Thursday, 17 March 2022
Western values? They enthroned the monster who is shelling Ukrainians today
Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
However repressive his regime, Vladimir Putin was tolerated by the US, Britain and the EU – until he became intolerable
Six days after Vladimir Putin ordered his soldiers into Ukraine, Joe Biden gave his first State of the Union address. His focus was inevitable. “While it shouldn’t have taken something so terrible for people around the world to see what’s at stake, now everyone sees it clearly,” the US president said. “We see the unity among leaders of nations and a more unified Europe, a more unified west.”
In the countdown to the invasion, the Conservative chairman Oliver Dowden flew to Washington to address a thinktank with impeccable links to Donald Trump. “As Margaret Thatcher said to you almost 25 years ago, the task of conservatives is to remake the case for the west,” the cabinet minister told the Heritage Foundation. “She refused to see the decline of the west as our inevitable destiny. And neither should we.”
Western values. The free world. The liberal order. Over the three weeks since Putin declared war on ordinary Ukrainians, these phrases have been slung about more regularly, more loudly and more unthinkingly than at any time in almost two decades. Perhaps like me you thought such puffed-chest language and inane categorisation had been buried under the rubble of Iraq. Not any more. Now they slip out of the mouths of political leaders and slide into the columns of major newspapers and barely an eyebrow is raised. The Ukrainians are fighting for “our” freedom, it is declared, in that mode of grand solipsism that defines this era. History is back, chirrup intellectuals who otherwise happily stamp on attempts by black and brown people to factcheck the claims made for American and British history.
To hold these positions despite the facts of the very recent past requires vat loads of whitewash. Head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, claims Vladimir Putin has “brought war back to Europe”, as if Yugoslavia and Kosovo had been hallucinations. Condoleezza Rice pops up on Fox to be told by the anchor: “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.” With a solemn nod, the former secretary of state to George Bush replies: “It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.” She maintains a commendably straight face.
None of this is to defend Putin’s brutality. When 55 Ukrainian children are made refugees every minute and pregnant women in hospital are shelled mid-labour, there is nothing to defend. But to frame our condemnations as a binary clash of rival value systems is to absolve ourselves of our own alleged war crimes, committed as recently as this century in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is to pretend “our” wars are just and only theirs are evil, to make out that Afghan boys seeking asylum from the Taliban are inevitably liars and cheats while Ukrainian kids fleeing Russian bombs are genuine refugees. It is a giant and morally repugnant lie and yet elements of it already taint our front pages and rolling-news coverage. Those TV reporters marvelling at the devastation being visited on a European country, as if its coordinates on a map are what counts, are just one example. Another is the newspapers that spent the past 20 years cursing eastern Europeans for having the temerity to settle here legally and now congratulating the British on the warmth of their hearts.
And then there is the unblushing desire expressed by senior pundits and thinktankers that this might end with “regime change” – toppling Putin and installing in the Kremlin someone more congenial to the US and UK and certainly better house-trained. Spotting the flaw here doesn’t require history, it just needs a working memory. The west has already tried regime change in post-communist Russia: Putin was the end product, the man with whom Bill Clinton declared he could do business, rather than the vodka-soused Boris Yeltsin.
Indeed more than that, London and New York are not just guilty of hosting oligarchs – giving them visas, selling on their most valuable real estate and famous businesses – they helped create the oligarchy in Russia. The US and the UK funded, staffed and applauded the programmes meant to “transform” the country’s economy, but which actually handed over the assets of an industrialised and commodity-rich country to a few dozen men with close connections to the Kremlin.
In 1993, the New York Times Magazine ran a profile of a Harvard economist it called “Dr Jeffrey Sachs, Shock Therapist”. It followed Sachs as he toured Moscow, orchestrating the privatisation of Russia’s economy and declaring how high unemployment was a price worth paying for a revitalised economy. His expertise didn’t come for free, but was bankrolled by the governments of the US, Sweden and other major multinational institutions. But its highest cost was borne by the Russian people. A study in the British Medical Journal concluded: “An extra 2.5-3 million Russian adults died in middle age in the period 1992-2001 than would have been expected based on 1991 mortality.” Meanwhile, the country’s wealth was handed over to a tiny gang of men, who took whatever they could out of the country to be laundered in the US and the UK. It was one of the grandest and most deadly larcenies of modern times, overseen by Yeltsin and Putin and applauded and financed by the west.
The western values that are being touted today helped enthrone the monster who is now shelling Ukrainian women and children. However corrupt and repressive his regime, Putin was tolerated by the west – until he became intolerable. In much the same way, until last month Roman Abramovich was perfectly fit and proper to own Chelsea football club. Now No 10 says he isn’t. There are no values here, not even a serious strategy. Today, Boris Johnson claims Mohammed bin Salman is a valued friend and partner to the UK, and sells him arms to kill Yemenis and pretends not to notice those he has executed. Goodness knows what tomorrow will bring.
However repressive his regime, Vladimir Putin was tolerated by the US, Britain and the EU – until he became intolerable
Six days after Vladimir Putin ordered his soldiers into Ukraine, Joe Biden gave his first State of the Union address. His focus was inevitable. “While it shouldn’t have taken something so terrible for people around the world to see what’s at stake, now everyone sees it clearly,” the US president said. “We see the unity among leaders of nations and a more unified Europe, a more unified west.”
In the countdown to the invasion, the Conservative chairman Oliver Dowden flew to Washington to address a thinktank with impeccable links to Donald Trump. “As Margaret Thatcher said to you almost 25 years ago, the task of conservatives is to remake the case for the west,” the cabinet minister told the Heritage Foundation. “She refused to see the decline of the west as our inevitable destiny. And neither should we.”
Western values. The free world. The liberal order. Over the three weeks since Putin declared war on ordinary Ukrainians, these phrases have been slung about more regularly, more loudly and more unthinkingly than at any time in almost two decades. Perhaps like me you thought such puffed-chest language and inane categorisation had been buried under the rubble of Iraq. Not any more. Now they slip out of the mouths of political leaders and slide into the columns of major newspapers and barely an eyebrow is raised. The Ukrainians are fighting for “our” freedom, it is declared, in that mode of grand solipsism that defines this era. History is back, chirrup intellectuals who otherwise happily stamp on attempts by black and brown people to factcheck the claims made for American and British history.
To hold these positions despite the facts of the very recent past requires vat loads of whitewash. Head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, claims Vladimir Putin has “brought war back to Europe”, as if Yugoslavia and Kosovo had been hallucinations. Condoleezza Rice pops up on Fox to be told by the anchor: “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.” With a solemn nod, the former secretary of state to George Bush replies: “It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.” She maintains a commendably straight face.
None of this is to defend Putin’s brutality. When 55 Ukrainian children are made refugees every minute and pregnant women in hospital are shelled mid-labour, there is nothing to defend. But to frame our condemnations as a binary clash of rival value systems is to absolve ourselves of our own alleged war crimes, committed as recently as this century in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is to pretend “our” wars are just and only theirs are evil, to make out that Afghan boys seeking asylum from the Taliban are inevitably liars and cheats while Ukrainian kids fleeing Russian bombs are genuine refugees. It is a giant and morally repugnant lie and yet elements of it already taint our front pages and rolling-news coverage. Those TV reporters marvelling at the devastation being visited on a European country, as if its coordinates on a map are what counts, are just one example. Another is the newspapers that spent the past 20 years cursing eastern Europeans for having the temerity to settle here legally and now congratulating the British on the warmth of their hearts.
And then there is the unblushing desire expressed by senior pundits and thinktankers that this might end with “regime change” – toppling Putin and installing in the Kremlin someone more congenial to the US and UK and certainly better house-trained. Spotting the flaw here doesn’t require history, it just needs a working memory. The west has already tried regime change in post-communist Russia: Putin was the end product, the man with whom Bill Clinton declared he could do business, rather than the vodka-soused Boris Yeltsin.
Indeed more than that, London and New York are not just guilty of hosting oligarchs – giving them visas, selling on their most valuable real estate and famous businesses – they helped create the oligarchy in Russia. The US and the UK funded, staffed and applauded the programmes meant to “transform” the country’s economy, but which actually handed over the assets of an industrialised and commodity-rich country to a few dozen men with close connections to the Kremlin.
In 1993, the New York Times Magazine ran a profile of a Harvard economist it called “Dr Jeffrey Sachs, Shock Therapist”. It followed Sachs as he toured Moscow, orchestrating the privatisation of Russia’s economy and declaring how high unemployment was a price worth paying for a revitalised economy. His expertise didn’t come for free, but was bankrolled by the governments of the US, Sweden and other major multinational institutions. But its highest cost was borne by the Russian people. A study in the British Medical Journal concluded: “An extra 2.5-3 million Russian adults died in middle age in the period 1992-2001 than would have been expected based on 1991 mortality.” Meanwhile, the country’s wealth was handed over to a tiny gang of men, who took whatever they could out of the country to be laundered in the US and the UK. It was one of the grandest and most deadly larcenies of modern times, overseen by Yeltsin and Putin and applauded and financed by the west.
The western values that are being touted today helped enthrone the monster who is now shelling Ukrainian women and children. However corrupt and repressive his regime, Putin was tolerated by the west – until he became intolerable. In much the same way, until last month Roman Abramovich was perfectly fit and proper to own Chelsea football club. Now No 10 says he isn’t. There are no values here, not even a serious strategy. Today, Boris Johnson claims Mohammed bin Salman is a valued friend and partner to the UK, and sells him arms to kill Yemenis and pretends not to notice those he has executed. Goodness knows what tomorrow will bring.
Forget ‘essential’, hijab isn’t that Islamic. Muslim women just made Western tees ‘halaal’
IBN KHALDUN BHARATI in The Print
Hijab is not Islamic. It’s Western. It’s not essential to Islam but an accretion to it. Unlike Islam, its origin is not in the seventh-century Middle East but in the late 20th century West. Therefore, at best, it could be called ‘Westo-Islamic’. And, insofar as it’s an accretion to the pristine religion, the right theological terminology for it would be bid’at — a new practice that has no authority in the sacred texts, and therefore, essentialises that which goes beyond the divine sanction and Prophet Muhammad’s call.
In the Arabic lexicon and the Quran, the word ‘hijab’ means a curtain, not a veil or a scarf. According to Asma Lamrabet, a Moroccan Islamic feminist, the term is reiterated seven times in the Quran, referring to the same meaning each time. “Hijab means curtain, separation, wall, and in other words, anything that hides, masks, and protects something,” she says. Never in Islamic history was this word used for a garment or a piece of clothing.
Product of new culture
The hijab, in its current form, is not older than two decades in India. As late as 2001, when this scribe stumbled upon an online matrimonial ad in which an American Muslim woman had said, “I wear hijab”, he, reasonably well-versed in Islamic idioms, couldn’t help wondering how hijab could be worn at all. He wasn’t aware that the said word had become a terminology that connoted a stylised head bandage worn to emphasise that the wearer belonged to a different religion and community and that she prided in her difference from those around her who did not belong to the same faith.
Although couched in the discourse of modesty, this was clearly a marker of identity, which soon became the uniform for religious assertion in societies where Islam wasn’t the dominant political force. The politics of this sartorial semiotics was neither lost on its proponents nor those who came to resent it.
Whether the case for hijab is argued from the vantage point of religiosity or identity, in neither case the proffered arguments could be regarded as liberal and secular. So, why can’t the liberal-secular intelligentsia tell the supporters of hijab that their insistence on displaying religious symbols in sanitised public spaces like schools is illiberal, un-secular, regressive, and militant? After all, wouldn’t it eventually harm those the most who have the greatest stake in India’s liberal secularism — the Muslim minority? Is it because the liberals, having completely lost the script and unable to fight their own battle, have been counting on the Muslim identitarian politics to keep them in the reckoning? Have they developed the same vested interest in Muslim communalism as did the British earlier?
Not a choice
Two key terminologies that have been bandied about liberally (pun intended) during the ongoing controversy — one in affirmation and the other in negation — are ‘choice’ and ‘patriarchy’. It has been argued that wearing any dress is a matter of individual choice. Of course, it is. However, one might ask whether the votaries of the hijab concede this right to all women to wear any dress of their choice. Would the very girls who have been exercising their “individual choice” to wear the hijab to school be able to walk freely, if they so chose, without it through their Muslim neighbourhoods and not compromise their families’ honour or invite opprobrium on themselves?
Hijab is not an individual choice, it’s a communal compulsion.
The pace at which it has been spreading hints that the day is not far when Muslim women not conforming to it may no longer be recognised as Muslims. This is what was going to happen if the Karnataka High Court’s judgement had gone the other way.
Equally insidious has been the narrative that the assertive display of the hijab is a setback to Islamic patriarchy. Far from it. Both in form and content, and very consciously too, this trend signifies the revival of orthodoxy, including its patriarchal presumptions. The religious sanction for man’s supremacy and his right to decide for women is not being questioned. Instead, what rankles is the loss of political supremacy of the supposed Muslim community. Muslim women, too, are supposed to have suffered from this loss.
Therefore, they, instead of seeking equality with men, are engaged in the higher pursuit of reviving supremacy over other religions. Their gender is not only secondary to Islam, but, as seen in the use of the hijab as a tool of religious assertion, also deployed in service of the religion. The capability and agency gained as blessings of education and modernity are ploughed back into the religious-political discourse.
Towards communal visibility
Another myth being circulated is that the hijab is an enabler for education, which is to say that had it not been for the hijab, Muslim girls wouldn’t be able to go out for studies. The fact, however, is that till the very end of the 20th century — before it became a common sight — most Muslim girls attended schools and colleges dressed in the same attire as other girls. The same trend would have continued if religious radicalisation had not permeated the socio-political atmosphere.
Therefore, before educating Muslim women on the hijab, so that a case could be made for the latter’s essentiality, our liberal-secular intelligentsia should have done better to wonder why an outer covering over the regular dress, which was not considered necessary earlier, became a precondition for going for studies.
This is despite the fact that the nature of the Muslim woman’s modest dressing underwent a change through the years. Before the head-wrap became trendy wear, there were three moot questions — Should a Muslim woman freely go out of her house? Should her face be covered with the naqaab? Can she, like men at home, wear Western attire?
The new hijab took care of all the questions. Women could go out. The face was exposed, but instead, the head and the neck had to be covered in a particular style, and, if topped with the hijab, Western dresses such as jeans and tee shirts became halaal.
Hijab replaced the earlier invisibility of the Muslim woman with a hypervisibility of her religious identity. Whether this identity should compulsively be asserted in public spaces is the question that Indian Muslims need to resolve wisely.
In the Arabic lexicon and the Quran, the word ‘hijab’ means a curtain, not a veil or a scarf. According to Asma Lamrabet, a Moroccan Islamic feminist, the term is reiterated seven times in the Quran, referring to the same meaning each time. “Hijab means curtain, separation, wall, and in other words, anything that hides, masks, and protects something,” she says. Never in Islamic history was this word used for a garment or a piece of clothing.
Product of new culture
The hijab, in its current form, is not older than two decades in India. As late as 2001, when this scribe stumbled upon an online matrimonial ad in which an American Muslim woman had said, “I wear hijab”, he, reasonably well-versed in Islamic idioms, couldn’t help wondering how hijab could be worn at all. He wasn’t aware that the said word had become a terminology that connoted a stylised head bandage worn to emphasise that the wearer belonged to a different religion and community and that she prided in her difference from those around her who did not belong to the same faith.
Although couched in the discourse of modesty, this was clearly a marker of identity, which soon became the uniform for religious assertion in societies where Islam wasn’t the dominant political force. The politics of this sartorial semiotics was neither lost on its proponents nor those who came to resent it.
Whether the case for hijab is argued from the vantage point of religiosity or identity, in neither case the proffered arguments could be regarded as liberal and secular. So, why can’t the liberal-secular intelligentsia tell the supporters of hijab that their insistence on displaying religious symbols in sanitised public spaces like schools is illiberal, un-secular, regressive, and militant? After all, wouldn’t it eventually harm those the most who have the greatest stake in India’s liberal secularism — the Muslim minority? Is it because the liberals, having completely lost the script and unable to fight their own battle, have been counting on the Muslim identitarian politics to keep them in the reckoning? Have they developed the same vested interest in Muslim communalism as did the British earlier?
Not a choice
Two key terminologies that have been bandied about liberally (pun intended) during the ongoing controversy — one in affirmation and the other in negation — are ‘choice’ and ‘patriarchy’. It has been argued that wearing any dress is a matter of individual choice. Of course, it is. However, one might ask whether the votaries of the hijab concede this right to all women to wear any dress of their choice. Would the very girls who have been exercising their “individual choice” to wear the hijab to school be able to walk freely, if they so chose, without it through their Muslim neighbourhoods and not compromise their families’ honour or invite opprobrium on themselves?
Hijab is not an individual choice, it’s a communal compulsion.
The pace at which it has been spreading hints that the day is not far when Muslim women not conforming to it may no longer be recognised as Muslims. This is what was going to happen if the Karnataka High Court’s judgement had gone the other way.
Equally insidious has been the narrative that the assertive display of the hijab is a setback to Islamic patriarchy. Far from it. Both in form and content, and very consciously too, this trend signifies the revival of orthodoxy, including its patriarchal presumptions. The religious sanction for man’s supremacy and his right to decide for women is not being questioned. Instead, what rankles is the loss of political supremacy of the supposed Muslim community. Muslim women, too, are supposed to have suffered from this loss.
Therefore, they, instead of seeking equality with men, are engaged in the higher pursuit of reviving supremacy over other religions. Their gender is not only secondary to Islam, but, as seen in the use of the hijab as a tool of religious assertion, also deployed in service of the religion. The capability and agency gained as blessings of education and modernity are ploughed back into the religious-political discourse.
Towards communal visibility
Another myth being circulated is that the hijab is an enabler for education, which is to say that had it not been for the hijab, Muslim girls wouldn’t be able to go out for studies. The fact, however, is that till the very end of the 20th century — before it became a common sight — most Muslim girls attended schools and colleges dressed in the same attire as other girls. The same trend would have continued if religious radicalisation had not permeated the socio-political atmosphere.
Therefore, before educating Muslim women on the hijab, so that a case could be made for the latter’s essentiality, our liberal-secular intelligentsia should have done better to wonder why an outer covering over the regular dress, which was not considered necessary earlier, became a precondition for going for studies.
This is despite the fact that the nature of the Muslim woman’s modest dressing underwent a change through the years. Before the head-wrap became trendy wear, there were three moot questions — Should a Muslim woman freely go out of her house? Should her face be covered with the naqaab? Can she, like men at home, wear Western attire?
The new hijab took care of all the questions. Women could go out. The face was exposed, but instead, the head and the neck had to be covered in a particular style, and, if topped with the hijab, Western dresses such as jeans and tee shirts became halaal.
Hijab replaced the earlier invisibility of the Muslim woman with a hypervisibility of her religious identity. Whether this identity should compulsively be asserted in public spaces is the question that Indian Muslims need to resolve wisely.
Monday, 14 March 2022
Saturday, 12 March 2022
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