PRELUDE: After seven centuries—from 11th to 18th century—because of thinkers, philosophers and scientists, the Europeans witnessed the age of Enlightenment. But the world of Islam from 13th century to the present day lost its progress, because there was no development in philosophical and scientific knowledge. This article is a continuum first four articles on History of Knowledge. Together they throw light on the progression of knowledge in the West, which is life and soul of today’s Western Civilization. Knowledge multiplies by the principle of reciprocity ~ Ashraf
A History of Knowledge-Explosion — Part V
Second Explosion: THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Summary: After the first explosion of knowledge that emerged in Athens of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and many other Classical Greek philosophers, the second explosion occurred in northern Europe at the end of the wars of religion and the rise of Galilean science. Starting from the eve of French Revolution and all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era of Enlightenment emerged. Many great scientists and philosophers helped create an ‘age of genius and new knowledge.’ Some of the best-known thinkers were Newton, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and many more, who made an everlasting mark on the history of knowledge. They explored the implications of the new sciences, humanities, and religious upheaval, which led them to reject many traditional beliefs and ways of seeking knowledge. Seeds of Enlightenment, sown in the seventeenth century, flourished into a period of revolutions and explorations. Most importantly it created a revolution of mind, which sought to reconstitute ethics of morality on rational basis instead of spirituality. Scientific attitude of rational inquiry replaced the previous intellectualism of thought and action. It shaped the idea that the methods and concepts of science should be applied in all domains of inquiry. This change became the key to Enlightenment which put human beings, more firmly important than ever before, at the center of the whole universe. The Enlightenment quest was driven by the belief that entirely on their own, human beings can know all that needs to be known, and in knowing understand, and in understanding gain the power to choose more wisely than ever before. The fusion of natural science and philosophy resulted in the Enlightenment ideals that placed highest value on scientific inquiry, reason, human natural rights, liberty, equality, freedom of thought and expression, and on diverse worldviews. MIRZA ASHRAF
To read full article please visit: https://independent.academia.edu/MirzaAshraf
(Interesting article by Wendy Orent on fast evolution of Europeans. If Middle Easterns are actually Europe’ ancestors , then why they are still living in past and has not progressed? f,sheikh).
We all know what Neanderthals looked like: the beetling brow ridges, thick nose, long skull, massive bone structure – and probably red hair and freckled skin. You might do a double-take if you saw one on the subway, wearing a suit, or you might not. But you would surely look twice at the hunter-gatherers that populated Europe between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago, whose DNA scientists are analysing now. They had dark skin and, very likely, bright-blue eyes, like the arrestingly beautiful child from Afghanistan you see in the photograph above. This combination essentially vanished from ancient Europe, replaced by light-skinned, brown-eyed farmers who moved in from the Middle East over the course of several centuries, and who looked like most of the population of southern Europe today.
These early farmers, who depended on milk, have the gene for lactose tolerance that is missing in the old hunter-gatherer population. They ate much less meat and far more starch than the original meat-eating Europeans, and depended both on milk and on sunlight for vitamin D – hence their lighter skin. As for the dark, blue-eyed people, they disappeared from Europe, swamped genetically by the invaders over time.
This is a tale of fast human evolution. New ways of living – farming crops, and herding animals rather than hunting – led to the rapid expansion of genes that took advantage of these cultural adaptations. The ancestral dark skin, probably inherited from our common forebears in Africa, could have been a disadvantage if most calories came from cultivated grains rather than meat from wild animals, rich in vitamin D. Blue eyes remained, though the form of the gene (called an allele) for blue eye colour is recessive, and easily swamped by alleles for brown eyes. So within some span of time – we can’t say exactly how long – ancient Europeans began to look quite different. There was also an influx of genes from east Asia, from peoples likely resembling the modern Chukchi and other native Siberian groups closely related to Native Americans. Ancient Europe was a melting pot, but certain alleles, for light skin and brown eyes, became dominant as the hunter-gatherer way of life receded against an influx of farmers and farming.
(In its first century the American higher-education system was a messy, disorganized joke. How did it rise to world dominance?- In 19th century most of the colleges were established by the land speculators to start cultural centers to sell their lands at higher prices surrounding these centers. By European standards, these colleges and universities were jokes. But this land speculative trend turned into higher education bonanza in the 20th century that provided first class higher education and research that world has ever seen. A fascinating story to read. F. sheikh)
From the perspective of 19th-century visitors to the United States, the country’s system of higher education was a joke. It wasn’t even a system, just a random assortment of institutions claiming to be colleges that were scattered around the countryside. Underfunded, academically underwhelming, located in small towns along the frontier, and lacking in compelling social function, the system seemed destined for obscurity. But by the second half of the 20th century, it had assumed a dominant position in the world market in higher education. Compared with peer institutions in other countries, it came to accumulate greater wealth, produce more scholarship, win more Nobel prizes, and attract a larger proportion of talented students and faculty. US universities dominate global rankings.
How did this remarkable transformation come about? The characteristics of the system that seemed to be disadvantages in the 19th century turned out to be advantages in the 20th. Its modest state funding, dependence on students, populist aura, and obsession with football gave it a degree of autonomy that has allowed it to stand astride the academic world.
The system emerged under trying circumstances early in US history, when the state was weak, the market strong, and the church divided. Lacking the strong support of church and state, which had fostered the growth of the first universities in medieval Europe, the first US colleges had to rely largely on support from local elites and tuition-paying student consumers. They came into being with the grant of a corporate charter from state government, but this only authorised these institutions. It didn’t fund them.
The rationale for starting a college in the 19th century usually had less to do with promoting higher learning than with pursuing profit. For most of US history, the primary source of wealth was land, but in a country with a lot more land than buyers, the challenge for speculators was how to convince people to buy their land rather than one of the many other available options. (George Washington, for instance, accumulated some 50,000 acres in the western territories, and spent much of his life unsuccessfully trying to monetise his holdings.) The situation became even more desperate in the mid-19th century, when the federal government started giving away land to homesteaders. One answer to this problem was to show that the land was not just another plot in a dusty agricultural village but prime real estate in an emerging cultural centre. And nothing said culture like a college. Speculators would ‘donate’ land for a college, gain a state charter, and then sell the land around it at a premium, much like developers today who build a golf course and then charge a high price for the houses that front on to it.
Of course, chartering a college is not the same as actually creating a functioning institution. So speculators typically sought to affiliate their emergent college with a religious denomination, which offered several advantages. One was that it segmented the market. A Presbyterian college would be more attractive to Presbyterian consumers than the Methodist college in the next town. Another was staffing. Until the late-19th century, nearly all presidents and most faculty at US colleges were clergymen, who were particularly attractive to college founders for two reasons. They were reasonably well-educated, and they were willing to work cheap. A third advantage was that the church just might be induced to contribute a little money from time to time to support its struggling offspring.
Often the motives of profit and faith converged in the same person, producing a distinctive American character – the clergyman-speculator. J B Grinnell was a Congregational minister who left the church he founded in Washington, DC, to establish a town out west as a speculative investment. In 1854 he settled on a location in Iowa, named the town Grinnell, gained a charter for a college, and started selling land for $1.62 an acre. Instead of organising a college from scratch, he convinced Iowa College to move from Davenport and assume the name Grinnell College.
This process of college development helps to explain a lot of things about the emergent form of the US higher-education system in the 19th century. Less than a quarter of the colleges were in the strip of land along the eastern seaboard where most Americans lived. More than half were in the Midwest and Southwest: the sparsely populated frontier. If your aim is to attract a lot of students, this was not a great business plan, but it was useful in attracting settlers. The frontier location also helps to explain the nominal church support for the colleges. In the competitive US setting where no church was dominant, it was each denomination for itself, so everyone wanted to plant the denominational flag in the new territories for fear of ceding the terrain to the opposition. Together, land speculation and sectarian competitions help to explain why, by 1880, Ohio had 37 colleges – and France just 16.
To think about partition on its 70th anniversary is to think, unavoidably, about the extraordinary crisis in India today. The 50th and 60th anniversaries of one of the 20th century’s biggest calamities were leavened with the possibility that India, liberal-democratic, secular and energetically globalising, was finally achieving the greatness its famous leaders had promised. In contrast to India’s grand and imminent tryst with destiny, Pakistan’s fate seemed to be obsessive self-harm.
The celebrations of a “rising” India were not much muted in 1997 and 2007, even as hands were dutifully wrung about the imperialist skulduggery and savage ethnic cleansing that founded the nation states of India and Pakistan, defined their self-images and condemned them to permanent internal and external conflict. Today, as the portrait of a co-conspirator in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi hangs in the Indian parliament, it is the scale and ferocity of India’s mutation that haunts our thoughts.
But should it really be so shocking? Were we too beguiled by the intellectual complacencies of historians and journalists, who turned liberal democracy, secularism, globalisation and economic growth into articles of a new faith?
It is of course easy to ignore the malign and enduring potency of partition. Many of our everyday experiences of pluralist identities comprehensively negate it. My own life has been enriched by Pakistani writers, musicians, cricketers and friendships across borders. Yet the Hindu fanatic who murdered Gandhi for being soft on Muslims and Pakistan exemplified early the lethal logic of nation-building. So did many avowedly secular Indian leaders who used brute force to hold on to Kashmir.
In many ways, Narendra Modi and his mob are completing the unfinished business of partition: the unification of a political community through identification and persecution of internal and external enemies. In conforming to this grimly familiar historical pattern, India has outpaced Pakistan, where regional differences serve to check a ruthlessly homogenising nationalism (and Islamism), and no single ideological movement is able to colonise all key institutions of the state and civil society.
We persuaded ourselves that India was somehow exceptional, immune to the political pathologies that have infected almost every nation on earth, and entered its bloodstream at birth. It is frightening to contemplate on this 70th anniversary what lies ahead for nuclear-armed south Asia. No illusions of a liberation from history, of a rising or emerging India, comfort us today. And we – Indians as well as Pakistanis – are forced to acknowledge the partition as the great atrocity that decisively shapes our brutish present.
Midnight’s Children was published a few months before the 34th anniversary of Indian independence in 1981, and another 36 years have elapsed since then. The novel now feels like a half-time report. The second half deserves its own novel, although I am not the right person to write it.
When my novel was published, some people criticised it for ending too gloomily. It’s true that much of the novel was written during the mid-70s “Emergency”, Indira Gandhi’s shameful 21-month suspension of democracy, and it bears the marks of that dark moment. But in the novel, as in real life, India emerged from the Emergency into a new day, and the narrator Saleem’s son Aadam represented the hope of a new generation. That new generation has grown up to inherit the world of midnight’s children, and India is becoming a different country. When I look at the last pages of my novel now, they feel almost absurdly optimistic.
The country is rapidly being pulled in the direction decreed by the proponents of “Hindutva”, Hindu nationalism, and away from the secular ideals of the founding fathers. To criticise this movement, in the age of the political Twitter troll, is to be branded “sickular,” or, even worse, a “sickular libtard”. Meanwhile, in the land of the sacred cow, people are being lynched for the “crime” of allegedly possessing or eating beef. History textbooks are being rewritten as Hindutva propaganda. The government’s control over a largely acquiescent news media (there are a couple of honourable exceptions) would be envied by the president of the United States, if he happened to concern himself with such faraway matters. The “world’s largest democracy” feels more authoritarian and less democratic than it should.
But the Modi government is popular. It’s very popular. This is the greatest difference between the India of Indira’s Emergency and the India of today. Back then, Mrs Gandhi called an election, wrongly believing she would win, and by doing so would legitimise the excesses of the Emergency years. But she was voted down resoundingly and driven from office. There is no sign that the Indian electorate will turn against the present government any time soon. Midnight’s grandchildren seem content with what’s happening. And that’s the pessimistic conclusion to volume two of the Indian story.
Salman Rusdhie’s latest novel, The Golden House, is published by Jonathan Cape in September.
Kamila Shamsie. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
When I was growing up, partition was not so much a historical event as a family story. Partition had made half my family Pakistani and the other half Indian; partition meant my grandmother couldn’t get a visa to visit her dying mother; partition meant that while I cheered on Pakistan’s triumph against India in the 1987 Test series, my great-uncle, who was then visiting his sister/my grandmother, in Karachi, was despondent that his cricket team had lost. Partition also meant that I grew up in Karachi, multi-ethnic city of migrants, which I loved fiercely enough to make the loss of half a family seem like a price worth paying in a child’s black and white way of seeing the world.
But at the level of official and national conversation in Pakistan, 1947 was a year to which the word “independence” rather than “partition” was attached. It was in British text books and British Raj revival films that “partition” almost always trumped independence. Of course it did. To talk about the independence of Pakistan and India is to acknowledge the yoke of colonial rule. Far easier to talk about “partition”, with its implication of everything falling apart as the British left, as though the falling apart wasn’t the direct result of a policy of divide and rule. And so I’ve always been uneasy – and continue here to be uneasy – when I’m asked to talk about partition rather than independence in Britain.
But the complicated truth is that the entwined nature of independence and partition must be acknowledged. These were nations born as a result of a heroic opposition to imperial rule, but their birth was also marked by hatred and bloodshed. Contemporary conversations often focus on what that bloodshed means for India and Pakistan’s relationship to each other, but increasingly as I look at both nations, now so mired in violence towards their own minorities, I wonder what it means for each nation’s relationship to its own history, its own nature. There was never a reckoning for the violence of partition; that would have got in the way of the narrative of a glorious independence. Instead it became easier to blame the other side for all the violence, and pretend that at the moment of inception both India and Pakistan didn’t wrap mass murder in a flag and hope no one would notice the blood stains.
Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel, Home Fire(Bloomsbury), has been longlisted for the Man Booker prize.
Seventy years after partition, the old hatreds are alive and well. India is descending into an intolerant Hindu nationalism, apparently intent on imitating the religious chauvinism and suppression of dissent that have served Pakistan so poorly. In Pakistan, a moment where it seemed that the press might finally become free and elected civilian rulers might regularly complete their terms has passed.
We are back in the murk of the unsaid, the unacknowledged, the undemocratic. Soldiers of both sides are firing across the line of control in Kashmir. Nuclear stockpiles grow. Rhetoric is unmeasured, indeed often unhinged. A person brought forward in time from the murderous slaughter of 70 years ago would probably look around and say, yes, this is what I expected.
What a failure. A failure for all of us, who live in south Asia. And for all of you, who live abroad, in countries whose governments see only market sizes and geopolitical advantage, and turn a blind eye to the great and mounting danger your angry brothers and sisters pose to each other.
Mohsin Hamid’s most recent novel, Exit West, published by Hamish Hamilton, has been longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize.
Kiran Desai. Photograph: Samuel Aranda/Getty Images
Every Saturday I suffer from a depression I call my Saturday depression. The main symptom of this is that when I look in the mirror I don’t see myself, I see a ghost. The sight of this ghost fills me with fear. I know this spectre is merely the cumulative result of one more week in one more year of many years of self-imposed isolation for the sake of a book I have been working on a long wh
Last Saturday to avoid my unavoidable depression I went to the Rubin Museum in New York to see the Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs of India. One section of the exhibition displays the photographs – I almost wrote paintings – that Cartier-Bresson took during the last days of Gandhi’s life and the days following his assassination. The photographs are painterly. Rather than emphasising a passing event, they have a staying presence; while the days they were taken were chaotic, they have a composed stillness; while it was surely noisy, the photographs are overcome by a hush – as if violence has blasted the scene still and all the millions of people in the crowds have been condemned to an eternal moment. The quantity of people is important here, and the fact that every individual in this crowd of millions appears to be missing his or her face. You cannot see the person for an emotion more primal than our human selves has consumed their individual natures to make them part of a whole catastrophic betrayal. Pandit Nehru wears the same loss as Brij Krishna, Gandhi’s secretary, as a man who has clambered up a tree for a view of the funeral pyre, as a refugee on a train leaving Delhi for Lahore.
I was glad to be alone for I found my face was wet with tears. But I wasn’t weeping over the past, I was grieving for the present. The political wing of the RSS, the organisation to which Gandhi’s assassin was once a member, is the party that runs the country now, and it exults in the same vocabulary of violence now as then. The faces of the poor are the same now as they were then. An exhausted labourer sleeps on the street beside his cracked shoes in the same way. The footage of a Muslim dairy farmer, Pehlu Khan, begging for his life before a Hindu mob, one of many such attacks this year – link back to these photographs as if the nation is condemned to forever return to the time of its conception. Perhaps India will never overcome this moment photographed here. Everything that has happened since feels fateful, cyclical, endless and pre-determined.
I thought for a guilty moment that I had no right to feel this for I had not been there to share it. But when I looked at these photographs, I didn’t see them from a foreign distance.
I remembered the story of a grand uncle jailed by the British — when he came out of prison he never left his room, he had been so damaged he stayed inside spinning khadi. He shared a special bond with my German grandmother who had sailed with a trunk full of china to marry the engineering student from East Bengal she had met in Berlin. She made a home in a country that would soon fight Germany alongside the British, became part of a family that was meanwhile fighting for Independence from the British. Everything a contradiction in ideologies, but not in the one thing that could undo it all, the personal story against all this history, all these wars.Gandhi’s funeral train leaves Delhi for Allahabad, the ancestral home of Nehru, reminding me of my childhood visits to my grandparents for my grandfather was a judge at the Allahabad high court. They were also Gujarati like Gandhi, and like millions of others had made a harsh journey away from their landscape, language, religion, their notion of caste for a secular ideal of India. My parents, born in British India, saw their childhood landscapes of Delhi and Allahabad alter beyond recognition as half the population departed for Pakistan. By the time I was born, things must have seemed comparatively quiet, although it was a year in which India and Pakistan went to war, but I too growing up had witnessed Delhi burning in another incarnation of violence. I remember the disabled Sikh gentleman down the road from us who was carried out of his house by a mob and never seen again.
I thought of my father who taught himself to read Urdu and took pleasure in reciting Faiz and Ghalib on his rooftop on a summer night. I thought of my mother’s book, In Custody, about a professor of Hindi literature trying to record the poetry of an Urdu poet. That India, the inclusive India, my natural birthright, is once again under threat, and it has always been so.
As I composed myself in the cool darkness of the museum before I stepped back into the bright summer day, I felt a private gratitude to Cartier-Bresson, for his example of an artist who erased himself becoming a ghost behind his little 35mm Leica in order to memorialise the erasure of others. While the pictures depict violence, looking at them restores one to a place of humanity.
A refugee camp in Delhi in 1947. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Baniachang, the village in Sylhet from which my father’s family came, became part of East Pakistan in 1947. Today, after the secession of East Pakistan in 1971, it is in Bangladesh. I’ve never been there. How difficult was it, I thought when hearing my family talk about leaving Baniachang, for them to choose one kind of identity over another, in this case religion over language and culture? Partition, as books in recent years by Yasmin Khan and Vazira Zamindar have shown, was a different process depending on which part of it you were caught up in. The British and Indian elites making their new nations – men exemplified by the British viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, the future Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his hardline Hindu nationalist deputy, Vallabhbhai Patel, the Indian industrialist and Gandhi patron GD Birla – were all in a hurry to force the process through. Mountbatten insisted on 15 August 1947 as the date for partition, just two and a half months after the decision to divide the subcontinent had been made. The boundary commission headed by the barrister Cyril Radcliffe finished preparing their maps only on 12 August, although these maps would not be made public until 17 August, two days after partition
By then, the ethnic cleansing was well under way. Over a million were killed, thousands raped and abducted, and between 12 and 20 million displaced in the process. Trains criss-crossed the landscape with carriages filled with corpses. Those escaping on foot travelled in columns that were sometimes 45 miles long. None of this violence and pain has really worked its way into the official histories of Britain, India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. This is surely one reason why the partition shows an uncanny ability to replicate itself through the decades, in mini partitions, mini pogroms and the steady marginalisation and brutalisation of minorities that has become the governing spirit of nationalism in south Asia.
The Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, who reluctantly moved to Pakistan from Bombay after partition and found himself utterly disillusioned in his new nation, captured the situation best in his short story about patients in a Lahore asylum being divided up as assets for the new countries. The Sikh protagonist, named Toba Tek Singh after the village he comes from, is taken to the border to be sent to India, although his village happens to be on the other side, in what is now Pakistan. Lying down on “a bit of land that belonged to neither India nor Pakistan”, he refuses to take part in this process of exchange that has already blighted so many lives. Seventy years after Partition, Toba Tek Singh’s defiant madness evokes freedom better than anything achieved by the supposedly rational nations that came out of that bloody process.
Siddhartha Deb is the author of The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India, published by Penguin. An excerpt from his new novel, set in part against the backdrop of partition, will be published in the autumn issue of N+1.
Fatima Bhutto. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer
India takes its name from the Indus, which flows through Sindh, my hometown in Pakistan. The mighty river is a force that animates the legends of India and Pakistan. Mohenjo-daro, the seat of that ancient river culture, is shared – no matter modern partitions – between our two countries.
Today Hindus and Muslims gather to pray together to the saint Udero Lal, a form of the beloved Jhulelal, in the complex where both a temple and a mosque stand together. Jhulelal has many avatars: for Sindhi Muslims he is a manifestation of Qalandar, a Sufi mystic who travelled from the Middle East to our shores to bring the faithful closer to God; for Hindus, he is an incarnation of a Varuna, a Vedic god who ruled the oceans. Across the border, the holy city Varanasi is named partly in his honour.
I spent many days in my childhood among the bricks of Mohenjo-daro. My brother spent his teenage years journeying to Udero Lal. Both of us have driven hours from our home in Karachi to sit under the golden dome of the Sufi shrine of Sehwan Sharif, where rose petals are offered to the tomb of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar by all faiths. Last year, the shrine was bombed by Isis because of what it stood for – a refuge, a site of adoration and love, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Sehwan, the name of the town where Pakistani Sufism’s most cherished shrine stands, is believed by many to be derived from the name of the god Shiva.
Sindh’s syncretic culture, its centuries of tolerant co-existence and even its turbulent present defy the sectarian logic of partition. And I have faith that it will survive the disasters designed to flow from it, even 70 years on.
