Rules of the Game

Trained as a lawyer and having been involved in several cases of human rights, Qureshi’s British citizenship certainly allows him to offer us a persuasive yet non-polemical account of various forms of violations undertaken over the past several years in the name of so-called ‘war on terror’. His slim volume takes us through stark biographical and legal facts related to a number of eye opening cases of malfeasance, undeterringly committed by the Western regimes and their allies since the 9/11. A work of this kind certainly offers a judicious and pertinent context to what has been happening to the civil rights of thousands of Muslims who happen to be the victims of willful arrests, summary renditions and continuous physical and mental anguish. Other than large-scale military invasions of Muslim lands such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, whose moral, legal and geo-political rationale remains contested, the arrests of countless Muslims all over the world offer a painful narrative. While such polices and practices have definitely destroyed several lives and those of their dependents, their continuation across the continents well over a decade leaves a bitter taste. It might take many more years and even more strenuous efforts to compute the total statistics of human, cultural and natural losses incurred by Muslim communities and countries at the behest of the war on terror. Other than the obvious political and military establishments unleashing their enduring campaigns, the powerful echelons from amongst the media, academia, ecclesiasts, think-tanks, xenophobes and racists have been the enthusiastic cheerleaders for a pervasive Islamophobia.