Diabolic Digest
Taking up
peace, putting down arms
Sistani won his peaceful protest in Najaf. But Gandhian methods in the Middle East must substitute rather than supplement violence, writes Brian Whitaker.
August 2004
A week ago in this column, (Attack on Pax - 23.08.04) amid the
carnage of Najaf, I wrote about a few rarely-heard people in the Middle East
who advocate Islamic non-violence, or "civil jihad", as some of them
prefer to call it. I asked why the techniques used by Gandhi against the
British in India had not been more widely adopted by Arabs and Muslims, and
wondered what Gandhi would have done in Najaf.
This brought an
unusually large number of emails from readers, many of them suggesting that
non-violent action in the Middle East was an idea whose time had come. Others
claimed that Muslims are incapable of anything but violence, while a gentleman
who signed himself "Barry" described the article as
"anti-semitic propaganda" and said I should be sacked for writing it.
My question about Gandhi
and Najaf was answered rather dramatically on Thursday when Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, who had returned to Iraq from medical treatment in London, brought
peace to the city by arriving in a motorcade accompanied by thousands of
unarmed supporters.
Sistani is such a widely
respected figure that he was able to achieve, by his presence and his
persuasive powers, what the Americans and the Iraqi government had failed to
achieve by force of arms. It was the most Gandhi-like act we have seen in Iraq
since the conflict began. Sistani has previously urged Iraqis to engage in "civil
jihad", and if this is what he means by the term, good luck to him.
Dr Gandhi, an American
citizen who runs the MK Gandhi Institute for Non-violence in Memphis,
Tennessee, also said non-violence would do much to improve the Palestinians'
image in the United States. "It makes not only moral sense but it makes
practical sense," he said. "I don't think Palestine has the economic
and military capacity to confront a huge state like Israel which has not only a
powerful military arsenal but powerful friends." There are signs that PLO and Fatah leaders, in
consultation with the Islamist groups, may be beginning to move in this
direction. They hope to push Israel into allowing elections, to organise mass
protests against the separation barrier and the mistreatment of prisoners, and
to challenge Israel again in the international courts. The high point of Dr Gandhi's trip was a protest
meeting, attended by about 2,000 Palestinians and Israelis, at Abu Dis in the
shadow of the illegally constructed separation barrier. The barrier, consisting
of 26-ft tall slabs of concrete, looks like an insurmountable obstacle but
several young Palestinians climbed up by wedging their hands and feet into the
cracks between the slabs - and sat on top of the wall to listen to Dr Gandhi's
speech. "This may indeed be what Mahatma Gandhi would
have advised in a situation like this," Uri Avnery, the veteran Israeli
peace activist remarked. "An open non-violence act of defiance ... showing
the oppressor the futility of his measures." (Pictures of the
wall-climbing can be found in the blog of Dr Gandhi's visit - Gandhi tour of Israel and Palestine). Several readers of last week's column wrote to point
out other instances of non-violent action by Arabs and/or Muslims. Perhaps the
most remarkable of these was the largely-forgotten example of Khan Abdul
Ghaffar Khan, a Muslim leader who resisted the British in the Afghan-Pakistani
border area during the 1920s and 1930s. Ghaffar Khan raised an "army" of 100,000,
known as the Servants of God, whose members took an oath: "I shall never
use violence. I shall not retaliate or take revenge, and shall forgive anyone
who indulges in oppression and excesses against me." Ghaffar Khan was a friend of Gandhi and always
insisted that the greatest figures in Islamic history were known more for their
forbearance and self-restraint than for their fierceness. His story is told in
a book, "Non-violent Soldier of Islam", by Eknath Easwaran. Readers
also cited the current hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners and the first
intifada as examples of non-violent direct action. The first intifada certainly
had non-violent elements and Gandhi used hunger strikes quite a lot - but so
did the Irish Republican Army. These readers (I think) missed the important
distinction between non-violence used as a tactic alongside more violent methods
- which has generally been the case in the Palestinian struggle - and
non-violence used as a substitute for violence. For Gandhi, it formed part of
his overall philosophy, and the problem with the pick-and-mix approach used by
the Palestinians and the IRA is that it doesn't provide moral superiority. Some
readers disputed Gandhi's role in achieving Indian independence, suggesting the
second world war was a more important factor. "All these movements were successful in bringing
down oppressors - and one of the next regions that is likely to see similar
results will be the Middle East." This brings us back to the question of whether the
Middle East really is fertile ground for Gandhian activity. Last week, I
suggested that Islam is not an obstacle but Arab machismo might be. Khaled Diab, an Arab reader and journalist based in
Brussels, sent an alternative view which is worth quoting in full: "I
don't think Arab culture is any less-equipped than any other culture to take on
a Gandhi mantle," he wrote. "In my own native Egypt, you can see
peaceful conflict resolution in action every day on the streets, in offices and
in families. "One key difference between 1940s India and the
21st-century Arab world is that no Gandhi has emerged to galvanise popular
support for such means. This is further complicated by the fact that an Arab
Gandhi would not only have to battle against a foreign oppressor but the
home-grown variety would chop him down before he could mature. "In addition, the two most popular manifestations
of Arab identity - the secular pan-Arab movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and
the current Islamist movement - are built on a sentimental desire to rebuild
past Arab glory. "Both believe, in their own way, that the only
way to counteract foreign domination is to construct a mighty and unified Arab
Nation [Umma}. 'Force is not repelled except by force,' is a common refrain.
There is a dangerous aspect to this attitude in that many Arabs tend to
overestimate the potential of their own power: 'The Arab World can be a
superpower, if it would only unite.' "The truth of the matter is that the Arab world
is not likely to unite in the near-term, and possibly never, and, even if it
did, it would not become an overnight world power. Arabs need to swap rosy
romanticism for gritty pragmatism. "What the Arab world needs is the charisma of
Nasser in the mould of Gandhi to make the political and cultural case for
peaceful resistance, that being a pacifist does not mean that you have been
pacified. Unfortunately, the only people who have so far made that case are
some Arab intellectuals and outsiders. Painful as it is, I hope the anarchy in
Iraq will deliver at least this one hope." This article appeared in the Guardian on 31 August 2004. ã Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004. ã2004 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website
is the copyright of Khaled Diab.
On the other hand, Jack DuVall of the Washington-based International Center on
Non-violent Conflict traced Gandhi's influence far and wide: "Solidarity
in Poland, the 'people power' movement in the Philippines, the people's
movement that defeated General Pinochet in Chile, the Velvet Revolution in
Czechoslovakia, the non-violent campaign in Serbia in 2000 against Slobodan
Milosevic, and the Rose Revolution against Shevardnadze in Georgia this year
all deliberately used the kind of non-violent strategies that Gandhi
pioneered," he wrote.