Social dislocation feeds Maldives Islamism by Praveen Swami

As street crime and narcotics proliferate, religious extremists draw island youth
http://www.hinduonnet.com/2007/11/18/stories/2007111860431200.htm

MAL E (THE MALDIVES): Three years ago, Ali Rameez abandoned his place under the spotlights, and chose a new life guided by the light of Islam.

In a public demonstration of his new convictions, the Maldives’ top rock star had thousands of hit compact discs thrown into the sea off Male, and invited his fans to follow the teachings of the islands’ best-known neoconservative Islamic theologian, Sheikh Ibrahim Fareed.

Both Mr. Rameez and Mr. Fareed are now being investigated for possible links with the cell which carried out the September 29 bombing at Male’s Sultan Park — the first-ever Islamist terror attack in the Maldives. But the real significance of Mr. Rameez’s story doesn’t lie in his possible links with terrorism. Instead, his journey represents an ongoing battle between religious neo-conservatism and liberalism: a battle Islamists seem to be winning.

Maldives residents say the influence of Islamists has become increasingly visible in what used to be an almost ostentatiously westernised society. There are more women wearing headscarves than short skirts or jeans now, while a growing number of men can be seen sporting full-length beards. On some islands, women have defied laws that prohibit the all-enveloping buruga, known in India as burkha.

Underpinning this shift is a deep cultural dislocation. Signs of the simmering social crisis aren’t hard to come by. Just three kilometres by two kilometres, Male is home to a welter of street gangs, engaging in violent crime and competing to sell drugs. Machangolhi’s Buru gang has clashed with the BG in Maafannu and the Flats’ Bosnia gang, named after the jihad which stirred Islamists worldwide.

Narcotics use has also grown to disturbing levels. According to a 2006 United Nations Children’s Education Fund report, non-governmental organisations have estimated that there are some 8,000 drug users in the islands — an astounding figure, given that their total population is just some 300,000. In the southern-most atoll of Addu, informants told UNICEF that up to 70% of young men and women were using drugs.

Islamist mobilisation

Islamist groups have been quick to cash in on the discontent, offering the rigours of religious practice as a cure for the strains of cultural and economic change. “Many parents,” says Male journalist Ahmed Nazim Sattar, “are delighted that their wards turn to religious groups, since it keeps them away from drugs and gangs. Very few understand where this journey might take their children.” Bookstores selling the Islamist vision to new recruits have proliferated. One, until recently owned by Mr. Rameez’s brother, Ibrahim Fareed, stocks a wide range of Salafi sect literature. Zakir Naik, a controversial Mumbai-based television evangelist whose admirers included 2005 Mumbai serial bombing-accused Feroze Deshmukh and Glasgow suicide-bomber Kafeel Ahmed, occupies a place of honour on the shelves.

Perhaps more important than ideology, Islamist groups are able to provide new recruits tangible material inducements.

Male’s traditional elites — in the main merchants and traders — have proved energetic sponsors of Islamist networks, hoping to regain the political influence they have lost to the new rich. Young Islamists are offered jobs, loans to start up businesses, and access to commercial networks that stretch into India and Pakistan.

Maldives Information and Legal Reform Minister Mohamed Nasheed is candid about the scale of the problem: “We turn out 10,000 ‘O’-level graduates each year, but the kinds of white-collar jobs they expect aren’t on offer. We need to find ways to absorb them into useful economic activities. We always thought prosperity would solve all our problems, but are now realising there are distributive and social issues that must be addressed.”

Ahmedabad blasts: the usual suspects by Praveen Swami in “The Hindu” dated Friday, Aug 01, 2008

http://www.thehindu.com/2008/08/01/stories/2008080155141000.htm

Gujar at has been targeted by jihadists half-a-dozen times since 2002 in a little-understood war.

One still afternoon in March 2002, Feroze Abdul Latif Ghaswala watched 40 victims of the anti-Muslim pogrom being buried near his aunt’s home in Ahmedabad. Back home in Mumbai, the automobile mechanic saw a printout of a Lashkar-e-Taiba pamphlet, which purported to show a riot victim begging for his life: “Do you think he should have a gun,” it asked.

In September 2003, Ghaswala volunteered for training in Pakistan with a group led by the 2006 Mumbai serial bombing architect, Rahil Abdul Rehman Sheikh. When the Delhi police caught up with him in the summer of 2006, Ghaswala, along with computer engineer Ali Mohammad Cheepa, had just received a consignment of military-grade explosives from the Lashkar for a major bombing in Ahmedabad

Ever since last week’s bombings in Ahmedabad — one among half-a-dozen major plots targeting Gujarat that the Indian police and intelligence services did not succeed in interdicting — the media have not tired of informing us that jihadist terrorism has taken a dramatic new turn. Instead of Pakistan-based terrorists, it is claimed, a new generation of Indian jihadists is spearheading the attacks.

On point of fact, the claim is nonsensical: not one single Islamist urban terror cell since 1993 has not involved a preponderance of Indian nationals. But the claim does show how little Islamist terror groups, and the politics that have driven their growth, are understood in India.

Politics isn’t welcome at the Lal Masjid seminary in Ahmedabad’s Kaulpur area. Its students learn the six principles of Islam as enunciated by the founder of the Tablighi Jamaat, Mohammad Illyas, and are exhorted to give up frivolities like television and cinema. Maulana Sufiyan Patangia, who ran the seminary, often travelled to Saudi Arabia, seeking support for his students. After the January 26, 2001 Gujarat earthquake, the cleric put these networks to use to raise funds for relief work. It was his first foray into the secular world.

The al-Qaeda’s bombing of New York and Washington D.C. gave Patangia a new cause. In the wake of the United States-led war on the Taliban, he declared that Islam was in danger. He set up a study group, Idara-e-Fadlullah-ul-Muslimeen (Institution of Charity for Muslims), to educate his earthquake volunteers. The IFM members monitored events in Afghanistan on the Internet, and listened to tapes of Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Mohammad Masood Azhar’s speeches.

Patangia used to be jokingly called ‘Mullah Omar,’ after the Taliban leader. His second-in-command Suhail Khan adopted an Osama bin-Laden-style headgear, acquiring the nickname ‘Chhota Osama,’ or Little Osama. In February 2002, when the communal pogrom in Gujarat began, Patangia was in Saudi Arabia on his annual pilgrimage. He turned to the South Asian Islamist there for help to defend his community — and to exact revenge. Abdul Bari, a one-time Hyderabad resident who is among the Lashkar’s top financiers, put up Rs.3,75,000. Two Saudi-based JeM fundraisers of Hyderabad origin, Farhatullah Ghauri and Abdul Rehman, threw in another Rs.5,00,000.

Most important, though, Patangia made contact with Rasool Khan ‘Party’ — nicknamed with the Ahmedabad argot for ‘contractor’ because of his work for top Gujarat mafioso Abdul Latif Sheikh and his Pakistan-based boss, Dawood Ibrahim Kaksar. In May 2002, Khan and his brother Idris met Patangia in Mumbai to discuss just how vengeance might be planned.

Late in May 2002, five bombs went off on buses in Ahmedabad, injuring 26 people. It was the first act of violence by Gujarat-based jihadists. In December, Khan arranged for eight of Patangia’s volunteers to travel to Pakistan for training. Along with other groups of young people from Hyderabad, Mumbai and Bangalore, the Ahmedabad jihadists flew to Pakistan through Dhaka, Kathmandu, Dubai and Bangkok.

Soon, the vengeance they sought was delivered. Gujarat’s Home Minister, Haren Pandya, who had led some of the most murderous mobs in Ahmedabad during the pogrom, was shot just 13 months later, by when he ceased to be Home Minister. Central Bureau of Investigation detectives later determined that he was killed by a hit-team directed by Patangia. Nine of the 12 assassins received life terms last year.

Despite the CBI’s successes, plans for large-scale reprisal attacks in Gujarat continued apace. The LeT and the Maharashtra-based Students Islamic Movement of India operatives took the lead — helped by a steady flow of funds.

In June 2004, the LeT despatched two Pakistani nationals from Jammu and Kashmir to execute a fidayeen attack in Gujarat. Jishan Johar of Gujranwala in Pakistan and Amjad Ali Rana, who hailed form Sargodha, were killed in a controversial encounter in Ahmedabad along with SIMI activist Javed Sheikh and his friend, Ishrat Jehan Raza.

The Maharashtra-based SIMI bomb-maker Zulfikar Fayyaz Kagzi built a sophisticated suitcase bomb that was planted on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad Express train in February 2006. An error in the timer circuit resulted in the bomb exploding 12 hours after the scheduled detonation time, by when the cleaning staff had deposited the suitcase in an empty corner of the Ahmedabad station. And in May 2006, the Intelligence Bureau prevented a potentially catastrophic bombing in Gujarat, penetrating an Aurangabad-based SIMI unit, which was in an advanced stage of preparation for serial bomb strikes.

Intellectual infrastructure

Has the vengeance the jihadists sought been delivered? Not quite. Minutes before the latest bombing, the Indian Mujahideen — a Lashkar-SIMI front organisation which also took responsibility for the earlier bombings in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh — sent out a manifesto explaining just what it now seeks.

According to the manifesto, the Indian Mujahideen is “raising the illustrious banner of Jihad against the Hindus and all those who fight and resist us, and here we begin our revenge with the help and Permission of Allah — a terrifying revenge of our blood, our lives and our honour that will Insha-Allah terminate your survival on this land.”

The manifesto calls on Hindus to “realise that the falsehood of your 33 crore dirty mud idols and the blasphemy of your deaf, dumb mute and naked idols of ram, krishna and hanuman [sic; capitalisation as in original throughout] are not at all going to save your necks from being slaughtered by our hands.” It demands that Hindus change their attitudes, lest “another Ghauri shakes your foundations, and lest another Ghaznavi massacres you, proving your blood to be the cheapest of all mankind.”

No great effort is needed to locate the intellectual genesis of this body of ideas: it draws heavily on long-standing LeT polemic. Indeed, the manifesto’s plea that the LeT not take responsibility for the attacks is something of a giveaway, since the terror group has never owned up to actions targeting civilians. In 2003, for example, the LeT argued on its website that violence against Muslims in India was an outcome of the core character of Hindus, who “have no compassion in their religion.” It was the duty of Muslims to wage a jihad against “Hindu oppressors,” and it was “the Hindu who is a terrorist.”

Lashkar chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed also said, “the Hindu is a mean enemy and the proper way to deal with him is the one adopted by our forefathers [who] crushed them by force.” He made clear — just as the Indian Mujahideen has — that the objective of the jihad was extending Muslim control over what it saw as Muslim land. At a November 1999 rally, he promised that he would “not rest until the whole of India is dissolved into Pakistan.” All those who participated in this project were promised “huge places in Paradise.”

SIMI, like the Indian Mujahideen, also invoked medieval conquerors in its literature. In the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, SIMI called for Muslims to avenge the act by following in the steps of the 11th century conqueror, Mahmud Ghaznavi. SIMI posters appealed to god to send another Ghaznavi, and thus avenge attacks on Muslims and their mosques by attacking temples.

Local influences

Local religious influences are also evident. In its manifesto, the Indian Mujahideen describes itself as “terrorist,” an apparently odd usage. However, it suggests that the author followed the neoconservative television evangelist Zakir Naik — just as several past Mumbai-based Lashkar operatives like Rahil Sheikh and Feroze Deshmukh did.

In a controversial speech on al-Qaeda chief Osama bin-Laden, Naik proclaimed, “If he is fighting the enemies of Islam, I am for him. If he is terrorising America the terrorist — the biggest terrorist — I am with him.” “Every Muslim should be a terrorist,” Naik concluded. “The thing is, if he is terrorising a terrorist, he is following Islam.”

Most Indian Muslims would dispute the proposition: it is not for nothing, after all, that the Indian Mujahideen manifesto devotes considerable space to railing against clerics who oppose its jihadism. But the fact remains that some numbers of young Muslims — angered by discrimination, enraged by pogroms — see jihadism as the sole option available to them. As the work of scholar Ashutosh Varshney points out, the roots of this tragedy lie in the breakdown of inter-communal institutions: in a creeping religious apartheid that enveloped Gujarat in the second half of the last century, decades before the pogrom.

In the weeks to come, the police and intelligence investigators will have to find out the perpetrators of the bombings. Politicians, however, have a far more important task: to ensure that justice and equity are placed at centre stage of civic life in Gujarat, and India as a whole. No other way exists to bring down the intellectual infrastructure of hate, on which the jihadist campaign rests.

Shattered certitudes and new realities by Praveen Swami in “The Hindu” dated Sunday, Jul 08, 2007
http://www.hindu.com/2007/07/08/stories/2007070859431000.htm

Though, this articles appears in the last year issue, the matter has relevance in today context. Significantly, the Islamic terrorists of Tamilnadu works in the similar lines.

Efforts need to be made to explore the ideological landscape in which the Karnataka jihadis moved on
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Ahmed was drawn around 1999-2000 to the Salafi movement Tablighi Jamaat attracted elite groups in search of legitimacy

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New Delhi: “I take pride,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a June 2005 interview, “in the fact that, although we have 150 million Muslims in our country as citizens, not one has been found to have joined the ranks of Al-Qaeda or participated in the activities of [the] Taliban.”

Just two years after he made that assertion, the certitudes which underpinned it have been blown apart. News that three Karnataka residents possibly spearheaded an Al-Qaeda plot to bomb Glasgow and London suggests that the global jihad might have deeper roots in India than most people ever imagined.

All the Glasgow suspects are the kind of upper-middle class Indian Muslims who policy-makers imagined had been made immune to Islamist seduction for reasons of privilege and prosperity. Effort must now be made to explore the ideological landscape which led them to join al-Qaeda’s war-without-fronts, analysts point out.

Journeys into the jihad

Days before he is believed to have rammed a burning Jeep Cherokee into the Glasgow terminal, Kafeel Ahmed phoned home to say he was about to face a difficult examination. His first presentation had been unsuccessful, the postgraduate engineering student said – a possible reference to the fact that the cellphone-triggered fuel-canister bombs he had placed in two Mercedes-Benz cars parked in central London had failed to work. “Pray for me,” he asked his mother Zakia Ahmed.

The belief system that led Kafeel Ahmed to the hospital burns unit where he is now battling for his life is unknown, bar one fact: at some point he began to journey into the strange and subterranean world of the jihadist movement.

By some accounts, Ahmed was drawn around 1999-2000 to the Salafi movement, a sect inspired by the 18th century preacher, Saudi Arab Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Salafis, who take the Prophet Muhammed’s companions and the two generations of Muslims after them to be exemplary models of the practice of Islam, became active in South Asia in the 19th century. Known in South Asia as the Ahl-e-Hadith, or followers of the Prophet’s traditions, the Salafi sect grew spectacularly because of Saudi Arabian support.

Different approaches

While some Salafi groups urge their followers to support or endure the regimes they live under, others call for armed struggle against non-Islamic regimes and Muslim states opposed to the Sharia. Perhaps the most active of these pro-jihad Salafi factions is the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the attack on the Indian Institute of Science right in Bangalore. In the Lashkar’s variant of mainstream Salafi ideology, the Koran is a manifesto for a perpetual jihad against unbelievers, in the pursuit of the construction of an ideal Islamic state.

Some, though, say Ahmed was in fact drawn to the Tablighi Jamaat – a pietist organisation that has often been involved in acrimonious ideological exchanges with the Salafis. Perhaps the fastest-growing Islamist organisation worldwide, the Tablighi Jamaat urges Muslims to discard what it perceives as corrupt influences that have permeated South Asian Islam. Its founder, Mohammad Illyas, privileged the jihad bin-nafs, or the war for the conscience, over the jihad bin-Saif, or holy war by the sword. Most South Asian Muslims reject the neoconservative theology and politics of organisations like the Tablighi Jamaat: their faith includes syncretic Barelvi-school practices like the veneration of saints and the worship of relics.

While the Tablighi Jamaat once used to be criticised for its apolitical stand, the links between some Tablighi Jamaat followers and Islamist terror groups has become increasingly clear. In February 1995, Pakistani investigative journalist Kamran Khan quoted a Harkat ul-Mujahideen spokesperson as admitting that “most of our workers do come from the TJ.” He said: “Ours is a truly international network of genuine jihadi Muslims.”

Like Hindu and Sikh neoconservative movements, the Tablighi Jamaat attracted elite groups in search of legitimacy. Lieutenant-General Javed Nasir, who was Director-General of the Inter-Services Intelligence in Pakistan during Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s first stint in office, was a Tablighi Jamaat activist. So was Mohammad Rafiq Tarar, President of Pakistan during Mr. Sharif’s second tenure. In 1995, the Pakistan Army arrested a group of 36 officers led by Major-General Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi on charges of conspiring to overthrow Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and declare an Islamic state. The conspirators, the Pakistani media reported, were mainly Tablighi Jamaat and Harkat ul-Mujahideen members.

It is not immediately clear if his Salafi or Tablighi Jamaat leanings led Ahmed – as well as his arrested brother, the Liverpool-based doctor Sabeel Ahmed, and cousin, Mohammad Haneef – into the embrace of Al-Qaeda. But this much is clear: others from the Tablighi Jamaat have traversed much the same road as Ahmed.

Preacher’s role

Earlier this month, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) secured the conviction of several members of an Islamist cell led by Maulana Sufiyan Patangia – a Tablighi Jamaat preacher who used to run in the Waliullah seminary in old-city Ahmedabad’s Kalupur area. Patangia is thought to have recruited cadre for the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad after the 2002 communal pogrom in Gujarat. According to the CBI, the preacher played a key role in organising the assassination of one-time Gujarat Home Minister Haren Pandya.

Salafi clerics, like their Tablighi counterparts, steer clear of endorsing terrorism. But their stances have proved attractive to many angry young people. Investigations into the 2006 serial bombings in Mumbai showed that top Lashkar-e-Taiba organisers Rahil Ahmed Sheikh and Zabiuddin Ansari often met at the Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) in Mumbai’s Dongri area. IRF librarian Feroz Deshmukh, their contact there, turned out to be a key member of the Lashkar-e-Taiba cell which executed the bombings.

Zakir Naik, a popular Salafi television evangelist who heads the IRF, had no role in the Mumbai serial bombings. But his teachings, which include calls for Muslims not to participate in Hindu and Christian festivities, have considerable symmetries with those of organisations advocating violence. Interestingly, the IRF is listed as an approved religious information resource on the official website of the Lashkar’s parent organisation, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa.

Inspiration

While figures like Zakir Naik are emphatic in their rejection of terrorism, others are less so. Tablighi Jamaat preachers in Gujarat, for example, have been deeply inspired by the South African cleric Ahmed Deedad. While Deedad’s target was syncretism, his work contained the seeds of violence praxis. Deedad’s Durban-based Islamic Propagation Centre International received large financial contributions from Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden. In 2001, South Africa’s Sunday Times reported that Deedad’s son and successor, Yusuf Deedad, had distributed anti-Jewish literature emblazoned with pictures of Adolf Hitler at the World Conference Against Racism.

Ahmed and his relatives, then, migh