Plato’s Beard

Anthony Appiah’s NYRB article:

How Muslims Made Europe - The New York Review of Books

[...]

Later Christian historians assigned to the Battle of Poitiers an epochal significance. Gibbon remarked that if the Moors had covered again the distance they had traveled from Gibraltar, they could have reached Poland or the Scottish Highlands. Perhaps, he thought, if ‘Abd al-Rahman had won, “the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.” For him, the fate of Christian Europe hung in the balance. After a week of battle, he wrote, “the Orientals were oppressed by the strength and stature of the Germans, who…asserted the civil and religious freedom of their posterity.”[2]

At the time, though, it would have been odd to regard Charles Martel’s victory as guaranteeing religious freedom. The small but influential Jewish community in Iberia had been tolerated in Spain when their Visigothic overlords were still Arian heretics ruling Catholic and Jewish subjects; but Jews began to be persecuted in 589, when the Visigoths converted to Catholicism. For the Jews, then, the Muslim Conquest, bringing rulers who practiced toleration toward them as well as toward Christians and Zoroastrians, was not unwelcome. During the first period of Muslim domination, Christians, too, discovered that they would have religious freedom, so long as they (like the Jews) did not seek to convert Muslims or criticize Islam. The contrast with Frankish rule could hardly have been more striking. The obsession of Catholic rulers with religious orthodoxy was one of the things that made the Dark Ages—as Petrarch was to dub the period from the fifth to the tenth centuries—so dark.

[...]

The original core of the Great Mosque at Córdoba, which stands to this day, was built for ‘Abd al-Rahman in an astonishing burst of architectural fervor, apparently between 785 and 786. With 152 columns, arranged in eleven aisles, it consisted of two parts: a large prayer hall, some two thirds of an acre in area, and an adjoining piazza of the same size, filled with rows of orange trees, which together made up a square whose sides measured about 240 feet. The results, added onto over the centuries, still amaze. Lewis writes:

Its builders devised the art and science of transmuting matter into light and form that medieval Christendom was the poorer for its general inability to comprehend…. The unprecedented innovation of the Great Mosque’s master builder was to loft the coffered ceiling to a height of forty feet by means of an upper tier of semicircular arches that appeared to be clamped to the bottom tier of horseshoe arches supported by columns…. Structurally ingenious, the visual effect of the double arches has been from the moment of completion one of the world’s distinctively edifying aesthetic experiences.

If the Great Mosque was the most evident material embodiment of the civilization of the Arabs in Spain, their intellectual achievements were even more astonishing. Starting in ‘Abd al-Rahman’s time, the Umayyads sought to compete with their Abbasid rivals in Baghdad for cultural bravura. Over the next few centuries, Córdoba alone acquired hundreds of mosques, thousands of palaces, scores of libraries. By the tenth century, those libraries had hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, dwarfing the largest libraries of Christian Europe. The university of Córdoba predated Bologna, the first European university, by more than a century. And al-Andalus was a world of cities, not, like Europe, a world of country estates and small towns. By the end of the millennium, Córdoba’s population was 90,000, more than three times the size of any town in the territory once occupied by Charlemagne. In those cities, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Arabs, Berbers, Visigoths, Slavs, and countless others created the kind of cultural goulash—a spicy mixture of a variety of distinct components—that would generate a genuine cosmopolitanism.

There were no recognized rabbis or Muslim scholars at the court of Charlemagne; in the cities of al-Andalus there were bishops and synagogues. Racemondo, Catholic bishop of Elvira, was Córdoba’s ambassador to Constantinople and Aachen. Hasdai ibn Shaprut, leader of Córdoba’s Jewish community in the middle of the tenth century, was not only a great medical scholar but was also the chairman of the caliph’s medical council; and when the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII sent the caliph a copy of Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, the caliph sent for a Greek monk to help translate it into Arabic. The knowledge that the caliph’s doctors acquired made Córdoba one of the great centers of medical expertise in Europe. By the time of ‘Abd al-Rahman’s successor and namesake, ‘Abd al-Rahman III, in the tenth century, the emir of al-Andalus had the confidence to declare himself caliph, successor or representative of the Prophet and, implicitly, leader of the Muslim world.

Like Charlemagne’s, the emir’s position was partly religious; he was supposed to be (and often was) pious. But piety for the emirs did not mean—as it did for the Holy Roman Emperor—imposing one’s religion on others. From the earliest times, the emirs of al-Andalus accepted conversion but did not demand it. There were, naturally, some pressures to convert: non-Muslim subjects—the so-called dhimmi—were required to pay special taxes; and non-Muslims could be enslaved while, at least in theory, Muslims could not. Still, it probably took about two centuries after ‘Abd al-Rahman’s death in 788 for Muslims to become a majority in al-Andalus.[4] In the cities of al-Andalus, scholars of all three faiths, with access to the learning of the classical world that the Arabs had inherited and brought to the West, gathered and transmitted the learning whose recovery in Europe created the Renaissance.

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Pankaj Mishra writes in The Guardian, about Fareed Zakaria, the latest intellectual empty suit of the talking heads circuit, his latest book, and the vision of India as a neo-liberal capitalist success:

In the past five years bomb attacks claimed by Islamist groups have killed hundreds across the Indian cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur, Varanasi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad. An Indian Muslim was even involved in the failed assault on Glasgow airport in July last year. Yet George Bush reportedly introduced Manmohan Singh to his wife, Laura, as “the prime minister of India, a democracy which does not have a single al-Qaida member in a population of 150 million Muslims”.

To be fair to Bush, he was only repeating a cliche deployed by Indian politicians and American pundits such as Thomas Friedman to promote India as a squeaky-clean ally of the United States. However, Fareed Zakaria, the Indian-born Muslim editor of Newsweek International, ought to know better. In his new book, The Post-American World, he describes India as a “powerful package” and claims it has been “peaceful, stable, and prosperous” since 1997 - a decade in which India and Pakistan came close to nuclear war, tens of thousands of Indian farmers took their own lives, Maoist insurgencies erupted across large parts of the country, and Hindu nationalists in Gujarat murdered more than 2,000 Muslims.

Apparently, no inconvenient truths are allowed to mar what Foreign Affairs, the foreign policy journal of America’s elite, has declared a “roaring capitalist success story”. Add Bollywood’s singing and dancing stars, beauty queens and Booker prize-winning writers to the Tatas, the Mittals and the IT tycoons, and the picture of Indian confidence, vigour and felicity is complete.

The passive consumer of this image, already puzzled by recurring reports of explosions in Indian cities, may be startled to learn from the National Counterterrorism Centre (NCTC) in Washington that the death toll from terrorist attacks in India between January 2004 and March 2007 was 3,674, second only to that in Iraq. (In the same period, 1,000 died as a result of such attacks in Pakistan, the “most dangerous place on earth” according to the Economist, Newsweek and other vendors of geopolitical insight.)

To put it in plain language - which the NCTC is unlikely to use - India is host to some of the fiercest conflicts in the world. Since 1989 more than 80,000 have died in insurgencies in Kashmir and the northeastern states.

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The Indian elite’s obsession with the “foreign hand” obscures the fact that the roots of some of the violence lie in the previous two decades of traumatic political and economic change, particularly the rise of Hindu nationalism, and the related growth of ruthlessness towards those left behind by India’s expanding economy.

In 2006 a commission appointed by the government revealed that Muslims in India are worse educated and less likely to find employment than low-caste Hindus. Muslim isolation and despair is compounded by what B Raman, a hawkish security analyst, was moved after the most recent attacks to describe as the “inherent unfairness of the Indian criminal justice system”.

To take one example, the names of the politicians, businessmen, officials and policemen who colluded in the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 are widely known. Some of them were caught on video, in a sting carried out last year by the weekly magazine Tehelka, proudly recalling how they murdered and raped Muslims. But, as Amnesty International pointed out in a recent report, justice continues to evade most victims and survivors of the violence. Tens of thousands still languish in refugee camps, too afraid to return to their homes.

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This a “PSA” from various movie and sports personalities (Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Aniston, Ellen Degeneres, Dustin Hoffman… even Sarah Silverman who otherwise has built a career out of anti-establishment behaviour, albeit with obligatory “radical” bra removal tricks and reference to herpes):

It is split into two parts. The first part has the personalities urging you to not vote, since it doesn’t matter. The second and longer part turns this around: well, if you care about [insert issue here] then may be you should vote?

This advertisement highlights the danger and possible self-defeating nature of this sort of cleverness, for unfortunately, the first part, taken seriously, makes its argument much better than the second one does. During the first part, the actor Leonardo DiCaprio exclaims “This is one of the greatest financial disasters in American history” closely followed by, I believe, the tennis player Andy Roddick asking us, “Why would you vote?”. Then come a range of voices:

Who cares? The economy is in the toilet!
Who cares about your children’s education?
Reading? Literacy?
Global warming?

Well played (if unintentionally)! Indeed we are in the midst of one of the biggest financial disasters in history. How do your representatives and candidates for PotUS act? They ignore the majority of you who were against this bailout and support it and pass it, including in it such wonderful measures as waiving federal acquisition regulations favouring minority and women owned businesses. Would your vote for McCain or Obama matter? Not really, since they both support the same action in response to the “one of the greatest financial disasters in American history”. Global warming? Both men support “clean” coal and off-shore drilling for oil. Children? McCain has battled all his congressional life against “quotas” and affirmative action, while Obama is worried about the excesses of 70s civil rights and is more interested in lecturing to black fathers.

Where the PSA shines (in the first part, that is) is in pinpointing exactly why your vote doesn’t matter: Who cares? Certainly not most of the candidates you will be permitted to choose from.

Seed: Turning a Blind Eye

The photos of grass-roofed shelters and hostile, body-painted Indians brandishing bows and arrows spread like brushfire around the globe. Survival International, an indigenous rights advocacy group, described the group as “uncontacted,” summoning celluloid fantasies of lost savages who had never seen civilization. Reporters began to describe them as “Earth’s last uncontacted tribe” who reacted violently to the “bird god” in the sky. But then the story collapsed. Meirelles stated in an interview that he had been following the group for two decades. The tribe was neither lost nor undiscovered — the outside world had known of them since 1910. It should have been clear from the beginning; the initial Portuguese reports never claimed the group was “uncontacted.” Introduced by sloppy reporting, this error fanned suspicions that the photos were just a hoax.

The crucial issue raised by these photos of a remote group isolated from our society is not whether, in an age of worldwide connectivity, surveillance satellites, and explosive population growth, we might still have undiscovered neighbors on a shrinking globe — we don’t. In fact, one of Meirelles’s friends first noticed the clearing where the tribe was found while browsing Google Earth. In truth, our reactions to and perceptions of these people reveal far more about us than about them. We easily believe that a band of hostile Indians confronting an airplane from a clearing do so out of ignorance and fear. But the likely truth is harder to face: The tribe might have threatened the observers precisely because they had encountered some of the worst aspects of our culture before, and suffered grievously. These images of a people courageously standing against us are not symbols of their ignorance, but of ours.

[...]

What we really offer to groups like those in the picture is not a utopia. Rather, we offer them the same poverty, anxiety, and health problems suffered by other poor populations in their region. Life expectancies among indigenous groups lag far below mainstream populations, even in countries with adequate health care. A billion people on the planet, already part of our global economy, have no potable water, cannot read, and live on $1 a day or less. Given the choice, they might also choose withdrawal from a system that has failed them.

For now the photos of belligerent Indians, robust and confident enough to stand their ground, suggest that the policy of noncontact is working. But as we begin to see that their aggression is a product of their familiarity with our society’s most abusive and rapacious tendencies, are we learning to restrain our desires and respect their choice to live apart? Can we leave them alone, or are we so thirsty for petroleum, so enamored of mahogany, so resentful of their decision to live differently, that we will destroy the fragments of their world rather than place some limit on our own? Their extinction — and the persistence of our Western way of life — is not inevitable. They’ve asked us nicely — now they’re willing to fight about it.

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An amazing economics experiment and how it got field workers to pick a lot more fruit. - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine

The owner had been paying a piece rate—a rate per kilogram of fruit—but also needed to ensure that whether pickers spent the day on a bountiful field or a sparse one, their wages didn’t fall below the legal hourly minimum. Farmer Smith tried to adjust the piece rate each day so that it was always adequate but never generous: The more the work force picked, the lower the piece rate. But his workers were outwitting him by keeping an eye on each other, making sure nobody picked too quickly, and thus collectively slowing down and cranking up the piece rate.

Bandiera and her colleagues proposed a different way of adjusting the piece rate: Managers would test-pick the field to see how difficult it was and set the rate accordingly, thus preventing the workers from engaging in a collective go-slow. (If the managers made a mistake in their estimate, and the pickers didn’t earn minimum wage, Farmer Smith would make up the shortfall with an extra payment. This rarely happened.) The economists measured the result. By the time the experiment was over, Farmer Smith’s initial skepticism had long evaporated: The new pay scheme increased productivity (kilograms of fruit per worker per hour) by about 50 percent.

The next summer, the researchers turned their attention to incentives for low-level managers, who would also be temporary immigrant workers but who would be responsible for on-the-spot decisions such as which workers were assigned to which row. The researchers found that managers tended to do their friends favors by assigning them the easiest rows. This made life comfortable for insiders but was unproductive since the most efficient assignment for fruit picking is for the best workers to get the best rows. The researchers responded by linking managers’ pay to the daily harvest. The result was that managers started favoring the best workers rather than their own friends, and productivity rose by another 20 percent.

Small wonder that the economists were invited back for another summer. They proposed a “tournament” scheme in which workers were allowed to sort themselves into teams. Initially, friends tended to group themselves together, but as the economists began to publish league tables and then hand out prizes to the most productive teams, that changed. Again, workers prioritized money over social ties, abandoning groups of friends to ally themselves with the most productive co-workers who would accept them. In practice, that meant that the fastest workers clustered together, and again, productivity soared—by yet another 20 percent.

The series of experiments provided a fascinating confirmation that financial incentives can trump social networks, with some precision and much detail about the mechanisms involved.

[...]

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Without any hint of irony or humour, The Guardian worries that Western influence within the United Nations is waning — worrisome because it wrecks “efforts to entrench human rights, liberties and multilateralism”.

Drop in influence at UN wrecks western attempts to push human rights agenda

The west’s efforts to use the United Nations to promote its values and shape the global agenda are failing, according to a detailed study published yesterday.

A sea change in the balance of power in favour of China, India, Russia and other emerging states is wrecking European and US efforts to entrench human rights, liberties and multilateralism.

This perhaps belongs in the same category of new-found Republican concerns regarding sexism and the Bush administration’s alarm at Russian unilateralism (vis-à-vis Georgia). Dare we remind them that the United Nations came about as a response to the two disastrous wars that these nations inflicted upon the rest of the unenlightened world? Or would that explicit notice have as little effect as the implicit caution offered by a history of colonialism, political mischief and unilateral intrusion (Iran, Iraq, Latin America, Afghanistan, Africa, India, Pakistan,…)?

A recent article in the New York Times presents an altogether different picture than the one The Guardian offers, when it comes to US interest or respect for other values and thought. The article ends with a quote from Northwestern law professor Steven Calabresi:

In “ ‘A Shining City on a Hill’: American Exceptionalism and the Supreme Court’s Practice of Relying on Foreign Law,” a 2006 article in the Boston University Law Review, Professor Calabresi concluded that the Supreme Court should be wary of citing foreign law in most constitutional cases precisely because the United States is exceptional.

“Like it or not,” he wrote, “Americans really are a special people with a special ideology that sets us apart from all the other peoples.”

Discussing the use of international opinion in judicial analysis, the NYT articles draws a telling contrast:

Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War.

[...] American constitutional law has been cited and discussed in countless decisions of courts in Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa and elsewhere.

But many judges and legal scholars in this country say that consideration of foreign legal precedents in American judicial decisions is illegitimate, and that there can be no transnational dialogue about the meaning of the United States Constitution.

[...]

The Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning, said John O. McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern, and recent rulings, whether foreign or domestic, cannot aid in that enterprise. Moreover, Professor McGinnis said, decisions applying foreign law to foreign circumstances are not instructive here.

“It may be good in their nation,” he said. “There is no reason to believe necessarily that it’s good in our nation.”

[...]

In any event, said Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago, many Americans are deeply suspicious of foreign law.

“We are used to encouraging other countries to adopt American constitutional norms,” he wrote in an essay last month, “but we have never accepted the idea that we should adopt theirs.”

“It’s American exceptionalism,” Professor Posner added in an interview. “The view going back 200 years is that we’ve figured it out and people should follow our lead.”

[emphasis mine]

In contrast, the New York Times describes the attitude elsewhere (including in India, a country that The Guardian laments is gaining influence in the UN, and whose UN soldiers are prominently pictured at the top of The Guardian’s piece):

The openness of some legal systems to foreign law is reflected in their constitutions. The South African Constitution, for instance, says that courts interpreting its bill of rights “must consider international law” and “may consider foreign law.” The constitutions of India and Spain have similar provisions.

and explains why a shift away from US standards and opinion is occurring:

Frederick Schauer, a law professor at the University of Virginia, wrote in a 2000 essay that the Canadian Supreme Court had been particularly influential because “Canada, unlike the United States, is seen as reflecting an emerging international consensus rather than existing as an outlier.”

House Chairman Failed to Report $75,000 in Income - NYTimes.com

Representative Charles B. Rangel has earned more than $75,000 in rental income from a villa he has owned in the Dominican Republic since 1988, but never reported it on his federal or state tax returns, according to a lawyer for the congressman and documents from the resort.

A while I ago I linked to Stanley Fish’s excellent criticism (Our Faith In Letting It All Hang Out) of those propagating the Mohammed cartoons under free speech justifications. Julian Baggini visits the issue in The Guardian via the Christ penis sculpture:

Julian Baggini: Christ reveals limits of free speech | guardian.co.uk

[...]

Doughty defenders of free speech will have no truck with such quibbling. They insist on a right to offend, wheeling out John Stuart Mill’s venerable “harm principle” to clinch the case: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” And, no, “mere offence” does not constitute harm.

There are two problems with this simple view. Saying that we have a right to offend skips over the question of whether we are right to offend. I have a right to tell random strangers that I think they’re ugly, or that they have terrible taste in clothes, but it would be wrong of me to exercise that right, and not just because of the pots and kettles principle.

But isn’t mockery good, and any belief system incapable of putting up with it deficient in some way? That’s true, but you can’t just ignore the background against which lampooning takes place. Christians, for example, are not oppressed, despite what some wannabe martyrs would have us believe. British Muslims, in contrast, are a somewhat beleaguered minority. We should think twice before mocking them because, while comedy speaking truth to power is funny, the powerful laughing at the weak is not. The difference is only subtle to those too dunderheaded to spot the obvious. Witness Alan Partridge asking a Jewish comedian who uses Jewish humour to “tell us a joke about Jews”.

That does not mean that we should never do anything that causes Muslims offence, or that shows Islam in a bad light, of course; only that we should not do so lightly. The choice is not between an all-out offence offensive and craven silence.

The other reason absolutist claims for speech acts are misguided is that we don’t just utter words, we do things with them, as the Oxford philosopher JL Austin put it. When words belittle or mock, they can reinforce prejudice and hierarchies that have very real effects on people’s lives. Mockery of those already on the margins can shore up the very barriers that limit their life chances.

Free speech is indeed precious, but that doesn’t mean that we have to defend without qualification every moron who abuses it.

[...]

House politics strikes ones of its savviest players:

House Tables Resolution to Censure Rangel - New York Times

The House of Representatives decided on Thursday afternoon to table, by a vote of 254 to 138, a Republican resolution to censure Representative Charles B. Rangel, the powerful New York Democrat who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. The resolution said Mr. Rangel “dishonored himself and brought discredit to the House,” citing a report in The New York Times on July 11 that Mr. Rangel occupied four rent-stabilized apartments in a Harlem building, including one that he used as a campaign office.

Rangel, to refresh your memory, is the same toad who thundered against Hugo Chavez (whose generosity fuels his constituents, unlike the lack of compassion of the leader he defends) in favour of the Imperial Presidency:

“You don’t come into my country, you don’t come into my congressional district and criticize my president,” Mr. Rangel, a Democrat, told stunned reporters on Capitol Hill.

From The Guardian:

Vivisection: Study finds 115 million animals used in tests worldwide

About 115 million animals were used in scientific research globally in 2005, according to an estimate based on official national figures and extrapolations from the number of scientific papers that were published involving animals.

The vast majority of the animals used were rodents (83.5%) with primates, cats and dogs making up 0.15%, 0.06% and 0.24% of the total respectively.

In case primates are the only thing that give you the warm fuzzies of empathy, that’s 172,500 chimps and friends a year. Or you like dogs? Well that’s about 276,000 dogs. But that’s not too much for a bottle of Chanel, is it (however the % of testing is for cosmetics)?

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