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Abdul Rahman says the festival's popularity stems from its accessibility for the poor.
Millions of Muslims gather in Bangladesh for the World Muslim Congregation: The gathering, at which Muslims pray and listen to religious scholars, was first held in the 1960s and was launched by Tablig Jamaat, a non-political group that urges people to follow Islam in their daily lives.Yeah, right. OK, so WhoTF are Tablig Jamaat, really?
Hmmmmm....let's play 6 degrees of separation with just that one name then:The Jamaat as a missionary organization is popular in South Asia and has many adherents internationally. The main headquarters for Tabligh Jamaat (known as a Markaz) is in Nizamud-deen, India. Europe's main Markaz is in Dewsbury, England. East Asia's main markaz is located in Jakarta, Indonesia. The main African markaz is in Johannesburg, South Africa. The group has also given lectures in the majority of mosques in the world.
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Among others, former Pakistani Prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and former Pakistani President Muhammad Rafiq Tarar have been associated with the Tablighi movement. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency was formerly headed by Javed Nasir, also a Tablighi.
Lieutenant General (retd) Javed Nasir, HI(M), SBt, was the former head of Inter-Services Intelligence from March 1992 till May 1993. He was instrumental in uniting the warring Afghan factions after the Soviet retreat, and installing the first Mujahideen government in Afghanistan. He was noted for being the first Pakistani general to have a full-grown beard against tradition of having only clean-shaved generals in the Pakistan Army after joining the Tablighi Jamaat.Which leads me quickly to Mumbai:
DECEMBER 14, 2008:The United Nations has been given a list of four Pakistani suspects that should be extradited to India or handed over to the UN. This is a grave escalation of the crisis caused by the terror suspects in the Mumbai carnage. The US and India have tried to pass a resolution against Pakistan before. Each time China had threatened to veto it. This time China approved the resolution and decided to abstain from it.
[SNIP]WASHINGTON: America is believed to be considering declaring more than four retired officials fo the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), including its former chief Hamid Gul, international terrorists through the UN Security Council, media reports have said. US State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood told a briefing in Washington Friday that details of the list of names to be submitted to the Security Council would be revealed when the document is sent to the UN.
The reports, citing sources, said that the names of Hamid Gul, Lt-Gen Javed Nasir, Major-General Zahirul Islam Abbasi (r), associated with the ISI during the Afghan war with the USSR, and Gen Aslam Beg (r), former Army Chief of Staff, were believed to be on the list.
2004: Mufti Shamzai was then the blue-eyed mullah of not only Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence but also of the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Saudi intelligence and played an active role in the recruitment of Muslims from Pakistan and other Islamic countries and training them with the help of Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment for waging a jihad against Soviet troops.
He became close to Zia, General Pervez Musharraf, General Mohammad Aziz, presently chairman, joint chiefs of staff committee, General Muzaffar Usmani (retired), former corps commander, Karachi, and vice-chief of the army staff, and three former jihadi chiefs of the ISI, namely, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, Lieutenant General Javed Nasir and Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed.
During his career, he issued nearly 2,000 fatwas. In the 1970s and 1980s, his fatwas were mainly directed against the USSR, India and Israel. After Osama bin Laden formed his International Islamic Front in February 1998, his fatwas became increasingly directed against the US.
After the US-led coalition started its so-called war against terrorism in Afghanistan in October 2001, he issued a fatwa calling upon the Muslims of the world to join the jihad against the US.
Shamzai was the mentor and godfather of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan and its militant wing the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami and the Jaish-e-Mohammad. He was designated patron-in-chief of the Jaish and was a member of the shura of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Maulana Fazlur Rahman's Jamiat-ul-Ulema Islam.
Here (the article was written in 2005) he is credited with the creation of the Taliban: The appointment of Lt.-Gen. Javed Nasir, a former I.S.I. chief, who played a key role in creating the Taliban, as head of the Pakistan Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee, is undoubtedly a calculated state policy to revive Sikh separatism, opines S. Venkatesh.Here he is in Bosnia:
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ISI Lt Gen Javed Nasir claimed that despite the UN ban, he successfully airlifted sophisticated anti-tank guided missiles and this forced the Serbs to lift the siege, much to the annoyance of the US government. Not only arms and ammunition, Javed Nasir facilitated the movement of jihadists from Paksitan – Afghan theatre into Bosnia, some of whom are today settled in Bosnia after marrying locally.
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Here we see he was the key component in Clinton agreeing to take Pakistan off the US State Department's Terrorist list:3. The US generally does not act upon intelligence against Pakistan provided by India due to the possibility that it may be motivated. It acts only when it is able to collect independent evidence from its own sources. The US has not yet been able to identify all the ISI officers, who had played a role in organising this attack just as it was able to identify in 1992-93 all the ISI officers, including Lt.Gen.Javed Nasir, the then DG of the ISI, who had instigated the Afghan Mujahideen not to sell back the unused Stinger missiles to the US.
4. It may be recalled that after assuming office in January,1993, the then US President Bill Clinton had placed Pakistan in a list of suspected State-sponsors of international terrorism and pressured Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister, to sack Lt.Gen.Nasir and other officers identified. Only thereafter was Pakistan's name removed from that list.
According to a leading editorial in the Daily Times of August 25,2002 captioned "Another blot on the ISI":"Gen (Retd) Javed Nasir was a born-again Muslim who converted from a playboy to a "pious" man of the reactionary variety. He nursed a flowing beard and ran the biggest Deobandi congregation in Pakistan, the Tableeghi Jamaat annual "jalsa" at Raiwind. He was ... placed atop the ISI .on the request of another ISI officer, Imtiaz Billa, who was also later tried for building up a private empire of properties when in office.
He was also the man who facilitated the likes of Osama bin Laden to build terrorist bases in Afghanistan.
After Gen Javed Nasir was removed from the ISI in 1993, it was discovered that he had pared off big sums of money by buying property for the ISI at inflated rates. It was also discovered that he had taken the entire ISI foreign exchange budget and placed it in Mehran Bank, which later collapsed.... Although he was an engineer in the army, he steadily advanced in career because of his "Islamic" guise.
Well.... now I KNOW they are a beard for jihad: Graham Fuller, a former CIA official and expert on Islam, characterized Tablighi Jamaat as a "peaceful and apolitical preaching-to-the-people movement."Dig this Dhimmi MFer!
Ex-CIA spy Graham Fuller: The West is wrong about Islam
The Future of Political Islam by Graham E. Fuller
Graham Fuller was a participant or observer in the following events:
1984-March 1985: US and Pakistan Begin Training Afghans to Attack Inside Soviet UnionMay 1985: ’Fuller Memo’ Codifies US Policy Towards Arming Iran
September 1999: CIA Analyst Suggests US Use Muslims to Further US Interests in Central Asia
September 11, 2004: Some US Officials Recommend Working with Muslim Brotherhood
January 3, 2008:Graham Fuller goes native
Graham Fuller is also a senior resident consultant at the RAND CorporationSomeone Asked the Imam:
is it true the Tabligh Jamaat is product developed by the C.I.A?Is it true that the funds requiered to set up the Ijtimas are funded by the British?
Barbara Metcalf, a University of California scholar of South Asian Islam, called Tablighi Jamaat "an apolitical, quietist movement of internal grassroots missionary renewal" and compares its activities to the efforts to reshape individual lives by Alcoholics Anonymous.
Metcalf was called on to write to the Administrative Review Boards held at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camps.[1] The Boards were authorized to recommend whether Guantanamo captives should continue to be held in extrajudicial detention. One of the justifications offered for the continued detention of over three dozen of the Guantanamo captives was that they had participated in the activities of a Pakistani Islamic missionary group named Tablighi Jamaat.
Metcalf addressed the benevolent nature of Tablighi pilgrimages. She wrote:
“I will also attempt to explain why it is implausible to believe that the Tablighis support terrorism or are in any way affiliated with other terrorist or ‘jihadi’ movements such as the Taliban or Al Qaeda.”
MAKING MUSLIM SPACE IN NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE by BARBARA METCALF
Olivier Roy, a prominent authority on Islam at Paris's prestigious Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, described Tablighi Jamaat as "completely apolitical and law abiding."
Governments normally intolerant of independent movements often make an exception for Tablighi Jamaat. Pakistani military officers, even allow Tablighi missionaries to preach in the barracks.[1]
Olivier Roy (born 1949) is a research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a lecturer for both the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (IEP). Since 1984, he has acted as a consultant to the French Foreign Ministry. In 1988, Roy served as a United Nations Office for Coordinating Relief in Afghanistan (UNOCA) consultant. Beginning in August 1993, Roy served as special OSCE representative to Tajikistan until February 1994, at which time he was selected as head of the OSCE mission to Tajikistan, a position he held until October 1994.
Roy is the author of numerous books on subjects including Iran, Islam, Asian politics. These works include Globalized Islam: The search for a new ummah, Today's Turkey: A European State? and The Illusions of September 11. He also serves on the editorial board of the academic journal Central Asian Survey.
His best-known book, L'Echec de l'Islam politique (1992) (The Failure of Political Islam) (1994), is a standard text for students of political Islam.
Roy wrote widely on the subject of the riots in French suburbs in November 2005 saying they should not be seen as religiously inspired as some commentators said.
His most recent work is Secularism Confronts Islam (Columbia, 2007). The book offers a perspective on the place of Islam in secular society and looks at the diverse experiences of Muslim immigrants in the West. Roy examines how Muslim intellectuals have made it possible for Muslims to live in a secularized world while maintaining the identity of a "true believer."
Globalized Islam - Interview with Olivier RoyAccording to Roy's analysis, contemporary Islamic projects are becoming increasingly disconnected from a particular territory, partly as a consequence of the failure of all attempts to build an Islamic state.In the NYT: How to Win Islam Over By Oliver Roy
DURING the presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he would convene a conference of Muslim leaders from around the world within his first year in office. Recently aides have said he may give a speech from a Muslim capital in his first 100 days. His hope, he has said, is to “make clear that we are not at war with Islam,” to describe to Muslims “what our values and our interests are” and to “insist that they need to help us to defeat the terrorist threats that are there.”
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Instead, Mr. Obama, the first “post-racial” president, can do better. He can use his power to transform perceptions to the long-term advantage of the United States and become a “post-civilizational” president. The page he should try to turn is not that of a supposed war between America and Islam, but the misconception of a monolithic Islam being the source of the main problems on the planet: terrorism, wars, nuclear proliferation, insurgencies and the like.
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Obviously Tablig Jamaat are Al Qaeda's mythical moderate Da-Wa BRAND, a stealth arm, presenting themselves as a sort of Evangelical Muslim movement... the words TABLIG JAMAAT literaly mean "Proselytizing Group":Every fall, over a million almost identically dressed, bearded Muslim men from around the world descend on the small Pakistani town of Raiwind for a three-day celebration of faith. Similar gatherings take place annually outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Bhopal, India. These pilgrims are no ordinary Muslims, though; they belong to a movement called Tablighi Jamaat ("Proselytizing Group"). They are trained missionaries who have dedicated much of their lives to spreading Islam across the globe. The largest group of religious proselytizers of any faith, they are part of the reason for the explosive growth of Islamic religious fervor and conversion.
Despite its size, worldwide presence, and tremendous importance, Tablighi Jamaat remains largely unknown outside the Muslim community, even to many scholars of Islam. This is no coincidence. Tablighi Jamaat officials work to remain outside of both media and governmental notice. Tablighi Jamaat neither has formal organizational structure nor does it publish details about the scope of its activities, its membership, or its finances. By eschewing open discussion of politics and portraying itself only as a pietistic movement, Tablighi Jamaat works to project a non-threatening image. Because of the movement's secrecy, scholars often have no choice but to rely on explanations from Tablighi Jamaat acolytes.
Certain other Muslims don't seem to like them....The members of Tableeghi Jamaat have become extremely unpopular with many communities of Muslims throughout the world and even in South Africa. However, many continue to tolerate them. In fact, what they do, in the manner of Christian evangelists, is to play on the guilt of insecure people and then offer them an emotional environment in which they can redeem themselves and find others in a similar plight who are ready for the same treatment. Such "conversions" are frequently very superficial and sometimes superficially quite dangerous for the individuals concerned.BTW please take note that the Islamic Academy site linked above is not located in Peshawar, Baghdad, Riyadh or Damascus... but in Plano, Texas, USA.
In recent years, allegations and concerns have risen about whether, or how much, the organization is linked to Islamic terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda
Islamist Extremism in Bangladesh
Well, there you have it..for now, anyway. I started out just skimming the Millions of Muslims gather in Bangladesh article for inclusion in a FPNS post - and I ended up here. Ya sure do learn something horribly new every day these days.
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