Shared by Imtiaz Bukhari

Replaying the Holocaust in the Middle East

By ANNA DELLA SUBIN

JAN. 18, 2018

THE LAST GIRL 
My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State
By Nadia Mural with Jenna Krajeski
Illustrated. 306 pp. Tim Duggan Books. $27.

How to approach a memoir of a war still being waged? “The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State” contains open wounds and painful lessons, as the Yazidi activist Nadia Murad learns how her own story can become a weapon against her — co-opted for any number of political agendas. In August 2014 Islamic State militants besieged her village of Kocho in northern Iraq. They executed nearly all the men and older women — including Murad’s mother and six brothers — and buried them in mass graves. The younger women, Murad among them, were kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. Raped, tortured and exchanged among militants, 21-year-old Murad finds an escape route when she is sold to a jihadist in Mosul who leaves a front door unlocked. She flees into Kurdistan by posing as the wife of a Sunni man, Nasser, who risks everything to escort her to safety.

Just when Murad, and the reader, expect a flood of relief, there is another sinister turn: Murad and Nasser are detained by Kurdish officials who force them to testify about their escape with cameras rolling. The officials are eager to hear how peshmerga fighters from a rival Kurdish faction — the two groups fought a civil war in the 1990s — had abandoned the Yazidi communities they were supposed to protect. The officials swear no one will ever see the tape, but it appears on the news that same night, putting Nasser and his family in grave danger. “I was quickly learning that my story, which I still thought of as a personal tragedy, could be someone else’s political tool,” Murad writes.

Freed from captivity, Murad remains trapped inside politics. To publish “The Last Girl” right now, in the United States, means there are tricky issues of sensationalism to navigate; in a threatening climate of Islamophobia, Muslims of all kinds are vilified for the actions of one group. Yet Murad, and the team of translators and writers with whom she worked, hedge against this response with a book intricate in historical context. Visible throughout are the disastrous legacies of the American intervention that dismantled Baathist institutions and bred a generation of Iraqis raised on violence and with few prospects. In a childhood flashback, a young Nadia receives a ring from one of the many American soldiers who arrived in Kocho in the mid-2000s bearing trinkets and empty promises. During the Iraq war, Yazidis became increasingly isolated from their Sunni Arab neighbors, caught in cross hairs of sectarianism in the wake of the “coalition of the willing.”

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Shared by Tariq Khan (Global Right Path)

1,800 Pakistani Muslim clerics have issued an Islamic directive forbidding suicide bombings. Will this bring an end to the deadly  practice of Islamic terrorism? 

By: The Algemeiner 

More than 1,800 Pakistani Muslim clerics have issued an Islamic directive, or fatwa, forbidding suicide bombings, in a book unveiled by the government on Tuesday.

For years, the South Asian nation has been plagued by violence by Islamist militants, who often use suicide bombers and preach that their struggle is a holy war to impose Islamic rule.

Suicide attacks are frequently condemned as fanatical and immoral, especially when civilians are killed, but insurgents view the tactic as their most effective weapon.

Seeking to curb “terrorism” that has resulted in tens of thousands of casualties since the early 2000s, the clerics declared suicide bombings to be forbidden, or “haraam.”

Stability of a Moderate Islamic Society

“This fatwa provides a strong base for the stability of a moderate Islamic society,” Pakistan President Mamnoon Hussain wrote in the book, prepared by the state-run International Islamic University and released at an official ceremony.

“We can seek guidance from this fatwa for building a national narrative in order to curb extremism, in keeping with the golden principles of Islam.”

Foreign and domestic critics of Pakistan’s government and military accuse them of cozying up to radical groups for political and military purposes and say the state has turned a blind eye to hate preachers in mosques for too long.

The fatwa was ratified by a number of prominent clerics who are outspoken critics of liberalism and the West, and are seen as controversial for preaching sectarianism or supporting the Afghan Taliban.

One of the clerics who signed, Muhammad Ahmed Ludhianvi, is the face of a banned sectarian organization, Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamat (ASWJ), and has been placed on a Pakistani legislative list of individuals with suspected links to “terrorism.”

The ASWJ figurehead, Aurangzeb Farooqi, attended the signing ceremony.

Another signatory, Hamid-ul-Haq, is the son of a cleric widely regarded as the “Father of the Afghan Taliban” after many prominent militants, including Taliban founder Mullah Mohammed Omar, were found to have graduated from his seminary in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Pakistan: Muslim Clerics Issue Decree Against Suicide Bombings