A Pakistani newspaper has called for Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia to lead a NATO-Like “Security Council Of Muslim Countries.” MEMRI.org provides the details here:
An article in an Urdu-language daily called on Muslim leaders to establish a security council of Muslim countries like the United Nations Security Council and NATO to deal with the affairs of the Muslim ummah and to resolve conflicts, if necessary, by force.
Roznama Islam, which is an Islamist daily, is published from the Pakistani cities of Karachi and Lahore. The article, titled “The Security Council of Muslim Countries” and published in the July 18, 2019 issue of Roznama Islam, is by Saeed Ahmad Hasan.
The author outlines a framework in which the religious power Saudi Arabia, the economic power Turkey, and the nuclear power Pakistan could play an influential role in establishing a security council of Muslim countries to be guided by a shura (“advisory council”).
Muslims Are Ordered [In Koran 49:9] To Establish An International Security Council… Where Arrangements Are Made To Save All Of Humanity, Including Muslims, From All Conflicts And Riots.”
The Qur’anic verse cited (49:9) refers to peacemaking among the members of the Umma, and says nothing about fighting against the Infidels. If this were the only verse relied on, it would make a “Muslim NATO” into a very different organization from the original NATO, which was established not to deal with conflicts within its member states, but to defend against both transnational subversion and military aggression by the Soviet Union and its satellites in Europe.
Saeed Ahmad Hasan, the author, explains: “In other words, Muslims are ordered [by Allah in this verse] to establish an international security council… where arrangements are made to save all of humanity, including Muslims, from all conflicts and riots, whose basis is completely fairness and justice, where the weak and victims find security, [and where] effective action is taken against oppressor and aggressor forces.” He adds: “This is an order of Allah and its fulfillment is obligatory upon Muslims.”
Quite a program. Muslims will save all of humanity, end all conflicts of every kind, ensure complete “fairness and justice.” Who could object? But how is it that it has taken 1,400 years, and the piercing insight of Saeed Ahmad Hassan himself, to discover the real significance of 49:9, which is that Allah ordered Muslims to establish an “international security council” to dispense justice, Muslim-style? In this paragraph, Hasan seems to suggest that non-Muslim actors — groups and states — will also be disciplined, yet in the very next sentence he goes back to his initial notion of dispensing justice only within the umma, and keeping non-Muslim countries from interfering in strictly Muslim affairs.
“It has been ordered in the aforementioned verse, whichever Muslim group even if it is in the form of a country, or in the form of a tribe, if it commits aggression, then it first be convinced through talks to desist; and if it doesn’t listen, it be [sic] put in its place [through the use of force]. Due to the aforementioned verse not being implemented, our disputes [between and within Muslim nations] are resolved by non-Muslim countries, which are our political, cultural, civilizational and religious adversaries,” the author observes.
What worries Saeed Ahmad Hasan the most is the failure of Muslim states to solve their own disputes, allowing an opening for non-Muslims to interfere in intra-Islamic conflicts, whether they are civil wars within Muslim lands or between Muslim countries. He cannot conceive of non-Muslim countries as possibly being helpful, for they are “our political, cultural, civilizational and religious adversaries.” Remember that remark, so unapologetically anti-Infidel, the next time you are subject to interfaith reassurances of how splendidly we should all get along if only we stopped listening to extremists “on both sides” — such as Al-Qaeda and its mirror image Jihad Watch.
He says: “In addition to the wars between Muslims, there is a long history of oppression and atrocities on Muslims by non-Muslim countries… [The atrocities] are spread from Bosnia to Burma and India, in which Muslims can be seen burning in the furnace of atrocities; there is no one to inquire about them. The United Nations and the organizations working under it have proved to be totally biased and irresponsible with regards to the problems of Muslims.”
The U.N. and the organizations working under it have indeed “proved to be totally biased,” but not in the way Saeed Ahmad Hasan thinks; the bias has been all on the side of the Muslims. Think of the hundreds of resolutions passed against Israel, the perennial whipping boy of Muslims, at the General Assembly, the U.N. Economic and Social Council, and the U.N. Human Rights Council. As of 2013, Israel had been condemned in 45 resolutions by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Since the creation of the Council in 2006, it has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than on the rest of the world combined. How is the U.N. biased against Muslims when it makes their anti-Israel cause its very own?
As for Bosnia, it’s the same story: the U.N. voted consistently against the Serbs. There was, for example, U.N.Security Council Resolution 913, which passed unanimously; it condemned the Bosnian Serbs and took no notice of atrocities committed against them by Muslim Bosnians. Years later, long after the NATO bombing of the Serbs, we discovered that Serbs had indeed been the victims of terrible crimes at the hands of Bosnian Muslims.
And then there is Myanmar (Burma), which has been consistently condemned by the U.N. Security Council and by the General Assembly for its treatment of the Muslim Rohingya, without Myanmar’s Buddhists ever being able to present their side of the conflict, including the historical context without which Buddhist anxieties and attitudes cannot be understood. Despite the U.N.’s record of near-total support for Palestinians, Bosniaks, and Rohingya, Saeed Ahmad Hasan has convinced himself that that organization has always been deeply biased against Muslims.
The “history of oppression” of Muslims by non-Muslims, and of “atrocities” committed against Muslims by non-Muslims, pale in comparison to the 1,400 years of oppression of non-Muslims, and to the atrocities non-Muslims have suffered at the hands of Muslims. In India alone, 70-80 million Hindus were killed during the centuries of Muslim rule. Buddhism was nearly wiped out in India, the land of its birth. When Muslim Arabs conquered Persia, Zoroastrian places of worship were desecrated, shrines were destroyed and mosques were built in their place. Many Zoroastrian libraries were burned, and much of their cultural heritage was lost. Forced to live as dhimmis, a status that required them to endure systematic abuse and discrimination and included the required payment of the Jizyah, many Zoroastrians converted to Islam. But for Saeed Ahmad Hasan, the Muslims have always been the oppressed, never the oppressors.
Muslim conquerors subjugated many lands and many peoples. From Arabia in the 7th century, Muslim warriors swept west, all across North Africa, into Spain, and then into France, until they were halted near Tours by the victory of Charles Martel in 732 A.D. Those Muslim Arabs who swept to the east conquered Sassanian Iran, and went as far as Hindustan, where Mahmoud of Ghazni, first of many Islamic conquerors, from 998 to 1030 A.D. ruled over a military empire that extended from Iran across all of northern India. During the next few centuries, Muslim warriors conquered ever more territory, in Hindustan, always after much slaughter, and founded several Muslim states.
From 780 to 1180, there were a series of Arab-Byzantine wars that ended finally in several Byzantine victories and the recapture of lands that had been lost to the Muslims in the 7th century. A series of conquerors took Anatolia from the Byzantines: the Seljuk Turks, then the Mongols, and then the Osmanli (Ottoman) Turks. The most important Muslim victory was the conquest by the Osmanli Turks of Constantinople, for half a millennium the richest and most important city in Christendom, after a long siege that ended on May 29, 1453. Ottoman forces then pushed northward into Europe. They seized the Balkans and managed to conquer lands as far north as central Hungary. Everywhere the Muslims conquered, they were the oppressors, not the oppressed. Saeed Ahmad Hasan is convinced that it was the Muslims who were subject to “oppression” by the Infidels, though he does not offer any examples of such oppression.
“The imperative of this situation is that Muslims should have their own security council in which there is a system of shura [a consultative council] and through collective and majority decisions, all countries together make arrangements for their security and internal stability,” he notes.
It’s hard to see how this Muslim “security council” or “Islamic NATO” — Hasan mentions both — would work in practice. Several important Muslim countries are at daggers drawn, and show no signs of conceivable compromise. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt are steadfast in their opposition to Qatar because of that country’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood and friendliness toward Iran. Turkey, however, is Qatar’s ally. Furthermore, according to Lorenzo Vidino, who specializes in the study of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan), Turkey has become the greatest supporter of the Ikhwan in the world, while Saudi Arabia remains the Brotherhood’s most potent enemy. Yet Saeed Ahmad Hasan dreams of Turkey and Saudi Arabia working in harmony for his fantastical Muslim version of NATO.
The Muslim Arab world is riven with conflicts and civil wars. In Yemen, the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia is both a civil war, with the Shi’a Houthi rebels fighting the Sunni-dominated government, and a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. It is hardly amenable to solution, so ferocious has the enmity become between those two states. Many Muslim countries are riven with internal conflicts. In Algeria, the demand is for real democracy, now that street protesters have forced out Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and an end to “le pouvoir,” the shadowy political, military, and economic elites who have run Algeria since independence. Also in Algeria, the Berbers in Algeria have another demand as well: they want more autonomy, and a greater recognition of Berber culture and the Berber language. In Libya, the forces of General Khaftar, a secularist based in Benghazi, are trying to wrest control of Tripoli from the Islamist forces who claim to be the Libyan “government.” There are other local militias in Libya, that control Misrata and Zintan, and have yet to be challenged. In Egypt, there is a continuing struggle between the authoritarian General El-Sisi and the Muslim Brotherhood. In Syria, the civil war that began in 2011 has been winding down, but the hatreds engendered by that war have not decreased; the largely Sunni opposition will never be reconciled to Assad’s Alawites. Half of the country’s population of 22 million has either fled Syria or has been internally displaced. In the Gulf states, there is still a land, air, and sea blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt; all diplomatic relations with Qatar have been suspended by those states; the conflict shows every sign of getting worse. How would an Islamic NATO cause that enmity to soften? Would Saudi Arabia defer to the decree of such a group? Would Qatar? If it were a Muslim “security council,” wouldn’t all the important members have the right to veto any resolution that threatened them?
In the author’s view, such a security council [or NATO] can be established if three powerful Muslim countries rise to the occasion and play an effective role. “In this regard, three countries can be considered responsible. It is incumbent upon them to play an international role with regards to the integrity and unity of the world of Islam. These countries are Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan,” he says.
“Due to the Haramain Sharifain [i.e., the cities of Mecca and Medina], the world of Islam has deep reverence for Saudi Arabia. This is a big reason which can be used for the unity of the ummah. Saudi Arabia has God-given oil wealth. And it has influence and reach in the nearby Arab countries,” the author says.
Saudi Arabia’s “influence and reach” does not quite extend to “nearby” Iraq, where Iranian-supported Shi’a militias, implacable enemies of Saudi Arabia, are the most powerful military force, nor to Syria, were Assad’s forces fought, among other groups, Saudi-financed Salafists. It is hard to see how Turkey and Saudi Arabia could work together, since they have been enemies for several years, due to Turkey’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood, its friendship with Qatar and, especially its ties to Iran, the arch-enemy of Saudi Arabia. So deep is the Saudi hostility toward Turkey that the Saudis have even demanded, as part of their price for ending the blockade of Qatar, that that country cut its diplomatic ties with Turkey. Saeed Ahmad Hasan is clearly unaware of how deep that Saudi-Turkish animosity runs. And that is not his only error.