Islamic Political Alternative

Excerpt from Richard Bulliet's excellent book, Islam: the view from the edge, written in 1994:

"I maintain that, whether or not they ultimately live by the ideals they espouse, today's Islamic activists have inherited from their historical tradition a claim to authority quite different from that of the familiar Middle Eastern monarchs and dictators, a claim that holds substantial promise of restructuring the political, cultural, and moral atmosphere of the Middle East.

The authority I see them wielding is the ability to answer the questions raised by believers in a fashion that convinces the believers of their correctness.. Nationalistic answers that once seemed heady and progressive, buttressed by a purported superiority of cultural and intellectual values originally imported from the West, now fall flat before the whispered--or shouted--suspicion that they are actually symptoms of the malignancy of cultural Imperialism...

I believe the future of the Muslim world lies with the Islamic political alternative."

Crusades in Muslim Lands

I ran across this really interesting piece of prose regarding the crusades. I thought would be nice to share with readers, it is very moving and beautiful. The excerpt is from the chronicler Ibn al-Athir.

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http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/middleages/topic_3/alathir.htm

It was the discord between the Muslim princes * * * that enabled the Franks to overrun the country. Abu l-Musaffar al Abiwardi >> note 3 composed several poems on this subject, in one of which he says:

We have mingled blood with flowing tears, and there is no room
left for pity.

To shed tears is a man's worst weapon when the swords stir
up the embers of war.
Sons of Islam, behind you are battles in which heads rolled
at your feet.
Dare you slumber in the blessed shade of safety, where life is
soft as an orchard flower?
How can the eye sleep between the lids at a time of disasters
that would waken any sleeper?
While your Syrian brothers can only sleep on the backs of their
chargers or in vultures' bellies!
Must the foreigners feed on our ignominy, while you trail behind
the train of a pleasant life, like men whose world is at peace?
When blood has been spilt, when sweet girls must for shame hide
their lovely faces in their hands!
When the white swords' points are red with blood, and the iron
of the brown lances is stained with gore!
At the sound of sword hammering on lance young children's hair
turns white.
This is war, and the infidel's sword is naked in his hand, ready
to be sheathed in men's necks and skulls.
This is war, and he who lies in the tomb at Medina >> note 4 seems
to raise his voice and cry: "O sons of Hashim!
I see my people slow to raise the lance against the enemy:
I see the Faith resting on feeble pillars.
For fear of death the Muslims are evading the fire of battle,
refusing to believe that death will surely strike them."
Must the Arab champions then suffer with resignation,
while the gallant Persians shut their eyes to their dishonour?

Traffic accidents in Iran

Iran has extremely bad driving practices, as those who have visited the country can attest. Below is some very informative information from a UN organization (UNICEF) which paired up with other organizations in Iran to help spread awareness.

Key points:  Each year, road traffic crashes kill nearly 28,000 people in Iran, and injure or disable 300,000 more.

What can be done to help bring these numbers down? I must admit I'm not an expert, but a list of solutions has been listed by UNICEF. In any case, becoming informed is the first step to take for sure. I know Iranians are good at being engineers, so any comments about what to do practically would be more than appreciated! 


I've re-posted the UNICEF article below, hopefully once we realize the gravity of the situation we can go about helping to combat this problem.

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Traffic accidents on Iran’s roads cause thousands of deaths and injuries every year, and cost the country’s economy billions of dollars. UNICEF, together with Iran’s Ministry of Health, State Welfare Organisation, police forces, and the Municipality of Tehran, has begun an awareness-raising campaign to shed more light on these facts and to contribute to reducing the mortality and injury rates caused by road accidents. Some of the key statistics of which any traffic participant in Iran should be aware are:

Ø The rate of road accidents in Iran is twenty times more than the world’s average.

Ø Globally, road traffics accidents kill 1.2 million people every year and leave 20-50 million people injured and disabled.

Ø In Iran, among all unintentional fatal injuries inflicted on children under five, traffic-related fatalities are the leading cause of death.

Ø Each year, road traffic crashes kill nearly 28,000 people in Iran, and injure or disable 300,000 more.

Ø Every 19 minutes one person dies on Iran’s roads, and every two minutes people will hear that one of their family members has survived a crash but with serious injury and perhaps lifelong disability.

Ø Traffic fatalities cost Iran’s economy six billion US dollar every year, which amounts to more than five per cent of the country’s Gross National Product.

Ø Some 25 per cent of all road fatalities in Iran are those involving motorcycles; over 60 per cent of those occur because the drivers did not wear a helmet and incurred head traumas.

Ø 90% of road traffic deaths in the world occur in low-income and middle-income countries.

Ø By the year 2020, road crashes will rank ahead of cancer and behind only heart disease and depression in terms of life-years lost.

Ø Globally, Road traffic injuries are the second leading cause of death for young people aged 5–25 years.

Ø Road traffic crashes are predictable and can be prevented. Many countries have achieved sharp reductions in the number of crashes and the frequency and severity of traffic-related injuries by addressing key issues. Interventions that have been proven to be effective include those that deal with:

Ø Speeding: Speed is a main factor contributing to road traffic injuries in most countries. Young men in particular are likely to drive at excessive or inappropriate speeds. Reducing the average traffic speed by 1 km/h has been shown to lead to a 4%–5% decrease in fatal crashes.

Ø Seat-belts: Seat-belts have saved more lives than any other road safety intervention in the event of a crash. Young male drivers have been found to use seat-belts less frequently than other groups. Seat-belts can reduce the risk of all injuries by 40%–50%, and of fatal injuries by 40%–60%.

Ø Child restraints: Child restraints, such as infant and child seats and booster seats, have been shown to be highly effective at preventing fatalities among both infants and young children travelling in cars. Child restraints reduce the death rates in car crashes by 71% among infants and by 54% among young children.

Ø Helmets: Wearing a helmet is the single most effective way of reducing head injuries and fatalities resulting from motorcycle, moped and bicycle crashes. Young men are less likely to wear helmets while riding motorcycles. Motorcycle helmets have been shown to reduce the risk and severity of head injury by about 70%.

Ø Road design and infrastructure: Measures to improve road design and infrastructure include: separating different types of traffic; providing safer routes for pedestrians and cyclists; building pavements and recognizable crossing structures for pedestrians; and reducing traffic speeds by constructing speed bumps, rumble strips and roundabouts.

Ø Emergency services: Many road crash victims die before they reach a hospital because of inadequate emergency services, including medical, fire and police services. Improving the emergency services from the crash scene to the health facility and beyond will increase the chances of those involved in road traffic crashes surviving, and avoiding long-lasting disabilities and injuries.

گفتگوی تنهایی - مصاحبه با شهاب حسینی - ویژه رمضان ۱۳۹۱

یک گفت و گوی بسیار زیبای با شهاب حسینی

Sectarian Shadows in Bahrain

This is an older article I wrote regarding Bahrain. I thought I might share it with the readers of this blog. I personally think this is one of my better works, I wrote it emotionally and it addresses some of the main issues facing the region, in my opinion.

Sectarian Shadows in Bahrain


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The specter of sectarianism grips the Persian Gulf and greater Middle East — just recently Iraq “awoke” to a spate of brutal attacks all across the country. The truth is, Iraqis have been awake in a nightmare of violence and struggle for decades, a nightmare that that the rest of the region has also been experiencing to various degrees.

Just down the coastline of the Gulf, the ghosts of sectarianism eye Bahrain, where plans to construct an ambitious Catholic Church have been met with stiff opposition. For those who believed that sectarianism was limited to intra-Muslim conflicts, they were rudely awakened.

After construction plans of the Church were announced, more than 70 clerics signed a petition addressed to Bahrain’s king “saying it was forbidden to build churches in the Arabian Peninsula, the birthplace of Islam,” according to the Associated Press (AP).

This is odd considering that the Quran formally recognizes Jews and Christians as “people of the book,” and the Prophet Muhammad as continuing the same message as the holy Jewish and Christian prophets before him.

According to the AP article,

“The uproar reflects the widening influence and confidence of hardline Sunni groups, who have been a key support for the monarchy as it faces a wave of protests led by Shiites demanding greater political rights. Shiites account for about 70 percent of Bahrain’s population of just over half a million people, but claim they face widespread discrimination and lack opportunities granted to the Sunni minority. The monarchy has also has relied heavily on help from ultraconservative Saudi Arabia, which last year sent troops to help crush protests.”

In response to the popular uprisings of the Arab Awakening, various governments throughout the region resorted to calling upon cynical religious affiliation to ward off completely legitimate demands and grievances against governments which did not fulfill their duties towards their constituents.

Bahrain is a glaring example of such blatant misuse of religious affiliation to hold firmly onto a power structure based on systematic discrimination of the majority Shiite population, and now as it seems, against anyone not to the liking of certain intolerant figures.

In March of 2011, just one month after mass peaceful demonstrations sprung up in Bahrain, neighboring Gulf monarchies led by Saudi Arabia invaded Bahrain and violently crushed thousands of protesters demanding reforms.

These forces, alongside the Bahraini government went on to destroy a reported 28 mosques and religious centers used by Shias. For a country with a such a small population, this is tantamount to what one resident called a “war against identity,” according to Al Jazeera.

A top Shia cleric, Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim, has contextualized these developments to also come out against the construction of the Church, “questioning why the government should donate land for a Christian site when Shiite mosques have been destroyed as part of the crackdown,” according to the previously cited AP article.

This is a potential missed opportunity given the shared assault the Shias, and now, Christians are beginning to feel. However, the motivations behind building this Church on donated monarchical land is suspect to Ayatollah Qassim who may view the move by King Hamad Al Khalifa as a defense against outside accusations of religious persecution while very real discrimination is happening against the population.

Regardless, Islam teaches for complete religious tolerance for Christians and if domestic constituents have demands for religious centers, there is no Islamic edict against such a thing. The Bahraini government has a complete responsibility to both Muslims and Christians in this regard.

Instead, by staking its defenses on being a shield against the specter of Shiism, the Bahraini government is now firmly entrenched and sensitive to backward religious discrimination, to a base of people it has scared into believing that disenfranchised citizens demanding completely logical and peaceful equality should be hated.

The way out is not through religious discrimination, but rather through ruling justly as the example of Prophet Muhammad provides, who lived peacefully with “people of the book,” (along with of course his fellow Muslims) and who built mosques, not destroyed them.

Perhaps it would be best for Bahrain’s clergy to rebuke King Al Khalifa with the lines of Ferdowsi, Persia’s master poet the next time the King approaches them (translation Dick Davis):

“It is not in my habit to shed blood / and besides it would be unworthy of my faith for me to do evil in this way.

You summon me, but to no purpose / I serve God, not kings”.

Reading Shakespeare in Kandahar - By Nick Schifrin | Foreign Policy

One of my favorite articles merging the relevance of literature to everyday life and politics. It has a highly pertinent message regarding the realities of vengence and hatred:

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Reading Shakespeare in Kandahar - By Nick Schifrin | Foreign Policy

"Thank you for coming," Prof. David Kastan told the half-full auditorium. "You did not have to be here this morning. I did. It means the world to me that you came." I looked around at my fellow classmates; we were all tired and dazed. The night before, the acrid, unforgettable smell of melted steel, atomized concrete, and human remains had drifted seven miles north, from southern Manhattan up to Columbia University's campus.

It was Sept. 13, 2001, and I was 21 years old. Two days earlier, I had walked into Kastan's Shakespeare class before the attacks began and walked out after the second tower had already fallen. Columbia canceled classes for two days. I spent my time at the daily student newspaper, the Spectator, where I was managing editor. On Thursday morning, the first class back was Shakespeare.

"I will not make a political statement today," Kastan continued. "But I will say this: This play we will discuss today is about revenge -- and what demanding revenge can do to a person. I only hope that the people who will be making decisions on how to respond to Tuesday's attacks read Titus Andronicus."

When he finished, the class gave him a standing ovation.

Nine-and-a-half years later, I found myself standing outside a large house in Pakistan. It was 1:00 p.m. on May 2, 2011, and I was a correspondent for ABC News. Twelve hours earlier, the United States had finally taken its revenge. In the middle of the night, Navy SEALs shot the man who ordered the 9/11 attacks in the head and chest. After loading his body onto a helicopter, they flew it to Afghanistan and then to a ship at sea, where they dumped the prepared body in the ocean. I was the first American reporter to arrive at Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad. My team and I aired the first video from inside the compound and filed 11 stories in five frantic days.

It was only after I had returned to my home in Islamabad, about a 90-minute drive away, that Titus Andronicus and Kastan's warning came to mind. I was sitting with a group of American and British friends -- journalists, NGO workers, and diplomats -- having that familiar melancholic conversation about 9/11: "Where were you?" And, because we now lived where 9/11's plotters had fled: "Did you imagine you'd be here, 10 years later?"

No, I said. I hadn't imagined, sitting in my Shakespeare class a decade ago, that I would end up in Pakistan reporting the death of Osama bin Laden. But perhaps Shakespeare might have imagined the United States would be "here," 10 years later.

Titus Andronicus is a play about revenge. It is about how a general fighting for an empire -- Rome -- finally defeats the "barbarous" Goths and returns to his capital with prisoners, the vanquished queen and her sons. Despite the queen's pleas, Titus kills her oldest son to avenge his own sons' deaths, beginning cycles of brutal violence that end in the death of nearly every major character.

At its core, Titus Andronicus is a play about how good people can become unhinged and indeed overwhelmed by the need to avenge. It is about how powerful people surrender themselves to cycles of violence, how tribal and religious customs unequivocally demand retaliation, and how two tribes' or two religions' speaking past rather than with each other can lead to chaos.

"Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,/Blood and revenge are hammering in my head," one of Titus's enemies says before the bloodletting begins.

Kastan was right to worry. The United States has made many of the same mistakes that Titus Andronicus and his fellow tragedians made: prioritizing revenge and killing the enemy over helping the local populations; choosing allies who help produce short-term gratification (security gains) but long-term trouble; refusing to truly engage with a population that seemed so different from themselves.

Had the Americans learned from Shakespeare's epic of vengeance, might Afghanistan and Pakistan, where I have lived for the last three years, been less violent and more welcoming of the United States today?

Roses from the Garden of Saadi

The poems of Saadi, unlike physical roses, are the literary roses which "always remain," as the poet himself claimed in his work, "Golestan." Below are some beautiful roses from his work, in a chapter fittingly called, "on the advantages of silence":

I said to a friend that I have chosen rather to be silent than to speak because on most occasions good and bad words are scattered concurrently but enemies perceive only the latter. He replied: ‘That enemy is the greatest who does not see any good.’

Virtue is to the eyes of enmity the greatest fault.  Sa’di is a rose but to the eye of enemies a thorn. 

 يكي را از دوستان گفتم : امتناع سخن گفتنم بعلت آن اختيار آمده است در غالب اوقات كه در سخن نيك و بد اتفاق افتد و ديده دشمنان جز بر بدي نمي آيد . گفت : دشمن آن به كه نيكي نبيند .

هنر به چشم عداوت ، بزرگتر عيب است
 
گل است سعدى و در چشم دشمنان خار است 

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A merchant, having suffered loss of a thousand dinars, enjoined his son not to reveal it to anyone. The boy said: ‘It is thy order and I shall not tell it but thou must inform me of the utility of this proceeding and of the propriety of concealment.’ He replied: ‘For fear the misfortune would be double; namely, the loss of the money and, secondly, the joy of neighbours at our loss.’

بازرگانی را هزار دینار خسارت افتاد پسر را گفت نباید که این سخن با کسی در میان نهی. گفت ای پدر فرمان تراست، نگویم ولکن خواهم مرا بر فایده این مطلع گردانی که مصلحت در نهان داشتن چیست؟ گفت تا مصیبت دو نشود: یکی نقصان مایه و دیگر شماتت همسایه.

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An ill-humoured man insulted someone. 
He bore it and replied: ‘O man of happy issue, 
I am worse than thou canst say that I am 
Because I know thou art not aware of my faults as I am.

یکی را زشت خویی داد دشنام		تحمل کرد و گفت ای خوب فرجام
بتر زانم که خواهى گفتن آنی		که دانم عیب من چون من ندانى

--- Source for English translation: http://www.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/far/hobbies/iran/Golestan/index.html