“The native is declared [by the coloniser to be] insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces… In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values.” — Frantz Fanon

Even after more than ten days after the May Day programme organised by JNUSU with Laal band from Pakistan, the debate centring it refuses to die down. DSU’s critique of the manner in which the last May Day programme was organised by the AISA-led JNUSU and our observations on the underlying politics of Laal has elicited many responses including that from Taimur Rahman, the leading artist of Laal. AISA-led JNUSU – and also SFI, another promoter of Laal in JNU – however, have so far maintained a calculated silence on the entire debate, while their individual activists have been expressing their opinion on public forums. This indicates that AISA organisationally has nothing to say in defense of its own politically bankrupt acts of that night. Why did AISA-JNU invite a self-proclaimed ‘communist’ band like Laal which is furthering the ideological agenda of US War on Terror under patronage not only of corporations like ‘Times Music’ but of the Pakistani and Indian comprador ruling classes? Why did it extend red carpet to the anti-worker JNU VC to address the May Day gathering while shouting ‘VC Murdabad’ just a few hours ago in the May Day Rally? And last but not the least, why did it allow the singing of a Sanskrit hymn praising Hindu god Ganapati by an artist who seems to have no idea of or concern for the historic legacy of May Day? AISA’s silence on these questions speaks volumes of their political bankruptcy.

Laal has been perceived as a progressive group of musicians who claim to adhere to Marxism / Communism . Their ideological commitment has been reflected in the songs they had composed in the past, most notably in their 2009 debut album Umeed-e-Sahar . It was therefore not unusual for the widespread enthusiasm and expectation among the students and teachers of JNU as well as other parts of Delhi in attending their concert organised in the campus, supposedly also to commemorate the International Workers’ Day. Laal has rendered the International – the anthem of the communist movement – and have adapted the poems of revolutionary writers like Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Habib Jalil. Even though commercially marketing their music (their first album was released by Geo TV group of Pakistan), Laal maintained a spirit of rebellion in the songs and performances, critiquing the comprador ruling classes of Pakistan as well as their master – US imperialism. This expression of popular discontent – from workers, peasants and the youth – which has made the band a household name among the urban middles classes in not only Pakistan but also in India.

By now, however, Laal has remained a mere shadow of its past . The failure of Laal to grapple with the semi-feudal semi-colonial reality of a society like Pakistan, where the people are facing relentless aggression from US imperialism in the garb of ‘War against Terror’, has brought to the fore the hitherto dormant but basic ideological disorientation afflicting the band from the beginning. This failure, which stems from an inability or unwillingness to correctly analyse the nature of the class struggle and the primary contradiction within the society, has led Laal and its party CMKP on the path of revisionism and opportunism. Their failure is all the more telling in the context of the ongoing imperialist war of aggression on the people of North West Frontier Province and Waziristan, and the US occupation of neighbouring Afghanistan. Laal’s politics has resulted in its alienation from the fighting masses, their lived reality and their aspirations. Indeed, the band and its music seem to have increasingly turned against the oppressed and exploited majority of the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan. As a result of its ideological bankruptcy, we find the band now performing in up-market fashion shows and programmes/tours promoted by corporate houses. In its desperation to ‘convey the message of the revolution’ in whatever way possible, Laal has even subordinated their art to commercial companies like Times Music, a rabidly reactionary Indian media conglomerate. With their new song titled ‘Dehshatgardi murdabad’, Laal’s break from the labouring classes and its going over to the side of the oppressors – the Pakistani, Indian and Afghan comprador ruling classes and US imperialism – seems to be complete. It is therefore natural that Laal collaborates with the Times Group, which never gets tired of branding the armed resistance movements in India, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine or Kashmir as ‘terrorism’. One must not forget that Times Group has been at the forefront in profiling the Muslims in India as ‘fundamentalists’ or the Maoists as ‘terrorists’, thereby justifying their persecution by the Indian state.

DSU has criticised Laal for promoting US sponsored propaganda of Islamophobia and ‘War on Terror’ with its song ‘Dehshatgardi murdabad’ (Death to Terrorism), which was performed in JNU as well. When the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and even parts of Pakistan are being devastated by US attacks in the name of fighting ‘Islamic terrorism’ and ‘religious extremism’, to chorus against the same only goes to justify such wars of aggression and occupation. The song says: “ Bomb blasts at every corner/ The ignorant march to ‘sacrifice’ themselves/ After having lashed women/ They take the name of Islam/ Then bomb market places/ Burn down girl’s schools/ And reduce our dignity to dirt/ America’s puppets, Since when did they become our friends?/ All together now! Death to terrorism, Death to barbarism …” Who are these ‘they’ referred to here? Above all, ‘they’ signify organisations like Taliban and Mujahideen of Afghanistan as well as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). But ‘they’ could also mean the millions of people in Afghanistan and Pakistan whom these organisations are today leading in their anti-imperialist/national liberation struggles. By the same logic, ‘they’ could also mean Hizbollah, Hamas or the armed resistance in Iraq, who are leading the people of their respective countries against imperialist aggressors. It is true that these organisations uphold Islam as their political ideology and mobilise the people for defending their land, faith and society against foreign imperialist forces. It is true that many of them, like the Taliban, took support and aid from US imperialism to oust Soviet social-imperialism and its puppet ‘communist’ government in Afghanistan. But it is also an irrefutable truth that much like fighting the invasion of USSR and defeating it through an armed struggle, the people of Afghanistan and North-West Pakistan are today fighting US invasion under the leadership of this same Taliban.

In spite of their ideological/political limitations and feudal social outlook, it is a fact that Taliban is leading the anti-imperialist struggle from the front, and to crush it the US-led imperialists are spending billions of dollars and deploying lakhs of armed forces. No doubt the ideology and actions of Taliban cannot be supported or followed blindly by communists, which will amount to the grave error of surrendering the leadership of the labouring classes to feudal forces or the bourgeoisie. However, if we accept that in Afghanistan (and Waziristan) today the main contradiction is between foreign imperialist forces and the vast masses of people, the task of every genuine revolutionary/ communist is to unite with the struggling masses and their organisations which are genuinely fighting their primary and immediate enemy – imperialism. Struggle against such organisations/forces is necessary. But in the context of an ongoing fight for national liberation against external enemies, unity with them becomes primary as opposed to struggle, which becomes secondary. History provides ample examples of such unity by communists, without the latter ever giving up or compromising their principles and politics. Communists of China under the leadership of Mao successfully built a joint front with the reactionary Kuomintang of Chiang Kai Shek during the Anti-Japanese War. Buddhist religious organisations actively participated in Vietnam War under communist leadership.

Moreover, to win over the basic classes from the grip of a feudal and backward ideology or organisations representing such ideology, the communists must work among the people , be a part of their struggles, win their trust and confidence by standing with them, and thereby emerging as the vanguard of their struggle for emancipation – not only from imperialism but also from feudalism and capitalism. Instead of doing or suggesting any of these, Laal (and all revisionist ‘Left’ parties of Pakistan and India) shout abuses at Taliban or other such fighting forces by calling them ‘fundamentalist’, ‘Islamist’ and ‘terrorist’. Denying even the possibility of solidarity and support to the Afghan people led by the Taliban, they indulge in the vilest kinds of propaganda against it in the name of upholding ‘secularism’ and ‘progressive politics’. With such acts, they only end up helping or plays into the hands of imperialism, and in the process alienating themselves from the oppressed masses. Clearly, when the class struggle sharpens, there is no neutral ground to equally condemn both the oppressor and the oppressed. But by castigating the oppressed, Laal has inadvertently sided itself with US invaders, notwithstanding their empty slogans of “Death to imperialism!”

In a series of articles titled ‘Dehshatgardi Murdabad’ in The Express Tribune last November, Taimur Rahman, the leading artist of Laal, elaborated his understanding of ‘terrorism’. He calls the social-imperialist USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan a mere ‘intervention’, and in fact justifies it by saying that “Soviet intervention was a response to the CIA’s plans of aggression against the revolutionary government of Afghanistan”! Taimur is silent on how US imperialism and Soviet Social imperialism in their tussle for redivision and geo-strategic supremacy of the world have exterminated the genuinely revolutionary forces in Afghanistan, thus creating a political vacuum in rural Afghanistan. Najibullah’s government, which Laal considers ‘revolutionary’, was in fact a Soviet puppet representing the interests of the Afghan landlords. Taimur also makes an outrageous and dangerous connection between ‘Jihaad’ and Madrassas in Pakistan, reminiscent of CPI(M)’s Bengal CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s notorious statement that Madrassas are dens of terrorists. Among the so-called ‘terrorist’ armed actions by the Taliban in Pakistan recounted by Taimur are included “coordinated strike in Lahore against buildings used by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), the Manawan Police Training School and the Elite Police Academy”, i.e., legitimate military targets.

For Laal, even the targeting of government’s army becomes an act of ‘terrorism’! Then he goes on to parrot Pakistan government’s statistics on ‘terrorism’ by stating that “The government estimates that more than 37,000 people have been the victims of terrorism in Pakistan (30,000 of these are civilians)”, and concludes that “Hence, it is clear that religious fundamentalists are in an all-out war with the rest of society”. Laal therefore mistakenly tells the masses to fight ‘religious fundamentalism’ and ‘Islamic terrorism’ as their primary enemy. For Laal, “today these forces have become the most important impediment to the emancipation of the people”! In doing so, Laal ignores the fact that many of these killings were engineered by intelligence agencies. It also conveniently forgets the lakhs of lives extinguished by US attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of fighting ‘Islamic terrorism’. Interestingly, the paper in which he has written this article, The Express Tribue , is said to be “the first internationally affiliated newspaper in Pakistan, in partnership with The International Herald Tribune , the global edition of The New York Times ”. Only the sycophants can forget the role of New York Times as a propaganda tool of US imperialism which broke the news of the non-existent ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ in Iraq – a piece of news that was utilised as a justification for the Iraq War and the total destruction of that country.

Laal has endeared itself to the Indian/Pakistani ruling classes subservient to US imperialism who allowed it to freely tour the country while being promoted by the Indian comprador bourgeoisie who owns Times Now. Such ‘favour’ and ‘benevolence’ from the reactionary classes have been bought by Laal at the price of becoming the paid piper of imperialism, by identifying ‘Islamic terrorism’ to be the main enemy of the Afghan/Pakistani/Indian people while relegating the fight against imperialism to the margins. Would the ruling classes ‘tolerate’ a truly revolutionary / communist cultural group, unless it is considered to be entirely ‘harmless’ to their interests, or worse still, perceive it as an ideological/cultural weapon to further their own interests? After all, the war against ‘Islamic terror’ seems to be the common agenda of Laal as well as the US and their local agents in Afghanistan/ Pakistan/India!

Laal could perform even in Pune, the same city where another cultural group – Kabir Kala Manch – has been hounded out by the Indian state for allegedly being Maoists, forcing them to go in hiding . Why does the state allow Laal to perform while KKM is not even allowed the democratic space to spread their message of land to the tiller, annihilation of caste, social justice and emancipation through their songs? Why is it that the same Indian state pronounces death sentence on a cultural activist like Jeetan Marandi of Jharkhand Abhen, who used only music as the means of social transformation? The answer lies in their respective politics and class outlook: while Laal serves the interests of the rulers and exploiters, KKM and Jharkhand Aven are opposed to them and stands with the exploited and oppressed masses. While Laal or its art stands for status-quo, KKM and Jeetan’s art stand for social change, thereby becoming a part of peoples’ culture and struggle. No wonder Laal was careful not to utter a word against the Indian ruling classes in its entire performance in JNU on May Day, against the policy of exterminating entire populations through Operation Green Hunt, Indian state’s persecution of cultural groups, against Hindutva communal forces and the massacre of minorities.

Ideological degeneration stemming from collaboration with the reactionary classes landed up Laal with ‘Tritha’ on May Day who sang paeans to the Hindu god Ganapati – the mascot of Hindutva, RSS, communal fascism and brahmanism – which has been historically utilised by Bal Gangadhar Tilak to Bal Thakre for communal mobilisation . The same blinkered pseudo-secularism of Laal and their hosts in JNU – AISA and SFI – make them accommodate Hindu brahmanical ideology in the garb of ‘Marxism’. When it comes to the vilification of Muslims, they all reproduce the Orientalist notions of ‘barbarism’ and ‘fundamentalism’ now drummed up by the US against the Islamic world. A Pakistani band that spews venom against the anti-US resistance by Islamic organisations and the Muslim people is a handy tool in the hands of imperialism. For the Indian state and the Hindu communal-fascists, such a band provides the much-needed legitimacy for unrestrained minority witch-hunt and pogroms. Not surprisingly, Laal was allowed to perform in fourteen concerts in various Indian cities whereas it originally planned for only four!

Vocal protests from the audience forced JNUSU president to ask the singer to cut short the Ganapati prayer, but AISA-JNUSU or SFI has not even said a word on this ‘mishap’ . Rather, a ‘debate’ has been launched by some ‘progressive’ members of AISA on whether it was correct to stop the singer in the middle of her Ganapati song! While a ‘secular’ Delhi University teacher terms this interruption as “an incident of murdering cultural expression though common consensus”, an AISA activist and former JNUSU councillor calls it “an act of unbelievable intolerance” from JNU students, even the ‘censoring’ and ‘silencing’ of freedom of expression! This however is not an isolated opinion, nor is it confined to only individual members of the revisionist ‘Left’. Indeed, such ‘tolerance’ and ‘soft corner’ for Hindutva communalism and brahmanism – which are the instruments of feudalism and imperialism in India – are the hallmarks of degenerate parliamentary parties like CPI(M)/CPI(ML) Liberation or their student outfits like AISA and SFI. These revisionists nevertheless reject the liberation struggles led by Islam-adherent groups and people the world over accusing them being ‘religious’ and ‘fundamentalist’. Is it not on similar grounds that they oppose the liberation struggles of the Kashmiris calling it ‘Islamist’, or the Naga freedom struggle branding it as ‘Christian’? It is the shared politics of revisionism, status-quo and reaction that makes the convergence of AISA-SFI-Tritha-‘Laal’ possible. They are all united in the opposing the genuine life-and-death struggles of the masses, albeit at times couched in religious idioms. Uncompromising and unsparing ideological struggle against such forces is a necessary precondition for the victory of revolutionary, democratic and anti-imperialist peoples’ struggles.

http://www.countercurrents.org/dsu140512.htm

The recent signing of a resolution after a meeting of the Muslim Spiritual Board of Dagestan on the one side, and the Salafi-backed Association of Akhlu Sunna on the other on April 29, appeared on the surface to herald a sensational victory for the Salafis and Sufi brotherhoods in the North Caucasus republic (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, May 8). Both sides appeared to have reached an agreement and suspend their mutual mud slinging and animosity toward the other. While similar meetings of this kind have been taking place in Dagestan for over a decade this one did not end in the usual brawls as in the past. As depicted in Youtube these meetings often have ended up in brawls, with each side claiming victory over the opposite side (www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7aQcaQ8Ruo). Neither the Sufis or the Salafists hold any particular high moral ground as both groups fiercely accuse each other of all kinds of sins. However, based upon the results of the meeting this meeting indicated some level of agreement. Of the 9 points of the resolution describing the meeting on the website Kavkaz-uzel.ru, several created a level of compromise. For example, point 5 demands that that the two sides abstain from insulting past and present Islamic scholars, and this mostly refers to the previous and actual Sufi sheikhs.  Point 6 sounds peculiar as it prohibits differential whistleblowing among people belonging to different Islamic teachings. This premise is a win for the Salafis. Point 7 proposes the establishment of a common board of the Salafis and the Sufis with equal representation of each side. Finally, point 9 calls on the authorities to reject the idea of abstention from sending people to study in foreign Islamic centers. Currently, there are several thousand Dagestani students studying abroad in such places as Medina in Saudi Arabia, Karachi in Pakistan and even Kosovo (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, May 8).

When analyzing the outcome of the meeting of Salafis and Sufis, one needs to consider who participated in the talks on behalf of the Salafis to understand the complexity and evolution of Islamic political affairs occurring in today’s Dagestan.  In the way of background, the Salafi movement was formed in Dagestan at the end of 1980s when it was formed into a political party known as the Islamic Party of Revival. The primary ideologue of Salafism in the republic, Bagautdin Kizilyurtovski (Kebedov) emerged as the de-facto spiritual leader of the movement. Kebedov was an interesting character. Against the backdrop of the victory of Chechen forces over the Russian military in the first military campaign of 1994-1996, Bagautdin Kebedov reached the conclusion about the possibility and necessity to wage jihad against the Russian Federation (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, March 20). By the end of the 1990s, Kebedov had completely removed the border between political and military wings of the jamaat, uniting them for jihad against the Russian Federation (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/203107/?print=true). Hence, the leader of the Dagestani Salafis was so assured that he could establish himself as a ruler of part of Dagestan and start conquering Russian territories that he proclaimed himself the spiritual and political leader of the Islamic Republic of Dagestan.

In 1999, Dagestani jamaat forces under Kebedov’s command invaded the mountainous area of Botlikh on the border with Chechnya (www.chechen.org/index.php?newsid=336).  The subsequent defeat of the Salafis in Dagestan in the summer and fall of 1999 resulted in Kebedov’s relocation to neighboring Turkey, where he has resided ever since.  Following this development the Salafis’ positions were further undermined by the introduction of a law that expressly banned this teaching in the republic. The law was passed by the local authorities on September 16, 1999 (Islam News, December 17, 2010).

With this development it seemed that the Chechen war had put an end to the possibility of Salafism gaining ground in Dagestan. However, the rising activities of the militants forced the local authorities to reconsider the old idea of creating and controlling the political wing of Salafism in Dagestan.  Since 2010 this outcome has been increasingly discussed as discussion arose about the idea of abandoning the law banning Wahhabism (aka Salafism) (Badnews.orgs).  Toward this goal a special commission was formed to foster the role of reintegrating former rebels back into civilian life. The commission resembled the same set of policies that Russia had adopted in Chechnya, but with a major difference.  In the case of Dagestan, the commission was led by Abbas Kebedov, the brother of the above mentioned Salafist leader Bagautdin Kebedov. Thus, by appointing the person who was least expected to be criticized for possibly betraying the Salafist side, the authorities in Dagestan actually tried by doing this to insulate themselves from this criticism.  Ironically, in 2005 Abbas Kebedov was sentenced to a one-year prison term for the illegal possession of arms. Kebedov later appealed against the court’s decision and was allowed to leave the country. He was forced to return to Dagestan in 2007 because of pressure from the Russian government and was subsequently appointed as the head of the adaptation commission to reintegrate former rebels, a move that was certainly political.

Being a member of the Dagestani movement of Salafis (known as Ahle Sunna Va Jamaa) while simultaneously serving as a member of the government commission certainly casts doubts on Kebedov’s Salafist credentials. The commission on adaptation while being under government control also included several leading Salafis.  What is interesting about this development and why it deserves explanation is that authorities in Dagestan for the first time approached the problem by attempting to isolate the political component of jihadism by creating a political wing as an outlet for jihad, something in the West that would appear to resemble Sinn Fein, the Irish political arm of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The key question now is how the rebel fighters in Dagestan will receive the news about the brother of their spiritual leader collaborating with the authorities while representing them at the same time. Judging by a posting on the Kavkazcenter website, the reaction of the rebels so far has been mostly negative as the government plan now appears to have backfired (Kavkaz Center, November 27, 2011).

According to a posting on their website, the Association Ahlu Sunna has decided to get rid of Kebedov and officially announced that he is no longer representing their organization (Ahlu.org).  Furthermore, the rebels accused Kebedov of close collaborating with the authorities and accused him of renouncing the primary postulate of the rebels – Jihad. Thus, in the course of 2-3 years Kebedov has managed to transition himself from being a fellow Salafi to an enemy of the group he used to head.  Going one step further, the Salafis have now proclaimed him to be a false scholar (because he incorrectly claims that he studied at al-Azhar University in Egypt), and an enemy of his own brother Bagautdin who continues to insist on the idea of waging jihad. So the government’s gamble on Kebedov ultimately failed, but the project itself still remains alive and relevant to the plans of local authorities.

With Kebedov’s departure from the Salafist scene, the remaining members of the organization he headed may still legally engage in their social activities, but perhaps only for the time being. However, the current leader of the association, the young scholar and theologian Kamil Sultanahmedov is quickly becoming a rising star among the Salafis.  Sultanahmedov is highly respected among Dagestan’s youth where much of his popularity and authority is based upon his criticism of Sufi rituals, as well as his explanation of the Salafi ideas in a calm fashion. At the same time Sultanahmedov has avoided making any direct calls for jihad, which if he did might be immediately cut short by the Russian security services.

In light of the issues outlined above, the Dagestani experience in creating a political wing of the military resistance may be the first successful project of regional authorities in the North Caucasus, although the militants are more likely to benefit from this than the government. On the one hand, the authorities in Dagestan need an instrument for diminishing the attraction of the ideas of global jihad by attracting persons to its side who are trusted by the radical youth. On the other hand, the rebels also need people who would voice their demands and make them known to the government, apart from the means of Internet. In the near future we can certainly expect the political wing of the militants to take an even more proactive stance than we have seen so far before because the government’s options in dealing with the ever-widening insurgency in Dagestan continue to shrink by the day.
http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=39392&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=7&cHash=d0471812b828831d2bc9df782eea15b2

The writer is author, most recently, of The Apricot Road to Yarkand (Sang-e-Meel, 2011) and a member of the Royal Geographical Society salman.rashid@tribune.com.pk
In 1914, Alfred Joyce Kilmer wrote a poem titled Trees: I think that I shall never see/ A poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prest/ Against the earth’s sweet-flowing breast; A tree that looks at God all day,/ And lifts her leafy arms to pray; A tree that may in summer wear/ A nest of robins in her hair; Upon whose bosom snow has lain;/ Who intimately lives with rain. Poems are made by fools like me,/ But only God can make a tree.

But we in Pakistan think that is hogwash. The Express Tribune issue of May 9 carried a news item about the cutting down of seven trees in Jinnah Supermarket, Islamabad. It detailed that the builder of a new plaza did not agree with the ugly view (as reported) that these 40-year-old trees presented to the plaza. I ask you! We are told that the Capital Development Authority only acted after the trees were destroyed to suspend the official concerned and impose a fine of Rs50,000 per tree.

There are two things about trees and us. For one, we do not know our indigenous species. And that may be because all of us have come from Arabia, Turkey, Iran or Central Asia. We first blighted this land with eucalyptus to such an extent that so-called educated people do not know that it is an alien from Australia. Now we are disfiguring it with cornucorpus, rubber tree, asoka and whatever else we can import from any old place.

The other thing is that we simply lack the acumen to see the connection between trees and ecology. So where we should be planting indigenous banyan, pipal and neem trees — to name only a few — we have diseased the land with useless species that give neither shade nor fruit nor sanctuary to our fast dwindling avian friends. Mind you, once the song of the birds is gone; we will die from a loneliness of the soul.

But the lout in Islamabad is no exception. About 18 years ago, a house was built in K Block, Model Town, Lahore. It being a corner
plot, there were eight magnificent biri patti trees along the boundary. All were chopped down. As the process was afoot, I paused to take up the issue with the perpetrators. They — simple workers — said the owner wanted his house to be seen from outside. Of course, who wouldn’t when they have a façade of bathroom tiles! Even today, a couple of stumps still remind me of once beautiful spreading trees.

In 2003 or thereabouts, a new road connected Thokar Niaz Beg with WAPDA Town. It swung past a clump of three handsome pipal trees about opposite the electric grid station in Johar Town. Then it was a single two-way road. In 2004, its second track was planned. I hurried to photograph the pipal trees because I knew they figured nowhere in the grand scheme of the morons who rule our miserable lives. Sure enough, the trees, those magnificent heroes who purified the air we breathed and who sequestered the carbon that we madly generated so that this world could still be liveable for us, were brutally cut down. There was no question of anyone even considering giving the road a little swing to one side in order to let the trees live. They disappeared from sight and memory. Today, they exist only in a set of 35mm transparencies in my collection.

Come with me to my ancestral village Uggi. On the highroad to it from Jalandhar city, amid carefully tended fields of whatever may be in season, the road suddenly divides in two. There in the middle of it stands a lovely pipal tree. I joked with my kinsman Bakhshish Singh who was driving me home to Uggi: “Cut it down, you fool. It has no business in the middle of a road”.

An aghast Bakhshish stopped the car. He turned around to look me straight in the eye. “Never ever must you talk of destroying a tree,” he said. “Here we value trees more than we value human life. They are our truest friends who only do us good; and they ask for no recompense.”

So what really went wrong with us?

Published in The Express Tribune, May 19th, 2012.

 http://tribune.com.pk/story/380935/trees-and-us/

Xinhua / ZUMAPRESS.com

A chorus of wailing muezzins and rattling windowpanes awoke residents of Yemen’s capital Sana’a on Friday as a sortie of government fighter jets dipped over mountains to the north and screamed across the city. The country is now seeing the largest military offensive in its history — the battle to uproot al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). And America is intimately involved in this war, providing arms, training and intelligence to Yemen’s armed forces as it pursues this fierce new war in the Middle East. The Pentagon believes AQAP may have established the most dangerous base of operations in the Arab world.

A plot last month by the group to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner — the third attempt in as many years — was scotched by a CIA undercover agent masquerading as a suicide bomber. The incident proved incentive enough for Yemen to ratchet up its 10-year fight against jihadism supported by the United States.

Yemen had slipped off the radar since last year when mass protests, mutinying generals and looming international sanctions helped unseat the country’s strongman, Ali Abdullah Saleh, after 33-years in power. Though a political transition is underway, the country remains on a knife-edge. Shi’a rebels, southern separatists, and a famine brought on by a crippled economy are all sapping Yemen’s efforts to build a new political order. But it is a group of al-Qaeda fighters in the south, who have driven out government forces and set up “Jihadi emirates” — mini Islamic fiefdoms — who now pose the gravest threat to the country.

Sweeping east from the southern port city of Aden and backed by heavy artillery and warplanes, thousands of Yemeni soldiers using tanks and Katusha rockets are trying to dislodge al-Qaeda from their lairs and strongholds in the mountains of Abyan province. Hunkered down amongst residents of local towns and villages the militants are using Duskas (Soviet-era heavy machine guns) and artillery they seized in forays on army outposts to stave off the army’s advance. “They [al-Qaeda] are fighting a guerrilla war. Hiding amongst civilians… fighting us tooth and nail with our own weapons,” says Brigadier General Mohammed al-Sawmli, whose Brigade 25 was pinned down for months by the Islamic militants last year after Yemeni security forces abandoned Abyan. “Every time we seize new ground they try to take it back. They prefer dawn raids so our men are getting little sleep, but God willing we will prevail.”

With Sana’a busy trumpeting the military’s advances on the evening news it is ordinary Yemeni citizens, not soldiers, who appear to be turning the tide against the jihadists. Residents of Lawder, a strategic town nestled among Abyan’s rugged mountains and a scene of much of last week’s fighting, have organized themselves into civilian groups known as “popular committees.” Using arms left behind by deserting army brigades, the committees have held off daily assaults on the city by al-Qaeda for months.
Ali Eidha, spokesman for a committee called ‘the sons of Lawder,’ said his tribesmen, fighting alongside the army, were pushing al-Qaeda back. “Yesterday we took back Jabal Yasouf,” he says over the phone, referring to a strategic mountain above Lawder that controls access to other al-Qaeda held towns in Abyan. “After the dawn prayer warplanes began bombing their positions from the sky, then we ascended up the mountain, arresting and driving al-Qaeda off the hillside. Afterwards we lit fires on the hilltops in celebration.” Eidha said his men had found the corpses of 12 Yemeni soldiers in a ditch on the mountaintop; their heads and hands missing. “They call themselves Muslims but they are barbarians,” says Eidha. “They do not understand mercy.”

Since assuming the presidency in February, Abd Rabu Monsur Hadi, Saleh’s former deputy, a renowned political lightweight, has bucked expectations — shaking up the military and purging Saleh’s loyalists from key posts in an effort to break up webs of patronage and cronyism still controlled by his predecessor. Whereas Saleh’s relationship with Washington blew hot and cold — strained by suspicions that he was encouraging al-Qaeda to extract more funds from Washington, Hadi — who has bullish pledges of support for the U.S. and has made belligerent threats against the terror group — has taken on the image of an incensed warlord. “The pursuit of terrorists is irreversible,” Hadi told Washington’s chief counter-terrorism czar, John Brennan, in a meeting in Sana’a this week. Brennan, a military strategist who is America’s chief liaison with Yemen, responded with a verbal pat on the back: “You are making historical decisions during these critical times in modern day Yemen.”

Nevertheless, while Hadi may wish to ensure the continued flow of billions of U.S. dollars to his near-empty government coffers, his rapport with the Americans is making him vulnerable to domestic political sniping. On Thursday al-Qaeda released a video portraying Hadi as a stooge of Saleh and an “agent” of the United States. “The corrupt [Yemeni] forces have agreed to fight the Mujahideen under the American flag and with Saudi funding,” said al-Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahri in the video. “The country should be cleansed from corrupt politicians who suck the people’s blood like vampires … and move towards building a Muslim Yemen governed by God’s law.” A web banner linking to the video uses graphics to dress up Yemen’s new president in an Uncle Sam suit.

Zawahiri’s rhetoric can usually be dismissed as extremist ramblings. However, U.S. policy in Yemen is indeed breeding widespread anti-American sentiment. An expansion of U.S. drone attacks in Yemen, endorsed by the Obama administration last month, has whipped up discontent among a population that views American influence as an encroachment on sovereignty. Many Yemenis see Gerald Feierstein, the U.S. ambassador, as the public face of a cruel military campaign that all too often misses its targets. In December 2009, a U.S. cruise missile crashed into a caravan of tents in the rural south, killing dozens, among them 14 women and 21 children.

“Further civilian casualties from airstrikes, whether inflicted by the U.S. or not strengthen the logic and appeal of al-Qaeda,” says Farid Al- Zahar, a politics professor from Aden University. “Every time an airstrike kills a civilian al-Qaeda can point and say, ‘look, your government not only neglects you, it allows Americans to kill your people. What kind of government is that? Is it a government you want to work with or a government you want to fight and destroy?”
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2115206,00.html

As China prepares for its leadership transition later this year, Beijing has faced an unusual number of high-profile political incidents of late, from the fall of Bo Xilai to Chen Guangcheng’s appeal for U.S. assistance.

In a Q&A, Douglas Paal explains that these incidents may help shift the balance of power within China’s leadership to give a larger voice to proponents of reform, but it’s too early to tell. And despite Washington’s role in both incidents, U.S.-China relations have not been affected thus far. The two countries are engaged in a high-level dialogue to minimize incidents during this politically sensitive year.

■Is the situation with Chen Guangcheng damaging the Communist Party’s reputation?
■Will Washington’s role in Chen Guangcheng’s departure damage U.S.-China relations?
■What is the significance of the Bo Xilai saga?
■Does the news coming out of Bo Xilai’s fall tell us anything about the stability of China’s political establishment?
■How will Washington and Beijing manage relations in this year of transition?
■Has internet activism reduced the central government’s control?
■Is there a possibility of reform in China?
Is the situation with Chen Guangcheng damaging the Communist Party’s reputation?
 
Douglas H. Paal
Vice President for Studies
More from Paal…
Relations with China Pass Stress Test
North Korea: The Mouse that Roared
North Korea: Land of Lousy Options, Again
SubscribeChina had the potential in seeing whatever positive things it’s trying to do with its soft-power initiatives damaged by this incident. Beijing efforts include creating things like Confucius institutes on campuses around the world and trying to put a softer image forward.

This would have been significantly damaged if they had used harsh methods to demand the return of Chen, imprison him, or continue to do tough things to his family. But they chose a mixed bag: China’s security forces are what they are and they are doing things that are not very nice, but the public image of China, where the foreign ministry and leadership were involved, was to try and accommodate Chen. They tried to treat him, since he was not being charged with any crimes in China, as an ordinary citizen and allow him to go freely to the hospital and to go study abroad.
 

Will Washington’s role in Chen Guangcheng’s departure damage U.S.-China relations?
So far it has not had a negative effect. The two countries had a rather productive Strategic and Economic Dialogue in the immediate aftermath of this affair.

In the longer term, it’s harder to tell, because in this short space of a few months we’ve had two American diplomatic institutions involved in things which are, from the Chinese point of view, domestic politics. And some of the things that were done at the American embassy are questionable—even though they were done in the spirit of trying to help someone and were humanitarian and understandable efforts—because in international behavior sometimes there is a price to pay if you violate the rules. China thus far has not, to my knowledge, imposed a price on the U.S. embassy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there are those in the Chinese system who are sharpening their knives to go at this.

In the aftermath of the Bo Xilai fall from power in Chongqing Province, we had a situation where the United States was involved in a very consequential matter in Chinese high politics. And then this Chen Guangcheng affair, the U.S. embassy got involved in a matter that was more low politics but high tension in the Chinese leadership.

So I can see how people who are losing in recent battles might want to pick up an American stick and beat their opponents with it. It’s not happening now—all of the evidence is running the other way. But China often doesn’t show you what’s really going on until sometime later.
 

What is the significance of the Bo Xilai saga?
Bo Xilai, when he was party secretary of Chongqing, pursued policies that were out of step with the Chinese leadership. And one thing China likes is to have people be in step, not out of step. Some of his solutions—and they were very expensive solutions—to social inequality and promoting growth in his province, were controversial, to say the least. And his harkening back to Cultural Revolution themes stirred patriotism in some cases but in other cases it stirred deep fears about returning to bad old days. He was pushing a kind of American-style political campaign to insert himself in the top leadership.

As I said, they like to stay in step and don’t like people to march to a different drummer. And he gave them the opportunity through his reported misdeeds to push him out.

But pushing him out affects the complicated balance of interest groups within the Chinese leadership, which thus far had sort of stabilized, in a newly institutionalized way. It’s both highly personal and highly institutionalized around several former and current leaders. And that balance has been upset.
 

Does the news coming out of Bo Xilai’s fall tell us anything about the stability of China’s political establishment?
I think it could. A lot of outside investors on the economy would be concerned if they saw the system, which seemed to be more institutionalized over the last fifteen years, start to lose that institutional quality and therefore become more unpredictable. That may be why the Chinese have in the last couple of weeks been extraordinarily pliant and pragmatic in dealing with things that have been very neuralgic for them to deal with in the past, from Taiwan arms sales, to dissidents, to involvement in their internal politics.

They may be so concerned not to show the outside world or their own people their differences that they’re accommodating us in the short term. If that’s true, then it’s going to be very hard to keep this volcano from blowing up at some point. That could very well happen as it did in 1989 when the streets filled in several cities in China with millions of protesters. Leaders know that so they don’t want to send a signal that there’s a division that people can exploit.
 

How will Washington and Beijing manage relations in this year of transition?
The United States and China have been in discussions since late 2010 about how to handle relations in this very politically sensitive year, both in the United States and in China. And they’ve been giving each other reassurances at the top levels: the national security adviser calls his counterpart, the secretary of state calls her counterpart, and they stay in touch. The leaders, Hu Jintao and Barack Obama, have met quite a few times—eleven times I believe. So they’ve been able to reassure each other that they are within the boundaries and they will try to maintain the relationship. We’ll keep the politics, which exist on each side, from breaching the jetties on the side of the stream.

Obama has talked about Chinese trade practices and currency practices very publically, but he hasn’t carried it into a campaign against China. And China raises its concerns for the purposes of discussing them with their own people, but they haven’t let this reach the banks.

On the Chen Guangcheng case, the good news is that the man had no charges against him. If he had charges against him, this might have been harder for the Chinese government to solve. This gave them a platform from which to say, okay, we can do business in a normal way over this Chinese citizen.
 

Has internet activism reduced the central government’s control?
The new media in China are fantastically efficient. There are over 300 million—I think closer to 500 million—internet users in China now. And a lot of them get on these microblogs and talk about issues that are sensitive, and when the Great Wall of Censorship is imposed on them so they can’t mention specific names, towns, or actions, they find homonyms and workarounds so that people are communicating constantly about issues that were unthinkably sensitive just a few years ago. The Chinese government now has to be more responsive to what it sees as public opinion by observing internet traffic, and the proliferation of ordinary television, radio, and print media.

And these places are all searching for market share and therefore tend to run to the extreme in telling their stories, and that puts even more pressure on the officials to show backbone against the Americans, for example, or to be exposed for putting unnecessary pressure on some people, like Chen Guangcheng who was being brutalized by local authorities without apparent authority from the center.
 

Is there a possibility of reform in China?
Reform has stopped. Both political and economic/financial reforms have been stopped for some time now, and in some respects are going backward. They have to get financial and economic reform underway. In the long-run they have to get political reform going as well, although they can probably get away with postponing that a little longer.

But public taste for change is coming—they are demanding it. With the Bo Xilai affair, there’s a possibility there’s been a shift in the momentum of the reformers, who had been trying to push reform but have been unable to achieve consensus in the Politburo standing committee where the top nine leaders meet. It’s possible now that if it goes to seven leaders, it might be a more reform-minded group that would restart some of the stalled economic and financial reforms, and we can always hope that they’ll try to begin the gradual introduction of political reforms as well.

But that’s still an unanswered question, we don’t know whether that’s going to happen or not. 

http://www.carnegieendowment.org/2012/05/16/china-s-political-turmoil/as4p

ISLAMABAD – The fate of Dr Shakeel Afridi, the Pakistani physician who helped the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) track down and kill al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, hangs in the balance a year after his arrest by Pakistani security agencies on a charge of carrying out a fake vaccination campaign in Abbottabad to obtain DNA samples of Bin Laden’s family members.

In the early hours of May 2, 2011, a joint military force led by US Navy SEALS attacked a compound in Abbottabad in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province 50 kilometers northeast of the capital Islamabad and killed Bin Laden. He had evaded detection for 10 years after fleeing from Afghanistan in late 2001 at the height of the US-led invasion to oust the Taliban regime.

Afridi, who is under arrest for treason, has already confessed to

Dilbert 

having conducted a fake polio vaccination drive in the Bilal Town area of Abbottabad between March 15-18 and April 21-23, 2011, to get DNA samples of the residents of the compound where Osama was thought to be hiding.

Afridi further confessed to having assisted the CIA in the final confirmation of Bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideout by speaking on the phone to the supposed owner of the compound, Arshad Khan alias Sheikh Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who was the most trusted courier for the slain al-Qaeda chief.

Using satellite photos and voice recordings, the CIA had sought to identify the inhabitants of the fortified compound. Samples of Kuwaiti’s voice, which were taken by Afridi, provided the final confirmation to the CIA that the man seen by their drones inside the compound was none other than Bin Laden.

Kuwaiti, a Kuwait-born Pakistani al-Qaeda member, was also killed in the SEAL raid.

Afridi has reportedly told his Pakistani interrogators that he was introduced to the CIA by the United Kingdom-based humanitarian organization Save the Children, an internationally acclaimed non-governmental organization that promotes children’s rights and helps support children in developing countries.

Save the Children has refuted Afridi’s claim, saying the allegation has had a negative impact on its ability to operate inside Pakistan.

United States Defense Secretary Leon Panetta confirmed in January that Afridi had been working for the Americans and had provided information to the CIA about the al-Qaeda chief.

Afridi disappeared soon after Osama was killed and his body dumped from a helicopter into the sea, but he was arrested by Pakistani security agencies from the Torkham border on May 22 while trying to cross into Afghanistan, 20 days after Bin Laden’s death.

A high-level judicial commission set up by the Pakistan government to probe the May 2 raid subsequently declared Afridi a “national criminal” and recommended to the government to try him on treason charges. These carry the death penalty.

Led by Justice Javed Iqbal of the Supreme Court, the four-member commission was constituted by the government in light of a resolution passed unanimously by a joint session of parliament on May 13, 2011. The commission was tasked with probing the covert American raid in which Bin Laden was shot dead along with his son and two aides.

Appearing before the commission, Afridi confessed to having set up a fake polio vaccination campaign to track down Bin Laden. The commission then directed the government not to hand over Afridi to the United States and to proceed against him on treason charges.

Afridi, in his late forties and the father of three children, is learnt to have informed his interrogators that he once treated wounded Taliban leaders, including the amir of the Khyber Agency-based Lashkar-e-Islami (LeI), commander Mangal Bagh.

What turned him against the Taliban was his 2007 abduction by the henchmen of Mangal Bagh, who thrashed him for charging huge fees from some of the wounded militants. Afridi was kept by the LeI militants for several weeks and released after his family paid a heavy ransom. Since his wife, Imrana Ghafoor (who was headmistress at a government-run girls’ high school) was an American national, Afridi left for the United States along with his family in 2008.

Afridi returned to Pakistan a few months later, but his family stayed in the US. During 2009-2010, Afridi met with American officials in Islamabad and Peshawar many times and agreed to become a CIA mole. The Americans reportedly asked him to spy for them in the Mansehra, Hassan Abdal and Kamrah areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa under cover of an anti-polio campaign.

In the beginning of 2011, Afridi managed to collect blood samples from Bin Laden’s compound. On April 28, these samples were reportedly matched through DNA tests from an American laboratory in Washington. Four days later, on May 2, the special forces conducted their clandestine raid.

Afridi’s continued presence in Pakistani custody has clearly become a thorn in the already tense Pakistan-US relationship. Pakistan has turned down two separate requests made by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, seeking freedom for the doctor and his extradition to the US.

While their “requests” were clearly aimed at exerting pressure on Pakistan to release Afridi, well-informed sources in the Pakistani security establishment have ruled out any such possibility, saying Afridi will be tried in accordance with the directives of the judicial commission.

Following Pakistan’s refusal, a group of US congressmen went to the extent of introducing legislation in the House of Representatives in February, seeking American citizenship for Afridi in recognition of his services.

“I have introduced legislation to grant American citizenship to Dr Shakeel Afridi, the Pakistan doctor who risked his life to identify Bin Laden and help the US military forces bring him to justice. If convicted, he could be executed,” said Dana Rohrabacher. “My bill would grant him US citizenship and send a direct and powerful message to those in the Pakistan government and military who protected the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks for all those years and who are now seeking retribution on those who helped to execute bin Laden.”

As if seeking American citizenship for the detained physician was not enough to tease Pakistan’s security establishment, Rohrabacher announced on February 14 that he would introduce legislation in congress seeking a Congressional Gold Medal for Afridi.

In a statement from his Washington office, Rohrabacher, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs sub-committee on Oversight and Investigation, said, “Dr Shakeel Afridi’s acts to help the US were extremely valiant and daring. All Americans owe him our most sincere gratitude for helping to execute the terrorist who murdered thousands of innocent Americans. Awarding Dr Afridi a Congressional Gold Medal is a great honor befitting a hero who took such great risks to help the United States achieve a major victory.”

In a press release issued by Rohrabacher’s office on March 1, he asked President Barack Obama to “personally intercede” in the case of Afridi in view of media reports that the Pakistan government had seized all his immovable assets.

“The Pakistani leaders continue to show the United States that they are a hardcore, two-faced enemy not worthy of the $2.2 billion in foreign assistance the Obama administration plans to give them next year. After Bin Laden murdered 3,000 people in New York City, the Pakistani government protected him for years and now they want to punish the man who helped reveal where he was living.”

Nevertheless, Pakistani security agencies continue to interrogate Afridi in a bid to ascertain how the CIA recruited him and several other civilians who have been under interrogation since the Abbottabad raid. This would help them unearth the recruitment network of the Americans in Pakistan.

As things stand, it is not yet clear whether the doctor will be tried under Article 6 of the constitution (on treason charges) or whether he will be prosecuted for indulging in espionage activities for a foreign intelligence agency.

In reaction to the frequent demands being made by US government officials and parliamentarians for the release of Afridi, the Pakistani Foreign Office has maintained that the doctor is being dealt with according to the country’s laws and Pakistan expects other countries, especially the United States, to respect its legal process by refraining from making baseless insinuations and drawing premature conclusions.

Amir Mir is a senior Pakistani journalist and the author of several books on the subject of militant Islam and terrorism, the latest being The Bhutto murder trail: From Waziristan to GHQ.

(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/NE18Df02.html

Islamic fundamentalism and postmodernism are ‘remarkably close in their critique of capitalism, although neither reject capitalism altogether or envisions socialism as a viable alternative. The only difference between them, perhaps, is that postmodernism offers no alternative to capitalism, while the fundamentalists serve up a more primitive capitalism in an Islamic wrap’
In Afghanistan where we have been consigned to the stone age, middle-class students returning from the US/UK universities as Fulbright and Chevening scholars want us to believe that we are living in a post-modern world.

For my studies and work, I have been frequently visiting or staying in Europe and the USA for extended periods for the last ten years. Attacks on welfare system and the burgeoning economic crisis—biggest since 1929’s Great Depression, according to various accounts—are likely to consign Europe and the USA to a pre-modern era too. At least Greece is already knocking on the door of 19th century.

However, postmodernist professors entrenched at metropolitan campuses go on telling their students [including Fulbrighters from periphery] that we are living in a new historical epoch, since the 1970 [1], marked by cultural changes (‘postmodernism’) and economic transformations (‘late capitalism’).

Asked what are these cultural ‘changes’ and what is really latest about capitalism? one gets no explanation. Only complex descriptions are offered, descriptions loaded with catch phrases like ‘new technologies’, ICTs [Information and Communication Technologies], the Internet, the “information highway”!

Along the course, one also comes across contemptuous disregard for terms like Enlightenment, Marxism, and Imperialism while phrases like identity, local, and global [even glocal] are highly emphasized. But what postmodernity/postmodernism really is? Nobody exactly knows. It remains vague. Even postmodernists don’t exactly know themselves. [Still they are always quick to accuse their rivals of ignorance.] Hence, the definitions offered even by postmodernist prophets like Lyotard and Jencks are mutually conflicting (Callinicos1989:2).

However, to approach postmodernism in a bid to understand it [an impossibility, anyhow], one may approach it via postmodernists. Or one can attempt to disentangle the postmodernist enigma through its left-wing interpreters. I will attempt both ways.

Disentangling postmodernism:

According to Marxist theorists like Fredric Jameson and David Harvey, modernity and postmodernity represent two phases of capitalism. The shift from one to the other has not been a shift from capitalism to some postcapitalist [or ‘postindustrial’] era while the basic logic of capitalist accumulation [exploitation] still applies. But there have nevertheless been drastic changes in the nature of capitalism. For Jameson, postmodernity corresponds to ‘late capitalism’ characterized by ‘informational,’ and ‘consumerist’ phase of capitalism. David Harvey describes it as a transition from Fordism [2] to flexible accumulation.

Postmodernity then corresponds to a phase of capitalism where mass production of standardized goods, and the forms of labor associated with it, have been replaced by flexibility: new forms of production – ‘lean production’, the ‘team concept’, ‘just-in-time’ production; a ‘flexible’ labor force, mobile capital, and so on, all made possible by new informational technologies (Harvey 1989, Jameson 1991). In other words, knowledge has replaced old-style proletarian labour.

Corresponding to these shifts, according to these theories, there have been major cultural changes. One important way of explaining these changes, notably in Harvey’s account of postmodernity, has to do with a ‘time-space compression’, the acceleration of time and the contraction of space made possible by new technologies, in new forms of telecommunication, in fast new methods of production and marketing, new patterns of consumption, new modes of financial organization. The result has been a new cultural and intellectual configuration summed up in the formula ‘postmodernism’, which is said to have replaced the culture of modernism and the intellectual patterns associated with the ‘project of modernity’ (Wood 1998: 27-29).

The project of modernity, according to these accounts, had its origins in the Enlightenment [which represents rationalism, techno centrism, the standardization of knowledge and production, a belief in linear progress, and in universal, absolute truths]. Post-modernism is supposed to be a reaction to the project of modernity. Postmodernity sees the world as essentially fragmented and indeterminate, rejects any ‘totalizing” discourses, any so-called ‘metanarratives’, comprehensive and universalistic theories about the world and history. It also rejects any universalistic political projects, even universalistic emancipator projects – in other words, projects for a general ‘human emancipation’ rather than very particular struggles against very diverse and particular oppression (Ibid).

If one goes by postmodernist explanations, postmodernity represents a convergence of three cultural trends. These are:

Changes in arts: these changes are marked by in architecture, novel writing, painting etc.
Poststructuralism: that reality has a fragmentary, heterogeneous and plural character and it denies human thought the ability to arrive at any objective account of that reality and the bearer of this thought [the subject i.e. human being] is reduced to an incoherent welter of sub- and transindividual drives and desires [3].
Cultural activism: Art and philosophy reflect changes in the social world (Callinicos 1989: 2-3).
In other words, postmodernism is bit of everything as long as it remains absurd and serves the status co. It can even incorporate elements of radicalism. Therefore, it was able to attract such a huge following at the metropolitan campuses. As often is the case, metropolitan knowledge is recycled to periphery. Hence, one finds Foucault in fashion even at Kabul’s American University, Delhi’s’ JNU [4] and Lahore’s LUMS [5] [I am relying here on some personal experiences]. But what explains the meteoric rise of this mumbo-jumbo intellectual movement?

One explanation is the crisis of the left in the 1980s that coincided with the rise of postmodernism and its cousins like postcolonialism and post-Marxism. Another reason is the postmodernist dictatorship: dissidents are denied jobs at faculties dominated by postmodernists. Even importantly, postmodernism synchronized with the mystification unleashed by globalization. Terry Eagleton, however, thinks, ‘A comprehensive assessment of postmodernism and its impact on culture is
presented. Postmodernism should not be viewed as a reaction to the defeat of Communism–it is a response to the “success” of capitalism’ (Eagleton 1995: 59).

Postmodernism’s rise:

Exemplified by Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, post-structuralism came into vogue in the wake of 1968 events (Wheen 2004:83). According to Terry Eagleton, ‘Post-structuralism was a product of that blend of euphoria and disillusionment, liberation and dissipation, carnival and catastrophe, which was 1968’. He goes on, ‘Unable to break the structures of state power, post structuralism found it possible instead to subvert the structures of language…Its enemies, as for the later Barthes, became coherent belief systems of any kind…in particular all forms of political theory and organisation which sought to analyse, and act upon, the structures of society as a whole. For it was precisely such politics which seemed to have failed’ (qtd in Wheen 2004:84). It included Marxism too.

Lyotard, in fact, was member of a quasi-Trotskyist Socialisme ou Barbarie group (Callinicos 1989: 3). Other postmodernist French prophets were also enthusiastic about 1968 before embracing post-structuralist consensus that developed in the 1970s.

This post-structuralist/postmodernist analysis had political implications as it rejected the objective of socialist revolution. The abandonment of Marxism by 1968’s disillusioned Parisian children ‘accorded well with the trend of opinion among many left-wing intellectuals in the English-speaking world. Thus the arguments of two leading ‘Post-Marxists’, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, that socialists should abandon ‘classism’, the classical Marxist stress upon the class struggle as the driving force of history and of the working class as the agency of socialist change’ (Ibid: 4) became a dominant discourse in the 1980s.

By the end of 1980s, postmodernists and their ‘post-ist’ cousins had established a hegemony at elite US universities. According to Francis Wheen, ‘They dominated the powerful American Modern Language Association, whose conferences were attended by up to 10,000 academic critics. They controlled the recruitment of lecturers in many universities, a power…displayed a few years earlier by the crusty conservatives of Cambridge [6]. This time, however, the victims were those who could not recite from the post-modern shibboleths…The Vatican of this new creed was Yale University, where the three ‘boa-deconstructors’ Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller reigned jointly as pontificating pontiffs, but the papal jurisdiction extended far beyond their own department of comparative literature’ (Wheen 2004: 81).One of the holy missions these pontiffs and their devotees have been engaged in, is their ‘war on truth’ that like ‘war on terror’ has no end.

Postmodernist ‘war on truth’:

‘The truth never dies, but is made to live as a beggar,’ goes the Yiddish proverb. Quoting this Yiddish saying, Sanbonmatsu reminds us that truth has always suffered in this world: ‘But no intellectual movement of recent memory has so beggared the truth as poststructuralism has. With the postmodernist turn in theory, truth became a dirty word’ (Sanbonmatsu 2006:196).

Truth sustained, initially, major post-structuralist blow when Foucault first time boldly put truth in scare quotes in the late 1970s. “Truth”, he declared, ‘is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements…. “Truth” is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produces and sustains it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it’ (Foucault 1980: 133).

According to Sanbonmatsu, “No longer would ‘the true’ be understood, as it had for a millennia, as that which is ‘in accordance with fact or reality’. From now on, for a growing and influential sector of the intelligentsia, the true would be posed as a problem to be solved. The prerogative of truth was thus transformed from a right of the oppressed into an object of study for the technical or academic expert. Only the qualified ‘specific intellectual’ or ‘genealogist’ could speak meaningfully of truth – or rather, could investigate the conditions of the possibility of truth” (Sanbonmatsu 2006:196).

‘Students taking courses in literature, film, “cultural studies”, and even, in some cases, anthropology and political science, were taught that the world is just a socially constructed “text” about which you can say just about anything you want, provided you say it murkily enough,’ says Barbara Ehrenreich, a left-wing American author. ‘One day my own children , whose college education cost about $25,000 a year, reported that in some classes, you could be marked down for using the word “reality” without the quotation marks,’ she laments.

As a media student at the SOAS, London, I was horrified to learn that the ownership and control of media do not matter since audiences are not passive [a theme constantly ramrodded down students throats], the audiences ‘decode’ the message the way they like. An enthusiastic theorist propagating this absurdity is Stuart Hall, once an editor at the New Left Review.

Embracing Islamic fundamentalism:

In their best-selling Empire, American scholar Michael Hard and his Italian counterpart Antonio Negri claim: ‘Contemporary Islamic radicalisms are indeed primarily based on “original thought” and the invention of original values and practices, which perhaps echo those of other periods of revivalism or fundamentalism but are really directed in reaction to the present social order. In both cases, then, the fundamentalists “return to tradition” is really a new invention. The anti-modern thrust that defines fundamentalisms might be better understood, then, not as a premodern but as a postmodern project” (Hard and Negri 2000:148-149). Both these Halfbright Scholars deserve a three-month research scholarship to Taliban Emirate in Exile of Waziristan!

However, Hard and Negri are not that wrong either.

‘Ironically, many arguments used by fundamentalists against the hegemony of the West for pushing forth ‘authentic’, indigenous traditions are shared by the postmodernist perspective,’ Moghissi points out (1999:73). Akbar Ahmed also argues that fundamentalism, like postmodernism, is an attempt to resolve how to live in a world of radical doubt (Ahmed 1992). Hence, both suspect Enlightenment, both favor premodern institutions and practices, both draw strength by playing with [and in the case of fundamentalism, manipulating] language and text (Moghissi 1999:74)

Other similarities between postmodernists and fundamentalists include their rejection of the West, their enthusiastic appreciation of anything non-Western, their localism, their opposition to secularism, and, as Turner argues, their preference for ‘ the authenticity of tradition’ as compared with ‘inherited, imported or alien knowledge’ (Turner 1994:7).

Hence, Moghissi points out, ‘the disenchantment of both positions with modern science and scientific achievements, as pillars of modernity, notwithstanding the willingness to use everything that science and scientific knowledge have to offer’. Similarly, both are ‘remarkably close in their critique of capitalism, although neither reject capitalism altogether or envisions socialism as a viable alternative. The only difference between them, perhaps, is that postmodernism offers no alternative to capitalism, while the fundamentalists serve up a more primitive capitalism in an Islamic wrap as an alternative to the West’s notion of modernity. Fundamentalism and postmodernism also unite in their rejection of the excessive consumerism of the West (Moghissi 1999:75).It is not a coincidence that Michel Foucault was fascinated by the Ayotollahs’ bloody mess in Iran! [7]

Bibliography:

Ahmed, A (1992) Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise. Routledge: London.

Callinicos, A (1989) Against Postmodernism. London: Polity.

Foucault, M (1980) Truth and Power. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon.

Moghissi, H (1999) Feminism and Islamic Feminism: The Limits of post-modern analysis. Oxford University Press.

Hardt, M and Negri, A (2000) Empire. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

Harvey, D (1989) The condition of post-modernity. London: Basil Blackwell.

Jameson, F (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press.

Sanbonmatsu, J (2006) Postmodernism and the corruption of academic intelligentsia. In Panitch, L and Leys, C (eds) Socialist Register. New York: Monthly Review Press

Eagleton, T (1995) Where do postmodernists come from? Monthly Review. 47(3):59-70. July.

Turner, B (1994) Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globism. London: Routledge.

Wheen, F (2004) How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. London: Harper

Wood, E M (1998) Modernity, Postmodernity, or Capitalism?. In McChesney, R, Wood, E M, Foster, J B (eds) Capitalism and the Information Age. New York: Monthly Review Press. pp 27-49

Notes:

[1]David Harvey has been pretty precise. He says postmodernist era dawned in 1972!

[2]According to Wikipedia: ‘Fordism, named after Henry Ford, is a modern economic and social system based on industrial mass production. The concept is used in various social theories about production and related socio-economic phenomena. It has varying but related meanings in different fields, as well as for Marxist and non-Marxist scholars. In a Fordist system the worker is paid relatively high wages in order to buy in large quantity the products turned out in mass production’.

[3]Sanbonmatsu claims, ’Postmodernism began as a separate – initially aesthetic – current from poststructuralism, but the two did converge: the poststructuralist critique of humanism, subjectivity, and foudationalism became indistinguishable from a general rejection of modernity and modern institutions (hence; post-modernism’ a philosophical outlook) (Sanbonmatsu, J (2006) Postmodernism and the corruption of academic intelligentsia. In Panitch, L and Leys, C (eds) Socialist Register. New York: Monthly Review Press.p221).

[4]Jawarlal Nehru University.

[5]Lahore University of Management Sciences.

[6]Wheen is referring here to the Colin MacCabe Affair, a big academic scandal of the 1980s’ UK. MacCabe, a postmodernist was dismissed from his Cambridge job by the conservative bureaucracy. It provoked a postmodernist outrage.

[7]Foucault also expressed sympathy with extrajudicial and popular forms of justice (summary executions or mob killings by the people in revolutionary context.) See Foucault: ‘On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists’. In Foucault, M (1980) Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon.

 Sahar Saba is an Afghan women rights’ activist. For many years, she was spokesperson of Revolutionary Afghan Women Association (RAWA). Also, she has worked with RAWA for many years in refugee camps in Pakistan and in Afghanistan in different capacities. She has traveled to many countries in the past several years to speak on behalf of Afghan women. She was born in Kabul. Her family migrated to Pakistan where Sahar Saba became active with RAWA. She has a law degree from London University and writes on issues facing Afghan women.
 
http://www.viewpointonline.net/postmodernist-war-on-truth.html

Egypt’s post-revolutionary environment—and especially its constitutional process—has touched off debates within the country and confusion outside of it regarding the role of the Islamic sharia in the emerging legal and political order.

In a Q&A, Nathan J. Brown explains what the Islamic sharia is—and is not—and how it might be interpreted in Egypt’s new political system. In explaining the complexity of the Islamic sharia, Brown warns that one of the most striking features of the debate is the flexibility of key concepts and positions. Therefore it is far more important to understand who is to be entrusted with interpreting and applying sharia-based rules than it is to search for the precise meaning of the sharia.

■What is the Islamic sharia?
 
■How do Egyptians feel about the Islamic sharia?
 
■What is likely to be included in Egypt’s new constitution?
 
■What are the legal implications if Egypt enshrines the Islamic sharia into law?
 
■What is the Muslim Brotherhood’s position on the Islamic sharia?
 
■What does the Islamic sharia say about the rights of women?
 
■How would the Islamic sharia apply to non-Muslim Egyptians?
 
■What should the West watch for in Egypt?
 
What is the Islamic sharia?
The term “Islamic sharia” has subtly different denotations and sharply different connotations in Egypt than it often does in the United States or Europe. There is a reason many scholars insist that defining it as “Islamic law” (as it is often described in non-Muslim countries) is sometimes overly narrow. Sharia includes large areas of personal conduct not generally covered by legal rules in many societies (such as the regulation of prayer or ritual purity). Not only does it blend private practice, ethics, and public law, but it also includes categories such as detestable (but not prohibited) or preferred (but not required) that make ethical but little legal sense. A vaguer but more accurate translation might be “the Islamic way of doing things.”

And that is the definition accepted by many who follow sharia. Such a translation makes clear why the Islamic sharia is hard to oppose. It is one thing to question hudud punishments (for serious crimes) by claiming to wish to follow the spirit but not the letter of traditional understandings. It is something quite different to proclaim that one prefers to do things in a non-Islamic manner or that Islamic teachings have no relevance in public life. It would be as unexpected as U.S. politicians claiming they prefer the “un-American way.” Public opinion polls on the subject provoke the same response among the broader society.

Of course, the Islamic sharia is not merely the equivalent of a flag pin for a politician’s lapel; it has enormous practical and not simply symbolic content. But observers should not expect many calls to abandon the Islamic sharia in Egyptian political debates.

There is another terminological oddity that can shed some light on the connotations of the Islamic sharia: following Egyptian usage, I have been referring to “Islamic sharia,” a phrase that seems almost comically redundant in English, like referring to a “Jewish rabbi.” A non-Islamic sharia might seem to be something like a “Protestant pope.” But Egyptians will sometimes refer to other religious communities as sharias. Muslims would still regard the Islamic sharia as superior—and indeed, as historically superseding those that came before—but they will sometimes refer to other religion’s sharias, especially regarding their provisions for personal status law (covering marriage, divorce, and inheritance). And since the Hebrew word for Jewish law is halachah (also meaning way) the idea of Jewish and, for that matter, various Christian sharias may strike some readers as odd but reflects occasional Arabic usage.

While the Islamic sharia sometimes means more than simply Islamic law, it certainly has extensive legal content. Exploration of its nature has led to over a millennium of intellectual inquiry. Business transactions, criminal punishments, inheritance, and legal procedures, among many other areas, have been the subject of scholarship by those who probed religious sources to discover the ways that a community of Muslims should operate. And the Islamic sharia also provides some guidance on how violations must be treated—by compensation, penalties, or the voiding of contracts, for instance. Because of this, referring to the Islamic sharia as law is not always misleading.

As with any intellectual tradition, opinions over the centuries have varied considerably about what God has required and what the earthly consequences are of violating a rule. For that reason, Muslims will sometimes take pains to distinguish between the Islamic sharia as unchanging divine guidance, and fiqh, or jurisprudence, as the fallible human effort to understand the content of that guidance. There is, in that sense, one sharia but many different interpretations. Nor is the diverse nature of fiqh seen as a problem; it is not uncommon to hear many Muslims today cite the multiplicity of interpretations in their legal heritage as a virtue, since it shows how attempts to discover and apply the Islamic sharia naturally evolve with prevailing conditions and community needs.

Ultimately, then, a call to apply or follow the Islamic sharia will have to confront the questions of which rules to apply from this rich tradition of legal and ethical speculation and—perhaps more critically—who has the authority to decide which interpretations are to be enforced. These are difficult issues, but there are surprising areas of convergence on them in Egyptian discussions. Such convergence sets the terms for debates but it hardly resolves them.

My answers are more of a guide to observers on what to watch for, rather than an attempt to advise Egyptians in any way on what choices to make or to advance some interpretations or approaches as preferable to others. After all, one of the most striking features of the debate is how flexible key concepts and positions are.
 

How do Egyptians feel about the Islamic sharia?
Debates about the Islamic sharia touch many areas, but perhaps the two most significant concern personal status and constitutional text.

The least controversial matter—but perhaps the most consequential one for Egyptians—involves the principle that the Islamic sharia should prevail in matters of personal status (covering marriage, divorce, and inheritance). This consensus within Egypt is a bit surprising since the term “personal status” itself, while widely used in Egypt today, does not derive from the Islamic legal tradition.

But this was the one area of law that has been continually informed by sharia-based rules, up to the present. It is thus for historical and not religious reasons that personal status has emerged as central to sharia debates. In purely religious terms, there is no reason to regard it as more important to ensure that a Muslim’s family relations are regulated in a manner pleasing to God than it is to enforce strictures regarding commercial transactions or criminal law.

Thus, even among Egyptians who feel no impulse to abandon the country’s current law for business transactions (largely French in origin), there is still little debate that when Muslims are born, marry, divorce, and die they should do so within a legal framework derived from the Islamic sharia. There are almost no calls for a civil law of personal status—one that applies to all regardless of religious affiliation.

But even if the laws of personal status are supposed to be rooted in the sharia, it is not clear what interpretation of sharia they should be based on. The task has fallen to the parliament—the current law of personal status in Egypt, even if it has been derived from Islamic sources, is still legislated by a popularly-elected body. And that is where most of the debate therefore takes place: what parts of the Islamic legal heritage should be codified through parliamentary legislation? And which interpretations are most appropriate for Egypt right now?

Personal status law affects every single Egyptian and is thus potentially the most significant area of law, but generally the debate over sharia’s role in the constitution is drawing far more attention. This is partly because for the last century, Arab constitutions have experienced what might be termed “Islamic inflation,” in which Islamic provisions have become more fulsome. Documents that were originally seen as merely arranging structures of government (and therefore made at most passing reference to Islam) came to be viewed instead as broad definitions of the purpose of political community, the nature of identity, and the character of public life. By 1980, the inflationary spiral had reached the point that Article 2 of the Egyptian constitution was amended to read that “the principles of the Islamic sharia are the main source of legislation.”

That text, as expansive as its prose, was attached to no clear implementing structures, so it was not clear at all what it meant when it was first adopted. It referred not specifically to the Islamic sharia but to its “principles,” a particularly ambiguous term. But the amendment led to a series of litigants—with one of the early challenges coming from al-Azhar University, the main Islamic center of learning, contesting the interest rate on a debt it had not paid to a contractor—challenging bits and pieces of the Egyptian legal order on the grounds that they violated the amended Article 2.

Over time, the country’s Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC), charged with measuring Egyptian laws against the constitution, worked out an approach to such cases, drawing on a century of modernist Islamic thought, led by a variety of religious scholars, intellectuals, and legal specialists, that centered around the question of how to understand the Islamic sharia in a manner appropriate for the needs of a modern society. The understanding developed by the SCC has seeped into current political debates and its terminology is cited across large parts of the political spectrum.

The SCC—and now many Egyptian intellectual and political figures—have come to see the Islamic sharia as relevant to modern law in two ways. First, the Islamic sharia is based on certain general goals or maqasid (such as the protection of life or religion), a concept derived from medieval jurisprudence to guide legal scholars in determining the law in difficult or ambiguous situations but now employed in a fairly expansive way by specialists and increasingly non-specialists (with some intellectuals, even those firmly in the Islamist camp, arguing that the maqasid have to be expanded still further beyond the older concepts to include additional goals like freedom).

Second, for all the diversity in the Islamic legal traditions, there are a small number of rulings or provisions which are not contested—so clearly founded in the sources and unambiguous in their meaning that they are not reasonably denied and therefore must be obeyed.
 

What is likely to be included in Egypt’s new constitution?
Probably something close to what was in the old one.

There is surprisingly widespread agreement in Egypt—albeit sometimes reluctantly among some non-Islamist forces—that something like the current Article 2 will appear in Egypt’s new constitution to be drafted this year. It was already copied directly from the abrogated 1971 constitution into the text of the currently governing but interim Constitutional Declaration of March 2011.

Indeed, it is striking how few changes have been suggested to the article. Occasionally a voice might meekly suggest that the word “the” (added in a 1979 amendment) be dropped so that the principles of the Islamic sharia become merely a source of legislation, rather than the source.

Some Salafis have deployed their newfound interest in constitutional texts by proposing that the word “rulings” (ahkam) be inserted so that it is not merely unspecified “principles” but the “rulings” of the Islamic sharia—a far more specific guideline—serve as the primary source of legislation.

That position has been rejected by the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Brotherhood has begun to muse about dropping the word “principles” so that the provision would read only that “the Islamic sharia is the main source,” an even more general phrasing than what exists currently. It has also offered the idea of incorporating language specifying that other religious communities should be governed by their own sharias in matters of personal status, a formula whose main effect might simply be to burden legal translators with the puzzling task of conveying the possibility of non-Islamic sharias. Such a clause would likely have minimal impact on the Egyptian legal order, since the personal status law for recognized religious communities is so deeply entrenched in Egyptian law and practice.

Thus, after considerable international handwringing and domestic mudslinging, something quite similar to the current language will likely be adopted. But unlike in 1980, when the wording was first adopted, there is now more consensus on the general terms of what that means, at least in theory.
 

What are the legal implications if Egypt enshrines the Islamic sharia into law?
That is far less clear. We need to first look at the maqasid of the sharia, which are widely accepted as binding under existing understandings of Article 2. Precisely what laws would thus be barred? The maqasid are not infinitely elastic, but they are so general that they could be stretched very far. Indeed, it would be difficult to put forth a non-controvertible invalidation of any legislative enactment primarily in terms of the maqasid.

But it would also be possible to use the maqasid to put forth a plausible argument striking down all sorts of provisions. Developed to aid sharia scholars in their interpretations, the maqasid were simply not designed to serve as clear constitutional norms in the hands of non-specialists. They play a considerable role in current public debates about implementing the spirit and not merely the letter of the law, but that is quite a different role from constituting definitive legal principles. It is thus impossible to evaluate what effect constitutionalizing them (as prevailing interpretations of the current Article 2 implicitly do) would have absent any consideration of which individuals or institutions are deploying them for guidance.

What of the more specific, definitive sharia-base rulings that would seem to give less room for interpretation? Will these necessitate rewriting significant parts of Egypt’s legal order? Or are there a similar set of loopholes that can leave the door open to ambiguity and argumentation? At first glance, such rules are so few in number that they would not seem to be that much of a restriction on legislation. But one entire area of law—hudud punishments—might easily be argued to fall within the category of definitive and unavoidable rules because they are often based directly on the words of Quranic passages rather than on extensive scholarly exegesis. Thus, it is possible that Article 2, under the emerging consensus interpretation, would require bringing Egypt’s criminal law in line with some sharia-based rules that often cause international concern.

Even here, however, there are loopholes—ones that are surprisingly large. Perhaps it would be more fair to their users to term them “windows” for interpretive flexibility, because they are employed not just by the cynical but also by those sincerely dedicated to applying the Islamic sharia to modern conditions. Loopholes or windows, it is often surprising who seeks to use them.

One window is a willingness to reinterpret even those sharia-based rules that have long been the subject of consensus among specialists. A similar one is using the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence to demand the most exacting forms of proof and render application very difficult. Devices like this have made it so hudud penalties are almost never implemented, even in societies that have them on the books (and Egypt does not).

The most notable example here is apostasy (abandoning one’s religion), which even scholars respected by the Islamist camp have argued needs to be reexamined. Some sharia specialists have claimed that the death penalty for apostasy was applicable under the category of hudud punishments only when it was associated with a threat to the community of Muslims at times of peril. In such circumstances it was a community defense against an act of betrayal or treason. But an ordinary renunciation of faith under stable circumstances—unaccompanied therefore by any threat to the beliefs, practices, and safety of Muslims—would not fall under hudud penalties and any sanction should be left to God.

A second loophole often used in modernist circles is the argument that the hudud cannot be applied because of prevailing economic conditions. Citing the tradition that the second caliph (or ruler), Umar, refused to inflict the prescribed punishment on thieves during a time of famine, some activists have claimed that in Egypt today, the state of the economy suggests a similar leniency. Therefore, if a state fails to provide for the basic needs of its citizens, it should not be inflicting harsh punishment on thieves. Such an argument is stunningly capacious, but it has been advanced by leading Brotherhood figures, at least since the 1950s and is deployed by some leaders today. And there is also a long tradition that allows difficult requirements to be overridden for the time being on the grounds of exigencies or social benefits.

Thus, while it might be said that the Brotherhood’s use of this loophole is implausibly extensive, the strategy does fit well with the movement’s preference for gradual change that coaxes (or nags) society along rather than presenting a sudden imposition that imposes hardships or backfires politically. Salafis, who view the Brotherhood as far too quick to embrace compromise on the grounds of political expediency, are much less likely to interpret hudud in this way.

It should thus be quite clear that for all the apparent broad consensus, prevailing ideas about the role of the Islamic sharia in Egypt’s legal and constitutional order could be pushed in some extremely different directions. And in that way, it becomes far more important to understand who is to be entrusted with interpreting and applying whatever sharia-based rules as it is to search for the precise meaning of various verbal formulas. How will Egypt’s SCC be structured? What should be the structure and role of state religious institutions, including al-Azhar?
 

What is the Muslim Brotherhood’s position on the Islamic sharia?
Much of the international concern about the Islamic sharia in Egypt stems from the growing political role of the Muslim Brotherhood and the party it founded, the Freedom and Justice Party. The Brotherhood has confused many (including, at times, its own members) by a variety of statements and proposals on the Islamic sharia. The movement’s confusing position stems from two impulses that pull its members in different directions.

First, the Brotherhood wants a political system that conforms fully and faithfully with Islamic norms, however broadly defined. That means that important Islamic values should be reflected in legislation; that the state should facilitate rather than obstruct the desire of Muslims to lead lives that conform to Islamic strictures; and that those with religious knowledge and training be consulted and be allowed to speak based on their training and expertise rather than be expected to tailor their interpretations to the political interests of high officials. The movement has therefore called for a stronger role for al-Azhar and for making the institution far more independent of the executive branch, which has dominated the institution by controlling its finances and senior positions for half a century.

Second, the Brotherhood emphasizes just as strongly change from below and the need for all Muslims to work to understand their religion and take responsibility for educating themselves. To place ultimate political authority for all religious questions in a small group of scholars smacks of the post-1979 Iranian model, one that the Brotherhood has consistently rejected as incompatible with Sunni Islam and with the movement’s own approach.

Thus, over the past few years, the Brotherhood has developed a series of confusing proposals. In 2007, the movement bowed to the first impulse when drafting a platform (never formally adopted) that suggested that legislation be presented to a body of religious scholars within al-Azhar in order to determine its conformity with the Islamic sharia. When that provoked a storm of criticism within and outside of the movement, the proposal was dropped. The idea has not been revived, but the Brotherhood’s momentary presidential candidate, Khairat al-Shater, made international headlines when he was quoted telling some religious scholars that he thought such figures should be consulted when new laws are considered.

The movement’s current position more closely reflects the second impulse of concentrating on Islamizing the society through gradual work rather than sudden legislative change. But even so, movement leaders clearly have not abandoned the idea of giving some role—albeit informal and based on persuasion and consultation rather than authoritative imposition—to religious scholars in the legislative process. (This is what likely led al-Shater to make his recent comment.) While not fully articulated, the movement’s current position seems to be that scholars on the Islamic sharia should be accorded the deference and respect that all specialists should receive, but that ultimate political authority should still lie in democratic structures.
 

What does the Islamic sharia say about the rights of women?
In general, the Islamic sharia is not gender-neutral in matters of personal status but instead establishes a differentiated web of rights and obligations on husbands and wives and sons and daughters. Broadly, husbands are expected to provide material support and a healthy home environment (failure to provide support or abuse can be grounds for a woman seeking a divorce). And wives are expected to accept their husbands’ authority. A husband can unilaterally divorce his wife; a wife (in the sharia-based Egyptian legal order) cannot do so, but can petition the court to order a divorce in cases when the husband fails his obligations. Custom is laid on top of sharia-based law—for instance, a prospective bridegroom might be expected to pledge a significant sum of money that is due to his fiancé if he divorces her, sometimes making his divorce rights extremely expensive to exercise.

Rather than arguing for a civil law or a completely gender-neutral law, advocates of women’s rights—out of a blend of genuine religious convictions, acceptance of political realities, and realization that juridical equality in an inegalitarian society can actually weaken subordinate parties—have focused most of their attention on mobilizing constituencies in support of interpretations of the Islamic sharia that grant women a stronger position. For instance, they successfully lobbied for an amendment to the personal status law allowing women to petition a court for divorce if they were willing to abandon most of their material rights and claims in the settlement. In doing so, they were able to call on some religious scholars in support of their position.

Islamist movements have sometimes questioned particular interpretations pertaining to women’s rights, but they generally have engaged directly in the debate and accepted the parliamentary-based legislation as binding. The Brotherhood’s flexibility on the issue is hardly infinite. For instance, the Freedom and Justice Party has singled out the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women for particular criticism, because of the claim that its provisions violate sharia-based rules about guardianship in the case of divorce.

Debate in Egypt is likely to center around very specific provisions of the personal status law. This includes the circumstances under which a wife can ask a court for divorce, the age of guardianship, or the age of marriage. The debate will have Salafis (and their extreme textualism) on one side and advocates of women’s rights (seeking to push the law as far as possible in the direction of increasing legal protections for women) on the other, leaving many political forces caught somewhere in the middle.

Thus, placing discussions on women’s rights and personal status within a sharia-based framework has had some real effects on the nature of the debate but not directly dictated the outcome.
 

How would the Islamic sharia apply to non-Muslim Egyptians?
Here the current approach of the Egyptian legal order is clear: each recognized religious community is free to have its own affairs governed by its own personal status law. Regular Egyptian courts regularly adjudicate such cases for all Egyptians, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, but simply shift the law applied; there are not separate courts for each religious community and the judges in personal status courts come out of the regular judiciary.

This leads to two problems for such groups. First, adherents of non-recognized faiths (most publicly members of the Bahai religion) have no clear legal status; even heterodox groups unrecognized by the state have no ability to follow their own beliefs and teachings.

Second, the system seems to encourage opportunistic conversions as a byproduct of marital disputes: a Coptic husband wishing to divorce his wife, for instance, might convert to a different Christian sect or even to Islam in order to make such a step possible. There has been some effort by Egyptian legal officials to work with Christian leaders in recent years to develop a uniform code of personal status for Christians to curtail this practice.
 

What should the West watch for in Egypt?
There is little in these debates that threaten Western security. But there are important implications for human rights and other values that Western actors hold dear. What makes the discussions about the Islamic sharia law so perplexing—and even occasionally alarming—for outsiders is the unfamiliarity of the basic concepts and terms.

Of course, the idea that religion should play a role in public life is familiar even where it is not widely accepted; and all sorts of states have some official status for a particular religion. But the debate about the Islamic sharia seems to pack a special punch, since it can move beyond hortatory and identity to specific and detailed legal norms.

And basic positions are not only unfamiliar to outsiders, they are also difficult to decode. Actors understood as “secular” raise no objection to a constitutional status for the Islamic sharia and self-proclaimed Islamists spout reassurances that they are focusing only on the sharia’s general goals, not its specific provisions.

If discussions about the Islamic sharia are simultaneously central to Egyptian politics and also indeterminate and even vague, does this mean that examining debates on the subject is seductive but pointless in the end? Not for long. The process of reconstructing the Egyptian political system may mean that however hazy current answers may be, there will soon be attempts to give them institutional expression.

But rather than trying to pin down the meanings of specific verbal formulas, observers who have the opportunity to ask questions focus instead on concrete and institutional questions. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, more thinking on:

■What elements of Egypt’s current personal status code should be amended and what should they say?
■What should be the structure of the SCC as it will likely have the authority to interpret any constitutional language on Islam?
■How should al-Azhar be governed? What should be the nature of its role in the Egyptian state and degree of its social influence?
■What should be the structure of other state religious institutions, such as Dar al-Ifta (the state’s mufti, responsible for delivering interpretations of Islamic law)?
■What priority should be given to criminal law reform (on this issue, the sharia provisions tend to be hard to avoid and highly polarized)?
■What should be the status of various international human rights instruments to which Egypt is a signatory? And who should be responsible for interpreting the existing reservations to those documents? (For example, Egypt’s ratification of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women includes the following reservation regarding the document’s second article: “The Arab Republic of Egypt is willing to comply with the content of this article, provided that such compliance does not run counter to the Islamic Sharia.”)
It is quite likely that key political actors in Egypt have only just begun to think about who will define these rules and how they will be decided. But some issues have already forced themselves on the agenda. The Brotherhood, for instance, has begun drafting new legislation for the Constitutional Court and the governance of al-Azhar was the subject of a controversial decree-law issued by the country’s interim military rulers immediately before the current parliament was seated.

Thus, while both external observers and Egyptian political activists are likely still to be perplexed over these issues, the time for carrying on debates only in an abstract and theoretical level may rapidly be drawing to a close.

The author would like to thank Jonathan Brown of Georgetown University and Clark Lombardi of the University of Washington for their insights and corrections. All remaining errors are his.

http://www.carnegieendowment.org/2012/05/15/egypt-and-islamic-sharia-guide-for-perplexed/argb

The cloud cover of sophistry that has been characteristic of India’s Iran policy in recent years lifted on Tuesday when the government admitted in parliament that it had taken a policy decision to reduce oil imports from Iran.

The frank admission came on a day when an emissary from Washington, Carlos Pascual, special envoy on energy matters in the United States State Department, arrived with the proclaimed intention of weaning New Delhi away from Tehran’s fuel.

The Barack Obama administration will be delighted that the sustained diplomatic and political pressure on India is finally bearing fruit. Tehran, on the other hand, will view this as the unkindest cut of all the blows that New Delhi has inflicted on it

over the past five year. Meanwhile, a protagonist lurking in the shade is all excited – Saudi Arabia.

A mystery lingers. What did the Obama administration promise the Manmohan Singh government as quid pro quo? Manmohan most certainly sensitized US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of India’s “wish list” during her recent hurried visit to hold consultations personally with him just ahead of the US-India Strategic Dialogue co-chaired by her, which is scheduled to convene in Washington.

Not as routine as it may seem
Delhi has been under immense pressure from Washington to fall in line with the letter and spirit of the US’s sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program and curtail the sourcing of crude oil from Iran. The Indian government’s official stance so far has been – and continues to be – that it is only bound by United Nations-backed sanctions.

Beneath the veneer of a principled position, however, India has been quietly and steadily backtracking. The frank admission on Tuesday came from Junior Minister for Petroleum R P N Singh, who disclosed, “Total crude oil imported from Iran by Indian companies during 2010-11 and 2011-12 is 18.50 million tonnes and 17.44 million tonnes, respectively. The target fixed for import of crude oil from Iran for 2012-13 is about 15.5 million tonnes.”

He made it look routine, but the cold statistics reveal that in the current fiscal year, India will be cutting its oil imports from Iran by 11%. The Indian bureaucracy is never at a loss for words and Singh added, “To reduce its dependence on any particular region of the world, India has been consciously trying to diversify its sources of crude oil imports to strengthen the country’s energy security.”

This is a considered policy decision backed by a detailed strategy paper based on a political directive to harmonize the policy on India’s petroleum imports with Washington’s Iran sanctions. No doubt, it is a major political decision, considering that India currently imports 80% of its crude oil from over 30 countries and relies on Iran for 12% of these imports.

Curiously, a huge “collateral” beneficiary is going to be the influential Indian corporate house Reliance. Pascual brought a proposal offering that Shale Gas in liquefied form could be supplied from the US to replace Iranian oil. Reliance holds a monopoly on Shale Gas technology in India and has invested heavily in the US Shale Gas industry.

The US proposal is based on a perfect matching of Obama’s political need to isolate Iran with India’s energy security and Reliance’s potentially massive business opportunity. The ingenuity of the American proposal is such that the Manmohan government cannot easily ignore it.

Meanwhile, a short-term beneficiary is also going to be Saudi Arabia, from where India hopes to make up the current shortfall in oil imports from Iran.

Riyadh derives satisfaction that India’s traditional ties with Iran are in the doldrums and that India’s recent “gravitation” toward the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) pole in the geopolitics of the Persian Gulf gets reinforced. There are fallouts in India’s domestic politics, too, where Saudi Arabia and the other Muslim Gulf monarchies exert a larger-than-life influence by lavishly patronizing the Sunni Muslim lobbies that have a nexus with various political parties.

But Saudi influence in India today exceeds the Sunni Muslim constituency. The Saudis have successfully emulated the pattern of US and Israeli diplomacy in New Delhi by casting their net wide in the strategic community. Indian pundits have begun arguing for the GCC side of the story in the geopolitics of the Persian Gulf. There has been a steady stream of the “Gulf Arab” leaderships visiting New Delhi – the latest being the colorful emir of Qatar. India attended the first session of the “Friends of Syria” grouping in Tunis.

Tehran will be unhappy that Manmohan has once again caved in to US pressure to roll back ties with Iran. Simply put, India has become adept at using the “Iran card” to leverage advantages out of the US. New Delhi has entrapped Tehran in a ring of pragmatic engagement, which falls far short of Indian promises or Iranian expectations, but Iran is left with the predicament to settle for the kind of relationship India chooses.

Superb timing
India is shrewdly exploiting Iran’s current vulnerabilities. Thus, by taking advantage of the obstacles being put by the US on the Asian Clearing Union payment mechanism of India-Iran trade, New Delhi persuaded Tehran to accept a system of barter trade for up to 45% of its oil exports, which would effectively work as an export promotion drive for Indian companies in the Iranian market.

Iran accepted the deal grudgingly since it is keen to continue somehow or other with its longstanding relationship on oil with India through the present difficult corridor of time. The heart of the matter is, remove oil from the Iran-India relationship and it will atrophy to virtually nothing. Evidently, New Delhi has assessed that the relationship means more to Iran than to India at the moment.

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad telephoned Manmohan on Monday in an attempt to shore up the relationship. He stressed that Tehran sets no limits to the broadening of ties with India and that the traditional, historical relationship has been of a “brotherly” character and is assured of a “promising future”. Manmohan responded with a caveat that India attaches importance to ties with Iran and welcomes a broadening of relations with Iran “on the basis of national interests”.

There is some evidence that Tehran is also settling for a low-key relationship. Tehran parried repeated Indian attempts to schedule a visit by the secretary general of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Saeed Jalili, to New Delhi. Tehran estimates that the consultations are best scheduled when New Delhi is genuinely open to strategic engagement with Iran.

Having said that, the big question still remains: What is it that India hopes to extract from the Obama administration in return for its momentous decision to comply with the US’s Iran sanctions?

Indian diplomacy is hard at work. Starting from 2006 when India began voting against Iran in the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran has become a factor in the US-India strategic partnership and New Delhi has been able to leverage it because Washington is extremely sensitive to Iran’s regional standing.

Manmohan’s timing is superb. Although Obama needs to take a decision on giving a “waiver” to India under the Iran sanctions regime only in July, Manmohan took the decision now to cut India’s oil imports from Iran.

Clearly, New Delhi has set its sights on the forthcoming US-India Strategic Dialogue in early June. After having discussed with Clinton during her recent visit the future directions of the US-India strategic partnership, New Delhi expects a tradeoff.

Obama’s political prestige is at stake over the Iran nuclear issue, especially in a tricky presidential election year for him. Manmohan is handing over to him a major foreign policy “achievement” in making Tehran look somewhat more isolated in its region just when the talks over the Iran nuclear issue are moving into a crucial phase.

If Indian diplomats are worth their salt, they are tiptoeing toward the US-India Strategic Dialogue with a killer instinct; they won’t settle for some two-penny worth gains.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/NE17Df03.html

Prince Saud Al Faisal, left, visited Turkey’s foreign minister in Ankara in January. (Courtesy Reuters)

Last month, Saudi Arabia rolled out the red carpet for Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The visit was yet another example of the degree to which relations between the two countries have improved in recent years.

Historically, the two nations have not been friendly, with economic relations only developing  in the 1970s. Turkey needed Saudi Arabia’s oil. For its part, Saudi Arabia needed Turkey’s huge construction sector to build its modern cities. In the 1990s, the arms-length relationship grew more distant. After the Persian Gulf War, Saudi Arabia, along with Egypt and Syria, banded together in hopes of creating a new Arab order. Damascus, no ally of Ankara at the time, was able to frame many of its narrow fights with Turkey as pan-Arab concerns. Down the Euphrates from Turkey, for example, Syria was locked in constant argument with the Turkish government over how much water it would allow to flow downstream. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Syria even launched a successful campaign to end World Bank funding for Turkey’s dam projects until Ankara signed a water agreement with the states below it. 

Even as Ankara pursued better relations with Saudi Arabia, it continued to engage Iran. As early as 2009, many in Saudi Arabia were growing suspicious of what they saw as Turkey’s double dealing. The United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003 changed all that. The toppling of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent empowerment of Iraqi Shias instilled a fear in the kingdom that Saudi’s own Shia population would agitate for change. Beyond that, Riyadh believed that Iran — through its activities in Iraq, its alliance with Syria, its support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and its nascent nuclear program — was attempting to become a regional hegemon. In response, Riyadh began building alliances with states that shared its outlook, a “Sunni axis,” so to speak, to combat the “Shia arc.”

Jordan and Egypt were natural fits. These predominantly Sunni countries were equally concerned with rising Iranian influence in the Levant and were determined to counter what they perceived as Tehran’s outsized influence in the region. Yet Riyadh went a step further and aimed to also enlist Turkey. As an important regional power, a member of NATO, and predominantly Sunni, Saudi Arabia saw Ankara as a valuable bulwark against Iran. Riyadh would normally be worried about a non-Arab power’s presence in the region undermining its own position, but it considered Turkey a lesser evil compared to Iran.

Thus, in 2006, Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud became the first Saudi monarch to visit Turkey in decades. That was followed by another visit in 2007. The next year, Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes Saudi Arabia, started a strategic dialogue about Iran. In the years after, Saudi-Turkish economic relations flourished. In 2011, trade between the two reached approximately $5 billion per year. Turkish construction companies continued to break ground in Saudi Arabia, and the number of Saudi tourists to Turkey reached 84,000 in 2010.

Like Saudi Arabia, Turkey was also interested in the status of Sunnis in Iraq, although less out of sectarian concern than a desire to keep Iraq unified. Turkey believed that the rise of the Shias and spiraling violence in Iraq would eventually result in the country’s division along ethnic lines. And if northern Iraq became a separate Kurdish state, Ankara feared, Turkish Kurds might want to join it. Turkey, too, wanted to tamp down Iran’s regional ambitions. Yet, while Ankara was keen to Riyadh’s overtures, it had no interest in becoming a central pillar of a new Sunni axis in the Middle East. On the contrary, as part of its “zero problems with neighbors” foreign policy, Turkey wanted to counter Iranian power in the region through soft balancing. Specifically, Ankara would undermine Tehran’s influence in Palestinian politics and its dominance in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria by getting closer to those states itself.

So, even as Ankara pursued better relations with Saudi Arabia, it continued to engage Iran, especially on the development of Tehran’s nuclear program. Whereas Saudi Arabia saw a potential Iranian bomb as a major threat and wanted to prevent it by any means possible, Turkey believed the matter could be resolved through negotiations. As early as 2009, many in Saudi Arabia were growing suspicious of what they saw as Turkey’s double dealing. Although Riyadh continued its policy of cooperating with Turkey, especially on Iraq, it also realized that Turkey would not be a close part of the alliance it had constructed with Egypt and Jordan.

Then came the Arab Spring. Saudi Arabia was uneasy with 2011′s outpouring of people power from the start, lest it flow into the kingdom as well. First, when Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia, he and his family were welcomed in Saudi Arabia. Then, Riyadh worked to prevent the toppling of the Hosni Mubarak regime, its ally in Egypt, but to no avail. It did, however, manage to help put down the Shia uprising against the Sunni government in neighboring Bahrain. It was only Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s downfall that Saudi Arabia welcomed. Saudi-Syrian relations had been quite problematic under Qaddafi, who was once even accused of trying to assassinate Saudi King Abdullah. Turkey, of course, took the opposite tack, supporting all the uprisings, with some initial hesitation in Libya. Ankara consistently called on the region’s beleaguered regimes to respond to the demands of the people, or else step down. The two countries’ diverging positions seemed to undermine hope that their strategic relationship could ever be solidified.

Then the Arab Spring reached Syria. The uprising there seemed like it might put Turkish-Saudi rapprochement back on track. Riyadh believes that the toppling of the Bashar al-Assad regime would limit Iran’s influence in the Arab world, since Syria is the Islamic Republic’s only Arab ally. Thus, last summer, Abdullah became the first Arab leader to criticize the Syrian regime openly; since then, Saudi Arabia has been actively supporting the Syrian opposition, including by advocating that the world arm the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the main opposition military force.

At first, Turkey attempted to convince Assad to reform. Last summer, believing those efforts were at a dead end, Turkey adopted a more critical position. Ankara called for regime change in Syria, actively backed the opposition, criticized the UN Security Council for inaction, and supported creating buffer zones and humanitarian corridors between Turkey and Syria. Turkey also houses one of the biggest opposition groups, Syrian National Council, as well as the FSA.

Although Saudi Arabia and Turkey share a common goal in Syria, there are some tensions between their positions. First, for Turkey, managing the Syrian crisis is not a way to limit Iranian influence; instead, it is a means of protecting Turkey from chaos on its southern border. Refugees have already started flooding into Turkey — and the longer the conflict drags on, the larger the burden Ankara will have to shoulder. Further, the influence of the Turkish Kurdish party on some Syrian Kurds is worrisome for Ankara.

Moreover, the Saudi and Turkish visions for post-Assad Syria differ. Saudi Arabia advocates a Sunni Islamist regime and is establishing ties with the more radical elements in the country. Turkey, on the other hand, favors the participation of all actors. Ankara is engaging and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, while also pressuring the group to accept a more participatory and representative Syria to prevent civil war in the post-revolution era.

In the meantime, Saudi Arabia’s involvement in Syria threatens to undermine Turkey’s “zero problems” foreign policy. Saudi Arabia is already casting the conflict in Syria as a sectarian one. Thus, Ankara’s close cooperation with Riyadh — and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood — places Turkey squarely within the so-called Sunni camp. Such a development would limit Turkey’s soft power in the region. In other words, although opportunities for rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Turkey arise from time to time, there are hard limitations to their relationship. They want different things in the region, and have different policies for getting them. On the other hand, as long as there are clear economic benefits in this bilateral relationship, both sides will gloss over their differences as long as they can.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137639/meliha-benli-altunisik/bitter-frenemies?page=show