I have copied this from the Religion bbs at MSNBC.
It speaks froma different POV about the fascistification of Islam.
It is very disturbing.
Ed

"I have reproduced this informative article in its
entirety simply because the URL is so long and tedious
for the reader to paste. Here it is if you insist. It's
a long read but I think it will shock you as well as
inform you.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=th
estar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1004828728549&cal
l_page=TS_News&call_pageid=968332188492&call_pagepath=News
/News&col=968793972154

Where are the moderates?
The Star's Asia bureau chief visits centres of learning
in Lahore and Karachi, expecting to reconnect with the
reflective voices
Martin Regg Cohn
ASIA BUREAU

'In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful'
- THE QUR'AN

SAMAR FATIMA is a woman of influence in a man's world.

From her perch in the chairperson's office at Sheikh
Zayed Islamic Centre in Lahore, Fatima sees herself in
the vanguard of progressive Muslims. Poised and polished,
she presides over a leafy campus that seems an oasis of
calm, far removed from the radical religious seminaries
that preach violent holy war near the border with
Afghanistan.

A Pakistani foreign ministry official had helpfully
suggested a visit to the Islamic centre, with its
Arabesque arches and soaring dome, to illustrate the
modern, moderate vision of Muslims. Their voices are
rarely heard in the West, too often drowned out by fringe
groups that capture the media's attention.

And so in the wake of the events of Sept. 11, I set off
to this citadel of tolerance, in search of the silent
majority.

Fatima had been enthusiastic on the telephone, eager to
reflect on how to reclaim Islam from fanatics. On
arrival, she proudly presented me with a copy of the
course outline: Her students not only learn lessons from
the Qur'an, Islam's holy book, but also master modern
political thought and comparative religion, ranging from
Buddhism to Christianity.

In person, empathy seems etched on Fatima's face, her
eyelids sagging as she mentions the horror of the attacks
on the United States. She recalls how her students,
mostly women, reacted to news of the carnage.

"We prayed for the Muslims to be united," she
says softly, as we sit down beside a map of the Islamic
world on her office wall. "I told my class: `We
believe in justice.'"

The conversation turns to terrorism and I ask,
delicately, how the suspected perpetrators managed to so
misconstrue Islam's message of tolerance. Fatima puts
down her teacup and stares quizzically at me through
heavy eyes.

There is a long silence, broken only by the unceasing
drone of a fan, until finally she tries to close off the
discussion: Where is the evidence that Osama bin laden -
or any Muslim - was involved?

"There is no proof," she says firmly.

So I ask more specifically about the 19 suspected
hijackers - middle-class men from Cairo and Saudi Arabia
who paid for pilots' courses in Florida and took lessons
on flight simulators, according to their aviation
instructors. How can educators respond to such extremism,
which threatens Islam's reputation as a religion of peace?

Fatima dismisses the questions with a wave of her hand.
Adjusting her blue and gold headscarf, she leads me
patiently through her analysis of Sept. 11.

"They say that most of the Jews took the day
off," she begins. "When the World Trade Center
was hit, most of them were not there."

This rumoured conspiracy has been circulating wildly
across the Islamic world and on the Internet, despite the
long list of Jewish casualties in New York. But I hadn't
expected to hear such views here, in a place of books and
learning, from professor Fatima.

On the one hand, she argues that Muslims are blameless,
because the Jews did it. But she seems to forget herself
a few minutes later, arguing that Muslims have every
right to lash out at the West after so many provocations
in Chechnya and Bosnia, Kashmir and Palestine, Saudi
Arabia and now Afghanistan.

"Most Muslims believe in jihad (holy war, or
struggle)," she continues, warming to her subject.
"They want to become shaheeds (martyrs) and they are
very courageous compared to non-Muslims."

As a teacher of comparative religion, she has considered
the differences between us.

"I have heard in your Bible that if someone slaps you
in the face, you turn the other cheek. We are not that
kind of people," she says. "We are supposed to
take revenge. That is the major difference between Islam
and Christianity."

----------------------------------------------------------
----------------------

On the phone, Fatima had been eager for readers in Canada
to hear from "moderate Muslims like me." Now,
hearing her strange analysis of Islam - unlike any I have
read by serious scholars - I fear I have come to the
wrong place.

It is an inauspicious start to this journalistic journey.

I first wrote about the moderate face of Islam on a
fellowship to Indonesia in 1989, when I visited the
world's most populous Muslim nation. Later, during four
years in The Star's Middle East bureau, and the past
three years covering Asia, I've had more frequent
encounters with militants who obsessed about jihads.

Still, as my plane touched down in Pakistan, I found
myself clinging to the belief that these radicals are
outside mainstream Muslim thought. Now, in the wake of
Sept. 11, with so many journalists making the rounds of
the madrassas - religious seminaries - to focus on the
fringe groups, I resolved to reconnect with the moderate
majority here on the subcontinent.

Yet, as my visit with professor Fatima makes painfully
clear, these reflective voices will not be so easy to
find. The assignment will take me down several blind
alleys, where I find Pakistan's elites lapsing into
denial and intellectual dishonesty. There are also
painfully honest voices, whose stark analyses leave me
depressed. And there is the occasional bright light,
whose words - and actions - offer hope.

----------------------------------------------------------
----------------------

Waiting behind the wrought-iron gate and gothic arches of
the University of Punjab, which opened its doors in 1870,
Dr. Akram Chaudhary welcomes me warmly to his office.
Dean of the faculty of Islamic and Oriental learning, a
Fulbright fellow, educated in Islamic studies at Al Azhar
University in Cairo, graduated from Glasgow University,
he is keen to explain that Muslims oppose terrorism.

"I know the clergy here better than anyone knows
them," he says.

The gray-bearded Chaudhary cuts a distinguished figure as
he leans back in his chair and disparages the
"primitive" misinterpretations of Islam by
radical religious seminaries in rural Pakistan. Many
Taliban leaders who studied there have given Islam a bad
name, he frets.

"These madrassas are not representative of our
religion, certainly not," he says.

The topic of the Sept. 11 hijackers comes up, but
Chaudhary seems reluctant to continue this line of
discussion. He looks relieved when two fellow professors
drop by his office and quickly invites them to join the
talk, which takes a sudden turn.

"We as Pakistanis feel it's the Jews behind all this
mess created so far, because they have a stronghold in
the economy of America, and the policies that she is
practising," says Dr. Teksin Firaqi, chairman of the
Urdu department.

The dean shifts uneasily in his chair, unhappy with the
questions, uncomfortable with the answers. Avoiding eye
contact, he politely excuses himself as Firaqi presses on.

"There is the question of the Jews. Where were the
4,000 Jews in the World Trade Center? None of the Jews
has been reported dead yet. It means this must have been
planned by the Jews themselves, so that Israel will
benefit."

Chaudhary huddles with another colleague in a corner of
his large office, beneath a faded black-and-white
portrait of Pakistan's idealistic founder, Mohammad Ali
Jinnah. The dean is eavesdropping on this bizarre
discussion, arching his eyebrows as he watches me jot
down notes.

Why won't he rejoin us? Does he know better? Is he afraid
of contradicting his colleagues? Or is he content to let
the conspiracy take root?

Eventually, he returns - just in time to see me out. He
is concerned that he may have forgotten to mention his
studies in Mecca. And did I write down that he was a
Fulbright fellow?

"In their hearts, Pakistanis are religious
people," he adds as an afterthought.

----------------------------------------------------------
----------------------

Khaled Ahmed, one of the country's most trenchant
columnists at the Friday Times, seems bemused by my quest
for the moderate face of Islam. In his cluttered offices
above one of Lahore's most popular bookstores, he is
scathing about Pakistan's academic world.

"When they talk to the West, they are lying - they
become defensive," Ahmed says, peering through
half-rimmed spectacles. "They say the fundamentalists
don't represent us Muslims. But when it comes to
challenging the fundamentalists, they fall quiet."

We discuss the fallout from Sept. 11 and how Muslims in
the West unequivocally denounced such radicalism. I ask
for his help in finding similar voices in Pakistan that
can put the fringe groups in proper perspective.

Ahmed has heard it all before and tells me what to expect:

A literacy rate of barely 33 per cent leaves students
vulnerable to half-baked religious ideas. With the public
school system in disarray, the boys end up in
tuition-free madrassas, where mullahs with questionable
qualifications inculcate a vocabulary of violence.

Ahmed is not only jaded about the jihadis, he also
challenges the assumption that fundamentalists make up an
insignificant, mindless minority. They may be a small
percentage in a country of 140 million people, he says,
but they wield disproportionate influence because no one
dares challenge them - certainly not the silent majority,
moderate or not.

"The intellectual battle is not being fought here. As
for Muslims in the West, they are out of touch. All over
the world, the Muslim moderate will meet the challenge of
criticizing the West very well, but he will not challenge
our own extremists."

By this, Ahmed means there is a sense of denial. Among
both armchair intellectuals and protesters on the
streets, a conventional wisdom has taken root that goes
something like this:

Islam is a timeless religion, and believers are
blameless; if there are a few wayward souls, or restless
terrorists, the fault lies with the West for exploiting
Muslims economically, oppressing them politically and
ultimately provoking rage.

The list of grievances includes Israeli abuses and the
absence of a Palestinian state; the presence of American
troops in the holy lands of Saudi Arabia; sanctions
against Saddam Hussein's Iraq that are blamed for the
deaths of tens of thousands of children.

Yet the grievances depend on the geography of the
aggrieved.

In Pakistan, the disputed territory of Kashmir tops the
list, though it is unclear why the U.S. would be blamed
for the transgressions of neighbouring India, which
occupies most of Kashmir and refuses any outside
mediation.

Other disaffected Muslims cite the situation in Chechnya,
though it's hard to see why the West is faulted when the
military intervention emanates from Moscow.

(Never do these Muslims mention Indonesia, the world's
biggest Islamic state, and its army's transgressions
against Catholic East Timor; or the Indonesian army's
atrocities against fellow Muslims in Aceh for seeking
self-determination. There is also a conspicuous silence
about abuses by Sudan's Islamist regime against its
Christian minority.)

The conventional wisdom holds that resolving these
grievances would remove the incentive for terrorists, and
their sympathizers, to oppose the West. The rage against
America, the world's sole superpower, would melt away if
only Palestinian statehood were declared, Kashmiri
independence proclaimed, Chechnyan autonomy safeguarded,
and so on.

These notions let Muslim thinkers off the hook, Ahmed
says. And by latching on to conspiracy theories, there is
no need for introspection about the constant references
to jihad by preachers close to home.

"It breaks my heart that it's not happening with
Muslim intellectuals," says Ahmed. "They're
simply whimpering. There's no soul-searching."

Part of the problem is that in Pakistan's polarized
society, educated, Westernized, secularized people have
virtually no interaction with the impoverished masses
that fall under the spell of hate-spewing preachers.

Even if the elites wanted to intervene - and it's unclear
that they do - they no longer speak the same language as
the common people.

"They can't communicate with the fundamentalists
because they don't know Islam at all," Ahmed says
acidly.

----------------------------------------------------------
----------------------

So, the silent majority is watching and waiting, making
allowances and apologies.

Many hope the army will do the dirty work for them, by
cracking down on the fundamentalists when they grow
inconveniently powerful.

Some in the elites are fearful that the true target of
the terrorists is not the U.S. - after all, airplane
attacks can't topple a superpower - but regimes closer to
home, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan.

In fact, Pakistan's army has played a disquieting role in
fostering the Islamist resurgence over the years.

The late dictator, Gen. Zia ul Haq, encouraged militant
extremists in the 1980s after he imposed sharia, or
Islamic law.

In the 1990s, the army's intelligence agencies armed and
trained jihad groups to fight a proxy war against India
in Kashmir, bolstering the power base of the radical
religious movements.

The pattern is reminiscent of what happened after the
U.S. equipped the mujahideen holy warriors fighting the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The
Americans later suffered from "blowback" when
erstwhile allies such as Osama bin Laden turned the guns
against them.

Now, the Pakistanis are facing a Frankenstein's monster
of their own making. This homegrown blowback is a
perversion of the Pakistani ideal of a secular homeland
for Muslims of the subcontinent.

The front lines of the war against terrorism may not be
in New York, or even Afghanistan. Instead of a clash of
civilizations, the true fault line may be in the Islamic
world itself, where a war within Islam pits moderates
against militants.

----------------------------------------------------------
----------------------

This spectre weighs heavily on Javid Iqbal, 76, an
Islamic scholar and a retired supreme court judge. His
late father was Pakistan's most famous poet, Muhammad
Iqbal, who first articulated the notion of a Muslim
majority area in the former colonial India. The son is
writing a book on Pakistan's identity and the
fundamentalist threat.

"We are also facing domestic terror in Pakistan,"
says Iqbal, sitting in the family's Lahore home. "It
is a clash within the same culture."

Iqbal is an exception among the elites: a Westernized man
of means, his children educated abroad, yet still in
contact with the religious world and capable of engaging
in dialogue. His living room is luxurious, but he has
been invited to Taliban Afghanistan, has spoken in
impoverished madrassas and has lectured to army officers.

"The madrassas are a breeding ground for this
(violent) frame of mind," Iqbal frets. "The
student must have an individual ego, to be confident
enough to have an analytical mind."

The pedagogical shortcomings of the madrassas - where
students memorize the Qur'an in Arabic, a language they
do not understand - are an old story in Pakistan. What
about the institutions of higher learning in Lahore,
where departmental heads cling to conspiracy theories?

Iqbal shrugs his shoulders helplessly. As a pillar of the
establishment, he takes it personally that radicalism has
invaded his old haunts.

"No one is giving an enlightened approach to
Islam," he says. "In my time, Punjab University
was a liberal university, as a university should be. But
no longer."

Iqbal is decidedly gloomy, brooding even, as he shows me
out - past the Persian carpets, the Qur'anic inscriptions
on the wall - the inheritor, in his old age, of the
tolerant tradition espoused by his poet father. His last
words to me sound prophetic.

"We are passing through a period of sectarian
terrorism here in Pakistan, which these people consider
part of Islam," he says. "And if it continues,
there could be civil war between extremists and
moderates."

----------------------------------------------------------
----------------------

Outside the salons and ivory towers of Pakistan, there is
a small movement afoot to break the stranglehold of the
extremists and their apologists. And it comes from an
unexpected quarter.

The Network of Minhaj-ul-Qur'an educational movement is
led by a headstrong philosopher-preacher, mullah
professor Dr. Muhammad Tahir ul Qadri. With his religious
skull cap and traditional shalwar kameez, he is dismissed
by many intellectuals as an old-fashioned cleric with a
graying beard, a man whose religious broadcasts they
reflexively tuned out when he preached on a regular
television program.

Now that he heads his own political party, the Pakistan
Popular Movement, he is a hard man to see, and sometimes
hard to pin down. When we finally meet, I wait 40 minutes
for him to finish consulting with staffers about the
photo layout for a documentary on his life.

He finally approves a flattering caption and proudly
shows me the finished product to test my reaction. Qadri
packages everything carefully. I had noticed on a tour of
his institute that the control room was stacked with 22
video machines, each of them recording his speech that
day.

The elites disparage him as vain and venal, but
Pakistan's military government is courting Qadri
assiduously. Alone among the religious parties, his has
endorsed the government's decision to back the U.S.-led
attacks on Afghanistan.

Unlike other religious scholars, Qadri doesn't flinch
when the question of culpability is asked. He does,
however, perform a delicate dance to position himself
squarely in the middle.

The Jews may have been behind the Sept. 11 attacks, he
muses, but more likely Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda
network were responsible. He rages at the mere mention of
bin Laden, the engineer and terrorist mastermind who
presumes to preach to the Muslim world.

"His knowledge of Islam is not so deep; it is the
superficial knowledge of a soldier, not a scholar,"
Qadri fumes.

He blames "those 19 Arab hijackers" for ruining
the reputations of Muslims and worries that "Islam is
being hijacked by a handful of extremists."

But he bears another grudge against bin Laden and his
Saudi Arabian roots. The practice of Islam in Pakistan
has been transformed in recent years by foreign
influences, notably Wahhabism, a puritan movement that
originated in the Arabian desert as a reaction to the
decadence of the Ottoman Empire.

In Pakistan, the Wahhabi school has blended with another
hard-line movement - Deobandi, which originated in India
and takes its name from a seminary in Deoband - to spawn
a potent strain of radical Islam that insists on rigid
adherence to Qur'anic injunctions.

It inspires Pakistan's hard-line religious parties,
infuses their madrassas and motivates many of
Afghanistan's uncompromising Taliban leaders who spent
their formative years here.

Saudi money has bankrolled many of the madrassas that
have sprung up across Pakistan to spread the
Wahhabi-Deobandi creed. This more-intolerant strain of
Islam has steamrollered the Sufi tradition of mysticism
that once predominated in Pakistan.

The Sufis dance and chant. They venerate saints and are
open to other faiths. But they are in rapid decline here.

The Wahhabis consider most Sufi practices to be heresy
and Pakistan's Deobandis, who vigorously oppose any local
innovations in Islam, have displaced the gentle tradition
with their relentless talk of jihad.

The combined Wahhabi-Deobandi brand of righteousness and
intolerance exasperates Qadri.

"We do not give the authority to declare jihad to a
handful of people," he protests bitterly.

----------------------------------------------------------
----------------------

In his rough-hewn way, Qadri is one of the few religious
thinkers to take on the radicals. Yet most of his
critique is focused on the fringe groups that recruit
followers from among the illiterate and impoverished in a
country where the average wage is $600 a year.

I am still wondering about the educated, middle-class
kids who became killers after taking flying lessons.

For answers, I turn to another retired jurist and Islamic
scholar, Khalid Ishaque. He greets me in his Karachi
residence, surrounded by 175,000 books that fill every
room on every floor of his home, spilling over into his
kitchen.

Ishaque, 75, pads about his carpets and decorative tiles
wearing slippers, a skull cap and the traditional
Pakistani kurta pajamas. He makes a point of telling me
his style of dress sets him apart from his wealthy,
Westernized neighbours, who are fast fleeing this
violence-plagued port city of 12 million people for the
suburbs.

We take tea in his study - where the shelves are lined
with books on Indian politics, Islamic ethics, Jewish law
- and Ishaque reflects on the motives of the hijackers.
He links their disaffection to the decline in urban life
that he sees around him in Karachi: the tension between
modernity and tradition.

"These boys are alienated in both worlds - in the
West, and their home countries," he explains.
"These young men from Arab lands feel their parents
have been converted to a pleasure-seeking, money-spending
lifestyle, and they don't like it."

Ishaque glides easily between the two worlds. He defends
rich clients in courts of law, but he also advises imams
on points of sharia religious law. His wealth of contacts
makes him alert to the sentiment on the streets as well
as in the corridors of power. He gets right to the point:

"It's quite interesting that Muslims all over the
world are very sympathetic to the perpetrators of Sept.
11, though publicly they will not admit it to you.
Privately, they believe it was a good thing that the
haughty West was punished.

"Unfortunately, we are in a tacit war with the West
and, in times of war, people don't like to talk in terms
of peace."

There is no reason to doubt Ishaque's assessment. He is
an able and articulate scholar, well-grounded in law and
politics, religion and psychology. I leave him feeling
dejected, not so much by his analysis, as by his inaction.

Surrounded by his books, perhaps he has allowed himself
to become a spectator to the tensions that are tearing
apart his country and now manifesting themselves around
the world.

And so I go to the outskirts of the city, to see a
scholar at the University of Karachi who has decided to
take matters into his own hands.

----------------------------------------------------------
----------------------

Abdul Rashid heads the department of Islamic Learning,
located in a three-storey building next to a small
mosque. A squat structure, it lacks the architectural
grace of the splendid Sheikh Zayed Islamic Centre, where
I began my inquiries in Lahore.

The Karachi campus seems dusty and forlorn in comparison,
and Rashid has no aides to summon for tea, so he hands a
security guard a few rupees to fetch a couple of Pepsis.

His office walls are bare but for a couple of Qur'anic
inscriptions hanging behind his desk and the dean is
equally unpretentious, apologizing for his choppy
English, though he is too modest. He describes himself as
a product of the madrassas, where he memorized the Qur'an
from age 6 to 17.

Rashid listens unsmiling to my questions about Sept. 11,
concentrating on my English, and I wonder if it will be
another difficult interview.

He answers slowly, methodically.

"When I heard about the attacks," he says, "I
was thinking: Is it true that this action was done by
Muslims? Can it be true?"

It is a familiar refrain, which in many of my previous
interviews was the preamble to a Jewish conspiracy
theory. Yet, unlike the others, Rashid doesn't take that
U-turn, doesn't lapse into defensiveness, but presses
forward.

"If they are Muslims, in my view this is totally
against Islam, because even in a jihad there are
restrictions on killing old people; babies should not be
killed; property should not be damaged. Even against an
enemy, you are not allowed such things."

He mentions Palestine and Iraq only in passing, for they
are tangential to his argument. Resolving these problems
would certainly reduce resentment against the West, but
Muslim violence won't magically melt away if and when
these foreign trouble spots recede from the horizon.

Rashid began thinking about the question of violence long
before Sept. 11, and not because of Palestine or Iraq.
For there is trouble enough closer to home.

Karachi is torn apart by communal violence between the
rival Sunni and Shia sects that leaves hundreds of
Muslims dead in the mosques and on the streets every year.

While people protest on the streets about superpower
transgressions, Rashid ponders the question of violence
perpetrated in the name of Islam.

He believes Muslims must look within themselves for
answers - not to remake their religion, but to rethink
the way they interpret it, teach it, propagate it.

The challenge is to reform Islamic education in Pakistan
and across the Muslim world.

His touchstone is "Tolerance," the title of a
colloquium on cultural understanding he organized on
campus in 1999. A few months ago, he set up the Global
Network for Promotion of Tolerance to spread the message
beyond Karachi, translating its material from Urdu into
Arabic and English.

"We accept this challenge," Rashid says, the
words tumbling out with growing intensity as I struggle
to keep up.

"I also came from a madrassa and I know the true
situation in the madrassas. Now, I'm in a responsible
position at a university, so I should work to bridge the
gap between the madrassas and the university."

As dean, he has modified the admissions criteria to make
it easier for madrassa graduates to enter the university
without all the usual qualifications. He wants to expose
them to the questioning, critical environment of his
university so their minds can be challenged.

"If you bring them out from the madrassa to the
university, then they will be able to decide things for
themselves, and not just follow whatever the imam says.
They will be able to think for themselves."

It has taken him several years to build these bridges,
leaving the ivory tower behind and going door to door
among the madrassas dotting Karachi's slums. His agenda
is ambitious and he must avoid ruffling the feelings of
status-conscious imams.

"We want to introduce modern courses, to change the
curriculum and their system of teaching," Rashid
explains.

"The problem is that if the imam claims, `God said
this,' or `The Prophet said that,' and if a student dares
to question it, the teacher will wag his finger and say,
`No, no, you are not allowed to ask questions.'

"Well, we tell them it is okay to ask questions. We
tell them for example, that jihad is about more than the
battlefield. Life is a jihad, a struggle for ethics and
work."

The last rays of sunlight are seeping through the windows
as the call to evening prayers wafts across the
high-ceilinged room. I marvel at the energy, even
bravery, of this plain-spoken professor - for Karachi can
be a deadly city, and Rashid is making waves.

How long will his stamina last, when so few of his peers
share his commitment and seem to prefer the easier jihad
of grievances and conflict?

Despite my faith in his mission, I worry that the
madrassa students who end up in his classroom will be a
lonely group of iconoclasts. They will emerge on a
different wavelength from the students who graduate from
the Sheikh Zayed Islamic Centre in Lahore or the
University of the Punjab, where I spent the previous week
hearing the professors talk in circles about conspiracies.

Still, it is a start. I notice that Rashid breaks into a
smile for the first time, chuckling about the overuse of
the word jihad in the madrassas and in the media.

He tells the famous story of how the Prophet Muhammad,
Peace Be Upon Him, came back from a battlefield victory
to tell his fighters that they had merely completed the
lesser jihad, a holy war.

A greater jihad of personal striving and struggle awaited
them, he explained to his followers.

"This is our jihad," Rashid says in his gruff
English as he talks about tolerance.

"This is our greater jihad."