by Tolu Ogunlesi

She was the only woman on the frontlines during Gulf War 1, surrounded by 43,000 men. So how did she cope with doing that thing that men can do in public but women can’t? “Nudity is tolerable, using the loo in front of other people isn’t,” she explained to a wine-sipping group of us gathered around her at a Nairobi house in August; as we awaited the start of a dinner party to end the 2009 Storymoja Hay Festival.

No war without Kate

In 2001 Britain’s Independent newspaper described Kate Adie OBE as “the best-known, most respected woman reporter in the UK.” She came to national prominence in 1980, reporting – from behind a car door – the siege of the Iranian embassy in London, in May 1980. In 1986 she covered the American bombing of Tripoli, and in 1989, in Tiananmen Square she was hit in the arm by a bullet which went on to kill a young man. During the first Gulf War a British newspaper published a cartoon showing two soldiers preparing to go into battle. “We can’t start yet, Kate Adie isn’t here,” one says to the other.

A day before the dinner party I had the privilege, alongside Ugandan journalist David Kaiza, of interviewing Adie in a packed tent on the grounds of Nairobi’s Impala Club. After four decades of reporting – which saw her rise from studio technician at a local BBC radio station in Durham to become the BBC’s Chief News Correspondent in 1989, covering wars everywhere from Armenia to Bosnia to Rwanda to the Middle East – she is eminently qualified to lecture on grand concepts like “news” and “war”.

“Ninety percent of wars are about land,” she said. “In the future it will be [about] land with water, land you can build on; live on.” She also hinted at the capacity of ‘war’ to feed the human predilection for euphemism – which would explain Kenya’s “post-election violence”, and Northern Ireland’s “troubles”.

The making of a journalist

But “international media” is one concept that doesn’t deserve an explanation. “There is no such thing as the international media,” she said.”You are all paid by somebody, you are all working for somebody… there is no such thing as international journalism reporting for the world. CNN’s target audience is middle America; it just happens that other people are subjected to it.” The BBC is “British in origin, and in orientation.” And for her “there really isn’t any kind of war that sees journalists as neutral. Whose side are you on – that’s the first question. Are you for us or against us?”

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By Namit Arora

Part 1: The Rise of Islam

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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A great rebellion had overthrown the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus in 750 CE, after which power shifted east to Baghdad—a city more Persian than Arab back then—reflecting the growing prominence of Persians in Islam. A new caliph, Abu Al-Abbas, a great-grandson of Muhammad’s uncle, founded the Abbasid dynasty, satisfying the fond desire of many rebels to get a caliph from the Prophet’s lineage. But their hopes were soon dashed when the new caliph began living up to his nickname, Al-Saffah—‘the blood-shedder’—by ruthlessly eradicating former allies like Abu Muslim. For the new regime, loyalty to the dynasty, and not the brotherhood of Islam, would be the basis of empire.

Leading up to the rebellion that had ousted the Umayyads, the Abbasids had made great play of the former’s addiction to wine and women. Now that they were themselves in power, their promise of a return to ‘true religion’ under the Prophet’s own family vanished into thin air; luxuries and irreligious behavior grew instead. The Abbasids, partly out of expediency, began patronizing a more liberal school of theology—the Mu’tazilah—much to the resentment of the Shiites and the orthodox Sunnis; it led to more crushed Shiite rebellions. [1]

The caliphs that followed Al-Abbas now presided over a loose collection of provinces, each with a governor and a bureaucracy similar to older Persian arrangements, where local satraps had a good deal of autonomy and power. Administration was divided into departments—or divans—headed by the vizier. The old Arab monopoly on power had passed—Islamized Persians began entering the higher echelons of leadership. The dominant Abbasid legal system—there were at least four to choose from, all proceeding from the Shari’ah but with significant variations nonetheless—became the Hanafi rite, the most liberal of the lot. In making civil laws and administering justice, it opposed overly literal readings of the Qur’an, relying instead on analogy, consensus, and judicial reasoning. [2]

In the ensuing decades came an era of relative peace. A general flourishing of agriculture and trade led to unprecedented prosperity and a huge burst of intellectual and cultural creativity, especially during the reigns of Haroon al-Rashid (786-809 CE) and al-Mamun (813-833 CE). This ushered in the ‘golden age’ of Islam;[3] Baghdad became the richest city in the world—only Constantinople came somewhat close. In A Short History of the Arab Peoples, Sir John Glubb wrote:

‘Their ships were by far the largest and the best appointed in Chinese waters or in the Indian Ocean. Under their highly developed banking system, an Arab businessman could cash a cheque in Canton on his bank account in Baghdad. [Wealthy women wore] lavish jewels and pearls, silks and embroidered fabrics. [A new upper class valued] exquisite carpets and cushions, the sparkling fountains, the soft music and the exotic perfumes of private apartments [of] musk, myrtle and jasmine …

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Towards a Philosophical History of Dogs

Justin E. H. Smith

What is it about the dogs? In recent philosophy everyone from John Searle to Donna Haraway has had something to say about them. And recent philosophy, as I never tire of insisting, is nothing new.

Now I have also been insisting for some time that there is no such animal as 'animals'. That is, when it is discovered, for example, that a chimpanzee in a zoo in Sweden is stockpiling stones to be thrown at a later hour, this does not prove, as the popular media would claim, that 'animals' are capable of conceptualizing and planning for the future. What a chimpanzee does says nothing at all about 'animals', but at most something about chimpanzees, and likely only about some chimpanzees, or indeed only one of them. Animals, I mean to say, need to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Haraway, to her credit, recognizes this. Her take on the special case of dogs issues in the somewhat cryptic claim that “we have never been human” (a riff, I think, on Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern). I understand this to mean that, for as long as there have been humans, the denotation of 'we' has never been understood to include all and only members of our species. It also includes dogs: we and they have co-evolved, and in a certain sense this puts our species closer to Canis lupus familiaris than to Pan troglodytes, not with respect to the tracing back of common ancestors, but with respect to recent history, the history of the past 15,000 years or so, the history that lingers in both of our memories, in which humans have been exercising intense selective pressure on dogs, and perhaps also dogs on humans. The result is that we have come out more like each other, behaviorally and expressively, than we are to either of our nearest cousins: the grey wolf in the case of dogs, and chimpanzees in the case of humans. The wolf is the dog's closest ancestor, but this implies no solidarity. Quite the contrary: the dogs are on our side.

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By Aditya Dev Sood

As we walk off the tarmac, the moon shines full and bright, lending the dark clouds of night a blue-black shimmer, a haunting presence. I hope this is an auspicious welcome to Bihar, the heart of that other India, which is not shining with the glow of liberalization and globalization of the past two decades. I’m here to set up fieldwork for a healthcare initiative in several rural districts of the state.

I get into the white Ambassador that has been assigned to me. The driver heats his engine for a bit, before coaxing it fully to life. kaun hotal chalaile? who hotel I get-go ya, he asks me, as we turn out of the airport parking lot. The language seems sweet, pleasing to my ears and easily disarms the gruff and combative khadi-boli attitude that I bring with me from Delhi. As we pull up to the ITDC hotel, my driver gestures to me to be careful in opening my door, lest I disturb the several women in their finery, who are even now getting out of a Maruti van and making their entrance into the hotel. The moment is striking for the sublime attunement that many Biharis seem to exhibit, towards one another’s consocial wellbeing. It is as if they have all known one another in generations past, which, in fact is true, given the long and continuous record of civilization in this region.

The word Bihar derives from vihara, monastery, truncated from brahmavihara, literally ‘an abode for the righteous, the benevolent, the kind.’ Bihar was the first monastic state, of which the Buddhist polities of Tibet, Sri Lanka and Thailand are contemporary, perhaps vestigial, examples. The region was once crosscut by a network of vihara-s, which provided religious, educational, health, and other social services to the laity around them. They served as an essential social and institutional infrastructure for the region’s ancient empires, the least of their functions having been the provision of hospitality for pilgrims, traders and visitors on official business to any local region.

My own hotel looks a mausoleum dating from the only India that existed in my childhood: white marble floors, shahi korma, and behind the reception, the time in New York, London and Osaka. If all this looks like the past to me, here in Bihar these State-run hotels might represent something like order and stability. Later in the night there are people whistling and chatting up and down the hallways and then, more ominously, people yelling incessantly, for over an hour, as if at a construction site. Sir, ve bhi guest hain, aap samajh lijiye hamari position. That the management cannot maintain decorum among its guests seems part of a larger problem abroad in the land.

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Note: The following is a true story, but the names of certain individuals, and other identifying details, have been changed.

A bullet through the head

The summer between my sophomore and junior years of college was the first of two six-week training programs at the Marines Corps officer training base at Quantico, Virginia. The second six-week training program, in the Marine Platoon Leader Class (PLC), is completed the following summer before graduation and acceptance of a commission in the USMC. The fourth week of my first summer was my first live fire training, which begins on the 100 yard rifle range. The Marine Corps takes rifle marksmanship far more seriously than any of the other three branches of the military. Every Marine officer must qualify each year as a rifleman. Failing to do so, the officer must write a letter to the Commandant of the Marine Corps and explain the unacceptable marksmanship. Coming to the attention of the top officer of the Corps would be auspicious, except for failure as a rifleman. The officer is expected to do whatever is necessary to re-qualify as soon as possible.

My training weapon was the M14, a redesign and upgrade of the WWII M1 Garand rifle. The most obvious difference was that the M14 was fitted with a bottom loading magazine that held up to 20 rounds. It was also modified to allow the rifleman to fire in fully automatic mode like a machine gun, BRRRRRRRRRRRT, with the flick of a selection lever. Otherwise, it was fired in semiautomatic mode like the M1. You squeezed the trigger once and fired one round at a time. One squeeze, one shot. With the firing of each round the spent cartridge shell was ejected, automatically, the next bullet was loaded into the firing chamber, and the weapon was ready for another squeeze of the trigger. The M14 rifle was designed to fire the 7.62 mm (30 caliber) ammunition that was standardized for all of the NATO countries. Another improvement was fitting a bi-pod under the rifle barrel for more stability when firing from a prone position.

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