by James McGirk

America should be more open than ever. Women and minorities are no longer excluded from high-earning professions and, if you are willing to take on the debt, a university education is more accessible than ever before. But if anything America is less egalitarian than it once was. The income gap between rich and poor has been growing since the 1970s. More worrying than that, a permanent class system seems to be calcifying into place: people born rich are getting richer, while the poor stay poor. America's elite has found a way to protect and perpetuate itself within what should be an inclusive system.

Sociologist Shamus Rahman Khan has a convincing explanation for how they do it. For his new book, “Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St Paul's School”, he spent a year doing ethnographic research, living among students as a tutor and conducting interviews at the exclusive boarding school in New Hampshire. “Elite schools exclude,” says Mr Khan “but today they frame themselves as doing so on the basis of talent.” Not necessarily money or good breeding, as many assume.

What defines talent is actually an arbitrary thing. When these students apply to university there is little to distinguish top applicants from one another, yet all want the academic boons such as research opportunities, close relationships with professors necessary for a postgraduate education, or the fast-track to elite employers. Attaining the highest board scores and grade point averages is no guarantee of admission, so decisions are instead made on the basis of narrative. A successful applicant must recommend him or herself through extracurricular achievement and other, squishier categories such as character and public service. All the more reason to be groomed at an elite secondary school that can foster students’ hobbies on top of their academic studies.

Read more »

Tomorrow
.. (listen below)

Often the guard
will just take a rest
his eyelids come down
he drops his chin on his chest
don't blame him tomorrow
don't blame him today
he only does what he can
to let himself get away

Like I choose your eyes
and I choose your hair
and I choose your skin
ah, what a lift to somewhere
don't count on tomorrow
and forget yesterday
and if they ask for your name
say, You can call me today

It's all special concern
and no religion but this
to pray with our hands
and confess with a kiss
don't count on tomorrow
and forget yesterday
and if they ask for your name
say, You can call me today

No harps in the sky
and no voices from the clouds
just the plain, simple truth
that even a fool is allowed
there's nothing to borrow
there's nothing to weigh
except the natural power
you come to gather today

don't call me tomorrow
my name is today
do you want to live losing
try to drive me away

Hey daughter so small
hey daughter of the smile
hey daughter so strong
hey daughter so wild

don't count on tomorrow
and forget yesterday
and if they ask for your name
just say, You can call me today

don't call me tomorrow
my name is today
do you want to live losing
try to drive me away

Do you want to live losing?
… try to drive me away

by Jim Culleny, 6/12/71
© Oct, 1993

by Maniza Naqvi

On a Saturday, in the crisp air and bright light of the highlands, hundreds of people, a flood of people —made their way to and from the market place, as has been done for centuries, carrying on their backs and shoulders, their precious babies and bundled loads of produce and goods. A miracle, this, how they had walked as far as forty kilometers up and down mountains for as long as five hours in one direction to reach the market with their livestock while carrying on their own backs and on the backs of their donkeys vessels of grains, honey, firewood, baskets, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, green chilies cauliflower, lettuce, live chickens, cabbage, Tef, Tej, sorghum, maize, wheat, rice, baskets and so on. In Lalibela, the sun drenched and bustling Saturday market right outside the walls of the dark, cool, quiet and largely empty inner sanctums of the stone churches reminded me of Jerusalem. The sacred it seems, all over the world must have a market. Or is it that commerce must have temples or that what is of value rings around itself the sacred?

In the market there are lemons for sale. And the guide picks one up and takes aim saying that over here if someone throws a lemon at you it’s a declaration of love. I can’t think of something clever so I say, “I bet they say that to all the older women who come through here”. He laughs, rubbing the back of his graying head, “Yes! See that motel there? It belongs to former guides who were helped by a lady tourist who was very happy with their services.” I pick up a lemon and do a mock throw at a kid who has been trailing alongside giggling and testing one liners on me in German, Italian and French.

My guide points out things that must be noted by me, “King Lalibela had divine intervention on his side, look what he accomplished, look how he carved this wall, that pillar, this step, that window, that cross and that detail of a divine eye watching over us.” My guide talks of King Lalibela as though he constructed the churches all by himself, single handedly. I point this out. Well that’s the folklore he says. “If there is anything divine,” I say, “Then surely it is the labor of the people who made these churches, no?” The guide agrees. I continue on “The rest is a King’s ego. Perhaps if rulers had focused on works that fed people instead of works that only nourished their own need for immortality then the centuries to follow would have been of plentiful crops. Kings who build such things and the places like the Taj Mahal seem to condemn generations forward to misery. A King who made his people labor for 24 years on carving out these churches with their hands and tools made of stone must have done this at the cost of producing food and security. No wonder the neighboring warlords marched right into these valleys…everyone was busy cutting stone.” The guide leans against an embankment of stone watching me silently. I ask whether there are irrigation channels, water storage cisterns and wells in the area that date from the same time as the churches. “No”, replies the guide, “There was no need at that time because the land was plentiful with water and forests. Now the hills and valleys have neither and depend on the rain. The new road built in the valley recently destroyed the water sources. Besides, the King’s granaries were full. He provided his people food for work.”

Read more »

by S. Abbas Raza

Once again, I present my own translation of two lovely couplets by Faiz Ahmed Faiz side by side with a translation of the same by the late Agha Shahid Ali. I do this not to criticize Shahid's translation in any way but actually to pay tribute to him as well as to Faiz and to show how very different translations can both, I hope, work. I have indulged in this sort of exercise before. You may see that previous effort here. This time, my translation is deliberately not as literal as it could be (although more so than Shahid's) and I have tried to retain the rhyme scheme and even, to some extent, the meter of the original Urdu. The original has no title, by the way (it just says “Couplets”), and Shahid and I have both made up our own. (My translation on the left; Shahid's on the right.)

AS IF

Last night my heart recovered a lost memory of you,
As if a desolate place had impetuously bloomed,

As if a moist breeze had washed over a parched desert,
As if a man, suffering, had a sudden peace assumed.

And here is an informal Urdu transliteration as well as the original:

ASHAAR

Raat yoon dil mein teree khoee hoee yaad aaee
Jaisay veeranay mein chupkay say bahaar aajaaey

Jaisay sehraaon mein hollay say chalay baad-e-naseem
Jaisay beemar ko bay-wajah qaraar aajaaey

I await suggestions for improvement from my Urdu-speaking (and other) readers!

by Akim Reinhardt

Historian Francis Jennings (1918-2000) didn’t take the fast track to academic fame. His first career was teaching high school English and Social Studies. After serving in World War II, he returned to the classroom and also became president of his union. Soon thereafter, he became a victim of the Red SCare; the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) fingered him during its 1951 “investigation” of organized labor in Philadelphia.

Jennings became disgusted and quit. Despite having small children, he abandoned a safe, established career and began pursuing a Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania. It took more than a decade, but he finally earned his doctorate in 1965 at the age of 47.

It would take another decade for Jennings to establish himself in academia. He could not immediately translate his hard-won Ivy League pedigree into any prestigious appointments. Instead, he taught at little known schools like Moore College of Art and Cedar Crest College.

Jennings finally arrived on the scene in a way that could not be ignored in 1975 after publishing his first book at the age of 57. The very title was a shot across the bow of America’s received history: The Invasion of America.

The book defied many academic conventions, not to mention popular, mainstream history. It disputed the romantic notion of the European “discovery” of America, redefining it as an invasion and recasting North America’s hearty pioneers as the brutal agents of colonial conquest.

The Invasion of America was a direct challenge not only to famous U.S. historians of yore such as Francis Parkman (1823-1893) and Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), but to entire generations of scholars that helped establish America’s founding mythologies. According to Jennings, these glorified apologias for European colonialism sometimes resulted from error and sometimes from the intentional manipulation of sources. Either way, he deemed them to be little more than crude propaganda that had nevertheless evolved into conventional scholarship and infected popular culture.

To overturn that mythology and reinterpret the colonial invasions, Jennings relied on French historian Marc Bloch’s theories of feudalism. For Jennings, the dull thud of feudal butchery and elitism explained much about European attitudes and actions in North America during the 17th century. The European invaders were a product of their times, and their times were decidedly feudal. They would arrive in America striving to be lords (if they weren’t already), and seeking to reduce the Indigenous population into vassalage.

Read more »

Talking With My Guru
—1.0 Nothing & Emptiness

G: What exactly do you mean by emptiness?
Me: I mean nothing.
G: Why then are we wasting time discussing it?

Take your tiny Tao shears
and snip emptiness out of Webster’s
and heave it into the void. It’s another
self-serving euphemism like time
or collateral damage

Cut wood, draw some water
and stop sound-biting things to death
and travel light (and lightly)
till no sun remains

nothing and emptiness
are for advanced students
with nothing to lose
and nothing to gain

…………………….
Jim Culleny, October 2007

by Liam Heneghan

Theories of war provoke snarling debate because we are never at peace. Similarly, calls for sustainability nettle us when accompanied by declarations of civilization’s imminent collapse. Certainly there are several lines of investigation indicating that the collective needs of humanity cannot be met in perpetuity and that current demands are already imposing an undue burden on systems that support human life on Earth (my 3quarksdaily colleague, Kevin S Baldwin, writes about it here). Sustainability initiatives, therefore, require us to consider a range of corrective actions. Consistent with what sustainability advocates call the “triple bottom line” of people, planet and profit, changes are needed in the economic, social and ecological realm. Beyond these immediately pragmatic considerations, calls for environmental sustainability also amount to calls for ethical change. The 1987 Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. The definition suggests an ethical dimension to sustainability. That is, sustainability requires a reflection on balancing the obligations of the moment against our obligations to humans both unknown and unborn. But why should we be concerned about these humans of the future, anymore than we are about those who went before us? Certainly they are of curiosity value, but are they ethically of concern to us? Sustainability may necessitate a vigorous upheaval in values.

Sustainability ethics, a subspecies of environmental ethics, refers to a set of positions that emerge when the environmental state of things is not simply regarded as irritating, but as immoral, bad, wrong or evil.[1] Environmental ethics in general and sustainability ethics in particular shares a framework in common with the rest of contemporary ethical philosophy, though it also has a suite of unique problems. Although most environmental ethics is human-centered in which environmental damage is largely considered reprobatory because of the consequences for human welfare, there are, more controversially, a set of ethical positions that center on concerns beyond those of our own species. In common though with other normative ethical frameworks, environmental ethics can be approached from a so-called consequentialist, deontological, or virtue ethical perspective.

Briefly, consequentialism, as the name implies, determines the rightness of actions based upon the consequences of actions. Typically the consequentialist strives to maximize the greatest good among a range of outcomes. One can determine the greatest good solely in relation to the agent making the decision – me, for instance, though this egotistical consequentialism can produce unpalatable results from the perspective of others (the non-mes!). Agent-neutral versions are more typical. I might, for example, make ethical decisions that produce the greatest good for all sentient beings, and in this way we can environmentalize consequentialist ethics. Deontological ethics are those that emerge from an examination of principles or rules rather than the value of those things that are affected by actions. Finally, virtue based ethics, deriving from Aristotle (though really they predate him), argues that there are certain human virtues that should be cultivated in order for people to live good lives. One would preserve aspects of the environment, or concern ourselves with the needs of others, in this view of things because to do so corresponds with the exercise of a particular virtue, the practice of which simultaneously brings us pleasure.

From here on I am concerned only with Aristotle’s ethics. Not because other approaches are irrelevant but because Aristotle’s ethical approaches seem to accord with the needs of sustainability in ways that, I think at least, has not been adequately explored.

Read more »

By Rishidev Chaudhuri

I

He was the masseur of persimmons, and he attached himself to that statement with as much precision as he could. It would be so easy, ever so easy, to let go, to slip away, to fade into one of those reddish, tannic, slightly yielding fruit. Every morning, every hour, every lunch break, every minute, he had to remind himself that he was the masseur of persimmons (and not the persimmon itself).

Like many days, he woke in a mild panic, scrambling to congeal an identity before the warm light of day smoothed out the lumps of his self and left him nowhere. He brushed his teeth and bathed, because that is what one does, and dressed in a cream shirt with a floral motif and beige, slightly ragged pants, all the while repeating his name and the fact of his existence to himself. He stepped down the stairs and onto the street, hiding slightly from the bright glare of the ghoulish sun, and then on, down the pavement, blinking owlishly and wondering how many new clients he would have.

His studio was atop a tired warehouse, south of the city center, amidst intersecting streets and cars in the process of being stolen. He stepped up the stairs to his studio, nervous that he'd find himself back at home and relieved to walk into the familiar room. Small, wood-panelled, with a flat desk and a high chair with no arms, so that his hands could freely range up and down. The persimmons lay in little crates, stacked sideways on the floor, and as he sat he kept his gaze fixed on them (the threats to his self, his reason for existence). He sat watching them for at least an hour, perhaps more, barely moving to scratch or fidget and only occasionally moving to remind himself of the contours of his body. Then he got up, bending forward from the hips, spine straight and counterbalancing upwards with the grace of a natural athlete. He approached the crate, slowly, a little scared and reached forward. Eyes shut he hesitated, not breathing, then let his fingers brush the smooth surface of one of those round objects. As he did, he felt a shudder of contingency pass through his being and he pulled back sharply, suddenly desperate to remember his place and time. But, of course, he was the masseur of persimmons and he had to massage persimmons or he would be nobody. And, besides, who would massage them if he didn't?

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“No one is so stubborn and dangerous as the beneficiaries of a fallen idea –
they defend not the idea, but their bare life and the loot.”
~Sándor Márai

One of the decided advantages enjoyed by central planning is the ability to, in the words of Captain Picard, “make it so,” and thereby create – or wreak – change on a grand scale. In the 20^th century, techniques of social, political and economic control were refined by authoritarian governments to the extent that vast reorganizations of the social fabric were effected in a relentless fashion. Initiatives that come to mind include China’s Great Leap Forward, or the Khmer Rouge’s decidedly anti-urban policies, exercised with great verve during their brief but dismal tenure. For its part, the Soviet Union offers many examples, but the consequences of one such phenomenon continue on: the so-called “closed cities” that were devoted to the research and manufacture of military equipment and, most importantly, nuclear weapons.

Originating in the late 1930s under Stalin’s direction, these cities bore all the hubristic hallmarks of an authoritarian command-and-control regime, including a unrepentantly narrow raison d'être and an utter disregard for geography. Known as ZATO cities (for “zakrytye administrativno-territorial'nye obrazovaniia,” or “closed administrative-territorial formations”), the sensitivity of their mission furthermore prevented them from even being placed on maps. A logical corollary to this is, if you don’t want to place something on a map, you probably aren’t keen give it a memorable name, either. At first, these cities were named in relation to the nearest, recognized city, and hyphenated with the approximate distance in kilometers. I must admit, given the nuclear remit of about ten of these cities, that there is something deliciously evocative about such a nomenclature – as if one was listing the known element and its artificially fabricated, enriched but less stable isotope. However, even this nomenclature proved a bit too explicit for the comfort of the Soviet authorities:

Thus, the All-Russian Scientific and Research Institute of Experimental Physics (VNIIEF) was initially known as Arzamas-60, a postal code designation to show that it was 60 km from the city of Arzamas. But the “60” was considered too sensitive, and the number was changed to “16.” In 1947 the entire city of Sarov (Arzamas-16) disappeared from all official Russian maps and statistical documents. The facility has also been known Moscow-300, the town of Kremlev, and Arzamas-75. Zlatoust-20 is probably the same as Zlatoust-36, and Kurchatov-21, Moscow-21, Moscow-400 and Semipalatinsk-121 are almost certainly the same as Semipalatinsk-16.

This points to another difficulty intrinsic to the ZATO archipelago – how many of them are there? Even today, it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty. Estimates tend to cluster around 40, but, somewhat confusingly, “in addition, there are thought to be at least 15 ZATO in existence that cannot be accounted for.”

An ambiguous ontological status isn’t the only privilege of the ZATO archipelago, either. In their Soviet heyday, these cities concentrated tens of thousands of the most advanced scientists and engineers in self-sufficient urbanizations loosely modeled on the factory town template. To compensate for the stresses of performing highly surveilled work in a remote location to which few had access, ZATO workers tended to be better paid than their counterparts who worked in more prosaic locations. Also, all financing for ZATO cities was administered directly through the federal budget. While this fact may seem dry and unimportant at first blush, it had tremendous consequences as the Soviet Union transitioned into post-Communist Russia.

Read more »

Drone

I speak a simple tongue
direct and to the point

I have no second thoughts
cluttered with misgivings

I don't mince words
I come from clouds

under a flag of state
I hunt outside the natural order

as cold and heartless as a hawk
but without its natural exculpation

I bring regal retribution:
a creator of corpses, I am

the Count of Capacitors
the Lord of Algorithms is my muse

I have no empathic circuits
nor do my masters

Mathematics only guides my moves
Precise and incendiary is my passion

I'm your envoy
your political assassin

Send me whenever you must
dispatch your current devil

I am yours —your
techno-cudgel
.

by Jim Culleny,
7/19/12

By Tom Jacobs and Troy Hatlevig

Profanity is the crutch of the inarticulate.

~ anonymous

Fuck you, you fucking fuck.

~ Joe Pesci, in Goodfellas

I curse a lot. I seem to drop the f-bomb more frequently than most, and I’m not sure why this is. I like the word and the way that it adverbializes or adjectivizes things in ways that most adverbs or adjectives don’t.[i] And it accentuates a thought like few other words can. I recall that one of my best friends growing up had an older brother, a true black sheep of the family—drugs, alcohol, county lock up, and so forth—and whenever his father referred to him, he never called him by his name (which I’ll say is Larry). He never said, when things went South for his son, “ah, that Larry.” He always said, “ah, that fucking Larry.” This seems right and true and appropriate. There’s just no other locution that will convey the sentiment.

There are many excellent curse words. Used to be that “douchebag” was the word of choice when describing an irritating or pretentious person (or, if modified to “douchebaggy”) an adjective to describe something overwrought or transparently depthless. Then it became “douchenozzle.” I’m not sure what’s replaced it, but I think the internet has had a role. When confronted with the incomprehensible, sometimes profanity is the only response.

***

No matter what, though, you still can’t really swear in front of your mom. Or, to be more precise, you can swear in front of your mom, but you can’t swear well. For example, one method of swearing well is by using purposeful offhandedness, as in, “so I asked the fuckin guy where his fuckin car was.” You might say that to your mom when telling her your funny story about the douchenozzle from the mall parking lot, but you won’t tell it in an offhanded way.

***

Swearing in front of your parents is a bit like smoking in front of them: embarrassing and humiliating and somehow dehumanizing to both parties. But still, there is an assertion of self there somewhere. Cursing in a most general kind of way is an assertion of self.

There is a peculiar thrill in cursing in front of people we shouldn’t (our parents, our students, our loved ones). But still, cursing rises like a dark light to imprism our behavior (both perceived and meant) on life’s stage. There is something about cursing well…about knowing how to deploy curse words to maximum effectiveness…that speaks volumes about your position in the larger scheme of things. Either you’ve plumbed or not; either you’ve worked construction or not. Either you have worked a blue collar job or not. And it is in the blue collar arena that the best swearing occurs.

Either to shock, or to generate some kind of fraternal resonance, or to simply act as a shibboleth…both you and I know this word, and I’m deploying it for a particular effect (to make you like me, to make you think I’m cool, or to settle the dust that’s been kicked up merely by meeting), cursing has a key role in our theatrical lives.

Read more »

After Mohammed Iqbal

Unveil your face
A star is witness

Stop flickering
Blaze

Illuminate
Be

How long will you beg like Moses on the mountain?
Fan the flame within you

Create a new Mecca with every speck of your embers
Rid yourself of idolatry

Observe the limits in this temple
Even if you want to boast

First create the confidence of Alexander
Then lust after the splendor of Darius

Translated from the Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari, guest poet at 3 Quarks Daily

by Elatia Harris

L., Cover, Girl in White, by Sue Hubbard, Cinnamon, 2012. The painting is Portrait of Myself on my Fifth Wedding Annivesary, by Paula Modersohn Becker, 1906, the Boettcherstrasse Museum, Bremen.

R., Sue Hubbard, photo by Derek Adams, suehubbard.com

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and critic, based in London, who has written about contemporary art for 3 Quarks Daily since 2008. She is the author of Girl in White, a newly published work of fiction based on the life of Paula Modersohn Becker, a pioneering German painter who died in 1907 at age 31, a few days after giving birth. In her short time, Becker worked with enormous dedication to paint authentically, and to focus on subjects outside the usual range of German painting of her era. She did not live to see the great transition of which she was a part. Rather, questioning everything, demanding love and fulfillment as a woman as well as freedom as a painter, she was among those who got to the very edge of the Modern. At her death, over 400 paintings and hundreds of drawings were found in her studio.

ELATIA HARRIS: I am struck by how, as a critic and writer about art, you are very much in the trenches, illuminating the sometimes quite difficult art that is happening right now. Yet Girl in White is set in the early years of the 20^th century. Did not only Paula Modersohn Becker but her era attract you?

SUE HUBBARD: It’s true I do write about contemporary art but I’m not a conventional art critic or an academic art historian. My first practice is as a poet. I started writing about art about 20 years ago, when a small magazine that published both art and poetry asked me to write about some artists. I have always seen art and poetry primarily as a form of exploration, a voyage of discovery to uncover the essential self. I am interested in artists and writers who push the boundaries, not for their own sake but to discover new things about the human condition. I’m attracted to the Romantics as well as to the early Moderns and existentialists, so I am quite at home with Paula, who was hungry to discover new things about herself and the possibilities of art.

Read more »

Further

nothing is further
than a horizon
on a day at sea

storm surge nil, line beyond
the rock of swells
and slap of sea on hull

the horizon,
that crisp ring
that noose

a scalpel cut
between gray and gray
between realms
it cleaves high and low

it's a rift we never breach
but ever keep our eyes on

the edge we never reach
the prey we never snatch
a shore we never beach
a gate that’s never latched

the horizon is tight-lipped and taut
as a lute string strung from zip to zip

distant as a hoax
a hold we never grip
.
.
by Jim Culleny 9/7/12

by Mara Jebsen

These are the first two entries of a book of poem-essays inspired by the Oxford English Dictionary.

A is for Ardor

Ardor is life. The zeal in a line

down the centre of the body. The wick.

I ascend, with burning

eye. Ascend: to rise

over mountain and lesser; to take on, in some sky

the space of dominion. Now Animated.

Now moved

from within. Fully half of all ancestors

are women. Their brave, painted faces are hard

to know. The frame around mine,

and the frame around yours could melt – there was a song:

my grandma and your

grandma,

sitting by the fire-

then one set the other’s flag ablaze.

It happens that our ancestors are moving

in small circles, in skirts, in their different

houses. Let us will them: Leave their houses.

Burn flags together. Ancestor worship— is veneration

of those dead, whose blood we believe

is threads through our own; that even now they hold sway

over the affairs of the living. Ahankara, in Buddhism

is the false identification

of the true inner spirit with the body,

or mind, or outside

world.

It all burns off, except the wick, the promise

of fire. Are we ardent spirits,

like brandy and gin? I cannot picture

myself without a body. Dear

grandmama, most inflammable of

flammables; how is it I know

you are dancing like blazes in the waltz

of the beyond: when I spin, I burn; hands open, receiving

the gust of a gift called ardor.

Read more »

By Maniza Naqvi

Burning the Koran was not a problem for some of the earliest and most revered Muslims considered to have been exemplary in their actions. In a manner of speaking, they were the forefathers of this tradition and had supremacy for burning the Koran in order, in their opinion, as a matter of necessity, to secure it.

Koran burning, it seems has proved handy for mining and oiling it for whatever its worth, whenever, whichever absolute power ruling over Muslim populations has faced any danger to its longevity. Fourteen hundred years later, Koran burning fueled divisions again; and was once again linked to reasons of security two years ago in September 2010 when there was much agony and fury about the odd call to burn copies of the Koran by an odd preacher in Florida. The President of the United States stepped in to plead with the preacher to not do this (here). And among the reasons the President gave in making his case was that it would endanger American troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. To have stopped the preacher outright from burning copies of the Koran would have been against the preacher’s rights of freedom of speech enshrined in the first amendment. The preacher was, quite correctly, free to do what he pleased it should not have mattered if he hurt sentiments. Sentiments are important but not as important as principles enshrined in the first amendment. This is what makes America: the rule of law that guarantees the freedom of speech, and together, the rule of law and freedom of speech, guarantee the strengthening of tolerance, a flourishing of opinions and civil liberties. The plea to not burn the Koran, however, wasn’t this, but rather couched in the justification that it would hurt the military troops and become a security risk because it would hurt sentiments! Anyway, a year and half later, earlier this year in February 2012, copies of the Koran were burned by Americans at a military base in Afghanistan. Protests and riots ensued and people were killed (here and here). These were people who probably had never had the opportunity to even learn how to read, let alone read or understand the Koran. It is not clear and no one seems to have investigated why there was a need to burn these copies or: why there were so many Korans at an American base or whether these were even copies of the Koran; or whether these were copies of the Bible in the Pashto language, which were being distributed by the US military to illiterate villagers who would not have known the difference as had been reported earlier (here, here , here , here and here) or why was there such religiosity at the base.

Destroying copies of the Koran has been a regular occurrence. In Pakistan alone, each year, for example in Lahore, hundreds of copies of the Koran are found lying in the bed of the main canal that runs through the city when it dries out—thrown in the water by the pious who want to rid themselves of torn copies of it—to do so in water is “allowed” by tradition and of course then there are the copies used by the pious for the purposes of securing their gains by using it as a prop and tool for black magic. In other parts of the country there are rivers where the same practice would occur and of course there is the sea in Karachi. The percentage for each form of piety’s purpose would be hard to determine though judging by the talk of black magic and superstition and the number of Mullahs involved, for a fee, in this booming business, I would imagine that the number of copies destroyed accordingly for this purpose outweigh any other reason.

Read more »