Muslims and Liberals

Myriad East-West interactions renewing religious and secular values

Fighting phantom terror

Posted on by Mustafa Malik

THE ISLAMIC STATE has sent new shock waves through the world by capturing more than 200 Syrian and Egyptian Christians. The terrorist group’s gruesome killing of other hostages has heightened concerns among many about the fate of these hostages. Meanwhile, the Obama administration and the Iraqi government reportedly have shelved their long-publicized plans to try...

Terror bred by grievances, not Islam

Posted on by Mustafa Malik

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S speech at this week’s terrorism conference in the White House sounded to me like a broken record from the George W. Bush administration. Bush and his advisers attributed Muslim terrorism to Islam. “Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him,” said John Ashcroft, Bush’s...

Cow, crescent and star

Posted on by Mustafa Malik

 Published in  Middle East Policy, Washington, D.C.; December 5, 2014 Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, is investigating the impact of Hindu nationalism on liberal values and democratic institutions in his native India. Earlier, he conducted fieldwork on religious movements and nationalist experiments in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent as a...

GOP win to prompt new wake-up call

Posted on by Mustafa Malik

Tuesday night’s Republican electoral victory poses an insidious threat to freedom and democracy in America. Yet if you believe in the American democratic system, you have to accept the argument that a majority of the American voters wanted to freeze the minimum wage at its starvation level, allow unbridled carbon emissions and deny healthcare to...

ISIS could trigger Arab revolution

Posted on by Mustafa Malik

On the darker upper strip of my computer screen I saw my eyebrows rising, as I read, for the first time, President Obama’s mission in Iraq and Syria. Now, as his aides and spokespersons drone on and on about that mission, I get ticked off or, alternately, amused. Can the United States and its allies...

Gaza, Pakistan and ignoble US legacy

Posted on by Mustafa Malik

The anti-government protests now raging in Pakistan and the travails of Hamas in Palestine remind me of Nurul Amin, my mentor. He served, at different times, as prime minister of Pakistan and Bangladesh, which was then East Pakistan. In February 1972, in Rawalpindi, Amin was telling me about the political intrigues that had led to...

Surviving 70 years of nuclear jingoism

Posted on by Mustafa Malik

As Hiroshima Day dawns, why are we still tempting nuclear fate? It is a wonder we have survived all these decades, given US policies on nuclear armament since Hiroshima Noam Chomsky for TomDispatch, part of the Guardian Comment Network Wednesday 6 August 2014 05.19 EDT Seventy-years ago today the Harry Truman administration launched the scariest...

Bringing Indian Muslims out from cold

Posted on by Mustafa Malik

THE INSTALLATION of India’s Narendra Modi government has triggered concerns among many Indian Muslims. Prime Minister Modi of the Hindu nationalist Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) has included in his Cabinet some of the well-known Muslim baiters such as Indresh Kumar and Sadhvi Rithambara. He has given top administrative posts to bureaucrats accused of involvement in anti-Muslim...

Manufacturing an ‘existential threat’

Posted on by Mustafa Malik

Here’s a searing expose of the ominous U.S.-Israeli narrative about Iran’s nuclear program. It shows how American neocons and the Israeli right wing made Iran’s peaceful nuclear program into an “existential threat” to Israel and sold it to the world. It reminds me of the “mushroom cloud” invented and propagated by the neocons during the...

Struggle for Bangladesh’s cultural soul

Posted on by Mustafa Malik

SYLHET, Bangladesh: Is modernity finally putting brakes on the Islamization campaign in Bangladesh? Is it eroding the nation’s ethnic culture? These questions keep haunting me during trips to Bangladesh. A visit yesterday to  Shahjalal University of Science and Technology in Sylhet lent the two questions special poignancy. The population of what is now Bangladesh is...