sporadic meditations

Making deliberate choices this new year

2012-01-02T16:14:00.008-06:00

So, what does it mean to have a new year? Isn’t the change just a figment of our collective imagination? Otherwise, the change from Dec 31 to Jan 1 is not much different from the change between Dec 30 and Dec 31. Yet Jan 1 is special because we consider it to be so.

We often learn its significance sub-consciously from our society, on how to feel and act about the new year. These feelings come almost involuntarily at the end of each year (thanks in part to the corporate media and school vacations).

The point here is not to question the significance of the new year, but to take the new year deliberately, to transform its meaning and make conscious choices about what to make of it.

Let’s make this year a special year, a year of deliberate choices. Not just any choices, but deliberate choices with a critically/spiritually conscious perspective and goals. Let's seek deeper and lasting awareness, beauty, and peace. Let's devote ourselves in the pursuits of truth and justice, individually and collectively. And let's transcend the narratives and preoccupations of our ego to connect to the heart of humanity and the essence of reality. Let's define our new year's resolutions in terms of revolutions!

With these thoughts and prayers, and the following poem, a happy new year!

Making Peace

By Denise Levertov (1923–1997)

A voice from the dark called out,
"The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war."

But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can't be imagined before it is made,
can't be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses. . . .

A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light--facets
of the forming crystal.

Motivation in Social Activism

2011-11-26T11:45:00.007-06:00

The below article makes an interesting argument about the limits of empathy for social activism. How to motivate people to do altruistic deeds is a core question for any social movement and welfare organization. Often it is not enough to feel sympathy for others; you have to be angry - or guilty - about the wrong to stand up and take action.

The next question is how to sustain this motivation and activism. I feel that the 'optional, weekend volunteering' attitude is not enough, especially when helping-others comes in conflict with one's own needs and comforts. Self-sacrifice on a regular basis would require more than feeling sympathy for others. It would require changing the whole self -- with empathy and compassion as part of that -- and dedicating that whole self for the good cause. I think the author also hints at that toward the end of this op-ed. On a different note, networks of friends and meeting people's other needs in life may also help sustain activism.

The Limits of Empathy by David Brooks

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/opinion/brooks-the-limits-of-empathy.html?_r=1&src=tp&smid=fb-share

"Nobody is against empathy. Nonetheless, it’s insufficient. These days empathy has become a shortcut. It has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them. It has become a way to experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgments. In a culture that is inarticulate about moral categories and touchy about giving offense, teaching empathy is a safe way for schools and other institutions to seem virtuous without risking controversy or hurting anybody’s feelings.

People who actually perform pro-social action don’t only feel for those who are suffering, they feel compelled to act by a sense of duty. Their lives are structured by sacred codes.

The code isn’t just a set of rules. It’s a source of identity. It’s pursued with joy. It arouses the strongest emotions and attachments. Empathy is a sideshow. If you want to make the world a better place, help people debate, understand, reform, revere and enact their codes. Accept that codes conflict."

Where do we find God?

2011-09-03T06:13:00.003-05:00

By Hajj Muhammad Legenhausen, Feb 8, 2010 (IslamicInsights)

Someone wrote to me: "I need to find God. Where can I find God?" And I thought, "I need to find God too. Don't we all? Where can we find Him?" This is what came to mind – fourteen places to find God. Of course, there are many more, maybe some which are better or more important than those I've mentioned here. Maybe some work better for some people than others.

1. Pascal's Way: Go to congregational worship, associate with believers, visit shrines, etc. Pascal's idea is that if you want to believe, you can condition yourself by engaging in the appropriate sorts of behavior. Actually, Pascal was giving advice about how to accept God as a Catholic, but the same principle can apply to believing in God as a Muslim. It might seem that it is a way of tricking yourself or brainwashing yourself, and Pascal talks as if going through the motions might just get you believing even when no good reason can be found. But we don't have to look at it that way. By practicing religious activities, we put ourselves in an environment in which we might notice something that will give us good reason for belief.

2. Intellectual Way: Read the books of religious philosophers and theologians and see what they say about God and how to prove His existence, etc. This is just preparatory. The real work comes in trying to think. This was Ibn Sina's way, or one of his ways. Think through the issues and find God through your own holy reason!

3. Yearning: Wake up for sahar, perform the Morning Prayer, and then ask God to help you find Him. Tell God that you are looking and want to find Him so much. Keep on doing this until you find Him. Never give up. Never give up. Never, never ever give up! This is called "importunacy" in English, and is somewhat similar to himmat in Persian/Arabic.

4. Silence: Try to calm yourself and look within. Meditate. Listen. Feel. Many of the scholars say that the hadith is not well supported according to which the Prophet (peace be upon him and his progeny) allegedly said, "He who knows himself knows his Lord." But it seems to be a very wise saying and has been repeated by Muslims over the centuries.

5. Poetry: Some people find God in listening to religious poetry, especially Hafez, Mawlavi (Rumi), Attar, etc., and especially when it is recited well.

6. Nature: The beauties of nature are also signs of God. God manifests His beauty in natural beauty. I especially find the ocean inspiring, and feel that it manifests God in a special way. Of course, everything is a sign of God in some way, but it isn't always clear how.

7. Pilgrimage: Suppose you wanted to set out on a journey to find a treasure. What do you do? First, you need to figure out how you are going to get there – in the company of fellow travelers or alone; by plane or bus or on foot; will you trust others to take you with them or do you have a map? Next, you need to figure out what to pack for the journey. There are guides for this sort of thing, like Fayz Kashani's Zaad-e Saalek, and even guides for the etiquette of visitation. What kinds of clothes should you wear? How can you find a good traveling companion?

8. Light: I have met some people who find God through light, a kind of inner light. They say that in certain places and people they find a kind of light, halo, aura, and they keep on following the light toward God. We could call this the Ishraqi way, after Sohravardi, known as the Shaikh al-Ishraq, the Master of Illumination.

9. Charity: Some people find God through engaging in charitable work. Helping those in need can get us to stop being so preoccupied with ourselves, and if we give in the name of Islam, we can find God by doing service to Him through service to others.

10. Gratitude: God can be found by reflection on natural feelings of gratitude that we experience when we have a good day, find food and shelter, health, see a flower, etc. We feel thankful, but to whom? Where does the thanking lead? Can we see where it points? Some people think this is silly, and maybe it doesn't prove anything, but I think that thanks and praise, when it comes from the heart, can open a great channel between a person and God.

11. Suffering: Some people find God when disaster strikes. When everything seems lost and we are suffering most, something happens within ourselves, and we find that a way appears and leads to Him. Consider the following verses of the Holy Qur'an: "And when harm touches man, he invokes Us, lying on his side, or sitting or standing. But when We have removed his harm from him, he passes on as if he had never invoked Us for a harm that touched him! Thus it is made fair-seeming to the Musrifun that which they used to do."(10:12) Also, "And when they embark on a ship, they invoke Allah, making their Faith pure for Him Only: but when He brings them safely to land, behold they give a share of their worship to others." (29:65)

12. Death: Some find God in mediation on death. Visiting cemeteries is recommended, and thinking of those who have passed away and that our lives, too, will end. In thinking, contemplating, and reflecting about these things, one may be drawn to a realization of a reality beyond this life and death. There are many narrations pertaining to this a number of which have been collected by Fayz Kashani in the very last book of his Mahjat al-Bayza, according to which the remembrance of death decreases our attachments to this world and helps us to conquer our passions.

13. Empathy: We can also find God through empathizing with others and finding traces of the divine in them. Of course, these traces are most salient in the Fourteen Immaculate Ones (peace be upon them), but we should look for it in others too. Empathy involves a shift of perspective from "me" to "we". At its highest stage, one finds oneself on the side of God, so that His will becomes our will.

14. Qur'an: The Qur'an is God's revelation. Revelation is showing. In the Qur'an God shows Himself. Some people find God in the recitation of the Qur'an, others in meditation on it, others in studying it, discussing it, reading Tafsir, and in the attempt to put its wisdom into practice in our lives.

There are many other places to find God. Since everything manifests God in some way or other, God can be found everywhere, if only we learn how to look. May Allah help us to look properly and to find His manifestations in all things, especially in the best of His creatures Muhammad and his Ahlul Bayt, the immaculate and pure, and in all the prophets and guides He has sent to humanity, and may we, too, in our own humble ways, come to manifest Him in our own lives.

Rejection letter from a publisher

2011-06-19T12:30:00.008-05:00

Most honorable Sir,
We perused your MS.
with boundless delight. And
we hurry to swear by our ancestors
we have never read any other
that equals its mastery.
Were we to publish your work,
we could never presume again on
our public and name
to print books of a standard
not up to yours.
For we cannot imagine
that the next ten thousand years
will offer its ectype.
We must therefore refuse
your work that shines as it were in the sky
and beg you a thousand times
to pardon our fault
which impairs but our own offices.

– Publishers

Often this letter (allegedly from a Chinese publisher) is referenced to Louis Zukofsky's "A" (1967). From googlebooks (as of today), the earliest appearance of this text is in "New Directions in Prose and Poetry" (1938) by James Laughlin.

Sharp Focus, Bitter Contrasts

2011-04-26T23:50:00.010-05:00

Found these in my inbox. Haven't been able to locate the source (the artist). Some sharp focus and bitter contrasts they present.

How businesses coax shoppers into spending

2010-12-05T19:21:00.009-06:00

A good summary of the tactics that businesses use to coax shoppers into spending. The article also illuminates how the ideology of 'choice' can be illusionary. I may think that I am buying this particular item out of my personal, independent choice, but in reality that choice or preference is conditioned by a number of stimuli, both within the store and from outside (ads, culture, media). A previous post also sheds light on the ideology of 'choice' being illusionary. A related clip from Raj Patel (in fact, the whole speech from the FORA.TV is worth watching).

Buyer beware — of how you're being coaxed into spending
Stores' music, lighting, 'deals' and pricing ranges can all influence what you buy. And if you want to spend less, pay in cash so you can see what you're losing.

By Karen Ravn, Los Angeles Times, November 22, 2010

http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-shopping-psychology-20101122,0,1283284,full.story

Chances are, given the time of year and all, you're about to go shopping (and shopping and shopping and shopping and shopping).

But beware. It won't be just a walk in the mall. Shopping is a far more complex undertaking than you probably realize, according to researchers who delve into the intricacies of consumers' buying habits.

"We have a difficult time controlling our shopping behavior," says Alexander Chernev, associate professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. "It's influenced by lots of forces we usually don't take into account."

We take account of some of them below.

The five senses

"Everyone in the world of retail is trying to get you to spend in their location," says Paco Underhill, author of "Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping" and "What Women Want." "They try to engage you with all five senses."

What you see: Retailers work to present their merchandise in the best light — literally. "They use lighting to make something that looks good look even better," Underhill says. "Everything tends to look better in the store than it does when you get it home."

What you hear: If you like the music a store plays, chances are you'll like the products it sells — and vice versa. That, at least, is the message many stores hope to send with their soundtracks. For example, the strains of Justin Bieber crooning "Someday at Christmas" are pretty much a shout-out to young girls that this is the store for them. Middle-aged nerds? Not so much. "The music can tell you either you belong or you don't belong," Underhill says.

Just as music can attract people into a store, it can help to keep them there, or hurry them out the door. That's because customers respond to the tempo of a store's music, says Deborah MacInnis, professor of business administration and marketing at the USC Marshall School of Business. "Studies show that the slower the tempo, the slower people walk through the store, so the more they put in their baskets and the more they end up buying. If the tempo is faster, people walk faster too. They don't stop to look so much, and they don't buy as much."

What you smell and taste: The sweet aroma of roasting chestnuts. Free samples of Christmas cookies. Like music, those are effective ways of inviting customers into a store and making them feel welcome.

Well duh, you may say. But smell and taste can serve another subtle function too, Underhill notes. "They get your saliva glands going, and that makes you hungry. And when you're hungry, you're more apt to buy anything, not just food."

What you touch: Signs encouraging customers to touch the merchandise are far less common in stores than signs imploring them not to. But research shows that retailers may be missing a rather lucrative boat. "There are three ways that touching an object can make you willing to pay more for it," says Joann Peck, an associate professor of marketing at the Wisconsin School of Business in Madison who has conducted a number of studies analyzing the role of touch in shopping behaviors.

One way — the most obvious — is by giving shoppers information they can't get otherwise, such as how much the object weighs, how soft or hard it is, how rough or smooth it feels. A second way is also quite intuitive. You may be willing to pay more for a cashmere sweater or a small, sleek smart phone just because you like how it feels.

More surprisingly, Peck says, apart from any information or pleasure it gives you, simply touching an object can make you feel a certain sense of ownership. "And you'll pay more for anything you feel like you own."

(Sometimes a lot more. In an experiment at Duke University, researchers asked students who had won tickets for the Final Four basketball tournament how much they'd be willing to sell them for — the answer, on average, was $2,400. They also asked students who had entered the lottery but not won how much they'd be willing to pay for tickets — in that case, the average was a measly $170.)

There are big individual differences in how much people like to touch things, Peck says. But the rule of thumb should probably be, "If you don't want it, don't touch it."

Impulse buying

Suppose you go to a store to buy a new USB cable for your camera. That's all you need. That's all you want. But it may not be all you buy. For while you're standing in line at the cash register, all set to pay and go home, what to your wondering eyes should appear but "The Hair Traffic Controller — the world's greatest pet hair remover"? Now, it just so happens that you own the world's shedding-est sheepdog, and, well …

It's not merely random good fortune that you should find this fantabulous product — on sale, no less! — where you do. Retailers often identify potential "impulse buys" and stock them at the ends of aisles and close to the checkout stand. Shoppers may not plan to make these sorts of purchases, but stores do plan to make these sorts of sales.

"If shoppers suddenly ceased to buy on impulse," Underhill wrote in "Why We Buy," "believe me, our entire economy would collapse."

Buying on impulse is often seen as a personal budget-breaker. A survey of adult women conducted for ShopSmart Magazine last year found that the average price of the women's most recent impulse buy was more than $100. And 35% reported regretting at least one impulse buy they'd made in the previous year.

If shoppers want to cut down on impulse buys, most experts advise that they make a list before they go shopping, and then stick to it. A 2009 article in the Journal of Marketing Research offers a less obvious approach. The study found that by eating a typical Thanksgiving dinner, with plenty of turkey and mashed potatoes — and thus plenty of tryptophan and carbohydrates — shoppers could cut down on impulsive buying later. The posited explanation: The neurotransmitter serotonin is known to reduce impulsive behavior, and it's synthesized from tryptophan.

At first glance this result seems to have very fortuitous implications for shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving. But unfortunately, the effects of a Thanksgiving meal will wear off by then, says the study's co-author Arul Mishra, assistant professor of marketing at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. "But it does have implications for online shopping."

Money, money, money

The best price in life is free. Or not. Customers are more likely to buy something if they think they're getting a good deal on it. And simply including something free with a sale often does the trick: Buy this $1,500 refrigerator and get a free six-pack of Coke. (Wee!) Buy three pairs of shoes, and get a fourth pair free. (Who cares if you don't need any new shoes at all?)

"The power of 'free' is really quite incredible," says Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and author of "Predictably Irrational." In a series of experiments described in his book, Ariely found that people consistently preferred to get something free over paying a little for something, even though they'd actually come out ahead in the latter case.

For instance, he offered mall-goers in Boston the following choice: a $10 Amazon gift certificate free or a $20 certificate for $7. Most opted for the freebie, even though they would have netted more money from the $20 certificate ($13 versus $10). In a second experiment, he offered a slightly different choice: People could buy a $10 gift certificate for $1 or a $20 certificate for $8. Again, the $20 certificate was $3 more profitable, but this time — with "free" off the table — people went for it.

Knowing that the free option isn't always best may make shoppers consider free offers more carefully. On the other hand, Ariely admits that he once bought an expensive new car at least partly because it came with three years of free oil changes.

The theory of relativity. (Not Einstein's.) Like everything else in the world, prices are relative. And shoppers rely on that relativity to judge value. In an experiment with 100 graduate business students that Ariely also reported in "Predictably Irrational," he listed three choices for subscriptions to the Economist (which he had found in an actual ad). For an Internet-only subscription, the price was $59; for print only, it was $125; and for both print and Internet it was also $125.

Happily for the reputation of the business school, none of the students chose the print-only option — obviously a bad deal because the print-and-Internet option was available for the same price. In fact, 16 students chose Internet only, and 84 chose print and Internet. But then Ariely downsized the options to two, eliminating the print-only option that everybody had wisely rejected before anyway. So the choices were Internet only for $59 and both print and Internet for $125. This time, 68 students chose Internet only, and 32 chose the print-and-Internet package.

The upshot in the experiment? Though the choices were essentially the same both times, just having the print-only option there the first time around seemed to confuse the issue. To most students, apparently, it made the print-and-Internet option look irresistibly good by comparison. Free of that distraction in the second experiment, many more of them opted to spend less money.

The upshot in real life? The value judgments shoppers make for any particular item can change depending on what they have to compare it with. So, for example, a computer store can probably sell more $100 printers if it also has a $300 printer for sale than it could if the $100 printer were the most expensive one they carried.

Although shoppers do make price comparisons, they're not always very good at it, as shown in a paper published last year in the Journal of Consumer Research. In that study, people were given a choice between two pens on which the authors had manipulated the prices. When the lower-priced pen cost $2 and the higher-priced pen cost $3.99, 44% chose the higher-priced one. But fewer than half as many — only 18% — chose the higher-priced pen when the prices were changed by just a penny — to $1.99 and $4.

Comparing only the first digits of prices may seem foolish. But it may be just one example of decision-making shortcuts that humans often take out of necessity. "We focus on what is easy to process," MacInnis says, "because we can't consider everything."

And sometimes it helps to compare apples to oranges, Ariely says. "If you're trying to decide whether to buy a coffee maker for $50, ask yourself what else you could do with $50. If there's something else you'd rather do, then don't get the coffee maker."

Giving cash some credit.

Paying with a credit or debit card can almost seem like not paying at all. No actual money changes hands. There's no real evidence that you're any poorer than you were before. But when you pay with cash, money does change hands, and not in a pleasant direction. You end up with less than you had before. You're demonstrably poorer. It hurts.

A number of studies have shown that shoppers are less prone to impulse buying if they leave the plastic at home and force themselves to endure the pain of paying with cash. Ideally, they should use bills of large denominations, according to a 2006 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research. "People are less likely to spend if they are carrying a $50 bill compared to when they have 10 $5 bills," says Mishra, a co-author of that article.

Part of the herd

Let's say you've been shopping for what seems like forever, and you're running out of ideas for gifts — but not out of friends to give them to. It may be time to join a herd — buy some books just because they're on the bestseller list, buy some wine just because it's on the "best wines under $20" list (these aren't really close friends!), wander around the mall and — trying your best not to look like a stalker — observe what other shoppers are buying, and buy it too.

As Ariely says, "Herding happens when we assume other people know something we don't." You may not end up with super-personalized gifts this way, but you'll save yourself some effort at a time when you're starting to flag.

The Big Mo

So. You've been really, really good — staying mindful of your budget, considering every option (if you get this for person A, then you'll get that for person B), not rushing into anything. In other words, your holiday shopping has yet to progress from looking to buying.

And then finally one day, you decide it's time. You'll buy this one surefire thing, a box of Aunt Erma's favorite chocolate truffles. So you do. And — poof! — your careful, cautious prudence evaporates, and you start buying left and right, smart and dumb.

So-called shopping momentum can be triggered, researchers reported in a 2007 article in the Journal of Marketing Research, when a shopper buys a single item, and in doing so shifts her mind-set from mulling things over to taking action now.

Hunters and gatherers

"There's a shopping center in Germany with a play area for men," says Daniel Kruger, a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "A woman can drop off her partner there, and while she shops he can drink, work with power tools or watch sports on TV."

The point being, both of them are happier that way. "Men just want to get what they want and get out," says Kruger, the lead author of a 2009 study published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology that documented fundamental differences in the shopping behaviors of men and women. "Women have a much greater appreciation of detail, a much greater desire to actually experience what they're getting. They want to see several items and compare them."

The researchers linked these differences all the way back to when the man of the cave went out hunting while his mate stayed home gathering nuts and berries — "which is very similar," Kruger observes, "to going to a flea market today and sorting through everything to see what's good."

For the man, a hunting expedition, which might take him far afield, would only count as successful if he brought home the bacon, er, woolly mammoth meat. For the woman, food gathering was more of a social event, something she did with friends, enjoying their company. And if she didn't find much one day, it was no big deal since she could easily go again the next.

These days, the lesson for women may be: If your partner hates going shopping with you, maybe it's not because he's a jerk. Maybe it's just because he's a guy.

Writing by hand makes kids smarter

2010-12-01T07:56:00.003-06:00

Not necessarily true for all people, but I suspect that it is for many.

How writing by hand makes kids smarter
TheWeek.com, October 6, 2010
http://theweek.com/article/index/207846/how-writing-by-hand-makes-kids-smarter

Younger Americans are typing or texting more and writing less, even in school — and that's a problem when it comes to brain development

With the ubiquity of keyboards large and small, neither children nor adults need to write much of anything by hand. That's a big problem, says Gwendolyn Bounds in The Wall Street Journal. Study after study suggests that handwriting is important for brain development and cognition — helping kids hone fine motor skills and learn to express and generate ideas. Yet the time devoted to teaching penmanship in most grade schools has shrunk to just one hour a week. Is it time to break out the legal pad? Here's a look at how the brain and penmanship interact:

Writing by hand can get ideas out faster
University of Wisconsin psychologist Virginia Berninger tested students in grades 2, 4, and 6, and found that they not only wrote faster by hand than by keyboard — but also generated more ideas when composing essays in longhand. In other research, Berninger shows that the sequential finger movements required to write by hand activate brain regions involved with thought, language, and short-term memory.

Writing increases neural activity
A recent Indiana University study had one group of children practice printing letters by hand while a second group just looked at examples of A's, B's, and C's. Then, both groups of kids entered a functional MRI (disguised as a "spaceship") that scanned their brains as the researchers showed them letters. The neural activity in the first group was far more advanced and "adult-like," researchers found.

Good handwriting makes you seem smarter
Handwriting also affects other people's perceptions of adults and children. Several studies have shown that the same mediocre essay will score much higher if written with good penmanship and much lower if written out in poor handwriting, says Vanderbilt University education professor Steve Graham. "There is a reader effect that is insidious," he says. "People judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting." And the consequences are real: On standardized tests with handwritten sections, like the SAT, an essay deemed illegible gets a big zero.

This isn't only an English-language phenomenon
Chinese and Japanese youths are suffering from "character amnesia," says AFP's Judith Evans. They can't remember how to create letters, thanks to computers and text messaging. In China, the problem is so prevalent, there's a word for it: "Tibiwangzi", or "take pen, forget character." "It's like you're forgetting your culture," says Zeng Ming, 22. So closely are Chinese writing and reading linked in the brain, says Hong Kong University linguist Siok Wai Ting, that China's reading ability as a nation could suffer.

New technology is part of the solution
New touch-screen phones and tablets, like the iPhone and iPad, are providing a countervailing force, translating handwriting into digital letter forms or making writing practice fun (a $1.99 iPhone app called "abc PocketPhonics" rewards kids with "cheering pencils"). In Japan, an iPhone game called kanji kentei — a character quiz with 12 levels — has become a hit with all age groups.

Science may just be catching up with common sense
Heather Horn in The Atlantic Wire says that while all this research is fascinating, it mostly shows that "scientists are finally beginning to explore what writers have long suspected." She notes a 1985 article in the Paris Review in which the interviewer asks novelist Robert Stone if he mostly types his manuscripts. His reply: "Yes, until something becomes elusive. Then I write in longhand in order to be precise. On a typewriter or word processor you can rush something that shouldn't be rushed — you can lose nuance, richness, lucidity. The pen compels lucidity."

Sources: Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Wire, AFP/Reuters

Is procrastination more than just a bad habit?

2010-11-22T14:04:00.013-06:00

Some excerpts from an insightful piece published in The New Yorker recently. I suggest reading it with a pinch of salt though. For one, I am not sure if some of the examples given could be so reductively analyzed as "procrastination" (with procrastination being the single or the primary cause of the outcome, which, it seems, gives too much credit to personal and psychological factors at the expense of political and economic).

I have cut out those examples from below excerpts, but see in the full text, for instance, G.M. delaying "tough decisions" or General McClellan’s “immobility”:

What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?
by James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, October 11, 2010
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/101011crbo_books_surowiecki

"Many of us go through life with an array of undone tasks, large and small, nibbling at our conscience. But Akerlof saw the experience, for all its familiarity, as mysterious. He genuinely intended to send the box to his friend, yet, as he wrote, in a paper called “Procrastination and Obedience” (1991), “each morning for over eight months I woke up and decided that the next morning would be the day to send the Stiglitz box.” He was always about to send the box, but the moment to act never arrived. Akerlof, who became one of the central figures in behavioral economics, came to the realization that procrastination might be more than just a bad habit. He argued that it revealed something important about the limits of rational thinking and that it could teach useful lessons about phenomena as diverse as substance abuse and savings habits. Since his essay was published, the study of procrastination has become a significant field in academia, with philosophers, psychologists, and economists all weighing in.

Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with finishing the piece. (This article will be no exception.) But the academic buzz around the subject isn’t just a case of eggheads rationalizing their slothfulness."
...
"It’s also a surprisingly costly one. Each year, Americans waste hundreds of millions of dollars because they don’t file their taxes on time... Procrastination also inflicts major costs on businesses and governments...

Philosophers are interested in procrastination for another reason. It’s a powerful example of what the Greeks called akrasia—doing something against one’s own better judgment. Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. In other words, if you’re simply saying “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” you’re not really procrastinating. Knowingly delaying because you think that’s the most efficient use of your time doesn’t count, either. The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. In one study, sixty-five per cent of students surveyed before they started working on a term paper said they would like to avoid procrastinating: they knew both that they wouldn’t do the work on time and that the delay would make them unhappy.

Most of the contributors to the new book [“The Thief of Time,” edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White] agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.” A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. A similar phenomenon is at work in an experiment run by a group including the economist George Loewenstein, in which people were asked to pick one movie to watch that night and one to watch at a later date. Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing. This is why Netflix queues are filled with movies that never get watched: our responsible selves put “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Seventh Seal” in our queue, but when the time comes we end up in front of a rerun of “The Hangover.”

The lesson of these experiments is not that people are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren’t consistent over time. [Confusing outcome and possible causes in this sentence?? What was the experiment about: inconsistent preferences. How do you explain that: inconsistent preferences? - SM] We want to watch the Bergman masterpiece, to give ourselves enough time to write the report properly, to set aside money for retirement. But our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run.

Why does this happen? One common answer is ignorance. Socrates believed that akrasia was, strictly speaking, impossible, since we could not want what is bad for us; if we act against our own interests, it must be because we don’t know what’s right. Loewenstein, similarly, is inclined to see the procrastinator as led astray by the “visceral” rewards of the present. As the nineteenth-century Scottish economist John Rae put it, “The prospects of future good, which future years may hold on us, seem at such a moment dull and dubious, and are apt to be slighted, for objects on which the daylight is falling strongly, and showing us in all their freshness just within our grasp.” Loewenstein also suggests that our memory for the intensity of visceral rewards is deficient: when we put off preparing for that meeting by telling ourselves that we’ll do it tomorrow, we fail to take into account that tomorrow the temptation to put off work will be just as strong.

Ignorance might also affect procrastination through what the social scientist Jon Elster calls “the planning fallacy.” Elster thinks that people underestimate the time “it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.” When I was writing this piece, for instance, I had to take my car into the shop, I had to take two unanticipated trips, a family member fell ill, and so on. Each of these events was, strictly speaking, unexpected, and each took time away from my work. But they were really just the kinds of problems you predictably have to deal with in everyday life. Pretending I wouldn’t have any interruptions to my work was a typical illustration of the planning fallacy.

Still, ignorance can’t be the whole story. In the first place, we often procrastinate not by doing fun tasks but by doing jobs whose only allure is that they aren’t what we should be doing. My apartment, for instance, has rarely looked tidier than it does at the moment. And people do learn from experience: procrastinators know all too well the allures of the salient present, and they want to resist them. They just don’t."
...
"Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle. McClellan was also given to excessive planning, as if only the ideal battle plan were worth acting on. Procrastinators often succumb to this sort of perfectionism.

Viewed this way, procrastination starts to look less like a question of mere ignorance than like a complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict. But some of the philosophers in “The Thief of Time” have a more radical explanation [??] for the gap between what we want to do and what we end up doing: the person who makes plans and the person who fails to carry them out are not really the same person: they’re different parts of what the game theorist Thomas Schelling called “the divided self.” [What about the story of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"? Also, Abrhamic faiths all speak of divided and contending selves, motivations, desires. Similar ideas can be found in the Easter Philosophy. Dr. Ali Shariati presents some of these ideas in his lucid speech, "Man and Islam". Recent variations could also be seen in Freud and Jung's psychoanalysis. - SM] Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves not as unified selves but as different beings, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control..."

"If identity is a collection of competing selves, what does each of them represent? The easy answer is that one represents your short-term interests (having fun, putting off work, and so on), while another represents your long-term goals. But, if that’s the case, it’s not obvious how you’d ever get anything done: the short-term self, it seems, would always win out. The philosopher Don Ross offers a persuasive solution to the problem. For Ross, the various parts of the self are all present at once, constantly competing and bargaining with one another—one that wants to work, one that wants to watch television, and so on. The key, for Ross, is that although the television-watching self is interested only in watching TV, it’s interested in watching TV not just now but also in the future. This means that it can be bargained with: working now will let you watch more television down the road. Procrastination, in this reading, is the result of a bargaining process gone wrong.

The idea of the divided self, though discomfiting to some, can be liberating in practical terms, because it encourages you to stop thinking about procrastination as something you can beat by just trying harder. Instead, we should rely on what Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson, in their essay in “The Thief of Time,” call “the extended will”—external tools and techniques to help the parts of our selves that want to work. A classic illustration of the extended will at work is Ulysses’ decision to have his men bind him to the mast of his ship. Ulysses knows that when he hears the Sirens he will be too weak to resist steering the ship onto the rocks in pursuit of them, so he has his men bind him, thereby forcing him to adhere to his long-term aims. Similarly, Thomas Schelling once said that he would be willing to pay extra in advance for a hotel room without a television in it. Today, problem gamblers write contracts with casinos banning them from the premises. And people who are trying to lose weight or finish a project will sometimes make bets with their friends so that if they don’t deliver on their promise it’ll cost them money. In 2008, a Ph.D. candidate at Chapel Hill wrote software that enables people to shut off their access to the Internet for up to eight hours; the program, called Freedom, now has an estimated seventy-five thousand users.

Not everyone in “The Thief of Time” approves of the reliance on the extended will. Mark D. White advances an idealist argument rooted in Kantian ethics: recognizing procrastination as a failure of will, we should seek to strengthen the will rather than relying on external controls that will allow it to atrophy further. This isn’t a completely fruitless task: much recent research suggests that will power is, in some ways, like a muscle and can be made stronger. The same research, though, also suggests that most of us have a limited amount of will power and that it’s easily exhausted. In one famous study, people who had been asked to restrain themselves from readily available temptation—in this case, a pile of chocolate-chip cookies that they weren’t allowed to touch—had a harder time persisting in a difficult task than people who were allowed to eat the cookies.

Given this tendency, it makes sense that we often rely intuitively on external rules to help ourselves out. A few years ago, Dan Ariely, a psychologist at M.I.T., did a fascinating experiment examining one of the most basic external tools for dealing with procrastination: deadlines. Students in a class were assigned three papers for the semester, and they were given a choice: they could set separate deadlines for when they had to hand in each of the papers or they could hand them all in together at the end of the semester. There was no benefit to handing the papers in early, since they were all going to be graded at semester’s end, and there was a potential cost to setting the deadlines, since if you missed a deadline your grade would be docked. So the rational thing to do was to hand in all the papers at the end of the semester; that way you’d be free to write the papers sooner but not at risk of a penalty if you didn’t get around to it. Yet most of the students chose to set separate deadlines for each paper, precisely because they knew that they were otherwise unlikely to get around to working on the papers early, which meant they ran the risk of not finishing all three by the end of the semester. This is the essence of the extended will: instead of trusting themselves, the students relied on an outside tool to make themselves do what they actually wanted to do.

Beyond self-binding, there are other ways to avoid dragging your feet, most of which depend on what psychologists might call reframing the task in front of you. Procrastination is driven, in part, by the gap between effort (which is required now) and reward (which you reap only in the future, if ever). So narrowing that gap, by whatever means necessary, helps. Since open-ended tasks with distant deadlines are much easier to postpone than focussed, short-term projects, dividing projects into smaller, more defined sections helps. That’s why David Allen, the author of the best-selling time-management book “Getting Things Done,” lays great emphasis on classification and definition [reminds one of Ellen Langer's 1990 book "Mindfulness" - SM]: the vaguer the task, or the more abstract the thinking it requires, the less likely you are to finish it. One German study suggests that just getting people to think about concrete problems (like how to open a bank account) makes them better at finishing their work—even when it deals with a completely different subject. Another way of making procrastination less likely is to reduce the amount of choice we have: often when people are afraid of making the wrong choice they end up doing nothing. So companies might be better off offering their employees fewer investment choices in their 401(k) plans, and making signing up for the plan the default option.

It’s hard to ignore the fact that all these tools are at root about imposing limits and narrowing options—in other words, about a voluntary abnegation of freedom. (Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing.) But before we rush to overcome procrastination we should consider whether it is sometimes an impulse we should heed. The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.” In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which. [A number of similar causes could be identified that may contribute to procrastination (procrastination, as a form of resistance perhaps - a third kind.). For example, you are not happy with your pay-scale, or you feel being treated unfairly, or you feel you could do better things in life than being stuck in a cubicle. - SM]

If you have read this all the way to the bottom, here is your reward! A funny comic from Calvin and Hobbes related to the topic .

An Outpost of Progress - Joseph Conrad

2010-11-21T09:13:00.007-06:00

"An Outpost of Progress" is an poignant short story by Joseph Conrad (the famous author of the "Heart of Darkness") written in July 1896 and is based in part on the author's own experience of being Congo. A wiki entry tells us that "Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew upon his experiences in the French and later the British Merchant Navy to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a worldwide empire while also plumbing the depths of the human soul."

I was introduced to this story by a professor in an undergrad class. Drawing from this story and a couple of other sources, I wrote a piece on the 'mentalities of the colonizers and colonized', which, unfortunately, I can't find right now. But I distinctively remember this story leaving an enduring impression on me.

Image source.

An Outpost of Progress
by Joseph Conrad

I

There were two white men in charge of the trading station. Kayerts, the chief, was short and fat; Carlier, the assistant, was tall, with a large head and a very broad trunk perched upon a long pair of thin legs. The third man on the staff was a Sierra Leone nigger, who maintained that his name was Henry Price. However, for some reason or other, the natives down the river had given him the name of Makola, and it stuck to him through all his wanderings about the country. He spoke English and French with a warbling accent, wrote a beautiful hand, understood bookkeeping, and cherished in his innermost heart the worship of evil spirits. His wife was a negress from Loanda, very large and very noisy. Three children rolled about in sunshine before the door of his low, shed-like dwelling. Makola, taciturn and impenetrable, despised the two white men. He had charge of a small clay storehouse with a dried-grass roof, and pretended to keep a correct account of beads, cotton cloth, red kerchiefs, brass wire, and other trade goods it contained. Besides the storehouse and Makola's hut, there was only one large building in the cleared ground of the station. It was built neatly of reeds, with a verandah on all the four sides. There were three rooms in it. The one in the middle was the living-room, and had two rough tables and a few stools in it. The other two were the bedrooms for the white men. Each had a bedstead and a mosquito net for all furniture. The plank floor was littered with the belongings of the white men; open half-empty boxes, torn wearing apparel, old boots; all the things dirty, and all the things broken, that accumulate mysteriously round untidy men. There was also another dwelling-place some distance away from the buildings. In it, under a tall cross much out of the perpendicular, slept the man who had seen the beginning of all this; who had planned and had watched the construction of this outpost of progress. He had been, at home, an unsuccessful painter who, weary of pursuing fame on an empty stomach, had gone out there through high protections. He had been the first chief of that station. Makola had watched the energetic artist die of fever in the just finished house with his usual kind of "I told you so" indifference. Then, for a time, he dwelt alone with his family, his account books, and the Evil Spirit that rules the lands under the equator. He got on very well with his god. Perhaps he had propitiated him by a promise of more white men to play with, by and by. At any rate the director of the Great Trading Company, coming up in a steamer that resembled an enormous sardine box with a flat-roofed shed erected on it, found the station in good order, and Makola as usual quietly diligent. The director had the cross put up over the first agent's grave, and appointed Kayerts to the post. Carlier was told off as second in charge. The director was a man ruthless and efficient, who at times, but very imperceptibly, indulged in grim humour. He made a speech to Kayerts and Carlier, pointing out to them the promising aspect of their station. The nearest trading-post was about three hundred miles away. It was an exceptional opportunity for them to distinguish themselves and to earn percentages on the trade. This appointment was a favour done to beginners. Kayerts was moved almost to tears by his director's kindness. He would, he said, by doing his best, try to justify the flattering confidence, &c., &c. Kayerts had been in the Administration of the Telegraphs, and knew how to express himself correctly. Carlier, an ex-non-commissioned officer of cavalry in an army guaranteed from harm by several European Powers, was less impressed. If there were commissions to get, so much the better; and, trailing a sulky glance over the river, the forests, the impenetrable bush that seemed to cut off the station from the rest of the world, he muttered between his teeth, "We shall see, very soon."

Next day, some bales of cotton goods and a few cases of provisions having been thrown on shore, the sardine-box steamer went off, not to return for another six months. On the deck the director touched his cap to the two agents, who stood on the bank waving their hats, and turning to an old servant of the Company on his passage to headquarters, said, "Look at those two imbeciles. They must be mad at home to send me such specimens. I told those fellows to plant a vegetable garden, build new storehouses and fences, and construct a landing-stage. I bet nothing will be done! They won't know how to begin. I always thought the station on this river useless, and they just fit the station!"

"They will form themselves there," said the old stager with a quiet smile.

"At any rate, I am rid of them for six months," retorted the director.

The two men watched the steamer round the bend, then, ascending arm in arm the slope of the bank, returned to the station. They had been in this vast and dark country only a very short time, and as yet always in the midst of other white men, under the eye and guidance of their superiors. And now, dull as they were to the subtle influences of surroundings, they felt themselves very much alone, when suddenly left unassisted to face the wilderness; a wilderness rendered more strange, more incomprehensible by the mysterious glimpses of the vigorous life it contained. They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one's kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one's thoughts, of one's sensations--to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.

Kayerts and Carlier walked arm in arm, drawing close to one another as children do in the dark; and they had the same, not altogether unpleasant, sense of danger which one half suspects to be imaginary. They chatted persistently in familiar tones. "Our station is prettily situated," said one. The other assented with enthusiasm, enlarging volubly on the beauties of the situation. Then they passed near the grave. "Poor devil!" said Kayerts. "He died of fever, didn't he?" muttered Carlier, stopping short. "Why," retorted Kayerts, with indignation, "I've been told that the fellow exposed himself recklessly to the sun. The climate here, everybody says, is not at all worse than at home, as long as you keep out of the sun. Do you hear that, Carlier? I am chief here, and my orders are that you should not expose yourself to the sun!" He assumed his superiority jocularly, but his meaning was serious. The idea that he would, perhaps, have to bury Carlier and remain alone, gave him an inward shiver. He felt suddenly that this Carlier was more precious to him here, in the centre of Africa, than a brother could be anywhere else. Carlier, entering into the spirit of the thing, made a military salute and answered in a brisk tone, "Your orders shall be attended to, chief!" Then he burst out laughing, slapped Kayerts on the back and shouted, "We shall let life run easily here! Just sit still and gather in the ivory those savages will bring. This country has its good points, after all!" They both laughed loudly while Carlier thought: "That poor Kayerts; he is so fat and unhealthy. It would be awful if I had to bury him here. He is a man I respect." . . . Before they reached the verandah of their house they called one another "my dear fellow."

The first day they were very active, pottering about with hammers and nails and red calico, to put up curtains, make their house habitable and pretty; resolved to settle down comfortably to their new life. For them an impossible task. To grapple effectually with even purely material problems requires more serenity of mind and more lofty courage than people generally imagine. No two beings could have been more unfitted for such a struggle. Society, not from any tenderness, but because of its strange needs, had taken care of those two men, forbidding them all independent thought, all initiative, all departure from routine; and forbidding it under pain of death. They could only live on condition of being machines. And now, released from the fostering care of men with pens behind the ears, or of men with gold lace on the sleeves, they were like those lifelong prisoners who, liberated after many years, do not know what use to make of their freedom. They did not know what use to make of their faculties, being both, through want of practice, incapable of independent thought.

At the end of two months Kayerts often would say, "If it was not for my Melie, you wouldn't catch me here." Melie was his daughter. He had thrown up his post in the Administration of the Telegraphs, though he had been for seventeen years perfectly happy there, to earn a dowry for his girl. His wife was dead, and the child was being brought up by his sisters. He regretted the streets, the pavements, the cafes, his friends of many years; all the things he used to see, day after day; all the thoughts suggested by familiar things--the thoughts effortless, monotonous, and soothing of a Government clerk; he regretted all the gossip, the small enmities, the mild venom, and the little jokes of Government offices. "If I had had a decent brother- in-law," Carlier would remark, "a fellow with a heart, I would not be here." He had left the army and had made himself so obnoxious to his family by his laziness and impudence, that an exasperated brother-in-law had made superhuman efforts to procure him an appoint- ment in the Company as a second-class agent. Having not a penny in the world he was compelled to accept this means of livelihood as soon as it became quite clear to him that there was nothing more to squeeze out of his relations. He, like Kayerts, regretted his old life. He regretted the clink of sabre and spurs on a fine afternoon, the barrack-room witticisms, the girls of garrison towns; but, besides, he had also a sense of grievance. He was evidently a much ill-used man. This made him moody, at times. But the two men got on well together in the fellowship of their stupidity and laziness. Together they did nothing, absolutely nothing, and enjoyed the sense of the idleness for which they were paid. And in time they came to feel something resembling affection for one another.

They lived like blind men in a large room, aware only of what came in contact with them (and of that only imperfectly), but unable to see the general aspect of things. The river, the forest, all the great land throbbing with life, were like a great emptiness. Even the brilliant sunshine disclosed nothing intelligible. Things appeared and disappeared before their eyes in an unconnected and aimless kind of way. The river seemed to come from nowhere and flow nowhither. It flowed through a void. Out of that void, at times, came canoes, and men with spears in their hands would suddenly crowd the yard of the station. They were naked, glossy black, ornamented with snowy shells and glistening brass wire, perfect of limb. They made an uncouth babbling noise when they spoke, moved in a stately manner, and sent quick, wild glances out of their startled, never-resting eyes. Those warriors would squat in long rows, four or more deep, before the verandah, while their chiefs bargained for hours with Makola over an elephant tusk. Kayerts sat on his chair and looked down on the proceedings, understanding nothing. He stared at them with his round blue eyes, called out to Carlier, "Here, look! look at that fellow there--and that other one, to the left. Did you ever such a face? Oh, the funny brute!"

Carlier, smoking native tobacco in a short wooden pipe, would swagger up twirling his moustaches, and surveying the warriors with haughty indulgence, would say--

"Fine animals. Brought any bone? Yes? It's not any too soon. Look at the muscles of that fellow third from the end. I wouldn't care to get a punch on the nose from him. Fine arms, but legs no good below the knee. Couldn't make cavalry men of them." And after glancing down complacently at his own shanks, he always concluded: "Pah! Don't they stink! You, Makola! Take that herd over to the fetish" (the storehouse was in every station called the fetish, perhaps because of the spirit of civilization it contained) "and give them up some of the rubbish you keep there. I'd rather see it full of bone than full of rags."

Kayerts approved.

"Yes, yes! Go and finish that palaver over there, Mr. Makola. I will come round when you are ready, to weigh the tusk. We must be careful." Then turning to his companion: "This is the tribe that lives down the river; they are rather aromatic. I remember, they had been once before here. D'ye hear that row? What a fellow has got to put up with in this dog of a country! My head is split."

Such profitable visits were rare. For days the two pioneers of trade and progress would look on their empty courtyard in the vibrating brilliance of vertical sunshine. Below the high bank, the silent river flowed on glittering and steady. On the sands in the middle of the stream, hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. And stretching away in all directions, surrounding the insignificant cleared spot of the trading post, immense forests, hiding fateful complications of fantastic life, lay in the eloquent silence of mute greatness. The two men understood nothing, cared for nothing but for the passage of days that separated them from the steamer's return. Their predecessor had left some torn books. They took up these wrecks of novels, and, as they had never read anything of the kind before, they were surprised and amused. Then during long days there were interminable and silly discussions about plots and personages. In the centre of Africa they made acquaintance of Richelieu and of d'Artagnan, of Hawk's Eye and of Father Goriot, and of many other people. All these imaginary personages became subjects for gossip as if they had been living friends. They discounted their virtues, suspected their motives, decried their successes; were scandalized at their duplicity or were doubtful about their courage. The accounts of crimes filled them with indignation, while tender or pathetic passages moved them deeply. Carlier cleared his throat and said in a soldierly voice, "What nonsense!" Kayerts, his round eyes suffused with tears, his fat cheeks quivering, rubbed his bald head, and declared. "This is a splendid book. I had no idea there were such clever fellows in the world." They also found some old copies of a home paper. That print discussed what it was pleased to call "Our Colonial Expansion" in high-flown language. It spoke much of the rights and duties of civilization, of the sacredness of the civilizing work, and extolled the merits of those who went about bringing light, and faith and commerce to the dark places of the earth. Carlier and Kayerts read, wondered, and began to think better of themselves. Carlier said one evening, waving his hand about, "In a hundred years, there will be perhaps a town here. Quays, and warehouses, and barracks, and--and--billiard-rooms. Civilization, my boy, and virtue--and all. And then, chaps will read that two good fellows, Kayerts and Carlier, were the first civilized men to live in this very spot!" Kayerts nodded, "Yes, it is a consolation to think of that." They seemed to forget their dead predecessor; but, early one day, Carlier went out and replanted the cross firmly. "It used to make me squint whenever I walked that way," he explained to Kayerts over the morning coffee. "It made me squint, leaning over so much. So I just planted it upright. And solid, I promise you! I suspended myself with both hands to the cross-piece. Not a move. Oh, I did that properly."

At times Gobila came to see them. Gobila was the chief of the neighbouring villages. He was a gray-headed savage, thin and black, with a white cloth round his loins and a mangy panther skin hanging over his back. He came up with long strides of his skeleton legs, swinging a staff as tall as himself, and, entering the common room of the station, would squat on his heels to the left of the door. There he sat, watching Kayerts, and now and then making a speech which the other did not understand. Kayerts, without interrupting his occupation, would from time to time say in a friendly manner: "How goes it, you old image?" and they would smile at one another. The two whites had a liking for that old and incomprehensible creature, and called him Father Gobila. Gobila's manner was paternal, and he seemed really to love all white men. They all appeared to him very young, indistinguishably alike (except for stature), and he knew that they were all brothers, and also immortal. The death of the artist, who was the first white man whom he knew intimately, did not disturb this belief, because he was firmly convinced that the white stranger had pretended to die and got himself buried for some mysterious purpose of his own, into which it was useless to inquire. Perhaps it was his way of going home to his own country? At any rate, these were his brothers, and he transferred his absurd affection to them. They returned it in a way. Carlier slapped him on the back, and recklessly struck off matches for his amusement. Kayerts was always ready to let him have a sniff at the ammonia bottle. In short, they behaved just like that other white creature that had hidden itself in a hole in the ground. Gobila considered them attentively. Perhaps they were the same being with the other--or one of them was. He couldn't decide--clear up that mystery; but he remained always very friendly. In consequence of that friendship the women of Gobila's village walked in single file through the reedy grass, bringing every morning to the station, fowls, and sweet potatoes, and palm wine, and sometimes a goat. The Company never provisions the stations fully, and the agents required those local supplies to live. They had them through the good-will of Gobila, and lived well. Now and then one of them had a bout of fever, and the other nursed him with gentle devotion. They did not think much of it. It left them weaker, and their appearance changed for the worse. Carlier was hollow-eyed and irritable. Kayerts showed a drawn, flabby face above the rotundity of his stomach, which gave him a weird aspect. But being constantly together, they did not notice the change that took place gradually in their appearance, and also in their dispositions.

Five months passed in that way.

Then, one morning, as Kayerts and Carlier, lounging in their chairs under the verandah, talked about the approaching visit of the steamer, a knot of armed men came out of the forest and advanced towards the station. They were strangers to that part of the country. They were tall, slight, draped classically from neck to heel in blue fringed cloths, and carried percussion muskets over their bare right shoulders. Makola showed signs of excitement, and ran out of the storehouse (where he spent all his days) to meet these visitors. They came into the courtyard and looked about them with steady, scornful glances. Their leader, a powerful and determined-looking negro with bloodshot eyes, stood in front of the verandah and made a long speech. He gesticulated much, and ceased very suddenly.

There was something in his intonation, in the sounds of the long sentences he used, that startled the two whites. It was like a reminiscence of something not exactly familiar, and yet resembling the speech of civilized men. It sounded like one of those impossible languages which sometimes we hear in our dreams.

"What lingo is that?" said the amazed Carlier. "In the first moment I fancied the fellow was going to speak French. Anyway, it is a different kind of gibberish to what we ever heard."

"Yes," replied Kayerts. "Hey, Makola, what does he say? Where do they come from? Who are they?"

But Makola, who seemed to be standing on hot bricks, answered hurriedly, "I don't know. They come from very far. Perhaps Mrs. Price will understand. They are perhaps bad men."

The leader, after waiting for a while, said something sharply to Makola, who shook his head. Then the man, after looking round, noticed Makola's hut and walked over there. The next moment Mrs. Makola was heard speaking with great volubility. The other strangers--they were six in all--strolled about with an air of ease, put their heads through the door of the storeroom, congregated round the grave, pointed understandingly at the cross, and generally made themselves at home.

"I don't like those chaps--and, I say, Kayerts, they must be from the coast; they've got firearms," observed the sagacious Carlier.

Kayerts also did not like those chaps. They both, for the first time, became aware that they lived in conditions where the unusual may be dangerous, and that there was no power on earth outside of themselves to stand between them and the unusual. They became uneasy, went in and loaded their revolvers. Kayerts said, "We must order Makola to tell them to go away before dark."

The strangers left in the afternoon, after eating a meal prepared for them by Mrs. Makola. The immense woman was excited, and talked much with the visitors. She rattled away shrilly, pointing here and there at the forests and at the river. Makola sat apart and watched. At times he got up and whispered to his wife. He accompanied the strangers across the ravine at the back of the station-ground, and returned slowly looking very thoughtful. When questioned by the white men he was very strange, seemed not to understand, seemed to have forgotten French--seemed to have forgotten how to speak altogether. Kayerts and Carlier agreed that the nigger had had too much palm wine.

There was some talk about keeping a watch in turn, but in the evening everything seemed so quiet and peaceful that they retired as usual. All night they were disturbed by a lot of drumming in the villages. A deep, rapid roll near by would be followed by another far off--then all ceased. Soon short appeals would rattle out here and there, then all mingle together, increase, become vigorous and sustained, would spread out over the forest, roll through the night, unbroken and ceaseless, near and far, as if the whole land had been one immense drum booming out steadily an appeal to heaven. And through the deep and tremendous noise sudden yells that resembled snatches of songs from a madhouse darted shrill and high in discordant jets of sound which seemed to rush far above the earth and drive all peace from under the stars.

Carlier and Kayerts slept badly. They both thought they had heard shots fired during the night--but they could not agree as to the direction. In the morning Makola was gone somewhere. He returned about noon with one of yesterday's strangers, and eluded all Kayerts' attempts to close with him: had become deaf apparently. Kayerts wondered. Carlier, who had been fishing off the bank, came back and remarked while he showed his catch, "The niggers seem to be in a deuce of a stir; I wonder what's up. I saw about fifteen canoes cross the river during the two hours I was there fishing." Kayerts, worried, said, "Isn't this Makola very queer to-day?" Carlier advised, "Keep all our men together in case of some trouble."

There were ten station men who had been left by the Director. Those fellows, having engaged themselves to the Company for six months (without having any idea of a month in particular and only a very faint notion of time in general), had been serving the cause of progress for upwards of two years. Belonging to a tribe from a very distant part of the land of darkness and sorrow, they did not run away, naturally supposing that as wandering strangers they would be killed by the inhabitants of the country; in which they were right. They lived in straw huts on the slope of a ravine overgrown with reedy grass, just behind the station buildings. They were not happy, regretting the festive incantations, the sorceries, the human sacrifices of their own land; where they also had parents, brothers, sisters, admired chiefs, respected magicians, loved friends, and other ties supposed generally to be human. Besides, the rice rations served out by the Company did not agree with them, being a food unknown to their land, and to which they could not get used. Consequently they were unhealthy and miserable. Had they been of any other tribe they would have made up their minds to die--for nothing is easier to certain savages than suicide--and so have escaped from the puzzling difficulties of existence. But belonging, as they did, to a warlike tribe with filed teeth, they had more grit, and went on stupidly living through disease and sorrow. They did very little work, and had lost their splendid physique. Carlier and Kayerts doctored them assiduously without being able to bring them back into condition again. They were mustered every morning and told off to different tasks--grass-cutting, fence-building, tree-felling, &c., &c., which no power on earth could induce them to execute efficiently. The two whites had practically very little control over them.

In the afternoon Makola came over to the big house and found Kayerts watching three heavy columns of smoke rising above the forests. "What is that?" asked Kayerts. "Some villages burn," answered Makola, who seemed to have regained his wits. Then he said abruptly: "We have got very little ivory; bad six months' trading. Do you like get a little more ivory?"

"Yes," said Kayerts, eagerly. He thought of percentages which were low.

"Those men who came yesterday are traders from Loanda who have got more ivory than they can carry home. Shall I buy? I know their camp."

"Certainly," said Kayerts. "What are those traders?"

"Bad fellows," said Makola, indifferently. "They fight with people, and catch women and children. They are bad men, and got guns. There is a great disturbance in the country. Do you want ivory?"

"Yes," said Kayerts. Makola said nothing for a while. Then: "Those workmen of ours are no good at all," he muttered, looking round. "Station in very bad order, sir. Director will growl. Better get a fine lot of ivory, then he say nothing."

"I can't help it; the men won't work," said Kayerts. "When will you get that ivory?"

"Very soon," said Makola. "Perhaps to-night. You leave it to me, and keep indoors, sir. I think you had better give some palm wine to our men to make a dance this evening. Enjoy themselves. Work better to-morrow. There's plenty palm wine--gone a little sour."

Kayerts said "yes," and Makola, with his own hands carried big calabashes to the door of his hut. They stood there till the evening, and Mrs. Makola looked into every one. The men got them at sunset. When Kayerts and Carlier retired, a big bonfire was flaring before the men's huts. They could hear their shouts and drumming. Some men from Gobila's village had joined the station hands, and the entertainment was a great success.

In the middle of the night, Carlier waking suddenly, heard a man shout loudly; then a shot was fired. Only one. Carlier ran out and met Kayerts on the verandah. They were both startled. As they went across the yard to call Makola, they saw shadows moving in the night. One of them cried, "Don't shoot! It's me, Price." Then Makola appeared close to them. "Go back, go back, please," he urged, "you spoil all." "There are strange men about," said Carlier. "Never mind; I know," said Makola. Then he whispered, "All right. Bring ivory. Say nothing! I know my business." The two white men reluctantly went back to the house, but did not sleep. They heard footsteps, whispers, some groans. It seemed as if a lot of men came in, dumped heavy things on the ground, squabbled a long time, then went away. They lay on their hard beds and thought: "This Makola is invaluable." In the morning Carlier came out, very sleepy, and pulled at the cord of the big bell. The station hands mustered every morning to the sound of the bell. That morning nobody came. Kayerts turned out also, yawning. Across the yard they saw Makola come out of his hut, a tin basin of soapy water in his hand. Makola, a civilized nigger, was very neat in his person. He threw the soapsuds skilfully over a wretched little yellow cur he had, then turning his face to the agent's house, he shouted from the distance, "All the men gone last night!"

They heard him plainly, but in their surprise they both yelled out together: "What!" Then they stared at one another. "We are in a proper fix now," growled Carlier. "It's incredible!" muttered Kayerts. "I will go to the huts and see," said Carlier, striding off. Makola coming up found Kayerts standing alone.

"I can hardly believe it," said Kayerts, tearfully. "We took care of them as if they had been our children."

"They went with the coast people," said Makola after a moment of hesitation.

"What do I care with whom they went--the ungrateful brutes!" exclaimed the other. Then with sudden suspicion, and looking hard at Makola, he added: "What do you know about it?"

Makola moved his shoulders, looking down on the ground. "What do I know? I think only. Will you come and look at the ivory I've got there? It is a fine lot. You never saw such."

He moved towards the store. Kayerts followed him mechanically, thinking about the incredible desertion of the men. On the ground before the door of the fetish lay six splendid tusks.

"What did you give for it?" asked Kayerts, after surveying the lot with satisfaction.

"No regular trade," said Makola. "They brought the ivory and gave it to me. I told them to take what they most wanted in the station. It is a beautiful lot. No station can show such tusks. Those traders wanted carriers badly, and our men were no good here. No trade, no entry in books: all correct."

Kayerts nearly burst with indignation. "Why!" he shouted, "I believe you have sold our men for these tusks!" Makola stood impassive and silent. "I--I--will--I," stuttered Kayerts. "You fiend!" he yelled out.

"I did the best for you and the Company," said Makola, imperturbably. "Why you shout so much? Look at this tusk."

"I dismiss you! I will report you--I won't look at the tusk. I forbid you to touch them. I order you to throw them into the river. You--you!"

"You very red, Mr. Kayerts. If you are so irritable in the sun, you will get fever and die--like the first chief!" pronounced Makola impressively.

They stood still, contemplating one another with intense eyes, as if they had been looking with effort across immense distances. Kayerts shivered. Makola had meant no more than he said, but his words seemed to Kayerts full of ominous menace! He turned sharply and went away to the house. Makola retired into the bosom of his family; and the tusks, left lying before the store, looked very large and valuable in the sunshine.

Carlier came back on the verandah. "They're all gone, hey?" asked Kayerts from the far end of the common room in a muffled voice. "You did not find anybody?"

"Oh, yes," said Carlier, "I found one of Gobila's people lying dead before the huts--shot through the body. We heard that shot last night."

Kayerts came out quickly. He found his companion staring grimly over the yard at the tusks, away by the store. They both sat in silence for a while. Then Kayerts related his conversation with Makola. Carlier said nothing. At the midday meal they ate very little. They hardly exchanged a word that day. A great silence seemed to lie heavily over the station and press on their lips. Makola did not open the store; he spent the day playing with his children. He lay full-length on a mat outside his door, and the youngsters sat on his chest and clambered all over him. It was a touching picture. Mrs. Makola was busy cooking all day, as usual. The white men made a somewhat better meal in the evening. Afterwards, Carlier smoking his pipe strolled over to the store; he stood for a long time over the tusks, touched one or two with his foot, even tried to lift the largest one by its small end. He came back to his chief, who had not stirred from the verandah, threw himself in the chair and said--

"I can see it! They were pounced upon while they slept heavily after drinking all that palm wine you've allowed Makola to give them. A put-up job! See? The worst is, some of Gobila's people were there, and got carried off too, no doubt. The least drunk woke up, and got shot for his sobriety. This is a funny country. What will you do now?"

"We can't touch it, of course," said Kayerts.

"Of course not," assented Carlier.

"Slavery is an awful thing," stammered out Kayerts in an unsteady voice.

"Frightful--the sufferings," grunted Carlier with conviction.

They believed their words. Everybody shows a respectful deference to certain sounds that he and his fellows can make. But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words. Nobody knows what suffering or sacrifice mean--except, perhaps the victims of the mysterious purpose of these illusions.

Next morning they saw Makola very busy setting up in the yard the big scales used for weighing ivory. By and by Carlier said: "What's that filthy scoundrel up to?" and lounged out into the yard. Kayerts followed. They stood watching. Makola took no notice. When the balance was swung true, he tried to lift a tusk into the scale. It was too heavy. He looked up helplessly without a word, and for a minute they stood round that balance as mute and still as three statues. Suddenly Carlier said: "Catch hold of the other end, Makola--you beast!" and together they swung the tusk up. Kayerts trembled in every limb. He muttered, "I say! O! I say!" and putting his hand in his pocket found there a dirty bit of paper and the stump of a pencil. He turned his back on the others, as if about to do something tricky, and noted stealthily the weights which Carlier shouted out to him with unnecessary loudness. When all was over Makola whispered to himself: "The sun's very strong here for the tusks." Carlier said to Kayerts in a careless tone: "I say, chief, I might just as well give him a lift with this lot into the store."

As they were going back to the house Kayerts observed with a sigh: "It had to be done." And Carlier said: "It's deplorable, but, the men being Company's men the ivory is Company's ivory. We must look after it." "I will report to the Director, of course," said Kayerts. "Of course; let him decide," approved Carlier.

At midday they made a hearty meal. Kayerts sighed from time to time. Whenever they mentioned Makola's name they always added to it an opprobrious epithet. It eased their conscience. Makola gave himself a half-holiday, and bathed his children in the river. No one from Gobila's villages came near the station that day. No one came the next day, and the next, nor for a whole week. Gobila's people might have been dead and buried for any sign of life they gave. But they were only mourning for those they had lost by the witchcraft of white men, who had brought wicked people into their country. The wicked people were gone, but fear remained. Fear always remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate and belief, and even doubt; but as long as he clings to life he cannot destroy fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible, that pervades his being; that tinges his thoughts; that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle of his last breath. In his fear, the mild old Gobila offered extra human sacrifices to all the Evil Spirits that had taken possession of his white friends. His heart was heavy. Some warriors spoke about burning and killing, but the cautious old savage dissuaded them. Who could foresee the woe those mysterious creatures, if irritated, might bring? They should be left alone. Perhaps in time they would disappear into the earth as the first one had disappeared. His people must keep away from them, and hope for the best.

Kayerts and Carlier did not disappear, but remained above on this earth, that, somehow, they fancied had become bigger and very empty. It was not the absolute and dumb solitude of the post that impressed them so much as an inarticulate feeling that something from within them was gone, something that worked for their safety, and had kept the wilderness from interfering with their hearts. The images of home; the memory of people like them, of men that thought and felt as they used to think and feel, receded into distances made indistinct by the glare of unclouded sunshine. And out of the great silence of the surrounding wilderness, its very hopelessness and savagery seemed to approach them nearer, to draw them gently, to look upon them, to envelop them with a solicitude irresistible, familiar, and disgusting.

Days lengthened into weeks, then into months. Gobila's people drummed and yelled to every new moon, as of yore, but kept away from the station. Makola and Carlier tried once in a canoe to open communications, but were received with a shower of arrows, and had to fly back to the station for dear life. That attempt set the country up and down the river into an uproar that could be very distinctly heard for days. The steamer was late. At first they spoke of delay jauntily, then anxiously, then gloomily. The matter was becoming serious. Stores were running short. Carlier cast his lines off the bank, but the river was low, and the fish kept out in the stream. They dared not stroll far away from the station to shoot. Moreover, there was no game in the impenetrable forest. Once Carlier shot a hippo in the river. They had no boat to secure it, and it sank. When it floated up it drifted away, and Gobila's people secured the carcase. It was the occasion for a national holiday, but Carlier had a fit of rage over it and talked about the necessity of exterminating all the niggers before the country could be made habitable. Kayerts mooned about silently; spent hours looking at the portrait of his Melie. It represented a little girl with long bleached tresses and a rather sour face. His legs were much swollen, and he could hardly walk. Carlier, undermined by fever, could not swagger any more, but kept tottering about, still with a devil-may-care air, as became a man who remembered his crack regiment. He had become hoarse, sarcastic, and inclined to say unpleasant things. He called it "being frank with you." They had long ago reckoned their percentages on trade, including in them that last deal of "this infamous Makola." They had also concluded not to say anything about it. Kayerts hesitated at first--was afraid of the Director.

"He has seen worse things done on the quiet," maintained Carlier, with a hoarse laugh. "Trust him! He won't thank you if you blab. He is no better than you or me. Who will talk if we hold our tongues? There is nobody here."

That was the root of the trouble! There was nobody there; and being left there alone with their weakness, they became daily more like a pair of accomplices than like a couple of devoted friends. They had heard nothing from home for eight months. Every evening they said, "To-morrow we shall see the steamer." But one of the Company's steamers had been wrecked, and the Director was busy with the other, relieving very distant and important stations on the main river. He thought that the useless station, and the useless men, could wait. Meantime Kayerts and Carlier lived on rice boiled without salt, and cursed the Company, all Africa, and the day they were born. One must have lived on such diet to discover what ghastly trouble the necessity of swallowing one's food may become. There was literally nothing else in the station but rice and coffee; they drank the coffee without sugar. The last fifteen lumps Kayerts had solemnly locked away in his box, together with a half-bottle of Cognac, "in case of sickness," he explained. Carlier approved. "When one is sick," he said, "any little extra like that is cheering."

They waited. Rank grass began to sprout over the courtyard. The bell never rang now. Days passed, silent, exasperating, and slow. When the two men spoke, they snarled; and their silences were bitter, as if tinged by the bitterness of their thoughts.

One day after a lunch of boiled rice, Carlier put down his cup untasted, and said: "Hang it all! Let's have a decent cup of coffee for once. Bring out that sugar, Kayerts!"

"For the sick," muttered Kayerts, without looking up.

"For the sick," mocked Carlier. "Bosh! . . . Well! I am sick."

"You are no more sick than I am, and I go without," said Kayerts in a peaceful tone.

"Come! out with that sugar, you stingy old slave-dealer."

Kayerts looked up quickly. Carlier was smiling with marked insolence. And suddenly it seemed to Kayerts that he had never seen that man before. Who was he? He knew nothing about him. What was he capable of? There was a surprising flash of violent emotion within him, as if in the presence of something undreamt-of, dangerous, and final. But he managed to pronounce with composure--

"That joke is in very bad taste. Don't repeat it."

"Joke!" said Carlier, hitching himself forward on his seat. "I am hungry--I am sick--I don't joke! I hate hypocrites. You are a hypocrite. You are a slave-dealer. I am a slave-dealer. There's nothing but slave-dealers in this cursed country. I mean to have sugar in my coffee to-day, anyhow!"

"I forbid you to speak to me in that way," said Kayerts with a fair show of resolution.

"You!--What?" shouted Carlier, jumping up.

Kayerts stood up also. "I am your chief," he began, trying to master the shakiness of his voice.

"What?" yelled the other. "Who's chief? There's no chief here. There's nothing here: there's nothing but you and I. Fetch the sugar--you pot-bellied ass."

"Hold your tongue. Go out of this room," screamed Kayerts. "I dismiss you--you scoundrel!"

Carlier swung a stool. All at once he looked dangerously in earnest. "You flabby, good-for-nothing civilian--take that!" he howled.

Kayerts dropped under the table, and the stool struck the grass inner wall of the room. Then, as Carlier was trying to upset the table, Kayerts in desperation made a blind rush, head low, like a cornered pig would do, and over-turning his friend, bolted along the verandah, and into his room. He locked the door, snatched his revolver, and stood panting. In less than a minute Carlier was kicking at the door furiously, howling, "If you don't bring out that sugar, I will shoot you at sight, like a dog. Now then--one--two--three. You won't? I will show you who's the master."

Kayerts thought the door would fall in, and scrambled through the square hole that served for a window in his room. There was then the whole breadth of the house between them. But the other was apparently not strong enough to break in the door, and Kayerts heard him running round. Then he also began to run laboriously on his swollen legs. He ran as quickly as he could, grasping the revolver, and unable yet to understand what was happening to him. He saw in succession Makola's house, the store, the river, the ravine, and the low bushes; and he saw all those things again as he ran for the second time round the house. Then again they flashed past him. That morning he could not have walked a yard without a groan.

And now he ran. He ran fast enough to keep out of sight of the other man.

Then as, weak and desperate, he thought, "Before I finish the next round I shall die," he heard the other man stumble heavily, then stop. He stopped also. He had the back and Carlier the front of the house, as before. He heard him drop into a chair cursing, and suddenly his own legs gave way, and he slid down into a sitting posture with his back to the wall. His mouth was as dry as a cinder, and his face was wet with perspiration--and tears. What was it all about? He thought it must be a horrible illusion; he thought he was dreaming; he thought he was going mad! After a while he collected his senses. What did they quarrel about? That sugar! How absurd! He would give it to him--didn't want it himself. And he began scrambling to his feet with a sudden feeling of security. But before he had fairly stood upright, a commonsense reflection occurred to him and drove him back into despair. He thought: "If I give way now to that brute of a soldier, he will begin this horror again to-morrow--and the day after--every day--raise other pretensions, trample on me, torture me, make me his slave--and I will be lost! Lost! The steamer may not come for days--may never come." He shook so that he had to sit down on the floor again. He shivered forlornly. He felt he could not, would not move any more. He was completely distracted by the sudden perception that the position was without issue--that death and life had in a moment become equally difficult and terrible.

All at once he heard the other push his chair back; and he leaped to his feet with extreme facility. He listened and got confused. Must run again! Right or left? He heard footsteps. He darted to the left, grasping his revolver, and at the very same instant, as it seemed to him, they came into violent collision. Both shouted with surprise. A loud explosion took place between them; a roar of red fire, thick smoke; and Kayerts, deafened and blinded, rushed back thinking: "I am hit--it's all over." He expected the other to come round--to gloat over his agony. He caught hold of an upright of the roof--"All over!" Then he heard a crashing fall on the other side of the house, as if somebody had tumbled headlong over a chair--then silence. Nothing more happened. He did not die. Only his shoulder felt as if it had been badly wrenched, and he had lost his revolver. He was disarmed and helpless! He waited for his fate. The other man made no sound. It was a stratagem. He was stalking him now! Along what side? Perhaps he was taking aim this very minute!

After a few moments of an agony frightful and absurd, he decided to go and meet his doom. He was prepared for every surrender. He turned the corner, steadying himself with one hand on the wall; made a few paces, and nearly swooned. He had seen on the floor, protruding past the other corner, a pair of turned-up feet. A pair of white naked feet in red slippers. He felt deadly sick, and stood for a time in profound darkness. Then Makola appeared before him, saying quietly: "Come along, Mr. Kayerts. He is dead." He burst into tears of gratitude; a loud, sobbing fit of crying. After a time he found himself sitting in a chair and looking at Carlier, who lay stretched on his back. Makola was kneeling over the body.

"Is this your revolver?" asked Makola, getting up.

"Yes," said Kayerts; then he added very quickly, "He ran after me to shoot me--you saw!"

"Yes, I saw," said Makola. "There is only one revolver; where's his?"

"Don't know," whispered Kayerts in a voice that had become suddenly very faint.

"I will go and look for it," said the other, gently. He made the round along the verandah, while Kayerts sat still and looked at the corpse. Makola came back empty-handed, stood in deep thought, then stepped quietly into the dead man's room, and came out directly with a revolver, which he held up before Kayerts. Kayerts shut his eyes. Everything was going round. He found life more terrible and difficult than death. He had shot an unarmed man.

After meditating for a while, Makola said softly, pointing at the dead man who lay there with his right eye blown out--

"He died of fever." Kayerts looked at him with a stony stare. "Yes," repeated Makola, thoughtfully, stepping over the corpse, "I think he died of fever. Bury him to-morrow."

And he went away slowly to his expectant wife, leaving the two white men alone on the verandah.

Night came, and Kayerts sat unmoving on his chair. He sat quiet as if he had taken a dose of opium. The violence of the emotions he had passed through produced a feeling of exhausted serenity. He had plumbed in one short afternoon the depths of horror and despair, and now found repose in the conviction that life had no more secrets for him: neither had death! He sat by the corpse thinking; thinking very actively, thinking very new thoughts. He seemed to have broken loose from himself altogether. His old thoughts, convictions, likes and dislikes, things he respected and things he abhorred, appeared in their true light at last! Appeared contemptible and childish, false and ridiculous. He revelled in his new wisdom while he sat by the man he had killed. He argued with himself about all things under heaven with that kind of wrong-headed lucidity which may be observed in some lunatics. Incidentally he reflected that the fellow dead there had been a noxious beast anyway; that men died every day in thousands; perhaps in hundreds of thousands--who could tell?--and that in the number, that one death could not possibly make any difference; couldn't have any importance, at least to a thinking creature. He, Kayerts, was a thinking creature. He had been all his life, till that moment, a believer in a lot of nonsense like the rest of mankind--who are fools; but now he thought! He knew! He was at peace; he was familiar with the highest wisdom! Then he tried to imagine himself dead, and Carlier sitting in his chair watching him; and his attempt met with such unexpected success, that in a very few moments he became not at all sure who was dead and who was alive. This extraordinary achievement of his fancy startled him, however, and by a clever and timely effort of mind he saved himself just in time from becoming Carlier. His heart thumped, and he felt hot all over at the thought of that danger. Carlier! What a beastly thing! To compose his now disturbed nerves--and no wonder!--he tried to whistle a little. Then, suddenly, he fell asleep, or thought he had slept; but at any rate there was a fog, and somebody had whistled in the fog.

He stood up. The day had come, and a heavy mist had descended upon the land: the mist penetrating, enveloping, and silent; the morning mist of tropical lands; the mist that clings and kills; the mist white and deadly, immaculate and poisonous. He stood up, saw the body, and threw his arms above his head with a cry like that of a man who, waking from a trance, finds himself immured forever in a tomb. "Help! . . . . My God!"

A shriek inhuman, vibrating and sudden, pierced like a sharp dart the white shroud of that land of sorrow. Three short, impatient screeches followed, and then, for a time, the fog-wreaths rolled on, undisturbed, through a formidable silence. Then many more shrieks, rapid and piercing, like the yells of some exasperated and ruthless creature, rent the air. Progress was calling to Kayerts from the river. Progress and civilization and all the virtues. Society was calling to its accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be judged, to be condemned; it called him to return to that rubbish heap from which he had wandered away, so that justice could be done.

Kayerts heard and understood. He stumbled out of the verandah, leaving the other man quite alone for the first time since they had been thrown there together. He groped his way through the fog, calling in his ignorance upon the invisible heaven to undo its work. Makola flitted by in the mist, shouting as he ran--

"Steamer! Steamer! They can't see. They whistle for the station. I go ring the bell. Go down to the landing, sir. I ring."

He disappeared. Kayerts stood still. He looked upwards; the fog rolled low over his head. He looked round like a man who has lost his way; and he saw a dark smudge, a cross-shaped stain, upon the shifting purity of the mist. As he began to stumble towards it, the station bell rang in a tumultuous peal its answer to the impatient clamour of the steamer.

The Managing Director of the Great Civilizing Company (since we know that civilization follows trade) landed first, and incontinently lost sight of the steamer. The fog down by the river was exceedingly dense; above, at the station, the bell rang unceasing and brazen.

The Director shouted loudly to the steamer:

"There is nobody down to meet us; there may be something wrong, though they are ringing. You had better come, too!"

And he began to toil up the steep bank. The captain and the engine-driver of the boat followed behind. As they scrambled up the fog thinned, and they could see their Director a good way ahead. Suddenly they saw him start forward, calling to them over his shoulder:--"Run! Run to the house! I've found one of them. Run, look for the other!"

He had found one of them! And even he, the man of varied and startling experience, was somewhat discomposed by the manner of this finding. He stood and fumbled in his pockets (for a knife) while he faced Kayerts, who was hanging by a leather strap from the cross. He had evidently climbed the grave, which was high and narrow, and after tying the end of the strap to the arm, had swung himself off. His toes were only a couple of inches above the ground; his arms hung stiffly down; he seemed to be standing rigidly at attention, but with one purple cheek playfully posed on the shoulder. And, irreverently, he was putting out a swollen tongue at his Managing Director.

Short-term relief alone won’t be enough for Pakistan

2010-11-02T01:54:00.005-05:00

Pakistan's Impending Food Crisis
By Aun Ali, IslamicInsights, October 18, 2010
http://islamicinsights.com/news/international-news/pakistan-s-impending-food-crisis.html

Pakistan’s massive floods destroyed not only the standing crops of the season but also vast proportions of arable land and capacities of numerous farmers to cultivate crops in the upcoming seasons. The consequences are far reaching for an impoverished country that relies heavily on its agricultural productivity and employs two-thirds of its population in this sector.

Nearly 20 million people have been directly affected, most of whom are from the rural agricultural areas and depend on agriculture to meet their food and income needs. A great number of them have been uprooted from their lands, with their household assets, investments in farm tools and animals, and food stocks all destroyed by the floods. Submerged roads and fallen bridges have disconnected access of thousands other to the rest of Pakistan. They all lack proper shelter, food, clean water, medicine, and other basic supplies. At least six million are at risk of waterborne diseases, including an estimated 3.5 million children according to U.N.

However, if the situation is terribly bad now, the worst is yet to come.

With major crops damaged or destroyed over 3.6 million hectares of cultivated land and variable food supply expected from the unaffected regions, a famine-like food crisis is imminent in many parts of the country that could be in full swing by coming spring when Pakistan’s current food stocks will start to run out. The shockwaves will be so far reaching that even the unaffected regions will not be spared.

Especially the high density urban areas that heavily depend on rural areas for food supply will come under immense pressure. They will experience acute shortage and a steep rise in prices of food and other daily supplies and services (as part of a contingent effect). The major cities were already hit by dramatic price increases in the last two months, probably artificially created by hoarders and retailers, but in coming months food shortage and price hikes will be much more real and deadly for everyone – especially the internally displaced population.

Pakistan's current foreign reserves are too thin to face a widespread food shortage. The inefficiency and corruption within the present government is evident to any discerning observer. The helpless conditions will force an even greater proportion of people from the flood-ravaged regions to move to major cities and other unaffected areas.

Poverty and hunger will push people from among the homeless and poor and working classes to form local supportive networks. But desperate circumstances could also force some to sell all their assets, beg in streets, commit suicide, or engage in petty crimes to feed themselves. Sadly, local news reports are already indicating an increasing number of such incidents.

The regions with high concentration of internally displaced and underserved populations could also experience the kind of food protests and riots seen in some 30 countries of the world in 2007-08. In regions like Karachi, desperate conditions could also feed into ongoing ethnic-political confrontations. Any prolonged unrest in the streets will be detrimental to the political and economic turmoil the country is already facing.

Pakistan is on the course of developing a humanitarian crisis much worse than what it is experiencing right now. The extraordinarily bad circumstances demand extraordinary measures.

Toward taking such measures, donations in food and other basic relief items are necessary and helpful, but not sufficient. They can feed people but cannot bring people back on their feet. Local and international donors and activists need to take a more comprehensive approach and empower the internally displaced populations, especially the small-scale farm owners and farm workers, to cultivate food for themselves with dignity and self-sufficiency.

The most critical time to do this is now, by mid-November, before the wheat sowing period ends in many parts of the country. We need to help these farmers return to their homes and provide them with necessary resources to fix and cultivate their flood-damaged lands. If fixing land is realistically not possible in particular cases, we should help them find arable lands on rental or shared basis. If we can do this successfully, by coming spring each of us would make at least some farmers and their families become self-sufficient in their food needs – perhaps even a whole village, depending on the yields.

Approach one or multiple affected families directly or through efforts led by dedicated and trusted individuals and NGOs. This cause will take about two to three hundred dollars at the beginning – for transportation to home, camp or bricks/woods to build shelter, rental tools/tractor/animal to plough land, seeds, filter to clean drinking water, medicine, and basic household items – and then less than a hundred dollar per month (on need basis) to sustain each family until the spring. We need to act swiftly. These few weeks are our best chance, if not the only chance, to minimize the risk of a food crisis.

It took decades of misguided economic policies, more than just recent climatic hazards, to bring the economy to its current state of crisis. Empowering small-scale farmers – men and women – will be a critical first step in the direction of a just, sustainable, and self-sufficient agricultural economy.

In coming months, Pakistan’s food sovereignty will get further tied to its national sovereignty. Our current dilemma is that we are in dire need of humanitarian support from the world, yet we need to be cautious against hegemonic state and corporate interests that want to make further inroads into our borders in the name of humanitarian relief and fighting extremism. This applies to our most basic needs like wheat seeds for which we are at risk of falling in the traps of monopolizing global corporations.

The best hope we have on the international scene is with independent individuals and organizations that work with a critical awareness of the politics of humanitarian relief and food security of their governments, international monetary institutions, and global corporations.

Aun Ali is doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at aunali@gmail.com. A longer version of this article appeared in PULSE on October 16, 2010.

Irony through pictures

2010-09-23T02:18:00.001-05:00

Calvin and Hobbes Comics

2010-09-23T02:05:00.010-05:00

Some cute and thoughtful comics from Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. Click to enlarge images.

I don't subscribe to the kind of nihilist existentialism you see in C&H sometimes. My concern though is to see if we can break open from the confines of phenomenology into the ontology of reality, before death. That's where spirituality comes in. (if these words are too elusive, consider this mundane illustration: think about the scene of Matrix pod in the first part from which Neo was ejected!).

A few quotes from C&H that I also like (I couldn't find the comic images):

"You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid? Well, mine are even worse!"
-Calvin

"So the secret to good self-esteem is to lower your expectations to the point where they're already met?"
-Calvin

"When I grow up, I'm not going to read the newspaper and I'm not going to follow complex issues and I'm not going to vote. That way I can complain when the government doesn't represent me. Then, when everything goes down the tubes, I can say the system doesn't work and justify my further lack of participation."
-Calvin

"You know how people are. They only recognize greatness when some authority confirms it."
-Calvin

"Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success... ...Flat stretches of boring routine... ...And valleys of frustration and failure."
-Calvin

"What I like is when you're looking and thinking and looking and thinking... And suddenly you wake up."
-Calvin

"You know, there are times when it's a source of personal pride to not be human."
-Hobbes

"I had resolved to be less offended by human nature, but I think I blew it already."
-Hobbes

"Being a parent is wanting to hug and strangle your kid at the same time."
-Calvin's Dad

“I try to make everyone’s day a little more surreal.”
-Calvin

“I used to make original snowmen, but it was time consuming, hard work. So I said, heck, this is crazy! Now I crank out crude imitations of what’s already popular! It takes no time or thought, and most people don’t care about the difference, anyway! And what good is originality if you can’t crank it out?”
-Calvin

“Now, a lifetime of experience has left me bitter and cynical.”
-Calvin

"People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don’t realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.”
-Calvin

“Nobody asks me how things oughta be! I’ve got tons of ideas!”
-Calvin

“These are interesting times. We don’t trust the government, we don’t trust the legal system, we don’t trust the media, and we don’t trust each other! We’ve undermined all authority, and with it, the basis for replacing it! It’s like a six-year-old’s dream come true!”
-Calvin

“If it was completely different, school would be great.”
-Calvin

“My time is valuable. I can’t go on thinking about one subject for minutes on end. I’m a busy man.”
-Calvin

"Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him?"
-Calvin

"Since September it's just gotten colder and colder. There's less daylight now, I've noticed too. This can only mean one thing - the sun is going out. In a few more months the Earth will be a dark and lifeless ball of ice. Dad says the sun isnt going out. He says its colder because the earth's orbit is taking us farther from the sun. He says winter will be here soon. Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?"
-Calvin, about to become aware of the concept of winter...

"I like maxims that don’t encourage behavior modification."
-Calvin

"I understand my tests are popular reading in the teachers’ lounge."
-Calvin

"I wanted to be a neo-deconstructivist but Mom wouldn't let me."
-Calvin

"Oh, great altar of passive entertainment... Bestow upon me thy discordant images at such speed as to render linear thought impossible!"
-Calvin

“I’m yet another resource-consuming kid in and overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by Madison Avenue and Hollywood, poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you’re old and weak.”
-Calvin

"I think life should be more like tv. I think all of life's problems ought to be solved in 30 minutes with simple homilies, don't you? I think weight and oral hygiene ought to be our biggest concerns. I think we should all have powerful, high-paying jobs, and everyone should drive fancy sports cars. All our desires should be instantly gratified. Women should always wear tight clothes, and men should carry powerful handguns. Life overall should be more glamorous, thrill-packed, and filled with applause, don't you think?"
-Calvin

"Dear Santa. Why is your operation located at the North Pole? I’m guessing cheap elf labour, lower environmental standards, and tax breaks. Is this really the example you want to set for us impressionable kids?" …My plan is to put him on the defensive before he considers how good I’ve been.
-Calvin

"Oh look, yet another Christmas TV special! How touching to have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food, and beer conglomerates. Who'd have ever guessed that product consumption, popular entertainment, and spirituality would mix so harmoniously? It's a beautiful world all right."
-Calvin

“Some diabolical fiend threatens to establish a totalitarian system of rule! Only Stupendous Man can save the day!…Aha! Just as I suspected! My evil arch-nemesis, Mom-Lady!”
-Calvin

"I'm a simple man, Hobbes."
"You?? Yesterday you wanted a nuclear powered car that could turn into a jet with laser-guided heat-seeking missiles!"
"I'm a simple man with complex tastes."

"I'm not going to so my maths homework. Look at these unsolved problems. Here's a number in mortal combat with another. One of them is going to get subtracted. But why? What will be left of him? If I answered these, it would kill the suspense. It would resolve the conflict and turn intriguing possibilities into boring old facts."
"I never really thought about the literary possibilities of maths."
"I prefer to savour the mystery."

"Dad, I'd like to have a little talk."
"Um...ok."
"As the wage earner here, its your responsibility to show some consumer confidence and start buying things that will get the economy going and create profits and employment. Here's a list of some big-ticket items I'd like for Christmas. I hope I can trust you to do whats right for our country."
"I've got to stop leaving the Wall Street Journal around."

"This meeting of the Get Rid Of Slimy Girls club will now come to order. First Tiger Hobbes will read the minutes of our last meeting."
"Thank you. (9:30) Meeting called to order. Dictator For Life Calvin proposed resoultion condemning the existence of girls. (9:35) First Tiger Hobbes abstains from vote. Motion fails. (9:36) Patriotism of First Tiger called into question. (9:37) Philosophical discussion. (10:15) Bandages administered. Dictator For Life rebuked for biting."
"Is this a great club or what?"
"(10:16) Forgot what debate was about. Medals of bravery awarded to all parties."

Engaging Raj Patel's "The Value of Nothing"

2010-09-11T23:58:00.009-05:00

I have not read Raj Patel's latest book yet, except for parts of its first chapter. Just read John Gray's review. I thought Gray raises an important question which remains an issue for materialist ideologies/movements fighting against materialism/capitalism. I touched upon this in a previous post, here. Yet, based on my previous reading and listening to Raj's work, I have a feeling that Gray might have under-appreciated Raj's call for a substantial change in how we value things and live our life; Gray may have read Raj through the lens of socialist/labor-rights/progressive movements that Raj is closed to in his activism, instead of reading the book on its own merit. But I can be wrong too.

On a side note, do check out a promotional video of the book that Raj has published online.

Excerpts:

Review: The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel
By John Gray, The Observer, December 13, 2009
Source

"Part of the problem is the belief that price and value are for most purposes one and the same. This equation makes it possible for them to develop impressive-looking mathematical models of the economy, but it involves a huge oversimplification of reality. As Raj Patel explains in this penetrating and admirably concise guide to the follies of market fundamentalism, the notion that the value of a good is its price obscures the complexity of markets and of human beings. Theories of efficient markets take the shifting abstractions generated by the price mechanism as actually existing entities but, as Patel puts it, using one of many vivid metaphors that stud his argument, this is like being in the simulated world of The Matrix, surrounded by "a digital rain of symbols and signs".

The seeming precision of the computer screen suggests that something substantial is being measured and exchanged, when in fact what is being traded are virtual assets whose relations with actual resources are tangled and hidden..."
...

"Contrary to the claims of economists, the belief that price equals value is not science, an accurate representation of the world, but ideology – a way of obfuscating the world."
...

"Much of what passes as economics is ideology and ideology only works if those who produce it also believe in it. The difficulty of the present situation comes from the fact that while few any longer believe in the free market, no one has an alternative to it that is able to command widespread support. Predictably, the financial storm has jolted moribund Marxist theories back into a semblance of life..."
...

"A passionate activist, he believes problems of resource scarcity are man-made and can always be solved by fairer distribution. However, the growth-oriented lifestyle of rich countries is not unsustainable because it is unjust; it is unsustainable because the Earth's resources are unalterably finite. It may be true that the imbalance between human demands and the environment could be diminished if enough people rejected material affluence as their main goal in life. But this is an extremely nebulous possibility and one that highlights the deepest difficulty for Patel's analysis.

Oscar Wilde may have been right that people know the price of everything and the value of nothing, a remark Patel cites at the start of his book, and which gives him its title. But what is value if it is not price? It is telling that when trying to flesh out a non-market account, Patel turns to religion, in this case Buddhism. The Buddhist tradition gives him what he needs – an understanding of human wellbeing that does not centre round the satisfaction of wants. Like the ancient European Stoic and Epicurean philosophies, Buddhism proposes that happiness lies in shrinking the self – in giving up our wants, rather than forever chasing after them. It is a thought that occurs to many well-off people from time to time, but it is hard to imagine large numbers of people ever acting on it.

Theories of value that focus on curbing desire run up against the demand for self-realisation, which is one of the strongest impulses in modern life. To be sure, the pursuit of self-realisation does not often result in happiness. But is it happiness that most people are pursuing? Or is it stimulus and excitement? In the Himalayan Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, Patel informs the reader, the introduction of satellite television has been followed by a crime wave. He seems to think this fact somehow strengthens his argument. But what it tells us is that no culture can now resist the dangerous charms of a life spent in insatiable desire."

The Illusion of Two-State Solution

2010-09-09T01:14:00.006-05:00

The cartoon is taken from MRZine: "As the driver of the "settlement" bulldozer removes the ground beneath his feet while blowing "two-state solution" soap bubbles, Mahmoud Abbas daydreams about a "sovereign Palestinian state." Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist. The text above is an interpretation of the cartoon by Yoshie Furuhashi."

I also liked the analogy by Avi Shlaim about the reality of "peace talks": It is like "two men negotiating the division of a pizza with one of them continuing to swallow chunks of it."

On how unrealistic (and increasingly out-dated) this solution is, see: How Realistic is the Two-State Solution at http://islamicinsights.com/news/international-news/how-realistic-is-the-two-state-solution.html

Also see Joseph Massad's excellent piece, How surrendering Palestinian rights became the language of "peace" at http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11034.shtml

See the bottom of the following page for an excellent list of material on the issue: http://gazaawareness.blogspot.com/

The Americanization of Mental Illness - Excerpts

2010-08-20T01:26:00.004-05:00

Excerpts from:

The Americanization of Mental Illness
By Ethan Watters, January 10, 2010, NYTimes
Source

AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

...

In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.

That is until recently.

For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.

...

Western mental-health practitioners often prefer to believe that the 844 pages of the DSM-IV prior to the inclusion of culture-bound syndromes describe real disorders of the mind, illnesses with symptomatology and outcomes relatively unaffected by shifting cultural beliefs. And, it logically follows, if these disorders are unaffected by culture, then they are surely universal to humans everywhere. In this view, the DSM is a field guide to the world’s psyche, and applying it around the world represents simply the brave march of scientific knowledge.

Of course, we can become psychologically unhinged for many reasons that are common to all, like personal traumas, social upheavals or biochemical imbalances in our brains. Modern science has begun to reveal these causes. Whatever the trigger, however, the ill individual and those around him invariably rely on cultural beliefs and stories to understand what is happening. Those stories, whether they tell of spirit possession, semen loss or serotonin depletion, predict and shape the course of the illness in dramatic and often counterintuitive ways. In the end, what cross-cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists have to tell us is that all mental illnesses, including depression, P.T.S.D. and even schizophrenia, can be every bit as influenced by cultural beliefs and expectations today as hysterical-leg paralysis or the vapors or zar or any other mental illness ever experienced in the history of human madness. This does not mean that these illnesses and the pain associated with them are not real, or that sufferers deliberately shape their symptoms to fit a certain cultural niche. It means that a mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host.

...

One study published in The International Journal of Mental Health, for instance, portrayed those who endorsed the statement that “mental illness is an illness like any other” as having a “knowledgeable, benevolent, supportive orientation toward the mentally ill.”

Mental illnesses, it was suggested, should be treated like “brain diseases” over which the patient has little choice or responsibility. This was promoted both as a scientific fact and as a social narrative that would reap great benefits. The logic seemed unassailable: Once people believed that the onset of mental illnesses did not spring from supernatural forces, character flaws, semen loss or some other prescientific notion, the sufferer would be protected from blame and stigma. This idea has been promoted by mental-health providers, drug companies and patient-advocacy groups like the National Alliance on Mental Illness in the United States and SANE in Britain. In a sometimes fractious field, everyone seemed to agree that this modern way of thinking about mental illness would reduce the social isolation and stigma often experienced by those with mental illness. Trampling on indigenous prescientific superstitions about the cause of mental illness seemed a small price to pay to relieve some of the social suffering of the mentally ill.
But does the “brain disease” belief actually reduce stigma?

...

Analyzing the data, Mehta found a difference between the group of subjects given the psychosocial explanation for their partner’s mental-illness history and those given the brain-disease explanation. Those who believed that their partner suffered a biochemical “disease like any other” increased the severity of the shocks at a faster rate than those who believed they were paired with someone who had a mental disorder caused by an event in the past.

“The results of the current study suggest that we may actually treat people more harshly when their problem is described in disease terms,” Mehta wrote. “We say we are being kind, but our actions suggest otherwise.” The problem, it appears, is that the biomedical narrative about an illness like schizophrenia carries with it the subtle assumption that a brain made ill through biomedical or genetic abnormalities is more thoroughly broken and permanently abnormal than one made ill though life events. “Viewing those with mental disorders as diseased sets them apart and may lead to our perceiving them as physically distinct. Biochemical aberrations make them almost a different species.”

...

Researchers hoping to learn what was causing this rise in stigma found the same surprising connection that Mehta discovered in her lab. It turns out that those who adopted biomedical/genetic beliefs about mental disorders were the same people who wanted less contact with the mentally ill and thought of them as more dangerous and unpredictable. This unfortunate relationship has popped up in numerous studies around the world. In a study conducted in Turkey, for example, those who labeled schizophrenic behavior as akil hastaligi (illness of the brain or reasoning abilities) were more inclined to assert that schizophrenics were aggressive and should not live freely in the community than those who saw the disorder as ruhsal hastagi (a disorder of the spiritual or inner self). Another study, which looked at populations in Germany, Russia and Mongolia, found that “irrespective of place . . . endorsing biological factors as the cause of schizophrenia was associated with a greater desire for social distance.”

...

NOWHERE ARE THE limitations of Western ideas and treatments more evident than in the case of schizophrenia. Researchers have long sought to understand what may be the most perplexing finding in the cross-cultural study of mental illness: people with schizophrenia in developing countries appear to fare better over time than those living in industrialized nations.

This was the startling result of three large international studies carried out by the World Health Organization over the course of 30 years, starting in the early 1970s. The research showed that patients outside the United States and Europe had significantly lower relapse rates — as much as two-thirds lower in one follow-up study. These findings have been widely discussed and debated in part because of their obvious incongruity: the regions of the world with the most resources to devote to the illness — the best technology, the cutting-edge medicines and the best-financed academic and private-research institutions — had the most troubled and socially marginalized patients.

...

Critically, the story allowed the person with schizophrenia a cleaner bill of health when the illness went into remission. An ill individual enjoying a time of relative mental health could, at least temporarily, retake his or her responsibilities in the kinship group. Since the illness was seen as the work of outside forces, it was understood as an affliction for the sufferer but not as an identity.

...

Many traditional cultures regard the self in different terms — as inseparable from your role in your kinship group, intertwined with the story of your ancestry and permeable to the spirit world. What McGruder found in Zanzibar was that families often drew strength from this more connected and less isolating idea of human nature. Their ability to maintain a low level of expressed emotion relied on these beliefs. And that level of expressed emotion in turn may be key to improving the fortunes of the schizophrenia sufferer.

Of course, to the extent that our modern psychopharmacological drugs can relieve suffering, they should not be denied to the rest of the world. The problem is that our biomedical advances are hard to separate from our particular cultural beliefs. It is difficult to distinguish, for example, the biomedical conception of schizophrenia — the idea that the disease exists within the biochemistry of the brain — from the more inchoate Western assumption that the self resides there as well. “Mental illness is feared and has such a stigma because it represents a reversal of what Western humans . . . have come to value as the essence of human nature,” McGruder concludes. “Because our culture so highly values . . . an illusion of self-control and control of circumstance, we become abject when contemplating mentation that seems more changeable, less restrained and less controllable, more open to outside influence, than we imagine our own to be.”

CROSS-CULTURAL psychiatrists have pointed out that the mental-health ideas we export to the world are rarely unadulterated scientific facts and never culturally neutral. “Western mental-health discourse introduces core components of Western culture, including a theory of human nature, a definition of personhood, a sense of time and memory and a source of moral authority. None of this is universal,” Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry in London observes. He has also written: “The problem is the overall thrust that comes from being at the heart of the one globalizing culture. It is as if one version of human nature is being presented as definitive, and one set of ideas about pain and suffering. . . . There is no one definitive psychology.”

Behind the promotion of Western ideas of mental health and healing lie a variety of cultural assumptions about human nature. Westerners share, for instance, evolving beliefs about what type of life event is likely to make one psychologically traumatized, and we agree that venting emotions by talking is more healthy than stoic silence. We’ve come to agree that the human mind is rather fragile and that it is best to consider many emotional experiences and mental states as illnesses that require professional intervention. (The National Institute of Mental Health reports that a quarter of Americans have diagnosable mental illnesses each year.) The ideas we export often have at their heart a particularly American brand of hyperintrospection — a penchant for “psychologizing” daily existence. These ideas remain deeply influenced by the Cartesian split between the mind and the body, the Freudian duality between the conscious and unconscious, as well as the many self-help philosophies and schools of therapy that have encouraged Americans to separate the health of the individual from the health of the group. These Western ideas of the mind are proving as seductive to the rest of the world as fast food and rap music, and we are spreading them with speed and vigor.

No one would suggest that we withhold our medical advances from other countries, but it’s perhaps past time to admit that even our most remarkable scientific leaps in understanding the brain haven’t yet created the sorts of cultural stories from which humans take comfort and meaning. When these scientific advances are translated into popular belief and cultural stories, they are often stripped of the complexity of the science and become comically insubstantial narratives. Take for instance this Web site text advertising the antidepressant Paxil: “Just as a cake recipe requires you to use flour, sugar and baking powder in the right amounts, your brain needs a fine chemical balance in order to perform at its best.” The Western mind, endlessly analyzed by generations of theorists and researchers, has now been reduced to a batter of chemicals we carry around in the mixing bowl of our skulls.

All cultures struggle with intractable mental illnesses with varying degrees of compassion and cruelty, equanimity and fear. Looking at ourselves through the eyes of those living in places where madness and psychological trauma are still embedded in complex religious and cultural narratives, however, we get a glimpse of ourselves as an increasingly insecure and fearful people. Some philosophers and psychiatrists have suggested that we are investing our great wealth in researching and treating mental illness — medicalizing ever larger swaths of human experience — because we have rather suddenly lost older belief systems that once gave meaning and context to mental suffering.

If our rising need for mental-health services does indeed spring from a breakdown of meaning, our insistence that the rest of the world think like us may be all the more problematic. Offering the latest Western mental-health theories, treatments and categories in an attempt to ameliorate the psychological stress sparked by modernization and globalization is not a solution; it may be part of the problem. When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world’s mental distress.

Ethan Watters lives in San Francisco. This essay is adapted from his book “Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche,” which will be published later this month by Free Press.

Three Cups of Tea - A Critical Review

2010-07-18T04:34:00.022-05:00

Three Cups of Tea - A Critical Review

By Ali A.

Different readers must have read “Three Cups of Tea” (2006) with varied emphasis and with different take-away lessons. The variation in their readings was probably informed by their educational, professional, geographic, ethnic, and national backgrounds, also their knowledge of the Pak and Afghan geographies and cultures, and, further, their understanding of current American involvement in these regions, its motives and history.

But, not all readings of this book are equal and not all facts and lessons from the book are worth taking. No doubt the book presents a remarkable story of courage and compassion. The purpose here is not to question those values. Nor to deny the personal struggles of the main character, Greg Mortenson, as depicted (and constructed) in the book. It is to scrutinize the cultural discourse – and solution – of 'development' and 'humanitarian intervention' offered in it. A New York Times bestseller that was subsequently published in two condensed versions for kids between 4 and 8 and 8 and 13 in the year 2009 and a required reading not just for school kids and social work majors in many US schools but also for senior commanding officers in the US military (according to the book’s official website), “Three Cups of Tea” has sort of become a canon for policy makers, social workers, and school teachers in many institutions. The availability of this book and its condensed editions in both original and cheap, pirated formats in bookstores of many South Asian cities indicates its widening popularity (or, at least, the potential for that). That makes it even more critical to carefully analyze the narrative and message of this book.

A particularly insightful approach to engage with this book is to examine its underlying normative assumptions and politics against the backdrop of the ‘cultural discourse’ that is being utilized to justify ongoing American hegemonic expansionism. This critical engagement is very relevant to how our humanitarian activists, policy makers, and general concerned audience, including you and I, understand these regions and peoples. It is also relevant for the kind of measures we adopt for 'solving' the regions' problems, deciding what is the 'right' thing to do, who should do it, and how.

Colonial Humanitarianism

First, the book never questions the idea of "humanitarian" intervention by an imperial power like the US, but only debates the method of such an intervention: That any such military intervention should be accompanied by humanitarian re-construction efforts, which (supposedly) would be a good thing for the local people and for American security interests (see p. 294). There is no reflection on Washington's past record of military interventions and its outcomes in this argument, and no appraisal of US motives and geo-strategic interests in the region. However, before any other question, the legitimacy of humanitarian interventions should be interrogated: What gives a country – especially a country like the US with a terrible track record of militarism and human rights violation – the right to violate sovereignty of other countries in the name of 'spreading democracy' and 'humanitarian interventions'?

Moreover, toward explaining the cause of extremism and 'terror', the book conveniently mutes the messy political history of the region-s. Perhaps because that history would point to the pivotal role that CIA, ISI, and Saudis played in creating the menace of terrorism and extremism. And, that would complicate the overly simplistic analysis of "terror" presented in the book. However, in any analysis of ‘terror’ in the Pak and Afghan regions, what should not be forgotten is that the Cold War was not fought in America or Europe but in regions like Pakistan and Afghanistan which are still paying the price of that war. In their efforts to combat Soviets, the US and its allies heavily funded and nurtured the most extremists of the militants in the region, because, as Mahmood Mamdani points out in his book "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim", they thought that fanatics fight harder. The US wanted to give Soviets their own Vietnam. The policy of using right wing religious organizations to combat socialist-nationalist impulses and movements was already a long-established US strategy in the Middle East before it was applied to the Afghan case.

Quoting a scholar from Pakistan, Mamdani also describes how a radical school curriculum was developed in an American university that was then taught to the children in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, particularly in the NWFP (now known as Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) and the FATA regions. The same children then would be recruited for fighting against the Soviets. The Taliban are just the second generation of those extremist militants that the CIA, ISI, and Saudis nurtured together, spending more than six billion dollars and providing sophisticated weapons and training. Without understanding this history and the influence of external powers, one cannot understand the causes of terror in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Furthermore, it should be made clear that the American interventions in these (and other) regions of the world are themselves a kind of terrorism which continues to breed more terror and violence in reaction.

“Three Cups of Tea” simply ignores this long history and continuing interests of regional and global powers. Instead, in its highly a-historical and a-political narrative, the roots of the problem are smoothly traced back to 'internal' causes within Muslim societies: the problem with competing interpretations of Islam and with local socio-economic and cultural conditions, in particular, illiteracy. The silence on the role of 'external' political factors allows the narrative of this book to present 'our' involvement as only humanitarian and benevolent: 'We have nothing to do with their mess; we only want to help them fix their mess. Because we are able to do it, therefore, we should do it, in good faith'.

As the book pampers the blissful ignorance of Americans – the primary target audience of the book – of the imperial and exploitative policies of their government, it also appeals to, and reinforces, a false sense of self-righteous philanthropy in them. However, not philanthropy, but social justice should be the idiom of American interaction with the rest of the world. The difference the second approach makes is huge, because it induces an attitude of humility and guilt as it also induces a critical political awareness.

What Americans need to understand is that their affluence, luxury, extravagant "way of life", apathy toward politics are all directly linked to wars and exploitation of people and resources by their government in other parts of the world (and in their own country too). And each American, especially those directly benefiting from the imperial exploitations, is morally responsible for the actions of the American government-s. The place to start any humanitarian effort is to put a stop on their own government's military adventurism as well as economic and cultural exploitations in other parts of the world. What needs to be understood is that anti-Americanism in most parts of the world is not a result of "ignorance" but of direct experience with the consequences of American exploitation. Without considering and addressing the political causes, trying to change 'culture' through education in Muslims societies won't be much effective. On the contrary, such culture-centered understandings of the issue have at times contributed to the propaganda and justification of Washington’s hegemonic expansionism (See Lila Abu-Lughod’s and Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind’s articles cited below).

Saving Muslims from themselves

Building on that last point, before Americans could help other people they should seriously reflect on their own biases and normative assumptions. The narrative in "Three Cups of Tea" never seriously reflects on how colonial-istic and arrogant it is to try 'changing cultures' of other people, through military means or ‘soft’ humanitarian efforts, to what 'WE' consider is 'right' for them. To save those people, to civilize them, to help them progress, isn’t this old colonial discourse of 'white man's burden' in a new guise?

"Three Cups of Tea" mentions in the passing another book "Ancient Futures" but never really connects the moral of that book to its own overriding message, especially the message presented in its second half. From the brief mention of that book in "Three Cups of Tea", "Ancient Futures" appears to suggest that there can be multiple ways to be modern, and indigenous people and cultures do not necessarily need to follow the West-European and American route-s to becoming modern. In fact, their definition of 'progress' and 'modern' may be very different from 'ours'. This moral lesson was shared in "Three Cups of Tea", but it never had any significant impact on its grand narrative or message, which remained couched in the idioms of "backward vs. modern", "conservative vs. progressive", "fundamentalist vs. tolerant". At various point in the book one gets the impression that the farther one gets from one's tradition and 'conservativeness' and becomes ‘like us', in thoughts and actions, the more "modern" one seems to become. Such measures of ‘progress’ and ‘achievement’ are especially apparent in the aspirations and changes reflected in the characters of Jahan, Aslam, and Tahira by the author-s for their ‘Western’ audience (See pages 195, 204, 299-303, 312).

The contention here is not about building schools or providing other welfare services to people, but who is building them, with what assumptions, and purpose. Furthermore, what kind of education is being given in those schools, imparted with what impressions about indigenous culture and life, and at what cost?

With regards to impressions about indigenous culture and life, “Three Cups of Tea” misleadingly characterizes rural as essentially wild, poor, and ignorant, and therefore inclined on extremism and terror. Quite the contrary, rural areas in Pakistan – especially the places with sustainable living patterns and rich traditions – can't always be considered "poor". If progress is measured with ‘happiness’, ‘peace’, and ‘trust’, and not through extra-complicated life arrangements and material luxuries of urban areas, some of these rural areas may be far richer than their urban neighbors. One should also bear in mind that the rural areas in most of Pakistan have been historically known for their pluralistic cultural environment with emphasis on devotion and diffused religious culture and practices. That is especially true for the Northern Areas with very rich and diverse cultural histories.

To automatically equate “rural” with backwardness and ignorance is quite presumptuous and misleading. And, although the intention in “Three Cups of Tea” was probably to develop a more sympathetic understanding of the focused regions and bring ‘West’ and ‘East’ closer on humanitarian grounds, the narrative has strong resemblances with the colonial-style Orientalist discourse about “other” cultures. That discourse was built on “differences” between “us” and “them”. The “us” in this discourse constructed its self-image in relation to “them” and understood itself as enlightened, civilized, and superior. The other, unfamiliar cultures, in this logic, were seen as barbarian and dangerous, therefore, to be afraid of and to be controlled and civilized (See Edward Said’s insightful works cited below). The “other” in the present narrative is not necessarily the opposite but just behind “us” in the historical march toward progress, and “our” responsibility is to help them catch up.

Given such misleading impressions about the rural – widespread not only among foreigners but also social workers and policy makers from more urban areas of Pakistan – one wonders about the curriculum and teaching that are being given in those schools. What image of their own lands, people, culture, and religion the students studying such curriculum would develop for themselves? And what impact it would have on their self-identity and sense of purpose when the West-European and American historical experiences are taught to them as ‘universal’ and the only route to modernization (or the most successful and natural route to modernization). Such normative assumptions are abundant in the established ‘modern’ school curriculums found in both America and Pakistan. One therefore wonders when the students are taught about Western advancements, are they also informed about colonialism and slavery which were fundamentally part of the same project of Western "enlightenment" and "progress" – not as exceptions but as part of the very logic of "progress" and "civilization" as could be seen in the writings of John Locke and John Stuart Mill who rationalized and justified colonialism as a ‘progressive force’ which would civilize the indigenous people in colonized territories? And, similarly, when the students are enchanted with dreams of Western modernity, are they also allowed to competently and critically reflect on possessive individualism, excessive consumerism, exploitation of environment and people, and secular transformation of religions and traditions, which are all part and parcel of Western ‘Enlightenment’ and capitalist advancements, and to decide if taking the western route to becoming ‘modern’ is really that desirable?

Having spent some time in the Gilgit-Baltistan region recently and seen the outcome of some welfare projects run under similar organizations, including Aga Khan's, I am very concerned about the notions of "development" which detach children from their roots and land, make them lose their identity and self-worth, and about the notions of "progress" which are defined primarily in material-istic terms, that is material well-being of individuals and collectivities, but without serious regard for spiritual and cultural values and goals. It is one thing to adopt boiling practice for drinking water but quite another to start considering your traditional dress as dirty and backward. From this viewpoint, the character of Jahan in the book is quite illustrative of this problem.

Pakistan does need more schools and quality education, but simply constructing schools is not enough. The key is to look into the curriculum and teachers training. What kinds of identities are being constructed in the process of schooling, what role models are being presented, what outlooks of the world and sense of purpose in life are being imparted, and what tastes, desires and values are being constructed?

We need to ask similar question about other development projects in the region: What cost and consequences to people, culture, identities, values, and environment?

Gross Misrepresentations

Apart from problems with normative assumptions in the book, there are gross misrepresentations which require thorough scrutiny. That includes elements of fictions. For example, as one commentator pointed out elsewhere, "Mortenson could not have attended Mother Teresa's funeral in Spring 2000 (pp 233-235) because she died in Autumn 1997" (Nosheen Ali, 2010).

I also have serious doubts about Mortenson's kidnap episode in Waziristan. Those familiar with the geography of the region know very well that the Northern Areas (Gilgit-Baltistan) are miles apart from Peshawar and the FATA areas (where “Waziristan” is), and it makes little practical sense to expand the project to that far-away region when Mortenson had not completed even his first school in Korphe, Baltistan (and the book itself admits that the people in Korphe’s neighboring areas desperately wanted schools in their localities). On the same note, consider also the November 1979 issue of Time Magazine covering the Iran hostage crisis that Mortenson finds in his cell and through which he and co-author, David Relin, construct an emotion-filled, deeply touching narrative of fear and hope in the same episode. The story was probably quite inspiring to many American readers, but it is very unlikely for that English-language, 15 years old issue, with a "garish painting of a scowling Ayatollah Khomeini" on the cover, to be found in a cell located somewhere in the remote area of Waziristan. Likewise, the whole episode is filled with holes that were never satisfactorily addressed, leaving too many doubts. The episode, curiously enough, is also devoid of traceable details about “Waziristan”. (One can similarly question his excursions, their nature and purpose, into Afghanistan immediately after the fall of the Taliban regime.)

The Waziristan episode was critical to collapse starkly different geographies, cultures, and political histories into each other to frame Mortenson's tale and message in terms of combating "terrorism". That became possible only by suppressing the rich histories and variations among Northern Areas, Peshawar, FATA, and Afghanistan. Northern Areas (Gilgit-Baltistan) have 60-75% Shia population, whereas demographic makeup in the FATA areas is quite the inverse. Northern Areas, furthermore, are ethnically and linguistically much more diverse than the FATA areas. The connection with terror of the Sunni-radical-Taliban kind could not have been made by just discussing the Northern Areas, where Mortenson actually did the majority of his educational and welfare work. How were these regions connected in “Three Cups of Tea” then? Not through showing any parallels between their cultures, political histories, or geographies, but through Mortenson's travel, and through that the readers were given the impression that these starkly different regions can all be understood as one geographic and cultural entity – untamed and dangerous, in desperate need of education and enlightenment.

Perhaps the author-s and publishers wanted to collapse these regions to make their story more marketable considering the hype about terrorism and its sell-ability in America, as Nosheen Ali suggests in her analysis (Nosheen Ali, 2010). Perhaps, they also wanted to make their narrative more relevant and engage with the current war-on-terror discourse seriously and sincerely – but, evidently, uncritically and un-self-reflectively – through their own liberal-humanist diagnosis of the problem: That is, ‘ignorance and backwardness are the root cause of terror in the Muslim world'.

The overly simplistic-and-generalized depiction of ‘rural as wild, poor, and ignorant in Pakistan inclined on extremism’ was also instrumental for the author-s to make the case for their kind of solution: ‘Build schools before madrassas gets them’. The subtext of this solution is that secular education would turn students into ‘modern’ Muslims (read: “Good Muslims”, defined as modern, progressive, tolerant, pro-West) and remove their misunderstandings and ignorance about America (because to have those “misunderstandings” is wrong and characteristics of “Bad Muslims”, defined in the dominant cultural discourse as backward, fundamentalists, violent, and anti-West.).

Toward conclusion, ignorance no doubt has created a lot of injustice in the world and no region is spared from its evils. For concerned Americans perhaps the most optimal place to start combating ignorance is America itself. But, simply opening more schools in America won’t do it. Because celebrating “Columbus Day” as “discovery of America” but not as colonial exploitation of civilizations which already existed in the Americas, and observing “Thanksgiving” as the national holiday but without contemplating on the historic injustice done to Native Americans, and slaves and indentured servants for that matter, will continue to reinforce that blissful ignorance and false self-righteousness in Americans. “Columbus Day” and “Thanksgiving” are just two among many instances of distorted elements in the established (dominant) curriculum and teaching practices. What we need is a substantial transformation of the established curriculum taught in the schools – and in the content of other popular sources, like TV, movies, novels, magazines, from which people learn history and construct their imaginations and identities. And, not philanthropy or false national pride, but a deep concern for social justice for everyone and a self-reflective and sincere understanding of other cultures should be the guiding principles for developing that curriculum.

For further readings on this line of argument, see:

"Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?"
http://www.smi.uib.no/seminars/Pensum/Abu-Lughod.pdf

“Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency.” By Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/1/777777190136/

Particularly, on problems with the binary of “Good Muslim vs. Bad Muslim”, see
"Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: Cracking the Media Code"
http://www.islamicinsights.com/news/opinion/good-muslim-bad-muslim-cracking-the-media-code.html

See also, Nosheen Ali’s excellent analysis of this book,
Ali, Nosheen. 2010. "Books vs Bombs? Humanitarian development and the narrative of terror in Northern Pakistan", Third World Quarterly, 31: 4, 541 — 559

Edward Said’s works, particularly, “Orientialism”, “Culture and Imperialism”, and “Covering Islam”, deal directly with some of themes discussed in this review.

Ali A. is doctoral student in Social Sciences. He can be reached at alismails786@gmail.com. Other versions of this article appeared in IslamicInsights and InkPaperMosaic

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[Edit Aug 6, 2010]

Further comments based on readers' responses from a discussion in a public forum:

Thank you for your thoughtful comments. Let me try to address them one by one:

**** Wrote: "Mr. Ali, with your assertion that, “…the book presents a remarkable story of courage and compassion. The point is not to question those values. It is to scrutinize the ideas (and solution) of ‘development’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’ offered in this book…” you are precisely undermining its message. I will also add that since this book is a novel, and not some study on the Afghanistan/Pakistan problem, it should not be criticized with the criteria that you use. Nevertheless, I will try to show that even with your pre-established criteria for judging the book, the book is still a great read."

1. In case you missed it, the book is written in the style of a realistic biography and partly as ethnography. Read the Harry Potter series instead if it is just courage and compassion that you are looking for and if that is your only criteria for judging the worth of this book. This book deals with some serious issues and the representation of the regions and solutions that it offers has some severe implications. And for that reason its narrative should be seriously engaged. “Three Cups of Tea” has sort of become a canon for policy makers, social workers, and school teachers in many institutions.

**** Wrote: "You accurately depict the US as an “imperial power” that does not have a stellar record when it comes to humanitarianism. Then you ask: “What gives a country – especially a country like the US with a terrible track record of militarism and human rights violation – the right to violate sovereignty of other countries in the name of ‘spreading democracy’ and ‘humanitarian interventions’?”

My answer:

The US does not have the right at all, but it has a duty to act in this unique case. Why? The US is ultimately responsible for the “mess” that continues to grow in that region. ... Therefore, since the US was one of the main actors in creating the problem, it is obliged to “fix” it too!"

2. No doubt, the US has created a mess in the Afghan-Pak regions. Good that we are on the same page on this point. What you also need to realize is that the current US presence in those regions is not out of altruism and benevolence. Furthermore, the continuing presence is actually exacerbating the political conditions there. For example, in Pakistan, we did not have any suicide bombers before 9/11, now we export them! Thanks to Bush and Musharraf’s anti-terrorism policies! In the case of Afghanistan, you may want to read on the phenomenon of “neo-Taliban” in Afghanistan (see, for e.g., Tariq Ali’s column cited below), who were not trained in the traditional madaaris of the 1980s but are from common Afghan people who have joined resurgent militant elements only after the American invasion, in reaction to continuous American bombardment and other misadventures in their country. What you also need to realize is that American intervention in these regions are themselves a kind of terrorism, which continues to breed more terror and violence in reaction.

**** wrote, "You claim that there is “…silence on the role of external ‘factors’….” in the book. This is false, because the book explicitly mentions the various external factors that I stated above. Specifically, Mortenson says it was the CIA which made “…Stinger missiles and the training to fire them effectively available to mujahedeen leaders battling America’s Cold War enemy here, leaders like Osama Bin Laden.”"

3. Of course, a few external factors have been ‘mentioned’ in the book, but never considered in the diagnosis of the main problem. The stinger missiles that you name were mentioned only in the passing and in inconsequential terms (see pgs. 213 and 217). And, if you look at the narrative carefully, even after ‘mentioning’ the external factors, the logic or cause of terrorism is basically traced back to the INTERNAL factors in the book: Conflict in interpretation of religion; the “good” and “bad” Muslims in that region; and, above all, illiteracy (as illustrated in the title of one of its chapters: “the enemy is ignorance”).

Once again, contrary to the book’s message, anti-Americanism in most parts of the world is not a result of “ignorance” but of direct experience with the consequences of American exploitation.

4. On the issue of false sense of self-righteousness, my basic contention is about the idiom of American engagement: philanthropy vs. social justice. The book does complicate the narrative of American engagement to some extent, but, as I argue in the review, the basic idiom remains the same. The courage and compassion that you find very inspiring in this book also feed into this idiom. I have made this point already in the review – so, won’t repeat that here. For further elaboration, you may want to read Lila Abu-Lughod’s and Saba Mahmood’s articles (cited below). You may also want to look at the politics of “Good vs. Bad Muslims”, which is part of that cultural idiom and discourse (See the article cited below).

5. Again, the subtext of Mortenson's solution is that secular education would turn students into ‘modern’ Muslims (read: “Good Muslims”, defined as modern, progressive, tolerant, pro-West) and remove their misunderstandings and ignorance about America (because to have those “misunderstandings” is wrong and characteristics of “Bad Muslims”, defined in the dominant cultural discourse as backward, fundamentalists, violent, and anti-West.). This subtext contradicts your claim that Mortenson’s solution is just about building schools and the curriculum choice is on the locals. For without the modern, secular curriculum that is by default the established curriculum in Pakistan, with all its faults, how is a school any different from a madressa. It’s the curriculum that makes all the difference and that is the key factor in Mortenson’s solution, even if he does not speak about that in open terms.

6. *** wrote, “The book proposes education and books as the solution, not wars and weapons. (With all due respect, I think you should be ashamed of yourself for depicting Mr. Mortenson in such a negative way for there are few people in the world who dedicate their entire lives in helping other human beings and bridging gaps between cultures. These are the people of action, not words.)”

At some points in the book, I agree with you, one does get the impression that the character Mortenson (as depicted in the book) opposes the American war-s and proposes books in place of wars. However, on pg. 294, Mortenson explicitly states that he supported “the war in Afghanistan” . He further says on the same page, “I believed in it because I believed we were serious when we said we planned to rebuild Afghanistan. I’m here [in Afghanistan] because I know that military victory is only the first phase of winning the war on terror and I’m afraid we’re not willing to take the next steps.” So, Ms. ****, if you look at his message closely, he is basically asking for a well-rounded strategy for war on terror, in which books should follow bombs in any post-war reconstruction efforts. In other words, ‘development’ should be part of US war strategy.

7. On the point about imposing normative assumption, as I suggest earlier, despite mention of some self-reflective works (like “Ancient Futures”), the grand narrative of the book remains couched in the tropes of “backward vs. modern”, “conservative vs. progressive”, “fundamentalist vs. tolerant”, in a new-Orientalist kind of narrative. As I suggest earlier, at various point in the book one gets the impression that the farther one gets from one’s tradition and ‘conservativeness’ and becomes ‘like us’, in thoughts and actions, the more “modern” one seems to become. Such MEASURES of ‘progress’ and ‘achievement’ are especially apparent in the aspirations and changes reflected in the characters of Jahan and Tahira by the author-s. Read closely the pages 195, 299-303, and 312.

For example, when Jahan says, “I couldn’t take my eyes off all the foreign ladies…They seemed so dignified. Whenever I’d seen people from downside before, I’d run away, ashamed of my dirty clothes.” (p. 195)

Or, when the book describes Tahira’s aspirations with these words: “Tahira, wearing a spotless white headscarf and sandals that wouldn’t have been practical in the mountains, told Mortenson that once she graduate, she planned to return to Korphe and teach alongside her father, Master Hussein. “I’ve had this chance,” she said. “Now when we go upside, all the people look at us, at our clothes, and think we are fashionable ladies. I think every girl of the Braldu deserves the chance to come downside at least once. Then their life will change. I think the greatest service I can perform is to go back and insure that this happens for all of them.” (p.312)

***, you may be seeing Jahan or Tahira as mere individuals who are asserting their personal aspirations. I am seeing their views as part of a pattern. It would take too much space to get in the debate of what’s wrong or right with this pattern and based on what perspective. Now, I am not saying all of these problems can be traced back to the curriculum being taught in those schools. The argument I presented is not just about what’s in the content but also what’s not in it and therefore what becomes the default presumption and bias. In that regard, in the review I hinted at some observations from my experience in the region and talk with people there. See the point about Western Enlightenment.

Furthermore, when I talked to people, I find that their aspirations and experiences of educational development and consequences are much more nuanced and multi-faceted than what was flatly and romantically presented in “Three Cups of Tea”. To give you just one example from a workshop that I conducted a couple of weeks ago in an area close to Gilgit, in which I emphasized on taking a comprehensive and cultural-sensitive approach to educational development, one community worker shared a concern that a single-minded emphasis on female education has created a disbalance in some places where you now have about 90% female literacy rate but very low male literacy rate. Now there aren’t good marriage proposals for these girls, many of whom end up in relationships that are less than satisfying to them. He connected that to the increasing number of suicide cases among educated females in a particular community. The observation, no doubt, requires further research into the causes and here I only present that as just a question to problematize the single-minded emphasis on female education advocated in “Three Cups of Tea”.

The observation also raises a number of other related questions here. The approach shared in the book is ‘ask people what they want and help them to get that’. You see that careful, contextual approach in the first few cases in the book, but then building-schools becomes the one-solution-for-all-problems for the rest of the places, especially in the second half of the book, with a focused emphasis on female education. We see no dialogue or critical exchange that should be the key ingredient of his advocated approach. Instead, the book relies on a very simplistic, if not misleading, diagnosis of local cultures and their problems (as I argue in my review) and advocates its single-minded solution to a problem (Wahhabi-Taliban style terrorism) that does not exist in the Northern Areas. That contradicts the approach that the book advocated at the beginning.

Community workers from the area shared a variety of experiences and approaches in their comments in my workshop, which were not always in agreement with each other, but they presented a quite complex picture of ground realities and needs. I wish Mortenson had continued the approach he advocates in principle, because that would have allowed us to see the variety of social factors and solutions that may be available. Next, and this might sound contradictory to the previous observation, but it could be argued that common people may not always know what may be best for them; more specifically, what may be the consequence of a certain educational development approach. To simply rely on their wishes may be too naive, and at times, irresponsible. I distinguish common people from the experienced community workers and that should resolve that apparent contradiction.

At times, especially in the second half of Mortenson’s book, I also felt that we see characters (not always professionals or experienced community workers) that speak exactly what he wanted to hear, expressing ideas and aspirations in a flat, almost romantic fashion for the Western readers about what needs to be done. This is probably due to the single-handed, decontextualized, anti-terror rhetoric and approach in the later half of the book, and perhaps also due to the construction of narrative by the two authors under the influence of the cultural discourse and in view of increasing the appeal of their narrative.

More Articles:

“Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency.” By Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/1/777777190136/

Tariq Ali on Neo-Taliban: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174977/tariq_ali_has_the_u_s_invasion_of_pakistan_begun_

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[Edit December 1, 2010: In another forum where this review was published, a person named Ghulam Parvi posted the following]

"GM. Parvi (Ghulam Parvi in three cups of tea). #

10.24.2010 10:56

Dear Ali and Friends. I am Ghulam Parvi for whom Greg Mortenson praised in his book three cups of tea.I know him, I worked him, I taught him, I helped him morally, physically and financially. Before publishing the book, when Greg showed me draft book, I told Greg and David that they have included many false stories and quite wrong picture of local culture and religion and law, Greg promised and committed that he will not included those false stories, but they published. Every reader should know that I was the translator to David Oliver Relien, when Greg brought David to Baltistan to polish the stories of three cups of tea. I am the eye witness to say that David and Greg has included false stories.

He proved himself to be a dishonest and false story teller. He and David has made the book interesting, with fictitious stories. When he says himself, what and how his humanitarian services mixes with Saudi Arab, Iran, Kuwait, Religious conflict, Wahabism, Taliban, etc. etc. He has shown him as Hero, while he has not mentioned great services of the local people, local organizations and groups.

Does the American Readers believe over the stories? Without confirmation. Strange. Do not the publisher of America need permission to publish ones reference, who is defamed. Are the American writers, publishers and humanitarian workers like American Army, who blamed Iraq for having mass destruction weapons, attacked Iraq against the will of UNO, and then later committed that there were no weapon of mass destruction and the report of their CIA was baseless."

Aaj Bazar Main Pa-bajola Chalo - Faiz

2010-06-13T02:19:00.020-05:00

چشم نم جانِ شوریدہ کافی نہیں
تہمتِ عشق پوشیدہ کافی نہيں
آج بازار میں پابجولاں چلو

دست افشاں چلو مست و رقصاں چلو
خاک برسر چلو خوں بداماں چلو
راہ تکتا ہے سب شہرِ جاناں چلو

حاکمِ شہر بھی مجمعِ عام بھی
تیرِ الزام بھی سنگِ د شنام بھی
صبحِ ناشاد بھی روزِ ناکام بھی

ان کا دمساز اپنے سوا کون ہے
شہرِ جاناں میں اب با صفا کون ہے
دستِ قاتل کے شایاں رہا کون ہے

رخت دل باندھ لو دل فگارو چلو
پھر ہمِیں قتل ہو آئیں یارو چلو

Translation (or, more appropriately, the way I read this poem)

The tearful eyes, the distressed soul are not enough
The accusation of love unannounced is not enough
Today, let us walk through bazaar with feet in chains

With hands spread, walk entranced and bedazzled
With ashes on head, blood on garb
Walk, as the whole city of the beloved has turned out to watch

Walk past the city’s ruler, general spectators
Past the arrows of accusation, stones of abuse
Past the morning of sorrow, day of failure

Who else beside us is intimate with them
Who now in our beloved’s city is still untainted
Who now is worthy of executioner’s hand

Pick up the burden of heart, let us go, heartbroken ones
Let us offer ourselves, once again, for execution

Whose "Human Rights"?

2010-05-21T05:11:00.015-05:00

This is from Talal Asad's book "Formation of the Secular" (2003). In it, he critically engages with the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum's 'Human Capabilities' approach to human rights.

Asad's critique problematizes the normative assumptions of (this version of) liberal "Human Rights" discourse, as well as dissects its political utility.

"The self-owning “human”

I said earlier that the Universal Declaration does not define “the human” in “human rights” other than (tautologically) as the subject of human rights that were once theorized as natural rights. But what kind of human does human rights recognize in practice?

Those who formulate and implement Western policies often assume that there is a natural fit between the legal culture of “human rights” and the wider culture of “Western norms.” This includes particular attitudes to the human body and to pain. In Chapter 3 I mentioned some post-Enlightenment views about measures of suffering that allowed imprisonment to be represented as humane as opposed to flogging. Here I want to pursue a slightly different point: attitudes to the body indicated by such moral preferences – why, for example, confinement, even solitary confinement, is an acceptable form of punishment while any punitive practice that directly impinges on the body is not.

High value is clearly given to the integrity of the body – which explains in part the particular horror in Euro-America at the widespread custom of female genital mutilation in some African regions. I say “in part” because there is no comparable sense of horror at the custom of male genital mutilation. The latter is, of course, a quite familiar practice in the Judeo-Christian West and the former is not. But there is more to it than that. There is the belief that female circumcision, unlike the male variety, interferes with the sexual pleasure of the women. The enjoyment of sexual intercourse is a valued part of being human; anything that interferes with that enjoyment is in some powerful sense inhuman. [31] It therefore becomes a matter of a human right and its violation. So there is here both an interference with the subject’s ability to experience “full” sexual pleasure. The human being owns his or her body and has the inalienable right to enjoy it.

In an impressive series of publications Martha Nussbaum has reopened the old question of human nature through the Aristotelian idea of human capabilities that she recognizes can also be linked to the concept of human rights. Her basic idea is that a list can be compiled of central human functional capabilities (for example, “Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason – and do these things in a ‘truly human’ way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing self-expressive works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth” [Nussabum, pp. 78-79]). The universal character of these capabilities, according to Nussbaum, can be found in the Rawlsian idea of “overlapping consensus,” which I have discussed briefly in connection with Taylor’s use of it in the Introduction. “By ‘overlapping consensus’ I mean what John Rawls means,” she writes, “that people may sign on to this conception, without accepting any particular metaphysical view of the world, any particular comprehensive or ethical view, or even any particular view of the person or of human nature.” And yet, Nussbaum’s idea of universal capabilities does express the emerging idea of “the human” in it. A subject possessing bodily integrity, able to freely express himself or herself, and entitled to choose for herself or himself what to believe and how to behave is not simply a “freestanding moral core of a political conception” to which people sign on. It is itself a thick account of what being human is – and one that underpins human rights.

As a view of human nature it follows that where these capabilities are not being exercised due to obstacles, their removal will allow humans either to exercise them spontaneously (and to rank them), or to freely choose not to do so. However, humans will have to be taught what good capabilities are and how to exercise them, and to be prevented from exercising vices that harm others. After all, humans are also capable of cruelty, greed, arrogance, treachery – indeed there is scarcely anything they are not capable of. So part from being able to identify vices and their harmful social effects, someone must have the power to identify “obstacles,” to remove them, and also to ensure – by force if necessary – that vices are not restored. That sovereign power is a human capability too, but not one that everyone may freely exercise simply on that account. When invested in the state, that juridical power becomes a precondition for the flourishing of human capabilities. According to Nussbaum, that state must, of course, be one committed to universal values. As such it would not only secure the same rights for all its citizens, but also their ability to experience the emotions of love, grief, justified anger – and even their ability to “use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason – and to do these things in a ‘truly human’ way.” One difficulty here is that the secular state now becomes the definer of “the truly human,” and although Nussbaum attempts to distinguish between capability and functioning, assigning only the definition of the former to the state, it is not always possible to distinguish between them.

There are other well-known problems with this view that may be noted in passing. First, the ability to choose freely whether or not to exercise a capability sometimes encounters a contradiction: because certain choices are irrevocable, they themselves may constitute insurmountable obstacles to further choices (as an illiterate one cannot make an informed choice regarding literacy unless one has experienced it, but having become literate one cannot then change one’s mind). Second, it is a notorious fact that human capabilities – and the conditions in which they are realized – are subject to conflicting interpretations. When “human capabilities” are legally enshrined the business of interpreting them is the privilege of judicial authorities and technical experts, and politics proper is excluded. In brief, it becomes a matter of domination rather than negotiation.

Who - in a world of nation-states - has the authority to interpret and the power to promote the conditions that facilitate human rights, and "the human" they sustain? At a meeting two years ago the U.S. Trade Representative negotiating China's entry into the World Trade Organization causally observed in response to a journalist's question that "democratic political reform and greater adherence to human rights are certainly encouraged by an opening to the West and Western norms." What might these norms be when viewed as styles of life relating to specific kinds of subjectivity?

In a recent article on American global power, Ignacio Ramonet, chief editor of Le Monde Deiplomatique, recounts the scale of U.S. military, diplomatic, economic, and technological hegemony, and then goes on to ask why - given the liberal democratic ideology of equality and autonomy - there isn't more criticism of it? I quote his elegant answer in full:

"No doubt because US hegemony also embraces culture and ideology. It has long been the home of many fine, universally respected intellectuals and creative artists in every field, who are quite rightly admired by one and all. Its mastery extends to the symbolic level, lending it what Max Weber calls "charismatic domination". The US has taken control of the vocabulary, concepts and meaning of many fields. We have to formulate the problems it invents in the words it offers. [The article at Le Monde's website currently has the following sentence instead: "It obliges us to formulate problems of its own invention with the words it offers". Italics supplied by Asad. He also combined the paragraphs together.] It provides the codes to decipher enigmas it created in the first place. In fact, it has set up any number of research centres and think-tanks for this very purpose, employing thousands of analysts and experts. These eminent bodies produce reports on legal, social and economic issues with a perspective that supports the ideal of the free market, the world of business and the global economy. Their lavishly funded work attracts endless media attention and is broadcast the world over... Wielding the might of information and technology, the US thus establishes, with the passive complicity of the people it dominates, what may be seen as affable oppression or delightful despotism. And this is all the more effective as its control of the culture industries lets it capture our imagination. The US uses its admirable know-how to people our dreams with crowds of media heroes, Trojan horses despatched by their master to invade our brains. Only 1% of the films shown in the US are foreign productions, while Hollywood floods the world with its wares. And close behind come television series, cartoons, videos and comics, not to mention fashion, urban development and food. The faithful gather to worship the new icons in malls - temples raised to the glory of all forms of consumption. All over the world these centres of shopping fever promote the same way of life, in a whirl of logos, stars, songs, idols, brands, gadgets, posters and celebrations (like the extraordinary spread of Halloween in France). All this is accompanied by the seductive rhetoric of freedom of choice and consumer liberty, hammered home by obsessive, omnipresent advertising (annual advertising expenditure in the US exceeds $200bn) that has as much to do with symbols as with the goods themselves. Marketing has become so sophisticated that it aims to sell not just a brandname or social sign, but an identity. All based on the principle that having is being... The American empire has become a master of symbols and seduction. Offering unlimited leisure and endless distraction, its hypnotic charm enters our minds and instills ideas that were not ours. America no longer seeks our submission by force, but by incantation. It has no need to issue orders, for we have given our consent. No need for threats, as it bets on our thirst for pleasure."

I do not present this statement as decisive evidence of what is going on in the world. Its interest lies in the explanation it offers of how, by having "to formulate the problems [America] invents in the words [America] offers," global society adapts to a stronger, more modern language - in which the equal rights to pleasure can be articulated as America's project of secular redemption. [38] Ramonet's recognition that the desire to do as one pleases (to do what pleases one) evoked by marketing discourse is familiar enough - the normalization of consuming desires is a banal feature of contemporary capitalist society often noted by both supporters and critics. Familiar, too, is his suggestion that the human being assumed in modern market culture is an autonomous individual who seeks pleasure and avoids pain. For just as electoral democracy postulates the equivalence of citizens (each of whom counts as one and only one) within any given party, so market strategies assume the equivalence of buyers (each of whom counts as one) within any given niche. In both cases the choosing subject is a statistical object to be targeted, added to or separated from other individuals. It is this that explains the U.S. Trade Representative's claim that greater adherence to human rights is encouraged by the acquisition of "Western (that is, American) norms" in place of older ones, just as the opening up of free trade with the West and the blossoming of a market society will reinforce human rights.

My thought is not that this claim is arrogant, or otherwise morally tainted, but that it may be true. "Cultures" are indeed fragmented and interdependent, as critics never tire of reminding us. But cultures are also unequally displaced practices. Whether cultural displacement is a means of ensuring political domination or merely its effect, whether it is a necessary stage in the growth of universal humanity or an instance of cultural takeover, is not the point here. What I want to stress is that cultures may be conceived not only in visual terms ("clearly bounded," "interlaced," "fragmented," and so forth) but also in terms of the temporalities of power by which - rightly or wrongly - practices constituting particular forms of life are displaced, outlawed, and penalized, and by which conditions are created for the cultivation of different kinds of human. Resentment on the part of the weak about being treated cruelly by the powerful is generally a spontaneous human reaction, but learning to see certain practices as insupportable that were not previously viewed as such, and organizing social opposition to them, are steps in the reconstruction of the human.

In an interdependent modern world, "traditional cultures" do not spontaneously grow or develop into "modern cultures," People are pushed, seduced, coerced, or persuaded into trying to change themselves into something else, something that allows them to be redeemed. It may not be possible to stop this process; it may be a wonderful thing that the process takes place as it does because people really are redeemed through it. I do not argue for or against such directed changes here. I merely emphasize that they are not possible without the exercise of political power that often presents itself as a force for redeeming "humanity" from "traditional cultures." Or - and this comes down in the end to the same thing - as the force for reclaiming rights that belong inalienably to man in a state of nature.

In the seventeenth century, so John Pocock proposed, the self was beginning to be seen as contingent. The anxiety that that provoked was the context in which Locke's political appeal to natural rights acquired added plausibility. Legal discourses for defining the person gain added weight. In an essay on flexible capitalism at the close of the twentieth century, Richard Sennett has argued that the highly unstable conditions of work in America are making a coherent narrative of the self - and therefore realization of "character" - increasingly difficult. It is possible (although this is not Sennett's argument) that this new stage in the growing anxiety about the private self is not unconnected to the increasing insistence on the redemptive quality of human rights at a global level. When the secularist ideological order separating public politics from private belief is seen to crumble, the new terrain is occupied by a discourse of human rights taht can be taken as either sacred or profane. Canovan's appeal to myth to defend the liberal project of human rights (see Chapter 1), King's appeal to universal brotherhood and human dignity under God, the U.S. government's global project to free both belief and property, and Nussbaum's celebration of the capabilities of the sovereign human are all variations of this discourse."

(Talal Asad 2003: 148-155)

[31] "Martha Nussbaum cites "opportunities for sexual satisfaction" as an aspect of "Bodily Integrity," listed as one of the "central human functional capabilities" in her influential Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 78. The assumption that "opportunities for sexual satisfaction" can be clearly identified and legally protected is intriguing".

[38] "But as the post-9/11 "war on terrorism" demonstrates, the United States does not simply seduce its opponents with pleasure. It is prepared to use devastating force. The war against Afghanistan was presented by the American media not only as the pursuit of terrorists but as as the liberation of Afghan women..."

Note: Please see the book for all footnotes.

Handala: 'keep that spirit of resistance alive'

2010-05-17T23:54:00.005-05:00

A friend forwarded the following description with this image:

Naji al-Ali, the creator of the Handala cartoon, once wrote of his famous creation:

"His name is Handala and he has promised the people that he will remain true to himself. I drew him as a child who is not beautiful; his hair is like the hair of a hedgehog who uses his thorns as a weapon. Handala is not a fat, happy, relaxed, or pampered child. He is barefooted like the refugee camp children, and he is an icon that protects me from making mistakes. Even though he is rough, he smells of amber. His hands are clasped behind his back as a sign of rejection at a time when solutions are presented to us the American way."

62 years, but not many more insha'allah. Let's hope Handala can be retired very soon!

Bringing Islam to Our Campuses

2010-04-22T02:05:00.005-05:00

Bringing Islam to Our Campuses
Ali A., IslamicInsights, April 19, 2010
Source

Allow me to start with a few inter-related questions. What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word "Shia"? Is it a specific color? Is it a certain "Shia" practice, or tradition, or occasion? Is it some experience you had while growing up? Is it a picture of some iconic "Shia" figure, or some symbol? Perhaps, it may be something totally different. Now, think about what comes to your mind when you hear the word "Muslim"? Is it the same color? How is this image similar or different from the one you have for "Shia"? Similarly, think about the words "Jewish", "Hindu", and "Buddhist".

These questions are meant to draw your attention to a basic anthropological observation. The more visible and ritualistic aspects of a religious tradition – symbols, celebrations, practices, people – usually become the medium through which most followers develop their understanding of the religion itself. These aspects may also become the primary markers of identity for the followers themselves and in the eyes of the outsiders. Traditions, practices, and other outer aspects are a very useful medium to convey deeper religious meanings and also to preserve them. They appeal to multiple levels of human faculties – physical, emotional, rational, spiritual. The problem occurs – and speaking from an Islamic perspective and focusing only on Islam here – when in the minds of the followers the visible and ritualistic aspects become all what Islam is supposed to be, and the followers do not realize their deeper meanings and social implications. Islam, in other words, becomes merely ritualistic or superficial.

A Self-Transformative Approach

The ritualistic Islam is just one among many other kinds of Islam-s out there. Whatever the kind of Islam we understand and practice is what we will bring to our on-campus activism. However, our understandings may or may not be in line with the true essence of Islam. That uncertainty alone is enough reason to warrant, in the first step of any outreach efforts, a careful reconsideration of our Islamic understanding. That brings me to a major point of this piece. Our outreach efforts should be oriented toward a sincere and constant reevaluation and development of our Islamic understanding, and through that process we should define the kind of outreach projects and activities we want to do as organizations or movements.

That reevaluation cannot happen simply by listening to monologues; that further development of Islamic understanding cannot happen if we just think about 'educating others'. They require a different approach, in particular, a discursive space for self-reflective, critical, and constructive engagement. That is what we first need to build within our organizations. Without a constant reevaluation of our Islamic understanding, the choices we make about activities, speakers, and outreach strategies and content may all just reinforce our previously held beliefs.

Having such a discursive space would also allow us to evaluate our activities and strategies on a regular basis. For evaluating the effectiveness of any of our activities, a critical measure should be to see if the members themselves have learnt from that experience. This is a critical element of, what is named here as, the Self-Transformative Approach. Promoting awareness of Islam should not be like teaching physics. I may or may not believe in Quantum Mechanics or String Theory, but I can still teach them in my classes. Islam should not be treated that way. Islam, as I have understood so far, is about "believing" and "doing" and their inseparable connection, but more than that it is a way of "being". It is a journey of self-transformation. Our outreach efforts should also be part of that journey, but they should not become the end in themselves.

Organizing outreach activities – congregational prayers, Du'a Kumail on Thursdays, tabling for promoting Islamic awareness, lecture events, etc. – in themselves cannot be the criterion of our effectiveness and success. Instead, what we gain from those experiences – in terms of increasing our spirituality and social awareness – is how we should evaluate their impact, along with other indicators. (As I write these words, I should ask myself: how does this activity relate to my own journey?) I strongly believe that as we do Islamic outreach with this approach, or method, transforming ourselves and building an environment of sincere learning and activism, we will inevitably impact others around us.

Expanding Our Horizons

A critical factor in this self-transformative approach is the scope of the perspective with which we understand Islam and do Islamic activism. I may lead a discussion on Hajj where I may just focus on the DOs and DONOTs of specific rituals and the places to visit in Mecca and Medina, or I may also delve into the deeper meanings of each and every ritual obligation of Hajj, from declaring the Niyyat (intention) and Tawaf (circumambulation) of Kaaba to the mandatory stay in Arafat and Sacrifice. Similarly, I may read Du'a Kumail and its translation every Thursday evening with friends, yet not reflect on its meaning or relevance. Or, I may also ponder over that one beautiful point toward the end of Du'a Kumail, asking God to turn all of my activities, during day and night, into a constant remembrance of God, and based on that standard define and evaluate my activities, values, career choices, and goals of life. When I organize a food drive, I may just satisfy myself by feeding the poor. Or, I may also take the next step and realize that Islam's socially conscious teachings demand that I ask why the poor is poor and what could be done about various forms of economic and social exploitations which lie at the roots of widespread hunger and poverty. All these examples are meant to elaborate the same point: our perspectives or levels of understanding of Islam have a direct impact on the scope of our activities; hence, the need for constant re-evaluation and expansion of our horizons.

For that reason, it is absolutely essential that we educate ourselves in scholarly literature on religious and contemporary issues. And, just knowing them is not enough. We also need to see what principles and inspirations we can derive from them that could guide our activities. In short, we need to develop an informed perspective (or perspectives) for all of our activities. The "Save Darfur" movement provides a useful illustration, and warning, in this regard. Without doubt tragic injustices occurred in Sudan and needed our immediate attention. A large number of ordinary participants across North America supported the "Save Darfur" movement out of their genuine concerns, humanitarian and religious, but they did not know that the organizers of the movement were intentionally pushing their hideous agenda behind this cause. Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University has documented the politics of that agenda in detail in his book Saviors and Survivors. In short, as Alan Kuperman summarized in his op-ed in the New York Times (May 31, 2006), instead of helping the cause, the "Save Darfur" movement actually "poured fuel on the fire". It is unfortunate that, still unaware of the organizers' agenda, a majority of ordinary participants continue to support that movement.

An informed understanding of issues and surrounding politics, therefore, is absolutely essential for all activities and causes that we take up on our campuses. In order to build that informed perspective, I emphasize again the need to develop a discursive space for critical dialogue among ourselves and also with scholars – from campus and outside – where we can define and evaluate our principles, strategies, alternatives, and short and long term goals. More examples of issues about which we need to observe similar care include the efforts to promote a positive image of Islam in Euro-American societies, defending pro-justice causes like that of supporting the Palestine cause, talking about gender issues, and presenting various moral and philosophical positions in the name of Islam.

It is quite natural to have doubts and unresolved questions during the college years. Students come across a range of conflicting ideas and questions in their classes, particularly those in social sciences and humanities. Those ideas directly impact their thoughts, outlooks, values, identities, lifestyles, and goals of life. It is very important that our gatherings provide a positive environment to engage those doubts and questions and use those occasions as opportunities for sharing and learning knowledge. Such gatherings, similarly, can help participants reevaluate their culturally constructed ideas of taste, desire, beauty, identity, and aspirations in life, all of which also impact their understanding and practice of Islam.

For example, the discussions and other activities may draw their attention to individual consumer choices and their connection to exploitation of people, cultures, and environment in their own country and other parts of the world. Such activities may also help them to realize the connection between, for example, "perfect body" images in their favorite Disney movies, TV shows, teen magazines, and advertisements and teen's low self-esteem and materialistic attitudes, and, also, how these adverse effects could be countered by re-defining our standards of beauty and adopting simplicity and modesty. The activities may also examine the distorted histories that are taught in classrooms, in different on-campus events, and promoted through celebrations and holidays like Columbus Day, and their connection to reinforcing racism and historical injustices. I feel that such discussions would inevitably have a self-transformative effect on all participants, including the organizers, broadening their understanding of what Islam is about and also its relevance to society. Islamic Insights contains a range of excellent topics and material to engage with in our campus activities. See also an excellent list of discussion topics compiled by SIA Chai-Chats.

We should also encourage our members and participants to gain necessary skills, knowledge, and experiences to advance their understanding, such as, learning relevant languages, studying Islamic and contemporary thought and history from multiple perspectives, and traveling abroad to explore different cultures and meet peoples.

Toward Building A Movement

Any on-campus organization, movement, or community that seeks to promote Islamic awareness cannot be built by just a one-day event or a few events each year. That community has to be developed through regular interactions and purposeful activities among organizers, members, and general participants. The regular activities can give them a sense of belonging, a conducive environment for spiritual and intellectual nourishment, a consistent impetus for social activism and striving for self-improvement, and life-long fraternity and learning opportunity through sustained communication and activism after graduation. We need people who are not only highly educated in different fields but who also have informed perspectives, sincere concerns, and positive identities, in short, those who are on the journey of transforming their "beings". In that process, they will inevitably influence the professional areas and communities that they will join after graduation. Promoting these qualities should be one of the major tasks of our on-campus Islamic activism, and as I have argued in this piece, building that discursive space with a friendly and constructive culture can do a lot of service in this regard.

Based on the above discussion, I hope we can see that doing Islamic activism should not be treated like joining just any other cultural or social organization on campus. Islamic activism demands a constant self-evaluation. Any attempt to change our surrounding has to start from within ourselves; the personal is directly connected to the social. And, our activism should be guided by an informed understanding of Islam and contemporary issues.

A practical concern emerges when we try to establish that conducive culture in our organizations: Start with changing hearts or disciplining actions based on Islamic teachings? A frequent issue that comes up in this debate is that of Hijab. Should we have Hijab as a requirement of membership and participation in our activities; at official forums should we allow members who dress modestly but do not cover themselves in formal Hijab to represent the Islamic cause of our organization; about a policy that asks, as the minimal requirement, not formal Hijab but just adherence to "modesty" (for both males and females), what may be its impact on the overall culture and direction of the organization? I cannot get into the details of this particular issue and the broader debate here, but if I may briefly share my perspective, the two directions do not need to be contradictory or mutually exclusive, and the emphasis on one direction or another can vary with contexts. In the university environment and in many other settings, however, I am inclined to approach Islamic activism with an emphasis on the first direction, not as an instrumental choice or strategy but as an appropriate approach to encourage individual perspective-building and meaningful self-transformation. I take this position with the realization that the outcome of this method may not always turn out to be what I consider is the best action or policy. This last point is further elaborated in the following section.

An Ethics of Engagement

Please consider this discussion as only a prologue, an opening of the discussion on this important topic. I do not directly address the related challenges here. Challenges like how to handle ideological and political differences, how to balance theory and practice in our activities, how to reconcile multiplicity of perspectives and the need for unity in actions, how to engage with non-member Muslims and non-Muslims on campus, how to work with other organizations for common causes without compromising our principles, how to build coordination with other Islamic organizations in different universities, and so on. I must admit that these are difficult questions. But at the same time I believe that these challenges should not undermine the objective need and importance of having that self-reflective, discursive space in our organizations.

Toward addressing some of those challenges it may help if instead of unpacking and confronting each and every challenge through rational discourse we start by reflecting on the method, or the ethics of engagement, for building the said discursive space. The method proposed here is oriented in a form of practice – not just rational dialogue – guided by the core teachings of Islam. It is to embark on the journey of self-transformation and in that process tackle those challenges with humility, sincerity, willingness to learn and share, and putting into practice what we learn and believe. There are risks involved in this attempt too. Among other things, this ethics of engagement would be seen as advancing a particular perspective, at the expense of others and excluding those who do not necessarily subscribe to its standards; this ethics is also a perspective after all. That is a valid question, and one of the challenges for any attempt to theorize our activism.

In engaging with that challenge, I would submit that the propositions presented in this article – or proposal – are meant less as a perspective with specified utopian ends or destination and more as a perspective that tries to outline a process of discovery through self-transformation. These propositions are based on a few principles, or (pre)requisites, which I believe are at the core of Islam, and they are what I propose as that ethics of engagement. Let me explicitly outline those principles so you can evaluate them in your discussions and through practice. The first is spirituality; the second is developing a critical social consciousness and striving for social justice and other humanitarian causes; and the third involves attitudes of sincerity, humility, devotion to learning, and willingness to sacrifice.

As I understand, all of these principles have strong rational and spiritual basis. The first is a universal goal in the teachings of all Abrahamic religious traditions, and, arguably, could be found in other prominent religions too, and may even appeal to those who consider themselves 'spiritual but not religious'. Perhaps the most direct statement of this goal in the Islamic tradition could be found in Sura Ash-Shams (Qur'an 91: 1-10). To purify and develop our "beings" and rise above the 'material' in the quest of limitless transcendental realities is a very common realization and pursuit among sages and saints all throughout history. Spirituality also has deep implications for our "worldly" lives and our assessment of social problems, and for the same reason, it should be part of a perspective for social change – as in adopting spirituality as a lifestyle emphasizing simplicity and modesty to resist hyper-consumerism and materialism. The second principle also has deep resonance in the essential teachings of many major religions. Furthermore, it is a shared principle among many pro-justice, environmental, and humanitarian movements – basically, among all those who, irrespective of their religious or non-religious affiliations, are concerned about miserable conditions of humanity today and realize that there are structural and cultural causes responsible for these miseries. The third principle should be self-evident from the teachings of many major religions and from experience. (The comparisons here are meant to point out the wider applicability and universality of these principles and not to advocate a philosophy of religious pluralism that hinges on moral and cultural relativism. I think that much should be obvious from the very nature of the above principles and the overall discussion in this article.)

If we could all agree upon this minimum standard, as the common denominator, and build from there the culture of our organizations and the scope of our activities, I believe we could address many problems and challenges that we face in our activism. One of the outcome of this (usually gradual) process of transformation of "beings", or consciousness, is that it would align our individual predispositions with each other. The logic of our working together would then transcend from the bond of "agreement on particular issues" or "agree to disagree" to the much stronger bond of sharing common goals and principles and supporting each other in our respective journeys, with humility and sincerity. At the same time, we should not expect that this creative process or practice will always result in a unanimously agreed upon perspective or policy on specific issues.

I hope that the points presented in this proposal contribute to theorizing the method and direction of our on-campus Islamic activisms, from defining and evaluating our strategies and activities to making alliances with other organizations for common causes. The discussed approach and their underlying principles favor a discursive and self-transformative process to encourage meaningful perspective-building and activism, and at the same time, they acknowledge the need for some ground rules and boundaries, in order to address, if in part, the problems of endless arguments, lack of direction, and doing activism without understanding. I hope student activists find this proposal helpful toward building meaningful Islamic movements on university campuses and beyond.

The Real Cost of the Olympics

2010-02-19T19:41:00.006-06:00

This demands a genuine reconsideration of how we view the Olympics. Nothing wrong with sports and games per se, but we should demand higher moral and socially-conscious standards for how they are organized anywhere.

What is wrong with the Olympics?
http://olympicresistance.net/content/what-wrong-olympics-0

The Olympics are not about the human spirit and have little to do with athletic excellence. They are a multi-billion dollar industry backed by real estate, construction, hotel, tourism and media corporations, and powerful elites working hand in hand with government officials and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). While public pressure is unlikely to stop the 2010 Games from occupying Vancouver, critical resistance is needed to expose deceptions about the Games’ impact and purposes, voice our dissent to the world, and strengthen social movement solidarity.

Occupation of Stolen Native Land: The vast majority of B.C. is unceded Native land, unlawfully occupied by B.C. and Canada. By Canadian law, Native title exists unless yielded by treaty and little of B.C. is covered, even by flawed treaties. Neglect of First Nations’ social, environmental, and political rights by a state that benefits from Aboriginal resources is a serious political crisis ignored by Canada and the Games.

“Security” and Eroding Civil Liberties: Increasing political repression and security build-ups accompany modern Games. Estimates for Vancouver of at least 16,500 Canadian military, border guards, private security, VPD, RCMP, and CSIS agents (plus foreign security) are unrealistically low: the Sydney Games had 35,000 police and security (4 cops per athlete) with 4,000 troops and commando units and the Athens Games had 70,000 police, security, and military forces. There will be at least 40 km of crowd-control fencing, video surveillance, and airport-style security zones around the city, including on public property. The monitoring and intimidation of political opposition has already begun. Vancouver City Council has followed the IOC requests to create an environment free of protest by enhancing bylaws to restrict posters, signs, leaflets, marches, noise-makers, and any possible “disturbance” to Olympic entertainment. Many elements can become permanent (such as public video monitoring, new security bodies and policing rules, and the criminalization of protest) and security costs are up to $1 billion.

Environmental Destruction and Waste: The 2010 Games will be one of the most ecologically damaging in history, featuring clear cuts, mountain blasting, road construction (and expansion of traffic), gravel mining (damage to fish stocks), massive amounts of steel, plastics, cement, wood, etc., threats to animal populations, unnecessary luxury buildings, and expanded infrastructure (with accelerated approvals) for mining, logging, oil and gas exploration, ski resorts, and tourism. Approximately 100,000 trees have been cut down for Olympic development.

Corporatization: The Games are entirely commercialized, with pro athletes, exclusive corporate sponsors, and crony deals for development, construction, and media companies. Image control is crucial and all outdoor advertising in Vancouver has been sold to the Games and their sponsors for weeks around the Games. The anthem lyrics “with glowing hearts” and words like “friend” have become trademarks related to the Olympics. Games regularly benefit and are sponsored by companies with poor human rights and environmental records, like Nike, Shell, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Petro-Canada, Dow, Teck Cominco, TransCanada, and arms makers GE and GM.

Damage to Communities: Racial profiling and lock-downs of ethnic communities are common for the Games (black neighbourhoods in L.A. and Atlanta, Muslims in Athens, etc.). More tourists increase abuses in the sex trade. Host cities routinely criminalise the poor or homeless and socially cleanse their cities (Vancouver relocated the homeless out of sight for Expo 86 and Atlanta did the same for its Games). The Vancouver Police crackdown on visible poverty has led to hundreds of tickets for panhandling, jaywalking, second-hand sales on the streets, and sleeping in parks. The sacrifice of housing, social services, and environmental and labour laws also hurt the poor, homeless, women, minorities, Natives, and workers. Since the 1980s, Games and their construction have displaced over 2 million people.

Honouring Exploitation: Despite Olympic claims, Games occur in places that violate “international standards” (Nazi Germany in 1936, more than 300 students massacred in Mexico prior to the 1968 Games, political oppression in China during the 2008 Games, etc.). Games are used to rally for nationalist causes, impose social control, and attract corporate investment, more than to celebrate “pure sport.” Past presidents of the corrupt IOC (including colonialists, Nazi sympathisers, and officials of fascist states) have used the Games to suppress dissent and serve their political and economic interests. Like the WTO, FTAA, G8, and APEC, the Games will use public funds to honour leaders from repressive regimes.

Lack of Affordable Housing: During a housing crisis, single-room-occupancies (cheap hotels) and affordable rentals are torn-down or converted to high-priced housing while the City lends money to build Olympic condos. Promises of affordable and social housing and shelter spaces are rarely met by host cities and Vancouver has already admitted that commitments will not be met. In fact, since the bid in 2003, we have lost over 850 low-income housing units and homelessness has tripled. Salt Lake City Games planned for 2500 units of affordable housing and created only 150; prior to Sydney’s Games, tenant evictions increased 400%; and Calgary failed to build any of its pledged social housing.

Public Costs and Debt: The $6 billion cost of Vancouver’s Games keeps increasing with cost overruns and hidden transfers. Host cities take on huge debts: Montreal’s 1976 Games were only paid off in 2002; Calgary had a $910 million debt; Barcelona a $1.4 billion debt; Sydney a $2.3 billion debt; etc. Claims of long-term economic benefits have been proven false in previous Games. The Olympics are an expensive 17-day corporate circus (during an economic crisis) that will cost us all for years to come.

On History and Historiography

2010-02-01T19:31:00.020-06:00

For sometime I wanted to list down articles and books related to the themes that I am interested in. Basically, a bibliography with titles that I have found useful or that I have read good reviews about and want to read soon. It's going to be a list of personal favorites, not a comprehensive list on the subject.

I start with Philosophy of History and Historiography in this post.

First, a quick note on how I distinguish the two. The philosophy of history, as it is understand here, is an attempt to find patterns and causes in social and historical changes. Historiography is about ways of writing history. It's about interrogating the research methodologies and social perspectives that inform selection of data, focus on certain historical agents (and not others), and questions that a historian/historical-sociologist pursues. The two - Philosophy of History and Historiography - are analytically separate enterprises, but closely related.

So, for example, Ibn Khaldun starts his "The Muqaddimah" with a critical appraisal of the history-writing of his time and proposes to present his own method, which he claims was based on ilm al-'Umran (Science of Population or Civilization). He outlines that science in 'The Muqaddimah' (the 'Prologue' to his Grand History, written in multiple volumes). The science was informed by his realistic and careful reading of history (realistic in terms of trying to find objective causes in history). He identified tribes and tribal solidarities as the core principle of social organization of his time and as a primary agent of historical change. His narrative focused on tribal groups to explain the rise and fall of dynasties.

The below list is in no ranked order:

"Trends of History in Qur'an" by Muhammad Baqir Sadr (Book, Online)

"The Muqaddimah" by Ibn Khaldun (Book, Online)

"On the Sociology of Islam" by Ali Shariati (Book, Citation)

"Social and Historical Change" by Murtaza Mutahhari (Book, Citation. Many parts are available Online. See "Man and Universe", Chapter V - "Society and History")

"On the Plight of the Oppressed People" by Ali Shariati (Article/Speech, Online)

"Marxism and other Western Fallacies" by Ali Shariati (Book, Citation)

"What is History?" by E. H. Carr (Book, Citation)

"Orientalism" by Edward Said (Book, Citation)

"Silencing the Past" by Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Book, Citation)

"Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992" by Shahid Amin (Book, Citation)

"The Holocaust industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering" by Norman G. Finkelstein (Book, Citation)

"Remembering partition: violence, nationalism, and history in India" by Gyan Pandey (Book, Citation)

"Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference" by Dipesh Chakrabarty (Book, Citation)

"The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories" by Partha Chatterjee (Book, Citation)

"Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time" by Reinhart Koselleck (Book, Citation)

Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities" by Marshall David Sahlins (Book, Citation)

"The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" by Max Weber (Book, Citation)

"Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison" by Michel Foucault (Book, Citation)

"Vision and Method in Historical Sociology" By Theda Skocpol (Book, Citation)

"Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons" by Charles Tilly (Book, Citation)

"Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation" by William Hamilton Sewell (Book, Citation)

On Institutionalized Sufism in Pakistan

2010-02-01T05:42:00.009-06:00

A little essentialism of Sufism here and there, but overall the article quite poignantly sheds light on the connection between sufism and institutionalized power in the Pakistani context. Other facets of Sufism - spiritually inclined and anti-status quo - also exist in Pakistan, although not as prominent in the social sphere (social relations, hierarchical structures). That other facet, however, is quite pronounced in the domain of cultural discourse (poetry, media), appropriated in a variety of ways by different groups, more recently by the pop culture and liberal elites of the Pakistani electronic media. Historically, at some places, the shrines also served as sites of mobilization and resistance against the powers-that-be.

See a relevant post here: "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim"

The bad Sufi
By Qalandar Bux Memon, Dawn, Jan 26, 2010

It is often assumed that Sufism stands opposed to Wahhabism. Wrong. Sufism and Wahhabism, in fact, share a fatal characteristic – they are religions of the status quo. In Pakistan, Sufism legitimises barbarities of inequality and starvation – ‘do nothing, it’s god’s will’ - while at the same time justifying structures of oppressive power, Pirism and landlordism, rather like Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. Contemporary Sufism, rather than being a solution to Pakistan’s problems, is the cause.

I was sitting at the shrine of Shah Kamal in Lahore, with the dhol beats and whirling dervishes dancing to connect to the ‘centre of the universe in themselves’, when a friend turned and pointed to an old German fellow sitting a few meters from us. “He just delivered a lecture on Sufism. He is an expert on the subject, and talked about how it’s a religion of peace and love.”

I replied curtly: “Have you ever been in love? Have you had your heart broken? What peace is there in that state? What peace was there when Mansur had his head chopped off on the orders of the Baghdadi Emperor? What peace was there when Shah Inayat was fighting against the Mughal emperor for his life and that of his commune? What peace is there in Sassui’s peeling feet as she searches for her beloved through the desert of Sindh?”

My friend agreed and said: “But they pay me – I have to go along with them.”

Western and Pakistani policymakers think Islam can be codified as either a religion of peace and love and given the brand of Sufism, or as a religion of violent jihad. They think it’s better, at this point in time, to promote the peaceful religion of Sufism.

Note how the word Islam is taken out – Sufism is codified as not really Islam. Thus Sufism is considered a perfect native antidote to the violent religion of Islam.

Why are dollars, pounds, rupees and Euros going to promote Sufism? What is it about today’s Sufism that allows it to serve a purpose for the American empire, and what function does it play locally in Pakistan?

The answer was hard for me to stomach. I had spent much time researching aspects of Sufism, and I thought I’d found a touchstone from which to articulate a spirituality that was socially radical and politically challenging to Pakistan’s parasitic elite and the US/Nato invaders. Ziauddin Sardar, polymath writer and scholar of Islam, forced me to face the facts.

He called Sufism “docile”, acting as an opiate for the masses, with most Pirs/Syeds/Sufis amounting to nothing short of “confidence tricksters”. And indeed, Sufism is docile. A shopkeeper in Main Market, Gulberg, had an emblem of the Sufi saint Lal Qalandar hanging in his shop, which he had got from Sehraw Sharif, Sindh, the town where the saint is buried. He said that “what these people do not realise is that 80 per cent of what we pray at the shrine [of Lal Qalandar] comes true.” A popular song sung across the Punjab at Sufi shrines tells women that if they light a lantern at the shrine of saints, their desire for a ‘son’ will be answered.

Items given by holy Pirs - threads, rings, blessings, and even sexual induction before marriage (in the case of a notorious Sindhi landlord/Pir) - are taken as altering the universe and leading to the granting of prayers of health, wealth, and other worthy claims by this mass of the wretched that is the Pakistani citizen. It is not only candles and lanterns that are lit at the shrines; money is exchanged and power is sustained. It is this power that has created a “docile” Sufism.

Pakistan is a vastly unequal society. Government figures put those below the poverty line at close to 40 per cent of the population, though the true figure may be closer to 50 per cent. Inequity is the hallmark of the Sindh province of Pakistan, which is celebrated as “the land of the Sufis” and is where Sufis and Pirs hold power. A recent World Bank report noted that Sindh has the narrowest distribution of land ownership, with the richest one per cent of farmers owning 150 per cent more land than the bottom 62 per cent of farmers put together. Feudal landlords in vast parts of Sindh have holdings of thousands of acres, and most of them are Syeds or Pirs. These lands were sometimes acquired during the Mughal era but were largely consolidated during the British colonial rule in India. The British, looking for local collaborators, found Sufi Pirs willing to oblige.

Sarah Ansari, in her book, Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sind, 1843-1947, notes: ‘the Sindhi Pirs participated in the British system of control in order to protect their privileges and to extend them further whenever and wherever possible’.

Today’s feudalists are keen to protect and promote “docile” Sufism to sustain their wealth and power – this time with US help.

Wealth is created by a pool of landless serfs who toil thousands of acres for their spiritual masters, while seeing their own children starve. These serfs create the wealth that sends the Bhuttos and the Gilanis to universities such as Oxford and Harvard, while their children get “blessings” and threads of “Pirs”. This stream of inequity from generation to generation is based on a lame theological idea, which nonetheless has been promoted by the Mughal Empire, the British Empire, the landlords themselves, and now by the American Empire, and thanks to such patronage has gained far more ground than the Taliban. It states that the Prophet was given divine light/knowledge, which passes on to his descendents. These descendents append the honorific title of ‘Syed’ [literally, ‘master’], and claim divine and material privileges.

Pirs justify their superiority on a similar argument – they were given the light, and this light continues to radiate in their descendants. At a recital of the poetry of the radical Sufi Waris Shah held each year in Lahore, the descendents of Iman Bari Sarkar (a Pir) enter the arena to be received with awe and sought for blessings by the crowd. The recital stops and they are escorted to the front and seated. All eyes are on these holy men who are not only descendents of a Pir but also Syeds – thus, doubly blessed with ‘light’! And then they begin expounding their ideology: “We the Syeds get different treatment from God Almighty, for our good deeds we get double the reward compared to ‘murids’ [non-Syeds] who only get single reward for a single good deed … but, it’s not easy to be a Syed … [he laughs] … we have to suffer double the punishment for our any wrong deeds whereas you [non-Syeds] get only single punishment for a single wrong deed!”

There you have it! Our holy man explains why he has a Land Cruiser jeep and “non-Syeds” have donkey carts. He explains why most Pakistanis are living in poverty while he and his Syeds and Pirs are lapping it up in luxury.

Contemporary Sufism is the ideology of Sindh’s landlords. It is the ideology that is used to uphold their wealth and despotism, and keeps millions in serfdom. A similar pattern is repeated throughout Pakistan. Given the lack of proportional representation and the vast inequality in power in each district between Pirs and the rest, it is almost always the case that elections flood parliament with Pirs/Syeds/landlords. The current Pakistani Prime Minister (Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani) and Foreign Minister (Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi) are examples. Both have the claim of being descended from Holy Pirs as the basis of their wealth and distinction. As a result, we cannot expect parliament to challenge inequity and injustice in Pakistan.

Parliamentarians know that lack of education, coupled with the obscurantism of contemporary Sufism, sustains their power. Like the British before them, the Americans don’t care about Pakistan’s growing multitude of serfs and the underclass, they don’t care whether the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister of Pakistan are deeply rooted in the cause of inequity and injustice in the country and part of the promotion of a system of starvation – a Sufism that tells people to take a blessing instead of demanding food, education, justice and liberty. Like the British, they will fund whoever furthers their interests. We, however, must care.

This is an article by Qalandar Bux Memon, editor of Naked Punch, from the The Samosa, a new UK-based politics, culture and arts journal, campaigning blog and website.

"The Secret" Unveiled - Individualism, Materialism, and the Modern Age

2010-01-31T21:51:00.011-06:00

Below see an insightful excerpt from Douglas Rushkoff's book, Life INC. (2009), which I am reading these days.

"The Self is the Source

We're trained in our society to give, but to feel uncomfortable taking or receiving. But if you don't take, you are denying another person from giving."

Three of the women smile and two others half-nod, glazed over. But the younger one in the corner still appears unconvinced by the life coach leading the session.

"What's that really mean, Eileen?" Amy asks. "Greed is good?"

"Well, sure," answers Eileen, a middle-aged and middleweight women in a chocolate-brown pantsuit. She doesn't appear to realize that Amy was quoting from the movie Wall Street. "That's not how they put it, but yes. We have to learn to accept the bounty that life offers. It's the key to seeing self as source. Remember, you make the world around you with your thoughts. If you aren't ready to accept, then how can the universe give you anything you want?"

Eileen's holding today's meeting in her apartment, a nondescript garden condominium outside Grand Rapids, Michigan. I found her while researching former Amway sales representatives for what I thought was going to be a chapter in this book on multilevel marketing networks. But Eileen's not interested in talking about her past failures as a Silver Producer level Amway distributor. She's dedicated to sharing her newest passion, free of charge, with the women who responded to her Internet notice for practitioners of The Secret-the latest and greatest "quantum-based" self-improvement system known to humankind, according to its practitioners and promoters-who are often the very same people.

Most simply, The Secret is a self-help DVD and companion book synthesizing the pitches of a few dozen of today's most prominent self-help gurus. Its creator, an Australian named Rhonda Byrne, claims there's a single truth underlying all the spiritual systems and get-rich-quick schemes of her many peers. It's more ancient than the Bible and has been intentionally hidden from human beings for just as long. The great secret? Positive thinking or, in The Secret's parlance, "The Law of Attraction." Like attracts like. Abundance is a state of mind: Think healthy, and you'll be healthy. Or-more to the point- think rich and you'll get rich.

The Secret is spiritually reconstituted for the "me" generation. As self-contained and utterly artificial as Birkdale Village, The Secret masquerades as a time-honored and diverse set of insights. And like the faux New Urbanist shopping mall, the underlying purpose of The Secret is to make money. Most of the spiritual teachers in The Secret are wealth-seminar leaders who display the book's logo on their ads and websites. The Secret has certainly worked wonders for its marketers: as of this writing, more than two million DVDs have been sold, and the book hit number one on the New York Times Best-Seller list of hardcover advice books.

While positive thinking no doubt has its benefits-from the placebo effect to good old self-confidence-The Secret tries to justify itself not only in the language of pop psychology but also in that of modern physics. According to the book, happy thoughts will do more than affect behavior. The Secret claims that interrelatedness of matter and energy-Einstein's E = mc2 [2= square]-allows people to change reality to their liking by changing the way they think about it. Thought is presumably the energy in this schema, and reality is the matter. For most, however, this potential for quantum transmutation is limited to attracting more marriage prospects into their bedrooms, or money into their personal bank accounts.

Eileen puts the law of attraction into practice on pretty much every physical surface of her home. Handwritten signs and Post-its proclaim affirmations such as "THE UNIVERSE ADORES YOU" and "YOUR MAN IS ON HIS WAY." A $10 million check from Eileen's bank account, written to Eileen, is stuck to her refrigerator under a green "S" magnet-most likely the closest one could find to a dollar sign. Over her gas fireplace hangs a collage of images she has clipped from catalogs and magazines representing the things she is in the process of attracting to herself. Female models smile as they drive expensive cars, frolic in the wavers with muscular male models pretending to be surfers, or sit with baby models under trees. The classic cultic goals: wealth, sex, fertility. In what might easily be a coincidence of simply the ethnographic bias of Eileen's favorite magazines, none of the pictures contains any black people, even though Eileen herself is African-American.

"Vision walls really work," Eileen assures her group. "There was once a man who wanted a multimillion-dollar mansion. He made a vision board, and kept it even after he made his million. One day, he was looking at it hanging in this bedroom, and he realized he was living in the exact house he had clipped!"

"Then there was the woman who really wanted to get married," chimes in Sharon, thirty-something unemployed former sales rep (she never told me of what) and recent convert to The Secret. "She started buying wedding magazines and clipping pictures of rings, flowers, dresses. She started acting like she was married already. And not only did she get married, the ring her fiancé proposed to her with was the exact same as the one she'd clipped for her board."

Think it, clip it, get it. In a process that's one step more pathetic than working to get the things they see in advertisements, practitioners of The Secret put the ads up on their walls and then wish really hard for what's in them. They turn the pictures in ads into idols to be worshipped [sic]. And to prove to themselves that they believe in the system enough to get it to really work for them, they must enlist others in The Secret as well. When not enlisting newcomers, they must meet regularly with other believers to keep the buzz of the belief alive. To stay psyched, so The Secret can work its positive magic.

That's the real reason for meetings like Eileen's: to proselytize The Secret-spreading the new word while supporting one another in buying more of the featured teachers' books and courses. It's a win-win for all concerned that mirrors the relationship of a corporation to its chartering monarch. Top-shelf self-help gurus-Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus author John Gray, Chicken Soup founder Jack Canfield, Conversations with God creator Neale Donald Walsch-get new life pumped into their waning careers, while the new self-help brand gains instant credibility from their participation. As if in full disclosure, they are all willing to teaching the fine arts of logrolling and bootstrapping to anyone who will listen and pay. Secret is as Secret does.

While The Secret isn't itself a multilevel marketing scheme (or MLM), it has become the sales pitch and rationale for many others. Three of The Secret's best-known officially sanctioned self-help gurus, Canfield, Bob Proctor, and Michael Beckwith, teamed up on a Secret-inspired get-rich MLM called the Science of Getting Rich. For $1,995, anyone can join. The only prerequisite to getting rich this way is that you have to really want it enough to get all your friends to want it, too.

"Kids, when they want something, harp on it, focus on it, and obsess over it until they get it," Eileen explains. "A child whines, 'But you promised!' " The women laugh. "Kids have the freedom to want what they want. And that's what the vision board reminds you. To really want means to be able to fully visualize and then through that, to really live."

"What if you don't get what you want?" The quiet one in the corner-the one in her twenties who, at least by outward appearances, would have the least trouble attracting a mate or landing a job-has finally spoken up. "If you don't get what you want, is that because you didn't attract it?"

"Right, Amy," says Eileen, nodding. "At least not yet." Eileen claims to be a graduate of the University of Michigan Business School's "Life Coach" program. No such program exists, but she does have an undergraduate diploma hanging in her bedroom office. If she really had attended a Life Coaching program, this is probably the kind of moment she would have trained for.

"So, if you're a mom in Iraq with a starving baby," Amy goes on, pursuing her line of questioning, "and you just can't get out, does that mean you're not wishing hard enough?"

"We get what we want," Eileen says. "So let's all think good thoughts."

"But what about the Holocaust?" Sooner or let it had to get there.

"I can't really answer that," Eileen says. "But I know there were people in the Holocaust who did want to survive and they lived."

"Just like there are people with cancer who lived because they really wanted to," adds Sharon.

"How? By putting pictures on the wall of people who are healthy?" Amy asks.

"That's part of it." Eileen is fumbling with her papers now, trying to move to her next planned part of the meeting. "They took responsibility for their disease, and visualized a way beyond it."

"And the ones who didn't live? They didn't want to survive badly enough?"

"Look, it's not all those other people you should be worrying about right now. You're here to make your life better. Start with yourself. The rest will follow. We attract what we are. The self is the source."

Amy's concern for others may be quaint, even well intentioned-but in the logic of The Secret, it's just an obstacle to manifesting her true self and attracting the partner, health, and wealth she deserves. Updating the rationale of the American Calvinists, who believed that wealth was an indication of God's approval, The Secret's practitioners equate persona success with having achieved scientific and spiritual harmony with the greater universe. All it takes is being enthusiastic and clear enough to manifest it-to attract all this good stuff to one's self.

The Secret isn't a fringe cult, but a mainstream global phenomenon. Its teachers show up regularly on Oprah's schedule right between Barack Obama and Michael Moore. That's because the philosophy is not an aberration at all, but the culmination of several centuries' dedication to promoting the self over pretty much everyone and everything else. The Secret simply gives people permission to be as selfish as they can tolerate, and to internalize the language and symbols of advertising into one's life as core guiding principles.

The self-absorption and self-interest dominating our values today is not mere happenstance, but the result of a century of public-relations campaigns, advertising, and social engineering waged against collective action, altruism, and even good government. Just as we were disconnected from place and reconnected instead to a map biased toward corporate interests, we have been disconnected from one another and led to behave instead as individuals and though corporatist ideals.

The rise of the self went hand in hand with the rise of the chartered corporation and the central authorities it anchored. Only a world steeped in this false notion of a wholly sovereign individual could have generated the bourgeois merchant class of self-made men threatening the static power of the aristocracy. Likewise, the subsequent elevation of chartered corporations was depended on highly individualized laborers and, eventually, customers who competed with one another for wages and riches. The more disconnected people became from one another, the more easily they could be manipulated. Unions of workers and functioning communities of citizens threaten the power of corporations, while individuals out for their own interests behave more like corporations themselves. The social concerns that make collective human behavior multifaceted and complex get smoothed out as people take actions directed by the much simpler calculus of the market. This makes people entirely more predictable, better targets for advertising, increasingly more isolated from one another, as well as more dependent on central authorities to create both value and meaning.

It's not as if a king conspired with the head of a chartered corporation to concoct the notion of individuality. (It wasn't until the heyday of public relations in the 1920s that anyone consciously tried to promote individual freedom as a cynical means of social control.) But the elevation of individual personhood to a literary and social ideal took place as part of the same wave of rationalism that brought to us chartered corporations, colonialism, and the Industrial Age. This was a new framework for how society could work and grow, funded and promoted by those who were growing rich and powerful by using it. We have to understand at least the very basics of how this notion, individuality, was invented in order to dismantle its inappropriate and automatic application today." (Life INC. (2009) by Douglas Rushkoff, pg. 84-89)

"Good Muslim, Bad Muslim"

2010-01-31T21:30:00.012-06:00

Good Muslims are moderate, rational, non-violent, and progressive, who chant, "Islam is the R-O-P" (Religion of Peace). Bad Muslims are extremists, irrational, violent, and fundamentalists, who chant "Death to Amreeka" and are against everything modern-and-civilized. Often this is how Muslims are presented in the mainstream news media. Which box do you fit in?!

Three Responses

Usually three kinds of responses to the above binaries have been seen in the mainstream media. Some do not see any problem at all in these binaries. You might hear them saying something on the following line, "Yes, you are right...there is some trouble with Islam." "Bad Muslims in fact do exist, just like you said it." "But...we are not like them! We are Good Muslims! We are just like you want us to be!"

The second does see a problem with these binaries. This is the apologetic response that tries to defend Islam and Muslims but without questioning the underlying assumptions of those binaries. The people following this stance seem to have internalized the underlying assumptions and are unconcerned or unaware of their politics. You might hear them saying, "No, not all Muslims are terrorists." "There are a few bad apples among all people. We renounce all forms of violence. Islam is a religion of peace." "Islam also preaches tolerance just like you are demanding." These responses are often defeatist. How so? Ask a simple question to them: Are you a fundamentalist?

The third kind of response starts by questioning the underlying assumptions and interrogates their politics. So, for example, it would first ask who is a fundamentalist, who is defining that to be so, with what assumptions, and for what political ends? Before invading Taliban-controlled Afghanistan when President Bush demanded, are you with us or with them, the third kind of response absolutely refused to play within this false dilemma: Neither you, nor them!

I find the third approach most fruitful and assertive. This discussion is important if we are concerned about the questions of patriotism and integration in the mainstream, if we are concerned about the future of our activism and politics, about how others think of Muslims and Islam, and how even Muslims see themselves and their religion in an era of information age and globalization.

Let me elaborate the third approach by way of examining their underlying assumptions and politics below. This discussion is informed by Mahmood Mamdani's widely acclaimed book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2005).

I should also clarify at this point that this piece focuses on how a certain mainstream discourse tries to frame and control Muslim outlook and politics. I do not deny that we have all kinds of social and political problems in our midst. We definitely need critical self-reflection and change. The concern in this piece is to be mindful of who is shaping the agenda of that "change", from what perspective, and toward what end? Another related concern is that even for resolving our "internal" problems we need to understand the role of "external" factors and long term historical interconnections.

The Underlying Assumptions

Want to understand why Muslim women are so oppressed? Why are Muslim men so violent? Why are there too many authoritarian regimes in the Middle East? WHY DO THEY HATE US? The answer to all of these questions, as the media and many political pundits tell, lies in understanding the "Muslim Mind" (or the "Arab Mind" or the "Shia Mind"). How do you read that mind? Read it by reading their religious texts. Understand the "logic of their culture" – often presented with quite simplistic and reductive formulas in the media. No surprise that immediately after 9/11, so many Americans rushed to Barnes & Noble to buy the Qur'an. No surprise that 'burqa' became the singular explanation of all kinds of oppression on women in Afghanistan. And no surprise that the anti-US-Israel resistance in many countries are many times explained through the so-called "martyrdom complex". ("It's not our fault that they are bent on killing themselves – we are just poor victims of their irrational beliefs.")

The Politics and Messy History

A historically informed perspective on the other hand would demand that the audience connect the abovementioned questions with wars, militarization, poverty, power struggles, the competition for global hegemony during and after the Cold War, the pursuit of oil and gas and other forms of economic and cultural exploitations, the direct support of the global powers to dictatorial and oppressive regimes. But you don't see that on the media most of the time. You instead see the above binaries that are simple, clear, and easy to understand and follow. These binaries, however, emphasize a narrow cultural logic for explanation at the expense of political causes and messy history, distorting the truth altogether.

That narrow cultural logic assumes that Muslim societies and politics are governed exclusively by their religions and culture and have developed in isolated containers, and the so-called 'West' had nothing to do with their political outcomes. Not many ask, for example: Were women in Afghanistan not already in bad conditions before the Taliban came to power (and worsened the situation further)? Why were they in such bad conditions? And why, out of various ideological inclinations and interpretations of Islam, only the most extremist versions became so dominant in Afghanistan during and after the Afghan Jihad?

Instead of focusing on the cultural logic, a better place to look at is the twisted history of the Cold War and its aftermath. The reality is that the battle ground for the Cold War was not America or Europe. It was fought mainly in the so-called "Third World" countries, of which the turbulent Pakistan and Afghanistan were key regions. The US interest in Afghanistan was to create a Vietnam for the Soviets, to "bleed them white", and for that purpose, a certain understanding of Jihad, devoid of its underlying Islamic ethics and respect for human life, was promoted with the co-sponsorship of Saudi Arabia. The combined interest of the two countries was also to contain the Iranian Revolution. Against the wishes and reservations of other jihadi and nationalist resistance groups, the most extreme and sectarian of those groups were officially patronized in Afghanistan and Pakistan during those years. The same groups were also given exclusive access to the refugee camps in the two countries to indoctrinate the next generation of mindless and ethics-less jihadis. The Taliban, their understanding of Islam, and style of jihad, all are the direct outcome of that joint enterprise.

The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan has a history and political context. So does the al-Qaeda. And so do the movements in Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. The origins, development, and forms of these various movements are often very distinct from each other. But by emphasizing those simplistic binaries, the mainstream media often conflates these very different kinds of movements into each other. No consideration is given that the pure terrorist organizations, many times created by those on the payroll of the CIA, like the Contras in Nicaragua or the shady al-Qaeda, are very different from those Islamist movements in Lebanon, Palestine, and elsewhere that are today engaged in principled resistance (militant or otherwise) and have legitimate causes and mass support base. Interestingly enough, the former groups – the pure terrorist movements – are used as the pretext in the so-called "War on Terror" through which the global powers and their supported dictatorial regimes suppress the legitimate resistance movements in their countries. Even non-Muslim states in South Asia, Latin America, and Africa have learned to use the rhetoric of terrorism to suppress various kinds of internal resistances opposing their oppressive policies and exploitative neo-liberal economic reforms.

Unfortunately, many urgently composed statements by Muslim media relations organizations denouncing "all violence in the name of religion" after tragedies like the Fort Hood shootings and Mumbai Attacks also collapse the distinctions among various groups and show little attention to the politics of these binaries. (I discuss this politics in more detail below.)

Power and Powerlessness

The adjectives "Islamist" or "Sectarian", as in "Islamo-fascism" or "Sectarian violence", are often used as both the 'description' and its 'explanation'. The answer is already assumed in the way question is defined. This is again an example of a narrow cultural logic which erases more than it explains.

Instead of the narrow cultural logic, the motivations of state rulers and grievances of people may be better understood by the logic of power and powerlessness. Saddam Hussein, for example, may have selected the most anti-Shia elements in his army to brutally suppress the Shia rebellion after the Gulf War, but if his Machiavellian suppression of the members of his secular-nationalist from the 1970s onward and the indiscriminate killing of the Kurds in 1987-88 are any indicators, Saddam himself was driven more by power ambitions than anti-Shia prejudice.

But what do we do about the explicitly religious vocabulary used by various terrorist and Islamist movements? We did discuss that there are important distinctions between various groups, between their origins, contexts, and modes of resistance, but at the end of the day they all claim themselves to be religiously motivated – so why the emphasis on power/powerlessness logic?

Two considerations: First, particularly in the context of the failure of various kinds of leftist and nationalist movements in the second half of the last century, religion provided the space to resist neo-colonial advancements and dictatorial oppression. In some movements, religion expressed itself in mainly 'reactionary' terms. But at other places, the Islamists 'proactively' sought to create a vision for an alternative future based on spiritual values and social justice. Among others, the poet-philosopher Mohammad Iqbal and Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr come to mind. Understanding their distinctive approaches and how they engaged with both traditional Muslim and Western scholarships and politics of the time are crucial to de-mystify 'fundamentalism' and its appeal to masses. The emphasis here is to understand the issues and responses in their historical context without undermining their distinctions and weight.

Second, Islam as-a-solution needs to be distinguished from the historical "causes" of contemporary issues. The power/powerlessness logic, although not the only effective logic, is analytically more useful than the narrow cultural logic for understanding the historical background of 'Muslim politics' in many parts of world, particularly that of the Shia populations.

Consider the following illustration: Facing systematic discrimination and exploitation from their rulers (who came to power due to multitude of historical factors, of which the colonial and neo-colonial experiences of the last 200 hundreds years is the most important), these Shias found a powerful expression of their grievances and a solution in the Islamic ideology around and after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. However, instead of falling in the trap of polarizing identity politics, this Islamic ideology and movement sought to be pan-Islamic (non-sectarian, but at the same time, it sought empowerment of oppressed Shias under many Arab regimes). It was also anti-imperial and dedicated to the Palestine cause (which, despite the rhetorical overkill of the Arab nationalist leaders still today, was gradually abandoned by the Arab states from the late 1960s onward). No wonder that the aware masses in the Middle East and elsewhere, from all kinds of religious and ideological backgrounds, were naturally attracted to the Iranian Islamic movement and its manifestations. Glimpses of that attraction was again seen during and after the 2006 Summer War in Lebanon, despite the concerted efforts by the dictatorial rulers and the US and Israel to raise the false specter of the "Rising Shia Crescent".

It is in understanding the politics those in power and those marginalized in each case can we find answers of many questions asked in the mainstream media. The apologetic commentators spend hours defending how Islam is a religion of peace which does not support violence, etc. But these theological discussions cannot explain the problems that have their roots in power/powerlessness. Those media discussions at best serve as distractions from the real issues and at worst as control mechanisms in the hands of powers-that-be. (See below.)

A False Sense of Moral Superiority and Self-righteousness

Why does the American public support the neo-colonial enterprise of its government? Or, put differently, how is it that the politicians are able to sell their war-mongering agenda to people every time? This is a critical question. Among other factors, a crucial ingredient is nurturing a sense of self-righteousness in the people based on a blissful ignorance of history and a belief in the moral superiority and universal validity of the ideals of the so-called Western civilization. A few issues with that sense of moral superiority have been discussed in a previous piece, where I reviewed Fatemeh Keshavarz's book Jasmine and Stars. A useful book that dissects this blissful ignorance of history is James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Book Got Wrong (2nd edition, 2007).

The point I want to make here is that the neo-colonial enterprise is of course not presented in blunt terms. There is a whole moral discourse that is based on that blissful ignorance and sense of moral superiority among the masses that the governing elites use to advance their agenda. In the past, the rhetoric of saving the poor, oppressed women from the oppression of "Muslim"/"Arab"/"Indian" men was used by the colonial powers to advance and justify their expansionist agenda. More recently, the same moral discourse of "colonial feminism" was used to "liberate" the Afghan women from 'burqa'. Yesterday's colonial expansionism is today advanced through "humanitarian interventions" and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" to promote democracy, freedom, human rights, and enlightenment. The fact that before the US invasion of Afghanistan, the cause of "liberating" Afghan women from 'burqa' was endorsed by people from a variety of political and ideological persuasions, from far-right and conservatives to Hollywood celebrities and liberals and leftists, suggests the pervasiveness of this particular way of seeing Islam and Muslim societies. Columbia University Professor Lila Abu-Lughod's following piece provides valuable insights in regards to the connection with the colonial discourse: Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?

A useful question to ask in this regard is how come we see a simultaneous development of the so-called European Enlightenment and Colonial expansionism. The answers are complex, but one thing to realize is that the two tendencies were not necessarily contradictory to each other. Colonial subjugation of "other" people was not contradictory to the liberal ideals of political rights and self-determination. Because the very ideals of European Enlightenment, anchored in the notions of uni-linear historical progress of civilizations, the emphasis on particular modes of reasoning, the importance on individual rights and private property as the means of self-actualization, and the difference between the "modern" and "backward", implied that Europeans see themselves as "different," "superior," and "civilized" in comparison to other unfamiliar cultures and peoples. Both John Locke and John Stuart Mill, the champions of Liberalism, supported and rationalized the practice of colonialism through these ideals. To them it was a "progressive force" that would civilize the indigenous populations in colonized territories. That was the "White Man's Burden". These ideals were also incorporated into particular versions of Christianity that were brought to the Americas by the European settlers.

This moral discourse has deep roots and is directly intertwined with those cultural binaries. By tracing those roots, we can find useful clues and illustrations for deconstructing the contemporary neo-colonial moral discourse, equally popular among the liberals and conservatives speaking on Islam in the media.

The Politics of "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim"

Neo-Colonial Humanitarianism

Be it the Fort Hood shooting, 9/11, Mumbai Attack, Hostage Crisis, Taliban, al-Qaeda, or Palestine-Israel violence, when political context and messy history is removed from the picture, when important distinctions among these cases are blurred, and simplistic cultural logic of "irrational, violent, fundamentalist" is emphasized, they not only lead to wrong identification of causes but also suggest misleading solutions. A whole intellectual industry of "reforming" Islam under the patronage of RAND Corporation, Freedom House, and similar organizations has exponentially developed post 9/11.

When focus is on culture and 'the tensions/conflicts within', defined by burqa or some age-old sectarian divide in different cases, it takes the role of powerful state actors and external powers out of the picture (whereas many times the state and foreign powers are the ones behind staging terrorist activities and instigating violence in the name of religion). Thus, for example, the failure of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq was conveniently blamed on "sectarianism". By blaming it on the cultural logic, the global powers can thus be presented as saviors, as the only recourse of the poor, oppressed people, and if they leave that region (as in Iraq or Afghanistan today), then one should only expect chaos and civil war.

As the Control Mechanism

The "Good/Bad" Muslim rhetoric also serves as a control mechanism that seeks to (re-)socialize the Muslims to a certain 'cultural script' where they are to live and act under constant fear and self-discipline. The "Good" Muslims are expected to distance themselves from the "Bad" Muslims. See how people react to the labels of "fundamentalist", "extremists", "militant" in our communities and how so many like to be considered "moderate", "modern", "peaceful". This 'cultural script' is already widespread in our midst demanding people to act and align themselves along certain politics (or lack thereof). Among other things, it polarizes and disunites our communities.

Every time a tragedy happens, they feel obliged to immediately respond and distance themselves from those 'bad' Muslims. No consideration is usually given over the framing of the issue: Should it be seen through the lens of "Islam" (and therefore the "problems" with its teachings and its people) at all. That 'cultural script' is reinforced every time tragic incidents like Fort Hood happen (last year it was the Mumbai attacks). Again, there is usually no discussion of political context or messy history (not for 'justifying' these acts but to 'understand' them).

On a related note, these binaries are not new. The African American community has already experienced them during and after the civil rights movement, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was presented as the 'Good Black' and Malcolm X was the 'Bad Black'. It is an interesting topic in itself if MLK could have succeeded without Malcolm X type parallel resistance against the powers-that-be and if the historical context were that of a century earlier and MLK was doing his non-violent activism in the South. Interestingly enough though, MLK was also coerced to shut up when he raised his voice against the Vietnam War.

De-legitimizing the Legit Movements

At times the mindless chanting of 'peace, peace, non-violence, non-violence' by Muslim activists are used to de-legitimize militant resistance (as 'irrational' and 'unjustifiably violent') in Palestine. They take attention away from the whole history of Israeli atrocities by focusing too much on – and even blaming at times – the victims for responding with violence in defense. (Same goes for the case of Lebanon.) The 'peace, peace' slogans sometimes neglect the fact that the international community has failed to deliver any positive results in the last sixty years. So far the only thing that has been directly effective against the Israeli expansionism is militant resistance.

One can also argue that instead of 'wasting' time on the two-state solution over the last 30 years or so (since Camp David), if we had spent our time and energies on discrediting political Zionism in public opinion, perhaps we would have made at least 'some' accomplishments by now. Two-state solution was never the right answer (see "How Realistic is the Two-State Solution?"). If nothing else, at least we could have somewhat united our own communities – their opinion and activism – for the cause over these years. Communities here refer to the general Muslim community but also people of conscience from any background. The glimpses of that possibility (of uniting those concerned) were seen during the Summer 2006 Lebanon War and even more so during the Gaza massacre eleven months ago.

This point also highlights the need for developing sound political analysis especially from those engaging themselves with the media and public opinion campaigns. How do we frame our concerns that are beyond the narrow objective of appearing as "Good Muslims"?

Obama/Clinton's "Smart Power" for the Middle East

So far, the Obama administration has shown no meaningful signs of any major change to the old grand plan of a "New Middle East" (as Condy Rice famously stated), other than slight modifications in the tactics. Suspending the expansion of settlements and recognizing the two-state solution that the current administration is asking of Israel were already part of Bush's "Road Map for Peace". Neither of them had actually enforced these demands on Israel.

Against the Bush administration's "hard power", however, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has put forward the idea of "smart power", combining diplomacy and "iron fist". What that probably means for Muslim countries is the 'Good Muslim vs. Bad Muslim' game. The good Muslims are those compliant to the US-Israeli imperial ambitions. The Bad Muslims are those who resist that and therefore must be disciplined.

The status quo regimes of the Middle East – Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan – are presented as the "moderate" Muslims. Those opposing their corruption and the hegemonic ambitions of US-Israel from within the status quo states and from outside are labeled as the Bad Muslims. And it is demanded from the latter (those resisting) to 'reform' and become 'good Muslims'. After the inauguration, Obama went to the West Bank, not Gaza, and then to Egypt, where he delivered his now popular Cairo speech.

Consider the following two sentences from the end of that speech: "Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition." What?! During the inquisition?! Muslims were slaughtered, forced to convert or exile under the Inquisitorial Regime. Is that what Mr. Obama is suggesting that Muslims do today against the oppression of their own dictatorial regimes and from outside? Perhaps it was a blunder on the part of Obama's speech writer.

But in practical terms, this is exactly what the current administration is asking of the Palestinian people: Keep suffering. Rhetorical gestures of re-conciliations by the new administration aside, the US and Israel are more or less continuing the same policy of turning Gaza into a virtual prison and dividing the West Bank into small quarantines through the Security Wall, with Israel having effective control over water, communication, and security matters of both areas.

Towards Conclusion

Perhaps we should also reflect upon the role of power (and powerlessness) that we too face in our societies, in our daily lives, in our activism: Why is it that we feel pressured to apologize/condemn every time a Fort Hood like incidence happens? Why don't our public relation organizations in America also condemn the ongoing US atrocities in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and other places with the same dedication? On another level, is it even correct to frame/understand Fort Hood shooting or 9/11 in terms of a narrow cultural logic of binaries? Who is defining that framework, with what perspective? What is the politics of this framing? Who benefits?

A challenge for all of us, especially the scholars and activists, is to come up with practical strategies and rhetorical tools for the media and public opinion that are in line with our principles and based on sound strategic analysis. Where we do not 'apologize' for the crimes that we did not commit, but at the same time, we proactively counter the negative propaganda against us and our legit causes. This is crucial not only for reaching out to the general audience and politicians but also for the outlook and identities formation of our own communities.

Important also is to closely study various anti-war/civil/human rights movements in the US, UK, South Africa, India, and elsewhere. What kinds of strategies and alliances worked, what did not, and in what political and historical context? Can we use the same strategies and tactics in the present context of the country we may be in?

Lastly, we need to do more than just issuing reactionary responses after every tragic incidence threatening the Muslim image. We need to come up with a more proactive vision for what our role as individuals and communities could be in the countries we may be in. An important point here is to not become so self-absorbed in our national interest that we dissociate ourselves from the conditions in the rest of the world. The challenge is to come up with sound analysis and detailed action plans – not just empty proposals and rhetoric in annual conferences – that combine our principles, national objectives, and global interests.

Ali A. is a doctoral student in social sciences. He can be reached at alismails786@gmail.com

The article was first published at: http://www.islamicinsights.com/news/opinion/good-muslim-bad-muslim-cracking-the-media-code.html

"Fish is Fish"

2009-11-17T19:32:00.004-06:00

"Fish is Fish (Lionni, 1970) describes a fish who is keenly interested in learning about what happens on land, but the fish cannot explore land because it can only breathe in water. It befriends a tadpole who grows into a frog and eventually goes out onto the land. The frog returns to the pond a few weeks later and reports on what he has seen. The frog describes all kinds of things like birds, cows, and people. The book shows pictures of the fish's representations of each of these descriptions: each is a fish-like form that is slightly adapted to accommodate the frog's descriptions- people are imagined to be fish who walk on their tailfins, birds are fish with wings, cows are fish with udders. This tale illustrates both the creative opportunities and dangers inherent in the fact that people construct new knowledge based on their current knowledge."

From "How People Learn: brain, mind, experience, and school" by John D. Bransford, et al.(2000, Washington, DC: National Academy Press), pg. 11.

Oh, What Games They Play

2009-08-01T01:32:00.009-05:00

An interesting comparison of Orwell and Huxley. Thanks to RecombinantRecords.net

Youth and the issues they face today

2009-08-01T01:07:00.005-05:00

A laudable and much needed service for our communities. For details see Muslim Youth Helpline's website.

See another noteworthy initiative here: Children's Islamic Library

Hope other communities can take inspiration from the above two projects. For the library project, I think a further challenge would to be incorporate general educational and recreational material, especially considering the dearth of Islamic educational material in certain areas. The challenge would be to develop the logistics and compile a list of quality material. By 'logistics' I mean general guidelines and review process.

The Love Connection

2009-05-25T23:39:00.005-05:00

Something that's long known to exist in all kinds of affectionate relationships, science is finally opening itself to this area of research:

from NPR (May 21, 2009):

The Love Study

On a bright spring day, Schlitz is leading Teena and J.D. Miller down a path to the laboratory at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, north of San Francisco. Schlitz is the president of the institute, which conducts research on consciousness and spirituality. The Millers have been married a decade and their affection is palpable — making them perfect for the so-called Love Study.

Schlitz takes Teena into an isolated room, where no sound can come in or go out. Teena settles into a deep armchair as Schlitz attaches electrodes to her right hand.

"This is measuring blood flow in your thumb, and this is your skin conductance activity," the researcher explains. "So basically both of these are measures of your unconscious nervous system."

Schlitz locks Teena into the electromagnetically shielded chamber, then ushers J.D. into another isolated room with a closed-circuit television. She explains that the screen will go on and off. And at random intervals, Teena's image will appear on the screen for 10 seconds.

"And so during the times when you see her," she instructs, "it's your opportunity to think about sending loving, compassionate intention."

As the session begins, Dean Radin, a senior scientist here, watches as a computer shows changes in J.D.'s blood pressure and perspiration. When J.D. sees the image of his wife, the steady lines suddenly jump and become ragged. The question is: Will Teena's nervous system follow suit?

"Notice how here … see, there's a change in the blood volume," says Radin, pointing to a screen charting Teena's measurements. "A sudden change like that is sometimes associated with an orienting response. If you suddenly hear somebody whispering in your ear, and there's nobody around, you have this sense of what? What was that? That's more or less what we're seeing in the physiology."

An hour later, Radin displays Teena's graph, which shows a flat line during the times her husband was not staring at her image, but when her husband began to stare at her, she stopped relaxing and became "aroused" within about two seconds.

After running 36 couples through this test, the researchers found that when one person focused his thoughts on his partner, the partner's blood flow and perspiration dramatically changed within two seconds. The odds of this happening by chance were 1 in 11,000. Three dozen double blind, randomized studies by such institutions as the University of Washington and the University of Edinburgh have reported similar results.

The 'Quantum Entanglement' Of Love

So how do you explain this? No one really knows. But Radin and a few others think that a theory known as "quantum entanglement" may offer some clues.

Here's how it works. Once two particles have interacted, if you separate them, even by miles, they behave as if they're still connected. So far, this has only been demonstrated on the subatomic level.

But Radin wonders: Could people in close relationships — couples, siblings, parent and child — also be "entangled"? Not just emotionally, and psychologically — but also physically?

"If it is true that entanglement actually persists, by means of which we don't understand," he says, "if they are physically entangled, you should be able to separate them, poke one, and see the other one flinch."

This idea — that we may be connected at some molecular level — echoes the words of mystics down the ages. And it appeals to some scientists.

But it infuriates others — like Columbia University's Sloan. The underlying idea is wrong, he says. Entanglement just doesn't work this way.

"Physicists are very clear that the relationship is purely correlational and not causal," Sloan says. "There is nothing causal about quantum entanglement. It's good to be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brains fall out."

Radin and others agree that that's what science says right now. But they say these findings eventually have to be explained somehow.

The Story of Stuff

2009-05-11T07:03:00.005-05:00

Watch the video here: Story of Stuff or here (full version). The website is here.

For related videos, see The Corporation, Affluenza (see also its PBS website), and Consuming Kids (also their feature: 'what parents can do').

A Cautionary Video About America’s ‘Stuff’
By Leslie Kaufman, NYTimes, May 11, 2009

Excerpt:

The video was created by Annie Leonard, a former Greenpeace employee and an independent lecturer who paints a picture of how American habits result in forests being felled, mountaintops being destroyed, water being polluted and people and animals being poisoned. Ms. Leonard, who describes herself as an “unapologetic activist,” is also critical of corporations and the federal government, which she says spends too much on the military.

Ms. Leonard put the video on the Internet in December 2007. Word quickly spread among teachers, who recommended it to one another as a brief, provocative way of drawing students into a dialogue about how buying a cellphone or jeans could contribute to environmental devastation.

So far, six million people have viewed the film at its site, storyofstuff.com, and millions more have seen it on YouTube. More than 7,000 schools, churches and others have ordered a DVD version, and hundreds of teachers have written Ms. Leonard to say they have assigned students to view it on the Web.

It has also won support from independent groups that advise teachers on curriculum choices. Facing the Future, a curriculum developer for schools in all 50 states, is drafting lesson plans based on the video. And Ms. Leonard has a contract with Simon & Schuster to write a book based on the video.

The enthusiasm is not universal. In January, a school board in Missoula County, Mont., decided that screening the video treaded on academic freedom after a parent complained that its message was anticapitalist.

But many educators say the video is a boon to teachers as they struggle to address the gap in what textbooks say about the environment and what science has revealed in recent years.

“Frankly, a lot of the textbooks are awful on the subject of the environment,” said Bill Bigelow, the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools, a quarterly magazine that has promoted “The Story of Stuff” to its subscribers and on its Web site, which reaches about 600,000 educators a month. “The one used out here in Oregon for global studies — it’s required — has only three paragraphs on climate change. So, yes, teachers are looking for alternative resources.”

Environmental education is still a young and variable field, according to Frank Niepold, the climate education coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There are few state or local school mandates on how to teach the subject.

The agency is seeking to change that, but in the interim many teachers are developing their own lesson plans on climate change, taking some elements from established sources like the National Wildlife Federation and others from less conventional ones like “The Story of Stuff.”

Ms. Leonard is self-educated on where waste goes and worked for Greenpeace to prevent richer nations from dumping their trash in poorer ones. She produced the video, with the Free Range Studios company, and with money from numerous nonprofit groups; the largest single giver was the Tides Foundation. She did so, she said, after tiring of traveling often to present her views at philanthropic and environmental conferences. She attributes the response to the video’s simplicity.

“A lot of what’s in the film was already out there,” Ms. Leonard said, “but the style of the animation makes it easy to watch. It is a nice counterbalance to the starkness of the facts.”

Nature Alive

2009-05-05T23:40:00.008-05:00

Meri Mehboob Kahin Aur Mila Kar Mujh Se

2009-04-11T11:52:00.010-05:00

Sahir's poem on Taj Mahal reminds one of Ali Shariati's On the Plight of the Oppressed People. Like Ali Shariati, Sahir seeks to set standards for beauty and love.

A question that comes to mind: Beauty and Truth, are they two separate things? Could a magnificent monument - be it Taj Mahal, Egyptian Pyramids, large Cathedrals, or extensive Mosques - built on the involuntary sweat and blood of innocent people be ever considered beautiful?

I copy two different translations of the poem below.

Taj Mahal by Sahir Ludhianvi

For you, the Taj may be a monument of love;
you may adore this lovely spot
but, darling,
let's meet somewhere else!

In such royal places,
we-- the poor?
Regal opulence seen every which way,
two poor lovers-- here?
Really out-of-place!

Sweetheart, under this so-called symbol of love,
if only you'd seen the vulgar splurge of opulence.
Charmed you may be by royal mausoleums,
if only you'd thought
of our own dismal homes!

Countless millions are in love;
who can say their emotions aren’t real
just because they, like us, have no means
to put up an advertisement?

These mausoleums, these arrogant forts,
these pillars of royal eminence, these lush gardens:
In these very flowers and vines
runs the blood of our own ancestors, my love.

Don't you think they must also have been in love,
the people whose art and skill
made this monument so beautiful?
They and their loved ones now lie nameless,
in unmarked graves,without a single candle
yet lit for them.

These gardens, by the Jamuna [River],
this palace, the embroidered doors, walls and niches--
that's just how an emperor,
using his wealth and power,
mocks the love between us destitutes.

Could we meet somewhere else, darling ?

Translated by: Riz Rahim

Taj Mahal by Sahir Ludhianvi

The Taj, mayhap, to you may seem, a mark of love supreme
You may hold this beauteous vale in great esteem;
Yet, my love, meet me hence at some other place!

How odd for the poor folk to frequent royal resorts;
‘Tis strange that the amorous souls should tread the regal paths
Trodden once by mighty kings and their proud consorts.
Behind the facade of love my dear, you had better seen,
The marks of imperial might that herein lie screen’d
You who take delight in tombs of kings deceased,
Should have seen the hutments dark where you and I did wean.
Countless men in this world must have loved and gone,
Who would say their loves weren’t truthful or strong?
But in the name of their loves, no memorial is raised
For they too, like you and me, belonged to the common throng.

These structures and sepulchres, these ramparts and forts,
These relics of the mighty dead are, in fact, no more
Than the cancerous tumours on the face of earth,
Fattened on our ancestor’s very blood and bones.
They too must have loved, my love, whose hands had made,
This marble monument, nicely chiselled and shaped
But their dear ones lived and died, unhonoured, unknown,
None burnt even a taper on their lowly graves.

This bank of Jamuna, this edifice, these groves and lawns,
These carved walls and doors, arches and alcoves,
An emperor on the strength of wealth,
Has played with us a cruel joke.
Meet me hence, my love, at some other place.

Translation by: K.C. Kanda

Life's Little Instructions

2009-02-17T21:20:00.009-06:00

Found this in my inbox today. Presents some useful points. Especially bcz of the last point, I felt that this advice was more than just think-good-feel-good self-centered absorption.

The 11 Rules To Change Our World

1. You be the change you dream of seeing (Thanks Mahatma Gandhi). "If everyone of us would sweep their own doorstep, the whole world would be clean," observed Mother Teresa. She was right.

2. Make time every day to reconnect to your highest ideals and boldest dreams. Without hope, people perish.

3. Leave every person you meet better than you found them. Life's too short to withhold encouragement and kindness.

4. See every setback as a stepping stone and every problem as a blessing in disguise. Contrary to what critics might say, these are NOT corny aphorisms. They are timeless truths of humanity. (And critics are just people too scared to grow their dreams anyway - pay no attention to them. The world needs more people lifting people up rather than putting people down).

5. Go the extra mile in everything you do - you don't need a title to be a leader. And on your deathbed, you'll never regret expressing the best within you.

6. Do what's right rather than what's easy. Being a great person isn't a popularity contest. Many of the greatest leaders were disliked because they refused to bend to the winds of public opinion. That's called Strength of Character.

7. Care for your health. You elevate the world by elevating yourself and your health really matters. Why be the richest person in the graveyard?

8. Tell your kids they are geniuses - and how much you adore them. Each of us are born geniuses but lose that gift within the first 6 years of our lives as we adopt the fears and limiting beliefs of those around us. Your kids are the leaders of the future. Grow their potential. Now.

9. Learn something new every day. As you grow, you begin to see possibilities you didn't have the eyes to see before. Read from an inspiring book, listen to an audio program, visit a good blog, go to a powerful workshop or have a conversation with an elder. One idea is all it takes to transform your life.

10. Keep your life simple. Please. The secret to success and happiness is building your life around a few important things. The person who tries to do everything accomplishes nothing.

11. Remember that life is a mirror and we receive what we give out. To get more joy, give more joy. To have more respect, give more respect. To realize your dreams, help others realize theirs.

By Robin Sharma, author of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

Also see a previous SM post related to this topic, Living in the Moment

Review - Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran

2009-02-10T15:45:00.010-06:00

Review: Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran (UNC Press, 2007)

By Ali A., Islamic Insights, Feb 9-15, 2009

While reading a text assigned for your class on a topic related to Islam and Muslims, ever had that feeling of frustration, “That’s NOT how it is!”? You know the reading is full of holes, yet you are at a loss for words to articulate what’s wrong with it?

If your answer is yes, here is a book in which you will find a range of tools to dissect those annoying readings. The book is called “Jasmine and Stars: Reading more than 'Lolita' in Tehran” (UNC Press, 2007). The author is Fatemeh Keshaverz, who is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Keshaverz’s argument is two-fold. One, she exposes the omissions and misrepresentations in Azar Nafisi's national bestseller “Reading Lolita in Tehran” (Random House, 2003). Two, she presents a literary analysis of a range of poetry and prose from Iran as well as gives us a feeling of life in Iran from her personal experience. This exposition is meant to question the simplistic and bleak picture one may get from “Reading Lolita in Tehran” and to invite the readers to understand Islam and Muslim cultures in their full complexity and richness.

Keshavarz argues that Azar Nafisi’s book represents a ‘New Orientalist’ narrative. Her argument builds on the critical writings of Edward Said in which he argued that the way the West perceived the Orient (the East) had profound consequences on their mutual interactions. By “West”, he was particularly referring to the circles of power and the intellectual discourse over the past few centuries. In the Orientalist perception, the East was seen as unvaryingly different, backward, inferior, mysterious, and dangerous. It was something to be wary of or to be disciplined. Aggressive colonial expansions in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere were rationalized as a ‘progressive force’ which would civilize the indigenous populations in the colonized lands. These expansions occurred simultaneously with the development of the Enlightenment and technological advancements in the West. [1] Edward Said further argued that such perceptions, especially concerning the Muslim world, continue to dominate the popular discourse in the West.

Developing on Said’s line of argument, Keshavarz argues that the ‘New Orientalist’ narrative "equally simplifies its subject. For example, it explains almost all undesirable Middle Eastern incidents in terms of Muslim men's submission to God and Muslim women's submission to men. The old narrative was imbued with the authority of an all-knowing foreign expert. The emerging narrative varies somewhat in that it might have a native--or seminative--insider tone. Furthermore, as the product of a self-questioning era, it shows a relative awareness of its own possible shortcomings. Yet it replicates the earlier narrative's strong undercurrent of superiority and of impatience with the locals, who are often portrayed as uncomplicated. The new narrative does not necessarily support overt colonial ambitions. But it does not hide its clear preference for a western political and cultural takeover. Most importantly, it replicates the totalizing - and silencing - tendencies of the old Orientalists by virtue of erasing, through unnuanced narration, the complexity and richness in the local culture" (p.3).

The introduction and the first chapter of “Jasmine and Stars” introduce the goal and main arguments of this book. The subsequent three chapters take the readers on an exciting journey which explores the rich literary heritage and diverse lives of the people in Iran. Keshavarz particularly focuses on the Sufi tradition in her discussion of Islam. The personal stories she shares all throughout the book convey feelings of warmth, tenderness, and “shared humanity” (p.5) (shared by the peoples of Iran and the West). In her analysis of poetry, novels, and Sufi thought in these three chapters she also shows how these literary expressions animate in the lives of ordinary people in Iran. The fifth chapter quite sharply dissects “Reading Lolita in Tehran”. Concluding the book in the sixth chapter, Keshavarz once again exhorts the readers to explore the shared humanity and richness of Muslim cultures.

The first and fifth chapters along with the introduction could also be read separately if readers are interested in specifically reading the critique of “Reading Lolita in Tehran”. The tools and vocabulary provided in these chapters could also help with evaluating works such as “Nine Parts of Desire”, “The Bookseller of Kabul”, “'The Kite Runner”, “The Almond”, “Persepolis”, and “The Trouble with Islam”.

The value of this book should be self-evident in a time when distortions and lies about Islam and Muslims are widespread. These distortions are damaging not only for inter-communal relations but also the way Muslims themselves perceive their identity. Yet while reading the book, at times I wished that Keshavarz had scrutinized the premises of these distortions even more deeply. This analysis would have expanded the power and scope of her criticism. Below are two inter-related points in this regard.

The first point is that people do not have to believe in the same things you believe in before you could appreciate and respect their humanity. By presenting instances of ‘shared humanity’ (shared values, emotions, thoughts), Keshavarz does a fine job of relating with the Western audience. Her discussion of modern Iranian literature, particularly the works by Forough Farrokhzad and Shahrnush Parsipur, conveys a strong sense of agency – the kind of agency which is idealized in the liberal feminist discourse(s). Keshavarz is also very frank about her feminist sensibilities in the book that have informed her selections and arguments. However, the real challenge in any attempt to understand other cultures and peoples is to appreciate the ‘differences’ in outlooks and sensibilities, while also observing that our own ideals may not be universally valid. For example, women in Muslim cultures may also cherish ‘autonomy’ and ‘empowerment’, but their definition of these ideals may be very different from what some liberal feminists would like for them. Failing to recognize this difference can result in the kind of intolerance that is seen today in France against the Muslim Hijab. Some scholars would take the argument on another level to argue that ideals like ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’ (which have a particular history in the Western liberal tradition and are often defined in terms of individual choices and interests in opposition to community values and interests) may not be as important – if at all – for many women in other cultures. Saba Mahmood and Lila Abu-Lughod’s works make compelling arguments in this regard. [2] In their works they also argue that appreciating these differences does not necessarily mean falling into moral relativism.

The second point is that we need to question the question first before answering with the typical ‘Not all Muslims are fundamentalist/extremists, and we need to consider the voices of moderation and peace too’. The question that needs to be asked first is what’s wrong with being a fundamentalist and who defines a “fundamentalist” as such? If being a fundamentalist means believing in some fundamentals of religion, then most Muslims are fundamentalists! This issue connects to a dichotomy that underlies the popular discourse in the West. In this dichotomy Muslims are either ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’. Good Muslims are ‘modern’, ‘moderate/progressive/rational’, and ‘pro-western’. The Bad Muslims are ‘backward’, ‘fundamentalist/extremists/fanatics’, and ‘anti-western’. I am not saying that “Jasmine and Stars” necessarily falls into this trap. But it misses the voices and sensibilities of those considered to be the “Bad Muslims” (both male and female), particularly those that were part of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and those that are opposed to physical and symbolic intrusions by global powers today. By no means is this segment of the population a minority in Iran, and they are the ones most frequently stereotyped in the ‘New Orientalist’ narratives. Representing their lives and outlooks does not necessarily mean that one endorses or justifies them. But as risky and daunting as this task may be for the kind of project that Keshavarz is engaged in, without challenging the ‘Good vs. Bad’ Muslim dichotomy most answers would come off as merely apologetic in the popular discourse.

Toward this end, we first need to scrutinize the normative assumptions of the liberal-secular discourse and its supposed moral superiority. (Examples are in the last two points – one relating to the discourse on women’s rights, the other relating to the politics of war on terror). Next, we need to bring in the political and historical context in the picture. I have Mahmood Mamdani’s important work “Good Muslim, Bad Muslims” (Pantheon, 2004) in mind that critically examines the American foreign policy during the Cold War era. In the first chapter of “Jasmine and Stars” Keshavarz could also use a more elaborate discussion on the relation between power and knowledge, in how misrepresentations about Islam serve the hegemonic ambitions of global powers today. [3]

In the challenging task of representing the missing voices (of the supposed “Bad Muslims”), Keshavarz could perhaps find a parallel with the outrage she personally felt when it was unintentionally implied to her by another person in London that the Iranian culture and people were backward ('they ate with hands') (p.24-25). The outrage was not about using or not using spoons per se. It was about the insinuation underlying it in that particular situation which she felt was undermining her culture and her own identity. She perceived it to be a kind of symbolic violence. It is clear from the text that she felt it rational and natural to respond to it. Other people can also have similar attachment to their religious symbols and values, and they can be as real and rational to them as any other reality out there.

On a side note, at times, I did not feel very convinced by the interpretation she presents in some of her anecdotal examples. For instance, the encounter she had at the grocery store in the check out line where she thought that her Muslim name caused discomfort and suspicion in the next lady. She made that conclusion by just observing the lady’s body language and thought that the lady's particular behavior was a reflection of the dominant cultural understandings (p.16-17). One can similarly question the scene in the bus where she listened to a conversation between two soldiers who were returning from the war front in 1987. Based on a very short dialogue between the soldiers, our author suggests that "I can tell you for sure that neither of them had enjoyed the war, or had looked for heroism, and yet neither had run away..." (p.134). Not sure what she meant to imply with this, but the question is whether anything could be implied with certainty on the basis of that short conversation. In these and some other anecdotal examples, more ethnographic details would have helped the readers to judge for themselves whether they agree with her interpretation.

I hope that the critical remarks in the second half of this review would not to dissuade you from reading this wonderful book with full of gems. These remarks were only meant to seriously engage with her arguments. I highly recommend this book for personal readings and group discussions. [4]

Ali A. is a doctoral student in social sciences. He can be reached at alismails786@gmail.com.

References:

[1] The critical point that needs to be emphasized here is that the justification given for Colonial expansions was not contradictory to the liberal ideals of political rights and self-determination. The Enlightenment contained notions of uni-linear progress of history and civilizations, the emphasis on particular modes of thought and reason, and the importance on individual rights and private property as means of self-actualization. Based on these ideals certain cultures and peoples were seen as “modern” and “superior” and others as “backward” and “inferior”. Both John Locke and John Stuart Mill supported and rationalized the practice of colonialism as a “progressive force” which would civilize and advance the backward civilizations. That was the “White Man’s Burden”. These ideas were also incorporated by particular versions of missionary Christianity. For more on this line of argument see Uday Mehta’s “Liberalism and Empire” (Chicago, 1999).

[2] See Lila Abu-Lughod. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” (American Anthropologist, September 2002). An interview with Abu-Lughod (Asia Source, March 2002). See Saba Mahmood’s interview by Nermeen Shaikh in “The Present as History” (Columbia, 2007) and her book “Politics of Piety” (Princeton, 2005).

[3] Hamid Dabashi’s critical review of “Reading Lolita in Tehran” entitled “Native informers and the making of the American empire” (Al-Ahram, June 2006) has some useful insights in this connection.

[4] Readers may also like to see the following pieces: Interview: Fatemeh Keshavarz with ZNet; Interview: Fatemeh Keshavarz with UNC Press; Interview: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim - Mahmood Mamdani - Asia Source; Review: Movie ‘300′ by Hamid Dabashi; “Questioning Liberalism, Too” by Saba Mahmood, Boston Review.

Connect Your Hearts With Gaza's

2009-01-17T14:11:00.005-06:00

An excerpt from "What Gaza Asks From Supporters?" from Gaza Awareness:

"The plight of the oppressed Palestinians and the cause of resisting the occupation are good enough reasons for people of conscience from different backgrounds to come together. This movement is not for particular individuals or organizations – religious or secular – over in Palestine or in the West. Some of us may not agree with everything that others believe in or have done in the past. But, people can still come together on the basis of their common belief in compassion and justice for humanity.

It’s also important that we do not lose sight of the distinction between the political Zionists and the general Jewish people. Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews (for example, the right wing Christian supporters of Israel in America). What should distinguish us from the Zionist oppressors are our morals/principles. It would be a shame and a moral defeat if in the process of resisting the oppression we become like the oppressors and start stereotyping and targeting a whole ethnic/religious group.

Consider also that you and I are part of the same society that we complain is so apathetic. Change starts from within, and once we have, it's impossible that we won't affect those around us.

Educate yourself, join the protests, and boycott the companies that are known for supporting the oppressive Israeli state.

Connect your heart with the oppressed people in Gaza and elsewhere in the world. Feel their pain. Hear their voices. Don’t let your busy life make you oblivious to their plight.

Honor the memories of the victims of the Gaza massacre. They were killed because they dared to dream a life of dignity and freedom for themselves and their children. Honor them in your commemorative vigils in years to come.

Honor them by your continued activism. Generate emergency funds in your localities through donation and public service. Establish these funds as part of a regular project (with a target amount to be generated each year) to help victims in Palestine and elsewhere.

Honor them by saving their memories and their cause from getting distorted in media and history writing, especially once the ongoing Israeli aggression is over and things resume to normal. Remain in touch with the latest developments and continue to write those op-ed columns and letters to your local and national newspapers and to your governments and local and international human rights groups.

Keep that spirit of activism alive!"
------
For more information and references, see Gaza Awareness at http://gazaawareness.blogspot.com/

The Message of Karbala

2009-01-02T05:04:00.004-06:00

I find the below message quite inspiring. Reminds one of Ali Shariati's Arise and Bear Witness.

A Message from Sheikh Muhammad Bin Yahya Al-Ninowy:

Virtues of Muharram

Bismillah Ar-Rahman Ar-Rahim

“Among the believers are Men, who delivered their promise to Allah” (Ayah 23/Surat Al-Ahzab)

If history has taught us anything, it has certainly delivered a message with unequivocal resonance; Haqq and freedom are not something that is given. Haqq and Freedom are things people take, and people are as free and on the Haqq as they want to be.

Islam, the religion of Haqq, justice and freedom came into a place and time where oppression was the rule, slavery was a tool to humiliate the weak, killings a way to solve problems. A society fueled by feuds, raging by violence, and merely being born in the wrong family could mean eternal slavery, oppression, and stripping of any and all rights. The Beloved Holy Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa aalihi wa sallam, emerged as the voice denouncing those ways while striving to ensure justice and equality.

By endangering himself, he -sallallahu alayhi wa aalihi wa sallam, gave us one of the most precious monotheistic gifts, namely the collective duty of self criticism.

Speak the truth though against yourself. Support the Haqq, denounce the Batel. Stand with the Haqq, abdondon the Batel.

Stand up to oppressors and tyrants, no matter of the price.

The Seerah of the Beloved Holy Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa aalihi wa sallam, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of Haqq over Batel, of Justice over Tyranny, of Freedom over Slavery.

If the Beloved Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa aalihi wa sallam, has taught us anything, then among the many, he taught us an important lesson.

One that the Qur’an amplified numerously: It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather a profoundly faithful few, who are keen to uphold the truth and sacrifice for it.

To be the example of a candle that burns itself illuminating the way for others, to give the ultimate sacrifice to enlighten the path of the truth, as the truth and only the truth shall set you free.

In a very famous Hadith, the Beloved Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa aalihi wa sallam, says: “Husayn is from me and I am from Husayn”. The meaning entailed by this Hadith is not that I am Husayn’s grandfather, as this is an obvious fact. The meaning sheds light that Husayn is like me, Husayn’s line is similar to my line, Husayn’s message is my message, Husayn is from me and I am from Husayn.

The Ayahs and Ahadith about Ahl ul Bayt al-Athar including their Master Al-Imam Al-Husayn are numerous, that most of you know.

We are already in Muharram, and in a few days, the day of Ashura comes. A day where the Beloved of the Beloved demonstrated the highest of nobility, and offered the ultimate of sacrifices. It is no wonder, knowing that he is the grandsone of our Beloved Holy Prophet, the son of Amirul-Muminin Ali, brother of Al-Imam Al-Hasan, and a beloved son to Master, the Lady of Ahl ul Jannah Sayyidatina wa Mawlatuna Fatimah-Azzahra, sallallahu ala sayyidina Muhammad wa aalihi wa sallam.

There was a noble reason that demanded the martyrdom of Imam Husayn. The simple and obvious reason is simply to preserve Islam. Islam, Haqq, Truth, Justice, Equality, Freedom and Liberty are all precious values that demanded precious sacrifice. That, to my mind, is the supreme significance of martyrdom. But the highest honour must still lie with the symbol, who faced fearful odds and refused to surrender to evil. Rather than allow a stigma to attach to sacred things, they paid with their own lives the penalty of honour and Haqq. The begining of the batter offered by our beloved Imam Husayn was when he went from city to city, hunted about from place to place, but making no compromise with evil. Then was offered the choice of an effectual but dangerous attempt at clearing the house of God, or living at ease for himself while closing an eye on the ongoing destruction of Islam and its values. He chose the path of danger and hardships with duty and honour, and never swerved from it giving up his life freely in the absolute bravest of ways ever known to Mankind.

That briefly is the story. What is the lesson? There is ofcourse the physical suffering in martyrdom, and all sorrow and suffering claim our sympathy, —- the dearest, nearest, purest, closest to our hearts, souls and minds. The one who the Beloved Holy Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa aalihi wa sallam, himself used to interrupt his speeches to pick him up, delay his prostration to honour and not bother him, the one whose face not only is honourable, but it is the face where The Holy Prophet’s honorable lips, face, and body touched, loved, and valued. It is that very same honorable face, that Yazid bin Mu’awiyah ibn Abi Sufyaan al-Ummayadi humiliated, slaughtered, put on the spears, and kicked…….. There are no words that can describe the pain profoundly felt in every Free Human’s mind, soul, and heart.

But there is a greater suffering than physical suffering. That is when a valiant soul seems to stand against the world; when the noblest motives of Islam are reviled and mocked; when truth seems to suffer an eclipse. It may even seem that the martyr has but to say a word of compliance, do a little deed of non-resistance; and much sorrow and suffering would be saved; and the insidious whisper comes:

“Truth after all will never die”

But the whole battle is for man’s keeping hold of Haqq and Freedom. And that can only be done by the highest examples of man’s conduct - spiritual striving and suffering enduring firmness of faith and purpose, patience and courage where ordinary mortals would give in or be cowed down, the sacrifice of ordinary motives to supreme truth in scorn of consequence. The martyr bears witness, and the witness redeems what would otherwise be called failure. It so happened with Al-Imam Al-Husayn, the Master of the youth of Ahlul Jannah. For all were touched by the story of his martyrdom, and it gave the deathblow to the tyrant politics of Yazid bin Mu’awiyah ibn Abi Sufyaan al-Ummayadi and all the oppression it stood for. And Imam Al-Husayn being alive, more alive than ever, not only externally but living profoundly deep in our hearts, in our souls, and in our minds, has still the power to ignite the light of truth in the heart of all free, to send a message to the courageous not to bow down to evil, and to teach people not to surrender to tyranny.

There are those who until today believe that forgeries, fancy words, and booklets can mask the shining truth. Persistent attempts to distance Al-Imam Al-Husayn and his Sirah away from Ahlus Sunnah are ongoing, and more intense, and serious than ever. This Yazidi line, regardless of what banner or name they choose to brand themselves with, can no longer fool the intellectual Muslim. Their scare tactics, labeling, and “intellectual terrorism” are weapons of the past, and no longer effective for those who see. While we must pray for their guidance, we shall never fall as victims to their misguidance.

In the upcoming very sad days in our lives, and the life of every free human being, I urge myself and you To:

1. Express sadness and show sorrow for the massacre of the dearest and purest of the Family of the Beloved Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa aalih wa sallam. It is customary to many families of Ahlul bayt to show sadness during this month.
2. Expressing sorrow should be manifested by sincere intentions of repentance, and believing that if you were with them, you would have been on the side of Imam Husayn, even if it costs you any and everything.
3. Increasing the recitation of Qur’an, and try to teach your fellow family, friends, and non-Muslims about the revolution of Imam Husayn.
4. Increase your Istigfaar per day, and increase your Durud on the Beloved Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa aalihi wa sallam.
5. Learn the Sirah of Imam Husayn, try to benefit from it, love it, live it.
6. Be generous to your family: bring them water ( and remember on this day Yazid’s army prevented Imam Husayn from drinking water), bring them food and remember the things that happened.
7. Be thankful to Allah, and ask Him to gather you with the supporters of Imam Husayn in this Dunya, and with his supporters and companions in the Akhira.
8. Be on the Haqq. Just, Freedom side,and check yourself.
9. Make the month of Muharram a month of Al-Husayn in your life, in a step to eventually make every month a month of Al-Husayn, Grandfather of Al-Husayn, Father of Al-Husayn, Mother of Al-Husayn, Brother of Al-Husayn, and those who love and follow Al-Husayn.
10. This is your chance to abandon the rest and follow the best. This is your chance to connect with Al-Imam Al-Husayn. Take time, purify your heart and connect.

His story purifies our emotions. We can best honour his memory by allowing it to teach us courage and constancy.

The sacrifice of Imam Husayn comes after the Sacrifice of his father, Sayyiduna Amirul’Muminin wa Imam al-Mutaqqeen Ali bin Abi Taleb al-Hashimi, and the sacrifice of Imam Hasan, and the line of sacrifice and martyrs among Ahlul Bayt is still a line enlightening the way for generations to come. They are like stars; you will not succeed in reaching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.

Al-Imam Al-Husayn’s message was simple and clear: Is life so dear or so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty Allah! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me Haqq, or give me death!

“It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees”

Wassalamu Alaykum,
Muhammad Bin Yahya Bin Muhammad Al-Ninowy

Courtesy: http://ca.groups.yahoo.com/group/Canadian_Muslims/

Every Day is Ashura, Every Land is Karbala

2009-01-02T00:56:00.008-06:00

Why were shoes thrown at Bush?

2008-12-15T23:17:00.006-06:00

Why were shoes thrown at Bush?
(inspired by the famous joke-riddle: why did the chicken cross the road?)

Plato: For the greater good.
Aristotle: To actualize their potential.
Epicurus: For the fun of it.
Zeno of Elea: To prove they could never reach Bush.
Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.
Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind of expression the Establishment would allow them.
The Sphinx: You tell me.
Pyrrho the Skeptic: What shoes?
Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long at the shoes, the shoes gaze also across you.
Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to themselves, the shoes found it necessary to hurl themselves at him.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of "throwing" was encoded into the objects "shoes" and "Bush", and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.
Conspiracy Theory: It was Bush who threw himself on the shoes.
Albert Einstein: Whether the shoes were thrown at Bush or Bush threw himself on them depends upon your frame of reference.
Kafka: Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a shoe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: They were not thrown at Bush, they transcended to him.
Voltaire: I may not agree with the act, but I will defend to the death their right to be thrown at Bush.
Thomas Paine: Out of common sense.
Mark Twain: The news of their throwing has been greatly exaggerated.
John Milton: To justify the ways of God to men.
Mr. T: If you were holding those shoes, you'd have thrown at him too!
Wordsworth: To wander lonely as a cloud.
The Godfather: I didn't want his mother to see it like that.
Othello: Jealousy.
Hamlet: That is not the question.
Dr Johnson: Sir, had you known the reality of American occupation for as long as I have, you would not so readily enquire, but feel rather the need to resist such a public display of your own lamentable and incorrigible ignorance.
Oliver North: National Security was at stake.
Donne: They didth for thee.
Jack Nicholson: 'Cause Bush (censored) deserved it. That's the (censored) reason.
Malcolm X: Because they had to be thrown at him by any means necessary.
John Lennon: Imagine all the shoes of the world thrown at Bush. Imagine a world without American neo-imperialism.
Barack Obama: The shoes were thrown at him because it was time for a CHANGE! Yes, We Can!
Hillary Clinton: Those were supposed to be my shoes.
Al Gore: I invented the shoes!

Ecstatic with love

2008-12-12T11:38:00.005-06:00

An inspiring ghazal by Sheikh Sa'di. See another beautiful ghazal with profound meanings here.

Ecstatic with love
Someday, I'll find my way to those lovely curls.
Of your sweet lips alone
I will tell a hundred savory tales

Do you wish to be unkind?
Here, I have only one life, consider it yours!
- Or if you want me to say -
I'll spend it like a carpet beneath your feet.

You say "Sit in sorrow till the end of your days!
Or, rise, and give yourself to love!"
Whatever you say my dear! I'll sit and rise
And sit,
And rise...

- Sa'di

Translation: Fatemeh Keshavarz (Jasmine and Stars)

To be human is to...

2008-12-12T11:04:00.007-06:00

Here is a beautiful poem by Sheikh Sa'di. It graces the entrance to the Hall of Nations of the UN building in New York. Dec 10 was the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While there may be questions about certain details, demanding consideration of diversity of opinions and cultural experiences, the idea of universal rights is still valuable. The idea has also found profound expression in the Islamic literature.

بنی آدم اعضای یک پیکرند
که در آفرينش ز یک گوهرند

چو عضوى به درد آورد روزگار
دگر عضوها را نماند قرار

تو کز محنت دیگران بی غمی
نشاید که نامت نهند آدمی

Human beings are members of a whole,

In creation of one essence and soul.

If one member is afflicted with pain,

Other members uneasy will remain.

If you have no sympathy for human pain,

The name of human you cannot retain.