” . . . and I’ll say that, of course, an attacker, who could be called the agent of Satan, he attacked, but after that I found angels on all my side, everywhere, all around me to this time and this place.”
I’m not editing videos (yet), but here I’m also not entertaining so much.
Malala’s story has had a profound impact on Pakistan’s perspective on itself and attitude toward its extremists. If by itself the tragedy proves less than pivotal, it will nonetheless feed into the weighing of justice and choices in commitments to values in whatever happens next.
Secularism is deemed to be a dirty word in Pakistan. But it is an idea whose time has come. In fact, it may already be too late. We now stand effectively disconnected from the freedom movement that was led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his associates.
“Here lies the dilemma: Pakistan’s material culture is modernising and non-material culture is Islamising. The result is that the values and norms that we espouse, offer little guidance for the behaviours necessitated by our material and urban ways of living. We are in a state of moral conflict.”
“We believe the universe was created for Mohammed, and we have the right to be the darlings of the universe. We darlings of the universe are your darlings by right, and you are very kind to us that you will keep us your darlings.
“The liberal intellectuals, the liberal politicians, the liberal middle class of the modern civilization or modern world, which has given a hope of survival to mankind, is committing its suicide instead of ensuring the future of mankind by pampering my ego, which says the universe belongs to me without any work that I do. I may do nothing. I was created a Muslim, so the extreme virtue I have committed just by being born: I came to the world, I have done this great favor that I was born, and I was born as a Muslim, so it is my right to be the most superior human being in the world.
“I can go with a penguin dress and a turban on my head and say, “No, I will not work, five times a day I will go for prayer. You pay me the wages because I am following my religion, and you must be ashamed of yourself that you object to my religion if you do.
“These are not my sarcastic remarks. These are the feelings of a genuine Muslim.”
Mobarak Haider urging Islamic reform and encouraging pressure on Islam to reform or evolve — to lose its narcissistic fix and change — September 24, 2012, Peace House, Oslo, Norway (quoted from the second video in the following series).
From the last video: “Hizb-ut-Tahrir” will never accept the responsibility for any act of terror, but they will prepare the Muslim mind to never go or act against that act of terror.”
Q: What is the cruelest thing an adult may do to a child?
A: Fail to educate the same.
There are zero dull days for anyone “tracking” conflicts via the World Wide Web, but the past several days have been especially touched by the attempted murder of Malala Yusufzai, a 14-year-old schoolgirl braving the Taliban — insulting them, actually — by merely taking ownership of her right to go to school.
This video featured Malala in 2009, and it starts this way: “In the area where I live, there are some people who want to stop educating girls through guns.”
Given the rush of expanding attention those intending to “stop educating girls through guns” have brought upon themselves by demonstrating the kind of thing they themselves seem to have learned to do best, they may have brought to the Swat Valley Region of Pakistan a more committed and vigorous national and international effort to renew civility, education, and global modernity — its freedoms and its values — all around themselves.
Reported by Reuters yesterday: “”We targeted her because she would speak against the Taliban while sitting with shameless strangers and idealized the biggest enemy of Islam, Barack Obama.”
If you think that’s a bit upside-down, considering what the conservative right in America and elsewhere has been saying about Obama these past and long four years, consider the same source said to Reuters, “The Quran says that people propagating against Islam and Islamic forces would be killed.”
A careful and close reader might catch the ambiguity and ambivalence embedded in that claim.
“I first traveled to the Swat valley, home of Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, the victim of a Taliban assassination attempt, when I was a girl of seven, with my Pakistani father. I recently returned there this spring under the protection of Pakistan’s Rangers in the Northwest Frontier Corps. The valley was just as beautiful as my vivid childhood memories had remembered, reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands; I immediately understood the stories of Churchill’s entrancement by the area. Only later I discovered that my paternal grandmother had been born in a village three hours from here. These were my people. I was theirs.
Those who remember, know the band well and true name of the music: Yes and “I’ve Seen All Good People”.
Theirs was a part of the ethos of the English-borne 1970s.
And here, 2012, far from those halcyon days, their art for the ears continues to resonate.
“Don’t surround yourself with yourself” — I should take the advice and perhaps others should take it for themselves as well.
My interest in the narcissistic dimension of political psychology started off with the direct and real space experience of personalities exhibiting mild to severe bipolar disorder and narcissistic personality disorder while in cyberspace I happened to be surfing conflicts and discovering for myself any number of autocratic regimes and the mess and misery they were able to bring to their hapless constituents.
(For this blog, the “Conflict – Culture – Language – Psychology” category should suffice, as I hope the whole production will not be so all over the place as the other, which I had created to showcase some other things I could do).
(In science, it is generally taken as a good thing to arrive at similar observations and insights by way of separate tracks — remember: theories stand until disproved, always, but they may be strengthened too by the arrival of new data — and that appears to be what has happened).
To move on: politics draw a variety of social competitors — advisers, leaders, warriors — and among the same, some may carry within themselves the over-the-top, unconstrained, boundary-confused, and often sadistic egotism of the malignant narcissist, and these too full of themselves no one needs.
As I type this, the intelligence of the world moves quickly in tens upon tens of thousands of communications per hour, and so it is I happen to participate in the Facebook presence of the Rationalist Society of Pakistan (the organizational site has been listed to the left). One of my Facebook buddies, Lakhkar Khan Hoti, posted there a statement by President Obama extolling the contributions made by Islam to humanity, which I interpret as part of the President’s promise to “extend the hand of peace” to Islam, and requested comment.
As professionals in a social-networking community may do, the original poster was asked to cite his source.
“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.
To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society’s ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.”
There are some things humans — individually, in aggregate, without regard to legacy — may wish to entertain as twined language, technology, and trade capacities continue to contract and integrate lives and lifestyles across our ever gregarious species. Start with the meaning and significance of self-concept in relation to others and whether certain degrees of glorious narcissistic self-aggrandizement have a place in anyone’s better future, not least of all Pakistan’s.
My interest in political psychology and the dimension referred to as “narcissism” was inspired by encountering in my web-borne travels so many tawdry dictatorships — the junta in Burma; Robert Mugabe (thank him for reintroducing cholera to his people) in Zimbabwe; Paul Biya whose French connections and chateau keep him comfy while his people starve in Cameroon; etc. Copy and paste “African Dictator” into your browser, and you should come up with a blog titled and devoted to just that subject, quite colorful. And awful.
One might suggest there’s some difference too between overt religiosity and deep and rightly cherished spirituality.
There may be a good track in humanity enforced by our natural and overwhelming propensity to enjoy one another despite whatever hardships we may be enduring.
Where conditions have become untenable, whether by the hand of Pharaoh or through the failure of ambition as represented by the will to war — other ideas and policies proving bankrupt beneath the hands of lost autocrats and warmongers both — most people resign themselves to suffering or leave for what they hope will prove a healthier situation.
A bully anywhere — schoolyard, saloon, state, tribe, region — drives humanity away, and one may suggest that even God’s love goes with those who leave.
Time and again, and without understanding the sources of their own ruin, time reduces the malignant and all they have done to rags and relics, not to mention the diminishing of their reputation down into the class of assorted “bad examples” in lessons to new generations.
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