Jamaat-e-Islami

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Jamaat-e-Islami party flag

The Jamaat-e-Islami ( Urdu جماعتِ اسلامی"Islamic Community", JI ) is an Islamist organization that was founded in 1941 by Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi in British India and is now politically active with branches in Pakistan , India and Bangladesh , but also proselytizing there and in other countries ( Daʿwa ) and conducts Islamic educational work.

organization

In Pakistan

The Pakistani JI is led by an Ameer . Since March 30, 2014 this office has been held by Siraj ul Haq. The organization has a strong base in each province and is further structured in districts, cities, villages and neighborhoods. She has special associations for doctors, teachers and workers and in the female wing the Halqa Khawateen (women's circle ). The student organization of the JI ( Anjuman-i Talaba-i Islam ) often engages in violent disputes with the corresponding organizations of other parties. The Institute for Policy Studies is considered to be the think tank of JI.

In Pakistan today, the JI is one of the larger components of a coalition of religious parties, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal . Its members are often referred to, usually by others, as "Jamaatis". Recently, the term has also been used as an adjective to denote a certain political point of view or attitude. Arguably the most influential religious party in Pakistan, the JI is a vocal opposition to the secular state. It is an elite party of the middle and upper classes in Pakistan and has numerous supporters in the army , police and secret service.

The party represents an image that glorifies early Islamic times and is fixated on state-authoritarian enforcement of an Islam that encompasses all areas of life and has been purified of elements of everyday South Asian culture . Although its parliamentary influence has always remained limited, the cadre party pushed through many of the “Islamic” constitutional amendments through its mass campaigns. She also campaigned for the persecution of Ahmadiyya as "un-Islamic".

In Bangladesh

During the time of East Pakistan (1947 to 1971) Jamaat-e-Islami participated temporarily in the democracy movement in East Pakistan and in this context also entered into temporary alliances with non-Islamist parties. Ultimately, however, the party was not interested in or fought against the central issues of the East Pakistani autonomy movement, which were mainly represented by the Awami League , namely the greatest possible autonomy or even independence, as well as the full equality of the Bengali language saw pan-Islamic solidarity and unity as their ideal. During the Bangladeshi War of Independence of 1971 Jamaat-e-Islami supported Pakistan's side and fought with the Pakistani army against the independence of Bangladesh. The party's militias were directly involved in the genocide in Bangladesh , the mass murder of 3 million political opponents, religious minorities and Bengali intellectuals, the rape of 250,000 women and the displacement of 10 million people.

After independence, Jamaat-e-Islami initially disappeared from the political stage because of these incidents, but became active again from the late 1970s. After the parliamentary elections in 2008 , which the Awami League won under Sheikh Hasina , the new government set up a war crimes tribunal to deal with human rights crimes during the 1971 Bangladesh war. Jamaat-e-Islami leaders were charged, some sentenced to death and executed .

On August 1, 2013, the Bangladesh Supreme Court revoked Jamaat-e-Islami from registering as a political party. As a result, Jamaat could not run in the 2014 general election . The party was not banned as an organization. Jamaat-e-Islami organized public protests and appealed the verdict.

The Jamaat-e-Islami student organization is called Chatra Sibir . Notorious are the often bloody clashes between this organization and the corresponding student organizations of secular and left-wing parties, as well as its riots against Hindus.

India

Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, the Indian branch of the party, conducts mainly educational and missionary activities, since an Indian party that only represents the minority of Muslims would have no chance. This is due, on the one hand, to the current majority voting system, which disadvantages minority parties, and, on the other hand, to the Indian constitution , in which secularism is laid down as a basic principle and which therefore imposes restrictions on religious parties.

United Kingdom

As a result of the emigration of South Asian Muslims, offshoots have also emerged in Western countries. The branch of the JI in Great Britain is called UK Islamic Mission with the Islamic Foundation think tank .

history

The historical background for the founding of the Jamaat-e Islami was the disputes among Indian Muslims over the division of British India in the 1930s. In 1930, the Indo-Islamic thinker Muhammad Iqbal made a public speech calling for the creation of a state of their own for Indian Muslims. The Muslim League led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah adopted his demand in 1940 and introduced it as a resolution in the Indian Congress. Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, who opposed the partition and advocated the creation of an Islamic state that would include all of India, founded Jamaat-e-Islami on August 26, 1941 as an organization to achieve this goal.

After adopting the two-nation theory in the spring, the British government drew up a partition plan that was accepted by both the Muslim League and the Indian Congress . In August 1947, when the country was granted independence, the country was divided into predominantly Hindu India and the newly founded, predominantly Muslim Pakistan with an ethnically mixed western part and a Bengali eastern part. In the course of the extensive population exchange, Maududi emigrated with many of his followers from India to Pakistan and re-established the JI there. It set itself the new goal of establishing an Islamic state in Pakistan. The parts of the movement that remained in India formed a separate movement called Jamaat-e-Islami Hind , which mainly focused on educational and missionary activities.

In the Pakistani parliamentary elections in late 1970, the first ever nationwide democratic election, the JI, together with two other Islamic parties, won only 18 out of 300 seats, all of them in West Pakistan. When in 1971 a secular movement for separation from the western part of Pakistan came into being in the eastern part of Bengal, Ghulām Aʿẓam, the head of the East Bengal wing of the organization, sided with the central government and helped organize paramilitary groups, the so-called Badr Brigades. After East Pakistan gained independence in December 1971 under the name of Bangladesh, they participated in the targeted murder of Bengali intellectuals in the genocide of the Bengali.

In Pakistan, the JI allied itself with other opponents of Prime Minister Bhutto in the spring 1977 elections and, after Bhutto's victory, presumably achieved by election fraud, organized sustained street protests that paved the way for General Zia ul-Haq's military coup in 1979. After the coup, she initially supported his policy of Islamization. Around 1985, however, she began to break away from the government because it was becoming increasingly unpopular. In Karachi in particular , numerous supporters turned away from the party because it appeared to be dominated by Panjabers .

In 1997 the party boycotted the elections. In the 2002 elections, she formed an alliance with other religious parties that won a quarter of the votes and seats. She herself won her mandates in the big cities of Punjab , Islamabad and Karachi . In the parliamentary elections in Pakistan on October 20, 2002, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal , which includes the Jamaat-e-Islami , won 11.3 percent of the vote and 53 of 272 seats in parliament. In 2006, the youth organization Jamaat-e-Islami offered a bounty of 7,000 euros on the Danish cartoonists.

Terrorist connections

A US congressional report from 1993 found that Hizbul Mujahideen was supported by the Jamaat-e-Islami and is also closely associated with it. Hizbul Mujahideen would receive weapons from these weapons and training support beyond that provided by Inter-Services Intelligence . Oriented towards the state and social models of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Sudan under President Umar al-Bashir , the movement under Abdul-Majid Dar has transformed into the Kashmiri branch of Jamaat-e-Islami, with a quasi-legal arm that questions of education and social activities and the Hizbul Mujahideen as the secret terrorist arm. With regard to the training of Islamic terrorists in Kashmir , the report states, " Islamist indoctrination and other assistance is provided the Jamaat-i-Islami of Pakistan ." (... "Islamist indoctrination is carried out by the Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan" ).

Khurshid Ahmed wrote on Jamaat.org: “ The cause of the war is the interference of Islamic forces in Kashmir, where the role of religious parties, and especially Jamaat-e-Islami, is becoming clear. The cooperation and cooperation between the military [meaning armed forces of Pakistan] and the Islamic forces are held responsible for the situation . "

literature

  • Mumtaz Ahmad: "Islamic Fundamentalism in South Asia. The Jamaat-e-Islami and the Tablighi Jamaat" in Fundamentalisms observed , ed. by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, Chicago, (1991). Pp. 457-530.
  • Kalim Bahadur: The Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan. Political Thought and Political Action , New Delhi 1977.
  • Sayyid Abul A'la Maudoodi: The Islamic Law and Constitution 4th edition Lahore 1969. (Collection of essays and speeches by Maudoodi, edited and introduced by Kurshid Ahmad, his successor in the party chairmanship)
  • Maidul Islam: Limits of Islamism: Jamaat-e-Islami in Contemporary India and Bangladesh. Cambridge University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-1-107-08026-3 . [Table of Contents: http://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/80263/toc/9781107080263_toc.pdf ]
  • Thomas J. Moser: Politics on God's Path, On the Genesis and Transformation of Militant Sunni Islamism . Innsbruck 2012. pp. 61–79, ISBN 978-3902811677
  • Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr (1994): The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution. The Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan , Berkeley / Los Angeles 1994.

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ↑ GlobalSecurity.org: Jamaat-e-Islami
  2. ↑ Jungle World: The countdown begins. Islamists and other opposition groups want to overthrow the Pakistani military ruler Musharraf. ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jungle-world.com
  3. ↑ Israel W. Charny, Simon Wiesenthal, Desmond Tutu, Encyclopedia of Genocide, Volume I (A - H), Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, 1999, ISBN 9780874369281 , p. 115
  4. ↑ See Hans Harder: "Bangladesh" in Werner Ende and Udo Steinbach: Islam in the Present . 5th ed., Pp. 363–371, here 369
  5. ↑ See Reinhard Schulze: History of the Islamic World in the 20th Century . Erw. Aufl. München 2002. S. 151f
  6. ↑ Cf. Andreas Rieck: "Afghanistan and Pakistan - Victory over Islamic Extremism?" in Hans Zehetmair : Islam - In the field of tension between conflict and dialogue . Wiesbaden 2005, pp. 236-248. Here p. 240
  7. ↑ See Harder 368f
  8. ↑ See Rieck 240
  9. ↑ Time: Allah and Humor
  10. ^ The New Islamist International: Task Force on Terrorism & Unconventional Warfare Report February 1, 1993
  11. ↑ Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan: [Pakistan: Crises and the Way Out], in the original text: "The reason of war is Islamic forces" meddling in Kashmir where religious parties "role, and particularly of Jamaat-e-Islami, is highlighted . Collaboration and cooperation between the military and the Islamic forces is held responsible for the situation. "

See also