An email that I got recently had this …
Some Hard truths in there
For weeks, the Russians have been bombing Chechnya. They
assert “Islamic terrorists” are holed up there and they are targeting them. But what the world
has been witnessing are only the Chechen children, women and frail elderly people
fleeing their burning homes and devastated villages and towns.
The international community is outraged, but not the Islamic
fraternity. It’s only just this past week that the OIC pieced together a delegation of sorts
and dispatched it to Moscow. For months, Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian thugs kept murdering
the ethnic Albanian Muslims in Kosovo, burying them in mass graves, raping their
women, ransacking their homes, torching their villages, and terrorising them out to
seek refuge in Yugoslavia’s neighbouring provinces and states. The world was outraged, but not the Islamic fraternity. The NATO bombed the Yugoslav butcher to hold him back and rescue these distressed Muslims from his thuggery. The fraternity didn’t remember them even in its prayers.
For horrifically long, the Serbs kept slaughtering Muslims in
Bosnia Herzegovina, molesting their women, plundering their homes and setting their villages
afire. The world was outraged, but not the Islamic fraternity. The
best it could do for these wronged Muslims was to set up an OIC contact group. But whom
did it contact, where and when was only known to the group; the world didn’t see of it.
Now for well over a decade, the Indian soldiers have been
slaughtering unarmed Kashmiris in the occupied Kashmir, gangraping their women, maiming their
youth, burning their homes and villages. But the Islamic fraternity’s silence over the tragic plight of these beleaguered Kashmiri Muslims is louder than that of even the world capitals
claiming to be the global champions of human rights. The most that it has come up with for them so far is to set up an OIC contact group. But whom it contacts must be a closely guarded
secret. Nobody knows of it.
And yet listen to any Muslim cleric or politician and you are
amazed by the effusion and exuberance with which they talk of a Muslim Ummah. But what
Ummah? Is it a fraternity that really cares for its people?
You must be kidding. It indeed is a fraternity that has shown
itself up at its weakest in safeguarding its solidarity or interests or in defending its
minorities in alien lands. It has demonstrated to be at its best in doing the bidding of the
aliens and even colluding with them in the killing of its own people on its own lands.
And yet the enthusiasts brag that this fraternity is great.
Sure, it is. Almost one quarter of the humanity inhabiting this planet, it produces such a huge
quantity of oil, gas, minerals and raw materials that many of the aliens now basking in
wealth and prosperity would go paupers if it denies them its possessions to fuel their
flourishing economies. But despite that intrinsic greatness, it’s practically the
most spineless fraternity whose voice counts not even for a dime in the world. Just look at
its Goliaths. In the corridors of Islamic forums, they roam like hungry lions in the jungle. But
watch them at the UN or any international conferences, and they look no bigger than the
kitchen mouse. Nobody looks at them or listens to them or shares a thought with them. They
walk the corridors lonely, fearing even the shadows of the aliens who thrive on their
wealth.
International treaties are formulated and concluded by the aliens without consulting the
fraternity or its consent. They haggle and squabble between themselves over key
appointments to prestigious international bodies and distribute these among their own
ranks. Neither they ever bother to accommodate this fraternity in any manner nor does it
itself ever dare to put up a stake. Like serfs, it just keeps watching on, with the lords
quarreling spiritedly for the spoils. Despite its size, strength and wealth and the inherent clout that comes with all that, it indeed has willingly and happily resigned to take the backseat in the world community. The only quality this fraternity of the fake, the frail and
the timid has excelled in is in killing and subduing its own peoples. It’s a fraternity where a people kill their own blithely, where one sect slaughters the other fanatically, where government troops and the dissidents murder one another vengefully.
And it's the fraternity where for well over two decades the people of the same nation,
Afghanistan, have been slitting each other’s throats with no sense of remorse.
It were the two nations of this fraternity, Iraq and Iran, who fought the longest war, for eight
years, since the Second World War and whose one member, Iraq, invaded the other, Kuwait, and occupied it for a while. It indeed is a fraternity whose members would zealously burn
up billions of dollars in arms purchases from the aliens, thereby creating more businesses,
jobs and wealth for them but further lengthening the shadows of bloodier conflicts, death
and destruction on their own fraternal brothers. The territorial disputes within the fraternity that should have been long settled in the true Islamic spirit of brotherhood, conciliation, accommodation and understanding, have been left out to simmer and keep its unity fractured.
And a tremendous opportunity that it got for giving concrete expression to the noble
message of Islam for helping your brother in need was nonchalantly frittered away during
the oil boom of the seventies and the eighties. Instead of going into developing the crawling
economies of the poor brothers to the benefit of all in the fraternity, petrodollars ended up
unthankfully in the coffers of the aliens’ banks and the pockets of their contractors, traders,
businessmen and real estate developers. With great fanfare the fraternity launched the Organisation of Islamic Conference and its affiliates, touting them up as the harbingers of an enviable Muslim solidarity and unparalleled economic progress and prosperity of all its
peoples. A Tunku Abdurrehman came all the way from Malaysia, leaving his post of the prime
minister, to head the organisation’s secretariat at Jeddah. But nearly three decades on, the OIC is only a phantom of what it was conceived to be and its affiliates are only a cluster of nonentities that provide employ to a few just to keep their names alive. None has anything even remotely spectacular to show for performance or accomplishment. The only achievement of the OIC is the talking shop that it sets up with great flourish every four years for the Muslim heads of state and government to sing songs in praise of an Ummah that exists only in fantasies, not in reality.
When the Soviet empire disintegrated and communism as a rival
global dispensation collapsed, the movers and shakers of the West scrambled about
in search of a potential common enemy to keep their own polities galvanised into a
united front. It could be the Muslims, they declared and their propagandists and hatchet men
went into a feverish talk of a clash of civilisations. How could they imagine that a fraternity whose peoples unabashedly prided on being the lackeys and footmen of the communist or the capitalist bloc all through the Cold War would now change and join up to challenge their erstwhile masters, victorious or vanquished? Anyway, it took them no much time to discover that the peoples they were talking about were in fact a pack of paper tigers who would ferociously growl and pounce at one another but turn tail at the very sight of an alien predator. But just to keep them on the run, these swashbucklers have branded them as terrorists, extremists and bandits, and keep chasing them everywhere. This fraternity indeed is not the one that could rightly claim to be an Islamic Ummah. That’s much too sublime a philosophy to comprehend and practise by circus clowns, court jesters, imposters and pretenders. It requires self-respecting Muslims to be its practitioners. By its conduct, this fraternity has shown it to
be far short of that requisite. So, it better stop talking of Islamic Ummah.