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Early Islam, Part 3: The Path of Reason
Part 1: The Rise of Islam / Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam
(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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Islamic scholars during the golden age of Islam (roughly 9th-12th centuries) widely referred to Aristotle as the ‘First Teacher,’ evidence of the high regard in which they held the ancient Greek philosopher. The man ranked by them as second only to Aristotle was a tenth-century Muslim thinker by the name of Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950 CE). [1] Perhaps a good way to illustrate the rational current of early Islam is through the life and times of this important thinker. In the words of Muhsin Mahdi, a modern scholar of Islamic studies, 1 comment on Early Islam, Part 3: The Path of Reason
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Flesh of Your Flesh
Should you eat meat? Here is a really good essay by Elizabeth Kolbert that also reviews Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.
Americans love animals. Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Collectively, these creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually … “We have so many customers who say they’d eat macaroni and cheese before they’d cut back on their dogs,” a Colorado pet-store owner recently told the Denver Post. In a survey released this past August, more than half of all dog, cat, and bird owners reported having bought presents for their animals during the previous twelve months, often for no special occasion, just out of love. (Fish enthusiasts may bring home fewer gifts, but they spend more on each one, with the average fish gift coming to thirty-seven dollars.) A majority of owners report that one of the reasons they enjoy keeping pets is that they consider them part of the family.Americans also love to eat animals. This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric. Broiler chickens, also known, depending on size, as fryers or roasters, typically spend their lives in windowless sheds, packed in with upward of thirty thousand other birds and generations of accumulated waste. The ammonia fumes thrown off by their rotting excrement lead to breast blisters, leg sores, and respiratory disease. Bred to produce the maximum amount of meat in the minimum amount of time, fryers often become so top-heavy that they can’t support their own weight. At slaughtering time, they are shackled by their feet, hung from a conveyor belt, and dipped into an electrified bath known as “the stunner.”…
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Ian Jack on Churchill
Earlier this week the BBC invited the chairman of the fascist British National Party (BNP), Nick Griffin, now a member of parliament, to its Question Time debate. The move led to a huge controversy and public protests outside the BBC studio, and attracted 8 million TV viewers. Griffin observed rather memorably that if Churchill had been alive today, he would have been a member of the BNP. The mostly dismayed British press has jumped to the defense of their beloved leader, but Griffin’s observation is not entirely off the mark, as Ian Jack writes:
However foolish Nick Griffin may have been on Question Time, one thing he said rang true: that if Winston Churchill were alive today, the British National party would be the only party that would have him. Churchill had notably racist opinions. About Indians, as the historian Ramachandra Guha has written, he could be “truly dreadful”. Leo Amery, his long-suffering secretary of state for India, recorded many Churchillian moments in his diary. One from September 1942 reads: “During my talk with Winston he burst out with, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion’.” The next year hundreds of thousands of people lay dead or dying from starvation in Bengal. When the cabinet was discussing the possibility that grain might be sent to relieve this appalling famine, Amery writes that the prime minister butted in with “a flourish on Indians breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing about the war”.In the end Amery wondered if his boss was ‘”really quite sane” about India. We could wonder the same about Griffin’s attitudes to Muslims. But when Jack Straw said on Question Time that the BNP’s policies contradicted “the longstanding values of British society”, we might also wonder just how long-standing some of those values have been.
Categories: Politics -
Is Football Like Dogfighting?
I got my first taste of live American football on my very first date in the US in a packed and roaring Louisiana stadium nearly twenty years ago. I have long thought of it as an exceedingly uncivilized sport, in which violence is endemic to the sport itself—part of standard operating procedure—frequently causing traumatic injury, cognitive disability, and even dementia. I wondered: How can so many enjoy its brutal form and look past its grievous impact on the players? What does this say about its parent culture? Malcolm Gladwell has written an informative and provocative essay in which he compares football with dogfighting. In a 3QD debate on it, I’ve argued that the comparison is apt in as much as their respective fans have a similar, seemingly blind capacity to get pleasure from violence and the suffering of others. The least one can do as a thinking citizen-consumer, I suggested, is to withdraw one’s monetary and emotional support from the sport, especially when little more than one’s entertainment is at stake.
Categories: Culture -
Happy Diwali!
Today is Diwali. It doesn’t feel the same to me outside India, so I’m celebrating vicariously through pictures.
Categories: Culture -
The Dark Side of Dubai
British journalist Johann Hari goes to the desert kingdom and finds a sea of disturbing stories: There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats…; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?
Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.
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Early Islam, Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam
(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
__________________________________________A great rebellion had overthrown the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus in 750 CE, after which power shifted east to Baghdad—a city more Persian than Arab back then—reflecting the growing prominence of Persians in Islam. A new caliph, Abu Al-Abbas, a great-grandson of Muhammad’s uncle, founded the Abbasid dynasty, satisfying the fond desire of many rebels to get a caliph from the Prophet’s lineage. But their hopes were soon dashed when the new caliph began living up to his nickname, Al-Saffah—‘the blood-shedder’—by ruthlessly eradicating former allies like Abu Muslim. For the new regime, loyalty to the dynasty, and not the brotherhood of Islam, would be the basis of empire.
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On Being Exiled From Nature
The vast majority of readers of this blog do not live in close proximity to nature but in urbanscapes of steel and concrete, as I do as well. Sure, now and then we go out camping or hike on a forest trail, but isn’t that as far as we go? Perhaps we go out because, as Thoreau said, “We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe, to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest.” Or perhaps deep down we feel, as John Muir did, that going out is really going in.
Our distant human ancestors lived in intimate contact with plants and animals, but in recent millennia, technologically advancing societies have been erecting barriers between us and nature, hoping to be shielded from its harshness, dangers, and unpredictability. Who among us would wholly dismiss that urge? By any yardstick, this process—which accelerated with the industrial revolution—has come a long way, and it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that a hallmark of our modernity is a near total loss of first-hand biological knowledge and personal experience of nature’s beats and rhythms. Our “objective” classroom knowledge now tends to be bookish, theoretical, and detached.
Childhood development was once shaped by the direct experience of plants and animals, their cycle and drama of birth, decay, and death, with folkbiology furnishing the taxonomy, teleology, and the interrelationships of the living world, including the attitude and knowledge needed for survival in a given ecological zone. A great many children now develop amidst apartment blocks, public parks, and city streets, where the context of local ecology, its delicate dependencies, and the sense of its inherent limits is less visible than ever before.
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Global Muslim Demographics
The Pew Research Center has published a new study on global Muslim demographics along with a helpful map. It should help combat some of the complacent stereotypes about Muslims as a monolithic group, including where they live and what they believe.A comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages living in the world today, representing 23% of an estimated 2009 world population of 6.8 billion.
Categories: Religion -
A Vaccine for HIV?
Dr. Sudhir Paul is a scientist at the very forefront of HIV research. A graduate of AIIMS, he is currently Professor and Director of the Chemical Immunology Research Center at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. Below is an excerpt from an article that describes why his research holds a great deal of promise, followed by a video that is part of a fund-raising drive led by the Covalent Immunology Foundation (CIF) to finance the final phase of his research—(expensive) clinical trials that could lead to a cure and a vaccine for HIV (see another video here).Scientists working to develop a vaccine for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) report they have created the first antigen that induces protective antibodies capable of blocking infection of human cells by genetically-diverse strains of HIV. The new antigen differs from previously-tested vaccines by virtue of its chemically-activated property that enables close sharing of electrons and produces strong covalent bonding. Researchers used a mouse model to generate the antibodies. The report by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston is online and will appear in a print issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry in November. (Read more)
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No Longer Golden
Paul Harris on the dire straits of California:
California has a special place in the American psyche. It is the Golden State: a playground of the rich and famous with perfect weather. It symbolises a lifestyle of sunshine, swimming pools and the Hollywood dream factory.But the state that was once held up as the epitome of the boundless opportunities of America has collapsed. From its politics to its economy to its environment and way of life, California is like a patient on life support. At the start of summer the state government was so deeply in debt that it began to issue IOUs instead of wages. Its unemployment rate has soared to more than 12%, the highest figure in 70 years. Desperate to pay off a crippling budget deficit, California is slashing spending in education and healthcare, laying off vast numbers of workers and forcing others to take unpaid leave. In a state made up of sprawling suburbs the collapse of the housing bubble has impoverished millions and kicked tens of thousands of families out of their homes. Its political system is locked in paralysis and the two-term rule of former movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger is seen as a disaster – his approval ratings having sunk to levels that would make George W Bush blush. The crisis is so deep that Professor Kevin Starr, who has written an acclaimed history of the state, recently declared: “California is on the verge of becoming the first failed state in America.”
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Michael Sandel on Justice
“Hundreds of students pack Harvard’s Sanders Theater for Michael Sandel‘s “Justice” course—an introduction to moral and political
philosophy. They come to hear Sandel lecture about great philosophers
of the past—from Aristotle to John Stuart Mill—but also to debate
contemporary issues that raise philosophical questions—about individual
rights and the claims of community, equality and inequality, morality
and law.” Below is the first lecture of his popular course. Additional ones can be viewed as they are made available here in the weeks ahead.More Sandel? Check out his excellent BBC Reith Lecture from earlier this year, A New Citizenship. Also check out Justice: A Journey in Moral Reasoning, and The Case Against Perfection: What’s Wrong with Designer Children, Bionic Athletes, and Genetic Engineering.
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Who’s Afraid of Savita Bhabhi?
The Indian government recently banned a website that runs a cartoon strip about the sexual escapades of a hot Indian bhabhi (“sister-in-law”), described as a “regular Indian woman who just can’t get enough sex”. This is a curious move in an age of widely accessible cyberporn, with countless sites saturated with far more explicit hardcore videos and images, representing ~10% of the most trafficked Internet sites. What is so transgressive about Savita Bhabhi to warrant such draconian action? Shohini Ghosh examines the phenomenon in some detail.
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Dalrymple on Travel Writing
William Dalrymple on the future on travel writing in the shrinking, globalizing world of the Internet age:
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The Truth About Burning Man
Jay Michaelson’s take on the famous event held each year in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada:
Categories: Art & Cinema -
Champion of the Green Revolution Dies at 95
Who has heard of Norman Borlaug? I had not heard of him until now, after his death, when the Wall Street Journal calls him “arguably the greatest American of the 20th century”.
Borlaug’s life work, the Green Revolution, is the reason the world is not starving today as it was half a century ago. As the individual responsible for spreading high-yield agricultural practices through the hungriest parts of the world, beginning with South Asia in the 1960s, he was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2006. He changed the world, as much as did Louis Pasteur or the Wright Brothers, yet his name is commonly unknown outside the Developing World. And his contribution is today seen as controversial.
Early Islam, Part 1: The Rise of Islam
(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two major currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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Imagine the Middle East in the early centuries of the Common Era. There is no Islam. The two dominant powers in the region are the Romans and the Persians, with a long history of fighting over territory and trade routes. The border between their two empires keeps shifting across Syria and Mesopotamia. To the north of this border, in the steppes, are the Turks, deemed ‘savage and warlike’ by Ammianus Marcellinus, a fourth century Roman historian and native of Syria. To the south, in the desert, are the Arabs. Neither the Persians, nor the Romans, took much interest in conquering these semi-nomadic tribal peoples. Instead, they followed that most pragmatic of imperial policies: turn these ‘semi-civilized’ folks into allies and use them opportunistically to score against their main rival.
How to Write About Africa
Binyavanga Wainaina, Kenyan author and journalist, in the winter 2005 issue of Granta:
Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.
