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Canadian Director Salim Mansur on Hans Kung, Toronto Sun, December 29, 2007
www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Mansur_Salim/2007/12/29/4744680-sun.php
Theologian finds peace path
By SALIM MANSUR
Toronto Sun, December 29, 2007
Hans Kung, a Swiss Catholic theologian and prolific scholar, after a
life-long study of Christianity and other faith-traditions proposed a compelling
theorem for global peace in our time of millennial change and unrest in world
history.
This theorem states, “No peace among the nations without peace among the
religions.”
Its corollary reads, “No peace among the religions without dialogue between
the religions. No dialogue between the religions without investigations of the
foundations of the religions.”
No scholar or theologian – leaving aside the fact he happens to be Christian
– has done as much in recent years in living the ideals of the above proposition
as has Hans Kung.
Remaining faithful to the life and teachings of Jesus the Christ, Hans Kung
has plunged deep in studying Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism.
But his most passionate commitment in this journey of reaching out has been
directed towards Judaism and Islam which together with Christianity form the
triangle of familial Abrahamic faith-traditions.
Hence, another reading of Kung’s peace theorem would be there can be no peace
unless this broken triangle of the Abrahamic faith-traditions gets repaired.
Kung’s devotion in getting this triangle repaired – of bringing Jews,
Christians and Muslims together on the common ground of being faithful to the
God of Abraham – is humbling for those who believe, irrespective of what any
faith-doctrine might teach in exclusivist language, that Abraham’s God is
lovingly and mercifully embracing of all His children.
In this missionary task, Kung has published this year his much
anticipated study simply titled Islam: Past, Present and Future.
Kung’s Islam, despite its almost forbidding length and scope in
mining the history of Muslims from conception to the present day,
deserves the widest attention and reading.
Most ironically, and urgently, it should be read by Muslims, and
especially by those Muslims residing in the West most driven to
apologetics and polemics with others.
There is no Muslim scholar I can readily think of who might be
mentioned in the same breath as Kung for engaging with similar devotion
and humility in the study of Judaism and Christianity, while putting
aside any expectation that Muslims should similarly engage in studying
and learning from the faith-traditions nominally described as Eastern
religions.
Radicalism, bigotry and violence have left their marks, as Kung
discusses, on Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
No adherent of any of these three faith-traditions can plead
innocence in God’s court of wrongfully spilling blood of others.
But Kung is right in asking, “did any religion pursue a victorious
course as rapid, far-reaching, tenacious and permanent as that of Islam?
Scarcely one.”
Islam in history is a “religion of victory.” And this history
occupies Muslim mind as a triumphal burden rendering Islam’s pristine
message to remain inextricably bound with and inseparable from the
course of its prophet’s life, and those who forged this message into the
template of an expansive empire.
Kung’s challenge for Muslims is remaining faithful to Abraham’s God
without sinking into oblivion under the weight of their history that has
become mostly irrelevant, if not entirely redundant.
And Kung’s challenge for others is remaining mindful of their less
than ideal history when engaging in the urgent work of repairing the
broken triangle of the Abrahamic faith-traditions.
Canadian Director Salim Mansur on Reading William Blake at Christmas, Toronto Sun, December 22, 2007
http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Mansur_Salim/2007/12/22/4737093-sun.php
CIP Note: William Blake is considered by prominent Islamic scholars to
be an outstanding example of a Sufi-like outlook within Christian culture.
Sharing Blake at Christmas
SALIM MANSUR
Toronto Sun
December 22, 2007
We live in deeply troubled times, and these will likely grow in our
increasingly inter-connected world.
But happily once a year when much of the world gathers to celebrate the birth
of the special child Jesus, we can take a break from troubles pressing upon us
to reflect upon the mysteries of life on Earth and beyond.
Mystery surrounds us from the moment we arrive on Earth until we depart. At
its most elementary the mystery is about what sustains this “brief crack of
light” – as the great writer Vladimir Nabokov in his autobiography, Speak,
Memory, phrased his opening sentence – “between two eternities of darkness.”
Is life merely this fleeting moment compressed between eternal darkness on
either side?
This remains the most compelling question that men and women of varying
intellects through the ages have pondered over and most, I suspect, preferred
believing that life is a passage, in the words of William Blake, “through
Eternal Death! And of the awaking to Eternal Life.”
Such belief rests on faith that there is an unseen power, eternally good,
merciful, loving and beautiful beyond our earthly sight yet visible to our inner
vision as Blake reminds us.
I refer to Blake, having gone back to reading him again during the past
months, for he is perhaps the most loved mystic poet in the English language.
Blake was born 250 years ago in London on Nov. 28, 1757, and died there Aug.
12, 1827.
He was, in the words of one recent biographer, “a competent engraver, an
eccentric painter” and “a devout believer in Christ as the embodiment of the
human imagination.”
All his life Blake was moved by the vision of God whose love was incarnated
in the human form of Jesus.
God in Blake’s vision was a personal Deity.
He was not lodged within the formal ornate settings of religious
institutions or encountered in the lifeless pages of sacred texts.
In the long poem Jerusalem, Blake writes:
“I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and a friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me.”
It is the mystic in Blake who cuts across cultural boundaries and
religious divide to bring people together on the common grounds of a
shared vision:
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
For Blake it was not what we see, but how we see that was crucial. He
wrote, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.”
Blake’s vision was a needed rebellion against the arid philosophy of
the rationalists with their mechanistic view of the universe that killed
imagination.
It was also a vision informed by the despair of grinding poverty in
the midst of rising wealth, of an England of newly arranged workshops
and factories. And Blake warned:
“A dog starved at his Master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.”
Our age has invented instruments to see the outer edges of stellar
space and map the universe of the infinitely small, yet Blake's vision
in our time has become perilously dim.
This Christmas we could do well sharing Blake with each other and
discovering with him the peace that comes in knowing “All deities reside
in the human breast.”
Executive Director Schwartz on Burma, including Burmese Muslims, The Weekly Standard, issue of October 8, 2007
www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/174jedwp.asp
The Saffron Revolution
Bloody but hopeful days in Burma.
by Stephen Schwartz
10/08/2007, The Weekly Standard, Volume 013, Issue 04
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At this writing, on Friday, September 28, the Burmese
military regime has brought its heavy hammer down on the
thousands of people demonstrating against the country's
45-year-old dictatorship. Police and troops have fired on
protesters, killing at least 13 people. Buddhist monasteries
have been raided and sealed, including the Shwedagon Pagoda, the
most famous and beautiful building in Rangoon, and some 200
monks are under arrest. Internet traffic, which dissidents used
to report events to the world, has been cut.
It may be pardonable to begin comment on a land almost
completely sealed off from the rest of the world with the only
trace of humor in its situation--the difficulty some
English-speaking newsrooms have had in deciding whether to adopt
the nationalist renaming of the country and its main city, from
Burma and Rangoon to Myanmar and Yangon. The Washington Post
sticks with the former; the New York Times and other leading
dailies prefer the new system, though the mouthful "Myanmarese"
has failed to gain currency, leaving pretty much everyone still
saying "Burmese."
Whatever one calls the country, its history since World War
II has been one of almost unrelieved tragedy. Ruled as a part of
British India from 1886 to 1948, it was once rich enough to be
aptly symbolized by the gold of its pagodas--especially the
thousands in the town of Pagan. An earthquake in 1975 damaged
many of Pagan's treasures, but that destruction was merely
physical--nothing compared with the political and psychological
cruelties Burma has endured.
Burma has been subjected to just about every form of
political and governmental brutalization the 20th century--and
now the 21st--could offer. It has much in common with other
victims of state socialism, including Cuba and the former
Yugoslavia.
Like Castro's fiefdom, it fell from significant prosperity to
extreme poverty, becoming a backward, ramshackle place. Like
Yugoslavia, it was never a genuine nation-state. Although the
CIA World Fact Book (which calls it Burma) claims the population
of 47 million is 68 percent ethnic Burman, some question that
figure. The many minority groups in the northern and eastern
highlands, usually called "hill tribes," probably comprise at
least a third of the population. They include several major and
dozens of minor identities, with Karens and Shans being the best
known, because of their long armed struggle for freedom.
While ethnic Burmans are typically Buddhist, the Karens are
Christians and the Shans have their own religion mixing Buddhist
and animist elements. A Muslim minority spread throughout the
country is indistinguishable from the Burman majority in
language, but has also been violently repressed, and hundreds of
thousands of Burmese Muslims have fled west to neighboring
Bangladesh.
Burma has not enjoyed real peace in over 50 years. Already in
the 1930s it saw growing nationalist agitation against British
rule. With the outbreak of World War II, "the Thirty Comrades,"
a group of Burmese patriots opposed to Britain, were recruited
by the Japanese and trained in Tokyo to lead a "Burma
Independence Army" (BIA). In 1942, the Japanese invaded Burma.
They were welcomed as liberators by the anti-British populace,
and the BIA collaborated with them in ruling the country.
Quickly, however, the new invaders' atrocious behavior alienated
the people, and the resulting resistance movement had a strong
radical-leftist flavor.
The leader of the collaborationist, then anti-Japanese,
forces was General Aung San, the most charismatic and popular of
the nationalists. His assassination in 1947 was a national
trauma. With the fall of the Japanese, Communist and ethnic
independence fighters such as the Karens sought to establish
power in their own enclaves. Even after independence in 1948 and
the establishment of a nationalist/populist government--a
"light" one-party state--turmoil continued, fed partly by China,
which treats Burma as its satellite.
In the "nonaligned" dreamland of the 1950s, when figures like
Tito in Yugoslavia, Nasser in Egypt, and Sukarno in Indonesia
(that last having also previously cooperated with Japanese
invaders) claimed to lead the former colonies toward progress,
Burma was a major player. Its representative at the United
Nations, U Thant, served as U.N. secretary-general from 1961 to
1971, even after Ne Win (one of the original Thirty Comrades)
and the military seized control of the country in 1962.
Ne Win committed Burma to economic and political ruin by
adopting a scheme called "the Burmese Way to Socialism," based
on total isolation, the looting of the economy for the benefit
of the military caste, and continued suppression of the minority
peoples. He was a confirmed believer in astrology and
numerology, who reconfigured the national currency, the kyat, in
bills of 45 and 90 units in the hope of increasing his own
longevity.
Ne Win left power in 1988, the year of a democratic movement
that the military suppressed by killing thousands, and which
brought Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy
(NLD) to the fore. Esteemed as the daughter of Aung San, she
commanded respect in her own right for her dignity and
simplicity. Since the late 1980s, and even after she was awarded
a Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi has been in and
out of house arrest, where she remains today.
Burma's current leader is General Than Shwe, another
megalomaniac, who is busy moving the capital from Rangoon to a
"new city" 200 miles to the north called Naypidaw. Than Shwe
seems bent on delivering another lesson to his subjects and the
world about the defiance of Rangoon's military rulers. But
before he shut down the Internet, the whole world saw the
affecting sight of Buddhist monks and nuns, in their maroon and
saffron robes, peacefully protected and assisted by ordinary
citizens, filling the streets of Rangoon and Mandalay in orderly
protest.
Some Western pundits have argued that a China now oriented
toward capitalist growth has an incentive to dissuade the
Burmese army from administering a bloodbath. Such optimism about
Beijing, however, is vain.The only hope for the rescue of the
tormented peoples of Burma resides in the solidarity expressed
by President George W. Bush at the U.N. General Assembly when he
said, "Americans are outraged by the situation in Burma. The
ruling junta remains unyielding, yet the people's desire for
freedom is unmistakable."
Cynics may decry the president's stand as a mere effort to
renew the vision of democratization that accompanied U.S.
intervention in Iraq. But Burma--like Georgia, Ukraine, and
Kyrgyzia before it--shows that the weak links in the global
chain of tyranny are breaking, one by one, and that the
worldwide movement for entrepreneurship, accountability, and
popular sovereignty can assert itself, with or without the help
of outsiders. For Americans and all haters of oppression, the
message is clear: The United States should show effective
support for the aspirations of Burma's diverse citizens; tougher
sanctions against the regime are only the beginning.
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Executive Director
Schwartz, "Bin Laden Looks for An Exit Strategy," TCSDaily, September 11, 2007
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=091107A
Bin Laden Looks for an Exit Strategy
By Stephen Schwartz
Since 2001, each September we remember. Today, we first think of the
frontline fighters in Iraq, Americans, Iraqis, and other members of the
Coalition in combat, first against Saudi-incited, Wahhabi terrorism - miscalled
a "Sunni insurgency."
But none of us forgets the terror inflicted on the whole world six years ago;
the sudden appearance, after so many years, of a real sense of American national
unity, and the equally-surprising commitment to change in U.S. policies in the
Middle East. President George W. Bush, in vowing to promote democracy across the
globe, brusquely abandoned the defense of the regional status quo that had come
to define his party and even his family legacy. But as reported in The
Washington Post on August 20, 2007, President Bush told the Egyptian opposition
intellectual Saad Eddin Ibrahim, "You're not the only dissident. I too am a
dissident in Washington. Bureaucracy in the United States does not help change."
The intervention in Iraq was a severe test for the doctrine of democratization.
American solidarity in the face of terrorism disappeared almost immediately.
Democracy became a term of derision among neo-isolationists and believers in the
realpolitik that had led to 9/11 - expressing a contempt few Americans of the
past could ever have imagined hearing. The Iraq war began in 2003, and four
years later the president's opponents repeat the same disinformational charges
they made then: mainly, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. But as
I have said before, Nazi Germany had nothing directly to do with the Pearl
Harbor attack on the U.S. by the Japanese in 1941. Yet Nazi Germany and Japanese
imperialism were allied in opposing the democratic West, and what might only
have been an American war of retaliation against the Japanese in the Pacific
almost immediately became a two-ocean war against fascism.
The war against Islamofascism - a term originating, in its present meaning,
among Muslims, and referring to fascism acting with a religious pretext, not the
whole faith of Islam as a variety of fascism - was similar to World War II from
9/11 on. To respond to Al-Qaida meant confronting all of its allies, enablers,
and friends, from the Taliban in Afghanistan and radicals in Pakistan through
the distorted universe of Saudi-organized extremist groups everywhere Sunni
Muslims live - in the West, but mostly in the East. The enemy's central theatre
was always in the Arab world, but it operated and operates inside the U.S. as
well as in Britain, its European stronghold, and from the Balkans to ex-Soviet
Central Asia, from Sudan to Southeast Asia. The war on terror was always a world
war, although arguing over whether it is or is not World War IV seems a waste of
time.
Saddam's Iraq was a prominent link in the chain of radical Islamic tyranny
extending across the Middle East. In an irony of history, Iraq had briefly been
seized in a pro-Nazi officers' coup in 1941, led by one Rashid Ali, and Saddam
himself grew up under the influence of Rashid Ali's nostalgic supporters.
Although Rashid Ali was quickly overthrown, the 2003 U.S.-led intervention in
Iraq may be viewed as a long-delayed settling of an account left over for more
than six decades. There was, then, no break between the second world war, the
Cold War, and the War on Terror; 70 years of the last century and the beginning
of the present one have been consumed by contests between democracy and
antidemocratic ideologies. Future historians may elide both world wars and the
conflicts after them into a single, long war, "the global war."
The enemies of democracy change their uniforms or their vocabulary, and modify
their tactics, but they do not change their essential character as haters of
liberty and usurpers of power over human beings. Hitler preached peace while
committing acts of war; Stalin and his Soviet successors did the same. Both
dictators subsidized "peace movements" in the democracies. Both declared their
actions were driven by self-defense against Western imperialist aggression;
today's Islamists employ identical phraseology.
Fascism created strong national states as protective shells for real power held
by the party, as Soviet Communism did with its multinational empire. The state
itself, as a central modern institution, began disintegrating in the mid-20th
century, replaced by the structures of ideology. As was predicted even before
World War II, wars between states became obsolete, replaced by wars between
foreign ideological forces, disguised as civil wars inside states. Standing
armies were challenged by guerrilla armies and then by terrorist conspiracies.
Radicalism among Sunni Muslims, which has its most important roots in the
kingdom of Saudi Arabia, surpassed that country's borders and became a
post-national phenomenon.
On the sixth anniversary of 9/11, the most pressing question for Americans is:
are we winning in Iraq? I believe that democracy and pluralism now have the
advantage over the Wahhabi incursion and Shia adventurism in Mesopotamia. We
have all heard the news: Sunni tribal leaders who supported "insurgency" (an
honorable and therefore inappropriate term for bands of murderers) discovered,
when Al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) showed up to "help" them, that the Wahhabi-Taliban
regime AQI imposed was much worse than a U.S.-led occupation. And so the Iraqi
Sunnis now turn to support for the elected government of Iraq, even though it is
largely Shia and plagued with internal discontent.
Are we in America safer than we were before 9/11? Who thought this question
would be answered immediately? Demand for instant gratification in the personal
choices of Westerners has turned into demand for instant gratification in
worldwide matters of life and death. Of course, the war in Iraq rallied
jihadists against us; of course, the enemy's plots expanded in number and
geographical range. After Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939,
the Nazis succeeded in occupying most of the continent of Europe; after Pearl
Harbor, the Japanese invaded and held much of the Asian mainland. War is not a
quick fix; politics produces quick fixes, and war is an admission that politics
has failed, and that "other means" (in the famous phrase of the military
strategist Clausewitz) are necessary.
The human, financial, and technological resources of Al-Qaida have diminished
immensely since 9/11: it lost its Afghan base and then plunged into the Iraqi
bloodbath, in which it is being defeated. Rather than a second Vietnam for the
U.S. - comparing two wars that really have almost nothing in common - Iraq could
be a fatal quagmire for al-Qaida. With the increasing failure of Iraqi Sunnis to
rally to AQI, the enemy seeks to export the Iraqi jihad to the weakest area on
the Western front: Europe.
But as became visible in the successive London terror conspiracies as well as
the most recent investigation in Germany, Al-Qaida has been significantly
degraded everywhere. In place of expensively-trained cadres driving airliners
against the most famous buildings in the West, the enemy must have recourse to
marginal fanatics using low-tech explosives. Superficial clichés about
"homegrown terror" among Muslims in the West ignore two things. First, the
conspiracies are never "homegrown," i.e. based in local grievances and organized
spontaneously. They are always directed from the same nexus in Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan. Second, the "terrorist movement" among European Muslims remains
atomized and peripheral. Its criminal efforts require efficient detection,
prevention, and punishment, but they are based in isolated cells, not in a
network with ranks of volunteers such as Al-Qaida possessed in 2001. Cell
operations cannot and do not replace mass movements in changing history.
Nevertheless, the Al-Qaida counter-offensive has weakened Islam in the West: it
has, by intimidation, hardened the conformism of Sunnis in following the radical
dictates of Saudi Wahhabi clerics, Pakistani radicals, and the supporters of the
Muslim Brotherhood, which together control Sunnism in the U.S. and Britain.
American Islam, in particular, is spiritually, intellectually, and
organizationally stagnant in a way never before seen in a religion with a new
and growing presence in this country. It produces no new leaders of substance,
and none who effectively questions why radicalism was promoted in American
mosques so long; it cannot change its idiom except to adopt perfunctory
denunciations of terrorism. The leaders of American Islam before 9/11 remain in
place, relabeled as "moderates."
Finally, on the sixth anniversary of 9/11, an opinion on the latest video
message from Osama bin Laden himself will be expected. Every expert on Islam,
terrorism, and Iraq will have something to say about it. If one goes beyond the
superficial and predictable rantings against American hegemony, the message of
OBL now appears defensive. The tape released over the past weekend was
apparently based on a script assembled by Adam Gadahn, or Azzam al-Amriki, the
inept propagandist OBL and his cohort seem to have adopted as their media
teacher, perhaps on the mistaken assumption that all Americans are media-savvy.
But the tape is a mish-mash of historical gaffes, weird allegations and
namedropping, and illiterate iterations of earlier messages. Reading the
transcript, can we really believe Osama bin Laden sits and reads Noam
Chomsky or obsesses about Richard Perle or imagines what it means for him to
endorse the anti-Jewish pamphleteering of Michael Scheuer, the former "expert on
Al-Qaida for the Central Intelligence Agency?" (Scheuer should not be pleased.)
These snippets in the OBL tape were obviously trolled from the internet and
thrown together with "clever" gimmicks like the call for Americans to embrace
Islam, plus jabs about taxes and the inefficacy of the Democrats. The old and
aggressive Islamic idiom found in Bin Laden's discourse is missing. So is the
fire. The tone is that of exhaustion, not exhilaration in jihad.br>
I believe, six years after 9/11, that Al-Qaida is losing badly in Iraq, and
while George W. Bush perseveres with the promise he made to fulfill America's
democratic legacy, Bin Laden is looking for an exit strategy. The Western
mainstream media has it backwards; we are winning, the enemy is losing, the war
was inevitable and honorable. And the innocents killed on 9/11 will be fully
redeemed.
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