Psalm 117
Praise the Lord, alll nations!
Praise him, all peoples!
His love for us is strong
and his faithfulness is eternal.
Praise the Lord!
English TEV
Thursday 24 September 2009
Thursday 17 January 2008
Bread, the (subsidized) staff of life in Egypt By Michael Slackman Wednesday, January 16, 2008 c/o IHT
Bread, the (subsidized) staff of life in Egypt
By Michael Slackman
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
CAIRO: "Get out! Get back! Get back! I am not selling to you!" Ibrahim Ali Muhammad, a bread seller, is shouting at his customers. His teeth are brown and misshapen from decay, and he says the stress of his 20 years on the job has given him diabetes. He is standing behind bars, jail-like bars, shouting into a crowd that is pushing, punching, thrusting money at him.
"I already sold to you," he screamed, again, this time distracted by a young man in a blue windbreaker who swiveled on his heels and punched the man behind him.
It is hard to make ends meet in Egypt, where about 45 percent of the population survives on just $2 a day. That is one reason why trying to buy subsidized bread can be a fierce affair, with fists and elbows flying, men shoving and little children dodging blows to get up to the counter.
Egypt also is a state where corruption is widely viewed as systemic, which is also why the crowd gets aggressive trying to buy up the subsidized bread. Cheap state bread can be resold, often for double the original price.
"What has not changed in Egypt for 50 years is not going to change now," Muhammad said, though it was unclear if he meant the chaos in front of him or the cheap bread cooking behind him.
Somehow, much of what ails Egypt seems to converge in the story of subsidized bread. It speaks to a state that is in many ways stuck in the past, struggling to pull itself into the future, unable or unwilling to conquer corruption or even to persuade people to care about one another.
How do you take a broken system that somehow helps feed 80 million people and fix it without causing social disorder? That is a challenge for Egypt at large, and for this little bakery where Muhammad ekes out a living, with a cigarette hanging from his lips and an angry crowd demanding his bread.
Bread, in Egyptian Arabic, is called aish, which literally means life, rather than khobz, the word that other Arab-speakers use. The word reflects the centrality of bread here. This is a culture of bread, not rice, not meat and potatoes, not humus.
Simple, doughy round pockets of bread that look like pita bread but are baladi bread, that is, peasant bread.
"The word, applied to bread, gives this everyday element an almost mystical quality," said Hamdy el-Gazzar, author of "Black Magic," a popular novel recently translated into English. "Egypt's relationship to bread is not one of freedom, but of necessity.
Egypt started subsidizing staples like bread, sugar and tea around World War II. Then when Gamal Abdel Nasser and his military allies overthrew the monarchy, the state leaned heavily on subsidizes to maintain social order and promote a socialist economic model. When the government tried to stop subsidizing bread in 1977, there were riots. Egyptians are generally not known as explosive people, but tell them you are raising the price of bread - of life - and beware.
So the bread subsidy continues, costing Cairo about $3.5 billion a year. Over all, the government spends more on subsidies, including gasoline, than it spends on health and education. But it is not just the cost that plagues the government. The bread subsidy fuels the kind of rampant corruption that undermines faith in government, discourages investment and reinforces the country's every-man-for-himself ethos, say government officials and political experts, not to speak of bakers and their customers.
"The most corrupt sector in the country is the provisions sector," said a government inspector who asked not to be identified for fear of punishment. His job is to go to bakeries to ensure they are actually using the cheap government flour to produce cheap bread that is sold for the proper price. "There is a great deal of corruption. The amount of money in it will make anyone accept to be bribed."
The inspector explained why the system is so open to abuse. The government sells bakeries large bags of flour for 8 pounds, or $1.50. The bakeries are then supposed to sell 20 pieces of bread for 1 pound. At that rate, the baker can make the equivalent of about $10 from each sack. Or the baker can simply sell the flour on the black market for $15.
If the inspector, who said he was paid $42 a month, certifies that after three months the baker has faithfully used the flour to bake bread, the baker gets a refund of about a dollar for every bag of flour he has purchased. A baker who goes through 40 sacks a day over the three-month period gets back around $3,300 - a sum, this inspector said, that could easily be shared with the underpaid inspector (the same one who verified there were no violations).
"I am someone getting 230 pounds for a salary," the inspector said. "Say I want to feed my children three times a day and send them to government schools, to do just that, I need 1,000 pounds a month."
Abdallah Badawy Aboul Magd, the head the Provisions Administration office in Giza, said that the corruption had increased lately because the prices of wheat and other basic foodstuffs have soared. He said that in Giza alone, the governate adjacent to Cairo, there are reports of 2,000 violations a month. To try to combat this problem, he said they have begun a pilot project of separating production from distribution.
"This will enable us to force the bakeries to produce the bread using the complete ration of flour they get," he said.
It is hard to assess actual corruption since corrupt practices are not regularly reported. In a prominent survey that ranks 180 countries by their inhabitants' "perception of corruption," Egypt fell in 2007 to No. 105 from No. 70 the year before.
The Egyptian government has received high praise for its economic changes. Foreign investment has risen sharply, and the World Bank said that gross domestic product grew a healthy 7 percent last year.
But there has been virtually no trickle down, so instead of making life on the streets more stable, the statistically strong economic performance has only made people even more annoyed. A study done this year by a consultant to the Human Development Group of the World Bank lent credence to the widespread feelings of discontent, concluding that overall poverty in 2004-05 "was back to almost the same level as it was in 1995-1996."
"In sum, almost 14 million individuals could not obtain their basic food and nonfood needs," the report noted.
So they fight for cheap bread. They begin gathering outside the bare one-room bakery at about 11 a.m. everyday except Friday, the day of prayer. Over the course of an hour, 14-year-old Mahmoud Ahmed managed four trips to the window. His job, he said, was to ensure a steady stream of bread for a nearby food vendor, who then resold it in sandwiches. It appeared the baker let him push his way to the front to get bread before others. Was there a deal going? Mahmoud would not say.
Down the road, five blocks away, Muhammad Abdul Nabi, 12, was selling bread, the same kind of bread, from a makeshift table for more than double the price of the bakery. There was no line.
Nadim Audi contributed reporting.
By Michael Slackman
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
CAIRO: "Get out! Get back! Get back! I am not selling to you!" Ibrahim Ali Muhammad, a bread seller, is shouting at his customers. His teeth are brown and misshapen from decay, and he says the stress of his 20 years on the job has given him diabetes. He is standing behind bars, jail-like bars, shouting into a crowd that is pushing, punching, thrusting money at him.
"I already sold to you," he screamed, again, this time distracted by a young man in a blue windbreaker who swiveled on his heels and punched the man behind him.
It is hard to make ends meet in Egypt, where about 45 percent of the population survives on just $2 a day. That is one reason why trying to buy subsidized bread can be a fierce affair, with fists and elbows flying, men shoving and little children dodging blows to get up to the counter.
Egypt also is a state where corruption is widely viewed as systemic, which is also why the crowd gets aggressive trying to buy up the subsidized bread. Cheap state bread can be resold, often for double the original price.
"What has not changed in Egypt for 50 years is not going to change now," Muhammad said, though it was unclear if he meant the chaos in front of him or the cheap bread cooking behind him.
Somehow, much of what ails Egypt seems to converge in the story of subsidized bread. It speaks to a state that is in many ways stuck in the past, struggling to pull itself into the future, unable or unwilling to conquer corruption or even to persuade people to care about one another.
How do you take a broken system that somehow helps feed 80 million people and fix it without causing social disorder? That is a challenge for Egypt at large, and for this little bakery where Muhammad ekes out a living, with a cigarette hanging from his lips and an angry crowd demanding his bread.
Bread, in Egyptian Arabic, is called aish, which literally means life, rather than khobz, the word that other Arab-speakers use. The word reflects the centrality of bread here. This is a culture of bread, not rice, not meat and potatoes, not humus.
Simple, doughy round pockets of bread that look like pita bread but are baladi bread, that is, peasant bread.
"The word, applied to bread, gives this everyday element an almost mystical quality," said Hamdy el-Gazzar, author of "Black Magic," a popular novel recently translated into English. "Egypt's relationship to bread is not one of freedom, but of necessity.
Egypt started subsidizing staples like bread, sugar and tea around World War II. Then when Gamal Abdel Nasser and his military allies overthrew the monarchy, the state leaned heavily on subsidizes to maintain social order and promote a socialist economic model. When the government tried to stop subsidizing bread in 1977, there were riots. Egyptians are generally not known as explosive people, but tell them you are raising the price of bread - of life - and beware.
So the bread subsidy continues, costing Cairo about $3.5 billion a year. Over all, the government spends more on subsidies, including gasoline, than it spends on health and education. But it is not just the cost that plagues the government. The bread subsidy fuels the kind of rampant corruption that undermines faith in government, discourages investment and reinforces the country's every-man-for-himself ethos, say government officials and political experts, not to speak of bakers and their customers.
"The most corrupt sector in the country is the provisions sector," said a government inspector who asked not to be identified for fear of punishment. His job is to go to bakeries to ensure they are actually using the cheap government flour to produce cheap bread that is sold for the proper price. "There is a great deal of corruption. The amount of money in it will make anyone accept to be bribed."
The inspector explained why the system is so open to abuse. The government sells bakeries large bags of flour for 8 pounds, or $1.50. The bakeries are then supposed to sell 20 pieces of bread for 1 pound. At that rate, the baker can make the equivalent of about $10 from each sack. Or the baker can simply sell the flour on the black market for $15.
If the inspector, who said he was paid $42 a month, certifies that after three months the baker has faithfully used the flour to bake bread, the baker gets a refund of about a dollar for every bag of flour he has purchased. A baker who goes through 40 sacks a day over the three-month period gets back around $3,300 - a sum, this inspector said, that could easily be shared with the underpaid inspector (the same one who verified there were no violations).
"I am someone getting 230 pounds for a salary," the inspector said. "Say I want to feed my children three times a day and send them to government schools, to do just that, I need 1,000 pounds a month."
Abdallah Badawy Aboul Magd, the head the Provisions Administration office in Giza, said that the corruption had increased lately because the prices of wheat and other basic foodstuffs have soared. He said that in Giza alone, the governate adjacent to Cairo, there are reports of 2,000 violations a month. To try to combat this problem, he said they have begun a pilot project of separating production from distribution.
"This will enable us to force the bakeries to produce the bread using the complete ration of flour they get," he said.
It is hard to assess actual corruption since corrupt practices are not regularly reported. In a prominent survey that ranks 180 countries by their inhabitants' "perception of corruption," Egypt fell in 2007 to No. 105 from No. 70 the year before.
The Egyptian government has received high praise for its economic changes. Foreign investment has risen sharply, and the World Bank said that gross domestic product grew a healthy 7 percent last year.
But there has been virtually no trickle down, so instead of making life on the streets more stable, the statistically strong economic performance has only made people even more annoyed. A study done this year by a consultant to the Human Development Group of the World Bank lent credence to the widespread feelings of discontent, concluding that overall poverty in 2004-05 "was back to almost the same level as it was in 1995-1996."
"In sum, almost 14 million individuals could not obtain their basic food and nonfood needs," the report noted.
So they fight for cheap bread. They begin gathering outside the bare one-room bakery at about 11 a.m. everyday except Friday, the day of prayer. Over the course of an hour, 14-year-old Mahmoud Ahmed managed four trips to the window. His job, he said, was to ensure a steady stream of bread for a nearby food vendor, who then resold it in sandwiches. It appeared the baker let him push his way to the front to get bread before others. Was there a deal going? Mahmoud would not say.
Down the road, five blocks away, Muhammad Abdul Nabi, 12, was selling bread, the same kind of bread, from a makeshift table for more than double the price of the bakery. There was no line.
Nadim Audi contributed reporting.
Tuesday 15 January 2008
In South Carolina, a bid for black women's votes By Katharine Q. Seelye Tuesday, January 15, 2008 c/o IHT
In South Carolina, a bid for black women's votes
By Katharine Q. Seelye
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
CHARLESTON, South Carolina: Juanita Ramsey, a retired administrative assistant, was standing by her front door in her largely black neighborhood here. As she pointed to the homes of her neighbors, she identified them by political preference:
"Obama, Obama, Hillary, Hillary, Hillary," she said. "And my aunt over there, she's for Hillary."
Ramsey, 59, is supporting Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. She likes him, she said, but she is also tired of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and her husband, Bill Clinton, the former president.
"Hillary and Bill, we've done that," Ramsey said.
The Democratic presidential primary here, on Jan. 26, will be the first test of the candidates' strength in a state where blacks are expected to cast more than half the Democratic votes. Significantly, perhaps a third of those voters will be black women, like Ramsey.
Both campaigns have been conducting intense drives for their votes, believing they will play a central role in deciding whether the Democrats ultimately nominate a white woman or a black man for president.
Interviews with about 50 black women, here and in Loris, a rural town in the eastern part of South Carolina, suggest split views but some growing support for Obama. The interviews were conducted just as racial questions were intensifying in the news media about whether Clinton and her husband had made insensitive comments and whether the Obama campaign had fanned the flames.
But many of the women said they were basing their views on other concerns. Some said they thought a man should be stronger than a woman. Many also panned the moment before the New Hampshire primary when Clinton briefly teared up when she was asked about the rigors of the campaign.
But as the checkered politics of Ramsey's neighborhood suggests, there is a reservoir of support for Clinton. Several women who said the economy was the most important issue to them said they planned to vote for her, and most said they loved Mr. Clinton. (Only one woman mentioned former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the third leading Democratic candidate, and that was because she had seen his television commercials.)
In North Charleston, Marvetta Perry, 46, who owns a beauty salon, said her customers were so divided between Obama and Mrs. Clinton that she would not publicly discuss her own choice for fear of alienating half her clientele. "I have some who are voting for Obama and some who are voting for Clinton," she said. An Obama sign hangs in her entryway, and Clinton literature is on the table.
Even as black women are choosing sides, many said they were still undecided. Scott Huffmon, a political scientist at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, said that while polls suggested Obama was winning the black vote, so many black women were undecided that they could influence the outcome.
"If Barack Obama captures the undecided black female vote, he will win the race," Huffmon said.
Ramsey said the racial politics of the moment was troubling. She said the Clintons were engaged in "character assassination" and would make a lame attempt to deny it.
"The tighter the race, a slip of the tongue, they'll apologize, 'Oh, we didn't mean to say it,' " Ramsey said. "One thing, they're saying Obama smoked the herb. Well, Clinton did, too."
Also working against Clinton here is a conservative, religious streak among black women. Many cited their biblical beliefs in saying they would vote for a man over a woman.
"A man is stronger," said Clara Vereen, 61, a hair stylist in Loris. She said she respected Clinton but "if a war come, a man should tell us what to do."
A glamorous picture of Obama and his wife, Michelle, beamed from the February cover of Ebony magazine, lying on a nearby table. "He's educated," Vereen said. "He's got what he's supposed to have. Why not give him a chance?"
Huffmon said that black voters here were reassured about Obama after he won the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3.
"Iowa showed that whites will support a black man," Huffmon said. "Some of the soft support for Hillary has been bleeding as African-Americans realized that Barack is viable even among whites."
For Obama, South Carolina is an important bridge connecting his proven support in white rural states and his potential support in big urban states that will vote on Feb. 5. For Clinton, the state is somewhat less vital strategically, but it remains a test of her own appeal — and that of her husband, the so-called first black president — in the face of the possibility of an actual black president.
"South Carolina, while very important to us, is not make or break for our campaign," said Jay Carson, a spokesman for Clinton.
Still, several women said Clinton was the best choice for working women, for the disabled and the elderly.
"She's willing to help people," said Nyeshia Green, 19, a parking attendant in Charleston.
Doretha McCallum Lee, 44, who does volunteer work and was having her hair done at Eclipse, in Loris, also said she liked Clinton.
"I think she'll be good for the people," Lee said.
Anesia Wilson, 34, who owns Eclipse and was spraying Lee's hair, is also with Clinton. "I don't think Obama is ready yet," Wilson said. "He's not ready to be a leader." She also admitted to some concern for Obama's safety. "Look what they did to Martin Luther King," she said.
Vereen had been reluctant to vote for Obama because she feared that giving him a higher profile might endanger him. But that concern has ebbed.
"I've been listening, and I even listened to him on 'Oprah' when he said, 'I ain't scared,' " Vereen said. "I would love for him to be president, and I'm not scared, so scared. I'm really trying to focus on what's good, what he'll do good for us."
Those who said they were undecided rendered a fairly harsh judgment on Clinton for the moment in New Hampshire when her eyes briefly went moist and her voice cracked.
"If Hillary is going to be president, she's got to toughen up," said Beverly Patrick, 49, the owner of Patrick's salon in Loris. She shook her head as she buzz-cut the silver dome of Mae Helen Johnson, 70, a home-health nurse.
"You can't get up there and cry," Johnson said.
Patrick said, "You've got to hide that," adding, "You've got to keep that in."
On the east side of Charleston, Marylee Aiken, 74, who has retired from the mailroom of a local paper company, said she was also turned off by the emotional moment.
"She had this breakdown, and if she's going to break down, you don't need this burden on you" of being president, Aiken said. She added that she was surprised by Clinton's quick pivot from tearing up to attacking Obama. "I don't know what got her pepped up so quick," Aiken said. But she was skeptical about it.
Outside a post office, Patricia Greene Edwards, 54, a schoolteacher, said she was sympathetic to Clinton's emotional moment.
And yet, Greene Edwards said, she has still not decided whom to support. She said she wished she could combine the best of Obama and the best of Clinton into one package.
By Katharine Q. Seelye
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
CHARLESTON, South Carolina: Juanita Ramsey, a retired administrative assistant, was standing by her front door in her largely black neighborhood here. As she pointed to the homes of her neighbors, she identified them by political preference:
"Obama, Obama, Hillary, Hillary, Hillary," she said. "And my aunt over there, she's for Hillary."
Ramsey, 59, is supporting Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. She likes him, she said, but she is also tired of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and her husband, Bill Clinton, the former president.
"Hillary and Bill, we've done that," Ramsey said.
The Democratic presidential primary here, on Jan. 26, will be the first test of the candidates' strength in a state where blacks are expected to cast more than half the Democratic votes. Significantly, perhaps a third of those voters will be black women, like Ramsey.
Both campaigns have been conducting intense drives for their votes, believing they will play a central role in deciding whether the Democrats ultimately nominate a white woman or a black man for president.
Interviews with about 50 black women, here and in Loris, a rural town in the eastern part of South Carolina, suggest split views but some growing support for Obama. The interviews were conducted just as racial questions were intensifying in the news media about whether Clinton and her husband had made insensitive comments and whether the Obama campaign had fanned the flames.
But many of the women said they were basing their views on other concerns. Some said they thought a man should be stronger than a woman. Many also panned the moment before the New Hampshire primary when Clinton briefly teared up when she was asked about the rigors of the campaign.
But as the checkered politics of Ramsey's neighborhood suggests, there is a reservoir of support for Clinton. Several women who said the economy was the most important issue to them said they planned to vote for her, and most said they loved Mr. Clinton. (Only one woman mentioned former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the third leading Democratic candidate, and that was because she had seen his television commercials.)
In North Charleston, Marvetta Perry, 46, who owns a beauty salon, said her customers were so divided between Obama and Mrs. Clinton that she would not publicly discuss her own choice for fear of alienating half her clientele. "I have some who are voting for Obama and some who are voting for Clinton," she said. An Obama sign hangs in her entryway, and Clinton literature is on the table.
Even as black women are choosing sides, many said they were still undecided. Scott Huffmon, a political scientist at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, said that while polls suggested Obama was winning the black vote, so many black women were undecided that they could influence the outcome.
"If Barack Obama captures the undecided black female vote, he will win the race," Huffmon said.
Ramsey said the racial politics of the moment was troubling. She said the Clintons were engaged in "character assassination" and would make a lame attempt to deny it.
"The tighter the race, a slip of the tongue, they'll apologize, 'Oh, we didn't mean to say it,' " Ramsey said. "One thing, they're saying Obama smoked the herb. Well, Clinton did, too."
Also working against Clinton here is a conservative, religious streak among black women. Many cited their biblical beliefs in saying they would vote for a man over a woman.
"A man is stronger," said Clara Vereen, 61, a hair stylist in Loris. She said she respected Clinton but "if a war come, a man should tell us what to do."
A glamorous picture of Obama and his wife, Michelle, beamed from the February cover of Ebony magazine, lying on a nearby table. "He's educated," Vereen said. "He's got what he's supposed to have. Why not give him a chance?"
Huffmon said that black voters here were reassured about Obama after he won the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3.
"Iowa showed that whites will support a black man," Huffmon said. "Some of the soft support for Hillary has been bleeding as African-Americans realized that Barack is viable even among whites."
For Obama, South Carolina is an important bridge connecting his proven support in white rural states and his potential support in big urban states that will vote on Feb. 5. For Clinton, the state is somewhat less vital strategically, but it remains a test of her own appeal — and that of her husband, the so-called first black president — in the face of the possibility of an actual black president.
"South Carolina, while very important to us, is not make or break for our campaign," said Jay Carson, a spokesman for Clinton.
Still, several women said Clinton was the best choice for working women, for the disabled and the elderly.
"She's willing to help people," said Nyeshia Green, 19, a parking attendant in Charleston.
Doretha McCallum Lee, 44, who does volunteer work and was having her hair done at Eclipse, in Loris, also said she liked Clinton.
"I think she'll be good for the people," Lee said.
Anesia Wilson, 34, who owns Eclipse and was spraying Lee's hair, is also with Clinton. "I don't think Obama is ready yet," Wilson said. "He's not ready to be a leader." She also admitted to some concern for Obama's safety. "Look what they did to Martin Luther King," she said.
Vereen had been reluctant to vote for Obama because she feared that giving him a higher profile might endanger him. But that concern has ebbed.
"I've been listening, and I even listened to him on 'Oprah' when he said, 'I ain't scared,' " Vereen said. "I would love for him to be president, and I'm not scared, so scared. I'm really trying to focus on what's good, what he'll do good for us."
Those who said they were undecided rendered a fairly harsh judgment on Clinton for the moment in New Hampshire when her eyes briefly went moist and her voice cracked.
"If Hillary is going to be president, she's got to toughen up," said Beverly Patrick, 49, the owner of Patrick's salon in Loris. She shook her head as she buzz-cut the silver dome of Mae Helen Johnson, 70, a home-health nurse.
"You can't get up there and cry," Johnson said.
Patrick said, "You've got to hide that," adding, "You've got to keep that in."
On the east side of Charleston, Marylee Aiken, 74, who has retired from the mailroom of a local paper company, said she was also turned off by the emotional moment.
"She had this breakdown, and if she's going to break down, you don't need this burden on you" of being president, Aiken said. She added that she was surprised by Clinton's quick pivot from tearing up to attacking Obama. "I don't know what got her pepped up so quick," Aiken said. But she was skeptical about it.
Outside a post office, Patricia Greene Edwards, 54, a schoolteacher, said she was sympathetic to Clinton's emotional moment.
And yet, Greene Edwards said, she has still not decided whom to support. She said she wished she could combine the best of Obama and the best of Clinton into one package.
Friday 28 December 2007
The news from India on Benazir's death! by Miriam @ MCM Dec 28,2007.
The news from India on Benazir's death! by Miriam @ MCM Dec 28,2007.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Security has been beefed up in Delhi. The Prime Minister called an emergency meeting to discuss the issue. The borders are being monitored, and the bus service between Delhi & Lahore has been suspended for security reasons. The ordinary man is shocked at Benazir's untimely death. Such a tragic waste of a life. She was a very promising leader. Her last speech was absolutely fiery. We heard it on TV. She put all the energy of her lifetime into her last speech. Amazing lady, who could have yet made a great impact on the world, if not for her sad death. The BBC website gave her a fitting tribute. Very good coverage of her life. Even the Malayala Manorama put up a good show, devoting front and centre pages to Benazir's life.
Statement by the President on the Death of Benazir Bhutto
Contact: White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 202-456-2580
CRAWFORD, Texas, Dec. 27 /Christian Newswire/ -- the following is the statement by the President:
Prairie Chapel Ranch
9:55 A.M. CST
THE PRESIDENT: Laura and I extend our deepest condolences to the family of Benazir Bhutto, to her friends, to her supporters. We send our condolences to the families of the others who were killed in today's violence. And we send our condolences to all the people of Pakistan on this tragic occasion.
The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy. Those who committed this crime must be brought to justice. Mrs. Bhutto served her nation twice as Prime Minister and she knew that her return to Pakistan earlier this year put her life at risk. Yet she refused to allow assassins to dictate the course of her country.
We stand with the people of Pakistan in their struggle against the forces of terror and extremism. We urge them to honor Benazir Bhutto's memory by continuing with the democratic process for which she so bravely gave her life.
END 9:57 A.M. CST
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Security has been beefed up in Delhi. The Prime Minister called an emergency meeting to discuss the issue. The borders are being monitored, and the bus service between Delhi & Lahore has been suspended for security reasons. The ordinary man is shocked at Benazir's untimely death. Such a tragic waste of a life. She was a very promising leader. Her last speech was absolutely fiery. We heard it on TV. She put all the energy of her lifetime into her last speech. Amazing lady, who could have yet made a great impact on the world, if not for her sad death. The BBC website gave her a fitting tribute. Very good coverage of her life. Even the Malayala Manorama put up a good show, devoting front and centre pages to Benazir's life.
Statement by the President on the Death of Benazir Bhutto
Contact: White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 202-456-2580
CRAWFORD, Texas, Dec. 27 /Christian Newswire/ -- the following is the statement by the President:
Prairie Chapel Ranch
9:55 A.M. CST
THE PRESIDENT: Laura and I extend our deepest condolences to the family of Benazir Bhutto, to her friends, to her supporters. We send our condolences to the families of the others who were killed in today's violence. And we send our condolences to all the people of Pakistan on this tragic occasion.
The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy. Those who committed this crime must be brought to justice. Mrs. Bhutto served her nation twice as Prime Minister and she knew that her return to Pakistan earlier this year put her life at risk. Yet she refused to allow assassins to dictate the course of her country.
We stand with the people of Pakistan in their struggle against the forces of terror and extremism. We urge them to honor Benazir Bhutto's memory by continuing with the democratic process for which she so bravely gave her life.
END 9:57 A.M. CST
Waves of migrants increase pressure on Greece By Caroline Brothers Thursday, December 27, 2007 c/o IHT
Waves of migrants increase pressure on Greece
By Caroline Brothers
Thursday, December 27, 2007
KIPI, Greece: Nowhere is the pressure on the European Union's borders mounting as insistently as in this northernmost corner of the Aegean Sea across the river from Turkey.
With the help of smugglers, dozens of migrants breach this frontier daily on foot, in plastic boats, by swimming, or crouched inside empty oil tankers or secret compartments of trucks.
In its zeal to secure the border, Greece is being accused of serious lapses in human rights and ignoring treaty pledges that bind it to give haven to refugees claiming protection - rights established under international conventions.
"There are serious problems with the asylum system in Greece," said William Spindler, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. "It doesn't meet European or international standards."
Would-be immigrants - Iraqis, Palestinians, Afghanis and others - are arriving here in numbers bigger than ever before. Their ranks are swollen by a "huge and very sudden influx" that began in September, according to Pangiotis Papadimitriou, the border monitoring officer for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Waiting for the new arrivals are the police. Refugees' lawyers say many migrants are secretly forced back, without being given the chance to request asylum.
"It is illegal, illegal, illegal," said Evgenia Papanastasiou, a refugees' lawyer in the northern Greek city of Kavala who has 19 years of experience in criminal law.
In October, two private groups, Pro Asyl, based in Germany, and the Group of Lawyers for the Rights of Refugees and Migrants, based in Athens, made a similar accusation, adding in a joint report that the Greek Coast Guard was pushing back migrants' boats at sea.
The police and the coast guard vehemently deny the allegations and say that those who require asylum can request it. Under Greek law, it is a crime for public servants to expel forcibly any person needing international protection.
The land border between Greece and Turkey, two historically antagonistic nations, extends for 182 kilometers, or 114 miles, tracking the Evros River, which the Turks call the Meric, down to the Aegean Sea.
For 11 kilometers, where the river temporarily parts with the frontier, the soil is studded with land mines - a legacy of old enmity. That does not deter migrants, who travel from as far away as Myanmar and Bangladesh and whose bodies are occasionally found in the minefields.
"You see wars, disasters and so on, on television, and six months later they are here," said a jaded Evros border guard who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.
Tens of thousands of migrants try to cross the EU borders every year. But while the numbers of arrivals have plunged in the Canary Islands this year and stabilized in Malta and the Italian island of Lampedusa, along the Greek-Turkish border they are on the rise.
In the district guarding the southern half of the Evros border with Turkey, the border police headquartered in Alexandroupolis arrested more than 15,000 migrants in 2006, and 13,869 through Oct. 30 this year, about four times as many as in 2005, when 3,706 were arrested.
Common among Greek officials is a sense that faraway Brussels requires them to be gatekeepers for the whole of the European Union, without having to deal with the stresses or offering much support.
"This is the EU border, and our job is to help the rest of the countries that are behind," Anestis Argyriadis, chief of the border police in Alexandroupolis, said in an interview this month. "The problem we face as Greek police is the problem of the entire EU."
The influx of displaced civilians is putting Greece's humanitarian resolve to the test. In many ways the nation is ill-equipped to handle the challenge. Its coastline is dotted with thousands of islands that are impossible to patrol, while its asylum procedures are rudimentary.
Emmanuel Karlas, prefect of the border island of Samos, says the European Union could start by urging Turkey, a prospective member, to improve its border controls.
"The EU stands far from here and watches with its binoculars and doesn't find a solution," he said. "This is not the problem of Greece, Italy or Spain; it is a problem for all of the EU."
Complicating matters, the Greek police cannot work with their Turkish counterparts to address border issues because the army, not the police, has jurisdiction on the Turkish side.
Still, under an agreement reached with Ankara in 2001, Athens is entitled to send undocumented migrants with no refugee claim back to Turkey; the narrow bridge across the Evros at Kipi is the only place in the whole country where this is authorized.
According to official figures, Athens requested readmission for 2,250 such people of various nationalities in 2006, and Turkey agreed to accept 456. Delays meant that in the end, only 127 were actually sent across.
Meanwhile, migrant numbers continue to rise. This year through November, 10,961 of them rowed inflatable dinghies to the three Greek islands closest to Turkey in the Northern Aegean; for the whole of 2006, the total was 4,024, Interior Ministry data show.
Greece sees the matter primarily as a security concern.
"The job of the police, the foremost goal, is to safeguard our border so migrants don't enter illegally, and as a consequence, to arrest them," Argyriadis said.
Undocumented migrants are held in administrative detention for three months. Members of the European Parliament who visited one such center on Samos in June described its conditions as deplorable; it stayed open for another six months. The Greek Interior Ministry would not allow a reporter access to detention centers there or elsewhere.
A number of lawyers for refugees say that the Greek police and army are secretly and illegally expelling migrants, some of whom are not even registered or given the opportunity to request protection. They say that these deportations take place at night, in small plastic boats, across the Evros River.
Mariana Tzeferakou, a refugees' lawyer in Athens, said that illicit deportations along the Evros were an open secret and had been going on for a decade.
"Now we realize it is going on much more intensely," she said, adding that a large number of people coming across in this area "are prima facie refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq and Africa."
Giorgos Tsarbopoulos, the Athens-based head of the UN refugee agency for Greece, said the agency had had several reports that this was happening.
"Our indications are that people are being made to return by unofficial means in a very short period of time," he said. "Some complained that they had tried to explain their need for asylum and were not heard."
For those who do get a hearing, Greece's overall recognition rate for refugees is low, hovering for years at roughly 1 percent. That compares with 45 percent in Italy last year and 19 percent in Spain.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees examined 305 randomly selected initial decisions on asylum claims, lodged in Greece by people from Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Sri Lanka, and found every one of them negative.
About 3,500 Iraqis requested asylum in Greece in the first half of this year, the highest number for any industrial nation except Sweden. Yet a study comparing decisions on asylum claims in five EU countries, published by the UN refugee agency in November, found that the chance of an Iraqi refugee's receiving protection in Greece stood at zero. In Sweden, it was 75 percent.
In April, the European Commission sued Greece in the European Court of Justice over its asylum processes. Greece lost.
Spindler, the spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, said the agency did not want Greece to lose sight of the need to offer protection.
"We understand the need to police the borders and combat illegal immigration, but you have to bear in mind that sometimes people cross borders without documents for very valid reasons," he said. "You have to leave the doors open for those people."
Anthee Carassava contributed reporting from Athens.
By Caroline Brothers
Thursday, December 27, 2007
KIPI, Greece: Nowhere is the pressure on the European Union's borders mounting as insistently as in this northernmost corner of the Aegean Sea across the river from Turkey.
With the help of smugglers, dozens of migrants breach this frontier daily on foot, in plastic boats, by swimming, or crouched inside empty oil tankers or secret compartments of trucks.
In its zeal to secure the border, Greece is being accused of serious lapses in human rights and ignoring treaty pledges that bind it to give haven to refugees claiming protection - rights established under international conventions.
"There are serious problems with the asylum system in Greece," said William Spindler, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. "It doesn't meet European or international standards."
Would-be immigrants - Iraqis, Palestinians, Afghanis and others - are arriving here in numbers bigger than ever before. Their ranks are swollen by a "huge and very sudden influx" that began in September, according to Pangiotis Papadimitriou, the border monitoring officer for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Waiting for the new arrivals are the police. Refugees' lawyers say many migrants are secretly forced back, without being given the chance to request asylum.
"It is illegal, illegal, illegal," said Evgenia Papanastasiou, a refugees' lawyer in the northern Greek city of Kavala who has 19 years of experience in criminal law.
In October, two private groups, Pro Asyl, based in Germany, and the Group of Lawyers for the Rights of Refugees and Migrants, based in Athens, made a similar accusation, adding in a joint report that the Greek Coast Guard was pushing back migrants' boats at sea.
The police and the coast guard vehemently deny the allegations and say that those who require asylum can request it. Under Greek law, it is a crime for public servants to expel forcibly any person needing international protection.
The land border between Greece and Turkey, two historically antagonistic nations, extends for 182 kilometers, or 114 miles, tracking the Evros River, which the Turks call the Meric, down to the Aegean Sea.
For 11 kilometers, where the river temporarily parts with the frontier, the soil is studded with land mines - a legacy of old enmity. That does not deter migrants, who travel from as far away as Myanmar and Bangladesh and whose bodies are occasionally found in the minefields.
"You see wars, disasters and so on, on television, and six months later they are here," said a jaded Evros border guard who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.
Tens of thousands of migrants try to cross the EU borders every year. But while the numbers of arrivals have plunged in the Canary Islands this year and stabilized in Malta and the Italian island of Lampedusa, along the Greek-Turkish border they are on the rise.
In the district guarding the southern half of the Evros border with Turkey, the border police headquartered in Alexandroupolis arrested more than 15,000 migrants in 2006, and 13,869 through Oct. 30 this year, about four times as many as in 2005, when 3,706 were arrested.
Common among Greek officials is a sense that faraway Brussels requires them to be gatekeepers for the whole of the European Union, without having to deal with the stresses or offering much support.
"This is the EU border, and our job is to help the rest of the countries that are behind," Anestis Argyriadis, chief of the border police in Alexandroupolis, said in an interview this month. "The problem we face as Greek police is the problem of the entire EU."
The influx of displaced civilians is putting Greece's humanitarian resolve to the test. In many ways the nation is ill-equipped to handle the challenge. Its coastline is dotted with thousands of islands that are impossible to patrol, while its asylum procedures are rudimentary.
Emmanuel Karlas, prefect of the border island of Samos, says the European Union could start by urging Turkey, a prospective member, to improve its border controls.
"The EU stands far from here and watches with its binoculars and doesn't find a solution," he said. "This is not the problem of Greece, Italy or Spain; it is a problem for all of the EU."
Complicating matters, the Greek police cannot work with their Turkish counterparts to address border issues because the army, not the police, has jurisdiction on the Turkish side.
Still, under an agreement reached with Ankara in 2001, Athens is entitled to send undocumented migrants with no refugee claim back to Turkey; the narrow bridge across the Evros at Kipi is the only place in the whole country where this is authorized.
According to official figures, Athens requested readmission for 2,250 such people of various nationalities in 2006, and Turkey agreed to accept 456. Delays meant that in the end, only 127 were actually sent across.
Meanwhile, migrant numbers continue to rise. This year through November, 10,961 of them rowed inflatable dinghies to the three Greek islands closest to Turkey in the Northern Aegean; for the whole of 2006, the total was 4,024, Interior Ministry data show.
Greece sees the matter primarily as a security concern.
"The job of the police, the foremost goal, is to safeguard our border so migrants don't enter illegally, and as a consequence, to arrest them," Argyriadis said.
Undocumented migrants are held in administrative detention for three months. Members of the European Parliament who visited one such center on Samos in June described its conditions as deplorable; it stayed open for another six months. The Greek Interior Ministry would not allow a reporter access to detention centers there or elsewhere.
A number of lawyers for refugees say that the Greek police and army are secretly and illegally expelling migrants, some of whom are not even registered or given the opportunity to request protection. They say that these deportations take place at night, in small plastic boats, across the Evros River.
Mariana Tzeferakou, a refugees' lawyer in Athens, said that illicit deportations along the Evros were an open secret and had been going on for a decade.
"Now we realize it is going on much more intensely," she said, adding that a large number of people coming across in this area "are prima facie refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq and Africa."
Giorgos Tsarbopoulos, the Athens-based head of the UN refugee agency for Greece, said the agency had had several reports that this was happening.
"Our indications are that people are being made to return by unofficial means in a very short period of time," he said. "Some complained that they had tried to explain their need for asylum and were not heard."
For those who do get a hearing, Greece's overall recognition rate for refugees is low, hovering for years at roughly 1 percent. That compares with 45 percent in Italy last year and 19 percent in Spain.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees examined 305 randomly selected initial decisions on asylum claims, lodged in Greece by people from Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Sri Lanka, and found every one of them negative.
About 3,500 Iraqis requested asylum in Greece in the first half of this year, the highest number for any industrial nation except Sweden. Yet a study comparing decisions on asylum claims in five EU countries, published by the UN refugee agency in November, found that the chance of an Iraqi refugee's receiving protection in Greece stood at zero. In Sweden, it was 75 percent.
In April, the European Commission sued Greece in the European Court of Justice over its asylum processes. Greece lost.
Spindler, the spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, said the agency did not want Greece to lose sight of the need to offer protection.
"We understand the need to police the borders and combat illegal immigration, but you have to bear in mind that sometimes people cross borders without documents for very valid reasons," he said. "You have to leave the doors open for those people."
Anthee Carassava contributed reporting from Athens.
Thursday 27 December 2007
THE MIDDLE EAST: SPIRITUAL BATTLEFIELD? ©2007. The Media Line Ltd. All Rights Reserved. By Rachelle Kliger on Thursday, December 27, 2007
THE MIDDLE EAST: SPIRITUAL BATTLEFIELD?
[Egypt] Under a woolen canopy, wisps of smoke from an outdoor fireplace mix with the scent of tobacco and rose tea. Magdi, an Egyptian Copt, nimbly rolls himself a cigarette. Sitting cross-legged on the cushioned floor, he ponders out loud how it came to be that all of his peers are happily married, while he is 32, good looking, intelligent, well-off-- and yet still painfully single.
The problem, he believes, is that his Christian religion limits his options for finding a soul mate in Egypt.
“If I married a Muslim girl my mother would kill me,” he says. “If it was a Jewish girl, she wouldn’t mind so much. But a Muslim? Never.”
Magdi cannot quite explain his mother’s unyielding attitude. But her attitude is typical of the prevailing feelings in this part of the world. The antagonism between Muslims and Christians goes back a long way, and the ever-present chasm between the two communities is noticeable in every walk of life.
The enmity is not limited to Egypt. The slaying of a Christian bookstore manager in Gaza in October marked a sad milestone in the relations between Muslims and Christians in the Palestinian territories.
Rami Ayyad was stabbed and shot to death after being accused by Gaza-based Islamic groups of engaging in missionary activity.
Similar incidents occurred this year in Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq. A group of 31 suspected Al-Qa’ida members were charged in Lebanon recently for plotting to bomb a church.
The list goes on. The Middle East is awash with religion-motivated violence.
Today, as Middle Eastern Christians dwindle in numbers and cling to their last vestiges, some are wondering whether Christians and Muslims here are engaged in a battle over the survival of the fittest.
Spiritual Warfare
Rev. Steven Khoury, head of the Calvary Baptist Ministries in Israel and the Palestinian territories, says the tension between Muslims and Christians is simmering beneath the surface. Paradoxically, he believes it will explode when the political crises in the Middle East are solved.
“Right now everybody -- Muslims and Christians -- is busy with politics,” Khoury says, tidying a pile of Arabic-language bibles at his chapel in eastern Jerusalem.
“Once the politics settle down, I believe it’s going to turn into more of a religious battle than a political battle.”
Once the politics are out of the picture, what remains will be spiritual warfare and the religious communities will be left alone to fight out their war to the bloody end, he predicts.
Not everyone agrees. “I’d resist the notion that there was a battle between the two religions,” says Prof. Gerald Hawting, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
From the advent of Islam there has been a religious dispute between local Christians and Muslims, but Hawting dismisses the notion that battles between the Byzantines and the Muslims in the ninth and tenth centuries, for example, were faith-based. Religion, he concedes, was often used as a propaganda tool to arouse the soldiers, but was not the main premise of the battle.
Crusades - A Quest for Earthly Gains?
And then came the crusades.
In the early crusades, Hawting says, the religious elements were very strong.
“The Europeans feel they’re engaged in a religious venture and they’re promised access to paradise if they’re killed in battle, and forgiveness for their sins,” he says.
But even in these early stages, there were other elements at play, such as economic and political gain, and the crusades gradually became more motivated by pragmatism.
“There’s a feudal system in Europe producing landless young men who haven’t much future in Europe. So sending them off to conquer land in the Middle East is a good way to keep them employed,” Hawting says.
As time progressed, European cities developed trade interests in the Middle East, and this, too, became an important motive.
Hawting does not believe the crusades is reason that Christians in the Middle East are discriminated against today.
“I think it’s convenient for some Muslims to raise that, but I don’t think the present difficulties between Christians and Muslims are to do with that. It’s to do with the reassertion of Islam and in the current situation. Local Christians are seen by some Muslims as a possible fifth column who are loyal to someone from outside.”
Wilfred Wong, a researcher with the Jubilee Campaign, says many Muslims in the Middle East have unofficially declared war on the Christians in the region, partly because of the United States and coalition forces fighting in Muslim countries.
Wong suggests that the Christians are wrongly perceived as being an extension of the Western forces, causing resentment towards them from many Muslims. The general increase in Islamic fundamentalism has also caused many Muslims in the Middle East to become more intolerant and resentful towards Christians and other non-Muslims living in their midst, he adds.
Wong says Christians are not trying to take over.
“Some Muslims are leading a crusade against the Christians, who just want to get on with their lives and stay in their ancient homeland.”
Persecution
Christians are a minority in the Middle East among a Muslim majority. Historically, in states governed by Islamic law, Jews and Christians were considered "People of the Book" and were given a special status under Muslim rule known as "Dhimmi." They had fewer legal and social rights than Muslims and were obligated to pay a tax known as jizya. But their life, property and faith were protected.
Today, rights organizations talk about severe encroachments on religious freedoms throughout the Middle East. Christians are often the first to bear the brunt.
“We’ve lived with this discrimination for 1,400 years,” says Nader Fawzy, President of the Canada-based Middle East Christians Association (MECA).
Contrary to Hawting, Fawzy believes the discrimination stems first and foremost from the religious differences.
“They cut our tongues and burned our churches,” he says. “The discrimination has nothing to do with the government more than it has to do with Islam.”
Nina Shea, director of the Center of Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, says that while the attitude of the regimes toward Christians in the Middle East varies from country to country, generally their situation relative to many other minorities in this part of the world, is bad.
The one positive exception, Shea notes, is in the Gulf states, where religious tolerance has improved in places like Qatar and Bahrain.
But elsewhere, the pattern in which Jews were coerced into leaving Muslim countries is now repeating itself with Christians. Countries are going from a once-Christian majority to having no Christians at all.
“And it’s accelerating,” Shea says. “I think it’s a very dismal picture.”
Not everyone paints such a bleak picture regarding Christian-Muslim relations. Mitri Raheb, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, says the main problem facing his community is not the Muslims. The one to blame for the Christians’ situation is Israel, because of its policies in the Palestinian territories, and the West.
“I think the main problem is the interference of the West here, militarily,” Raheb says.
“This interference is not letting our region enjoy any stability.”
Raheb is particularly concerned about Western efforts to recruit the Middle East’s Christian community as a tool against the Muslims.
Mohsen Haredy, an Islamic scholar and editor of the online information service, Ask About Islam, urges caution in generalizing about the suffering of Christians in the Middle East.
“Ordinary people, Muslims and Christians, live their life normally and they have good relations with each other,” he says.
“If some Christians are suffering somewhere in the Middle East, they are victims of the political agenda of some states, the same way Muslims are suffering, too.”
Conversion Attempts
Assuming the Christian claims of persecution are accurate, some Muslims say they are not entirely unprovoked. The primary grievance leveled against the Middle East’s Christians is their efforts to convert Muslims to Christianity, a practiced disdained by Islam.
Christians, on the other hand, complain of forcible conversions to Islam. In Egypt, there have been reports of Christian girls being kidnapped and coerced into becoming Muslims; or Christians who are bribed with jobs and money to change their faith.
The boom in media channels, satellite television and especially the Internet has created new ways for both faiths to reach out to potential newcomers, making the practice more difficult to counter.
Khoury does not deny encouraging people to embrace his faith.
“I believe that each Christian should do their duty and that is to preach the gospel and to speak about the life that Christ lived,” he says. “I don’t think it’s wrong at all to speak about my Savior.”
Khoury does not believe in aggressive missionizing, but the sensitivity of the issue will not push him to the shadows.
“If I keep a low profile, how effective will I be?” he asks. “If a Muslim wants to listen about my religion and my faith, I’ll be more than happy to speak with him. I don’t think it’s wrong.”
This attitude does not fare well with the Muslim community. In response to a query posted by a reader on the popular website Islam Online, a religious advisor listed instructions about how Muslims should deal with evangelizing campaigns in Islamic countries.
Muslims should learn to identify the problem and deal with it through preventative methods and educational programs, it says.
“Determine the outlets through which these missionizing messages are coming,” the site instructed. “Whether it’s through films, leaflets, magazines or other means. Do not let them through, and punish anyone who violates this with a deterring penalty.”
It also advises the more well-off Muslims to provide social support to the underprivileged and tend to their needs, so that evangelizing Christians will have no reason to reach out to the poor and take advantage of them.
“Muslims don’t want Christians to trade with their religion,” Haredy says.
Christians should not be exploiting the poverty and ill health of others in order to pull them into the religion. Calling on any belief should be based on dialogue and understanding.”
Other Muslim scholars voiced similar concerns about Christianity using the poor status of some Muslims to recruit them to the Christian faith.
Dr. Hamza Dib, a lecturer on Islamic law at Al-Quds University in eastern Jerusalem, maintains that the most disturbing element is that those targeted are often uneducated and do not have the intellectual tools to challenge the conversion attempts.
“I’m not concerned for those who know about Islamic religion. I’m afraid for those who don’t,” he says.
While religious figures on both sides claim the relationship between the Muslim and Christian communities on a daily basis is mostly cordial and even warm, the attitude of Muslims toward their co-religionists who convert to Christianity is an entirely different story.
Muslims who insist on converting to Christianity testify to horrendous difficulties in maintaining their faith.
“This is a catacomb existence for these new Christians,” says Shea. “It’s not a flowering of Christianity. There are some conversions, but it’s a hard cultivation and there’s much intolerance in these places. They have to hide their conversion.”
A case in point is Sam (The Media Line is withholding his real name out of concern for his safety). Sam, who is Middle East native, converted from Islam to Christianity nearly 20 years ago and has since made a home for himself in Europe.
“It was a long journey. I’m one of the early converts,” he says.
The problems facing converts in his home country apply to every aspect of life: including issuing an identity card, getting married, educating children, and securing an inheritance. The harassment is both bureaucratic, from the government, and physical, from friends and even family members, he says.
Sam insists that he was not encouraged by the Christian community to become a Christian because “they were scared.”
“I had a friend, a young lady from a family of strong Muslims, and her family slaughtered her because she became a Christian,” he says.
The government does not systematically kill people if they convert, but if they are killed by someone in the community, the murder will be met with impunity, he explains.
According to Islam, Muslims must not convert from their faith.
Traditionally, a Muslim man who turned his back on the religion would be executed and a woman would be imprisoned until she repented. But this penalty is only applied if these people pose a threat to Muslim society, such as propagating their new religion, says Dr. Muhammad Serag, a professor of Islamic studies at the American University in Cairo.
He explains that this severe attitude toward converts was originally adopted for political reasons -- in order to preserve the interests of the Muslim society.
“In the past it could be appreciated, understood or justified, but not in modern times.”
Conversion from Islam is still frowned upon in Muslim society.
Haredy says Muslims have no problem with people of other faiths and cites the Quranic verse “Let there be no compulsion in religion,” (Al-Baqara, 2:256) as evidence.
“If some Muslims are not practicing this, then the problem is with their understanding of Islam, not with Islam itself. Islam should not be judged by the bad practice of Muslims.”
Fawzy, like Khoury, believes there is a battle between the two religions, and does not see an end in sight under the current conditions.
“The only way to end the war is to say Christianity is in the church, Islam is in the mosque and let us live as Egyptians. We don’t need to have religion everywhere in our lives,” he says.
Many identify this perceived battle between Muslims and Christians with the clash between East and West. But while the battle has until now been limited to conventional war-like tactics, the 21st century could mark a dangerous turning point, with the weapons available today becoming both more effective and more destructive.
Dwindling Numbers
Quantifying the number of Christians in the Middle East today, compared with their numbers in the past, is a difficult, if not impossible task. Governments in the region have an interest in keeping census data quiet for political reasons, while Christians tend to inflate their numbers.
“Religious demographics are so sensitive in these places that they don’t take censuses that are meaningful, so we’re just guessing the figures,” says Nina Shea, director of the Center of Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute.
Any census of religious groups would also include ethnic minorities, so the results could upset the delicate balance of power in countries where the relative strength of one group compared to another can affect the political make-up. Lebanon is a prime example of the phenomenon.
Numerous United Nations organizations and NGOs contacted by The Media Line could not provide sufficient data to point to an accurate trend in Christian demographics in the Middle East over the past century. However, several Christian sources and academics estimated that Christians comprised between 20 and 30 percent of the population at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
The major changes came about through civil wars, and especially in the massacre and deportation of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
Today, with the exception of Lebanon, Christians comprise less than 10% of the populations of most Middle Eastern countries. In some states, such as Saudi Arabia, Mauritania and Somalia, there are none. (See chart below)
The reasons for the decline in the numbers of Christians vary. Some are fleeing because of discrimination from their societies or from the regime; and some are being persecuted.
The ease of travel has made it much simpler now than in the past to leave the region. Many Christians are well-educated and find that they have more opportunities in the Western world than in the Middle East.
The fact that Christians have a lower birthrate than Muslims also works against them demographically.
Conversions from Christianity to Islam, whether forced or voluntary, is another contributing factor – although not a major factor, numerically - in their dwindling numbers.
Raheb, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, points to another disturbing aspect of this exodus. It is not just the Christians leaving the Middle East, he says. Those departing also include secular Muslims and in the case of Israel, liberal Jews.
The region, he says, is gradually losing its pluralism and leaving a disgruntled, homogeneous and more radical society behind.
The Christian population in Iraq, for example, has diminished significantly since the war in 2003, because many are fleeing from both the hardships of war and persecution.
It is estimated that Iraqi Christians account for nearly 40% of the refugees who have fled the country, a percentage several times higher than their proportion in the general Iraqi population.
According to the CIA’s World Factbook, the percentages of Christians living in countries and territories which are members of the Arab League are as follows:
1) Algeria - Less than 1%
2) Bahrain – 9%
3) Comoros – 2%
4) Djibouti – 6%
5) Egypt – 10%
6) Iraq – 3%
7) Jordan – 6%
8) Kuwait – Less than 15%
9) Lebanon – 39%
10) Libya – Less than 3%, if any (no info)
11) Mauritania – None
12) Morocco - 1.1%
13) Oman – None
14) Qatar – 8.5%
15) Saudi Arabia – None
16) Somalia – None
17) Sudan – 5%
18) Syria – 10%
19) Tunisia – 1%
20) West Bank – 8%, Gaza – 0.7%
21) United Arab Emirates – Less than 4%
22) Yemen – No info, except that there are some very small Christian communities
It is worth noting that because of a lack of hard data, many of these figures are based on estimates. In several cases, Christians in these countries say their true numbers are much higher.
©2007. The Media Line Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
By Rachelle Kliger on Thursday, December 27, 2007
[Egypt] Under a woolen canopy, wisps of smoke from an outdoor fireplace mix with the scent of tobacco and rose tea. Magdi, an Egyptian Copt, nimbly rolls himself a cigarette. Sitting cross-legged on the cushioned floor, he ponders out loud how it came to be that all of his peers are happily married, while he is 32, good looking, intelligent, well-off-- and yet still painfully single.
The problem, he believes, is that his Christian religion limits his options for finding a soul mate in Egypt.
“If I married a Muslim girl my mother would kill me,” he says. “If it was a Jewish girl, she wouldn’t mind so much. But a Muslim? Never.”
Magdi cannot quite explain his mother’s unyielding attitude. But her attitude is typical of the prevailing feelings in this part of the world. The antagonism between Muslims and Christians goes back a long way, and the ever-present chasm between the two communities is noticeable in every walk of life.
The enmity is not limited to Egypt. The slaying of a Christian bookstore manager in Gaza in October marked a sad milestone in the relations between Muslims and Christians in the Palestinian territories.
Rami Ayyad was stabbed and shot to death after being accused by Gaza-based Islamic groups of engaging in missionary activity.
Similar incidents occurred this year in Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq. A group of 31 suspected Al-Qa’ida members were charged in Lebanon recently for plotting to bomb a church.
The list goes on. The Middle East is awash with religion-motivated violence.
Today, as Middle Eastern Christians dwindle in numbers and cling to their last vestiges, some are wondering whether Christians and Muslims here are engaged in a battle over the survival of the fittest.
Spiritual Warfare
Rev. Steven Khoury, head of the Calvary Baptist Ministries in Israel and the Palestinian territories, says the tension between Muslims and Christians is simmering beneath the surface. Paradoxically, he believes it will explode when the political crises in the Middle East are solved.
“Right now everybody -- Muslims and Christians -- is busy with politics,” Khoury says, tidying a pile of Arabic-language bibles at his chapel in eastern Jerusalem.
“Once the politics settle down, I believe it’s going to turn into more of a religious battle than a political battle.”
Once the politics are out of the picture, what remains will be spiritual warfare and the religious communities will be left alone to fight out their war to the bloody end, he predicts.
Not everyone agrees. “I’d resist the notion that there was a battle between the two religions,” says Prof. Gerald Hawting, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
From the advent of Islam there has been a religious dispute between local Christians and Muslims, but Hawting dismisses the notion that battles between the Byzantines and the Muslims in the ninth and tenth centuries, for example, were faith-based. Religion, he concedes, was often used as a propaganda tool to arouse the soldiers, but was not the main premise of the battle.
Crusades - A Quest for Earthly Gains?
And then came the crusades.
In the early crusades, Hawting says, the religious elements were very strong.
“The Europeans feel they’re engaged in a religious venture and they’re promised access to paradise if they’re killed in battle, and forgiveness for their sins,” he says.
But even in these early stages, there were other elements at play, such as economic and political gain, and the crusades gradually became more motivated by pragmatism.
“There’s a feudal system in Europe producing landless young men who haven’t much future in Europe. So sending them off to conquer land in the Middle East is a good way to keep them employed,” Hawting says.
As time progressed, European cities developed trade interests in the Middle East, and this, too, became an important motive.
Hawting does not believe the crusades is reason that Christians in the Middle East are discriminated against today.
“I think it’s convenient for some Muslims to raise that, but I don’t think the present difficulties between Christians and Muslims are to do with that. It’s to do with the reassertion of Islam and in the current situation. Local Christians are seen by some Muslims as a possible fifth column who are loyal to someone from outside.”
Wilfred Wong, a researcher with the Jubilee Campaign, says many Muslims in the Middle East have unofficially declared war on the Christians in the region, partly because of the United States and coalition forces fighting in Muslim countries.
Wong suggests that the Christians are wrongly perceived as being an extension of the Western forces, causing resentment towards them from many Muslims. The general increase in Islamic fundamentalism has also caused many Muslims in the Middle East to become more intolerant and resentful towards Christians and other non-Muslims living in their midst, he adds.
Wong says Christians are not trying to take over.
“Some Muslims are leading a crusade against the Christians, who just want to get on with their lives and stay in their ancient homeland.”
Persecution
Christians are a minority in the Middle East among a Muslim majority. Historically, in states governed by Islamic law, Jews and Christians were considered "People of the Book" and were given a special status under Muslim rule known as "Dhimmi." They had fewer legal and social rights than Muslims and were obligated to pay a tax known as jizya. But their life, property and faith were protected.
Today, rights organizations talk about severe encroachments on religious freedoms throughout the Middle East. Christians are often the first to bear the brunt.
“We’ve lived with this discrimination for 1,400 years,” says Nader Fawzy, President of the Canada-based Middle East Christians Association (MECA).
Contrary to Hawting, Fawzy believes the discrimination stems first and foremost from the religious differences.
“They cut our tongues and burned our churches,” he says. “The discrimination has nothing to do with the government more than it has to do with Islam.”
Nina Shea, director of the Center of Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, says that while the attitude of the regimes toward Christians in the Middle East varies from country to country, generally their situation relative to many other minorities in this part of the world, is bad.
The one positive exception, Shea notes, is in the Gulf states, where religious tolerance has improved in places like Qatar and Bahrain.
But elsewhere, the pattern in which Jews were coerced into leaving Muslim countries is now repeating itself with Christians. Countries are going from a once-Christian majority to having no Christians at all.
“And it’s accelerating,” Shea says. “I think it’s a very dismal picture.”
Not everyone paints such a bleak picture regarding Christian-Muslim relations. Mitri Raheb, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, says the main problem facing his community is not the Muslims. The one to blame for the Christians’ situation is Israel, because of its policies in the Palestinian territories, and the West.
“I think the main problem is the interference of the West here, militarily,” Raheb says.
“This interference is not letting our region enjoy any stability.”
Raheb is particularly concerned about Western efforts to recruit the Middle East’s Christian community as a tool against the Muslims.
Mohsen Haredy, an Islamic scholar and editor of the online information service, Ask About Islam, urges caution in generalizing about the suffering of Christians in the Middle East.
“Ordinary people, Muslims and Christians, live their life normally and they have good relations with each other,” he says.
“If some Christians are suffering somewhere in the Middle East, they are victims of the political agenda of some states, the same way Muslims are suffering, too.”
Conversion Attempts
Assuming the Christian claims of persecution are accurate, some Muslims say they are not entirely unprovoked. The primary grievance leveled against the Middle East’s Christians is their efforts to convert Muslims to Christianity, a practiced disdained by Islam.
Christians, on the other hand, complain of forcible conversions to Islam. In Egypt, there have been reports of Christian girls being kidnapped and coerced into becoming Muslims; or Christians who are bribed with jobs and money to change their faith.
The boom in media channels, satellite television and especially the Internet has created new ways for both faiths to reach out to potential newcomers, making the practice more difficult to counter.
Khoury does not deny encouraging people to embrace his faith.
“I believe that each Christian should do their duty and that is to preach the gospel and to speak about the life that Christ lived,” he says. “I don’t think it’s wrong at all to speak about my Savior.”
Khoury does not believe in aggressive missionizing, but the sensitivity of the issue will not push him to the shadows.
“If I keep a low profile, how effective will I be?” he asks. “If a Muslim wants to listen about my religion and my faith, I’ll be more than happy to speak with him. I don’t think it’s wrong.”
This attitude does not fare well with the Muslim community. In response to a query posted by a reader on the popular website Islam Online, a religious advisor listed instructions about how Muslims should deal with evangelizing campaigns in Islamic countries.
Muslims should learn to identify the problem and deal with it through preventative methods and educational programs, it says.
“Determine the outlets through which these missionizing messages are coming,” the site instructed. “Whether it’s through films, leaflets, magazines or other means. Do not let them through, and punish anyone who violates this with a deterring penalty.”
It also advises the more well-off Muslims to provide social support to the underprivileged and tend to their needs, so that evangelizing Christians will have no reason to reach out to the poor and take advantage of them.
“Muslims don’t want Christians to trade with their religion,” Haredy says.
Christians should not be exploiting the poverty and ill health of others in order to pull them into the religion. Calling on any belief should be based on dialogue and understanding.”
Other Muslim scholars voiced similar concerns about Christianity using the poor status of some Muslims to recruit them to the Christian faith.
Dr. Hamza Dib, a lecturer on Islamic law at Al-Quds University in eastern Jerusalem, maintains that the most disturbing element is that those targeted are often uneducated and do not have the intellectual tools to challenge the conversion attempts.
“I’m not concerned for those who know about Islamic religion. I’m afraid for those who don’t,” he says.
While religious figures on both sides claim the relationship between the Muslim and Christian communities on a daily basis is mostly cordial and even warm, the attitude of Muslims toward their co-religionists who convert to Christianity is an entirely different story.
Muslims who insist on converting to Christianity testify to horrendous difficulties in maintaining their faith.
“This is a catacomb existence for these new Christians,” says Shea. “It’s not a flowering of Christianity. There are some conversions, but it’s a hard cultivation and there’s much intolerance in these places. They have to hide their conversion.”
A case in point is Sam (The Media Line is withholding his real name out of concern for his safety). Sam, who is Middle East native, converted from Islam to Christianity nearly 20 years ago and has since made a home for himself in Europe.
“It was a long journey. I’m one of the early converts,” he says.
The problems facing converts in his home country apply to every aspect of life: including issuing an identity card, getting married, educating children, and securing an inheritance. The harassment is both bureaucratic, from the government, and physical, from friends and even family members, he says.
Sam insists that he was not encouraged by the Christian community to become a Christian because “they were scared.”
“I had a friend, a young lady from a family of strong Muslims, and her family slaughtered her because she became a Christian,” he says.
The government does not systematically kill people if they convert, but if they are killed by someone in the community, the murder will be met with impunity, he explains.
According to Islam, Muslims must not convert from their faith.
Traditionally, a Muslim man who turned his back on the religion would be executed and a woman would be imprisoned until she repented. But this penalty is only applied if these people pose a threat to Muslim society, such as propagating their new religion, says Dr. Muhammad Serag, a professor of Islamic studies at the American University in Cairo.
He explains that this severe attitude toward converts was originally adopted for political reasons -- in order to preserve the interests of the Muslim society.
“In the past it could be appreciated, understood or justified, but not in modern times.”
Conversion from Islam is still frowned upon in Muslim society.
Haredy says Muslims have no problem with people of other faiths and cites the Quranic verse “Let there be no compulsion in religion,” (Al-Baqara, 2:256) as evidence.
“If some Muslims are not practicing this, then the problem is with their understanding of Islam, not with Islam itself. Islam should not be judged by the bad practice of Muslims.”
Fawzy, like Khoury, believes there is a battle between the two religions, and does not see an end in sight under the current conditions.
“The only way to end the war is to say Christianity is in the church, Islam is in the mosque and let us live as Egyptians. We don’t need to have religion everywhere in our lives,” he says.
Many identify this perceived battle between Muslims and Christians with the clash between East and West. But while the battle has until now been limited to conventional war-like tactics, the 21st century could mark a dangerous turning point, with the weapons available today becoming both more effective and more destructive.
Dwindling Numbers
Quantifying the number of Christians in the Middle East today, compared with their numbers in the past, is a difficult, if not impossible task. Governments in the region have an interest in keeping census data quiet for political reasons, while Christians tend to inflate their numbers.
“Religious demographics are so sensitive in these places that they don’t take censuses that are meaningful, so we’re just guessing the figures,” says Nina Shea, director of the Center of Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute.
Any census of religious groups would also include ethnic minorities, so the results could upset the delicate balance of power in countries where the relative strength of one group compared to another can affect the political make-up. Lebanon is a prime example of the phenomenon.
Numerous United Nations organizations and NGOs contacted by The Media Line could not provide sufficient data to point to an accurate trend in Christian demographics in the Middle East over the past century. However, several Christian sources and academics estimated that Christians comprised between 20 and 30 percent of the population at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
The major changes came about through civil wars, and especially in the massacre and deportation of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
Today, with the exception of Lebanon, Christians comprise less than 10% of the populations of most Middle Eastern countries. In some states, such as Saudi Arabia, Mauritania and Somalia, there are none. (See chart below)
The reasons for the decline in the numbers of Christians vary. Some are fleeing because of discrimination from their societies or from the regime; and some are being persecuted.
The ease of travel has made it much simpler now than in the past to leave the region. Many Christians are well-educated and find that they have more opportunities in the Western world than in the Middle East.
The fact that Christians have a lower birthrate than Muslims also works against them demographically.
Conversions from Christianity to Islam, whether forced or voluntary, is another contributing factor – although not a major factor, numerically - in their dwindling numbers.
Raheb, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, points to another disturbing aspect of this exodus. It is not just the Christians leaving the Middle East, he says. Those departing also include secular Muslims and in the case of Israel, liberal Jews.
The region, he says, is gradually losing its pluralism and leaving a disgruntled, homogeneous and more radical society behind.
The Christian population in Iraq, for example, has diminished significantly since the war in 2003, because many are fleeing from both the hardships of war and persecution.
It is estimated that Iraqi Christians account for nearly 40% of the refugees who have fled the country, a percentage several times higher than their proportion in the general Iraqi population.
According to the CIA’s World Factbook, the percentages of Christians living in countries and territories which are members of the Arab League are as follows:
1) Algeria - Less than 1%
2) Bahrain – 9%
3) Comoros – 2%
4) Djibouti – 6%
5) Egypt – 10%
6) Iraq – 3%
7) Jordan – 6%
8) Kuwait – Less than 15%
9) Lebanon – 39%
10) Libya – Less than 3%, if any (no info)
11) Mauritania – None
12) Morocco - 1.1%
13) Oman – None
14) Qatar – 8.5%
15) Saudi Arabia – None
16) Somalia – None
17) Sudan – 5%
18) Syria – 10%
19) Tunisia – 1%
20) West Bank – 8%, Gaza – 0.7%
21) United Arab Emirates – Less than 4%
22) Yemen – No info, except that there are some very small Christian communities
It is worth noting that because of a lack of hard data, many of these figures are based on estimates. In several cases, Christians in these countries say their true numbers are much higher.
©2007. The Media Line Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
By Rachelle Kliger on Thursday, December 27, 2007
Iranian in India encourages dialogue Somini Sengupta Thursday, December 27, 2007 c/o IHT
Iranian in India encourages dialogue
By Somini Sengupta
Thursday, December 27, 2007
NEW DELHI: Ramin Jahanbegloo, a philosopher granted bail by Tehran, sees lessons for Mideast.
"I've lived here on and off for two years, with imprisonment in between."
Ramin Jahanbegloo, an Iranian philosopher, described his Indian sojourn this way, and even as he agreed to an interview this month on the condition that he not be asked to talk about his home country, which imprisoned him last year, it kept creeping into the conversation, quite uninvited, like a gnome.
In Iran, Jahanbegloo, 50, was accused of collaborating with Americans to destabilize the state, kept in solitary confinement for four months and released on bail.
Out of jail, but with the charges still pending, he returned here to finish his latest book, "India Revisited: Conversations on Contemporary India," a collection of 27 interviews with 27 remarkable Indians that the Indian arm of Oxford University Press has just published. The book is ostensibly about Indian subjects - dance, caste, Parsee, democracy - but it inexorably engages many of the issues that vex Jahanbegloo's homeland, including tradition, pluralism, the West and freedom.
Born in Tehran, Jahanbegloo discovered India in childhood. His father was an economist, his mother a playwright. The Indian ambassador in Tehran was a guest at family dinner parties when Jahanbegloo was young, and the library in his home contained the works of Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru; both had visited Iran.
Jahanbegloo said that he liked to think of himself as an Indian, without the citizenship but with what he calls an Indian's "metaphysical view of the world."
One would be hard-pressed to find a more eloquent promoter of the idea of India.
"India is a country where you find a dialogue of cultures in a very deep sense of the term," Jahanbegloo said. "I try to understand this spirit. I try to follow this spirit. Even if you find a lot of tension, riots, killings, that spirit itself brings India back."
Jahanbegloo's intellectual home in India, the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, where he has had a faculty appointment for the last two years, is also home to a number of other iconoclasts, like Ashis Nandy, a political psychologist, who likewise appears in the new book. Nandy explains where Gandhi sits in Indian consciousness. D.L. Sheth, another scholar at the center, discusses the shifting meanings of caste. Mrinal Sen, a filmmaker from Calcutta, occasionally reprimands Jahanbegloo for not properly understanding his oeuvre.
Kapila Vatsyayan, a cultural historian, offers an elegantly simple explanation of India's survival.
"India has so far demonstrated the capacity to hold together two lifelines, one an original, primal, or indigenous, almost immutable line, and the other of 'change,' " she tells Jahanbegloo. "No single unit or dimension is totally 'insular' or 'static.' "
Jahanbegloo finds this an especially trenchant lesson for Middle Eastern countries, which he says have not been able to accommodate a dialogue of cultures. Instead, he says, they have suffered either a modernization from above, as in the case of Iran under the Shah, or a virulent assertion of fundamentalism from below, as with the Taliban of Afghanistan.
"Iranians, like Arabs, have not been able to digest modernity because they did not find a way to create a permanent dialogue between the two concepts," he said. "It's either created authoritarian modernity or authoritarian traditionalism."
Jahanbegloo credits Indian thinkers for their "soft reading of modernity, not a violent reaction to it." Missing from his glowing appraisal is sufficient explanation for the violence that persists in Indian life, whether in the guise of Maoist insurgents or Hindu radicals or homegrown Islamist terrorist groups.
"This is what I think is so important to people of the Middle East, particularly Turks, Iranians and Arabs," he said. "They want to keep their own identity. They want to be proud of their past. But it's very important to open up to other cultures. Democracy is a result of this. Democracy is a government of dialogue."
Jahanbegloo studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and stayed on in France for 20 years. Among his first books were works on the 19th-century German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
His inquiries were very much European, from the making of the modern European state to the idea of revolution. And he was very much engaged with what he called "philosophies of violence."
As Jahanbegloo recalls it now, the violence of the 1979 Iranian revolution kindled his interest in nonviolent ways of making change, though it was not until the early 1990s, when he returned home to Tehran, that his mind returned to the philosophers of nonviolence. In 1998 he wrote a book on Gandhi; in 1999 a book on nonviolence. He invited thinkers from across the world, from Richard Rorty to the writer V.S. Naipaul, to his independent institution, the Cultural Research Bureau, in Tehran. He also published a scholarly journal called Goftegu, or Dialogue.
As it happened, dialogue landed him in prison. In April 2006, while he was on his way to a conference in Belgium, he was arrested at the Tehran airport and sent to Evin Prison; he had recently returned home from Delhi for a vacation. At the time, the Iranian information minister was quoted as saying that Jahanbegloo had had "contacts with foreigners." He was released after confessing that foreign agents might have exploited his expertise.
Jahanbegloo says he told the Iranian authorities that he had attended conferences with plenty of foreigners but never with an "anti-state agenda" and never to divulge anything to foreign intelligence officials.
"There were no names I could give," he said in the interview here. "I could give only names of philosophers. There was no way I could reveal any secrets. There were no secrets."
Other scholars, including two Iranian-Americans, Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, and Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planner with ties to the Open Society Institute, were arrested in May on similarly vague accusations of plotting a foreign-sponsored "velvet revolution."
All three appeared on Iran's state-run television in July, making statements that could have been interpreted to suggest that they had tried to overthrow the Iranian government. Jahanbegloo's televised statement, recorded during his detention in 2006, included the admission that on trips outside Iran he had become acquainted with Americans and Israelis, many of whom, he said on television, were "intelligence figures."
Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh were released in September.
In prison, as a way to get his mind out of his cell, Jahanbegloo wrote as many as 2,000 aphorisms on the backs of tissue boxes. They will soon be published in Iran in a collection called "A Mind in Winter," a title that he described as "a metaphor for being alone, hibernating also."
Next he plans to return to a book he began, but did not finish, on Iran and modernity. By early next month Jahanbegloo, who also holds Canadian citizenship, will move to Toronto with his wife and daughter and join the faculty at the University of Toronto.
David Malone, the Canadian high commissioner here, credits Jahanbegloo in "India Revisited" for compelling so many Indian scholars "to speak in short, clear, largely jargon-free sentences," as he wrote in an e-mail message. "It allows the lay reader to access how thoughtful Indians (and there are so many!) struggle with notions of democracy, multiculturalism, the caste system and the situation of minorities, religious and otherwise, all important issues in India, most of which are mirrored in the West," he wrote.
For Jahanbegloo, more than 16 months after his release, the nightmares have begun to dissipate. "Breathing the Indian air brings me health, at least mental health," he said wryly. "Sometimes I get really mad at the corruption, the Delhi traffic, how people drive, honking all the time. But the absence of nervousness and psychological violence gives you a peaceful life. In many other countries, like America and Iran, people are very nervous, psychologically very nervous."
By Somini Sengupta
Thursday, December 27, 2007
NEW DELHI: Ramin Jahanbegloo, a philosopher granted bail by Tehran, sees lessons for Mideast.
"I've lived here on and off for two years, with imprisonment in between."
Ramin Jahanbegloo, an Iranian philosopher, described his Indian sojourn this way, and even as he agreed to an interview this month on the condition that he not be asked to talk about his home country, which imprisoned him last year, it kept creeping into the conversation, quite uninvited, like a gnome.
In Iran, Jahanbegloo, 50, was accused of collaborating with Americans to destabilize the state, kept in solitary confinement for four months and released on bail.
Out of jail, but with the charges still pending, he returned here to finish his latest book, "India Revisited: Conversations on Contemporary India," a collection of 27 interviews with 27 remarkable Indians that the Indian arm of Oxford University Press has just published. The book is ostensibly about Indian subjects - dance, caste, Parsee, democracy - but it inexorably engages many of the issues that vex Jahanbegloo's homeland, including tradition, pluralism, the West and freedom.
Born in Tehran, Jahanbegloo discovered India in childhood. His father was an economist, his mother a playwright. The Indian ambassador in Tehran was a guest at family dinner parties when Jahanbegloo was young, and the library in his home contained the works of Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru; both had visited Iran.
Jahanbegloo said that he liked to think of himself as an Indian, without the citizenship but with what he calls an Indian's "metaphysical view of the world."
One would be hard-pressed to find a more eloquent promoter of the idea of India.
"India is a country where you find a dialogue of cultures in a very deep sense of the term," Jahanbegloo said. "I try to understand this spirit. I try to follow this spirit. Even if you find a lot of tension, riots, killings, that spirit itself brings India back."
Jahanbegloo's intellectual home in India, the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, where he has had a faculty appointment for the last two years, is also home to a number of other iconoclasts, like Ashis Nandy, a political psychologist, who likewise appears in the new book. Nandy explains where Gandhi sits in Indian consciousness. D.L. Sheth, another scholar at the center, discusses the shifting meanings of caste. Mrinal Sen, a filmmaker from Calcutta, occasionally reprimands Jahanbegloo for not properly understanding his oeuvre.
Kapila Vatsyayan, a cultural historian, offers an elegantly simple explanation of India's survival.
"India has so far demonstrated the capacity to hold together two lifelines, one an original, primal, or indigenous, almost immutable line, and the other of 'change,' " she tells Jahanbegloo. "No single unit or dimension is totally 'insular' or 'static.' "
Jahanbegloo finds this an especially trenchant lesson for Middle Eastern countries, which he says have not been able to accommodate a dialogue of cultures. Instead, he says, they have suffered either a modernization from above, as in the case of Iran under the Shah, or a virulent assertion of fundamentalism from below, as with the Taliban of Afghanistan.
"Iranians, like Arabs, have not been able to digest modernity because they did not find a way to create a permanent dialogue between the two concepts," he said. "It's either created authoritarian modernity or authoritarian traditionalism."
Jahanbegloo credits Indian thinkers for their "soft reading of modernity, not a violent reaction to it." Missing from his glowing appraisal is sufficient explanation for the violence that persists in Indian life, whether in the guise of Maoist insurgents or Hindu radicals or homegrown Islamist terrorist groups.
"This is what I think is so important to people of the Middle East, particularly Turks, Iranians and Arabs," he said. "They want to keep their own identity. They want to be proud of their past. But it's very important to open up to other cultures. Democracy is a result of this. Democracy is a government of dialogue."
Jahanbegloo studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and stayed on in France for 20 years. Among his first books were works on the 19th-century German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
His inquiries were very much European, from the making of the modern European state to the idea of revolution. And he was very much engaged with what he called "philosophies of violence."
As Jahanbegloo recalls it now, the violence of the 1979 Iranian revolution kindled his interest in nonviolent ways of making change, though it was not until the early 1990s, when he returned home to Tehran, that his mind returned to the philosophers of nonviolence. In 1998 he wrote a book on Gandhi; in 1999 a book on nonviolence. He invited thinkers from across the world, from Richard Rorty to the writer V.S. Naipaul, to his independent institution, the Cultural Research Bureau, in Tehran. He also published a scholarly journal called Goftegu, or Dialogue.
As it happened, dialogue landed him in prison. In April 2006, while he was on his way to a conference in Belgium, he was arrested at the Tehran airport and sent to Evin Prison; he had recently returned home from Delhi for a vacation. At the time, the Iranian information minister was quoted as saying that Jahanbegloo had had "contacts with foreigners." He was released after confessing that foreign agents might have exploited his expertise.
Jahanbegloo says he told the Iranian authorities that he had attended conferences with plenty of foreigners but never with an "anti-state agenda" and never to divulge anything to foreign intelligence officials.
"There were no names I could give," he said in the interview here. "I could give only names of philosophers. There was no way I could reveal any secrets. There were no secrets."
Other scholars, including two Iranian-Americans, Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, and Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planner with ties to the Open Society Institute, were arrested in May on similarly vague accusations of plotting a foreign-sponsored "velvet revolution."
All three appeared on Iran's state-run television in July, making statements that could have been interpreted to suggest that they had tried to overthrow the Iranian government. Jahanbegloo's televised statement, recorded during his detention in 2006, included the admission that on trips outside Iran he had become acquainted with Americans and Israelis, many of whom, he said on television, were "intelligence figures."
Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh were released in September.
In prison, as a way to get his mind out of his cell, Jahanbegloo wrote as many as 2,000 aphorisms on the backs of tissue boxes. They will soon be published in Iran in a collection called "A Mind in Winter," a title that he described as "a metaphor for being alone, hibernating also."
Next he plans to return to a book he began, but did not finish, on Iran and modernity. By early next month Jahanbegloo, who also holds Canadian citizenship, will move to Toronto with his wife and daughter and join the faculty at the University of Toronto.
David Malone, the Canadian high commissioner here, credits Jahanbegloo in "India Revisited" for compelling so many Indian scholars "to speak in short, clear, largely jargon-free sentences," as he wrote in an e-mail message. "It allows the lay reader to access how thoughtful Indians (and there are so many!) struggle with notions of democracy, multiculturalism, the caste system and the situation of minorities, religious and otherwise, all important issues in India, most of which are mirrored in the West," he wrote.
For Jahanbegloo, more than 16 months after his release, the nightmares have begun to dissipate. "Breathing the Indian air brings me health, at least mental health," he said wryly. "Sometimes I get really mad at the corruption, the Delhi traffic, how people drive, honking all the time. But the absence of nervousness and psychological violence gives you a peaceful life. In many other countries, like America and Iran, people are very nervous, psychologically very nervous."
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