Karachi at dusk

We've had a lot of angst, and whatnot about the events in Karachi. Please do read the piece below. Kamal is a friend, too, but he's evolved into one of the most objective observers I know in the business--anywhere. [Yes, more so than I.]

Mohsin Hamid’s latest op-ed is pretty good. Recommended reading for anyone who wants to know how things looked/look from the perspective of the every day life in Pakistan.

"Civil Society" has become the new touch phrase in Pakistani politics. And it’s gotten to the point where people express the same kind of cynicism about it that is usually reserved for words like "Islamist", and "War on Terror", and, well, "Progressive Islam". A friend on one of our alumni mailing lists was getting pretty disgusted by Nawaz Sharif’s piling on to the Civil Society bandwagon.

Tariq Ramadan has an excellent piece about being presented by Tony Blair as the token progressive Muslim. I am often surprised at how often non-Muslims, particularly the current crop of politicians, think that to qualify as a ‘moderate’ or ‘progressive’ Muslim one needs to be apolitical and uncritical of the powers-that-be. Fortunately, Ramadan’s willing to give Tony a smack in the face with a wet fish.

President George Bush’s "war on terror" rhetoric has strengthened terrorist groups by helping them to create a shared identity, the development secretary, Hilary Benn, warned yesterday.The Foreign Office reportedly asked politicians and diplomats to drop the phrase last year.

(Originally written: 2/25/07)

Let’s be blunt: I want stuff to happen, and I’ll generally do my darndest to make it happen—as long as the means are morally permissible, of course. Three examples will suffice.

Today, while my mouth was dry and my stomach rumbling, I opened an email from MPAC (it does not seem to be up on thier site, yet). It was an editorial from one of the few national Muslim organizations that I trust, so I read it from start to finish. Salam al-Marayati wrote about the need of American Muslims to pressure the US Government to benefit more from American Muslim inputs when making policy. As I was reading, I thought that this was actually a good idea. It would finally put American Muslims in publicly prominent positions that help America. This would be a stunning public refutal of Islamophobic charges that Muslims are just freeloaders and freeriders in America. I have no doubt that Mr al-Marayati does not intend to achieve the typical Islamist goal of penetrating our government to assist fellow Islamists overseas like some immigrant Muslim organizations wistfully desire. Instead, I think he genuinely desires this as a public relations coup, one that our community badly needs.

I left this as a comment to Salika’s posting (http://salika.wordpress.com/2006/10/04/moderate-muslim/)

Salam, found you via the Carnival. For what its worth, I think people use the adjective “moderate” when they really mean “moderate in political issues”. I think this is part of the big problem with how Muslims mix temporal politics and conflicts with eternal faith. Non-Muslims pick up on this very well, mostly because they see so many of us doing it first and then use ‘Muslim’ as if it is in the same class as ‘Democrat’, ‘Capitalist’ and not in the same class as ‘Christian’, ‘S

I’m reading Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance, and in the very first paragraph is something that reminded me of someone we all know.

The paragraph reads thus:

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius… A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.

From the ForeignPolicy.com blog:

I’ve got an idea for Sen. Allard’s the next Congressional hearing on the virtues and dangers of immigration. Call Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, to testify. Ask him if he could fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without the 33,000 non-U.S. citizens currently serving in the military. After all, it is Hispanic soldiers who, according to research by demographers at the University of Pennsylvania, are doing a disproportionately high percentage of the dying in Iraq.

There is, I think, a difference between being an American and being a U.S. Citizen. It may be just a semantic difference to some, but it isn’t to me. A day after 9/11, Le Monde published a headline: "Nous sommes tous Américains."