New Delhi Times (www.newdelhitimes.com), or NDT in short, a news portal focussing on international news, published two news items about the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami Hind. The author of the articles is, however, anonymous.
While one article was published in July 2021, the other was published in December 2021.
These articles are : Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, and the Islamisation of democratic societies and PFI and JeIH, the Muslim Brotherhood of India.
In response, I sent an article to the portal’s editor, explaining in detail what the two Muslim organizations stand for. I also contacted the portal’s editorial team through text messages and phone. Through a message on Whatsapp, I was told that it would not be published if there is no reply within ten days. After that, NDT even avoided receiving my calls.
I forwarded the article to NDT on January 19, and it has not been published.
I am publishing the same article here for the benefit of our readers. Syed Khalique Ahmed.
NEW DELHI—Your portal has published two articles in recent months (July 5, 2021, and December 27, 2021), strongly criticizing the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), and demanding a ban on the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH), one of the most prominent Muslim religious organizations in India.
However, you have not given any convincing reason behind your suggestion to ban the JIH. The only reason you have advanced is that Muslim Brotherhood that took birth in Egypt is the ideological fountainhead of the JIH. Your accusations are not based on truth. It is entirely misleading to all those who might have read the article and anyone who will read it in the future.
I am neither a member of the JIH nor MB, and hence, I hold no brief either for the JIH or MB. However, since your articles are highly unfair to the two organizations and intend to demonize Islam and its teachings, I am writing this piece to reply to your accusations that seem to be influenced by the policies and ulterior agenda of the Islamophobic West intending to run down Islam and Muslims even if they contribute positively and in a healthy manner to the society.
I don’t know the ideological background of promoters of your portal. But a reading of the articles about Muslims indicates that you are working with an agenda to demonize and discredit Islam and Muslim organizations engaged in establishing justice, peace, political empowerment of people through democratic means, and unity of people belonging to diverse faiths, cultures, and languages throughout the world. This is so because unity, political empowerment of people, peace and justice in the Muslim world go against the narrow interests of established military and economic powers, be they global or regional.
What you have preached about MB and the JIH is a pack of lies. The falsehood that you have churned out and are peddling about the two organizations appears to be a part of a pre-determined global agenda. And you are doing it in the guise of an India-based digital news organization.
MB argues for democracy in place of monarchies, dictatorships
MB is not known for what you have tried to convey in your articles. Undoubtedly, MB is engaged in motivating people to follow the teachings of the Quran and Sunnah of the Prophet in their daily individual and collective life. No one in Muslim communities worldwide questions the veracity of the teachings of the Quran and Sunnah, including the strongest critics of MB in the Arab Muslim world and outside. Even the Arab Muslim dynasts, who feel threatened from the activities of MB, would never oppose the truthfulness of the teachings of the Quran and Sunnah.
The question arises: Why do the rulers in the Arab Muslim world oppose MB and have suppressed it, even in Egypt, the land of its birth? This is a significant question that must be answered before responding to any other question since your very thesis about MB being an outlawed group is based on this specific point alone.
Whether it is Egypt, or any other Arab Muslim country, MB leaders and supporters are demanding change in the system of governance which is either dynasty like in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, etc., or military dictatorship as in Egypt.
MB believes that the dynastic rule or dictatorship is against the ethos and teachings of Islam and against modern principles of governance that are based on the involvement of people through a process of elections, or what is called democracy. Any government which is formed through involvement of people and administrative head of the state is elected and appointed through democratic process, brings empowerment to the people. Such a government is favourable for the growth of science, technology, industry, academic and intellectual activities, apart from strengthening the country’s defence from outside interference. The government in a democracy is accountable to the people. The people have a right to change a government if it does not perform up to the people’s expectations and replace it with the government of another group at an interval of every few years in the larger interest of their country and society. Against it, dynasties and dictatorships don’t allow any criticism. The dynasties and dictatorships don’t follow any Constitution. The whims and fancies of the dictators and dynasts are the law, and any dissent to it is unacceptable. Therefore, the role of people in running the government is restricted. History is a witness that dynasties and dictatorships have only brought devastations, not peace and development.
Arab monarchies oppose democracy demanded by Muslim Brotherhood
Arab dynasties vehemently oppose MB’s demand for democracy. The dynasts believe that they and their families would lose the political power in their countries if a system of governance based on democracy come into existence. That is why powerful Arab dynasts have suppressed the MB movement in their countries. When Mohammed Morsi became the first democratically elected president of Egypt in June 2012, Arab dynasts became nervous. As Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign in February 2011 after months of public protest that led to elections and installation of MB in power, Arab dynasts felt that the wind of democracy would reach their doorstep also. The Arab dynasts realized that there could be a demand for elected governments in their countries if MB continued in power in Egypt. So, the Arab dynasts conspired with the US and the Egyptian Army to topple Morsi. Egypt’s army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi removed the democratically elected government of Morsi through a military coup. So, the democracy was murdered in its nascent stage that was brought in Egypt with decades of effort by MB. It is wrong to describe MB as a terror organization. MB was, and is, a great champion of democracy in the Arab Muslim world. The international human rights organizations report substantial violations under al-Sisi’s dictatorship, but the self-proclaimed champions of world democracy – the US and Islamophobic Europe – are silent.
While Arab dictators welcomed Morsi’s overthrow, Western powers did not call it a military coup, indicating the convergence of interest between the two sides on the issue. The US and European powers, who have democracies in their own countries and claim themselves as champions of democracy worldwide, are the strongest supporters of dynasties and military rule in the Muslim world. They hate democracy in Muslim countries because the transition to democratic governments will empower people and strengthen Muslim countries economically and militarily. This will change the military and economic equations globally. The political decisions for Muslim nations will not be taken in Washington DC or the capitals of Islamophobic European powers but the Parliament of the respective Muslim countries. Democracy in the Muslim world means a challenge to the Western hegemony. The Islamophobic Western world believes that the real threat to its political and military supremacy is from the empowerment of Muslim communities, not from China. That is why this demonization of MB and other Muslim groups aspiring to establish democracy, peace, and unity of communities. Does it amount to an international crime or global terrorism if a group in the Arab Muslim world demands democracy and people’s empowerment through elections or public consultations? The Western powers and their allies will answer with a big YES because it hurts the interest of the Islamophobic Western powers who will not be able to exploit the resources of the oil-rich Arab countries under democratic rule. The empowerment of people will threaten the economic and military dominance of the Islamophobic Western world over the Muslim world since the fall of Ottoman Khilafat in 1924.
US, European powers destabilized Muslim societies, not Muslim Brotherhood
You have called MB a terror organization aiming to destabilize societies simply. Your accusation is based simply because the US says so. However, you have conveniently ignored the butchering of millions of innocent people in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan, apart from North Vietnam by the US and its Western allies.
May I ask the article’s anonymous author what have the champions of world democracy, the US, and the Islamophobic European powers, have done in the world? Have they strengthened societies and countries or destabilized them, bringing immense hardships to the people? The answer is that these champions of democracies have brought only miseries to the people in Muslim lands.
Why did the US attack Iraq? Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction(WMD)? And if Iraq possessed WMD, so did the US, European powers, and Israel, besides many other countries of the world. If any nation has used nuclear power against another, it is the US. After killing over two million innocent Iraqis, including half a million children, and maiming and injuring an equal number or more than that, the US said it did not find WMD in Iraq. Did the US attack Iraq for fun? The US then said its actions had brought democracy to Iraq, but the reality denies the US claim. Iraqi society had never witnessed so much destabilization and destruction as happened during the US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussain.
Did the UN impose a no-fly zone over Libya owing to a rebellion against Gaddafi’s rule in the wake of an uprising in Tunisia and Egypt in February 2011? A revolt was also there in Egypt. But the UN did not impose a no-fly zone over Egypt. Why? Simply because Gaddafi refused to surrender to the wishes of the US and Islamophobic European powers. Against this, the Egyptian dictator took the orders from Uncle Sam. To enforce the UN-mandated no-fly zone, the US, France, UK, and Canada attacked Libya, destroyed and destabilized it, creating enormous problems for Libya and neighboring countries. Moreover, Libya under Gaddafi was wealthy and economically supported many poorer countries in its neighbourhood.
The world also knows that US intervention in Syria and its NATO allies was intended to achieve regime change on the pretext of exterminating the Islamic State. While they could not complete the regime change target due to Russian intervention, they succeeded in destroying Syria.
The US also tried to destabilize its NATO ally Turkey by arming Kurdish rebels, but Turkey understood the game before it was too late. It exposed the designs of the US.
As for Islamic State(IS), anyone with knowledge of Arab and international affairs knows that international intelligence agencies set it up to destroy Muslim lands-from Iraq, Syria to Afghanistan. Two US embassy officials and a US Christian priest were involved in an attempted coup in Turkey in July 2016, apart from a US-based Turkish Muslim cleric. The US has yet not returned the Muslim cleric to Turkey despite President Erdogan’s appeals to conduct his trial as per law in Turkey. Former US president Trump forced Turkey to repatriate the Christian priest to the US. In this way, the US and its Islamophobic European allies destroyed the military power of the Muslim countries around Israel.
Again, what the Uncle Sam and Islamophobic European powers did in Afghanistan must have ashamed the civilized world. They killed lakhs of men, women, and children on the “War on Terror” pretext. Was any Afghan involved in the 9/11 terror? In the words of President George W Bush, it was a Crusade, a Christian religious war. Undoubtedly, it was a Crusade because the US Christian soldiers dropped copies of the Bible in the Pashto language in towns and villages of Afghanistan to propagate the message of Christianity and convert local Muslims to Christianity.
Earlier, the US supported the Afghans fighting the USSR as Mujahideen, a word carrying an aura of respect around it. After the Mujahideens defeated the USSR, Uncle Sam went against them because Mujahideen leaders set up a government based on the principles of Islam. The US took no time in terming them terrorists when they refused to take orders from the US concerning the system of governance in their country. The US propped up the Taliban to dislodge the Mujahideens out of power. When the Taliban, too, did not agree to take the US diktat and continued with a government based on Islamic Shariah, Uncle Sam launched a propaganda to defame the Taliban as terrorists. And NATO, led by the US, finally attacked Afghanistan to dislodge the Taliban.
In both the cases – their fight with the USSR and challenging the US hegemony – the Mujahideen and the Taliban defended the political independence, or sovereignty of Afghanistan. This indicates the discriminatory attitude of the US and Islamophobic Europe, their allies and supporters, towards democracy and political liberty of weaker countries, mainly Muslim countries.
However, having failed to defeat the Taliban, the US left Afghanistan by handing over the country to the same Taliban it had classified as a terrorist organization and the biggest threat to regional and global peace. This reflects it had no moral standard and could go with anyone to fulfill its narrow political, economic, and military interests.
I must give one more example of the Western world’s “civilized behaviour” and their love for democracy. The armies of Islamophobic Western powers laden with the deadliest weapons went to Libya, Syria, Iraq to defend human rights, and Afghanistan to fight terror. But the same forces did watch the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina at the hands of Islamophobic Serbian army in the 1990s. Thousands of Bosnian Muslim women were raped and kept in camps till they delivered babies. What happened with the Bosnian Muslims inside Europe was never witnessed in the world’s recorded history.
And yet, the anonymous author has the gall to deliberately defame Islam and Muslims and describe MB as a terror outfit because the ‘Butcher of the World’ says so.
MB opposes ‘cultural assimilation’, akin to religious conversion
The author accuses MB of obstructing the cultural assimilation of Muslims in Europe and Western countries and encouraging Muslims to protect their Islamic identity. The author considers it a crime if Muslims preserve and protect their religious and cultural identity.
The argument of cultural assimilation for Muslims is nothing but intolerance of the Islamophobic Western countries towards Islam and its culture. One may question why this defiance from MB and Muslims to calls for assimilation in Western culture? The fact is that culture is not something independent. Culture is derived from religion. The two overlap so much that sometimes culture becomes religion, and religion becomes culture. They are inseparable.
Since culture emanates from religions, it always contains attributes or features of faith from which it is derived. Since Islam and Christianity differ in their concepts about God and many other things, there will be a difference in the two communities’ cultures. The same is true with Islam and other religions. So, imposing a culture of one religion on the followers of other religions on the pretext of bringing uniformity in the culture of the entire population of a country means forcing the members of a minority community to give up his religious beliefs and culture and get themselves converted to the religion of majority community through what the Islamophobic Western countries call cultural “assimilation”.
The Western Christian-dominated countries indirectly want to repeat the history of Spain, where Muslims were converted to Christianity by use of force in the 15th century. They advocate the same thing in entire Europe by making life tough for Muslims by bringing laws prohibiting them from practicing their religion. If a Muslim group fights against this onslaught on Islam and the religious identity of Muslims, that group and its members are dubbed terrorists and an impediment to the process of assimilation, or what can be rightly called religious conversion to Christianity.
So, if MB has done anything through literature, speeches, and other peaceful means to protect and preserve the Muslim identity and prevent forcible assimilation of Muslims in Christian or the Islamophobic Western culture, the act does not come under the definition of terrorism as the author has tried to paint it.
JIH’s policies based on the teachings of the Quran and Sunnah
Now, I must come to your repeated goading for a ban on the JIH. Your argument for seeking a ban is that it adheres to the religious and intellectual ideologies of MB. One who knows and studies the literature of the JIH can confidently say that there is no truth in the argument of the author. Undoubtedly, the JIH draws its ideologies and principles from the teachings of the Quran and Sunnah, the universal Islamic literature which can be procured by anyone living in any corner of the world and benefit from it. The basic objective of the JIH, according to its Constitution, is to establish peace and justice based on the guidance of the Quran and the Sunnah of Prophet Muhammad, without any distinction of race, colour, caste and creed. There is nothing wrong if different organizations use the same set of literature to chalk out a way of life for themselves and their supporters. Hence, it is utterly wrong to say that JIH and MB are the same things because they draw inspiration from the same literature set. There are many schools of Islamic thought. All of them derive their principles and methodology from the Quran and the Sunnah and yet, differ from each other in several respects.
Even a non-Muslim individual or an organization of non-Muslims can follow the teachings of the Quran and Hadith in their personal and collective lives. For example, there was no provision of divorce in Christianity and Hinduism. But both the religions introduced reforms in their religious laws by borrowing the provision of divorce from the Quran and Hadith to make life easy for their followers. When there was no provision of divorce in undiluted laws of the two religions, men and women of the two communities had the life of hell in cases where husband and wife could not live together. By stretching the arguments of the author of the two articles, shall we assume that Christianity and Hinduism have become Islamized because they have adopted the provisions of divorce and widow remarriage of Islam?
JIH is not “anti-diversity”, works within provisions of the Constitution of India
JIH has been working within the parameters of freedom of religion and conscience as guaranteed under Article 25 of the Constitution of India. There are umpteen religious organizations of Muslims and non-Muslims operating based on the provisions of the Constitution and propagating their religious beliefs peacefully. Likewise, throughout the length and breadth of India, the JIH has been working to promote justice, peace, harmony, and brotherhood in collaboration with like-minded Muslims and non-Muslim organizations and their religious leaders. The JIH regularly holds religious and communal amity programmes in collaboration with religious and social leaders belonging to other faiths. The JIH also works through various other forums comprising intellectuals and workers from different religious groups to promote peace and harmony. And yet, the author calls JIH an “anti-diversity” organisation.
The JIH is also engaged in different sectors like health, education, disaster management, relief work, and providing interest-free loans to poor and needy persons, irrespective of their faith. When the Islamic Relief Committee of Gujarat (IRCG) built houses for the 2002 riot victims, they also reconstructed the houses of many Hindus whose homes were destroyed during the same riot. The JIH also developed drinking water facilities for Muslims and non-Muslims in one of the worst-affected villages in the Panchmahals (Godhra district) of Gujarat in 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom.
As a journalist, having worked for 32 years with a leading national English daily, I have not come across a single disruptive incident in which a JIH functionary was found involved. I am saying this with confidence because I have spent a long stint of my journalistic career covering police and crime.
JIH is against communal hatred, class struggle & all types of mischief
The JIH does not believe in Machiavellian principles of fraud and deceit to achieve its objectives. The JIH’s Constitution available on the internet clearly says, “In all its actions, the Jamaat shall be bound by moral limits and shall never adopt such means or ways which are against truth and honesty or through which may come about communal hatred, class struggle and Fasaad fil arz (social chaos, discord, anarchy, corruption and mischief).”
The JIH Constitution further says that “the JIH shall adopt constructive and peaceful methods; that is, it shall reform the mental outlook, character, and conduct through propagation (of Islam), instruction and dissemination of Islamic ideas, and thus shall train public opinion to bring about the desired righteous revolution in the social life of the country.” And the JIH means what it says.
