Joe Sacco - On Satire

Can Sufism save Sind?

Suleman Akhtar in The Dawn

Sindh is under attack. The land of Shah Latif bleeds again. The seven queens of Shah Latif’s Shah Jo Risalo – Marui, Sassui, Noori, Sorath, Lilan, Sohni, and Momal – have put on black cloaks and they mourn. The troubles and tribulations are not new for the queens.

After the sack of Delhi, Nadir Shah (Shah of Iran), invaded Sindh and imprisoned the then Sindhi ruler Noor Mohammad Kalhoro in Umarkot fort. Shah Latif captured it in the yearning of Marui for her beloved land when she was locked up in the same Umarkot fort.

If looking to my native land
with longing I expire;
My body carry home, that I
may rest in desert-stand;
My bones if Malir reach, at end,
though dead, I'll live again.
(Sur Marui, XXVIII, Shah Jo Risalo)

The attack on the central Imambargah in Shikarpur is as ominous in many ways as it is horrendous and tragic.

The Sufi ethos of Sindh has long been cherished as the panacea for burgeoning extremism in Pakistan. Sufism has been projected lately as an effective alternative to rising fundamentalism in Muslim societies not only by the Pakistani liberal intelligentsia but also by some Western think-tanks and NGOs.

But the question is, how effective as an ideology can Sufism be in its role in contemporary societies?

To begin with, Sufism is not a monolithic ideology.

There are several strains within Sufism that are in total opposition to each other, thus culminating into totally opposite worldviews. The most important of them is chasm between Wahdat al-Wajud (unity of existence) and Wahdat al-Shahud (unity of phenomenon).

The former professes that there is only One real being not separated from His creation, and thus God runs through everything. While Wahdat al-Shahud holds that God is separated from His creation.

 While the distinction between the two might seem purely polemical, it actually leads to two entirely opposite logical conclusions.

Wahdat al-Wajud sees God running through everything. Thus apparent differences between different religions and school of thoughts vanish at once. In diversity, there lies a unity thus paving way to acceptance of any creed, irrespective of its religious foundations.

Ibn al-Arbi was the first to lay the theoretical foundations of Wahdat al-Wajud and introduce it to the Muslim world.

On the other hand, the Wahdat al-Shahud school of thought was developed and propagated by Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi, who rose to counter the secular excesses of Akbar. He pronounced Ibn al-Arbi as Kafir and went on deconstructing what he deemed as heresies.

Wahdat al-Shahud in its sociopolitical context leads to separation and confrontation. The staunch anti-Hindu and anti-Shia views of Ahmed Sirhindi are just a logical consequence of this school of thought. Ahmed Sirhindi is one of the few Sufis mentioned in Pakistani textbooks.

Historically, Sufis in today’s Pakistan have belonged to four Sufi orders: Qadriah, Chishtiah, Suharwardiah, and Naqshbandiah.

It is also interesting to note that not all of these Sufi orders have been historically anti-establishment.

While Sufis who belonged to the Chishtiah and Qadriah orders always kept a distance from emperors in Delhi and kept voicing for the people, the Suharwardia order has always been close to the power centres. Bahauddin Zikria of the Suharwardiah order enjoyed close relations with the Darbar and after that leaders of this order have always sided with the ruler (either Mughals or British) against the will of the people.

 Sufism in the subcontinent in general and Sindh in particular, emerged and evolved as a formidable opposition to the King and Mullah/Pundit nexus. Not only did it give voice to the voiceless victims of religious fanaticism, but also challenged the established political order.

To quote Marx it was ‘the soul of soulless conditions’.

A case-in-point is Shah Inayat of Jhok Sharif, who led a popular peasant revolt in Sindh and was executed afterwards. Shah Latif wrote a nameless eulogy of Shah Inayat in Shah Jo Risalo.

However, the socio-political conditions that gave rise to Sufism in the subcontinent are not present anymore. The resurrection of Sufism as a potent resistance ideology is difficult if not impossible. Sufis emerged from ashes of civilizational mysticism, independent of organised religion and political powers.

Today, however, the so-called centres of Sufism known as Khanqahs are an integral part of both the contemporary political elite and the all-powerful clergy. On intellectual front self-proclaimed proponents of contemporary Sufism – Qudratullah Shahab, Ashfaq Ahmad, Mumtaz Mufti, et al – have been a part of state apparatus and ideology in one form or another.

Sufism is necessarily a humanist and universal ideology. It is next to impossible to confine it to the boundaries of modern nation states and ideological states in particular, which thrive on an exclusivist ideology.

Mansoor al-Hallaj travelled extensively throughout Sindh. His famous proclamation Ana ‘al Haq (I am the truth) is an echo of Aham Brahmasmi (I am the infinite reality) of the Upanishads. There are striking similarities between the Hindu Advaita and Muslim Wahdat al-Wajud. These ideologies complement each other and lose their essence in isolation.

Punjab has been a centre of The Bhakti Movement – one of the most humanist spiritual movements that ever happened on this side of Suez – but all the humanist teachings of the movement could not avert the genocide of millions of Punjabis during the tragic events of the Partition.

The most time-tested peace ideology of Buddhism could not keep the Buddhists from killing Muslims in Burma.

Such are the cruel realities of modern times that can overshadow the viability of any spiritual movement.

Sufism in Sindh exists today as a way of life and not an ideology.

It is an inseparable part of how people live their daily lives. In Pakistan, however, to live a daily life has come to be an act of resistance itself.

Sindh bleeds today and mourns for its people and culture that are under attack. Bhit Shah reverberates with an aggrieved but helpless voice:

O brother dyer! Dye my clothes black,
I mourn for those who never did return.
(Sur Kedaro, III, Shah Jo Risalo)

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Part 2

The Doctor and the Saint

Why sport needs to be playful

Ed Smith in Cricinfo


I'd like to make a case for sport. My argument ignores the usual theories - weight lost, arteries unclogged, endorphins released, friendships made, purpose gained, associations formed, communities knit together.


All true enough. But my theme is different. My focus is the value of play, within sport and also in life. Because it is usually perceived as the opposite of serious, we tend to trivialise play. In fact, play needs to be taken much more seriously.


I am making a deliberate distinction between merely "doing" sport and really "playing" sport. For it is possible to play sport unplayfully, joylessly going through the motions, merely acting out a prearranged plan, becoming a cog in a cold machine, becoming totally closed to instinct or mischief. Indeed, one of the ironies of the development of modern sport - both professional and, more depressingly, amateur - is that it has become progressively less playful.


There is, I think, a unique category of play, different and special: playful play. This is not, obviously, the exclusive preserve of sport - it is also central to good conversation, intellectual life, music and scientific invention. In my personal experience, however, I feel a great debt to sport in particular. Perhaps unusually for a professional sportsman, I am reflective, analytical and happy with long periods of solitude. Playing sport - really playing sport - was not only a counterpoint (and a pleasure). It has also been a catalyst.


My experience is backed up by academic research. I recently read Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation by the scientists Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin. I recommend it to sports fans and sceptics alike.


Much of the book is unconnected to sport. According to Bateson and Martin, play is "an evolved biological adaptation that enables the individual to escape from local optima and discover better solutions". They use the example of a squirrel swinging on a branch merely playfully, which by accident enables it to reach nuts that were previously inaccessible. So the change in behaviour becomes a learned modification; an activity that was apparently without purpose becomes all too useful. That is how kids learn, too, the authors propose: more playful children become creative adults.




The word "creative" has become a corporate cliché. Corporate life wants everyone to be creative, which is a bit like a coach wanting every batsman to score a hundred. Well, of course. But how? The link between creativity and playfulness is rarely accounted for. As the zoologist George Bartholomew concluded: "Creativity often appears to be some complex function of play… The most profoundly creative humans of course never lose this."


Alexander Fleming, who created the penicillin vaccine, was described, disapprovingly, by his boss as treating research like a game. When asked what he did, Fleming replied, "I play with microbes… it is very pleasant to break the rules and to be able to find something that nobody had thought of."


In contrast, "the meeting" - enforced boredom orchestrated by authority - is the most anti-playful invention known to man. Any event that is closed, bounded and explicitly humourless is almost certain to be uncreative. In calling a meeting, in the traditional sense, corporations increase the probability of not finding a solution.


Thinking about play has encouraged me to rethink certain aspects of sport. When I was still a professional player, I naturally revered high performance - the score on the board. Now, from the vantage point of retirement, I can see that the only way to "win" at sport, in the deepest sense, is also to enjoy it.


I was fascinated while commentating with Sunil Gavaskar last summer to hear the master batsman say he enjoyed the second half of his career far more than the first. This from the man who scored 20 Test hundreds in his first 50 matches! A slight diminution in output was outweighed, from Gavaskar's perspective, by a far more joyful approach to batting.


When Tiger Woods was in his pomp, many of my colleagues used him as a model, perceiving him as the ultimate sportsman. But I was never so sure. Was it really so enviable, Woods' life? To Woods, sport seemed to be about negating his humanity, ironing the play out of his game rather than embracing it. We might admire his iron willpower. But how many people would a Woods-style career really suit? Santi Cazorla, the impish and mischievous Spain and Arsenal midfielder, seems to have more fun in 90 minutes than Woods has in an entire season.


For the apotheosis of unplayful sport, look no further than Lance Armstrong. Forget the cheating and the bullying for a moment. What could be more depressing than tweeting a photo of yourself sitting alone in suburban luxury surrounded by (fraudulent) yellow jerseys? Were there no happy memories, in his mind rather than his camera, to soften the blow of disgrace?


It is also possible for sportsmen, even within the fiercest battles, to cooperate in permitting an air of playfulness.


You see this occasionally in tennis. Most of the time, of course, tactics are explicitly reductionist and self-interested: doing what the opponent least wants. But occasionally a point develops that is different. Both players are constantly trying to win the point, but they also implicitly - and surely subconsciously - enter a different mode. A slice is followed by another slice (apparently inexplicably), a change of pace leads to another change of pace. In short, a conversation develops, something to be enjoyed and extended. And won. For I'm not interested in showmanship here, exhibition-style showing off or playing to the gallery. But there also are moments within proper combat when players are trying to do three things simultaneously - to win, to play (for the fun of it, selfishly) and also to encourage a similar mood on the other side of the net. It must be a rarefied, complete mode of living.


In normal life there is a simpler reason to stay playful. "We don't stop playing because we grow old," George Bernard Shaw remarked, "we grow old because we stop playing."

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Syriza’s cleaners show why economics needs a new broom

Heather Stewart in The Guardian

Among the most uplifting images from Syriza’s victory in Greece last week were the elated faces of a small group of fiercely determined women: the public sector cleaners who were laid off during the country’s brutal budget cuts and had been told they would be swiftly re-hired by the new government.

The fate of a few low-paid mop operatives is a world away from the cut and thrust of international negotiations on debt relief for Greece. Yet it has so often been the fate of working-class women – standing in the bread queues, scrabbling to feed their families, laid off in their droves in the public sector job cuts mandated by the country’s troika of creditors – that has best illustrated the despair to which many in the recession-ravaged country have been driven.

Syriza had promised that “hope is coming”, injecting the language of emotion into dry debates about deficits and debt repayments. It remains to be seen how successful they will be in the high-stakes negotiation they must now enter with their eurozone partners, under the minute-by-minute scrutiny of the financial markets.

But the party’s triumph – and the cleaning women’s plight – underlines the fact that economics is about not just the state of the public finances (improving, in Greece’s case) or GDP (on the up), but raw human experience in homes and families.

One lesson from the crises that have roiled the eurozone over the past five-plus years is that anyone who tells you the only response to a public debt crisis is to slash spending and embark on “structural reform” is either masochistic or downright mad.

But we could take a more profound lesson away too, which so far most economists have failed to learn from the Great Recession and its long-drawn-out aftermath: the individualistic, neoliberal perspective on the world that bleaches out humanity in favour of equations needs to be junked too.

Margaret Thatcher’s promise in 1979, “where there is despair, let us bring hope”, may have prefigured Syriza’s language, but her arrival in No 10 marked the start of an era in which we have increasingly come to see ourselves as “aspirational”, atomised individuals, scrabbling to make our way in a world without the support of the society Thatcher notoriously dismissed.

This approach was underpinned and apparently vindicated by the proliferation of economic models that conceived of people as cool, rational, drastically simplified robots who beetle around trying to maximise their utility. The market became seen as the ultimate expression of this calculating rationality, and its values – competition, self-interest, even greed – as the fundamental driving forces of life.

Behavioural economists have spiced up this dull world with concepts such as irrational exuberance, helping to explain why even financial markets – supposedly the embodiment of hardnosed rationality – can experience moments of madness. And others show why the qualifier ceteris paribus – “all things being equal” – that always applies to these elegant mathematical constructions is a nonsense, because all things are never, ever equal.

Still others, such as David Tuckett at UCL, have done good work weaving the role of emotion and ambition into the coke-fuelled activities of City traders, whose decisions can have such catastrophic effects on the rest of us.

But a polemical and entertaining new book by journalist Katrine Marçal suggests that Economic Man has another major shortcoming: he’s not, and never could be, a woman.

In the excellently titled Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? (spoiler: it was his good old loyal mum), Marçal argues that a swath of traditionally feminine activities – cooking, cleaning, caring, changing nappies – have been systematically excluded from economists’ view of the world, which has become the lens through which just about everything is scrutinised.

Models conceived of people as cool, rational, simplified robots who beetle around trying to maximise their utility

Smith and his fellow pioneers in economics asked themselves how a loaf of bread got to their table – through the unpleasant-but-useful self-interest of the farmer who grew the wheat, the miller who made the flour, the baker who kneaded the dough, and so on (most of them chaps in those days, naturally). But they simply took it for granted that someone would nip out to the shops to buy a loaf, slice it, toast it, butter it and pop it on a plate. And make the beds. And cook the kids’ tea. Care, which is still overwhelmingly carried out by women, was effectively a natural resource.

That helps to explain why roles such as nurse, cleaner, carer are still undervalued today; but it also leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of human motivations. Economic Man has nothing as troubling as emotions, family connections, class loyalties or friendships. He’s a lean, mean, utility-maximising machine.

He’s been repeatedly rubbished over the years: by Nobel prize winners Kahneman and Tversky, for example, who showed decades ago that we just don’t think in the shrewd, consistent way required to make the logic work. Maybe the bolshie cleaners were acting out of rational self-interest when they camped out in front of the finance ministry for months; more likely they were hurt, disillusioned and furious.

Marçal argues that the rationalist worldview has had extraordinary sticking power because it appeals to a desire in us to detach ourselves from the messy world of love and duty, and make decisions in a clean, rational way.

It’s also elegant and apparently powerful: it allows the number-crunchers to construct models apparently encompassing entire economies.

Anything that replaces it would be more piecemeal, messier, more uncertain, and certainly less appealing to purists. But more true. As Marçal puts it: “Economic science should be about how one turns a social vision into a modern economic system. It should be a tool to create opportunities for human and social development. Not just address our fears as they are expressed as demand in the market.”

Hope, and a whole slew of other messy emotions – fear, greed, loyalty, even love – need to be brought back not just onto the streets of Athens, but right into the heart of economics.