Monthly Archives: March 2019

“Silencing Islamophobes is as futile a response as banning the Qur’an” Kenan Malik

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What drove Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch gunman, to commit his heinous acts? It’s a question that has, understandably, occupied much media space . A key debate has been over the role of anti-Muslim hatred and its entrenchment in mainstream society.

In an open letter, Britain’s counter-terror chief, Neil Basu, called out the mainstream media for the “messaging” that fuels far-right terrorists. It’s a theme echoed by many on the left.

Rightwing commentators such as Melanie Phillips have dismissed such criticism as itself “peddling hatred, lies and incitement”. Spectator columnist Douglas Murray insisted that the only person responsible for the massacre was “the gunman himself”. But, he protested, “that hasn’t stopped all manner of people on social media… seeking to apportion blame” on people such as himself.

This was the same Douglas Murray who, two years ago, after jihadist attacks in Britain, claimed that Jeremy Corbyn was “guilty of facilitating the extremists” and that while there was only a small number of terrorists there was a “far larger number of people who provide the mood music for these people”. Presumably, “mood music” matters and the apportioning of blame is legitimate only when it comes to Islamist terrorists.

Hypocrisy is not confined to the right. Many on the left saw the Christchurch attacks as evidence that free speech had gone too far. Few, though, would have seen the Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017 or the Paris massacres of November 2015 as a “free speech issue”. Fewer still would support the likes of the Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders, who has demanded a ban on the Qur’an, which he damns as “hate speech” that leads jihadists to commit mass murder.

There are, of course, differences between Christchurch and the Manchester bombing or the terror in Paris, differences in context and causation. But double standards are no more acceptable on the left than they are in the writings of figures such as Murray. He is right that “mood music” matters. Creating or contributing to a culture that sees migrants, especially Muslim migrants, as “invaders”, insists that Muslims undermine “western values” and regards the promotion of “white racial self-interest” as a legitimate goal inevitably leads to Muslims being seen as a problem.

There is, though, no straight road from this to the horrors of Christchurch. I have written about the complex social and political roots of western jihadism. The same is true of white nationalist terror too. We need to understand, for instance, the ways in which social and political grievances become refracted through the politics of identity to take the form of hostility towards migrants and Muslims and how this can lead some to acts of terror. To see a direct line between Murray’s writing and the Christchurch killings is no more plausible than the claim that the Qur’an explains jihadism.

Tarrant’s “manifesto”, which he published online to justify his acts, is a grim clutter of anti-Muslim hatred, white identity politics, hostility to globalisation and a defence of environmentalism. The Christchurch attack, he writes, “was not an attack on diversity, but an attack in the name of diversity. To ensure diverse peoples remain diverse, separate, unique, undiluted and unrestrained in cultural or ethnic expression and autonomy.”

It’s a kind of rabid mishmash of left and right that is often found on the white nationalist fringe, as well as among jihadists. It reveals far-right terror to be a more complex phenomenon than many on the left want to believe. Many rightwing commentators, including Murray and Phillips, argue that they are not hostile to Muslims, simply critical of Islam. It’s an important distinction, but also one that’s gravely misused.

I have long argued that the very term Islamophobia is problematic because it conflates criticism of Islam and hatred of Muslims. As I wrote in a report by the anti-racist Runnymede Trust, this conflation enables both Muslims “to attack criticism of Islam as illegitimate because it is judged to be ‘Islamophobic’ ” and “permits those who promote hatred to dismiss condemnation of that hatred as stemming from an illegitimate desire to avoid criticism of Islam”.

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TFUSA Meeting Sunday, March 31st, 2019- Part II What Is Logic ?

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Thinkers Forum USA

Cordially invites all participants to the monthly Meeting/Discussion

On Sunday, March 31st, 2019

Time

11: 55 AM

To

2: 30 PM

Speaker

Noor Salik

Topic

What is Logic?

Moderator

Dr. Fayyaz Sheikh

Location

Saffron Indian Cuisine

97 RT 303, Congers, N.Y. 10920

845 767 4444

Brunch served after lecture

Outline of topic for discussion

What is Logic?

Logic is the systematic study of the form of valid inference, and the most general laws of truth. A valid inference is one where there is a specific relation of logical support between the assumptions of the inference and its conclusion.

There is no universal agreement as to the exact scope and subject matter of logic, but it has traditionally included the classification of arguments, the systematic exposition of the ‘logical form’ common to all valid arguments, the study of proof and inference, including paradoxes and fallacies, and the study of syntax and semantics.  Historically, logic has been studied in philosophy (since ancient times) and mathematics (since the mid-19th century), and recently logic has been studied in computer science, linguistics, psychology and other fields.

Most people tend to think of themselves as logical. Telling someone you are not being logical is normally a form of criticism. To be illogical is to be confused, muddled, and irrational.

We all reason. We try to figure out what is so, reasoning on the basis of what we already know. Logic is the study of what counts as a good reason for what and why.

Here are two bits of reasoning – logicians call them inferences.

  1. Rome is the capital of Italy, and this plane lands in Rome; so the plane lands in Italy.
  2. Moscow is the capital of USA; so you cannot go Moscow without going to USA.

In each case, the claims before the ‘so’ – logicians call them premises – are giving reasons; the claims after the ‘so’ – logicians call them conclusions.

The first piece of reasoning is fine; but the second is pretty hopeless and simply false. The premise had been true – if say, the USA had bought the whole of Russia (not just Alaska) and moved the white house to Moscow, the conclusion would have been true. It would have followed from the premises; and that is what logic is concerned with.  It is not concerned with whether the premises of an inference is true or false. That is somebody else’s business (in this case the geographer’s. It is interested simply in whether the conclusions follow from the premises. Logicians call an inference where conclusion really does follow from the premises valid. So the central aim of logic is to understand validity.

Kinds of Validity:

  1. Deductive validity
  2. Inductive validity

 

Let us consider the following three inferences.

  1. If the burglar had broken through the kitchen window, there would be footprints outside; but there are no footprints; so the burglar did not break in through the kitchen window.
  2. Jones has nicotine stained fingers; so Jones is a smoker.
  3. Jones buys two packets of cigarette a day; so someone left footprints outside the kitchen window.

The first inference is a very straightforward one. If the premises are true so must the conclusion be. Or to put is another way, the premises could not be true without the conclusion also being true. Logicians call an inference of this kind deductively valid.

Inference number two is a bit different. The premise clearly gives a good reason for the conclusion, but is not completely conclusive. After all Jones could have simply stained his hands to make people think that he was a smoker. So the inference is not deductively valid. Inferences like this are said to be inductively valid.

Inference number three seems to be pretty hopeless by any standard.

 

Inductive validity is very important notion. We reason inductively all the time; for example in trying to solve problems such as why the car has broken down, why a person is ill, or who committed a crime.

Despite this historically much more effort has gone into understanding deductive validity – may be because logicians have tended to be philosophers or mathematicians (in whose studies deductively valid inferences are certainly important) and not doctors, detectives or mechanics.

So what is a valid inference?

We saw where the premises can’t be true without the conclusion also being true.

But what does that mean? In particular, what does the can’t mean?

In general can’t can mean many different things. Consider for example: Mary can play the piano, but John can’t; here we are talking about human abilities.

Compare: ’You can’t go in here: you need a permit’; here we are talking about what some code of rules permits.

 

It is natural to understand the ‘can’t’ relevant to present case in this way; to say that the premises can’t be true without the conclusion being true is to say  that in all situations in which all the premises are true, so is the conclusion.

But what exactly is the situation? What sort of things go into their makeup and how do these things relate to each other?

And what is it to be true?  Now there is a philosophical problem.

‘Situation’ and ‘Truth’ are complex concepts in philosophy which philosophers incessantly struggle to grapple with.

 

 

 

Aristotelean Logic

Aristotle’s collection of logical treatises is known as Organon. Of these treatises, the Prior Analytics contains the most systematic discussions of formal logic. In addition to Organon, the Metaphysics contains relevant material.

Subject and Predicates

Aristotelean logic begins with the familiar grammatical distinction between subject and predicate. A subject is typically an individual entity, for instance a man, or a house or a city. It may also be a class of entities, for instance all men. A predicate is a property or attribute or mode of existence that a given subject may or may not possess.

For example an individual man (the subject) may or may not be skillful (the predicate), and all men (the subject) may or may not be brothers (the predicate).

The fundamental principles of predication are:

  1. Everything is what it is and acts accordingly. In symbols:

A is A.  For example, an acorn will grow out of an oak tree and nothing else.

  1. It is impossible for a thing both to be and not to be. A given predicate either belongs or does not belong to a given subject at a given time . Symbolically: Either A or non-A.

For example, a society must be either free or not free.

These principles have exercised a powerful influence on subsequent thinkers. The twentieth-century intellectual Ayn Rand titled the three main divisions of her best-selling philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged after principles above, in tribute to Aristotle.

Syllogisms

According to Aristotelian logic, the basic unit of reasoning is the Syllogism.

It is of the form

Some A s B.

All  B is C.

Therefore, some A is C.

Every syllogism consists of two premises and one conclusion.

Each of the premises and the conclusion is one of the four types.

Universal affirmative:          All A is B.

Universal negative:               No A is B.

Particular affirmative:          Some A is B

Particular negative:              Some A is not B.

The letters A, B, C are known as terms. Every syllogism contains three terms. The two premises always share a term that does not appear in the conclusion. This is known as the middle term.

 

 

 

A more comprehensive format of syllogism:

All [some] As are [are not] Bs.

All [some] Bs are [are not] Cs.

So, all [some] As are [are not] Cs.

 

In order to classify the various types of syllogisms, one must take account of certain symmetries. In particular “no A is B” and “no B is A” are equivalent, as are “some A is B” and “some B is A”.

Furthermore, the order of the two premises in a syllogism does not matter.

Allowing of these symmetries, we can enumerate a total of 126 possible syllogistic forms. Of these 126, only 11 represent correct inferences.

For example, the form

all A is B, all B is C, therefore all A is C

represents a correct inference, while

all A is B, all C is B, therefore some A is C does not.

The classification of syllogisms leads to a rather complex theory. Medieval thinkers perfected it and developed ingenious mnemonics to aid in distinguishing correct from the incorrect ones.

Theory of Definition

In the older logic a definition is the delimitation of a species by stating the genus which includes it and the specific difference or distinguishing characteristic of the species. A typical definition of man as rational animal. The genus is the animal genus and the distinguishing characteristic is rationality. (What has been stated in capsule form is the Aristotelian theory of definition).

Aristotelian analysis, do seriously promulgate the four traditional rules of definition:

  1. A definition must give the essence of that which is to be defined.
  2. A definition must not be circular.
  3. A definition must not be negative when it can be in the positive.
  4. A definition must not be expressed in figurative or obscure language.

Certainly these rules have serious use as practical precepts. They rule out as definitions statements like:

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.   KHALIL GIBRAN, The Prophet,                            which violates Rule 4, or:

Force is not a kinematical notion, which violates rule 3.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE SENTENTIAL CONNECTIVES

 

We need to develop a vocabulary which is precise and at the same time adequate for analysis of the problems and concepts of systematic knowledge. We must use vague language to create a precise language.

We want to lay down careful rules of usage of certain key words: ‘not’, ‘or’, ‘and’,

‘If … then …’, ‘if and only if’, which are called sentential connectives.

Negation and conjunction.

We deny the truth of a sentence by asserting its negation. We attach word ‘not’ to the main verb of the sentence.

Sugar causes tooth decay. Negation: Sugar does not cause tooth decay.

However, the assertion of negation of a compound sentence is more complicated.

‘Sugar causes tooth decay and whisky causes ulcers’

Negation: ‘It is not the case that both sugar causes tooth decay and whiskey causes ulcers’.

In spite pf apparent divergence between these two examples, it is convenient to adopt in logic a single sign for forming the negation of a sentence. We shall use the prefix

‘-‘, which is placed before the whole sentence. The negation of the first example is written:     – (Sugar causes tooth decay).

The negation of the second example is – (Sugar causes tooth decay and whisky causes ulcers)

The negation of a true sentence is false, and negation of false sentence is true.

NEGATION

.

P -P Q -Q
T F T F
F T F T

 

The word ‘and’ is used to conjoin (combine) two sentences to make a single sentence which is called the conjunction of two sentences.

‘Mary loves John and John loves Mary’ is the conjunction of sentence ‘Mary loves John’ and sentence ‘John loves Mary’. The ampersand sign ‘&’ is used for conjunction.

The conjunction of any two sentences P and Q is written as P & Q.

The conjunction of two sentences is true if and only if both sentences are true.

There is no requirement that two sentences be related in content or subject matter. Any combinations, however absurd are permitted.

CONJUNCTION

P Q P & Q
T T T
T F F
F T F
F F F

 

Disjunction:

The word ‘or’ is used to obtain the disjunction of two sentences. The sign ‘V’ is used for disjunction. The disjunction of any two sentences P and Q is written P V Q.

The disjunction of two sentences is true if and only if at least one of the sentences is true.

DISJUNCTION

P Q P V Q
T T T
T F T
F T T
F F F

 

Implication: Conditional Sentences.

The expression ‘if …, then ….’ Is used to obtain from two sentences a conditional sentence. A conditional sentence is also called an implication.

 

IMPLICATION

P Q P ==èQ
T T T
T F F
F T T
F F T

 

Conditional:

P =è Q

P implies Q

If P, then Q

The conditional statement is saying that if P is true, then Q will immediately follow, and thus be true. So the first row naturally follows the definition.

Similarly, the second row follows this because we say “P implies Q’ and then P is true and Q is false, then the statement “P implies Q” must be false, as Q did not immediately follow P.

The last two rows are tough ones to think about, so let us look them individually.

Row # 3  P is false, Q is true.

Think of the following statement.

If it is sunny, I will wear my glasses.

If P is false and Q is true, then it is saying that it is not sunny, but I wore glasses anyway. This certainly does not invalidate my original statement as I might just like my glasses. So if P is false, but Q is true,  it is reasonable to think “P implies Q” is still true.

Row #4   P is false, Q is false.

Using the example about sunglasses, this would be equivalent to it, not being sunny and me not wearing my glasses.

Again this would not invalidate my statement that if it is sunny, I wear my glasses.

Therefore, if P is false and Q is true, “P implies Q” is still true.

Continuing with sunglasses, the only time you would question the validity of my statement is if you saw me on a Sunny day without my glasses (P true, Q False).

Hence the conditional statement is true in all but one case, when the front (first statement) is true but the back (second statement) is false.

  • Conditional is a compound statement of the form “If P then Q”
  • Think of the conditional as a promise
  • If I do not keep my promise, in other words Q is false then the conditional is false, if the promise is true.
  • If I keep my promise, then Q is true and the promise is true, then the conditional is true.
  • When the premise is false (i.e P is false) then there was no promise, hence by default conditional is True.

 

 

  • Equivalence: Biconditional Sentences.
  • The expression ‘if and only if’ Is used to obtain from two sentences a biconditional sentence. A biconditional sentence is also called an equivalence and the two sentences connected by ‘if and only if’ are called the left and right member of the equivalence. The biconditional

P if and only if Q       (1)

Has the same meaning as the sentence

P if Q and P only if Q      (2)

And (2) is equivalent to

If P then Q, and if Q then P.    (3)

Rules of usage for conjunction and implication tell us that (3) is true just when P and Q are both true or both false. Thus the rule “A biconditional sentence is true if and only if its two members are either both true or both false.

As a matter of notation it is written P ç==è  Q for biconditional formed from sentences P and Q.  It can also be said Q is necessary and sufficient condition for P.

When a conditional statement and its converse are combined, a biconditional statement is created.

“P if and only if Q”, notation   P ç==è Q

P ç==è Q   means P =è  Q and Q =è P

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • EQUIVALENCE
P Q P çèQ
T T T
T F F
F T F
F F T

 

Summary of connectives and Truth Tables

Disjunction P V Q P or Q
Biconditional P çè Q P if and only if Q
Conditional P =è    Q If P then Q
Conjunction P ^ Q     (P  & Q) P and Q
Negation ~ P   or   – P Not P

Truth tables (F = false, T = True)

 

 

P

 Q P V Q P & Q P è Q P çè Q
T T T T T T
T F T F F F
F T T F T F
F F F F T T

 

P and   ~P have opposite truth values.

Tautologies

A tautology is true for all possible assignments of truth values to its components.

 

A tautology is also called a universally valid formula and logical truth. A statement formula which is false for all possible assignments of truth values to its components is called a contradiction.

.

Three Well-Worn Arguments for the Existence of God

From the book “An Incomplete Education”

…

NOTE: During our Sunday discussion we will see how logicians analyze these arguments about the existence of God.

 

These old chestnuts mark the point at which philosophy — which supposedly bases its arguments on reason — and theology – which gets to call in revelation and faith – overlap. The results as you will see, sounds an awful lot like wishful thinking.

THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT:

This one dates all the way back to Aristotle’s theory of motion and encompasses Thomas Aquinas’ version, known as the argument from contingency and necessity. We know from experience that everything in the world moves and changes, said Aristotle (or simply exists said Aquinas), and everything that moves, or exists, has a mover, i.e., a cause, something that precedes it, and makes it happen. Now, we can trace lot of things in the world back to their immediate causes, but there is always another cause behind them and another behind them. Obviously said Aristotle, we cannot keep tracing effects back to causes indefinitely; there has to be one cause that isn’t, itself caused by something else, or one entity that existed before all the others could come into existence. This first cause, the Unmoved Mover, is God. The cosmological argument, widely accepted for centuries, started running into snags when Hume decided that the whole principle of cause and effect was a mirage. Later Kant made matters worse by pointing out that there may be cause and effect in this world, we do not get to assume that the same holds true out there in the Great Unknown.

Today, critics counter the cosmological argument by pointing out that there is no reason to assume we cannot have an infinite series of causes, since we can construct all sort of infinite series in Mathematics. Also that the argument never satisfactorily dealt with the question of any four-year-old knows enough to ask, namely, Who made God?

 

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT:

 

This is an example of old philosopher’s dream of explaining the nature of universe through sheer deduction; also of how slippery a priori reasoning can get.

The argument, which probably originated with St. Anslem back in the Middle Ages and  which hit its peak with Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, the Continental  Rationalists of the seventeenth century runs as follows:

We can conceive of Perfection (if we couldn’t, we would not be so quick to recognize imperfection) and we can conceive of a Perfect Being. God is what we call that Being, which embodies all imaginable attributes of perfection, the Being than which no greater Being can be conceived. Well if you are going to imagine a Perfect Being, it stands to reason that He exists, since a Perfect Being that did not exist would not be as perfect as a Perfect Being that did, and isn’t, therefore, the most Perfect Being you can imagine.

(Is He?)  Hence by definition, God Exists. If you are still reading at this point, you may have already noticed that the ontological argument can be criticized for begging the question; that is, it assumes at the outset, the very thing it purports to prove. Still, when you think about it, the argument is not nearly as simpleminded as it appears. Just where did you get your idea of a Perfect Being if you are so sure no such thing exists?

 

THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT, OR THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN:

 

Simply by looking around, you can see that the world is a strange and wondrous place, something like an enormous machine with millions of perfectly made perfectly interlocking parts. Now, nobody but an underground filmmaker would claim that such a structure could be the result of mere chance. For metaphysicians from Plato and Aristotle to eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, enamored of mechanical symmetry of the universe, and nineteenth-century ones, enamored of biological complexity of same, the idea that there had to be a Mind behind all this magnificent order seemed pretty obvious. The teleological argument survived for so long partly because the world is pretty amazing place, and partly because the argument’s validity never depended on the idea that God is omniscient or omnipotent, only He is a better planner than the rest of us. However as Hume, the great debunker, was to point out, even if we could assume the existence of a Cosmic Architect who was marginally better at putting it all together than we are, such a mediocre intelligence, which allowed for so many glitches in the plan, would hardly constitute God. And then along came the mathematicians again, pointing out that, according to the theories of chance and

Probability, the cosmos just might be an accident after all.

 

Pascal Wager will also be discussed, if time allowed.

 

 

 

” Human Existence & Identity In Modern Age: A Socio-Philosophical Reflection” Hulya Yaldir& Mirza Ashraf (eds)

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(This Preface and introduction to the book was forwarded by Mirza  Ashraf Sahib. Reading these pages provokes further curiosity to know more especially how identity problem is perceived by different age groups. What seems to be schizophrenic characteristic to our older generation may be normal for my two year old grandson who already knows many  technological gadgets. Should we be defining for them what an identity should be? Will they even care what we have to say? This book is available at Amazon. F. Sheikh)

PREFACE: Mirza Iqbal Ashraf

WE ARE OFTEN REMINDED, if we are to deal with new challenges of our era we define as modern age, how important it is to understand the intellectualism of our contemporary period and society! We are aware, no matter what happened in the past hour is history, we live every minute, every hour in the present, in the ‘modern age’ and with the modern calendar. At this point, the account of our existence and identity with an accepted modern technology defining time to an accuracy of nanoseconds, it is vital for our success to manipulate the analysis of all the variables of time and space, find reality of human identity in the consensus of manageable ideas of knowledgeable intellectuals and thus, comprehend the nature of human existence.

Despite our technological progress and appearance of artificial intelligence, we still reflect our religious traditions and philosophical cognitions, our political order and economic systems, our social structure and cultural heritage by the cognitive power of our minds. Since we know that the mind of a time is a joint output of the leading minds of that time in the form of their ideas, discoveries, experiences, scientific, and philosophical reflections, Professor Dr. Hulya Yaldir, with her fingers on the pulse of modern time, invited some contemporary intellectuals to cognize and present an insightful observation of human existence and identity in modern age. In this endeavour, I am humbled to have joined with the learned Professor to co-edit the book Human Existence and Identity in Modern Age: A Socio-philosophical Reflection, which, I believe, is a timely sweeping exposition of understanding the modern age; an age in which—caught in the lure of digital attraction—we are plugged in, getting our brains bombarded every second by text messages, emails, twitter, Facebook and unlimited information.

Today, we are living in a ‘scientific civilization’. We mostly talk about scientific progress, and talk little of philosophy. Thus, in our modern age, every information, even our philosophical cognition we transmit all over the globe online, proliferate in artificial intelligence, we proceed as if science and philosophy are separate fields of knowledge. But well-articulated subjects offered in our book will be helpful to the readers in understanding that every chapter written by a scholarly author is in itself an insightful vehicle of both philosophical and scientific knowledge, transporting great ideas from mind to mind: IDEAS THAT ARE DRIVERS OF CHANGE.     (October 14, 2018)

 

INTRODUCTION: Hülya Yaldır

Each era brings with it a paradigm shift, that changes dramatically the prevailing world-view. The postmodern era is no exception. In this era, as Jean-François Lyotard famously argues, the universal and absolutist meta-narratives of modernity have been replaced with the small narratives that foster plurality, diversity and relativity. Put it differently, whereas the modernity is characterized by its quest for certainty, universality, and unity, postmodernity stands for subjectivity, relativity and diversity. Owing to these defining features of postmodernity, the age-old problem of identity presents itself with a new vigour and a greater difficulty. The postmodern self is no longer unified and permanent as it was in the modern era, but rather constantly changing and composed of many selves.

Situated in a world of small narratives, people form their identities relative to them. That is, people gain a sense of identity based upon their place within the world of narratives. All identities-national, ethnic, religious, class, gender, etc., have been created in accordance with these narratives. From the moment they are born, people are exposed to a set of narratives dictating their identity, their ethnic, religious affiliation, their gender roles, and start perceiving the outside world and themselves accordingly. Being surrounded by these narratives, people find a space where they can construe their own narrative and feel a sense of belonging. As new narratives are continuously being added to the narrative set, identities are reformed and reshaped.

In the twenty-first century, the world of the narratives has gone through enormous changes. The digital revolution being witnessed in this century, has shattered the existing narratives and set the stage for new ones. The technological advances and the development of communication have significantly transformed people’s lives and the way they define themselves. This is achieved through what the social theorist David Harvey calls ‘time-space compression’ or the diminution of the spatial and time barriers. This is especially evident in the internet wherein a cyberspace (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) has been created. This space enables people all over the world to communicate with each other at any time. So, social space has been reduced to ‘a virtual common space’. This opens the door for the transformation of our individual, social, political and moral identities. But, unfortunately, this transformation is not always a positive one. For the internet and social media platforms offer people an opportunity to create a world of illusion and fantasy. In these platforms, people can portray themselves as they want by changing their personal information like age, physical appearance, job, etc. Put differently, people can use these spaces to build ‘virtual selves’ whom they want to be (e.g. beautiful, blonde, intellectual, etc.) without making any effort. This is the reality of today’s digital world and it echoes what Jean Baudrillard calls ‘hyperreality’ or ‘simulation’. Living in a world of hyperreality or simulation, people have become more alone and more alienated to themselves than ever. For their real selves have been superseded by their virtual selves. Owing to this fact, people of digital age exhibit a schizophrenic character, suffering from an identity crisis and existential anxiety. This existential anxiety is fuelled by the capitalist consumption madness, tempting people to overcome their existential crisis by means of consuming and expressing themselves with the products they buy. The digital age has given rise to existential fear, identity crises and depression. This in turn has led people to question their identities with the world surrounding them and figure out their true selves. So, people need to flee from the world of simulation or hyperreality and find their true selves.

Does the erosion of meta-narratives (Kantian universal moral law, Marxist understanding of history, etc.) lead to the destruction of selves? Or does it bring about a new kind of identity? How will people re-define themselves as ontological, political and ethical beings in today’s world? These and suchlike questions is the main focus of this book. The book will address the question of human existence and identity in the modern mega-tech age through interdisciplinary, in particular philosophical and sociological reflections. This interdisciplinary edited collection, Human Existence and Identity in Modern Age: A Socio-philosophical Reflection, is a comprehensive and extensive effort by the editors, and the contributors focuses on a multitude of challenges regarding human existence and identity, which calls for an immediate solution in today’s world. The main task of this book is to increase awareness of the public, particularly university students, who are interested in arising human existence and identity problems in modern world through the viewpoint of the intellectuals who cherish different cultural experiences, and to offer valuable suggestions for solution. This study particularly intends to encourage young intellectuals across the world to become more conscious on the personal identity and survival of Homo sapiens, along with others, by creating a better and more peaceful world. The role of the Humanities and Social Sciences in enriching society and human condition should thus never be underestimated.

Another take on Thirty Years of Satanic Verses-“that those who begin by burning books end by burning people”

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Touching the untouchable

Hanif Kureishi remembers the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, thirty years on

HANIF KUREISHI

It was the early months of 1989, and they were becoming strange days indeed. It’s not often you see two policemen on their knees looking under your bed, glancing into your wardrobe and dragging aside your shower curtain to make sure there’s no terrorist waiting to spring out and strangle a novelist who’s popped round for a drink. But in the North of England bearded Pakistanis were buying books in their local Waterstone’s before setting fire to them; and a foreign government had just pronounced a “fatwa” – whatever that was – on a writer for a wild piece of postmodern prose concerning migration, the breakdown of belief, multiple subjectivities and the chaos and derangement of capitalistic acceleration.

As if that wasn’t enough: with the cops sniffing around, you couldn’t even smoke a joint in your own living room. Luckily, Salman assured me, the policeman wouldn’t leap up and handcuff me since he really had no sense of smell.

Then, one morning, the Labour MP for Leicester East, Keith Vaz, whom I knew a little – a polite man, he’d introduced me to his mother in the House of Commons – called to say we could rely on his support for Rushdie until the end. That night I glimpsed him on television leading a march in his constituency against the novel. You’d have to say that realism was getting very magical in a black sort of way; and one of the problems with reality, as The Satanic Verses points out, is that it is always being invaded by unreality. That which we believe is solid can melt in a moment. And the novel of all things – probably the form which most lends itself to the exploration of human complexity – had become the site of a world-wide controversy.

A few days later I was sitting with Harold Pinter in a pub near Downing Street and we were trying to work out what to say to Margaret Thatcher if she happened to be in when we passed by with our statement about protecting novelists from intimidation by foreign governments. To our relief, Thatcher wouldn’t meet us, but creditably she did say, “There are no grounds on which the government would consider banning the book”.

Unfortunately my father saw me on television wandering around outside Downing Street and nearly had another heart attack. He had worked in the Pakistan High Commission for most of his life and had warned me that Muslims could become more than agitated if provoked about the Prophet. During Ramadan he had to eat his sandwiches behind a tree in Hyde Park for fear a colleague would spot him breaking the fast. Now he rang me up yelling that I should keep out of “the fatwa business”.

Dad had admired the way Jewish writers and artists had flourished in the West. Philip Roth had run into some community trouble with his great Portnoy, but once he became admired and famous everyone shut up and claimed him as a literary hero and truth-teller. Dad said Jewish children were part of Britain: they were westernized without forgetting their heritage. Why couldn’t we as a migrant community do that? Why were we going the other way?

What, I wondered, was the “other way” my father referred to? What exactly was going on? What was this “return” and where had this new political and moral fervour come from?

If my friends and I as a generation were surprised and even amused by the fatwa and the level of fury The Satanic Verses was provoking, perhaps we boomers had become inured to outrage, insult and provocation. A turd in a tin, a pile of bricks, copulation in an art gallery, dirty nappies, menstrual pads: not a flicker did they raise among the sophisticated. Outrage was style: it was what we expected before we went out to supper. Soaked in drugs and exhausted by years of random copulation, maybe nothing much registered with us now and we were jaded after decades of hectic nihilistic rock and roll and consumerism. The Berlin Wall had fallen; Soviet Marxism was over. Perhaps it was true, as some intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama suggested, it had been the end times, and we’d really been living in the best of all political worlds.

Not only that, hadn’t novels and their authors been pointlessly condemned before? D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Vladimir Nabokov, among many others, had been pursued and prosecuted. And seriously, had anyone become morally worse after reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Tropic of Cancer? There was nothing about banning and prohibition to suggest that it wasn’t a waste of time and money. As the years passed, attempts at censorship looked even worse: the Sex Pistols, for instance – on the yellow press’s front pages for weeks – had been more pantomime and PR than subversion.

Despite this, at the time of the fatwa a lot of the media noise concerned Western liberals, intellectuals and even novelists calling for the book to be withdrawn or not published in paperback to protect the feelings of “insulted” Muslims, though it was doubtful that these people had ever met a Muslim, let alone one who was insulted. Richard Webster, for instance, in A Brief History of Blasphemy (1990) writes about The Satanic Verses, saying, “its reception and defence by liberal intellectuals had seemed to give a kind of moral licence to racism which had always been latent”. John le Carré said, “My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity”. Roald Dahl wrote to The Times: “In a civilized world we all have a moral obligation to apply a modicum of censorship to our own work in order to reinforce this principle of free speech”.

If they wanted to give way on Rushdie, what other censorships would they end up favouring? This group were not unlike Soviet fellow-travellers – useful idiots – with little idea that their naivety and wish to side with the underdog was protecting a murderous and authoritarian ideology they wouldn’t want to live under for a moment. According to this elite form of colonial patronizing, free speech was only for the select few; the poor and benighted – as they were seen – couldn’t deal with, or ever require, satire, criticism or scabrous story-telling. The book burners and censor-mongers weren’t adult enough to think about simple but essential questions: why should we do what God says? And, when is obedience a good idea, and when is it not?

More importantly, it didn’t occur to these so-called liberals that the insulted book burners and putative writer-killers whose feelings they were keen to protect might turn out to inflict immeasurable harm on their own communities, eventually promoting a Salafi version of Islam which was not only a betrayal of religion, but of women, minorities and most Muslims who had come to the West to make a better future for their children. If my father had been surprised by how English, as he put it, we, his children had become, that was the price he knew he had to pay for the opportunities he’d got on the boat for.

If these weak and guilty liberals didn’t like the idea of people being insulted – though one always chooses to be insulted – it might have been advisable for them to fight the ubiquitous racism their society generated rather than shutting down a fellow artist who was asking important questions about migration, identity and the sort of world being created by the market economy. Rushdie had touched on the untouchable, and was saying the unsayable. That, after all, was the point of serious writing, though not the sort of writing his literary detractors – thriller writers and children’s entertainers, mostly – were capable of.

One thing more: what exactly had Rushdie touched on with his critique of Islam? What was the unsayable? The fury he had aroused guaranteed, it occurred to me, that he had spoken aloud the deeply forbidden thing: the doubts of many believers. Surely the people who most infuriate us, the ones we most hate, are those who create the most conflict in us? Doubt, disbelief and transformation were intolerable to those who’d moved to a new land. Doubt could bring with it a total loss of one’s bearings. And those who intimated this wanted to kill the messenger.

The time of the fatwa certainly politicized me; many of us from Muslim, immigrant backgrounds had to rethink our identity and politics. Who exactly were we in the new country and what did we want to be? Why was it so difficult for us to get on? And, importantly, what were we even called?

For most of my life immigrants and their children were known as Asian, a term vague and inaccurate enough not to be as offensive as some of the other words used for us. Now, organized around the fatwa, the religious designation, Muslim, began to emerge. It had barely been used in the West before; now it became common. Looking back, I can see that this was a fatal identification and mis-step, giving rise to the false idea that we were a unified religious community who all believed the same thing; and not only that, were separate from other minority groups who were in a similar position in Britain. Even in Pakistan recently a gay friend said to me, “They call us Muslims and we’re not even religious! They think we all believe the same thing! We’ve been boxed in”.

After the fatwa, in the early 1990s, when I began to research the novel which became The Black Album, I noticed that the young Muslims I met were not interested in Rushdie or literature at all; and we barely discussed free speech. Even worse, I realized, no one had thought to interest them in Britain, and certainly not in the Britain I’d loved, of the 1960s and 70s, of fashion, theatre and dance, of drugs, dissent and the fascinating counter-cultural churn of ideas: feminism, patriarchy, sexuality, class.

Those whom we once called “fundamentalists” had become Islamists, and they didn’t require tools to think with because they knew already what they wanted. They weren’t superstitious, benighted former villagers, but scientists, professors and star, grade-A students. And what they were involved in seemed more like a cult than a religion. They had submitted to God, so they said, and were keen to have others submit to them. They’d moved beyond the usual rules of sociability, and weren’t people you could debate or engage with. They would sneer, harangue and intimidate. It wouldn’t be difficult for them to colonize and impose their ideas on a heterogeneous and vulnerable community. Where, I wondered, were the more balanced, older people in the mosques?

Ultimately this group wanted to recruit believers to help them make a political return to the centuries after the Prophet had died. They even promised, as a vanguard, to create a state based on the strict, macho-fascist Salafi principles that ISIS would later adopt. (I call it fascism because fascism always uses ideas of purity, sacrifice and return, alongside the promised elimination of a particular group, as fundamentals.) This notion was a perfect compromise for this relatively small group of paranoiac men bursting with revolutionary fervour. They would, as young people have to, betray their parents, but only in this particular way: by being morally more severe. It was a return, but it was a new form of political religion.

I remember thinking of them on the day of the London 7/7 bombings, in 2005, when fifty-two people were killed. Three out of four of the terrorists were under the age of twenty-two, and three of them were the sons of Pakistani immigrants. They had, apparently, been inspired by the lectures of the imam Anwar al-Awlaki.

We know now that the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine was right: that those who begin by burning books end by burning people. Salman Rushdie wrote a good book and couldn’t have predicted the furious outcome. But we know that what the Bradford book-burners and Islamists should have seen was that Islamism was never going to be a theology of liberation. Their actions have been a disaster, contributing to the rise of an active, virulent fascistic Right in Europe, one that condemns minorities and wants to reaffirm a Judaeo-Christian future. The creation of the phantasmic figure of the Muslim – to which religious fanatics have stupidly added much colour – is used to justify an increase in prejudice, racism and hate unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.

Now the community has to fight on several fronts: to detoxify itself, get up off its knees and open itself to better ideas from a range of voices, particularly women and the young. It has to join with other groups to fight against racism. None of this is impossible. Fascism doesn’t evolve, it’s always the same, but immigrant communities and their children change every day. They should be horrified by the image of themselves that has been created. The part of multiculturalism which is essentialist – limiting groups to a parade of “authentic” dances, exotic clothes and practices – has also to be fought. The message of the Enlightenment is that we have some choice over who we want to be, making our own destiny as individuals, without submitting to gods, revelation or ancestors. The basis of this is a liberal education and a democracy of ideas. These are not British values – over which Europeans have no monopoly – but universal ones.

There’s no doubt that the fatwa was one of the strangest and most significant events in literary history. But what should it continue to remind us of? I can recall, at the end of the 1990s, seeing Rushdie being interviewed on television, where he said something like, “Fundamentalists lack a sense of humour”. This remark struck me as important, encouraging us to notice that the greatest works of literature are often comedies, and that comedy is a vital value, particularly when it comes to mocking privilege, power and dogma. The fundamentalists of the time, and the Islamists who followed them – whether part of al-Qaeda, ISIS or one of the other many groups – have intimidation, humiliation and the desire to shut people up in common. We should not fail to notice that many of the Islamists’ attacks – on Rushdie himself, Theo van Gogh, Charlie Hebdo, and music venues and clubs – are attacks on cultural pleasure, playfulness and sexual freedom.

Novels and other forms of storytelling might present, analyse and satirize tyrants, but they don’t themselves tyrannize over us. Novels, if they’re doing it right, show us people as they are in their complexity, not as they should be. They can create disorder, using language to free us from the bondage of a particular way of seeing, increasing our autonomy. Disobedience, as every child knows, is a form of freedom, and absolute certainty is a form of madness. Mockery is authority’s nightmare, and the return of religion, of the tyrant and strong man, should inspire us to better doubts and more questions, naivety and enquiry. Tyrants seek to heal conflicts by pretending that everything is already decided. They need to be reminded that questions about power, gender, class, sexuality can never be defined once and for all, but are conditional and must be open to experimentation. This is radicalism, which bears no resemblance to the phoney conservative “radicalism” we’ve been subject to.

Notions of criticism, free-ranging thought, and questioning are universal values which benefit the relatively powerless in particular. If we gave way on any of these, even for a moment, we’d leave ourselves without a culture, and with no hope.