And now hear this ...

A couple of years ago a visiting friend (who has asked to remain anonymous) played me a 'boot-leg' copy of a speech. As far as I could make out - the recording was an excerpt that was missing the beginning an the ending - the theme was was Liberal Education . It was a delightful lecture and I always wished we could have heard the whole thing. Unfortunately, we knew not where the speech was given nor, even more of a plight, who the speaker was ... such is the tragedy of poorly pirated material ;-) I even took a sentence or two from the speech, at random, and tried to Google it ... but nothing was found at that time.

Last week I was gifted "The Philosophy of Religion", a course recorded by Professor John Hall for The Teaching Company (TTC). Impressed by the simple lucidity and tone of the very first of the 36 lectures), I searched for him on the internet and was delighted to be led to his homepage, which, in turn, led me to the Convocation Address delivered by him at The University of Richmond in 2005. And that's the one we'd heard!

While I suggest that you download and read the entire lecture (it's only 3 pages long), along with the Collegian piece, I would like to quote one of its sections here with permission from Professor Hall.

Liberal Education and Impracticality

One of the hallmarks of liberal education is that it is does not have immediate applications, results, or investment returns. This is what people mean when they say that it is impractical. But is liberal education really impractical?

If the desired outcome of schooling is job-skill, then Strayer would be the model school. My wrestling with the ambiguities of Ionesco, studying the complexities of natural selection, trying to figure out what the American Civil War was really about, and exploring the mathematics of musical key transposition, are not likely to increase the GNP or lower the CPI overnight, if at all. On the other hand, my learning to keyboard data into a computer, take accurate telephone messages, keep a double-entry ledger, and figure profit margins, might. Indeed, I could measurably increase my disposable income simply by addressing envelopes at home in my spare time. (Many matchbook covers tell me so, and I believe them.) But who will write the programs for me to keyboard? Who will leave a message worth my taking down? Who will create the business that needs me to keep its books? Who will invent a product that will generate profits for me to calculate? Indeed, who will create something worthwhile to put in the envelopes I address?

For individuals and their communities to thrive, people need to know more than the answers to familiar questions. They need to know what questions to ask, and that means that they need to be inventive enough to come up with new ones. They need to be able to make judgments without bright-line criteria, and that means that they must be able to wrestle with ambiguity without having a panic attack. They need to be able to make informed political decisions, and that means that they need to understand historical connections and the difference between appearance and reality. And they need to be able to function in a complex society that divides its labor, which means that they need to have some understanding of what everyone else is doing, even if they don’t have to do everything everyone else does themselves.

And this is where a liberal education is most liberating. By freeing us from the expectation of an immediate payoff for each thing we learn or do, it opens us up to learn and do things that, while they may lack an immediate payoff, may have long-term potentials that we cannot even imagine in advance. This is why a highly placed corporate officer once told me “when we want worker bees, send us trained technicians; but when we want leadership send us people who have studied history and literature and science. We can train new hires to run the machinery if we need to; but we are not equipped to teach them how to use their minds.” So the “impracticality” of liberal education is not necessarily impractical at all. By allowing students to go beyond job training, it encourages them to stretch themselves to the absolute limit of their potentials and, unhampered by external or artificial constraints, to be flexible and to grow.

[I am not sure if the good professor will be willing to talk to a T2F audience in far away Pakistan via Skype - but I'd love for him to spend a few minutes with us during a Science Ka Adda evening on another topic he enjoys: Pseudoscience and the Paranormal.]

I had, very recently, finished listening on my iPod - overflowing with several audiobooks and brilliant podcasts - to Professor Esposito delivering his balanced and very informative TTC lectures on Islam (as a part of The World's Great Religions series). The Philosophy of Religion course promises to be an even more enjoyable learning experience.

The range of subjects that TTC courses cover is extremely vast. I wish Dr Atta ur Rahman (HEC) or Dr Naveed Malik (VU) would strike a deal with those guys and make several of these courses available locally at subsidized rates. I'd be willing to enroll, even at my age (and with the way I feel about educational institutions), in a college to take advantage of such a deal, if it was required.

Postscript: Lest some of you worry, no, I am not about to be 'born again'. Religion has always been a subject of great interest to me and the current revival (in its worst forms, I might add) and its political impact, globally, has just re-kindled that. But next on my course list - if I can raise the money (HEC/VU are unlikely to even consider this one) - is Professor Greenberg's How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. 48 lectures of 45 minutes each. I can't stop drooling.

A treat for Karachiites on August 23rd

If you are a Qavvaali lover, or looking for an introduction to the genre, call Abu Muhammad at 0300-210-5393 and ask for a FREE invitation to what will be a fabulous event at the Pearl Continental.

(Invitation Cards will need to be presented at the entrance).

This is the 5th in a series of memorial farshi nashists, held annually in honour of the great Ustad Munshi Raziuddin sahab. These tribute sessions have become one of the most awaited in the city because they offer one opportunity, outside of the homes where a Mahfilé Sama' still means what it once implied, at which the audience is treated to glimpses of the purist qavvaali tradition.

See you there ...

Telling & Chilling!

So what do all these guys have in common?



They are Sponsors of the 17th Annual Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conference. Now I am REALLY worried!

(Thanks for the poster, Isa)

Surprise, Surprise. Or not.

Harsh Kapoor's SACW mailing this morning (subscribe to the list if you really wish to know what's happening in the region) included the following editorial from today's Daily Times - a popular Pakistani newspaper. [My comments follow.]

CARTOONS, THREATS AND JOURNALISM

Daily Aajkal, which is a sister publication of Daily Times in Urdu, is under attack from the clerical partisans of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad for its anti-extremism editorial policy in general and a cartoon in particular. The Lal Masjid mullahs say the cartoon is "insulting" and they say their "patience with the paper is running out" because of its "editorial policy". The cartoon published in Aajkal showed the leader of the partisans, Umme Hassaan, in a burka teaching her burka-clad students the radical political philosophy of the group. But since this could hardly be construed as insulting in any way- after all, the various statements of the group's philosophy are already public knowledge - the group has clutched at the argument that the cartoon "insulted those who taught the Quran", implying some sort of "Islamic" justification for their threats.

This is completely untrue and totally divorced from the purport of the cartoon. The cartoon was made and published within the tradition and practice of satire in the Pakistani press. It was aimed at political partisans, like all political cartoons against other partisans in the political parties and groups.

The umbrage has been taken owing to the heat produced by the political fallout of the operation against Lal Masjid. This is understandable and Aajkal is not too happy about offending any side involved in the controversy. But the cartoon itself was not intended to attack anyone; it was published in the spirit in which all political cartoons in Pakistan are accepted as the lighter side of our political life. There was nothing more and nothing less in the conceiving of the said cartoon. It was not directed at the faith that Aajkal itself upholds within the permitted variety of belief among Muslims. (Italics mine! Just curious as to where one gets these 'permits' ... Zakintosh)

A cartoon is the yardstick by which you measure the level of tolerance in any given society. When states are troubled, the first institution that is attacked is the institution of public criticism through satire. This is simply because satire is always considered less harmful and subversive than a detailed indictment of any person or institution. It is light-hearted and asks the victim to smile rather than take offence. In Pakistan, as everywhere else in the world, all public events, all happenings that touch the consciousness of the people, become the subject of a cartoon. The caricature tries to capture what the people at large think of a certain issue. This is the way it has developed in Pakistan in the last 60 years.

The fact is Lal Masjid involved itself in public affairs when it took in hand the task of "social cleansing" some years ago. The subliminal intent was to attract public attention and plead for approval because it was, according to its lights, doing moral correction where the state had failed. This was the beginning of the public image of the madrassa at Lal Masjid. Its leaders sought public limelight and asked to be judged at the court of public opinion, partly by vigilante action. The result was a mixed verdict. That was natural because any invitation to arbitration by public opinion will yield positive and negative opinion. This process also activated the journalistic device of the cartoon.

If you pick up the newspapers of the past few years, you will come across a lot of cartoons made on the events related to the activity of the Lal Masjid clerics and their pupils. The crux of these drawings was the same: to highlight an incongruity through humour and satire. Pakistan has now a well established tradition of cartoons. The politicians don't mind being portrayed in a funny manner, and even when they do, they keep quiet rather than hurl threats. Therefore the clerics in the public eye should also know that this is the process they have to go through. Neither the politician nor the cleric has suffered any lowering of his respect and honour because of the cartoons.

With the spread of the private TV channels, the business of cartoons has been revitalised. It has become dramatised with live characters mimicking well-known personalities including the ulema who, incidentally, also teach the Quran. The cartoon itself has become a "cartoon strip" and has supplemented and strengthened the tradition of cartooning in Pakistani journalism. The tragedy of Lal Masjid in 2007 happened right in front of the seeing eye of the cartoon. Where Lal Masjid received a lot sympathetic support, and the government had to face criticism, there were occasions when the opposite happened too.

There are always two sides to an issue, even a religious issue, and there will be partisans of this or that point of view. That is the essence of a free society and democracy. Even the issue of suicide-bombing has two opposed ways of looking at it. The division is there even among the ulema. Over fifty ulema in 2005 issued a collective fatwa saying suicide-bombing was against Islam. It was their right to say so, but it was wrong on the part of some other ulema to threaten them to cow them into silence. They would have been within their rights had they issued a counter-fatwa saying suicide-bombing was right.

Threatening a newspaper into silence indicates the level of intolerance that will do no one any good in the long run. The mission of moral correction taken up by the Lal Masjid partisans will be successful only if it is accepted by the people without coming under duress. Indeed, any order imposed through intimidation and threat of violence is not durable and will be rejected by the people in the long run. Therefore Lal Masjid should become the symbol of struggle against the use of violence; and it should not give the impression that it can use violence to achieve its ends.

Many of you may recall the heavily choreographed and manipulated protests, nation-wide, when the provocatively irresposible Danish cartoons first surfaced. That the major portions of rallies were, initially, quite obviously 'staged' until they pulled others into their fold as the frenzy caught on, is a widely accepted fact. Still unsure of this line of reasoning? Think, for a moment:

(a) Where would thousands of unconnected people suddenly appear from out of all nooks and crannies of our small towns, waving identical Danish flags? Maybe I am wrong and most Pakistani homes usually keep all the world's national flags as part of our standard household inventory, ready to be whipped out (and burnt! Who pays for that and the required 're-stocking', I often wonder...) at the drop of an ink-spot. We have, over the years, seen Indian, US, Israeli, British, Bangladeshi, Russian, UN, and other flags suddenly unfurl in hundreds. Hmmmm. (Of course, there are also reliable reports of a leading foreign journalist, at least on one occasion, passing out flags for burning, in order to get a good video clip for her channel!)

(b) When the Government, the 'agencies', and the Islamist parties - at the behest of their common paymasters - thought that it was an inopportune time for a 'repeat performance', the Geert Wilders movie, Fitna, came and went almost unnoticed. Maybe we ran out of combustibles, but no flags, tyres, or effigies blotted our streets.

Given that some irresponsible sections of our popular press, in an effort to play to the gallery and increase sales, supported the unruly and misdirected hooha in the cartoon cases, isn't what's happening to Aajkal (the paper with, incidentally, the best layout in our vernacular press world) just a case of chickens coming home to roost, albeit in the wrong coop?

Regardless of how we got to this spot in our sad history, if this direction is not actively reversed NOW (and I have little hope that it will be) we will keep heading further and further into an abyss from which there is no return.

The recent disgusting and offensive hero-ization of the Lal Masjid miscreants, including the burqa clad woman (and man) who bear much of the responsibility, is the worst ammunition that has recently been appropriated for a political battle in which all sides will lose, if Pakistan loses The electronic media's support of this idiocy, through completely distorted 'revisits' to the Lal Masjid incident, is a classic case of 'apnay paeroñ par külhaa∂ee...'

The Twain Meet

Waiting for Professor Aslam Farrukhi to show up for what became, in his delightful retelling, a grand - almost visual - tour of Karachi, 1947, I was fortunate to be to be at the same table as Yusufi Sahab, who, with just 4 books pubished, is arguably the finest writer of Urdu prose today. 

Apologizing for a really pita hua question, I asked him whom he read and was influenced by. I am not sure what name[s] I expected ... but without a moment's pause he surprised me by saying "Mark Twain", which - in retrospect - doesn't seem so odd. He also went on (with almost childish awe) to describe his recent visit to Twain's hometown and the house he lived in.

I hope that T2F will, one day, be honoured by an evening of Yusufi Sahab's readings. How we'll accommodate the hundreds that will turn up, I don't know. Guess that's reason enough to increase the space, Sab ;-)

As a possible result of our colonization, older readers in this part of the world were traditionally more familiar with writers from Britain, as compared to those from the USA, a legacy they passed on via textbooks and home libraries to their young. Over the years, the one good thing to emerge from the Americanization of Everything, is that we have all become familiar with several new and powerful authors from the other side of the Atlantic. In fact, one has to look really hard for good British, non-desi authors in our bookshops!

However, Samuel Longhorn Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, is still not as commonly read in this part of the world as he should be. Here's a piece by him that is as relevant today (and to us) as when it was first published as part of a short story.

O Lord, Our Father

by Mark Twain

O Lord, our father, 

Our young patriots, idols of our hearts, 

Go forth to battle - be Thou near them! 

With them, in spirit, we also go forth 

From the sweet peace of our beloved firesides

To smite the foe.

O Lord, our God, 

Help us to tear their soldiers 

To bloody shreds with our shells; 

Help us to cover their smiling fields 

With the pale forms of their patriot dead;

Help us to drown the thunder of the guns

With the shrieks of their wounded, 

Writhing in pain.

Help us to lay waste their humble homes 

With a hurricane of fire; 

Help us to wring the hearts of their 

Unoffending widows with unavailing grief;

Help us to turn them out roofless 

With their little children to wander unfriended

The wastes of their desolated land 

In rags and hunger and thirst, 

Sports of the sun flames of summer 

And the icy winds of winter, 

Burdened in spirit, worn with travail, 

Imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -

For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, 

Blast their hopes, 

Blight their lives, 

Protract their bitter pilgrimage, 

Make heavy their steps, 

Water their way with their tears, 

Stain the white snow with the blood 

Of their wounded feet!

We ask it in the spirit of love - 

Of Him who is the source of love, 

And Who is the ever-faithful 

Refuge and Friend of all that are sore beset

And seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts.

Amen!

Absolut Joy!

You deserve a really big round of

SABEEN

§

Also, a big

THANK YOU

to

EVERYONE

who helped

make it happen.

Khoda pahaa∂ - Nikla chooha

... aur voh bhee mara hua!

Fitna turned out to be what we once used to call a 'chüzzzz' ... a kind of anti-climax.

To be fair, it really did make me angry. How dare Wilders call this tired product a film? Put together and presented PowerPoint style, Fitna is merely the stringing together of a bunch of videos easily available all over the net, some other pre-existing footage from archives, newspaper shots, and some stills. Background music comes from Tchaikovsky and Grieg who would have been as angered at this association as is the Danish cartoonist (though the latter is upset - in a twist of decency - about 'copyrights'). Suprimposed over an image of the Qurãn there are some comments/subtitles, but no original footage, no interviews, no revelations, nothing! Director Scarlet Pimpernel, too, offers little I would call 'Direction'. The credit - if any - must go to the Editor.

Both Jehan Ara and I (we watched the film together) were bored and upset at the time wasted. She, fortunately, was able to go back to reading and answering her eMail around 6 minutes into the movie. I had to force myself to see the whole thing because someone from France was going to call and get my views for a Web site to which some of us bloggers from Pakistan contribute occasionally. (I know of Teeth Maestro - who has blogged about this movie, too - and Jamash, but there may be others from here).

The short [non]film says nothing that hasn't been said before. Admittedly there are some horrifying and gory scenes that violence-voyeurs may have missed. "Yes," I told my French caller, later, "it will lead to protests, some violent, others not. And it could further put anyone who even faintly represents the West* at risk in some troubled parts of the world." ... After all, chootia provocations will draw chootia responses.

* ("Don't they all look so-o-o alike? How can one tell?" - a Chinese shipmate had once asked me when I had pointed out the the 'Englishman' he was talking to was, in fact, a Yugoslav and understood no English!)

Even the peaceful among Muslims who are angered by this film - and there is reason enough for many to be angered by the intent if not the content - could respond by putting up links to videos related to Jesus Camp - now there's a frightening scenario to match our choice madrassahs. But what would such mud-slinging achieve, other than further dividing people from each other? Some globalization!

Wilders is not the first politician to choose his path to fame by fanning the flames of hatred, although that role is far better served by the many priests of all religions. It is served most effectively, of course, when the role of politician and priest are combined in one person (as we see frequently in our own country and elsewhere). (Fortunately Wilders will not be accessing my blog or he could get an idea from this and join a Holy Order).

My verdict: I am inclined to agree with the friend quoted at the end of Ali Eteraz's post. (For those unfamiliar with AE's writings, a good place to start would be his Muslamism piece.)

-------

An hour later: Have just seen that a German Web site has placed a WARNING screen before the actual video. I can't translate the rest of paragraph but the large warning in red and black says: ACHTÜNG! Have requested the webmaster to change that to ACHTHÜ!

John Shelby Spong Re-Visited

I have frequently (including very recently) circulated, among friends, sections from the writings of Bishop Spong whom I hold in extremely high regard not only for the lucidity of his writing, but also for his analytical skills, sincerity, courage of conviction, and genuine compassion.

His bestselling "Jesus for the Non-Religious" requires some basic familiarity with The Bible. Its Audible edition has found a permanent space on my iPod along with Dawkins's "The God Delusion". While one would be inclined to think that a Bishop and an Atheist would make for odd neighbours, even in an iPod, read what Spong once had to say about Dawkins:

I think Professor Dawkins is both brilliant and an incredible communicator. The definition of God that he rejects is the same one I reject. The difference being that he thinks the God he rejects is the western God of Christianity and I believe that deity is a distortion of who and what God is. The Christian Church has made such incredulous claims about who God is and who God hates and how God acts that it is always on the defensive when new learning that challenges old definitions appears.

Traditional Christianity has been buffeted by the insights of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Freud and many others. They have destroyed the credibility of much of our God talk. Richard Dawkins points that out in powerful ways, feeding his conclusion that God is a harmful delusion that ought to be dismissed. I agree that God is in fact a delusion and ought to be dismissed. We disagree on the question of whether that God is the God encountered in Jesus of Nazareth or a gross distortion. I believe it is a distortion.

I met Richard Dawkins some years ago when I gave a lecture at New College, Oxford. I had just that day read his incisive book The Selfish Gene in the Bodleian Library at Oxford so I was pleased to find myself seated next to him at the High Table for dinner.

From among Spong's many shorter pieces, the following paragraphs taken from On Faith (a wonderful Newsweek / Washington Post series) probably explain his amazing qualities and convictions best.

Obsessed with Sex, not Morality

This nation has a strange fetish with sexual sins. The press obsessed on President Clinton’s tawdry sexual behavior, but seems to regard the Bush administration’s distortion of truth about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify its military adventure in that land to be of lesser significance. Even the intelligence report on Iran’s efforts to build nuclear weapons reveals that this administration was caught once again in what can only be called deliberate acts of misinformation. President Clinton’s actions, distasteful as they were, did not cost the lives of some 4,000 American military personnel and thousands of innocent Iraqis. Yet the Congress wasted time and money in impeachment procedures on the Lewinsky affair. The far greater, but not sexual, nature of this administration’s crimes has not had a similar response.

We live in a time of changing sexual standards. Premarital sex is almost a universal practice in the developed world against which an “abstinence campaign” is laughably ineffective. The reasons for this are not that we have become an immoral generation, as ecclesiastical leaders like to presume. Rather, it is caused by the fact that we have created a 10-to-15-year gap between puberty and marriage. That is not a reality that contemporary moralists seem to notice. Better health practices have lowered the age of puberty in girls, while the opening of the doors to higher education and thus for career opportunities for young women has postponed the age of marriage to new and more mature age levels. In the Middle Ages when life expectancy was much shorter, females tended to marry within 12 to 18 months of puberty. Today marriage in the late twenties for young women is commonplace. In the past the double standard that governed sexual activity meant that the male was not expected to be chaste until his marriage. Today, not only has that double standard disappeared, but so has the rigid chaperone system we once employed to protect the virginity of upper class females.

Is sex outside of marriage a sin? That is the way religious people still pose the issue, but that question does not address reality. As a pastor I have confronted issues where sex inside marriage was sinful. I have known rape to occur inside marriage. I have seen sex inside marriage used as a weapon in marital disputes. It is not marriage that makes sex holy and good; it is the quality of the relationship. So before answering that question we need to face these facts. Only then can we move on to the question at hand.

Are young people who live together prior to marriage sinful? If they love each other, if they are committed to that relationship and if their life together makes both of them more whole and more deeply human, then I do not think so. If they are merely using each other, then they have turned that relationship into an act of personal diminishment. A relationship that diminishes one or the other of the partners can never be called holy.

I have know post-married people, either divorced or widowed, who have formed bonded and sexually active relationships, some times in old age that are both beautiful and life-giving, though neither person ever planned to get married. I have known gay and lesbian couples whose fidelity to each other is wonderful to behold, but who are told by church and state alike that there is something defective and even evil about their relationships. I find that deeply prejudiced, life-denying and simply wrong [...] The issue is not about sex, either inside or outside marriage, it is about the quality of the relationship [...]

It is God’s business, not the state’s or the church’s, to determine whether any act is forgivable or not. Private morality does not seem to me to be the state’s business unless it compromises the public welfare. The sexual debates that go on in the public arena are to me little more than diversionary attempts to keep the public attention away from the great moral issues of our day such as war and peace, the corruption and exploitation that takes place in business, the environmental degradation that occurs in the name of the bottom line and the manipulation of the market place for private greed. Until the state and church pay attention to these moral issues, their credibility on matters of sexual ethics will have little about it that is worthy of much attention.

Vaah!

--------------

NOTE 1: I had blogged about him earlier, too, and received some flak offline and via email for daring to suggest that we need Muslim Clerics (see note below) with similar skills of analysis and communication. Around the same time, several anti-Spong pieces by Muslims also appeared on the 'Net, egged on particularly because of an NPR program in which he was praised by Irshad Manji, an almost certain way to gain unpopularity among the Ummah.

NOTE 2: While not clerics, two scholars do offer cool and clear views that, in general, differ from the views proffered my most hardliners (such as Dr Israr Ahmad) and many accepted historians. One is Dr. Ghamdi - now often seen on TV and the subject of fatvaas, hatemail and threats. The other, the lesser-known Professor Ziauddin Kirmani, whose book ("The Last Messenger with a Lasting Message"), has now been reprinted and is available at T2F. For several people, this rather unconventional study has been a source of great inspiration, while annoying many others for what Kirmani sahab referred to as "the clearing of cobwebs" around Islamic History. (Another Zia - the General - wanted to present him the Seerat of the Year Award, provided he would alter/delete certain parts but he refused to compromise his years of research.)

The Day of Days

This is not a frequent happening.

The festivals of several belief systems and cultures have come together on March 21, 2008: Good Friday, Holi, Nauroz, and Eedé Meelaad-ün-Nabi have all fallen on the same day as World Anti-Racism Day, beckoning everyone of us to live in Peace.

In a saner world - considering that the event could have been reasonably predicted years ago - we would have made this a special international day of celebrating our diversities. Here's hoping it'll happen the next time around.

Until then, the least we all can do is

(The graphic has been taken from some website. Can't recall origin. Z)

Apnay hee paer par külhaa∂ee maarna ham say seekho

Here's what one site has to say about the Pak-YouTube Fiasco:

Pakistan removed from the Internet
Posted by Richard Stiennon
Categories: State Sponsored Hacking
Tags: YouTube Inc., Pakistan, Internet, Internet Service Providers (ISPs)

The telecom company that carries most of Pakistan’s traffic, PCCW, has found it necessary to shut Pakistan off from the Internet while they filter out the malicious routes that a Pakistani ISP, PieNet, announced earlier today. Evidently PieNet took this step to enforce a decree from the Pakistani government that ISP’s must block access to YouTube because it was a source of blasphemous content.

I cannot let the irony pass with out commenting. A religious state, Pakistan, identifies a content provider, YouTube, as the source of blasphemous, seditious content and orders, King Canute style, that the Internet tides be stopped. A zealous ISP ignorantly decides the best way to comply with the decree is to re-route all of YouTube’s IP addresses to whatever site they thought was more appropriate. The first repercussion was that YouTube disappeared from the Internet for almost an hour. I suspect the second repercussion was that Pakistan’s Internet access crawled to a halt as all of a sudden they were handling IP requests for one of the busiest sites in the world. As of this writing YouTube has announced more granular routes so that at least in the US they supercede the routes announced by PieNet. The rest of the world is still struggling. So, while working on a fix that will filter out the spurious route announcements, PCCW has found it necessary to shut down Pakistan’s Internet access. The leadership of Pakistan just created a massive Denial of Service on their own country.

I could say: “be careful what you wish for” to those elements that object to free and open access to information and expression of ideas. But to put it in terms they might understand better: Do not anger the Internet gods or you will suffer their wrath!

------

Many many years ago Aslam Azhar - a friend I admire and respect - as head of PTV, 'allowed' the broadcast of a music show that showed a pop concert and taubah, taubah an audience in which boys and girls actually performed obscene gestures, such as sitting on their seats and waving their arms in the air, in full view of the public. The pure in the land were horrified. After all, this was no simple prank, like the abduction of political opponents, or jirga-ordered rape, or the naked parading of women on the streets by feudal enemies, or enhancing political power and personal wealth by supporting the USA's outsourced torture program whose victims were from countries including Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Sudan, and included children as young as seven!!!

'What next?', everyone wondered, with their twin virtues of nationalism and religiosity simultaneously under threat by bared wrists.

A few days later I happened to be visiting Lahore and heard that Aslam was going to be 'put in the docks' by people during a discussion forum at Jang's office. Off I went to hear him defend his promotion of such lewd actions. I shall always remember what he said at one point, rather coolly, during the other side's display of hotness: "In years to come, if we go down the path some people are suggesting," he predicted, "we will not just be a nation that chose a different track, we will be considered - and become - a different species!"

That time, dear Aslam, is fast approaching!!!

==============================================

30 minutes later

Update and Clarification: PCCW has been identified by Richard Stiennon, above, as "The telecom company that carries most of Pakistan’s traffic". This indicates that other telecom routes may still have remained operative and Pakistan not entirely cut off. While one friend reports successfully accessing the 'Net from his Blackberry from Lahore, a techie from Pakistan has responded to Stiennon's article stating that he is being able to access not just the Internet but, surprisingly, also YouTube from his computer.

That's really confusing.

Can someone put the entire episode into a non-techie jargon and provide a link here?

Voting: A Right or A Duty?

"There is no Compulsion in Religion", says the Qur'an ... so should there be one in Voting?

One reason why I have waited until the end of the Election Day to write this is that the responses, if any, will hopefully not be emotionally charged after the event. Another is that the matter has been already discussed in several other fora, including the popular ATP.

Well, I did not vote!

There. I've said it. And with no idiots screaming at me without even listening to my views. (Yes, I do have a point of view!). As I write down my thoughts on the subject, I am aware that some are probably a little more than loud-thinking. A few are well-formed; others continue to hang before me as questions that, perhaps, some of you will help me answer. So, please do comment. A request: Don't just tell me I am wrong, tell me why and where.

The first problem I faced when trying to make up my mind about voting or not was to understand why I was voting. I mean it's not an act in itself that has to be done (unlike defecating) but what the process leads to, na?

So I needed to analyse what the criteria would be for my giving my vote to someone, if I were to cast it at all. It was obvious that it was not the person whose picture appeared on the posters: after all in the case of some of the images on the banners, they were not even of the people who were standing ... for example, MQM's Altaf Hussain ... or PPP's Benazir ... or PML(N)'s Nawaz Sharif).

This meant that I would eventually be casting my vote for the symbol that was assigned to a party or to an independent candidate. Naturally it did not depend upon whether I liked the Icon, itself, but what the party stood for. In other words, I needed to check out their manisfestos. Never mind whether they stood by these in practice; that's another track. At least I wasn't going to vote for someone whose very vision of Pakistan or the shrinking world was the antithesis of mine! So the manifestos, specially in some of the key areas - and on issues important to me - had to be clearly different among the parties.

(When buying a house, one tries to choose the one that most closely meets one's needs ... which is not the same as 'choosing the lesser of the evils', a really stupid idea that seems to have been promoted by idiots! You can alter the house to some extent, later, but what do you do to the corrupt political rep you've placed in power? To use another analogy, when you marry, do you choose a person because s/he is the lesser evil or the best possible match? Is there no difference?)

The manifestos (not all were easily available or, when found, even readable) had to be abandoned for another reason: They were being abandoned by the parties themselves! While coalitions between parties that think somewhat alike are fairly normal in politics, to see almost all the parties align themselves with any and everyone is nothing if not making a mockery of the voters. The PPP strikes a deal with PML(N) nationwide, but supports a PML(Q) candidate in Karachi. PML(N) - despite the ads put into newspapers today by PML(Q)'s Dirty Tricks Department - has decided to go with PPP, but how far? Asif Z has shown his willingness to work with Musharraf (who has been pointed more than one PPP finger at for possible complicity in Benazir's murder) and is anathema to Nawaz and company.

Even more confusing was the course MQM took: Having conveyed the impression, only a couple of days earlier, that they could be allied to the PPP - that's how the press interpreted the MQM statement that it could strike a deal with any secular party - chose to team up with Maulana Fazl-or-Rahman and his obviously secularly named Jamiaté Ulemaé Islam. So whose manifesto would I be voting for, regardless of which candidate I chose? A secular, working, middle class party or a Taleban-supporting mulla and his insatiable greed?

(Somewhere along the line my mind wandered off and I began wondering how supporters of Jamaaté Islami and Tehreeké Insaaf were supposed to perform their duty to vote, if their parties were boycotting the elections. And, if it is the citizens' duty to vote, shouldn't - by extension - boycotting the election also be considered dereliction of duty by a party?)

The biggest source of grief to me is seeing the ease with which the term "free and fair elections' has become acceptable to people. The election of a candidate, to me, implies a whole process and not just the transaction that takes place on the Election Day in a booth. As Muneer Malik explained clearly to his T2F audience, just yesterday, this involves the right people in positions of relevance (EC and other related institutions), an unbiased government, fair acceptance/rejection of candidates, easy and non-coercive access to voting, correct transmission of untampered ballot-boxes to the counting team, an honest count and announcement of results, and a just response to any objections that opponents may raise. If any of these processes are disrupted by someone with vested interests, it would be done with the intent of placing soeone else in the victor's seat than the person the voters had chosen. So, if the process is not 'free and fair', how is it an 'election', at all, and not a 'selection'?

An observation: Contrary to a view that seems to be popular among many, I believe that Elections are not the pre-cursor to Democracy. Elections have been held here before, and elsewhere, by Dictators and Despots ... with no sign of resulting Democracy except for a sham. It is Democracy that creates an environment which, in turn, makes Elections the method by which to place people's representatives at the helm of affairs.

Finally, I come back to the aspect of Voting being a Duty (Farz). Even assuming it is, there's something else to consider: Do the choices (of candidates) being offered really provide you the opportunity to make a satisfactory and sensible decision? Think: If you had to choose a travel companion and all you had to choose between were a murderer and a dacoit, would you not consider postponing the trip?

When duties are assigned, they are not unconditional. They are expected to be performed only if the conditions necessary for their performance are present ... or they can be safely ignored. After all, this applies even to duties assigned in the Qur'an: Surah 5 Ayat 6, for example, assigns Muslims the 'duty' of washing their 'hands' before prayers. Surely a man without arms (or with just one hand) would not be shunning his duties in not following it to the letter. 

Hmmm.

"There is no Compulsion in Religion", says the Qur'an ... so should there be one in Voting?

At least SHE will rest in peace!

For this country,
things will continue to get
a lot worse before they get a lot worse!

Season's Greetings

Bakray kee maañ kay naam!

Confession

One stupid view raised every time some part of the nation begins to protest against an entrenched despot is: But we don't have anyone to take his/her place.

Dammit, if the Occupiers of the State never allow institutions to develop, or for new leaders to grow out of the population, we'll always be in such a rut. So break the chain, yaar! And, let's face it, the despots did eventually leave. And we have managed (in many cases better than during their periods) to splutter-start-stop-lurch-and-drag our way through for another few years ... at least until someone else spreads UHU over the chair before sitting on it.

This time around, however, there is an embarrassing bit that I have to add, if I am to be honest with you and myself: I do worry about the transition to someone else, sometimes - although I desperately want it to happen.

OK .. Ok ... let me explain before you condemn me.

I am no fan of Musharraf - primarily so because I'd like to see civilian rule (unambiguously real civilian rule, I mean - not the kind we've had since 1953) in my country. Benazir's record is poor on several counts. Her financial corruption - terrifying though it is - is, imho, the least of the problems she brings to the country each time. A lot more happens under her that is far worse. There is no real danger of Imran Khan taking the reins in his hand - his party hardly gets a couple of seats. Also, I really think he makes an important member of the Opposition, from where he can continue to try and keep checks and balances, without endangering us with his born-again rhetoric. But each time I ponder this, I am really scared shitless:

"O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet."
— St. Augustine —

2007 and All That

As a child, one of the books in my father's library that was always a source of chuckles and guffaws was Sellar & Yeatman's 1066 and All That, now available again in it's 75th Anniversary Edition. The book spawned as many sequels and variations as did the title itself.

If you like humour, rush and buy it now! I lost the original (with most of my father's books) in a tragedy that I'd rather not dwell upon, so I am certainly waiting to get my hands on a copy soon. It will occupy pride of place on the shelf that houses the Richard Armour and Spike Milligan histories.

Our own history is too brief for such elaborate spoofs, although Ibné Insha's Urdu Ki Aakhri Kitaab does include a short and brilliant piece on Akbar and his Nau-Ratans (= Jewels) as his learned band of advisors was called) that parallel the government shenanigans of Ayub Khan and his advisors. Inspired, I suspect, by 1066 - an acknowlegded classic of the time - Ibné Insha's book, too, features classroom style questions at the end of the chapter[s]. My favourite question: Would you like to become well-educated and be a Nauratan or remain uneducated and become a King?

A word of caution: Someone has translated Insha Jee's masterpiece into English. Please. If you can read even basic Urdu, read the original - for a lot of the nuances have been lost in translation. Sarcasm and wit, like poetry, is the most difficult to tote across linguistic barriers without serious damage.

Unless I am mistaken, it was the Sellar & Yeatman book which stated that the rule of Henry the IV Part 1 was followed by that of Henry the IV Part 2 ... which is what, today, I was reminded of as President Musharraf Part 1 prepares to hand over charge to President Musharraf Part 2. It is important to note that in the case of the Henries, it was Shakespeare and not Schizophrenia that was the coas cause.

Being older than most of my blog readers (many among them are about one-third my age) I do realise that a lot of our national and political history is unknown to them because, for the same reason that they are unfamiliar with even those subjects they once scored A's in, it has been taught at school where the concentration is primarily on dates and stats. Sadly, even that is not laid out in any cohesive manner. To help with that, for starters, I have a chart that (seriously!) could help youngsters - many of whom are out protesting these days - understand at least those aspects. Maybe schools can even put it up in their classrooms.

If you find factual errors in the above (dates, names, parties)
please email me and I will put up the corrected version asap.

On Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple is an atheist who is greatly disturbed by 'the new atheists' (Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, & Hitchens). An interesting though long-winded writer - I had enjoyed his Our Culture, What's Left Of It - he is now engaged in an ongoing war of words with Sam Harris, which makes for fun reading.

For the last few years Dalrymple has often written on Islam and Muslims in the City Journal (a quarterly). So, it was bound to happen that the subject of Terrorism would crop up at some point:

"It’s not just Islam, but the tension between Islam and Western modernity, that makes them tick.

While I was on a visit to Toronto recently, police arrested 17 men, the oldest of them 43 but most much younger, on charges of plotting a terrorist attack. They wished, apparently, to blow up the parliament in Ottawa and publicly behead the prime minister. Cops caught them in the process of buying three times as much material for explosives as Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing. Reporting the arrests, the New York Times called the men “South Asians” — though one of them was an Egyptian, two were Somali, and most had been born in Canada — thus concealing by an inaccurate euphemism the most salient characteristic of the alleged plotters: that they were all Muslims. The Canadian police, emasculated and even stupefied by the exigencies of political correctness (the modern bellwether of virtue), said that the 17 came from such diverse backgrounds that they were unable to discern anything in common among them.

Canadians, on the whole, reacted to news of the plot with a mixture of outrage and disbelief. A few responded more vigorously, smashing the windows of a Toronto mosque, which the press swiftly denounced as un-Canadian. But many wondered, why us? when Canada had been among the most tolerant and accommodating countries to its immigrants in the world, and where celebration of diversity for its own sake had been made almost an official fetish. Could it be that no liberal policy goes unpunished?

It rapidly became clear that no single sociological factor of the kind usually invoked to explain outrageous behavior — poverty, say, or racial discrimination — could explain the adherence of all 17 to the plot (assuming that the charges against them are true). The Somalis involved were born in Somalia in the midst of the chronic civil war there and came to Canada as refugees, where they soon fell into unideological delinquency before catching the Islamist bug; they were not economic success stories. Other alleged plotters, however, emerged from the well-integrated middle classes, such as the son of a successful doctor of Indian origin who had emigrated to Canada from Trinidad. The pictures of the houses in which some of the plotters lived and grew up must have made more than a few newspaper readers envious. Whatever explained the resort of the 17 to the scimitar and the bomb, raw poverty or the hopelessness of insuperable discrimination was not it."

The above are the opening paragraphs in Dalrymple's rather long review of Terrorist - a novel by John Updike. Of course, as an alternative to the review and, possibly in the same amount of time, you could read Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and feel equally bored. However, should any of you decide to read the Updike book, I'd also suggest - preferably instead of it - Doris Lessing's chiling novel The Good Terrorist. Sadly, it is hard to find these days - but try bookshops that sell old books and you may be rewarded.

Justice - Saudi Style

A rape victim was punished for violating Shoddy Arabia's laws on segregation that forbid unrelated men and women from associating with each other. She was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being in the car of a strange man. On appeal, Arab News reports, the punishment was not reduced but increased to 200 lashes and a six-month prison sentence.

The 19-year-old woman was gang-raped 14 times in an attack in Qatif in the eastern province a year-and-a-half ago. The BBC has a report.

So ... it's final? {aka After the Fatwa!}

Proud to know you all ...

Specially you, TT!



Much love (and deepest respects) to everyone at Tehelka
for an unparalleled report.

(This needs be taught in schools of journalism.)

The Writing on The Wall

(a modified evolvefish.com poster)

Thank you, PF!

Creative Thinking and The Creation

You may believe that the present is the key to the past, but what if The Present has been 'created' as is, and there is no such thing as The Past?

For those of you who need a nudge from your science-infested arrogance, to return to belief, the Institute for Creation Research offers a great deal of information to counter the propaganda spread by such ignoramuses as Charles Darwin, Julian Huxley, and the evil-mouthed Richard Dawkins. Here's an extract from an article by Andrew A. Snelling, Ph.D., of ICR, that finally trumps all the fallacious logic which has resulted in conclusions based on faulty extrapolation of evidence.

The Appearance of Age at Creation

At the marriage feast in Cana (John 2:1-11) Jesus commanded servants to take huge water pots and fill them with water. He then told the servants to draw from the pots and take it to the Ruler of the Feast, who deemed it excellent wine. However, the Ruler of the Feast had used the assumption that the present is the key to the past! He used his own reasoning based on what he knew happens in the present. He assumed, based on everyday experience, this wine had come from grapes grown on vines, grapes that had been harvested and crushed, fermented, and bottled. He thought it had taken a long period of time, but he was wrong. Jesus had, in fact, created this wine. This then is the characteristic of anything God does in creation. From our experience it has an apparent age, an appearance of a non-existent history. And why did Jesus do this? He did it to meet an immediate need.

When God commanded the fruit trees into existence He created them already bearing fruit. If we went back in time, we would have looked at those trees and would have said that they had taken years to grow and mature. But God created a mature, fully-developed creation, because it was meant to be in existence immediately so that when Adam and Eve walked the earth three days later, their food needs would be met.

What do many people say today? They say the world "looks old," therefore the Bible is wrong or God has deceived us. No, God has not deceived us, because He told us what happened in His eyewitness account in Genesis 1. God saw what He made and said it was very good. He was present. He was fully capable of recording and preserving for us His eyewitness account so we would know what happened at creation with absolute certainty. The Gospel accounts give Jesus' stamp of approval on Genesis 1 as the historical record of the earth's beginning. God's timetable for the creation was that He spoke the earth into existence.

Yes, the earth has an appearance of age. But if we use the wrong assumptions to interpret the evidence, we come to the wrong conclusion that the earth is very old, when God clearly says it isn't.

Evolution is not the only misleading theory under attack by the people at ICR, which claims that its "articles are written by top professionals in the fields of geology and biology."

"Global Warming may affect some parts of our society negatively ... but would likely benefit others. In fact, the current warming trend may be returning our global climate closer to that prevalent in the Garden of Eden...", says Larry Vardiman, Ph.D., also of ICR.

Hmmm ...

Dr. Snelling bases his conclusions on the Bible, but what about Dr. Vardiman? I searched and searched ... and finally found the book from where he got his great insight.

HERE IT IS!