A Very Happy 2010….Now Go Kill Yourself!

Figuratively speaking.

A suggestions for a New Year resolution – eliminate your social network existence and reconnect with your real life. Nothing on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or any one of those online social environments will resolve your continued sense of isolation, marginality, meaningless of your life.

Lets face it – you can only really have one or two really close friends and that frankly that is all that you need. We live in a world where we are being told that we have to talk to everyone, and know about everyone. I can’t see the point of that. It was fun for a while, because it was a novelty. But 99% of the people on Facebook are bores, and their interest and cute posts are tiresome and infantile. Do I really need to know this?

No.

So kill your online existence – our friends at Web 2.0 Suicide Machine can help you.

Not sure how to do it, then here is an instructional video.

Have a lovely, fun, real-world 2010.

Losing Our Moral Compass Or When Genocide Becomes A Necessity And Can Be Explained

We have often wondered what led so many Germans to just sat by or appeared to ‘collaborate’ during the Jewish genocide, or the Rwandans to engage in mass slaughter of each other, or the Serbians to look away as Sarajevo burned, or the Pakistanis to celebrate the slaughter of the Bengali. And many more such situations that leave so many ‘civilized’ and ‘decent’ people asking themselves that old question: how can a people do this to another?

Well, this is how we do it.

Civilized, decent people very much like ourselves, very much like our neighbors, reveal the lies, hyperbole, ethnic hate, religious delusions, ethno-centric racism that is worn easily and comfortably and thousands of innocents will quietly bleed, die and disappear. And all along we will go about convinced that we were just, civilized and humane. We refuse to raise our consciousness and our sense of morality and justice above primitive ethnic, religious, and nationalist allegiances.

Max Blumenthal continues to reveal an ugly side of our society that today has become a force so contorting that it is simply murderous and genocidal. And yes, what is happening in the name of Israel, in the name of ‘liberty’ and ‘civilization’ – what has been happening there for over 100 years, is an ethnic cleansing, a ethnic genocide of a people who are ‘not Jews’. And it is events such as this, held on the very streets of our very modern city, that fuel it all.

And lets be honest: a strain of American Jewry – more fundamentalist, rabid and hate filled than anything we can find elsewhere, is fueling murder and slaughter. There is so much evidence of it that even Israeli journalists have had to step up to expose it – see Akiva Eldar’s piece called U.S. tax dollars fund rabbi who excused killing gentile babies.

And then there was this recent discussion, thanks for Tikum Olam, that sent chills down my spine (click the CC to get the english translation):

On the streets of New York City, they are dancing in anticipation of Palestinian blood. They are calling for kill. They are lusting for death. And we still have to wonder how the Germans, or the Rwandans, or the Serbians did it? Right under our noses, and right where our fine media, with its self-proclaimed liberal and civilized values, finds it impossible to report, reveal and condemn.

Never again…..indeed!

The Indians Just Do It Better Or Its Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s Birthday

Lets see, its either this, if you just want to swing

Or this, if you want to do something else, for its Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s birthday and holiday season in The Islamic Republic of Pakistan – what a coincidence!

Seasons greetings all!

And for the Swiss – those few who are so bent out of shape over minarets – a hearty ‘F**k You’ in the form of some scenes from churches in Pakistan, thanks to Pakistaniat.com, on this holiday season:

Oh, and there are more than four in the country, in case you were curious. And indeed, not to dismiss the problems of the minorities in Pakistan, for they remain and are real. But idiocies like that of the Swiss rankle because they remind us of the myopia, stupidity and ignorance that is at the root of these issues. The Swiss, those few at least, set no example. Hopefully, this season, the Pakistanis can offer the Swiss a valuable lesson about tolerance, acceptance and acculturation, however constrained and limited.

A very merry Christmas.

See you all next Eid ul Fitr.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s HOME

It is, despite my earlier misgivings, a spectacular production, and worth each minute.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s HOME project is a sight to behold, and a realization that demands repentance.

You can see the entire film by clicking on the image below. Please note, the film is not available in the USA.

Here is to yet another wonderful new year!

Are You Happy To See Me Or Is That A Minaret In Your Lederhosen?

The decision is stupid, disgraceful and racist. I have expressed my views on it in an earlier post called Welcome To The Islamic Republic of Switzerland Or Do You Want Your Burqa In Black Or Blue?

Today Jon Stewart of The Daily Show just calls it as it is:

more about “Single Prayer Option: The Daily Show …“, posted with vodpod

‘Going Muslim’ At Fort Hood Or How Rabid Simplicities Masquerading As Insight Just Sell More Magazines

UPDATE: A recent article in The Boston Review, titled God, The Army & PTSD by Tara McKelvey raises a number of important questions about the increasing use of Christian religious/spiritual material at military institutions, including the pop-psych mumbo-jumbo of Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life by Pastor Rick Warren, to treat soldiers suffering from PTSD and other psychiatric problems. For example, it points out that:

When a 2006 Government Accountability Office report raised questions about whether soldiers were getting the psychiatric help they needed, an assistant secretary of defense disputed the report’s findings, pointing to the fact that soldiers were being referred to chaplains. During this time contracts for veterans’ services were increasingly parceled out to leaders of faith-based organizations rather than to secular ones, even though veterans’ advocates opposed any bias toward faith-based treatment and argued that replacing empirically proven, nonsectarian programs with faith-based ones was a mistake.

As one commentator points out in the responses to this piece:

Major Hasan would have been familiar with the conditions described in this essay. As psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center for the last five years he would have both treated patients for PTSD and have been familiar with the preference for faith based treatments described in this article.

We hear from Major Hasan’s family that he complained about religious harassment during his tenure at Walter Reed but we do not know specifics. It is reasonable to believe that his patients suffering from PTSD might not have liked being treated by a Muslim and almost certainly heard specific opinions about Islam and Muslims from those patients. The inevitable investigation into Major Hasan’s career will reveal the dynamic of those patient interactions.

This is, again, about asking human questions about a human, criminal act so that we may know meaningful and actionable facts and truths about such heinous acts. I raised this point in the main essay (see below) some weeks ago. Searching for the psychology of ‘Muslims’, as the learned Tunku Varadarajan wants to do, or exploring the pages of a religious text, while erasing daily and ordinary social, political and lived reality of an individual is a false, and frankly, racist approach. It seems to be particularly reserved for anyone who can be labeled ‘Muslim’. That word – ‘Muslim’ has now come to take on the meaning of a special species – devoid of individuality and history and to be seen only as a mob, mass, collectivity, blob and spiritually programmed pathology.

∞

It did not take long for overtly racist explanations to be offered. Before facts come fantasy, and before truth comes tabloid opinions masquerading as insight. And it arrived not in some radical, fringe magazine but in the pages of the international magazine Forbes by one of their regular contributors. (I of course ignore the determined Islamophobia of outlets like Fox News.)

Tunku Varadarajan wrote a piece for Forbes magazine on 11th November 2009, title Going Muslim where he argued that:

“Going postal” is a piquant American phrase that describes the phenomenon of violent rage in which a worker–archetypically a postal worker–”snaps” and guns down his colleagues.

As the enormity of the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sinks in, we must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we might dub–disconcertingly–”Going Muslim.” This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American–a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood–discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans. This would appear to be what happened in the case of Maj. Hasan.

Mr. Varadarajan is no clown – he is in fact a a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor for opinions at Forbes. Clearly a man of some learning and yet able to offer us this fine insight:

This is part of a larger–and too-hot-to-touch–American problem, which is the privileging of religion, and its frequent exemption from rules of normal discourse. Muslims may be more extreme because their religion is founded on bellicose conquest, a contempt for infidels and an obligation for piety that is more extensive than in other schemes.

Moving on to ask us a crucial question of whether:

But can the American swagger persist if many Americans come genuinely to view Muslims as Fifth Columnists? The integration compact depends on a broad trust that the immigrant’s desire to be American can happily co-exist with his other forms of racial/cultural/religious identity. Once that trust doesn’t exist, America faces a problem in need of urgent resolution.

∞

One doesn’t quite know where to begin to respond to what is without a doubt an overtly racist diatribe that takes the actions of an individual and paints it as that of a collectivity. That is after all the ideal description of racism: (noun) the belief that all members of a group posses characteristics or abilities (or pathologies) specific to that group. But then again, the learned professor is not alone in this and arrives as the inheritor of centuries of orientalist thought that can never quite reconcile itself to the individuality of the people it labels as Muslims. And he is not alone in America, or elsewhere.

But the learned professor raises specific points which I would like to examine perhaps a little more closely.

He says in this very article that ‘they’ [the Muslims] are more extreme because ‘their’ religion is …founded on bellicose conquest, a contempt for infidels and an obligation for piety that is more extensive than in other schemes.

Only sheer hubris combined with willful amnesia can allow this gentleman to offer us this explanation. Hubris as he sits as a citizen of a nation that is at this very moment in violent and repressive conquest of at least two once sovereign nations, and whose army has repeatedly insisted on a sheer contempt for the infidels it has found there and encouraged its soldiers to piety the likes of which can only make the foundations of our Republic weaker. The hundreds of thousands that have died since 2001 under the guns and arrogance of an overtly Christian/Evangelical administration that also led us to become instigators of war crimes, violators of international law and perpetrators of mass murder perhaps may not agree that it is Islam that is intrinsically programmed to encourage mass violence, conquest and/or piety.

(For those with short memories, see Micklethwait/Wooldridge’s The Right Nation, or Chris Hedges’ American Fascists or Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming or any number of others books on this issue)

I don’t think I have to elaborate on our occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I will move to the next point – Islam’s unique contempt for infidels and its piety. Really? Is it that unique? Lets see.

In a fabulous piece written by the relentless Jeff Sharlet for Harpers Magazine title “Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade For A Christian Military”, he points out that:

When Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office in January, he inherited a military not just drained by a two-front war overseas but fighting a third battle on the home front, a subtle civil war over its own soul. On one side are the majority of military personnel, professionals who regardless of their faith or lack thereof simply want to get their jobs done; on the other is a small but powerful movement of Christian soldiers concentrated in the officer corps.

What men such as these have fomented is a quiet coup within the armed forces: not of generals encroaching on civilian rule but of religious authority displacing the military’s once staunchly secular code. Not a conspiracy but a cultural transformation, achieved gradually through promotions and prayer meetings, with personal faith replacing protocol according to the best intentions of commanders who conflate God with country. They see themselves not as subversives but as spiritual warriors—“ambassadors for Christ in uniform,” according to Officers’ Christian Fellowship; “government paid missionaries,” according to Campus Crusade’s Military Ministry.

This is perhaps one of the scariest pieces of journalism I have read, reminding us of the infiltration of Christian fundamentalist ideology infesting the armed forces and its consequences for our operations abroad. Perhaps the learned professor would do well to read his words, including:

Within the fundamentalist front in the officer corps, the best organized group is Officers’ Christian Fellowship, with 15,000 members active at 80 percent of military bases and an annual growth rate, in recent years, of 3 percent. Founded during World War II, OCF was for most of its history concerned mainly with the spiritual lives of those who sought it out, but since 9/11 it has moved in a more militant direction. According to the group’s current executive director, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Bruce L. Fister, the “global war on terror”—to which Obama has committed 17,000 new troops in Afghanistan—is “a spiritual battle of the highest magnitude.” As jihad has come to connote violence, so spiritual war has moved closer to actual conflict, “continually confronting an implacable, powerful foe who hates us and eagerly seeks to destroy us,” declares “The Source of Combat Readiness,” an OCF Scripture study prepared on the eve of the Iraq War.

As we look across to our Israeli allies, we ironically (or perhaps not) find in fact the same problem there! In a scathing piece written by Christopher Hitchens called An Army of Extremists for Slate Magazine, he pointed out that:

Recent reports of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in the course of the intervention in Gaza have described the incitement of conscripts and reservists by military rabbis who characterized the battle as a holy war for the expulsion of non-Jews from Jewish land. The secular Israeli academic Dany Zamir, who first brought the testimony of shocked Israeli soldiers to light, has been quoted as if the influence of such extremist clerical teachings was something new. This is not the case.

And should one have thought that this was simply a rare exception, he goes on to remind us that:

Possibly you remember Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the man who in February 1994 unslung his weapon and killed more than two dozen worshippers at the mosque in Hebron. He had been a physician in the Israeli army and had first attracted attention by saying that he would refuse to treat non-Jews on the Sabbath. …[I]n the March 22 New York Times about the preachments of the Israeli army’s latest chief rabbi, a West Bank settler named Avichai Rontzski who also holds the rank of brigadier general. He has “said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath … is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred.” Those of us who follow these things recognize that statement as one of the leading indicators of a truly determined racist and fundamentalist. Yet it comes not this time in the garb of a homicidal lone-wolf nut bag but in the full uniform and accoutrement of a general and a high priest.

And we can even look outside of the ‘immediate’ military structure, and find piety and a religious zeal for conquest raising its ugly head. In an article written by Jeremy Scahill titled Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder we learn that:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia.The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

In fact, the allegations read as follows:

To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince’s executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to “lay Hajiis out on cardboard.” Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince’s employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as “ragheads” or “hajiis.”

Again, perhaps the learned professor would like to peruse this material if for no other reason than to understand that zealotry, piety, and a desire for conquest is never the exclusive purvey of any one spiritual delusion, but reflects the world views of practically all of them.

But in particular, at this moment in time and history, at this juncture of modernity, if there is a rapid, rapacious, powerful and in fact in execution spiritual movement of conquest and a drive for excessive piety, it is more so in the hands of some of the most powerful military nations in the world. And none of them can claim an Islamic collective mindset.

I will say something about the learned professor’s incredibly racist mistake in assuming that the shooter was an immigrant – as he says The integration compact depends on a broad trust that the immigrant’s desire to be American can happily co-exist with his other forms of racial/cultural/religious identity. But in fact Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is as pure an American as they come; born, raised, educated and trained in the United States of America. He wasn’t an immigrant professor, he was an American.

And he was an American inside a deeply Christianized, racist military structure that has become comfortable speaking about and of the Arab world and Muslims in the most derogatory, demeaning and racist terms. It has become so because its wars are against a people it sees as a mass, a mob, a group, a collective – A-rabs, Muslims, ragheads, hajjis. The latter term is used openly and gleerfully in even such mainstream Hollywood films such as Stop-Loss. (I am sure there are more, but Hollywood is not something I watch with interest or regularity.)

The army has has become so because it is the war that it is fighting and it is here that we refuse to ask the hard question; how much of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s rage was against his fellow soldiers and the atmosphere at the base itself that allowed for a constant and unchecked language of hate and ridicule against an entire religion, people, culture and way of life? Were there, perhaps, white supremacists on the loose? Well, we will never know of course.

But I am sure that the learned professor doesn’t know either. What is dismaying is that he does not have the awareness to ask, but has instead chosen to give public vent to what can only be a deeply personal hatred against all Muslims claiming that it is only political correctness that is forcing America, and her Army, from taking the necessary, collective/racial profiling, actions that it should. He is angry that America suffers from a …privileging of religion, and its frequent exemption from rules of normal discourse.

Lets be clear, the learned professor is not complaining about America’s privileging of all religions, for after all it is not the insanity of the Christian Evangelicals that has bought him to this realization, but that the country is not collectively targeting Muslims! We have to remember that the same learned professor has been an outspoken advocate of racial profiling of Muslims in America,

But dear professor, viewing a crime as the act of an individual and not because of a pathology indigenous to an entire collectivity is less about being politically correct and more about being just and not being a racist. In fact, the determination to not reduce this to yet another all-too-easy Islam bashing exercise is a testament to America’s determination to return to the ways of the law and legality, and to move its society back to a point where it speaks not with generic hatred of an imaginary collectivity but with genuine desire to offer both justice and rights for individuals who commit crimes. It is one of the very set of values we always speak about and insist are what we are killing in places around the world for!

And it is a battle that we as American citizens have had to fight hard – to move past the infantile and retrograde desire to hate ‘all of them’ for the actions of a few, to lynch them for their color for example, and move towards the point where we can see individuals and individual responsibility and make them not only the recipients of retribution, but also the motivation for our respect for fundamental liberties and rights.

I do not know what led Maj. Hasan to do what he did. I can’t even begin to understand his motivations, and certainly not his actions. I remain dismayed to learn that he chose to justify his murders on the basis of his spiritual beliefs. Just as I have been dismayed to learn about Jewish extremists gloating about their murders on the basis of their beliefs, or Christian fanatics e.g. those in the US military I speak about earlier explaining their bloody rampages because of their ‘loving god’. Maybe he was just a mentally disturbed and ill person, as a recent NPR piece claims to have uncovered. Maybe he lost his way. I don’t know. I don’t claim to have an answer here.

My interest here is to question our learned professor. And wonder how we have arrived at a moment in time when such blatantly racist statements can make it to the pages of one of our most respected magazines, and then find hundreds who rush to defend his bigotry? Our continued insistence on seeing Muslims as a collective whole, tied at the psychological and moral level into one large blob, is quite flabbergasting and ultimately confusing.

Like a taint, a disease, a scar or a deformation, anyone, man, woman or child, even vaguely or deeply implicated by having been born, raised, educated, traveled to, interested in, curious about things Muslim has his entire identity and all its various other facets subsumed and erased by the label of being Muslim. And once that is established, the individual is safely dropped back into a mob, where only mob acts that are predictable and programmatic based on an formalized, systematized, idealized and perfectly synchronized response to instructions in text books or from the mouths of religious leaders can occur. LIke robots in a massive spiritual assembly line, anything that reeks of Islam can be expected to behave like a swarm, mindlessly following the dictates of their religious books, devoid of individuality, individual morality, judgment, discernment and comprehension.

I am diseased.

There have been calls to sanction the learned professor. I don’t support these calls. I think it would be better to debate him. He has a right to speak, and we would be right to dissuade him off his delusions rather than sanction him to where he would simply continue his nonsense.

Welcome To The Islamic Republic Of Switzerland – Do You Want Your Burqa In Black Or Blue?

Update: 30th November 2009

The vote to ban the minaret was passed. Switzerland, long pretending to be a liberal, democratic nation that respected the rights to the free practice of all faiths, has revealed its ugly underbelly. Amnesty International has already declared the country in violation of the right to the free practice of religion. Their statement was unequivocal:

“Contrary to the claims of the initiators of the referendum, a general prohibition of the construction of minarets would violate the right of Muslims in Switzerland to manifest their religion,” said Nicola Duckworth, Europe and Central Asia Programme Director at Amnesty International.

“A ban on the construction of minarets while, for example, allowing those of church spires would constitute discrimination on the basis of religion.”

And even if it wasn’t, it entire campaign reflects a loving immersion in the joys of bigotry, and ahistorical idiocy.

The campaign to ban the minaret fed off irrational and hideous fears of the bogeyman of Islam, and a deep-seated and seriously bigoted depiction of the faith, its history, its community and its ideals. Suffice it to remind the idiots in Switzerland, that their own Christian steeple traces its own history to the Islamic minaret. Our friends at Chapati Mystery kindly posted a piece written by the historian Richard J. H. Gottheil. called “The Origin and History of the Minaret” in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Mar., 1910): 152-4. where he points out that:

It seems to me, therefore, that a possible explanation of the sudden appearance of the campanile in Italy during the eighth and ninth centuries, would be that they are due to Mohammedan influence. Whether this influence came from Egypt, or from Syria and Mesopotamia, or even from the Maghreb, is a point upon which I should not like to insist. But this much does seem to follow from a study of history of the monuments, that the old idea of the Ziggurat or tower in some way connected with worship at a shrine has filtered down to us through the Mohammedan minaret and finds its expression to-day in our church steeple.

To say nothing to these illiterates that Islam and the Muslims have been an integral part and influence on Europe, and have had a presence there, since nearly 700 years. Europe’s ability to extricate itself from the horrors of the dark ages, and to pull itself onto the path of the enlightenment, could only have happened because of the deep-seated Islamic presence and influence on her culture, knowledge, society, intelligentsia, and politics. To say nothing about the introduction of decent hygiene!

Juan Cole penned an angry piece, title Bigotry Wins in Switzerland, in response to the Swiss-cheese-like thinking that led to this dark moment in European history. He reminds us that:

Switzerland is said to be 5 percent Muslim, and of course this proportion is a recent phenomenon there and so unsettling to some. But Islam is not new to Europe. Parts of what is now Spain were Muslim for 700 years, and much of the eastern stretches of what is now the European Union were ruled by Muslims for centuries and had significant Muslim populations. Cordoba and Sarajevo are not in Asia or Latin America. They are in Europe. And they are cities formed in the bosom of Muslim civilization.

For those of you looking for a more thorough examination of Europe’s real history, and the impact of Islamic heritage on her modernity and present, I would recommend Maria Rosa Menocal’s book  Ornament Of The World, and/or David Levering Lewis’ God’s Crucible: Islam & The Making Of Europe 570-1250 or even Jack Goody’s remarkable insights in works like Islam In Europe.

Switzerland is merely the beginning of this sordid episode. Europe’s hideous shift to the right will continue to make matters difficult for the region’s Muslim populations. Hence it becomes even more imperative that we know how to speak back – with history on our side and with the truths that can cut past the bigoted simplicities, delusions and paranoia being used to defend imagined and ahistorical ideas about Europe, her heritage and her culture. The false claims to a purely Judeo-Christian heritage are as meaningless as the claims to a purely Greco-Roman intellectual inheritance. I have written about this delusion in a previous post titled What A Tangled Web We Weave.

May the battle go to the most intelligent, cogent and coherent.

∞

The poster above has become the source of embarrassment and debate within Switzerland. Printed by the far-right Swiss People’s Party (SVP) it is part of their campaign to put a stop to the construction of mosques in the country, and raise their voices against the presence of ‘the other’. The poster depicts minarets in the shape of missiles, and of course, the ubiquitous burqa-clad woman who apparently represents Islam. As explained in a recent piece in Spiegel magazine called Why The Swiss Are Afraid Of Minarets the poster and campaign was the idea of …

…a German man who is behind the successful anti-minaret campaign. The 46-year-old from Hamburg moved to Switzerland after completing his university studies. He worked as a journalist for the conservative Schweizerzeit newspaper and later for the anti-Islam newspaper Bürger und Christ, or “Citizens and Christ,” in which he wrote tirades against a liberal society. “I’ve been able to be active with the SVP on referendum and election campaigns for years,”

Many cities in Switzerland have banned the poster.

But once again, I disagree with this decision. I think that all cities should allow this poster to be shown and distributed. It is the only way that we can reveal the hatred and racism that informs this campaign and confront it head on. But unless we bring these paranoia and delusions into the open, unless we create an environment where these hate-mongers and racists can be directly confronted and challenged, we will not eliminate this scourge from amongst us.

Banning it will only force it to where we cannot confront it, and remove it, and will empower the instigators of this campaign to continue to spread their hateful message but in more insidious and covert ways.

It is clearly obvious that the Swiss are intelligent enough to see the dangers of this campaign, and the racism that informs it. As the Spiegel piece points out:

The minaret initiative is so radical for a Western country that even some die-hard members of the far-right Swiss People’s Party (SVP) are uncomfortable about it. The former party president and current defense minister Ueli Maurer said he was “not totally happy” about it. It probably breaches the consitutional right to religious freedom and could do further damage to Switzerland’s international reputation which has already suffered in recent months from the UBS debacle in the US and accusations that Switzerland is a haven for tax evaders. The case could even provoke the same kind of violent reaction in Muslim countries as the publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers did four years ago.

There is in fact no point in a ‘violent’ reaction. This is a stupid campaign, by stupid men, and based on stupid assumptions and prejudices. They can be easily, and rather casually, challenged, undermined and eliminated.

There will always be extremists – the ones who are scared, and confused in the face of a changing world and a modernity that seems to be leaving them behind. Rewarding them with public censure only encourages their behavior because it offers them the victory of ‘victimhood’ and ‘martyrdom’. We should not do so.

Print the posters!

I suggest we all print them and hang them up in our homes if for no other reason than to remind us that our silence or our attempts to silence them will in fact be the reason for the ideas that inform this poster to become reality.

Print the posters.

SVP, please send me a copy!

You may also want to read Pankaj Mishra’s piece A Paranoid, Abhorrent Obsession and I quote the paragraph that obviously is an influence and an inspiration for my stand here:

It is a depressing spectacle – talented writers nibbling on cliches picked to the bone by tabloid hacks. But, as Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, the “men of culture”, with their developed faculty of reasoning, tend to “give the hysterias of war and the imbecilities of national politics more plausible excuses than the average man is capable of inventing”. The “public conversation” about Islam…should not be avoided. Its terms have already been set low, and the bigger danger is that it will be dominated by an isolated and vain chattering class that, rattled by a changing world, seeks to reassure us by digging an unbridgeable trench around our minds and hearts.

An Entity Conceived In Hatred, Survives On Hatred Or How Abul Kalam Azad’s Fears Became Pakistan

Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed (11 November 1888 – 22 February 1958) was a Muslim scholar and a senior political leader of the Indian independence movement. He was a vociferous advocate for the unity of India, opposing the partition of India on communal lines. Following India’s independence, he became the first Minister of Education in the Indian government.

A learned Islamic scholar, Maulana Azad opposed Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his march to create a separate homeland for India’s Muslims. I came across a fascinating interview that he gave in 1946 to a Lahore magazine that reveals his clarity of thought and prescience of mind.

Confronted with the partition of India, something that he vehemently opposed, he warned with great prescience and foresight that:

We must remember that an entity conceived in hatred will last only as long as that hatred lasts. This hatred will overwhelm the relations between India and Pakistan. In this situation it will not be possible for India and Pakistan to become friends and live amicably unless some catastrophic event takes place. The politics of partition itself will act as a barrier between the two countries. It will not be possible for Pakistan to accommodate all the Muslims of India, a task beyond her territorial capability. On the other hand, it will not be possible for the Hindus to stay especially in West Pakistan. They will be thrown out or leave on their own.

The prominent Muslims who are supporters of Muslim League will leave for Pakistan. The wealthy Muslims will take over the industry and business and monopolise the economy of Pakistan. But more than 30 million Muslims will be left behind in India. What promise Pakistan holds for them? The situation that will arise after the expulsion of Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan will be still more dangerous for them. Pakistan itself will be afflicted by many serious problems. The greatest danger will come from international powers who will seek to control the new country, and with the passage of time this control will become tight. India will have no problem with this outside interference as it will sense danger and hostility from Pakistan.

Could he have been proven more correct? These are the insights of a brilliant mind, one that refused to be cowed by the populist rhetoric of the age and instead choose to courageously speak to the dangers that lay in the future. He was constantly castigated by the more fundamentalist and extremist interpreters of Islamic philosophy and thought. He however remained aware of the actual history of Islam in India:

Muslim history is an important part of Indian history. Do you think the Muslim kings were serving the cause of Islam? They had a nominal relationship with Islam; they were not Islamic preachers. Muslims of India owe their gratitude to Sufis, and many of these divines were treated by the kings very cruelly. Most of the kings created a large band of Ulema who were an obstacle in the path of the propagation of Islamic ethos and values. Islam, in its pristine form, had a tremendous appeal and in the first century won the hearts and minds of a large number of people living in and around Hejaz. But the Islam that came to India was different, the carriers were non-Arabs and the real spirit was missing. Still, the imprint of the Muslim period is writ large on the culture, music, art, architecture and languages of India. What do the cultural centres of India, like Delhi and Lucknow, represent? The underlying Muslim spirit is all too obvious.

I highly recommend reading the entire interview, if for no other reason than to remember that there were dissenting voices to the journey to partition, and that the creation of a Muslim homeland was a project that required political and social planning. It was not a natural outcome of the reality of India and his society – the Hindus and Muslims do not belong to two separate world views or irreconcilable social spheres. In fact, India’s reality was quite the contrary.

Our future – that of Pakistan and India, is dependent on an honest and clear-sighted reading of the political, economic, social and even personal factors that led to the partition. Dreamy and misleading fantasies about irreconcilable religious worldviews will only continue to divide us and confuse it. It will make reconciliation and collaboration impossible.

Maulana Azad’s words remind us that it could all have been a different possibility. And that the different possibility always remains within our grasp. This is not some naive call for ‘reunification’ mind you. It is a reminder simply that our antagonisms, suspicions and fears are manufactured and maintained by powerful social, political and historical forces. They were made by man, and can be unmade by man. And they will require courage and honesty to dismantle. For dismantle they must be if we are to find normalcy – peace, trust, collaboration and calm across that infamous, blood stained border that divides India from Pakistan.

Not In Our Name: Hamburg Artists Speak Out Against A Segregated City

A group of artists, intellectuals and concerned citizens have issued a ‘Not In Our Name’ statement to the city development authorities demanding that the ‘planned’ city and its extensive ‘gentrification’ be immediately stopped and that it not be used to create socially and class segregated ‘ghettos’ that privilege the few over the culture, social space and life of the city and it many diverse communities.

The original statement in Germany can be read here Not In Our Name, Marke Hamburg and an English translation is available here Not In Our Name.

Some key paragraphs that highlight the ideas of the manifesto:

• In Hamburg’s case, the competition now means that city politics are increasingly subordinated to an “Image City”. The idea is to send out a very specific image of the city into the world: the image of the “pulsating capital”, which offers a “stimulating atmosphere and the best opportunities for creatives of all stripes”. A local marketing company feeds this image to the media as “the brand Hamburg“. It is flooding the republic with brochures that turn Hamburg into a consistent, socially passified fantasyland with Elbe Philharmonic and table dancing, Blankenese and Schanzenviertel, agency life and art scenes, local Harley Days, gay parades in St. Georg, alternative art spectacles in the “HafenCity“, Reeperbahn festivals, fan miles and Cruise Days. Hardly a week goes by without some tourist mega-event carrying out its “brand-strengthening function.”
• Stop this shit. We won’t be taken for fools. Dear location politicians: we refuse to talk about this city in marketing categories. We don’t want to “position” local neighborhoods as “colorful, brash, eclectic” parts of town, nor will we think of Hamburg in terms of “water, cosmopolitanism, internationality,” or any other “success modules of the brand Hamburg” that you chose to concoct..We hereby state, that in the western city center it is almost impossible to rent a room in a shared flat for less than 450 Euro per month, or a flat for under 10 Euro per square meter. That the amount of social housing will be slashed by half within ten years. That the poor, elderly and immigrant inhabitants are being driven to the edge of town by Hartz IV (welfare money) and city housing-distribution policies. We think that your “growing city” is actually a segregated city of the 19th century: promenades for the wealthy, tenements for the rabble.
• We, the music DJs, art, film and theater people, the groovy-little-shop owners and anyone who represents a different quality of life, are supposed to function as a counterpoint to the “city of subterranean parking” (Süddeutsche Zeitung). We are meant to take care of the atmosphere, the aura and leisure quality, without which an urban location has little chance in the global competition. We are welcome. In a way. On the one hand. On the other, the blanket development of urban space means that we – the decoys – are moving out in droves, because it is getting increasingly impossible to afford space here.
• We say: A city is not a brand. A city is not a corporation. A city is a community. We ask the social question which, in cities today, is also about a battle for territory. This is about taking over and defending places that make life worth living in this city, which don’t belong to the target group of the “growing city”. We claim our right to the city – together with all the residents of Hamburg who refuse to be a location factor.

Suddenly, I like Hamburg.

The gentrification of the life of cities is taking place all across Europe. Stockholm is suffering this disease, rapidly creating little ‘middle class’ ghetto estates that lack any sense of human existence and reflect the complete degradation of human life to that of work and rest before returning to work. Cold glass and concrete buildings that look increasingly like fashionable prison cells are being sold on the market, with streets devoid of commerce, society or even a real natural settings to take pleasure in. And the public square, where people can gather, mingle, savor a cup of coffee, has been completely erased! Stockholm has no public squares! But it has a lot of the same second-rate shopping boutiques and very similar, cookie-cutter yuppie drones walking around wearing the same faux-designer clothing!

The conformity of modernity is suffocating and it is being manufactured by some lowly educated machine tool bureaucrat with no imagination of sense of the human, diligently working his way to the pensioned life s/he has been dreaming of since graduating from some technical college.

This is especially personal because I lived through the years when the life, society, diversity, uniqueness, quirkyness and sheer magnificent madness of New York was pillaged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The rape of Times Square that transforemed this squalid but human, complex, diverse, challenging and provocative space into a anesthetized, lobotomized, corporatized, disneyfied infantile playpen was perhaps the symbolic act of those years.

So thank you Hamburg!

It is time to stop this shit!

Saying ‘Fuck Off’ In Muslim And Why I Say It So Often!

I was days away from penning a piece about how we should neither ask or give ‘collectivist’ explanations for acts of violence carried out by people 1) using Islam as a justification, 2) with Arabic/Islamic/Muslim names, and 3) veiling their illegal, violent and inhumane activities behind a language and rhetoric of Islam.

But Ali Eteraz beat me to it, and did it more articulately and with greater clarity. By the way, I have quoted from Eteraz’s works in the past. He has also recently published what looks like a fascinating memoir. The book is called Children of Dust and chronicles his journey from a village in Pakistan to the USA where he remained the rest of his life.

In a piece called Muslims Should Raise The Other Finger , written in the aftermath of the Fort Hood shootings and the massive outcry against ‘Muslims’ and ‘Islam’ that emerged overtly or surreptitiously (and obviously not for the first or the last time), Ali gets right down to it and says:

There is no need for one Muslim to condemn the crimes of another. Collective responsibility cannot, and should not, be accepted. Where one accepts collective responsibility one opens the door to collective punishment. Are Muslims individuals? Or are they one singular marionette that pirouettes each time its string is pulled?

Saving a particular, and well inspired, bile for a certain individual who recently wrote a very stupid piece in the Huffington Post

One of the most egregious acts of kowtowing to the “massa” occurred recently in the aftermath of the Fort Hood shootings. At Huffington Post, Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Salam al-Maryati wrote an article directed to Muslim-Americans, extolling them to “amplify our Muslim American identity.” No thanks. The only thing I’ll amplify is the length of my middle finger.

Time again there is an outcry against ‘Muslims’ that insists and demands that they [the Muslims] condemn acts of individuals or individual groups, as if this community – hundreds of millions of people, dozens of different cultures and ethnicities, hundreds of different histories and heritages, and dozens of political national groups were all somehow tied to each other and aware and responsible for the acts of all within it.

No other group is expected or asked to perform such demeaning and degrading ‘collective’ apologia. A Jewish settler slaughters a Prime Minister, but he is quickly seen as an ‘individual’, ‘an extremist’ and unrepresentative of his people. A Christian fanatic blows up a Government building in Oklahoma, but churches are not raided, nor charities closed. Christian soldiers in America’s armies are out there killing and murdering civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, and yet few are exploring the pages of the New Testament to find its ‘genetic’ coding for violence. Or insisting that every Evangelical take responsibility for their actions and ‘do something about it’. A post office shooter kills off colleagues he finds boring, but we never investigate his religious feelings or delusions as a source of an explanation.

But god-forbid you have a 1) Arabic name, 2) come from a country with a predominantly Muslim heritage, or 3) traveled to or worked in or slept with a prostitute from a country with a predominantly Muslim heritage, and all bets are off and we are in the realm of the ‘mass condemnation’ and ‘mass apologia’. The ‘Muslim’ community is called to task by political leaders, and all sorts of self-appointed ‘leaders of the community’ emerge from their rats holes to speak for ‘us’.

Who are these people?

Islam has no clergy. And no illiterate, provincial or self-selected Mullah or Maulvi speaks for me or anyone in the community. It is not their role, it is not their responsibility, and it is not something anyone in any community has asked them to do. But from the morons at the Vatican to the morons at the White House, we repeatedly seen this pathetic theater of some lame-duck ‘Muslim’ leader – never heard of before or since standing alongside a bunch of self-righteous and pleased ‘Western’ leaders and playing the ‘moderate’ card. As if standing there with George Bush and mouthing stupidities about ‘the peaceful nature of Islam’ is what is needed and not what will only further encourage collectivist generalizations and racist simplicities.

So with Ali Iteraz I say – fuck you – not just to those who attempt to collect everyone of any random/vague or specific Muslim heritage into a mass, but also to those so-called ‘Islamic’ leaders who have the audacity to speak on my behalf. To turn and see acts of individuals and groups as acts of an entire, diverse and complex community is simply racist i.e. the belief that all members of a group posses characteristics and abilities (in this case, a propensity and preference for religious violence!) specific to that group!

So the next time someone asks you ‘Why is Islam so violent?’ or ‘What is your community doing about this?’ or ‘What is wrong with Islam?’, just indeed look them in the eye, smile, and say ‘Fuck you, you racist!’ There are extremists, morons, deranged individuals carrying out criminal acts all over the world. They come from all backgrounds, classes, ethnicities, religions and nations. To understand a crime we have to investigate it as a crime.

Crimes have personal, political, economic and social reasons and we are better off exploring these, than the pages of religious texts or the ‘psychology’ of ‘a belief’ to see if something in their DNA makes them uniquely susceptible to murdering, or creating illegal settlements, or faking weapons of mass destruction accusations, or building gas chambers to take out another ‘entire’ people.

Footnote: In 2005 I met a very well known American photographer in Jerusalem. I was on my way to Gaza and she was just returning from there. Upon learning that I was of a Muslim heritage, her immediate reaction was to ask me where in the Koran she could find an explanation for suicide bombings.

It took a few minutes for me to overcome my amusement and a growing disdain for this individual. I did however find a few moments of control to respond.

I turned to her and said only this – that I found it laughable that despite spending 3 weeks with the Palestinians of Gaza, and witnessing first hand their desperate conditions, their daily humiliations, their powerlessness to fend off the systemic violence inflicted on them and their children, their hunger, joblessness, and general hopelessness – conditions that have continued for decades and maintained because of an Israeli occupation, that she was searching the pages of a religious text to understand why the Palestinians engaged in retaliatory violence!

I believe that she kept looking in the pages of the Koran. She may still be looking after all these years!

Her pathetic cowardice and determined recism – one that erased the lived history and daily experiences of human beings, experience that she had seen with her own eyes, and chose instead to wallow in ‘religious’ fantasies and collective simplicities was just too appalling to behold. Suffice it to say, she has gone on to win many awards for her work. In a mainstream world where the mediocre is the magnificent, I would expect nothing less.

Who Was That Busker You Gave 50c To? The Same I Paid $100 To See The Night Before!

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

That is how this wonderfully funny, and yet poignantly dismaying, story in The Washington Post begins describing how Joshua Bell, one of the world’s leading violinists, stood on a Washington subway platform and performed six Bach pieces on a violin worth $3.5 million. As the article explains:

Called the Gibson ex Huberman, it was handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master’s “golden period,” toward the end of his career, when he had access to the finest spruce, maple and willow, and when his technique had been refined to perfection…Twice, it was stolen from its illustrious prior owner, the Polish virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman. The first time, in 1919, it disappeared from Huberman’s hotel room in Vienna but was quickly returned. The second time, nearly 20 years later, it was pinched from his dressing room in Carnegie Hall. He never got it back. It was not until 1985 that the thief — a minor New York violinist — made a deathbed confession to his wife, and produced the instrument. Bell bought it a few years ago. He had to sell his own Strad and borrow much of the rest. The price tag was reported to be about $3.5 million.

And how much did Bell make that day from busking on the Washington subway?

$32.00

You can hear his subway performance here. Its spectacular. But I can’t help but feel that I too would have just walked by, and not even dropped a coin in the bag!

Oh, how I lament my musical illiteracy!

Here is Joshua Bell playing Ave Maria:

Where The Head Spun: November 13th 2009

A wide range of issues came across recently and though I would love to wax lyrical about all of them I find my head space considerably limited to speak of each in some reasonable fashion. But I wanted to draw your attention to some interesting developments, a few of which are being carefully ignored in our press and oh-so-alert media

The Pakistanis are holding elections in Gilgit-Baltistan: Yes, as we continue to babble on about Kashmir and the conflict there, a monumental shift in Pakistan’s stance towards the regions of Gilgit-Baltistan. This is significant because these regions are part of what was once the Princely state of Jammu & Kashmir and were occupied by Pakistan in the 1948 invasion of the state. Dawn, one of Pakistan’s major English daily’s, reveals in a series of detailed reports what is happening there. We should not underestimate the significance of this decision, one that would have required considerable debate within the echelons of power and the military because, as we learn from Dawn

:

The problem though has to be seen in the international context because of the Kashmir issue. Historically, Gilgit-Baltistan was not merged into Pakistan proper because the fear was that it could undermine our claim on Kashmir and it was not merged into AJK because it could complicate a settlement on the area. If, for example, Gilgit-Baltistan is made a full-fledged province within the constitutional framework of Pakistan, India could perhaps argue that the state it has carved out of the disputed area, Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir, is also a legitimate entity and that it is a settled issue.

Of course it is premature to assume that this means anything significant, but we would be wrong to under estimate the meaning of this and the shift in the position of the Pakistani government when it comes to the areas once known as ‘The Northern Areas’. Could this be the beginning of a shift in the language and rhetoric towards the regions of Kashmir Valley? Could the situation there be transformed into a discussion about citizen rights, laws, accountability and representation? The Indians would do well to listen and pay attention. Others, who continue to write about Kashmir as if we are still back in the early 1990s, would do well to try to understand this issue at greater depth.

∞

In Sweden much to no one’s surprise, IKEA is revealed to be a mini-fascist state: Ok, I exaggerate, but there has a new tell-all, gossip book out by a former senior management member of the enterprise who reveals a lot of unmentionables about this otherwise ‘most Swedish’ of companies.  Tidbits include such exciting stuff such as:

On the executive floor, Stenebo claims, foreigners were repeatly denigrated as “niggers.” They apparently had no chance of promotion within the company — something Stenebo blames on Kamprad’s increasing paranoia. Ikea, in spite of being the world’s largest furniture company, is run exclusively by people from Älmhult in the Swedish region of Smaland — the small town where Kamprad himself grew up. “Born on the farm” is how the Swedish describe it. The importance of blood and place of birth within Ikea is no coincidence, Stenebo claims — blatant racism exists within the company.

Ah, yes, that never-ending flower of rampant nationalism continues to raise it skirts to reveal things incredibly hideous!

∞

On a different note, the incredibly obvious has been turned into a documentary, and many are ’shocked’. Philippe Diaz’s has a new documentary called “The End of Poverty?” which reveals, according to a review in Salon magazine, that:

What’s most profound, and also most controversial, in this analysis is the question of how much this pattern of exploitation continues today. Between 1503 and 1660, the precious metals looted from the Americas by the Spanish crown increased the European silver reserves fourfold, funding a massive expansion of imperialism. Today, the World Bank estimates that the developing world spends $13 in debt repayment for every $1 it receives in grants. Exactly how different are these scenarios? Is our affluent, consumer-democracy Western lifestyle only possible because we are, in effect, still stealing from the poorest people in the world?

Well, neither profound, nor controversial, but in fact a banal reality that most ignore willingly. This of course is not a criticism of the film which hopefully can educate many more about how things actually work. I was also reminded of Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines & The Making Of The Third World the only work I know that actually asks the obvious question: How did the 3rd World become the 3rd World? - something that is rarely if ever discussed, and certainly never approached in our much celebrated higher education institutions.

∞

Speaking of the scourge of terrorism, yet another lame-duck reporter for the New York Times reminds us, or purports to remind us, that Pakistani pop musicians seems to be producing a lot of music criticizing America, while ignoring the threat of the Taliban.  Adam B. Ellick is indignant at the Pakistani musicians, particularly the new generation of pop stars at their clear ignorance and irresponsibility. Oddly, it never occurs to him that the reason could be that the Pakistanis do in fact consider America to be a more real, dangerous and immediate threat to the country than the marginal, and very small so-called Taliban threat!

It seems beyond his ability to accept that perhaps most Pakistani musicians, much like their countrymen, are focus on the core problem that has plagued the country since the late 1950s i.e. American intervention and meddling in the nation’s affairs, facilitated and supported by a cabal of shallow, venal elites bent on retaining control of legal and illegal revenue sources. That includes the military mind you. And that they understand that ridding Pakistan of America – and Afghanistan for that matter, will rid the country of the so-called Taliban too! In fact, I have quoted Eqbal Ahmed frequently to make this point. His analysis is from some decades ago when he said:

There is an increasingly perceptible gap between our need for social transformation and America’s insistence on stability, between our impatience for change and American’s obsession with order, our move towards revolution and America’s belief in the plausibility of achieving reforms under the robber barons of the ‘third world’, our longing for absolute national sovereignty and America’s preference for pliable allies, our desires to see our national soil free of foreign occupation and America’s alleged need for military bases.

And that was back in the 1970s! Mr. Ellick’s blinders make it impossible for him to see how his nation is seen from the perspective of a Pakistani’s economic and political emasculation, a trait shared by most every American reporter reporting from that country. Now lets see, where did I put my iPod play-list of American pop musicians sonorously protesting her illegal wars, torture centers, illegal detentions, thirst for the blood of Iraqi and Afghani ‘half-humans’? Oh, wait, there isn’t one!

∞

Speaking of thirst for blood, an American ultra-orthodox fanatic and frankly, lets admit it, deranged lunatic, Yaakov Teitel is on trial in a Jerusalem court room. He is the latest concoction of the fanatical and murderous settler groups infesting the West Bank (I apologize for using the ‘insect’ language here – infest – but it was too tempting not to since it is usually how such murderous religious terrorists are spoken about when it comes to some other religions!). Most of these, by the way, are not Israeli, but in fact, American zealots being trained there and being sent to the West Bank and once to Gaza. Yaakov Keitel made a home in a West Bank settlement of Shvut Rachel, that was also the home of yet another Jewish terrorist, Asher Weissgan, convicted of massacring five Palestinian laborers in a 2005 terror incident.

But, then again, this is not surprising given that deans of yeshiva can go about issuing statements justifying the killing of non-Jews in specific conditions – most by the way are written to justify Jewish killings and harassments of Palestinian on whose lands they are building settlements. The dean of the ultra-fundamentalist Od Yosef Hai yeshiva (orthodox religious school) in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar recently made this enlightened fatwa (thanks to Didi Remez)

“In any situation in which a non-Jew’s presence endangers Jewish lives, the non-Jew may be killed even if he is a righteous Gentile and not at all guilty for the situation that has been created…When a non-Jew assists a murderer of Jews and causes the death of one, he may be killed, and in any case where a non-Jew’s presence causes danger to Jews, the non-Jew may be killed…The [Din Rodef] dispensation applies even when the pursuer is not threatening to kill directly, but only indirectly…Even a civilian who assists combat fighters is considered a pursuer and may be killed. Anyone who assists the army of the wicked in any way is strengthening murderers and is considered a pursuer. A civilian who encourages the war gives the king and his soldiers the strength to continue. Therefore, any citizen of the state that opposes us who encourages the combat soldiers or expresses satisfaction over their actions is considered a pursuer and may be killed…There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”…In a chapter entitled “Deliberate harm to innocents,” the book explains that war is directed mainly against the pursuers, but those who belong to the enemy nation are also considered the enemy because they are assisting murderers.”

The entire fatwa can be read on Didi Remez’s blog site. Thankfully some of this has been noticed by the media in the USA, and words spoken. Glenn Greenwald has written a piece about Teitel and others like him for Salon where he takes to tasks religious fanaticism and madness infesting not just the Jewish settler movement, but the US military and right-wing extremist groups in the USA. Oh, and by the way, Teitel walked around free in Israel for over 12 years before being taken into custody as Alex Fishman reveals in this piece called They Are Not Scared,

They shouldn’t be telling us that Yaakov Teitel’s arrest is a success story. They shouldn’t try to sell us, again, the weak excuse about the individual terrorist that cannot be traced. When a murderer like Yaakov Teitel walks around freely for 12 years, carries out attacks, trains, creates an explosives lab, and builds up a weapons depot with no interruption, this means there is no deterrence.

All in the name of religion and belief – and before members from other monotheism or any other faux-ism start to rant lyrical, just listen to Teitel’s justifications and realize that it is not just a fundamentalist Jew speaking, but that it could be any religiously delusional mind, narcissistic to the core, convinced, through no evidence whatsoever, of his unique mission for god here on earth to kill, murder, pillage and ruin:

“It was a pleasure and an honor to serve my God,” said Teitel at the Jerusalem courthouse. “I have no regret and no doubt that God is pleased.”

What kind of a god is pleased with murder? We should all ask that question.

∞

Speaking of taking the facts to the deluded, Shlomo Sands and Avi Shlaim gave a talk at the Frontline Club in London which you can see here (if you don’t see the video, click the reload button on the lower left side of the video itself):

Shlomo Sands is the author of a fascinating study of Jewish heritage and history called The Invention of The Jewish People (no, it is not an anti-simetic tract and morons who step up to use it as such should be condemned immediately and vociferously. I will do so here on this blog if i have to.) The book is a huge best seller in Israel, and has already been translated into a number of languages. As described on the book description itself:

A leading Israeli historian shatters the national myth of the Jewish exodus from the promised land. A historical tour de force that demolishes the myths and taboos that have surrounded Jewish and Israeli history, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a new account of both that demands to be read and reckoned with. Was there really a forced exile in the first century, at the hands of the Romans? Should we regard the Jewish people, throughout two millennia, as both a distinct ethnic group and a putative nation—returned at last to its Biblical homeland?

Shlomo Sand argues that most Jews actually descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered far across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The formation of a Jewish people and then a Jewish nation out of these disparate groups could only take place under the sway of a new historiography, developing in response to the rise of nationalism throughout Europe. Beneath the biblical back fill of the nineteenth-century historians, and the twentieth-century intellectuals who replaced rabbis as the architects of Jewish identity, The Invention of the Jewish People uncovers a new narrative of Israel’s formation, and proposes a bold analysis of nationalism that accounts for the old myths.

Avi Shlaim is author of Israel & Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations and another fine Israeli historian whose works like The Iron Wall: Israel & The Arab World are must reads. The interview is worth a listen.

∞

Finally, the always provocative, Slavoj Zizik reminds us of the continued delusion conflation of capitalism with liberty and democracy could pose a great danger to our societies in a recent piece in The London Review of Books concluding with the thought that:

Today we observe the explosion of capitalism in China and ask when it will become a democracy. But what if it never does? What if its authoritarian capitalism isn’t merely a repetition of the process of capitalist accumulation which, in Europe, went on from the 16th to the 18th century, but a sign of what is to come? What if ‘the vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market’ (Trotsky’s characterisation of tsarist Russia) proves economically more efficient than liberal capitalism? What if it shows that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer the condition and engine of economic development, but its obstacle?

What if indeed!

Offering Silence To The Oppressed Or How Photography Can Become A Weapon Of Repression

An exhibition called ‘Beware The Cost Of War’ recently opened in London.

Reading about it in the New York Times ‘Lens’ blog left me deeply disappointed and concerned.

Let me explain.

(Aside: Yoav Galai, the curator, is someone I have called a friend for some time now and I hope that he will forgive me for this very critical review of what is something he clearly put a lot of work in to. It is not personal, but merely a reflection on this propensity in our world to fear speaking, to raise a voice, to add details and specifics where generalizations only confuse, perpetuate injustices and acquit the guilty. I am sorry Yoav. I must say my piece.)

∞

In their book Another Way of Telling photographer Jean Mohr and writer/intellectual John Berger present an experiment where a series of Mohr’s photographs, each with their captions removed, are shown to a number of ordinary strangers and each is asked to explain what they see in the photograph. As Jean Mohr himself explains:

Was it a game, a test, an experiment? All three, and something else too; a photographer’s quest, the desire to know how the images he makes are seen, read, interpreted, perhaps rejected by others. In fact in face of any photo the spectator projects something of her or himself. The image is like a springboard. (page 42)

The result was that each individual described the photograph differently, thereby rending each photograph meaningless, and completely erasing it of history, context, intent and meaning and replacing them with what were little more than randomly created ideas based on fantasies, prejudices, and ignorances. The photos gave nothing to the viewer, the viewer merely imposed their ‘knowledge’ – factual and otherwise, onto the image. The images became springboards indeed, but they also became empty vessels into which the viewer could put anything and make them what s/he wanted. The images offered nothing, taught nothing, revealed nothing and as a result added nothing.

∞

Jean Mohr also collaborated with the writer/intellectual Edward Said to produce what I consider to be one of the finest, most important, book of photojournalism ever – After The Last Sky. This book, about which I have written elsewhere, is a masterful collaboration between a photographer and a writer. It is one of those rare photography books that has managed to lift itself from the fashionable but frivolous shelves of photography books and into the more relevant Middle East History section of a bookstore.

The book grew out of an unusual context; in 1983 Edward Said was a consultant to the United Nations International Conference on the Question of Palestine (ICQP) and he suggested that some of Jean Mohr’s photographs of Palestinians be hung in the entrance hall to the main conference site in Geneva, Switzerland. The official response to this suggestion, as Said himself describes it in the book, was unusual; they would allow the photographs to be hung, but no words could accompany them, and no explanations.

It was then that Said and Mohr came up with the idea of writing about the Palestinians – about adding the words to the photographs. As Said explains:

Let us use photographs and text, we said to each other, to say something that hasn’t been said about Palestinians. (page 4)

But they were aware that the problems they faced was not a lack of text on this matter, but perhaps too much of it. But it was also clear that:

…for all the writing about them, Palestinians remain virtually unknown. Especially in the West, particularly in the United States, Palestinians are not so much a people as a pretext for a call to arms. (page 5)

Confronting this challenge about how to convey the Palestinian experience to a reluctant audience was not going to be easy, and yet it was crucial and clear that text was going to be a fundamental act of resistance, and that its place for a people oppressed was fundamentally important because:

Stateless, dispossessed, de-centered, we [Palestinians] are frequently unable either to speak the ‘truth’ of our experience or to make it heard. We do not usually control the images that represent us; we have been confined to spaces designed to reduce or stunt us; and we have often been distorted by pressures and powers that have been too much for us. (page 6)

∞

“Beware The Cost Of War” is an exhibition of Israeli and Palestinian photographs now being shown in London. In a review written on the New York Times blog ‘Lens’, a review titled Stirring Images, No Names the writers explain that:

“Beware the Cost of War,” a show opening Friday at the Blackall Studios in London, will be conspicuous for many reasons — one of them being what it lacks: captions and credits next to the images, which were taken both by Israeli and Palestinian photographers.

The notion is that, without words, the pictures will be freer to speak for themselves.

In a slide show of some of the images we are shown scenes of grieving Palestinian and Lebanese families and of Israeli families. The curator, Yoav Galai, we are told:

…hoped viewers would discard customary ideological and political preconceptions as they looked at the images, many of which are deeply disturbing…

He is later quoted as saying:

“I realized it’s hard to show what’s really happening,” Mr. Galai said. “Once a photograph is out there, people ascribe whatever they want to it. So I thought, why not take all the pictures and tear them away from their narrative?”

∞

Yoav Galai is a young photographer. An Israeli who has documented the destruction of the Palestinian social, cultural and physical space in occupied East Jerusalem, he and I have frequently communicated via email and I respect his individual voice and determination.

But sadly I find myself in deep conflict and disagreement with this entire exhibition, and the silencing of the experience, history, and narrative of the Palestinian people already suffering from decades of silencing, marginalization, and erasure. The entire impression of ‘balance’ here is specious, and frankly misrepresents the situation which is simply one of a powerful military occupier systematically repressing and controlling an otherwise unarmed and desperate Palestinian population.

Tearing away the narrative, the history, the context of a photograph is the best way to further enable people to ascribe whatever meaning people want to images, and hence, only confirm and not question their prejudices, hates, ignorances and fears.

That Israeli historians, intellectuals, writers and journalists can clearly speak of this, admitting to the injustices their government has been executing against the Palestinians, only reminds us of the vast gap in intellectual and physical courage that imbues our societies when it comes to the question of the rights of an Arab people.

This exhibition in its current format ends up committing a number of sins against the history of the situation it claims to speak about, and even about the lives of the people involved.

• The exhibition removes context, so that we never know who is the occupier, and who the occupied. It pretends to suggest that everyone is a victim, when in fact that is not true. Israel is an occupying force, its citizens repeatedly voting into power civilians leaders, most all with deep military track records and connections, based on their ability to ‘handle the Palestinians’. The Palestinians are an unarmed people now trapped in quite possibly the most extensive, professionally administered, rationally planned, efficiently executed occupation regime in history.

• The exhibition removes chronology, so that we never know whether the act occurred this year e.g. the brutal and unnecessary massacre of nearly 2000 Palestinians of Gaza in early 2009 prompted by Israeli domestic political needs and condemned in the recent UN Goldstone Report vs. the aftermath of a suicide bomb that occurred many years ago and the likes of which have not been repeated in years.

• The exhibition removes history, so that we never know what it is that violence represents i.e. acts of legitimate violence in order to resist and overthrow and illegal occupation vs. acts of repressive violence meant to occupy, steal, and control.

• The exhibition removes the ugliest of constant and material facts; the dehumanizing and degrading check points, the summary arrests, the illegal (and yes, please, they are illegal) settlements, the military patrols that enable them, the hideous barbarism of the fundamentalist, fanatical and humanly deviant Jewish settlers, the summary executions, the entire infrastructure – administrative, military, political, under-cover of the occupation regime, the displacements, the senseless closures, and the constant threat of violence that hangs in the air and frequently manifests itself into reality.

The exhibition in fact become a tool of oppression, creating ‘balance’ where there is none, offering the easy consumption of ‘violence’ while ensuring that nothing provokes us to realize the truths that create the violence, the injustices that continue to be perpetrated, and the powers that have to held accountable for what is a clear and simple crime against humanity and massive violation of international law.

As writer Peter Lagerquist comments after hearing and reading about this exhibit:

It’s not only offensive but brutalizing, because it perpetrates another violence on those pictures, and their subjects. They are robbed of meaning, the viewer is robbed of their ability to think critically about violence, rather than merely wringing their hands over it…All that we are left with here is diffuse pathos, the knowledge that violence is bad.  And this simply is not enough; we need to understand something else.

We don’t have to love the Palestinians, but why must we insist on shutting them up? Why must we be so dismissive of values and laws that we with such fanfare created and offered at Nuremburg and enshrined in so many UN charters and Geneva Conventions? Why, when it comes to the ‘lesser’ people, do our voices suddenly find no air, our minds no thoughts, our courage no will and our photographs no captions?

∞

An oppressor wants to erase the voice of the oppressed. ‘Balance’ serves the interests of those exercising disproportionate violence and control over a weaker people and society. A people displaced, dispossessed, ignored, dehumanized, and incarcerated, in flagrant violation of our most valued principles of international law, justice and rights, do not need us to ‘remove’ their context, history and experiences of their suffering. On the contrary, it is precisely words, text, and voice that need to be used to unveil their experience. It is crucial to our responsibilities as reporters, journalists and photojournalists, to speak with courage and clarity and add our voice to those of the weak to counter, and challenge the easily heard and broader disseminated voice of the powerful.

Michael Massing took on the issue of specious ‘balance’ that today’s media organizations strive for and identified it as one of the major problems with journalism today. In a piece called The Press; The Enemy Within he quoted the writer Ken Silverstein (I am a big fan of Ken’s work!) who was then working on a piece about voting fraud in St. Louis and who found clear evidence of Republic Party manipulation of votes but was not allowed to say it as such and encouraged to ‘balance’ it with comments about similar actions, though far less systematic, by the Democrats:

I am completely exasperated by this approach to the news. The idea seems to be that we go out to report but when it comes time to write we turn our brains off and repeat the spin from both sides. God forbid we should…attempt to fairly assess what we see with our own eyes. “Balanced” is not fair, it’s just an easy way of avoiding real reporting and shirking our responsibility to inform readers.

Any easy was to shirk our responsibility to inform readers, and I would add, help them understand the perspectives and principles that are in fact consistently and necessarily defensible. And we are being cowards to not admit that there are principles of law, justice and national behavior and they are enshrined in documents that we love to quote e.g. Sudan, Kosovo, or Kuwait when it suits our needs.

I quote Edward Said from his work Representations of the Intellectual when he points out that:

Universality means taking risks in order to go beyond the easy certainties provided to us by our background, language, nationality, which so often shield us from the reality of others. It also means looking for and trying to uphold a single standard for human behavior when it comes to such matters as foreign and social policy. (page xiv)

My point would be that for the contemporary intellectual [or individual] living at a time that is already confused by the disappearance of what seem to have been objective moral norms and sensible authority, is it unacceptable simply either blindly to support the behavior of one’s own country and overlook its crimes or to say rather supinely “I believe they all do it, and that’s the way of the world?”

To speak consistently is upholding standards of international behavior and the support of human rights is not to look inwards for a guiding light supplied to one by inspiration or prophetic intuition. Most…countries in the world are signatories to a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed in 1948, reaffirmed by every new member state of the UN. There are equally solemn conventions on the rules of war, on treatment of prisoners, on the rights of workers, women, children, immigrants and refugees. None of these documents says anything about ‘disqualified’ or less equal races or peoples. All are entitled to the same freedoms. (page 97)

This exhibition, sadly participated in by Palestinians photographers themselves, further oppresses the Palestinian experience, because it reduces everything to merely violence and sensationalism. This is the legacy of wire photography, and of mainstream photojournalism that chases blood, celebrates murder, and titillates through the tragic.

At a time when more than ever we need to speak with courage and clarity at the systematic dispossession of what little has been left to this blighted people, we have photojournalists and curators participating in a project of silence and obfuscation.

∞

“Beware The Cost Of War’ unfortunately attempts to balance what is so terribly imbalanced. And in that process it misleads. There is nothing to be gained by wringing our hands at the hideousness of blood and flesh torn by bombs. There is nothing to be understood by images of mothers crying. There is no value in the sight of another babies still body. To produce something that can really only provoke pity – a debilitating and cowardly emotion, is to produce nothing at all. (I am reminded of Nietzsche’s argument that… the thirst for pity is a thirst for self-enjoyment, and at the expense of one’s fellow men. It reveals man in the complete inconsideration of his most intimate dear self, but not precisely in his ’stupidity’.)

As photographers we must demand that the text be returned to us who made the works. Our eye and our text is our intent, our ideas, our values and our risks. We must insist that our images not be exploited or left open to the random violence and fantasies of an indifferent and/or confused viewer. Context matters, history matters, and memory matters. We must insist that our words are not dismissed, that the intents with which we produced our images is not marginalized, and that our images do not become merely ‘illustrations’ but are clear statements of our work and our beliefs.

Our words anchor the image, and give it something that itself does not contain; meaning and intent. The caption is crucial because it is also the photographer’s insistence on controlling the use the image is put to, and to what extent it can be manipulated. In a world overrun with meaningless illustrations, the caption takes on even greater value. Context becomes a powerful weapon against propaganda and obfuscation. And a means towards clarity and understanding. We should not surrender or relinquish this right easily. In a conflict mired in millions of words of propaganda, from both sides of course but certainly largely from the mouths of the powerful who have an unbalanced access to mainstream print, internet, and tv media, the words of those who have witnessed first hand are paramount.

Epilogue: A few days ago a Swedish magazine invited me to publish my portraiture from Gaza in its pages. A highly respected publication, it offered me the choice to submit as many images as I liked, with just one condition – they would not use the words that accompanied the work. They only wanted the pictures. You can see this work, images with words, as it appeared in a recent issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review. I refused to let them publish the work, arguing that erasing the words reduced them to meaningless aesthetics, and silenced the voices of the individuals who sacrificed their time and patience in the most horrifying of conditions so that I may carry to the world their sufferings. As photographers we either forget, or prevented from being complete individuals; thinking, creative individuals with opinions, ideas and realizations. We must defend this completeness, and the sanctity of our individual experiences, understandings and conclusions.

Update: The No Captions Needed site, authored by two professors, one from Indiana University and the other from Northwestern University and described by them as ‘…a book and a blog, each dedicated to discussion of the role that photojournalism and other visual practices play in a vital democratic society.” also discussed the ‘no caption’ approach at this exhibit which you can read here: Visual Ironies

Personal Note: This post was edited to ensure that it is understood that it does not claim that the curator(s) intended to oppress the voices or remove context, but simply that the current format inadvertently ends up doing that. This is a criticism of the format, not of the individuals involved, all of whom I am more than sure have the most determined and committed intentions to raise awareness of the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Pakistan In A Nutshell Or Examples in Failures Of The Imagination

Pakistan Receives First of 18 Lockheed F-18C Fighter/Bombers for which it paid nearly $2,000,000,000.00

October 13, 2009 Air Chief Marshal Rao Qamar Suleman of the Pakistan Air Force shows off the country's new toy

Woman & her 3 daughters commit suicide – cause: unbearable poverty

The article points out that “According to sources, Muhammad Sharif was a poor man and leading hand to mouth life with his spouse Zahida Bibi and three minor daughters while the couple would scuffle on an on due to poverty. Yesterday, Zahida Bibi together with her three minor girls committed suicide over being emotional by dint of poor living conditions, sources said.”

∞

The relevance of a nation, the legitimacy of its government, the professionalism of its military and the allegiances of its elite are judged by the welfare of its weakest citizens. As this mother dies, her children with her, I question the relevance of the government, these deadly toys, the professionalism of the military and the allegiances of the elite.

Most post-colonial nations (and I mean most, not all) have chosen a path of purchased modernity - a propensity to believe that simply buying new toys, clothes, college degrees and properties in foreign lands would bestow upon us a European modernity. We are desperate to display it, mimic it, consume it and be equated as being modern. The mimicry of the material is balanced by a determined erasure of the human and the just. I believe that Europe herself has failed her own intellectual and philosophical legacy – as Frantz Fanon argued in his masterpiece The Wretched of the Earth:

Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.

… but nevertheless, it is this legacy that is completely ignored by us. We want the toys, not the thoughts. I accept that we don’t know our own legacies of humanism, tolerance, justice, equality and service. After all, our education systems, particularly those provided to the elite, are principally Euro-centric, teaching us mostly European literature, arts, history, and else.

To be modern, as understood by our leaders, elites and the military, is to be materially rich in the products, behaviors, and tasts that mirror the European/West. Even our politics simply mirrors their priorities.

We are nations of small ambitions. As our citizens die death not worthy of dogs, as we ‘best’ and most educated, gloat about the opening of a new BMW dealership in Karachi, but remain silent in the face of real scandals that are occasionally printed on the back pages of local newspapers.

∞

I wish for a day when a Pakistani government would collapse not because it was less willing to fleece its people or pander to imperialist interests, but because a mother and her 3 children were forced to kill themselves because of the negligence and indifference of a government that was supposed to protect them and their welfare.

Photo Projects I Like: Jörg Brüggemann’s “Same Same But Different”

Backpackers are mildly delusional. I mean that in the most serious way. They travel to some of the most travelled regions of the globe, along paths so well worn that they have been eroded to their skeleton of touts and shysters, but carry within them the idea that they are somehow traveling ‘off the beaten path’ or engaged in some sort of unique journey of self-discovery. They arrive with fantasies of exotic lands, and the belief that their journey will be unique, experiential and enlightening. They insist on remaining oblivious to every sign around them that reminds them that they are in fact indulging in what is no more than another ‘packaged tour’. Facilitated by the Lonely Planet guide, the ‘individual travelers’ bible, and quite possibly the most significant inducer of the delusion that the world is just waiting for the individual travel to explore it and explore him/herself, they simply follow the instructions on the pages, right down the sequence of the experience.

That these travelers, with their illusions of discovery and self-exploration, arrive and live amongst tens of thousands of others doing the same thing, does not deter them from their fantasy. Neither do the many touts, hospitality businesses, tour guides, and others constantly waiting outside their doors to whisk them off to some ‘exotic’ locale or sell them some faux-exotic trinket. Perhaps the best sign of their self-sustained fantasy is their annoyance and aloofness towards other such travelers – they avoid looking at each other. Another backpacker reminds them that in fact they are not indulging in anything unique, but in merely the easy and conveniently packaged. It reminds them that they are not in fact unique, nor on an adventure, not exploring anything, and not ‘off the beaten path’.

Jörg Brüggemann has been working on a wonderful photo project that captures much of this ‘alternative’ but mass tourism travel industry. I wanted to post it here because I loved how these images really reflect the world of the backpacker and how they capture the contradictions that define their experience. The images are intelligent and express his intent and ideas well.

Copy Right Jorge Bruggemann

So what do these travelers tell each other, and their friends once these travels are over? What world have they really seen and experienced? As the entire ‘backpacker’ experience remains largely packaged and delivered with convenience and ease, it remains travel with little or no experiences. The entire path as laid out in books like the Lonely Planet guide or any number of other ones found in bookstores everywhere, is lined by ‘professional’ locals – people who are there to sell and nothing more. Ironically, a backpacker can no longer expect to meet any real experience, individual or situation since all of it is fronted by professional ‘locals’, ready to deliver a ready-made experience, sell ready-made souvenirs and provide ready-made stories for the ‘intrepid’ to take back home and attempt to impress their friends with. This is of course a generalization, but like most such generalizations, also largely true.

Can we ever travel again without the travel guide? I wonder.

The Hindus Live In Small And Dark Homes Or Educating Our Child Soldiers

The minds of children are usually shut inside prison houses, so that they become incapable of understanding people who have different languages and customs. This causes us to grope after each other in darkness, to hurt each other in ignorance, to suffer from the worst form of blindness. Religious missionaries themselves have contributed to this evil; in the name of brotherhood and in the arrogance of sectarian pride they have created misunderstanding. They make this permanent in their textbooks, and poison the minds of children.

Rabindranath Tagore “To Teachers”,

from Chakravarty, A (ed) The Tagore Reader (Page 216)

Jamaat-e-Daawa/Lashkar-e-Taiba Graffitti Near The Town of Gujranwala, Pakistan Reads "THE LIBERATION OF KASHMIR WILL NOT BE ACHIEVED THROUGH NEGOTIATIONS BUT THROUGH THE DEATH & DESTRUCTION OF THE HINDU"

Our wars, our massacres, our suspicions and fears, our prejudices and hatred, begin in the pages our of children’s textbooks.

No where is this more apparent than on the pages of Pakistan’s Social Studies and Pakistan Studies textbooks, most of which were being taught in her schools up till at least 2002 if not later. In a study commissioned by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, titled The Subtle Subversion:The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan, the authors identified a long list of what can only be called hate material taught to high school children in Pakistan.

It makes for sobering reading that I share with you here.

• Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter the temple at a time. In our mosques, on the other hand, all Muslims can say their prayers together. - Muasherati Ulum for Class V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, 1996, p 109

• This division of men [among Aryans] into different castes is the worst example of tyranny in the history of the world. In course of time the Aryans began to be called the Hindus. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 59

• The Hindus lived in small and dark houses. Child marriage was common in those days. Women were assigned a low position in society. In case the husband of a woman died, she was burnt alive with his dead body. This was called ‘sati’. … The killing of shudras was not punished, but the murder of a Brahman was a serious crime. … However, the people of low caste were not allowed to learn this language. The caste system had made their life miserable.” - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 67

• Muslim children of India wear shalwar kameez or shirt and pajama and Hindu children wear Dhoti also. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p 79

• Hindus thought that there was no country other than India, nor any people other than the Indians, nor did anyone else possess any knowledge. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 82.

• …but Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the [1857] rebellion. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 90

• Nehru report exposed the Hindu mentality. - Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 102

• The Quaid saw through the machinations of the Hindus. - Social Studies Class-VII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, ?, p 51

• The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things — Hindus did not respect women. - Muasherati Ulum for Class IV, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, 1995, p 81

• The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilisation. Hindi-Urdu controversy, shudhi and sanghtan movements are the most glaring examples of the ignoble Hindu mentality. - M. Ikram Rabbani and Monawar Ali Sayyid, An Introduction to Pakistan studies, The Caravan Book House, Lahore, 1995, p 12

• Hindu pundits were jealous of Al Beruni. Since they could not compete against Al Beruni in knowledge, they started calling him a magician. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 82

• The Sultans of Delhi were tolerant in religious matters. They never forced the non-Muslims to convert to Islam. The Hindus embraced Islam due to the kind treatment of the Muslims. The caste system of the Hindus had made the life of the common people miserable. They were treated like animals. Nobody could claim equality with Brahmins. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 109

• The Hindus who have always been opportunists cooperated with the English. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 141

• The Hindus praised the British rule and its blessings in their speeches. The Hindus had the upper hand in the Congress and they established good relations with the British. This party tried its best to safeguard the interests of the Hindus. Gradually it became purely a Hindu organization. Most of the Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent. They demanded that the Muslims should either embrace Hinduism or leave the country. The party was so close to the Government that it would not let the Government do any work as would be of benefit to the Muslims. The partition of Bengal can be quoted as an example. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 143

• …but Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the [1857] rebellion. – Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 90

• The British confiscated all lands [from the Muslims] and gave them to Hindus. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 91 [This is stated despite the fact that all the large feudal lords in the part that later formed Pakistan were Muslims]

• Therefore in order to appease the Hindus and the Congress, the British announced political reforms. Muslims were not eligible to vote. Hindus voter never voted for a Muslim, therefore, … - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 94-95

• Hindus declared the Congress rule as the Hindu rule, and started to unleash terror on Muslims – Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 104

• At the behest of the government [during the Congress rule], Hindu “goondas” started killing Muslims and burning their property. – Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 104-105

• The British, with the assistance of the Hindus, adopted a cruel policy of mass exodus against the Muslims to erase them as a nation. The British adopted a policy of large scale massacre (mass extermination) against the Muslims The Muslim population of the Muslim minority provinces faced atrocities of the Hindu majority. [The Muslims] were not allowed to profess their religion freely. Hindu nationalism was being imposed upon Muslims and their culture. All India Congress turned into a pure Hindu organisation. The Congress was striving very hard to project the image of united India, which was actually aimed at the extermination of the Muslims from the Indian society. The two Hindu organisations [Congress and Mahasabha] were determined to destroy the national character of the Muslims to dominate and subjugate them perpetually. - National Curriculum English (Compulsory) for Class XI-XII, March 2002, pp 6, 13, 31, 45, 7, 25, 8, 46, 48, 50

• While the Muslims provided all type of help to those wishing to leave Pakistan, the people of India committed cruelties against the Muslims (refugees). They would attack the buses, trucks, and trains carrying the Muslim refugees and they were murdered and looted. – National Early Childhood Education Curriculum (NECEC), Ministry of Education, Government of Pakistan, March 2002, p 85

• The Hindus in Pakistan were treated very nicely when they were migrating as opposed to the inhuman treatment meted out to the Muslim migrants from India. - Social Studies Class- IV, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p. 85

• After 1965 war India conspired with the Hindus of Bengal and succeeded in spreading hate among the Bengalis about West Pakistan and finally attacked on East Pakistan in December 71, thus causing the breakup of East and West Pakistan. - Social Studies (in Urdu) Class- V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p 112

• Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam - Urdu Class V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 108

The dismaying simplicities and inanities are too many to list here. Suffice it to say that since the 1970s the children of Pakistan have been subjected to a systemic and comprehensive ‘poisoning’ of their minds when it comes to matters Indian, Hindu and the country’s Islamic heritage. The same report outlines in great detail the encouragement of religious violence, the denigration of women, the foisting of an Islamic ideology of Pakistan and other ahistorical perspectives with which the country’s children have been scared.

Professor Pervaiz Hoodbhoy has been documenting the deterioration in the educational culture of the country, in particular, the celebration of religious violence and the projection of a homogenous Islamic heritage of Pakistan, the latter at times going to levels of stupidity that defy commonsense. For example, history textbooks in Pakistan actually attempt to directly associate the ‘idea of Pakistan’ and the ‘creation of Pakistan’ to the earliest presence and arrival of Arab forces on the shores of Sindh! This inane association, in fact violent castration of the history of the region, to all that is perceived to by only ‘Islamic‘ is perhaps the underlying pathology that has scared education in the country for decades. (Please email me directly if you wish to see a copy of this report.)

The quest for peace and reconciliation often begins in the gilded corridors of diplomacy, or the cynical bed chambers of the politicians. It would seem that we would do well to instead begin in the moldy, dank, dark classrooms of the nation’s ignored and underfunded education institutions where the foundations of suspicion, fear, loathing and anger are laid.

In her book The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum argued that:

The ability to accept difference – difference of religion, of ethnicity, of race, of sexuality – requires, first, the ability to accept something about oneself; that one is not lord of the world, that one is both adult and child, that no all-embracing collectivity will keep one safe from the vicissitudes of life., that others outside oneself have a reality. This ability requires, in turn, the cultivation of a moral imagination that sees reality in other human beings, that does not see other human beings as mere instruments of one’s own power or threats to that power.

Martha Nussbaum, The Clash Within, (Page 336)

Pakistani society, from its citizens to its military, is imbued with a suspicion and fear of ‘the other’ defined as ‘the Hindu‘, the nation of whom is India. It is cultivated in their minds at an age when they are hardly able to think, and more susceptible to the perspectives and dogmatism of their adults.

It is a dogmatism, bigotry and hate that is of course mirrored across the border in India, particularly during the hideous eight years the Indian democracy was under the guidance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In a series of terse and critical essays, India’s Outlook magazine featured a series of articles by writers taking to task the BJP government’s attempts to re-write Indian history with a distinctly communal/sectarian bent.See for example the piece Communalisation of Education by Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, or a piece by the eminent historian Irfan Habib called The Rewriting of History…

I found this last essay particularly interesting because of its focus on the treatment of the heritage and presence of Islam and Muslims in India in the National Curriculum Framework of School Education (NCERT) text books. NCERT is a technically a private body, but has close links to the Ministry of Education (MoE), with NCERT’s head being chosen by the MoE. The Supreme Court has in fact defined the NCERT back into the government and given broad authority.

I quote Habib himself:

Given its view of Muslims as utter barbarians, the Sangh Parivar is naturally uncomfortable with Muslim scientific thinkers. Alberuni, whose description of Indian sciences in the earlier part of the eleventh century was described by K.M. Panikkar as “a moment in history”, attracts the ire of the Sangh propagandists who hasten to picture him as anti-Indian, because of his remarks about Bahmagupta’s mythological explanation of the eclipses and about the Indian tendency not to accept external discoveries. As for Akbar the Mughal emperor, who occupies a particularly high place in Indian history, for his policy of tolerance, humanism and patronage of the arts, he is totally unacceptable not only as a “foreigner,” but also as the grandson of Babur, made notorious owing to the Babari Masjid. When the Indian Council of Historical Research, during its pre-RSS past, decided to observe the 450th birth anniversary of Akbar in 1992, the BJP MPs raised the matter in Parliament, one of them even describing Akbar as a “Pakistani” having been born in Umarkot (Sind).(They naturally forgot the birthplaces of L.K. Advani and the like).

Martha Nussbaum provides a detailed examination of the assault on India’s textbooks that took place under the ‘wise’ guidance of the BJP’s historians. A large number of Indian organizations and individuals challenged the distortions, bigotry and outright lies that tainted the new textbooks being made available to Indian students once the BJP had come to power. The attempts to ’saffronize’ education in India i.e. to infuse it with the ideology of Hindutva, became a fundamental goal, with education minister Murli Manoha Joshi, a BJP politician with known links to the RSS and VHP, given the leadership of this effort.

And with an indictment that could not cut more deeply, Irfan Habib warns the Indians that:

If the BJP is to have its way, we would soon be competing with Pakistan in framing the utmost possible parochial view of the past.

And indeed, given the state of books in Pakistan today, a situation that many in its civil society are fighting to reform, there could be no worse insult or fear. Pakistan and India eye each other with fear, loathing and suspicion. The idea of the other as the singular enemy, distorted in its hatred of ‘us’ and determined to do anything in its power to destroy ‘us’ is ingrained into our minds from an early age. At ages when children are still grasping to understand the fundamentals of Newtonian physics, they are subjected to historical, sectarian, and political indoctrination that they can neither comprehend nor question. In fact, they are encouraged not to question at all. And perhaps that is why this indoctrination must take place at so early an age – an age where critical thought could develop but instead unquestioning obedience and obeisance is encouraged.

Our child soldiers are being prepared as we speak. They, with their distortions and prejudices, will eventually man the corridors of diplomacy, politics, military and the citizenry. They will, except for a handful few able to break the pattern, carry within them the lessons of their youth, the unexamined prejudices and hatred of their adolescence. To imagine that their distorted world views, developed under the authority of a state and its adult voices, will not color their engagement with ‘the other’ is to be naive at best, irresponsible at worse. It is a world view apparent in the language of our military and our politicians today – bent as they are on working with caricatures and generalizations that convince them that only barbarians and killers live on the other side of the borders.

Its time to read new books.

The New India? Or How It Became Just Like Everyone Else!

I came across this piece in the recent issue of Granta and it made for depressing reading.

Capital Gains by Rana Dasgupta

I was not quite sure what about it really cut to the quick. I am still not sure.

Perhaps it is some sort of romanticism about a world in the past that cared for something more than just material wealth, brand awareness, consumer choice and flash. But I have read Robert Musil’s A Man Without Qualities and know well that such a world never existed. There is a surprising continuity in man’s perpetual search for the banal, the bombastic and the brilliantine!

Perhaps it was that it reminded me so much of the Karachi that i grew up in – vapid, empty, all show and no go, where men were hot air and women simply decorative pieces to be shown and then discarded to their domestic nothingness. Pakistan succumbed to the seductions of the ‘free market’ i.e. open to foreign products and killing all its own, far earlier than India did. And all throughout my early years I would envy India’s independence, her ability to stand on her own feet, achieve engineering and national achievements through her own efforts. While Pakistan was for sale to the highest bidder. Probably another romantic delusion, but certainly with some truth to it. Pakistan became a ‘client’ state back in the 1960s, whereas India was always the independent, confident, self sufficient and not cowed by power structures from without.

But Dasgupta’s piece bought back memories of that earlier Karachi I disliked and feared so much. Today it is a hollow city, its inhabitants without culture, their eyes turned towards ‘the West’, desperate to make their children the equivalent of modern day Janissaries, as the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid once called my generation. A generation raised in Pakistan to be sold to the highest bidders (academic, corporate) in the Western world. If you don’t know, the Janissaries were a force made from abducted sons from conquered countries, and then sent back to those countries to act as soldiers and administrators.

Is India becoming a Pakistan i.e creating an entire class of people who have effectively seceded, as Arundhati Roy once argued from the rest of the nation?

Tarun, the editor of the amazing Tehelka magazine is quoted in this piece as saying:

‘No one cares,’ he says. ‘There are no ideas except the idea of more wealth. The elite don’t read. They know how to work the till, and that’s it. There’s nothing: we are living in the shallowest decade you can imagine. Rural India, that’s 800 million people, has simply fallen out of the master narrative of this country. There should have been an enormous political left in India, but people worship the rich and there’s no criticism of what they do. They face no consequences; they live in an atmosphere of endless possibility.’

The conflicts in Pakistan are not seen as class wars, but they are. I recently wrote a post called Wrapping Photographers Into The Packaging of War about how foreign journalists/reporters are confused when it comes to reporting about Pakistan. Few realize that the rise of insurgencies and voices of sectarian political allegiances are veils that hide large scale class conflicts that have not be resolved in the country.  India’s conflicts in the West (Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Chattisgarh etc.) are class conflicts as well, as reporter Jason Motlagh has recently written in Conflicts Within.

In Pakistan the deprived (and they are not necessarily the poor, simply the cheated, fooled and ignored) are asking for their share, and using religion (in Swat for example) and nationalism (in Baluchistan for example) to fight for their share of the pie that is otherwise in the hands of a minority, venal, wealthy class that just does not care!

I will say that while reading this piece I was irritated by the suggestion that this mindless affinity for wealth and its display, the indifference towards the environment or broader societal welfare needs (education, health care etc.) is some sort of Hindu problem. Such suggestions are simply racist – there is just no other term for it. They are reductive, simplistic, and label hundreds of millions of people from varied class, culture, ethnicity etc. with a broad brush. Many object to such language when it comes to Africans, or Muslims, or Arabs. I can’t accept it here and we should not either.

The greed of man, the banality of man, does not need a religion or a universal spiritual outlook. I mean, has anyone been to Dubai recently? Money and consumerism have reduced that nation to a catatonic bonhomie that I believe would easily diagnosed by a professional as ‘diseased’! It continues to surprise me  the ease with which we speak to the general but rarely ever acknowledge the shared; human greed and frivolity is universal and has nothing to do with religious outlooks or philosophies. If anything, the religions are easily (too easily!) woven into our human preferences and values most of the time anyways – its called cultural adaptation and adjustments!

What is happening in Delhi is real of course. But its not just Delhi – it will happen in every city of India if its not already that way. I would argue that anyone who knows the history of India, particularly the show and pomp of its most recent collection of rulers; the British, The Mughals, the Hyderabadi dynasty etc. will know what pomp and bombast are. Are we truly in a moment of unique crassness and indifference? I am not so sure. And Its not unique to India either. Its China. Its Islamabad. Its Doha. Its Milan. Pankaj Mishra wore eloquently about this India in a piece in The Guardian some months ago.  I remember this paragraph:

In India…the pursuit of economic growth at all costs has created a gaudy elite but also widened already alarming social and economic disparities. Facilities for health care and primary education have deteriorated. Economic growth, confined to urban centres, is largely jobless. Up to a third of Indians live with extreme poverty and deprivation. And militant communist movements have erupted in the poorest, most populous states.

When we arrive in India in a few weeks (aside: this essay was originally written for workshop students accompanying me to India in August 2009) we have to remember that we are entering a dynamic and modern India, but that the stories we will cover are the ones that are being lost in the hysteria of celebration and consumerism. There are many who are richer, but some argue, many more who have been left in the wake of this pursuit of wealth.

As journalists it is our responsibility to add the weight of our voices to that of the weak, to help balance the equation, and facilitate their access to rights, justice, and basic human needs. I think that Pankaj Mishra said it best, in a tribute he wrote for the late Babara Epstein (editor The New York Review of Books), when he said that:

…literary and political journalism requires much more than the creation of harmonious and intellectually robust sentences; … it is linked inseparably to the cultivation of a moral and emotional intelligence; … it demands a reasonable and civil tone, a suspicion of abstractions untested by experience, a personal indifference to power, and, most importantly, a quiet but firm solidarity with the powerless.

I don’t believe that any nation that ignores the welfare of all its citizens can succeed in the long run. I know this from my experiences in Pakistan – a very wealthy nation with levels of deprivation and poverty that leaves one reeling. Certainly in Sweden, where I have now lived for nearly 9 years, I can see possibilities I had previously not imagined; the achievements of a state that invests in the broad welfare of all its citizens is quite a sight to behold.

You can’t build a sky scrapper over weak foundations.

Staying Faithful To The Totality Of Experience Or New Frontiers In Photography

It is something that those of you reading my posts will by now recognize I hold very dear; the absolute and crucial need for a new generation of story tellers to reach past the conventions, cliches and crass generalizations about ‘the other’ that have so informed and influenced a whole generation of photographers, photojournalists, writers and editors.

Some of these are so familiar, so obvious, that they have become truths in and of themselves and no longer require questioning or examination; The hijab as oppression, the refugee as victim, the Muslim maulvi as fundamentalist, the Jewish settler as fanatic, the drug addict as lost, the African as violent and so on and so forth. Our challenge remains to cut past the obvious and to allow ourselves to explore spaces, lives and circumstances with humility and a genuine recognition of the humanity, history and individual agency of our subjects.

I am reminded of a wonderful essay by the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainain that appeared some years ago in the British literary magazine Granta. Title How To Write About Africa., it was an acerbic, at times tongue-in-cheek, poke at the conventions that shackled ‘Western’* writing about Africa. I quote a small piece:

“In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.”

I highly recommend reading the entire piece. As an exercise, try doing it without laughing.

James Gibbons, in a recent review of books from Africa and about Africa, points out that:

Wainaina’s essay is more than an acerbic takedown of lazy and half-informed Western perceptions. Embedded within it is a manifesto of sorts. If we turn inside out the sardonic rules and prohibitions, a vision of African literature emerges that departs from the dark-continent fantasies still entertained even by sophisticates in Europe and North America…In one sense, this is a call to normalize African writing, to make its human scale comparable to that of literature set elsewhere…The dilemma for imaginative writers lies in staying faithful to the totality of their experiences while shunning images that simply confirm … biases. The sporadic media coverage of Africa runs a familiar gamut, broadcasting a continent in perpetual—and, it is implied, essential—peril. The challenge of African writing is to provide some new news.

I love that phrase staying faithful to the totality of their experience and what it implies for the new possibilities opened up to a new generation of photographers and journalists. It was very much what Edward Said challenged us to do with it came to things Islamic and Muslim in his work Covering Islam: How The Media and the Experts Determine How We See The Rest Of The World. And for that matter, even Amartya Sen in a work already on our recommended reading list The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity where he takes typical ‘Western’ assumptions and generalizations about India, her heritage and her people to task.

At the 2008 World Press Photo awards Stephen Mayes, managing editor at the VII photo agency and a WPP judge, pointed out that too many photographers were chasing the same too few stories. That too much of the world’s experiences were being ignored as photographers attempted to find formulas for success and recognition that increasingly seemed to hinge around shooting the same stuff as that which may have already been published or recognized.

This seems even more egregious if not outright irresponsible when the formulas for producing new and interesting stories has already been offered to us. We just need to consider it, absorb it and act on it.

* ‘Western’ here does not refer to a physical land, area or people, but more a metaphor of a certain world view and presumptions about the conditions of man, the relationships between nations, and the role of the ‘haves’ towards the ‘have nots’ etc.

2000 Women Whipped, Babies Dropped From Towers, Red Cows For The Messiah’s Holocaust Or Other Wisdoms Our Elders Taught Us

Click Image To Go To Video

And least some Islamic triumphalist become too content, perhaps s/he would like to examine this ritual being performed under the banner of the faith

But then again, there is no limit to the idiocies that can be sanctioned under the banner of ‘absolute faith’, a form of collective delusion fueled by a deadly combination righteousness, arrogance, i,nsecurity, infantilism and obstinate blindness – oh, by the way, the red heifer is desperately bred, probably genetically modified and not a natural or ‘miracle’ birth which I suspect was the intention of the prophesies, but of course, they edit that detail out in the video. Why wait for ‘god’ to do it when we can do it ourselves and claim victory!

In a piece in the National Review, we are informed that:

In 1996, thanks in part to a cattle-breeding program set up in Israel with the help of Texas ranchers who are fundamentalist Christians, a red heifer was born. There was immense excitement among messianists of the Israeli religious Right, and their American Christian counterparts… (but)…As it turned out, during the three years of waiting for the heifer to reach the ritually mandated age of sacrifice, white hairs popped out on the tip of her tail. This bovine was, alas, not divine. But now there’s a successor, and rabbis who have examined her have declared her ritually acceptable (though she will not be ready for sacrifice for three years).

As humanity, as society, we have to ask ourselves this simple question; what is our definition of a mental illness and if a condition known as ‘faith’ or ‘belief’, something obvious based on nothing but a will to believe, creates situations of human suffering and in other cases large scale oppression and bloodshed, should not that condition be labeled an illness and treated?

I believe this question can simply be answered by determining the human cost – in terms of war, bloodshed, suffering, cruelty, inhumanity, injustice that a belief creates. If murder is an evil, then why not the minds and manufactured beliefs that justify it?

There are many who wish the ‘humanist’ project dead – the idea that we have a capacity for recognising moral values, we perceive our own self and its relation to other selves, and we should try to work toward a notion of goodness that can be accepted by all, and that protects all from cruelty, inhumanity, suffering, torture and injustice. I still believe in this model and remain convinced that despite the cynicism (read: intellectual and moral cowardice) of our age, there are universal principle of justice and humanity that are worthy of defending and fought for. Traditions have their place, but not unquestioningly. For many, ‘faith’ is simply a tradition handed down and then mindlessly followed and transformed by an act of will into ‘truth’. We fear questioning this ‘truth’ – and the consequences of the belief in those ‘truths’. Even if it kills us!

For a quick update on the humanist project, I do recommend Todorov’s The Imperfect Garden – yes, its Euro-centric offering only examples of European philosophers and thinkers, but it is brilliant and necessary. For those trying to read beyond and perhaps explore these ideas in another part of the world, Ifran Habib’s Akbar & His India makes for interesting reading. Or even Sen’s The Argumentative Indian, or something by R. Tagore like Sadhana or The Religion of Man or Edward Said’s Humanism & Democratic Criticism or Representations of the Intellectual.

“Beware the man of one book.”

- St. Thomas Aquinas (the irony is killing!)

Read, something, other than just that one ‘book’!

Make Mine Bigger Or Maps And What They May Say About History And Us

A friend recently pointed to a poster on her wall and explained that it a Peter’s Map. An area accurate projection of the world, its first publication in 1974 provoked a minor firestorm. Perhaps because it revealed how the world’s powers were in fact geographically tiny nations – as if size and land mass may have had something to do with cultural, intellectual, military and social superiority. China was finally seen to be nearly 4 times the size of Greenland. Africa was 14 times the size of Greenland. Its just not cricket!

I recently came across a fabulously interesting and informative website called Strange Maps. Containing gems like Heineken’ (founder of the beer company) idea of a United States of Europe:

Source: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Or a map of the Mahatma Gandhi as India

Source: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Or a mapping of what aliens monitoring our TV signals will see (American TV only – we presume that is all an alien life form would want to watch, particularly given its plethora of incomprehensible and socially eviscerating reality tv shows!)

Source: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

How Hindus Are Destroying New Delhi Or An Exercise In Absolute Foolishness Masquerading As A Stupid Opinion

Writer Rana Dasgupta, famous for his book Tokyo Cancelled, has penned a piece on the city of New Delhi and its rampaging obsession with things material, brand-obsessed, consumerist, shallow, callow and crass. Called Capital Gains it appeared in the recent issue of Granta magazine.

Fair enough – one can write similar pieces about pretty much any city in any ‘capitalist revolutionary’ city anywhere in the world. Take your pick, this story though well written and at times funny, could just as well be about Karachi, Rio De Jeneiro , Bangkok, Dubai, Shanghai, Beijing or even the now-under-China’s shadow, Hong Kong.

I enjoyed reading the piece, but the reason why I am writing this post is less the piece itself, since it was rather banal and unsurprising, but that in the midst of it I came across this rather amusing (and I mean that not in an amusing way) exchange that the write has with an editor at Tehelka magazine:

‘No one cares,’ he says. ‘There are no ideas except the idea of more wealth. The elite don’t read. They know how to work the till, and that’s it. There’s nothing: we are living in the shallowest decade you can imagine. Rural India, that’s 800 million people, has simply fallen out of the master narrative of this country. There should have been an enormous political left in India, but people worship the rich and there’s no criticism of what they do. They face no consequences; they live in an atmosphere of endless possibility.’

‘Do you think anything will come of all this money they’re making?’ I ask. ‘Do you think they’ll try to leave behind a legacy?’

‘They don’t care about their legacy! This is a Hindu society: I’m back for a million more lives – how much fuss am I going to make about this one? Indian businesspeople might run a school or feed a few orphans, but they’re not interested in reform because they are bent on making the system work for them. Hinduism is very pliable. It rationalizes inequality: if that guy is poor it’s because he deserves it from his previous lives, and it’s not for me to sort out his accounts. Hinduism allows these guys to think that what they get is due to them, and they have absolutely no guilt about it.’

Frankly, and I realize that this is merely the opinion of an individual at a magazine that I otherwise respect, I was shocked that such reductive, essentialist nonsense made it past the editing sessions. This statement is so wrong that it isn’t even wrong, its just plain callous, and frankly lunatic.

A city of tens of millions of people, with a history and a heritage that goes back over a thousand of years and that contains within it an incredibly diverse, varied, complex community of people of all walks of life, beliefs, class, ethnicities, cultures, values, ideas, fears, doubts and dreams can never be called ‘a Hindu society’ alone. This is such a vast idiocy that it can’t even be laughed it. Delhi is one of the world’s great cities and what makes it so is that it is a cradle of the world’s heritage and civilizations and that billions have passed through her, lived there, defined it and more will.

It is a world city. Complete with the full complexity and vastness of what that term means.

The so-called Hindu businessmen with their indifference to reform are pretty much like tens of millions of other businessmen and capitalists around the world. Their being Hindu explains nothing about their exclusivity, pursuit of wealth and bombast, their greed or their general indifference. They are just businessmen, much like all the others (Muslims, Sikh, non-believers, gay, straight, black, white and other) that live and work and play and show-off in Delhi. Business is about profits regardless of who conducts it. There are strands of Hinduism (I use this term broadly) that call for asceticism and abstinence from desire. So by what definition is the tern Hinduism being used here by this editor? And what does anyone being Hindu really tell us about their indifference and/or greed? Nothing I say!

An elite, a capitalist elite, weaned on the belief that success is to the strong and clever is indifferent to the under privileged and exploited in all societies across the globe. I am sure that Dasgupta has been to the USA, or China or even to Pakistan. It has nothing to do with Hinduism. The Delhi elite are in fact too much like those in other nations and cannot be understood through the prism of religion. To attempt to explain what are secular acts – power, wealth, snobbery, indifference by deferring to something as ill-defined as Hinduism is irresponsible to say the least, and dangerous at the worst. I say dangerous because it encourages people to essentialize others, to reduce them to a mass and loose sight of them as individuals. It is the same issue I have by the repeated insistence of journalists, pundits, intellectuals and others to explain socio-political issues in Muslim and Arab nations through the prism of Islam. This is a distorting and randomizing prism that allows us to say anything about any situation based purely on imagined ideas of how people transform philosophies (which is what religions are) into worldly actions. It is near impossible to imagine that everyone does it the same way!

Full disclosure: I remain a big admirer of the Tehelka editor who actually made this inane comment and encourage people to read Tehelka magainze – a real example of courage in journalism.

I repeat a comment made by Robert Musil in his masterwork A Man Without Qualities that I am reading now as I wrote in an earlier blog piece called In Bed With Robert Musil Part I

…it is always wrong to explain what happens in a country by the character of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters; a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot. (page 30)

The point being not that there are nine or three or ten or twenty characters, but that individuals are more than just one things and that a religion is simply one piece that can be at times a major and other times a minor influence of their decisions, priorities, values and behaviors. To attempt to blame this on religion, and worse on a religion as varied, complex, and near-impossible-to-define, as Hinduisum is even more egregious.

What is happening in Delhi though disappointing is in fact taking place in cities all across the globe and is not unique to India, or to Hindus. It cannot be understood, explained or blamed on something called Hinduism or the Hindu.

In Bed With Robert Musil: Part I

I am traveling with Robert Musil’s A Man Without Qualities.

I have a bad habit of writing in books I read. I will usually do it on the inside flap of the cover and never on the pages of the book itself. Readings will provoke thought, but more often, I will simply note down a page where I found a sentence or an idea particularly interesting.

What I love about Vintage International’s edition of Musil’s book is that it comes with a number of blank pages towards the end. This is not the only excellent thing about the version; the bindings are superb and allow the reader to bend and fold the book comfortably into his hands without cracking the spine. And its porportions are an excellent example of the size a book should actually be – easy to hold, carry, bend, store and pack.

Any by the way, one copy of A Man Without Qualities read with focus and reflection far outweighs the value of a thousand random and insipid books on a Kindle (who came up with that retarded name?) or any other electronic book readers. Do you really want to carry yet another recharger? Call me backward, old fashioned or just 43-years of age, but I can’t see how a reading medium that reduces your gazpacho soup recipe to the same form and flow as your The Adventures of Amir Hamza can really work for anything other than simple, easy, low-concentration fare.

Call me sceptical, but never thickheaded, I remain open to the idea that it may be more convenient to carry your entire library with you wherever you go, but is it really what reading is all about? And why is it that I can read 100 pages from the printed edition of A Man Without Qualities without tiring, while I can barely make it through a digital, multi-page online article on Salon or The New York Times Magazine?

I ponder.

So, back to Musil. I am traveling in India with him by my side, and I am taking you along for the ride. Over the course of the next few weeks, some snippets of insights that perhaps will also encourage others to read this wonderful European novel.

Patriotism remains a disease despite all attempts at modernity and greater moral civility. This passage could just as well have been written about Pakistan, India and a number of other nations determined to ‘celebrate’ their purity and superiority through banal and insipid and definitely artificial symbols and rituals:

Patriotism in Austria was quite a special subject. German children simply learned to despire the wars sacred to Austrian children, and were taught to believe that French children, whore forebears were all decadent lechers, would turn tail by the thousands at the approach of a German soldier with a big beard. Exactly the same ideas, with roles reversed and other desireable adjustments, were taught to French, English, and Russian children, who also had often been on the winning side…But in Austria, the situation was slightly more complicated. For although the Austrians had of course also won all the wars in their history, after most of them they had had to give something up.  (page 13)

The following passage should be read by most in America’s conservative and lunatic fringe right wing, including the making-too-many-apperences-on-TV and clearly determined to outline his warmongering credentials, the hideous John Bolton, former Permanent US Representative to the UN during the repugnant George W. Bush Administration:

Uninitiated observers have mistaken this for charm, or even, for a weakness of what they thought to be the Austrian character. But they were wrong; it is always wrong to explain what happens in a country by the character of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters; a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot. (page 30)

And a wonderfully funny moment when Ulrich considers the consequences of his choice of a career in the field of mathmatics:

We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one’s big and second toe; there’s work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving. It is exactly as though the old, inefficient breed of humanity had fallen asleep on an anthill and found, when the new breed awoke, that the ants had crept into its bloodstream, making it more frantically ever since, unable to share off that rotten feeling of antlike industry…The inner drought, the dreadful blend of acuity in matters of detail and indifference towards the whole, man’s monstrous abandonment in a desert of details, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, money-grubbing, coldness, and violence, all so characteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logical thinking! (page 36)

I loved this statement that had me thinking since I read it:

Then Clarisse and Ulrich took a walk through the slanting arrows of the evening sun, without Walter; he remained behind at the piano. Clarisse said:

“The ability to fend off harm is the test of vitality. The spent is drawn to its own destruction. What do you think? Nietzsche maintains it’s a sign of weakness for an artist to be overly concerned about the morality of his art.” She had sat down on a little hummock. Ulrich shrugged.

More in the coming days on this wonderful work, but I highly recommend it!

Yes, Your Taste In Music Sucks Or What MTV Erases!

That can either be me talking about you, or your judgment of what I listen to these days. So enjoy it regardless!

The Carolina Chocolate Drops are an old style, talented, string band carrying on the tradition of some of the greatest string musicians from North and South Carolina. Tell me that Rhiannon Giddens voice isn’t simply hair raising!

The next videos is from the brilliant documenta/film called Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus – A tour of the American south through its music and its people.

I loved this film so much that I have been listening to the likes of Jim White, Wovenhand, Johnny Dowd, Mellisa Swingle, and The Handsome Family ever since!

This scene from the film, an interview with Lee Sexton, should be a photograph! I remember watching it the first time and thinking that I would love to have been there to shoot the moment – that perfect artificial light, the beautiful window beam, that perfect and magnificent presence of age and experience embodied in this man. The scene only gets better in the second session when a younger man joins him in the interview – this is a beautiful photographic moment! This is an American light!

David Eugene Edwards – the lead singer of what was once 16 Horsepower and now, more recently Wovenhand was also introduced to me by this film. This is Christian music but seriously spiritual music. Not the cheesy, mass produced, muzak you find in religious bookstores. This is the sound of the belief of the South and in it one begins to see and understand a certain side of America that we often ignore what with our obsession with things New York, LA or Chicago!

Then there was the beautiful Melissa Swingle who appeared in a short clip on the film and stole my heart! Well, my musical heart with the striking, jagged, interupted voice that had so much vulnerability in it that one could not help but be smitten. She lead for the band Trailer Bride, which has disbanded and now she is with a band called The Moaners – hard,, southern rock that I am not such a big fan of. But Melissa remains a wonderful talent – see her song on the film itself!

Moving on: Adem – brilliant, individual singer, you have to listen to. His new album ‘Takes’ is a must:

or

There will be more in the near future!

And What Did You Hear, My Blue Eyed Son

No words. Just music. Thanks to DuckRabbit for reminding me as well of one of my favorite Dylan songs.

Where did this music go? Where did these words go? Where did this voice go? Doesn’t our generation deserve this as well?

I wonder.

Losing My Religion To Tomorrow’s Headlines

Via Sepia Mutiny:

This is RizMC

Realities, Myths, Fantasies & Paranoias: The Muslims – Get To Know Them Series

Professor Yoginder Sikand recently posted an extensive review of Abdelwahab El-Affendi’s Who Needs An Islamic State. The book is a fascinating challenge to political Islamists everywhere and confronts them on their simplistic, utopian and definitely mythical ideas about an earlier pure, ideal, perfect Islamic past. As Professor Sikand writes:

El-Affendi is particularly critical of modern Islamist ideologues, such as the Egyptian Syed Qutb and the Pakistani Abul Ala Maududi, who conceived of an ideal Islamic state as being totalitarian, anti-democratic, authoritarian and coercive. He is bitter about what he calls the Islamists’ ‘self-righteous pretensions’, which translates into ‘a readiness to resort to violence at the slightest pretext’. He likens them to the Khawarij or Kharijites, an early splinter group from among the Muslims, who saw themselves alone as true Muslims, and the rest of the world, including other Muslims, as deviant, aberrant, even anti-Islamic, thus ruling out any room for compromise.

While still upholding the notion of a Muslim state molded or guided by religio-moral concerns and principles, el-Affendi points to the serious gaps in modern Islamist political thought, indicating the way forward for the emergence of a genuinely democratic, pluralist and contextually-relevant Muslim political discourse.

∞

I also found Salman Hameed’s blog Irtiqa. As he describes it, it:

…tracks and comments on news relevant to the interplay of science & religion – including scientific debates taking place in the Muslim world. Irtiqa literally means evolution in Urdu. But it does not imply only biological evolution. Instead, it is an all encompassing word used for evolution of the universe, biological evolution, and also for biological/human development. While it has created confusion in debates over biological evolution in South Asia, it provides a nice integrative name for a blog that addresses issues of science & religion.

Salmam Hameed is an Assistant Professor of Integrated Science & Humanities at Hampshire College, Massachusetts and working “…on understanding the rise of creationism in contemporary Islamic world and how Muslims view the relationship between science & religion.”.

Check it out – There was an amusing discussion about a mythical Halal Browser – a poke at the recently announced Koogle a Kosher browser – no, I kid you not! The Halal browser drew some comments from Karachi blogger Tazeen Javed about its seductive features for the obscurantists.

∞

I also found, thanks to Salman Hameed something that I had been looking for for months – a survey of educational institutions in Pakistan and in particular the spread of madrassas as far as the country’s education structure goes. Here is a fascinating piece by Asim Khwaja called The Madrassa Myth that examines how pervasive a presence these religious institutions have in the country. The conclusion: not much! Though as one commentator points out, unregistered madrassas may not be in the data. Worth a read.

∞

And then from my own bookshelves I found, while dusting them of course, copies of Fazlur Rahman’s Islam and Islam & Modernity.  Fazlur Rahman studied Arabic at Punjab University,  went to Oxford University where he wrote a thesis on Ibn Sina. He then taught at at Durham University and then at McGill University where he taught Islamic studies until 1961. A noted Islamic scholar, he was also the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Islamic Thought at the University of Chicago. And perhaps most obviously, he was reviled and hounded out of Pakistan where he had been invited to head the Central Institute of Islamic Research. As explained by Hangingodes:

Anyone examining the newspapers of second half of 68′ would know with ease that the whole episode was one of the earliest and most unfortunate sagas of political hijacking of Islam. It is immaterial whether Fazlur Rahman was labeled a kaafir, an apostate or a religious hypocrite and how the political environment at that time overshadowed an otherwise academic issue; what is important however, that Fazlur Rahman proved to be a victim of misdirected traditionalist emotionalism and paid the heavy price of abandoning his cherished goal of transforming intellectual heritage of Muslims and deploying a modern religious education policy in Pakistan.

A brilliant man, a superb scholar, his works are the earliest influence on my own ideas about the study of religions and in particular the rigorous and modern examination and investigation of the religion of Islam. I recommend both Islam and Islam & Modernity as places to start, the latter is in fact a fabulously enlightening work!

Great Moments In Film History: The Bat Mitzvah Singer, Starsky & Hutch

The singer is Dan Finnerty, and the scene is from the otherwise lame movie re-make of the tv series Starsky & Hutch starring Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughan and Ben Stiller.

Finnerty is also the wedding singer in this classic scene from the film Old School – watch Will Ferrell’s reaction!

There are things that only Hollywood can pull off!.

A Kinda/Sorta Conversation With Magnum’s Peter Marlow

No I have actually never had a conversation with the great Peter Marlow. I have never even met him. But he wrote a blog post back in 2007 to which I responded with some comments.

I am posting these comments here now because I realize that these comments, made back in July 2007, contain within them the seeds for what eventually has become my ‘The Idea of India’ project I am currently working on. It surprises me to see the continuity of thought that I was able to sustain – something I can’t claim I have ever achieved before – and that eventually, nearly 12 months later was expressed as this new project.

Peter’s original post explored how the Balkan conflict was ‘officially’ represented in Serbia, and that even today it is best referred to as ‘NATO aggression’. As an American visiting Serbia for a series of exhibitions Peter found himself in a slightly uncomfortable position and had to carefully negotiate what is still clearly a very sensitive issue in the country. While giving a talk at a workshop that he held for Serbia photojournalists, Peter explains that he..

…showed a press card created by our New York office, bizarrely for the ID photograph they used a shot of me wearing anti-flash goggles on the deck of the aircraft carrier. As many of the people in the room had shot the story from the ‘receiving end’ I could feel a strong reaction as soon as I mentioned the ‘Kosovo Crisis’ and my own coverage of it. I asked the audience if this was the right terminology, and was told rather sharply by one photographer that the correct expression was “The NATO Aggression”.

I was reminded of a recent experience I had had in Japan while on assignment there for National Geographic (France) magazine and decided to write a response to Peter’s post which read something like this:

peter;

your experience with the serbian photojournalists reminded me of a recent experience i had with some japanese manga artists. while on assignment in japan i had the opportunity to speak to a couple manga artists famous for their works depicting the horrors of the aftermath of the hiroshima bombings. i was moved by the power of their work and by the immediacy of their memories of the terribly day of the bombing. their work powerfully depicted the sufferings, and later the humiliating abandonment of the victims by their own fellow japanese.

however, i was also very perplexed when i realized that throughout our conversations we avoided any discussions about the broader, historical context of the event. no one mentioned that japan at that time was a nation at war, that millions had died in countries in asia resisting her expansionism, that her occupations iin south-east asia and south asia were brutal and resulted in unmentionable atrocities and so on and so forth. we only talked about hiroshima decontextualized from wider events.

the issue of history, japan’s role in WWII, her occupations and war crimes of course remain controversial issues even today and her history books continue to face criticism for their avoidance of specific facts.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_history_textbook_controversies

these are painful issues and not easily resolved. and i am not suggesting that the war justified the hiroshima bombings. i am merely suggesting that ignoring facts is an act of will, a choice that one makes perhaps because one is determined to hold on to one’s prejudices or beliefs. or simply that playing the role of a victim takes less effort!

calling the war in kosovo merely ‘NATO aggression’ is neither historically correct nor a defensible position. it is an act of transforming oneself into ‘a victim’, hence excused from broader moral issues. it encourages us to simply not make an effort beyond our current beliefs. it is a prejudice that suggests a determination to not examine or give a hearing to the wider issues at play in the conflict, including human manufacturing of history, the use of propaganda, the cold lies and manipulations of politicians, the atrocities and injustices carried out ‘in the name of the nation’ and other abstract, little examined assumptions.

your suggestion for a series of workshops in serbia is a fabulous idea. i do believe however that photography can avoid falling into the trap of pandering to any one side ‘of the same story’, but to use photography’ to develop an awareness of the broader story, to help a nation question her prejudices, to encourage citizens to confront uncomfortable truths and view points and use photography as a way to raise awareness, change ideas, and develop new dialogues where previously only rhetoric may have existed.

kosovo and serbia have continued to hold on to their rigid myths with little or no effort to develop a new dialogue that may spare them further wars and further suffering of their people. prejudice, hate, and self confirming and aggrandizing beliefs still fill the air in both regions. photography may never convince people to change their ideas, but it can certainly begin the process by encouraging them to step into uncomfortable situations and confronting those we may have previously dismissed or disliked.

i am sorry that this is so poorly written. i am still waking up here in sweden.

today we are told that photography has no role to play in bringing forth the truth, and that it is merely to be reduced to illustration or art. but i disagree. photography is not just the pictures, but also the research and act of stepping out to take the pictures. these intellectual and physical elements also differentiate one photographer from another. some are better at it than others in clearly measurable ways!

and they are perhaps the most important elements in helping us learn, grow and change – we have to read, and we have to step out into new world, confront people there, and actually engage and deal with them. this is where photography outdoes literature, poetry, paintings etc. because it is the only creative endeavor that forces us to create and maintain a dialogue with our subjects. other endeavors allow this dialogue, but do not necessarily demand it (i will say nothing about works by people like jeff wall etc.)

imagine, a group of serbian photographers having to do personal stories about life in kosovo, or on the edges of divided cities like mitrojvica! i can see the workshop going far beyond the banality of aesthetics, exposure control, RAW processing or frame filling! it steps into a whole new world where perhaps we can once again begin to discover the reasons why man picked up the camera in the first place and started to bring pictures back home – to amaze us with the incredible things we saw in the world, and to surprise us with what we had never expected!

Asim (July 24th, 2007)

How The Israeli Arms Industry Learned To Dance With Bollywood.

Rafael is an Israeli arms manufacturer and here is their attempt to convince ‘feminine’ India of her need for protection thanks to the modern, macho, western Israeli man?

With lyrics such as ‘I believe In You.  You believe In Me. Together. Forever. We Will Always Be. Dinga Dinga Dee’ we have a glimpse of the sophistication of the world this video emerges from and is distributed in to.

more about “Iron Eagle Nominee: Israeli Armsdog-M…“, posted with vodpod

An Unnecessary Education

One of first things my father exclaimed when I returned from the USA with an engineering degree in hand was ‘So, now can you fix my refrigerator?’ Some part of me wanted to believe that he meant it as a joke, but another part realized that in fact he was being serious; an education is an investment for future returns that must manifest themseves in practical achievements and solid job/working capabilities.

Why else would you want to send your child for an education?

∞

The New York Times recently carried a small piece by Patricia Cohen called In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth. It regurgitated arguments against a humanities education that we have been hearing for decades, perhaps since the very birth of the field itself.

And these are arguments that we all of course well understand; at a time when millions have lost their jobs, other millions confront the possibility of being laid off, and still more, mostly students, prepare to enter the ‘workforce’ it is natural and indeed common sense to question whether one has employable skills. Particularly in the USA where most of its graduating body will be burdened with large college loans that become payable within weeks after they leave their institutions.

(When did an education become bondage? More about that in a separate post.)

Ms Cohen aptly in facts asks:

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency.

Derek Bok, ex-President of Harvard University and a man we would expect can defend a liberal arts education on grounds other than ‘practical’ is quoted as saying ‘“The humanities has a lot to contribute to the preparation of students for their vocational lives.’

Despite an attempt to remind us of the importance of a Humanities education in helping students navigate life beyond the pay check, Ms Cohen ends her piece with this ominous note:

As money tightens, the humanities may increasingly return to being what they were at the beginning of the last century…the province of the wealthy.

That may be unfortunate but inevitable…The essence of a humanities education — reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming “to grips with the question of what living is for” — may become “a great luxury that many cannot afford.”

Unfortunate indeed!

∞

I believe that a humanities education is today more important than ever before!

There, I have said it. So now let me explain.

I think that Mark Danner said it best in his commencement address to the graduating students of the Department of English of the University of California at Berkeley in 2005.

Titled ‘What Are You Going To Do With It!‘, he argued that:

whether you know it yet or not, you have doomed yourselves by learning how to read, learning how to question, learning how to doubt.

And this is a most difficult time-the most difficult I remember-to have those skills.

Once you have them, however, they are not easy to discard.

Finding yourself forced to see the gulf between what you are told about the world, whether it’s your government doing the telling, or your boss, or even your family or friends, and what you yourself can’t help but understand about that world-this is not always a welcome kind of vision to have. It can be burdensome and awkward and it won’t always make you happy.

We are living through the aftermath of one of the most corrupt, venal, covert and violent American administration never elected to power. During those 8 years we have seen our finest journalists, intellectuals, politicians and citizens derailed by lies, obfuscations and the seductions of access to power.

And as citizens we have been convinced to support torture, accept the loss of our civil liberties, celebrate pre-emptive war, condone war crimes, remain quiet about the rape of a nation, look away from nepotism, ignore cronyism, tolerate blather masquerading as politics, surrender our citizen’s rights, believe that the enrichment of the few is in fact ‘liberty’, believe in ‘ghosts’ called ‘Islamofascism’, gamble with our pensions, imprison ourselves in criminal mortage scams, watch our kids die in wars of greed, walk away from our jobs without support or rights, tolerate being unemployed, toleratebeing homeless/evicted, privatize the National Treasury, rape our protected parks, devalue community, suspect civic duty, consider the lunacies of the christian right, fear every thing, accept a dysfunctional health care system as ‘best of class’, believe that only ‘the individual’ matters while society as a whole does not. And a lot more.

To say nothing about the ecological disaster unfolding around us, a clear consequence of exclusively technical minds unable to balance technological progress with ecological responsibility.

To say nothing of the financial disaster unfolding around us, a consequence of corruption and greed in an industry where the word ‘ethical’ and ‘asshole’ are synonyms.

To say nothing of the loss of our civil liberties and the abuse of our democratic institutions by a lunatic cabal called The Bush Administration, and their imitators across the globe, a consequence of a citizenry too easy befuddled by slogans and sound bites, and too involved in its ‘technical’ pursuits to give a damn.

One would think that if there ever was a time for ‘..learning how to read, learning how to question, learning how to doubt’, it would be now!

∞

This issue – the role and value of the humanities in public and civic life, occupied Edward Said for many decades. His two books on the issue, Representations of the Intellectual and Humanism and Democratic Criticism make for essential reading for those trying to understand why we should even bother with subjects like philosophy.

In Representations of the Intellectual, Said quotes from C. Wright Mills’ Power, Politics , and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, reminding us:

The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely living things. Fresh perception now involved the capacity to continually unmask and to smash the stereotypes of vision and intellect with which modern communications (i.e. modern systems of representation) swamp us. These worlds of mass art and mass-thought are increasingly geared to the demands of politics. That is why it is in politics that intellectual solidarity and effort must be centered. It the thinker does not relate himself to the value of truth in political struggle, he cannot responsibly cope with the whole of live experience.

You may want to re-read that.

In Humanism and Democratic Criticism he goes on to add:

That the humanities as a whole have lost their eminence in the university is…undoubtedly true. As Masao Miyoshi has claimed…the American university has been corporatized and to a certain degree annexed by defense, medical, biotechnical, and corporate interests, who are much more concerned with funding projects in the natural sciences than they are in the humanities. Miyoshi goes to to say that the humanities…have fallen into irrelevance and quasi-medieval fussiness, ironically enough because of the fashionability of newly relevant fields like postcolonialism, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and the like. This has effectively detoured the humanities from its rightful concern with the critical investigation of values, history, and freedom,[my italics] turning it…into a whole factory of word-spinning…and specialties, many of them identity based, that in their jargon…only address like-minded people, acolytes, and other academics.

If you think that that is just hog-wash, check out this story unfolding at Harvard Medical School! And for an even greater depth and insight, read this fantastic piece by Marcia Angell called Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption where she also reveals the involvement and influence of pharmaceutical companies have at American universities and colleges.

Our education programs, even the ‘acceptable’ ones are under attack by corporate and industry interests.

So who is educating whom, about what?

∞

Martha Nussbaum wrote an entire book arguing for a greater stress on a humanities education. Called Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform In Liberal Education she presented a series of case studies of a new generation of creative educators in America, and various arguments for the singular importance, nay, centrality of a humanities education for the future of American democracy and society.

In an essay discussing the book, she points out that a ‘liberal’ education:

“”liberates” students’ minds from their bondage to mere habit and tradition, so that students can increasingly take responsibility for their own thought and speech. In his letter on liberal education, Seneca argues that only this sort of education will develop each person’s capacity to be fully human, by which he means self-aware, self-governing, and capable of respecting the humanity of all our fellow human beings, no matter where they are born, no matter what social class they inhabit, no matter what their gender or ethnic origin.”

But what prevents us from understanding this?

Nothing more complex than fear. As Nussbaum explains:

Liberal education is in one way frightening. For it requires opening the personality to change and questioning, to the possibility of moving out of the security of one’s own comforting habits. In this time of fear, it is all too easy… to resist this challenge, to look for comfort to a less challenging idea of education, rooted in pre-professional and economic aspirations. To close one’s “inner eyes” is comforting; to open them with an educated compassion is difficult and painful.”

∞

The New York Times may not understand why all this matters. But then again, this is the newspaper that for example showed us during the build up to the war on Iraq that the pursuit of journalistic truth and the execution of the responsibilities of a democracy’s 4th estate were just another “…great luxury that many cannot afford.”

In a world where power has increasingly sophisticated tools and techniques to ‘convince’ a citizenry of its priorities, we need more who can think, question and understand.

We are attempting today to extricate ourselves from decades of crass corruption and scandal. America today stands at one of its lowest political, economic and cultural moments.

It is now, more than ever, that we need a generation that knows ‘…how to read, … how to question, … how to doubt.’

UPDATE: 25th July 2009: Chris Hedge’s new book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy & the Triumph of Spectacle includes an impassioned plea for the need to centralize a humanities education. He argues, similar to what I have argued here, that it is the inability to ask the larger questions, something that one learns through a strong humanities foundation, that we have ended up in the economic and other crisis we face. He argues that the increasing focus on a for-profit vocational training reduces individuals to knowing simply how to ‘maintain the status quo’, to jimmy a few things around to keep them going. Hence the incredible financial bail outs that maintain the very system that eat itself and the country’s wealth! You can hear an interview with Chris Hedges here & here.

Dialogue Between Bigots: Part VI of VI

This is the final installment of the interview, part VI, of ‘Dialogue Between Bigots’

EDITOR: Spanish, French Portuguese and Italian derive from Latin, yet can one argue that today these are the same language? They have diverged to the point where they are mutually unintelligible and hence different languages. All Indo-European languages derive from Sanskrit (including Farsi), yet can one claim they are the same as Sanskrit?
Christianity, Judaism and Islam have a common genetic origin, for sure, but over time these religions have diverged to the point of being mutually exclusive.

When you say Islam offers variations and adjustments, what does that mean? Let’s consider one example that goes to the heart of the matter. Christianity says that Christ was crucified for our sins, and he arose three days later in fulfillment of His promise to us. Islam says that at the last minute, a woman was substituted for Christ and it was she who was actually crucified. Christianity says God manifested himself as the Trinity (the Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit). By definition, to be a Christian is to accept the Trinity and the Crucifixion and resurrection (you can throw out everything else). Islam says there is no Trinity, period. Now, I ask you, are these the same religions? These are mutually exclusive, diametrically opposite, irreconcilable positions.

Of course there is cultural interaction, particularly on the peripheries and borders of civilizations. But that is not the norm nor the point under discussion. I am referring to the law of the land and where it derives from. Again, to use a secular example, If I live in Detroit, I am subject to US laws, if I live in Windsor, I am subject to Canadian laws, even though these cities are next to each other and separated by Lake Superior (a 15 minute drive across the bridge). The laws of the land are well defined even at the peripheries, though the cultural practice not dealing with legal issues may in fact be muddier (i.e., music, art).

One cannot ignore 2000 years of Christianity, 1400 years of Islam, and 3000 years of Judaism when considering the origins of these systems. The weight of thousands of years of history cannot be dismissed, and this is manifestly obvious even from a cursory examination of today’s civilizations. If Islam and Christianity were so similar, why do they lead to such starkly different civilizations today?

As for your comments on Sharia, I am not referring to the process. Sharia, irrespective of how it is arrived at, is a body of law that is supreme and cannot be superseded. That is the point.

You can disagree with me or Daniel Pipes about this point, but to say that he has not studied his demons is an ad hominem argument. It suggests there is something wrong with him, which is not fair. He is not the only one who shares this opinion — as you say yourself, even Muslims (and not fundamentalists, either) have this opinion. And I again I point to 1400 years of history to demonstrate this.

The Caliphate was a political structure, to be sure, but it was an Islamic political structure. It was a direct expression of Islamic law. It began as an Islamic governance system and stayed so until its dissolution when the Ottoman empire ended. There is no legal mechanism within Islam to separate the religious from the secular, unlike Christianity, where the secular principle was expressed by Christ himself (“My Kingdom is in heaven” and “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”). The examples you provide are all because of Colonial influence. Before European colonialism, there were no secular structures in the Islamic world. Of course, the secular principle was not always applied in Christendom, but that’s a different discussion.

Again, I think we have different definition of “nation.” A nation is a group of people with a common culture, language, religion and history. It is not a race-based entity, it is a belief-based entity. Are there pure races? No. Are there pure individuals? Yes. Are there pure nations? Yes. Are there mixed nations? Yes.

I think you under-estimate the cohesive force of religion. What does a Christian in Iraq have in common with a Christian from Trichur or a Christian from Texas? A lot more than you may realize. Similarly for a Muslim from Baghdad and a Muslim from Bangladesh. Your worldview is fundamentally shaped by your religion, and ultimately I, as a Christian from Baghdad, would have much more in common with a Christian from China than a Muslim from Baghdad..

I don’t think my views are bigoted or biased. I am bi-cultural and worldly, and I don’t come to these conclusions lightly. But we are talking about different things. You are talking about the machinations of empires, which I don’t dispute, and I am talking about religions.

I am not aware of modern persecution of immigrants in Europe. Can you give me examples

In conclusion, the problem with Edward Said and his Orientalism is that it is unbalanced and dismisses legitimate Western argument, criticism and points-of-view. It’s like that old joke, just because you are paranoid, it DOESN’T mean there ISN’T anyone out to get you Edward Said ultimately misses, dismisses, trivializes or just plain ignores the point that there are real and irreconcilable differences between civilizations and they cannot be deconstructed away are made to appear to be pathologies afflicting the West. That’s ridiculous.

As you have tried to argue that Islamic civilization is not monolithic, so is the case with the West.

END OF INTERVIEW

Dialogue Between Bigots: Part V of VI

This is part V of the interview ‘Dialogue Between Bigots’

AR: I think you are being very liberal in your belief that European law begins with the Bible and that Islamic law begins with the Koran. To claim that Europe takes from the Bible and Morocco from the Koran is to indulge in a terrible simplicity that can only be achieved by suspending genuine intellectual engagement in the history of societies and the development of their social, legal and criminal systems. Perhaps a re-reading of Michelet’s ‘History of France’ is due or at the very least Todorov’s ‘Imperfect Garden’. Lets remember that Europe also has an Islamic/Muslim heritage. I speak not just of regions that were part of various Muslims entities, like Spain or Italy or cities like Genoa, but i mean by the centuries of relationships that have existed between Europe and the east. Anyone familiar with the history of a city like Seville, or Sicily, or Venice for example, will be hard pressed to tell me where ‘the west’ starts and ‘the east’ ends. Through commerce, trade, travel, study, administration, settlement, conquest etc. Europe and the Middle East shared and exchanged over centuries and consistently and constantly. Here is Pankaj Misra on Venice.

For me at an intellectual level these ‘religious’ civilizational divisions do not ring true nor do they reflect reality. And i would add that I think you under value European law, and Arab or other national laws, by linking them to just Bible or some other religious text. In fact, I would say that you denigrate their laws. Thank goodness for laws that allow rights for homosexuals, for abortion, for contraception, and many other liberties and humane rights we have instituted despite our religious texts instructions! One would like to believe that we have left the simplistic, inhumane, often cruel black & white simplicities of these religious texts behind. Remember, the Bible took us to the inquisition, a justice and religious institution the taliban would really have loved!

It also appears that you do not understand what ’sharia’ is. Sharia is not laws. Sharia is a method of arriving at law. It is a judicial, legal process that also includes Ijma (consensus), Qiyas (reasoning by analogy) and centuries of debate, interpretation and precedent. Furthermore, that there are many different versions of these processes that rely, traditionally speaking, on different versions of the hadiths to execute their process. There are at least 4 recognized schools of hadiths for example. a sharia process can begin in the Koran (or not) but that is a start, not the end. It can’t be of course because the Bible, the Koran, the Torah and in fact most any religious text are very simplistic, in fact quite banal in their ideas of right and wrong and life’s complicated problems are best not handled by referring to them directly. ‘Thou shall not kill’ is not a very interesting legal precept. So, there is no one sharia because sharia is not law, it is a procedure to arrive at law. It requires legal experts, religious experts, academics, it is open to debate and challenge, it is open to review and study, it is open to interpretation and revision. As any other legal system in the world. What comes out on the other end is the judgment of men to respond to the needs of their society to best offer justice. and as all legal procedures, sometimes it is good, other times it is bad. and in the latter case can be changed – or prevented if it serves someone’s power interests.

I will add that Islam does not offer a political system. There is a great myth, very popular amongst orientalist and religious fundamentalists that Islam offers ‘a complete system’. There is no discussion what so ever in any aspect of the philosophy of the religion on ‘political systems’. Daniel Pipes loves to bring this one up all the time and it is actually quite funny because the rest of us can see how little people like him have really bothered to study and understand their demons. I think that Daniel Pipes actually claims that the political system offered in Islam includes ‘tawhid‘, ‘risalat‘ and ‘khilafat‘. Well, 2 of those concepts have nothing to do with politics – tawhid is monotheistic belief in one god (shared with Christianity and Judaism), and risalat is that this one god has sent messengers (e.g. Jesus is in Islam’s structure itself). So this is not politics.

Khilafat is simply a version of a monarchy and given divine Islamic sanction. No European king would have survived long without the claim of the divine sanction, and the support of the church. It is not defined by any religious declaration, or divine ordination. Calling it an ‘Islamic’ political system would be like calling Constantine’s dictatorship a ‘Christian’ political system! And it is not the preferred or sought after political model for any Arab or Muslim state in the world today.  For example, Iran has a parliamentary system. It is a constrained one, but nevertheless, they hold elections, they elect their representatives, and participate in the government. Pakistan has a parliamentary system designed around the British system, and is different from the Iranian.

Now, speaking of ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Christian’ or other such, I have to ask where does one find ‘pure’ nations in our world? Where are these communities who have been so isolated and segmented that their collective behavior is only influenced by some ‘nation gene’? Are the Assryians so pure that their 2000+ years in the middle of a region of rich trade, artistic development, intellectual development, social development, economic progress, never affected them? Is there nothing Arab culture, traditions, values, morals, and norms that have affected them or been adopted by them? I believe that we are never just ‘Muslims’ or ‘Christians’. Nations are not just ‘Muslims’ or ‘Christians’. They are many different things. Just as an individual identity is made up of many things, and s/he stresses one or the other at certain times, but contains with him/herself all. This is of course simply Edward Said’s argument read back in an amateurish way.

To argue that my ‘Muslim’ identity is the most important or the only important part, is a choice, not a fact, and a misleading and narrow fact at that. Governments can through coercion create common actions amongst men and common opinions. But this abstraction of ‘nations’ is a very weak and poor construct. Just your language alone, and the other languages that have influenced it, reveal that falsity in this belief. Christianity is not ‘pure’. As a creed it carried over myths, rituals, structures of earlier religions and societies. And also absorbed the behaviors and values of people who lived in and around the lands in emerged in. When in fact Freud examined the life of Moses in ‘Moses and Monotheism’ he was doing precisely this – examining the various strands of culture and history and ethnicities that were absorbed/adopted by the Jews as they adopted Moses, an Egyptian, into their religion.

As for Lebanon, my point is tangential to Lebanon’s war so i will not address it here. My point was about how one understands man’s actions in this world. We do not run around trying to understand the brutalities of the Christians in Lebanon by studying the bible, or claiming to have found some verse there that justifies genocidal madness. My point was about the way to understand the behaviors of men.

Your last set of comments sadden me that because the contain in it so many false assumptions and misunderstandings about the Middle East, Muslims, Islam, modernity, democracy and such that i don’t even know where to begin.  But as I said, we are on opposite ends of the spectrum here. To me statements like ‘Islam needs to modernize’ are deeply bigoted comments. And they are simplistic as well. They paint America as a purveyor of good and justice in the world when in fact it is not that alone but something else as well. They suggest a belief in the intellectual and moral backwardness of millions of people and dozens of cultures that inhabit the Middle East, and do so without once acknowledging their real lived histories and struggles against colonialism and imperialism. They engage in sweeping generalizations about falsely concrete concepts that are in fact abstractions and contested forms (e.g. ‘Islam’), fail to point out our (American) deep economic, political and historical connections to countries like Saudi Arabia, obfuscate our role in the repression of modern democracy in the Middle East (e.g. assasination of Mossadeq in Iran for example, or the constant funding of dictators like Mubarak, the Shah, the Saudi family, the kings of Jordan etc.), its mindless unthinking support of the repression and brutality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, its complete disregard for the human and political aspirations of the people of the lands where American claims it ‘interests’, etc. etc.

You condemn regions, cultures, peoples and societies to backwardness, barbarism, terrorism and extremism by conveniently leaving out our shared history.

Dialogue Between Bigots; Part IV of VI

This is Part IV of the interview ‘Dialogue Between Bigots’

EDITOR: Whereas I agree with you that there is nothing inherently ‘Islamic’ about laws in many nations i.e. your statement is prima facie true. However, the question is what is the source of the common law of the land in Pakistan, in Iran, In Saudi Arabia? You will, of course, find examples of secular law or behavior, but the common law springs from the Koran, just as the common law in Christendom (the West) springs from the Bible. To me the question is not whether a system is secular or not, it is where its common law derives from. Even Sweden, with its famed secularism, derives its common law from the Bible, so that even if Swedes don’t know they are Christians, for the most part they act according to Christian law. It is the historical tradition and culture that determines whether a country is Muslim or Christian or Hindu or Buddhist.

Only Islam (and to a lesser extent, Judaism) offers a complete system — religious and political. Because Shari’a cannot be superseded by and other law, it ultimately shapes societies into an Islamic image. This is not true in Christianity. From the beginning Jesus articulated a distinction between church and state, i.e., Christianity does not offer a political system.

When you speak of the influence of religion on American politics and law I don’t know what supreme court decisions against family planning laws you are referring to. I assume you
mean abortion. The issue for Christians is not family planning, that is a red herring, the issue is taking a human life. If you believe that the fetus is a human being with a soul, then you cannot support abortion, because that is murder. No one argues against family planning. There are a hundred different ways to do that (i.e., condoms, birth control pills, natural methods, abstinence, &c.).

I don’t claim that America is not a religious state, it is (segments of it, at least). There is nothing wrong with that, just as there is nothing wrong with an Islamic state. If that’s what the people want, more power to them. The issue is tolerance of others. When different religious groups live with each other, there should not be religious violence. If there is proselytizing, let it be peaceful and let the merits of the arguments determine the winner. But that has not proven to be the case historically with Islam. See ‘Symposium: Islamic Cultural Genocide’

Now, blaming unscrupulous leaders may be true for the immediate past, i.e., in the post-colonial era, but how do you account for the persecution of minorities in previous eras? This persecution started almost immediately after the Caliphs established themselves in Baghdad, and has lasted since. Again, one cannot ignore the history. I think we may be speaking at different levels. I am not so much concerned with geographic states as much as nations, which may span borders. Nations conform to a code of behavior (i.e., Hindu, Christian,
Muslim), and that is what concerns me. Looked on in this light, one sees the larger patterns in history.

As for your comments about the Christians in Lebanon; Lebanon was destabilized because Yasar Arafat and his PLO moved into Beirut. What choice did the Christians have but to fight? There is no excuse for the Sabra and Shatila massacres, of course, but that is not germane to what happened to Lebanon.

As for Europe, I will say that Europe is firmly a Judeo-Christian civilization, it is not an accident that it is called Christendom. Europe is now losing this, and that is why it is beginning to ask questions. It should not lose its heritage, of course, because it is a proud heritage, it is part of the mosaic of cultures that make up our world. I think as Islam is practiced now by the majority of Muslims, it is incompatible with most of the world. It needs to modernize, it needs to catch-up.

And as for why America is in Iraq, I can tell you my opinion about why America is in Iraq. This is my opinion, of course. The Iraq war is to contain Saudi Arabia, which is the real backer of Islamic extremism. Saudi Arabia has spent $80 billion dollars to date on spreading Wahabism. The war on Islamic fundamentalism will be won only when the ideology is defeated. This is a long range plan to modernize the Middle East, liberalize Islam, introduce democracy and raise the standard of living in the area so that the people will have other outlets beside fundamentalism. There is also the divide and conquer strategy. Look for Iran to become a nuclear power (with covert or tacit support from the US) so that it will stand opposed to the Sunni states. The funds spent on spreading Wahabism will be redirected to defense spending.

Dialogue Between Bigots: Part III of VI

This is Part III of the interview ‘Dialogue Between Bigots’

EDITOR:  By Islamic states I mean the countries that are majority Muslim and whose power structures are in the hands of Muslims. Iraq is not an Islamic theocracy, but it is surely an Islamic state. It’s history, tradition and values are shaped by Islamic religion and culture. Let us narrow the discussion. Let’s focus on Iraq and it’s history since 1800 — though we must keep in mind the 1400 year weight of Islamic history and tradition in Iraq. I will rephrase the question. I am not sure that your statement that secular governments exist in the Middle East is true. There are governments who don’t emphasize Islam, except when convenient to retain power (e.g., Saddam), but the governments are Islamic in substance. Are there truly secular governments, like Sweden, for example? Actually, your comments below are a good response to the question as it was framed. I think you have answered the question very well Why don’t you incorporate the comments below into your answer and we can take the discussion from there. This organic discussion is turning out well.

AR: Thank you for taking the time to put these clarifications together. i am glad that we are actually discussing these specific points because i feel that most American media is too quick to jump to use too many unconsidered labels and phrases when it comes to speaking about anything ‘Muslim’.

So in the same spirit – i think that you mean ‘Arab’ states, and not ‘Islamic’ ones. For example, India is a nation with a deep Islamic history, heritage and culture, but it is not an ‘Islamic’ state. There are 130 million Muslims in the country, and its laws and codes are deeply influenced by this heritage, but it is not an ‘Islamic’ state by any means. and more controversially, neither is Pakistan. There are powerful, state supported religious fundamentalist political organizations in the country and they have been allowed to distort the law or contravene the constitution, but the nation and its legal and civil code procedures are less influenced by dogmatism than by pragmatism. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws for example have been foisted on the country by fundamentalist mysoginists in the pay of authoritarian rulers searching for a support base but are contested daily by a battery of legal experts, women’s rights activists and citizens. There is nothing inherently ‘Islamic’ about them, other than a small group of fundamentalists shouting loudest to claim that they are. The voices of opposition often get lost.

We are too quick to grab the ’sensational’, the demeaning, and to claim it as ‘Islamic’. Any Arab nation as any other is a contested space and in fact there is no one ‘Islam’. A Pakistani from Baluchistan will be horrified to sit with a Chechyan and vice versa! They would not recognize what the other calls ‘Islam’ where alcohol sits comfortably with namaz.  Though there are common ritual practices, but like all cars with 4 wheels but that does not make the similar, the importance is in the differences.  We are not merely our religions, and do not see our world only through that prism.

In Iran, with all its grandiose theocratic weirdness, can reveal a very modern and pragmatic approach to birth control and family planning. In Morocco recent adjustments to its family code captures the rich and complex dialogues prevalent in most any nation whether Arab or other. My point being that the social and legal laws of these country are far more complex, far more interesting when seen in the specifics and not just sweepingly called ‘Islamic’. There is little in common in the way issues of family planning, or inheritance or such are handled in Iran vs how they are handled in Lebanon for example. The richness of the region, the richness of the variety of peoples, ethnicities, cultures, histories, traditions of the region (the Middle East, South Asia, or any nation that is predominantly Muslim in heritage) is lost if we do not see the specifics.

Labeling a country as ‘Islamic’ hides more than reveals, obfuscates more than clarifies.

You are right that few if any country in amongst the Arab states can claim a truly ’secular’ government and you are right that few if any country in amongst the Arab states can claim a ’secular’ government such as Sweden. But even ’secular’ governments reflect influences that would not be defined as secular.  For example, would you contest the United States government and its administration, its supreme court and its recent adjustments against family planning laws are not influenced by conservative Christian thought? Would you call the USA a truly secular state when both Obama and Bush were at Saddleback church just this week, to say nothing of the many other churches both conservative and liberal, that they have been trawling through to get to ‘voters’? If America is a secular democracy, then why is it so important to constantly shake your religious credentials, to seek ‘counsel’ from influential (and really wealthy) pastors? See Kaplan’s ‘With God on their side’, or Woolride & Mickeltwaith’s ‘The Right Nation’ or Hedge’s ‘American Fascists’. But this is not just me reading in my apartment.  I did an entire story for National Geographic magazine called ‘Religion and Power’ over the course of many months on the influence of the religous right on American society and politics.

The point being – nations and their laws have a lot of influences, and bring many centuries of heritage to them. But they need not necessarily only be determined from the point of view of a religious heritage. Pakistan is a Muslim state, but this heritage is not an all encompassing and exclusive influence on its laws or even its society.

What instead I do see and that which I think is the principal threat to minorities in Arab states and that we should discuss is this; most all Arab states have unpopular and unscrupulous leaders who have failed their nations and contorted their societies. These same unpopular leaders have exploited radical Islamic groups to bolster their power and allowed at times for these groups to contort their constitutions and civic code. This is of course not a uniform situation, but is true for Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the gulf states etc. In such nations religion is merely a tool of politics and power. The persecution of the Copts by the Muslim Brotherhood was a political move, one that in fact can change as the political demands change. In fact, the welcome that the Arab Christians receive in Syria could change in the future if the political dynamics change. So whether a minority has a hope of being part of the fabric of an Arab state requires us to look at the politics and power plays of that state, and the value placed on religious groups to grab and maintain power.

For example, Lebanon is a deeply divided sectarian country, but its wars began of the arrogance and bigotry of its Christian minority! In Lebanon they are not a persecuted minority, but in fact the instigators of tremendous horrors against fellow citizens. This is history though I have of course generalized here to make a point. But it would be wrong to run around stating that there is something inherently ‘Christan’ about their behavior or arrogance or violence in acts like the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. It would be in fact idiotic. I would be a fool to go searching into Lebanon’s 1400 year Christian heritage to understand their behavior, or trawl the bible to find some passages on rape! It can’t be understood merely from the prism of religion. We have to look at the real world, at specific political, secular events and actions, and more importantly that desperate quest for power and control that drives all men.

And this is no different than what is happening all over Europe for example, where a weird Islamophobia has taken over nations such as Denmark, Italy and France, where political leaders repeatedly refer to Europe’s imagined exclusively Judeo-Christian heritage and insist on separating themselves from the ‘Muslim disease’ etc. etc. Pankaj Mishra wrote a wonderfully clear piece about this recently called ‘A paranoid, abhorrent obsession’.

Creating such stark divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ of course helps us avoid the more complex questions; Europe’s tremendous economic problems in the last decade and related unemployment, the emergence of the EU and the associated sense of a loss of local identity (national identities being extremely important and entrenched here in Europe).  These are the unspoken realities that are avoided by turning our wrath against poor, marginalized, and weak immigrant communities.

Europe is not just a Judeo-Christian civilization even if we go back to the Greeks whose main centers of culture and learning were always on the other side of the Bosphoros! But of course, Goytisolo’s life was spent arguing this, but a more recent book speaks about it rather clearly and well.  You must read David Levering Lewis’ ‘God’s Crucible’.

I agree, I think we are best to discuss the modern history of Iraq, post WW II, post colonialism.

The weight of 1400 years of Islamic history in my opinion is not as relevant in shaping this country as the weight of a 100 years of colonial control and power politics of post-colonial influence. The Baath party is not an Islamic heritage left over, neither were the kings foisted on Iraq upon its creation during the demise of the Ottoman empire. And to not speak about the discovery of oil and its contorting effects on Iraqi politics would be criminal. Islam, Muslims, 1400 year heritage – this actually has little meaning and will not help us understand where we are today or why we are where we are today.  I would deem it intellectually irresponsible, if not morally irresponsible, to seek the sourcs of Iraq’s trauma in ‘Islam’ or the ‘Koran’, when in fact the 12 year sanctions regime, the Oil For Food program, the repeated invasions and the current occupation seem to be more pertinent.

The dismemberment of Iraq has political and power drivers based squarely in the USA, driven less by issues of religion, and more by issues of oil, strategic depth, fear of Iran etc. We would be all naive and irresponsible to speak as if this was a necessary war, that lies were not told, that the nation was not forced into this mess because of the need and greed of a few in the neo-conservative movement. I would prefer that neo-conservatives were more honest about their intentions – the petty lies and childish language to hide
their real intents are so amateurish that it only makes them look silly.

So cutting through all the nonsense, Iraq is just an occupation, its political structure conveniently created to serve American economic and military interests, and created I believe to ensure continued instability and weakness in the nation so that the US and continue to maintain an involvement and control, and in particular, control the important assets; oil, bases, police and borders. There are no nation building intents, not in Iraq nor in Afghanistan. There are merely control and own intents, and those too short term. The sectarian structure of politics is less due to any ‘heritage’ or ‘history’ or Iraq, but more based on a continuity of belief that occupied countries are best governed by divisions not unity. This is the oldest colonial model in the book i.e. find all the ethnic and sectarian dividing lines and exaggerate them through ethnically determined largesse. This is nothing new. Its boringly old in fact.

There are many models of governments in Muslim countries that are not sectarian, so there is nothing ‘natural’ about such a structure. It is always created, and historically we can see that occupying powers love to deal with divided communities because it makes it easier to control them. Its just simple politics and pragmatic administration.

I  hope that this is not just proving to be a huge annoyance. The interview seems to have all but disappeared. But really, I appreciate your patience and tolerance of my long responses and digressions.

Dialogue Between Bigots: Part II of VI

This is Part II of the interview ‘Dialogue Between Bigots’

EDITOR: In your opinion, is it possible for Islamic states to adopt secular systems of government, and to allow non-Muslim minorities to integrate in Muslim dominated political structures? Put another way, given the history and tradition of these areas, Iraq in particular, did the Americans have any choice other than to work with sectarian structures?

AR: Sorry, i don’t mean to be rude but i do not understand your questions because 1) I can’t tell what ‘Islamic’ states you are talking about, 2) what is the time frame that you refer to as when you speak of the ‘history and traditions’, 3) what do mean when you say ‘these areas’ and 4) secular governments do exist so why would you want to know if they can?

Perhaps I can explain the reasons for confusion.

Most Arab states are not ‘Islamic’ but more closer to secular states, not ‘Islamic’ ones. They may not be democratic, but that is a different issue. Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria and the non-Arab Turkey are secular/non-denominational governments, not ‘Islamic’ governments. Only Saudi Arabia and post-revolution Iran qualify as religious states and Islamic ones at that. But ‘the region’ including Saddam’s Iraq were not ‘Islamic’ by any definition, though i have no idea what an ‘Islamic’ government would be like. So we have to be very specific and very clear here.

Furthermore, what time frame are you talking about where you would want to examine issues related to minorities? Minorities have flourished in Arab lands since time immemorial.  For example, the modern history of the Middle East demonstrates that Arab Christians have been at the forefront of the Arab nationalism, that there is an indigenous Christian community that has had centuries of fertile exchange with Muslims in these regions. To say nothing about their artistic, intellectual, and political contributions. There is nothing inherently ‘foreign’ about Christians in the Middle East. If you go back even further in time, lets say to the time of the emergence of the Islamic empire as it meets up with the Byzantine and the Sasanian, we see a rich exchange of ideas and even common sharing of religious practices. e.g. see Fowden’s ‘The Barbarian Plain’.  To suggest that non-Muslim minorities cannot ‘integrate’ into Arab/Islamic societies would betray a terrible lack of knowledge of history. After all, for example, where did the Jews go after the inquisitions and their expulsion from Spain? Where did the Syrian orthodox church live and flourish for so many centuries? So this question about ‘integration’ is ahistorical.  The Sephardic Jews, the Copts, the Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Zoroastrians, Manichaen and many many more.  The Arab lands are not ‘pure’ or isolated.

There have indeed been periods of persecution, but there have also been periods of tremendous tolerance and acceptance. So this question makes no sense, unless you want to speak in specific circumstance e.g. the recent backlash against the Christians in the Middle East which indeed is taking place. But then we have to speak about each country specifically – the backlash against the Christians in Lebanon has a different set of political, historical, social reasons than say that against the Copts in Egypt. And we have to be specific about what time frame we are talking about.

On the whole there has been centuries of exchange and tolerance in the Middle East and that remains the norm, not the exception.  If there have been persecutions, they are in fact the execptions to the larger norm.  For example, if you ever go to Beit Sahour in the West Bank, OPT you will find Muslims and Christians sharing shrines, and praying at monasteries. Professor Glenn Bowman of the University of Kent at Canterbury has written extensively about this. In Syria too you will see practices that the two religions share. In Rusafa in Syria there stood a shrine to St. Sergius right next to which stood a mosque, with a large hall joining the two structures.

There were hundreds of such locations all over the Levant. Today there still are many that bear witness to the tremendous sharing between the two communities. Muslims even pray like the orthodox! The sounds of the Sufi saints come from those of the choirs. In Alleppo in the Casbah you can hear this music again and feel that the choirs of Seidnaya have entered the streets. I speak of today, not a millenia ago. William Dalrymple has written extensively about this in his work ‘From The Holy Mountain’

The middle east is vast, and a diverse region. Tunisia is not Lebanon is not Iraq is not Egypt. We can’t speak about ‘areas’ we have to be specific about what country we are speaking about. After WW II the post-colonial trajectories of each nation need to be very specifically known and kept in mind as we discuss developments. For example, why has Morocco managed to maintain a very open relationship with its Jewish community despite the majority of the Jews choosing to leave the country? And why is it different for example in Lebanon? The answers lie in specific histories and not through generalizations of ‘Islamic intolerance’, a sweeping simplicity that explains little but confirms many prejudices.

The Middle East has had many secular governments, some elected ones too. Turkey is a secular government, so is Syria, so too was Iraq, so is Egypt.  Besides the much spoken about fear of Islamic parties being elected and creating theocracies is a false one as even ostensibly Islamic parties have a real habit of behaving with politically savvy and democratic insight once they come to power. I recommend you read Harper magazine’s Ken Silverstein’s piece on the rise of Islamic democracy to better understand how and what these Islamic political movements are and how they behave.

Finally, as to your last point on whether the Americans had a choice – we can certainly discuss that endlessly though I will admit that i am not as well qualified to answer that one. I suspect that the Americans did have a choice. Furthermore, from a long term perspective, they should have insisted on it because a sectarian structure will not work and is the principal reason for the instability today. To say nothing about the illegality of the war, the carnage in the post-invasion period etc. Furthermore, we would be naive to ignore the history of the creation of Iraq particularly the role of the British in its creation, the deep influence of British intellectuals and orientalists on the minds and actions of the American administration (for example Bernard Lewis was not just an important encourager of the invasion but deeply entrenched in the think tanks advising on what needs to happen post-Saddam!) and the seeming seamless continuity in the assumptions about the ‘Arab mind’ between the British ideas and the current set of colonial administrators.  A book that I myself am going over again is Fromkin’s ‘A Peace to End All Peace’ and I highly recommend it to understand the history of the creation of the modern state of Iraq.

I will just conclude by saying that it is important for me that questions are carefully framed and in particular that they do not nudge responses into expected places. All that being said, I am not the best person to speak to about the future of the middle east or the politics of the region or the real-political actions.

Dialogue Between Bigots: Part I of VI

A few months ago I was asked by an editor in Europe to speak about my work, in particular my work in the Arab world.  She had seen some of my photographs from Northern Iraq that focused on the struggle of Iraq’s Assyrian Christian community as it confronted a resurgent Kurdish nationalism and a raging Iraqi militant resistance.  The editor wanted to discuss not just the specific issues related to the Assyrian Christian community, but broader issues related to the ‘Muslim’ world.

The interview quickly fell apart.  In fact, it fell apart on the very first question.  I had been vary of giving an interview.  In fact, I generally don’t like to do interviews because I find that nothing but inconsistencies and confusions leave my mouth.  The opening question set of a series of short essays between me and the editor that spanned a range of issues and ended by no conclusive insights and/or understandings.

I wanted to share this interview with you.  Since it is a long series of issues, I have edited the original content and of course protected the identity of the Editor herself.  I hold myself completely responsible for the breakdown in what should have been a simple and basically benign dialogue.  That morning perhaps I was tired, perhaps I was overly sensitive. Perhaps I was perceptive to the dangers that come from not examining assumptions that lie behind a question.  Very often an interview will ask a loaded question, filled with assumptions that predetermine the nature of the answer, or necessarily place the interviewee on the defensive.  Or so I feel.  On re-reading some the responses I can’t help but think that I was rather pompous and self important in some of the responses.  However, I do feel that I touched on a number of issues that I feel are often ignored in discussions about matters in the Middle East and the Muslim world in general.  So if you can excuse the bombast, here is the interview as it transpired, edited for this blog of course.

EDITOR: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be interested in Iraq and Assyrians?

AR: My interest, as in most all the projects I do, is in confronting the reductive historical narratives created by political opportunists and religious fundamentalists. In particular, I am interested in documenting situations where the complex tapestry of life and history has been destroyed to serve some political or economic end. This interest is a reflection of my own personal life and experiences. As a Kashmiri i am heir to a complex and varied heritage that includes Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islamic beliefs, culture, philosophy, art, poetry and secular intellectual writing. This diversity has been lost in Kashmir because of a movement for liberation that has recently deteriorated into a sectarian conflicts. Such sectarian rewritings of history are of course a global problem.

We face them here in Europe today, a region suffering from a serious bout of xenophobia and Islamophobia as entire histories of the continent are revised to exclude the presence and influence of Islam and the Muslims on Europe’s development in the past and today. And i saw a similar situation in what took place in Iraq after the American invasion. I was appalled by the quick and convenient reliance on a sectarian politics by the Americans, a sorry reflection of the practices of British colonialists across the Middle East and in South Asia. The damage that British policies did in India during their reign can still be seen today as South Asian continues to struggle to overcome the divisions within their societies and build a sense of citizenship and belonging that extends beyond the clan and the religious group.

Documenting the plight of the Assyrians as a way to speak out against the marginalization and erasure of the presence of minorities, and the destruction of the complex fabric, multi-ethnic and multi-religious, of Iraqi society and life. Whether it had existed under Saddam or not remained irrelevant since it was being destroyed under the direction of an American occupation. I felt that there was a shocking ignorance of Iraqi society and history, and that it;s cleavage along sectarian lines could only signal further disintegration and oppressions. These are of course not unique insights for anyone who has read even a basic book on the history of the country and the broader region. In the rush to speak about the liberation of the Kurds the Assyrians appeared conveniently forgotten. Such tribal politics can only succeed by inflicting tremendous suffering and dispossession on another. We have see this repeatedly in the wake of 20th century nationalisms, with the horrors of the Armenian genocides, the destruction of the pluralist cultures of many cities in what was once the Ottoman Empire, in Israel etc. etc.

When Nuri Kino, to whom I was introduced to by a friend in the USA, spoke to me about this community, I  saw a situation that i wanted to say something about. Sadly most local and international media failed to see the significance of their struggle, and i believe still do not see it. A few voices if any have argued for the need of a secular political structure in Iraq.

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