Wary of Islam, China Tightens a Vise of Rules

KHOTAN, China — The grand mosque that draws thousands of Muslims each week in this oasis town has all the usual trappings of piety: dusty wool carpets on which to kneel in prayer, a row of turbans and skullcaps for men without headwear, a wall niche facing the holy city of Mecca in the Arabian desert.

But large signs posted by the front door list edicts that are more Communist Party decrees than Koranic doctrines.

The imam’s sermon at Friday Prayer must run no longer than a half-hour, the rules say. Prayer in public areas outside the mosque is forbidden. Residents of Khotan are not allowed to worship at mosques outside of town.

One rule on the wall says that government workers and nonreligious people may not be “forced” to attend services at the mosque — a generous wording of a law that prohibits government workers and Communist Party members from going at all.

“Of course this makes people angry,” said a teacher in the mosque courtyard, who would give only a partial name, Muhammad, for fear of government retribution. “Excitable people think the government is wrong in what it does. They say that government officials who are Muslims should also be allowed to pray.”

To be a practicing Muslim in the vast autonomous region of northwestern China called Xinjiang is to live under an intricate series of laws and regulations intended to control the spread and practice of Islam, the predominant religion among the Uighurs, a Turkic people uneasy with Chinese rule.

The edicts touch on every facet of a Muslim’s way of life. Official versions of the Koran are the only legal ones. Imams may not teach the Koran in private, and studying Arabic is allowed only at special government schools.

Two of Islam’s five pillars — the sacred fasting month of Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca called the hajj — are also carefully controlled. Students and government workers are compelled to eat during Ramadan, and the passports of Uighurs have been confiscated across Xinjiang to force them to join government-run hajj tours rather than travel illegally to Mecca on their own.

Government workers are not permitted to practice Islam, which means the slightest sign of devotion, a head scarf on a woman, for example, could lead to a firing.

The Chinese government, which is officially atheist, recognizes five religions — Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Taoism and Buddhism — and tightly regulates their administration and practice. Its oversight in Xinjiang, though, is especially vigilant because it worries about separatist activity in the region.

Some officials contend that insurgent groups in Xinjiang pose one of the biggest security threats to China, and the government says the “three forces” of separatism, terrorism and religious extremism threaten to destabilize the region. But outside scholars of Xinjiang and terrorism experts argue that heavy-handed tactics like the restrictions on Islam will only radicalize more Uighurs.

Many of the rules have been on the books for years, but some local governments in Xinjiang have publicly highlighted them in the past seven weeks by posting the laws on Web sites or hanging banners in towns.

Those moves coincided with Ramadan, which ran from September to early October, and came on the heels of a series of attacks in August that left at least 22 security officers and one civilian dead, according to official reports. The deadliest attack was a murky ambush in Kashgar that witnesses said involved men in police uniforms fighting each other.

The attacks were the biggest wave of violence in Xinjiang since the 1990s. In recent months, Wang Lequan, the long-serving party secretary of Xinjiang, and Nuer Baikeli, the chairman of the region, have given hard-line speeches indicating that a crackdown will soon begin.

Mr. Wang said the government was engaged in a “life or death” struggle in Xinjiang. Mr. Baikeli signaled that government control of religious activities would tighten, asserting that “the religious issue has been the barometer of stability in Xinjiang.”

Anti-China forces in the West and separatist forces are trying to carry out “illegal religious activities and agitate religious fever,” he said, and “the field of religion has become an increasingly important battlefield against enemies.”

Uighurs are the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, accounting for 46 percent of the population of 19 million. Many say Han Chinese, the country’s dominant ethnic group, discriminate against them based on the most obvious differences between the groups: language and religion.

The Uighurs began adopting Sunni Islam in the 10th century, although patterns of belief vary widely, and the religion has enjoyed a surge of popularity after the harshest decades of Communist rule. According to government statistics, there are 24,000 mosques and 29,000 religious leaders in Xinjiang. Muslim piety is especially strong in old Silk Road towns in the south like Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan.

Many Han Chinese see Islam as the root of social problems in Xinjiang.

“The Uighurs are lazy,” said a man who runs a construction business in Kashgar and would give only his last name, Zhao, because of the political delicacy of the topic.

“It’s because of their religion,” he said. “They spend so much time praying. What are they praying for?”

The government restrictions are posted inside mosques and elsewhere across Xinjiang. In particular, officials take great pains to publicize the law prohibiting Muslims from arranging their own trips for the hajj. Signs painted on mud-brick walls in the winding alleyways of old Kashgar warn against making illegal pilgrimages. A red banner hanging on a large mosque in the Uighur area of Urumqi, the regional capital, says, “Implement the policy of organized and planned pilgrimage; individual pilgrimage is forbidden.”

As dozens of worshipers streamed into the mosque for prayer on a recent evening, one Uighur man pointed to the sign and shook his head. “We didn’t write that,” he said in broken Chinese. “They wrote that.”

He turned his finger to a white neon sign above the building that simply said “mosque” in Arabic script. “We wrote that,” he said.

Like other Uighurs interviewed for this article, he agreed to speak on the condition that his name not be used for fear of retribution by the authorities.

The government gives various reasons for controlling the hajj. Officials say that the Saudi Arabian government is concerned about crowded conditions in Mecca that have led to fatal tramplings, and that Muslims who leave China on their own sometimes spend too much money on the pilgrimage.

Critics say the government is trying to restrict the movements of Uighurs and prevent them from coming into contact with other Muslims, fearing that such exchanges could build a pan-Islamic identity in Xinjiang.

About two years ago, the government began confiscating the passports of Uighurs across the region, angering many people here. Now virtually no Uighurs have passports, though they can apply for them for short trips. The new restriction has made life especially difficult for businessmen who travel to neighboring countries.

To get a passport to go on an official hajj tour or a business trip, applicants must leave a deposit of nearly $6,000.

One man in Kashgar said the imam at his mosque, who like all official imams is paid by the government, had recently been urging congregants to go to Mecca only with legal tours.

That is not easy for many Uighurs. The cost of an official trip is the equivalent of $3,700, and hefty bribes usually raise the price. Once a person files an application, the authorities do a background check into the family. If the applicant has children, the children must be old enough to be financially self-sufficient, and the applicant is required to show that he or she has substantial savings in the bank. Officials say these conditions ensure that a hajj trip will not leave the family impoverished.

Rules posted last year on the Xinjiang government’s Web site say the applicant must be 50 to 70 years old, “love the country and obey the law.”

The number of applicants far outnumbers the slots available each year, and the wait is at least a year. But the government has been raising the cap. Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that from 2006 to 2007, more than 3,100 Muslims from Xinjiang went on the official hajj, up from 2,000 the previous year.

One young Uighur man in Kashgar said his parents were pushing their children to get married soon so they could prove the children were financially independent, thus allowing them to qualify to go on the hajj. “Their greatest wish is to go to Mecca once,” the man, who wished to be identified only as Abdullah, said over dinner.

But the family has to weigh another factor: the father, now retired, was once a government employee and a Communist Party member, so he might very well lose his pension if he went on the hajj, Abdullah said.

The rules on fasting during Ramadan are just as strict. Several local governments began posting the regulations on their Web sites last month. They vary by town and county but include requiring restaurants to stay open during daylight hours and mandating that women not wear veils and men shave their beards.

Enforcement can be haphazard. In Kashgar, many Uighur restaurants remained closed during the fasting hours. “The religion is too strong in Kashgar,” said one man. “There are rules, but people don’t follow them.”

One rule that officials in some towns seem especially intent on enforcing is the ban on students’ fasting. Supporters of this policy say students need to eat to study properly.

The local university in Kashgar adheres to the policy. Starting last year, it tried to force students to eat during the day by prohibiting them from leaving campus in the evening to join their families in breaking the daily fast. Residents of Kashgar say the university locked the gates and put glass shards along the top of a campus wall.

After a few weeks, the school built a higher wall.

Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

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Author: EDWARD WONG
Original Source: New York Times
Date Published: October 19, 2008
Web Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/world/asia/19xinjiang.html
Date Accessed Online: 2009-01-08

Town Asks Kung Fu Monks for Tourism Blessings

GUANDU, China — The cluster of temples at the heart of this dusty, traffic-clogged town are picturesque reminders of China’s faded Buddhist past. On a recent day, dogs warmed themselves in the winter sun as a few toothless devotees bowed before smiling Buddhas. The only sounds were the occasional clanging of wind chimes and the splash of coins tossed into a mucky pond.

While soothing to some, the tranquillity is galling to Guandu’s city fathers, who recently spent $3 million to rebuild the four temples. They had become schools and warehouses during an earlier era, when the Communist Party sought to suppress nearly all religious activity, including that by Buddhists.

To sweeten the lure for free-spending tourists, they tore down the jumble of ancient homes that surrounded the 1,000-year-old temples and built rows of antique-looking shops that sell bootleg DVDs, sneakers and stuffed Santas.

Still no one came.

“The temples have been money losers,” grumbled Dou Weibao, the commissioner of ethnic and religious affairs in Guandu, which has long since been subsumed by the sprawl of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province.

Mr. Dou found a savior 1,200 miles away, in the Song Mountains of central China, where the warrior monks of Shaolin have mastered the art of monastery marketing. Since the early 1990s, the chief abbot, Shi Yongxin, has turned Shaolin into a lucrative draw for kung fu enthusiasts and has transformed his lithe disciples into global emissaries for the temple’s crowd-pleasing mix of Zen Buddhism and fly-kick combat.

In November, the two parties struck a straightforward deal. In exchange for managing the Guandu temples for 30 years, the monks will keep all proceeds from the donation boxes and gift shops. In a news release announcing the arrangement, Shaolin said its primary goals were to carry out charitable activities, maintain the temples and “spread the faith.”

Mr. Dou, who described himself as an atheist, sees things somewhat differently. “We’re going to use their fame to attract more business,” he said on Wednesday as he and a batch of newly arrived monks exchanged pleasantries.

Guandu officials say they will get no money from the deal, but they hope the Shaolin mystique will pull in the kind of crowds that have turned the flagship monastery, in Henan Province, into one of China’s most popular tourist destinations. Mr. Dou said the government would save the $88,000 once spent on temple maintenance each year. They are also counting on the tax revenue from a vast new mall that is nearing completion next to the temple complex.

The management deal has provoked howls among some Chinese, with many critics decrying the commercialization wrought by the Venerable Yongxin, who drives a Land Rover and has established Shaolin branches in Italy, Germany and Australia.

“Shaolin Chain Store,” read the headline of one recent posting written on Sina.com, a popular Web site. “There’s nothing wrong with chasing profits and fame, but they can’t use the name of Buddha.”

Such sentiments are hard to find in Guandu, where people seem to enjoy the sudden uptick in tourism. Last Wednesday, a squadron of incense vendors surged around visitors, and the Liu family noodle shop was doing a brisk business feeding the famished. “Before the monks came, the only people who came were old, and they didn’t spend any money,” said Cao Jinbu, the shop’s owner.

Wan Liqiong, who runs a trinket stand across from the temple gate, said she would probably have to switch some of her stock to include Shaolin-oriented souvenirs. “We’ve really been struggling here,” she said. Then she offered up an expression that roughly translates to “if you burn incense, they will come.”

After reading about the Shaolin deal in his local newspaper, Ying Daojin made the eight-hour journey by bus just to catch a glimpse of the monks. A 30-year-old corn farmer from northeast Yunnan, Mr. Ying described himself as a nonbeliever but seemed willing to give religion a try. “I’ve heard Buddhism can open your mind,” he said wide-eyed as a monk glided by. “Kung fu is also good for your health.”

According to his secretary, the Venerable Yongxin, the head monk based in Henan Province, does not give telephone interviews, but he encouraged a reporter to seek out Master Yanjiang, the abbot assigned to run the Guandu complex.

Master Yanjiang, however, proved just as elusive and refused to discuss his plans for the temples.

His monks were decidedly unapproachable.

The young men waved away inquiries. When one bespectacled monk found himself the subject of a photographer’s interest, he grabbed the camera and then offered a menacing martial arts pose when his demand to have the picture erased went unmet. Negotiations proved fruitless, and the pictures were deleted. The monk bowed, smiled and walked away.

Others were busy helping to renovate the gift shop while another group of monks was handling the bequest of an adherent who had stopped by bearing gifts.

A few days after their arrival, the monks taped a handwritten poster at the temple entrance advertising kung fu lessons. The cost: $44 for a month of instruction, nearly a full month’s wage for some Chinese workers.

The security guard at the front gate said the classes were selling well, with more than 100 people already signed up. He showed off the student roster, most of them children and teenagers. “Everyone loves the Shaolin monks,” he said with a smile.

Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

------------------------------------------------------------
Author: ANDREW JACOBS
Original Source: New York Times
Date Published: January 2, 2009
Web Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/world/asia/02shaolin.html
Date Accessed Online: 2009-01-08

Crisis of Faith in the Muslim World

PART 1: Statistical evidence

Given the prominence of what Westerners call "Islamic fundamentalism", it seems odd to speak of a crisis of faith in the Islamic world. Several authors, including George Weigel [1] and Phillip Longman [2], support my contention that death of religious faith in Western Europe underlies its demographic decline. In slower motion, Islam faces a crisis of faith that will bring about a demographic catastrophe in the middle of the present century. I have called attention to the disturbing demographics of Islam in the past (The demographics of radical Islam, August 23), and here will offer evidence that the source of its demographic troubles is to be found in a failure of faith.

Striking statistical evidence supports this conclusion, which I shall present below. A wide range of fertility rates characterizes the Islamic world. Most of the variation in fertility can be explained by a single factor, namely, literacy: as Muslims (and especially Muslim women) learn to read, they drift away from traditional faith. The birthrate drops in consequence.

Radical Islam should be interpreted as a cry of despair in the face of the ineluctable decline of Islamic society. Read carefully, the leading Islamists say precisely this. At the close of the 19th century the Ottoman Empire was the sick man of Europe, and its former territories today comprise the incurables ward of geopolitics. From this vantage point, America's attempt to foist its own form of democracy on the Islamic world seems delusional.

As I have reported before, the demographic position of the Islamic world has set a catastrophe in motion. It is hard enough for rich nations to care for a growing elderly population, but impossible for poor nations to do so. Iran, along with most of the Muslim world, faces a population bust that will raise the proportion of dependent elderly in the population to 28% in 2050, from just 7% today.

If America faces discomfort, and Europe faces crisis, Muslim countries face breakdown. America now has a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of US$40,000 and a diversified economy. Iran has a per capita GDP of just $7,000 and depends on oil exports for the state subsidies that keep its population fed and clothed - and Iran will no longer be able to export oil after 2020, according to some estimates.

America can ameliorate the impact of an aging population by raising productivity (so that fewer workers produce more GDP), attracting more skilled immigrants (and increasing its tax base), and, in the worst of all cases, tightening its belt. American life will not come to an end if more people drive compact cars instead of SUVs, or go camping for vacation instead of to Disney World. But the Islamic world is so poor that any reduction in living standards from present levels will cause social breakdown.

In 2002, the United Nations' Arab Development Report offered a widely-quoted summation of the misery of the present position of the Arab World, noting:
# The average growth rate of per capita income during the preceding 20 years in the Arab world was only one-half of 1% per annum, worse than anywhere but sub-Saharan Africa
# One in five Arabs lives on less than $2 per day
# Fifteen percent of the Arab workforce is unemployed, and this number could double by 2010
# Only 1% of the population has a personal computer, and only half of 1% use the Internet
# Half of Arab women cannot read.

Negotiating the demographic decline of the 21st century will be treacherous for countries that have proven their capacity to innovate and grow. For the Islamic world, it will be impossible. That is the root cause of Islamic radicalism, and there is nothing that the West can do to change it.

Among the Muslim states, Iran has seen the future most clearly, and drawn terrible conclusions. President Mahmud Ahmadinejad understands that life as Iranians know it is coming to an end, and has proposed drastic measures commensurate with the need.

In a program made public on August 15, Iran's new president proposed a pre-emptive response to the inevitable depopulation of rural Iran. He plans to reduce the number of villages from 66,000 to only 10,000, relocating 30 million Iranians out of a population of 70 million. In relative terms, that would be the biggest population transfer in history, dwarfing Joseph Stalin's collectivization campaign of the late 1920s.

A generation hence, Iran will not have the resources to provide infrastructure for more than 50,000 rural villages inhabited mainly by elderly and infirm peasants. In response, Iran will undertake the biggest exercise in social engineering in recorded history, excepting perhaps Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

America's fertility rate - the average number of children per woman - has stabilized at just around the replacement level. That is why America's elderly dependency ratio will stabilize around 2030. But the fertility rate of the Muslim world is falling much faster.

In the case of Iran, Algeria and many other Muslim countries, the fertility rate in 2050 is expected to fall below two children per woman. Replacement is 2.1. Even Saudi Arabia, the bastion of Islamic conservatism, will show a fertility rate below the replacement level, according to UN projections. I think the UN estimates err on the high side. Modernization is likely to push fertility down further than the demographers now calculate.

What is killing the fertility rate in the Muslim world? There really is no such thing as a "Muslim" fertility rate, but rather a wide spectrum of fertility rates that express different degrees of modernization. Where traditional conditions prevail, characterized by high rates of illiteracy (and especially female illiteracy) the fertility rate remains at the top of the world's rankings.

But where the modern world encroaches, fertility rates are plummeting to levels comparable to the industrial world. No single measure of modernization captures this transformation, but the literacy rate alone explains most of the difference in fertility rates among Muslim countries. Among the 34 largest Arab countries, just one factor, namely the difference in literacy rates, explains 60% of the difference in the population growth rate in 2005.

The population of Somalia, where only a quarter of adults can read, is growing at an enormous 4% per year. At that rate, the number of Somalis will double in just 18 years. But in Algeria, where 62% of adults can read, the population growth rate is only 1.4% per year. At that rate it would take 50 years for the population to double. Qatar, with a literacy rate close to 80%, has a population growth rate of just 1.2%.

Notes

[1] See here.
[2] The Empty Cradle, by Phillip Longman (Basic Books: New York, 2004). See my review in ATol, Faith, fertility and American dominance.



PART 2: The Islamist response

Note: The following essay, whose first installment appeared on November 1, was written in September, prior to the uprising of Muslim youth in France. Despair at the prospective dissolution of Muslim society is the mother of radical Islamism, and its path of least resistance goes toward violence. Nowhere is that more obvious than in France, where a spontaneous outburst of rage among disaffected Muslim youth has, over the past 10 days, mutated into an organized campaign of violence.

There is no evidence in the public domain that Islamist radicals initiated the violence. Nonetheless, generals are chosen by their



armies. The Grande Armee did not invade Russia because it was led by Napoleon Bonaparte; rather, Napoleon invaded Russia because he had half a million scavengers to lead, of whom only a tenth were French.

Albrecht von Wallenstein's army did not mutiny against the Austrian throne because its field marshal wished to betray his masters; rather, Wallenstein betrayed Austria because he could not maintain his locust-horde and be loyal to Austria at the same time.

A vast army of young unemployed Muslims, estimated to reach 25 million in the Arab countries alone by 2010, stands at the disposal of the would-be Napoleons and Wallensteins of radical Islam, and they have no choice but to lead it. The outcome well might be a new Algerian War fought on French soil, with all the horrors that attended that conflict just half a century ago.

For three years I have argued that Europe sought to avoid conflict with the Muslim world precisely in order to mitigate this danger, but that Europe's appeasement would be futile. Europe now faces a terrible reckoning which will not be paid in full for years.


Why does population growth fade in response to rising literacy in the Muslim world? It might be that Muslim women stop making babies as soon as they can read the instructions on a packet of birth-control pills, but the matter is not so simple.

The crisis of modernization first of all is a crisis of faith, and the attenuation of religious faith is the root cause of the birth rate bust in the modern world. Traditional society is everywhere fragile, not only in the Islamic world; by definition it is bounded by values and expectations handed down from the past, to which individuals must submit. Once the bands of tradition are broken and each individual may choose for herself what sort of family to raise, religious faith becomes the decisive motivation for bringing children into the world.

As Phillip Longman wrote in The Empty Cradle, "Faith is increasingly necessary as a motivation to have children." The collapse of traditional society has brought about a collapse of birth rates across cultures. Cultures that fail to reproduce themselves by definition are failed cultures, for the simple reason that they will cease to exist before many generations have passed.

That is why the Islamists - Muslims who seek a new theocracy - display a sense of extreme urgency. They are not conservative Muslims, for they reject Muslim society as it exists as corrupt and decadent. They are revolutionaries who want to create a new kind of totalitarian theocracy that orders every detail of human life. They are not throwbacks to the past, but products of modern education. Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the founder of the modern Islamist movement, formulated his theory while earning a master's degree in education at the Colorado State College of Education. He wrote in 1949:

Islamic society today is not Islamic in any sense of the word ... In our modern society we do not judge by what Allah has revealed; the basis of our economic life is usury; our laws permit rather than punish oppression ... We permit the extravagance and the luxury that Islam prohibits; we allow the starvation and the destitution of which the Messenger once said: "Whenever people anywhere allow a man to go hungry, they are outside the protection of Allah, the Blessed and the Exalted." [1]

The Islamists feel that they have nothing to lose, for the fear of cultural extinction surpasses the fear of physical death. The Islamist dream of theocracy, for example, Osama bin Laden's vision of a restored caliphate, represents what might be the last stand of an endangered culture, something like the Nazi hallucination of Aryan empire. The Islamists have nothing to lose, but they have much to gain: they perceive not only weakness, but also opportunity. Islamic life is dying, but far more slowly than the senile civilization of Western Europe.

Education and literacy appear to threaten traditional Muslim social relations. The cliff-like drop in Muslim fertility sets the stage for social crisis a generation from now. Islam threatens to join the list of failed cultures. By using the term "failed culture", I do not mean to deprecate Islam as a religion or Muslims individually. Islamist writers, starting with Sayyid Qutb, as quoted above, say precisely the same thing. It is not surprising that Islamist radicals are obsessed with survival. Although some of their behavior appears irrational, their underlying premise is not. The Islamist revival responds to the Muslim countries' failure to adapt to the modern world.

Urbanization, literacy and openness to the modern world will suppress the Muslim womb, in the absence of radical measures. Radical Islam is born of existential fear. In a new volume of academic essays on modern Islamic thought, two Islamist academics, Suha Taji-Farouki and Basheer M Nafi, observe, "Rather than being a development within cultural traditions that is internally generated, 20th-century Islamic thought is constitutively responsive; it is substantially a reaction to extrinsic challenges." [2]

The challenge stems from the transformation of Muslim life:

In the Middle East of 1900, for example, less than 10% of the inhabitants were city dwellers; by 1980, 47% were urban. In 1800, Cairo had a population of 250,000, rising to 600,000 by the beginning of the 20th century. The unprecedented influx of immigrants from rural areas brought the population of Cairo to almost 8 million by 1980. Massive urbanization altered patterns of living, of housing and architecture, of the human relation with space and land, of marketing, employment and consumption, and the very structure of family and social hierarchy. [3]

The sharp fall in the Muslim population growth rate expresses the extreme fragility of traditional society. Again citing Taji-Farouki and Nafi, this means"

A Muslim sense of vulnerability and outrage is further exacerbated by the seemingly unstoppable encroachment of American popular culture and modes of consumerism, and the transparent hypocrisy of the American rhetoric of universal rights and liberties. It is also stoked by Western ambivalence towards economic disparities in the world. [4]

The remarkable fact about Taji-Farouki's and Nafi's book is not the professorial observations quoted above. What is most remarkable, rather, is the alleged participation of one of the scholarly authors in terrorist enterprise.

Professor Nafi, who teaches history and Islamic studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, also happens to be under indictment in Florida for "conspiracy to murder, maim or injure persons outside the United States". He was deported from the US for visa violations in 1996, and was one of eight men, including three professors, indicted by a US District Court in Florida in 2003 for providing material aid to the terrorist organization Islamic Jihad. Nafi was indicted along with Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, an adjunct professor of Middle East Studies at the University of South Florida (USF). Reported Middle East analyst Daniel Pipes:

Even after the indictment, Arthur Lowrie, formerly vice chairman of USF's committee for Middle Eastern Studies, praises Shallah for his "good scholarly work". And Gwen Griffith-Dickson, director of Islamic studies at Birkbeck, describes Nafi as "highly respected", lauding him for his efforts "with energy and commitment, to encourage critical thinking about religious issues and academic balance in his students, and thus to encourage social responsibility". [5]

Basheer M Nafi is not the only Muslim intellectual to support violence in the cause of Islamic theocracy. Time magazine five years ago hailed the Geneva-based Professor Tariq Ramadan as one of the world's "spiritual innovators", for "creating a new kind of European Islam that bridges his Islamic values and Western culture". [6] "Ramadan's chosen task is to invent an independent European Islam ... With 15 million Muslims on the continent, Ramadan believes it's time to abandon the dichotomy in Muslim thought that has defined Islam in opposition to the West," Time enthused.

Ramadan's reputation grew such that Notre Dame University offered him its Henry R Luce professorship of "Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding" in 2004. Before Ramadan could assume his position, however, the US Department of Homeland Security revoked his work visa on the grounds of alleged terrorist association.

Precise reasons were not given, but it turns out that the Department of Homeland Security was not alone in its evaluation of the Swiss Islamist. France had refused entry to Ramadan in 1996 because of alleged links to an Algerian terrorist then engaged in bombing attacks. [7] Ramadan since took up an appointment at Oxford, and in August this year was appointed to a panel advising British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Islamic matters.

A disturbing sort of observer effect is at work in the field of Islamic studies; it is hard to find coherent formulations of the Islamist position without finding that the formulator has already chosen involvement in terrorism. Westerners should not be too shocked at this turn of affairs, for stranger things have happened in the West. During the years before and after World War II, respectable academics who apologized for Soviet aggression often supported it covertly. Thanks to the Venona wiretap transcripts, we now are aware that prominent Americans who apologized for the violent actions of the defunct Soviet empire also were agents of Soviet espionage. [8] But the fact that prominent Islamist academics offer more than moral support for Islamist terrorism is a leading indicator of cultural despair.

We typically call terrorism "senseless". A Google search for the term "senseless and terrorism" yields more than half a million hits. But sense and rationality have an existential component, that is, we presume that we will continue to exist in order to be sensible and rational. If we know with near certainty that we shall cease to exist, or at least cease to exist in a recognizable way, the term "rationality" loses meaning. At this point we feel that we have nothing to lose, like Adolf Hitler in 1939. That is why the violent proclivities of Ramadan and Nafi must be explained existentially, rather than rationally.

Most of the world's cultures will go into oblivion without a fight, either because they cannot or do not wish to fight for survival. Of the world's endangered cultures, only one can and will fight to perpetuate itself, and that is Islam. Militancy is not unique to Islam.

Twice during the 20th century the nations of Europe fought each other for pre-eminence, with the result of their common ruin. Yet Islam's decline was not an accident, nor is the fearsome response to that decline offered by the Islamist radicals. Born in militancy, Islam among the world's religions offers a unique justification for conquest. The war that Islam will offer the West in its final throes will be a tragic, terrible, and prolonged war that cannot be avoided, but only fought to exhaustion.

Islam has one generation in which to turn its foothold in Western Europe into a governing power, before the effects of slowing population growth set in. Although the Muslim birth rate today is the world's second highest (after sub-Saharan Africa), it is falling faster than the birth rate of any other culture. By 2050, according to the latest United Nations projections, the population growth rate of the Muslim world will converge on that of the US (although it will be higher than Europe's or China's).

Islam has enough young men - the pool of unemployed Arabs is expected to reach 25 million by 2010 - to make its stand during the next 30 years. Because of mass migration to western Europe, the worst of the war might be fought on European soil.

Twenty million Muslims now live in western Europe; the dean of Islamic scholars, Bernard Lewis, predicts that Europe will be Islamic by no later than the end of this century. The numbers suggest otherwise; the end of the century will be too late.

Notes
[1] Social Justice in Islam, by Sayyid Qutb, translators John B Hardie and Hamid Algar (Islamic Publications International; Oneonta 2004)

[2] Suha Taji-Farouki and Basheer M Nafi, Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century (Tauris: London 2004), page 9

[3] Ibid, page 2

[4] Op cit, page 14

[5] Terrorist Profs , February 24, 2003

[6] Trying to Bridge A Great Divide

[7] See Why Revoke Tariq Ramadan's US Visa?, by Daniel Pipes, New York Sun, August 27, 2004.

[8] http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/venona/venona.htm

------------------------------------------------------------
Author: Spengler
Original Source: Asia Times
Date Published: Nov 1, 2005 & Nov 8, 2005
Web Source: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GK01Aa01.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GK08Aa01.html
Date Accessed Online: 2009-01-08

Katrina and China's whirlwind growth

China's economic growth arises from the greatest migration of peoples in history, involving the displacement of hundreds of millions to the coast from the interior over the course of a century. On a smaller scale, Hurricane Katrina emulates Chinese circumstances for the poor residents of New Orleans, the destruction of whose homes is the best thing that could have happened to them.

Inadvertently, the United States has taken a leaf from China's book. The US should stop worrying about the parity of the yuan and consider what it might learn from China's economic success.

Sunday's New York Times offered a piece titled "Katrina's tide carries many to hopeful shores", recounting the rising fortunes of impoverished New Orleans residents forced out of their flooded homes. The newspaper analyzed relocation patterns in 17 counties in and around Atlanta and Houston, two leading destinations for Katrina evacuees.

Like the Marcells, the average evacuee has landed in a neighborhood with nearly twice the income as the one left behind, less than half as much poverty, and significantly higher levels of education, employment and home ownership.

A Ms Marcell, a black woman interviewed by the Times, "was furious with Barbara Bush last fall when the former first lady, seeming to ignore the pain the storm had caused, said the evacuation was 'working very well' because most displaced families 'were underprivileged anyway'. Yet in calling [her new home] Atlanta a 'land of opportunity', Ms Marcell, from the other end of the class spectrum, is making a parallel point," the newspaper observed. I do not read the New York Times exhaustively, but this may be the first kind thing it has said about a member of the Bush family in a decade.

The best way to improve the lot of poor people is to move them out of poor regions into rich regions. Rich regions offer a culture of enterprise that easily assimilates new entrants, while poor regions labor under a cultural of poverty that stifles their most promising residents. Merely displacing people from poor regions, of course, does not necessarily improve their lot.

In the case of China, peasants arriving in cities improve their living standards manifold even with the humblest employment in an urban economy, and rapidly acquire skills that give them upward mobility. The same appears to be true for the refugees from Katrina.

That is the source of China's economic miracle. China's cities held only 135 million people in 1995, but will burgeon to 800 million by 2050, according to United Nations population forecasts. Peasants who spent their lives in rural poverty without hope of betterment are joining the global economy. At a 10% economic growth rate, China's output will double every seven years. It can sustain this growth rate as long as it can transfer people from low-productivity subsistence agriculture to high-productivity manufacturing. China's urban-rural population ratio now stands at about 1:2, but by mid-century will shift to 2:1.

The US long since accomplished the great transition from farm to city, but pockets of immiserated rural culture remain in the great cities. New Orleans notoriously enclosed the poorest black population in the United States. The city produced nothing of note, hosted no great financial institutions, attracted no entrepreneurs in the emerging technology industries, but offered an urban theme park to tourists attracted by the garish carnival, jazz funerals, decaying 19th-century architecture, Creole cooking, an officially tolerated sex industry - in short, the lurid slop of Anne Rice novels.

To the regret of tourists who no more will click their tongues over the quaintness of New Orleans culture, Katrina washed away the detritus of the US south's putrescent aristocracy. Brennan's, the city's best-known purveyor of local cuisine, will continue to cook gumbo at its Las Vegas location, joining the local reproductions of Venetian canals and the Eiffel Tower in America's commercial museum of world culture.

The former residents of New Orleans slums, meanwhile, find themselves in the promised land of shopping malls and suburban subdivisions. As the cited New York Times story says of Atlanta,

Growth is the region's secular religion. A half-century ago, Atlanta was a second-string province the size of Birmingham, Alabama. Now it is home to 4 million people and the world's busiest airport, with a prosperity that crosses color lines. Compared with blacks nationwide, the black population of Greater Atlanta is much better paid, much better educated and much more likely to be raising children with two parents at home.

Of course, the traditional culture of New Orleans will disappear, like most of the traditional cultures of the world. But the people of New Orleans are better off without it. Full disclosure: I never visited the city nor intended to, in part because I detest New Orleans jazz, but mostly because the ambience of louche hedonism annoys me. I read with indifference the innumerate eulogies to New Orleans culture.

Eulogies of this kind are becoming more frequent. Perhaps 90% of the world's languages will disappear during the next century. One is more likely to encounter KFC chicken or Domino's pizza in downtown Shanghai than the recondite and elegant cuisine that bears the name of the city.

Many beautiful things will disappear because poor people no longer will suffer to make them. One simply cannot find decent Mexican food in the United States, in part because traditional Mexican cuisine requires vast amounts of labor. Machine-made corn tortillas never will hold the savor of the hand-made article, but Mexicans migrate to the US precisely to escape a life of making tortillas by hand.

Atlanta, for readers whose main association with the Georgia state capital might be Gone With the Wind, has metamorphosed into an expanse of steel and glass surrounded by ticky-tacky housing developments, an emblem for the sort of urban sprawl that Europeans disdain. "I love New Orleans, don't get me wrong," one of the Katrina refugees told the New York Times. "But I thank God we are in Atlanta."

The best thing the US could do for the poor people of its urban ghettos is to expel them. One does not do poor people a favor by concentrating them in government housing (or for that matter refugee camps) where they depend on the public dole. Given the incidental costs of major hurricanes, there probably are cheaper ways to accomplish this, eg, simply pay them to leave.

This is difficult to accomplish in a democracy, to be sure, for the elected representatives of immiserated black Americans form a bloc large enough to thwart legislative attempts to better their conditions. Were the urban poor dispersed into the rich regions of the country, they no longer would vote as a bloc for the sort of congress members who now conspire to keep them poor.

It was the great luck of the poor blacks of New Orleans that a great wind came along to carry them away from servitude to their political leaders. The Black Caucus of America's Congress keeps urban blacks as political hostages, much as the regimes of the Arab world have exploited Palestinian refugees, whom they refuse to take in, and expel when convenient.

China's advantage is that it is not a democracy and can manage the great transfer of population by fiat (see China must wait for democracy, September 27, 2005). I favor democracy and abhor many practices of China's regime, but it is an ill wind that blows nobody good.

Nor do I mean to make light of the consequences of cultural deracination. Many of Katrina's refugees are ascending out of the humiliating poverty that blighted their lives back home. Now they will have the means to watch sex and violence on plasma-screen televisions, spend their free time in the esthetic dystopia of shopping malls, and worship in mega-churches.

Will more money make them happier? I do not think so, any more than the loss of traditional Chinese culture in the globalized urban jungle of the coastal cities will make Chinese peasants happier. With the admonition Careful what you wish for, I addressed that issue in a March 21 review of Rod Dreher's book Crunchy Cons.

What it will do, however, is enable them to contemplate their unhappiness with a sense of empowerment. People with money, education and opportunity may be as miserable as any illiterate dirt farmer, but they have the means - how did Thomas Jefferson put it? - for the pursuit of happiness. Whether they choose good or ill is not up to this writer. But it is a vicious form of condescension to condemn people to perpetual poverty in the name of preserving traditional culture.

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Author: Spengler
Original Source: Asia Times
Date Published: Apr 25, 2006
Web Source: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HD25Ad01.html
Date Accessed Online: 2009-01-08

Suicide by Israel

A policeman's nightmare is the prospective suicide who forces the constable to shoot in self-defense. No matter how justified the killing, others always will wonder whether the shooter had an opportunity to avoid a fatal outcome.

Peoples commit suicide as much as do individuals. The geopolitical cognate of "suicide by policeman" is Hamas' attempted suicide by Israel. Israel's objective is to eliminate Hamas rule. There are only two ways to do that: destroy Hamas' international support, or make its rule in Gaza insupportable.

I hate to be the one to bring up the unpleasant things that no one else wants to talk about, but just what do you do when a substantial group of people would rather die on their feet than live on their knees? For Hamas, to live on one's knees would be to accept a permanent Jewish presence in the historic land of Israel, an outcome which Hamas was formed to prevent in the first place.
One answer is that a slow-motion humanitarian disaster will gradually erode the fighting capacity and morale of Hamas and its popular base in Gaza, presuming that external sources of support can be throttled. What the International Red Cross calls "a full-blown humanitarian crisis" in Gaza is, in a certain sense, part of the solution, not part of the problem. A million and a half people have no way to live in Gaza except on the dole of the international community, in a Petrie dish for Islamist extremism.

As the pro-Israeli analyst Martin Kramer observes in his blog, economic sanctions against Gaza - that is, pressure on the civilian population - are an integral and entirely legitimate aim of Israeli policy. "Were Israel to lift the economic sanctions," Kramer writes, "It would transform Hamas control of Gaza into a permanent fact, solidify the division of the West Bank and Gaza, and undermine both Israel and Abbas by showing that violent 'resistance' to Israel produces better results than peaceful compromise and cooperation. Rewarding 'resistance' just produces more of it. So Israel's war aim is very straightforward, and it is not simply a total ceasefire. At the very least, it is a total ceasefire that also leaves the sanctions against Hamas in place. This would place Israel in an advantageous position to bring about the collapse of Hamas rule some time in the future - its long-term objective."

Israel's alternative would be to ignore Hamas, and instead attack Iran or Syria, Hamas' main supporters in the Muslim world. A humiliating blow against the state sponsors of Hamas would make it harder for an organization that represents itself as a non-state player to continue fighting. Last April, Israel had the opportunity to deal such a blow to Syria, and had it taken pre-emptive action against Syria at the time, it is unlikely that the present attack on Gaza would have been necessary. (Please see Ehud Olmert on the Damascus road Asia Times Online, April 15, 2009.)

War with Syria or Iran, to be sure, entails far more risk for the Jewish state. As Barak Ravid wrote in Ha'aretz: "Defense Minister Ehud Barak told [a December 20 conference in Tel Aviv] that Israel is strong enough to take down the Assad regime in case of war with Syria ... However, even if Israel strikes a severe blow, he told the conference, Syria 'even when battered and weak has a significant ability to inflict damage, as a result of the weapons it has and its capacity to use Hezbollah'. Barak emphasized that in the case of a confrontation with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah would also likely join the fighting, and that it is exceedingly difficult to forecast how another war in the Middle East would play out."

It is hard to fault Israel for not taking the risk of war with numerically larger, if technologically inferior, opponents, when those risks are very difficult to assess from the outside. Nonetheless, it seems clear that Israel chose to attack Gaza as a low-risk alternative. Hamas is a far softer opponent than Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon War. Hezbollah had received massive military support from Iran in building tunnel defenses and deploying sophisticated weapons. Hamas does not even appear to have night-vision equipment. A risk-averse strategic posture does not show Israel in a particularly strong light, whatever the merits or demerits of its present policy.

If the world had wanted Israel to adopt an alternative defense strategy, it should have encouraged an Israeli attack on Iran, or Syria, or both. Both the Bush administration as well as the Barack Obama transition team (via Obama's Middle East advisor Robert Malley) favored "engaging Syria", as did Israeli Prime Minister Olmert. That idea may have reached its best-used-by-date. As Lee Smith wrote December 24 on the Hudson Institute website, "The goal of trying to wedge Syria away from Iran is to return it to the so-called 'Sunni fold,' which includes, most importantly, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The problem, however, is that over the last several years Damascus has alienated the Sunni powers, especially Saudi, whose King Abdullah has suffered multiple insults at the hands of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. When enmity becomes personal, as it often does in the Middle East, there is no telling how or when it is likely to be resolved. In other words, there is no Sunni fold for the Syrians to return to: the Sunnis are hardly eager to embrace an Arab regime that over the last four years has served as the Persians' pitbull."

For the moment, Israel is treating Hamas as a state rather than as a state actor. As in any war, economic pressure on the civilian population, as well as military operations that kill civilians as collateral damage to the pursuit of military objectives, are legitimate instruments of warfare. It is hypocrisy to pretend otherwise.

To insist that Israel desist entirely from military activities that have a high probability of causing civilian casualties is doubly hypocritical. That would demand, in effect, that Israel value the lives of Palestinian civilians more than those of its own civilians, who are subject to rocket bombardment. That is something no state in the world can do, and it is silly to ask it. Israel has less reason than any other on Earth to heed such a demand. Never has the state of Israel been offered mercy by its enemies, nor has it any reason to expect it. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain by following the almost-golden rule: "Do unto others before they do unto you."

Israel is in the unenviable position of mopping up a problem created by the inertia of the international community. Fourth-generation "refugees" living in towns officially designated as "camps" never have existed under international law until the world community found it expedient to defer the "Palestinian problem" into the indefinite future. The Gazans cannot be economically viable on their 139 square miles of sand, and the humiliation of perpetual dependency and poverty makes a political solution unattainable.

The international community could help most by finding better homes for a few hundred thousand Gazans. The best-case scenario would be a parallel to Hurricane Katrina, which forced the mass evacuation of the city of New Orleans during 2005. Displaced to Atlanta, Georgia, Houston, Texas, and other cities with a strong black middle class, the poor African-American refugees soon were earning more and living better than they had in corrupt, backward New Orleans.

I reviewed the good fortune of the New Orleans refugees here (See Katrina and China's whirlwind growth Asia Times Online, April 25, 2006) and observed that the best way to help poor people is to move them out of poor regions into rich ones. The late Sam Kinison's stand-up comedy routine about world hunger applies doubly to Gaza. "You want to help world hunger? Stop sending them food. Don't send them another bite, send them U-Hauls ... we've been coming here giving you food for about 35 years now and we were driving through the desert, and we realized there wouldn't BE world hunger if you people would live where the FOOD IS!"

Otherwise, the default recommendation is what I offered five years ago, (See see More killing, please! Asia Times Online, June 12, 2003). As I observed at the time,

A recurring theme in the history of war is that most of the killing typically occurs long after rational calculation would call for the surrender of the losing side. Think of the Japanese after Okinawa, the Germans after the Battle of the Bulge, or the final phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty Years War, or the Hundred Years War. Across epochs and cultures, blood has flown in proportion inverse to the hope of victory. Perhaps what the Middle East requires in order to achieve a peace settlement is not less killing, but more.

That is horrifying, but nonetheless true, and the international community simply may have to raise its threshold of horror.

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Author: Spengler
Original Source: Asia Times
Date Published: Jan 8, 2009
Web Source: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KA08Ak01.html
Date Accessed Online: 2009-01-08