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No redemptive, just, honorable or worthwhile politically transformatory objectives can be met, or even invoked, by attacking a mass transit railway station, a restaurant, a hotel or a hospital. The holding of hostages in a centre of worship and comfort for travelers cannot and does not challenge any form of the state oppression anywhere.

The terrorists (I unhesitatingly call them 'terrorists', a word which I am normally reluctant to use, because their objective was nothing other than the terror itself) who undertook these operations did not deal a single blow to the edifice of oppression in this country, or in any other country. On the other hand, they strengthened it. By helping to unleash calls for war, by eliminating (unwittingly perhaps) those that have been investigating the links between fringe far right groups and home grown terror, by provoking once again the demand for stronger and more lethal legislation for preventive detention (in the form of a revived or resuscitated POTA), these terrorists have done statist and authoritarian politics in India its biggest favor. The sinister and lunatic fringe of far right politics of the Hindutva variety (which seems to have acted hand in glove with rogue elements within the security establishment) in particular, must be delighted to have been gifted this latest horror on a platter without having had to work hard for it.

While the agents of the attack in Bombay may have been genuinely motivated by their own twisted understanding of Islam, they have demonstrated that they have no hesitation in putting millions of Indian Muslims in harms way by exposing them to the risk of a long drawn out spiral of retaliation. We need to underscore that they killed 40 innocent, unarmed Muslims (roughly 20 % of the current total casualty figures of 179) while they unleashed their brutal force on Bombay. The terrorists who authored their deaths cannot by any stretch of imagination be seen as partisans or friends of Islam. They are the enemy of us all, and especially of those amongst us who happen to be Muslims, for they jeopardize the safety and security of all Muslims in India by unleashing yet another wave of suspicion and prejudice against ordinary Muslims. Any effort to rationalize their actions by reference to real or perceived injustices to Muslims in India, is patronizing at best, and insensitive at worst.

While the agents of the attack in Bombay may have been genuinely motivated by their own twisted understanding of Islam, they have demonstrated that they have no hesitation in putting millions of Indian Muslims in harms way by exposing them to the risk of a long drawn out spiral of retaliation. We need to underscore that they killed 40 innocent, unarmed Muslims (roughly 20 % of the current total casualty figures of 179) while they unleashed their brutal force on Bombay. The terrorists who authored their deaths cannot by any stretch of imagination be seen as partisans or friends of Islam. They are the enemy of us all, and especially of those amongst us who happen to be Muslims, for they jeopardize the safety and security of all Muslims in India by unleashing yet another wave of suspicion and prejudice against ordinary Muslims. Any effort to rationalize their actions by reference to real or perceived injustices to Muslims in India, is patronizing at best, and insensitive at worst.

It is therefore neither surprising nor remarkable that several Muslim organizations and individuals in India have unanimously condemned the terror attacks and terrorism in general. The actions of the terrorists (their purported statements as aired on India TV notwithstanding) constitute an insult to anyone who is interested in seriously addressing the discrimination faced by minorities in India.

What is particularly reprehensible about the terrorist's actions is their choice to target and kill unarmed Jewish travelers, a rabbi and his wife. This choice was not accidental; these people were targeted because of their religious affiliation and their ethnic origins. The anti-Semitic edge of contemporary Islamic Fundamentalism has nothing whatsoever to do with any opposition to the oppressive policies and practices of the state of Israel towards Palestinians. Targeting Jews (who may or may not be Israeli) or individuals who happen to be Israeli in a house of Jewish worship in Mumbai for the actions of the State of Israel is not unlike attacking Carribean Hindus and Hindu Indians at a Hindu temple in Trinidad for real or imagined misdemeanors of the Republic of India. It would be similar to attacking ordinary Indian, Pakistani or Somali Muslims and Iraqis in retribution for the offences committed by the erstwhile Ba'athist government of Iraq on Kurds. The Israeli government treats Palestinians in occupied Palestine a shade better than Saddam Hussain's Iraq treated Kurds. (Settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, though they have no doubt borne the brunt of Israeli state terror, have not to my knowledge been gassed by chemical weapons). Islamic fundamentalist anti-Semitism is as much an abomination as Hindu, Christian or Jewish Fundamentalism or Secular Islamophobia anywhere in the world

One of the theories doing the rounds of the underbelly of blogs and mailing lists is that of 'Mossad-CIA' involvement in the attacks on Bombay. While I have no doubt at all about the fact that organizations such as the Mossad and the CIA are murderous and unscrupulous in terms of their day to day operational existence and that they have an active and corrosive agenda in South Asia, I find the theory of their involvement in the Bombay terror attacks as far fetched as the assumption that the Indian Ocean Tsunami was a result of a Mossad-RAW conspiracy to test secret undersea weapons. Such theories, which are closely related to the '9/11 was a Mossad job' kind of wild conjecture, are a species of denial, and are often propagated by credulous commentators and politicians, particularly in the Muslim world (and their non-Muslim sympathizers), with a view to maintaining the myth of the eternally victimized and wronged Muslim. Such unsubstantiated conjectures and allegations do not help Muslims in any way. On the contrary their whimsical non-seriousness perpetuates the conditions that undermine responsible non-xenophobic Muslim points of view from being taken seriously.

Having said all this (which I believe is necessary to say), it is equally important to address several other serious issues that have raised their ugly heads in the aftermath of the attack on Bombay. The aftermath of the terrible recent events in Bombay contains a great deal of debris. A spell of terror destroys so much, so quickly. A lot gets damaged by violence. Lives are shattered, walls and roofs collapse, entire neighborhoods get devastated. Cities, sometimes the populations of countries, find what gets called their 'spirit' broken. But one thing stays intact, and on occasion even finds new strength. This one thing is a sense of wounded innocence, and the search for easy fixes and answers. There can be nothing more dangerous at present than this deadly combination of injured innocence and glib macho loose talk. I would like to spend some time looking at the sources and consequences of two specific kinds of loose talk which I will address in turn

1. War Mongering: The Indian state is an injured and innocent party, and an attack like this gives India the right to conduct a military campaign, even war, against Pakistan to finish once and for all, the scourge of terrorism. As the botoxed visage of Simi Garewal screamed on 'We the People' broadcast on NDTV two evenings ago 'Carpet Bomb those parts of Pakistan..."

2. Islamophobia : We can understand everything about the motives and drives of the terrorists by pointing to their 'Muslim' identity. A variant of this is - 'The Quran sanctions violence against unbelievers, and that is all that we need to know in order to understand the roots of the attacks in Bombay'. This kind of sentiment is burgeoning on the internet, where it feeds the testosterone overdrive of a certain kind of overzealous netizen who sees the tragedy that has befallen Bombay as an opportunity to put out a sick and prejudiced agenda.

It should not come as a surprise that often, the two come linked. The idiotic and jejune militarist fantasies of the hard Hindutva right are a public secret. However, there are also many card carrying secular nationalist 'war mongers' who see the times we are living through as an opportunity to exhibit how much more 'patriotic' they can be than their communal peers. Of course, these attitudes have their exact mirrors in Pakistan. And a peculiar mirroring is currently underway between Indian and Pakistani news channels, with news anchors such as the hysterical Arnab Goswami (Times Now TV) in India and his counterparts in Pakistan indulging in a perverse and dangerous game of jingoistic one-upmanship. Even retired senior officers of the armed forces who are sought out for comment and analysis in television studios and politicians of parties such as the BJP (neither of whom are necessarily known as models of moderation) are acting with greater restraint than sections of the electronic media. They (the BJP politicians) are at least at present not rushing to talk of war (how could they, they have an election to contest in a few months time, and an Indo-Pak military standoff that could work to the advantage of the incumbent UPA government could really upset their best calculations). The retired soldiers by and large, speak wisely of avoiding military options as far as is possible. It is only the few news anchors who have let their place in the spotlights go to their heads, (and their adolescent online clones) who are consistently maintaining the shrillness of war-talk. Those speaking of war or punitive military strikes base their arguments on the 'enough is enough' theory, that time has now come to deal Pakistan a hard blow as a punitive action against letting its territory being used against India. This line of reasoning assumes that India is cast as the eternal victim and can never be seen as the aggressor If this is so, then (following this line of thinking) there is no reason why India too should not have been carpet bombed for allowing the use of its territory and resources for acts of terror against its neighbors. The memory of news anchors may be as brief as the punchy headlines of breaking news, but even a cursory examination of recent history would show that the Indian state and elements within India have sinned as much as they have been sinned against

Perhaps as the comparatively militarily weaker neighbor of mighty India, it may have found itself reluctant to imagine, let alone carry out such a bizarre threat. Clearly, the nuclear fuelled fantasies of militarist Indians brook no such reasons for reticence. I wonder whether it is amnesia and the lack of a moral-ethical sense that underwrites Indian militarism or is it the intoxication of arrogant militarism that induces this dystopic inability to either remember ones own state's history of complicity in terror or to behave ethically and reasonably in times of crisis. Further, should a professional investigation into the devastating attack on the Samjhauta Express train to Pakistan reveal that the perpetrators of the attack were Hindu radicals assisted by rogue elements within the military intelligence apparatus in India, would Pakistan then be justified in 'carpet bombing' Pune, indore, Jammu and other places linked to the cluster of organizations and individuals around outfits such as 'Abhinav Bharat'?

A military adventure into Pakistani held territory by Indian forces at this current juncture can be nothing short of a disaster, it risks taking South Asia and the world to the precipice of a nuclear conflict. It has been pointed out by some idiots on television that the United States is apparently safer today for having sent troops to fight into Afghanistan and Iraq. The truth is, the United States has made the world and Americans a great deal more unsafe, and a great deal more vulnerable to terrorism, by the conduct of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The incidence of terrorism worldwide has increased due to its intervention, and even the attacks on Bombay can in a sense be seen as ricocheting off the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan. The deliberate targeting of British and American individuals by the terrorists in Bombay last week demonstrates how unsafe it is to be seen carrying an American passport today. If India is to be pulled headlong into conflict with Pakistan as a result of the fall out of the attacks on Bombay, the world will automatically and immediately become a far more unsafe place. There will be more, not less terrorism for us all to deal with

The only way for us to defeat terrorism in South Asia is for ordinary Indians and Pakistanis to join hands across the Indo-Pak divide to say that they will no longer tolerate the nurturing of terror, hate and division in their societies through the covert and overt acts of rogue elements in both their governments (which have a vested interest in the continuity of conflict) and powerful non-state actors in both societies. Neither POTA, nor military misadventures, nor harder borders can defeat terrorism. A suicide bomber can only be disarmed by the narrowing of the political and cultural space for hatred For this to occur, we all need to shed the cocoons of the assumptions of our own innocence. The sooner we do so, the sooner we realize that culpability in terror in South Asia is not a one way street with all signs pointing only in the direction of Pakistan, the better it will be for peace in our time. The automatic assumption of our own innocence, especially at times when we perceive ourselves to be the victims, is something we cannot afford. Whatever little illusory comfort it may give us in the short run, it will rebound to haunt us with unforgiving intensity

If we are serious about putting an end to the seemingly endless spiral of retributive violence behind us we have to exercise the hard and necessary choice of leaving the discourse of 'martyrs', 'victims', 'villains' and 'heroes' behind us. The media and especially the electronic media have a special role to play in this regard. They have much introspection to do. It will not do to have jingoist anchors and commentators protect their diminishing intelligence and rising moral culpability in stoking the flames of war themselves with the fig leaf of 'national psyche' and 'popular sentiment'. It is they who fashion the chimera of 'popular sentiment' with their spin doctoring, and it is unacceptable to see people refuse to take responsibility for the very serious consequences of this dangerous spin.

Finally, I come to the question of whether there is anything specifically 'Islamic' about acts of terrorism such as we have witnessed in Bombay last week. Under normal circumstances, such ridiculous questions would not need any attention. Unfortunately, these are not normal circumstances, and it is at times such as these, that otherwise marginal irresponsibly articulated opinions get a disproportionate velocity due to the way in which they circulate, particularly on the internet and then leak out into the grit of innuendo, insinuation, half-informed speculation and rumor in daily conversation. One particularly pernicious communication that has been doing the rounds of chain mails, and has already begun cropping up in blog posts and discussion lists is the familiar litany of - "There are suras (chapters) in the Quran that justify the slaughter of unbelievers and what the terrorists were doing was only fulfilling the commands of their faith". This kind of response asks us to assume two things,

One, that the source of the motivation for the terrorists actions was predominantly scriptural (this bases itself somewhat on the scripture laden rhetoric and vocabulary of the so-called 'Indian Mujahideen' terror emails that accompanied previous attacks this year) .Secondly, that if as a believing Muslim you do not follow Quranic injunctions to unleash violence, you are at best an insincere or inconsistent Muslim, and the only true Muslim is the one who kills unbelievers to earn his place in heaven

The first reduces the speechless complexity of terrorist actions to a few pithy and selectively quoted phrases. The second is an insult to the lives, actions and convictions of the absolute majority of believing Muslims. Both betray a singular and profound ignorance of Islam, of the concept of jihad within Islam and an unwillingness to engage with Islamic belief and the history of Islamic societies.

This (completely erroneous) view of all Muslims as mindless 'holy warriors' takes the injunctions to do with the term 'jihad' (which translates, not as 'holy war' as is commonly thought, but as 'struggle') as referring solely to acts of violence. It needs to be stated here, once again, as has been stated many times before, in many different contexts, that 'jihad' within the theological context of Islam is of two kinds, and that only one of these refers to the conduct of armed struggle. The greater and more commendable jihad is that which involves a personal struggle with one's own baser and unethical propensities, which every believing Muslim is asked to conduct as a spiritual cleansing process. The 'lesser jihad' concerns specifically defensive military acts conducted against aggressors as a last resort, when all else fails. The Quran is replete with statements such as 'to you your religion and to me mine', or 'there can be no compulsion in religion'. When the adherents of other religions are specifically mentioned by name (Jews, Christians and Sabeans) it is said -

"Believers, Jews, Christians and Sabeans (the followers of St. John the Baptist or Hazrat Yahya) - whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day and does what is right - shall be rewarded by their Lord, they have nothing to fear or to regret". (Sura Baqarah - The Cow - 2:62)

It is important to keep this in mind specifically with regard to the special targeting of unarmed Jews by the terrorists in Bombay. Their acts, in this specific instance stand in direct contradiction to the spirit of the Quran. While there are anti-Semitic traces in the Ahadis (the reported traditions of the prophet that were accumulated and collated over the centuries), there is no unanimity or consensus amongst believing Muslims about the authenticity of different 'isnads' (lines of transmission) attached to different Ahadis. Therefore, in instances of ambiguity, as with regard to the attitude to Jews and those of other faiths, it is only the unquestioned authority of the Quran that can be seen as acting as the final arbiter and guide. From this standpoint alone, the anti-Semitic edge of the terrorists actions in Bombay last week can be justifiably condemned as anathema by all believing Muslims.

Generally speaking, the quote that is most commonly hurled by Islamophobes is "Kill them wherever you find them, drive them out of the places from which they drove you" (Sura Baqarah - The Cow - 2:190-191). This verse was given to the prophet Mohammad before the advent of a major battle when all attempts at arriving at peaceful negotiations had been exhausted, and when the Prophet and his fledgling community in Medina were in danger of being exterminated by invasive aggression. The injunctions are specific; they apply only to retaliation against armed bodies of men who have acted as aggressors. What is omitted when these verses are hurled, either by Islamophobes, or by Islamists, is that they follow immediately from the injunction that says –

"Fight for the sake of Allah those that fight against you, but do not attack them first. Allah does not love the aggressor" (Sura Baqarah - The Cow - 2:190-191). It is also followed by the equally specific injunction "but if they mend their ways , know that Allah is forgiving and merciful. But if they mend their ways, fight none other than the evil-doers." (Sura Baqarah - The Cow - 2:190-191).

So, we have repeated caveats, repeated qualifications - 'do not be the aggressor', 'fight only if they fight you', 'cease armed action if they see reason' that immediately surround the quote that is so often pulled out at times like this like a tired rabbit from a magicians hat. And yet, the sleight of hand continues.

By what stretch of imagination can a chef's assistant in a hotel, or a rabbi's wife, or passengers trying to get to second class railway carriages or children who live on the street, ordinary Muslims, or police officers trying to investigate the terrorist outrages purportedly undertaken by radicals who happen to be Hindus with a view to intimidating ordinary Muslims be seen as 'aggressors' against Islam? By which Quranic injunction can we justify acts of aggression against such individuals?

Once again, by their concrete actions, the terrorists have demonstrated not their fidelity, but their sharp deviance from the letter and spirit of the Quran. Those motivated and prejudiced slanderers who circulate the insinuations about the 'Islamic' provenance of the terrorist actions are actually just as much guilty of spreading a mistaken understanding of Islam as the terrorists themselves. In fact, objectively, once again, Isamophobes and Islamists are not adversaries, but allies.

The lineage of the terrorists who attacked Bombay is better traced to those vicious acts of twentieth and twenty-first century terror which feature self styled protagonists of all the faiths and ideologies that mark our modern world. They are to be found as much amongst the New Age-Buddhist-Hindu hybrid of Aum Shirin Kyo, the Branch Davidians, the Balinese Hindu vigilantes who slaughtered 40,000 unarmed Indonesian Communists and their suspected sympathizers in 1965, the ultra-left and far-right radicals of West Germany, Japan and Italy in the seventies As such, they, like the Indian Maoists and Salwa Judum and the ingredients of the alphabet soup of insurgent and counter-insurgent outfits operating through the length and breadth of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma are the objective agent-provocateurs of reactionary, authoritarian, statist politics. Terrorism, whatever else it may be, is in the end, the mightiest secret weapon in the arsenal of the state to beat and badger a terrified population into meek submission by creating a situation where the surrender and abdication of civil rights is seen as a normalized and natural response to a mounting crisis. Even a brief history of the limited genre of terrorist actions such as 'hotel bombings and attacks' reveals a rainbow hued ecumenical pantheon of contemporary terror. The attacks on the Taj and the Obeori Trident (which constituted the spectacular telegenic apex of the Bombay attacks) need to be seen as successors to the Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad, Pakistan of only a few months ago, the bombings of the Radisson SAS, Grand Hyatt and Days Inn Hotels in Amman, Jordan in 2005, the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, UK by the Provisional IRA in 1984, the bombing of the Hilton Hotel in Sydney, Australia by suspected Ananda Marg radicals in 1978 and last, but certainly not the least, the King David Hotel Bombing in Jerusalem, (then Palestine) in 1946 carried out by Irgun , a terrorist organization wedded to the Zionist ideal of a Jewish state in Palestine.

If hotel massacres were something like cricket scores, then we could say that the Bombay attacks have finally surpassed the hitherto all time high 'score' of the King David Hotel Massacre of 1946. The Irgun, a terrorist outfit espousing an ostensibly 'Jewish' and supposedly 'Zionist' cause had held till date the record of maximum casualties for this outrage - 93 dead. The Bombay attacks, apparently authored by militant Islamists, have gone higher. Those who identify terrorism with Islam today would find themselves faced with the uncomfortable fact that as far as the lethality of attacks go, the bar was raised early, and high, by self-styled 'Jewish freedom fighters' who counted amongst their ranks the then future prime minister of the state of Israel, Menahem Begin. The Islamists have once again proved how imitative they are of the militant far-right edge of Zionism. Again, the students have learnt well from their historical teachers.

Begin (who is somewhat of an icon amongst many current islamophobic zealots of the 'war against terror' for the hard line that he took in Lebanon against the PLO ad its Lebanese allies and against violent as well as non-violent forms of Palestinian resistance) is himself reported to have said while referring to the period in which the King David Hotel Massacre took place - "We actually provided the example of what the urban guerrilla is, we created the method of the urban guerrilla." - see - 'By Blood and Fire: The Attack on Jerusalem's King David Hotel' by Thurston Clarke, Hutchinson, 1981

To extrapolate from the spectacular successes of self styled 'Jewish' terrorism in Palestine under the British Mandate in the 1930s and 40s to a generalized theory of 'Jewish' Terrorism would have been as prejudiced and short sighted then (and many efforts were made in this direction) as the current efforts to give current global terror a 'Muslim' face are today. In fact the ancestors and first cousins of today's Islamophobic zealots are yesterday's and today's anti-Semitic rabble rousers. Sometimes, at the outer edges and wild fringes of the global far right, they still do meet. The irony in the fact that here, they often find themselves in the convivial company of self styled 'Hindu', 'Christian', 'Neo-Nazi' and even 'Jewish' radicals, (whose agendas merge and diverge like the courses of unpredictable rivers) is inescapable.

The 'Jewish' bombers who took down the King David Hotel in 1946 entered it carrying milk cans laden with explosives in the guise of 'Muslim Arab' milkmen. Reports of the earlier round of Malegaon and Nanded blasts featured instances of the possibility of 'Hindu' radicals donning fake beards and 'Muslim' guises to plant bombs. Reports of the recent Bombay attacks suggest that the 'Muslims' who entered the Taj and the Trident hotels wore red threads around their wrists and had smeared their foreheads with 'tilaks' in order to appear as 'Hindus'. What this 'tragedy of errors' suggests that as far as terrorists are concerned, identity is a masquerade. Jews and Hindus cross-dress as Muslims, Muslims appear in Hindu drag. In killing and dying, they cross the line and embrace the identity of the very other that they ostensibly hate. It is only we, the witnesses and the vicarious spectators of this masquerade, the rag-pickers in the debris of their actions, who obsess about the 'reality' of their identities. By doing this we follow what is scripted for our bit parts in this charade to the hilt. When the curtain calls come, we, the chorus, the extras, are all lined up behind the principal actors, taking a bow. They were their costumes; we are naked in our (in) credulity.

This profound ambiguity, if nothing else, should prompt us to be moderate and reasonable in our responses to the spectacle of terror. To buy into its proffered illusion of certainty is perhaps one of the greatest signs of submission that we can offer to those who have nothing other than terror to give us.

(This text was first posted on The Reader-List and on Kafila.org on 3rd December, 2008]

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Given an argument, the guest, ever a conciliator (a gentleman of the free world that he was),agreed: The Mumbai catastrophe was not Washington's fault, it was everybody's fault. Which didn't prevent Dr.Chopra from returning soon to his central theme -- the grave offense posed to Muslims by the United States' war on terror, a point accompanied by consistent emphatic reminders that Muslims are the world's fastest growing population -- 25% of the globe's inhabitants -- and that the U.S. had better heed that fact. In Dr. Chopra's moral universe, numbers are apparently central. It's tempting to imagine his view of offenses against a much smaller sliver of the world's inhabitants -- not so offensive, perhaps? (Such as the Aborigines or the Kiwis. Red Indians of course were a bigger sliver and deserved to be counted at par)

Two subsequent interviews with Larry King brought much of the same -- a litany of suggestions about the role the U.S. had played in fueling assaults by Muslim terrorists, reminders of the numbers of Muslims in the world and their grievances. A faithful adherent of the root-causes theory of crime -- mass murder (with hand held weapon in a CQB mode, silly fellow. Dint’ he know about the stealth bombers and surgical or almost medical strikes), in the case at hand -- Dr. Chopra pointed out, quite unnecessarily, that most of the terrorism in the world came from Muslims. It was mandatory, then, to address their grievances -- "humiliation," "poverty," "lack of education." The U.S., he recommended, should undertake a Marshall Plan for Muslims.

Nowhere in this citation of the root causes of Muslim terrorism was there any mention of Islamic fundamentalism -- the religious fanaticism that has sent fevered mobs rioting, burning and killing over alleged slights to the Quran or the prophet (and thus belittling the hard-earned rights to communicate libel and defamation and blasphemy against ‘the other’ fellow). Not to mention the countless others enlisted to blow themselves and others up in the name of God (In keeping with the high concept of equality, they could have at least given a chance to the Satan also, to blow up others and never themselves). Nor did we hear, in these media meditations, any particular expression of sorrow from the New Delhi-born Dr. Chopra for the anguish of Mumbai's victims: a striking lack, no doubt unintentional (despite prodding by the interviewer?), but not surprising, either. (The idiots don’t even follow the prescription and try to seek good on their own) For advocates of the root-causes theory of crime, the central story is, ever, the sorrows and grievances of the perpetrators. For those prone to the belief that most eruptions of evil in the world can be traced to American influence and power there is only one subject of consequence.(Forgetting the enormity of the US ability to make friends and influence people and make some money also on the sly, if sufficiently unnoticed)

Accustomed as we are by now to this view of the U.S., it's impossible not to marvel at its varied guises -- its capacity to emerge even in journalism ostensibly concerning the absurd beliefs about the 9/11 attacks held by so many Muslims. It's conventional wisdom in the region -- according to a New York Times dispatch from Cairo, Egypt, last fall by Michael Slackman -- that the U.S. and Israel had to have been involved in the planning, if not the actual execution of the assaults. No news there. Neither was the information that there was virtually universal belief in the area that Jews, tipped off, didn't go to work at the World Trade Center that day. (When did we face this injured innocence first? But what is the truth? Any list with the identities of the Jews who died? Why not give the Muslim theorists a frontal blow by dispelling this hogwash statistically. Any news on this?).Or that the U.S. had organized the plot in order to attack Arab Muslims and gain access to their oil.

The noteworthy point here was the writer's conclusion that the U.S. itself was to blame for the power of these beliefs. "It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre," Mr. Slackman allowed. But that would miss the point that the persistence of these ideas represents the "first failure in the fight against terrorism." A U.S. failure? Nowhere in the extended list of root causes here was there any mention of the fanaticism and sheer mindless gullibility that is the prerequisite for the holding of such beliefs (The superstitious lot who think that by dying in the way of their struggle, they would get to heaven. Ha, ha.)

Its very ordinariness speaks volumes about this report. A piece written with evident serenity, the perversity of its conclusions notwithstanding, it's one emblem among many of the adversarial view of the nation that is today entrenched in the culture. So unworthy is the U.S. -- an attitude solidly established in our media culture long before the war on terror -- that only it can be held responsible for the deranged fantasies cherished in large quarters of the Arab world. So natural does it feel, now, to hold such views that their expression has become second nature (and the Wall Street Journal has to tolerate all this and much more!!).

Which is how it happens also that the U.S. is linked to the bloodletting in Mumbai, with scarcely anyone batting an eye, and Larry King -- awash perhaps, in happy molecules -- thanking guest Dr. Chopra for his extraordinary enlightenment (Happy integration of the world economies notwithstanding!!).

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Faced with the problem, the Japanese Buddhists went for abortion on an unprecedented scale without giving any regard to their rational beliefs or moral constraints grossly undermining their faith. The Catholics also found it impossible to solve the problem of limitation of birth within the framework of their ideological system which does not provide any solution of the problem. This is true of all the contemporary ideological systems which have to discard the true mantel of their ideology to solve this problem. Islam alone comes out with an effective solution of the problem without undermining the standard of morality set by the creed.

The Quranic injunctions provide the solution in clear and unmistakable terms very much within the framework of the religio-cultural system it stands for, with out compromising any of its basic principles.

The problems arising from industrialization and class conflict, urbanization and its related problem of slums and urban poor can be similarly solved within the framework of Islamic ethics with relative ease and durability

The basic Islamic principles of the unity of God equidistance of the Creator from all his human creations, the human relationship based on equality, its rationality, logicality, balance and temperance, its insistence on achievement and not ascription, as a criterion of honorability, its system of distributive justice, its unique code of interaction with others, provide solutions of the emergent problems effectively, provided they are given a chance to operate.

A lamentable lag on the part of the vast bulk of the Muslims in gaining awareness of the uniqueness of the cultural heritage in interpreting it in liberal terms, and applying these to their life, on account of their insignificant intellectual and economic achievement, is responsible for many evils that have crept in their society. These are not altogether absent from the socio religious and theological literature, but needs being focused and elucidated in comparative terms, to make a sense of pride in our children, and also to draw the attention of the world towards this.

Janab Siddiqui is a renowned Anthropologist form Kolkota and can be reached at : ioscal@cal3.vsnl.net.in

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