On the edge of consciousness

Brief review of the film "A Separation"

2012-01-10T20:07:00.011-06:00

A Separation (Persian: Jodaeiye Nader az Simin), directed and written by Asghar Farhadi (2011).

The acting is remarkable and the development of the story is top-notch. But this is not what made me fall for this film. More than any film I can recall, it prompted me to reflect on the ups and downs of life-changing relationships — mine and others. We all make mistakes, and in this film we are brought empathetically but forcefully into a tumultuous period of the characters' lives in which they can't help but make their fair share. In this sense the film is more true-to-life than any other I've seen. We see the characters' decisions and actions, and sometimes it's far from clear whether they derive from a motivation to do what they truly aspire to, or if they are just trying to survive under difficult circumstances. We cannot help but watch compassionately, especially because the film wisely and resolutely refuses to allow us to be swept along by stereotypes, sentimentality or rigid distinctions between good and bad. Instead we come to understand the characters even though we don't understand all that they do. Some of my friends say the film is sad or even depressing, but I disagree. I find it uplifting — I am encouraged by the character's struggle for dignity, and humbled by the double-edged nature of their pride. This is film-making and story-telling of the highest standard.

Tehran street scene (this is not from the film)

Photographing in Iran

2011-11-07T01:11:00.002-06:00

Bakhtiari Couple, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province

Somebody recently wrote to me asking for advice about photographing safely in Iran. They wondered if I needed a permit for some of my photographs, and whether my photographic gear was safe.

Iran is a wonderful country in which to photograph. Iran has a thriving photographic community and art scene, with plenty of highly talented photographers producing outstanding work. It has the rural charms of neighboring countries like Pakistan and Tajikistan, and like them, it has a rich and storied history. However in comparison to its neighbors, Iran is arguably more diverse. Its urban centers are wealthier. It has many stunning architectural forms and details. Its poets are famous the world over.

Woman walking, South Tehran

Iran is famous for its beautiful women too. What's there not to like?

Everywhere I've photographed in Iran, I've done so without a sense of inhibition. This has gotten me into conversations with government police and security officials a couple of times in Tehran, but never elsewhere.

Couple on motorcycle, Tehran. This was one of the photos that got me into trouble.

The first time was in 2007, when plainclothes policeman in his mid-20s took exception to my street photography outside a popular cinema in central Tehran. He angrily confronted me in the street and while he didn't speak English, he made it clear he wanted me to accompany him and his colleague in their car. I had absolutely no intention of doing that. With the help of a young woman managing an Internet café, he questioned me for about one hour, letting me go only when he determined that I was a genuine tourist. He claimed I needed a permit to photograph anything other than well-known places in Tehran.

A few weeks later, I spoke with a member of the official tourist police in Isfahan. He spoke fluent English, and in great contrast to the plainclothes policeman, he was a thoroughly nice guy. He said there was no need for a permit, arguing the plainclothes policeman was out of line.

Friday Prayers, Tehran

The only other kind of photographic incident I've had in Iran was in 2008 when I went to photograph the Friday prayers in Tehran. Perhaps whether I was naïve or simply did the right thing, I had no hesitation in wanting to photograph the prayers. As far as I was concerned, I wasn't doing anything out of line. I wasn't a reporter, so I didn't need a journalist's permit. I was merely photographing a public event, like any other. My Iranian companion that day, however, didn't see it that way. She was deeply concerned that the authorities would stop me and possibly detain me, which worried her enormously. After having barely arrived, she was proven correct. Several senior security officials questioned me for some minutes, wanting to know who I was and why was there. After conferring with their higher-ups, they allowed me to photograph the prayers for a few minutes.

In retrospect, I don't think either of these situations were particularly serious. I was probably not in danger of being arrested. Of course, if I had accidentally photographed something of a sensitive military or governmental nature, the situation could have been very different. But that is pretty much the same in many countries these days.

One thing I did not attempt was to photograph police officers arresting or detaining young people for wearing too much makeup or having the wrong kind of hair. From the perspective of documentary-style street photography, these scenes were often compelling and would have made wonderful photographs. However the police officers made it clear that they were totally against such photography. I didn't want to try their patience.

Unfortunately the Iranian justice system can be highly politicized. As is widely documented, innocent people can be detained for long periods while being denied their basic human rights. This fact alone can certainly make oneself cautious. Outside of Tehran, however, it seems to me there is little reason for any special caution. Iran remains a wonderful place in which to photograph.

The death of Jawahar Abu-Rahmah of Bil’in

2011-01-09T16:07:00.005-06:00

Noam Sheizaf has written a detailed account of the death of Jawahar Abu-Rahmah at the village of Bil'in.

Poor Ms. Abu-Rahmah was killed by exposure to tear gas during a protest in which she was a bystander — and instead of the Israeli government and Israeli Defense Forces pausing to take a deep breath, and reassess why they protests are occurring, a deluge of shameless lies emerges.

Blind Palestinian villager during protest on September 2, 2005.

I’ve been to Bil’in. This is an audio slideshow of a protest in Bil'in I made in 2005.

The events Mr. Sheizaf describes are very much disturbing — in a way that I cannot quite make rational sense out of. As Mr. Sheizaf suggests, to be killed or wounded in the places where everything is going on — in the middle of the action among the bullets, tear gas and rocks — is not at all surprising. Yet Ms. Abu-Rahmah was standing on a hill, away from central action, and the gas rushed towards her and ultimately killed her. Perhaps it is a kind of metaphor for the unintended consequences of deploying mass violence to repress problems. The gas, carried by the wind, is our foolishness and arrogance, our failure of the imagination, and our greed. We cannot control the wind, and no one in the history of humanity has been able to control all the flow-on effects of choosing violence over nonviolence, repression over dialogue, and arrogance over genuine collaboration between people with differences.

Standing on the shoulders of giants and condemning them

2010-11-11T19:15:00.003-06:00

Every once in a while people become recognized for the work they do to help make the lives of marginalized people better. Such people can work tremendously hard—often with the critical help of a substantial number of other people—to improve the lives of others, especially those who are vulnerable. One can think of great feminists, for example, who struggled valiantly for the rights of women everywhere to be fully recognized. They may not have achieved all they wanted in their lifetime, but their contributions to humanity have lived on, and their thought and action has come to touch the lives of many millions of people.

I find it especially aggravating when someone from successor generation attacks the individual leaders, their ideas or the movements they were associated with when they themselves are a beneficiary of that great person's work. Sometimes the criticism comes from the people you would least expect it from, because they are one of the direct beneficiaries.

An obvious example is when young female (and male) university students criticize feminism as an extremist movement in which they want no part. They fail to recognize that it is due to feminism that women are even able to study in universities to begin with. One can say much the same thing about human rights. Some students heavily criticize human rights. Their passion to do so can be particularly strong. They too fail to recognize that without human rights visions such as the idea that everyone has a right to an education, regardless of their background in life, they might not even be at university.

In class I had today, some students vigorously criticized an approach to improving the lives of the poor called "sustainable livelihoods". Dr. Robert Chambers is an academic who has written about this approach. One student was criticizing the approach of Chambers for being an example of when "expert" outsiders go to a location and tell poor people how they should live their lives. In reality, Chambers is famous for critiquing this kind of "expert" knowledge. His 1983 book, "Rural Development : Putting the Last First", deals with precisely this question. The student was unknowingly taking an idea Chambers had articulated some 30 years ago and using it against him and his work. In this instance the student could not possibly have been more wrong in their criticism.

I must confess I struggle to keep my cool in such situations. I tend to become rather emotional and passionate myself in defending the work, ideas or lives of great people in such situations. Personally I need to work harder to have the patience to explain to people that their understanding could very definitely be improved. Obviously something sensitive inside of me is being touched and I feel compelled to respond, and I struggle to do so in a way that is fully respectful of the people I'm in conversation with.

Often my mistake is to not take the time to understand the other person's frame of reference that causes them to be so vigorous in their condemnation. Yet I suspect the same could be said of the critics too. Something inside of them has been touched, and their response is to condemn when they would be better off taking the time to better understand what it is they are condemning. Perhaps they feel compelled to project something onto what they are condemning because deep down they see themselves in it. Rather than critique themselves, they condemn others. Perhaps because they are a beneficiary of the person's work, the feeling they have is even more intense than it otherwise would be.

I'm not entirely sure why the issue makes me so passionate, or exactly what inside of me is being touched. One obvious candidate is a simple sense of fairness, but there must be much more to it than this. Many things in the life are clearly grossly unfair, but it is an extraordinarily rare person who deals with them with a consistent level of passion and commitment. So it cannot simply be a case of "right and wrong". I need to think more about this. Meanwhile, I'll try to be more patient.

Learning Farsi in Isfahan Part 2

2010-08-13T04:01:00.003-05:00

Girl with blue ball, Isfahan

After reading my previous blog entry, many people have contacted me requesting information about studying Persian at the University of Isfahan. A common problem is that when emailing the university, it can take a long time to get a response. It is hard to say if this is because of internal bureaucracy or technical difficulties with the university's email system (their IT systems are often unreliable). You can also try iinternationaloffice@yahoo.com (note the two i's at the beginning of the address).

I had intended to study again at the University of Isfahan this summer. Unfortunately I was not issued a student visa. The university claimed I had not sent them an application, which was bizarre, because I certainly did. I was later informed by my academic advisor that when an visa application is declined, instead of saying so, it is considered polite by Iranian officials to say it was not received. The university encouraged me to apply for a tourist visa, but this was neither declined or issued. Instead, the application simply languished.

I was surprised to have my visa application rejected. I had not had significant problems with being issued an Iranian visa in the past. Moreover, I have not engaged in any political activity related to the elections last year. An Englishman who also studied Persian last year was also not issued a visa.

Ahmadinejad looks on, Isfahan

In July I received an email from the university stating "I hereby inform you that the regulation of issuing visa is slightly changed from 4th of July 2010. According to the new rules those visitors who enter Iran with a tourist visa can not apply for short course Persian learning programs and their period of stay will not be extended. Therefore any applicant, who would like to learn Persian, should apply for a student visa (through the Office of International Scientific Cooperation).It is important to note that for this kind of visa, the applicant should apply at least three months prior to travel."

Unfortunately the university has not been forthcoming in providing information as to why a visa was not issued to me earlier this year. The Iranian Embassy in New Zealand was similarly unhelpful. This leaves my research plans in Iran in tatters. I am writing this blog entry in Khujand, Tajikistan. I will likely do my anthropological PhD research in Tajikistan, with a different project to that I had planned in Isfahan.

Many Americans study Persian and Tajik in Dushanbe, where they learn from Iranian teachers. Having not participated in their course, I cannot comment on the quality of the instruction as compared to Isfahan.

The American Jewish Committee and Iran

2009-09-21T13:52:00.012-05:00

Today I received an e-mail from the American Jewish Committee (AJC). The AJC says it "has worked since 1906 to safeguard and strengthen Jews and Jewish life worldwide by promoting democratic and pluralistic societies that respect the dignity of all peoples". Their objective is laudable and sensible, and indeed has much to commend it. The AJC has chosen an objective that is both pragmatic and stirring. I support their stated idealism. Life is difficult, injustice is pervasive, and genuine peace so often seems elusive. As a minority population, the Jewish people have been acutely aware of this for thousands of years. Their history makes a compelling case for their goal—their idealism is firmly rooted in the knowledge that when the dignity of all peoples is respected, everyone benefits, especially minorities. Their idealism is grounded in realism.

How strange it is, then, that their e-mail contained a video produced by them which could hardly do more to contradict their ideals. The video highlights alleged and actual Iranian government acts, encouraging viewers to take action to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. These acts include the 1994 bombing of a Jewish Center in Argentina (an act for which no one has yet been proven guilty in a court of law, which the video does not mention), public hangings within Iran, and recent Iranian government action against protesters. The public hanging scene is extremely disturbing, showing the twitching legs of a man in the last moments of his life. The method the video uses to convey its message is intriguing. It combines the familiarity of everyday things—trucks, motorcycles, and cranes, as well as homely music—with sights that are meant to be perceived as grotesque and jarring. Here it draws upon Sigmund Freud's idea of the uncanny. In this video, the Iranian government is familiar, yet monstrous. It is like us, but unlike us in the most awful ways imaginable. Given the frequency with which the uncanny occurs in cultures worldwide, Freud was onto something, which the producers of the video cleverly exploit.

The AJC is hardly alone in producing a video of this character. Naturally, videos and e-mails are commonly produced by individuals, organizations and governments that highlight what they see as monstrous acts by the Israeli government. An abundance of imagery exists of large numbers of civilians being killed by not only Israeli military weapons, but everyday things like bulldozers. An Israeli soldier once told me a story about some of his colleagues who were convicted for playing football with a Palestinian boy's head. They had made a video of themselves doing it. Important, influential intellectuals within Israel, such as Yehezkel Dror, openly advocate the use of Israel's nuclear weapons in the case of a "sufficiently grave" threat.

What I find so strange is that the AJC is so willing to give us simply more of the same. It thus gives the appearance of being nothing more than a partisan in the midst of a propaganda war that it is determined to win. How refreshing it would be if the AJC mustered the imagination to do something different. For example, the AJC could make a video that showed the effects of violence on ordinary people regardless of their nationality or religion, and then demonstrate how this is ultimately a threat to everybody's well-being. That would be keeping with their stated ideals.

Tragically, Israel and Iran have been both victims of mass violence, heavily marking the psyches of their peoples. But they have both been perpetrators of it too. It would be courageous if the AJC were to acknowledge the violence inflicted by the Israeli state, and the ongoing pain and injustice this has caused for its victims. It would be wise if they were to advocate for a truth commission to examine the many varieties of violence in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories—violence that strips away the dignity of everyone living there, regardless of religion, race, gender, age or nationality. The AJC could vigorously campaign for for a world free of nuclear weapons, including Israel's. That would certainly respect all people's dignity.

Is the AJC ever likely to do any of this? I remain hopeful. Conflict between and among peoples is inevitable, and can even be healthy. But mass violence is neither inevitable or healthy. To work toward its own objective, the AJC needs to practice conflict transformation, not contribute to the world's already overflowing cesspool of manipulative propaganda.

A riot of color

2009-09-08T00:45:00.006-05:00

Click on the image to view the slideshow

Politics plays with words, images and ideas, tossing about the known and the imagined as if they were one. Art does too.

I have my own words and ideas about Iran, but here I want these images—snapshots in time of what I have seen in this vast and beautiful land—to convey the feeling I have in my heart.

What do you think? Leave your comments below.

Learning Farsi in Isfahan

2009-07-11T04:39:00.007-05:00

I am three weeks into a Farsi course at International Scientific Cooperation Office (ISCO) at the University of Isfahan. There is very little information available on the Internet detailing student experiences of learning Farsi in Iran. I have therefore decided to share some impressions and personal experiences.

Because the ISCO does not provide a handbook for new students, most of the information I've provided here you need to figure out by yourself or with your fellow students. My hope in writing this blog entry is that some people will find it helpful.

In the classroom

As a warning to the reader, I must say at the outset that I am not especially good at learning a new language. I have little natural talent for it. I am almost always the slowest student in the class. I was not taught grammar in when I was a student in New Zealand. Furthermore, I did not undertake any formal study of Farsi before coming to the course. I had done a little self-study with the Rosetta Stone Farsi language CDs.

Before arriving, the University applied for a three month student visa on my behalf. It took about five and half months for it to be issued. It took so long that I had to change my plans and shorten my course of Farsi study. Shorter length tourist visas, suitable for shorter periods of study, can take much less time to be issued.

As of mid 2009, the classes are small. This provides many opporunities for individually tailored language instruction. Classes run from 8:30am till about 11:45am, with a small break in between. The teachers are all women. They are interesting, engaging and friendly teachers. They have without expception been patient, polite and a pleasure to learn with. They are all well educated. Almost of them speak adequate English, which is helpful for beginners like me, when explanations are needed. However those who are more advanced in their knowledge of Farsi will of course prefer their teachers teach in Farsi.

Sheikh Loft Allah Mosque, Isfahan

The classrooms are located in a very beautiful part of the campus, beside a lovely garden. Nearby insects can sometimes be heard creating a enticing symphony of chirps, which can be a welcome respite from the feeling of being overwhelmed by the unfamiliar and strange sounds of a new language.

In the beginners class, a text book called Let's Learn Farsi is used. It can be purchased from a bookshop near Siosipol Bridge (a teacher will tell you where to buy it from). Accompanying the text book is an audio CD, which is not for sale. However this is not a problem as the MP3 files from the CD can be copied from computers at the ISCO. The book is helpful. It contains helpful phrases which are immediately useful in places like shops and homes. It is professionally produced, and has some interesting music to accompany it. However in the accompanying audio, the dialogue can proceed at such a tremendously rapid rate that it is impossible for the beginner to keep up. This can be frustrating. The aim is laudable—ordinary Iranians are inclined to speak fairly rapidly, and the student needs to learn to listen to conversational Farsi sooner or later. However, in my opinion, it would be useful for the audio guide to include the option of dialogue spoken more slowly, in addition to the existing dialogue. Furthermore, new words can be introduced without an explanation of what they mean. Sometimes the meaning can be guessed, but it means that without a dictionary, the teacher's guidance is truly essential.

Fruit and vegetable market, Isfahan

Fellow students may be fluent in Arabic (which makes it far easier for them), or may have English as a second or third language. One of my classmates is from Korea. It is very difficult for him to pronounce Farsi. He is much better at understanding Farsi than I am (he has been in Iran for more than a year), but I have an impossible time understanding what he is saying when he speaks Farsi.

I have found it very helpful to continue using the Rosetta Stone Farsi language CDs outside of class. They are logical, and the accompanying audio is always extremely well spoken. I also appreciate the pedagogy they use, where written words and audio accompany images, without any translation into English. Although the text book uses a similar approach, personally I strongly prefer Rosetta Stone to the text book, because of its structure and pace (of course, there is nothing like being in a classroom to ask questions and have errors in pronunciation corrected). To use Rosetta Stone you'll need your own computer, obviously.

Friday Mosque, Isfahan

I recommend bringing your laptop, if you have one. You can use it in the accommodation to connect to the Internet using a LAN connection in your room. Otherwise Internet access on campus is not easy. A Internet cafe not far from the Guest House is basic, and closes during summer, when most students are on their break.

The University of Isfahan has a truly vast campus—easily the largest campus I have ever seen. Free buses are available to transport students and visitors to various points throughout the campus. The campus rests on a gently sloping hill, providing a splendid view of the city. Gardens, lawns and at least one orchard are scattered about the campus. Unlike any other University I've attended, fences dominate the campus . One gets the impression that the planners deliberately made it difficult to walk from one place to another using a direct route. Instead of handy gates or walkways between building and fences, one must circumnavigate them to get where one needs to go. That can occasionally add many minutes to one's walk.

View from the Mehmansara

The accommodation provided for most students in the course—those who do not already live here in Iran, or who do not have families with them—is in the University Guest House (Mehmansara). It is a bit like budget hotel. The rooms are spacious and functionally furnished. I have not needed to share my room, but that could change if the number of students were to increase. The quality of room you will receive may vary dramatically depending on exactly which room you get assigned. In the first room I stayed in, the telephone and Internet did not work at all. The shower hardly worked and the toilet was problematic. The balcony was very dirty. After a couple of weeks, when despite repeated requests to the Mehmansara staff it became clear they would not be fixed, I requested a room change from the ISCO. My new room is far superior.

The quality of the Internet connection varies. Sometimes it works without issues. At other times, it does not work at all, or runs very slowly. Naturally, censorship of the Internet is in place, as required by the Government.

There is no laundry facility in the Mehmansara, and it is unclear as to where the nearest laundromat is. The restaurant at the ground floor of the Mehmansara is vegetarian unfriendly. The only suitable vegetarian dish is a mediocre salad. There are a couple of stores a few minutes walk away, selling dry goods, as well as fruits and vegetables. However almost all the rooms in the Mehmansara are not designed for cooking in. If you're lucky, you might be one of the few people to be provided with a small heating element, but don't count on it. If you're going to stay here for three months, that could be a problem.

Armenian Orthodox Church, Isfahan

Not far from the Mehmansara is a handy bus stop, which is regularly served by buses that can take you straight into the center of town. If you are contemplating learning Farsi in Iran, and you've never been to Iran, it is helpful to know that Isfahan is a very beautiful and often charming city. Its architecture can be stunning. Some of my photos of Isfahan (also spelled Esfahan) can be found here and here.

Update, August 13 2010: You can view a followup to this blog entry here: http://www.edgeofconsciousness.net/2010/08/learning-farsi-in-isfahan-part-2.html.

Why I wrote Rapid Photo Downloader

2009-04-12T01:57:00.009-05:00

I am the developer (author) of Rapid Photo Downloader. This is a free software program written for professional and amateur photographers. It helps photographers by downloading photos from their memory cards onto their computer, renaming them in a format specified by them. It can also backup the images as they are downloaded. It includes features to help them do this as efficiently as possible. For example, it can download from more than one card reader at the same time, which is especially helpful when a photographer returns to their computer with hundreds if not thousands of images (which is more common than you might imagine, especially for people like wedding photographers).

It has taken more than a thousand of hours of my time to do this. Why would I do such a thing, and charge nothing for it? I have several motivations. First, I see it as an act of service. Second, I see it as part of a contribution to a bigger movement, the free software movement, which was founded by Richard Stallman.

Let me first discuss the second motivation. Free software refers to not only the price, but especially to freedom. In the words of the Free Software Foundation:

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

With free software you can be a good neighbor and share it freely with others. You are encouraged to do so! People can use it without having to pay money for it.

I firmly believe that free software is a much closer fit with human rights and global solidarity than the combination of proprietary software and capitalism. Proprietary software—which by its very nature is not free—has led to a small number of people becoming incredibly wealthy, with significant control over what users can and cannot do with their software and their data. This goes against the central tenet of democracy, which is that people have the option to meaningfully participate in decisions that affect their lives. Free software is more democratic and respectful of the user.

Currently proprietary software is the dominant form of software on most people's laptops and desktop computers, but free software like the Firefox web browser is becoming increasingly popular. Linux is the most popular free operating system. Millions of people use it on their desktops everyday, in government and industry, at home and in civil society organizations. It has already proved a marvelous success. But compared to Windows and Mac, not enough people use it. I wrote my program so that I can help free software, and Linux in particular, become more popular among photographers. Only a small percentage of serious photographers use Linux. Many more could be using it in future. My humble little program is a small but important tool that can help prompt photographers to see what free software has to offer photography, and to be part of a movement that encourages the development of better free software programs for everyone.

As I mentioned, I also wrote this program as as act of service. I see it as one way of giving back a little of what I have received from others. I would not have been able to create this program were it not for the hard work of many others—including especially my teachers, and those who wrote the software without which my own program could not be developed or run. I was fortunate to receive an excellent education in computer science—two years at Victoria University of Wellington, and one semester at the University of California at Berkeley. Many people do not have access to the quality of education I received, even when they have the talent and desire. With free software, not only can they run the program, but they can study it and improve it if they wish.

The knowledge that we cannot be fully human without recognizing our dependence on others is reflected in the name of one of the most widely used distributions of Linux, Ubuntu, who says:

Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'Humanity to others', or 'I am what I am because of who we all are'. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.

I am very pleased to be able to make a meaningful contribution to the free software movement. For some time it has been one of those things I would like to achieve before I die.

Student contributions to peacebuilding

2009-02-28T22:51:00.004-06:00

The theme of the International Student Festival held on 20 February to 1 March 2009 in Trondheim, Norway was on how peace can be built and maintained. The festival emphasized student contributions to peacebuilding. The organizers published a 128 page book (PDF, 72MB) with contributions from students and professionals, including three of my photos from Israel / Palestine.

I am very pleased to be associated with this project. I have always believed that the more people who study peacebuilding systematically and seriously, the more likely peace is likely to be established. The world needs a will to peace—to believe that it is possible, and to know what it takes to achieve it.

The truth behind the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi

2009-01-22T23:53:00.006-06:00

St. Francis, probably the most loved of all Christian saints, was born as Francis Bernadone, in Assisi, Italy, in 1181 or 1182. A remarkable prayer has been commonly attributed to him, called simply the Prayer of St. Francis. As one might expect, there are a few variations of it, and this is one:

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.

This version was taught to me by my meditation teacher, Eknath Easwaran. Sri Easwaran had a deep love for St. Francis. I suspect it was Sri Easwaran who added the words "to self" in the last line—no doubt to emphasize the idea that eternal life means mystical union with the divine, as opposed to the idea of spending eternity in heaven.

The NY Times today reported that this prayer is not believed to have come directly from St. Francis, a fact widely understood within certain circles of the Catholic Church. In fact, no one knows for sure who exactly wrote it. It was very likely inspired by St. Francis's life, and some of his phrases might be reflected in it, but he didn't write it.

When I first heard this news from Fr. Michael McGarry, when staying at Tantur in 2006, I was initially somewhat shocked. On Sri Easwaran's recommendations, it was my first meditation passage. I imagined that St. Francis himself had composed it based on his own experiences living the best life he possibly could.

In time, I concluded it didn't matter who wrote it. It remains one of the most stunningly inspiring religious passages we have available to us in the modern world. It's direct and to the point, from the first line to the last. It's an especially powerful passage to turn to when struggling to be good among difficult people who in their ignorance are behaving badly. And it is faithful to St. Francis's life. The real truth behind this prayer is that it speaks of the truth of humanity's highest ideals.

Shortly before my mother died, she and I watched the marvelous film on St. Francis's life, "Brother Sun, Sister Moon". She was moved by it. I read out the prayer at her funeral. I very much hope it will be a part of my life till the day I die.

Two pieces of good news from the U.S.

2009-01-22T06:08:00.004-06:00

Close Guantánamo Amnesty International Protest

Great news! President Obama seems to be making good on his promise to close the Guantánamo Bay prison complex. This is a victory for human rights campaigners—and ultimately a victory for those who seek to make the world a safer place in which to live.

Equally important, to my mind, is an observation from PepsiCo manager Bryan Lembke: "If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it". He was referring to PepsiCo's initiative to measure the carbon footprint generated by the production of their orange juice. He is absolutely correct. I applaud the people responsible for undertaking this initiative within the company for their work in this area, and I hope it is the one of a series many meaningful steps to improve the sustainability of their industry.

If Mr. Lembke's simple observation was applied more widely, fantastic changes for the better could be made. I have long believed that measuring economic performance by primarily relying on GDP (or GNP) is foolish and dangerous. Wonderful alternatives to exist that can be used to help societies more wisely measure socioeconomic wellbeing. Many are outlined here.

New websites

2009-01-08T12:56:00.004-06:00

Today I launched two new websites. The first is the beginnings of my personal website:

http://www.damonlynch.net/

The second site relates to a free and open source software project I have been working on for some time:

http://www.damonlynch.net/rapid

They're both currently rather modest, but I hope that changes in time! For instance, I plan to put links to my academic research on my personal site.

Defeated, dethroned, and now, defaced

2008-12-08T21:25:00.004-06:00

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was Iran's monarch from 1941 to1979. He ruled the country for 37 years, and was unceremoniously removed from power in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini and his many millions of followers. He died in 1980. Today his wife, Farah Pahlavi, divides her time between the West and Egypt.

A lavish photo book extolling the glories of Iran's present and past, called Persia: Bridge of Turquoise, was produced during the king's reign. The photography was by Roloff Beny, and it included an essay by the renowned Iranian scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr. The forward was written by Farah Pahlavi.

The book contains a few images of the king and his wife, both of whom look eminently regal in appearance. When I was browsing through a copy of this book a few days ago in the Morrison Library at UC Berkeley, I was momentarily stunned and slightly bemused to find an X a previous reader had drawn using a red ball point pen on one of the pictures. It was scribbled directly on the face of the former king. Someone had literally defaced the king.

The vandalism of a library book is a librarian's nightmare, of course. Damage done to any book is often permanent, and can be disastrous when the book is impossible to replace. UC Berkeley's library is one of the finest in the United States. It provides an outstanding environment for scholarly research. One simply doesn't expect to find random acts of permanent political protest within the pages of its library books, even at a campus with a progressive reputation like Berkeley. In such an august environment, is such an act by a reader a stirring rebellion in favor of humanity's dignity and justice, or merely the uncouth work of a hasty barbarian?

What was the vandal thinking? Was it spontaneous? Maybe seeing a few images of regal splendor was more than the vandal could handle, and the defenseless book was the object of their frustration. I imagined a face, angry at first, eyes ablaze, a red pen held aloft ready to strike, but then softening to reflect a warm, satisfied glow. Or perhaps it was a measured act, plotted after a night of determined reflection. My mind formed the image of a student tossing and turning in bed, unable to sleep, with angry thoughts coursing through his tender mind. Perhaps his uncle had been tortured and killed by the king's intelligence services, and he was taking revenge. Perhaps he hated the outlandish wealth of the king, while the ordinary people suffered.

I became fascinated with the defaced image. It represented something for me, but what was it exactly? There are many oppressive forces that bear down on us. We may feel like we have little control over our destiny. We might well be aware that many of our leaders are selfish and perhaps even overtly corrupt, like the former king of Iran was, but we probably feel we have little power to change the situation. Defacing an image might be one way for someone to feel like they're doing something productive.

The king was a handsome man. His wife was undoubtedly beautiful. Iranians often place a premium on looks. They can afford to. They're an attractive and refined people. An Iranian American was recently telling me of his displeasure at what he considers the rampant materialism and all around shallowness found within much of his community in southern California. Yet the red X disregarded all of that decadent aesthetic pleasure. It said “I don't care how handsome and beautiful you are, you're still a dastardly scoundrel.”

Perhaps the fact that I am a photographer myself makes me sensitive to these issues. I'm often intrigued when there is a collision between ideals and ideology, or beauty and ugliness. Images I've published on the Internet are often used for political or artistic purposes by individuals and organizations. Sometimes people ask me for permission, and they occasionally even pay me for the privilege. At other times they use an image without bothering to contact me. Sometimes they respect the dignity of the people in the images, sometimes not.

All in all, the vandal got me thinking. I don't like how they did it, but I have to admit they left their mark on more than just the book.

"Making a go of things" vs. "bouncing around"

2008-12-03T22:58:00.005-06:00

The extent to which a few years of difference in age can influence perceptions of what people really ought to be doing in life is remarkable. Things which are seen as wise in one period of life can be seen as irresponsible if done a little later. The change over from one period to the next can be rapid. Having a changeable vs. stable career is like this. Doing a mix of jobs and being living an itinerant life in one's twenties and early thirties is often perceived positively by other young people and their elders. It indicates a willingness to experiment and to be open to new experiences. For the young adult, it promises adventure and self-discovery. However there comes a point where doing the same things while being more advanced in years has a cost. Not only do the advantages of a stable life seem more compelling for the individual themselves, but other people's perceptions can quickly change. No longer is the person making a go of things. Instead, they are merely bouncing around from one thing to the next. They are not making the most of the experience they have accumulated in life. Instead, they are frittering away their life without a clear sense of direction and purpose. What they need is a plan that leads them to a path of robust stability.

When I graduated from my undergraduate studies as a fresh faced 21 year old youth, I could have continued straight on into a program of graduate study, culminating in a Ph.D. This would have set me up for a long career in the academic world. Life as an academic is a viable and very attractive option for me. I enjoy academic life immensely, and while there are gazillions of things in this life for which I truly have no talent for, the kinds of skills I have do find useful expression in a university. The fields of study I am most passionate about relate to people and their culture, particularly as they relate to religion, peace and conflict. As a young adult, I did not believe I had the necessary experience to make the most effective use of all that graduate studies can offer. Instead, I wanted more experience with life outside the university. I chose to work with civil society organizations (also known as non government organizations), eventually securing work in the Philippines in the fields of biodiversity conservation, sustainable development policy advocacy, and later agrarian reform. I later spent time in other countries, working, meeting people and experiencing cultures very different to the one in which I was raised. During this time, I have not had a single job that I've worked at for more than two and half years. What I have had is the experience of working with a huge variety of people in a bunch of different contexts.

Philippines, 1999

In the last few years, I have begun to get comments from concerned friends that I ought to focus my energies on a clearer path in life than what I've been leading. I still get the odd comment from people who do have stable careers that they deeply admire the variety in my life, and that they wish they had the same experience for themselves. But the former is slowly becoming more common than the latter.

The truth is, I also long for some stability. I've not had a proper home for myself in more than four years. Living out of a suitcase does mean adventure and experience, but it has lots of downsides too. I anticipate that my notably itinerant lifestyle of the past few years will come to an end next year, when I hope to start a Ph.D program in anthropology. After my Ph.D, I plan to pursue an academic career in which I can bring my life experiences into the classroom and my research. Some focus will do me good, and allow me to make a more in-depth contribution than I otherwise would. That's the theory, at least. Now is the time for it's application.

California, 2008

It's my birthday

2008-11-30T12:24:00.003-06:00

I was born in Wellington hospital in New Zealand at 3 o'clock in the morning on December 1. My mother is no longer alive and in losing her it feels like I lost my connection to the source of life. But as this photo shows, I am standing on the land. I am by the sea, which is where life emerged from many millions of years ago. Mother Earth is our mother.

Who is the mother of our planet? A million suns are ablaze with light, and the sea of blue is spread in the sky, says Kabir. We stand and look to the stars, our world turning, their ancient light reaching into our depths.

Rains pour down without water, and the rivers are streams of light, Kabir adds. In the very depths of our consciousness, we find the source of life. We open our eyes, and we see it everywhere.

A southern wedding

2008-10-21T14:11:00.012-05:00

Before last Saturday, the previous three weddings I'd attended were in Pakistan and India. You know the setup. Weddings that go on for days. Dancing that goes on late into the night. Gold jewelery and glittering precious stones practically lighting up the room. Women wearing more makeup than a corpse. Hordes of cousins and aunts and uncles and family friends and children dressed up in little suits. The bride and groom sitting patiently on a stage having their photo taken with never ending waves of relatives.

A tiny fraction of the diamond and gold jewelery worn at an Indian wedding earlier this year

I'd never been to a wedding in the Southern U.S. before. When I found out that my peace studies classmates Jonathan and Diana were having a part of their wedding celebration in Atlanta, Georgia, I welcomed the chance to attend. Since Jonathan is from Atlanta, and Diana is from England, their marriage is a mixed marriage -- one of those where people think a little differently from each other beyond what color to paint the bedroom. The weddings in South Asia had been among identical couples -- the same religion, ethnicity, nationality, and socioeconomic class. Only the gender was different. Di and Jonathan are both Christians, and their education is naturally as close to the same as you're ever going to find, but here Di was marrying someone in whose church people speak in tongues. That's just not done in England.

Di and Jonathan exchanging vows in Jonathan's church

The service was held in Jonathan's church. Near the church entry, scenes from their wedding proper in Oxford played on a couple of monitors. The back wall was dominated by a large sign that said "SEEING THE UNSEEN" and an American flag. People sang songs about Jesus their savior. The atmosphere was relaxed, caring and inclusive. Anyone who wanted to could participate during the prayers for the couple. Jesus's name was proclaimed loudly and regularly. The very high esteem felt by Jonathan's community for him marked every prayer. None of this was surprising. What was surprising -- shocking almost -- was when one of Di's family friends, a tall silver bearded Englishman in his fifties, spoke of Jesus and the couple so enthusiastically that he ended up shouting loudly into the microphone. He out evangelized the evangelicals on their own patch. I never thought I'd live to see that.

A light hearted moment during prayers

Another peace studies classmate of ours, Elizabeth, had already married her sweetheart, Dylan. Dylan is from rural Kentucky. Elizabeth is Mexican, and proud of her indigenous heritage. They both attended the wedding. Dylan was wearing a sweater from the University of Notre Dame. On it the coat of arms of Sorin College was proudly displayed. A local asked him if he was one of the English guests.

Elizabeth and Dylan. Their marriage was in Mexico City. Elizabeth is Mexican and Dylan is from Kentucky.

Dylan and I had a chat about mules. Mules are what happens when a male donkey and a female horse have a good time together. They're prized for having the best characteristics of both animals. The Wikipedia entry for a mule observes it "possesses the sobriety, patience, endurance and sure-footedness of the donkey, and the vigour, strength and courage of the horse." They make wonderful working animals. I confess that I might be one of the few people on Earth ever to have contemplated the mule as a metaphor for the benefits of mixed marriages. But it's true. I did for a while.

There's only one problem with mules: unlike a horse, who mostly kicks backwards and occasionally forwards, a mule can kick in all directions. Another characteristic of mules is that they're almost always sterile. That's not so much a problem for the farmer -- they can always breed some more. But it can be problem for the mule. They can feel the desire to get laid but lack the reproductive equipment needed to act on it. Dylan told me a story from rural Kentucky some forty years ago. A female horse was in a field beside a male mule. The horse was in heat. The owner of the mule didn't stand a chance. This mule did more than just kick. By the time his body was found, the mule had taken out his rampant sexual frustration by using his powerful jaws to almost sever both of the unfortunate farmer's arms from his body.

I know what tragedy is. That's when you get a kick in the guts, get up after a while, only to get another one before you've had a chance to fully recover, and so on. Repeat until death. But I've never seen anything try to chew a person's arms off. That's a new one.

So much for the mule as a metaphor for countless the blessings of mixed marriages. Still, there must be a metaphor in there somewhere, right? After all, there is the "elephant in the room". Everyone knows that. Perhaps there could also be "the frisky mule in the field". Hmm. That probably won't work either.

Performing a religious song in front of an American flag

It often seems to me like a good mixed marriage is a miracle of sorts. The miracle is not that they work. Cultural differences pose no insurmountable barrier when the love is true. The miracle is that they work in spite of the skeptics and naysayers who sometimes make it their eternal mission to sow the seeds of doubt and division. In these two peace studies marriages, even if such thinking did exist somewhere, it wouldn't have stood a chance, given the loving support the couples received.

Interview with Rabbi David Rosen

2008-10-12T01:40:00.002-05:00

Rabbi David Rosen is one of the world's leading figures in inter-religious relations.

This interview was conducted in his office in Jerusalem on January 8, 2006. Nothing has been left out.

Rabbi David Rosen giving a speech at an Arab university on January 4, 2006

Damon Lynch: Very briefly, I am interested in something called the spiritual imagination. I see my interest in this as being related to character, conduct and consciousness in people, and how they connect their inner life—their spiritual life—to the action they take in the world. I am particularly interested in how they see the use of love, power and knowledge. My feeling is that a lot of religious people talk about love without incorporating necessarily the component of power. There is the Quaker phrase, “speak the truth to power.” I think we can have power as well, and use it responsibly. I am very interested in developing a counterpart to C. Wright Mills’ sociological imagination, but with a more inner dimension. And I am interested in how people understand the development of their inner selves, their inner life, with the action that they take, particularly peacebuilding. So I wanted to know what kind of ideas you might have in this area.

Rabbi David Rosen: Well I do not know I have any particular significant ideas. What you say sounds extremely right—that these individuals do have what you call a spiritual imagination and are integrated in their approach towards both the more moral and ethical-spiritual dimensions. Then their ability to be able to contribute to reconciliation and mutual respect is all the more powerful. I agree with you that the ideal would be where these elements are of both one’s relationship to the institutional structures that determine people’s life—political structures, the structures of authority—should be the goal of those who are animated and motivated by the moral, emotional and spiritual aspects of their own conviction. But the reality, certainly in this part of the world, is that that tends to happen too rarely, that those who are related to the structures of the power are anyway here very much subject to political authority. Also the vast majority here, because we are in a context of conflict living in degrees of greater or lesser fear and suspicion, which therefore limit the full expression of their spiritual imagination. Those who are more spiritually developed tend therefore not to be part of the institutional structures and tend to be more involved in grassroots activities, and there tends to be a dislocation between the two. And therefore, if I may be so immodest, those few of us who do seek that kind of integration have a responsibility to try to be able to egg on those in institutional positions in order to be more responsive to the challenges. I think we need to be modest as to what extent we can actually open up their minds and hearts.

Lynch: It strikes me that most people when it comes down to it would rather be a blessing instead of a curse on the rest of life.

Rosen: Well it is absolutely true, but nevertheless it is like the famous—this is an over exaggeration—it is like the Mel Brooks takeoff of Hitler where he says “all I want is peace, I want a little piece of Poland, and a little piece of this.” So everybody here wants peace and everyone here wants to be a blessing, but they always wanted peace on their own terms. Generally speaking, because of their own insularity, and because of their fears, they see the responsibility with the Other and see themselves as virtuous and self-righteous.

Lynch: I have noticed that when I have asked people how they connect their inner life to their outer actions, people struggle to articulate this. Maybe I am asking the wrong questions.

Rosen: No, I think it is very true because most people do not think of their inner life. I suppose it depends where. I think in the Western world, that is not so true. In the Western world we have had to look more critically at what our what our religious and spiritual convictions and therefore can talk of them in terms of our inner life. But I would say that is relatively new. Well, it has always been of course the language of the mystics. But, in terms of institutional authority, maybe there are two things. Maybe in a way, power and authority tend to stifle the degree to which people devote themselves more to their own inner life. If you look through history, I suppose, generally speaking, those of the more mystical orientation have been those who have eschewed power and authority. And those who have been in authority, therefore have been by almost definition rather one-dimensional types. In our part of the world to the large degree that is still the case. Then there is another factor, and that is to be able to answer your question properly requires a degree of self-critique. It requires a capacity of introspection, which tends to come with a capacity of self-critique. That requires a degree of confidence and I would say that the vast majority of people here do not have that self-confidence to be able to look critically at themselves or at their tradition. So there are a number of different factors that need to be there to facilitate that integration. Of course there have always been remarkable individuals who have risen above such limitations, but they have been exceptions and therefore almost by definition not impacted enormously upon the overall context. So I think if you going to say to what extent does your prayer and your meditation and of course you religious study impact upon your life, all leaders would say “of course it impacts upon my life, it directs my life.” But nevertheless, they have not really looked at themselves within a more self-critical perspective to enquire more profoundly as to what relationships are between the inner and the external. The difficulty that people have comes to some extent from the circumstances in which they live, and of course it could come from the fact that maybe they do not have a significantly developed inner spiritual life!

Lynch: One example I am intrigued by is the example of Abdul Ghaffar Khan in the North West Frontier Province of what is today Pakistan. With his Servants of God, they took on British imperialism with nonviolence. His people were, to put it bluntly, a smashed, divided, very weak people. One of the arguments he put to his people was that “if we Pukhtuns fight the British violence with nonviolence and we are patient, we will show the whole world who are the civilized people here”, obviously putting the challenge to the British to critique their own concepts of civilization. He used a number of religious and nonreligious arguments to convince his followers to stick steadfastly to nonviolence. But I very much like one in particular: the idea of taking the culture’s strengths and using them to overcome its weaknesses. A particular strength of the Pukhtuns was their honor. Khan used it to get his followers to overcome a serious weakness, which was the idea that they were brutes, uncivilized and uncouth (which had some truth to it as well). Sheikh Aziz Bukhari mentioned to me yesterday this idea that if you are standing at a checkpoint and the soldiers are not being nice, he does not want to give them the satisfaction of seeing him respond with anger—sometimes they provoke people to do that. He said he instead smiles. I see that as a similar kind of a concept, but in a smaller way, of taking a bad situation and turning it into a good one. I am beginning to think that this seems to be a core idea of being able to imagine something very different from what it is now—of taking what you have now, and transforming it into something good.

Rosen: I would say two things. First of all, what you are describing with regards to the Pukhtun ways of course was Gandhi’s own approach towards the British as well. A number of scholars have observed that he was very lucky that he was preaching this idea of nonviolence, a culture of nonviolent resistance, to the British. Had he been advocating that let’s say to Nazi Germany, then that would have been the end of India, and it would have been wiped out entirely. In order to be able to have preached that kind of approach, you have to have an antagonist on the other side who can be responsive to it. Otherwise, as a principal I think it is a fallacy with regards to those who cannot appreciate the value of what you are standing for. Therefore I think we have to be very cautious about generalisations in that regard. With regards to Sheikh Abdul Aziz I think it is very important in any situation, if we are able to, to be compassionate. I remember reading a story of somebody during the period of the Holocaust. He was a rabbi, and he was being beaten by the Nazis. He was being tortured, and he was feeling a great deal of pain. He was filled with an initial sense of great hatred towards the people who were torturing him. He said, “I had to remind myself that these are also creatures created in the image of God. Once I remembered that, I could bear all the torture that they had to throw at me.” So obviously the power of both affirming the dignity of the Other and compassion towards the Other is an enormous resource and reservoir that enables us to withstand enormous adversity. However in certain situations, smiling at somebody can actually do the reverse. I remember another Hasidic story of a rabbi who had a shrewish wife and he was very henpecked. She used to say all sorts of nasty things to him, even in the presence of his Hasidim, his followers. He never answered them back. He always kept his quiet, because he was a very saintly man. On one occasion he replied to her sharply and she was quiet and went back to wherever she had come from. The people said to him “Well rabbi, you have never ever replied to your wife. Why did you do that like this? ” He said “because I could see that being quiet and not responding to her was causing more anguish than if I responded.”

Lynch: I remember Sri Ramakrishna used to say to his followers that some people should be saluted from a distance. I very much like that image. As an aside, what you make of the arguments of some that the challenge of the German women to get the Jewish husbands back outside the Reichstag in Berlin—I forget which year it was, 1941, 42, 43—paralysed Hitler’s so-called iron will? What do you make of this account that the German women undertook nonviolent direct action? [Editor’s note: read a detailed account of the event here. The location was Rosenstrasse, not the Reichstag]

Rosen: I do not know. I do not know the story, but I would be very surprised. I cannot see any reason why Hitler would have behaved like that.

Lynch: I wish I had memorised it better, but in short, the German women with their Jewish husband’s, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, were taken and imprisoned. Some were already on the way to the gas chambers. The German women for two or three days conducted nonviolent resistance, right outside the headquarters of something important like the SS, a very symbolic place anyway. Hitler knew what was going on. He could not just shoot them.

Rosen: Why?

Lynch: Perhaps because they were German.

Rosen: He shot plenty of other Germans. He did not have any problem with homosexuals. In fact, I would say the vast majority of those who continued to be married were publicly humiliated. If anybody was caught walking with a Jewish partner they were generally publicly humiliated in the streets. It is very difficult to believe that Hitler felt a little more compassion than his SS guards who were behaving like that the streets.

Lynch: Well apparently in this case not only did the men come back—not only were they saved that day—but they were not picked off one by one as the war progressed, as we might have assumed. Apparently they lived.

Rosen: This is totally inconsistent with almost everything else that happened under Nazi Germany—there must be some other factor at play.

Lynch: I share your concern about the smile and be happy approach all the time. I think it has its time in its place. Sometimes, a word said sharply can be very useful.

Rosen: I think actually what is much more effective is the model that Marshall Rosenberg has developed, which basically comes out of Carl Rogers, and that is the language of empathy—being able to understand somebody’s needs and wants and their feelings at any given moment. Therefore, if you are able to say to somebody something along the lines of “I realise that this is really tough for you and it is really dangerous and there are some really nasty people around who want to do harm, and you had to protect it, etc”. You show compassion to them. Then you say, “I would like you also to understand how I am feeling in this regard” than express your own particular feelings, values and needs. As long as you have shown compassion from the beginning, you are likely to get a lot through. But you have got to be able to connect to the person’s feelings and needs.

Lynch: In your own tradition, what are some ways that you teach others to develop empathy for those who they truly believe are inferior to themselves?

Rosen: In my own tradition, from my point of view, the most important principle is to teach them that there is nobody who is inferior to them, because everybody is created in the divine image, and therefore everybody is of inestimable worth, and every life in all their dignity is therefore of inalienable value. That is not taught well enough. The problem is that when you get to the situation of conflict there is a need to demonise. Therefore you look to sources that therefore can reinforce the dehumanisation of the other. But in my opinion they all fundamentally contradict the most central principle that everybody is created in the divine image. Of course we all have problems with our texts because in every text, whether it is the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, or the Koran, we find areas of where clearly there violent things that are endorsed in one way or another under certain circumstances. Therefore if you are dealing with a person of a more liberal orientation, you can look at them and you can say what are the more central principles for the more contextual issues, and therefore what we have to be guided for. But when you are dealing with people who are basically fundamentalists—this word fundamentalist of course, Scott Appleby in particular would understand is a rather dangerous word because it can have so many different meanings. But if we said let us use the term to say we are dealing with people who are uncritical with regards to their text in their tradition, then it is very much easier for them to be able to draw on more problematic texts as much as to be able to draw on the more positive texts. I would therefore obviously seek to reinforce as much as possible additional texts. The most famous rabbinic text is a discussion between Rabbi Akiba and Ben Azzai on what the most important principle is in the Bible. I would say to them “look, there is no way it says the most important principle is a question of protection of property or protection of land. The most important principle that they discuss is that Akiba says ‘love your neighbour as yourself.’ And Ben Azzai says the more important principle is that every human being is created in the divine image, so you do not say because I was despised so let my neighbour be despised, because I was cursed, so let my neighbour be cursed. In other words his concern is that Akiba will make ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ to mean ‘love your neighbour as you yourself were loved or not loved’, and therefore his emphasis is that it does not matter how you have been treated, you have to be able to always remember that you have to treat an individual as a child of God and a person created in the divine image. And then comes the punchline of Rabbi Tanchuma who says that if you do so (in other words if you say because I was cursed so let my neighbour be cursed, or because I was despised so let my neighbour be despised) know who it is who you despise, because in the image of God he made man.” In other words, any act of disrespect to another human being is an act of disrespect to God. So if you could communicate that effectively to people that in fact behaving badly towards other people is behaving badly towards God, then even in your more uncritical—or using the term unscientifically, fundamentalist elements—you may succeed better in getting it across. However I get back to what I said before. All these arguments utilising Jewish sources are only going to be feasible if people do not feel threatened and if they do not feel fearful. Therefore to overcome their sense of threat and fear, you have to be able to give them empathy. To give them empathy means that you need to be able to show them that you are connecting to their needs and their feelings.

Lynch: In a moment, I want to come back to this disconnect between the power structures and the religious life. I share your caution about being arrogant about this kind of thing, but let us suppose for a moment the more highly developed spirituality of some people. But as an aside, in Hinduism of course one of the ancient discoveries was that the Atman is the same as Brahman, or the inner infinite Self is the Godhead. Is this compatible with the idea that we are all created in the image of God?

Rosen: I would say yes obviously, and it would be more within the mystical tradition that would see us meaning “all created in the image of God” as all part of God and that we die we are as it were returned to the Godhead. Therefore it is all part of the mystical idea especially developed by the Hasidic movement, that God is in everywhere and everything. This was not always the perception, in which often the sacred was divorced from the non-sacred. There is within the mystical tradition a view that there is sanctity in everything everywhere. And that idea I would certainly identify with, even though I would not buy into all necessarily the cosmology that comes with certain parts of Jewish mystical tradition, specifically within Kabbalah. That is part of the reason also why I am a vegetarian, because I believe that in different degrees there is sanctity in everything. One can never be absolutely reverential of all sanctity to every single degree—one has to find a balance somewhere. But the more one is conscious of the divine in everything, the more one is able to both ennoble oneself and one’s society. Again, there is a danger of course, especially with regard to vegetarians—there are plenty of people who care more about animals than they do about human beings. It has always got to be done with a certain telos, a certain teleology in mind. Those who accuse people of speciesism are actually being immoral. If you put all sentient beings on the same level then you are going to be at some stage inadequately sensitive to the needs of human beings. This is not a new idea. This is in the writing of one of the great Jewish philosophers, Joseph Albo, a mediaeval philosopher. Therefore for me ethical vegetarianism actually is in its most potent and valuable when it takes place with an understanding of a hierarchy of life in which human life is more sacred than animal life. In my opinion that is where vegetarianism is its most ethical. Where it is seen that all sentient life is of the same order, then it is dangerous, because then you can lose the necessary sensitivity towards human life.

Lynch: Yes I think I agree. I am also a vegetarian. Coming back to this disconnect between the power structures and the spiritual life of people, you must have given some thought about how to make that disconnect a little less disconnected, and to build some bridges between these two worlds.

Rosen: It is not a matter of just thought—it is a matter of what I do in my life. It is really what I do. In order to do that, I have to be able to speak many languages. Even as I am speaking English or Hebrew in the course of the day, I have to speak many languages because I have to connect to people where they are at. Very central to my work is a belief in the power of the human encounter. I agree with you that most people want to be a blessing. From this point of view, this is a big difference between Judaism and Christianity, of not seeing the human being as essentially flawed. From a Jewish perspective, if anything, we are born with original virtue. It is only social factors that can corrupt us and lead us astray, or these fears that I spoke about before. The more that we can therefore bring people to overcome those fears and those suspicions and overcome those stereotypes and prejudicial preconceived perceptions, the more we can enable their inner spiritual life to be expressed in the way they relate to others and in the issues and initiatives that they able to contribute to and come to. I see myself very much as a mediator in that. Certain things for example, like bringing the Chief Rabbinate of Israel out of its cocoon, have been facilitated by external factors, not least of all the visit of Pope John Paul II to Israel in the year 2000, which developed the opening for the Committee of the Chief Rabbinate for Dialogue with the Vatican. For those involved it is significant, and even for those not involved it begins to lead them to start questioning as to whether their narrow perceptions are fair. We had another moment at a discussion on interfaith relations at - a conference of Orthodox Jewish leadership that has just concluded. Most Orthodox rabbis unfortunately, and I say this as an Orthodox rabbi, tend to be rather insular. This once again reflects their fear and lack of comfort with the world outside. On discussion of interfaith, of course I was very passionate about its importance. One of the reservations expressed by one of the rabbis, is the fear that this would therefore lead to intermarriage and undermine the integrity and therefore the continuity of Jewish identity and of the Jewish peoplehood. I give that as an example of the kinds of fears that one has to be able to contend with. You need to be able to argue with them constructively, both by giving them empathy for what their fears are, of being able to suggest to them that there is actually more to gain than to lose, and to be able to introduce them to the opportunity. You cannot always do it. In many cases it is not possible. One just has to keep on trying as much as one can.

Lynch: The initiative that you are involved with, with rabbis and imams, this world council, is this involving rabbis who represent a broad spectrum of rabbinic thought in Israel?

Rosen: In Israel, yes. There are all kinds of internecine problems, similar to the problems that you will not be able to get major Sunnis if you have Shi’ites there, or if you have Sufis there, and certainly not if you have Baha’is there. Unfortunately most of my Orthodox colleagues, unfortunately—while they are certainly open to meeting Muslims and to a lesser degree meeting Christians—the ones they fear most are other kinds of rabbis from the liberal strands of Judaism. Basically in their eyes they see those as heresies. They see them as more threatening heresies because they threaten to undermine their own power base. One of the things we have to decide with regards to the imams and rabbis is who are our target groups. If your group encompasses the total spectrum, then you will not get the spectrum, because by having the presence of one you cannot have the presence of the other. Our need was to get to the most intensely rooted—and in a way you might even say insular elements, within both communities. In Brussels at the first conference the spectrum of Israeli Jewish orthodoxy was amazing. We had an amazing spectrum of rabbinic representation. Many of those had never met a member of another religion ever before, let alone a religious leader. It was a very important opening for them. I would say it was the same in many senses for Muslims as well. In order to be able to get that spectrum of Orthodoxy it meant we had to have only a sprinkling of non-Orthodox rabbis, and then almost under wraps in order to get the more fervently Orthodox elements to participate.

If you are involved in trying to take spiritual values which are animated by one’s own personal inner spirituality and moral convictions—and to bring these to an area where people, because of their fears, misunderstandings and insecurities are less able to give full expression to this inner life—then you have to work out all kinds of stratagems and tactics that are seeking certain creative options, but are always making certain sacrifices at the same time. Inevitably this involves some form of moral sacrifice in the process. Just not to invite people who represent other communities is in a way a moral sacrifice.

Lynch: That is where the importance of having a trusting relationship becomes paramount, does it not?

Rosen: Yes it is very important but it is important that that trusting relationship—and this is very germane to your central thesis—comes from your own inner spirituality in relation to the Other because intellectually and strategically, because in a way you are being dishonest. When I meet with colleagues from the most fervent Orthodox segments of society, and yet I know I want to bring some of my Liberal colleagues to be able to be there, I have to some extent to deceive them. Now I will try to do it in a way that is as tolerable for them as possible, and obviously be conscious not to put them in an embarrassing position. While I am to some extent deceiving them on a strategic level, what I must never do is deceive them in terms of the inner spiritual content. In other words the sincerity of what I am doing and what I am saying must come across to the other individual. As long as the other individual feels I am sincere, he or she might discover that things were not exactly as they had fully planned—or there might have been things that were even a little uncomfortable—but within certain bounds they will be able to tolerate that if they feel that the motive is totally sincere. But it is a delicate balance.

Lynch: I am trying to put myself in their shoes, imagining what it would be like. It is difficult, because I was not raised in that strand of thought. I am trying to imagine what it would be like from their perspective to be with people they have never met before, and to be an authentic, Orthodox Jew and to meet with an imam.

Rosen: That is much easier for them than to meet with a reform rabbi, especially with an imam. As far as Orthodoxy is concerned, Islam is pure monotheism. Christians are a little more of a problem, because there their perception of Trinity and incarnation poses certain questions. They have to be able to hopefully get into position where they can understand that maybe the way Christians understand these concepts is not exactly the way they think Christians understand them. Of course that is one of the most important guidelines of interreligious dialogue—to be able to understand the way the other understands herself or himself, and not the way you have necessarily conceived of the Other’s beliefs. But for their perception, a Jew has to observe a Jewish way of life the way they understand it. Therefore a Jew who seeks to understand a Jewish way of life in a different way, or even propound it in a different way, is far more problematic than a Muslim leader, who is a pure monotheist. You also have to remember that from a Jewish perspective, however this has developed, there is not a universal imperialism—you do not have to be Jewish in order to be loved by God. God loves you as a good Muslim, and I would say also as a good Christian, and I would say also as a good Hindu. From their perspective, certainly God loves you as a good Muslim because their perspective is that Islam is pure monotheism. Their dialogue with the Muslim is actually theologically the easiest thing for them to do. The problem for them is because of the political reality, in the conviction—which unfortunately is on both sides, both the Muslims and Jews—that the other side is out to get them, or to do them in, or to get rid of them, or to undermine them, or to deny their dignity or their attachments or one thing or another. The relationship has been vitiated in the last hundred years by politics—intensely so—but of the theological relationships, it is the easiest one for them.

Lynch: To have a Rabbi Fruman show up at a Hamas rally in Gaza, having met monthly with Sheikh Yassin in prison I understand. . .

Rosen: These things get exaggerated. He met with him I think only twice.

Lynch: Is this something that you attach some significance to?

Rosen: Actually Rabbi Fruman invited me to go along to meet him when Yassin was released, thanks to Netanyahu. Of course it was Netanyahu who brought Yassin back to Gaza, because of his botched attempt to try to assassinate Mashal, and therefore this was the price he had to pay to King Hussein. When Yassin came back to Gaza, Rabbi Fruman called me up and said “would you like to go with me? ” I said “there is a limit.” I am willing to reach out to anybody who is willing to be able to at least seek to live with me in some form of peaceful accommodation, and even if that person says there are these conditions, 1, 2, 3—but somebody who is openly advocating murdering me, my children, and my family at the same time, it seems to me to be a rather rash thing to do. It seems to me that there you are behaving irresponsibly with regards to your own community because you are undermining their well-being. Now, Hamas is not the way many Israelis think, a totally monolithic structure. There are different elements within it, like within the Islamic Brotherhood, or like the stupidities you hear in America with regards to Wahhabism and Salafism as if it is all somehow totally inimical to the very existence of anybody else, and totally destructive. I personally think that is totally counter-productive. There are within all those communities the possibilities of finding individuals who are open to dialogue, and who could become interlocutors. Looking to the possibility of finding elements within Hamas with whom you could dialogue I think is a wise thing to do. It depends who does it and how it is done, because you do have other factors to take into consideration, of the ways in which it can be exploited and misrepresented and can do more harm. In principle, I am not against it, but I think it requires a very very cautious and careful approach.

Mindfully happy - Thich Nhat Hanh in Delhi

2008-10-05T02:34:00.005-05:00

Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh is an 83 year old Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, author, and one of the most popular Buddhist teachers in the West. On October 4, a sizable audience in Delhi treated him with great respect and dignity, attentively listening to his joyous speech on the spiritual practice of mindfulness.

The content of his talk was a mixture of Buddhist philosophy and contemporary stories from the lives of ordinary people he knew. Major themes included being present in the moment, happiness, and bringing out the goodness and compassion that already exists in people. He spoke with such joy and reverence for life, that by the time he came to tell his stories, many audience members were visibly moved.

The audience listens

One story that touched many in the audience was his description of a failing marriage that was revived by the wife rediscovering love letters her husband had written decades before. He said that people should keep their love letters, so that they can be read later in life. It stuck me that it was through sharing ideas like this that he was able to convey his deep respect for the audience's lives, reassuring them that despite he being a celibate monk, he understood them.

As Thich Nhat Hanh was on stage with his fellow monks, one of the elderly audience members felt a little hot, and placed an brochure from the event down his neck to cool down. It seemed even at the back of the room, Thich Nhat Hanh was keeping an eye on things!

Later in the day, some of his monks led further teachings on mindfulness. One young monk, a delicately built Asian woman, sang "Breathing In":

Breathing in, breathing out
Breathing in, breathing out
I am blooming as a flower
I am as fresh as the dew

Her confident, calm voice conveyed genuine love for what she was singing.

I am as solid as a mountain
I am firm as the earth
I am free.

She sang not as a performer projecting herself onto her audience, but as someone immersed in the meaning of what she was singing. She embodied it and radiated it.

Breathing in, breathing out
Breathing in, breathing out
I am water reflecting
What is real, what is true
And I feel there is space
Deep inside of me

Till this point in the song, she had sung slowly and reverently. For the last three lines of the song, she picked up the pace dramatically.

I am free
I am free
I am free

Her song rang true in the depths of the hearts of her listeners, and all were uplifted.

Soon afterward a monk led an "apple meditation", by which he meant the practice of eating an apple with complete attention to the act. He encouraged us to truly smell the apple's fragrance, to feel the juice running down one's face, to imagine who had produced the apple, and to be aware of the sunlight that had nurtured it. He told us to be completely in the moment and be happy. As he said this, we all slowly ate an apple, including him. He asked for reactions from the audience. One woman admitted she'd never smelled an apple before. Another spoke of the appreciation for the workers who transported the apples from farms near the Himalayas.

I had a different reaction. I also allowed my senses to appreciate the apple. But soon my mind was occupied by the idea that I was eating it, and that life eats other forms of life. I reflected on the supreme mystery of that simple fact: life consumes life. As I did so, I was reminded of the fact that everything is destroyed. When the sun runs out of energy, life will be extinguished on planet earth. In the fullness of time, everything as we know it will cease to exist. There will be no apples, no Buddhist teachings, and no life. I was overawed by the mystery of that, but also afraid, because I knew the answer to the question of "why" this is so will always remain elusive. In the face of the ceasing of existence, mere happiness didn't have much meaning for me.

In the question and answer session that concluded the day, I tried to share my reaction and asked for a comment. I probably didn't do a good job of communicating what I felt, because in response, a monk briefly talked about the duality of suffering and happiness. Again the focus was on being happy.

I'm not one to argue against being happy and living a life of radiant joy. The wife of Sri Ramakrishna once said "I never saw the Master sad. He was joyous in the company of everyone, whether a boy of five or an old man. I never saw him morose, my child. Ah, what happy days those were!" Thich Nhat Hanh and his fellow monks reflected the spiritual power found in living a life of joy.

But in the face of the destruction of all existence, there is a limit to how satisfying happiness will leave us. Faced with death, as we all are, the immanent prospect of the destruction of our bodies is a powerful motivating force to transcend limited notions of who we really are.

I reflected on the famous moment in time when the "father of the atomic bomb", J. Robert Oppenheimer, witnessed the first explosion of a nuclear weapon, and repeated to himself a line from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." There is clearly something very deep that can occur when we truly reflect on death and destruction, whether it be our own or someone else. That can be lost if we merely focus on the here and now of being happy, without awareness of what the full range of the Buddha's teachings were.

Although I don't have much direct experience with the particular ways in which Thich Nhat Hanh presents Buddhism, given his vast experience and his stature as a great teacher, I can imagine he has a whole variety of methods to get his devotees to reflect on life in all its dimensions. I'm interested to know what some of them are.

Sex in the ashram

2008-10-02T10:05:00.003-05:00

"I had a lot of sex in the ashram" a Spanish friend told me today. A mischievous smile covered his face. "When the day’s yoga training finished, you had a choice. You could meditate or you could find someone to have sex with. There was an Israeli woman who twice asked me to sleep with her. She didn’t realize I am gay. I refused her, telling her I had come to India to find my spiritual path." He laughed contentedly as he said that.

What he didn’t tell her is that he was having sex with his guru, the yoga teacher. He described the ashram in Rishikesh he spent a week at learning yoga as a hothouse of sex between people who may have met only when they arrived there. "They had a lot of energy to release," he said.

Earlier this year I spent a couple of weeks at three ashrams in northern India associated with Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. Two of these were high in the mountains, well away from main population centers. The monks living there are able to pursue meditation and other spiritual disciplines in relative solitude. Nevertheless, they are not totally isolated. Both ashrams have small communities in the vicinity. Their populations are directly served by the ashrams in some useful manner, such as through the provision of medical treatment and agricultural support. The third ashram was located in Haridwar, a thriving city nearby Rishikesh. The ashram has a major hospital attached to it, which serves the poor.

The three ashrams accept a limited number of visitors who hope to deepen their spiritual practice in the company of monks who have dedicated their lives to it. All visitors are required to seek permission before they can stay. During my visit, at least, the great majority of visitors were in their 50s or later. While each ashram had their own feel, what they all had in common was the absolute seriousness of their mission. The monks have undertaken vows of celibacy. In an age of profound cynicism toward religious men who make such vows, it’s easy to dismiss such undertakings. But when you’re in the ashram, the atmosphere is such that it would be incredible to conceive of any of them having sex with anyone. Likewise, it is unthinkable to imagine visitors having sex with other visitors they’ve just met.

I didn’t ask my Spanish friend the name of the ashram he attended. I didn’t feel the need.

Who regulates?

2008-09-29T09:20:00.003-05:00

With the Western world's press fascination with the ongoing financial crisis in the United States, talk of government regulation (or in this case, the lack of it) in financial markets has once again been a topic for spirited conversation. People typically equate lack of government regulation with lack of regulation altogether.

Things don't work like that.

The great American sociologist C Wright Mills observed in his book The Power Elite "That both state and federal governments were decisively limited in their power to regulate, in fact meant that they were themselves regulatable by the larger moneyed interests."

That is what has happened. Financial traders followed rules. It's just that they made them up themselves. The rules were not developed by mechanisms in which the public had any kind of hope of meaningful participating in, which is was democracy is all about. Instead the larger money interests used their considerable financial and political clout to set things up in their interest, telling government they knew best. And the American power elite let them get away with it.

It's very often not a question of regulation vs. no regulation. Rather, it's a question of who makes the rules, and for whose benefit.

Vodafone India and their "mobileconnect" internet access

2008-09-28T09:02:00.003-05:00

As a rule I don't post on technical issues on this blog, but since I had a lot of trouble connecting to Vodafone India's Mobile Connect service, I hope this will be of help to folks out there. I registered for the service but it simply didn't work. Repeated google searches couldn't explain why I was constantly getting an error registering on the network, with "Error 31: A device attached to the system is not functioning" being the culprit. Calling their helpline was useless. Their support staff seemed like they had not been trained to deal with it. Finally I brought my notebook computer into a vodafone store and they suggested this line in the modem initialization commands:

AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","WWW"

It fixed the problem right away. They don't seem to mention this anywhere on the vodaphone site, which is odd.

Imagining violence

2008-09-14T07:48:00.003-05:00

When I was in Lahore earlier this year, I heard a suicide bomb being detonated. I was not afraid. Last night there were approximately five terrorist bombings in Delhi. I did not hear them, but it left me far more disturbed. I think the reason why is because can vividly recollect where three and possibly four of the bombs were detonated. I have spent enough time in those areas to reconstruct the places that were attacked in my mind in good detail—the sights, sounds, and feel. I can easily imagine being a victim in the Delhi blasts, and I can imagine what the actual victims look like. In contrast, I had no idea about the site that was hit in Lahore. I cannot reconstruct the scene in my mind.

This reminds me of when I was a student in Carolyn Nordstrom's "Women and war" class at UC Berkeley in 1994. Carolyn taught that many civilian victims of modern war were tortured in environments familiar to them, using familiar objects. For instance someone might be tortured in their own home, using an ordinary household iron. The advantage for the perpetrator of the violence is that in comparison to violating someone in an unfamiliar environment, it will be better remembered. The power that violence has over people becomes magnified.

The people who chose the locations of last night's bombing probably had that in mind as they made their nefarious plans.

A different kind of sightseeing

2008-09-13T06:38:00.005-05:00

"Buying things and sightseeing are fun for a while", said a German art therapy student visiting Delhi. "But after a while they are not so interesting". Given we had been having a conversation about Hinduism, I suggested to him that one could find plenty of sights by looking inside, within one's self.

He smiled and suggested a name for it: "insight seeing".

"How clever", I thought to myself. I smiled back, marveling at his command of English.

Sikh prays at Golden Temple - Amritsar

Becoming a better photographer

2008-09-12T09:01:00.005-05:00

I am finding more frequently that people ask me for advice on improving their images. George Barr has some essays that I always recommend, Taking Your Photography To The Next Level:

Part one
Part two
Part three

Alan Briot also has some helpful essays.

There is plenty to read there! But for those who are serious about the artistic side of photography, I think they're worthwhile.

I will add only one brief observation of my own. It's easy to develop one's own personal style, and begin to see all your photographic possibilities through it. When you become good at something, if you're anything like me, you often seek to be better and better at it. But your style can obscure as much as it illuminates. It's hard to realize how powerful this effect is when you photograph by yourself. But when you're in a group of photographers, most of whom quite naturally will have a different style to you, the learning you get simply by looking at how others composed an image in the same place you were at is remarkable. You'll often find yourself thinking "why didn't I see that?!" You didn't see it maybe because you were thinking of something else, and they likewise didn't see what you saw. Maybe you were changing your lens at the wrong moment. But perhaps you couldn't see it because you simply weren't seeing it the same as they were. And even if you had the time, you still may not have seen it, because your personal style meant you simply missed it. It's a humbling and invaluable experience.

Here is an example. Here are a couple of my images:

And finally one by my friend, Alieh. I prefer her one!

Village alley - Lijiang, Yunnan, China

2008-09-10T08:27:00.003-05:00

This image was made in December 1999. If I were to point to a single image that planted the seed of my interest in photography, this would be it. After this image, I became aware that merely taking snapshots would never again be satisfying.

I remember it vividly. The first attempt at recording the scene had my companion in it. She was posing as people are inclined to do, especially when they're travelling. We moved on, and then coming back through the same alley some minutes later, I thought to myself "this is so beautiful, I should make another photo, but without my companion posing in it." This was the result.

At the time I using an ultra-cheap Minolta SLR camera, which I had purchased a little over three years before. I had no idea how to operate it, apart from pressing the button and loading the film. I did not use it very much. It was stolen the next year, and it would be five years before I purchased another SLR.

Ironically, these days I most enjoy taking photos of people!

Baba Kuhi and Hafez

2008-08-25T06:41:00.007-05:00

Shiraz has long been Iran's cultural capital. It has produced poets and mystics of such renowned quality that some parents of neighboring countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan teach their children Farsi, just so they too can drink from the cup of divinely inspired verse and prose.

Baba Kuhi's tomb overlooking Shiraz

Hafez, born approximately 1320 A.D., is among the most famous of Iran's poets. Everyday masses of visitors and locals flock to his magnificent tomb, touching his grave and reciting his poetry. They know him especially for his romantic poetry, but he also composed poems on God and in protest of oppressive political rule. He has become a cultural icon. This was not always so. In fact in his lifetime he had enemies who were jealous of his prodigious talent, including among the conservative religious clergy, who accused him of not being Islamic. However his talent was too great to repress, and the common folk adored him. These days even mullahs may occasionally be seen praying beside his grave.

Hefez's tomb

Baba Kuhi, who died approximately 1050 A.D, is less well-known. Indeed many Iranians know little about him, if they have heard of him at all. Unlike Hafez's tomb, which is prominently located in the city, Baba Kuhi's tomb is found perched on the side of a small mountain ("Baba Kuhi" translates into English as "father of the mountain"). There are no sign posts pointing the way to his tomb, and it is not even located on tourist maps produced by an elegant hotel nearby.

Baba Kuhi appears to have reached the highest levels of divine union, as evidenced by his classic poem, Only God I Saw:

In the market, in the cloister -- only God I saw.
In the valley and on the mountain -- only God I saw.

Him I have seen beside me oft in tribulation;
In favor and in fortune -- only God I saw.

In prayer and fasting, in praise and contemplation,
In the religion of the Prophet -- only God I saw.

Neither soul nor body, accident nor substance,
Qualities nor causes -- only God I saw.

I oped mine eyes and by the light of his face around me
In all the eye discovered -- only God I saw.

Like a candle I was melting in his fire:
Amidst the flames outflashing -- only God I saw.

Myself with mine own eyes I saw most clearly,
But when I looked with God's eyes -- only God I saw.

I passed away into nothingness, I vanished,
And lo, I was the All-living -- only God I saw.

(The translation is from Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam, London: Arkana, 1989).

Baba Kuhi's modest grave

When I visited Baba Kuhi's tomb, I soon discovered it was being reconstructed, from top to bottom. The grave itself was tiny and nondescript. The site was covered in fine dust. Rickety old chairs stood to one side. I looked up and admired what I thought was the handsomely painted ceiling. Only after clambering up the scaffolding using a makeshift ladder did I realize that the ceiling work was made from countless ceramic tiles which had been patiently cut into pieces and neatly arranged, including the detailed geometric designs. The man undertaking the work, Hamid, proudly showed me his handiwork. One day his children will come, and tell their children that it was their grandfather who built the ceiling, piece by piece.

Ceiling tiles at Baba Kuhi's tomb

Hamid left me at the tomb and headed back into town. I then meditated using Baba Kuhi's poem as my passage, concluding with a different passage that Sri Ramakrishna used to enjoy singing from. I wondered who might have come to this place before me and likewise drawn on these two mystical figures.

I headed down the mountainside and stumbled across Baba Kuhi street. Soon after I saw a woman in her late forties sitting beside the road. Next to her was a battered old car. I asked her if she minded being in a photo. She looked puzzled. I tried to explain that her face would not be seen. She looked even more puzzled. I took the photo. Soon a rotund man from across the street joined us. I showed them the image and they seemed to conclude I was a little deranged. "He's a tourist" she muttered to him, and he nodded in agreement.

There is a charming story linking the lives of Hafez and Baba Kuhi that deserves to be more widely known. As a young man, Hafez had fallen in love with a beautiful woman, Shakh-e-Nabat. His love was a hopeless love, however, as she was due to marry a local prince. In desperation he remembered the legend that if he were to stay awake for forty nights at Baba Kuhi's tomb, he would be granted immortality, the gift of poetry, and whatever his heart wished for. Determined, Hafez undertook a lonely vigil at the tomb. By the end of the forty nights, his most fervent wish had changed. His longing for Shakh-e-Nabat was supplanted by a longing to achieve union with God, which he achieved forty years later.

A girl from among a group of school children singing Hafez's poetry at his tomb talks to her teacher

I thought it was rather neat that I had the good fortune to visit Baba Kuhi's tomb as it was being reconstructed. The symbolism of the two tombs is dazzling. Hafez, poet of the masses, awaits his many visitors in a manner befitting his role as a great troubadour of love. Meanwhile, his spiritual father quietly looks down from the mountain, seeing God in everyone and everything. Just like his tomb, true love is something that always needs to be worked on. Perhaps in future more visitors will come to his tomb and find what they may. Before leaving I had my own conversation of sorts with Baba Kuhi. "It is time", I told him. I hope he agrees.

Longing for home

2008-03-08T04:06:00.004-06:00

Late last year I made a slideshow incorporating some photos I had made in Iran. I had made it primarily for friends, and assumed that it would not be of particularly great interest to anyone. How wrong I was! Recently it exploded in popularity, with tens of thousands of people viewing it.

The feedback I received from Iranians living abroad was encouraging. Some said how they were moved to tears. Some talked of their childhoods, and others of their planned trips home. From this I realized expatriates can be very much moved by images of their homeland, especially by imagery which is outside the mainstream that they can easily see everyday.

I had originally hosted the website on which this slideshow is located on a webserver in Aotearoa New Zealand, using the company OpenHost NZ. I found their service to be excellent, and I can highly recommend them. There was a problem, however. Given the bandwidth constraints of hosting a website in NZ, I had to quickly find a hosting provider outside of NZ. OpenHost NZ worked constructively with me and I found a new one in the US, where bandwidth limits are practically non-existent in comparison.

Violence and everyday language

2008-01-31T03:58:00.000-06:00

In a blog entry recommending a couple of resources focusing on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, Z writer Paul Street opens with 'Here is a killer musical video from the wonderful left English folk-singer Billy Bragg: "The Loneseome Death of Rachel Corrie," adapted from a famous Dylan song.' Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli military bulldozer while undertaking nonviolent resistance against housing demolitions undertaken by the Israeli government. It disappointed me to read Paul use the term 'killer' to describe something dedicated to her work. I considered simply leaving a comment to this effect, but I decided it was more productive to ask him why he used that term.

In a comment, I asked him 'What made you describe the video as a "killer" video? If it is excellent, why not say so? Why use the language of violence and death to describe something that is intended to be uplifting and ennobling? And why did you use this in the context of a woman who died practicing nonviolent resistence?'

He responded with 'Damon please don't come round here unless you have something substanttive to say; tantrums over minor word-choice matters are not worth having online. Life is short.'

Paul's use of language and his response to my questions raises some interesting points. I will consider four of them. First, Paul interpreted my questions as evidence of a tantrum. Or perhaps he was merely trying to be humorous.

Upset Palestinian boy

Either way, it is of course impossible to tell, because our interaction thus far has been completely devoid of important signals like tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language. As is well documented, people consistently overestimate their ability to deduce the tone of electronic communication, and tend to interpret text more negatively than they otherwise should.

My questions were genuine and it never occurred to me that they could be perceived so negatively. This was a mistake on my behalf. Another mistake I made was not to connect emphatically to what Paul was promoting, which is nonviolent, creative, life-affirming responses to Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. If I had started out by saying 'I realize that you are describing very important work by courageous people who face hostility and danger on a daily basis' -- if I had shown compassion to Paul -- and then said 'I would like you also to understand how I am feeling in this regard' and then expressed my own thoughts, I then could have received a much more positive response from him. This approach was taught to me by Rabbi David Rosen, and it is something that I personally need to work on a lot more.

The second point is that the choice of words we use really does amount to something substantial. Every word counts. Everyone knows this. That is why racists use language that humiliates people they consider inferior to themselves, and that is why people who fight racism also fight the very language racists use. Sexist language is less common than before because of efforts to encourage use language that is more representative of reality. Therefore Paul's claim that using the word 'killer' is not worth discussing is simply wrong.

Third, using a word like 'killer' to describe something as having excellent qualities betrays the values of social movements that Z embraces. 'Killer' is a word associated violence and murder, and specifically with slayer, exterminator, executioner and so forth. These are not the foundations upon which we want to build our societies. They are the antithesis of nonviolence.

Whether falsely shorn of its ugly brutality and merely labeled 'force', or adorned in the vain glory of terrorism, the sharp edge of violence is its medley of methods that penetrate, starve, bowdlerize, impair, disable and pulverize the body. Its pernicious profundity lingers after the bodily act itself through fear, shock, denial, horror, despair and anguish; it manipulates memory by attaching itself to culture in distorting and occasionally insidious ways, including the language we use.

Israeli activist and aoldiers in Palestinian village

For those of us who have lived with violence or its direct threat, the choice of words is even more acute than for those whose exposure has been minimal. Waking up in Ramallah to the sound of automatic weapon fire close by is not something that is easily forgotten or dismissed. Having a powerful gun pointed at you by an Israeli sniper who is seriously contemplating gunning you down sinks into the ocean of the mind like molten lava – it burns and sears, eventually hardening into rock. Passing buses in streets far away from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv still prompts me to briefly ponder if they will be blown up -- such is the efficacy of violence.

Fourth, the deepest challenge of all is to always communicate kindly. The mystical side of Islam, Sufism, has a wonderful proverb about speech. It says that one should say something only if it is necessary, true, and kind to all concerned. My meditation teacher, Eknath Easwaran, has written 'Millions of people today believe that unkind, hurtful language is a necessary part of communication. I feel very deeply, but I never use an unkind word. I have very strong convictions, but I never express them in language that would be harmful. I think it is Gandhi who pointed out that those who get angry when opposed or contradicted have no faith in themselves. When you have faith in your convictions, you won’t get angry. I can listen to opposition with sympathy, and yet I will stand by my own convictions whatever the opposition is. . . . When people are impolite to you, that’s the time to be exceptionally polite. When people are discourteous to you, that’s the time to be more courteous. By your continuing courtesy and kindness, you are educating that person.'

Six years of Guantánamo Bay

2008-01-11T15:35:00.001-06:00

Today Amnesty International UK organized another by now annual protest against the Guantánamo Bay prison and detention facility run by the U.S. government. It's been six years since the first prisoners were taken there, and according to Wikipedia, "775 detainees have been brought to Guantanamo, approximately 420 of which have been released. As of August 9, 2007, approximately 355 detainees remain." Amnesty International says it "was one of the first to call for the closure of the Guantánamo detention facility. New voices have taken up the demand each year as more and more people have come to recognize the unlawfulness of the detentions."

Amnesty International protest

The protest today was in two parts. Overnight, in the small hours of the night, activists braved the rain to spend an hour each caged up. At 10:30am the main event got underway. Hundreds of participants dressed in orange overalls and goggles lined up as if they were prisoners. Imposing men dressed in army uniforms barked out orders. Given the way they talked and moved about, they seemed like real soldiers. A couple of them had dogs. It was easy to imagine it being not so different for it to be all too real.

Close Guantánamo

As is the case with many protests run by professional activist organizations like Amnesty International, the main audience for the protest was not bystanders in the street or the officials in the US Embassy -- it was the media. Photographers and television crews were in abundance. There were television crews representing channels in the Middle East and Pakistan, as well as media companies like Reuters. The event was staged to be friendly to media deadlines (and therefore distinctly unfriendly to people doing a regular 9am - 5pm job). Clusters of photographers gathered round a scene when something "happened", such as when a prisoner was ordered to lie face down on the ground.

Photojournalist

I felt a curious affinity with the television crews. I can't say why, but I enjoying watching them film their newsclips after the protest had finished. Considering I rarely watch the news on TV it was a bit strange. It might be because from my own experience on working with audio slideshows I know it's not easy to say something into a microphone, all the while keeping the content coherent and the voice interesting. Doing so in front of a camera would make it doubly difficult.

Television journalist

Security, London style

2008-01-07T08:55:00.001-06:00

As I stood waiting for a train at Tolworth Railway station, thirty minutes from London's city centre, I was stopped by the London metropolitan police on anti-terrorism grounds. The police officer explained to me that he didn't think that I was a terrorist, but his presence was designed to reassure the public that the police were keeping a close eye on things. He asked me some questions and filled out a form. He wanted to know my name, age and where I was staying. To describe me, he wrote that I was wearing a brown hat, green jumper, blue jeans, and black shoes. That was greatly reassuring, as if I showed up the next day wearing a brown jersey instead of a green one, everything would be thrown into complete confusion. I could not remember the address of where I was staying, but that did not bother him. He simply wrote "declined" on the form. How all this is supposed to keep the nation safe from terrorism is unclear.

If only the British Library was as relaxed about the addresses as the police doing their anti-terrorism work with the general public. To read a book in one of their reading rooms, one must register with the library authorities. They require original documentation of home address, which must be less than three months old. If you cannot provide this documentation, you simply cannot view the books -- no exceptions made. Too bad if you are homeless, or like me because of circumstances cannot provide the documentation they want.

Islamic Global Peace & Unity in London

2007-12-03T05:49:00.000-06:00

The comfortable and familiar feeling of being among a sea of Muslims returned when I attended the Global Peace & Unity event held in London on November 24 and 25. There were literally tens of thousands of Muslims from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Everyone looked the part, largely dressed in a way that set them apart from the rest of the British population. There were elegant East African women -- tall, thin, dark, and often carrying themselves with striking beauty. The South Asian women varied from those who wore an all enveloping hijab that left only the eyes visible--often thick with makeup--to those who made no attempt to hide their feminine charms. Likewise, their menfolk included men with imposing black beards and others whose visits to mens grooming saloons must have been at least once a week. Confusingly, the majority of this vast crowd spoke English with a thick working class British accent. My eyes were telling me "that man sure looks Arab" while my ears were saying "but he certainly sounds English". I was immersed in a mixed-up world of multiple identities and generational allegiances, where English was Arab and Pakistani was English, and where half the women wore cheap Chinese made Palestinian style kaffiyehs despite having almost certainly never set foot anywhere near Jerusalem.

Muslim woman

There was a large room with all kinds of small booths and stalls offering things for sale and causes to contribute. One popular stall painted small flags on women and girls' cheeks, and henna on their hands.

There was a man and woman selling Muslim T-shirts. A brown shirt said simply resistance, and had a picture of an automatic weapon. A blue shirt had a superman logo that said "Muslims do it 5 times a day". But the finest was a red shirt with ISLAM in large letters, whose 'M' was in the style of the famous McDonald's logo. Beneath it was the slogan "I'm lovin it". I looked at it intently with a no doubt perplexed look on my face. I asked the man if he thought the shirt was sacrilegious. Without a hint of irony or humour, in his British accent he told me he didn't know what sacrilegious meant. I told him it meant it was against the sacred nature of Islam. He replied that he had designed the shirt himself, and that some Muslims loved it while others hated it. He thought it was practical. Imagine, he said, a young Muslim man being confronted by drunks on an underground railway station at 11 p.m. The drunks would find the shirt amusing, giving the upstanding Muslim the perfect opening to preach the glories of Islam. His wife was standing beside him, her face covered, busy serving customers. I did not know what she thought of such practicalities.

Mr McIslam

I asked a man selling a military biography of Khalid ibn al-Walid, otherwise known as the Sword of Allah, whether this was an appropriate book for a peace and unity event. He admitted he had not read the book and could not say. Before asking him this, I had taken his photo alongside it, honouring his request to include the honey he was also selling.

There was a booth with a bearded man bellowing loudly into the ear of a young woman. Above them was a sign promising to assist those suffering from evil eye, black magic, or jinn possession. The man was effective. Soon enough, the woman broke down in tears. While all this was going on, I asked his son of I had permission to photograph the sign advertising their services. He told me to go ahead. I took the photo, his father noticing out of the corner of his eye. He stopped helping the woman and began to berate me for daring to take a photograph. I let him speak, and when he was finished, I told him I had merely photographed the sign with his son's permission. His temper flaring, he demanded to know I was a journalist. I said I was not. He was agitated and I realised it was best to listen to him quietly and calmly. He said in his booming voice that British journalists had made a mockery of his work, and a French television station had confused him with a man wanted by the police, giving him all kinds of things to worry about. A elderly man beside me became very angry and demanded to know what I was doing there with a camera. I said nothing but looked him in the eye, which he took to be a sign of aggression. The curer of evil eye, black magic and jinn possession calmed down at this point, and told the other man he could handle it. I reassured him that at no time had I photographed anything but their sign. I gave him my card and expressed my sympathy for his predicament. He smiled, apologised, and resumed his work. The elderly man also smiled apologetically.

The massive crowd

I came across a booth where a wife and husband of Pakistani origin had enterprisingly set up a small photographic studio. We struck up a long and fruitful conversation. The wife told me about their photography business, emphasising her skills as a woman photographer, which was very useful with the upsurge in gender segregated weddings. They were dull to photograph, she said, because they lacked the interaction between the groom and bride that made wedding photography so special. But it was good for business. In our discussions on Muslim marriages she told me that she believed a woman should always have the right to choose her husband, no matter what anybody else in the family says. She herself was married at age 17, without ever having met her husband till the day she was married. While she had a marvellous marriage with three children, she said as women became better educated they were demanding their right to choose their husband themselves. A skinny pimple faced young man came up to the booth, examining the beautiful bridal photographs on display. She offered him her brochure, at which point he realised that he was not at a booth offering to match potential brides and grooms. His friends laughed at him. The woman pointed out that all the brides were already married, and her husband pointed to a portrait photo of a girl who was about three years old, mentioning that she was not married. We all laughed.

I joined a crowd of many thousands enjoying musical performances taking place in a huge auditorium. On stage were a continual stream of earnest musicians emphasising their wholesome family values and commitment to Islam. It was in fact uplifting family entertainment suitable for the many young children present. The organisers wisely interspersed the more somber acts with a dash of humour, which proved to be a big hit. A Californian named Baba Ali had everyone laughing when he described how a Muslim could get thrown off a plane. One suggestion was to scream loudly in Arabic. Another was to turn to a friend mid-flight, waking him up and saying loudly "Osama, it's time, it's time." He said that wearing a hijab would not get you thrown off a plane. Neither would a large beard. But wearing a hijab while having a large beard probably would.

Baba Ali

The woman on the train

2007-11-17T03:30:00.001-06:00

I saw her first at the underground railway station. She was about 30. Her face was red. It must have been a cold. She had a book with her. It was written in Turkish. I also had a book, by VS Naipaul. After arranging her clothes she settled into her seat to read. The train approached. She quickly got up, anticipating the train's arrival. We both needed a seat. We each found one. We smiled at each other. It is much easier to read while sitting. She opened her book and resumed her reading. I resumed mine. But she was too intriguing, so I ignored my book and watched her as she traced her finger over the words she was reading. Soon she was speaking the words to herself, immersed in the world the pages conveyed. The author's mind and her mind were meeting as the stations came and went. The author did not know. But I did, watching this woman on the train.

God's villages

2007-10-19T08:59:00.001-05:00

Once there was a man walking in a field with God. As they passed near a village, God asked the man if he knew the people living there. The man said he did. God asked him if he knew their religion. The man said “they are Jews.” The pair continued to walk and eventually they passed beside another village. God asked the man if he also knew the people in this village. The man said he did. God asked him he knew their religion. The man said “they are Muslims”. They continued walking and saw more villages. One was Christian. Another was Hindu. One was even Buddhist. God asked the man why the villages had different religions. The man thought about it for a long time. The only answer he could give was that the village children learned their religion from their elders, who were taught by their elders, going back generations, all the way to their prophets. God asked the man if he could explain why a certain child was born in one village and not another. The man said “only you know that”.

Laylat Al Qadr in Jerusalem

2007-10-09T13:55:00.002-05:00

Upon recently arriving in Jerusalem, I was determined to go to the Haram Al Sharif and into Al Aqsa Mosque on the night of Laylat Al Qadr (you can read more about this holy night here and here). Many Muslims are unable to travel to the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, their third holiest site. It is therefore a great privilege for me to go there, and I wanted to make the most of it.

I walked in the direction of the Haram Al Sharif from Damascus Gate, down through the streets of the Old City of Jerusalem. There were many people--mothers holding tightly onto small babies, old men wearing their "kafiyeh" (head dress), and old women walking leisurely on the way. All were making their way to or from the Haram Al Sharif. The Old City's streets are narrow in some places. Because the shop keepers like to put seemingly half of their shop's goods for sale on tables outside their shop, the streets became even narrower. Pop music sung by women from Lebanon was heard bellowing out of one shop, while another not far away had Qur'anic music sung by groups of men with deep voices. Shop keepers yelled out what they were selling and how much it cost. "Hamseen sheckels!" they yelled again and again. Even the young boys working on behalf of their father or uncle had booming voices that no one could fail to miss. Smoke from meat burning on barbecues and countless water pipes hung in the air almost everywhere.

I finally arrived at my favorite entrance to the Haram Al Sharif, not far from the Western Wall. There were many thousands of men and women praying. Most of the women were in a different area from the men, around the Dome of the Rock, but there were a few women under the covered walk ways off to the side of the men. Some of these women were looking after small children. But others were quite old, and I am unsure why they were not with the other women. No one seemed to mind. It was all quite relaxed.

Praying on the Haram Al Sharif

While the men were praying with devotion and concentration, there were other men shouting out what food they were selling from their stalls. I did not expect people to be buying and selling things on such a holy site during one of the most holy nights of the year.

I immediately found a spot to join the men praying, and I did this for some time. Since I was off to the side, it was a safe place for me to start. After discretely taking a few photos, I went to another spot to pray. This time I went down the front, very close to Al Aqsa Mosque, and much more in the open.

I was doing the prayers like the other men, and soon another man came to pray beside me. I thought to myself "ahh, now I am really in the middle of things!" Many thousands of us prayed, and this particular set of prayers went on for perhaps another 20 minutes. There was a lot of Arabic that I did not understand but for me it did not matter. The main thing was that I was praying sincerely to God, with all my heart. I gave it my best concentration, and I felt my consciousness was changing. By this I mean that when I was focused on God in such a holy place, there was a special feeling in my mind that I cannot describe. All I can really say is that it is not an emotion. Just like when we fall asleep, our consciousness changes. In this case, it was changing but I was of course very much awake! It was wonderful to be in the midst of such a huge crowd of people praying to God on such an auspicious night.

When we finished, the man beside me turned to me and he said "you made many mistakes". I said "yes you are right, it is to be expected because I am very new to this". He asked me "are you Muslim or a tourist?" I gave him my answer, and he told me he wanted to teach me about Islam. While I think all prayers offered with sincerity are as real as each other, it is of course best to show respect for what is considered correct, so I was eager to hear what he had to say about correct ways to pray. I listened to what he had to say. Instead of talking about prayer, he emphasized the elements of cleanliness and purity. He liked what he was teaching, but I could not help but think he should have talked to me a little more first to understand exactly what he needed to teach me! However it was still good to listen to him.

After we finished our discussion, I went straight inside the Al Aqsa Mosque. It was not my first time there, but it was my first time on the night of Laylat Al Qadr. There was hardly any room to pray. There was many people and many things were taking place at the same time. Someone was giving a political speech about America and Israel. Some men were praying. Some were sleeping. Others were looking at everyone who walked by them.

Inside Al Aqsa Mosque

There was little emotion from the people praying and waiting inside Al Aqsa Mosque, giving the occasion a very different temperament than might be had a Shi'ite place of prayer, for example. My initial impression is that Sunnis seem to be more reserved than Shi'ites. Personally I prefer the more emotional and passionate approach--I cannot but help think of the example of Sri Ramakrishna on the occasion of religious festivities. Perhaps it will sound strange for me to mention a Hindu man as a role model, but for those who know of the life example of Sri Ramakrishna, it is of absolutely no surprise at all!

The dysfunctional relationship between the U.S. and Iran

2007-09-22T04:14:00.001-05:00

In a piece sadly typical of the mainstream U.S. news media, Adam Goldman's idea of critical news journalism is to join the chorus attacking Iranian President Ahmadinejad. I certainly have no problem with any journalist critiquing the powerful, including of course President Ahmadinejad. The job of any decent journalist should be to understand power, to expose lies and to report the truth. Naturally a critical stance is absolutely fundamental to this. Like any powerful leader, there is plenty to write about President Ahmadinejad and his supporters. Yet Mr Goldman uses his critical stance only to critique the enemies of successive U.S. government administrations, including President Ahmadinejad. The U.S. entirely escapes his critical glare. His use of quote marks to describe American aggression are particularly revealing.

Missing is any acknowledgment of the deeply dysfunctional relationship between the U.S. and Iran, going back decades now. Few Americans are aware that in the 1950s Iran had a democratic government and a popular Prime Minister in Mohammed Mossadegh. This government was destroyed by the combined talents of the British and U.S. intelligence services, who in 1953 sponsored a coup and replaced it with a dictatorship far more accommodating to Western oil companies. The dictatorship led to the Iranian revolution in 1979.

During this entire period the relationship between the two countries could only be described as dysfunctional. Even the years of the dictatorship in 1953-1979, when government-to-government relations were good, the type of relationship between the two countries can hardly be described as healthy. U.S. support for the dictatorship was in no way meant to be something designed for the betterment of Iranians and their country. Instead, it existed to further the power and wealth of Western companies. Any benefits to Iranians were tangential to this objective.

The 1979 Iranian revolution of course dramatically changed the nature of the government-to-government relationship, and from my perspective the two governments did much to ensure the relationship between the two countries would remain poor. There were significant exceptions of course, such as the efforts toward dialog during the administration of former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. Yet on the whole, progress has been disappointing, which is the responsibility of both countries.

It is ironic that Mr Goldman's article finishes with a recognition of the right to free speech, given how much his own article resembles those found in countries with strict media censorship. It's all pretty much the same fare - "we are the good guys, with superior values and deeds, and they are the bad evil doers". It's an approach to journalism that any dictator would be satisfied with.

Amman, an ancient city still growing up

2007-09-20T09:14:00.001-05:00

People have been living in what is today Amman, Jordan for many thousands of years, with archaeological evidence pointing to the existence of Neolithic civilisation in 6500 BC. In one respect, Amman is a very old city indeed. In other respects, it is a rapidly growing pugnacious youngster. It lacks the Grand Bazaar found in other Middle Eastern metropolises. It lacks the parks and historic monuments. Despite the fancy five-star hotels and advertisements for global cell phone companies, it still retains a somewhat village feel.

For instance, yesterday I visited the Post Office to mail a package overseas. The man in the Post Office was kind and helpful, informing me that it closed at 3:30 p.m. I returned at 3:20 p.m., thinking I had plenty of time to spare. Alas! While the door to Post Office was indeed open till 3:30 p.m., there were no services available from 3 p.m., because as he explained he had to count the day's takings. Curiously, the Post Office contained no postal supplies like envelopes and boxes. He informed me that I needed to buy them somewhere else. The next day I found a stationery shop which did sell such supplies. However the shop had only one padded envelope, and it was very large. I was unsure whether the Post Office would accept it. So the shopkeeper told me to go to the post office and check, and if it was okay, I could then return and pay him for the envelope. Given that we had never seen each other before, I thought that was really very kind and trusting of him.

Pervez Hoodbhoy, modern Muslim hero?

2007-09-12T15:16:00.001-05:00

I met Pervez Hoodbhoy in 2001 at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. We spent some hours together. We exchanged ideas on religion and science, and he shared a little of his relationship with the great Pakistani intellectual Eqbal Ahmad. From these all-to-brief discussions I formed an immense admiration for Dr. Hoodbhoy, which I still hold. For I knew at once I was in the presence of a man whose goal was to serve his people as best he knew how. He could have easily been working in a prestigious Western university, living a comfortable lifestyle. Instead he chose to work in an environment which is at times deeply hostile to his cherished ideas on science and humanity. For years now he has been publishing a range of articles carefully advancing his views on science, religion, progress, intellectual freedom, history, and more.

Consider this recent article on science and the Islamic world. These are the words of someone passionate about his subject, yet respectful of people who hold differing views. His appeal is to Muslims who think critically, regardless of their personal religious views. Whether his readers be atheist or devout Muslims, there is something in his writings to seriously reflect on and ponder, which in my mind is a sign of excellent writing. It is in this sense that I think of Dr. Hoodbhoy as a modern Muslim hero. Having placed himself at the service of his people, who are Muslim, he has engaged Islam. He has taken the time to study Islam and its history. Islam benefits from Dr. Hoodbhoy because he poses challenging, vital questions for its followers in a dignified and respectful manner.

I say these things mindful I have till now completely ignored Dr. Hoodbhoy's individual religious views, and in this sense it is certainly deeply presumptuous of me to suggest he is a "Muslim" hero. Yet when I look to his dedication to his cause, pursued not out of a desire for fame or fortune, I cannot help but be reminded of the spiritual yearning for truth and freedom from the bonds of ignorance that exist within every major religion, including Islam. In this spiritual sense he is more "Islamic" than many practicing believers are. If more religious people were to serve their people instead of their intolerant arrogance, their religion and their community would flourish!

Americans being interviewed about our world -- Funny? Frightening? Arrggghhhhh!

2007-07-16T04:47:00.001-05:00

An Australian reporter interviews Americans on their general knowledge of the world, and issues of peace and conflict:

How many Eiffel towers in Paris? Where was the Berlin Wall? What is the religion of Buddhist monks? Kofi Annan is a drink -- true or false? Who should be invaded next? The language they speak in Latin America is Latin - true or false?

Visit to Mandriva Paris office

2007-07-10T07:56:00.000-05:00

Mandriva's Gnome expert Frédéric Crozat was kind enough to show me around the Mandriva office today. We then had lunch together. He is a real gentleman. We discovered we have a common interest in not only free software, but also photography. However our roles are somewhat reversed -- he knows more about software development than I do, and I know more about photography than he does ;-)

All the staff I met were friendly and kind. They gave me some free Mandriva products and goodies, which was a great surprise! I was also surprised to learn the language used inside the company is English, as that is the language shared with staff in other countries, e.g. Brazil.

For me it was an excellent experience to meet some of the people behind the software I have used at work and at home in different countries for so many years. With free software you know in your heart you are part of a larger movement that is improving the lives of people worldwide through meeting their needs.

Using fashion to promote a culture of violence

2007-04-20T09:52:00.001-05:00

Mere days after Cho Seung-Hui shot dead more than 30 victims using handguns, photographer Laszlo Balogh photographed a model presenting swimwear during a fashion show in Budapest, April 19, 2007:

Notice the handgun attached to the garter belt? The physical intent of firing a handgun at a human body is to penetrate it with overwhelming violence, rupturing muscles, possibly shattering bones and disintegrating organs, causing vast pain and sometimes death.

The intent of attaching a handgun to the leg of a scantily clad model is not quite so simple. Perhaps the person responsible simply adores weapons. Perhaps he or she gets a thrill out of sex and violence. Or perhaps the person is simply dim-witted fool who provokes controversy without understanding it. But whatever the truth is in this instance, ultimately such displays glorify sex, power and violence.

The world of fashion as seen on global catwalks has long been one of the most vacuous human endeavors of all time. Shows like the one in Budapest demonstrate it to also be one of the most insensitive.

A not so tall tale of a small fish

2007-04-08T14:25:00.000-05:00

If someone told you about the story of a fish that swims inside your body when you are urinating underwater and proceeds to gorge itself on your blood, would you believe such a story? Probably not. But in this case, you might want to learn about the Candirú, the Terrifying Toothpick Fish.

El tornado - the story of the little vacuum cleaner that could

2007-03-28T12:30:00.001-05:00

"With some people coming tomorrow night," I thought, "I had better cleanup."

I got the apartment building's shared vacuum cleaner, and innocently turned it on, not anticipating the maelstrom that was about to immediately ensue. In a violent outburst of noise, dust and bits and bobs exploded out of the top left corner of the vacuum cleaner's plump bag, forming a brown mushroom cloud. A veritable torrent of dust was unleashed. The hazy dust cloud covered the entire room with every other apartment's dirt. I stumbled through the gloom to the door, only to be greeted with the piercing screams of the smoke alarm.

"Thank God I started with Paulus's room," I thought.

After powering off the dangerous machine -- not yet having actually vacuumed anything up -- I removed the still full bag and took it out to the dumpster to empty it. Out came a mountain of dust, lots of long black hair, and a couple of used contraceptives. I was glad they had not blown out of the bag.

I reflected on the bag's crude design. You practically needed to be a mechanic to open it. That may have explained why it had apparently not been emptied for some years. Only a clever genius must understand why its design was patented.

As I stomped flat the bag's metal flap to close it up, I pondered the vacuum cleaner's incredible sucking power. It sucked like there was a tornado in town. That was it then, its name had to be "el tornado".

* I am kidding about starting in Paulus's room. And the contraceptives also. But everything else is true!

Norouz in SouthBend

2007-03-22T11:26:00.002-05:00

Norouz is a celebration of spring, originating in Iran many many centuries ago. While it had religious origins then, for most Muslims today it is a cultural celebration. For Baha'is it is different. For them, it is a religious holiday, which makes sense given their small numbers and their need to build upon existing cultural traditions. I have created an audio slide show of the 2007 Norouz celebration in South Bend, IN:

U.S. Navy Year in Review: reality missing in action

2007-03-18T22:31:00.002-05:00

The U.S. Navy has put together a review of its year in 2006 designed, they say, "to share the Navy experience with the general public":

http://www.navy.mil/media/OtherMedia/YearInReview2006/

In 6 minutes and 40 seconds the Navy presents a series of often very good quality photographs in combination with a couple of musical tracks. Featured are a variety of men and women of all ages, either working in the Navy or being helped in some sense by the Navy. There are lots of smiling faces—former President George Bush, film star Halle Berry, and even a dolphin make an appearance.

Strikingly, however, while there are plenty of weapons, there are no victims of those weapons shown. The only reference I noticed to a U.S. casualty in 2006 was that of Paul J. Darga, who was killed in Iraq on August 22. He was symbolized by a gun and helmet. He is one of 3,166 U.S. armed forces deaths in Iraq so far.

The people the US armed forces fought against in 2006 are not featured, with the exception of one photo. Here, a few suspects (as the caption describes them) were alive, but in a submissive state.

There were no human bodies penetrated, bowdlerized, impaired, disabled or pulverized by weapons. I have asked the Navy if this is part of their operational guidelines when producing such materials. Perhaps they will respond. For whatever reason—and there could be plenty—the gruesome reality of violence and death is hidden, replaced by smiley happy people. If all the Navy did was rescue people, that would be ok. But part of their reality is killing and injuring people. Part of their reality having the same done to their personnel. This reality is missing in action from their year in review.

Face2Face in Israel Palestine

2007-03-16T11:12:00.001-05:00

It's pretty amazing what you can do with a creative imagination, a 28mm lens, and the will to think big (all images are from the Face2Face project):

"The Face2Face project is to make portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same job and to post them face to face, in huge formats, in unavoidable places, on the Israeli and the Palestinian sides."

It features my friends Eliyahu Mclean and Shiekh Aziz Bukhari. Shiekh Tamimi is also here:

To learn more about the project, and watch a good video, visit:

http://www.face2faceproject.com/

Universal love: Pato Banton in Jerusalem

2007-03-16T10:43:00.001-05:00

My friend Eliyahu McLean hosted the noted reggae singer Pato Banton in his home in Jerusalem. Pato is described as a "conscious UK reggae artist", which makes sense when you hear his songs. This song is inspiring! Hajj Ibrahim is there to enjoy things -- of course.

Video made by CaseyYurow, Youtube.

Sikh Delegation meets Rabbi Froman

2007-03-13T12:19:00.001-05:00

December 12, 2005

The religious peacemaker Eliyahu McLean let me know he was hosting a Sikh tour of the Holy Land, and he invited me to join them throughout their travels. I joined them when they visited Rabbi Froman in Tekoa. Sikhism is one of the world's newest religions, and Judaism one of the oldest. One is from the Punjab in India and the other Jerusalem. Both have about twenty million followers each, and both have experienced more persecution than they have the intoxicating glories of political and territorial rule. While the orthodox followers of one like to wear loose white clothes and the orthodox followers of the other like to dress in formal black suits, they both admire long flowing beards very much. It promised to be an interesting afternoon and evening.

The delegation of Sikhs numbered about twenty. They were all Orthodox: they faithfully followed their tradition of kesh (keeping their hair uncut) and wearing a kara (steel bracelet). One of them assured me they also wore the kangah (wooden comb) and the kirpan (ceremonial dagger), albeit a small version “so as not to cause problems with security.” They take this tradition very seriously, wearing their dagger even when they sleep. However they were not wearing what would strictly be considered kachha (short pants). I imagine this was a concession to modesty than for any profound religious reason.

Upon boarding a small bus to visit Tekoa I found the Sikhs sitting contentedly, their tall trim bodies filling the small seats. All but two were men. Some were already in a trancelike state, an impressive undertaking given the formal prayers had not yet started. Eliyahu later confided they had been up all night travelling and were probably just exhausted.

The Muslim peacemaker Ibrahim was there sitting at the back of the bus with his usual big smile and traditional Arab garb. Last time Ibrahim and I were on a bus he would take every opportunity to tell the young Israeli soldiers stationed at numerous checkpoints that they looked like one of his ten children and that they were beautiful. The soldiers invariably broke into a big smile themselves when he told them that, their tension spontaneously transformed into genuine joy.

The settlement of Tekoa is reputed to be the land of Prophet Amos. It is close to the Palestinian village Tekua. Mt. Herod sits silently nearby. Tekoa is in an arid part of the West Bank, beside a series of spectacular valleys heading down to the Dead Sea. What few trees survive without be watered by people are undoubtedly old and hardy.

We arrived in Tekoa to find an Israeli soldier guarding the entrance. Rabbi Froman is a man of peace but his village still relies on the military for protection.

Froman joined us on the bus with greetings of “shalom salaam”. He said in Jewish and Islamic traditions, shalom and salaam respectively mean both peace and “the very name of God.” Thus the land of peace is the land of God, according to both faiths.

We were guided to the edge of the settlement, overlooking the inspiring hills and valleys. Jordanian hills could be seen in the distance. A dry riverbed (known as a wadi) wound its way through the valley floor below.

Gulleys beside Tekoa

Off in the distance an isolated settlement sat, its distinctive red roofs signifying it was Jewish. Although it looked peaceful, the existence of settlements like this are perceived by many Palestinians, Israelis and international observers as one of the three major causes of conflict between Palestinians and Jews, along with Palestinian refugees demanding they be able to return to their villages they left during wars during the 1948 war, and the status of Jerusalem as a capital city claimed by both Israelis and Palestinians.

Jewish settlement

Amidst laughter and joy the Sikhs' leader and Froman began to swap religious insights and stories, using the geography of the land and their respective religious culture for guidance. Ibrahim looked on as the Jew and the Sikh conversed.

Swapping religious stories

But before this interreligious dialogue Rabbi Froman thanked the Sikhs for their remarkable hospitality at the 2004 World Parliament of Religions in Barcelona, where they fed the 8,000 participants free meals. Froman said Jews have strict dietary requirements, and confessed with a happy smile that the enormous Sikh tent was the only place in all of Barcelona they could eat. He apologized for not preparing a tent for the Sikhs. The Sikh leader said that on the contrary, the land itself was a big tent, where they shared the love of God. Froman said “yes, yes, the love of God.” The Sikh leader said they had come simply to pray, to love each other and seek peace. He added that we become wise by serving God and serving his people.

Swapping religious stories

When Froman tried to articulate a spiritual dimension of hospitality, his budding command of English led him to confuse the word with hostility, bringing not only more laughter but an observation from the Sikh that language is tricky and cannot satisfactorily describe God. Froman added that despite his limited command of not only English but also Arabic, he has close friends who are Arab. He said it did not matter because “the language of the heart is less tricky than the language of humans.”

A young Sikh alone surveyed the land quietly as the sun hovered behind him, a land described by Froman as currently being in a “miserable” state because of the conflict between Jews and Palestinians, one of the few political references shared between them.

Contemplation

Jewish tradition holds that the wadi that runs from Jerusalem (a point of life) to the Dead Sea (a point of death) is special, for at what Froman referred to as “the end of days” the Dead Sea will receive the water from Jerusalem and become a sea of life instead of death. Froman also outlined a story from Chronicles, near the end of the Hebrew Bible where enemies are defeated not by power and force but by love, humility, and by singing to God and praising him (God was always referred to in the masculine sense by both Froman and the Sikhs). The Sikh leader then recounted a Sikh story which had a similar perspective on the need to praise God.

These observations reminded me of the complex nature of religious thought. While praising the God present in all people as being higher than one's limited self is a fine thing—or put it in non-religious terms, to live for the good of others and not just yourself is wonderful—to live responsibly does not mean abdicating reason to a vain hope for what Karen Armstrong calls “miraculous intervention”. She points out the danger of “a form of religiosity that reduces spirituality to magic.” Religious stories will always need wise interpreters, it seems.

After the two religious leaders shared spiritual insights, emphasizing a universal spiritual identity above that of their identities as faith leaders, the Sikhs lead a session of prolonged prayerful singing.

Prayerful singing

Prayerful singing

The Sikh leader and Froman sat side by side, emphasizing their unity and perhaps even their status as leaders in their respective communities.

Prayers

Two thirds of the way through the sun began to set, and Froman excused himself to perform traditional sunset prayers while the Sikhs continued to sing. Their different voices of prayer came together, the unity in diversity clearly apparent to everyone present.

Sunset prayers

He then joined them once more, this time in a particularly enthusiastic round of singing the praises of a wonderful God, his body swaying back and forth.

Prayers

As they all sang together the religious intensity became greater and greater, the men's voices rising in volume and quickening in pace.

After the devotional singing the men and woman talked among themselves. I conversed with a Sikh born in 1941, a humble man with a sharp mind. Many of the Sikhs in the delegation appeared to have roots in Kenya. There are something close to 500,000 Sikhs living in England, according to my interlocutor Sikh, who is leader of a Gurdwara (Sikh religious temple) in England. When I asked if it made sense to ask an Orthodox Sikh if they had a favorite Guru among the thirteen who founded Sikhism, he said it did not, as they regarded all of them as one. In response to a question of mine, he said the idea of Khalistan (an independent homeland between India and Pakistan for Sikhs) was one formed by the “propaganda machine” of India, and that his party was religious and not political, having nothing to do with the Khalistan movement. However he was familiar with a political figure associated with that movement, Singh Mann. He did not know of the Indian independence leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, being much more familiar with figures like Jomo Kenyatta, having instead grown up in Kenya and experiencing its freedom struggle.

On the way out we visited a Yeshiva (school of religious learning) in the settlement. There were an impressive number of students and many of them were studying in small groups. They were all very enthusiastic to meet the Sikhs and talk with them.

In the Yeshiva

One thing about the beards, flowing garments and turbans of the Sikhs is that they immediately make them stand out from the crowd, even in a place rich with religious symbolism like Israel Palestine.

In the Yeshiva

When back on the bus I felt a sense of great peace and calm among these religious Sikhs. Their very presence conveyed peace in our often hurried and turbulent world. The next day I heard a well-known Israeli peacemaker who is non-religious describe an experience where Froman was in the back of his car, presumably lost in prayer, completely oblivious to the vigorous political discussion taking place around him. Whether one admires religious peacemaking efforts like this, or finds it archaic, naïve or worse, it is undeniable that the religious figures see themselves playing a valuable role in bring peace to this land. It might be that the mere fact a variety of Palestinians and Israelis witnessing such figures may be an experience that stays with them for some time to come, perhaps even influencing their thinking. Perhaps sessions of prayers and singing gives them legitimacy in the eyes of the religious. Whether it not the actual act of prayer and singing contributes to a culture of peace is a research question where gaining evidence is not easy.

In the Yeshiva

It has been said by some that “denial is not just a river in Egypt”—and this was powerfully illustrated on the bus ride to and from Tekoa. The Israeli man acting as tour-guide pointing out the sights on the way from Tantur to Tekoa began pointing out places where “Palestinian terrorists” had been shooting and murdering innocent Jews. He referred to Israeli settlements not as settlements but as towns. Just six weeks before his son's girlfriend was one four young people murdered by unidentified Palestinian gunmen not far from the road where we turned off to go to Tekoa, an tragedy that generated a lot of news coverage and led to the closure of the West Bank by Israeli authorities for some days. On the way back, the Israeli man again at some length talked about Palestinian terrorism, pointing out places where the Israeli State had placed protective barriers to minimize the effects of sniper fire from Palestinian villages neighboring the road. Not once did he talk about Israeli violence against Palestinians. In private I asked him why he believed the killings were taking place. He replied by saying the Palestinians had a culture of violence. Behind his back, Eliyahu just rolled his eyes and smiled. When I pointed out to the Israeli man that three times as many Palestinians had died compared to Israelis since the start of the second Intifada, he said that was because Palestinians were killing each other in intra-group violence. He said that Palestinians like to fire guns at weddings and funerals. In short his message was: Palestinians are violent and Israelis are innocent of any wrongdoing. Eliyahu mentioned quietly to me that the Sikhs would be visiting Bethlehem later in the week, where they will hear Palestinian perspectives.

The tour-guide when not talking about Palestinian terrorists did usefully point out that some of terraced fields we were passing by in the minibus had been dated as being between 3-4,000 years old by archaeologists, with ancient olive trees also present.

I must confess I was surprised that one of the Sikhs present was a professor at the University of London, who said he was a friend of the late Edward Said and of Noam Chomsky. He said he edits the journal Social Identity and is a specialist in post colonial theory, including sub-altern studies.

Comment from a friend on this article, January 1 2006:

“It is my view that the important thing for people like you, and even to some extent myself though I have been here so long, is to be a neutral as we can. This struggle is not a football match—and no good purpose is served by taking sides as so many outsiders of evident goodwill seem to do. The Israeli who described the attacks by Palestinians was telling the truth as he saw it, and indeed he seems to have had a personal reason for painting them all black. You will find the same absolute black and white views among Palestinians. Those who believe in peace have to slowly reduce the number of people holding these views, based on pure ignorance and inablity to see any point of view except your own, so that those who hold them are reduced to an impotent minorty. But it is slow work.“

Radiance, pessimism, and hope

2007-03-03T23:56:00.001-06:00

Only recently have I come to better appreciate the wisdom of the late Charles West Churchman, formerly a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He once said:

"The design of my philosophical life is based on an examination of the following question: is it possible to secure improvement in the human condition by means of the human intellect? The verb 'to secure' is (for me) terribly important, because problem solving often appears to produce improvement, but the so-called 'solution' often makes matters worse in the larger system (e.g., the many food programs of the last quarter century may well have made world-wide starvation even worse than no food programs would have done.) The verb 'to secure' means that in the larger system over time the improvement persists."

Source: Churchman, C. West. Thought and Wisdom. Intersystems Publications, Seaside, Calif., 1982, p. 19f.

Churchman also offered an insight on hope and radiance, which I have come to recognize as being of seminal importance:

'It is tempting to define hope psychologically, as strong belief in and desire for a future without any perceivable evidence for its occurrence.... But something crucial is missing, because a man could engage in a risky gamble or adventure on the grounds that his gain, if he is successful, would be very great.

The word I want is "radiance." The Latin word claritas can be translated into "clearness," meaning "precise," as in Descartes or later in symbolic logic. But it can also mean "light" or "brilliance." Thus, one way to talk about aesthetics is to say that it is the variety of expressions of radiance, including the dark. But it is not merely "black and white," for radiance includes the colours, and sounds, and aromas, and touches.

Back to "hope." It means belief in the desirable without perceived evidence, but it also means radiant belief. I don't know what this means, but I can imagine it easily enough. When I say, "I hope that humanity will succeed in using its intellect to improve the human condition," and someone says, "How can you hope anything of the kind, given the way humans exploit humans?"—then there is no argument: he is trying to destroy the radiance, to put out the light, and I must do my best to preserve the radiance despite his cynicism.

And, of course, radiance includes humour, because hope is a motley, which includes its own absurdity. Hope is always both serious and ridiculous. Only there is no lesson to be learned, no rational conclusion to be drawn, from saying, "Hope is absurd." The rational mind wants to say, "Hope is ridiculous and therefore..." It's like someone saying, "What's the point of Hamlet after all?"'

Source: Churchman, C. West. The Systems Approach and its Enemies. New York: Basic Books, 1979, pp. 191-192.

To me personally, this means that even as we develop and articulate a deep awareness of the profound injustice and violence found in our world, we must at the same time embody a positive vision for the present and the future, and recognize the many positives in our pasts. We need to be radiant. This is not always easy, but it is often highly important.

Consider the act of criticism, for instance. When people are being critics of something—a film, or the actions of another person—they are often making observations on the character, conduct and perhaps consciousness of other people, or perhaps their works of art or commerce or activism. Sometimes people are overwhelmingly negative in their criticisms. There are some genuinely bad things in life, of course, but oftentimes there is good and bad mixed together. None of us are perfect—we all make mistakes, big and small. Yet when criticizing others, some people tend to focus only on the negative, forgetting the positive aspects of people and their efforts.

This is not a call for merely being "balanced"; rather, it is to draw attention to the interwoven roles of pessimism and hopefulness. In his remarkable book "The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace", John Paul Lederach refers to the "gift of pessimism". Lederach asks "What do people who live in settings that are moving from war to peace teach us about the challenge of understanding the nature of genuine constructive social change?" He says:

"First, in deep-rooted conflict, people locate themselves and change and gauge authenticity with an expansive view of time and an intuitive sense of complexity. These create a cautious approach to promises that constructive social change will happen in a short period of time, independent of the historical context in which the violence has evolved. In short, there is a prevailing ethos of pessimism. This does not mean that desired changes are not hoped for or possible, even in the short term. But pessimism provides a point of departure for understanding the nature of change. Very simply it says this: Gauging whether the change process is genuine requires serious engagement with the complexity of the situation and a long-term view. If simple answers are reached as if complexity did not exist, then just as Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests, they are not worth a fig."

Source: Lederach, John Paul. 2005. The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace: Oxford University Press, USA.

This has a sound philosophical basis, as witnessed by a couple of thousand years of Indian philosophical pondering:

"The attitude of mind which looks at the dark side of things is known as pessimism. Indian philosophy has often been characterized as pessimistic and, therefore, pernicious in its influence on practical life. . . . Indian philosophy is pessimistic in the sense that it works under a sense of discomfort and disquiet at the existing order of things. It discovers and strongly asserts that life, as it has been thoughtlessly led, is a mere sport of blind impulses and unquenchable desires; it inevitably ends in and prolongs misery. But no Indian system stops with this picture of life as a tragedy. It perhaps possesses more than a significance that even an ancient Indian drama rarely ends as a tragedy. If Indian philosophy points relentlessly to the miseries that we suffer through short-sightedness, it also discovers a message of hope. The essence of the Buddha's enlightenment—the four noble truths—sums up and voices the real view of every Indian school in this respect; namely: There is suffering.—There is a cause of suffering.—There is cessation of suffering.—There is a way to attain it. Pessimism in the Indian systems is only initial and not final."

Source: Chatterjee, Satischandra, and Dhirendra Mohan Datta. 1984. An introduction to Indian philosophy. 8th ed. Calcutta: University of Calcutta, pp. 13-14.

In these points, there is much crossover in the philosophy of Churchman, Lederach and India's philosophical traditions. For instance, Churchman abhors short-term solutions that ignore the complexity of the systems in which problems are embedded, a point also made by Lederach.

Yet finally, in the midst of complexity and an awareness of suffering, radiance is an indispensable condition for long-term well-being.

Reflections on conflict and peace

2007-02-06T14:19:00.002-06:00

The search for perfection, the longing for freedom, truth and pure peace has been humanity's earliest preoccupation in its awakened mind (Ghose, 1971). Humanity dreams of a state of being which is in flagrant contradiction with reality. Sages like Aurobindo suggest that life might well be a series of “transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering”, but like generations before us we still long to “build peace and a self-existent bliss”.

Consider these two children. They both live beside railway tracks in Karachi, their makeshift homes standing on the stones that surround railway tracks all over the world, squeezed in between a road and the tracks.

This boy looks unhealthy and perhaps even malnourished. His skin is diseased.

This girl, on the other hand, expresses a tremendous inner beauty. She is physically beautiful, but the radiance and joy she conveys is totally at odds with her surroundings.

It is in the midst of such radiance that the highest dreams dwell.

Despite the immense diversity of cultures that people our planet, and their varying experiences of violence and peace, there are universal shared experiences familiar to all of us, among them fear, discrimination, separation, empathy, artistry, hope, love, and solidarity.

Military Occupation

Let us see what we can learn from Israel Palestine. Perhaps there is something about life under military occupation and the threat of terrorism that opens a window into these universal themes.

We can start by taking a look at the Palestinian village of Bilin on a typical Friday afternoon.

Bilin is a symbol of resistance for many Palestinians. The immense separation barrier Israel has built separates the villagers from their land.

This land has effectively been stolen and given to Orthodox Jewish settlers occupying newly built settlements nearby.

It is an absolute disgrace, and a tremendous violation of the ethical and spiritual principles of Judaism. Rabbi Michael Lerner tells us that ‘The most frequently repeated injunction in Torah are variations of the following command: “Do not oppress the stranger (the 'other'). Remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”’

It is therefore no surprise that Israeli and international activists have joined Palestinians in weekly protests against the barrier, from before it was built to the present day.

The protests are largely nonviolent, but sometimes the villagers throw rocks, as the sound slides demonstrate. Such occasional violence unfortunately provides a convenient alibi for the Israeli military to undertake extreme actions. These actions are frightening. They scared me at the time and they scare me now.

After two years of continuous resistance, 11 Palestinians have been killed. Many Palestinian, Israeli and foreign activists have been injured, sometimes very seriously, including brain damage after being shot in the head at close range.

What have these sacrifices achieved? The fence was built without difficulties. Distinguished peace activist and Israeli parliamentarian Naomi Chazan is critical of the activists for putting so much effort into an unsuccessful undertaking, missing the opportunity to do something more productive for peace.

While she has a point, she under-appreciates the tremendous symbolic value for Palestinians of witnessing idealistic Israelis struggling courageously at their side. Such solidarity transcends typical notions of group identity, allowing at least some Palestinians and Israelis to regard each other as more fully human. The activists have also succeeded in making the conflict more visible.

One remarkable aspect of the Bilin protests is their orchestrated, almost ritualistic character. The basic structure of the ritual is pretty simple.

The nonviolent activists attempt to march to the barrier.

The soldiers confront them at some point, maybe in the village, or maybe at the barrier or along the way. They warn the activists to leave. The activists do not leave. The soldiers fire at them with tear gas, sound grenades, rubber bullets, and on occasion live ammunition.

The activists shout back moral slogans, appealing to the conscience of the soldiers. The soldiers say very little in return.

In short, there is a lot of mutual posturing going on, punctuated by occasional episodes of significant violence resulting in injury and death.

Posturing is used to project fear and strength onto opponents by demonstrating how dangerous and frightening an adversary one can be. Opponents can fight, flee, submit or posture themselves.

Posturing is exceptionally easy to see in child soldiers who have not had rigorous military training, such as with the young boys and men who fought in Liberia a few years ago. Video footage shows them firing their weapons with apparent abandon, shooting from the hip, dancing as they celebrated their manliness. They were much more concerned with posturing in front of their buddies and the enemy than they were in trying to actually kill people on the other side.

Posturing has always been a huge part of war, embodied in ritual and myth. Modern methods of military training channel the spirit behind such posturing into more efficient methods for killing, but nevertheless posturing is still commonplace (Grossman, 1996).

Separation and intimacy

One of humanity's central dilemmas is separation. The Buddha identified separation from what one loves as one of the “six moments when life's dislocation becomes glaringly apparent”(Smith, 1991, p. 102). It often plays an extremely important role in conflict.

I wrote about separation in this blog entry.

In a relationship if two people separate their intimacy is either stopped completely, or at the very least severely curtailed. One of the most bizarre aspects of military occupation is that this is not the case. Peoples are separated alright, but then they are pulled together in the most intimate of manners. Salam Fayyad, former Finance Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, explains this paradox.

He says: 'Examining the past 6 years of this conflict, I would characterize the Israeli-Palestinian relations over this period as having been too intimate—too intimate for the Palestinians and too intimate for the Israelis. You may be stunned by this characterization, for many have characterized it as the opposite. But the nature of relations today between Israelis and Palestinians has reached levels of micromanagement, where Israel is involved in the minute details of the lives of Palestinians. It is important to remember that the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is ruled by military orders—not by politics, logic, or reason—but by military orders with “security” dictating the rules of the game.'

If anything, Fayyad was being diplomatic. These “military orders” can make Palestinian's lives hell, with women unable to make it on time to hospital to give birth and cancer patients dying at the checkpoint because soldiers refused to let them pass through by vehicle, to cite but two very recent examples.

Tamar Meshulam

Artists and designers often have fascinating insights into life’s moments of separation, intimacy, awareness and identity.

Tamar Meshulam is a Jewish woman hailing from Jerusalem, who designed a peace game called Master Peace that won the first prize at the most recent UNESCO Design contest, a contest held every five years encouraging young designers to make a positive contribution to society. She says “Every game stands for something, Monopoly stands for capitalism; chess stands for war. I wanted to create something that stands for cooperation.”

Palestinians and Israelis have played the game together, and the game has generated interest in the Middle East, Europe, and the US. It has been described as “a communication project which uses the medium of a game to trigger off group dynamic processes among the players which contribute to an understanding of the ethnic groups and cultures in Israel.”

That’s one way of thinking about it. I spent some time interviewing Tamar, but frankly we are better off reading an account from the magazine Egypt Today. I have modified slightly an article of theirs, and reproduced it:

To play the game, the players are asked to work on a collective story in order to complete a “self-journey” from a place called home, outwards, and then back to home. This is a journey where identity is nurtured; people feel safe and recognize themselves.

The magazine poses the question that these are nice ideas, but how is it possible for Palestinians and Israelis to agree on a constructive story when they cannot yet agree on their past?

Tamar responds by saying “during the game there isn’t one past to agree on, because the story is composed of pieces of everybody’s interpretation of reality. The others are asked to try to comprehend the player’s point of view, and learn to accept it, though not necessarily to fully understand it.” The group’s agreements through their dialogue are made for present actions.

For Tamar cultural exchange is a vital part of the peace process. She says “Israelis and Palestinians experience their common history each in their own way of perceiving life. Getting to know each other’s mental perspective is beneficial for the future construction of our relations.”

“To accept the other’s experience and having the other accept yours is a major step in any relationship, if it ever happens. In the political sense, the situation between Palestine and Israel was a strategic ‘war game’. Now it aims for ‘no game,’ which is a long distance from ‘cooperative game’ [such as Master Peace].”

Tamar says “the use of abstraction in the game, acts as a method for opening new ways of expression instead of repetitive clichés. It definitely does not mean forgetting pasts. This whole game is based on the identities people gather throughout their collective and personal pasts.”

Ancestry

When we talk our collective pasts, of course, we talk of our ancestors. Wherever we go, we bring our ancestors with us. We bring them in our bodies. Our bodies are a living workshop of previous generations' embodied experiences. We bring our ancestors in our minds too. Our expectations, values, knowledge, experiences, hopes, fears and desires reflect what our ancestors thought. Whatever innovations we as individuals bring forth into the world always occur within the design patterns our ancestors have given us.

The ancestors I bring with me on my travels hail from the youthful country Aotearoa New Zealand, and before that from Britain and Greece. I had never personally been to the continent of Africa before visiting there last year. Returning to the United States after spending time in Uganda and South Africa gave me a new understanding of African Americans.

This was not a gradual realization. Rather, it struck me with tremendous force one day in Washington, DC as I saw an African-American man walk ahead of me. I realized that this man had likely descended from slaves forcibly brought to the United States from somewhere in the vast continent of Africa.

It was not an intellectual realization. Since being a small boy I have known that slavery had existed in the United States. Instead, it was an emotional reaction at a gut level. For a few moments, I was observing not an African-American walking down a street in what may well have been his home town. I was seeing a former slave. This man symbolized slavery. His ancestors were not only with him—they were him.

This powerful feeling was made possible only because of my time spent in South Africa and Uganda. Cape Town felt to me like a white town with black people on the periphery. Kampala, on the other hand, felt like a black person’s country, rippling with a multitude of black cultures and subcultures living alongside one another.

Without me being necessarily consciously aware of it, Kampala came to symbolize a truly African home. When I saw the man who had become a slave in Washington, DC, Kampala provided me with the mental imagery to imaginatively recreate the home he had been ripped away from, ending up in a city that symbolized the overwhelming power of the white Western world.

None of this is to suggest that an African-American leads a life any less authentic than a Ugandan, or that a white South African is somehow less African than a black South African.

All lives and all identities are authentic. To suggest one part of the African continent is truly African while another part is not, is not to comment on the authenticity of those who live there, but on the visible intensity of the presence of the place's ancestors.

It is worth noting that in describing his experience playing Idi Amin in the film “The Last King of Scotland”, Forest Whitakker very recently said “I'm African-American, I'm not African. It is my ancestors that come from there, so I had to understand a different rhythm, a different way of looking at the world.”

“Because I was dealing with a lot of people just as friends,” he says, “I got to understand that part of myself that is already deeply rooted in my ancestors in Africa in the way I behave, and that became stronger and stronger as I went along.”

Favela Morro da Pereira

On the day I arrived in Rio de Janeiro, on December 28 2006, violence left 18 dead.

The worst attack was on a bus. About 10 assailants surrounded the bus on a major highway and tossed gasoline-filled bottles inside. The attackers set the bus on fire and prevented the 28 passengers from getting off. Seven people burned to death.

Imagine you were one of the 28 people on that bus. Can you see the men surrounding you, trapping you, hemming you in? Can you see the flames leap and dance? Can you feel the heat burning your skin? Can you hear the screams of your relatives and friends, wounded and dying? Can you smell the burning gasoline, the burning seats, the burning hair, and the burning flesh?

It is safe to assume almost everybody in Rio believes the attackers came from the favelas, which are the sprawling slums perched on steep hills and other marginal places which are a legacy of slavery. Favelas are controlled by powerful gangs who deal in drugs and organized crime. Rio de Janeiro has one of the highest murder rates of any city in the world, and street crime is a major problem. In short, favelas have a notorious reputation.

Morro da Pereira is a favela in Rio de Janeiro. Neucirlan Oliveira lives there. He likes the sense of community and solidarity found in the favelas. Neucirlan is a peacebuilder, literally—he built a model of his favela on the hill outside his family home.

He started when he was 14 and of the boys that helped him, only one took up a life of violence by becoming a gang member. His name was Max, and he was shot dead by the police. I asked him why people join gangs. He said such young people lack information on the reality of what they are about to participate in. “They don't realise they can change the world” he says.

His peacebuilding work could do with some improvement—he banned girls from building the mini favela, justifying this with what are obviously feeble reasons. Perhaps he did so because it might lead to conflict among the boys themselves, disrupting their solidarity.

Despite his gender discrimination, his mini-favela has contributed to peace. But how are we to understand his artistic endeavor as a peacebuilding phenomena?

Since Aristotle is one of my ancestors, I feel it entirely appropriate to leave the last word to him. Paraphrasing Thomas Cahill (Cahill, 2003), we can draw upon Aristotle’s timeless observations of the Greek play, Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannos, and apply them to Neucirlan’s efforts:

This is not life but a mimicking of life. We have been playing with imitation humans that can be put back in their homes made of bricks. We leave the mini favela warned by what we have witnessed but purged of negative emotions. We are pleasantly exhausted now; as if we had recently expelled a poison from our body. We are at peace, exalted by our encounter with this pageant of truth. We are restored by this vicarious brush with destruction and death. We didn't die. We are still alive—and can face tomorrow with a certain placid wisdom.

Aristotle's brilliant analysis has never been improved upon.

References

Cahill, T. (2003). Sailing the Wine-Dark sea: Why the Greeks Matter (1st ed.). New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.

Ghose, A. (1971). The Future Evolution of Man: The Divine Life Upon Earth (2d ed.). Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

Grossman, D. (1996). On killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (1st pbk. ed.). Boston: Little, Brown.

Smith, H. (1991). The World's Religions. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.

The death of the moon

2006-11-28T16:41:00.001-06:00

This past Sunday I called my classmate Moon in Jerusalem from the top of the Pyramid of the Moon, Teotihuacán, Mexico.

Moon, Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem

Two ancient holy cities were thus connected by modern technology.

Pyramid of the Moon, Teotihuacán, Mexico

From the Pyramid of the Moon, a couple looks down on the Avenue of the Dead. No technology can stop anyone making their own walk down the avenue of the dead -- one reason we have holy sites, I suppose.

Couple viewing Avenue of the Dead, Teotihuacán

While the moon shines without blocking the light of the stars behind it (as Moon is fond of pointing out), it shines because of the sun, a star like those it shares the sky with. When the sun dies, the moon will remain, but it may not ever be seen again by any conscious being. With no one to see it, will it also be dead? No, a reader protests, it still exists. It is not dead. It simply cannot be seen. Likewise, when our body dies, do we still exist, merely unseen? Or to put the question another way: in the depths of consciousness, do we outlive even the stars?

***

Last Friday an old Mexican woman working behind a stall in Chicago airport asked me if I drank. She was happy when I said no. She left her husband in Mexico, she says, because he beat her and because he drank. She works long hours and everyday prays for her son. On the plane to Mexico City a Mexican man told me enthusiastically how he was going to visit some strip bars in a town near Cuernavaca, drink a lot of liquor, and sample the local women. All for much cheaper than is possible in Chicago. As he loudly told me of his plans, a woman sitting in front of him with her children asked him to shut up. He went on to recount a time when he was caught driving when utterly drunk by the police near Cuernavaca. A healthy bribe meant he avoided costly legal proceedings. He said you can murder someone in Mexico and a big enough bribe will set you free. If he was aware of how his willingness to bribe contributes to a culture of corruption, lawlessness and hence murder, he did not say.

"As a person acts, so he becomes in life. Those who do good become good; those who do harm become bad. Good deeds make one pure; bad deeds make one impure. So we are said to be what our desire is. As our desire is, so is our will. As our will is, so are our acts. As we act, so we become." - Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

"When you keep thinking about sense objects, attachment comes. Attachment breeds desire, the lust of possession that burns to anger. Anger clouds the judgement; you can no longer learn from past mistakes. Lost is the power to choose between what is wise and what is unwise, and your life is utter waste. But when you move amidst the world of sense, free from attachment and aversion alike, there comes the peace in which all sorrows end, and you live in the wisdom of the Self." - Bhagavad Gita

The death of two fathers

2006-11-20T01:57:00.001-06:00

Someone asked me recently if what I write in this blog is true. Of course it is. I will share a tale with you which you can choose to disbelieve if you like. But I assure you, it is true.

My mother and father separated when I was four years old. I took the loss of my father badly. I missed having a father very much. I remember when he came back to visit our house with a new wife and a small boy wrapped in a white sheet, my half-brother. I felt abandoned.

When I met my step-father for the first time, he was not yet my step-father. He was my neighbor. I told him that I used to have a father, but he went away, and I did not have one anymore. Imagine a five year old boy saying that to a grown man. He remembered it. Later he and my mother got together. I remember the day my mother telling me I could call the man who had become my step-father "Dad". I remember him hugging me for the first time, when we were alone one evening. I felt safe.

I don't remember much from my youth, but I remember these things, for they were of seminal importance to me.

My step-father died of lung cancer in 1996. I was living in Manila at the time. He called me on the telephone on the day he died. I did not know he was going to die that day. I asked him if he was going to enjoy the cricket season that was coming up. He said, with a particular tone of voice, "no I don't think so." Later that day he coughed and coughed, coughing up blood and parts of his lungs into a bucket. He turned a different color and drowned in his blood as my step-sister held him. I attended his funeral in Upper Hutt, New Zealand. When I came back to Manila a week after he died, I went back to my internship on a Monday and there was a letter from him. He had sent it the day he died.

I was at work in 1998, still in Manila, when my mother called on the telephone to tell me some bad news. There was that tone of voice again. I thought immediately "my grandmother has died", but my mother had called to tell me my biological father had been hit by a train and killed instantly. Here is the the part that cannot be true, but is. I had written him an e-mail shortly before my mother had called, but I had not sent it. It was to be my first communication with him in a year or so. I even signed off with "Love" which was not something I did with him in those days. By the time my mother called me, he would have been dead for quite some hours, as the police had a difficult time locating his wife so they could notify her of the tragedy.

My biological father and I were not close. He rarely communicated with my brother and I when we were small boys, and as we got older things did not really improve much.

What I have to say next has no scientific basis that I am aware of. But I will say it anyway. Imagine if I had sent the e-mail to my biological father the day before he died, and he had read it. That would have been nice. But did we deserve that? Maybe it was our own stupid fault for not keeping in contact with one another. Instead, for some reason I had a strong urge to write it after he had been killed, even though I had no way of knowing he had died. Maybe he communicated with me after his death. Maybe in writing the e-mail that was never sent, he somehow read it. Who knows.

One thing is certain: for me the deaths of my two fathers were entirely different in character, but they tell a story that is fair and just. With my step-father our communication on the day of his death reflected our life together, and with my biological father it reflected the life we did not have together.

Loyal Daughters of Notre Dame

2006-11-17T06:30:00.001-06:00

It was sometime in 1998, Manila. I was lying on a bed. Some men and maybe a woman were holding me down. I don't remember exactly, as I was not totally aware of all that was happening around me. I was wearing no underwear. A foreign object had been inserted into my anus, up past my rectum and into my colon. It hurt. It really hurt. My screams could be heard from the hallway. My girlfriend at the time, Buena, was debating with herself whether to charge into the room and put an end to things, but she did not. I could hear a female voice--the voice of authority and control in the room--saying again and again, "just a little bit further". I begged her to stop, but she did not. She continued looking at the television screen. The pain was unbearable. At last it stopped, and I passed out.

The foreign object in my intestines was a video camera. The woman who put it there was a doctor. The people holding me down were nurses. A person was missing: the anesthetist, who was supposed to make me unconscious before things got underway. He or she had not shown up. I had given my consent to the doctor to proceed with the procedure with a much reduced level of anaesthetic that she herself administered.

Rape is an event that occurs without the victim's consent. I have never been raped. I do not know what it is like to experience rape. But I do know for years after that traumatic experience in the hospital, there was no way anyone was going to put any kind of object anywhere near my anus. I may not ever give consent to it.

Sexual violence attacks the integrity of body, mind and spirit. This is what gives it its power. If it merely attacked the body, its effects lasting as long a common cold, then it wouldn't matter so much (ignoring of course the transmission of disease). Instead, its violation is profound, penetrating not only the body but emotions deep within the mind, emotions we cannot fully understand let alone control.

The raw sensitivity and brutal intensity of these emotions is perhaps known fully only to those who experience it, or immerse themselves in empathy with those who have. I would never have known the sense of violation of being "felt up" unless it happened to me. Of the range of sexual assaults, this is extremely minor. Yet I can never forget the time in San Francisco more than thirteen years ago when I was felt up. For the first time in my adult life I was wearing a dress. It was Halloween, and my costume for one of Castro's famous street parties was tame compared to many others. While leaving a bar with two of my friends, an Australian named Slim and an Austrian named Helma, someone, who I could not identify, placed a hand up the inside of my legs and headed toward my genitals. I tried to turn and around and see who it was, but people were packed in so tightly I could not do so. It was truly a creepy, awful and absolutely unwelcome feeling, leaving me with a sense of violation far more powerful than I would have ever imagined before experiencing it.

When I hear my female friends talk of their fear of being raped, I listen with all my heart and soul. I can ask them to describe how they felt, to hear how their body and mind responded to the fear. But I know that I cannot really know unless I experience that fear myself. My body and mind does not have the memory of rape, only the imagination of it.

This lack of experiential memory, paradoxically, is one reason among many why it is so crucial that initiatives like that of University of Notre Dame senior Emily Weisbecker's play Loyal Daughters are widely seen and discussed. The play, whose theme is sexuality and sexual assault as told by Notre Dame students, gave voice to actual student victims of sexual violence on and off campus. They included a woman raped in a library toilet by a member of the university's famous college football team, another woman raped by two men one after the other, and the attempted rape of one man by another. Their stories were at times graphic, and always real.

Loyal Daughters was performed this week at Notre Dame amidst some controversy, as the President of Notre Dame, Father Jenkins, withdrew his complete support for the play on the grounds that it 'at times takes a "neutral stance" toward consensual sex outside of marriage.' However according to student newspaper the Observor, Weisbecker said 'the goal of the play was not to explain Catholic teaching to audiences or preach right from wrong but rather to give "a glimpse of what's really going on [so they can] make [their] own decisions."'

In his inaugural address as President, Father Jenkins said "We will strive to build a community generous to those in need and responsive to the demands of justice – strengthened by grace and guided by the command to love God and neighbor. . . . Catholic social teaching insists that we embrace the whole human family, especially those in greatest need."

Women and men who have been sexually violated as students, faculty and workers are among those in greatest need of help on our campus. While I fully respect that one Father Jenkin's many responsibilities is to represent the teachings of the Catholic Church authentically, wisely and insightfully, I cannot help but wonder if his withdrawal of full support for the play undermined his support for ending sexual violence at Notre Dame. Would it have been possible for the women and men to tell their stories of sexual violence through the play without representing the reality of the environment in which these acts take place? Had this environment been stripped out of the play, would the audience have been able to relate their own everyday norms and attitudes on topics such as sex and alcohol to the dreadful acts the play reported? It is not enough to know that sexual violence occurs within the Notre Dame community. The play was responsible not only because of what it reported but also because it implicated attitudes many students hold, including those who would not dream of actually committing sexual violence.

As Father Jenkins himself said in his inaugural address, the "first principle" of a Catholic University is that "Knowledge is good in itself and should be pursued for its own sake." The second principle: "There is a deep harmony between faith and reason." Genuine social change requires not only faith in God, it requires faith in people: in their ability to think critically, examining their values and behaviours so that they can change them. With his deep knowledege of and respect for human nature, Father Jenkins knows this as well as anyone. By withdrawing his full support, whether he wanted to or not he weakened our community's ability to discuss openly our problems and make responsible changes in our lives. He weakened our ability to carry on the kind of conversations "in the dormitories, the dining halls, on the quads, and on long walks around the lakes" that he welcomes. We did not need to be preached to in the play. We needed to see ourselves and know more than ever that we need to make the promise of positive social change a reality.

Two phone calls with my mother

2006-10-31T14:49:00.002-06:00

One of my most precious memories of my mother is one, strangely enough, where we were thousands of kilometers apart. We did not even get to exchange conversation. Yet all the same, I felt a powerful connection to her as we shared a special moment in time. It was the evening of December 31, 1999. I was in a large room functioning as the sleeping quarters, kitchen and general living area for two monks. It led into a temple in the Songzanlin Monastery, nestled at the foot of hills overlooking Zhongdian, Yunnan, China. Having just arrived an hour or two before, my hosts were as curious about me as I was about them. They stood looking at me in their robes with attentive smiles as I called my mother to greet her on the new millennium using a cellphone. I looked back at them joyously as I left a message enthusiastically telling her where I was and who I was with.

My mother, Jennifer Lynch

The two monks could not understand the details of much, if anything, of what I was saying. One of them spoke a little English, enough to say "come, sit down" and to welcome me to stay the night with them. In the next few days I discovered he had learned English while walking for three months from Nepal to Dharamsala in India. He would have caught the bus but he had run out of money after catching a bus from Yunnan into Tibet, and then from Tibet into Nepal.

Temple, Songzanlin Monastery

A few days later I received a happy email from my mother telling me about her new millennium experience on a beach in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the surprise and delight she felt surge through her when she listened to the unexpected phone message.

I put in hours and hours of meditation in the ten days I spent at the monastery. I remember going onto the roof of the temple building and gazing up into the stars in the dark of night, thinking that in our deepest consciousness we can outlive even the stars. I remember my host explaining the Chinese occupation of Tibet with simple yet remarkably vivid language: "China sit in Tibet, very bad". I remember him not letting me sweep clean the months and perhaps years of accumulated dirt in the room above the temple. I remember the room we slept in being so cold at night that water would freeze. Then there was the yak butter tea that tasted nothing like tea, but rather just as you would expect a mix of regular butter and hot water to taste. But most of all I remember leaving my mother a happy and hopeful message on the night I arrived.

A few years later my mother became a Buddhist in the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Her new practice and faith was a great help to her as she struggled first with cancer, and then with her impending death. Within fifteen minutes of her passing away in the Mary Potter hospice in Wellington New Zealand on March 29 2006, I made another phone call. This time it was to Lama Karma Samten Gyatso, a Tibetan monk staying in Dharamsala. He performed an "ejection of consciousness" ritual by chanting over the telephone. When the ritual was completed he asked me to locate the crown of her head. When I had done so, he then asked me to grip some of her hair and pull it out. I remember thinking "but it will hurt!" before realizing that it no longer made a difference. Lama Samten informed me that the hair was to be used in a fire ritual to be held later that year in Dharamsala.

Ejection of consciousness ritual

Two phone calls across the world thus connected three Tibetan monks and a mother and son in the great mystery we know as life. There was a connection between those calls. They were not isolated events. They circle both my mother's life and my own.

Thank God and Greyhound

2006-10-25T01:11:00.001-05:00

For the last couple of days I've been visiting my beautiful Tajik classmate Zamira in St Paul and its been great. After a good catch-up after a long time, Zamira and I went to the science museum to see a lot of dead Germans in an exhibition called Body World ("more than 200 real human specimens"), and took some pictures in a park in the freezing cold.

Zamira

On the bus ride here, while motoring past the beautiful fields of rural Wisconsin, I was able to get through almost all of King Leopold's Ghost -- an amazing and tragic tale of the Belgian colonization of the Congo. Life is funny like that isn't it? In our hearts and minds we are in two (or more) continents at once, each just as real as the other.

A couple of guys in America once came up with the country and western song Thank God and Greyhound (She's Gone). One of the guys was from Indiana -- a neat kind of thought to have when riding on a Greyhound bus from Indiana, through Illinois and Wisconsin, and onto Minneapolis St Paul.

Thank God and Greyhound, you're gone
That load on my mind got lighter when you got on
That shiny old bus is a beautiful sight
With the black smoke a-rollin' up around the tail light
It may sound kinda cruel but I've been silent too long
Thank God and Greyhound, you're gone.

Where did she go, the woman of this song? Did she come to the rolling rural land of Wisconsin, where barns nestle up against groves of trees, basking in the late light of the day, fields of golden corn shimmering resplendently? Did she see family homes with devoted parents and content children, or homes with men who beat their women and children? Did she see the fading glory of the fall trees, green, yellow, orange and red? The endless stream of hotels? Did she smell the tawdry odors emanating from the McDonalds found everywhere, especially at Greyhound rest stops? Did she ride on a bus full of white college age students, like this one, or dominated by lower class blacks and whites, like the previous one headed into Chicago?

And what of the man who inspired the song? Did he love the woman? Were they lovers? Probably. Did he regard female orgasms as an expression of biological anarchy? Probably not. Did she think he was hick? Maybe.

What a vast and steamy metropolis America is, gleaming, rural, voluptuous, more compelling than it is forgettable.

Sprinting to God

2006-10-17T23:36:00.001-05:00

Two rows of men were neatly lined up for prayer in the Al Noor Mosque in South Bend tonight. As is the custom, the women were partitioned off in another side of the prayer hall. The men, old and young, were close to one another as they submitted themselves to God. One father had his young boy with him, an enthusiastic little fellow who took great delight in sprinting joyously across the prayer carpets and up and down the stairs while the elders were solemnly praying. His magnificent smile and sparkling eyes rippled across the room as he positively galloped back and forth. Occasionally he made room for himself in the tiny gap between his father and another man, boldly squeezing in his small body, forcing the men to shuffle sideways. His head barely came up to their waists, but he knew how to pray and his lithe body made the older men's bowing and kneeling seem labourious in comparison.

The little boy reminded me of a story from my Jewish friend Eliyahu McLean. When Eliyahu was a student in New York, like many other students he eagerly anticipated meetings headed by Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), a highly prominent Rabbi in the Chabad/Lubavitch branch of Chassidic Judaism. Emotions were running high among a large proportion of Schneerson's followers that any day the Rabbi would announce publicly that he was the Messiah. Many of his followers believed he was the Messiah, and he did nothing to dissuade them of this belief. Students had their pagers set to alert them when Schneerson was to appear at a meeting. When they were studying together, their pagers would all go off at the same time, and they would sprint through the streets of Brooklyn to the large meeting hall. Despite Schneerson being partially paralysed by a stroke and unable to speak, his presence was nonetheless electrifying. He never did announce his role as Messiah, and today his followers are are divided as to his status. Chabad/Lubavitch Jews who believe he was merely a normal Rabbi have a normal sized picture of him on the wall of their synagogues, whereas those who believed he was indeed the Messiah typically make do with a truly enormous portrait of Schneerson.

Believers all make their own way to God, some a little quicker than others it seems.

The boy who learned to cook

2006-10-04T13:32:00.001-05:00

I recently made a new friend from Kenya. He knows how to cook, being taught by his mother from a young age how to not only cook, but also wash dishes and generally make himself helpful around the house. When he was a small boy, he thought nothing of this, because for him this was normal. When he became older, however, and played with other boys, he realised this was far from normal. He realised the other boys had to do none of these things. Instead, the women and girls of the house did everything. He questioned the wisdom of his mother's approach, and began to rebel. One day his mother sat him, his three brothers and two sisters down and had a talk with them. She pointed out that as there were only two girls, and four boys, it was unfair to expect the girls to do all the work for the boys. She had a valid point there, my friend had to admit. But we all know that inequity is often insufficient motivation to change people's personal behaviours, especially if it involves them doing extra work. She then asked the children if one day they might like to be married.

"Of course!", replied all the children.

She said to the boys, "What do you think of a situation where one day you come home and you are hungry. There is a lot of food in the house, but you do not know how to prepare it. Imagine some reason why your wife cannot prepare the food for you. Maybe she is not there, or maybe she is not feeling well. How would you feel that all that food was sitting there, and you could do nothing?"

The boys admitted avoiding such a situation would be a good thing.

Then came the clincher. She asked the boys if they wanted to grow up to be real men.

"Of course!", replied the boys.

"Imagine if you cannot cook," she continued. "You can see that your wife can make all kinds of demands from you. She could say 'I want this and I want that, and if you want dinner, you have to do it for me'. If you are totally dependent on her for your food, she can do that. Do you want to be controlled by her? Do you think you would be a real man if she controlled your life like that?"

My friend learned to cook and clean. His mother is a clever woman.

Those weird countries

2006-09-14T11:40:00.001-05:00

The buses plying routes most used by Palestinians in Jerusalem are comfortable, reliable, efficient and relatively inexpensive. Being small, they run regularly, zipping along eagerly from one stop to the next. The only thing that seems to halt their journey is when they are stopped by the police or military, who undertake random checks looking for Palestinians who Israel determines to be in Jerusalem illegally. Palestinians who live in the West Bank and lack an Israeli permit to enter Israel, for instance, are not allowed to visit Jerusalem. If caught they face the prospect of a fine or even imprisonment.

Soldiers questioning a Palestinian bus passenger outside Tantur, July 30 2005.

Today the bus I was on, which runs from beside the old city to Bethlehem, was stopped for such a check. A policewoman boarded our bus. Her job was to collect the identification papers of everyone on board the bus bar the driver for her colleague sitting outside to examine, which she did with all the enthusiasm and joy of someone thoroughly unhappy with their job. She took a lazy glance at my passport, and collected everybody else's papers . She returned in a few minutes with the papers, and we were on our way.

Closer to Bethlehem, our bus was pulled over a second time, this time by the military. A super buffed up soldier entered the bus, his olive green shirt struggling to contain his incredibly muscular and attractively tattooed arms. His hair was cut very short, and his orange sunglasses were resting neatly on his green beret. His automatic weapon was slung over his powerful shoulders like a small toy. He talked to us loudly and enthusiastically in Hebrew, a happy smile and cherry tone of voice putting everyone at ease. The two Palestinian women sitting in the seats in front of me smiled. Having been through the routine many times, I had my passport opened at the page with my photo. He saw I am from New Zealand, laughed loudly, and said in English with a thick American accent "A kiwi!' The two women smiled again. He took my passport from me and briefly thumbed through it. He said I must be a photographer given I was wearing a vest. He was right, and I showed him my camera. He positively beamed and asked if I was going to take photos in Bethlehem or Hebron. I told him I was merely going to Tantur, just down the road. As he moved down the aisle onto the other passengers he methodically checked the overhead racks for anything suspicious, singing a tune from the early 80s as he did so. He may have been jolly but he was certainly thorough.

When the soldier finished checking the other passengers, he said "Ok Mr Kiwi, come with me off the bus please." Mr Super Buff then asked the driver to refund my bus fare before escorting me off the bus to be interviewed by another soldier. The bus left. Like the first soldier, the second soldier was also of American origin, jolly, and buffed. He was not quite as buffed as Mr Super Buff, but he had obviously spent hours in the gym like his buddy. As he looked through my passport, he began a series of questions. What was I doing in Israel? Photographing my classmates, I said. I pulled out my Notre Dame student ID. Where was I going? Tantur, I replied. What was I going to photograph there? I said I was staying there. Then the interesting questions began.

"You have been to a lot countries this year, and you cannot tell me that's for tourism," he said.

I said he was right, explaining that I was taking photographs of peace studies students doing their fieldwork for an exhibition to be held at the University of Notre Dame, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. I began listing each country I had been too, and the names of my fellow students -- Hala from Lebanon, who is in Cambodia. Maria Lucia from Colombia and Tania from Sri Lanka, who are in the Philippines. Mark and Lisa from the United States, and Lison from India, who are in South Africa. Alicia from the United States, YatMan from China, and Patrick from Zimbabwe, who are in Uganda. He interrupted me and I jokingly asked if any of the students are from the United States. And then came the important question.

"What were you doing in Pakistan," he asked, "also photographing students?"

"Attending another classmate's wedding," I said, grinning. "I got detained at the airport for seven hours because of that."

He laughed and said "Yes, you will get questioned after being in a country like that. Those other countries are weird enough, but Pakistan, now that's something else."

"It's a complex society," I said. "You should visit it. I have a Jewish friend working in the World Bank who visits all the time "

"No way, I am happy here!" he said as he handed my passport back.

I hopped on the next bus, whose passengers had already been checked by the first soldier, and made my way home to Tantur.

Life in Jerusalem

2006-09-13T07:30:00.001-05:00

On Saturday I spent the day with a Jewish religious peacebuilder friend of mine, Eliyahu Maclean. Because it was Shabbat (the sabbath), and because Eliyahu is an orthodox Jew, that meant I could not operate any technology until the Shabbat ended. For instance I could not use the telephone or a camera (shock!). In the morning we went to a long service at a synagogue, and then in the afternoon we had lunch at a friend of his--a woman who had 14 children before her Rabbi husband left her for a younger woman. Her house was modest and cosy. I have never seen so many books in such a small place.

Eliyahu McLean

The sense of community among people who went to the synagogue is strong and vibrant. They loved to sing and swap stories. There was a point where I really wanted to use my camera--after the service, when people were drinking and eating, I noticed a woman in her 60s who was wearing giant platform shoes, a bright yellow dress, a huge blonde wig that made her look like she was 20, and an enormous pair of sunglasses.

Eliyahu was delighted to show me pictures of his trip earlier this year to India with his old friend Haj Ibrahim. They attended a conference on world ethnic religions, whose participants included indigenous sharman's from Latin America and Swedes attempting to recover their pre-Christian religious identity. A huge banner on the stage of the conference had the theme "spirituality without religion" prominently displayed in bold letters. I am sure that is an idea that would excite some people, but what the organisers really meant was religion without Christianity and Islam. Prominent in the conference were the Hindu fascists the RSS. Being India, there were many tens of thousands of participants, most of them men. You can imagine the noise as the massive crowd shouted triumphant Hindu slogans and listened to condemnations of Christianity and Islam. It was remarkable that Haj Ibrahim and Eliyahu were at invited at all. Naturally Haj Ibrahim wore his traditional Palestinian dress and kaffiyeh wherever he went. He charmed everybody, as usual, including even the head of the RSS. When he addressed 2000 students at a local school, he told them what he tells everybody--"you are welcome to my home".

Haj Ibrahim with another religious peacebuilder friend of his, Rabbi Fruman

The local media had a field day with Eliyahu and Haj Ibrahim, putting a photo of them on the front page with the headline "the enemies hug", a rather dramatic announcement given they have been close friends for years.

On Friday morning, I went to Tel Aviv to take photos of my classmate Moon in a meeting, before heading to Ramallah to take photos of Moon attending another meeting. We were taken to Ramallah by the co-chairperson of the organisation I used to intern for, the Israel Palestine Centre for Research and Information. The co-chairperson, Mohammed Dajani, comes from a distinguished family with a long history in Jerusalem. It is his family that owns the abode where Jesus was believed to have had his Last Supper. Moon and I had a brief meal at Mohammed's home. Jesus did not appear for lunch, at least not in a form I was aware of.

Such is life in Jerusalem.

Separation

2006-09-13T06:50:00.001-05:00

Jerusalem is a city I am familiar with, having lived here for half a year. Returning to Jerusalem has surprised me. I have experienced a sadness I did not anticipate, a sadness caused by the overwhelming sense of separation the city engenders. Palestinians are separated from Jews by the separation barrier. Jews are separated from their most holy site, the Temple Mount. Muslims call this same holy site the al Haram al Sharif. Today Muslims control this site, and yet many Palestinian Muslims living in the West Bank and Gaza are seperated from this site because Israel denies them permission to enter its territory.

Dome of the Rock on the al Haram al Sharif

With a classmate I discussed the sense of sadness I feel at the sense of separation here. I was not able to articulate at all well what I was feeling. My time here now is different to my time here last year. Then it struck me. Life has not changed here so much since I left, but I have. I am separated from my mother, who died earlier this year. I am separated from those I love most dearly. I have become more sensitive to the pain of separation.

I am reminded of a story from India my meditation teacher Eknath Easwaran taught me. It has been years since I read it, but if anything its profundity has only increased since I first saw it. Once there was a man walking through a field with God. They were talking. God was thirsty and asked the man to get him a cup of water. The man walked to a village and in the first house he came across, he was greeted by a magnificently beautiful woman. The man fell in love. He forgot about the cup of water. He had a family with the woman. Life was good. The family prospered in the happy life of the village. One day there was a flood. Everyone in the village died except the man, who was devastated at the loss of his wife and his family. God appeared before the man and asked him if he had his cup of water.

This religious tale resonates deeply with me because it reminds me of one the central dilemmas of humanity, separation. One is tempted to think the ultimate form of separation is death. Yet according to the mystics what we are really separated from is the divine Self within us all. Until we are in union with God within, we will always be searching for ways to overcome that separation.

Learning to pray at the Western Wall

In life we seek connection with others, through community, family, our work and of course most especially through those we love. This story tells us in dramatic terms that no matter how deep and beautiful a connection with we have with others, we should always strive for the divine Self within.

You might be asking yourself, this is all very well and good, but what does this have to do with something like the separation barrier? Is not this barrier an expression of Israeli power imposing its will upon the Palestinian people? Is not one of the goals of the barrier--in some places an 8m high wall, in other places a fence--to reduce violence? Here you are talking of divine love, while in Jerusalem, this holy city, it is power that carries the day.

I ask you in return, is the separation of Palestinian and Israeli peoples the best way to reduce hatred and fear between them? Or will it merely increase hatred among those it affects most negatively? But most of all, is the vision it is based on all that humanity is capable of? Is it the best we can expect from the Holy Land for now?

Intimacy and power side-by-side

Naturally different people will have different answers to these questions, as well as questions of their own. I am left wondering, however, how to connect love with power, and human bonds with human separation. I am wondering how intimacy is confronted by the ordinary facets of everyday life. And I want to write about them in this blog.

A quail of a tale in Pakistan

2006-09-12T09:20:00.003-05:00

Depending on the intensity of the traffic and the state of repair of the Grand Trunk road, the village of Pabbi is about 45 minutes from Peshawar in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan. Among NWFP’s valleys and fertile plains are found idyllic villages. Here life is agricultural, governed by the coming and going of the seasons. Crops in golden fields sway gently in the breeze. Tall elegant trees line paths between villages and fields. Sporadically a lovingly tended garden resplendent in flamboyant color bursts forth amidst the muted browns and greens that dominate the landscape. Hardly a sound can be heard apart from nature’s gentle soothing charms. Pabbi is not such a village. It assails the senses as a city does, her raucous markets teeming with people, and buses and vans and trucks and most especially rickshaws spewing out noxious exhaust fumes, soot and dust. A garish hand painted sign dominated by a giant set of teeth advertises a dental practice; beneath it tired donkeys trot past baring their own teeth at blows from the sticks of their masters. Squashed vegetables and fruits litter the roadside. Garbage festers in open drains, the acrid stench of their dank waters mingling with the biting smells of cooking wafting over the imposing walls of secluded homes.

Children playing amidst Pabbi's alleys

Pabbi may have the body of an adolescent city, but the cultural blood flowing thickly through her veins is pumped by a rural heart. Vast loosely extended families cluster alongside various lanes and roads of the village, linked by forgotten marriages of years gone by. People rise early in the morning. Crops are tended in fields scattered throughout the village, becoming more abundant further away from the main road.

In Pabbi females and males are profoundly segregated from a budding age until death. Only children are free to see whom they please. Females are enveloped by flowing burkas whenever they go into the streets. Some men call the burkas shuttlecocks, for when they are white--as they often are--the resemblance is striking.

Shuttlecocks in field, Pabbi

Refugees from Afghanistan have made their home in between the seams of interlocking family units in Pabbi, where despite the gangs they have formed and occasional police raids, life is safer and more prosperous than in Afghanistan. Although like the locals they too are Pukhtuns, locals refer to them as Afghans, noting that someone must be an Afghan if they are unable to locate where in the village the locals live.

Afghan girl, Pabbi

As Pukhtun culture dictates, wives move in to live with their husbands in large family compounds, where brothers share the same compound as their parents. In the sanctity of the home gender demarcations rigidly and stubbornly retain their force, with brothers barred from laying eyes on their sisters-in-law even in progressive families. From one generation to the next the marriage of first cousins is especially common--birth defects are a subsequently reality in some families. Despite this danger marriages between cousins remain popular, not only to secure the financial standing of the family and because of limited social opportunities for young men and women to meet one another, but also because people who are not known cannot be trusted.

Girl in alley, Pabbi

I spent thirty days in Pakistan. Although it was not my first exposure to the country, my thoughts were dominated as never before by a simple virtue: trust. Or more particularly, an apparent lack of trust exhibited by many Pakistanis toward each other and to human nature more generally. It has scarred seemingly every aspect of Pakistani society. Where does this profound distrust come from? Although I was not able to come to any substantial conclusions beyond mere speculation, throughout this little piece I will share one or two examples, and some ideas. Perhaps some readers may like in turn to share their own observations.

Boys in madrassa (school), Pabbi

***

Pabbi is the village of Dr. Sher Zaman Taizi (DSZT), a former government worker turned novelist, academic, historian and translator. Cicero is reputed to have proclaimed “He who does not know history is destined to remain a child.” DSZT knows history. Born November 3, 1931 in the house of Kator Shah in Pabbi, DSZT is an authentic village intellectual in whose accounts the echoes of the distant past reverberate as robustly today as those from the present. Language fascinates him. Once in conversation he explained the origin of the early symbols of the ancient Egyptians, alif and beit. These characters eventually found their way into Arabic, and are still in use in Arabic to this day. He pointed out in English we use the term alphabet, the first two Middle Eastern characters thus linking East and West.

Dr. Sher Zaman Taizi (DSZT), Pabbi

I share with DSZT a common interest in the life of the great Pukhtun and Muslim leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988). I have been a guest in DSZT's home on two occasions now, first in 2001 and most recently in 2006. Our admiration for this truly remarkable man has led us to become friends.

DSZT has just finished translating the Pashto autobiography of Khan into English. Khan had two autobiographies, the earlier and less detailed of which is English. Unfortunately his more detailed autobiography was written late in life, when his memory was naturally not as strong as it once was. Furthermore he was not a great writer. Nevertheless the value of its translation should not be underestimated, as it will assist more people to become familiar with Khan's vision and practice of a vigorous, tolerant and spiritually grounded Islam, and his hitherto unique historical innovation in forming a disciplined, well-trained and highly organized nonviolent army.

Khan took on landlords, British imperialism, and ignorant local religious clergy with a powerful sense of honor and dignity that sprung from his total conviction that nonviolence would advance his people's lot. A practical visionary, in addition to his nonviolent army, the Khudai Khidmatgars (Servants of God), he founded schools, a journal and political organizations. He initiated a social revolution where formerly marginalized peoples achieved positions of respect and social power. He campaigned for the liberation of women. He did so in a complex, deeply stratified society where poverty and illiteracy were the norm. For his work he spent thirty years in prison yet never advocated revenge.

Policeman by Qissa Khawani Bazaar, Peshawar

Khan did all this while working through his people's culture, using strong cultural traits such as a sense of honor and the value of keeping one's word to overcome elements of cultural decay. These included a fanatic fascination with revenge as well as more mundane characteristics that retarded their development, like their disdain for trades like shopkeeping.

While sitting over a cup of piping hot tea on an equally hot day in the dusty village of Pabbi it is easy to believe with total conviction the truth of DSZT’s assertion that for Pukhtuns, their culture is more vital than their religion of Islam. The religious clergy likes to see themselves as the arbitrators of religious life, but they know that should their religious preaching contradict local customs, they will be ignored. Besides this, their religious knowledge is weak and DSZT goes so far to refer to them as parasites.

Man laughing in Islamic bookstore, Peshawar

One is tempted to relegate Islam to be of little force compared to local cultural norms. This would be wrong of course. Islam does exert considerable influence on the thinking of most Pukhtuns. Khan himself used Islam to advance the notion of nonviolence among Pukhtuns. Yet there are cultural norms so deeply held by a large number of Pukhtuns that one wonders what possible sway religious teachings could have in opposition to them. Take the issue of “honor killings” in which Pukhtuns who are perceived to have violated cultural norms are killed for their transgressions, including especially if they have broken taboos like sexual activity outside of marriage. Perpetrators are likely to be killed by their community or family if they get caught engaging in such behavior. Only those who are able to exploit their position of privilege and power, like landlords, are able to regularly get away with extra-marital heterosexual (and homosexual) behaviors.

DSZT and I had a passionate discussion about honor killings. He is a strong proponent of them, going so far as to refuse to call them honor killings. Couching his argument in terms of rights, DSZT believes that when an individual violates cultural norms, they have violated the rights of the community and must therefore be punished. I suggested that even if one was in total agreement that such behaviors were in violation of community rights, why did the perpetrator need to be killed? Could they not be punished in some other manner? He responded by saying that such people were no longer human, and therefore had to be killed. I pressed the issue further, saying that people can be led into such behaviors due to difficult circumstances over which they may have had little control, such as traumatic marriages devoid of love or childhoods in which they experienced sexual or emotional abuse. Furthermore, people make mistakes. Is not compassion therefore superior to community sanctioned murder? DSZT rejected this approach. He said that were these punishments not in place, society would break down and many people would naturally behave immorally. Killing wrongdoers is therefore essential to preserve decency.

The idea that people will behave badly should there not be a fear of punishment is not intrinsically wrong. There is an element of truth to it. Yet the idea that people must be killed to enforce limits on sexual behavior is predicated on the notion that people cannot be trusted. It indicates a fear of what people could do if they are free. In doing so, it shuts down the space for individual spiritual and moral growth by placing totalitarian faith in exacting adherence to community norms. The most prominent aim of honor killings is not the growth of individuals and their society, but the application of the most severe form of control over individual behavior possible--death--to enforce a vision of a good life which is clearly not shared by all people at every point of their life.

In his classic work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire stated that freedom is “the indispensable condition for the quest of human completion.” Early last century, in his book Jnana Yoga Swami Vivekananda expressed the same idea even more forcefully:

[Y]ou must remember that freedom is the first condition of growth. What you do not make free, will never grow. The idea that you can make others grow and help their growth, that you can direct and guide them, always retaining for yourself the freedom of the teacher, is nonsense, a dangerous lie which has retarded the growth of millions and millions of human beings in this world. Let men have the light of liberty. That is the only condition of growth.

DSZT is a progressive Pukhtun man. His ideas on honor killings are likely representative of Pukhtun males of his generation, and probably a good number of Pukhtun females as well. Yet they are not representative of all Pukhtuns. Generational change may be taking place. One person who embodies such change is Samar Minallah, who is Executive Director of EthnoMedia and Development in Islamabad. She acts as media consultant to a range of organizations.

Samar Minallah, Islamabad

Samar is a Persian name meaning fruit. Minallah is Arabic, meaning from Allah.

Samar is a Pukhtun who is working to reform her culture, focusing on the rights of women. Samar says that the situation of women is very difficult to change in the NWFP. “It really is one of the close to untouchable aspects of Pukhtun life,” she says.

Samar has faced heavy criticism for this work by Pukhtuns who believe she is unpatriotic and embarrassing Pukhtuns. However, when she has spoken out, she has also received support from Pukhtuns who like what she says but feel powerless to say the same thing. Like DSZT, she believes that generally speaking, culture is more important to Pukhtuns than Islam. Being a worthy Pukhtun is more important than being a worthy Muslim. The honor of being a Pukhtun must be defended. Samar believes that aspects of Pukhtunwali--the ancient code of Pukhtun honor and custom--are good, even as there are other areas in need of reform.

I was interested to know how Samar developed the consciousness to work with women on the reformation of Pukhtun culture. She told me that she was encouraged by her father to develop friendships on an equal basis with Pukhtun women living in villages in rural areas, despite their lower socioeconomic class. As Samar grew older, she began to develop an awareness of the restrictions that these women faced in their lives, and which she did not face herself.

Woman watches wedding dancing, Rawalpindi

Interested in anthropology, Samar began documenting the cultural traditions associated with tribal Pukhtuns who were visiting shrines. She was interested in the particular customs of such visits. She noted that through folksongs, many of which are developed by women, women had a public forum in which they could air their problems in a culturally acceptable manner, somewhat anonymously but still publicly. The folksongs therefore contain a lot of meaning. Being a Pukhtun woman herself, Samar found that the tribal women accepted her and were very open to sharing their problems with her.

Samar points out that culture is never static. What is seen as a fixed cultural tradition today may have developed over time from an honorable tradition into a profoundly negative one. For instance, a current “traditional” method of dispute resolution involves the payment of a girl to a family that has been wronged. Samar has documented this practice in two districts in the settled areas (settled areas are parts of NWFP under formal government rule, as opposed to tribal areas which are largely autonomous). A similar practice occurs in other provinces of Pakistan, albeit with different names. Historically, Samar believes this tradition involved a girl from one family or village going to another family or village, and returning with gifts, signifying the respect of one family or village for the women of the other. However this practice decayed until it reached its present form. Samar is challenging this practice of dispute resolution in the Supreme Court, hoping to have it declared illegal.

Old man, Rawalpindi

There is the difference between the culture of the Pukhtuns living in the tribal areas, and Pukhtuns living in the settled areas. In the tribal areas, women work in the fields. Men are happy to introduce their wives to guests. In the settled areas, men will not do this. This may be because cultural traditions are more easily enforced when there is sufficient economic prosperity. In the tribal areas, women must work outside the home. Naturally they will meet outsiders from time to time. However, in the settled areas, it is not seen as necessary that women work outside the home.

As part of her work, Samar produced a talk show for a Pashto television channel, which she hosted. She invited some respectable guests. One of these guests was Dr Wiqar Ali Shah, a historian whose published works include research on Abdul Ghaffar Khan in the Khudai Khidmatgars (KKs). On the program, he defended the honor killing of women and said this is justified under Pukhtunwali. Samar was shocked that a professor from a prestigious university in Islamabad would advocate such a position. She temporarily forgot her role as talk-show host to challenge those statements of Dr Wiqar Ali Shah. She believes that due to his role as an academic, he is a role model to many young Pukhtun men.

In my opinion Samar is right. The primary role of an academic in society is to develop and pass on ideas to others. When these ideas include the killing of women for particular behaviors, then the person advocating them has one hand on the handle of the knife that is driven into the chest of the women being killed, and the other hand on the mouth that is smothered to stop the screams. Freedom is never merely an abstraction.

***

One approach to understand the intensity of distrust in Pakistan is to link it to the prevailing political and economic conditions. Since the country's creation in 1948, her governments have been dominated by military dictatorships; Pakistan is currently ruled by a military dictator. Their claims of selflessly serving the people aside, it is hard to escape the conclusion these regimes have grossly retarded Pakistan’s political progress. One Pakistani illustrated this with a vivid analogy. Supposing, he said, the guard at the entrance of the hotel you are staying in storms the hotel and takes it over, kicking out or even murdering the owners and dominating the guests. That is what the military has done in Pakistan. The analogy was especially effective because hotel security guards in Pakistan are fairly low status, in contrast to the military, which has awarded its members all kinds of lucrative perks. Indeed the military has enmeshed itself in another of Pakistan's long-standing problems--feudalism--which keeps millions in squalor and makes the practice of genuine political democracy extremely difficult.

Pakistan exists because in the lead up to the independence of India from Britain, some Muslims feared that they would be dominated by Hindus, so they clamored for a state of their own. They successfully convinced a sufficient number of Muslims to join them in fighting for a Muslim homeland. The fruitful collaboration of Muslims like Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the KKs with Hindus directly challenged this separatist worldview. Khan and the KKs did not support the creation of Pakistan. When Pakistan became a reality, they were called traitors by Pakistani elites and severely repressed. Despite the fact that they had sacrificed more than any other Muslims for independence from Britain, they were shamefully ignored or demonized by many non-Pukhtun Pakistanis. Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, called Khan a Hindu. In 1948 150 supporters of the KKs were killed, and 400 wounded at a massacre carried out by the police in Babra. Khan spent fully half of his 30 years in prison in Pakistani prisons.

Could be that Pakistan, which so successfully repressed honest, decent leaders like Khan and in their place put feudalists, dictators and extremists, is naturally, almost unconsciously, going to impart upon its citizens a fear of human nature and a profound distrust in its possibilities? Could there be a connection between political repression and repression of human intimacy, both being founded on perceived need to control and manipulate society?

***

One way to explore these questions could be through poetry. Social activities in Pabbi are limited. Poetry is a local pastime that brings people together to exchange ideas and of course poems. On the first Sunday of the month the Kamil Pashto Adabi (Kamil Pashto Literary Association) meets in what is known as a mushaira. Mushaira, meeting of poets, is itself an interesting name, its etymology including poetry and consciousness. There are more than 250 such Pukhtun poetry groups throughout Pakistan and some cities in the Middle East.

Kamil Pashto Adabi, Pabbi

The use of local languages in Pakistan is highly political. The official languages of Pakistan are Urdu and English; major local languages include Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto (spoken by Pukhtuns), Saraiki and Baluchi. Many Pakistanis converse in their local language but receive their education in Urdu and English, both of which are imported languages. Pakistan television provides only very limited programming in local languages like Pashto, and while there is more extensive radio coverage in local languages radio is not as popular as television. Pashto print media in NWFP are not widely read.

Fifty or sixty years ago it was hard to find an educated person who would write in Pashto. But thanks to the work of Pashto reformers the language has undergone a revival. Reformers included Bacha Khan, who formed the journal Pukhtun, and literary figures who introduced a range of literary genres into Pashto such as novels.

The Pabbi poetry group has been operating since at least the 1970s. For some time it was dormant, but on June 21 1979 it was revived. It is named after a significant literary figure, Dost Muhammad Khan Kamil Momund, who was from a small village close to Pabbi. Kamil was a lawyer and keen student of Khushal Khan Kattak, publishing a popular collection of Kattak’s poetry. The group used to be called the Khushal Pashto Adabi Jirga, but the name was changed on 23 July 1983 because there were already two other groups with the same name in Pakistan.

The Kamil Pashto Adabi presently hold their monthly meetings at the privately operated Cenna School and College, one of two popular schools in Pabbi. The proprietor and administrator of this school is Ghulam Nabi Cenna. Cenna has provided funds for publication of three books of poetry, including one by his son Adnan Mangal, who is a member of the poetry group. Adnan is a passionate and emotional young man in his early twenties who told me within five minutes of meeting me that he “would die” if I did not stay as a guest in his home. I did not stay with him. He did not die. Adnan married last year and he hopes to soon join his wife in Florida, where she lives. As a man who values his culture, I probed him as to how he would cope in a foreign culture and with a wife who might not necessarily share his views on the role of women. It quickly emerged that Adnan would not like his wife to work. “Not at all?” I asked. “What if she wanted to become a lawyer or something like that”. He agreed this would be a fine occupation--he is happy for his wife to be in any job where she is the boss, but he would not like to see her work under someone in any job which impinged on her honor or dignity. He would rather have her at home. Only late in our conversation did it emerge that she is still in high school and is only 15 years old.

Adnan Mangal, son of Ghulam Nabi Cenna, Pabbi

Men and women do not mix in social occasions in Pabbi. The only exceptions are activities such as weddings, which are in any case limited to family only. So in this poetry group only men meet. There is a young and bold poetess in Pabbi, Naheed Sahar. She runs a school known as the Sahar Educational Academy. She was previously vice-principal at Ceena. Despite being a published poet, as the subculture of Pabbi dictates, she is unable to attend Pabbi’s mushaira. Fortunately for her (and her society, I believe), she is able to attend mushaira elsewhere in NWFP, where gender segregation is not so unyielding.

The poetry meeting I attended was a small affair. But this is not always so. On the 22nd of Feburary1980 a big show was made at the Government High School in Pabbi in which guests included the Federal Minister for Education, Tourism and Culture Nawabzada Mohammed Ali Hoti, and the Provincial Advisor for Education Abdul Hasham Khan. The audience was over a thousand. The meeting continued for the whole day and into the night. The theme of the meeting was the famous Pukhtun poet Khushal Khan Kattak, the second most famous poet among Pukhtuns. Kattak was a kind of warrior prince, a man who adored poetry as much as the many women in his life.

Pervez, a taxi driver, is another member of Pabbi's poetry group. He recited his poem by singing it in what is known locally as a “sing-song” manner. His father-in-law Ahmad Khan was a very popular folk singer who used to sing on Peshawar radio. That was in days before the radio station had recording equipment, so such performances were live. Ahmad Khan adored quails, and one time he brought a live quail with him into the studio, which he placed on a chair. While he was singing on air, a man entered the studio and sat in the chair, leading Khan to shout loudly in the middle of his song “You are killing my quail!” One can imagine the bemused reaction of his listeners throughout the province!

Mr Pervez, son-in-law of Ahmad Khan, Pabbi. It was his father-in-law who brought a quail into the radio station and caused a commotion on air.

Other members include Nasir Afridi, who is an English teacher and student of Buddhism and Pashto. Zahidur Rahman Saifi is a railway station master; Liaqat Ashiq, a tailor; Hajji Adbul Wadood, Chief Head Draftsman WAPDA (retired); Mohammed Ghafoor Khan Kheil, another railway station master, but from Swat.

Hajji Adbul Wadood reads his poem, Pabbi

In the meeting the poets read (or like Pervez sing) their poetry, eager for feedback from other members. The meeting was a joyous affair, with affectionate laughter and murmurs of appreciation accompanying most readings. DSZT introduced the idea of poetry criticism to the group. Before this poets read their work and there was little or no feedback. At first poets felt insulted or aggrieved when their work was criticized, but in time they came to appreciate the feedback. DSZT suggested that it was best that they not respond to any criticism or feedback from the group, except when answering questions of clarification. This mirrors the process of publication, for when a book is published, there is no chance for dialog between the reader and writer--the book takes on its own life in the mind of the reader.

Man listening to music, Karachi

Perhaps in poetry we might find expressed the yearnings of the Pukhtun spirit for not only their traditional desire for political freedom, but freedom from all that bonds the human spirit. This could be an interesting area of research. Intriguingly, the most popular poet among Pukhtuns is the mystical poet of Peshawar, Rahman Baba (A.D. 1650-1715). If Kattak is the archetype of a stereotypical Pukhtun male, then Baba could well be its antithesis. Baba hardly bothered following religious norms, instead bathing himself in the intoxicating presence of divine love. For one who feels such ecstasy, what need is there for social customs and rules?