March 29, 2008
Encouraging Adoption Pakistan and the Muslim World
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Encouraging Adoption in Pakistan and the Muslim World
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March 01, 2008
Pakistan's political heir
The mourning period of Benazir Bhutto’s tragic assassination has passed this week with a surprisingly calm election and Pakistanis will no doubt begin to approach her son and political heir Bilawal Bhutto Zardari in various ways to express their hopes and fears for the country. As one such citizen, I write this article at the eve of the publication of his mother’s notable book and also after a pivotal election victory for her party. You may ask why I write to give advice to a nineteen year old who couldn’t even run in the election? The answer is simple: reform is far easier to advocate to those who are new to the process than to those who are entrenched in entitlements of the old system. Perhaps that is why so many Americans are gravitating towards an inexperienced but youthfully optimistic senator named Barack Obama.
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January 21, 2008
Indonesian Islam is "greening"
In a remote part of Central Java, Indonesia’s most populous island, there is a rather unusual form of environmentalism taking root. Shadowed by the great Merapi volcano and surrounded by fertile fields of rice and sugarcane, a small school is graduating environmentalists whose commitment to the earth is not based on Western conservation texts but rather predicated in values derived from Islam. The head of the school, Nasruddin Anshari, frequently uses the refrain “one earth, for all”, just as much as he does the usual Islamic invocation of Allah-u Akbar (God is Great).
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December 27, 2007
Benazir Bhutto's Tragic Demise
Benazir was a charismatic yet polarizing politician who showed remarkable courage in returning to Pakistan earlier this year despite numerous threats to her life. It is a tragedy for the country that those who follow absolutist ideologies are armed to the teeth and can inflict such damage both literally and figuratively to Pakistani society. The only way to address the problem is to have a massive campaign to disarm militants, and also strengthen civil institiutions so that people have a voice and the fanatics lose their recruiting ability. At the same time it is important for Americans to keep things in perspective about Pakistan. While this is a terrible tragedy, America has also shown to the world that strong societies can recover after such dreadful assassinations and the vast majority of Pakistanis have a vibrant national commitment that will allow them to recover as well. The next few weeks will be crucial in terms of how fast this recovery will be -- the international community must remain engaged with Pakistan's transition towards democracy and keep the pressure on President Musharraf to hold free and fair elections in coming months.
Linked below is a long audio interview that I gave to our local press about the Bhutto tragedy which they have posted online with a slide show about Bhutto's life and tragic passing which can be heard from the link below:
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/legacy/slideshows/122707bhutto/index.html
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December 23, 2007
Balancing Islam in Academe
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November 24, 2007
Salvaging Peace with Syria
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November 10, 2007
Pakistan's Lessons from Lebanon
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October 12, 2007
The Nobel Prize and Gore
I wrote the following review before the Nobel Prize announcement on October 12, 2007. While there is much to admire about his activism, the Nobel committee has just politicized the debate further by giving the prize to Gore. The IPCC certainly deserves to be recognized and that should have been sufficient:
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A Review of "An Inconvenient Truth" (By Al Gore, Rodale Books, 2006), Reviewed by Saleem H. Ali
Al-Gore has admirably reinvented himself as the environmental conscience of public officials. Unlike his earlier book "Earth in the Balance," which read like a regular nonfiction paperback, this publication is more like a coffee-table compendium with glossy pages and illustrations elucidating the impact of global warming. Each chapter is punctuated with a personal interlude that ties momentous events in Gore’s life to concerns abut global warming. The book and its accompanying documentary film has been credited by Time magazine as making a definitive change in public perception of global warming, and Gore has been named one of the “people that mattered” in 2006
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September 28, 2007
Indigenous Rights and the Quartet
After two decades of deliberations, the United Nations General Assembly finally adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples on September 13. The voting demographics were most interesting: 143 nations in favour, 11 abstaining and 4 against. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States were the quartet that voted to deprive indigenous people of a largely ceremonial endorsement of their fundamental rights. Pakistan happily voted in favour of this resolution, though I wonder how much our government really appreciates the status of our tribal populations.
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September 16, 2007
Israel and Pakistan: comparative perspectives on the judiciary
Paradoxical protests of victory were recently held on both sides of the famed barrier fence that Israel has been constructing to prevent suicide bombings. On September 6, the head of the village council of a Palestinian village called Bil’in won a ruling at the Israeli Supreme Court that declared that the route taken by the barrier had illegally appropriated land from the village. Palestinians had accused Israel of seizing around 200 hectares of land in the village to make way for the barrier, and charged that thousands of olive trees had been uprooted for construction. This week’s ruling provides residents with the opportunity to reclaim at least 100 hectares of confiscated land.
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September 05, 2007
Greening Pakistan's Cities
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July 15, 2007
Peril in Pakistan
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June 12, 2007
A sign in Seoul's city plaza on June 5, 2007 -- South Korea has the highest per capita emissions in all of Asia
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May 28, 2007
Critical Education
For the past three months, the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad has been under high alert due to a group of renegade clerics at the largest mosque in the city. Maulana Ghazi, the imam of the mosque (known as Lal Masjid) has been leading a squad of vigilante students from the mosque's madrassah to close "sinful" commercial businesses such as video shops. The government responded by surrounding the mosque's compound with military troops and police. Some plain-clothes police were held hostage by the mosque clerics last week, leading to intense negotiations to resolve the mounting crisis. Despite the release on May 24 of policemen abducted by the Lal Masjid cadres, anxiety about the situation in Islamabad continues. The government is clearly in the most uncomfortable position in dealing with the problem, which requires, among other things, a look at “absolutist” educational institutions and their rejection of critical reasoning.
Perhaps the starkest example of such an educational institution was the “University of Dawah [evangelism] and Jihad” set up in the mid-eighties in Peshawar by Professor Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf. The founder of this “university” which produced acrimonious alumni such as Ramzi Yousef and whose aim it was, and remains, to quash critical reasoning has been one of the top warlords during the Afghan war and later the civil war. Since 2001 he has been vying for supremacy within the Karzai government. To call this institution a “university” is particularly unfortunate.
This is not peculiar to a particular country or religion. Institutions that stifle critical reasoning and thrive on agenda-driven education can be found at many places.
In the United States, one of the leading lights of the evangelical movement with absolutist views about Christian supremacy, Reverend Jerry Falwell, died last week. His well-known Liberty University produced a legion of activists, many of whom have found employment in prominent government positions. Falwell was as much valorised by his disciples and with as much fervour as Maulana Ghazi of Lal Masjid is by his minions. While the tone of his messages was more measured, he clearly stirred militancy in his own way.
Consider that only a few days after his passing, a young student from Liberty was arrested with a cache of bombs. Authorities in Virginia indicated that Mark David Uhl intended to use the bombs to “stop protesters from disrupting Falwell’s funeral”.
It should be noted here that like Christianity, Islam is a strongly evangelical religion (unlike Judaism). Even the more enlightened institutions of higher learning such as the Islamic University of Islamabad, which offer courses on global trade and environmental law, have a “Da’wah Academy”. This should, itself, not be a cause for concern, since Islam ordains that there must be “no compulsion in religion”. However, problem arises when other competitive forces of evangelism are stifled in countries like Saudi Arabia, leading to an autocracy of proselytisers who claim monopoly over communication.
Similar to other social movements, religious motivation has often been linked to violence as well as building peace. Like any powerful human phenomenon, religion can be used to either end and has tremendous potential to instil pugnacity as well as cooperation. Similarly, we can find ways of harmonising the best of Eastern and Western traditions, if absolutism is avoided. There are some remarkable stories to be told of graduates of Islamic schools that have been able to bridge their education with Western traditions.
Consider the case of Bakhtiar Effendy, who started his formal schooling in the Pesantren Pabelan in central Java, Indonesia, in the early 1960s. While at that Islamic boarding school, he received an American Field Service scholarship and attended Columbia Falls High School in Montana. Subsequently, he returned to Jakarta for his college degree and then went back to the States for his doctorate at Ohio State University. Following his doctoral degree, Dr. Effendi returned to his homeland and joined the faculty of the Islamic State University in Jakarta. Such meandering interactions between East and West, while rare, are possible between educational traditions and deserve more careful study and analysis.
The use of educational institutions for political ends is a well-established tradition across cultures and societies. Exemplified recently by anti-war activism at universities in the West as well as the rise of Marxist movements in schools in South America or the Ayatollah ascendancy at Tehran University, institutions of learning are often places of revolution. Ideas invigorate young minds to action but Alexander Pope’s prescient observation of “a little learning being a dangerous thing” is just as true today. While the independence of educational institutions must be maintained, some level of quality assurance and critical reasoning is also essential to ensure that captive audiences of students are not manipulated.
The Lal Masjid case clearly shows us the need for instituting a peace-building curriculum in all educational institutions across Pakistan. We shall explore the efficacy of such a curriculum in this space subsequently. Until then, let us reflect on the words of Robert Frost:
“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence”.
Saleem H Ali is associate dean of graduate education at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and a senior fellow at the United Nations mandated University for Peace. He can be reached at saleem@alum.mit.edu
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May 11, 2007
Degrees of Fortune
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April 28, 2007
Demography of Terror
By Saleem H. Ali
Former secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, in a recently released confidential memorandum, posed the central question about the American war on terror: “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassahs and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” Starting with Rumsfeld’s question, journalist, Mark Danner has commendably approached this issue in detail and his answer is a resolute “no”.
Danner quotes counterinsurgency specialist John Arqullia who compares the US reaction as highly mercurial: “We have taken a ball of quicksilver, and hit it with a hammer”. The irony of this analogy is that it also shows how elusive our statistics might be — ascertaining the actual number of atomised extremists is just as difficult as trying to quantify mercury particles in motion.
The number of civilian casualties in the current conflict has been the single most motivating factor in galvanising public opinion against the “war on terror”. I have often heard the most astounding accounts of casualties in Afghanistan at mosques in America. When asked where the numbers were obtained, the response is often a nondescript web site or an anecdote.
Manipulation of statistics to spin conspiracy theories is of course not just confined to Muslims. Every community seems to have its share of such spin masters and conspiracy cultivators. The US has certainly contributed to the phenomenon by not keeping data on civilian casualties and then dismissing any attempt at scientific study. This was especially apparent when the US army rejected a study conducted by Johns Hopkins University and published in the British journal The Lancet earlier this year on the alarmingly high rate of civilian casualties in Iraq. The matter could have been easily resolved if the army had kept track of civilian casualties by death certificates with just as much care as they do with their own personnel.
However, even when government keep the data, the statistics can be used in rather contorted ways. For example, in India, Hindutva activists have on numerous occasions used census data to give the impression that Muslim population increase is a targeted effort to outnumber Hindus and cause a diminution of India’s Hindu identity. I amusingly recall my taxi ride in Mumbai last year when the friendly taxi driver commented, while passing by the shrine of Haji Ali, that he believed there were now more Muslims in India than Hindus!
Such contorted visions of demography became especially acute when the results of the Indian census were released in 2001. J Sri Raman has admirably described this propaganda campaign by Hindutva activists in detail along with an exposition of how Hindutva activists continue to mislead with erroneous analysis of statistics. Of the total Indian population of 1.028 billion at the time of the census, the Hindus totalled 827 million, comprising 80.5 percent of the population. The Muslims numbered 138 million or 13.4 percent of the population. The next in size were the Christians (24 million or 2.3 percent).
Census data since 1951, the year of the first Indian headcount, suggest that the Muslim population has increased by about one percent every decade. Activists used this data to suggest that it will take three centuries for India to become a Muslim-majority country! The figures, turned out to be inaccurate because the census of 2001 included India’s only Muslim-majority State of Jammu and Kashmir which had been excluded in the 1991 exercise, and the Northeastern State of Assam, excluded in 1981.
After two days of rising tensions, the commission came out with “adjusted” figures, which told a rather different story. They showed that the growth rate of the Hindu population had declined from 22.77 percent over 1981-91 to 20.02 percent over 1991-2001, and that of the Muslim population from 32.86 percent to 29.33 percent. In other words, the decline in the population growth rate has been greater for Indian Muslims.
The misuse of data by politicians is of course a continuing embarrassment for the Indian government since it prides itself on being the world’s largest secular democracy. It is interesting to note that, in the tradition of Gandhi, many left-leaning non-Muslims such as Yoginder Sikand in India are leading the struggle to protect Muslim rights in this regard. We must not forget that Gandhi, a man of universal integrity, was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic because he was perceived to be too friendly to Muslims. This is of course reminiscent of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish fanatic or Anwar Sadaat’s assassination by a Muslim fanatic. In all cases the conflict within the community to resist change was the most potent and pernicious factor in the escalation of violence.
Such episodes as well as the support of some authoritarian regimes by Western powers have led to an unusual alliance between secular leftists and Islamists. The Kefaya (“Enough”) movement in Egypt exemplifies the willingness of Islamists to form coalitions, albeit reluctantly with other secular movements for reform. This diverse coalition of oppositional movements — new Islamists, liberals, Nasserists, and Arabists — has demanded change from below and an end to the rule of President Hosni Mubarak as well as American influence in the region.
Unequivocal support of authoritarian regimes at the behest of security is problematic without a more acute awareness of demographic trends. Coalitions, such as those in Egypt, in a democratic setting might lead to electoral power for Islamists. However, if there are adequate checks and balances, they may also play a moderating role on each side.
Demography has always been a tool for democratic agency since the lowest common denominator is always a voting individual whether in India or the United States. The ways in which the US political parties in power have redistricted various constituencies to get more votes for a particular party are emblematic of this matter.
The West has clearly been concerned about the impact of population dynamics on extremism — hence its willingness to support autocratic regimes at the expense of its democratic ideals. Clearly this is not a sustainable strategy. The best way for building bridges between the East and West is for the western powers to only intervene on humanitarian grounds where needed, and build a reputation for non-opportunistic action. There may be initial setbacks, as was the case with the well-intentioned US intervention in Somalia, but slowly there may be a mark to be made.
The Western intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo are cases where Muslims were advantaged by US and European intervention. Yet in these cases, little effort is made to highlight the statistics of Muslim lives saved or how the interventions might have led to the growth of Islamic institutions. Such efforts should be given more coverage in historical accounts of East-West relations in textbooks and media outlets in the Muslim world. Demographic shifts and migration patterns of asylum-seekers in the West, which advantage oppressed groups, also deserve more coverage and analysis.
There is no doubt that demography is essential to our understanding of extremism as well as its antidotes. However, the lens or frame with which we view and analyse these numbers is just as significant.
Dr Saleem H Ali is associate professor of environmental planning and conflict resolution at the University of Vermont and a senior fellow at the United Nations mandated University for Peace. He can be reached at saleem@alum.mit.edu
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March 14, 2007
Pricing Nature and Harmonizing Economics
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February 15, 2007
Global Warming and Population
Robert Hardaway and Judy Swearingen
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February 10, 2007
Obama and Islam
By Saleem H. Ali
Never before has the middle name of a US senator gained as much print coverage as that of Senator Barack Hussein Obama of Illinois. For the past several months the US media has been obsessed with the potential connection between Mr Obama and Islam, even though he has adamantly declared his credentials as a Christian.
The auditory similarity between “Obama” and “Osama” has led to all kinds of jokes and media slips that are quite revealing of the continuing apprehensions about Islam that so many citizens continue to feel across the land. Of course, the US Congress now has a bona fide Muslim member, Keith Ellison, from the state of Minnesota, and his decision to take an oath on the Quran instead of the Bible created an uproar as well. However, the significance of Mr Obama’s Islamic connection is far more consequential because of his national prominence.
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January 22, 2007
Tribal Targets
For much of the Pakistan’s history the federally administered tribal areas (FATA) have been off limits to the central government both in terms of governance systems as well as social services. Governing the tribal belt was a tabooed topic that no one dared to advance in Islamabad’s halls of power. There was a stale sense of sanctity ascribed to this terrain that most were too afraid to tread upon. With scant investment in educational infrastructure and social development the tribal areas became a twilight zone for those who wished to cling to a bygone warrior era.
The missiles that destroyed a madrassah in Bijaur agency last year (supposedly fired by American aircraft) have alerted Pakistanis to how President Musharraf has taken on the task of breaking the tribal taboo. Yet has the government considered what constitutes a tribal identity in the greater context of pan-Islamism that so many in this frontier region claim to espouse? The other tribal target for the current government has been the Baluch communities which also frame their identity in tribal terms, though with a much lesser allegiance to Islam. As one Baluch leader recently remarked in an interview to the BBC, betrayal of his tribal identity was an act of kufr (blasphemy) for him. The notion of kufr leads us to yet another tribal group that have been given the epithet of kafir, (infidel), though with more benign connotations.
The fabled Kafir-Kalash tribe (a.k.a. Kalasha) have been the most celebrated “infidels” of Pakistan, but have lived in relatively peaceful coexistence with their Muslim neighbors in the Chitral valley. However, even this remote community of less than 3000 individuals has recently been under siege through forces of religious intolerance and economic intrusion. As polytheists, the tribe have found themselves in the unenviable category of mushrikeen and hence particularly ripe for conversion. Unlike their ethnically similar neighbors in Nuristan, the Kalasha have so far been spared any cornered conversions. However, this may change as religious radicalization spreads across the tribal frontier. While Islamic doctrine is very clear on there being “no compulsion in religion” (Surah Baqarah, verse 256), there is no denying the pressure of evangelism in Pakistan, from cricket teams to remote tribal communities.
Tribal populations constitute ancient social systems which historically provided a means of survival under hostile environmental conditions. At one level, we should try to transcend “tribalism” as broader conceptions of human civilization are accepted. On the other hand, such tribal affiliations, give us distinct and diverse cultural traditions -- food, music and language which provide texture and meaning to the fabric of humanity. Thus targeting tribalism is always going to be a challenge for those who wish to preserve such diversity.
Unlike Judaism, both Christianity and Islam have attempted to go beyond tribal identity as a binding force. All ethnic groups are welcome to join without any requirement of matrilineal association or ethnic descent as was traditionally the case with Judaism. However, the darker side of this universalism in the later two Abrahamic faiths has been their propensity to proselytize and claim exclusivity over salvation. By claiming that only their adherents can reach heaven, many Muslims and Christians have themselves formed tribal identities that are connected by scripture rather than ethnicity or genetics.
The international community is confronted with the dilemma of whether or not religious identity should be subsumed within the broader categorization of “culture,” when it serves to negate other cultural attributes such as music and art. Last year, I attended a meeting of the United Nations Permanent forum on Indigenous People in New York. This was a colorful gathering of tribal groups from around the world who self-defined themselves as those having the most continuous and close relationship to their region of habitation. There was one Pakistani delegate at the meeting from Chitral who repeatedly expressed concerns about the perils of nationalism in stifling tribal expression.
Given this prior exposure to the debate on indigenous recognition, it was gratifying to learn in June of this year that the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a landmark declaration on the rights of indigenous people. Pakistan voted in favor of this declaration along with 44 other members. Only two members of the council voted against the declaration – Russia and Canada, which are physically the world’s first and second largest countries respectively. Geographic expanse may explain the fear of these two countries in endorsing some aspects of the declaration which they felt could erode a sense of national identity. Yet, if we are to mitigate such threats to national unity and conflict escalation, the only way forward is to develop a truly global identity which trumps the divisive aspects of tribalism at multiple levels.
Once we are able to recognize our mutual interdependence on global resources, the positive aspects of tribalism, as exemplified by indigenous languages, art and learning can shine through. Religious devotion and patriotism to national identities could also coexist in such a world but with due deference to the larger goal of a truly “civil” society.
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December 24, 2006
Salvaging Islam in Sudan
By Saleem H. Ali and Mahmoud El Zain (originaly published in The Daily Times, May 20, 2006)
Africa’s largest country has once again moved towards greater notoriety by being declared the most “failed” state in the world by Foreign Policy magazine in their latest ranking of nations in turmoil. The crisis in the Darfur region of the country is major reason for this latest epithet for the Sudanese regime. Hence the news of a peace agreement between the government and the largest rebel group in Darfur might be considered a promising sign of renewal, but we must hold the applause. The Sudanese government has equivocated on peace agreements before and the various factions are still not all on board.
There is, however, some reason for optimism in Sudan. The once obstinate religious leader of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al Turabi is showing astonishing signs of moderation. In a recent interview to the London-based newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat, Dr Turabi spoke of allowing women to become imams, promoting greater allowances for inter-marriage between Muslims, Jews and Christians and even venturing to call for radical Muslims to seek penance for their indiscretions.
The Sorbonne-educated Turabi has been an enigmatic and somewhat chameleonic figure in Sudanese politics for the past 30 years. The 9/11 Commission report referred to him as “Sudan’s long time hard-line ideological leader” who gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden. He was a spiritual leader of the current Sudanese government until 1999 when he fell out with President Al Bashir and was imprisoned in March 2004 for fomenting a coup plot. He was released in the summer of 2005 and continues to command considerable respect in many parts of the Muslim world.
Turabi’s newly found moderation has left many Islamic scholars aghast and several Sudanese clerics have branded him an apostate. However, the mere fact that such clear calls for moderation and reinterpretation of Islamic texts is coming from such an old ideologue such as Turabi is very promising indeed. Even if we discount these proclamations as opportunistic attempts to seek help from the West, the call for reform emanating from one of Al Qaeda’s oldest friends is a dramatic change to consider. It is equally significant that this call is coming from Sudan, which has been at the crossroads of conflict at multiple levels.
The fault lines in the civil war in southern Sudan had been about religion and race — Christians Africans versus mostly Muslim Arabs. The conflict was used in the West to highlight the most macabre face of Islamic and indigenous cultural extremism, from slave trades to forced conversions. Accuracy of these accounts was disputed and conspiracy theories about oil greed and imperialism raged on for years. Thankfully, most of these came to rest following the peace agreement between the government and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) in January 2005.
More than a year has passed and this agreement has withstood continuing turmoil in Darfur as well as the death of the SPLM leader John Garang in a helicopter crash in August 2005. Hence extremists who had repeatedly concluded the incompatibility of Muslims and Christians to live together in Sudan have thus far been proven wrong.
However, the Darfur crisis has been far more vexing for Muslim clerics such as Turabi to understand. All sides in the conflict are Muslims of the same sect. Hence sectarian strife such as is the case in Iraq or Pakistan cannot be blamed either. There is not even a clear racial distinction to be drawn in the crisis since there have been Arab-African alliances during some phases of the conflict. In fact, historically, inhabitants of the region had experienced changing identities, where a Baggara (Arab) tribesman through access to the means of production and settlement in a Fur (African) village could acquire the Fur ethnic identity.
The perpetuation of the Darfur crisis has thus led to some soul-searching on the part of ideologues such as Turabi who now conclude that a culture of violence in many Muslim states is to blame for such conflicts. Inequality of resource distribution and competing land use policies, sparked by a cultural acceptance of weapons to resolve disputes are the key ingredients of Sudan’s predicament.
If there is a silver lining to this tragic tale, it would be that extreme elements such as Turabi have been forced out of their martyring determinism. The dogmatic chapters, which such clerics still hold from their defunct political ideology, are maintained merely to calm the remnants of religious militias that have not yet been demobilised. Whether the peace agreement in Darfur holds or not, the West should pay close attention to the way this conflict is transforming the vanguards of Islam in Sudan.
Saleem H Ali is associate professor of environmental planning and conflict resolution at the University of Vermont. Mahmoud El Zain is a Sudanese scholar currently on the faculty of the United Nations-mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica
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December 23, 2006
At the Annual Earth Dialogues event in Brisbane, Australia with Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi and colleagues
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December 22, 2006
Curing the Resource Curse
Countries that produce oil, metals and precious gems have recently come under scornful scrutiny by numerous public intellectuals. Phrases such as “resource curse”, “petro-politics”, and “conflict diamonds” are now common parlance. The war in the Middle East and the empowerment of Iran through petrodollars has brought this matter in the limelight again. The conflict in Balochistan is also claimed by many to be a manifestation of the “resource curse”. In a recent column Thomas Friedman of the New York Times claimed that “countries that get addicted to selling their natural resources rarely develop their human resources and educational institutions”. Such statements are neither well supported by facts nor offer much prescriptive guidance for resource-rich economies with no other significant endowments upon which to base development.
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