Compasses and Extremism

(Reflections on Durant’s Age of Faith)

So many definitions of extremism. Ironically, they’re framed in the binaries of comparison so loved by public media and that are inherently—extreme. Is extremism the opposite of reason? Is it the opposite of Western?

History tells that extremism can be found in avowed atheists as well as men of God. It is not bound by any geography. It is found in the rule of policy levied by our kings and administrators as well as in lines of resistance.

Julian I credited with the Hellenistic spurt after Rome cracked like Humpty Dumpty should seem a splendid paragon of reason and balance. He loved the philosophers, was an avowed Pagan, rebuilt Greek temples smashed in the Christianization of the Roman Empire, and collected libraries. He also persecuted Christians, lusted after Persia, and created bloodbaths in his excessive animal sacrifices,

Power wants us to believe that those without power are most prone to the extreme. Rather, its stinks up hovels and palaces, revelries and seminaries, and streets and pulpits, one and all. My friend, you could be extreme if I woke up on that whim. If I was one of media oligarchs controlling world news.

Balance and tolerance are the works of civilization; its complex thing after all to remember context, to say that two apparently contradictory statements could be correct, and to admit the principle of uncertainty to the point of saying “I believe you are wrong but I will defend to the death your right of saying it” [Voltaire].

Tolerance is an act of godliness in Islam. We learn that man becomes great when he sees human will, insight, and knowledge is limited. That is the condition for speculating on alternate possibilities of truth within the frame of Divine guidance. Not that there is no truth but that he may not know it. Truth is not the property of powerful men or institutions. It just is. It was accessible to the occasional humane king on the throne as well as the great faqirs of South Asia. It’s accessible to you and me.

Every civilization sways towards the extreme when its foundational compass is broken. It could be an civil institution, a constitutional tract, or the narrative process of memory. In South Asia, civil society disappears because the family dies. In the US, the constitution splinters under the ponderous weight of hubris. “As stiff twin compasses are two/ Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show/ To move, but doth, if th’ other do.” [John Donne]

Bhool Bhulaiya: Bollywood’s Retro Conservativsm

I just finished watching one of Bollywood’s mega hits of 2007: Bhool Bhulaiya. The production values were fantabulous . . . Bollywood certainly doesn’t suffer from underfunded cinema budgets. The movie opens with a young Indian prince returning home from (where else?) America with his mod scod wife to take up residence in his haunted palace, much to the horror of his extended family. I settled in for 4 hours of the normal Bollywood flick with anticipation: the lovely Vidya Balan played the modern wife, the prince was suitably good looking, there was a lovely, romantic musical number in the start. (KK, love your voice!)

But as the movie wore on, I began to feel shock. Could it be that India, after a vigorous feminist movement, India, the country of heroines like Arundhati Roy and ladies of the Narmada Dam campaign, is regressing to reactionary antidiluvianism? The ghost of a mistreated dancer from generations past seems to strike and things start going horribly wrong, especially to the young princess. The Levi-clad, laptop-comfy prince obviously doesn’t believe in supernatural hoo-haa. He does apparently believe in prosecution on suspicion, accusing his jilted cousin (’cause, losing a hot guy like him is enough to drive any chick psychotic). Next, a famous Indian American psychiatrist—Akshay Kumar going for comedy but coming off as buffonish—is called in to treat the cousin. On his expert advice, she is then shunned by her family and locked up in a room. And when we are treated to a indigestible psychological explanation for how it’s the young princess who is possessed by the ghost of the murdered dancer, there is painful sequence in which a pundit called in for exorcism actually strikes the crazed lady with a stick. That sound you hear? That’s The Feminist Mystique going up in flames.

India is trying to recreate the ideal Aryan culture that it believes it lost with the coming of Islam to India (a narrative processed straight from the history books of British Orientalists). I’m from that part of the world and have been watching Hindi movies forever, but now, I actually have to read the subtitles. Not that it’s surprising, what with Bollywood being one of the major vehicles to Sanskritize the language of the subcontinent. But with the culture and traditions, patriarchy is also making a comeback. This is where you have women touch their husbands’ feet in a recognition of their godhead (as in, pati dev), where lower classes deferred the value of their whole existence to the comfort and desires of the upper castes, and where respect for parents is conflated to a situation in which they have an unhealthy degree of influence in their children’s lives: Ekta Kapoor’s soap serials, anyone?

Traditional forms of authority are given uncritical validation. In Bhool Bhulaiya, you have an ecstatic ceremony for the prince’s return, where all the villagers turn out to watch the royal return to his palace in a carriage drawn by a white horse and get coronated with a diamond decked turban. That’s really nice, except India is apparently a democracy. And his wife, before the musical number says something that roughly translates as: “I’m so blessed you have made this unworthy thing [nacheez] to be your Rani.” I’m blessed I didn’t have dinner before I started watching this flick or it would have gone through an unpleasant trajectory.

With the separation of India and Pakistan, both nations have tried to turn their back on what was a brilliant shared culture and tried to ethnicize their shared heritage. So, here, you have Gandhi-esque pastoral scenes of village pundits meditating under trees, rituals at the holy river Ganga (presumably . . . its nice that the prince’s state is located in a part where the Ganga flows through), Bengali dance sequences, all set in the backdrop of Mughal architecture with those unmistakable arches and embellished wall paintings. There’s also the obligatory Muslim song sequence, where Muslim forms of worship are portrayed in an elaborate (and usually ritualistically wrong) sequences that serves to exoticize and other Islam: setting Islam apart as something strange and foreign, not a force that was integrated with the very fabric of the subcontinent for hundreds of years. Only as far back as Umrao Jaan and Pakeezah, Hindi films represented Indian Muslims with a naturalism that could only come from home. Now, we’re a fashion that’s slated to go out of date.

For me, Bhool Bhulaiya is exactly what the name suggests; something that deserves bhool-jana (forgetting).

The Great Debaters; Film Review

The past week, I went to see The Great Debators with a friend. The opening shot announced that this was indeed a “big” film; the smooth, panoramic shot of the Southern Texas’ forests and mangroves not only set the scene, but spoke volumes about the production values, the expertise, and the money behind the movie. Clearly Oprah Winfrey and Denzel Washington also felt the need for a change from the low budget movies in which black men inevitably end up cavorting around in women’s clothes or fat suits (sometimes both at the same time). Thank God.

James Berardinelli sees the movie as the epic struggle of Wiley College’s talented black debate team to rise up against the racism that infected the 1930s South. The heart of darkness unveiled in The Great Debaters is of course, the lynching scene; as Melvin Tolson drives his team to a competition, they come across a gathering of white rurals congregating around the charred body of a young African American hung on a tree. “Was he a farmer, was he a sharecropper?” wonders one of the debaters later on. “They lynch people in Texas,” the young James Farmer Jr. tells his Harvard audience in the concluding debate. True, the ignorance and brutality of South deserves to be recorded as one of the darker chapters in human history. At a salon I recently attended, we saw printouts of historical lynch scenes where some members of the the white audience congregating around lynchings were actually smiling in glee. Clearly, there is no darkness like the darkness in the heart of man.

Benazir and the real tragedy of Pakistan

It was like a replay of another celebrity death. As when Diana died, there was the morning wakeup, the hurried relating of the news, and shortly afterwards, the television blare filtering through the house. Montages of an elegant woman killed in a brutal fashion. Death’s shock factor of “now she’s here and now she’s not”, never so vivid as when someone famous passes. Dark hints of political conspiracy or terrorist reapers evoked. All this might have been shared with any other viewer of the morning news. But for a Pakistani American, there is an added dimension to the shock. A staple of the Pakistani political world had been shot down. It was almost as if Coca Cola had been killed.

Condolences have poured in from world leaders. Mostly, she is portrayed as a martyr, a fallen redeemer of Pakistan’s democratic soul, a toppled champion. Benazir was at her attractive 54 year old prime and pop culture is prone to painting her passing as a Joan of Arc going down in a blaze of political virtue. The emotion and violence surging across Pakistan, with brown skinned people weeping, shouting, rioting, seems to support the dapper mourning of the international political leaders. But does it?

Benazir was an able television president. She looked good; her austere features, regal bearing, and erudition made her standout from the regular mass of beefy and barely literate Pakistani politicos. Her father’s roti, kapra, makaan rhetoric gave her some ability in the line of populist outreach. Her training in Radcliff College and Oxford University in the 1970s gave her requisite familiarity with discourses of democracy and feminism that are the passports for winning international legitimacy since the United States became a world superpower. She made a far better impression when giving speeches in English rather than in Urdu.

Benazir’s image as a feminist leader injected a splash of exoticism to a highly traditional formula of power building followed by third world women political leaders. The daughter of a landlord family in Pakistan’s Sindh province, she cemented her alliance to Pakistan’s traditional elite by marrying Asif Ali Zardari, a landlord from the neighboring Baluchistan province. She was also instrumental in reinforcing Pakistan’s status as an American ally in the post-Cold War era. Her two terms as Prime Minister were darkened by charges of corruption. As reported by a 1998 New York Times article, a corruption inquiry found over $100 million channeled in real estate and foreign bank accounts.

Many of her ardent supporters became incredibly disillusioned by her administration’s corruption, preferential politics, and Pakistan’s growing indebtedness to the World Bank and IMF. While she emphatically denied the corruption charges, her lavish lifestyle in the United States and England was compromising. While exiled, she supported the United States’ 1998 missile attacks on Afghanistan, and on her 2007 return, promised to crackdown on terrorists and extremists in her country. Given the massive political will that Musharraf has lost through the the army’s summary arrests, detentions, and various raids on the citizenry in the name of the War on Terror, its unclear how her contribution to Pakistan’s people would have been distinguished from the Army General’s. This is of course, if we evaluate work for democratization as building true representative institutions and safeguarding people’s civic liberties, rather than merely a round of elections.

An informal poll in the people of Pakistan before this tragic event would have revealed a desire to elect anyone who was not Musharraf. If this poll probed deeper, it would uncover a wish for a true and independent leader unstained by scandal and betrayed hopes. The real tragedy of the Pakistan is not that democracy has been snuffed out by the death of a charismatic politician. It is in the growing fear and uncertainty in the people. It is in the downward spiraling quality of life, where cooking oil has become a luxury and jobs and opportunities for education for the children have graduated from being a dream to a chimera. It is in the iron clamp on their rights by a General charged with lassoing in quotas of terrorists by the US government and still accused of unsatisfactory results. Benazir’s death is a tragedy, but more so is the lives lost in the mayhem. The tragedy of Pakistan is in the conditions of a people whose political sponsors are losing the game of nations.