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There is a growing sense of isolation among the Muslims of the world, after the recent political shock waves from Madrid rippled right across the continents. The bloodshed following terrorist attacks in Spain'scapital city have shown that Osama's?crusader? targets are as vulnerable as they were when the Twin Towers in USA were reduced to a rubble on September 9.
Intelligence agencies around the globe are trying to identify the man who, in a videotape found in Madrid, has claimed responsibility for the attacks for Al-Qaeda. The taped declaration ran as follows:
?We declare our responsibility for what happened in Madrid exactly two-and-a-half years after the attacks on New York and Washington. It is a response to your collaboration with the criminal Bush and his allies.
?This is a response to the crimes that you have caused in the world, and specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there will be more, if God wills it. You love life and we love death, which gives an example of what Prophet Mohammad said. If you don'tstop your injustices, more and more blood will flow and these attacks will seem very small.?
Speculation is also rife on a direct link between the Madrid attackers and the group that killed 44 people in suicide bombings, in Casablanca in May 2003, as Spanish investigators travelled to Morocco to confirm the connection.
In a recent poll carried out by Guardian Weekly (dated March 18-24) there has been a significant weakening, during the past 18 months among Britain'sMuslim community, in their desire to integrate into the British society. Worse still, there is a growing sense of isolation among the 1.56 million-strong Muslim community, ?with nearly half the adults now wanting their children to attend separate Muslim schools.? Although the majority of Muslims still have a desire for integration, the balance of opinion has begun to swing against measures such as taking oaths of allegiance from them by the British government.
The poll also revealed that many Muslims see the ?war against terrorism? as a war against Islam and believe that anti-terrorist laws are being used unfairly against the Muslim community.
What role will Europe's12 million or so Muslims play in the continent'saffairs? Most people discern two possibilities?either European Muslims will integrate seemingly into their adopted countries? political and economic life or they will stay on the margins, nursing their rage. The Economist weekly (dated March 6-12) says, ?In fact, both things are happening. As German citizens of Turkish origin acquire voting rights and wealth and leading Muslims become regional governors in France or peers in Britain, there are healthy signs of a community gaining in status and respect. The great majority of French Muslims are melting successfully into the social mainstream,? comments Soheib Bencheikh, the liberal mufti of Marseilles. ?But at the other extreme a handful of ultra-militant preachers are offering moral and even material support to terrorism.?
Though a new generation of European-born Muslims is learning to work within their adopted countries, laws and political system, it still draws spiritual and ideological inspiration from Islam'sMiddle Eastern heartland, and cherishes the hope that Islamic rule will prevail over secular governments in Muslim countries. The reason could be the mounting pressure to dominate European Islam by sympathisers of Muslim Brotherhood, which is a grass-root movement to build an Islamic society from the bottom upwards. This movement spread in Egypt in the early 20th century, despite repression, across the Islamic world.
The Brotherhood'sprincipal ideologue is Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, a 77-year old religious teacher, who encourages keen but qualified participation in the Western system, with the intent of Islam always in mind. Though many are far from being Brotherhood sympathisers, but the staunch Brotherhood clan of Egypt wants to re-Islamise society, and ultimately the State by galvanising individuals, families and communities. The wave is being felt across Europe. There are movements in progress that follow the Brotherhood'sideology in a narrower sense and are bidding to be the loudest Islamic voice in Europe.
It is undermining of terror that is important, strategically, as confronting it. ?Its supports should be knocked away, or bribed, or persuaded, or loved out of its flirtation with death. And certainly it shouldn'tbe locked up in the same place and forced unnecessarily to share the same political air.
?This makes a big difference to the way we enforce terrorist legislation, how many searches are carried out, how many are detained and in what way. Better to have ID cards which we all carry?than to alienate entire sections of the population. Better to demonstrate, as the Spanish did last week, what it is like to be civilised.??The Observer.
What the Muslims the world over have to realise is that it is not mounting pressure from outside which will help them merge into the mainstream of the countries of their adoption. It is the extremists among them who are responsible for their isolation.
Here one is tempted to quote the charismatic leader Hassan Nasrallah of the Lebanese Shia militia, the Hizbullah, who had remarked recently in the context of the killing of innocent Muslims by the suicide bombers in Iraq when he said that the perpetrators are ?petrified extremists living in the Stone Age who claim allegiance to Islam?, and who pose a far sadder and greater danger. Events in Europe should sound a warning bell for the Muslims in India too if they do not want to be left isolated like their co-religionists elsewhere in the world. (FOC)
What the Muslims the world over have to realise is that it is not mounting pressure from outside which will help them merge into the mainstream of the countries of their adoption. It is the extremists among them who are responsible for their isolation.
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