The convention is devoted to finding solutions to excessive use of fossil fuels.
By Syed Iqbal Hasnain
SEATTLE: Radical Jihadism and climate change, which claim thousands of lives across continents each year, are two of the gravest challenges the international community is facing at the moment. At the outset, the two pose entirely different types of challenges and the only commonality maybe that they demand global solutions.
By a quirk of fate, they are set to share the same space later this month. Heads of state and government from 159 countries are scheduled to converge on November 30th to finalize an agreement to reduce human influence on climate change. The main objective of annual conference, known as conference of parties (COP) is to review the implementation of “Rio convention” agreed upon at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 .
The venue of the convention, COP21, is Paris — the city that witnessed despicable carnage last week, when terrorists from the Islamic State (ISIS) killed 129 innocent people and injured hundreds more in coordinated attacks.
COP21 presents the world leaders and the United Nations with an opportunity to tackle the terror issue. On the sidelines of the climate change conference, the global body should hold a special session of the heads of state and government convening in the city and come up with a binding agreement on how to defeat ISIS.
Western powers should push Saudi Arabia, Oman, the UAE and Qatar to do more and deploy their army boots on the ground and defeat ISIS in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Sinai. Make no mistake: ISIS is an Arab baby nurtured by rich monarchies of Arabian Peninsula. They have to throw that baby out with bathwater for the sake of regional and global security.
The current terrorism challenge requires a global response similar to the way much of the world was united in fighting a grave threat in the last century: the one unleashed by Adolf Hitler on innocent Jews across Europe. At the end of the war, the United Nations created an independent Jewish state in Palestine.
Ironically, the UN action in the aftermath of the World War II may have in some ways contributed to the current crisis. The world would have been different had UN declared the City of Jerusalem as an international city with joint administrative control by Jews, Christians and Muslims.
The Palestinian issue — the removal of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland — has fueled hatred toward the West and subsequently terrorism. It was Palestinians who pioneered commercial plane hijacking and suicide bombing to regain their homeland. Displaced Palestinian refugees living in ghettos in many Arab countries slowly became the hub of radicalized youths.
Incidentally, oil — which is one of the prime factors behind the climate change — is at the heart of the global Jihadi terrorism as well. The United States first entered in the Middle East through private companies engaged in oil exploration. This was around the same time Ford launched its assembly line plant in Detroit and started mass production of affordable cars not only in America but around the world.
The US oil companies, which gained access to Middle Eastern oil, acquired strong financial muscle, with the increase in sales of motor cars. They were further bolstered by the demand for oil for heating homes, and public and commercial buildings.
Subsequently, major oil companies started influencing US Congress and the White House. The first US intervention in the Middle East, at their behest, was to replace the popularly elected Iranian leader Mohammad Mossadegh who antagonized American interests after he nationalized oil.
The strong US oil lobby was instrumental in triggering the regime change and the installation of the despot Reza Pahlavi in place of democratically elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh. The world would have been free from the Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei had the US not changed the regime of Mosaddegh.
Later successive US administrations installed and protected the hard-line ibn Saud family in Saudi Arabia. Sufi traditions were very strong among Muslim societies till the 18th Century when Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab preached purity of Islam and captured Mecca and Medina with the help of ancestors of the present ibn Saud family.
In 1818, the Ottoman Empire, which ruled holy cities, captured Chieftain Abdullah bin Saud and executed him in Istanbul. For the next hundred years followers of the Wahhabi movement were lying low. It became prominent again when the present Saudi Kingdom was established.
The Saudi rulers, over the years, have used their oil dollars in funding the Wahhabi movement across the world and radicalized the followers of the Sunni Islam. One of the disastrous influences of Wahhabism on Muslim youths across the world was the loss of middle ground and tolerance, which are prerequisites for peaceful coexistence of various communities.
In recent years, the most consequential mistake was committed by President George W. Bush when he attacked Iraq under dubious ground, unleashing and reigniting centuries-old Shia-Sunni conflict.
Making the matters worse, the post-Saddam Hussein government installed by the United States took the unprecedented step of disbanding the entire Sunni-dominated administrative and security set up.
The former Iraqi Army and police personnel were the first recruits of ISIS to fight the Shia/Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and later to fight the corrupt Shia regime of Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq.
Once ISIS acquired the territory in Syria and Iraq, it was smart in using the power of social media and internet to recruit hundreds and thousands of frustrated youths from Europe and North America to their Jihadi network and the so-called Caliphate.
To defeat the ISIS ideology, a new global alliance with a strong counter narrative by Muslim intellectuals that has a strong social media and internet presence has to emerge from within the Islamic world. The secretariat of the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) can perhaps play a role here. The counter narrative has to challenge the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, which has spawned extremism globally in 21st century.
COP21 is a conference devoted to finding solutions to the problems created largely by the excessive use of fossil fuels. It also provides an ideal opportunity for the world community to find solutions for the Jihadi terrorism, which also has a lot to do with oil.
(The writer is a consultant on education and climate change, based in Seattle. He is a former Vice-Chancellor of University of Calicut, Kerala, and Professor of Environmental Sciences at the Jawaharlal Nehru University.)
2 Comments
I agree with the views of Dr Syed Husnain.
The modern fundamentalist strain of Sunni Islam, formulated not so much by Ibn Wahhab but by Sayyid Qutb, the stain that has declared jihad against the West, is rooted in the madrassas built around the world by the petro-dollars generated from the West since the Six Days War (after that war gas prices doubled and prices doubled again after the Yom Kippur War in the West). What has a young man learned after graduating from a madrassa? A thorough vetting of the educational cadres at madrassas by the Umma must take place. Building the equivalent of community colleges into the madrassas, empowering young men with not just the word and spirit of God/Allah in their hearts, but empowering them with the skill sets and trades needed to survive and thrive in the modern word, will decrease the likelihood unemployed and unemployable Muslim youth will turn to jihad.