Since then Taqwacores has become a sort of manifesto (though Knight is reluctant to admit that) for an eponymous global Muslim punk movement taking root. The disapprobation hosted by American and British Muslim youth–afire at both ends: towards the West for misrepresenting Islam and the Islamic orthodoxy for their bigotry–the taqwacores claim has finds expression in their movement (in conjunction with a larger Progressive Islam movement of which Knight is a part) posed in adversity to the burgeoning fundamentalism among the same Muslim youth. Unsurprisingly, the Muslim orthodoxy has dismissed the Progressive Muslims as being a misguided bunch, regressing into the jahilliyah (age of ignorace).

9/11 shook the foundations of Muslim identity in the West without a doubt. The ”otherizing” (for lack of a better word) of Muslims, of identifying them as Western society’s perennial foes, spawned a number of reconciliatory movements, some noticeably taking precedence from the Sufis critical position vis-a-vis Islamic orthodoxy. Arguably, underpinning these projects was the idea of a greater Islamic Reformation; to rid Islam of its purportedly cumbersome 14th century garbage. As a result there was some brouhaha over Muslim Refuseniks and Reform in Islam (as if no such impulse existed until now).

I cannot stress how valueless I find such taxonomy to be. Neither am I amused by contrived, inordinately ironical characters such as “burqa-clad dominatrices”, “hafiz pornstars” or Muslim punks for that matter. What I fail to understand is why such deviance has to be named so flagrantly in conjunction with Islam; the rationale that this exposes the variety of Islamic belief is moot: why should the quality of being Muslim be provenancial and determinant of all of an individual’s actions? Incidentally I have another bone to pick; this one with Eteraz.org, purveyors of Islamic Humanism and Islamic Existentialism. Pronouncing humanist, postmodern, existential or any other-ism elements in Islam is a different thing; I suppose that releaves the integrity of one system for its loss at the other’s expense and ultimately contributes to discernment of wortwhile, enduring streams in human thought….but Islamic Existentialism…now what in the name of Sheba’s breasts is that?

A quote from CM is in order, for it explains very clearly and concisely what I am struggling with here:

I will say it again. Islam is not a religion of peace. Islam is not a religion of war. Islam is not this or that and here or there. Islam is a living tradition with a complex history of fourteen centuries. Islam did not stop evolving in the 7th century. It actually has a history of transformations – grave transformations. It has a history of secessions and renewals and new modalities. Start here and work back.

My apologies for the vagrant post. I am in expedient need of Islamic psychoanalysis.

 (btw; Eteraz.org is indeed a wonderful blog; they just get carried away sometimes)

Inevitable Revolutions

by GYAN PRAKASH

[from the April 30, 2007 issue]

E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India ends with a poignant exchange between Aziz, a young Muslim doctor, and Fielding, a Briton sympathetic to Indians. Though Aziz is acquitted of the false charge of molesting a British woman, he is deeply wounded by the experience and wants nothing to do with the colonial race. Fielding, an old friend, seeks him out and asks why they cannot be friends again.

But the horses didn’t want it–they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices. “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.”

This is how the novel ended, written in 1924 against the backdrop of the first mass nationalist upsurge against British rule. Gandhi, who led the movement, was a product of the Indian encounter with Western culture. He trained as a barrister in London and spent more than two decades in South Africa, developing his doctrine of nonviolent struggle in campaigning for Indian rights. Western ideas deeply influenced his political philosophy, and he maintained lifelong friendships with a number of Europeans. But anticolonialism formed the bedrock of his relationship with the West. Despite good intentions, there could be no friendship in the abstract. You could not simply wish away empire when it formed the setting in which the members of colonizing and colonized cultures met.

Historians of empire have always understood this chasm in human relationships created by the fact of one culture ruling over another. But a reappraisal of this truth has been under way for some time now at the hands of revisionist historians of the British Empire. These historians dislike Edward Said and the postcolonial critics who cite French theory and argue that the British Empire established lasting Orient/Occident and East/West oppositions in politics and knowledge. Uncomfortable with the political passion and theoretical language of these critics, the revisionists counsel us (in mainly British accents, with some American intonations) to lower the anti-imperial temperature and write old-fashioned narrative history. They contend that empire is the oldest and one of the most widely practiced forms of governance.

The Romans did it, the Spaniards did it, the Russians did it, the Chinese did it, even the newly independent nations have done it. Everybody oppressed everyone else. Pax Britannica may have ruled over one-fifth of humanity, but the conquerors, soldiers, administrators and scholars were also human. Why bring in such abstractions as Orientalism and colonialism? Underneath it all, the story of the British Empire is a narrative of individuals caught up in human encounters between cultures.

True, the revisionist argument continues, Britons went to distant lands to profit and conquer. But vastly outnumbered by the local population and pitted against powerful adversaries, they were deeply conscious of their vulnerability. This was particularly true in the eighteenth century, when the British were all too aware of the power and grandeur of the Ottomans and the Mughals. The Barbary corsairs and Algerian slave owners harassed them in the Mediterranean, the Indian tribes challenged them in North America and the French engaged them in imperial wars. Then, their American territories fell. On the Indian subcontinent, the Mughal Empire was reduced to a shell, but successor states posed a serious challenge to the East India Company’s military position. Embattled, the British were forced to depend on indigenous allies and could not afford to treat native populations and cultures as inferior. Forcibly or willingly, many crossed cultural borders. They shed European trousers for native pajamas, grew Hindu mustaches and Muslim beards, married local women and kept concubines, and collected indigenous texts and artifacts. A human story of interest and immersion in other cultures, languages and artifacts–not mastery–underpinned British imperial expansion.

Stroke by stroke, this revisionist historiography seeks to redraw the portrait of the British Empire. This picture has received prominent attention in British publications, including leftist ones, eager to mark distance from their imperial past while trying to rescue some cultural value from it for the present. In this version of the story, set against the current spectacle of an arrogant and dangerous American imperialism, we are told the British Empire developed willy-nilly as a collection of territories and cultures; it was never the project that nineteenth-century imperialists claimed and that present-day postcolonial critics allege. The conquerors, particularly in the eighteenth century, are seen not as agents of colonial oppression and exploitation but as hapless imperialists caught in a hostile environment; weak and embattled, they eagerly embraced indigenous allies and cultures.

This revisionist view of the British Empire underpins William Dalrymple’s deeply researched and beautifully written The Last Mughal. The subject of his study is the 1857 Uprising against British rule in India. It was an event that, according to Dalrymple, marked the end of the eighteenth century’s “relatively easy relationship of Indian and Briton” and the onset of “hatreds and racism” that became so characteristic of the nineteenth-century Raj. “The Uprising, it is clear, was the result of that change, not its cause.”

When the Uprising broke out, Company rule in India was already a century old. During this time, the Company had acquired effective military and political control over nearly the entire subcontinent. The imperial Mughals, a dynasty that traced its lineage back to Timur (Tamerlane) and had ruled India since 1526, still enjoyed nominal authority. The aging Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, lived in Delhi. Clutching hollow emblems of authority, Zafar presided over the royal household and harem. Real power lay with the Company, which used it to build a modern empire. The Company annexed territories, established courts, laid telegraph and railway lines, collected taxes and instituted land settlements that caused widespread discontent. The developing ideology of liberal imperialism, buttressed by evangelical Christianity, left little room for existing cultures and traditions. The old nobility and landholders were summarily cast aside, and Thomas Macaulay declared that all the accumulated products of Oriental knowledge were worth a single shelf of a Western library.

The simmering discontent against British rule boiled over with the “greased cartridge” controversy. At the end of 1856, the Company army, which consisted of both Hindu and Muslim sepoys (recruits) commanded by British officers, introduced the new Enfield rifle. Loading the rifle required biting open the cartridge, which was greased to ease pushing the ball down the barrel. Initially, the grease was made of cow and pig fat, defiling to both Hindus and Muslims. This was quickly changed to beeswax and linseed oil, but the damage was done. A rumor spread that the British were deliberately using pig and cow fat to violate the sepoys’ religions.

The Uprising began on May 10, 1857, with a mutiny of Indian soldiers in the military barracks of Meerut. The mutineers killed their British officers and marched thirty miles south to Delhi, where they were joined by the sepoys in the regiments stationed in the city. Together, they “restored” Zafar as their emperor. The spirit of rebellion spread to other garrisons in North India and turned from a limited mutiny into a widespread revolt of peasants, artisans, laborers, religious leaders and the old gentry. For more than a year, the fire of the Uprising raged. European officers, women and children were massacred. British authority crumbled in large parts of North India until it was restored with brute force in the summer of 1858. Zafar’s glory ended even earlier. Within a few months, the rebel position in Delhi fell. The emperor was tried and convicted for hatching an international Muslim conspiracy against his English benefactors, and exiled to Burma. The charge was legally and factually absurd. Since Zafar had never renounced sovereignty over the Company, he could not possibly be guilty of treason. In fact, Dalrymple explains, “from a legal point of view, a good case could be made that it was the East India Company which was the real rebel, guilty of revolt against a feudal superior to whom it had sworn allegiance for nearly a century.” Equally groundless was the allegation that Zafar was behind an international Muslim conspiracy stretching from Constantinople to Delhi. “The Uprising in fact showed every sign of being initiated by upper-caste Hindu sepoys reacting against specifically military grievances perceived as a threat to their faith and dharma; it then spread rapidly through the country, attracting a fractured and diffuse collection of other groups alienated by aggressively insensitive and brutal British policies.” The British “bigoted and Islamophobic argument” reduced the complexity of the rebellion to an oversimplified and fictional picture of a “global Muslim conspiracy with an appealingly visible and captive hate figure at its centre.” Back in England, the Uprising and the aftermath of British bloodlust shocked the Parliament into assuming direct rule over India. Company rule was abolished, and Queen Victoria became the Empress of India.

Understandably, the Uprising aroused heated emotions. The British officials and civilians caught up in it captured the experience in their writings. Several fictional and historical accounts were published, including Flora Annie Steel’s novel On the Face of Waters (1896) and John Kaye’s three-volume History of the Sepoy War in India (1877). In the British imperial imagination the Mutiny was remembered as the moment when Indians bared their barbarian souls. In Indian nationalist mythology, it was the first war of independence. Outside these stock images and myths, there exists a substantial body of sophisticated and complex historical work on the Uprising, notably the writings of Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Gautam Bhadra and Eric Stokes. But historians have largely ignored Delhi’s experience of the cataclysm, preferring to focus on areas where the revolt was more protracted.

Dalrymple, a British travel writer and historian who divides his time between London and Delhi, sets out to correct this neglect. Writing with obvious affection for Delhi and appreciation for Mughal culture, he shows that the experience of the rebellion in the city was quite distinct. It was the seat of the imperial Mughals and the center of high Indo-Muslim culture. Even if Zafar no longer exercised real power, the emperor, as the rebel proclamation demonstrated, still exercised tremendous symbolic significance. From his palace in Delhi’s Red Fort, Zafar wrote accomplished poetry and presided over a refined court milieu. Living under his patronage was Ghalib, possibly the greatest poet ever in the Urdu language, and one who went on to record his experiences of the Uprising. Using sources in Persian and Urdu along with voluminous British papers, Dalrymple has written a riveting and poignant account of the events of 1857 in Delhi.

When the mutineers descended on Delhi, the city initially welcomed them. Dalrymple shows that Zafar was gratified by the “restoration” of his imperial sovereignty but chafed at the lack of proper deference the rebels showed. He complained bitterly about the violation of imperial protocols and the country manners of the largely Hindu sepoys and was alarmed by the jihadi rebels who arrived from the North Indian town of Bareilly to add religious zeal to the Uprising. Trapped between the imperious British and the rude sepoys and zealous jihadis, Zafar reluctantly assumed the mantle of rebellion. However, he was too weak, too indecisive and utterly incapable of assuming the role assigned to him. The Uprising floundered and the elite opinion in the city turned against the violence and the unsophisticated culture of the lowly sepoys. Bandits and roving rebels ruled the roost on highways, making escape from the city hazardous.

Europeans found their houses ransacked, their property looted and their lives endangered. Upon victory, the British celebrated their triumph by letting loose a reign of terror on the fleeing insurgents and Delhi’s inhabitants. The princes who had participated in the Uprising surrendered unconditionally to a British officer, William Hodson, with the hope that their lives would be spared. Hodson stripped them naked and shot them in cold blood. Then he promptly proceeded to strip the corpses of their rings and amulets, which he pocketed. Satisfied with the killing and the loot, Hodson wrote to his sister: “I am not cruel, but I must confess I did enjoy the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches.” Edward Vibart, who participated in what he called the “murder” of defenseless civilians, wrote about the horror of hearing women scream after witnessing their husbands and sons being butchered. “Heaven knows I feel no pity–but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your eyes–hard must be that man’s heart I think who can look on with indifference,” he wrote. But horror quickly shifted to bravado and justification: “And yet it must be so for these black wretches shall atone with their blood for our murdered countrymen–my own father and mother–sister and brother all cry aloud for vengeance, and their son will avenge them.” Slaughter followed slaughter. In the Kucha Chelan neighborhood, Dalrymple writes, about 1,400 residents were cut down: “After the British and their allies had tired of bayoneting the inhabitants, they marched forty survivors out to the Yamuna, lined them up before the walls of the Fort, and shot them.” Among them were some of the most distinguished poets and artists of Delhi.

The victors made little distinction between insurgents and civilians. George Wagentrieber wrote with satisfaction in the Delhi Gazette Extra: “Hanging is, I am happy to say, the order of the day here.” Believing that the rebels had sexually assaulted their women (a charge proved false by a subsequent inquiry commission), “the British officers did little to stop the raping of the women of Delhi.” To escape the victors’ wrath, most of Delhi’s residents fled to the surrounding countryside, finding shelters in tombs and ruins and scavenging for food. Looters went house to house, seizing whatever they could. “To all of us [soldiers],” wrote one officer, “the loot of the city was to be a fitting recompense for the toils and privations we had undergone.” Prize Agents stalked the city, confiscating native property and delivering it to Europeans. To punish the residents for having supported the Uprising, the British considered leveling the entire city. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. “Even so, great swathes of the city–especially around the Red Fort–were still cleared away.” Many fine mosques, Sufi shrines, palaces and the houses of notables were demolished. Ghalib grieved that, under wanton destruction, “the whole city has become a desert.” Dalrymple relates this story in all its horror, quoting extensively from the melancholy descriptions written by Delhi’s literary elite and from accounts by the victors, who gleefully recorded the terrible vengeance they wreaked on the vanquished in what became known as the City of the Dead.

Dalrymple mourns the passing of an age, the end of Delhi’s urbane milieu in which the Europeans had taken a deep interest. Now that the “beating heart of Indo-Islamic civilization had been ripped out,” the British-Indian racial divide ripped open the body politic. Contrary to received opinion, Dalrymple argues that the Uprising did not cause this divide; rather, the blame should be placed on “the Victorian Evangelicals whose insensitivity, arrogance and blindness did much to bring the Uprising of 1857 down upon both their own heads and those of the people and court of Delhi, engulfing all of northern India in a religious war of terrible violence.” The rebel violence and the British retribution merely widened the gap between the rulers and the ruled that had already opened before 1857. He tells this story with an eye on the current phenomenon of an evangelically inspired American imperial power locked in battle with jihadi Islam. He sees ghosts of the past in the present good-versus-evil war: “Today, West and East again face each other uneasily across a divide that many see as religious war. Jihadis again fight what they regard as a defensive action against their Christian enemies, and again innocent women, children and civilians are slaughtered.” The contemporary passion for absolutes, he argues, inflicts irreparable damage on ordinary interactions and exchanges between cultures and religions.

As critical as Dalrymple is of the current ideological war of opposites, he is equally impatient with Edward Said and postcolonial critics. Writing with the traditional British suspicion of theory, he sees them as purveying the abstract concepts of Orientalism and colonialism. These abstractions, according to him, do injustice to the human interactions across identities that were common in the eighteenth century. Before nineteenth-century racism and colonial arrogance took over, the British and Indians bridged the distance of language and religion.

Dalrymple is on familiar ground here. He has published two acclaimed books that celebrated Europeans who crossed racial and religious boundaries. In City of Djinns, a book about his year in Delhi, he uncovers the ghosts of the city’s turbulent and varied past. Among them was William Fraser, a Scotsman sent by the Company to Delhi in 1805 to pacify the brigand-infested countryside around Delhi. Cut off from his compatriots, Fraser gathered a private force of Indians and set about his business. Always ready to abandon the routine of the office desk for the excitement of the battleground in the Company’s wars, he surrounded himself with a community of Indian followers whom his contemporaries likened to Scottish Highlanders. He adopted native dress and customs, and he fathered “as many children as the King of Persia” from his harem of Indian wives. Dalrymple compares him to Mr. Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; like Kurtz, “he saw himself as a European potentate ruling in a pagan wilderness.” The Company officialdom did not trust him, but Fraser was no power-hungry brute. He was a philosopher who took a deep interest in Sanskrit, composed Persian couplets and befriended the poet Ghalib. His younger brother found him unrecognizable; he had turned “half Hindoostanee.” In a curious twist, Dalrymple’s research uncovered that Fraser was a distant cousin of his wife.

This mixture of the personal and the intellectual also animates Dalrymple’s White Mughals. While researching the book, he discovered that his great-great grandmother was born to a Hindu Bengali woman who had married a Frenchman. This discovery awakened his interest in the unwritten history of interracial unions under empire. In White Mughals, he tells the fascinating story of James Kirkpatrick, the British Resident in the court of Hyderabad between 1797 and 1805. Kirkpatrick fell in love with 14-year-old Khair, the grandniece of a powerful Muslim noble, and married her despite official disapproval. Khair bore him two children, who were promptly packed off to England. After Kirkpatrick died, she had an affair with his assistant, who eventually deserted her. Khair was exiled from Hyderabad, lost her house and money and never got to see her children again. In telling this story of love and betrayal, Dalrymple weaves in accounts of other “White Mughals,” men like Sir David Ochterlony, the British Resident in Delhi, who lived the life of a Mughal nobleman. He dressed in Indian clothes, had a fondness for hookahs and dance girls and strolled Delhi every evening with his thirteen wives, each mounted on an elephant.

The Last Mughal returns to this territory of Frasers and Ochterlonys. Dalrymple writes that there were a number of landed families in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who walked the fault lines between Islam and Christianity, the Mughals and the British. Several of these families descended from European mercenaries who had married into the Mughal elite and practiced a hybrid lifestyle. They were Christians but had adopted Mughal customs and manners. All this cultural borrowing came under increasing scrutiny and critique with the consolidation of Company power and the arrival of the evangelicals by the 1830s. An intolerant spirit was in the air. The winds of change were blowing on the Muslim side as well. Zafar himself was born of a Hindu mother, not untypical of the Mughals. He promoted a form of mystical Sufi Islam and was revered by many as a saint. Delhi’s literary culture was also open and tolerant, suspicious of orthodox theologians. But the orthodox opinion began gaining strength, setting the stage for the clash of fundamentalisms.

This is a neat formulation, but it is also false. The clash of religious fundamentalisms did not cause the Uprising. A great majority of the sepoys who mutinied and assembled in Delhi to “restore” the Mughal emperor were Hindus. Despite the presence of jihadi rebels, the rebellion was a remarkable display of Hindu-Muslim unity in Delhi and elsewhere. If it was a religious war, it was one only insofar as the rebels opposed what they thought was the British plot to impose Christianity. The growing evangelical influence was a factor in fomenting this opposition, but the causes of the Uprising lay in colonialism itself. Coercion, conflict and violence were built into colonial rule, even when it was imposed with the help of indigenous allies and soldiers. As the Company government violently displaced existing structures of power and authority, it encountered endemic opposition. The 1857 Mutiny in the army over greased cartridges served only to unify and escalate specific grievances at different places and among different groups into a widespread violent opposition to the Company.

To argue, as Dalrymple does, that it was only imperial arrogance and evangelical influence that forced the rebels to engage in a life-or-death struggle is to underestimate the depth of their determination. Revolt and resistance against colonialism were inherent in alien rule. Since the beginning of the Company conquest in the mid-eighteenth century, rebellions were endemic; the Uprising was only the most widespread and fierce expression of the built-in conflict between the colonizers and the colonized. Dalrymple overlooks this history and assumes that but for the nineteenth-century imperial foolhardiness, the imagined eighteenth-century empire might have remained intact. This would be like supposing that prior to present wars of fundamentalisms, the West’s history of domination over the rest of the world was free of sharp oppositions and discords. In drawing a parallel between 1857 and the current “clash of civilizations,” Dalrymple makes precisely such a suspect assumption. Whatever the role of the “clash of civilizations” ideology in the current conflict, the opposition to Western domination did not begin with it, just as the insurgency against Company rule in India did not start with the arrival of Victorian evangelicalism but was endemic to British rule. Empire has always produced challenge and resistance. If Dalrymple and like-minded writers were not so dismissive of the “abstractions” of Edward Said and postcolonial critics, they would not need the reminder that colonialism was always a fundamentally violent system.

Joseph Conrad wrote that the conquest of earth was never a pretty thing if you looked into it too closely, for it meant taking lands away from people of a different color and appearance. Even if racial superiority and the “civilizing mission” were not marshaled to justify the eighteenth-century empire, this does not mean that it was a pretty thing. As Nicholas Dirks’s superb recent book The Scandal of Empire shows, greed, duplicity, corruption, exploitation and violence were present at the birth of Company rule in India. With perceptive readings of the British record in eighteenth-century India, Dirks shows that the scandal of colonial violence and oppression was systemic, and not just the product of a few bloodthirsty and corrupt officials. Edmund Burke’s eloquent rage against the Company’s arbitrary power during Warren Hastings’s impeachment trial, for example, was underpinned by his scorn for Indian customs and traditions. He expressed sympathy for the plight of native rulers deposed by Hastings, but what really troubled him about the Company’s conduct was that it was being corrupted by India. One day, he feared, this corruption would spread to Britain. The scandal of Company rule had to be expunged so that the record of the British Empire would remain untarnished. Such an assertion on behalf of the empire and its legitimacy is unthinkable without a belief in Britain’s right to conquer and rule and a complete disdain for Indians.

Consider the fabrication of European deaths in the Calcutta Fort in 1757 into the mythical “Black Hole” incident. Dirks points out that combat rather than imprisonment caused most of the deaths, and that there were far fewer fatalities than initially claimed. But Europeans were so quick to believe the lurid tale of Oriental barbarism that the Black Hole soon acquired a mythical status. When the Company carried out sustained wars against indigenous rulers in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the desire to punish native perfidy encouraged the brutal campaigns.

As globalization compresses space and time, those privileged and educated enough to travel between cultures find themselves increasingly impatient with the legacies of imperial racism and nationalist myths. This is understandable. But to retail the eighteenth century as a time when Europeans and non-Europeans overcame racial and religious boundaries is to fly in the face of historical evidence. To see the crossing of imperial borders in the lives of “White Mughals” is to misrepresent both the nature of interracial liaisons and imperial conquest.

Empire made the Frasers and the Ochterlonys possible. It was because of empire, not despite it, that Europeans took an interest in non-European cultures. Colonial power enabled the Europeans to enter into interracial unions, keep concubines and father children, and learn native languages and customs. This was largely a one-way street on which mostly European men traveled to “collect” Indian women, territory, texts and artifacts. Astonishingly, Dalrymple fails to see the sense of imperial entitlement that permitted Company men to penetrate indigenous culture and become White Mughals. He identifies William Fraser with Kurtz but still insists that the eighteenth-century conquerors could act without a sense of racial privilege. This is to claim that empire can permit “easy relationships” between cultures, that human exchanges can occur outside history. Not now, not then.

______________________________________________________________________________________

A brilliant discussion on and around the subject follows at Chapati Mystery.

I have been a lover from time immemorial
Sin and Salvation do not concern me.
Now that I found your doorstep to prostrate upon,
I have no need for His sanctum.
My obesiance, my offerings are
in need of no church or mosque.
To glance at you, though for a moment
and through seven veils is commensurate with a lifetime of prayer.
My life is your love.
Your love is my life.

Yeh Jo Halka Halka Saroor Hai – Mohammad Iqbal Naqibi or Iqbal Qasoori.

Also check out Sadarang. This is an excellent resource on Pakistani classical music with detailed descriptions of the gharanas and lineages.

The days when great parliamentary orators would hold audiences rapt for hours are long gone, replaced by the incoherent impulse of the digital age, writes Simon Schama

Friday April 20, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Full text: Winston Churchill’s speech
Audio: ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ (12mins 16s)It was well after midnight on February 7 1787 when Richard Brinsley Sheridan MP got up in the House of Commons to flay the hide off Warren Hastings, the impeached Governor of Bengal.

The chamber was packed to the rafters, notwithstanding the 50-guinea price for tickets. By the time Sheridan was done it was six in the morning and no one had moved.

But virtuoso marathons of oratory weren’t at all unusual in that distant golden age of eloquence (and they were a lot more fun than the Castro all-nighter).Arguing for law reform in 1828, another celebrated silver-tongue, Henry Brougham, clocked six hours and three minutes and again no one budged. But then they both knew their spellbinding craft backwards.

Brougham had written essays on oratory (his favourite being Demosthenes) and at Edinburgh University had heard the great master of rhetoric, Hugh Blair (no relation), whose published lectures supplemented Cicero’s De Oratore as the two great primers of studied eloquence, ancient and modern.

Sheridan took his stagecraft into the chamber, fulfilling Cicero’s ideal that the orator should resemble Rome’s star tragedian Roscius: “When people hear he is to speak all the benches are taken … when he needs to speak silence is signalled by the crowd followed by repeated applause and much admiration. They laugh when he wishes, when he wishes they cry.”

When did you last hear a speech that good? Tony Blair’s epideictic performance at the Labour Party conference last year won admiration even from his foes, but by and large the digital age is cool to rhetoric and, as the enthronement of the blogger suggests, prizes incoherent impulse over the Ciceronian arts of the exordium and the peroration.

State of the Nation addresses to the US Congress – that theatre of sob-sisters and ra-ra patriotism – most usually confuse passion with sentimentality, and since they are worked up by industrial teams of speechwriters, lack one of the elements thought indispensable to great oratory: integrity of personal conviction, the sound of what Cicero, following the Greeks, called ethos.

The robotically choreographed antics in which Democrats and Republicans alternate standing o’s every five minutes is the opposite of the free-spirited audiences Cicero had in mind submitting themselves to the persuader’s art.

True public eloquence presupposes a citizen-audience gathered into a republic of listening. But our oral age is i-Podded for our customised egos, an audience of one. Headphone listening seals us off, cuts connections.

Then there is that peculiarly British thing about grandiloquence, happier, for the most part absorbing it in the theatre than in the public realm, where, as Winston Churchill found for most of his career, it was thought a symptom of his showy shallowness, his inconstancy, his addiction to hyperbole; in short everything a man of sound policy was not.

But of course, speeches were what he did supremely well. Self-conscious that he’d never been through the upper-class nursery of eloquence, the Oxbridge Unions, Churchill fed off the great tradition of British politicians who had prevailed over the laws of understatement and pragmatic sobriety.

He communed with Cromwell, Chatham, Burke and Fox, Brougham, Macaulay and Gladstone, studying their master speeches for instruction on the oral economy of vehemence; when to let pathos, the appeal to passion, rip, and when, as Hugh Blair insisted, to make it retreat. And in one moment, the catastrophic late spring of 1940, this lifetime of rhetorical education and mercurial performance finally paid off.

Churchill’s words went to war when Britain’s armed forces seemed to be going under and had less wordy politicians like Halifax scurrying for a compromise with the triumphant Axis.

But, though he felt “physically sick” at the Cabinet meeting of May 26, when the horrifying magnitude of the German sweep to the Channel, coupled with King Leopold’s Belgian capitulation, was sinking in, Churchill was adamant.

“No such discussions are to be permitted” was his response to suggestions to evacuate the Royal Family to some distant dominion of the Empire.

When Kenneth Clark proposed taking the cream of the National Gallery’s collection to Canada, Churchill shot back: “No. Bury them in caves and cellars. None must go. We are going to beat them.”

The rehearsal for his great performance in the House of Commons on June 4 was to the full cabinet (helpfully minus Halifax) in which Churchill passionately declaimed “we shall go on and we shall fight it out here or elsewhere and if at the last the long story is at an end it were better it should end, not through surrender but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.” (Hugh Dalton added that Churchill had actually said “when each of us lies choking in his own blood”.)

Ministers thumped fists on the table; some rose and patted him on the back. Defeatism – for the moment – had been held at bay. The long speech to the House of Commons a week later was meant to pre-empt any further thoughts of compromise with the “Nahzies” (a wonderfully, calculatedly dismissive pronunciation) and to turn the mood of the country from despair to resolution.

Josiah Wedgwood thought it was worth “a thousand guns and a thousand years” and he was right. It embodied both ethos (noble candour ) and pathos (vehement passion) in equal degree and its inspirational persuasion depended fundamentally on one rhetorical tactic: honesty.

Unusually, Churchill dispensed with an introductory exordium and went straight to his narrative of the German blitzkrieg on the north, as if he were writing one of his military histories.

No one minded the mixed metaphor “the German eruption swept like a scythe stroke”. Interspersed amid the lengthy storytelling was heroic relief, albeit in tragic mood: the futile four days of resistance in Calais (ordered by him). “Cheers” reported the Guardian.

Then followed, in Churchill’s instinctively archaic manner, what he thought would have been – and what still sounded like – “hard and heavy tidings” of the encirclement.

He trowelled on the despair, “the whole root and core and brain of the British army … seemed about to perish on the air”. But the “about”, of course, allowed his transition to the “miracle of deliverance” account of Dunkirk for which Churchill switched tenses, consciously emulating the Chorus from Henry V: “Now suddenly the scene is clear and the crash and thunder has if only for a moment died away.”

“Wars are not won by evacuations” he cautioned, but then followed another of his romances of the “island home”; the valiant airmen compared to whom “the Knights of the Round Table, the Crusaders – they all fall back into the prosaic past”.

Each time Churchill appeared to be describing calamity, he made sure to punctuate it with gestures of improbable defiance. There had been “a colossal military disaster” but “we shall not be content with a defensive war” (cheers).

He could not guarantee there would be no invasion, but he summoned up the Clio again to remind the House that Napoleon too had been a victim of that delusion.

Even that might have gone differently had the winds in the Channel veered differently. But as the great speech moved to its unforgettable peroration, Churchill was giving all who heard it and beyond the sense of historical vocation, a calling against tyranny, that he felt so deeply himself. “We cannot flag or fail,” and from his cabinet speech: “We shall go on to the end,” followed by the incantatory lines: “We shall fight on the seas and oceans,” and the rest. To hear the recording of the speech is to be amazed all over again at the fine tuning of the performance since Churchill deliberately lowers his pitch for much of the “we shall fight” repetitions, in softly heroic lament, a reproach, perhaps, to the unhinged vocal histrionics of his arch-enemy.

Only with “we shall never surrender” did the voice suddenly produce a mighty Churchillian growly roar; the full-throated resonance of the roused beast.

It is still magically easy to conjure him up: the glasses down the nose; the bottom lip protruding in pouty determination, shoulders stooped, his very un-Ciceronian body language of patting both hands, all five fingers extended, against his chest, then, as Harold Nicholson reported, down his stomach all the way to his groin.

Standing like that, Nicholson wrote that he looked like “a solid, obstinate ploughman” as if the earth of Britain itself defied the worst that Hitler could throw at it.

Nicholson’s wife (sort of), Vita Sackville West, wrote to him that even when recited by a news announcer, the speech sent “shivers” (of the right kind) “down my spine”.

The reason, she wrote, “why one is stirred by his Elizabethan phrases, that one feels the whole massive backing of powerful resolve behind them, like a fortress, [is that] they are never words for words sake”.

She was right. They were words for everyone’s sake. They were the lifeboat and the blood transfusion. They turned the tide.

This cool blog here by the name of Jahan-e-Rumi, recently posted the following (abbreviated)-

The anguish of Bahadur Shah Zafar

The last of the Mughal Emperors – Bahadur Shah Zafar - died in exile after the 1857 War of Independence. He was a gifted poet and a patron of struggling artists in Delhi. I found a translation of his famous ghazal here. Below is an image of a stamp with an image of verses by Zafar

Lagta nahiin hai jii mera ujray dayar mein
Kis kii banii hai aalam-e-na-payedar mein
Kah do in hasarataun se kahiin awr jaa basen
Itanii jagah kahan hai dil-i daaghdaar mein

You ask for a translation, I submit (As always, it is a liberal one):

My heart finds no repose in this desolation.
In this transient world, has anyone held it all–
for all too long.

Tell this longing to abide elsewhere,
There is not room enough in my ravaged heart!

(Bob Dylan – Love Minus Zero/No Limit)

You’ve been with the professors
And they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known
Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

(Bob Dylan – Ballad of a Thin Man)

The University of Minnesota recently hosted a symposium titled Highway 61 Revisited: Dylan’s
Road from Minnesota to the World, spanning the oeuvre of the state’s most…well…dylannic native son. The symposium offered lectures with such sonorous titles as Dylan as Avatar, Get Born: Dylan’s Body in Time and Space, Highway 61: Dylan’s Chosen Route Through Time And Space. Dylan has a curious relationship with scholastic culture: there is a smattering of academics across college campuses who have worked on the “Dylan canon”; inducting him into their respective scholarly regimens. A great majority of these projects look to be exercises in futility (apt to ask: how is one to determine the utility or futility of intellectual exercises). I speak meekly, however; for ghosts of those many hours I killed in performing exegeses on “Desolation Row” and crafting essays on Dylan’s Sufi bent, follow close behind. What is it that inspires such plucking of Dylan’s lobes? And why is it so difficult to legitimately pronounce “Dylan Studies” ? A friend once proposed that there is nothing extraordinary about Bob Dylan: he was a bad singer by all standards, a mediocre guitarist and as a lyricist, he was at best an excellent imitator. Indeed, Dylan himself writes in his autobiography that there was nothing original about his work. He found it hard to reel in the seasoned folk fans, because he had nothing new to offer, so his primarily audience became the young bohemians of the folk revival scene. His folk and blues renditions were uninspiring. His lyrical content, initially, was derived from the old folk songs and influeced later by the impulses (surrealist, symbolist.etc.) attendant in the works of contemporary poets who he frequently associated with. In his biography Dylan intimates that he read voraciously in his friend’s remarkable personal library–consuming books on a variety of subjects; despite this, one never finds Dylan substantively ‘negotiating’ with literary / poetic artifacts via his erudition.

Arguably, Dylan’s prowess as a poet is not intrinsic to his locution and style or to his lack of correspondence with the academic-poetic tradition, but quite the opposite; his poetics are a poetics of imitation. Not unlike Ulysses, Dylan’s corpus lends itself to scholastic inquiry because of the staggering number of meta-textual tie-ins with innumerable cultural artifacts. The cognitive and semantic distances between those references are so vast that their assemblage creates a unique poetic sensation as exemplified by “Desolation Row”–a poetics, at time, suspended between aphoristic meaning and a sort of rhetorical stoicism, in which it resembles Zen Koans, Sufi stories and “ambient” poetry which has gained some ascendance of late.

The question of whether or not Dylan merits being called a “poet” is a tricky one. With the burgeoning academic interest in his work, the push to firmly place him in the literary ranks has gotten more persuasive. Personally, despite my reverance, I’m not too keen about “literarizing”* his music; but then just as quickly, my doubts about Dylan’s status as a poet are assailed: ll cite just one brilliant instance of Dylan’s pellucid poetic vision, cast upon the murky states of being human:

“And though her eyes are fixed upon Noah’s great rainbow
She spends her time peeking into Desolation Row”

*His first formal attempt at literature, the unbearably convulted Tarantula is virtually indecipherable, but noticeable for its novelty; Chronicles Vol. 1, however, is a very memorable read.

The Costs of Iran’s Political Pageantry

Karim Sadjadpour

“You know the thing about Iran,” a European Ambassador in Tehran once lamented to me. “It has such a rich culture, a grand history, wonderful people. The cuisine is sophisticated and the scenery is breathtaking. It’s got incredible poets, musicians and filmmakers. Beautiful art and architecture…But it’s cursed with such lousy politicians.”

I was reminded of these words when watching the pageantry of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this morning, announcing that 15 British sailors held captive in Iran would be “pardoned” as an Easter “gift” to the British people in a gesture of magnanimity from “the great Iranian nation.”

Hardliners in Tehran are certain to perceive the entire incident as a diplomatic victory. After all, Iran publicly humiliated its long-time nemesis Britain, and won the release of an Iranian diplomat who had been detained in Iraq.

But at what cost?

From the diplomatic perspective, Tehran may feel like it has chastened the Europeans to think twice before working in concert with the U.S., but in fact they’ve likely achieved the opposite effect. Instead of splitting the international coalition assembled against them by weaning the Europeans away from the Americans—a strategy which Iran successfully employed during the era of reformist President Mohammed Khatami—Iran has further eroded European confidence that there exists a mature Iranian leadership amenable to diplomatic compromise.

And what effect will this have on the moribund Iranian economy, the regime’s Achilles heel? Is the multi-national corporation looking for investment opportunities in the Middle East going to go to Iran or Dubai? Is the international energy firm going to look to sign lucrative natural gas contracts with Iran or Qatar? Are the European tourists who were looking to visit the Middle East this year going to journey to Iran or Egypt?

Iranian hardliners similarly proclaimed victory after the 444 day hostage crisis in 1979 which humiliated the Carter administration. While three decades later the hostage crisis is a blip in the history of the United States, Iran continues to pay for it in terms of a soiled international reputation, political and economic isolation, and vastly unfulfilled potential.

And what about the Iranian people, whom president Ahmadinejad professes to speak for? Ahmadinejad’s entire campaign platform was about compassion for the common man and putting the oil money on people’s dinner tables. But they have been diminished to a mere footnote during his presidency, amidst the bustle about uranium enrichment, centrifuges, holocaust denial, and now British sailors.

Before announcing the release of the sailors, Ahmadinejad felt compelled to lecture the West on gender sensitivity, asking why the UK would send Faye Turney, a mother, on such a compromising mission. “Why don’t they respect the values of families in the West?” he asked. “Why is there no respect for motherhood, affection?”

His remarks come one month after a few dozen Iranian women were arrested and/or beaten while peacefully assembling against laws which, among other things, permit stoning women to death if they are convicted of adultery and deny women equal rights in divorce, custody and inheritance. I’m sure the double standard was lost on him.

In characteristic fashion, Iran’s leadership is consumed by short-term tactics at the expense of long-term strategy. In the short term, Iran thumbed its nose at the West and put a smile on the face of millions around the world—especially in the Islamic world—who abhor Western policies in the Middle East.

But once the dust has settled in Tehran, more sober Iranian officials will come to realize that Iran has only increased the time and distance it will need to travel until it can reintegrate itself into the international community and assume its rightful position as a respected member of the league of nations.

Karim Sadjadpour recently joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace after serving four years as the chief Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group based in Tehran and Washington, D.C. A leading researcher on Iran, Sadjadpour has conducted dozens of interviews with senior Iranian officials, and hundreds across Iranian society. He is a regular contributor to BBC World TV and radio, CNN and National Public Radio, and has written in the Washington Post, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and New Republic.

Link.

2)
Saudi Balancing Act

Karen Elliott House

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia–For all the oil riches of his desert kingdom, King Abdullah arguably has one of the world’s worst jobs. The octogenarian ruler, who only 18 months ago inherited the dynastic throne, is besieged by internal and external challenges. Sectarian chaos in Iraq, messianic militancy in Iran and the diminishing clout in the Middle East of its longtime U.S. ally all pose threats from without. Religious extremism, youth unemployment and princely corruption threaten from within.

It is a sign of how intense–and potentially fatal to the ruling regime–those pressures are that King Abdullah opened the Arab Summit meeting here last Friday by lashing out at U.S. troops in Iraq as an “illegitimate foreign occupation.” But the pressure also explains why Saudi Arabia has a ruler who actually is trying to grapple with challenges to the kingdom his father founded 75 years ago. On the one hand, the elderly king is opening up an unprecedented internal public dialogue on sensitive issues ranging from religious extremism to the role of women to ease pressure from middle-class Saudis. On the other hand, in a kingdom that historically limited its international role to pulling strings in the shadows, he has engaged in active and open regional and international diplomacy.

The king’s initiatives are all the more surprising given his own history. King Abdullah has no formal education. His government experience for most of the past 50 years consisted of heading the kingdom’s National Guard. For most of the past decade as Crown Prince and regent for his infirm elder brother, King Fahd, Abdullah contented himself largely with presiding over a static and stagnant government. Among his earliest moves upon finally taking the throne, the king called together the most senior princes to admonish them that the family’s retention of power required greater unity and integrity than had been evident in the lost decade of Fahd’s fading rule. More significantly, Abdullah imposed for the first time ever an orderly process for selecting future kings.

Rather than passing the crown from aging brother to aging brother among the surviving sons of founding ruler Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the next king will be Crown Prince Sultan and his crown prince will be chosen by a formal vote among the 36 sons of Abdul Aziz who are either living or have a living son to represent them. This plebiscite among princes obviously falls far short of democracy, but it has reassured the country that there is an orderly process to transition from the sons of Abdul Aziz, the youngest of whom is now 63, to the next generation.

On a broader level the king has lifted the traditional tight lid on public discussion of controversial issues and has encouraged a series of nationally televised dialogues on such touchy issues as extremism, education and the role of women. The long tame Saudi press has been unleashed to write about taboo topics like crime, drug use and violence against women and is beginning even to tiptoe into the sensitive issue of princely corruption. Saudi Arabia still lacks anything approaching a representative parliament, but the hand-picked members of the Majlis Ash Shura have been expanded under King Abdullah and are at least discussing, though not deciding, sensitive domestic issues. And, on the religious front, he is talking a new language of tolerance that appeals to the restive middle class even at the risk of alienating religious extremists.

None of these moves would make King Abdullah a progressive in any other society, but in Saudi Arabia they have given him an unprecedented measure of public support. The fact that his initiatives have led to very little substantive change so far is widely blamed on what are seen as reactionary relations, especially his brother, Prince Naif, who heads the Ministry of Interior, and on the religious establishment. “I am hopeful with King Abdullah more change is on the way,” says Tawfiq al-Saif, a member of the minority Shia sect and one of several Shia leaders with whom King Abdullah has opened a dialogue. “The people around him are more open. But we need to institutionalize change, not have it be a personal thing that comes and goes.”

Internationally, the king’s earliest focus was on trying to repair the damage done to U.S.-Saudi relations when, on Sept. 11, 2001, 15 Saudi extremists and four others attacked the U.S., and by the wider perception that Saudi Arabia has exported Islamic extremism. Royal diplomacy over the past 18 months had substantially patched up the bilateral relationship with the Bush administration, which dropped talk of the need for democracy in Saudi Arabia, though the king’s remarks at the Arab Summit aren’t likely to go over well in the White House. Changing the kingdom’s image among the American public will take far more effort. As one Saudi official says bleakly, “There is no way to change the image of Saudi Arabia without changing the image of Islam.”

Saudi Arabia’s other diplomatic priorities are to convince nations with regional influence that Sunni-Shia sectarian strife must be stopped at Iraq’s borders, that Iranian militancy must be contained, and that the Sunni Arab world, of which Saudi Arabia is a part, must be supported in the self-interest of the West.

In short, Saudi Arabia wants to preserve the regional status quo even as it is aware that Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its influence in Iraq make that unlikely. From the Saudi perspective, Iraq already is largely under Iranian domination and nothing the U.S. is likely to do will change that. Iran, in the private view of senior Saudi officials, is an impoverished country, radicalized by Shia extremists and now led by a madman, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is intimidating regional and Western nations. Serious senior Saudis truly believe Mr. Ahmadinejad seeks nuclear weapons to create an apocalyptic event that he believes would bring the “final days” and the return of the Twelfth Imam, whom Shia Muslims believe has been alive but concealed since 874. His return, they believe, will herald the defeat of the enemies of Shia Islam, which include not only Christians and Jews but also Sunni Muslims.

The genuine fear of Mr. Ahmadinejad is also tinged with a certain jealousy since Iran has rapidly replaced Saudi Arabia as the perceived benefactor of the Palestinians through its support of violent Hezbollah and Hamas proxies. It galls the Saudis that they have $1 billion in prospective aid to the Palestinians sitting in escrow awaiting Hamas’ acceptance of Israel’s right to exist while the Iranians can thumb their nose at Israel and buy Palestinian affections for a tiny fraction of that largesse.

“These are Arabs,” says Prince Saud al-Faisal, the kingdom’s foreign minister. “Iran can help achieve peace but not interfere or impose its own policy. This is a test of will between us and them.”

Most Saudis one encounters here seem to see the U.S. as a fading presence in the region–worn down by its painful experience in Iraq, divided at home, and lacking the national unity necessary to sustain its historic great power role. The ruling regime is historically and inextricably linked to its U.S. ally but is beginning to hedge its bets by improving ties with Russia, China, India and other powers. “We want to get to a point where China, Russia, the U.S. and Europe all have an interest in stability in the gulf so it is no one’s sphere of influence and all need to work together to guarantee stability in order to protect their own economic security,” says one senior official.

Despite all the effort to broaden its diplomatic circle of allies, both Saudi officials and ordinary citizens with whom one talks are fixated on the Iranian threat and on whether or not the U.S. will launch a military strike to try to destroy, or at least retard, Iran’s nuclear programs. During dinner in a tent outside Riyadh with members of a Young Saudi Leaders group, the topic comes up over and over. The general tenor of the evening is that the U.S. has horribly “botched” Iraq and this could encourage young Saudi extremists to be drawn to Iraq to fight the U.S. and return, radicalized, to threaten Saudi Arabia, or that sectarian strife will spill into Saudi Arabia where the oil-rich Eastern province is dominated by Shias.

It is clear this group doesn’t want a nuclear Iran nor a U.S. strike to prevent it. “You Americans should stay out of our region,” one young man angrily asserts. “You divided Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq. Please just go.” Says another more realistic Saudi: “We face two evils. If the U.S. strikes Iran it is terrible for us and if Iran gets nuclear weapons it is terrible for us.” The Saudis, as always, are better at fretting and finger pointing than at taking decisive action. And the king and his regime, notwithstanding their new realism and openness, are much better at seeing problems than solving them.

To the Saudis success lies in balancing competing pressures to preserve the status quo not in staking out risky new directions. There still is little sign that the kingdom has the courage of its own concerns. The regime talks about Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and Israel having common strategic interests in the Middle East, including containing extremist forces in the region and blocking Iranian domination. But as yet they haven’t stepped up to join Egypt and Jordan in recognizing Israel. For all the concern about U.S. failure in Iraq, the oil rich kingdom isn’t helping U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for a war whose outcome is at least as important to Saudi Arabia as the U.S. For all the fears about Iranian domination of the region, the Saudi response beyond multiple levels of dialogue, is to hope that the U.S. solves the problem.

Still, whether one views Saudi Arabia as a largely loyal U.S. ally, as an increasingly reluctant dependent or as a country haltingly seeking an independent position in this dangerous region, the U.S. continues to have a profound interest in Saudi stability. In a part of the world where America has few friends and many enemies, King Abdullah is a last best hope for the U.S. as well as the Saudis. What will follow him, regardless of whether there is an orderly succession, almost certainly will be less to America’s liking.

Ms. House, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, won a Pulitzer prize for her coverage of the Middle East.

Link.

1.1
Hakim Bey aka Peter Lamborn Wilson, famous for TAZ’s and Pirate Utopias has an interesting lecture entitled “The Art Of Sufi Travel”, which is worthwhile, if nothing, for its exegesis of medieval Sufi travel. In the lecture Wilson proposes that the physical meanderings of the dervish are akin to the [psychogeographic] locomation of Sufi poetry and literature and demands similar exegetic treatment. He discusses the works of medieval Islamic travellers such as Nasir Khusraw, Ibn Batuta and Ibn Khaldun. Though straying into weird occultist tangents on occassion and peppered with factual errors (the Ka’aba is not a black stone, is not a black temple), it is despite its suspect mysticism* an intriguing lecture; especially for those of us with dispositions given to whimsy, romance and adventure. Most notably, towards the end, Wison bemoans the demise of wanderlust and the wayfaring spirit, citing Nietzsche’s final ramblings and Rimbaud’s Abyssinian excursions, during which the two figures experienced a heightened. blazened consciousness followed by consuming madness–as the last of the great European travellers before modernism destroyed the traveller forever…or at least ’til it was resurrected with an extreme makeover via postmodern technoculture.

1.2
Wilson seems to have overlooked 19th and 20th century colonial travellers. Indeed, Wilfred Thesiger, obscure compatriot of T.E. Lawrence, is a veritable emblem of wanderlust. His account of his travels through the Empty Quarter with the Bedouin is a compendious illustration of Bedu life at the eve of its demise. Thesiger’s curiosity, the quintessential capital of the colonial adventurer (much like medieval Muslim imperialists and their conquistadors counterparts) is evinced in his detailed observations of desert topography. Though, like a true wayfarer, his narrative writhes with a compelling existential restlessness; and therefore makes for a deeeeelightful read.
Wilfred Thesiger’s obituary in the Guardian.

1.3
I have been occupied with Naipaul’s travel narrative, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, of late; in specific the section of the book pertaining to Pakistan. The title seemingly connotes a sort of fraternity with the “Believers”, but as one flips through the pages of this book, Naipaul’s patronizing illustration of the characters he encounters, suggests a sense of claustrophobia; of being stuck, caught ‘among the believers.’ Naipaul is not a curious traveller insomuch that he ‘seeks’ something in his travel like Wilson’s prototypal Sufi wanderer or Thesiger or Lawrence; instead, he is an educated, informed traveller like colonial travellers, amused by the queerness of his hosts, observing them for the sensibility of his vantage perspective. Perhaps, not the best nonfiction prose I have read, Naipaul does, however, possess the flair of a distinguished, seasoned writer which comes through vividly. The narrative swells with evocative imagery intertwined with historical exposition, pivoting on the perplexing interplay of Islam and modernity. From the irascible band of lawyers and “letter-writers” loitering outside courts to the interior Sindh excursion, Among the Believers, despite its faults, offers many memorable snapshots of Pakistan at the eve of Zia’s regime: perpetual exiles.The characters seem caricaturesque at times, given to Naipaul’s taxonomy, but they are more or less an accurate portrayal, especially in capacity of a travelogue. Besides, one is likely to encounter the same populating Naipaul’s book in the streets of Karachi, in government offices, courts and mosques of Pakistan. It saddens me to say but Pakistan is inhabited by a lot of ‘papier-mache men’ to use Conrad’s term.
Further: The New York Times Review of Naipaul’s book, bearing the horrid titled ‘In Search of Islam’.

To be continued.

From Ayub Khan to Zia ul Haq to Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s warrior-kings have made one fundamental claim to the public: that their particular act of suspension of democracy in Pakistan was ultimately constitutional and, hence, for the benefit of the nation. And they have had the support of the Supreme Court in making this claim – a support which gave them the necessary legitimacy to stay in power. In order to understand the current crisis in Pakistan – and to recognize the ultimate blunder of Pervez Musharraf – we have to look at the history and role of the Constitution in Pakistan, the historical involvement of the judiciary in the dismissal of democratic institutions and the tensions between the three centers of power in Pakistani society that undergrid this whole enterprise. Feel up to it?

It is all about the mythic Constitution.

It took nine years after independence, in 1956, for the Constitutional Assembly to come up with the first constitution of Pakistan. That remarkable document survived a mere two years – as General Ayub Khan installed Martial Law in 1958. Another constitution was drafted in 1962, suspended in 1969 and abrogated in 1972. Finally, the constitution drafted in 1973 has held up to this day albeit with this checkered past, summarized aptly by the CIA Factbook: suspended 5 July 1977, restored with amendments 30 December 1985; suspended 15 October 1999, restored in stages in 2002; amended 31 December 2003. It was Zia ul Haq who issued a dozen or so Presidential Ordinances which were grafted as amendments to the constitution in 1985. Among other things, they cemented the power of the Executive to dismantle the legislative branch within the Constitution. Ask Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif about that.

It may appear counter-intuitive from the teleology I give above, but the Constitution became an almost totemic document in the Pakistani political psyche. It may be that the very public and near-constant assaults increased its importance as a political document. Or, I can conjecture that it was one of the sole documents that sought to ‘define’ Pakistan as a post-independent reality as opposed to a ‘once-future’ promise of 1940 (is it an Islamic State? a Democratic Republic? whose Laws for whom? were all questions that had to be answered in that document. Of course they remain questions, still). The keepers of this tattered almost-narrative – the Supreme Court of Pakistan – have built their own prestige on the back of this document by honing a unique relationship to Pakistan’s self-identification.

The first blow was struck in 1954, when Governor General Ghulam Muhammad dissolved the Constituent Assembly. Maulvi Tamizuddin Khan, the President of the Assembly, appealed to the Supreme Court, asking it rule on the legitimacy of such an action – was the legislative branch a legitimate member of the government, he asked. Chief Justice Mohammad Munir sided with the executive and declared that the legislative served only at the pleasure of the executive because Pakistan was a dominion state and the British Raj still applied. Four years later, in October 1958, President Iskander Mirza killed off the 1956 Constitution and declared Martial Law with General Ayub Khan as the Martial Law Administrator. The case State vs Dosso came before CJ Munir again. Using Hans Kelsen’s Grundnorm thesis, the Supreme Court upheld the coup. The very next day, General Ayub Khan exiled the President and the template was fixed for futures to come.

In 1977, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld Martial Law under General Zia ul Haq. In 1981, he instituted the Provisional Constitutional Order and asked all Justices to re-take their oaths. Those that refused, were fired or retired. This was to ensure future accommodation of any wishes of the Chief Military Officer of the country. The Supreme Court, for example, rejected all challenges and upheld the 1988 dissolution of the National Assembly by General Zia. In 2000, Musharraf stuck to the playbook by sacking any judge that refused to take their oaths to his regime.

The basis of this symbiotic relationship between The General and the Court lie in the structure of power and influence in Pakistani society. The tiers in this pyramid are the Military, which is the largest employer, the largest landholder and has the longest duration in power, the civil bureaucracy, which traces back to the Raj though much weakened during Musharraf’s tenure, and the largely land-based elite. Functioning between these tiers are functional classes like the Lawyers who have parlayed their unique access to military, civil and landed elite into their necessary role as brokers. The Court is apex of such brokerage. It has relied especially on the hagiography of the Constitution to bolster its power. The Generals, eager to have any official stamp on their chest, have in turn portrayed the Court as the last bastion of truly apolitical and patriotic actors in Pakistan. Which means that when scandal does erupt around the Court, it has far greater reverberations. (Courtesy: CM)

Readers can (and should) access the complete blog post here. I am unsure as to how much I share with sepoy, in his opinion of Musharraf; or with Mr. Ayaz Amir for that matter, whose impetuous piece in the Dawn was so unabashedly inquilabi that I couldn’t quite tell whether there was a joke which I had missed (though well worth the read by all means). Ardeshir Cowasjee also published a piece, which was much tempered than Mr. Amir’s; and duly acknowledged that while “President General Pervez Musharraf is a military dictator…he has (so far) not proven himself to be endowed in any manner with fascistic tendencies. (Cowasjee Corner, March 18, 2007)

That Raft of the Medusa which is the ill-fated Islamic Republic, is beset with yet another tempest; and as is the case in such circumstances, people have taken to prophesizing. Will this be the end of Prez Pervez-that straight, no chaser general who managed to convince an entire nation of the transparency of his regime? Ayaz Amir’s latest article, with characteristic nods to the Western canon (his last article was frought with references from Euripides and Keats), guesses that a “long summer of discontent” looms ahead. He writes: It is perhaps the fear of the unknown; what was unthinkable before, or at least unrealistic, now looking plausible: the dim outlines of a post-Musharraf era.

Whatever happens, I have a feeling that the dingy dhow of Pakistan will stay afloat. As Naipaul observed in “Amongst The Believers” migration defines Pakistan; and wayfarers somehow make do. (Doubts should never be entertained, no matter how compelling)