RESPONDING TO 'EFFORTS TO IMPOSE SHARIAH LAW IN BANGLADESH

Monday 20 February 2012

Responding to ‘Efforts to Impose Shariah Law in Bangladesh’

Hameed Abdul Karim

As a Muslim I am required to know aspects of the Sharia so as to live life in accordance with my faith. But the Sharia that Manzoor Ahmed is talking about in ‘Ceylon Today’ (Saturday 18 February 2012) under the title ‘Efforts to Impose Sharia Law in Bangladesh’ is the one that is promulgated by Western interests as a scaremongering tactic to frighten non-Muslims and even ‘moderate’ Muslims away from the teachings of Islam.

From its very inception Islam remedied many of the injustices the world was riddled with as even a non-friendly writer like Karen Armstrong, among many other past and present orientalists have been compelled to admit as a historical fact. Is the world a better place today? One of Islam’s basic tenets is to fight against economic injustice and it is reported in Sahih Bukhari (a collection of the prophetic sayings) that the blessed messenger of God the prophet Muhammed (peace and blessings of God be on him and all the prophets who preceded him) had said that he would love to see the day when a rich man traversed the world to give zakat (charity) to the poor and found no takers. Giving of charity is enshrined in the Sharia. Would anybody like to object to that aspect of the Sharia?

The Sharia is against interest and usury based economies where banks fleece the people and ensure, by many other means, that they remain not only poor but destitute too, very similar to the agenda of the IMF so vividly described by John Perkins in his book ‘The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man’. This is the system that is found in the great USA, the land of the free and the brave, where tens of thousands of poor people have been thrown out of their homes for non-payment of ‘dues’. I daresay that if the economic aspect of Sharia was in force in the USA such an injustice would never have happened. What we had instead was the government coming to the aid of the rogue banksters pumping billions of dollars from public funds to keep them from going belly up.

I believe Manzoor Ahmed is a product of the Rand Corporation judging by his views on Islam and the Sharia. The Rand Corporation is an US outfit that has 1600 people on its payroll providing in depth analyses to the US Department of Defense (DOD) and by extension to the Pentagon. Their job is to find people who are able and willing to subvert any policy or faith that undermines the supremacy of the empire, for a fee of course. One such employee is the Jewish Zionist Sheryl Bernard who in her report titled ‘Civil Democratic Islam’ outlines the need to employ influential people in Islamic societies and get them to write and help publish their views on ‘moderate’ Islam so as to take away the political dimensions of the faith, like what they did to Christianity, and confine it to basic rituals that would not in any way hinder the empire’s agenda for ‘full spectrum domination’ of the world. Islam seems to stand in the way with its Shura (consensus) form of government as opposed to ‘democracy’ form of oppression.  

The basic principles or guidelines of the Sharia law boil down to just six (6) points. They are:-

1.       The right to protection of life.

2.       The right to protection of family.

3.       The right to protection of education.

4.       The right to protection of religion.

5.       The right to protection of property (access to resources) and

6.       The right to the protection of human dignity.

Sound familiar, don’t they? Well they might very well be the guiding principles of the European Court of Human Rights that dear Manzoor Ahmed so very supinely quotes to boost his argument to abandon the Sharia. But this is the Sharia. The only difference is that these came about in Muslim societies centuries ago when Europe was still groping in the Dark Ages and America had not still been ‘detected’ as Oscar Wilde would have it. All these human rights that the Europeans and North Americans brag about may have come from Muslim scholars like Ibn Rushd (Averroes) or Avicenna (Ibne Sina) or Algazel (Imam Gazali) among many others as judge Christie Weeramantry points in his book ‘Islamic Jurisprudence - An International Perspective’.

Manzoor Ahmed sounded scandalised when he says that the Imams and moulanas of mosques and even the Khatib of Baitul Mukarram in Dhaka called America a terrorist country. Poor fellow! How would he feel if he gets to know that Noam Chomsky, the leading American intellectual, himself calls his own country a terrorist state and that even the World Court condemned the United States for international terrorism  over its assault and mass murder of Catholics in Nicaragua.  The only reason why the UN Security Council couldn’t categorise the US as a terrorist state is back the US used its veto to protect itself in the same way it has protected Israel, the other terrorist state, by vetoing over 60 resolutions to that effect. Would the writer like to call Chomsky a ‘Muslim fundamentalist’ and would he like to call the World Court? Wake up, I say, Manzoor Ahmed Saab, come into the real world.  

I wouldn’t want any harm to come to Salman Rushdie or Taslima Nazreen. I would rather leave matters of punishment for blasphemy to God almighty himself. Besides, fatawa (plural for fatwa) cannot be given by just one scholar. From what I know, a certain number of scholars must agree on a fatwa for it to become effective. And the Prophet Muhammed had said ‘The learned of my ummah (community) will not agree on anything that is wrong’. But as a Muslim I detest both these writers of filth for vilifying my Prophet whom I and all Muslims the world over are required, by faith, to love and cherish more than anything or anybody in the world. Do I sound like a Muslim ‘fundamentalist’? Well, so be it. 

Appeared in ‘Ceylon Today’ Monday 20 February 2012