US govt slanders Tablighi Jama’at
The New York Times has published the story of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen born in Germany who was arrested in Pakistan not long after the 9/11 attacks, and handed over to the Americans who have since imprisoned him in Guantanamo Bay (hat tip: Ginny). He has been designated an “enemy combatant” despite, according to this report at least, not having been in possession of a weapon at the time of his arrest.
A federal district judge has dismissed the sole document of evidence against Murat Kurnaz as “rife with hearsay and lacking in detailed support for its conclusions, but … also in direct conflict with classified exculpatory documents”; the Command Intelligence Task Force’s own report concludes that Kurnaz cannot be shown to have an al-Qa’ida link or to have made any direct threat to the USA. Despite this, the Combatant Status Review Tribunal still calls him an “enemy combatant” when there is no proof of him being any sort of combatant.
Apparently, the two facts which raise suspicion are his presence in Pakistan, and his being there as a guest of the Tablighi Jama’at. The TJ are a perfectly legal organisation, if indeed it is an organisation rather than a tendency – I’ve not heard of a single place where they are banned, and this certainly includes the UK where they operate openly. The vast bulk of their activities consist of taking groups of men from mosque to mosque, simply for group study. Not all Muslims agree with their methodology (such as making barely any attempt to bring people into Islam), or their attitudes (their tendency, for example, to suggest that Muslims have “low imaan”), not to mention that a large chunk of the Indo-Pak Muslim community will not touch them due to their Deobandi heritage. The Taliban shared that heritage and there was much pro-Taliban sentiment among Deobandis and Tablighis in this country, but this certainly doesn’t mean that a foreign Muslim in the country “on Jama’at” is a terrorist. I’ve personally encountered Pakistani and Sri Lankan Jama’ats in England, and numerous Muslims from this country went to their Ijtima in Bangladesh.
Kurnaz is, of course, one of many victims of Bush’s “global gulag” and his network of third-world client dictators. Musharraf, AKA Busharraf, appears concerned about the effect Mukhtaran Bibi was having on his country’s image, but no country ruled by a treacherous general can have a good name, to say nothing of the country’s existing reputation for chaos and corruption. People are not going to forgive him for collaborating in Bush’s wrecking campaign in Afghanistan, which more than three years on has not produced a stable government. In any case, the threatening presence the US maintains in various corners of the Muslim world (in particular) arouses enormous suspicion and resentment; the next time an American installation is destroyed with great loss of life (perhaps after the overthrow of one of their client regimes), they may not be able to call those involved terrorists.
