Why do the American extreme religious right’s sacrilegious statements go unchallenged by the defenders of our faith?

Helicopters dive down for a peek to see the swell on a Sunday afternoon. Men, almost all with beards, make their way towards Zero Point in Islamabad. They come on foot. They have come from far. There is an urgency in their stride; a grim determination to defy the ban to take out a jaloos. Around Islamabad highway are scattered ISI men in black waistcoats and black beards, just sitting and spying on people. An odd police car with blazing lights cruises past. Residents come out on the streets wondering if it will be a bloody Sunday. Black smoke rising from Rawalpindi catches the last rays of the setting sun.

In drawing rooms, the chattering classes divine their own equations, second-guessing if Qazi Hussain Ahmed is the man of the hour. Will he make good his promise to remove President Musharraf? Will he deliver on his sermons swearing never to allow another military general to rule over Pakistan in the future? Does he have enough street power to change the status quo?

Discussions whip up a frenzy of emotions. Politicians from opposition parties look stunned. Left leaderless, they are unwilling to take any lead. Benazir and Mian Nawaz Sharif are thundering from Dubai and London respectively, not for a moment contemplating their return.

“It is now or never,” says a retired bureaucrat who has held senior positions in both Bhutto’s and Nawaz Sharif’s governments. “If the two don’t come now, then they are stupid. Let them come and lead the people who are spilling into the streets in open rebellion. This is their chance to seize power.”

The gently aging bureaucrat feels Musharraf’s time of reckoning has come. The cartoon furor has spiralled into a national protest by the millions of Pakistanis living in grinding poverty while their leaders live charmed lives.

“The common man has spoken with acts of violence — that is his only weapon against the tyranny of his leaders,” insists the bureaucrat. “More than the cartoons, it’s Musharraf and Bush that Pakistanis are reacting against.”

Another politician who didn’t get elected in the last elections cites American ambassador Crocker’s address to some politicos. Something should happen by the end of March, Crocker is meant to have told his clueless dinner guests.

I am reminded of a conversation with the then acting American ambassador a day before Benazir Bhutto was sacked the second time. As I left John Holzman’s office that November afternoon, some 10 years back, he merely wondered if something was to happen the next day. I let the question pass without reading too much into it.

Another March and a sugar crisis jumps to mind. Ayub Khan’s ‘decade of reforms’ ended in a whimper when crowds took to the streets calling his minister Hoti “Cheeni chor”.

The first sign of contempt for Ayub Khan came from the students of the Rawalpindi Polytechnic. They defied bans and created havoc on the roads. Joining these brave souls were the students of Gordon College on Murree Road. For weeks these students played hide and seek in the little lanes on Murree Road, making the local police look like village idiots.

Finally, one spring day, Yahya Khan, the then C-in-C sacked Ayub Khan. America had nothing to do with the change, nor was it hated by Pakistanis as much as it is hated today.

While Europeans today are at the receiving end from the Muslim world, it is amazing how Muslims have continued to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the insults heaped on the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) by the religious right in America.

Following 9/11, foul mouths like Rev Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham Jr and Pat Robertson have derided Islam and its Holy Prophet (PBUH) with irreprehensible words carried live by TV networks like Fox News.
Helpless, that’s how Akbar S. Ahmed summed up the paradox when I asked him some four years ago: “There’s a serious crisis in the 1.3 billion Ummah straddling 55 states, with one nuclear (Pakistan) ... never before have Muslims been as helpless as today,” said the Washington-based Pakistani scholar, who is a common sight on American TV and a great proponent of interfaith dialogue.

“What can you do when well-known heads of religious universities in the US start misbehaving,” he asked. The Muslim world is suffering from an acute “identity crisis,” he said. “It lacks a common platform to fight the filth being perpetrated against Islam by the West. There is not a single Muslim in the US Congress, nor is there a Muslim media mogul here who can plug for us, nor are there any Islamic scholars on the campuses to silence such tacky sanctimonious chatter.”
Rev Jesse Jackson mocked Muslims saying: “Before September 11, you people thought you were white and thought you’re the elite, but now you too are black like us.”

Why do the American extreme religious right’s sacrilegious statements go unchallenged by the defenders of our faith? The Saudi silence is deafening, to say the least. The only voice of protest came from an American newspaper itself and not from any well-heeled Muslim in America.

Warning that such loose talk is not “just the words of a fringe movement”, Washington Post, in its stern editorial, equivocated such damnation with the White House since the damnifiers were among President Bush’s closest political allies. “On their noxious mix of religious bigotry and anti- Muslim demagoguery, Mr Bush’s silence is deafening ... it therefore falls to the president to break his silence on their gross distortion and to put some distance between their rhetoric and his own professions of tolerance.

“To avert his gaze from their actions is to permit the Falwells, Robertsons and Grahams to legitimize their own perverse teachings through their association with the president of the United States. If their words are not his, then the president must say so.”

We are still waiting for Bush to say so.

The attack on Islam, said Akbar, has been launched from two fronts: the campuses around the US and the mainstream media. “Because our voice in both is missing, therefore,” added Akbar, “when a crisis comes, our Prophet and religion become open targets.

Akbar vented his anger at the well-heeled Pakistani community in the US. “I have been to their multi-million-dollar homes and all they have to show is a signed photo of Hillary, Bill or Bush posing with them, forming the centre of their universe, a kind of shrine in their homes, as if by paying big bucks to their political campaigns (Republicans or Democrats) they think they are safe and will not be discriminated like fellow Pakistanis, who are profiled, detained and deported.”

Given the current Bush-burning, will President Bush land in Pakistan next month is a question many ask today.