Muslim cleansing: A global pandemic?

By Hamid Dabashi

What is happening to Muslims around the globe? In China they are put into concentration camps, in Myanmar they are slaughtered en masse, in India they have been the targets of systematic pogroms, in Israel along with Christian Palestinians they are mowed down on a daily basis, in Europe and the United States they are subject to increasing demonisation and persecution.

The fate of Muslims in their own homeland is not particularly rosier. From one end of the Muslim world to the next, Muslims - in Iran, Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia in particular - live under tyrannical regimes, ruthless dictators, murderous military juntas, with their most basic civil liberties and human rights denied. In Yemen, they are being slaughtered and subjected to man-made famine by the Saudis and their partners - and if one journalist dared to raise his voice he is chopped up to pieces in his own country's consulate.

What is this? What is going on? What does it all mean? 

Al Jazeera

China’s brutal crackdown on Uighurs shows no sign of slowing down

By hasnet Lais

The shameful silence of Muslim politicians over the treatment of this community is more than a story of betrayal. It’s a tragic tale of how globalisation has exalted wealth over human rights

Having endured the brunt of the US military machine for decades, the Muslim world is today confronted with another leviathan forcibly seeking its political acquiescence: China.

The People’s Republic is currently pursuing an unprecedented crackdown on the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, previously East Turkestan, for whom the region has become a real-life dystopia.

More than a million Muslims have been arbitrarily detained in re-education centres under the guise of combating extremism and are forcibly undergoing indoctrination programmes, which involve studying communist propaganda and renouncing fundamental pillars of the Islamic faith.

Uighurs can be prosecuted for the most benign manifestations of faith, such as wearing headscarves, growing “abnormal” beards and reading the Quran. Their details, collected from facial recognition, identity cards and DNA samples are fed into a database to determine their loyalty to the communist creed.

In the clutches of a surveillance apparatus very much the stuff of Orwellian nightmares, Uighur Muslims find themselves the foremost target of the Sinicisation of religions, a policy which the Communist Party secretary of Xinjiang, Chen Quanguo, previously modelled in Tibet to accelerate the political and cultural transformation of local people.

the INDEPENDENT

How Islam Spread Throughout the World

By Hassam Munir

CONTINUED FROM  LAST WEEK'S CCN....

I: The Spread of the Message
 

Trade
 

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ himself was a merchant at one stage of his life, and trade has historically been instrumental in the spread of his message. The lands that came under Muslim rule after the early conquests included some of the most important trade routes (e.g., large parts of the Silk Road), commercial centers (e.g., Damascus), and ports (e.g., Aden) of the pre-modern world. The Muslims also inherited the ever-lucrative spice trade flowing across the Indian Ocean. As Muslim merchants traveled, they inevitably―and, it may assumed, often very deliberately―exposed non-Muslims to their beliefs, values, and way of life.

The early emergence of Muslim communities on the Malabar Coast in southwestern India is a fitting example of the role of trade in the spread of Islam. The pre-Islamic Arabs and Persians frequently visited the ports of the Malabar Coast to trade with merchants coming from further east. These connections were so strong that there is a mosque, called Cheraman Jāmiʿ Masjid, that is widely believed to have been originally built by Muslim traders in 630―during the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.[27]

The narrative of the origins of this mosque is unverifiable, but it does indicate the possibility of a very early Muslim presence on the Malabar Coast. The Muslim traders who settled in Malabar and intermixed with the local population came to form the Māppila Muslim community that is prevalent in the region today.[28] By the 10th century, according to the ʿAbbāsid historian al-Masʿūdī, a settlement called Saymur (south of present-day Mumbai) was home to about 10,000 Muslims.[29] Many of these are likely to have been indigenous converts, the “great majority” of them embracing Islam to escape their status as downtrodden, low-caste Hindus.[30]

Looking further east, it is arguably no coincidence that China’s oldest and largest mosque―the Great Mosque of Xi’an, thought to have been built in 742 CE―stands in the city (then known as Chang’an) that marked the easternmost point of the Silk Road.[31] In addition to Chang’an, early Persian and Arab Muslim merchants also traveled by sea to Guangzhou, Quanzhou, and Kaifeng; the ʿAbbāsid ruler al-Mansūr (d. 775) boasted that there were no obstacles for trade between his new capital, Baghdad, and these commercial centers.[32] An estimated 120,000 “non-Chinese,” including Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, were killed in Guangzhou in 877 during a rebellion, providing us with a sense of how many Muslims (most of them merchants) traveled to and settled in Guangzhou alone.[33] Trade took Muslims as far as “al-Shīla” (Korea), where many of them had settled by the late 800s.[34]

In the case of Southeast Asia, there is evidence dating as far back as the 7th century that Arab traders were active in the region, especially in Sumatra (Indonesia).[35] A shipwreck found off the coast of Java and dated to the year 960 included a stone mold to make medallions that read “al-mulk lillāhi al-wāhid al-qahhār” (“All Sovereignty is Allāh’s, the One and Only, the Dominator”).[36] By the 10th century, communities of Muslim traders had started to settle in Southeast Asia, the most prominent of them in Champa (Vietnam), from which the present-day Cham Muslims of Cambodia and Vietnam originate.[37] By the 11th century they were active in present-day Brunei and the Philippines.[38]

A key turning point in the Islamization of Southeast Asia was the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258. Given the damage done to infrastructure and the breakdown of authority in Iraq, the Persian Gulf and the Tigris-Euphrates river system could no longer serve as the primary trade route for the spice trade from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, including rising European markets. The Red Sea route rose to prominence, including the ports of Alexandria, Cairo, Jeddah, Aden (from where Hadramī dāʿīs often embarked, headed east), Cambay (Gujarat and Mumbai), Calicut, and Pisai (Malacca and Aceh).[39] Freitag has noted that “the presence of high status and economically successful [Muslim] merchants seems in itself to have provided an example which seemed well worth emulating. Conversion to the faith of the economic elite held advantages such as the promise of becoming part of an international commercial network.”[40]

By the 14th century, the spread of Islam across Southeast Asia was well underway, peaking with the prosperity of the Sultanate of Malacca (1403-1511); notably, the rulers of Cambay and Aceh were also Muslim by the early 15th century.[41] According to the Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires, who visited Malacca in 1507, it was the most important city in the world, and whoever controlled it “shall have his hands on the throat of Venice”―a reference to Europe’s reliance on the spice trade that flowed through the city.[42]

The spread of Islam in Eastern Europe offers another example of the central role of trade in this process. In the late 1930s, an Arabic silver coin dating from the time of the Umayyad ruler Marwān II (r. 744-50) was found in the village of Potoci in Herzegovina.[43] In nearby Hungary, Muslims had served as minters and money-changers for the court, had been heavily involved in the customs system, and had controlled the production and sale of salt, all before the Golden Bull of 1222 declared that no Muslim or Jew could serve in the administration.[44] Much earlier, King Ladislas I (r. 1077-95) had referred to certain merchants in Hungary, called “Ishmaelites” who had nominally converted to Christianity but continued to profess and practice Islam.[45] And in 2013, excavations at a cemetery in Orosháza revealed that the bodies had been buried with their heads facing south (i.e., in the direction of the Kaʿbah, as per Islamic practice). The village also showed an unusual “lack of pig bones” and the presence of measuring devices, strongly suggesting that its inhabitants were Muslim merchants.[46]

Another case of trade serving as the avenue for the spread of Islam is that of East, Central, and West Africa. Due to their proximity, Arabia and East Africa had a long pre-Islamic history of close political and trade relations. Soon after the advent of Islam, merchants took the lead in introducing the faith to this region. The East Africans developed and maintained close ties with Muslim outposts in the Indian Ocean, especially the ports of Yemen, the Persian Gulf, and India; this brought with it so much cultural exchange that Ibn Battūtah, traveling in the 1300s, noticed that the same food he had enjoyed in Mogadishu (Somalia), Mombasa (Kenya) and Kilwa (Tanzania) was offered to him in Sarandīp (Sri Lanka).[47] The merchants’ “delivery” of Islam was bolstered by a steady stream of refugees coming from Arabia in the 7th-10th centuries, many of them fleeing civil wars or natural disasters. One of them, ʿAlī ibn al-Hasan Shirāzī, later established the Kilwa Sultanate, which at its peak covered the entire Swahili Coast.[48] Despite all of this trade and settlement, it was not until the 13th century that the Islamization of East Africa started to accelerate.[49]

The baqt in Sudan played a key role in the spread of Islam in East-Central Africa. In 652, having completed the conquest of Egypt, Muslim forces moved south and met Nubian forces at Dongola (Sudan). Rather than press for a fight, the two sides agreed to a baqt, or peace agreement, which was remarkably honored for six centuries.[50] The baqt enabled Muslim scholars and traders to travel freely in the region, thereby introducing Islam to the Nubians. During the early 9th century, large deposits of gold and emeralds were discovered in the desert south of Aswan.[51] This prompted Egypt’s Arab Bedouin tribes, many of whom had firmly embraced Islam by this point, to migrate into this region, and, over time, to penetrate deep into present-day Sudan and settle down. It is clear that the spread of Islam in this region took centuries, and Islam could be said to have supplanted Christianity in the area of Nubia only by the 14th century at the earliest.[52]

In the Central-West African region, too, Islam was introduced by Muslim merchants from North Africa. It is no coincidence that some of the first towns to develop a significant Muslim population in this region were Awdaghust (Mauritania) and Tadmekka (Mali), two of the southern termini of the famous Trans-Saharan trade route.[53] The geographer Ibn Hawqal (d. c. 988) recorded that Kumbi Saleh, the capital of the Ghana Empire, had a neighborhood of Muslim merchants. Around the years 1009 and 1040, respectively, the kings of Takrur (Senegal) and Gao (Mali) had embraced Islam. By 1085, Islam was spreading quickly in Kanem (Chad-Nigeria).[54] These developments, virtually all initiated by Muslim merchants, paved the way for powerful Afro-Muslim empires such as that of Mansa Musa, which in turn facilitated the further spread of Islam in the region, as described above. And, as was the case in many places, Islamization here was a very long process, and was still observably underway when the German explorer Heinrich Barth travelled through the region in the 1850s.

TO BE CONTINUED IN NEXT WEEK'S CCN....

Source

UK's Oldest Mosque: Incredible pictures shine a light on Britain’s oldest mosque dating back to the reign of Queen Victoria

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