My dear Muhammad Ali: I fully intend to continue with my lessons to the Indians, but the world is in such flux that what is of moment today gets overtaken by another event tomorrow. There is just no let up - last month it was Mumbai. Now it is Gaza. You are seeing history being made at breakneck speed, perhaps faster than it was after World War II when military decolonisation by the war-depleted and weary European powers commenced. Yet again Palestine is being adorned with Palestinian blood. Yet again Muslim potentates - vassals and satraps all - sit by mutely twiddling their thumbs, their hands resting on their vast circumferences, contemplating their overstretched navels like losers and copouts. Gone are the days of Salahuddin Ayubi. We suffer the times of Shimmer and Yazid, Mir Jaffar and Mir Sadiq. Three countries claim leadership of the Muslim world - Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. What have they done? Nothing. Is Israel quaking in its shoes fearing the reaction from these three great Muslim powers? The crucial difference is that whilst we are America's stooges, Israel has made America into its stooge. The biggest continuing failure of the Muslims is intellectual. The best scholars of Islam today are either western non-Muslims or western converts to Islam. Not surprising, considering that there is not one - repeat one - world class university in any of the 57 Muslim majority states today. Unless you count some universities in India because it has at least as many Muslims as Pakistan or Bangladesh, second only to Indonesia, and certainly many million Muslims more than any Arab country. Once the great universities of Syria, Egypt and Baghdad that were the envy of the world stopped Ijtehad or constant reinterpretation by analogy to keep in step with the contemporary, with changing times and societal and technological progress, they fell into rigidity, obscurantism and learning by rote without understanding. Divided now into at least 72 sects, movements and schools of thought, with no focal point like the caliphate left, the ummah or Nation of Islam has disappeared. Each sect, movement and school of thought has become a law unto itself, considering itself as the only true interpreter of Islam and some, like the Takfiris, consider those who disagree with them as infidels worthy of death. What chance is there? Its best to try to be a good Muslim according to your own light and what Allah says in the Holy Quran, focusing on implementing Haqooq-ul-Ibad, the Rights of God's Creation, at the individual level, for Muslims states have failed pathetically to implement them. Why, many of their rulers don't even know what Haqooq-ul-Ibad is. The holocaust by the Zionist-Nazis continues. Now you see what state terrorism that begets non-state terrorism is? They have turned Gaza into a phosphorous gas chamber. They have successfully butchered more than over 1,000 Palestinian helpless civilians, one-third babies and children. Adolf back in his victims; Nazis reborn in Israel - Hitler's revenge, the hunter reincarnated in the hunted, the oppressed becoming the oppressor. Abuse Zionists, America, the West, whoever as much as your want...its a copout too. What about the shameless Muslims? The West is like the old Axis powers that ganged up with Hitler. The Muslims are vacillators like Britain and America, knowing what is going on but not lifting a finger, only wagging their tongues as little as possible. Britain and America let the Jews get gassed and acted only when the fascists came to their doorstep. That is what we are like, except that when the fascists come to our doorstep we will not even have the capacity to move. We will then get exactly what we deserve. Our excuse is that we lack leadership. Leadership doesn't drop out of the sky. Elected or imposed-but-tolerated, it's a reflection of the people. In elections we willingly go back to our old oppressors, stooges of the imperialists. Look at Bangladesh. I once quoted from an essay of your grandfather Mr Altaf Gauhar that he wrote in Mr Bhutto's prison for his editorials. He also wrote another one then called, The Future of the Muslims. I will reproduce Part I of it here for the younger generation (my useless generation might find it instructive too) for what he said 36 years ago is still pertinent. It should help you understand the pathetic Muslim condition. "Do the Muslims have a future in the modern world? This is a question which Orientalists and Western sociologists are never tired of posing. Whether it is Wilfred Cantwell Smith or Albert Hourani or Rosenthal, they are all in agreement that Islam has become a decadent force and that its adherents have failed to 'establish compatibility of religion and modern sciences'. The efforts of Syed Ahmed Khan are recalled as one of the pioneers who tried to bring about among the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent 'a religious revival and an accommodation, if not an integration, with Western culture and civilisation'. Wilfred Smith examines the predicament of the Muslims with great feeling and at even greater length. He identifies the fundamental malaise of modem Islam as 'a sense that something has gone wrong with Islamic history'. He suggests that the fundamental problem of modem Muslims is 'how to rehabilitate that history; to set it going again in full vigour, so that the Islamic society may once again flourish as a divinely guided society should and must'. Wilfred Smith observes three outstanding new tendencies of modern Islam - nationalism, apologetics and dynamism. Nationalism was taken up by the Muslims on the Western pattern, though their emotions were significantly Islamic. As a result no Muslim people have been able to evolve a national feeling, meaning 'a loyalty or even concern for a community transcending the bounds of Islam'. He then notes the considerable literature produced by Muslim scholars in defence of Islam, which he, quite appropriately, describes as apologetics. The whole effort is 'not to re-think Islam, but to re-think its defences'. Dynamism among the Muslims means 'a stirring of intense, even violent, emotionalism'. Various Muslim scholars have elaborated the same theme and the view is generally accepted that unless the Muslims reinterpret their faith in the light of contemporary realities and evolve a synthesis between Islam and secularism they are unlikely to survive. If one forgets the rhetoric it means simply that the future of the Muslims depends on their willingness and capability to adopt the Western way of life. Faced with this situation liberal Muslims devoted much of their energy to finding rational explanations for Islamic beliefs and laws to make them acceptable to the Western mind. At the other extreme were the orthodox Muslims who rejected all that the West stood for. The various institutions and systems of economic growth which secularism developed e.g. private enterprise, industrialism, socialism and communism, were not treated as economic programmes or institutions, but as full fledged ideologies standing in opposition to the Islamic ideology. The result was that a vast majority of Muslims came to believe that their salvation lay in denying themselves any knowledge or technology offered by modern sciences. Their sole concern was to preserve the essentials of their faith and they thought that by shutting out all the forces of change they would be able to protect their faith. In the course of time their attitude became totally negative. They developed resentment against philosophy, against science, against technology, even when their whole way of life and thinking was affected by philosophic methods, scientific research and technological innovations. They would sullenly accept whatever conditions were imposed upon them and not raise a voice of protest lest this should create disruption among their ranks. They would not attempt direct understanding of the sources of their code of life lest this should give rise to new ideas and divide the community. They would not allow any change, lest this should contaminate their faith. They convinced themselves that determined resistance to change was the greatest service they could render to Islam, as by doing so they would be preserving its original purity and glory. That they were closing all avenues of creative activity on themselves and on the community did not worry them. Too late, they realised that what they had managed to save was the form without the spirit. Their critics did not fail to observe the state of decay and stagnation in which they plunged the ummah, and concluded that Islam, as a cultural force, had ceased to be operative and that Muslims were an anachronism in the modern world. They patiently expressed the hope that Muslims would either politely disappear or gradually get absorbed in the mainstream of Western culture." The writer is a senior political analyst E-mail: humayun.gauhar@gmail.com