The Skeptic الشكاك

1082 Amitav Ghosh on Egypt and Xenophilia

Amitav Ghosh, writing in Outlook magazine, fondly remembers his time spent in the Nile Delta as a young man, reflects on the non-aligned movement, and hopes that people from far-away lands will meet each other face-to-face more often:

The other principal association that rural Egypt had with India was the matter of water-pumps, which were of course very important in rural communities. In those days Egypt imported so many water pumps from India that in some areas these machines were known as makana Hindi – or simply as Kirloskar, from the name of a major pump-manufacturing company. The purchasing of a water pump was a great event, and the machine would be brought back on a pick-up truck, with much fanfare, with strings of old shoes strung around the spout to ward off the Evil Eye. Long before the machine made its entry into the village, a posse of children would be sent to summon me: as an Indian I was expected to be an expert on these machines, and the proud new owners would wait anxiously for me to pronounce on the virtues and failings of their new acquisition.

Now it so happens that I am one of those people who is hard put to tell a spanner from a hammer or a sprocket from a gasket. At first I protested vigorously, disclaiming all knowledge of machinery. But here again, no one believed me; they thought I was withholding vital information or playing some kind of deep and devious game. Often people would look crestfallen, imagining, no doubt, that I had detected a fatal flaw in their machine and was refusing to divulge the details. This would not do of course, and in order to set everyone’s fears at rest, I became, willy-nilly, an oracle of water-pumps. I developed a little routine, where I would subject the machine to a minute inspection, occasionally tapping it with my knuckles or poking it with my fingers. Fortunately no machine failed my inspection: at the end of it I would invariably pronounce the water-pump to be a makana mumtaaza – a most excellent Kirloskar, a truly distinguished member of its species.

Yet, even as I was disclaiming my relationship to those water-pumps, I could not but recognize that there was a certain commonality between myself and those machines. In a way, my presence in that village could be attributed to the same historical circumstances that introduced Indian pumps and Indian films to rural Egypt. Broadly speaking, those circumstances could be described as the spirit of decolonization that held sway over much of the world in the decades after the Second World War; this was the political ethos that found its institutional representation in the Non-Aligned Movement. We are at a very different moment in history now, when the words Non-Aligned seem somehow empty and discredited; today the movement is often dismissed not just as a political failure, but as a minor footnote to the great power rivalries of the Cold War.

It is true, of course, that the movement had many shortcomings and met with many failures. Yet it is also worth remembering that the Non-Aligned Movement as such was merely the institutional aspect of something that was much broader, wider and more powerful: this, as I said before, was the post-war ethos of decolonization, which was a political impulse that had deep historical roots and powerful cultural resonances. In the field of culture, among other things, it represented an attempt to restore and recommence the exchanges and conversations that had been interrupted by the long centuries of European imperial dominance. It was, in this sense, the necessary and vital counterpart of the nationalist idiom of anti-colonial resistance. In the West, Third World nationalism is often presented as an ideology of xenophobia and parochialism. But the truth is that many of these movements of resistance tried very hard, within their limited means, to create an universalism of their own. Those of us who grew up in that period will recall how powerfully we were animated by an emotion that is rarely named: this is xenophilia, the love of the other, the affinity for strangers – a feeling that lives very deep in the human heart, but whose very existence is rarely acknowledged. People of my generation will recall the pride we once took in the trans-national friendships of such figures as Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Chou En Lai and others. Nor were friendships of this kind anything new. I have referred above to the cross-cultural conversations that were interrupted by imperialism.

These interruptions were precisely that – temporary breakages – the conversations never really ceased. Even in the 19th century, the high noon of Empire, people from Africa, Asia and elsewhere, sought each other out, wrote letters to each other, and stayed in each other’s homes while traveling. Lately, a great number of memoirs and autobiographies have been published that attest to the depth and strength of these ties. It was no accident therefore that Mahatma Gandhi chose to stop in Egypt, in order to see Sa’ad Zaghloul before proceeding to the Round Table Conference in London. This was integral to the ethos of the time. [Full Essay…]

Thanks, SP

1080 The Truck Driver and the Atom Bomb

I’m enjoying this, from the latest New Yorker:

The single, blinding release of pure energy over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, marked a startling and permanent break with our prior understandings of the visible world. Yet for more than sixty years the technology behind the explosion has remained a state secret. The United States government has never divulged the engineering specifications of the first atomic bombs, not even after other countries have produced generations of ever more powerful nuclear weapons. In the decades since the Second World War, dozens of historians have attempted to divine the precise mechanics of the Hiroshima bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, and of the bomb that fell three days later on Nagasaki, known as Fat Man. The most prominent is Richard Rhodes, who won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1988, for his dazzling and meticulous book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” But the most accurate account of the bomb’s inner workings—an unnervingly detailed reconstruction, based on old photographs and documents—has been written by a sixty-one-year-old truck driver from Waukesha, Wisconsin, named John Coster-Mullen, who was once a commercial photographer, and has never received a college degree. [Read on…]

988 Muslim Scholar Concludes Prophet Mohammed Never Existed

Andrew Higgens for the Wall Street Journal:

Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert and Germany’s first professor of Islamic theology, fasts during the Muslim holy month, doesn’t like to shake hands with Muslim women and has spent years studying Islamic scripture. Islam, he says, guides his life.

So it came as something of a surprise when Prof. Kalisch announced the fruit of his theological research. His conclusion: The Prophet Muhammad probably never existed. [More…]

608 Man Kills Baker for Refusing to Sell Bread

In the Nozha district of Cairo yesterday, a man killed the owner of a government bakery when the baker refused to sell him bread.

Mohammed Said Mohammed, a 23-year-old doorman, reportedly attacked and killed Mahmud Abd al-Rahman Mohammed when the latter refused to sell him bread. The bakery supplies to other government-subsidized bakeries, but does not sell directly to customers.

Elsewhere in the capital, there were indications things were getting better.

Mohammed Khalid, of Darb al-Ahmar, told al-Masry al-Youm: “I used to buy bread on my way home from work every day. I often had to stand in line for almost two hours. When I got home I was so tired I could barely move.”

“But things started to get better around 10 days ago. The lines were shorter. At first I was afraid that the bakery was closed, or that the bread was finished.”

595 Harum Scarum

Via Worthy Oriental Gentleman, for your entertainment: “Elvis, a thieving midget, dancing girls, and an Oriental souq.”

576 Sterlization, for a Brighter Future

Eugenicist: Each baby, when it’s born, must donate some of his sex cells—sperm or egg—and these are put in a deep freeze, and just kept. The person leads his life, and, uh, and dies. And after he’s dead and gone, so all the heat and passion is taken out of the matter, a committee meets and studies his life.
Interviewer: During his lifetime, then, he hasn’t had any children…
Eugenicist: He’s been sterilized and hasn’t had any children in the normal way. After he’s dead and gone, the committee meets and reviews his life and asks, “Would we like to have some more people like him?”

More on the American “eugenics movement…”

(Found while browsing videos published by one of my favorite bloggers, Paleofuture)

542 Unintentional Irony and Arrogance

Unintentional Irony: Mustafa al-Fiqi, commenting on renewed speculation over the life and death of Nasser’s defenestrated son-in-law, Ashraf Marwan: “If Ashraf Marwan had told Israel about the time of the war, we would have lost.”

Arrogance: A few days ago Finance Minister Yusef Boutros-Ghali turned his back on opposition and independent MPs questioning him about the government’s plans to reduce the budget deficit and its national debt and took a call on his mobile. The minister has every reason to hold the People’s Assembly in contempt. It’s an expensive rubber stamp with a few futile trappings of democracy. The MPs’ no-confidence motion in the minister and the government (over the substance of the proposals, not the minister’s contempt) was doomed from the start.

Usually, though, ruling-party types like to maintain the fiction that the Parliament is important. Or at least important enough to warrant good mobile-phone etiquette. In any case, I’ll take casual arrogance over the erratic thuggery the government can display when it’s really challenged, as it was in the Judges’ Revolt two years ago, or in the Rafah border crisis a few weeks ago, when Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit threatened to break the legs of any Palestinian trying to cross into Sinai.

The world’s diplomatic set has been snickering or stunned by Aboul Gheit’s bizarre rants about gays for years, leaving those who work under him banging their heads on their desks as they watch years of hard work representing Egypt with dignity evaporate with each vituperative word.

Lately Aboul Gheit has been in a particularly bad mood. Some weeks ago, he told the world that “Egypt totally rejects attempts by anyone who takes it upon himself to be an investigator of human rights in Egypt.” This was in response to a motion before the EU Parliament censuring Egypt for its human-rights record. Of course the EU doesn’t want to get rid of the Association Agreement, so obviously not a big deal. Or at least not so big a deal as to warrant the exaggerated response.

Aboul Gheit seems incapable of being diplomatic for very long. Perhaps that’s the key to his success. Diplomats who try to bring up human rights and democracy with the Egyptians do complain of bullying, and they confess that it usually works. Perhaps he’s kept his job in the same way former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton kept his for as long as he did: He’s a good man to deliver a big fuck-you.

Also on the subject of thuggery and casual contempt, this one a week old: Ayman Nour has accused Speaker of the People’s Assembly Fathi Sorour and prison authorities of falsifying a report he submitted to the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Geneva. Nour said those cited in the report had never examined him, and asked that the report be amended to reflect his medical records on file at the Qasr al-Aini hospital downtown. He said he feared he’d die in prison from a failure of his heart or kidneys.

520 Epizootics

An early parody of the lark that ate Hollywood and other places where rich fools congregate.

(Via Dana Goodyear)

517 The Lost Archive

Interesting page 1 feature in the WSJ today:

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God’s word. The wartime destruction made the project “outright impossible,” Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars — and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

“He pretended it disappeared. He wanted to be rid of it,” says Angelika Neuwirth, a former pupil and protégée of the late Mr. Spitaler. Academics who worked with Mr. Spitaler, a powerful figure in postwar German scholarship who died in 2003, have been left guessing why he squirreled away the unusual trove for so long. [full story]

508 Holy Smokes

Forget Hiya Fawda, this is the shit:

Ahmad Zaki’s Al-Bari’ (The Innocent), via TortureinEgypt and Hossam. Thanks, ya shebab. If anyone can pass me a full, uncensored copy, I’d be most grateful.

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