An Islamic Solution or A Buddhist Islamic Solution

Returned Pre-Islamic Artifacts Displayed in Kabul

The dream of an Islamic solution is backfiring all over the world. The problem with Muslim wanting and wishing - is that it is done in the absence of truth. There is the usual reminiscence of the time when ... Islam used to be... But the truth is that Islam from its inception in Afghanistan was violent. The Buddhist and Hindus occupying the area the so-named Hindu Kush - named after the blood spilled and graves dug - stretched from the mountains of Pakistan to Kabul and possibly beyond. Saw indigenous people with mystic beliefs - beliefs which reflected the mountains they inhabited - lives torn to bits and forever transformed - in the name of Islam and the imposition of Sharia law.

In this sense the terrorist may have it more accurate - they are indeed getting back to the true Islam - the Islam that saw blood flow in its name - with no limits to its brutality - to gain its way, on those very mountains.

The extremist boldly look at Islam's terrible terrifying history - the moderates prefer to keep their hand over those pages of Islam's history - they negate it. But together they want to create an Islamic world that will will all love to live in - either willingly or by force, by the sword.

The writer talks of an Islamic renaissance in Afghanistan - based it seems on thinkers and an ideology more akin to that of Buddhism. It talks of the oneness of people. What then of the non-believing infidels and the Jews and the Christians and the idolater Hindus. And it talks of women's rights - more akin to a western democracy [where he lives in exile from Iran] and even the atheist communists - that when Afghanistan was under their control women did not need to seek out references within Islam's long history for justification to work as a doctor or to care for children in a foster home - they just did.

This is the renaissance that the Afghan people need - the casting off of religious rhetoric that asks for their submission as slaves to it. If the Afghans are going to have respect for others among them - it should be because they feel that it is the right thing to do - not because Islam wants it - or because they found justification - to respect others within Islam. These things should come from within based on honesty and simple logic.

Islam is - in the way both sets of Muslims envision it - dead. People though - and their quest for freedom - are not. These recovered sculptures and the pyramids attest to a time of order before Islam - proof that life can exist and thrive without it. Showing that Islam needs people - people don't need Islam. Today it is clear that brutality is the bond holding Islam together - an indication it has run its course. Its surrounded by a sea of freedom - people look toward the light.


By ABOLHASSAN BANI-SADR: 1st elected Iranian President after the fall of the Shah
Published: October 8, 2009

PARIS — In Afghanistan, where young people have placed themselves on waiting lists to become suicide bombers, increasing the number of soldiers — whether U.S., NATO or Afghan (in order to “Afghanize” the war) — will prolong the conflict rather than end it.

The decades of violence and instability in Afghanistan require a deeper answer to a deeper problem. What the country needs is an interpretation of Islam that embraces freedom and human rights instead of violence and tribal oppression. Everything else is a Band-Aid.

The despotic and misogynist narratives of Islam that predominate now must be challenged by alternative interpretations of Islam. The argument that Afghanistan is “not ready” for democracy and only capable of authoritarian politics misses this point entirely and condemns Afghanistan to a permanent state of war.

Afghanistan is a deeply religious society, but the dominant interpretations of Islam, as in most Islamic countries, is one that fosters submission to force. More specifically, under existing sharia law, which is completely detached from the message of the Quran, human beings are understood to be at the service of religion, and not vice-versa. Because this belief is entrenched deeply in the popular psyche, the struggle for social and political dominance expresses itself through religious discourse.

Religion has become about power. The most abhorrent form of this violence, suicide bombing, is the direct result of the dominance of a religious interpretation that sanctifies violence. Unless this changes, religion in Afghanistan will continue to serve the fundamentalist powers and those who are nourished by the politics of fear.

What is required instead is a revival of the repressed traditions of Islamic thought and practice, such as the concept of “Tawhid.” This is a worldview that regards the whole of existence as a single form. The whole of existence is a single living and conscious organism, possessing will, intelligence, feeling and purpose. This encompassing existence is damaged by conflict and by separation from others.

Through this lens, the exercise of submission to power is regarded as anti-Islamic rather than as intrinsic to the faith. The expansion of freedom and development is understood as the pathway to the divine. From this perspective, human beings are created with the talents, rights and responsibilities of initiative and self-determination. All forms of censorship within “self” and “society” have to be removed because they are obstacles on the path to realization. This means that no individual or group can legitimately dominate another, and that challenging all forms of domination in oneself and others is an ethical responsibility. This Islam is a religion of freedom.

What does this mean in practical terms? The task of revolutionizing Islam in Afghanistan should begin with attention to the plight of women.

Presently, half the population is absent from the public domain, veiled from head to toe, branded as inferior to men and treated as sexual objects to be kept at home. There is no doubt, given that the society is patriarchal and highly militarized, that changing this status is a Herculean challenge. But the enormity of the task should not prevent Afghans from undertaking it, as it is impossible to imagine a democratic and developing Afghanistan if the status of women is not confronted. It requires a frontal jihad — a political, intellectual and spiritual struggle to liberate Muslims and Islamic societies from the addiction to force. This can only be successful when grounded in a freedom-oriented Islam.

It goes without saying that neither more foreign troops nor more suicide bombers can contribute to this essential transformation.

If there is any chance for the indigenous emergence of peace and stability in Afghanistan through an Islamic renaissance, the global and regional powers surrounding it should act on a principle of “negative equilibrium” in which no country can interfere in Afghanistan’s affairs.

The Afghan people should also consider that a plurality of different ethnic groups can maintain peaceful relationships only when the country becomes a federation organized around three major rights: the right to participate in government; the right to practice different languages, cultures and religions; and the right to peace through the absence of domination of any ethnic groups by any other.

The renaissance of Islam is above all the task of young Afghan people, who make up nearly 70 percent of the country’s population. Such a renaissance is not historically alien to Afghan culture: Avicena’s rationalism and Rumi’s mystic philosophy are, after all, part of this tradition, much more so than the practice of suicide bombing.

Communicating this interpretation of Islam through the relative freedom of the media in Afghanistan could play a major role in popularizing democratic and humanist forms of Islam, which could in turn pave the way for the development of a democratic and independent Afghanistan that is a threat to no one, including its own people.

Abolhassan Bani-Sadr was the first elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran after the 1979 revolution. He lives in exile in France.

NYTimes