‘Muslims in Europe must detoxify prevailing opinion about themselves’

The far right in Europe has been on the rise since the fatwa against Salman Rushdi.

This was stated by an award-winning British author and playwright of Pakistani descent, Hanif Kureishi, at the ThinkFest held at the Institute of Business Administration’s City Campus, Karachi, on Saturday.

His keynote address was titled, “Where now?”

“We writers have to pause to ponder as to where and what’s gone wrong,” said Kureishi. “People who call themselves Muslims shooting people and causing bomb blasts are causing this.”

“We now know that the fatwa was disgraceful. The Western world is now turning to the right because of Muslim militancy,” Kureishi said. Race and religion, he said, would now fuel totalitarianism.

He said that after 1989 some of the young people today were turning to militant revolutions. Muslims, he said, were the “new Jews” of Europe. “We have to detoxify the prevailing opinion about ourselves,” he said.

Fortunately, he said, there was the generation of young Muslims who were seeing things objectively and could well be instrumental in bringing about secular radicalism. This could give us all something to look forward to, he said, adding that that while the attitude of the European majority could not be defended, the Muslims also had to indulge in introspection.

Speaking from the point of view of his own family, he said his father migrated to Britain seeking security, education and progress. However, he said racism was there and further waves of immigrants fuelled this feeling all the more as they tried to preserve their racial and cultural identity. They were totally alienated.

Speaking next, Azeem Ibrahim of the US Army War College and a senior Fellow at the Centre for Global Policy in Washington, said there were 1.2 billion Muslims in the world but there were only a miniscule number of radicals yet they were so militant that we seemed to be losing the battle against them.

Quoting the Global Terrorism Index prepared by the University of Maryland in the US, he said that thus far there had been 150 cases of terrorism in 163 countries. He named Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, Nigeria, and India as the centres of terrorism and said there were 274 known groups most notable among these being the ISIS, Daesh and Boko Haram. Nigeria and India, he said, were not Muslim majority countries. “That goes to show why the West has this negative impression of us,” he said. The majority of the ISIS militants, he said, were from Tunisia.

Wahabiism, he said, was an extremely conservative form of Islam and they viewed Shias and Sufis unfavourably. “Terrorists cannot be defeated militarily,” he said.

Next to speak was Dr Flagg Miller from the University of California at Davis, CA, USA. He said his research had been based on 1,500 audiotapes he had got from Afghanistan.

Tracing Laden’s rise to primacy, he said he was at the bottom of his career in 1996. Then he used the global media to attain the position that he did by 2011.

He said what was really responsible for this was the US global ambitions after the end of the Cold War. “Al-Qaeda has a history on which the US empire has a bearing.”

Imtiaz Gul, head of the Centre for Research and Security Studies at Islamabad, and author of “Pakistan: Before and after Osama Bin Laden”, said that there were 120 active groups in 60 countries. These active groups, he said, shared an ideology and did not recognise national boundaries.

The year 1979, he said, was decisive as regards what we are seeing today and cited the Soviet entry into Afghanistan and the consequent mobilisation of radical groups from all over the world by the US. There were even volunteers from the West, he said. However, he said, we should not mix radicalism with religiosity.

He cited the case of his own brothers who, he said, offered their prayers five times a day but were anything but radicalised. He said the graph of radical violence in Pakistan had gone down over the last five years.

Earlier, Dr Miftah Ismail, chairman, ThinkFest; Dr Farrukh Iqbal, Executive Director, IBA; Yaqoob Bangash, Founder, ThinkFest; and Faiza Mushtaq, Co-Founder, ThinkFest, Karachi, welcomed the guests. Dr Iqbal outlined the aims and activities of the IBA and how the institute was much more than just a business institute and was attaching pivotal importance to social sciences. Yaqoob Bangash said that social sciences were the building blocks of a harmonious society.