Brainwaves and more

Predictions on Pakistan in 2011- Khaled Ahmed

2011-01-15T12:28:00.000-08:00

In the coming months, Pakistan will see the consequences of not passing on the cost of importing oil and non-enforcement of the RGST, while the inflationary effects of these two non-acts will be sought to be offset with more religious frenzy. Sectarian strife will widen among the majority Muslims while Al Qaeda and Taliban win without fighting too much. Xenophobia growing out of religious emotions will convince the world that helping Pakistan will actually harm it, which in turn will destroy Pakistan Army’s thesis that the world needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs the world.

Predicting the coming year is an annual ritual of repeating clichés about Pakistan. No coming year has been better than the past year and that has happened over the past six decades. This pattern is embedded in Pakistan’s ‘certainty’ about its pre-modern ideology and its inability to suit it to modern times. But some immediate economic fallout from our dishonest internecine politicians – led by the big party PMLN who knows better – will ruin the first half of the year for us. The rest will be ruined by our religion with more judges passing religious verdicts and the clergy growling at the state for not taking on the world which sustains it through trade and handouts.

Want hara-kiri? Go for economic populism: Adjusting fuel prices has never been popular. Anywhere in the world price hikes are unpopular and unseat governments. (But in France and the UK, oppositions have been voting with the government for ‘tough decisions’.) In Pakistan too the PPP government has been forced to take back the price hike by the opposition which threatened to unseat it. Earlier the opposition did the same sort of thing with the RGST. Both times the PPP has dug its own grave by kowtowing. It will disembowel itself in the coming months through economics, which is what the opposition wants.

The government took back a 9 percent rise in oil price, triggering the budget deficit about which the State Bank has been crying itself hoarse. The oil will be subsidised to the tune of Rs 5 billion a month, setting the country on the path of building another circular debt, making it economically unviable for a purblind PMLN when it comes to power with its testicles in the inflationary grinder. The budget deficit will cross 8 percent of the GDP and no amount of cosmetic cutting down of ministries will bring employment in a landscape where the employer is shutting shop and preparing to leave for the UAE.

Year of French Revolution or ‘bloody revolution’? The 2008 decision to peg domestic oil prices to the international ones has been overturned by political parties stricken blind by fate. The mullah hates the economy but the PMLN knew what it was doing while putting the muffler on Ishaq Dar who knew that Mian Sahib was putting the blade to the party’s midriff by going along with illiterate Altaf Hussain ordering his MQM to stage a French Revolution. Shahbaz Sharif has been seeing a less outlandish ‘bloody revolution’ on the cards. He may want it to come in 2011 with Al Qaeda making him go to South Punjab and bend the knee to that destroyer of all economies, and a seller of religious Viagra to the masses, Aiman Al Zawahiri.

The politician has taken revenge on the economy additionally by not letting the government enforce the RGST it had promised the IMF. He takes an evil pleasure in spiting the US, Pakistan’s biggest trading partner and biggest sheller-out of assistance bucks, and thumbing his nose at the IMF, the only source of cheap money with which to buy Pakistan’s imports and maintain its credit-rating. The clergy grows tumescent seeing the politicians go through this routine of self-evisceration. Last time we went through this ritual was when the nation got a collective tumescence testing the nuclear device in 1998. The following day the economy was belly-up.

Print money and die: If the opposition wants the PPP government out because there is too much inflation, wait till the recall of the RGST and oil subsidy have their effect. Pakistan had entered a 25-month $11.3 billion Stand-by Arrangement (SBA) with IMF in November 2008. The arrangement was supposed to end in January 2011, but the IMF postponed the disbursement of the 6th tranche worth $1.7 billion in August because Islamabad did not impose the RGST. Now we are on a nine-month reprieve but the year 2011 will see Pakistan once again flat-footed in the face of street threats.

Pakistan will print more money and the rupee will go through the floor. The revenue estimate in Pakistan is Rs 700 billion but the government has already borrowed Rs 15,000 billion and the first months of 2011 will see the State Bank struggling to keep the rupee from collapsing, forcing the common man to buy a paan for Rs 500. The inflation may have been officially 14 percent and unofficially over 22 percent but the year 2011 might see it rise to close to 30 percent. That will be time for us to line up the politicians and the clergy against the wall with their backs bared for what the Taliban did to the women of Swat.

Ban the word ‘allallay-tallallay’! We say inflation comes from ‘allallay-tallallay’ – a hateful Urdu term which covers our lack of economic literacy and is on the lips of most TV anchors. But the truth is that inflation comes, not from allowing the prices to remain unsubsidised, but from subsidising them in favour of the well-heeled. The well-heeled today are the past-corrupt and prospective-corrupt opposition politicians and the Arab-funded clergy. Inflation is simply printing of money when a contracting economy produces little. Keynesianism will not work in Pakistan anyway because the state projects all end up looking like the ‘ghost schools’ of Punjab and Sindh.

The year of 2011 will see the peak of Pakistan’s only growth industry: extremism. This means that Pakistanis will kill some more Pakistanis while spouting hatred for Hindus, Jews and Christians – all somehow encapsulated in the identity of Americans. Al Qaeda and Taliban will lean back and rest while the country, shrinking like a bashful Muslim bride before being deflowered, gets itself ready for a takeover by them. Some more poor Christians will be immolated to the false gods of the Blasphemy Law.

Year of the unviable state: Pakistan in the year 2011 will get a little looser in the hinges. The Baloch and the Pakhtun dreaming of their separate states – one under the sardars who live in Karachi and the other under the Taliban who live in North Waziristan – should be reminded that when in 1947 the enthusiasts of the Pakistan Movement were told that the state they were dreaming of was unviable, they did not listen. Maybe the Baloch and the Pakhtun can be forewarned against tracing the same kind of trajectory. The outside world will tire of Pakistan in the months to come and start thinking of alternatives to Pakistan as an ally in the war against terrorism.

China will watch this happen, hardly able to cover up for all the follies of a state sick with unguided religious fervour. Pakistan will pass another year without trying to understand what makes China tick. This is a love affair where too much examination will only expose the fact that it is China which Pakistan’s extremism will target next. Our submission to Al Qaeda and our friendship with China do not make for a good chemistry of relations in the future.

Ironies of Aasia Bibi’s Pakistan

2010-11-25T15:42:00.001-08:00

Ironies of Aasia Bibi’s Pakistan

Najam Sethi's E d i t o r i a l

The Aasia Bibi blasphemy case has caught the world’s headlines because it is full of desperate and nasty ironies. She is a Christian mother of two children, sentenced to death in a Muslim country that is notorious for making and practicing laws that persecute its minorities even as its official state religion of Islam proclaims special protection for them; whose citizens “hate” the West even as they line up outside Western embassies for work, education and tourist visas; whose governments shamelessly clamour for financial handouts from Western aid agencies even as they roundly condemn the “begging-bowl syndrome”; whose military establishment provides “safe havens” for Al-Qaeda-Taliban terrorists in North Waziristan even as it fights them in South Waziristan and Swat; whose security posture compels its strategic US ally to look upon it as both the problem and the solution for the war in Afghanistan.

Aasia’s crime: an allegedly blasphemous and angry retort to some Muslim village women who taunted her faith and her low caste by refusing to drink water from a utensil tainted by her “unclean” infidel hands. She was imprisoned for a year during trial and sentenced to death by a magistrate quaking in fear of the mullahs. The Punjab law minister, Rana Sanaullah, says that Aasia’s conviction is a miscarriage of justice. But there is deep irony here. Mr Sanaullah’s PMLN party rules in Punjab province. He has close links with hard line religious groups. In 1992, his PMLN was in power in Islamabad and mandated the death sentence for blasphemy.

At least two judges have been assassinated in the past for acquitting victims of the blasphemy laws and thirty two persons have been “extra-judicially killed” by mobs on the spot, inside prisons or outside courtrooms. According to the National Commission for Law and Justice, from the mid 1980s, when the blasphemy laws were enlarged under the regime of General Zia ul Haq, to 2009, over 960 people have been thus charged, among them 479 Muslims, 340 Ahmedis (who are prosecuted for insisting they are Muslims), 119 Christians, 14 Hindus and various others. An overwhelming 70% of such cases are situated in the “settled” areas of Punjab province. Of the nearly 2 million Christians in Pakistan, nearly half live in seven settled districts of Punjab, namely Lahore, Faisalabad, Sialkot, Qasur, Gujranwala, Sheikhupura and Toba Tek Singh.

The Penal Code was established by the British Raj in 1860. In 1927, the law for offenses against religion was beefed up to include all deliberate and malicious acts, by words or visible representations, aimed at outraging anyone’s religious feelings and the maximum punishment was extended from two to ten years and/or a fine. The aim was to clamp down on rising communal passions amidst Hindu demands for independence from the British and Muslim demands for separate electorates. The real mischief came in 1982, 1984 and 1986 in Pakistan when General Zia ul Haq increasingly relied upon the religious parties for political legitimacy and decreed so-called Islamic edicts which enveloped “desecration” of the Holy Quran and use of derogatory remarks in respect of the Holy Prophet (pbuh). The critical “willful intent” conditionality behind any such outrage, even by “innuendo or imputation or insinuation”, was removed and the sweeping punishment of death or life imprisonment was made a weapon in the hands of mullahs against their secular or mundane opponents. In time, these laws were exploited to settle property or personal disputes not just between Muslims and non-Muslims but also amongst Muslims themselves.

In 2000, another military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, professed “enlightened moderation” to woo the West and promised to end the embarrassing exploitation of these laws. But, like Gen Zia earlier, he too reneged on his pledge when he cemented an electoral alliance with the mullahs in 2002. In the last few years, feeble anti-blasphemy law voices in parliament and civil society have been drowned out by the self-righteous and cowardly rhetoric of the majority.

To his credit, the PPP’s President Asif Zardari is considering a mercy petition from Aasia Bibi to commute her death sentence , which he is entitled to do by law, even as a High Court is about to review her conviction . As the mullahs gather to protest any dilution of the law or punishment – which has nothing to do with Islamic theory or practice because the Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) forgave all blasphemers in his time – there are two points of view in civil society: one insists that pressure should be brought to bear on the courts to acquit Aasia on the basis of due process of law and evidence, thereby institutionalizing the judiciary’s freedom from fear of the mullahs; the other wants to lean on President Zardari to send a strong signal to all and sundry at home and abroad by pardoning Aasia and pre-empting the courts.

The best course of action would be to officially protect Aasia from harm in prison, help her mount a stout legal defence in the High Court and get her acquitted, failing which the President could set her free. He could do much better by instructing his coalition partners to suitably amend an atrociously unjust and exploitative law that defames Pakistan and harms its citizens.

Murder of history- Myths, fables and lies

2010-10-25T13:38:00.000-07:00

Raza Rumi
K K Aziz saw that ‘History’ in his beloved country had turned into sham-narratives and national myths

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A textbook, as Aziz notes, mentions Maulana Maudoodi among the “founders of the ideology of Pakistan”, when in fact the right-wing leader bitterly opposed the creation of Pakistan

K Aziz’s seminal study, ‘The Murder of History’ is essential to understand what went wrong in Pakistan. The most worrying sign of an insecure and fissured polity is when it reinvents, twists and lies about its history especially relating to its genesis and progress. K K Aziz was not an Indian nationalist, nor a screaming ideologue who wanted Pakistan to fritter away. In fact his early work The Making of Pakistan remains an essential reading on how Pakistan came into being. He believed in Pakistan despite his emotional links to the separated eastern part of the Punjab. However, at the zenith of his career he could not conceal his deep anguish and disappointment with the way ‘History’ in his beloved country had turned into sham-narratives comprising fables, myths and outright deceit.

Three brutal realities by the end of Zia era were clear: Pakistan’s military-bureaucracy complex had reinvented an ideological state based on a sectarian worldview; History was an instrument of propagating this ideology; and the jihad factories were flourishing. Jinnah’s Pakistan had been irreversibly shattered and perhaps destroyed. For K K Aziz’s generation this was nothing short of a great betrayal.

Published in the early 1990s, ‘The Murder of History’ for the first time documented a meticulous analysis of the history books taught in Pakistani schools and colleges. The book revolves around the main argument that History and Pakistan Studies curricula was nothing more political propaganda aimed at indoctrinating young minds through half-truths and blatant falsehoods.

In this study, Aziz scrutinized over 65 textbooks, which have been promoting prejudice, xenophobia and discrimination in our young children (who have grown up now). According to the Aziz, the publication of such textbooks was the responsibility of the provincial textbook boards but the National Review Committee of the Federal Education Ministry had appropriated the role of approving the ‘ideological’ content.

Aziz starts with how the Pakistan movement is disfigured. How lies about Jinnah are perpetrated (for instance about his education, leanings etc.) and how military rule and wars are glorified that too without credible facts. The most incisive part pertains to the events of 1971. Aziz questions this obviously false account found in one of the textbooks: “In the 1971 war, the Pakistan armed forces created new records of bravery, and the Indian forces were defeated everywhere.” He further traces how the Pakistani Hindus in East Pakistan are blamed for engineering anti-Urdu demonstrations during Jinnah’s time. This movement started by ‘Hindus’ had sowed the seeds of separation of East Pakistan, if the disingenuous sham-historians of the state were to be believed. Aziz questions how the great surrender of Pakistan Army in December 1971 happened apparently when our troops were bagging so-called victories on all fronts. Furthermore, Aziz also dismisses the notion that accepting Bengali cultural values, as a part of national heritage, was some sort of a national humiliation.

A textbook, as Aziz notes, even mentions Maulana Maudoodi among the “founders of the ideology of Pakistan”, when in fact the right-wing leader bitterly opposed the creation of Pakistan and called Jinnah a non-Muslim. Zia ensured that an unconstitutional overthrow of Bhutto’s government was due to an ‘un-Islamic system’. Little wonder, Al-Qaeda and its partners are busy telling us why democracy should be rejected in the Islamic Pakistan. The greatest lie as detected by Aziz’s meticulous pen relates how the arrival of Zia-ul-Haq was celebrated: “General Zia ul Haq was chosen by destiny to be the person who achieved the distinction of imposing Islamic law.... The real objective of the creation of Pakistan, and the demand of the masses, was achieved.”

Aziz also records major omissions and makes a robust effort to correct them in the later chapters. The last parts of the book analyse the impact of such chicanery on the students and on the nation at large: Assuming that three students come from one nuclear home, we have at least eight million households where these books are in daily use … Eight million homes amount to eight million parents (father plus mother), not counting other family members... In this way the nonsense written in the books is conveyed to another sixteen million persons.

After reading Murder , one is left distressed with the unethical principles that the governments and the textbook boards follow while preparing textbooks. This is not just a matter of school curricula as Aziz rather presciently argues: Some of the people bred on these books become journalists, columnists and editors of popular magazines and digests ... making all possible allowances for’ the margin of duplication, we are still left with a very conservative figure of say thirty million people being told what they should not be told and hearing what they should not hear. When we recall that this group contains within itself the social and intellectual elite and the actual or potential leadership of the country, we have nothing but stark despair staring us in the face and promising rack and ruin.

The rot has already set in. Popular media and generations raised on lies are now a formidable reality of our national discourse. Sections of print media and some TV anchors churn out such half-truths on a daily basis. Above all, the youth (as noted by many surveys) are confused about their identity with an ingrained anti-India sentiment and a vague sense of Pan-Islamic identity.

A decade and a half later when Musharraf tried to reform the curricula his attempts were foiled by powerful ideologues within the Establishment and very soon he lost the will to drive this reform. When the Aga Khan Foundation took the initiative in Karachi, the Mullahs threatened and roared. The current PPP government’s education policy makes no concrete commitment to the textbooks. Aziz’s last line remains relevant: “Is anybody listening?”

Pakistan’s existential battle is inextricably linked to the poison of these textbooks. Without a concerted effort to purge our curricula of xenophobia, jingoism and Islamo-fascism, we are simply doomed. The political elites have a small window of opportunity. If they are not going to forge a consensus on textbooks’ reform, their relevance in the long term remains uncertain. This is why K K Aziz’s legacy is formidable and needs to be reiterated every now and then.

Hate Literature We Call Textbooks

2010-10-23T00:16:00.000-07:00

Hate literature we call textbooks

Khaled Ahmed
Official textbooks excite exclusion and violence by firstly defining the ‘other’, and secondly redefining the self so stringently that certain communities become automatically excluded before becoming victims of violence

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Pakistan insincerely signed agreements about purging its books of hatred of India and religions other than Islam, but in 2010, Pakistan is more narrow-minded when its literacy rate is over 60 percent, than in 1947 when its literacy rate was 20 percent

hen nations go to war, they usually plead disputes relating to boundaries, but the real cause of war is always in the mind, and the mind is prepared over time through messages buried in the textbooks. National wars can’t be executed without a uniform national mind and national mind can’t be created without first artificially creating a national psyche. This job is done through textbooks made to serve as cruel injections of falsehood into the nation’s children. Education can enrich nations economically through skills; education can also poison them and retard them.

Defining the ‘other’ through a ‘master narrative’: This evil function of education is called the creation of the ‘other’. This ‘other’ can be an enemy without or an enemy within. Who can stop a state that designates enemy states beyond the national frontier from designating the enemy within? The external enemy can be created through a concocted national memory, but most often it is easily created through religion. And religion cuts two ways. It cuts into the internal fabric of the state much more cruelly because ‘exclusion’ of communities living within the state can be accomplished more easily. In other words, the master narrative that permeates the official textbooks tends to act as a mithridatic against the violence emanating from within rebuking the state for being quiescent. The official textbook may excite to exclusion and violence by two methods: first is to define the ‘other’ and second is to redefine the self so stringently that certain communities become automatically excluded before becoming victims of violence.

Pakistan has been cruelly undermined by what is called the Curriculum Wing in the federal Ministry of Education where nationalism is defined through prescriptions thought up by those entrusted with the ‘identity’ of the state. Pakistan has been on the back-step defending its half-literate mind-developers of the Curriculum. It has insincerely signed agreements about purging its books of hatred of India and religions other than Islam, but it has not been able to correct its ‘hate problem’. In 2010, Pakistan is more narrow-minded when its literacy rate is over 60 percent than in 1947 when its literacy rate was 20 percent. John Dewey said if education is packaged wrong it is better to remain illiterate. Because of the ideological content of its textbooks, the more literacy there is in Pakistan the more narrow-minded it will become, threatening the world with its ‘non state actors’. In other words, Pakistan is endangered by literacy.

Musharraf backed off from textbooks: Musharraf knew what he was facing in the realm of writing textbooks. He wanted the hate-manufacturing aspects of the Curriculum Wing removed but could do nothing mainly because the material needed to be purged related to the status of the army in Pakistan and was considered pivotal to the shaping of Pakistani nationalism. When hate-books caused the Northern Areas to go up in flames – instead of India – his education minister actually asserted that no change was even intended by the government in the realm of textbook-writing.

Daily Nawa-e-Waqt (24 Dec 2006) quoted federal education minister General (Retd) Javed Ashraf Qazi as saying that there was no move to remove Islamic content from textbooks, but the case of style of namaz in one textbook had to be changed for fear of violence in the Northern Areas. He said instructions for the saying of namaz were not acceptable to the people of Northern Areas who had reacted to the textbook and killed 60 people and burned five schools to the ground while for 9 months there was total closure of all schools. He said the textbook had to be changed for that reason. (And not because it was wrong in principle to sow hatred among the people.)

Hate textbooks discussed and approved: In 2002, an NGO in Islamabad called SDPI got together a group of scholars to examine class one-to-twelve textbooks in the subjects of social sciences/Pakistan Studies, Urdu and English. The books were prepared on the basis of the curriculum set by the Federal Education Ministry in its Curriculum Wing. The Wing had been manned by a certain kind of officers who had served governments of all stripes without any minister challenging their modus operandi. The guidelines were all fashioned in the name of Islamisation, but if a minister had ever to look at the vocabulary used and the direction given by the Wing to provincial textbook boards, he would have tried to reform the Wing, change the civil servants working there and replace them with more enlightened individuals. By and large, education as a subject has not appealed to any intellectual politician, most probably because he feared clash with the country’s ideology.

Dr AH Nayyar who had penned the report on textbook was soon taught a lesson on a TV channel through a carefully orchestrated discussion. GEO TV’s host Hamid Mir (25 March 2004) led the discussion with Dr AH Nayyar and his three conservative opponents, Urdu columnist Mr Ataul Haq Qasimi, academic Ms Dushka Syed, and federal education minister Ms Zubaida Jalal. Dr AH Nayyar said that when there was no argument against the truth it was usual in Pakistan to make accusations and level charges. He said that there was no doubt that history was being twisted around in the textbooks. He gave the example of one primary school textbook which declared that the Muslims were massacred and their women raped by Hindus and Sikhs as they crossed over to Pakistan from India. He said the book declared that Sikhs and Hindus were allowed to go to India in safety by Muslims. He gave another example of brainwashing when he said that a textbook declared that in the 1965 war, which started with an invasion by India, Pakistan had conquered Indian territory but when India felt that it was about to be vanquished it went to the Soviet Union and begged for help. The upshot was that Pakistan returned the captured Indian territory.

Ms Dushka Syed said that SDPI and its scholars had been given a certain line (from outside) and they were pushing it. She said there was nothing wrong with teaching jihad to children; after all, Islam was not the religion of Christ who taught its followers to turn the other cheek. Why should jihad be wrong when the Americans feel that it is against them? What was required of Pakistan now? Are we supposed to become prostrate in front of India (lait na jayen)? She said our history was full of jihad and the Holy Prophet PBUH himself did jihad. But the SDPI was obstinately against our history. ‘What are we supposed to do? Should we do namastay-namastay ?’ There was injustice being done in Palestine and Israel was crushing the Muslims with impunity. Should Pakistan become Switzerland in these conditions? The SDPI Report was given the same kind of treatment a day earlier, on 24 March 2004, when ARY TV had its host Dr Shahid Masood take up the subject. Musharraf had to back down.

How textbooks support militarism: Now we are in the year 2010. The hate content in the textbooks is the same and India continues to be the bugbear with which to arouse the nation to war. The real cause of the crisis of Pakistan is the Pakistani mind, and this mind is created through the textbook curriculum that underpins national education. It has been spelled out in ‘Shaping a nation: An Examination of Education in Pakistan’ (OUP 2010), Edited by Stephen Lyon and Iain Edgar, under Series Editor Ali Khan of LUMS. Ayaz Naseem, who teaches in Canada, has contributed an important paper on what may be at the root of Pakistan’s status of a weak state. His study shows that the Pakistani mind is shaped by textbook militarism which mixes lethally with the Islamic concept of free-wheeling jihad.

Of the school textbooks, he writes: ‘The battles and wars of early Muslim adventurers in India such as Mohammad bin Qasim, Mahmood Ghaznavi, Ahmad Shah Abdali, and Sultan Tughlaq are used to normalise war and militarism as cherished activities’ (p151). Recipients of Nishan-e-Haider in wars against India are lionised; Abdus Sattar Edhi and Abdus Salam are ignored. Islamabad controls the textbook content through the Curriculum Division of the Federal Ministry of Education. The author tells us: ‘The curriculum seeks developing an understanding of Hindu-Muslim differences; enhancing the understanding of the forces working against Pakistan; promoting realisation about the Kashmir issue; evaluating of the role of India with reference to aggression’ (p31). The curriculum directives seek to designate India (and by association Hindus) as the ‘other’, develop a siege mentality by learning that there are a number of outside forces working Pakistan, Israel and Jews among them (p152).

Ayaz Waseem defines militarism thus: An uncritical and unquestioning acceptance of the ways of the military by the general population of a society (p150). More significantly: ‘The normalcy of war and violence also normalised violence against the domestic ‘other’. Thus, we see in Pakistan how the military and militarism of all shades and hues, whether in the form of religious fanaticism, violence against women, children and minorities, or support for jihadi organisations domestically and internationally has come to be seen as normal’ (p157).

Hate textbooks are pan-Islamic: Shahid Javed Burki in his book Changing Perceptions, Altered Reality: Pakistan’s Economy under Musharraf 1999-2006 (OUP 2007) says education is a Muslim problem because the sector is backward in the entire Islamic world, and that ‘the study of Islam was introduced as a compulsory part of the curriculum in Pakistan in the 1970s and the 1980s…in order to placate a small but influential segment of society’ (p.177). The truth is that Pakistan is located in the middle of multiple concentric ideological circles: the circle closest to it is India-centric; the outer circle joins it with the backwardness of the Islamic world. After the Erdogan government has finished with it, Turkey too will be included in this ‘area of darkness’ called the Islamic world.

Is the Islamic state doomed? A interesting book Teaching Islam: Textbooks and Religion in the Middle East ; Edited by Eleanor Abdella Doumato & Gregory Starrett (Viva Books 2008) looks at the textbooks in the Muslim world. It takes account of the function of exclusion the state performs to purify itself and make itself more homogeneous. The Muslim obsession with national monism is intense because of low level of expertise of the state in education and its tendency to lean blindly on religion. Usually the invitation to violence against the excluded communities is only implied whereas in some cases, as in Saudi Arabia and Syria, it is quite plain. Invitation to violence against external foes is reactive in nature, relying on the holy edict allowing war in the defensive or resistant mode.

Hating the ‘other’ becomes hating oneself: In Egypt, the textbook competes with the extremist unofficial literature and loses out, leading to the conclusion that good textbooks are ineffective when social environment rejects moderation. Saudi textbooks talk of an enemies’ list at the high school level: among the deviants who have assaulted Islam are the Sabaeans (a Saudi reference to Shias in Yemen?), Kharijites, Qarmatians, Zanj, and Ismailis; tribal group spirit (asabiya) of the age of ignorance (jahiliya): the Shu’ubiya controversy during the age of the Umayyads; atheism (zandaqa); and heretical Sufism’ (p.158).

The Saudi books easily apostatise those who negate the Wahhabi worldview, implying the punishment of death to those who deviate, relying on the hadith that says, ‘Whoever changes his religion, kill him’. Saying Eid Mubarak to a Christian is like worshipping the Cross, meaning conversion to apostasy and therefore death (p.161). The Saudi textbook also outlaws saying assalam aleikam to a Christian or a non-Muslim, but if a non-Muslim offers the greeting in the Muslim mode it should be answered with wa alaik and not the full salutation (p.166). The Saudi government has removed certain even more primitive contents of the textbooks, only to be attacked by the radical ulema on Al Jazeera, saying the government was taking the Kingdom on the path of infidels (p.173).

Sickness of flood politics - Khaled Ahmed - Friday Times

2010-08-21T16:19:00.000-07:00

The flooding in Pakistan in July-August 2010 was a natural calamity that the equal of which it had never experienced before. The deluge came in the wake of a nationwide ‘lower-riparian’ furore, against Punjab by Sindh, and against India by a raucous ‘water-war’ lobby in Pakistan, because of scarcity of water. When the rivers overflowed after rainfall, Pakhtunkhwa-Malakand, Gilgit-Baltistan, Punjab and Sindh were inundated, dislocating 20 million people.

The scale of the calamity was clearly beyond the capacity of an administratively and financially drained state. Instead of concentrating on the crisis, the media made the nation concentrate on the revelations made about Pakistan’s double-faced strategy in Afghanistan made through an LSE research paper and ‘leaks’ in the world press. The floods were ignored and the government was pilloried after President Zardari made the politically unwise decision to leave Pakistan after the onset of the flood. He visited the UK whose prime minister had accused Pakistan of duplicity during his visit in New Delhi. The media became obsessive about ‘ghairat’ (national pride).

Welcome to flood-politics: The flood was further ignored for the following reasons. The media attacked the PPP government and used the flood scenes to emphasise – falsely – that the masses were suffering because of the government. The technique used was to make the stricken population accuse the government of not caring for their plight. The opposition joined in and focused on Zardari’s visit and its various lurid aspects like the visit to a luxury villa in Paris and staying in a posh hotel in the UK. Punjab government couldn’t do much to prevent the millions being displaced but still accused Zardari for not being around to nurse the stricken.

The truth is that there was not much the affected provinces could do. The calamity was just too big. And Pakistan’s ability to govern had been devastated by years of Taliban and Al Qaeda assaults on its cities. Another reason this capacity declined sharply was the media focus on US and India as the producers of the suicide-bombers found prowling the streets of the country. Lack of trust was endemic. Provinces wanted the centre to shell out big money for the rescue and rehabilitation of the stricken population. Punjab asked for 10 billion rupees immediately; Pakhtunkhwa asked for 25 billion. The provinces had not developed their capacity to raise their own funds.

Media repeats its overkill: The 2010 calamity was many times bigger than the 2005 earthquake. Flooding did the sort of damage that the earthquake never did. What was destroyed most crucially was the communication system. There was no way the rescuers could reach the road network. It is not true to say that the civil society did not respond. The response was there but it was delayed by the understandably slow pace of the development of logistics. Not even in Gansu, China, where the economy is growing at a high rate and national foreign exchange reserves are the highest in the world, could the flood-affected population be saved in time.

Flooding easily destabilised the country. The blame for this instability must be borne by the media which learned nothing from the overdrive it went into in 2005, accusing the then government of dereliction. The earthquake suffering was exaggerated and the government condemned during the period that the army was struggling to reach the affected areas. This time too the army – the only organised entity in the country with capacity of outreach without roads – had to take time to plan its rescue campaign. It would be difficult to fault the efforts made by it although the scale of destruction was too large even for its relatively well-equipped response.

Calamities and dismemberment: Natural calamities have not been politically good for Pakistan because of the opportunist interpretations placed on them. In East Pakistan, a historic cyclone was interpreted politically by the opposition to start a campaign that resulted in 1971 in the breakup of Pakistan. In 2005, the Musharraf government was saved by the international community that praised Pakistan for tackling its earthquake effectively. Reproducing what the media said during that crisis would shame many aggressive TV anchors and Urdu columnists today.

Pakistan destabilises itself during crises by becoming xenophobic. The UK, which was hugely maligned – the internal criticism in the UK of his gaffe in New Delhi should have been enough – ended up committing flood aid to the tune of 30 million pounds sterling. The US has committed $71 million thus far. The big friends – Arab countries (except Saudia Arabia), and China - do not yet appear on the list. (Saudia has sent two planeloads of goods and committed $100 million so far, and Chinese ambassador says his country has announced assistance.) If India offers help (New Delhi says it is ready to give $5 million) Pakistan will most probably not open the Wahga border. And if it does, it will register no gratitude because of ‘ghairat’.

Flood as punishment for sins: No one minds those who accuse the stricken population of sinning. According to Express (11 Aug 2010) chief of Jamaatud Dawa Hafiz Saeed appealed to all Pakistanis to pray to Allah and sincerely ask Him to forgive them for the sins for which He is punishing them. Similar appeals of ‘contrition of sins’ were made by Maulana Haneef Jalundhari chief of Pakistan’s top madrassa in Multan, and the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb and great scientist, Dr AQ Khan. Surprisingly, MQM’s Farooq Sattar too has joined the chorus in misplaced populism.

Quoted in Jinnah (13 Aug 2010) Jamaat Islami chief Dr Munawwar Hassan asked the Muslims to pray for forgiveness from Allah as the floods were sent down as calamity (azab) from Allah for sins committed by them. Jihadi publication Al Qalam editorialised that floods were an indication that the nation of Pakistan had committed certain acts (lagh-zashain) that were not good in the eyes of Allah who had sent down the calamity. The editorial said that the Quran was the authority behind this opinion. Voltaire (1694-1778) blasphemed against the Church of Rome when he condemned the latter for interpreting plague as punishment for sins.

Calamity as cause of fall of government: In 2005, the banned jihadi organisations were let out to rescue people from the earthquake. It immediately led to the ouster of the NGOs from areas where the jihadis were operating. It later on led to the weakening of the position of General Musharraf within the army. His ability to control the jihadis who had tried to kill him a number of times declined, which led to the new aggression shown by Lal Masjid and its supporters within the state. After that, Sipah Sahaba staged its largest show of force in Islamabad in 2006 which was followed by Musharraf’s operation against a greatly emboldened Lal Masjid, in which he was defeated in 2007.

The jihadis are once again in the field. This time the affected areas are nearer home and the population ready to reward their efforts with loyalty to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. (Jihadi publications are back in circulation after the 2006 ban and a booklet of Al Zawahiri rejecting the Constitution of Pakistan is being mailed to people in the big cities.) Reported in Jang (11 Aug 2010) the Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq, named after a killer of the Shia in Pakistan, announced that if Pakistan returned the American aid the Talban were willing to pay $20 million as a substitute fund. And if the Pakistan government assured security, the Taliban were ready to distribute charity and do rescue and relief work in the flood-affected areas.

Talibanisation of the flood: Reported in the jihadi Jaish-e-Muhammad publication Al Qalam (13 Aug 2010) Al Rehmat Trust had gone into motion in the flood-stricken areas of Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab with its thousands of volunteers helping 3,439 victims in one week in Pakhtunkhwa. It was helping families in Nowshehra, Malakand and Akora Khatak, giving food worth Rs 1100 per family. In Punjab it was active in Rahimyar Khan, Muzaffargarh, Taunsa, Kot Addu and Leiyah. Al Rehmat, attached to Jaish-e-Muhammad, was in coordination with Al Shafi Medical Welfare Organisation.

Pakistan’s flood could be on the brink of Talibanisation, followed by a rise in the hold of the banned terrorist organisations over the masses. The Pakistan army is stretched to its limits rescuing people as well as fighting the Taliban in Waziristan and Orakzai. That Pakistan’s posture is confrontational vis-à-vis India and the US will not help in the coming days when estimates of the damage sustained by it will become public and the world will be found reluctant to help a strategically confused state.

God to Man: your life is not sacred

2009-07-16T06:57:00.000-07:00

In old times, Nature was God, like the Gods of the Greeks based on the sun and sea. Now, nature only speaks Gods words. In our daily lives, if something unexpected and positive happens, its a mircle and no doubt the hand of god was behind it. When something doesnt play out like we wanted, we reassure ourselves that god never wanted it to be.

After reading this article I realized that God (or Nature) is trying to tell us something about how we value human life. We have built our judicial, economic, political and health care systems on one premise that no one questions. Human life is sacred. Again and again, our systems collapse, or are collapsing, because of this one premise. For example, global warming is a result of our belief that human life is sacred. Indeed, even quality of life is sacred. Planet be damned. We are reaching 6 billion because each of the 6 billion is sacred. Another example is health care. As the article explains, health care systems must put a price on human life or they are doomed to breakdown.

The answer seems clear. Human life is not sacred, ie, priceless. God reminds us that it is not so by destroying the systems we have built on this premise alone.

The problem, as I see it, is one of self reference. We can be objective economists, putting a dollar figure on someones life when it comes to life and death questions of some imagined person. But must shed this objectivity when the person who's life is on the line is us or someone close to us.

WWDC Apple 2009

2009-06-08T09:03:00.000-07:00

Here are my predictions for what will be announced at the Apple WWDC 2009 today:

iphone:

1) digital compass
2) movie making/editing capability
3) faster processor
4) better battery life
5) Other stuff that has already been announced like cut and paste, in app payments, etc

An idea that could save Pakistan

2009-04-26T14:13:00.001-07:00

Very few (rich people) in Pakistan pay taxes. Those that do, tend to not pay what they owe. Result, The government has no money. What it does collect is misspent.

What would happen if we put all taxation data and spending online. If I wanted to find out exactly how much money nawaz sharif or my next door nieghbour declared and paid in taxes, I should be able to look it up easily. Similarly, all the money given to the education ministry and had how it was spent should be put online.

We can use web 2.0 to become the fact checkers and the eye in the sky in Pakistan. Okay, maybe it won't save Pakistan but it would be a step in the right direction.

US headed the way of Ireland?

2009-04-21T19:42:00.000-07:00

Great article by Krugman as always. I feel this threat of a US debt crisis may well be the next shoe to drop if Obama does not see that Gietner's plans are not going to work but rather making things worse.

Banks well capitalized?

2009-04-21T10:37:00.001-07:00

Gietner says the banks are well capitalized. The IMF says losses from the credit crisis in the financial sector will reach 4 trillion.

The treasury, like most other actors in this crisis, are acting out of fear. Fear, if these fallen banks are not propped up, all hell will break loose.

Hell has already broken loose. Sweeping things under the rug will only prolong the anguish. The banks are not capitalized well. Why else would the likes of GS play with it earnings. Like taking December out of its annual report in reporting its latest earnings.

Stop proping up failed institutions mr secretary. Stop acting out of fear.

Crochet and hyperbolic space

2009-04-20T21:47:00.001-07:00

Ted talk: beyond euclidian, spherical geometry is the geometry of correls, modeled by a cornell scientist, daina taimina, via crochet.

In hyperbolic space, an infinite set of lines are paralell to a given line.

History is a (double) helix.

2009-04-20T18:49:00.001-07:00

Reading an economics article I came across the following: history is not a sine wave, endlessly repeating the same pattern. Rather it is a helix, in that we encounter issues that lie in the same plane but are different.

Apologizing for Beloved Theories

2009-03-08T21:44:00.000-07:00

Communism didn't fail- it was the communist that failed.

Religion is great- its just misunderstood, misapplied and misused.

Lessay fair economics didn't fail- it was the greedy bankers that failed us.

You either agree or disagree with all of the statements above.

A True Gift

2009-03-04T17:46:00.000-08:00

Sitting in class, I realized. A true gift requires you to apply yourself.

A New Type of Economics

2009-03-01T23:07:00.001-08:00

Joe the plumber is so incompetent that you wouldn't let him touch a leaking faucet- he invariably makes things worse. Would you then consider his help if the water main broke and water was filling your basement?

"I share with Economists the belief that government intervention creates more problems than it solves." That line from David Swenson's book Unconventional Success, reminds me of Joe the plumber, who's help we would rather not take when things are fine. Why then are we all, Economists included, suddenly looking to Joe to help us in the current crisis?

To make matter worse, Economic principals as well as those from Evolutionary Biology and Ecology suggest that when a market participant does something stupid, they should suffer the consequences. Capitalism is survival of the fittest. In ecology, the old must die to make way for the new-- think of wildfires that are essential for the health of the forest. Death is an essential part of life.

The hard part is that when the economy is collapsing, the metaphor that that must be used is that of a house burning and not of a wild fire. When people are losing jobs, its a matter much closer to home than something thats happening far off in a forest. So what does one do when ones house is burning and -- to stick with the metaphor-- the parts that are burning are the worst parts that will one day be replaced by much better parts.

One cant just stand and watch! Joe the plumber, who in this case is the US government, led by Obama, must act. They must give us hope that the house will be saved even though we know that eventually, the fire will burn out, and things will return to normal, in spite of what the Government may or may not do.

But as we know, Joe is only making things worse by his efforts to stamp out the fire. His shoe is on fire and he only manages to spread the fire to other parts of the house. (As most economists agree, or at least used to agree, that there is a place for government intervention, but it is limited to fixing market inefficiencies and not to bailing any one out.)

Therefore, I propose a new field of study-- call it Pseudo-economics. A field that teaches Joe (the Governments) how to look like he is on top of the fire fighting situation but in reality not touch the fire at all. Just let it run its course. This would do good by raising the confidence of the public but take away the harm that the government ends up doing in trying to help the economy in crisis.

Could Religion be the Ultimate Nihilist's Response?

2009-02-18T13:40:00.000-08:00

The moral world is a spectrum. On one end: absolute faith, a world full of meaning, if not moral certainty then at least the belief in a moral compass. A world of structure and direction. It may be a bit contradictory (Libral Muslims favourites: boozing yes, pork no, adultary yes, jizyah no, interest no, fajr no, the list goes on-- its all interpretation silly!). But you've got God looking over your shoulder. Logical inconsistency or arbitrarness is a small price to pay.

On the other end of the moral spectrum: Nihilism. The belief that there is no inherent meaning but the one that we create. Amoral. Directionless, but also, by definition, contradiction free. Also free of Judgement (of others and oneself). The opposite of complete Faith: complete Doubt.

But, to give you my favorite quote: in doubt, there is freedom.

In reality, this spectrum may just be a mobius strip. (I keep telling this to my mother- a woman of great faith- she, greatly influenced by the Sufi Mystic tradition sees "the connections" and the Unity, still cant help but take swipe's at Darwin and Atheists every now and then. Why swipe if you we all pray to the same God in our own different way?).

If you have ever traveled by foot ALONE in the mountains or the deserts for even a day, you will know what I am talking about. There is sense of being tiny and insignificant- of dare I say it, being meaningless. A solo trek in the mountains or desert, my friends, is the first steps down the road to nihilism- as much as it may be a turn towards religion.

Imagine a boy in the desert, herding sheep, close to nature in all its grandeur. In the old story, the boy is (or becomes) religious, and goes on to create the great religion of Islam. In this story, the boy is a little different. Being a humble shepherd, someone who tends to the simple practicalities of life, the boy in this story is, well, practical. He has also lost both his parents. His way of dealing with meaninglessness is simply to accept it as reality. This adventurous soul, didn't latch on to the ready made meaninglessness destroying "memes" of his forefathers. In the desert he searches for his own meaning.

When Nietzsche talks about Nihilism, he compares it to drowning in a sea; It is as if the earth become one vast ocean, a giant drop of water, and you are sinking in it. There is no up or down (a myth that is to this day pervasive, even after we know the vastness of the cosmos is directionless), no right and no wrong. It is an Abyss. It takes time to come to terms with such a world view. In this story, it takes the boy till 42 to come to terms with it. And in coming to terms with it, the boy finds in it the Freedom of what Nietzsche called the Superman.

In many ways, believing in something, actually makes it true. The credit crisis is in ways nothing more than a self fulfilling prophesy- a lack of confidence in the economic future. At the individual level, another example is confidence itself- as I like to say before my friends at Cornell before they go in for interviews: the only way to have confidence is to believe you have it. The placebo effect is another well documented example of mind over matter. These are trivial concepts. The wise shepherd thought about and understood them quickly. Indeed, he is tempted to create his own reality (and did he not indeed succeed) to escape the meaninglessness.

But before he can do this- he must die. So strong are the chains of the value system your parents, friends and family wrap around you, that they only come off after death.

Why did god take away my parents? he asks. Our shephard is drowning in the Abyss. The only way it made sense to this simple shephard was to say that it made no sense at all. When the boy has lost his mind as well as the old value system, Gabriel finally comes to him. The boy (who is now a middle aged man of 42) is reborn in a moment of clarity, a moment of complete freedom.

Freedom: to question the traditions and beliefs of your forefathers. This is what the shephard understood. He questioned the traditions of the tribes of his time, from their belief in multiple gods to the treatment of women, children and orphans. He preached goodness. Why? Because he finally understood why his parents died: for no reason, other than, they were human. Fragile creatues. Of flesh and blood.

Like Kant was trying to say (but not in so many words), goodness that springs from the Abyss of Nihilism, is true goodness. It has no other motive behind it besides the will to do good, an end itself. It is not coerced goodness, which is what we practice today, afraid of the police or heaven and hell.

Muhammad became Superman, and, as the story goes, Nihilsm gave birth to its alter ego, Religion.

Next time: why our shepherd Superman did not give the order for the Quran to be compiled.

Apple

2009-01-23T15:52:00.000-08:00

A stock I pitched to the Cornell Investment Management club came out with better than expected results. Apple seems to be defying the recession-- as I had predicted-- although not so much through the iphone sales but through the ipod sales. But my thesis was still correct. The new ipods, with their ability to surf the internet and download apps are like cheap netbooks.

Apple remains on my conviction buy list, despite Steves ill health. I feel that great design is-- after 10 years of Steve being at the helm-- imbedded into Apple' genes.

Steve Jobs Takes Leave of Absence

2009-01-14T21:50:00.000-08:00

Today Steve announced, "....during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought... In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June."

The Stock fell 8% in after hours.

Steve led Apple over the last decade or so to great heights. But should we expect that Apple will not be able to keep producing great products without him? I don't think so. Indeed, it was not Steve who came up with the click wheel. Or the design for the iBook's, iMac's. etc.

Apple has a great industrial design team for that. Jonathan Ives who designed the most of the hit products for Apple is a cult figure himself (more popular in the UK that JK Rowlings. See article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3481599.stm ).

What Steve did well was able to identify good design and not let it be ruined by what is known as "design by committee" (DbyC). DbyC or its sister, design by programmers (what Microsoft does) takes even good designs and dilutes them till they are indistinguishable from bad ones.

If you look at the stunning growth in Apple you realize that Steve has educated all of us about good design. He has taught all those who love their ipods and the iphones, that design matters. That technology doesn't have to be dull, but can have a style and sensibility, that makes these objects of affection; "cool" rather than just tools that make our lives more efficient (which they do as well).

If he could have taught all this to us, the general public, it seems likely that those that have been closest to him, those that have actually made the designs that he then pushed forward (or modified) know this too.

I believe that Steve has, over the last decade, put in place a brand which such a strong sense of style that the products that will be coming out of apple are almost obvious. So, for example, a larger iphone type tablet device, in the range of 8 to 9 inches diagonally, is on its way sometime this year. How can I be sure? Place all the apple devices that apple has current from the smallest (the ipod nano) to the largest (the plasma display) and you will notice a gap in the size in this range. More on this anther time...

My point is this. As long as Apple does not fall for DbyC, they should be fine, with or with out Steve. And I don't think they will fall for DbyC, because if I'm telling you about it, its such an obvious trap that the smart people at Apple will know about it too!

On the Demise of the US

2009-01-09T13:56:00.000-08:00

Its seems to be trendy to say the US is on a steady decline and a superpower for only a while longer. China is sure to be kicking US ass shortly (economically at least), they say.

Reason's given are based on the unsustainable US government deficit (40% of GDP), the current account deficit, social security crisis, rising military spending, etc.

These proclamations are not new. I asked Peter Bakstansky – Senior Vice President (retired), Fed Reserve of NY the question (week on wall street): does the fed worry about the current account deficit. He said yes, its discussed but its never been a real cause of concern. On the current account deficit he said, "they said it (the current account deficit) would be unsustainable at 5% (of GDP) that came and went, then they said 7% and that too came and went".

The current economic crisis has given second wind to these theories. Seventy years ago, during the great depression, I bet these theorists might also have found lots to clamor about. To such people, the end of the US should seem eminent at every recession.

My position is simple. We simply do not have sufficient data at this point to say either way.

To take an analogy from picking stocks-- analysts and those trained in the art know how hard is it to call a stock. Where will GE trade a year from now? Most would shy away from making a call on GE given its complexity and diverse business. Yet, when it comes to the $40 trillion firm called the USofA everyone seems to know and is ready to call which way the stock is going.

On Technology Trends

2009-01-09T13:23:00.000-08:00

Three trends in personal technology are note worthy:

1) The User Interface (UI) is the computer
2) Different UI's fill different needs
3) Data doesnt differentiate between UI's

1) The UI is the computer:

Once upon a time, computers filled entire rooms. Then they came in big beige boxes. Finally, the iMac shrunk all the innards and hid them behind the LCD screen and thus began the age of the UI. The iPhone is one big UI.

2) Different UI's fill different needs

In olden times, a warrior carried a knife, a shield, a sword and other fighting equipment. Today, in the information age, the UI is the equipment we take to battle. I might take just my mobile device on my jog to listen to podcasts/news. To a meeting, I'll take my laptop to make presentations. At home I'll use a desktop (or desktop replacement laptop) to complete multiple tasks efficiently.

3) Data doesnt differentiate between UI's

Data is UI agnostic. Today, I cant have a video conference on my cell phone as easily as I can on my laptop, or create or edit documents as easily. Just like my laptop will not be as portable as my mobile device (by definition) there are some inherant reasons why differnet UI's will always have some advantages, but they will converge.

On the trends

2009-01-09T13:09:00.000-08:00

The Cornell MBA "week on wall street" came to an end yesterday. I couldnt help but think it should be called the "weak" on wall street.

Among the highlights were meetings with analysts from The Capital Group, Jim Cramer, S & P and Mavrick Capital.

Gunnar Overstrom – MD, PM at Mavrick mentioned that he looks at three things while picking stocks. The secular trend, the cyclical trend and particular bottom up trends (the last being things like management, accounting standards. fraud, etc.)

Deeper evaluation is done on the basis of fundamentals, (market) expectations, valuations (which he considered the least important) and management.

I like this way of breaking things down.