Mawdudi, and his followers then and now, saw India as a land of filth inhabited by sub-human idol-worshippers and considered it their civilising mission to create the circumstances to make the whole of India convert to Islam. He thought the creation of Pakistan would detract from that mission.

Mawdudi’s followers in Britain today have similar feelings about this country, and Europe.

Many of the comments which follow however show just how far matters have deteriorated; a succession of warmed over ‘facts’ from the past – prize examples of ‘learned and rehearsed’ history tourism.

As Ayub Khan, sometime dictator of Pakistan, wrote in his memoirs about the section of the ulama class who had opposed the creation of Pakistan:

Pakistan was the greatest defeat of the nationalist ulema. But they are a tenacious tribe and power is an irresistible drug. Soon after the establishment of Pakistan this type of ulema reorganised its forces. Now that Pakistan had been established, these people asked, who, indeed, except the ulema, could decide how the new Muslim state should be run. Some of the nationalist ulema decided to stay in India; others hastened to Pakistan to lend a helping hand. If they had not been able to save the Muslims from Pakistan, they must now save Pakistan from the Muslims. Among the migrants was Maulana Abul Aala Maududi… This venerable gentleman was appalled by what saw in Pakistan: an un-Islamic country, an un-Islamic government, and an un-Islamic people. How could any genuine Muslim owe allegiance to such a government? So he set about the task of convincing the people of their inadequacies, their failings, and their general unworthiness. All this was really a facade. The true intention was to re-establish the supremacy of the ulema and to re-assert their right to lead the Community.

Ayub Khan was right about Maududi being identifiable with the ulama even without being a formally trained cleric/scholar; but he was wrong about the reasons for the opposition of the “nationalist ulema”, such as Maududi, to the creation of Pakistan.

The real, fundamental, reason was that India, the subcontinent, was unfinished business for Islamic hegemony. They, Maududi and his ilk, wanted it all, so settling for only a fraction was unacceptable. That “dream” is still alive and kicking today among the ulama, in both Pakistan and India.

I also enjoyed your previous article on Hizb-ut-Tahrir and it’s anti-semetic rhetoric: http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/08/18/hizb-ut-tahrir-%E2%80%9Cwhat-is-required-is-actual-war%E2%80%9D/

Keep them coming

Islam never expelled a single Jewish (or for that matter Christian) community. Sure they were dhimmis, but there were no mass expulsions or pogroms for at least 500 years under the Ottoman Empire. Not one.

Not true. While the overall historical record of the Ottoman Empire is mainly one of compelling Jews to wear special clothes to mark them out, live separately or in ghettos, restrict their rights and force them to pay additional taxes (great!), as in the rest of the Islamic world, there were indeed expulsions, forcible conversions to Islam, pogroms and massacres. For example:

12,000 Jews expelled in 1915 by the Turks from southern then El Kuds region of what is now Israeli territory

Jews of Jaffa hanged by the Turks in 1917 before allied armies arrived

1864-1880 More than 500 Jews murdered in Morocco, often in broad daylight

1897 Synagogues plundered throughout Tripolitania

Sefrou, Morocco: Jewish quarter pillaged by Muslims after a flood in which 54 Jews died

Jerba 1864 Muslim groups pillage Jewish communities, burn & loot synagogues, rape the women

Tunis 1145 Jews forced to convert or leave

1933 Iraq 20 Jews murdered

1941 Iraq Rashid Aii’ss pro Nazi govt: riots in which 175 Jews killed, 1,000 injured, looting of property-900 houses destroyed

1935 Iraq Jews removed from government service, forbidden to travel to then-Palestine

1897 synagogue sacked, subsequently widespread anti-Jewish violence in Algeria

1934 Constantine, Algeria 25 Jews killed during attacks by Muslim groups

Libya 1945 Anti-Jewish riots of 1945–over 100 Jews killed in each of seven towns across the country

Casablanca 1907: 30 Jews killed, 200 women, girls & boys abducted, raped & then ransomed.

Numerous local uninvolved Jews murdered across countries under Islamic rule from 1880 onwards in protest against European Jews seeking to settle in Israel (perhaps you think the Jews were to blame for that?)

Episodes of forcible conversion of Jews to Islam in Meshed, Iran

and many others.

Then of course there were the reactions of states under Islamic rule, and of Muslims to the coming of Jews to then Palestine before the establishment of Israel and thereafter– local massacres, numerous murderous pogroms, confiscations of property, expulsions on a huge scale etc etc. Or perhaps you think the Jews or “the zionists” were to blame for those?

Source: Martin Gilbert, Atlas of Jewish History, Routledge

What you’re doing here is just recycling old Iranian-Islamist and Arab nationalist propaganda about the wonderful treatment of Jews under Islam which claimed to be “merely” anti-zionist but was all too obviously anti-semitic. The aim of this propaganda is to underpin numerous anti-zionist, but de facto anti-semitic myths around Israel including–the Palestinians are being forced to pay for European persecutions of Jews; there was never any need for Jewish self-determination, including the establishment of a Jewish state in its historic homeland; anti-semitism is a European phenomenon–the Jews lived a wonderful life under Islam and alongside their Arab Muslim neighbours, with just one or two minor inconveniences, as you argue here.

Here’s a comment from a Tunisian Arab Jew describing reasons why Jews of Islamic countries also wanted to leave their countries and have a homeland of their own in Israel.

We should have liked to be Arab Jews. If we abandoned the idea, it is because over the centuries, the Muslim Arabs systematically prevented its realization by their contempt & cruelty (Albert Memmi,1975)

Here’s a comment from a Libyan-born Jew written in 1975 reflecting on his experience before he emigrated to Israel:

the man in the street was intolerant of the mere existence of the Jew in his country (Maurice Roumani Jews & Arabs in Libya)

Yes, there were many periods when the Ottoman Empire was relatively liberal and positive towards Jews–like when it suited them to invite Jewish merchants and trading communities to settle in the lands of its own empire in order better to colonise them. But we don’t hear much about Islamic imperialism.

And the Christian rulers of Europe also sometimes treated Jews well and invited them to settle here or trade there–when it suited, as did Casimir, King of Poland, which became and remains one of the most anti-semitic countries of central Europe.

That’s why zionism developed–as did Sinn Fein (ourselves alone) in Ireland
“Muslims weren’t nearly as anti-semitic as European Christians” doesn’t amount to much of an excuse.

Mawdudi and his ilk were angry and frustrated men who dream’t of power and political authority. Today his followere in the UK have the same ambitions. Bungles is a self-confessed Mawdudi fan, actually it was Mawdudi’s writings that got him into Islam!

Azad Ali’s Muslim Safety Forum and Islamic Forum Europe are both JI front organisations. MCB is made up of many JI inspired individulas i.e. Bungles and Abdul Bari. The governement needs to stop wasting time and money on these idiots as they are part of the problem and not the solution.

For all those who see Islam as intrinsically anti-imperialist, Mawdudi absented himself for the biggest campaign against imperialism in the history of the world – the fight for Indian independence.

Put simply, a Hindu or a Secular India could actually be worse than the Raj. Only when Pakistan was up and running did he head over there, and then with the single objective of making it as Islamic a state as possible.

Those who see anti-imperialism as being to the fore in UK Islamist organisations, need to think very carefully about who, and what, they are actually with.

Of course, we mustn’t forget that the bulk of international funding for the promulgation of mainstream, Koranic literalist Islam – including the building of mosques and the funding of Mullahs – comes from the Arab world; especially Saudi Arabia.

This Saudi funded Islamic re-blueprinting against the Koranic standard has been going on since the 70s, spreading out from Riyadh, Jeddah and Mecca as a malign plague of the mind. I saw it’s early effects as a teenager in Malaysia.

That should also get much more exposure.

An erudite post, for which I thank you.

As re: the first sentence of that post, here given:

“There is a common misconception that the roots of radical Islamism stem from grievances in the Middle East i.e. Israel/Palestine.”

I respectfully see and raise you, thusly:

There is a common misconception, held by arrogant ethnocentric bien peasant Western white people educated far past their intelligence at University, that the entire history of the world is about them, because that’s how stupid and racist and uninterested in history they are.