21 Sunday Oct 2012
Tags
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.
Article: http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-9-138736-Not-by-religion-alone
23 Thursday Aug 2012
Tags
agnosticism, atheism, Judaism, philosophy, religion, theism, theology
I guess I love to talk by “chatyping”.
Even back in my Booz (Allen and Hamilton) days, lunch and bbc-type intranet went together, not necessarily a good thing because in some corporate environments, people may track what others say with interest in evaluating or stinging the same down the road.
Then too, there are some “thought police” scattered around the world: the existence of state-controlled media tells as much, and the various wars on various nasty cabal and larger organizations involve every kind of intelligence “listening post” and cyber-scanning.
The machines want to know some things, one may suppose, and certainly all those offices also want to know the nature of the various species crawling across their once pristine and easily defined battlespace: forget about cartel kingpins and venal state lobbyists — what do with so many friendlies zipping and zapping everywhere in shark tank cyberspace?
God bless ’em.
And God bless us, one and all.
In any case, come forward about 17 years from the olden days and upwards of, I don’t know, maybe 30,000 or more messages typed online in various communities, and here am I (and you perhaps) with Facebook and both of us — all of us — somewhere in the middle of an awesome conversation, and it turns out I like what I type in short form.
Of course, I’ve had a lot of practice.
The subject was an aphorism that I “Liked” in the Facebook way: “Morality is doing the right thing regardless of what you were told; Religion is doing what you were told regardless of what is right.”
I laughed too.
And then I thought about it.
—–
Although I got a chuckle out of this, I feel I should mention that I am not an atheist, do not advocate “no religion”, and do believe that the cultivation of “good conscience” may be derived from and integrated with culture, cultural values, language in general, language metonymy more specifically, language behavior (sensibility and timbre in expression), and the vagaries of individual psychology and various social processes. If we follow the black-and-white inversion that may formulate as Too Much Religion –> No Religion, the barren quality in that may force even the most rigorous intellectuals to advocate as healthy the presence and persistence of magical, romantic, and universal thought.
The matter of resisting malicious ideas and impulses comprise a large part of moral and religious instruction, but a few can and do get their grip on the levers of institutions and in the pursuit of their own “dreams of glory” lose the better part of their humanity. They are those who exceed limits, cannot contain themselves, become the worst hypocrites, and, when so empowered, lead their people to ruin.
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20 Monday Aug 2012
Posted in Religion
As noted, I participate in the Rationalist Society of Pakistan’s forum hosted by Facebook, and the breadth of arguments and presentations of evidence should surprise those in the “anti-Jihad” who have taken the most pessimistic approach available toward all things Islam. The above video comes by way of that forum and may be making the rounds today — I posted the same to my wall a few minutes ago — in that medium.
Kacem El Ghazzali, who blogs in English at Atheistica (now listed also to the left) strikes me as a young Moroccan version of the literary icon long familiar to English souls who have dipped into the whirlpools swirling around religion: Christopher Hitchens.
“Hitch” left us late last year, and, God willing, he will not have met his maker, nor heaven nor hell or any of that, but from my sentimental view may God bless him anyway, as he fought relentlessly for a better, more kind and thoughtful humanity.
Again, Hitch has left his mark and is gone, and as so much having to do with The English, the voices of others, even if in English in addition to some other more primary language for each, have been surfacing on the radars of a rapidly developing international and typing-in-English (soon to become Skyping, I’m sure) intelligentsia.
Welcome then Kacem el Ghazzali, who is just starting his long journey across a short leg in the overall journey of Man.
If one takes “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as template, Ghazzali, who is by no means as innocent of power as the boy in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, has in the boy’s place spoken to the powers that be (and those that merely roam about) — and he’s heard back in snarky comments and death threats.
“I have the fear,” Ghazzali says to Michael Coren, “but I can’t really submit, I can’t really stop what I’m doing because the cause I have is not only for me but for the thousands of young people who are living the Islamist’s war, and their conditions of life and conditions of security are much, much, much bad than what I have here.”
A mensch!
Coren goes on to bring up Hitchens, so here too is Hitchens, who has perhaps set a standard for toughened and unsentimental reasoning:
My own stance: Jewish. I prefer to throw in with God, my people, and the ancient and customary one-sided Friday evening chit-chat with the Almighty, but I am ever mindful of nature too and within it our human potential in evolution that runs alongside the stupidity in some that finds necessity in fashioning by their own grandiose aspirations the suffering of others.
17 Friday Aug 2012
Tags
book review, books, civilizational narcissism, history, Islam, Mobarak Haider, narcissism, political psychology, politics, religion, Taliban
Civilizational NarcissismEverything you wanted to know about why what is wrong with Islam — that abysmal present soaked in blood, dependence, hate, ignorance, and failed or failing or drifted states from Asia to Africa to the Middle East — may be covered in Mobarak Haider’s 2008 (Urdu version; English version, 2010) Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg.
“Narcissism is a psychic state of extreme subjectivity. The civilizational narcissists have mostly two alternating mental states: either they are perfectly unaware of the role of the world around them or if they are aware, they are sure that it admires or envies them. This infatuation with their own charm renders them totally impervious to the beauty and merit of others. Civilizational narcissism is therefore collective to the extent that all the admirers of their own civilization admire only abstract concepts; no living human or the existing pattern of civilization impresses them.”
With Pakistani street cred and cosmopolitan ivory tower brights and insight, Haider walks the reader through each dimension of cultural, geopolitical, linguistic, psychological, and social history and thought in laying out the case for an unbridled narcissism as the core component promoting the misery the Muslim Ummah continues to deal to itself and to others in the name of Allah.
In addition to the psychology, which I regard as rich and spot-on, Haider’s honesty and integrity in scholarship in and of itself stands signal to the kind of change the whole world wants as regards Islam’s ability to accept criticism, to develop by first developing itself (through other than alms and arms) and to enjoy — now these are my words — the world’s present and most assuredly future “cultural polyphony”.
I have found an implacability in conservative Muslim and American circles in which one party or the other is not only being victimized by the other, but reverting, or stuck, in the mechanics of the most woeful prejudice, which may be reduced to the statement, “they are all like that.” For some, every Muslim is a Jihadi-head (and it may be tragic for Muslims that whatever potential lay in the term “Jihad”, it really has become synonymous with “bombs on two legs” and the like); and for some opposite, every “right-winger” is Pamela Geller or Robert Spencer (I like them both): my way out of that debacle has been through the window of a term I refer to as “shimmer” — i.e., for what’s coming over the berm, uncertainty as to who, in impassioned numbers, really wants what.
Not to be the “useful idiot” in this crowd, I have at this point engaged many Muslim friends (around the world too), most of whom I genuinely enjoy in an atmosphere as generous in mutual regard as I have ever experienced in conversation.
Nonetheless, in the hands of clerics, the Taliban, and the Arabs who profit mightily on religion — the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, may be valued at $30 billion annually according to a Gulf News report — the culture produced within the vaunted “religion of peace” has serious social issues with the rest of the world.
And it can’t stand to hear about them.
After so much delving into contributing cultures and history, Haider makes this general observation, which I feel should be taken to heart:
“In all these forms of contact — individual, tribal, and civilizational — supremacy of one over the other, i.e., ascendancy of one sex over the other, of one tribe over the other, or of one civilization over the other, is a bad arrangement. It is less productive and cannot hold forever. It has been observed that if clash is less frequent than kindness, in these forms of relationships, the resulting posterity is healthier and happier. The concept of dominance seems to be the less developed form of behavior in human history. That is perhaps why all doctrines and philosophies of wisdom preached against it.” (p. 174).
I would suggest our species more gregarious than not and altogether more inclined toward real goodness and good relationships than not.
However, be that as it may, a little farther on in a chapter titled, “Hate the Jew: And Do Not Ask”, Haider notes, “The tragedy does not lie in the inability of Muslims to learn or think” — here I interrupt to note my friends do learn and do think, wonderfully, but they may be neither representative of all nor few, a subject to be taken up at another time . . . but back to Haider’s telling sentence — “it lies in the absolute dominance of Islamic dogma that has been carefully defended, so that no critical approach could ever raise a finger . . . . In Saudi Arabia, even now geocentric astronomy is taught as syllabus; Abdul Rahman bin Baaz, the head of Medina University received award of merit for his thesis that the Earth is static while the Sun and the Moon move.”
I believe the veracity of Haider’s anecdotal evidence.
Those who believe Abdul Rahman bin Baaz’s theory would seem capable of believing anything, not that anyone dare tell them that.
American Psychiatric Association. Personality disorders. In: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc; 2000:717-731.
Ali, Jasim. “Sweeping economic impact of the Haj.” Gulf News, November 7, 2011.
Altaf, Waseem. “We need multiple measures to start a return: Mobarak Haider.” Viewpoint, n.d.
Ambardar, Sheenie and David Bienenfeld. “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” Medscape Reference, updated May 24, 2011. (References 2000 DSM-IV-TR).
Kreger, Randi. “Don’t Diss the Narcissists!” Psychology Today, May 24, 2010.
15 Wednesday Aug 2012
Tags
Islam, Mobarak Haider, Muslim, narcissism, political, politics, psychology, religion
Haider, Mobarak. Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg. Pakistan: Saanjh, 2008 (Urdu), 2010 (English).
An experience embraced over time becomes an education, and so in this my fifth year of the most obscure blogging, I may graduate (by my own authority, naturally) from generalist to specialist, from being many things to many people (three dimensional fellow: writer, photographer, musician) to settling down between the desktop, library, and Skype, and forging ahead not only with what has been incubated on Facebook — every you-know-what has an opinion, of course — but narrowing even those lively rounds down to a more in-depth and perceptive tracking and analysis of the conflicts blazing away beneath an umbrella I call the “Islamic Small Wars”, that band of civil conflict and terror that has established a cold or hot presence in every Muslim-majority state and produced misery along the interface with western and other cultures.
I may not confine myself to that interest, dictators and junta and crooked oligarchs serving equally well for mindful entertainment and colorful data on which to mull the human condition and the autocrat’s propensity for mad self-adoration and aggrandizement.
We’ll see how this goes, and if it goes well, I suppose I shall have to archive and close the high school version of my foray into foreign affairs: Oppenheim Arts & Letters.
I’ll put up an “About” page soon, but, right now, I’m reading the above noted book by Mobarak Haider, and it is answering questions, filling in gaps, making sense of many things having to do with the architecture and character of the Islamic Small Wars,
I don’t want to review Haider’s book in this post — I’m still reading it, for one thing — but have wanted to play with this blog concept for a while.
The industry that has taken on the name “anti-Jihad” has grown extensively around the art of righteous complaint, and for that there has been no lack of material for squawking. What perhaps has been lacking would seem a less aligned perspective in a mind moving off the field and down into the engine room of the soul, which, incidentally, Haider does quite well, and searching out and perhaps arguing for answers.
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