As the European powers were deliberating in Brussels about the means to bring Gadhafi to yield in Libya and hope for the Arab revolutionary is hanging by a thin thread, the Arab League on its own came to a unanimous resolution for a no-fly zone over the fellow Arab state.
The Arabs apparently eat themselves.
Unless a new body of people embraces Islam, the religion can never again become a contestant for universal power and resources.
Can the no-fly zone resolution be about Amir Mousa who wants to leapfrog from Arab League secretary-general to position number one in Egypt, replacing Hosni Mubarak as the ultra Israel and American ally?
The question arises since President Obama and the Nato members have not decided yet the course of actions to take against the revolutionary hero.
The answer to the question will have to wait.
What is assumed about the Arab League is none from among its members can decide without consulting allies from the European front or from the USA. In short, the resolution was probably orchestrated from outside.
Gadhafi may be the exception to the rule. But even if we remember Lockerbie, Gadhafi’s only “crime” now appears to be about staying in power for 41 years, as some surviving Arab monarchs may do.
Gadhafi may have no peer. He is the soul of Libya who does not hold any official office or title. But Libya nonetheless complied with the IMF.
The oil producer has hefty deposits in European and American banks that are now frozen - hundreds of billions of Euros in Germany alone.
While many in the world and especially the Latin Americans socialists are backing Gadhafi, the Arab League jumped the gun for the no-fly zone.
It means the Arab League has voted for military intervention into the affairs of a sovereign Arab state. That runs against the UN Charter and should run against Islamic ethics as well.
What have the Arab nations done for their people that Gadhafi hasn’t done?
He modernized Libya, provided for her sustainable growth spending billions to bring water thousands of kilometers through the desert from the Upper Nile and miraculously greening Tripoli’s sandy hinterland.
It was a great Arab romance, the ideas and achievements of the revolutionary soldier spilling the world in places he spawned and sponsored socialist(ic) revolutions.
To many who were born to rise into the heights of the Afro-Asian revolutions, he was the other side of Lawrence of Arabia. But many Libyans from as long ago as the 70s regarded Gadhafi’s emancipation of women and his brand of socialism as Islamically antithetical.
He was one more Afro-Asian who had stood for the freedoms from wants, from fear and from tyranny, a formula of freedoms that had come from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and which, as it was understood by the generation of Bandung 55, had meant it took first call while the freedom of speech and expression, freedom of conscience and freedom of assembly which are the new frontiers, would come later.
Now once again to the peoples of that spirit all over Africa and Asia, plus the brothers and sisters in Latin America, another Arab leader, another Arab people’s socialist state, is being dispelled by the Arabs and Muslims and is being readied for the storming, once again by the West, like it had been with Iraq, and then, Afghanistan.
Present orthodox Islam, set against the principle of peace by the benefit of the other in the Treaty of Westphalia,1648,has been like crap ravings.
Having no magisterium to moderate between the different sects (mazhab) and the cults in Islam, Muslims in most Islamic countries and in the world cannot unite.
Iraq after the American invasion and Pakistan by contagion of the war in Afghanistan, are great examples of the Muslim sectarian blood-lettings, the disintegration of pan-Islam as run-offs of the social disintegration that attended the transitions from the colonized world to the world of decolonized natives Franz Fannon and Jean Paul-Sartre had dreamed for the newly independent Afro-Asians.
Everywhere in the Muslim world most of the intelligentsia cannot communicate with the religious scholars and their captives. It’s a separate reality that’s the wall of the divide, the exceptions to be found in the Al-Qaeda operatives, many of whom have become martyrs in suicide bombings.
Then, in a widening crescent of the sublime religion, followers of their holinesses attack Christian minorities, which brings us to the lark in Malaysia where, by a regulation passed in 1986, the Christian minority was and is denied their Bible in the national language, Bahasa Malaysia.
It makes no sense other than merely as one of the many regulations in the feudal form of social control and of coercion carried into independent and contemporary Malaysia.
It is an absurdity of statecraft, of governance in a plural society, of modernization and of diplomacy in the new millennium.
Yet it is universal in the Islamic resurgence the world over.
Yet a part of the professional and scientific communities of Muslims have volunteered to die in the on-going mission to battle against Western and Christian oppressions and atrocities.
The confusion cuts deep into the sinews of the Islamic societies.
This isn’t about the “bewildered.” This is a new set of references in the Islamic consciousness the Al-Qaeda and the Taliban had secured, something the Japanese had done in the War.
Malaysia did not see a freedom revolution. In Malaysia Islam is mainly about a rites of passage and the Law, or something of a quest for Islamic integrity and supremacy that is as wild as Sylvester d’ Pussycat can get in his quest to fry the little birdie, which would be barbaric, of course, but celluloid.
Muslims in Malaysia may be fined Ringgit 5,000, imprisoned for two years and whipped six times for drinking in a public place a glass of beer, or for being in “close proximity” with the other gender outside the muhrim ( close relatives), or if suspected of deviant Islam, can be detained without trial for as long as it does not matter to society. Isn’t that nice!
Caught in a trap of conflicting civilizations that colonization, modernization and development brought, Muslims face dysfunctional families and social disintegration they cannot manage in the given cast of religious emotions.
The religious bodies are bent on preserving the wonderment of a Way of Life God Himself revealed through angels, prophets and messengers, in a set of Books and preserved by ustaz and ustazah (male and female religious teachers) who believe of themselves as custodians of the religion.
It’s about the same with the other Abrahamic sisters – Judaism and Christianity. These two may or may not have gotten out of the legalistic jumble a lot earlier, depending on cultic preferences and the political mission they must undertake as “fishers of men”, no less.
How do we believe these aged systems of faiths and laws can draw for us a compound of ideas that may relief us of all or of some of the challenges in a world that’s already seven billion and facing a painful climatic revolt that is bringing back the fluvial age?
Can we believe it is possible to stop by prayers the melting icecaps and the glaciers on the third polar region?
Or do the religions have, in their cache of mercy, compassion and agape, the means to at least extend favorably a way of cooperation between the nations?
If Islam, or Christianity or Judaism fails to suggest to the world anything equal to the principles of the Treaty of Westphalia, they should, at the very least, let the rest of humanity be free to attempt tearing down the walls and build bridges and an ark of friendship and respectful coexistence.
But that may amount to innocent simplicity. The world isn’t as simple anymore. China is reported to have agreed with the Americans over Libya, for instance, causing the former socialist bloc to hold its breath for what can transpire in the UNSC should the forces of America, Europe and the Arab League decide to bring Libya to the UN.
Within the context of such an excess of geopolitical realities, Malaysian Muslim authorities and some NGOs are insisting the Christians must not be allowed to extend their missions using a Malay translation of the Bible.
In fact, the non-Muslim citizens in Malaysia cannot use the Name, Allah, nor can they say Allahu Akbar, Great God!
What happens if the injured take their savings and investments elsewhere? Will the financially powerful Arabs bring their dirhams and dinars here?
Hush babe, the truth about all of that is surely coming this way soon! Surely.--- a. ghani ismail, 13 March, 2011
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