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Why employers ignore abuse complaints

Michael Skapinker in The Financial Times


“We all knew about it! We. All. Knew,” Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of London’s Royal Court Theatre, said of the sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the film and theatre industries. 

People felt that, as long as it was not happening in their rehearsal rooms or their theatres, they weren’t responsible, she told The Guardian. “I just can’t believe that we’ve all colluded,” she said. 

Allegations of sexual abuse by top executives are rarely a surprise to those who work for or with them. So why does it take a newspaper investigation or a small number of brave individuals to uncover what so many on the inside already knew? 

First, complaining is like leaping off a cliff on your first sky dive. Once done, there is no going back. And the risks of it going wrong are huge. Those who complain are usually, at best, ignored. Otherwise, they are often crushed by the superior force of the organisation’s lawyers and drummed out of the industry. 

In many years of talking to whistleblowers and complainants about corporate abuse, I have not met any who emerged undamaged. The problem with my skydiving analogy is that skydivers have a far higher chance of landing unscathed. 

An allegation of abuse or harassment threatens not just the managers concerned but also the way the organisation sees itself 

And sexual abuse is only one aspect of organisational harassment. There are other ways managers misuse their power, such as systematic bullying and victimisation. 

When people do speak up, organisations usually fail to respond or hit back at the complainants, alleging, for example, that their performance has been poor. 

An allegation of abuse or harassment threatens not just the managers concerned but also the way the organisation sees itself. All enterprises have a purpose, an ethos, what we have come to call a corporate culture. Suggesting that mission is flawed threatens not only the organisation’s leaders, but its employees too. 

We devote most of our waking hours to working for our organisations. If someone suggests that everything we are doing is built on managers’ nefarious behaviour, what does it say about us that we are putting up with it? Those who speak out often find that their fellow workers prefer not to know. 

When those who complain get nowhere, “a subtle complicity evolves among the other employees”, an article in the Academy of Management Executive journal said. That complicity compounds the other employees’ shame at not speaking out, and makes it less likely that they will do so in future. 

Analysing “deaf ear” syndrome, the article, by a group of academics at the University of North Carolina, compares companies that close ranks against complainants to narcissists “who need to maintain a positive self-image and engage in ‘ego-defensive’ behaviour to preserve their self-esteem”. 

If the misbehaviour does come out, the article says, the damage to the organisation is often extensive — in compensation payments, the departure of senior employees and reputational damage. 

Does the recent flood of allegations mean people will be more willing to speak up? 

Well, that Academy of Management article appeared in 1998, nearly 20 years ago. It followed a string of sexual abuse scandals at Mitsubishi, the US Army and the US branch of Astra, the pharmaceuticals company that is now part of AstraZeneca. In the biggest settlement at that time, “Mitsubishi agreed to pay $34m to several hundred women who had alleged unheeded claims of sexual harassment over a period of years”, the article said. 

Yet here we are again, with serious allegations against, among others, Harvey Weinstein, co-founder of the Weinstein Company, and Kevin Spacey, former artistic director of London’s Old Vic theatre. 

Will things change? Will those who suffer abuse be readier to speak up, and are managers more likely to believe them and take action? One can hope so. But organisations’ drive to protect themselves and their own self-image will not go away. 

Real change would require independent third parties that people can report to, and impartial hearings. With trade union membership falling and access to legal representation increasingly out of reach of ordinary people, complaining remains as daunting a first step as ever.

The myth of the ‘lone wolf’ terrorist

Jason Burke in The Guardian


At around 8pm on Sunday 29 January, a young man walked into a mosque in the Sainte-Foy neighbourhood of Quebec City and opened fire on worshippers with a 9mm handgun. The imam had just finished leading the congregation in prayer when the intruder started shooting at them. He killed six and injured 19 more. The dead included an IT specialist employed by the city council, a grocer, and a science professor.

The suspect, Alexandre Bissonnette, a 27-year-old student, has been charged with six counts of murder, though not terrorism. Within hours of the attack, Ralph Goodale, the Canadian minister for public safety, described the killer as “a lone wolf”. His statement was rapidly picked up by the world’s media.

Goodale’s statement came as no surprise. In early 2017, well into the second decade of the most intense wave of international terrorism since the 1970s, the lone wolf has, for many observers, come to represent the most urgent security threat faced by the west. The term, which describes an individual actor who strikes alone and is not affiliated with any larger group, is now widely used by politicians, journalists, security officials and the general public. It is used for Islamic militant attackers and, as the shooting in Quebec shows, for killers with other ideological motivations. Within hours of the news breaking of an attack on pedestrians and a policeman in central London last week, it was used to describe the 52-year-old British convert responsible. Yet few beyond the esoteric world of terrorism analysis appear to give this almost ubiquitous term much thought.

Terrorism has changed dramatically in recent years. Attacks by groups with defined chains of command have become rarer, as the prevalence of terrorist networks, autonomous cells, and, in rare cases, individuals, has grown. This evolution has prompted a search for a new vocabulary, as it should. The label that seems to have been decided on is “lone wolves”. They are, we have been repeatedly told, “Terror enemy No 1”.

Yet using the term as liberally as we do is a mistake. Labels frame the way we see the world, and thus influence attitudes and eventually policies. Using the wrong words to describe problems that we need to understand distorts public perceptions, as well as the decisions taken by our leaders. Lazy talk of “lone wolves” obscures the real nature of the threat against us, and makes us all less safe.

The image of the lone wolf who splits from the pack has been a staple of popular culture since the 19th century, cropping up in stories about empire and exploration from British India to the wild west. From 1914 onwards, the term was popularised by a bestselling series of crime novels and films centred upon a criminal-turned-good-guy nicknamed Lone Wolf. Around that time, it also began to appear in US law enforcement circles and newspapers. In April 1925, the New York Times reported on a man who “assumed the title of ‘Lone Wolf’”, who terrorised women in a Boston apartment building. But it would be many decades before the term came to be associated with terrorism.

In the 1960s and 1970s, waves of rightwing and leftwing terrorism struck the US and western Europe. It was often hard to tell who was responsible: hierarchical groups, diffuse networks or individuals effectively operating alone. Still, the majority of actors belonged to organisations modelled on existing military or revolutionary groups. Lone actors were seen as eccentric oddities, not as the primary threat.

The modern concept of lone-wolf terrorism was developed by rightwing extremists in the US. In 1983, at a time when far-right organisations were coming under immense pressure from the FBI, a white nationalist named Louis Beam published a manifesto that called for “leaderless resistance” to the US government. Beam, who was a member of both the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations group, was not the first extremist to elaborate the strategy, but he is one of the best known. He told his followers that only a movement based on “very small or even one-man cells of resistance … could combat the most powerful government on earth”.

 

Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh leaves court, 1995. Photograph: David Longstreath/AP

Experts still argue over how much impact the thinking of Beam and other like-minded white supremacists had on rightwing extremists in the US. Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people with a bomb directed at a government office in Oklahoma City in 1995, is sometimes cited as an example of someone inspired by their ideas. But McVeigh had told others of his plans, had an accomplice, and had been involved for many years with rightwing militia groups. McVeigh may have thought of himself as a lone wolf, but he was not one.

One far-right figure who made explicit use of the term lone wolf was Tom Metzger, the leader of White Aryan Resistance, a group based in Indiana. Metzger is thought to have authored, or at least published on his website, a call to arms entitled “Laws for the Lone Wolf”. “I am preparing for the coming War. I am ready when the line is crossed … I am the underground Insurgent fighter and independent. I am in your neighborhoods, schools, police departments, bars, coffee shops, malls, etc. I am, The Lone Wolf!,” it reads.

From the mid-1990s onwards, as Metzger’s ideas began to spread, the number of hate crimes committed by self-styled “leaderless” rightwing extremists rose. In 1998, the FBI launched Operation Lone Wolf against a small group of white supremacists on the US west coast. A year later, Alex Curtis, a young, influential rightwing extremist and protege of Metzger, told his hundreds of followers in an email that “lone wolves who are smart and commit to action in a cold-mannered way can accomplish virtually any task before them ... We are already too far along to try to educate the white masses and we cannot worry about [their] reaction to lone wolf/small cell strikes.”

The same year, the New York Times published a long article on the new threat headlined “New Face of Terror Crimes: ‘Lone Wolf’ Weaned on Hate”. This seems to have been the moment when the idea of terrorist “lone wolves” began to migrate from rightwing extremist circles, and the law enforcement officials monitoring them, to the mainstream. In court on charges of hate crimes in 2000, Curtis was described by prosecutors as an advocate of lone-wolf terrorism.

When, more than a decade later, the term finally became a part of the everyday vocabulary of millions of people, it was in a dramatically different context.

After 9/11, lone-wolf terrorism suddenly seemed like a distraction from more serious threats. The 19 men who carried out the attacks were jihadis who had been hand picked, trained, equipped and funded by Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida, and a small group of close associates.

Although 9/11 was far from a typical terrorist attack, it quickly came to dominate thinking about the threat from Islamic militants. Security services built up organograms of terrorist groups. Analysts focused on individual terrorists only insofar as they were connected to bigger entities. Personal relations – particularly friendships based on shared ambitions and battlefield experiences, as well as tribal or familial links – were mistaken for institutional ones, formally connecting individuals to organisations and placing them under a chain of command.


As the 2000s drew to a close, attacks perpetrated by people who seemed to be acting alone began to outnumber all others

This approach suited the institutions and individuals tasked with carrying out the “war on terror”. For prosecutors, who were working with outdated legislation, proving membership of a terrorist group was often the only way to secure convictions of individuals planning violence. For a number of governments around the world – Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Egypt – linking attacks on their soil to “al-Qaida” became a way to shift attention away from their own brutality, corruption and incompetence, and to gain diplomatic or material benefits from Washington. For some officials in Washington, linking terrorist attacks to “state-sponsored” groups became a convenient way to justify policies, such as the continuing isolation of Iran, or military interventions such as the invasion of Iraq. For many analysts and policymakers, who were heavily influenced by the conventional wisdom on terrorism inherited from the cold war, thinking in terms of hierarchical groups and state sponsors was comfortably familiar.

A final factor was more subtle. Attributing the new wave of violence to a single group not only obscured the deep, complex and troubling roots of Islamic militancy but also suggested the threat it posed would end when al-Qaida was finally eliminated. This was reassuring, both for decision-makers and the public.

By the middle of the decade, it was clear that this analysis was inadequate. Bombs in Bali, Istanbul and Mombasa were the work of centrally organised attackers, but the 2004 attack on trains in Madrid had been executed by a small network only tenuously connected to the al-Qaida senior leadership 4,000 miles away. For every operation like the 2005 bombings in London – which was close to the model established by the 9/11 attacks – there were more attacks that didn’t seem to have any direct link to Bin Laden, even if they might have been inspired by his ideology. There was growing evidence that the threat from Islamic militancy was evolving into something different, something closer to the “leaderless resistance” promoted by white supremacists two decades earlier.

As the 2000s drew to a close, attacks perpetrated by people who seemed to be acting alone began to outnumber all others. These events were less deadly than the spectacular strikes of a few years earlier, but the trend was alarming. In the UK in 2008, a convert to Islam with mental health problems attempted to blow up a restaurant in Exeter, though he injured no one but himself. In 2009, a US army major shot 13 dead in Fort Hood, Texas. In 2010, a female student stabbed an MPin London. None appeared, initially, to have any broader connections to the global jihadi movement.

In an attempt to understand how this new threat had developed, analysts raked through the growing body of texts posted online by jihadi thinkers. It seemed that one strategist had been particularly influential: a Syrian called Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, better known as Abu Musab al-Suri. In 2004, in a sprawling set of writings posted on an extremist website, Nasar had laid out a new strategy that was remarkably similar to “leaderless resistance”, although there is no evidence that he knew of the thinking of men such as Beam or Metzger. Nasar’s maxim was “Principles, not organisations”. He envisaged individual attackers and cells, guided by texts published online, striking targets across the world.

Having identified this new threat, security officials, journalists and policymakers needed a new vocabulary to describe it. The rise of the term lone wolf wasn’t wholly unprecedented. In the aftermath of 9/11, the US had passed anti-terror legislation that included a so-called “lone wolf provision”. This made it possible to pursue terrorists who were members of groups based abroad but who were acting alone in the US. Yet this provision conformed to the prevailing idea that all terrorists belonged to bigger groups and acted on orders from their superiors. The stereotype of the lone wolf terrorist that dominates today’s media landscape was not yet fully formed.

It is hard to be exact about when things changed. By around 2006, a small number of analysts had begun to refer to lone-wolf attacks in the context of Islamic militancy, and Israeli officials were using the term to describe attacks by apparently solitary Palestinian attackers. Yet these were outliers. In researching this article, I called eight counter-terrorism officials active over the last decade to ask them when they had first heard references to lone-wolf terrorism. One said around 2008, three said 2009, three 2010 and one around 2011. “The expression is what gave the concept traction,” Richard Barrett, who held senior counter-terrorist positions in MI6, the British overseas intelligence service, and the UN through the period, told me. Before the rise of the lone wolf, security officials used phrases – all equally flawed – such as “homegrowns”, “cleanskins”, “freelancers” or simply “unaffiliated”.

As successive jihadi plots were uncovered that did not appear to be linked to al-Qaida or other such groups, the term became more common. Between 2009 and 2012 it appears in around 300 articles in major English-language news publications each year, according the professional cuttings search engine Lexis Nexis. Since then, the term has become ubiquitous. In the 12 months before the London attack last week, the number of references to “lone wolves” exceeded the total of those over the previous three years, topping 1,000.

Lone wolves are now apparently everywhere, stalking our streets, schools and airports. Yet, as with the tendency to attribute all terrorist attacks to al-Qaida a decade earlier, this is a dangerous simplification.

In March 2012, a 23-year-old petty criminal named Mohamed Merah went on a shooting spree – a series of three attacks over a period of nine days – in south-west France, killing seven people. Bernard Squarcini, head of the French domestic intelligence service, described Merah as a lone wolf. So did the interior ministry spokesman, and, inevitably, many journalists. A year later, Lee Rigby, an off-duty soldier, was run over and hacked to death in London. Once again, the two attackers were dubbed lone wolves by officials and the media. So, too, were Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013. The same label has been applied to more recent attackers, including the men who drove vehicles into crowds in Nice and Berlin last year, and in London last week.

The Boston Marathon bombing carried out by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2013. Photograph: Dan Lampariello/Reuters

One problem facing security services, politicians and the media is that instant analysis is difficult. It takes months to unravel the truth behind a major, or even minor, terrorist operation. The demand for information from a frightened public, relayed by a febrile news media, is intense. People seek quick, familiar explanations.

Yet many of the attacks that have been confidently identified as lone-wolf operations have turned out to be nothing of the sort. Very often, terrorists who are initially labelled lone wolves, have active links to established groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaida. Merah, for instance, had recently travelled to Pakistan and been trained, albeit cursorily, by a jihadi group allied with al-Qaida. Merah was also linked to a network of local extremists, some of whom went on to carry out attacks in Libya, Iraq and Syria. Bernard Cazeneuve, who was then the French interior minister, later agreed that calling Merah a lone wolf had been a mistake.

If, in cases such as Merah’s, the label of lone wolf is plainly incorrect, there are other, more subtle cases where it is still highly misleading. Another category of attackers, for instance, are those who strike alone, without guidance from formal terrorist organisations, but who have had face-to-face contact with loose networks of people who share extremist beliefs. The Exeter restaurant bomber, dismissed as an unstable loner, was actually in contact with a circle of local militant sympathisers before his attack. (They have never been identified.) The killers of Lee Rigby had been on the periphery of extremist movements in the UK for years, appearing at rallies of groups such as the now proscribed al-Muhajiroun, run by Anjem Choudary, a preacher convicted of terrorist offences in 2016 who is reported to have “inspired” up to 100 British militants.

A third category is made up of attackers who strike alone, after having had close contact online, rather than face-to-face, with extremist groups or individuals. A wave of attackers in France last year were, at first, wrongly seen as lone wolves “inspired” rather than commissioned by Isis. It soon emerged that the individuals involved, such as the two teenagers who killed a priest in front of his congregation in Normandy, had been recruited online by a senior Isis militant. In three recent incidents in Germany, all initially dubbed “lone-wolf attacks”, Isis militants actually used messaging apps to direct recruits in the minutes before they attacked. “Pray that I become a martyr,” one attacker who assaulted passengers on a train with an axe and knife told his interlocutor. “I am now waiting for the train.” Then: “I am starting now.”

Very often, what appear to be the clearest lone-wolf cases are revealed to be more complex. Even the strange case of the man who killed 86 people with a truck in Nice in July 2016 – with his background of alcohol abuse, casual sex and lack of apparent interest in religion or radical ideologies – may not be a true lone wolf. Eight of his friends and associates have been arrested and police are investigating his potential links to a broader network.

What research does show is that we may be more likely to find lone wolves among far-right extremists than among their jihadi counterparts. Though even in those cases, the term still conceals more than it reveals.

The murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox, days before the EU referendum, by a 52-year-old called Thomas Mair, was the culmination of a steady intensification of rightwing extremist violence in the UK that had been largely ignored by the media and policymakers. According to police, on several occasions attackers came close to causing more casualties in a single operation than jihadis had ever inflicted. The closest call came in 2013 when Pavlo Lapshyn, a Ukrainian PhD student in the UK, planted a bomb outside a mosque in Tipton, West Midlands. Fortunately, Lapshyn had got his timings wrong and the congregation had yet to gather when the device exploded. Embedded in the trunks of trees surrounding the building, police found some of the 100 nails Lapshyn had added to the bomb to make it more lethal.

Lapshyn was a recent arrival, but the UK has produced numerous homegrown far-right extremists in recent years. One was Martyn Gilleard, who was sentenced to 16 years for terrorism and child pornography offences in 2008. When officers searched his home in Goole, East Yorkshire, they found knives, guns, machetes, swords, axes, bullets and four nail bombs. A year later, Ian Davison became the first Briton convicted under new legislation dealing with the production of chemical weapons. Davison was sentenced to 10 years in prison for manufacturing ricin, a lethal biological poison made from castor beans. His aim, the court heard, was “the creation of an international Aryan group who would establish white supremacy in white countries”.

Lapshyn, Gilleard and Davison were each described as lone wolves by police officers, judges and journalists. Yet even a cursory survey of their individual stories undermines this description. Gilleard was the local branch organiser of a neo-Nazi group, while Davison founded the Aryan Strike Force, the members of which went on training days in Cumbria where they flew swastika flags.

Thomas Mair, who was also widely described as a lone wolf, does appear to have been an authentic loner, yet his involvement in rightwing extremism goes back decades. In May 1999, the National Alliance, a white-supremacist organisation in West Virginia, sent Mair manuals that explained how to construct bombs and assemble homemade pistols. Seventeen years later, when police raided his home after the murder, they found stacks of far-right literature, Nazi memorabilia and cuttings on Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who murdered 77 people in 2011.

 

A government building in Oslo bombed by Anders Breivik, July 2011. Photograph: Scanpix/Reuters

Even Breivik himself, who has been called “the deadliest lone-wolf attacker in [Europe’s] history”, was not a true lone wolf. Prior to his arrest, Breivik had long been in contact with far-right organisations. A member of the English Defence League told the Telegraph that Breivik had been in regular contact with its members via Facebook, and had a “hypnotic” effect on them.

If such facts fit awkwardly with the commonly accepted idea of the lone wolf, they fit better with academic research that has shown that very few violent extremists who launch attacks act without letting others know what they may be planning. In the late 1990s, after realising that in most instances school shooters would reveal their intentions to close associates before acting, the FBI began to talk about “leakage” of critical information. By 2009, it had extended the concept to terrorist attacks, and found that “leakage” was identifiable in more than four-fifths of 80 ongoing cases they were investigating. Of these leaks, 95% were to friends, close relatives or authority figures.

More recent research has underlined the garrulous nature of violent extremists. In 2013, researchers at Pennsylvania State University examined the interactions of 119 lone-wolf terrorists from a wide variety of ideological and faith backgrounds. The academics found that, even though the terrorists launched their attacks alone, in 79% of cases others were aware of the individual’s extremist ideology, and in 64% of cases family and friends were aware of the individual’s intent to engage in terrorism-related activity. Another more recent survey found that 45% of Islamic militant cases talked about their inspiration and possible actions with family and friends. While only 18% of rightwing counterparts did, they were much more likely to “post telling indicators” on the internet.

Few extremists remain without human contact, even if that contact is only found online. Last year, a team at the University of Miami studied 196 pro-Isis groupsoperating on social media during the first eight months of 2015. These groups had a combined total of more than 100,000 members. Researchers also found that pro-Isis individuals who were not in a group – who they dubbed “online ‘lone wolf’ actors” – had either recently been in a group or soon went on to join one.


Any terrorist, however socially or physically isolated, is still part of a broader movement
There is a much broader point here. Any terrorist, however socially or physically isolated, is still part of a broader movement. The lengthy manifesto that Breivik published hours before he started killing drew heavily on a dense ecosystem of far-right blogs, websites and writers. His ideas on strategy drew directly from the “leaderless resistance” school of Beam and others. Even his musical tastes were shaped by his ideology. He was, for example, a fan of Saga, a Swedish white nationalist singer, whose lyrics include lines about “The greatest race to ever walk the earth … betrayed”.

It is little different for Islamic militants, who emerge as often from the fertile and desperately depressing world of online jihadism – with its execution videos, mythologised history, selectively read religious texts and Photoshopped pictures of alleged atrocities against Muslims – as from organised groups that meet in person.

Terrorist violence of all kinds is directed against specific targets. These are not selected at random, nor are such attacks the products of a fevered and irrational imagination operating in complete isolation.

Just like the old idea that a single organisation, al-Qaida, was responsible for all Islamic terrorism, the rise of the lone-wolf paradigm is convenient for many different actors. First, there are the terrorists themselves. The notion that we are surrounded by anonymous lone wolves poised to strike at any time inspires fear and polarises the public. What could be more alarming and divisive than the idea that someone nearby – perhaps a colleague, a neighbour, a fellow commuter – might secretly be a lone wolf?

Terrorist groups also need to work constantly to motivate their activists. The idea of “lone wolves” invests murderous attackers with a special status, even glamour. Breivik, for instance, congratulated himself in his manifesto for becoming a “self-financed and self-indoctrinated single individual attack cell”. Al-Qaida propaganda lauded the 2009 Fort Hood shooter as “a pioneer, a trailblazer, and a role model who has opened a door, lit a path, and shown the way forward for every Muslim who finds himself among the unbelievers”.

The lone-wolf paradigm can be helpful for security services and policymakers, too, since the public assumes that lone wolves are difficult to catch. This would be justified if the popular image of the lone wolf as a solitary actor was accurate. But, as we have seen, this is rarely the case.

Westminster terrorist Khalid Masood. Photograph: Reuters

The reason that many attacks are not prevented is not because it was impossible to anticipate the perpetrator’s actions, but because someone screwed up. German law enforcement agencies were aware that the man who killed 12 in Berlin before Christmas was an Isis sympathiser and had talked about committing an attack. Repeated attempts to deport him had failed, stymied by bureaucracy, lack of resources and poor case preparation. In Britain, a parliamentary report into the killing of Lee Rigby identified a number of serious delays and potential missed opportunities to prevent it. Khalid Masood, the man who attacked Westminster last week, was identified in 2010 as a potential extremist by MI5.

But perhaps the most disquieting explanation for the ubiquity of the term is that it tells us something we want to believe. Yes, the terrorist threat now appears much more amorphous and unpredictable than ever before. At the same time, the idea that terrorists operate alone allows us to break the link between an act of violence and its ideological hinterland. It implies that the responsibility for an individual’s violent extremism lies solely with the individual themselves.

The truth is much more disturbing. Terrorism is not something you do by yourself, it is highly social. People become interested in ideas, ideologies and activities, even appalling ones, because other people are interested in them.

In his eulogy at the funeral of those killed in the mosque shooting in Quebec, the imam Hassan Guillet spoke of the alleged shooter. Over previous days details had emerged of the young man’s life. “Alexandre [Bissonette], before being a killer, was a victim himself,” said Hassan. “Before he planted his bullets in the heads of his victims, somebody planted ideas more dangerous than the bullets in his head. Unfortunately, day after day, week after week, month after month, certain politicians, and certain reporters and certain media, poisoned our atmosphere.

“We did not want to see it …. because we love this country, we love this society. We wanted our society to be perfect. We were like some parents who, when a neighbour tells them their kid is smoking or taking drugs, answers: ‘I don’t believe it, my child is perfect.’ We don’t want to see it. And we didn’t see it, and it happened.”

“But,” he went on to say, “there was a certain malaise. Let us face it. Alexandre Bissonnette didn’t emerge from a vacuum.”

Muslims Want Tarek Fatah Dead

With penalties so weak, tax evasion is worth the risk

Polly Toynbee in The Guardian

At last night’s Black and White ball to raise funds for the Conservatives, more than 500 phenomenally rich donors gathered in London’s Grosvenor House hotel – last year’s guests were worth £22bn. Paying £15,000 for dinner was peanuts compared to sums this assembly of plutocrats will donate to the party – no wonder there’s been a news lockdown. Are these the people who really run the country, buying an election to ensure government by their people, for their people? That’s for voters to consider in May: Cameron’s government has certainly been kind to its funders.

HSBC scandal: government makes statement in House of Commons - live

The world’s second-biggest bank is under fire, after it was revealed that its Swiss banking arm helped clients avoid taxes

 

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But there could hardly be a worse day for the ball as the Guardian, Le Monde, BBC Panorama and the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed a whistleblower’s details of some of the wealthy account-holders – including tax dodgers – with HSBC in Switzerland.

It has taken our reporting team several months to sort the mountainous information revealed about these Swiss accounts. This investigation has proved in some ways more difficult and risky than taking on the secret world in our WikiLeaks revelations, or even than the Snowden files. The might of the US and UK state, the fury of governments and secret services, are nowhere near as dangerous to a newspaper as the threats we have received from a string of top law firms trying to prevent revelation of their clients’ secret Swiss accounts.

Over the past four weeks we have been dealing with long and threatening lawyers’ letters from some of those we are naming. They accuse us of “false, misleading, sloppy journalism” and “defamation”, with threats under the Data Protection Act and warnings of injunctions: “You may be in no doubt that legal actions will swiftly follow”, and the like. Carter-Ruck, Schillings, Withers, Hill Dickinson – and many others – pile in to try to frighten us off. The danger is that we can be right 99 out of 100 times, with more revelations still to come – but one error can kill you. The new defamation law should be better than the old libel laws, but its impact has yet to be tested in court.

For nearly five years the government has stayed silent about these HSBC Swiss account-holders. How grateful the world of Tory donors must be to see this embarrassment handled with gentlemanly delicacy. No naming, shaming – or, God forbid, prosecutions. Instead, privately some but by no means all that’s owing has been repaid by UK cheats – so far £135m.

Tax evasion is a risk well worth taking with such trivial penalties: in some cases all HMRC demands is the tax owed, plus interest, plus 10% – not confiscation. The total collected is far less than the French and Spanish have reclaimed, though the UK has many more account-holders. Among them are famous names, entrepreneurs and aristocratic families – alongside dictators and drug dealers. HMRC has treated them with the same discretion as HSBC did when they handed over bricks of money to “respectable” people. Compare all this to the slightest infringement of benefit rules over minuscule sums.

Tax cheats are forever one step ahead. That’s why George Osborne carefully introduced a General Anti-Avoidance Rule – which expensive lawyers can get round – not a General Anti-Avoidance Principle, which would strike at the spirit of avoidance. The US, Belgian, French and Argentinian governments have instigated criminal proceedings against HSBC – it’s no surprise that our government has not.

Few experts think HSBC exceptionally venal; it’s just the one that got caught – again.

One embarrassment would be any development implicating Stephen Green, former HSBC top man, appointed by David Cameron as minister of state for trade and investment in September 2010, despite the authorities already having the dynamite details of HSBC’s tax-avoiding connivance. Few experts think HSBC exceptionally venal; it’s just the one that got caught – again. Only regulation can stop them – shame doesn’t work. HSBC was obscured in the public mind by its chairman’s piety as an ordained priest.

Lord Green was chief executive from 2003 to 2006, until he took over the chair. Pursued down the street by Panorama, he had nothing to say. But in the past he has written much about ethical banking in two books reconciling God and Mammon. However, under his custodianship Mammon seems to have got the upper hand. His report is among papers for discussion on restructuring the Church of England at the synod this week. His effort to bring business culture into the church is not well timed, with its management-speak aim of turning the clergy into a “talent pool” of future business-type executives. The Dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, Professor Martyn Percy, is not alone in choking into his chalice at receiving “a summons urging early booking for an MBA-style programme”. Green is one of the high net-worth evangelicals of Holy Trinity Brompton, favoured by many wealthy holy-rollers. Their creed has always been that God rewards wealth: to him that hath, more shall be given – tax-free.

Labour is lucky this global story blew up in a week already dominated by a tax avoidance row: it was a Tory blunder to put up the Monaco-dwelling head of Boots to call Labour a “catastrophe”, when his company pays a fraction of the UK tax it did before switching its base to Switzerland. Timing is important here: the HSBC revelations haven’t emerged on Labour’s watch. Both Eds have frequently – and rightly – apologised for Labour’s feeble regulation of banks pre-crash, while always reminding Cameron and Osborne that they called loudly for less banking “red tape” in those days.

Ed Miliband warns the many tax havens under the British crown that he will clamp down – not before time. He now needs to show his determination by setting up an office of tax responsibility, where he should install Margaret Hodge to chase up her public accounts committee tax investigations.

In power Labour shied away, afraid of offending business. Not this time. It’s worth recalling that Tony Blair in 1997 had no FTSE 100 supporters: they and the CBI warned of the dire consequences of a national minimum wage. They called his £5bn windfall tax on utilities “Stalinist”. For Labour, only the assumption of power brings business converts – seekers after preferments, contracts and influence. Those who assume otherwise delude themselves.

Pro athletes cannot be bullied into better performances

Valuable notes from a book that explains the intricacies of coaching and captaincy without once mentioning either

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

November 9, 2014

C

Coaches must remember that practice isn't an end in itself © Getty Images

I've just read a brilliant book about captaincy and coaching. It might be the best book ever written on leadership in sport. The author not only studied many of the greats at first hand, he also did the job himself. There is a surprise, however, and I'm not going to spoil it. So guess, by all means, but I'm not giving away his name until the end.

I've gone through the notes in my book, collecting his advice into several themes.

Mystery
"The better a captain is, the less you know why. You certainly can't get the qualities from a textbook, and they can't be faked by copying a great captain. But there is also a practical side: however much talent you're born with, there's a lot to learn. All the best captains and coaches work hard at their craft, developing their own individual ways. They all do it differently, so there can't be only one "right" way. To put all young leaders through a training course only means that a mass of mediocrity will be let loose on the world."

Instinct
Intuition rather than rationality often drives inspired decisions. "Some captains and coaches are totally instinctive and can't describe what they do. [After one game] I was so impressed that I complimented the captain on a detail. 'Oh! Did I do that?' he replied."

See the big picture
Being preoccupied with details can't be allowed to obscure what really matters. "Skilful captains and coaches can transform the way a team plays in a very short time, even though some of them wouldn't be able to tell you much about tactics or technique. Before modern video and analytics, there was far less emphasis on precision and more on capturing the overall mood of a team. Captains were listening for bigger and more important things. We've lost something in demanding total accuracy."

Show, don't tell
One great captain "could tell me what he wanted with his eyes," the author writes. "It's important to look at players as if you expect the best, not as if you fear the worst. Many inexperienced coaches seem to be "looking for trouble", a real turnoff for a team. When I look at players during a match, I'm trying to involve and communicate what I'm feeling rather than police them."

Authenticity
Waving your arms around and acting for the cameras doesn't fool anyone. The author advises captains to have the integrity to stay focused on the game situation rather than get side-tracked about the impression he's making. If the captain is "naturally flamboyant, then it's a natural expression of his feeling". But when his self-conscious gestures are just acted out, "and don't have a real relationship with the game… then it's just a circus."

Practice is not the real thing
"The most important thing about a practice session is that it's not an end in itself. Everything a coach does must aim at a good performance on match day. Take a chance and leave some things fluid. Don't cross every "t" and dot every "i". This may feel risky, but it keeps a team on its toes and gives the match day an "edge". Don't practise a team to death; I've never had much sympathy for coaches who "program" a team at practice and then just "run the programme" during the match. There is more to it than that."

Seek authority not power
"Captaincy and coaching are like riding a horse, not driving a car. A car will go off a cliff if you "tell" it to; a horse won't. A team has a life of its own, based largely on the players sensing what each other will do."

	Be true to your captaincy instincts © Getty Images  Enlarge

Some coaches have an "unfair" knack
"An assistant coach told a story about how he couldn't get the team to work together at practice sessions, despite giving crystal clear instructions. Some time later he attended a practice led by the brilliant head coach, who began with the same practice drill. The head coach gave his characteristically vague and wobbly advice, and the whole team played together perfectly. It's an unjust world."

Allow room for mavericks
However good you are, some players won't listen - and nor should they. "One of the greatest players in history said he never looked at captains in the field as he couldn't understand what any of them were doing."

****

It's a very good list. But here is a confession. The book, though real, is not about cricket. The words captaincy and coaching are not mentioned at all, not once. The book's real subject is classical music, the title is Inside Conducting and its author is conductor Christopher Seaman. In quoting from the book, each time the term "conductor" appeared, I changed it for the word "captain"/"coach".

First, I want to demonstrate that cricket is not a ghetto, a special case that cannot learn from other disciplines. The art of performance is largely universal. As I found out when I made a series for the BBC comparing the life of a cricketer with that of a classical musician, the differences are dwarfed by the similarities.

Secondly, given the evolved state of professional sport, we need to rethink the outdated assumption that the way to inspire better performances is to threaten, bully, intimidate and scream at players. It's not wrong because it is undignified (though there is that too), it's wrong because it doesn't work. As I've argued before here, instead of seeing sportsmen as a rabble of unmotivated shysters in search of a sergeant-major to whip them into shape, professional athletes have more in common with surgeons and musicians.

Above all, captaincy and coaching are collaborative. No one, no matter how brilliant, can lead without followers. So I'll leave my favourite anecdote from the book in its original form, "untranslated" into cricket-speak:

"A famous conductor was conducting a major work without the score. At one point in the concert his memory failed him, and he gave an enormous downbeat in a silent bar. Nobody played, of course, and he froze in horror. A voice at the back of the violas whispered, 'Aha! He doesn't sound so good on his own, does he?'"

Will Pakistan become a Taliban State?

Interview with Arshad Mahmood

SHAH WALI ULLAH's POLITICAL THOUGHT - Still a major obstacle against modernisation of Indian Muslims.

by R.Upadhyay


Shah Wali Ullah (1703-1762) was a Muslim thinker of eighteenth century. His time was one of the most emotional chapters of Islamic revivalist movements in Indian subcontinent. The on going Hindu-Muslim communal controversy in contemporary India is deeply rooted in his political Islamic theory. The most significant contribution of Wali Ullah (Allah) for his community is that his teachings kept alive the religious life of Indian Muslims linked with their inner spirit for re-establishment of Islamic political authority in India.

Historically, Wali Ullah's political thought was to meet the political need of his time, but its relevance in the changed social scenario is one of the most important reasons that Indian society is not free from the emotional disorder. If the society has not developed the attitude of let bygones of the dark history of Indian subcontinent be gone, then Wali Ullah's political Islam is also responsible for it. His emphasis on Arabisation of Indian Islam did not allow the emotional integration of Indian Muslims with rest of the population of this country. Regressively affecting the Muslim psyche, his ideology debarred it from a forward-looking vision. His political thought however, created " a sense of loyalty to the community among its various sects" ((The Muslim Community of Indo-Pakistan subcontinent by Istiaq Hussain Qureshi, 1985, page 99).

Born ( Muzaffarnagar-Uttar Pradesh) in a family loyal to Mogul Empire Wali Ullah claimed his lineage from Quraysh tribe of Prophet Mohammad and of Umar, the second caliph (Religion and Thought of Shah Wali Allah by J. M.S.Baljon - E.J. Brill 1986, page 1). Inheriting the Sufi tradition of Sunnism he succeeded his father after his death in 1719 as principal of Madrasa Rahimiyya at Delhi at the age of 14. He went for pilgrimage to Mecca and Madina in 1730 and pursued deep study of Hadith and Islamic scriptures during his 14 months stay there.

On his return to India from the epicentre of Islam in 1732, Shah Wali Ullah was found more concerned with the political disorder and fading glory of Muslim power. He wanted the Muslim society to return to the Prophet era for the political unity of the then Muslim rulers. His religio-political thought was based on the 'Perso -Islamic theory of kingship' (Shah Wali Ullah and his Time by Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, page 397) and Mahmud Ghazna and Aurangzeb were his heroes among the Muslim rulers. His objective was to re-establish the Islamic cultural hegemony in the Indian sub-continent.

Shah Wali Ullah realised the political rise of non-Muslims like Maratha, Jat and Sikh powers and the fading glory of Islamic rule as danger to Islam and therefore, any loss of political heritage of Muslim was unbearable to him. He was the first Arab scion in India, who raised Islamic war cry for stalling the diminishing glory of Mogul Empire. His religio-political theory inspired a large number of successive Muslim scholars, who carried forward his mission and resultantly gave birth to Islamic politics in India. The slogan of 'Islam is in danger' - is profoundly embedded to his hate-non-Muslim ideology.

Wali Ullah "grew up watching the Mogul Empire crumble. His political ambition was to restore Muslim power in India more or less on the Mogul pattern (Aurangzeb not Akbar's model). Pure Islam must be re- enacted, a regenerated Muslim society must again be mighty" (Islam in Modern History by W.C.Smith, Mentor Book, 1957, page51-52).

In the face of the fading glory of Mogul Empire and indigenous resurgence of non-Islamic forces like Maratha, Jat and Sikh in Muslim dominated India Wali Ullah decided to re-evaluate the Muslim dilemma. He realised that sectarian divisions and dissensions in the community and struggle for power among the various Muslim rulers were the major factors responsible for the diminishing pride of Mogul Empire. Forging unity among them with an overall objective to restore political dominance of Islam therefore, became his intellectual priority. The main thrust of his extensive writings was to present an integrated view of various Islamic thoughts.

Giving a call for 'a return of true Islam' and asking the Muslims to go to the age of Quran and listen to its literal voice sincerely, Wali Ullah boldly asserted that " the Prophet's teachings were the result of the cultural milieu then prevalent. He opined that today (that is in his days) every injunction of the Shariat and every Islamic law should be rationally analysed and presented" (Muslim Political Issues and National Integration by H. A.Gani, 1978, page 184).

Being proud of his Arab origin Wali Ullah was strongly opposed to integration of Islamic culture in the cultural mainstream of the sub-continent and wanted the Muslims to ensure their distance from it. "In his opinion, the health of Muslim society demanded that doctrines and values inculcated by Islam should be maintained in their pristine purity unsullied by extraneous influences" (The Muslim Community of Indo-Pakistan subcontinent by Istiaq Hussain Qureshi, 1985, page 215). "Wali Ullah did not want the Muslims to become part of the general milieu of the sub-continent. He wanted them to keep alive their relation with rest of the Muslim world so that the spring of their inspiration and ideals might ever remain located in Islam and tradition of world community developed by it". (Ibid. page 216).

On principle Wali Ullah had no difference with his contemporary Islamic thinker Abd-al-Wahab (1703-1787) of Saudi Arabia, who had also launched an Islamic revivalist movement. Wahab, who is regarded as one of the most radical Islamists has a wide range of followers in India. He "regarded the classical Muslim law as sum and substance of the faith, and therefore, demanded its total implementation" (Qamar Hasan in his book - Muslims in India -1987, page 3).

Wali Ullah also supported the rigidity of Wahab for strict compliance of Shariat (Islamic laws), and shariatisation was his vision for Muslim India. He maintained that "in this area (India), not even the tiniest rule of that sharia should be neglected, this would automatically lead to happiness and prosperity for all" (Shah WaliUllah and his Time by Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, 1980, page 300). However, his theory of rational evaluation of Islam was only a sugar quoted version of Islamic fundamentalism for tactical reasons. He was guided more due to the compulsion of the turbulent situation for Muslim rulers at the hands of non-Muslim forces around them than any meaningful moderation of Islam, which could have been in the larger interest of the subcontinent.

Glorifying the history of Muslim rule as triumph of the faith, WaliUllah attributed its downfall to the failure of the community to literal adherence to Islamic scriptures. His movement for Islamic revivalism backed by the ideology of Pan-Islamism was for the political unity of Indian Muslims. His religio-political ideology however, made a permanent crack in Hindu--Muslim relation in this sub-continent. Subsequently non-Muslims of the region viewed his political concept of Islam as an attempt to undermine the self-pride and dignity of integrated Indian society.

The religio-political theory of Wali Ullah was quite inspiring for Indian Muslims including the followers of Wahhabi movement. It drew popular support from the Ulama, who were the immediate sufferers from the declining glory of Muslim rule in the subcontinent. The popular support to his ideology "has seldom been equalled by any Muslim religious movement in South Asian subcontinent" (The Genesis of Muslim Fundamentalism in British India by Mohammad Yusuf Abbasi, 1987, page 5). He was of the view that the lost glory of the faith could be restored if the Muslims adhered to the fundamentals of Islam literally.

Contrary to Akbar's 'conciliatory' policies in the governance of multi-religious and multi-ethnic Indian society, Wali Ullah wanted "a return to the ideals of the first two successors of Prophet Muhammad" as the only answer to the social conflicts. Laying stress on adherence to "the orthodox religious principles of Sunnism" he was against seeking any cooperation from Hindus or even Shi'is (Shah Wali Allah and his Time by Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, 1980, page394). He invited Ahmad Shah Abdali of Afghanistan to attack the Maratha in third battle of Panipat and advised his collaborator Najib al Dawla to launch jehad against Jats. 

Eulogizing the barbaric persecution of non-Muslims in medieval India as glory of Islam, he did not believe in Indian nationhood or any national boundary for Muslims and therefore, invited Shah Abdali, Amir of Afghan to attack India (Third battle of Panipat 1761), in which Marathas were defeated. In his letter to the Afghan king he said, "…All control of power is with the Hindus because they are the only people who are industrious and adaptable. Riches and prosperity are theirs, while Muslims have nothing but poverty and misery. At this juncture you are the only person, who has the initiative, the foresight, the power and capability to defeat the enemy and free the Muslims from the clutches of the infidels. God forbid if their domination continues, Muslims will even forget Islam and become undistinguishable from the non-Muslims" (Dr. Sayed Riaz Ahmad in his book 'Maulana Maududi and Islamic state' - Lahore People's Publishing House, page 15 - 1976).

He further wrote:

"We beseech you in the name of Prophet to fight a jihad against the infidels of this region… The invasion of Nadir shah, who destroyed the Muslims, left the Marathas and Jats secure and prosperous. This resulted in the infidels regaining their strength and in the reduction of Muslim leaders of Delhi to mere puppets" ( Shah Wali Allah and his times by Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, page page305).

He also instigated Rohillas leader Najib al Dawla against his Hindu employees alleging that they were sympathetic to Jats. "Shah WaliUllah pointed out that one of the crucial conditions leading to the Muslim decline was that real control of governance was in the hands of Hindus. All the accountants and clerks were Hindus. Hindus controlled the countries wealth while Muslims were destitute" ( Shah Wali Allah and his times by Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, 1980, page 304). In his letter he advised Abdali for " orders prohibiting Holi and Muharram festivals should be issued" (Ibid. page, 299) exposed his hostility towards both Hindus and Shias.

Reminding the Muslim rulers of the dominant role of Muslims even in a multi-religious society Wali Ullah said, "Oh Kings! Mala ala urges you to draw your swords and not put them back in their sheaths again until Allah has separated the Muslims from the polytheists and the rebelious Kifirs and the sinners are made absolutely feeble and helpless" (Ibid. page 299)

Noted historian Dr. Tara Chand remarked:

"He (Wali Ullah) appealed to Najib-ud-Daulah, Nizamul Mulk and Ahmad Shah Abdali - all three the upholders of condemned system - to intervene and restore the pristine glory of Islam. It is amazing that he should have placed his trust in Ahmad Shah Abdali, who had ravaged the fairest provinces of the Mogul empire, had plundered the Hindus and Muslims without the slightest compunction and above all, who was an upstart without any root among his own people" (History of the Freedom Movement of India, volume I, 1970, page 180).

Even though the defeat of Marathas by Abdali could not halt the sliding decline of Mogul Empire, it made Wali Ullah the hero of Indian Muslims and he emerged as main inspiring force for Muslim politics in this country. His Islamic thought was regarded as saviour of the faith and its impact left a deep imprint on Indian Muslim psyche, which continues to inspire them even today. Almost all the Muslim organisations in this country directly or indirectly draw their political inspiration from Wali Ullah.

Wali Ullah died in 1762 but his son Abd al Aziz (1746-1823) carried his mission as a result India faced violent communal disorder for decades. Considering Indian subcontinent no longer Dar-ul-Islam (A land, where Islam is having political power) and British rule as Dar ul-Harb (A land, where Islam is deprived of its political authority), he laid emphasis on jehadi spirit of the faith. Saiyid Ahmad (1786-1831) of Rai Bareli a trusted disciple of Abd al Aziz launched jehad on the Sikh kingdom but got defeated and killed in battle of Balkot in May 1831. Tired with their failures in re-establishing Muslim rule the followers of Wali Ullah preferred to keep their movement in suspended animation for decades, when the Britishers established their firm grip on this country.

The Sepoy mutiny of 1857 was a turning point in the history of Islamic fundamentalism in India. With its failure Indian Muslims lost all hopes to restore Muslim power in India. But successive Ulama in their attempt to keep the movement alive turned towards institutionalised Islamic movement. Some prominent followers of Wahhabi movement like Muhammad Qasim Nanauti and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi drew furter inspiration from the religio-political concept of Wali Ullah and set up an Islamic Madrassa at Deoband in U.P. on May 30, 1866, which grew into a higher Islamic learning centre and assumed the present name of Dar-ul-Uloom (Abode of Islamic learning) in 1879. For last 135 years Dar-ul-Uloom, which is more a movement than an institution has been carrying the tradition of Wahabi movement of Saudi Arabia and of Wali Ullah of Delhi. Even Sir Sayid Ahmad drew inspiration from the tactical moderation of Islam from Walli Ullah in launching Aligarh movement. The Muslim politics as we see today in Aligarh Muslim University is deeply influenced with the Islamic thought of Wali Ullah.

Most of the Muslim scholars and Islamic historians have projected Wali Ullah 'as founder of Islamic modernism' and a reformer of faith because of his emphasis on rational evaluation of Shariat. His attempt to present an integrated view of the various schools of Islamic thought was however, more a tactical move for the political unity of Muslims to restore the political authority of Islam than for overall development of an integrated Indian society. His insistence for not diluting the cultural identity of Arab in a Hindu-majority environment shows that his so-called reform of Islam was only for a political motive. His obsession to extreme Sunnism of Sufi tradition exposes the theory of Islamic modernism. His political objective that followers of Islam should not lose their status of dominant political group in state Wali Ullah was against the concept of civilised democracy.

Contrary to his projected image of a reformer, Wali Ullah like other militant group of Islamic intellectuals did not appreciate any cultural and social reconciliation with non-Muslims in an integrated society. His communal bias against the political rise of non-Muslim powers like Maratha, Jat and Sikh goes against the theory that Wali Ullah was a Muslim thinker for Islamic moderation. His exclusivist theory favouring political domination of his community all over the world with starting point in India vindicates this point. In the background of his hate-Hindu political move, Wali Ullah may not stand the scrutiny of being a Muslim thinker for rational evaluation of Islam and its moderation.

By and large Muslim intellectuals have eulogized Wali Ullah that he was deeply hurt with the plight of his community particularly after "Nadir Shah's sack of Delhi and the Maratha, Jat and Sikh depredation" (The Muslim Community of Indo-Pakistan subcontinent by Istiaq Hussain Qureshi, 1985, page 199). But they ignored the communal bias of Wali Ullah, for whom Maratha, Jat and Sikh revolts were "external danger to the community". Wali Ullah hated Nadir Shah for his barbarous invasion but he was more so because of him being a Shia Muslim.

According to Dr. Sayed Riaz Ahmad, a Muslim writer, the Muslim leaders like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Mohammad Iqwal, Abul A'la Maududi and others, who participated in freedom movement were followers of Wahhabi school and carried the tradition of Wali Ullah with slight re-adjustment. Thus, the nostalgic appeal to Muslim fundamentalism had a direct or indirect influence of Wali Ullah on the overall psyche of Indian Muslims. Unfortunately, the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam by Wali Ullah gradually widened the gap of mistrust between Hindus and Muslims of this sub-continent.

Creation of Pakistan was against the pan-Islamic concept of institutionalised fight for restoration of pure Islam. Dar-ul Uloom hardly made any attempt to abandon its pan-Islamic ideology and therefore, nationalist forces viewed its opposition to partition as a tactical move to ensure the growth of the institution by aligning with the freedom movement. Since Wahabi movement and Islamic thoughts of Wali Ullah did not sanction the concept of Indian nationalism, the claim of Dar-ul-Uloom that its leaders were 'nationalists' is not based on sound logic, as they always considered Islam above the nation. 

Religion is by and large known as a path in search of spiritual truth but religious fundamentalism begins where spiritualism ends. Wali Ullah was confronted with the problem of division and dissension among the Muslim rulers. He wanted to bridge the sectarian gap within the community for restoration of the political glory of Islam and interpreted his faith accordingly. His interpretation of faith was hardly linked to any spiritual search even though it is contrary to his tradition of Sufism. The theory of Islamic moderation might have been helpful to his political objective but in long run it pushed Indian Muslims away from modern outlook and also created a dilemma for them. On the other hand it also created suspicion in non-Muslim world against this fourteen hundred-year-old religion. His suggestion for strict adherence to the precepts of Quran and Hadith practiced during the period of Prophet Mohammad and his Caliphs known as classical age of Islam ('622 AD to 845 AD') is still a major obstacle against modernisation of Indian Muslims. 

Combination of Islamic extremism of Wahhab and religio-political strategy of Wali Ullah has become the main source of inspiration for Islamic terrorism as we see today. So long as the Muslim leaders and intellectuals do not come forward and re-evaluate the eighteenth century old interpretation of faith any remedy for resolution of on going emotional disorder in society is a remote possibility. It is the social obligation of intellectuals to awaken the moral and economic strength of entire society without any religious prejudice.