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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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

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