Commentary

20th September 1998

Rescuing Iran's Islam from Afghan Taleban

By Mervyn de Silva

The spotlight is on Taleban and Afghani stan, and thus this region, Iran, included, not only for reasons of geography but ideology..... what the western media persist in describing as "Islamic fundamentalism". Is it a "doctrine" identified by these selfsame western opinion-makers with Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini a lonely Iranian exile in Paris whose sermons smuggled to his people, inspired one of the most extraordinary revolutions in modern times? Those sermons saw the Shahenshah (the King of Kings) popularly known as 'the American Shah', flee his country.

'But the U.S did have its revenge. Its main post-war rival, the Soviet Union was dragged into an Afghan quagmire and President Reagan settled scores.... Afghanistan for Vietnam, no more Soviet Union, just Russia.

From the Ayatollah Khomeini to Saddam Hussein, the popular image of Islam is that of a militant, expansionist and rabidly anti-western religion that has gripped the minds of governments and the media, observes Professor John L.Esposito, a Consultant to the State Dept., and the author of The Islamic Threat.

Great danger

On Tuesday Iran warned Afghanistan's Taleban and Pakistan that their actions could provoke a "major regional conflict". Ayatollah Ali Khameni said: "I have so far prevented the lighting of a fire in this region which would be hard to extinguish. But all should know that a very great and wide danger is quite near. Students of regional politics and our foreign policy-makers cannot ignore the warning if only because we not only have a politically conscious Muslim elite but also a complex and violent conflict in one of our own ethnically mixed provinces.

What brought the conflict in Afghan crisis to the edge of the precipice, both western diplomats and area specialists agree, was the seizure by the Sunni Moslem Taleban of the Shiite Muslim stronghold of Bamiyan last weekend. It was this turn of events which provoked the Iranian leader to intervene and warn that a very great danger was quite close.

Russia's new prime minister Yevgeny Primakov is an old Asian hand. A journalist whose beat was Asia.... from the Middle-East to the Indan sub-continent.... he must know the vital part that Afghanistan played in the last year of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Geo strategy

"Just as the retreat of the Soviet Empire from Eastern Europe necessitated a radical reassessment of the geo-strategic borders of Europe, so the emergence of the newly independent states of the Soviet Muslim periphery requires a complete re-valuation of the frontiers of Central Asia...."

Asian affairs specialists in Moscow are quite conscious of the new demand - a much closer and careful study of Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. Prime Minister Primakov was a serious student of Central South Asia and the Arab world when he was roving correspondent of Pravda. A more active Russian regional diplomacy can be quite confidently predicted. But "identity" before conventional geo-politics meaning Sunni and Shia for instance and Afghanistan, Taliban as item No. I right now.

Modern Muslim

Though geographically close, the leading actors in the current drama are not familiar faces. Nor their ideas and aims. What makes a modern Shiite. Sheikh Hassan Nasrullah is the leader of the Hizbollah operating in South Lebanon. fighting a holy war against the unholy I.D.F., the Israeli army which has its Lebanese units operating on their home-ground. Of course, they are mercenaries, the ungodly in the eye of Nasrullah. Will Prime Minister Netanyahu surprise his enemies and return occupied Syrian, Jordanian and Lebanese land in a negotiated settlement - the Israeli-Egyptian exercise as a model?

Sheikh Hassan Nasrullah dismisses that as a "trick," Item No. 1 on his agenda is a hearts-and-minds operation and the inspiration is Islam but Islam as practised in Iran, not as practised in most Arab countries. "It suits the US to show Islam as ignorance, savagery, degradation of women.... In Iran by contrast what is being presented is an enlightened and tolerant Islam, based on the origins of religion. "The impact, he admits, may be slow, gradual... but it will liberate the people.

Hulftsdorp Hill

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