September 17, 2001, 10:57 a.m.
A Sikh man has been killed in
"retaliation," though the local law enforcement in Phoenix, Arizona, are
not treating this as a hate crime.
David Grenier continues to have far more links
and excerpts than I could possibly manage, and The Guardian (UK)
has a sepcial section on the
attacks and their implications.
___________________________________
In its understandable rage for justice,
America may be tempted to overlook one uncomfortable fact. Its own policies
in Afghanistan a decade and more ago helped to create both
Osama bin Laden and the fundamentalist Taliban regime that shelters
him.
The notion of jihad, or holy war, had almost ceased to exist in the
Muslim world after the tenth century until it was revived, with American
encouragement, to fire an international pan-Islamic movement after the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. For the next ten years, the CIA
and Saudi intelligence together pumped in billions of dollars worth of
arms and ammunition through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence
agency (ISI) to the many mujahideen groups fighting in Afghanistan.
The policy worked: the Soviet Union suffered such terrible loses in
Afghanistan that it withdrew its forces in 1989, and the humiliation of
that defeat, following on from the crippling cost of the campaign,
helped to undermine the Soviet system itself. But there was a terrible
legacy: Afghanistan was left awash with weapons, warlords and extreme
religious zealotry.
Excerpted from The Economist, September 13, 2001, print
edition, from an article entitled, "A Bitter Harvest: The Sufferings of
Afghanistan comes to New York."
September 15, 2001, 9:19 p.m.
Last night in Hamilton, Ontario (Canada),
the Hindu
Samaj of Hamilton Region, was torched and burnt to the ground.
8:44 p.m.
checking: http://davidgrenier.weblogger.com/2001/09/13,
http://www.mediamonitors.net/amritjitsingh1.html
I want to make clear
that my opposition to and criticisms of U.S. foreign policy does
not necessarily entail a position of support for "the other side,"
as if the field of power or politics could actually be
encapsulated by Good versus Evil, comic
book-style.
I am against all fundamentalisms, defined by Clara Connolly
as "the mobilization of religious affiliation for political
ends." But in the last few days U.S. women who once purported to express
sympathy for women under the Taliban's rule are now calling for their
deaths in retaliation for the NYC/WDC attacks. Meanwhile Islam is
reduced to a one-dimensional caricature of fanaticism. This excerpt is a
response to both.
By collecting dossiers on the condition of women in various Islamic
countries, the women in [the international group Women Living Under
Muslim Laws] gather information on the diverse political and social
implications of Islamic laws as they are carried out in various
countries. For instance, in some countries it is mainly poor women who
feel the force of these laws while upper-class women have various means
to escape them. Thus, these dossiers reveal that there is not one
homogenous Muslim world.
What concerns this group of women is the widespread promulgation of
the view that there is one interpretation of Islam and one way of living
that reality as Muslim women. Yet, in only one instance of resistance to
fundamentalism, Bangladesh women have organized by remembering what
happened in Iran, where women participated in the revolution against the
Shah only to find themselves outside the power structures once an
Islamic state became established. One has only to look at the various
essays in Deniz Kandiyoti's collection Women, Islam, and the State
in order to see how differently Islamization becomes state law in
various countries as it interacts with specific historical conditions,
how varied the political interests are that are fostering Islamization,
and the specific purposes that each of these groups of interests has in
order to create Islamic states.
As Deniz Kandiyoti argues, the political interest Islamic
fundamentalist groups have in common is that of basing their movements
on the control of women; how and why they push this goal is specific and
varied. The purpose of the dossiers is to record this variety of
experiences. The documents that comprise the dossiers are not only
collected by women in the countries themselves, they are used in any
number of ways, including the documentation of oppressive conditions
that can aid in some women's efforts to argue for refugee status.
Reinterpreting the Koran, providing new translations and interpretations
is, therefore, an important part of this movement. Such practices, of
course, run counter to the various fundamentalist groups that wish to
create a Muslim homogeneity. Therefore it can be argued that these
practices refuse to play into the hands of both the US "democratic,
free-world" agenda as well as the Islamic fundamentalist states and
groups.
Excerpted from Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and
Transnational Feminist Practices, an anthology edited by Caren
Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, from their introduction.