Monthly Archives: May 2013

‘Room for hope’ By Moeed yusuf

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A well balanced and insightful post-election commentary in Dawn.

WE are through with the May 11 elections. Given the persistent violence and the overall aura of uncertainty that marked the run-up to the elections, the state deserves credit for having pulled off the ballot.

The conduct of the elections itself was satisfactory although rigging has been alleged in a handful of constituencies in Sindh and Punjab. Of course, the allegations necessitate an impartial and authoritative inquiry by the election commission — with tangible repercussions for the individuals and parties involved.

That said, these irregularities should be situated within our context. Unfortunate as it is, the quantum of alleged rigging and more significantly the response to it marks considerable improvement over the past. What we have witnessed is a substantially constrained space for riggers now operating under the eye of the camera and in the presence of proactive citizens eager to report irregularities.

The response by those seeking to be redressed and the media has also been mature and categorical. The parties allegedly involved have been called out; even if evidence to prosecute them is found wanting this time, civil society’s focus and the media’s stance will only make it harder for them to put up repeat performances in the future.

There are a number of other positives to report from the recent ballot.

Hardly anything needs to be said about the all too apparent excitement and energy among Pakistani voters. The 60pc-plus turnout speaks for itself. All credit to the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) for having sparked an election campaign focused on the traditionally de-politicised urban segments of society; this, in turn, compelled rival parties to follow suit.

The emergence of a genuine third force in Pakistani politics is also a positive sign as is the fact that both the PTI and PML-N ultimately campaigned on the message of change and hope — a much-needed communication strategy for a citizenry that is otherwise becoming increasingly despondent about its country’s future.

The results of the elections are also fairly positive in as far as they provide a genuine opportunity to the winners to govern effectively. The biggest fear of pundits prior to the elections — a hung parliament that would create a gridlock on key national issues — has not materialised. The PML-N has emerged with a healthy mandate. Its control over Punjab will provide it even greater leeway to implement its national vision.

At the same time, the results force Nawaz Sharif to work with the PTI and PPP in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh respectively and to form a coalition government in Balochistan. This should be reassuring for those concerned about the PML-N’s dictatorial tendencies, manifested during the 1997-99 period when the party had a two-thirds majority at the centre. With the 18th Amendment in place and the PML-N absent from governments in KP and Sindh, Sharif will have no option but to maintain cordial relations with the provincial governments. The centre and KP will also require extensive collaboration on Fata.

Also, not to be ignored, political parties have exhibited a fair amount of maturity in the post-election week. While Machiavellian manouvering and lobbying continues behind closed doors in all party headquarters, we shouldn’t dismiss Sharif and Imran Khan’s desire to let the past be and work together. Similarly, kudos to the PPP and Awami National Party (ANP) for making statements that acknowledge that the results reflect the electorate’s rejection of their performance. Click link for full article;

http://dawn.com/2013/05/20/room-for-hope/

Posted By F. Sheikh

‘Argument with Myself ‘

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Book Review by Mike Jay-Permanent Present Tense: The Man with No Memory, and What He Taught the World by Suzanne Corkin

Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw closer; University Challenge gets easier, remembering what you came downstairs for gets harder. Yet if we were somehow to freeze our memory at the youthful peak of its powers, around our late twenties, we would not create a polished version of ourselves analogous to a youthful body, but an early, scrappy draft composed of childhood memories and school-learning, barely recognisable to our older selves.

Something like this happened to the most famous case of amnesia in 20th-century science, a man known only as ‘H.M.’ until his death in 2008. When he was 27, a disastrous brain operation destroyed his ability to form new memories, and he lived for the next 55 years in a rolling thirty-second loop of awareness, a ‘permanent present tense’. During this time he was subjected to thousands of hours of tests, of which naturally he had no recall; he provided data for hundreds of scientific papers, and became the subject of a book (Memory’s Ghost by Philip Hilts) and a staple of popular science journalism; by the 1990s digital images of his uniquely disfigured hippocampus featured in almost every standard work on the neuroscience of memory. Since his death his brain has been shaved into 2401 slices, each 70 microns thick, compared in one account to the slivers of ginger served with sushi. Suzanne Corkin, an MIT neuroscientist, first met him in 1962 and after 1980 became his lead investigator and ‘sole keeper’. Permanent Present Tense is her account of Henry Gustave Molaison – his full identity can finally be revealed – and the historic contribution he made to science.

Unwittingly snatching ‘dreams’ from the recesses of his waking mind was consistent with the ways Henry, always intelligent and perceptive, became adept at filling the gaps in his memory with hunches and canny guesswork. Sometimes this would baffle his researchers: one day he astonished Corkin by knowing that he was in the MIT laboratories, only to reveal that he had deduced his location from a passing student’s sweatshirt. When asked a question beyond the reach of his memory, he would often pause and then reply, ‘I’m having an argument with myself’: a range of possible answers would come to him, whether from intuition, partial recall or informed guesswork, but he would have no means of deciding between them. Although he was unable to recall specific events, regular routines would prompt him in ways that eluded conscious recognition: walking a familiar route, he might turn the correct way without knowing he had done so. A situation that recurred often enough seemed to create a ghostly outline. In 1977, after the death of Henry’s father, a lab researcher noticed that he kept in his wallet a handwritten note to himself – ‘Dad’s dead’ – to anchor his recurring feeling of absence. Click Link for full article;

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/mike-jay/argument-with-myself

Posted By F. Sheikh

 

Victorian-era people more intelligent than modern-day counterparts!

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By Bob Yirka.

Researchers suggest Victorian-era people more intelligent modern-day counterpartswikpidia photo

The Victorian era has been highly touted by historians as one of the most productive in human history—inventions, observations and highly acclaimed art and music from that time still resonate today. The era was defined by Queen Victoria’s reign in England which ran from 1837 until her death in 1901. Comparing the average IQ of people from that time with that of modern-day people is, of course, impossible—at least using traditional methods. The researchers suggest that reaction times to stimuli can be used as an alternative way to compare relative IQ levels.

In a new study, a European research team suggests that the average intelligence level of Victorian-era people was higher than that of modern-day people. They base their controversial assertion on reaction times (RT) to visual stimuli given as tests to people from the late 1800s to modern times—the faster the reaction time, they say, the smarter the person.

IQ tests themselves have come under scrutiny of late because they quite often reflect bias, such as education levels, societal norms, and other not-easily defined factors. Other research has shown that overall health, nutrition levels and degree of fatigue can impact IQ scores as well. For this reason, the team has turned to RT as a means of evaluating what they call general intelligence, which they claim to be a measure of elementary cognition. Click link for full article;

http://phys.org/news/2013-05-victorian-era-people-intelligent-modern-day-counterparts.html#ajTabs

Posted By F. Sheikh

Islam and Modernity

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Submitted by Mirza Iqbal Ashraf

(1) WHAT IS ISLAM?— (2) WHAT IS MODERNITY?— (3) WHO ARE MUSLIMS?

First of all: WHAT IS RELIGION? Oliver Leaman in his work the Islamic Philosophy, (page 126) explains what religion is: “Etymologists tell us that the word “religion” may come from the Latin root religare, meaning to adhere or bind. It’s a wonderful derivation. In both its secular and religious manifestations, faith is alluring and seductive precisely because it’s driven by propositions that bind or adhere the believer to a compelling set of ideas that satisfy rationally or spiritually, but always obligate. History is a crucial concept for religion, since the rationale for a particular religion may well be historical. For example, it is often argued by a religion that the truth of its doctrines lies in the facts of the past, and, were it not for those historical facts, that the religion would be unworthy of acceptance.” According to an American philosopher C. S. Lewis: “As a biological phenomenon, religion is the product of cognitive processes that have deep roots in our evolutionary past.” What is ironical with the Darwinian theorists, that regarding religion they argue that it is a myth of the past, but regarding human being they link him to the very past man the animal. If man can evolve from an animal to a present day human being, it is quite natural that his mythical convictions evolved as a religion in his present cognition. We cannot ignore that the quest of myths, religions, philosophy, and science is same; the quest for knowledge to reach the “ultimate truth” of creation of man and the cosmos.

Secondly ORIGIN OF RELIGION: Origin and source of religion can never be known with certainty. Different researches are based on speculations. The anthropologists hold that religion originated from people’s interaction with nature; the psychologists view frustration, fear, stress, and emotional need; the sociologists believe religion as the first social system; and the rational philosophers agree not to agree on the subject of religion. For those who believe in God, Divine revelation is still an agreeable and acceptable origin of the religion.

Thirdly WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE IN RELIGION: “Mankind is continually and universally threatened with failure, frustration, and injustice. Religion becomes the attempt of people in groups to “relativize” such threats to their wholeness by placing them within a context of a larger system or plan and by “explaining” much that happens in terms of supernatural intervention into and control over and control over earthly events. At the same time, threats similar to those experienced by individuals also affect social relationships–and, in fact, society itself. Religion arises as an attempt by society to cushion such threats (both itself and to its members) by bringing people into a ritual fellowship of common belief. Religion is thus a response to both individual and group needs.” (Ronald L. Johnston: Religion in Society, page 35).

1. WHAT IS ISLAM? As a matter of fact, religion is not a fixed collection of beliefs, myths or rituals. Properly understood, Religion–when both science and philosophy fails to give a definite answer to man–is a living technology for experiencing the Creator or to be more explicit, God. Religion, somewhat began in fear, whereas philosophy began in wonder about various issues related to fear and wonder of natural phenomena that human beings found mysterious and surprising. In Islam, we have both, fear and wonder combined together. Many great Islamic thinkers and philosophers from al-Kindi to Allama Iqbal agreeably created a meta-theory–a theory about theory–called “theory of double truth” meaning that the truths of religion and philosophy are so distinct that there is no way that they can contradict each other. In Islam reason and religion do not come into conflict, they are rather about the same truth, only expressed in different ways, (for detail read Ibn Rushd, al-Ghazali, and Iqbal).  Allama Iqbal’s whole philosophy is based on characteristics of Hz. Khizer, Sikander, and Rumi. Unfortunately no one understands Iqbal today. Please see Iqbal’s great Persian verses, (translated by me and posted on TF web) and understand Sikander the non-believer challenging the Qur’anic figure Hz. Khizer (It is viewed that that Hz. Idris is Hz. Khizer). Islam, according to many great Islamic philosophers, is a social phenomenon and, as such, is in a continual reciprocal, interactive relationship with other social phenomena–Divine and earthly.

2. WHAT IS MODERNITY? Modernity has many interpretations. Generally the idea of modernity common to sociology, economics, and historiography, both in their professional and popular or fold form, is an attempt to grasp the peculiarity of the present by contrasting it with the preceding age. Philosophically, modernity means various moments of abundant epistemological optimism. Since no other religion after Islam has successfully appeared or has been accepted as religion, Islam is accredited as the latest or a modern religion. Within this context, Islam as a religion does not need to be changed or even modified since it has the capability to be compatible with every age and to assimilate all modern thoughts and traditions in its discipline, except those which are un-natural. Islamic jurisprudence based on Shari’ah, socially or politically, has never been a static set of rules throughout the 13 centuries of Islamic dominance in the world. Although I can quote hundreds of references from European and American historians and thinkers, here I am quoting few lines by the agnostic, humanist thinker, and a protagonist of mathematical-philosophy, Bertrand Russell. He writes in his great book, A History of Western Philosophy, in the chapter Mohammedan Culture and Philosophy, page 419-28: “The religion of the Prophet (Mohammed) was a simple monotheism, uncomplicated by the elaborate theology of the Trinity and the Incarnation. . . . Arab Empire was an absolute monarchy, under the caliph, who was the successor of the Prophet, and inherited much of his holiness. The caliphate was nominally elective, but soon became hereditary. The first dynasty, that of Ummayyads, which lasted till 750, was founded by men whose acceptance of Mahomet was purely political, and it remained always opposed to the more fanatical among the faithful. . . The Abbasids were, politically, more in favor of the fanatics than the Ummayyads had been.” He further writes, “Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters.” Here, I would dare to disagree with Russell [since he had not read Qur’an] as the Qur’an clearly mentions, “Call [the mankind] unto the way of thy Lord with wisdom and fair exhortation, and reason [argue] with them in the better way,” (Q. 16:125). According to the Prophet of Islam, “God has not created anything more beautiful, better, or more perfect than reason–so much so that to ponder for an hour, is better than Divine service for a year,” (Sahih Bukhari).

3. WHO ARE MUSLIMS? This is a big question? Whereas all other civilizations in the world have gradually evolved, Islam is a civilization founded by its Prophet. Muslims are citizens of a great ummah, a civilization under the banner of universal Islam, where they believe in One God, the five pillars of Islam. Islam presents an all-embracing system of life comprising a distinct and self-contained culture. Their diversity in different factions and different approaches is the result of Islam’s capacity to assimilate other cultures into this system, including Central Asian, Persian, Egyptian, European, Indian, Mongolian, and Far Eastern peoples, a culture which is originally Arabian, is based on Islam’s appeal to humanitarian theism. Today what is feared and is being challenged–and is being treacherously presented under the garb of pristine Islam–is in fact the essence of Islam’s doctrine of immanent universality [a universality that has the capability to assimilate all other cultures and traditions which do not confront natural tenets of mankind and are not repugnant to Qur’anic injunctions], against which the non-Islamic world is poised. This natural religion of Islam, a driving force in Muslim civilization, has been and is still politically misunderstood, misinterpreted, and exploited both within and beyond Islam.

Mirza Iqbal Ashraf: May 18, 2013