By Emile Nakhleh
WASHINGTON, Sep 5 2014 (IPS)

Millions of words have been written about the rise, conquests, and savagery of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, and Boko Haram in Nigeria. Both have declared an “Islamic State” in their areas although Boko Haram has not claimed the mantle of a successor to the Prophet Muhammad as ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has done in Greater Syria. The two groups are the latest in a string of terrorist organisations in the past two decades.

American and other Western media have raised the ISIS terror threat to unprecedented levels, and the press have extolled the group’s military prowess, financial acumen, and command of social media propaganda.

The beheadings of U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff are the latest horrible manifestations of the group’s brutality. ISIS is now seen as a serious threat to the U.S. and British homelands and new measures are being taken in both countries to combat the dangers it poses.

The Sunni regimes’ benign neglect of the rapidly spreading Sunni violent ideology and its divisive sectarian policies has allowed ISIS to spread. This does not augur well for its survival. The Saudi brand of intolerant, narrow-minded Wahhabi-Salafi Sunni Islam is not much different from al-Baghdadi’s modern day caliphate.
Although surprised at the rapid growth of ISIS, Western policymakers should not be bewildered by the rise of yet another terrorist group. In the past 20 years, the world has witnessed the emergence of al-Qaeda as a global jihadist group, Jama’a Islamiyya in Southeast Asia, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Qaeda in North Africa, al-Qaeda in Iraq, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Islamic Fighting Group in Libya, al-Shabab in Somalia, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a few more localised bands of terrorists across the greater Middle East.

In every case, Western countries described the groups as a “gathering threat” and mobilised friendly countries, including autocratic rulers, against the perceived dangers.

Policy and intelligence analysts spent untold hours and travelled thousands of miles tracking the movements of these groups and their leaders, and writing briefs and reports about the nature of the threat.

Most of these analytic reports have focused on “current” issues. Only a meagre effort has been expended on long-term strategic analysis of the context of radical and terrorist groups and their root causes. It’s as if we are doomed to fight yesterday’s wars with no time to look into the context that gives rise to these groups. President Barack Obama’s recent statement that his administration had no strategy to fight the ISIS menace in Syria epitomises this analytical paralysis.

Regional problem

ISIS is primarily a threat to Arab countries, not to the United States and other Western countries. The more Sunni Arab states remain silent in the face of this pseudo-religious vulgarity, the sooner terrorism would be at their door. Arab society under the yoke of extremist Islamism must be addressed from within the region, not by American airstrikes or Western military intervention.

If the Islamic State expands beyond the Levant, it will plunge Arab societies into militancy, bloody conflicts, and depravity devoid of free thought, creativity, and economic prosperity.

The threat that Western societies could potentially face would come not from ISIS but from the hundreds of their young citizens who joined ISIS. These young jihadists, who hail from the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Australia, and other countries, have joined ISIS either as “walk-in” volunteers or as a result of ISIS’ sophisticated social media recruiting campaign. They left their seemingly comfortable lives for all kinds of political, psychological, religious, or ideological reasons to fight for a “cause” they are not terribly clear about.

If they survive the fighting, they would return home having been brainwashed against the perceived decadence of Western Christian societies and the imagined “purity” of their faith. Their imported emotional contradictions would drive some of them to relive their jihadist experience in the Levant by committing acts of violence and terrorism against their fellow citizens.

The so-called caliphate, whether in the Levant or West Africa, is a backward perversion of Sunni Islam that opposes modernity in all of its manifestation – interfaith dialogue, women’s education, minority rights, tolerance, and reason. A self-proclaimed successor to the Prophet Muhammad, al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State in the Syrian Desert is violating every principle of Muhammad’s Islamic State in Medina in the 7th century.

Some Bush-era neo-cons and Republican hawks in the Senate who are clamouring for U.S. military intervention in Syria seem to have forgotten the lessons they should have learned from their disastrous invasion of Iraq over a decade ago. Military action cannot save a society when it’s regressing on a warped trajectory of the Divine – ISIS’ proclaimed goal.

As long as Arab governments are repressive, illegitimate, sectarian, and incompetent, they will be unable to halt the ISIS offensive. In fact, many of these regimes have themselves to blame for the appeal of ISIS. They have cynically exploited religious sectarianism to stay in power.

If it is true that a young man is not radicalised and does not become a terrorist overnight and if it is true that a terrorist group does not develop in a vacuum, then it’s time to stand back and take a strategic look at the factors that drive ISIS and similar Sunni terrorist groups in the Arab world.

1. Intolerant Doctrine. Some Arab Sunni regimes, including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, continue to preach an intolerant religious Sunni ideology that denigrates not only other faiths but also Shia Islam. Christian religious places and educational institutions cannot operate freely in places like Saudi Arabia.

Much of the anger that has characterised the Islamisation of Muslim societies in recent years has been directed against these institutions. This type of harassment is felt across the region, from Palestine to Saudi Arabia. What makes this reality especially sad is the fact that Christian institutions have been at the forefront of Arab educational renaissance since the 19th century.

The Sunni regimes’ benign neglect of the rapidly spreading Sunni violent ideology and its divisive sectarian policies has allowed ISIS to spread. This does not augur well for its survival. The Saudi brand of intolerant, narrow-minded Wahhabi-Salafi Sunni Islam is not much different from al-Baghdadi’s modern day caliphate.

The Saudis oppose ISIS because of its perceived threat to the regime, but they cannot disavow their theological worldview, which rejects Shia Islam, Christianity, and Judaism and denies women their rightful place as equal citizens. The rapidly spreading ISIS doctrine is making it a bit late for the Saudis and other Sunni regimes to act. Nor will the West be able to bail them out.

2. Arab Autocracy. Sunni Arab dictators have refused their peoples freedoms of speech, organisation, political activism, innovation, and creativity. The three “deficits” of freedom, education, and women’s rights that Arab intellectuals identified in the Arab Human Development Report in 2002 are yet to be meaningfully addressed.

Politics is controlled by the powerful with no room for reason or compromise among the different stakeholders and centres of power in society. Those on top commit all kinds of dastardly deeds to stay in power, and those at the bottom are doomed to remain stuck in the proverbial “bottom one billion.” Regimes do not allow the meaningful separation of powers, checks and balances, and independent judiciaries to properly function. Control, fear, and co-optation remain the preferred tools of Arab dictators.

3. Hypocrisy of “Values.” President Obama has often invoked American values of liberty, human rights, equality, justice, and fairness as the underpinnings of U.S. democracy and of “what makes us who we are.” Yet when Arab publics see Washington steadfastly supporting Arab dictators, who are the antithesis of American “values,” the United States comes across as hypocritical and untrustworthy.

The debates within Islam over whether the faith should return to its 7th century roots, as ISIS’s ruthlessness has shown, or leap into the 21st century modern world, as Turkey has demonstrated, should primarily concern Muslims. They and they alone are the ones to resolve this quandary. ISIS is a violent symptom of this tug of war between intolerant traditionalists and forward-looking reformists. The West should stay out of the debate.

Western security and law enforcement agencies should focus on their own citizens and track their would-be jihadists, but Western military aircraft should stay out of the skies of the Levant.

Edited by Ronald Joshua

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Christian girls at a school in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, May 19 2014 (IPS)

Minority communities in Pakistan have long had a raw deal. Accounting for just 10 percent of this country’s population of 180 million, they are no strangers to marginalisation, discrimination or even violence.

But persistent reports that Christian and Hindu girls are being forcibly converted to Islam might just take the top spot in a long list of atrocities that non-Muslims are forced to endure.

“The situation is extremely grim. About 1,000 Hindu and Christian girls are abducted in Pakistan every year. They are converted to Islam through the use of forced marriages,” Dr. Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, chief patron of the Pakistan Hindu Council (PHC), told IPS.

Rights groups who have been following the issue for years say the number of reported cases fails to capture the true extent of the problem, since many families are unable or unwilling to lodge formal complaints, and the girls themselves are reluctant to speak out against the perpetrators.

In December last year, a six-year-old girl named Jumna, along with her 10-year-old sister Pooja, went missing from their home in Mirpur Khas, a city in Pakistan’s southeastern Sindh province. After hunting day and night, their parents discovered the girls were living with a man named Rajab Pathan.

Soma, the girls’ mother, told IPS that the case quickly blew up in the media, leading to a trial at which both girls admitted to having embraced Islam of their own free will.

This, according to a report released last month by the Movement for Solidarity and Peace in Pakistan, is typical of young girls who are kidnapped, forcibly kept away from their families and – in all likelihood – intimidated by their captors.

“Once in the custody of the abductor, the victim girl may be subjected to sexual violence, rape, forced prostitution, human trafficking and sale, or other domestic abuse,” the report found.

Focusing primarily on the Christian community, the study says roughly 700 of the girls abducted each year are Christians, while “conservative estimates” indicate that about 300 are Hindu. Most of the girls are thought to be between 12 and 25 years of age.

A dearth of press coverage and reluctance on the part of the police to disclose details of such cases mean the actual figures could be much higher, the report’s authors say.

Even when families do file official complaints in the form of First Information Reports (FIRs) for abduction or rape at the local police station, the kidnappers immediately file counter-claims on behalf of the victims, stating that the conversions were voluntary and accusing the families of “harassing” the happily married girls.

The cases are then closed, without any relief for the families involved.

PHC’s Vankwani told IPS he is unhappy with officials’ reaction so far to the problem. “The government fears reprisals from fundamentalist groups, so our complaints go unheeded,” he said.

The threat of armed groups is not to be taken lightly. A famous case in 2012 involving a girl named Rinkle Kumari illustrated the darkest side of the forced conversions.

Abducted from her home in the Sindh province in February, the girl was subsequently produced before a magistrate to whom she allegedly stated that she had married her captor, Naveed Shah, of her own free will.

That statement, according to PHC General Secretary Hotchand Karmani, was “made under duress” due to the presence of “dozens of armed men in the court premises,” he told IPS.

A troubled history

Comprising just 1.6 percent of Pakistan’s overwhelmingly Muslim population, Christian communities have traditionally settled in the southern port city of Karachi, as well as throughout villages in the Punjab, and in large industrial metropolises like Lahore and Faisalabad.

An estimated 200,000 Christians also dwell in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, formerly known as the North Western Frontier Province, with 70,000 Christian residents in Peshawar, the capital city of the largely tribal region.

Hindus form a larger group, counting seven million members who make up 5.5 percent of the population. Many reside in urban areas throughout the province of Sindh, but at least 50 percent are concentrated in the southeast district of Tharparkar, which borders India.

A long history of invasion, conquest and settlement has shaped the demographics of present-day Pakistan. Hindus, for instance, once made up the majority of the Sindh province, but were forced to scatter in the wake of Persian, Arab and Ottoman invasions, the earliest dating back to 513 BC.

Waves of violence following the bloody partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 forced thousands of Hindus to flee to cities like Delhi and Mumbai. While the Christian community has not experienced comparable bouts violence, they too have suffered attacks and systematic discrimination.

Those who wish to preserve Pakistan’s diversity fear that the latest wave of religious intolerance spells trouble for a country already torn asunder by fundamentalists often operating in collusion with what Vankwani calls the “illiterate clergy”.

All Hindu Rights Organization Chairman Kishan Chand Parwani told IPS he is “deeply perturbed” over the forced conversion of minority girls.

“Our problems are increasing with each passing day, with no apparent interest on the part of the government to solve them,” he added, pointing to the government’s failure to pass the 2008 Hindu Marriage Act, which would allow Pakistan’s largest religious minority to register its own marriages.

Government officials, meanwhile, deny that they have been sitting on their haunches. Federal Minister for Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony Sardar Muhammad Yousaf told IPS his office had issued instructions to all provincial governments to take legal steps to prevent forced conversions.

“The government has given us approval to take concrete steps for the protection of the rights of minorities,” he insisted. “We are set to present the Hindu Marriage Bill in the National Assembly soon.”

For religious experts, forced conversions fly in the face of Islam’s most basic tenets of peace, love and brotherhood. “People should be free to live in line with their chosen religions,” Peshawar-based religious scholar Ghulam Rahim told IPS.

“The government should protect them. Islam itself forbids the idea of forcing someone to take a religion they do not truly believe in. It goes against the teachings of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon Him.”

(END)