any notions of sovereignty of the masses.

This particular gap between sovereignty of the masses and that of the legislative assemblies has created what we can call the democracy paradox. In democratic polity, the democratic institutions are built deriving their legitimacy from the legislative assemblies. So, the shape of the republic (or the state) and all its institutions is determined by the legislative assembly—whether the state would have a parliamentary or presidential form of government, what would be the powers of the executive authority, what would be the jurisdiction of the judiciary, who would collect and manage finances, the number of ministries, the civil military relations and their conduct, the guiding principles and rules of foreign and defense policy, and the like. It is important to note that all institutions of the state derive their legitimacy from the legislative assemblies. The legislative assemblies have the right to amend the shape of the state institutions, limit or expand their jurisdiction, and abolish these institutions and make new ones in their place. In short, the legitimacy of the state institutions and everyone working for them, whether in the position of ruling or as an employee of the state, is derived from the legislative assemblies and not directly from the masses. In modern democratic polity, the nation state is sovereign and all actions carried out by the state and any of its institutions are considered legitimate. However, the modern democratic state claims authority and sovereignty in the name of the masses and, as argued earlier, takes its legitimacy from the legislative assemblies and not directly from the masses. The democracy paradox, as is often seen in every democratic state, is that of popular versus institutional legitimacy. What if the state and its institutions take decisions which are in sharp contrast to the popular sentiment of the general public at large? Would that decision be legitimate because a legitimate and competent authority took that decision or would it be illegitimate because the popular will is against it? To put the paradox clearly: What if the state which claims sovereignty in the name of the people takes some actions or adopts some policies which are in direct contradiction to the popular will of the masses? In this case, will institutional legitimacy take preference or the popular will triumph? Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq against popular will back home, the bailout packages given to American banks against popular sentiment, austerity measures being carried out in Greece and Italy against the will of the masses, the continuation of the Afghan war by Western nations despite its unpopularity at home, the pursuance of peace process between the democratic governments of Pakistan and India despite popular resistance at home, and the continuation of war on terror in Pakistan despite fierce public opposition are just a few of the many examples of policies or decisions taken by democratic states where the state and the masses were at odds with each other.

However, there is another dimension to this debate. The Western Powers which lead the world today and claim its intellectual leadership insist on the universality of democracy as a system of life and the separation of the state and the church. The Post World War II international order has been built on the liberal ideas which these states own and propagate. Through multilateral institutions like the United Nations, European Union, Common wealth, and NATO, these states have propagated democracy as a way of life. So, a forced international consensus has been maintained through the political power and influence of Western states which insists that the international community adhere to liberal ideas and values and the states across the globe adopt democracy as the basis of their ruling systems. This forced intellectual consensus at the international level is used to support those who believe that institutional legitimacy of democratic institutions takes precedence over popular will of the masses.

For the Muslim World, this particular debate about institutional versus popular legitimacy is very important in the context of change, its description, and how it can be brought about. Since the abolition of the caliphate at the hands of Mustafa Kamal, a forced reform of the society, initiated by the state, has been imposed upon it by a ruling class which believed institutional supremacy is more important than popular will. The mantra was, the Muslim public is naïve, backward, and is deeply steeped in the legacy of the caliphate and the idea of unification of the temporal and the spiritual; therefore, it is not expected that it will adopt the “modern nation state” and democratic institutions. Hence, the way forward is that democratic institutions and republican ideas be imposed upon it by a select liberal elite which will also act as “a vanguard group” and will lead this reform through the power of the state. The emergence of “Kemalism” as the defining ideology of the post caliphate order epitomized such an approach and served as a model and a precedent for the whole of the Muslim World which was implemented in every Muslim nation state which emerged from the debris of the caliphate, albeit in different forms (kingships, constitutional monarchies, dictatorships). The fact that Kemalism emerged as a political ideology from Istanbul, the seat of the caliphate, could not have been more symbolic, for this was the message to the Muslim World that it should move beyond the institution of the caliphate towards republicanism, and that Turkey, the intellectual and spiritual center of the Muslim World, has taken the lead in this regard. The six principles or the “six arrows” (as they are called) of Kemalism which formed the cornerstone of Mustafa Kamal’s brutal republican rule were aimed at forcing the Muslims of Turkey to embrace the ideals of the new world, which were preached by London and Paris. Mustafa Kamal’s six principles included: Republicanism – which aimed to replace the Ottoman political order, which invested power in the sultan and his immediate entourage, with a republican system; Nationalism – which aimed to inculcate a distinct Turkish identity within the Muslims of Turkey to replace the pan-Islamism of the Ottoman State; Populism – which aimed at introducing democratic ideals in the Muslims of Turkey; Revolutionism – a  doctrine which was used by Mustafa Kamal to justify radical change in the Ottoman system; Secularism – which was aimed at achieving a far-reaching overhaul in the power of religion within the state; and Statism – which, like its contemporaries communism and fascism, favored the state-led development of the economy and society.

Mustapha Kamal’s approach, which was adopted by ruling elites across the Muslim World, focused on institutional supremacy over popular will. This approach advocates the importance of institutions over that of the aspirations of the masses. So, the legitimacy of the state and its institutions throughout the Muslim World does not come from the Muslim Masses in the context of their approval for them, rather these institutions have been forced upon the Muslim World by a ruling elite which sees itself as “reformers” trying to reform their populations into adopting democratic ideals and values. At the heart of the problem of establishing democratic institutions in the Muslim World is that the Muslim World is not convinced on the idea of the “sovereignty of the human mind”. The popular will in the Muslim World stands for the unification of the temporal and the spiritual while the state and its institutions emphasize the separation of the two. So, the Muslim World finds itself in a fierce battle within itself. On one side is the state, its institutions and a group of “liberal” reformers who have used state power to try to reform the Muslim world; on the other side are the Muslim masses and political movements who have resisted this reform and braved state power and oppression to advocate different institutions which are built on the idea of the rule of the divine. It was this fierce struggle which was going on for decades as strong undercurrents within the Muslim World which imploded in the form of the Arab Spring. The fact that every post Arab spring government has brought Islamists into power goes on to show that the “Kemalist” approach of state backed reforms has failed and that the Muslim World aspires to rule by Islam.

However, the Arab Spring and the mass uprisings also brought forth the question of institutional versus popular legitimacy in the context of change in a practical manner. The manner in which transition of power took place in different Arab countries forcefully brought forward the need to intellectually settle this question. As the popular uprisings filled Arab streets, the role of Arab Armies became central in the removal of the old despots. So, should the army or the people of power support institutions and the state against popular will? Or should the armies support the desire for change and become tools for change by abolishing the existing states and their institutions? While the “Kemalist” approach relied on state power and force to reform the society based on ideals alien to it, supporting existing political movements advocating certain ideals which enjoy mass support is a radically different approach. In fact, it appears that the only thing which stands between the Muslim World and radical restructuring of the state and its institutions is the decision of the Muslim Armies to make up their minds—Whether they will support the old state and its institutions or if they will support popular will and put their weight behind the call for reuniting the temporal and the spiritual by reestablishing the caliphate.

Moez Mobeen is a free lance columnist based in Islamabad who regularly writes on Muslim Affairs.

Afghan immigrants Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba Mahommad Yahya and their 21-year-old son Hamed were found guilty in a Canadian court Sunday of first degree murder in the 2009 “honor killing” deaths of four female family members, and sentenced to life imprisonment. These were not poor, uneducated people, but upstanding members of Canada’s economic elite. The enterprising Mohammad escaped to Pakistan as “free Afghanistan” descended into civil war in 1992, before emigrating to Australia and Dubai, where he made his fortune in Doha’s hot real estate scene, finally settling in Canada in 2007.

Judge Robert Maranger called the crimes “heinous”: “The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honour. It’s a sick notion of honour that has no place in a civilised society.” Mohammad Shafia replied: “We are not criminals. We are not murderers. We didn’t commit murder. This is unjust.” “I am not a murderer. I am a mother,” echoed Tooba Yahya.

The three defendants were found guilty of the deaths of the couple’s three daughters and Shafia’s first wife. The bodies of the victims were found in a car submerged in a canal lock near Kingston, apparently an accident, but wire-taps of the father revealed he showed no remorse for their deaths because they had damaged the family’s reputation by wearing revealing clothes and otherwise rebelling against tradition. This and other circumstantial evidence convinced the jury that the father had arranged their murder, using their brother as an accomplice.

Since 2002, Canada has suffered about 6000 murders, 13 of which involved “honour killings”, defined as a homicide of a member (female or male) of a family or social group by other members, for bringing dishonour upon the family or community. Whether or not the accused here carried out the crime, such drastic resolutions of a family conflict are surely reprehensible, though a tradition that has been part of all cultures — European and American included — until the recent past. “Shotgun weddings” are just one form, as are “shotgun divorces”. A third of all women murdered in the US are murdered by boyfriends or husbands. Both East and West, statistics show that most murders are by family members.

The main difference between the very few honour killers in Canada’s legal history and the overwhelming number of whiter, more “civilised” home-grown murderers is that the latter do not justify their actions by a sense of morality however “twisted”. They are usually acts of revenge, hatred, drunkenness — both behind the wheel and through drink-induced madness.

But what about the other homicides which Canadians are increasingly indulging in? Canada is slogging through its 11th nightmarish year of occupying Afghanistan in the name of freedom. Statistics about Afghan “casualities” are notoriously poor, as the occupiers say they’re too busy to compile them. How many innocent Afghans, not to mention freedom fighters, have Canadian soldiers and mercenaries killed since 2002? Surely many thousand times the 13 deaths attributed to honour killings on the home front.

And just why are the Shafias with their un-Canadian ways even living in Canada at all? It is a direct result of the destruction of their homeland which the US fuelled starting in 1979 by arming and funding mujahideen. Without that truly gruesome political event, the Shafias would have been living in a peaceful Afghanistan, where compliance with social norms by their children would have been the case, and no thoughts of this ultimate punishment would have entered their stern father’s head.

But no. And just as Canada enthusiastically jumped onboard the USS Mission Civilatrice  in Afghanistan a decade ago fighting those very mujahideen, it is a high profile participant in the propaganda campaign to convince Canadians that Afghans are barbarians and that exterminating them is a Boy Scout’s duty.

The shameful, very noisy trial of the Shafias distorts the real news about Canada’s relations with Afghans, a perfect metaphor for the high-tech imperial centre presenting itself (through the embedded media) as the world’s sole source of progress and reason, even as it drags that world down into chaos and destruction. The colonial periphery is depicted as savage and cruel, whereas it is in fact the victim of immeasurable violence at the hands of the empire. The handful of “honour killings” and hand cuttings for various crimes (especially popular in US ally Saudi Arabia), however deplorable, are a drop in the ocean of imperial violence, and have actually increased due to Western meddling.

The reality is best revealed by statistics. Muslim countries have far lower murder rates than Western countries. As empire-central, let’s focus on the US, where the murder rate is 5.2 per 100,000, seven times higher than Egypt’s 0.8 (sorry, no stats available for poor Afghanistan). The US also has the highest incarceration rate in the world bar none — seven times that of Canada and nine times that of Egypt. US prisons are notorious, where rape and drug addiction abound.

The flip side of honour crime is rape. The incidence of rape in the US is 300 times that of Egypt (Egypt 0.1 per 100,000 vs 30 in the US and 1.5 in Canada). The incidence of rape in Afghanistan was once upon a time also negligible. It is now an epidemic far more horrible than the isolated honour killings there (or by hapless Afghan emigres) — and directly a result of the occupation’s 150,000 killer-invaders and the chaos they have brought. For better or for worse, we must conclude from these statistics that old-fashioned honour killing is a powerful disincentive to rape.

Also for better or for worse, it is a fact that second generation Muslim immigrants often discard their religion and customs, seduced by the overt sexuality and commercialism of Western culture. The Shafias went that route. But at the same time, other immigrants become more devout and angrily reject the alluring trappings. What happens to them?

A famous case is Aafia Siddiqui, a brilliant American-educated Pakistani cognitive neuroscientist, who donned the niqab and showed sympathy for the likes of Al-Qaeda and other groups resisting the US onslaught on the Muslim world. She paid the price by being given a life sentence for supposedly trying to murder her US interrogators in Afghanistan. Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan criticised the conviction and the judicial process saying it was carried out by a kangaroo court, though curiously Amnesty International has not championed Siddiqui’s cause.

Not only Muslim immigrants find solace in traditional Islam. According to a survey conducted by Swansea University, Wales, nearly two-thirds of the 100,000 recent British converts to Islam were women, more than 70 per cent white, with an average age at conversion of 27. They identified alcohol and drunkenness, a “lack of morality and sexual permissiveness” and “unrestrained consumerism” as their motivation.

Current NGOs and Western media blithely exhort Afghans and other unfortunates to adopt Western standards with nary a word about how they might be serving the West’s implicit imperial agenda. This is rank hypocrisy in the eyes of Muslims. Take for instance the Independent Republican Institute, which was active in overthrowing the Honduran government in 2009. It was just last week caught with its finger in the cookie jar in Egypt, much to the feigned shock of US President Barack Obama, who threatened to cut off US bribes (excuse me, funding) to Egypt unless all charges against the IRI functionaries and other intriguers (excuse me, altruists) were dropped immediately.

The Islamic world broadly disapproves of what it sees as the collapse of morality in the West. While Western critics accuse Muslims of having an “obsession with the purity of women”, for Muslims, naked ladies on magazine covers, legalised prostitution — not to mention the alarming incidence of rape in the West — do not represent liberation of women. On the contrary, they see much of Western culture as undermining any genuine sense of dignity for women.

Following the verdict against the Shafias, Canadian Justice Minister Rob Nicholson called honour killings a practice that is “barbaric and unacceptable in Canada….This government is committed to protecting women and other vulnerable persons from all forms of violence and to hold perpetrators accountable for their acts.”

The only riposte possible is to condemn Nicholson’s own endorsement of Canada’s “barbaric and unacceptable” involvement in US imperial wars which kill thousands of “women and other vulnerable persons”, and to demand that he “hold perpetrators accountable”. Fat chance.

Canadian Eric Walberg is known worldwide as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia. A graduate of University of Toronto and Cambridge in economics, he has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s. He has lived in both the Soviet Union and Russia, and then Uzbekistan, as a UN adviser, writer, translator and lecturer. Presently a writer for the foremost Cairo newspaper, Al Ahram, he is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Global Research, and Al-Jazeerah. His articles appear in Russian, German, Spanish and Arabic and are accessible at his website ericwalberg.com. His Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games  is available at http://claritypress.com/Walberg.html or through Amazon.

Almost a year on, the developments following the Arab Spring brings the attention of the western political elite to Islam’s political ambitions in a very precarious part of the world. Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis postulated Islam as a mere irritant in the West’s path to cementing secular democracy as the pinnacle of man’s social and political achievements. Such a prediction, however, seems to have received a contending voice in the religiously inspired politics captivating the Egyptian political scene where the murmured fear is that much of the Muslim citizenry possess an end of history thesis themselves albeit ending in a slightly different crescendo of perfection to the one predicted by Fukayama.

Amidst the quandary which is Egyptian politics in the post-Mubarak era, the Muslim Brotherhood have announced themselves as the main actors in deciding the nations domestic and international relations having gained a majority of votes in the recent parliamentary elections. Much has been made of the discord between the Brotherhood’s old and new guards, with the younger, modern, educated segment objecting to the ultra-conservatives’ authoritarian practices,[i] indicating to many that we are passing through a nascent post-Islamist Middle East. Yet, we cannot afford to ignore the overwhelming recourse to Islam as a way of steering the trajectories of parties like the Brotherhood and the Salafi Al-Nour party. Despite the absence of a soundly delineated political agenda from either party, far from sidelining religious teachings to the peripheries, it would appear Egypt is on the brink of a model of government where Islam is touted as the de facto solution to the country’s social, economic, and political woes. While the appeal to religion as an adequate panacea for a country’s regression is unthinkable in western political circles, the insulation of Islam from the political sphere has been actively reversed by the political aspirations of Muslim Egyptians, and their support for a cross-fertilization between religion and politics has been made patently clear. So, how should interested observers in the western world—many of whom incidentally, are deeply troubled by the religious players at the forefront of the post-Mubarak regime—react to what many have prematurely labelled an ominous development in Egypt’s transition from authoritarianism to pluralism?

Well firstly, it may help to remind some of our misinformed and unenlightened ‘Islamistphobes’ that history bears witness to the successful application of governing systems steeped in Islamic law. One need only look at the Abbasid Caliphate, Muslim Spain, and the Ottoman Empire as identifiable epochs in the political history of Muslims, where the machinations of just government, effective judiciary, and requisite checks and balances were all hallmarks of the Islamic bodi-politik. The perception generated by Orientalist scholarship—that Muslim societies have unvaryingly produced politically incompetent leadership, autocratic governments, and weak legal structures—may be true when we take a cursory glance at the despots and monarchs ruling the Muslim world in the past century, though, it is arguable whether the culpability for this rests with the inability of Muslims to effectively dictate their political destiny or the aggressive colonialism of western powers. However, the view that this was an ineradicable Muslim sensuality from the gestation period of Islam until the end of theOttoman Empire is only advanced by those plunged into the sort of misinformation which makes them uncritically receptive to the commonplace demonization of Muslims and Islamic history.

Those who are cynical about the efficacy of judicial institutions administered by Islamists only need to consult 14^th century Islamic court practices where hierarchical appellate structures and system of successor review were trademarks of Islamic legal theory.[ii] In this can be seen a vindication of Islamic Law’s commitment to human rights as conceptualised today. For instance, Article 14 (5) of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) states, “Everyone convicted of a crime shall have the right to his conviction and sentence being reviewed by a higher tribunal according to law”.[iii] In fact, this right of appeal to higher tribunal, so flagrantly dismissed during the Mubarak regime’s wrongful conviction of many political dissidents, was a customary practice of Abu Yusuf, the Chief Justice during the Caliphate of Harun al-Rashid, in 8^th century Baghdad.[iv] The Secular liberals who have sounded the alarm at the prospect of Islamist Egypt signalling the demise of constitutionalism and rule of law have, if anything, been poorly served by an erroneous scholarship which fails to recognize Shariah Law’s functional equivalent of a higher court reviewing the decisions of a lower court. This revision and appeal of judgements is contained in the Islamic legal principle of ‘murafa’ah’ and should be favourably received in anEgypt which for too long has witnessed political opposition quashed into silence and post-trial rights aborted. We should welcome the prospect of such formal legal and constitutional structures being reintroduced inEgypt. Islamic legal dispensations can easily lend to the development of a free and independent civilian judiciary which can render the politically repressive and authoritarian methods employed by Mubarak’s military regime as a relic of a bygone era.

Another source from history which ‘Islamistphobes’ are well advised to consult is the central, most animating figure of Islamic history himself—Muhammad. Exactly how much of his life and statesmanship is familiar to the average western politician remains unknown, but if the time-honoured European hostility towards Islam and Muslims is anything to go by, it is probably very little, or certainly subverted by medieval Christian polemics on Muhammad which were informed with a crusading zeal. Concerning the westerners who remain ambivalent at the prospects of an Islamically governed Egypt, it cannot be too much an ask to appeal to their goodwill in order they look beyond the hate-filled scholarship which is detrimental to reasoned judgment. Doing so will open up the intellectual space to engage with the biographies and predominantly Muslim accounts of Muhammad so that lessons and practices from his lifetime which speak directly to the Egyptian political predicament may be identified. This can help bridge the gap between the much played out conundrum between Islamic Law and international human rights law.

For example, it is often alleged that the formal introduction of Shariah law into Egypt’s state machinery will sound the death knell for Christian Copts, minorities, and non-conformists who depart from the state-sponsored orthodoxy, and has raised doubts about any impending government pursuing Islamization. Take for example, the ‘civil death’ incurred by Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd whose call for the revision of conventional approaches to Quranic hermeneutics[v] was treated as apostasy. Or the instances of harassment voiced by Egypt’s Coptic population who are an endogamous people insisting on separate existence largely due to their perception of being targets of planned provocations by the status quo during the Sadat and Mubarak years where censorship of the Coptic press and persecution by state security forces[vi] was quite routine. These cases have left a considerable voice amongst Egypt’s religious minorities feeling, at best, uncertain about Islamist guarantees of rights under international human rights law.

Yet, many Muslims would argue that such discrimination is not only in violation of international legal norms, but contradicts the Prophetic model which enshrines the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and entitles all faith communities to defend themselves from any seditious provocation.[vii] We need to ask ourselves whether any wisdom may be extracted from Muhammad’s interactions with others that can serve as an instructive and educative principle for social organisation in Egypt. Perhaps the ‘Sahifat al-Madina’ is a starting point. Popularly referred to as the ‘Mithaq al-Madina’, it has been described by some as the first constitution in human history[viii] and is entirely accredited to Muhammad and the Islamic faith. Dr Robert Dickson Crane, a former foreign policy advisor to Richard Nixon, writes:

“When the various tribes living in Madina invited the Prophet Muhammad to become their leader as a means to overcome their inter-tribal rivalries and bring peace, prosperity and freedom, there was no such thing as a state in the modern sense. In fact, such a modern concept was not invented until more than a thousand years later, even though there were empires, like the Persian, Chinese, and Incas, based on the modern concept of might makes right. In the Covenant of Madina the various autonomous trines were incorporated in a single confederation with common rights and responsibilities. The Prophet called this confederation an umma or single community composed of different ethnic and religious ummas as sub-groups.”[ix]

The Madinan charter carried the force of law and was drafted with the intention of effecting better relations between groups and tribes in what was a heterogeneous social composition. Muhammad’s diplomacy then can be perceived as being relevant to the circumstances obtaining in an Egyptian society, where the successful integration and status of different religious communities, ranging from Jehovah’s Witnesses to members of the Baha’i faith, have to be carefully negotiated. One of Muhammad’s aphorisms pertinent in the current context is, “Whoever violates the rights of the People of the Book, I will complain against them on the Day of Judgment”, which is a sufficient Islamic guarantee against the dissolution of minority religious communities.

With the granting of asylum to those requiring protection and the formation of alliances with Jewish and Christian minorities—a prevailing characteristic of Muhammad’s statesmanship in Medina—contemporary critics of political Islam should look with a degree of optimism at the prospect of an Egypt which, far from accosting its religious minorities, can embrace their potential value to the wider Islamic polity, in a parallel manner to Muhammad’s interplay with religious and ethnic minorities in 7^th century Arabia.

Hasnet Lais is a freelance writer, with a Masters in Islamic Societies and Cultures from The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Dominating the UK press this week is the tale of two bankers, a banker’s bonus, and the end of honour. Whilst it is rather surprising that the contrasting tales of two bankers should dominate the news it does reveal interesting aspects of capitalist society and the rather shallow way it addresses the banking crisis.

One banker “a chivalrous type” has come riding in on his horse with full shining armour and has set about righting a horrendous wrong. Getting to grips with the disaster that is RBS, our hero – let us call him Stephen – has rather gallantly foregone his bonus of £1 million in share options which as the company builds back into the stratosphere of elite banking profits would have returned a very tidy dividend of many times that amount. Under great pressure he has turned down the bonus he was entitled to, in order to focus upon the excellent job he is doing. In such austere times, and with similar “public servants” (RBS is over 80% owned by the public) he has done the right thing and saved the government from the embarrassment of reporting the biggest ever bonus in the public sector, and in a loss making enterprise to boot.

On the other hand our tale has a nasty villain, a Knight of the realm no less, who has betrayed us all. In just a few short years our villain – let us call him Sir Shred – has taken RBS from being the biggest bank in Europe to its knees, a mere shadow of its former self. And the public purse has been called upon to bail out the company with £45 billion of taxpayer money (once the government gets around to extracting this from the public, bearing in mind the recession and dwindling tax revenues). Lest the news of our hero, Stephen, be tarnished by association with Sir Shred and lest the news of Stephen’s undoubted high but fair bonus dominate the airwaves, rather conveniently the “Forfeiture Committee” has come to the rescue and saved us from the embarrassment and shame that Sir Shred has cast upon these fair Isles. The only solution they could come to was to defrock Sir Shred of his “Sirness” and he will forever more be referred to simply as “Shred the Fred”. The shamed, but still free, and still very wealthy, former chief executive of RBS.

On reflection

Amidst the hyperbole there is a serious flaw in the above argument. In fact it is completely wrong. Stephen Hester has failed dismally in his role and should be facing the sack rather than multi-millions in salary and bonus. He was brought in to put RBS back into profitability and to ensure that RBS is out of public ownership as soon as possible. This he has summarily failed to do, and in 2010, when the bank showed an improvement in its share price he pocketed £7.7 million in salary and bonus whilst still being short of the level at which the bank could go public again. Yet this year when RBS’s share price has contracted by over 40% his board and compensation committed have suggested the £1million bonus to add to his £1.2 million salary. Ample reward for failure in a year in which the most notable achievement of the bank was to shed several thousands of jobs. Hester’s predecessor Fred Goodwin earned his moniker “Fred the Shred” from such tactics of cutting staff numbers, and with an aggressive takeover policy grew the bank to the point where it could boast £1.9 trillion in assets (and £1.8 trillion in liabilities!) by late 2008, and the title of the world’s largest company. So why is the media lauding Hester for his tactics of shredding jobs, whilst ridiculing Goodwin’s shredding?

The answer of course lies in the failure of David Cameron to hold to his promise of restricting bonuses in the privatised banking world. Getting tough on the bonus culture goes well with the electorate but the reality of implementing it is far harder. The Tory party promised: “We have ensured that this year there will be no cash bonuses over £2,000 at taxpayer-owned banks” yet okaying bonuses in shares (instead of cash) is hardly in the spirit of their promise.

There are fundamental flaws in the bonus culture across capitalist society, not only does it unfairly reward excessive risk taking, it also provides compensation committees with a ready means to underpay those deserving of a higher base salary. The promise of complementary bonuses alongside low base salaries gives companies a means to effectively dismiss the staff they no longer wish to keep via paying no bonus whatsoever -  a chance to force the employee out via underpayment of what was promised. Of course it gets messy when your Chief Executive mistakenly falls under these tactics from public pressure. Although I’m sure that Stephen Hester will be promised a make up bonus along the lines of what was provided in 2010!

Sir Fred Goodwin was Knighted for services to banking because he was unabashedly a success. Under his tutelage the bank acquired Natwest, Citizens Financial Group, and lastly and perhaps fatally, Abn Amro. With each successive acquisition the balance sheet grew and greater risks were adopted. Profits grew in turn during the good years and the high risk strategy paid off to an extent. But with the inevitable downturn in markets of 2007/08 the high cost, high risk strategy (RBS held risky CDS (insurance type) contracts worth more than the whole UK economy) turned sour. As has been highlighted Goodwin did nothing illegal, he was merely following the high risk/high reward strategy. Gordon Brown and Prince Charles feted him because of his verve, risk taking and pure capitalist success. Goodwin and his highly paid board and executives all bought into the high risk strategy and were highly rewarded. As did the government and opposition parties of the day.

Responsible Capitalism

Faced with hypocrisy on the scale of that highlighted above, today’s politicians have launched a new offensive to try and explain away the contradiction in rewarding and condemning risk taking. The new term is “responsible capitalism” which is very similar to the notion of responsible chicken coop sacking by foxes. If you are going to pay people excessive bonuses for excessive profits, we should not quibble at the results of such excessive risk taking when the risks go wrong, including the bringing down of the whole financial system. UK Chancellor George Osborne complained previously of “burdensome city regulation” and Labour maintained a regime of “light touch” self regulation. Effectively giving the banks a green light to do as they please. The hotch potch of casino, gambling, leveraged, mess we’ve been living through for the past few years is entirely predictable and indeed several hedge fund managers correctly bet on the system imploding.

Rather than point fingers at those that won and then lost at their game, surely it is time for the politicians to wake up and tackle the corruption at the heart of the financial system which allows a virtual complete lack of meaningful regulation. Which brings us back to the opening line “A convenient diversion” because I doubt the politicians have any intention of making any changes to this banker dominated system.

Jamal Harwood is a regular contributor to New Civilisation.  He is a lecturer in Finance, and a member of the UK Executive Committee of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain.