And specifically on the map, look how long the tail used to be.

What is it that must precede the conveying of history? Must there not be the declaration of a double passion, an eros for the past and an ardor for the others in whose name there is a felt urgency to speak? To convey that-which-was in the light of this passion is to become a historian. Because the past is irrecoverable and the others in whose stead the historian speaks are dead, unknowable, she cannot hope that her passion will be reciprocated. To be a historian then is to accept the destiny of the spurned lover - to write, photograph, film, televise, archive and simulate the past no merely as its memory bank but as binding oneself by a promise to the dead to tell the truth about the past.
…
Can the historian ever bring back that which has gone by, ever tell the truth about the past? The mundane view of truth as a matching of event or pattern with what is said about it, a relation of homology between proposition and referent, has been undermined by powerful present-day criticisms of both rationalist and empiricist theories of knowledge. Is the historian as the lover who is spurned a faithless lover after all who seduces with a promise that cannot be fulfilled, yet knows all along that truth as the return of the past in all of its Leibhaftigkeit is a chimera? Does she lie when she avers, “I will tell the truth about the past, je te jure?”
- Wyschogrod, Edith. An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

To what purpose does NYT give space to such claptrap? I am sure there are many thousands of voices waiting for the ability to speak to NYT’s global audience. And they chose this partisan hack?

Aaargh.

update: It was heartening to see that all of the letters to the editors flayed Luttwak. Also, Juan Cole does the dutiful and takes on the theological argument.

Some pics from my recent trip. I have like 3 times more but I got tired of uploading them to Flickr.

Enjoy.

At the top of the ninth, he took the mound to a standing ovation. And stood there, alone, throwing pitches.

See, earlier that day, I had wanted to go to my first ball game of this season. So, I emailed the usual suspects and lo and behold raver comes up with these awesome free tickets. Providence, you know. It was utterly beautiful at the park. The sky cleared up - the breeze - the game. After months in the darkness of Chicago’s coldest winter, I felt as if I had lungs to breathe.

And suddenly this good, nay pretty great night, was about to enter legendary status. I could witness a no-hitter.

The human mind is a funny thing. Well, mine is. I stood there, clapping and hollering, and wishing, wishing more than anything I have wished for, that Gavin would get this no-hitter. I wanted it for him. I wanted it because if it happened, it would be a sign. A clear indication that the impossibilities amassed on my shoulders could dissipate. Hope, right.

That moment, at the top of the ninth, with one out - that was a great moment. That’s what sports can do for you - give you air for your lungs.

The following pictures were harvested from the Daily Waqt over the last month or so. They show you something.

See the Tick Tock Series … XI, X, IX, VIII, VII, VI, V, IV, III, II, I for our journey so far.

This just made my day.

that would be the easy life that i can never have.

in my day dream, i had two rooms in the railway station. and here, i do not embellish my young self. one room would be filled with books. the other room would be filled with mangos.

during that phase, i would often sneak out of the house at night. and hop trains. i know, it was dangerous and insane. but i was in thrall with the sound of the train as it rolls over the gap in the rail.
and the night.

i wanted that clanking silence.

if that makes any sense.

• First off, a sunday reading link to myself! Nathanael Robinson and Manan Ahmed had a conversation about memory and history and they put it up for you to read. It is not anything special (if only to see how badly I write when I write ‘academic’).
• However, I can spot excellent writing from a mile away. Wendy Doniger’s essay in the LRB, The Land East of the Asterik is profound, funny, comprehensive and just an all around must-read on IE, PIE and horses. She really is a beacon of shining light in our dim academic world.
• Also in the LRB is Zizek’s rather merde-y letter on China and Tibet. He seems to be ill-informed about a lot of things in there - including Fareed Zakaria’s brilliance.
• A nice overview of Palestinian cinema by Nicholas Blincoe in the Guardian.
• MQM must be stopped from terrorizing the citizens of Karachi.
• Finally, it appears that bloggers and netizens can now link directly to Encyclopedia Brittanica. Let’s test it: al-Ḥajjāj al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf ath-Thaqafī

Below the fold, another number from Yogi B and Natchatra from Hiphopistan.

update: We will talk soon about this. Until then, enjoy the pictures and, below the fold, a couple of videos in crappy youtube (I will put up nicer streaming verisons on the hiphopistan website):

and

There are a string of factual mis-readings, the most egregious one being that the Red Mosque was a “co-ed” compound which “not only included large numbers of women but also put them in close proximity to men,” and that in this unique madrassah, there was “the militarization of women…and their deployment shoulder to shoulder with men.” Let me answer this, briefly: No, wrong, Nope, and Absolutely off-the-wall. And, I just got off the phone with an erstwhile female student at the seminary, just to make sure I wasn’t all confused and wrong. Jami’a Hafsa, the female seminary, was completely separate from Jam’ia Faridia, the male seminary. They had separate buildings. They were never in contact with each other; no combined rallies; no annual picnic; no campus sports day. Do you remember seeing the pictures of the ninja-warriors-for-islam? Um, did you see any men next to them? Check out this GIS and let me know when you find them fighting shoulder to shoulder. In addition, Devji argues, based on a few last interviews of Abdul Rashid, that the madrassah was not ‘conservative’, nor explicitly anti-Shi’a. Again, if one has any, even remote, understanding of the history of Jami’a Hafsa/Faridia and the connection with Darul Ifta Jamia Benori, Karachi, or if one visits the forums of the Jamia with threads such as Shia Exposed, one wouldn’t make such claims. These are not simple errors since the “mixing of gender and geneologies,” is more or less the fulcrum on which Devji’s entire argument rests. Hence, the classic blunder of “speculative scholarship” - facts are constructed after the “theory” has been solidly established - facts be damned, in fact. I will focus, some other day, in some other venue, on an examination of the “expert on jihad” phenomenon which is currently sweeping the field of South Asian history and political theory. For now, let us disentagle Devji’s convoluted logic a bit more.

Based on his spurious reading, Devji makes two theoretical points, one about Lal Masjid itself and the other about Islamic militancy:
1. Red Mosque folks were motivated by the desire to “occupy the arena of antigovernment struggle in Pakistan’s civil society” and that the “Red Mosque was linked more to the everyday and even secular practices of modern life in the region than to any religious or cult behavior.”
and
2. Red Mosque, particularly the case of Abdul Rashid Ghazi, is “an example of the gradual transformation or at least flattening out of Islamic militancy, which has in many parts of the world been weaned off its dependence on highly organized or institutional forms to become yet another kind of voluntary association that individuals join for their own reasons, often as part-time members rather than full time radicals”.

Devji misreads a lot of things - most importantly, he misreads the fact that the Red Mosque contingent knew P.R. and media relations; that they realized the power of spectacle. The somber force of rows upon rows of burqa-clad seminarians as an image of considerable impact does, in fact, mean that they were keyed-in to the global arena of anti-state, anti-secular, fundamentalist propaganda. But, it is a mistake to read their awareness of message politics with their fundamental cry: “Shariah or Shahadat” (Rule of Islamic Law or Martyrdom). The Message is the Message.

Red Mosque is, of course, a part of Pakistani civil society. To argue that they have “evolved” into a civil social organization is again a misreading. The operational context of any of the religious groups that have cropped up since Jamaluddin Afghani traveled down these roads is always social and civil. They don’t form a civil society organization, they are conceived in civil social terms - hence, the schooling component. Devji’s assertion that Red Mosque is a “mutation of Sunni militancy into the kind of mobilization that is neither nationalist nor in fact militant in any professional way but perhaps nongovernmental” is patently absurd. I don’t even know what and where to begin disputing that because the statement rests on his already factually inaccurate reading of Red Mosque’s history, ideology and operational structures.

However, leaving aside Red Mosque, I want to see if Devji does highlight a new development when he speaks about the “flattening out of Islamic militancy”. Devji, uses as evidence the failed suicide attacks in Glasgow and London in 2007. He believes that since these professional doctors¹ concocted this scheme during their private time, hence, it must mean that they are absolutely amateurs engaging in “extracurricular” activity. This “amateurism” speaks to Devji of Islamic militancy entering a “pluralistic kind of civil society activism.” Well, now. The scholarship that I have read on Al Qaeda (admittedly not much, not my cup of tea) has always highlighted the fact that it operates on the distributed computing model with a host of quasi-independent functionaries operating in rigid, hierarchical organizations. Which is why, unlike other historical examples of anarchists and terrorists, AQ relies so heavily on coded but publicly accessible rhetoric. Their aims and ideologies aren’t “secret” but are disseminated as far as possible. Hence, the teams of experts on our end, trying to find the hidden messages in this or that released video from these terrorists. These videos get abundant airplay, easily discoverable on youtube; forums proliferate wherein folks can divine secret strengths from their sheikh. What I see is, then, the easy availability of mediating messages that functional, yet disturbed, individuals can glom onto and attempt their own interventions into global injustices against their perceived community. This points out only that there exist structural inequalities in societies that permit individuals to “disappear” and “re-emerge” in a new form. Or it may point towards major psychological damage. I don’t know. Was Seung-Hui Cho a case in Devji’s point?

The AQ remains just as much, or as little, professional as it ever was. The recent spate of suicide bombings in Lahore and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, in fact, point to the very meticulous and professional nature of such militancy. These were sophisticated operations. Not civil society activism. Which, by the way, is a particularly offensive way of categorizing terrorism that has claimed thousands of innocents lives across the world.

I know that there should be a space for such “academic” and “psycho-theoretical” discussions. But do we really need to muddy these waters, even more?

1. Devji writes, “Naturally some kind of relationship must have existed between the public and private lives of these doctors, perhaps based on the notions of altruism and self-sacrifice that are meant to inform medical as much as terrorist practices, but my point is that the latter remained distinctly amateurish in character”. I respond, “Huh??”

Hannah Temple, a MEALAC major who graduated last June, told me, “I left Columbia sorry to have had my academic experience in that department. You couldn’t get anything done; it was so bitterly divided. And then there was all the outside instigation, like the film. It didn’t resonate with me, but to some of my friends it did. I think now that it wasn’t really about Columbia, or even Massad. It was about Edward Said. It was as if all those forces had been waiting until he was gone to make a case against him.
[emphasis added]

See:
Irwin, Robert. Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents. London: Overlook Press, 2006

Ibn Warraq. Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2008