Anti-American Rally in Kabul, Photo Military.com (http://www.military.com/news/article/petraeus-burning-quran-endangers-troops.html?ESRC=army.nl)

According to a recent email from Gen. David Petraeus, the American commander in Afghanistan, to the Associated Press (September 7, 2010), “Images of the burning of a Quran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan — and around the world — to inflame public opinion and incite violence.”

Well–duh.

Petraeus is referring to the plans of a Gainesville,Florida-based church to hold “International Burn A Quran Day” on September 11, 2010.

The church in question, the Dove World Outreach Center, led by Pastor Terry Jones, has been holding annual anti-Islamic events on September 11 for years and is of a piece with Fred Phelps notorious Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas–known for a homophobia so rabid it has led to protests at the funerals of American soldiers on the grounds that they died serving a country that has fallen from God’s favor.

Like Phelp’s Westboro Baptist Church, Dove World Outreach has been involved in cartoonish anti-gay protests, aimed for example at Gainesville’s mayor, with church members carrying signs saying: “No Homo Mayor.” But while Westboro specializes in homophobia–with anti-Islamic activity a sideline–the priority is reversed at Dove World. Pastor Jones has penned a bigoted screed by the title Islam is of the Devil (Creation House, 2010) in which he claims expert knowledge of Islam based on having lived a few years in, wait for it, Germany.

The laughable illogic of Jones’ claims to any considered expertise regarding Islam, however, is almost beside the point. While it is Phelp’s church that has been parodied on the popular HBO series True Blood–the opening credits include a churchyard sign that says “God Hates Fangs”–surely Jones’ efforts are equally worthy of derision.

But how should we think about the claims by Gen. Petraeus that actual burning of Qurans by an independent church with maybe 50 members will put the lives of American soldiers and marines in danger?

Well, first it is undoubtedly true. But it is true with a huge caveat: The genuinely hateful act of the Gainesville church may be detested by Muslims everywhere–as by Christains, Jews and Others–but the sorts of violent reactions the American commander points to will come from national populations already at war with or strongly predisposed to think of the United States as an enemy.

Please note that I am not talking about strenuous symbolic reaction to the destruction of a sacred symbol, but actual violence against Americans.

Does it make sense to blame all Americans for the actions of a marginal and widely-deplored group of private citizens? In the logic of justice, of course not. But this is exactly the logic of warfare, in which enemy nationals are essentially interchangeable. It is the logic that allows the United States to blithely shoot missiles at various localities that according to “actionable intelligence” harbor “terrorists” with full knowledge that they are also home to various categories of non-combatants–that is women and children, farmers and teachers, and other who have lived for decades under the shadow of war. It is the same logic that allowed the Bush administration to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American people, who trapped in the logic of warfare couldn’t imagine that Saddam Hussein’s regime was not involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Even the strongest denunciations of the Dove World hate-mongering, of course, will have little impact on those Muslims who are already trapped in a war logic, but this is sort of beside the point. The best way to protect the “troops” is undoubtedly to get them the hell out of Afghanistan–though if I thought Jones’ media circus sideshow was susceptible to a “protect American troops” argument I would not object to making it.

Ultimately, however, the reason to denounce, detest and otherwise condemn the actions of Dove World have nothing to do with American soldiers. Every church, every politician, every institution, every person of good will should condemn Jones’ Quran burning because it is hateful, because it is calculated to cause pain, because it is a pure expression of bigotry.

The floods in Pakistan

An interview by Maggie Ronkin with Fayyaz Baqir, Director of the Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Center, Islamabad, Pakistan

MR: What regions of Pakistan and sectors of the population are affected most by the tragic flooding?

FB: Vast swathes of land in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (previously the Northwest Frontier Province), Southern Punjab (the Siraiki region of the Punjab), Sindh, and Balochistan have been devastated by the recent floods. These floods are considered to be the worst in the entire world during the past hundred years. It is not an exaggeration that fifteen million families have been rendered homeless, and hundreds of thousands of homes have been wiped off the face of the earth. Hundreds of villages are no more. Standing crops over thousands of acres, cattle, infrastructure, and productive assets of millions of families have been lost due to flooding. A woman from a very well off and respected family of a rural district contacted by phone said “Everything is gone. We are beggars”. Scores of women from small farm and landless families burst into tears when asked about their plight. “There is no food, no water, no medicine, no help” most of them narrated. If they do not receive assistance soon, they may reach the point where they think that there is “no hope”. Such a situation will add another dimension to the crisis because desperate minds are fertile ground for militants. This is a great humanitarian crisis to which the world’s conscience needs to respond.  The scale of this tragedy is so enormous that the country’s entire population is reeling in shock. (Read the rest of the article on Anthropology Works; Image credit: Anthropology Works.)

Enter 2010. In the wake of this year’s catastrophic flooding the situation is different. I would still argue that the security of Pakistan’s nukes is not really the question, but without a substantial commitment to the project of rebuilding the country from the international community, the Pakistani state could end up in a downward spiral.

No force inside the country is even close to being strong enough to overthrow the central government as long as it enjoys the backing of the military–certainly not the Pakistani Taliban (this is a little like worrying that the militia wing of the Tea Party will overthrow the U.S. government), but without sustained efforts at post-flood redevelopment, the state may lose its writ in large parts of the country.

Try to imagine a situation where Hurricane Katrina had hit not just New Orleans and the Gulf Coast with full force, but hundreds of cities and towns, submerging them under water for weeks on end. And then people were left to their own devices. And then Congress decided their was no money at all to rebuild. This is what Pakistan is facing.

As a matter of principle no state should be left on its own in the wake of a catastrophic natural disaster. The humanitarian cost is too high. Many will also hasten to point out that a Pakistan caught in a downward spiral is not good for anyone. Though I detest the militarist strategies that have been developed to respond to such, states in crisis are indeed incubators for “terrorists” (I’d prefer to call them internationally inclined political criminals). Moreover whatever else happens, invasion plus regime change is not really an option in the case of nuclear-armed country. Even if it was possible to “secure the nukes” with commando raids and so on, the risk of even a few weapons either being used or smuggled into the hands of non-state actors under such conditions is just too high.

So what is the choice?

The international community, the U.S., the World Bank and IMF should,

1) Defer loan repayments on existing debt, granting a 3 year moratorium and partial debt cancellation;

2) Boost guaranteed multi-year redevelopment funding to a level commensurate with the need, at least $25 billion. This may seem like an impossibly large number, but an even larger sum is being burned in Afghanistan for negligible results;

3) These funds need to flow through state institutions, but with a plan for devolution to the provincial and local level;

4) Accountability needs to be built into the disbursement and use of this funding, provided by independent citizen oversight committees with access to international technical advisers. The institutions of the Pakistani state need to open their books to these committees as a way of rebuilding trust.

None of this, of course, is particularly likely to happen in the robust form indicated here, but the arguments need to be made. Without an effort akin to the one outlined above, the situation in Pakistan will deteriorate to the benefit of no one save those who profit from chaos and misery.

(Image: Pakistani villagers gather on higher ground as floodwaters enter the Alam Kot village in Sindh province on August 26, 2010. – AFP)

From Liberty Magazine (http://www.libertymagazine.org/index.php?id=1330)

“A large number of young people who live under the rule of fundamentalists have renounced their religion because fundamentalists forced religion on them,” he said. “Faith thrives on freedom and freedom is the basis of ethics. When a religious adherent is forced to give charity, then this charity means nothing and has no actual value.”

Al Qabbanji also referred to fundamentalists in power as “apostates” who have “planted the seeds of hypocrisy” by taking away choice, forcing religious observance on people.

As a humanist it will come as little surprise that I find Mr. Al Qabbanji’s views relatively congenial, but I am more interested in the way in which the idea of “fundamentalism” is used and how Islamic fundamentalism is similar to and different from various forms of Christian and other fundamentalisms.

Often used as little more than a term of abuse, the word “fundamentalism” and its cognates is of recent origin, dating only to the early twentieth century when the Bible Institute of Los Angeles published a series of essays called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, by A.C. Dixon and Reuben Torrey. These tracts defended “traditional” Protestantism against liberal theology, secularism, Catholicism, and socialism. They were part of a backlash against what was widely seen as the “feminization” of the church, reflected in both declining male attendance and support for issues of social welfare from the pulpit.

Christian fundamentalism in the United States has since mutated many times, evolving into a many-headed chimera that has eaten politics, radio and television, stadium-style worship and a variety of disparate theological perspectives, splitting various denominations and bringing “cultural issues” to the center of American political life. It is crucial to recognize, however, that religiously speaking the various streams of Christianity called “fundamentalist” are quite diverse, organized in  thousands of microcosms, ranging from the single household to the mega-church supplemented by the televised ministry.

In the late-1970s and 1980s a series of organizations dedicated to politicizing Christian Fundamentalists and their more amorphous “Evangelical” cousins were founded. They were supported by right-wing Republican political strategists and several prominent televangelists, most notably Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. The history of the origins of these organizations and the role of the Christian Right in American right wing politics in recent decades is told in Sara Diamond’s (1989) highly recommended book Spiritual Warfare.

In the wake of 9/11 several Christian Right leaders speculated that the successful terrorist attacks on the United States represented a withdrawal of God’s protection. Jerry Falwell, speaking on the Christian Broadcasting Network the day after the attacks famously blamed the usual suspects:

“You helped this [the 9/11 attacks] happen… The pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle.”

A bizarre accusation, unless you buy the logic of divine protection and its withdrawal–and a logic that echoed the preoccupations of militaristic Islamic Fundamentalists such as Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden and company accused the West and the U.S. in particular of a decadence that assured them of ultimate victory–because God would not favor such societies.

Two sorts of tendencies–puritanical social control and aggressive “crusader”/jihadi militarism–condense around fundamentalism. This is true of both Christian and Islamic varieties and is typical of ultra-nationalist movements as well. Typically these movements ground their ideologies in rigid gender roles and make being a “real man” or “real woman” prerequisite to being a real American (German, Russian, etc.). This is a toxic intersection of gender identity and national belonging that acts as a potent driver of aggressive militarism.

It is a relatively easy thing, in the end, to point at “fundamentalism” of either the Islamic or Christian variety and see the enemy of freedom, reason and humane social policy. Other kinds of fundamentalism, particularly the nationalist variety, are both more common and more destructive in the contemporary world. Though they can be wedded to religious ideologies, it is wounded, fearful, and aggressive nationalism that has caused the most extreme human tragedies of the last century. (Okay–it might be a neck-and-neck contest with pure greed, but even the greediest imperial kleptocrats use fundamentalism of the nationalism variety to spur people to willful bloodletting.)

The years long campaign to stop the mining project has attracted unprecedented attention for a small tribal group, receiving support from the British and Norwegian governments, the Church of England, human rights and environmental groups. Survival International, an NGO that promotes indigenous rights, has been at the forefront of the battle to stop the mining. A short film, Mine: Story of a Sacred Mountain, has been widely viewed, helping to promote international support for the Dongria.

Read more about the Dongria and view the film at the Survival International site.

(http://www.survivalinternational.org/)

(Photo: A Dongria Kondh woman picks millet in Niyamgiri, India. Credit © Toby Nicholas/Survival.)

(Left, table set for Iftar at the City Cafe in Abu Dhabi, photo by S. L. Gardiner.)

Non-Muslims are welcome at the restaurant Iftar meals and they are quite popular since the vast majority of restaurants, cafes and coffee shops are closed during the day (a few exceptions are open for travelers in the major hotels). Laws and traditions vary considerably from one part of the Muslim world to another, but in the Gulf region the norm is for public eating and drinking to be restricting during daylight hours. Work places adjust their hours to accommodate Ramadan practice, typically opening early and then closing around 3:00 PM and opening again after Iftar and remaining open late into the evening, often long past midnight.

For many expats the Ramadan restrictions can feel onerous–a burden imposed on them in their country of residence that feels unnecessary. Fasting during Ramadan is a blessing in Islam, one of the Five Pillars required of believers.

“O you who believe! Fasting is prescribed for you as it was prescribed to those before you that you may learn self-restraint.” (Qur’an 2:183)

But for non-Muslims, particularly those from societies where religious practice has been personalized, a matter of choice, instead of a central component of social and national identity, the inconvenience of not being able to stop for lunch or coffee while out running errands or get a bite from the cafeteria while at work can be annoying. It is important to recognize, however, that annoyance is the correct word and it is both disrespectful, and unrealistic, to expect the same rules to apply in Doha, Cairo, Lahore or Abu Dhabi as apply in New York, London or Berlin. And while construction workers toiling in the 100-plus degree heat may suffer if they are denied access to water–as should not happen under UAE law–Western professionals missing their lattes is not really the stuff of oppression. Let’s keep it real folks.

Angie Reed and I were out for another Iftar a few nights ago, this one at the Lebanese Flower in Khaladia. Standing outside a South Asian woman in full hijab (shayla and abaya), a young child in tow, approached us outside the restaurant. We were looking at apartment rental signs taped to a lamp post.

“Is that what you have to do?” the woman asked, speaking with an English accent. “Do you speak any English?”

“Yes,” we said together,”we do.” It was an Abu Dhabi moment–she’d been in town for 5 days and was looking for an apartment. We’re on our third Ramadan. The assumption, parsing ethnicity and religious self-presentation suggested she was an Arabized Pakistani, a long-time resident in the Gulf. As so often with stereotypes, particularly here, this was dead wrong. After finding out a little more about her circumstances, we suggest she try a little further from the downtown area, where there are more and larger spaces available.

The for rent signs are a minor obsession for me, triggering a somewhat vague ethnographic intuition that they are material evidence of the way in which ethnic enclaves are formed and perpetuated here. The sign above indicates for Filipinas only–and it is in English. Most working class flats are shared, and the sharing is parsed by gender and ethnicity.

The division by gender is legally mandated–it is illegal to live with a non-family member of a different gender (except for servants living in family households)–but the division by ethnicity seems to simply be something no one would think twice about.

Immigrant neighborhoods form here, but the patterns are very recent. The city itself is really only about 40 years old, but this has been ample time for housing that was originally built for and occupied by Emiratis to give way to an influx of Pakistani, Indian, Chinese and other immigrants. The ethnic anchors of these communities are small businesses run by an immigrant and owned in partnership with an Emirati. Immigrants who are part owners of such enterprises can stay in the country indefinitely–the rest of us are on 2 or 3 year contracts and our visas expire when our employment ends.

I have seen signs, interestingly enough, that advertise for Indian or Pakistani–this suggests a certainly level of pragmatism among workers on the ground in the Abu Dhabi that is almost unthinkable back in the home countries. It reminds me of something said to me by a Pakistani friend who lives in New York and is married to a woman originally from India: “Pakistan and India, the same people, the same language, the same food, the same culture…” A far cry from the “we can never trust them” voices I heard in Pakistan, that are vocal (though far from universal) on the South Asian blogs, and that permeate conspiracy discourse in both countries.

The rental signs, Ramadan, Iftar–it may all sound a little dour. It’s August and the weather is hot, nearly unbearable outside, but this is a comfortable country, at least for people like me, Western professionals. It’s damned uncomfortable for many South Asians, in some cases even unlivable, but this is true for low wage immigrants in most parts of the world. It is a struggle to survive. Nonetheless, Abu Dhabi is far from being the puritanical cultural wasteland some Americans in particular might imagine. They might have heard of the glitz and the bling, but have probably not understood that Abu Dhabians, like people from Chicago and Denver, San Francisco and Atlanta, and even my own home town of Boring, Oregon, like to have fun.

I give you the purple Mini.

Life in Pakistan was both intense and intensely social: we made many friends. As catastrophic floods have hit the country in recent weeks our hearts go out to Pakistan and we encourage friends to make a donation to an NGO doing work in the region such as Oxfam or Doctors without Borders.

(Me in front of the Professor bedding shop in Abu Dhabi, August 2010, photo by Angie Reed Garner)

Abu Dhabi provided a soft landing. Compared to Lahore, the UAE is an easy place to make a life. I have  heard this even from Pakistanis working as taxi drivers, shop minders and craftsmen, do not have our privilege or the generous income provided by my position as a professor at a federal university. These, of course, are relatively privileged working class workers. Many laborers and construction workers end up feeling deeply stuck, indebted, and unable to go home. Many Pakistanis send a large portion of their hard-earned incomes back to the home country to support their families, and many are subject to exploitative work rules and dangerous working conditions. Nonetheless many appreciate being here.

(Construction workers in Abu Dhabi, 2009. Photo by Steven L. Gardiner)

One of the first people I met in Abu Dhabi was Faruhk, a tailor from Karachi. I was living temporarily at a 5 star hotel at my employer’s expense. It was summer, 115-degrees and high humidity, and I decided to wander around the city in shalwar kameez, the Pakistani national dress–a loose-fitting pajama-like suit that is very practical for the heat. This attracted attention, particularly from Pakistanis who wanted to know my story.

Faruhk invited me to a cafe for a tea and we talked. He’d been in Abu Dhabi for 10 years. His income was meager and he had a hard time sending home what he would like. He was lonely. He didn’t make enough money to sponsor his family to come and live with him in Abu Dhabi and was lucky to see his wife and two children once or twice a year. In spite of the hardships, however, he said that he could not relax in Pakistan anymore, there was too much tension. “In Pakistan every day is tension. I no longer feel at home in my own country.”

It is an opinion that has been volunteered to me many times by Pakistanis, whenever I venture to use my bad Urdu and explain that I lived in Lahore for a year. Such attitudes are sometimes resented in Pakistan and a division between those living “at home” and those “in the diaspora” can be marked at times in spite of the constant flow of money, information and people. (The same, of course, could be said for India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Malaysia and any number of other countries, but Pakistan is the case I know best.)

Not every encounter ends up with tea drinking. A tragedy has been unfolding for many years in Pakistan, dating to the hyper-militarization of the culture that goes back the 1980s and the rule of General Zia Ul-Haq. The unbalanced influence of the military in national life predates Zia’s rule, but during his tenure as military ruler a “Kalashnikov culture” developed in the country. Military-style weapons became a commonplace, spreading throughout Pakistan, and ideologically motivated fighters–the Mujaheddin–poured into the country to fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the coffers of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) from the United States and Saudi Arabia to fund the campaign against the Soviet occupation.

At the same time over a million refugees flowed from Afghanistan to Pakistan, where Saudi Arabian charities build thousands of religious schools, or madrassas. These camps and schools became the recruiting ground for the various incarnations of the Taliban. Already plagued by ethnic tensions between the dominant Punjab province and Sindh, between native Sindhis and immigrants from India, and between Pashtun and Baloch peoples wishing either autonomy or their own state, Pakistan became a breeding ground for various sorts of violence–almost none of which has anything to do with the kind of “international terrorism” so feared in the United States.

Under such circumstances and with “America’s war on terror”–as it is commonly called in Pakistan–raging along the Pak-Afghan border and the backlash increasingly affecting the Pakistani heartland it is hardly surprising that not every American-Pakistani encounter in Abu Dhabi is simple. It is not anger I have heard from the Pakistanis I have spoken with in the UAE, however, but sadness and a deep sense of loss. In some cases such as Farukh, the tailor mentioned above, and a Balochi man who now and again gives me a ride to work, the loss is expressed as feeling like a stranger in their own country, of being afraid to go home. In other cases, I hear a plea, at times quite passionate, to please “stop the killing”–I wrote about one such incident here–if only I had that power.

Part 1 – To be Continued

I met Aaron at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association a few years ago. He can a paper on sexual assaults directed at military men by other military men. It reminded me of such an assault that I was witnessed while in the United States Army in the early 1980s. We had a long conversation after his presentation and were in touch for a year or so afterward until I moved to Pakistan.

My own position on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is both straightforward and complicated. As a matter of basic civil rights and military efficiency it has to be repealed; gay men, lesbians and bisexuals who wish to serve in the armed forces should have the same chance to do so as straight men and women.

The complexity emerges because I increasingly believe that America’s current wars are both immoral and unwinnable. In such a context resistance becomes the higher form of service. This, however, is a decision that every American able to serve should be allowed to make for him or herself.

Palm has recently released a new study by Nathaniel Frank, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Detailing the Damage” (August 2010). The report confirms what has long been suspected, that women in the military are disproportionately hurt by the DADT policy. Writing on the Huffington Post, Belkin says:

Although women comprise only 14% of the Army, the new data show that lesbians received 48% of the Army’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” discharges last year. In the Marines, women comprise just 6% of the force, but received 23% of discharges under the policy. In the Air Force, women comprise 20% of the service but received 51% of “don’t ask, don’t tell” discharges last year. Women comprise 14% of the Navy but received 27% of the discharges.

He goes on to indicate that the discharge of lesbian and gay service members has cost the American armed forces mission critical specialists, including desperately needed interpreters, that they can ill afford to lose.

My response–the reason for this post–is to the comments, and in particular to a single comment from TEPK, which I will excerpt in full below:

“Yeah … in the middle of The Great Foreclosure Crisis and The Great Recession … the American working middle class is really interested [in] issues related to the mini-minority of gays and lesbians in the military!

Get a grip!

The DEMs have totally blown it because of failed prioritizing.

Forget the fact that the country is going down the drain because of a failed economy … while attending to the needs of the LGBT crowd, illegal immigrants, muslims in NYC and every other “politically-correct” oddball and mini-issue that can be found!

We need a Kennedy-Johnson-type Democratic Party (and President!) … not one being strategized and directed by Dr. Feelgood!”

Huffington Post readers stepped up and responded coherently and appropriately to this comment (though it had a number of fans). They take various routes in refuting the central gist of the comment: That the issue isn’t important enough to bother with. Most tellingly many people responding to the comment indicate that the issue of “importance” is linked directly to where you happen to be standing. Others noted that the whole point of Belkin’s article was that the military should repeal DADT for its own good.

What I want to highlight is that what TEPK glosses as “failed prioritizing” is actually something quite different. He/she reveals this with the angry, bigoted language that fails to see how full civil rights for LGBT folk, civil and humane engagement with immigrants no matter how they came here, and the acceptance of religious freedom are issues of soul–for want of a better word–for the Democratic party in particular.

In other words, these are areas where the President and the Democrats can actually demonstrate a commitment to human dignity and democracy. Fixing the broken economy is going to require massive public re-investment; it is going to require raising taxes, rebuilding the decaying infrastructure (human and material), and putting an end to the “forever war” forever before it sucks us into a bottomless pit of war-debt borrowed from China. These are easy to agree to in principle–at least for anyone not convinced by the hyperbolics of the Republican’s new Red Scare–but extremely difficult to do.

The difficulty, of course, is no excuse for not making a start: massively increased stimulus spending and un-deregulating the financial sector in the short run, raising taxes and re-instituting a far more progressive tax system, rebuilding the roads, bridges, schools, hospitals and other public services and moving much more aggressively to develop alternative energy sources in the longer run are crucial.

Standing up for immigrants and religious freedom does not detract from doing these things. Ultimately President Obama can end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell with the stroke of his pen. Not to do so shows a kind of political cowardice that is exactly what leads to paralysis in the face “big” issues. Not to repeal DODT at this juncture is to say, after so much research and investigation, and reasoned justification is to say to America, “No, not even this.”