How to use this Page

All simplistic hypothesis about “what drives terrorists” falter when there is suddenly in front of you human faces and complex life stories. The tragedy of contemporary policies designed to handle or rather crush movements who employ terrorist tactics, are prone to embrace a singular explanation of the terrorist motivation, disregarding the fact that people can be in the very same movement for various reasons.

The post The different faces of Taliban jihad in Pakistan appeared first on OUPblog.

As the new year dawned on 1 January 2016, six heavily-armed men crossed through a marshy section of the Punjab border from Pakistan into India. Disguised in Indian Army fatigues, they commandeered first a taxi, then a small SUV, eventually covering the approximately 35km to reach the Air Force base at Pathankot. There, they cut through […]

The post How India can motivate Pakistan to prevent cross-border terrorism appeared first on OUPblog.

आतंकवाद -शहीद जवान और नेताओं की राजनीति आतंकवाद -शहीद जवान और नेताओं की राजनीति जिस तरह से आतंकी हमलों में हमारे जवान शहीद हो रहे हैं और नेता अपनी बयानबाजी से थम नही रहे हैं चाहे भाजपा हो या कांग्रेस और न्यूज चैनल आरोप प्रत्यारोप की राजनीति गरमाई हुई है … ऐसे में बहुत लोग […]

The post आतंकवाद -शहीद जवान और नेताओं की राजनीति appeared first on Monica Gupta.

Rosanne Hawke writes hard-hitting yet compassionate novels about young people in difficult, often dire, situations. Her most recent novel for young adults is The Truth About Peacock Blue (Allen & Unwin), about a young girl accused of blasphemy. It’s an inordinately powerful and topical story, which is also well balanced. Thanks for speaking with Boomerang […]

Category #6 is up today, and while Brown Girl Dreaming was one of my favorite reads of last year, I have opted to review the young reader’s edition of Malala’s story, which is co-written by the talented YA author (and … Continue reading →

The story of Pakistan is the story of missed opportunity. As I began to write about the history of this land, I could not help feeling a sense of an intertwining of personal and national destiny in what was necessarily an account of my own missed opportunities [...]

The post What Pakistan’s history means for its future appeared first on OUPblog.

By Paul Cobb

Recently the jihadist insurgent group formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) underwent a re-branding of sorts when one of its leaders, known by the sobriquet Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was proclaimed caliph by the group’s members. In keeping with the horizonless pretentions that such a title theoretically conveys, the group dropped their geographical focus and embraced a more universalist outlook, settling for the name of the ‘Islamic State’.

As a few observers have noted, the title of caliph comes freighted with a long and complicated history. That history begins in the seventh century AD, when the title was adopted to denote those leaders of the Muslim community who were recognized as the Prophet Muhammad’s “successors”— not prophets themselves of course, but men who were expected, in the Prophet’s absence, to know how to guide the community spiritually as well as politically. Later in the medieval period, classical Islamic political theory sought to carefully define the pool from which caliphs might be drawn and to stipulate specific criteria that a caliph must possess, such as lineage, probity, moral standing and so on. Save for his most ardent followers, Muslims have found al-Baghdadi — with his penchant for Rolex watches and theatrical career reinventions — sorely wanting in such caliphal credentials.

He’s not the only one of course. Over the span of Islamic history, the title of caliph has been adopted by numerous (and sometimes competing) dynasties, rebels, and pretenders. The last ruler to bear the title in any significant way was the Ottoman Abdülmecid II, who lost the title when he was exiled in 1924. And even then it was an honorific supported only by myths of Ottoman legitimacy. But it’s doubtful that al-Baghdadi gives the Ottomans much thought. For he is really tapping into a much more recent dream of reviving the caliphate embraced by various Islamist groups since the early 20^th century, who saw it as a precondition for reviving the Muslim community or to combat Western imperialism. Al-Baghdadi’s caliphate is thus a modern confection, despite its medieval trappings.

That an Islamic fundamentalist (to use a contested term of its own) like al-Baghdadi should make an appeal to the past to legitimate himself, and that he should do so without any thoughtful reference to Islamic history, is of course the most banal of observations to make about his activities, or about those of any fundamentalist. And perhaps that is the most interesting point about this episode. For the utterly commonplace nature of examples like al-Baghdadi’s clumsy claim to be caliph suggest that Islamic history today is in danger of becoming irrelevant.

Caliph Abdulmecid II, the last Caliph before Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

This is not because Islamic history has no bearing upon the present Islamic world, but because present-day agendas that make use of that history prefer to cherry-pick, deform, and obliterate the complicated bits to provide easy narratives for their own ends. Al-Baghdadi’s claim, for example, leaps over 1400 years of more nuanced Islamic history in which the institution of the caliphate shaped Muslim lives in diverse ways, and in which regional upstarts had little legitimate claim. But he is hardly alone in avoiding inconvenient truths — contemporary comment on Middle Eastern affairs routinely employs the same strategy.

We can see just such a history-shy approach in coverage of the sectarian conflicts between Shi’i and Sunni Muslims in Iraq, Syria, Bahrain, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The struggle between Sunnis and Shi’ites, we are usually told, has its origins in a contest over religious authority in the seventh century between the partisans of the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali and those Muslims who believed the incumbent caliphs of the day were better guides and leaders for the community. And so Shi’ites and Sunnis, we are led to believe, have been fighting ever since. It is as if the past fourteen centuries of history, with its record of coexistence, migrations, imperial designs, and nation-building have no part in the matter, to say nothing of the past century or less of authoritarian regimes, identity-politics, and colonial mischief.

We see the inconvenient truths of Islamic history also being ignored in the widespread discourse of crusading and counter-crusading that occasionally infects comment on contemporary conflicts, as if holy war is the default mode for Muslims fighting non-Muslims or vice-versa. When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi can wrap himself in black robes and proclaim himself Caliph Ibrahim of the Islamic State, when seventh-century conflicts seem like thorough explanations for twenty-first century struggles, or when a terrorist and mass-murderer like the Norwegian Anders Breivik can see himself as a latter-day Knight Templar, then we are sadly living in a world in which the medieval is allowed to seep uncritically into the contemporary as a way to provide easy answers to very complicated problems.

But we should be wary of such easy answers. Syria and Iraq will not be saved by a caliph. And crusaders would have found the motivations of today’s empire-builders sickening. History properly appreciated should instead lead us to acknowledge the specificity, and indeed oddness, of our modern contexts and the complexity of our contemporary motivations. It should, one hopes, lead to that conclusion reached famously by Mark Twain: that history doesn’t repeat itself, even if sometimes it rhymes.

Paul M. Cobb is Chair and Professor of Islamic History in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.  He is the translator of The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades and has written a number of other works, most recently The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Image credit: Caliph Abdulmecid II, by the Library of Congress. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Is Islamic history in danger of becoming irrelevant? appeared first on OUPblog.

        

Related Stories

• What is the Islamic state and its prospects?
• Five myths about the “surge” of Central American immigrant minors
• Did Napoleon cause his own downfall?

 

Maggie Steele, the storybook heroine who vaults over the moon, has been attracting thousands of visitors from around the world. So many visitors, in fact, that she’s using a time zone map to keep track of them all.* People are … Continue reading →

“In the world I came from it wasn’t cool to say that you wanted to be a writer or read books. I always wanted to be a writer but I just kept it hidden for 20 odd years which was a strange state of mind to be in.”

One male author of color has a YA book released this month.

“Irfan Master is project manager of Reading the Game at the National Literacy Trust. His father is from Gujarat, India where the novel is set, and his mother is from Pakistan. Irfan grew up speaking both Urdu and English.” He grew up reading The Count of Monte Cristo with his grandfather and developed a love or reading. He knew that sometime ago, there was a split in India, but no one could or would tell him about it. So, Ifran decided to written A beautiful Lie. He went to India and then Morocco, where he wrote most of the book. he says “Everything came from the first two words ‘Everybody lies’…”

A beautiful lie has already been published in the UK and hit US shelves 1 August.

Award nominations:

North East Book Award

Essex Book Award

WE Read Book Prize

Branford Boase Award

Redbridge Book Award

Amazing Book Award

Waterstones Children’s.Book Prize

Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Journey to Change the World... One Child at a Time (The Young Reader's Edition) Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin, adapted by Sarah Thomson

Ok, so I read this before everything came out challenging the accuracy of Mortensen's story.

According to the book, after getting lost while coming off K2 after failing to reach the summit, Mortensen stumbled into a small Pakistani village. The villagers there took care of him as he regained his strength and health. When he saw that the kids had no school, but practiced writing in the mud every day even though a teacher only came three days a week, Greg promised to build the kids a school.

Raising the money and building the school was hard, but it got done and Greg built more schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He believes that through education comes peace.

Of course, now we're unsure how much of this really happened. BUT! Schools got built. Schools are good and I think that education brings economic prosperity and peace. Education is the key.

I tried to read the adult version of this and just couldn't get through it. The Young Reader's edition is much tighter! But, both books idolize Greg Mortensen. I guess it kinda makes sense, because the adult version was his memoir and I'm sure he meant it to also work as a fundraising tool for the Central Asian Institute. But, at the same time, these books present him as God's gift to the Pakistani people. Even before the revelations came out, I was questioning the book, because Greg just seemed too good to be real, like Nancy Drew or an Ibbotson romance heroine.

And it's sad that the book did this and it's sad that so much of the story might not be true, because it dilutes the importance and impact of education and schools. It dilutes the ways that kids here can help other kids around the world and promote friendship and understanding.

Today's round up is over at Wrapped in Foil.

Book Provided by... the publisher for Cybils 2009 consideration

Links to Amazon are an affiliate link. You can help support Biblio File by purchasing any item (not just the one linked to!) through these links. Read my full disclosure statement.

Forward by N. R. Narayana Murthy,
A Clear Blue Sky: Stories and Poems on Conflict and Hope
Puffin Books, India, 2010.

Ages 13+

War. Violence. Death. Poverty. Hatred. Displacement. No matter where we live, as human beings we hope that these dark parts of life will not touch our lives, but even more, that they will not touch the lives of our children and young people. For many, however, darkness weighs heavy on childhood. This has been particularly true for millions living in southeastern Asia over the last decades, as religious and national conflicts have marked and scarred the lives of the children growing up in them. This collection of stories and poems from writers from India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan sings stories of their national and personal grief.

The grace of the collection is how the writers manage to remind us of our own saving grace: how, paradoxically, “conflict and hope” can co-exist, as the subtitle indicates. In “A Time to Mend” by Asha Nehemiah, after an angry mob breaks into a church in Bangalore, beating the priest and leaving the church in ruins, a shaken and distraught Mubina and her brother bring home the damaged altar cloth, where their grandmother, the one person in the city with the skill to repair it, makes it whole again. In another story, “The Answer” by Rohini  Chowdhury, childhood sweethearts meet again, decades after being torn apart by the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. Perhaps one of the most haunting stories is Adithi Rao’s brilliantly told “Turban for A Little Boy”, which uses the format of a boy’s essay to convey how the innocence of a child can unintentionally provide the catalyst for evil – and how that innocence is then scarred.

Masterful storytelling techniques throughout offer classroom uses far beyond social studies; and the short bios of each writer at the end of the book also provide options for further reading.  The stories question the very idea of the reality of storytelling itself. Some tales are clearly fiction, but others, particularly a set of first-person stories, will leave their teenage readers wondering, “Was that real? Did that happen to the author? Or is it made up, historical fiction?” Such doubt creates unique teaching moments, about perception and reality, and about storytelling itself, as well as about the way people thrive, survive, and find hope in shards of despair.

Sara Hudson
July 2011

A 60 Minutes report last night accused author Greg Mortenson (pictured, via) of fabricating parts of his bestselling memoirs and misusing funds from his charity, the Central Asia Institute (CAI).

The report examined three particular issues: (1) Did Mortenson first visit the village of Korphe after a mountain climbing trip as he wrote in his memoir, Three Cups of Tea? (2) Was Mortenson captured by the Taliban as he alleged in his follow-up Stones into Schools? (3) Is the CAI carrying out its charitable mission with the money it collects from philanthropists and donors? According to several sources who were interviewed, the answer is “no” to all three questions.

Former CAI donor Jon Krakauer called Mortenson’s first meeting with Korphe villages “a beautiful story” and “a lie.” Mansur Khan Mahsud denied that the Taliban kidnapped the author.  Mahsud appears in a photograph from the alleged kidnapping, but works as the research director of a respected Islamabad think tank.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Last week, I posted a short piece about Pakistan’s floods and where you can donate to make a difference to the thousands suffering from displacement and distress, not to mention the threat of disease.  The Canadian government recently said they will match private donations made by citizens for aid to Pakistan from Aug. 2 to Sept. 12.  I was recently made aware of one organization that specifically aids children: SOS Children’s Villages — a non-denominational, non-political NGO that assists neglected and abandoned children in developing countries.   SOS Children’s Villages is currently seeking donations to assist with the relief effort in Pakistan, and if you haven’t yet donated, you might consider giving to this NGO, especially if you are a Canadian, during this time of matching funds by the Canadian government.

A young Afghan boy shares his life and dreams for the future with us in The Roses in My Carpets by Rukhsana Khan and illustrated by Ronald Himler (Holiday House, 1998), a beautiful, thought-provoking picture book set in a refugee camp in Pakistan. He doesn’t like school but loves the afternoons he spends weaving carpets from brightly colored threads that all hold special meaning for him: although “Everything in the camp is a dirty brown, so I do not use brown anywhere on my carpets.” One day his work is interrupted by the shocking news that his sister has been badly hurt. He runs to the hospital. His mother is already there, too distraught to think rationally. Our young narrator takes charge, sending his mother home while he waits for news at the hospital. Fortunately, this being a children’s story, the news is good – which in turn allows for a breathing space that alters the nightmare of conflict he describes at the beginning of the book: that night his dreams open up to allow a tiny space out of danger for him and his beloved family.

Reading a story that includes issues of conflict and hurt needs plenty of thinking and discussion space around it, especially at bedtime – but Rukhsana Khan has written this story so deftly that they too will be comforted by the ending. This wonderful book includes a lot of incidental detail, such as the muezzin calling people to prayer and the boy’s musings about his overseas sponsor. Particularly convincing is the way the boy and his mother can hardly eat at the end of the day, after their terrible fright; and also the reality depicted of a boy who is very mature – who has had to grow up too quickly and take adult responsibilities on his shoulders. The attention to detail also carries over into the fine ilustrations – and young readers, and perhaps adults too, may be particularly struck by the mud buildings in the refugee camp.

I have included The Roses in My Carpet in my Personal View for our current issue of PaperTigers, which focuses on Refugee Children. Rukhsana also talks about the book in her interview with us last year; and do listen to her reading it here. On her blog, she has been discussing Ramadan recently – and I particularly enjoyed this post with an Afghan fable. Yesterday Aline pointed to some books for children that focus on Ramadan – including another of Rukhsana’s…

And please, please spare a thought for all those caught up in the floods in Pakistan, including Afghan refugees like the boy and his family in The Roses in my Carpets. If you’re looking for a charity who are sending relief, take a look at Sally’s post for some links.

Recent floods in Pakistan have immobilized the country and have put many lives at peril and risk.  Of course, among the many affected are children.  Response to the disaster has been slow but there are places where one can donate specifically to help children such as UNICEF, World Vision,  Save the Children in addition to the Red Cross.   PaperTigers has covered a number of books about Pakistani children in distress, particularly those in refugee camps on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and those working as child laborers.  The plight of children in distress and the way their stories can be told in books is the focus of Pegi Shea’s Personal Views piece in this month’s PaperTigers issue which is about refugees.

Dr. David Kilcullen is one of the world’s leading experts on guerrilla warfare.  He has served in every theater of the “War on Terrorism” since 9/11 as Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency to the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq, and chief counterterrorism strategist for the U.S. State Department.  In his new book, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars In The Midst of a Big One, Kilcullen takes us on the ground to uncover the face of modern warfare, illuminating both the global challenges and small wars across the world.  In the excerpt below we learn why the Afghanistan is so very difficult and so very important in this struggle.

People often speak of “the Iraq War” and the “the war in Afghanistan” as if they were separate conflicts.  But was we have seen, Afghanistan is one theater in a larger confrontation with the transnational takfiri terrorism, not a discrete war in itself.  Because of commitments elsewhere-principally Iraq-the United States and its allies have chosen to run this campaign as an “economy of force” operation, with a fraction of the effort applied elsewhere.  Most of what has happened in Afghanistan results from this, as much as from local factors.  Compared to other theaters where I have worked, the war in Afghanistan is being run on a shoestring.  The country is about one and a half times the size of Iraq and has a somewhat larger population (32 million, of whom about 6 million are Pashtun males of military age), but to date the United States has resourced it at about 27 percent of the funding given to Iraq, and allocated about 20 percent of the troops deployed in Iraq (29 percent counting allies).  In funding terms, counting fiscal year 2008 supplemental budget requests, by 2008 operations in Iraq had cost the United States  approximately $608.3 billion over five years, whereas the war in Afghanistan had cost about $162.6 billion over seven years: in terms of overall spending, about 26.7 percent of the cost of Iraq, or a monthly spending rate of about 19.03 percent that of Iraq.  In addition to lack of troops and money, certain key resources, including battlefield helicopters, construction and engineering resources, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets, have been critically short.

Resource allocation in itself is not a sign of success-arguably in Iraq we have spent more than we can afford for limited results-but expenditure is a good indicator of government attention.  Thus the international community’s failure to allocate adequate resources for Afghanistan bespeaks an episodic strategic inattention, a tendency to focus on Iraq and think about Afghanistan only when it impinges on public opinion in Western countries, NATO alliance politics, global terrorism, or the situation in Pakistan or Iran, while taking ultimate victory in Afghanistan for granted.  Two examples spring to mind: the first was when Admiral Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, remarked in congressional testimony in December 2007 that “in Afghanistan, we do what we can.  In Iraq, we do what we must,” implying that Afghan issues by definition play second fiddle to Iraq, receiving resources and attention only as spare capacity allows.  The reason for Admiral Mullen’s remark emerges from the second, larger illustration of this syndrome: by invading Iraq in 2003, the United States and its allies opened a second front before finishing the first, and without sufficient resources to prosecute both campaigns effectively.  Western leaders committed this strategic error primarily because of overconfidence and a tendency to underestimate the enemy: they appear to have take for granted that the demise of the Taliban, scattered and displaced but not defeated in 2001, was only a matter of time.

These leaders would have done well to remember the words of Sir Olaf Caroe, a famous old hand of the North-West Frontier of British India, ethnographer of the Pashtuns, and last administrator of the frontier province before independence, who wrote in 1958 that “unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over; in British times at least they were apt to produce an after-crop of tribal unrest [and]…constant intrigue among the border tribes.”  Entering Afghanistan and capturing its cities is relatively easy; holding the country and securing the population is much, much harder: as the Soviets (with “assistance,” and a degree of post-Vietnam schadenfreude, from Washington) discovered to their cost, like the British, Sikhs, Mughals, Persians, Mongols, and Macedonians before them.  In Afghanistan in 2001, as in Iraq in 2003, the invading Western powers confused entry with victory, a point the Russian General Staff lost no time in pointing out.  The Taliban movement’s phenomenal resurgence from its nadir of early 2002 underlines this point: the insurgents’ successes seem due as much to inattention and inadequate resourcing on our part as to talent on theirs.

Afghanistan is also a very different campaign from Iraq, though the two conflicts are linked through shared Western political objectives and cooperation between enemy forces.  The Iraq campaign is urban, sectarian, primarily internal, and heavily centered on Baghdad.  The Afghan campaign is overwhelmingly rural, centered on the Pashtun South and East, with a major external sanctuary in Pakistan and, as of 2008, increasing support for the effort in Afghanistan than for Iraq (though rhetoric often does not translate into action).  Afghanistan is seen as a war of necessity, “the good war,” the “real war on terrorism.”  This gives the international community greater freedom of action than in Iraq.

Perhaps counterintuitively, events in Afghanistan also have greater proportional impact than those in Iraq, effort there has greater effect than equal effort in Iraq-a brigade (3,000 people) in Afghanistan is worth a division or more (10,000-12,000) in Iraq, in terms of its proportionate effect on the ground.  Regardless of the outcome in Iraq, Afghanistan still presents an opportunity for a positive long-term legacy for Western intervention, if it results in an Afghan state capable of effectively responding to its people’s wishes and meeting their needs.

Conversely, although the American population and the international community are inured to negative media reporting about Iraq, they are less used to downbeat reporting about Afghanistan.  Most people polled in successive opinion surveys have tended to assume that the Afghan campaign is going reasonably well, hence Taliban successes or sensational attacks in Afghanistan may actually carry greater political weight than equivalent events in Iraq, a campaign that is so unpopular and about which opinion is so polarized that people tent to assume it is going less well than is actually the case.

Although places like Afghanistan, Kurdistan, and Turkistan have had their names for maybe a thousand years and tend to be in the same general part of the world as Pakistan—that is, sort of north and west of India—Pakistan is a made-up name that hasn’t been around even 100 years.

The maker-upper of the name was a fellow named Chaudhary Rahmat Ali who is identified as “a student at Cambridge” in 1933 according to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

But looking elsewhere I see that this Chaudhary Rahmat Ali was more than a Cambridge student. He’s reported to have been the founder of the Pakistan National Movement and I found his name confusingly similar to Chaudhary Muhammad Ali, one of Pakistan’s Prime Ministers.

It isn’t the same guy though.

The inventor of the name appears to have done so long before the actuality of an independent nation was a possibility.

He imagined that there should be an independent homeland for Muslims in India and he figured the Muslims who should hang together were from Punjab, the Afghani border region, Kashmir, and the Sindh region. So he just took the initials from those places and came up with PAKStan. The –stan fit well with the other countries in the neighborhood (it means “land of”) and as a bonus the word pak in Urdu meant “pure” so his imagined country’s name meant essentially “pure homeland.”

This etymology is backed up by other dictionaries including the Oxford English Dictionary, as well it should, since the researcher who seems to have done the definitive work on the etymology of Pakistan is a man named Robert Burchfield.

I don’t think he’s been mentioned before on podictionary and that’s a shame because it was Burchfield who brought us from that 100 year old first edition of the OED to the second edition.

He only died back in 2004.

As you know although earlier versions of the OED and other dictionaries did not include rude four letter words, current versions of all the good dictionaries do.

Burchfield was on the cutting edge of bringing academic rigor to the examination of such words.

But it was an uphill battle.

He found that his library research assistant refused to look up what she considered to be filthy words. He could hardly believe it, saying

“Against all expectations…a few members of staff had no stomach for the crudities of sexual and scatological vocabulary. I had assumed…that Homo lexicographicus was a chalcenterous species of mankind, that is, a person with bowels of brass.”

ShareThis

NY: Viking, 2006.
ISBN (hardcover) 0670034827 9780670034826
ISBN (paper) 9780143038252

Michael Sedano

An interesting variation in the subtitle of David Oliver Relin’s telling of Greg Mortenson’s story illustrates two ways to sell the book. The hardcover book calls itself “One man’s mission to fight terrorism and build nations-- one school at a time.” The paperback edition titles itself, “One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time.”

The work offers a creative nonfiction account of a mountaineer who stumbles off the Himalayan peak K2 in 1993. Taking a life-threatening wrong path, he stumbles into an unmapped village far from his intended landing. It’s a life-changing error, both for the mountaineer and the villagers who save Mortenson’s life.

During his recuperation in the village, Mortenson observes the village girls conducting school in the open air because they have no teacher nor a structure. He promises to return and build the girls a school. The adventurer’s gratitude takes on missionary zeal and he cannot stop with the one promise, instead devoting his career to building schools for girls across rural Pakistan. By September 11, 2001, Mortenson’s success has led him to Afghanistan, where he runs afoul of the Taliban, opium traders, moujahedeen, and the CIA. Here is the source of the spin given by the hardbound subtitle as the final chapters of the story focus on Mortenson’s experiences in Afghanistan. It’s an inescapable perspective, but the paperback volume’s subtitle about peace more accurately describes the likely outcome of Mortenson’s actions had there been no attack by the U.S., and a workable strategy should our nation choose alternatives to invasion and religious enmity.

The girls and villages benefiting from Mortenson’s work are Muslim. Mortenson is the son of Christian missionaries and not a convert to Islam. While religious schism plays little role in Mortenson’s commitment, it informs the story in surprising ways. The fathers and village men do not oppose education for their girls, yet one conservative cleric declares fatwa on Mortenson’s efforts, preventing building schools in the region. All of Mortenson’s local supporters are Muslim, too, but are powerless to intercede directly on his behalf. Instead, they petition the “supreme leader” of the Shia in northern Pakistan, who not only declares the fatwa inconsistent with Islam, Syed Abbas offers his wholehearted support to Mortenson’s project.

The story of Mortenson’s various projects fills the book with numerous emotional peaks. Dismal stories of government incompetence, generations of neglect, and abject poverty are sure to be depressing. Then, when the reader gets to see villagers hauling heavy loads up steep mountain tracks, followed by frantic construction ahead of winter culminating in the opening of a girl’s school, knowing that these children’s lives have changed forever is sure to bring tears to all but the most cynical eyes.

Three Cups of Tea offers a compendium of intercultural communication. “Dr. Greg,” as Mortenson is known, adapts to local custom. A natural linguist, he becomes proficient enough to earn the honor explained by the title. Mortenson’s second father, Haji Ali, teaches him that the first cup of tea taken with a villager is taken as a stranger and given out of obligation. The next cup is offered for a guest. The third cup makes one a member of the family.

Perhaps guilelessness helps. In one frightening instance, Mortenson disregards a friend’s advice never to travel alone. He finds himself imprisoned by a warlord and seems at risk of being executed. Beheading has not yet reached the news, so Mortenson fears only being shot. He doesn’t speak the captor’s tongue—he is blazing a trail into new territory—and requests a Koran. Having learned the proper manner of ablution from one informant, and how to read the pages from an illiterate, Mortenson makes a favorable impression. Doubtlessly, the captors have checked out Mortenson’s background and they release him.

Mortenson’s good works created a good name for “Dr. Greg.” As he advances into Afghanistan’s northern frontier, he goes in search of the principal commandhan of Badkshan, a man described as tying spies between two jeeps and pulling their bodies apart, the fiercely reputed Sadhar Khan. Alone and lacking any documentation, having sneaked into town hidden under rotting goat hides, Mortenson approaches a jeep of substantial appearing men. In a strange coincidence, or perhaps a bit of fiction has sneaked under the radar here, when Mortenson says he’s looking for Sadhar Khan, the driver says he is Khan! After a few moments explaining why he’s here, Khan shouts, “You’re Dr. Greg!” A couple years earlier, some riders had appeared near the Pakistan border after an eight day ride, beseeching Mortenson’s building a school for their village. Mortenson had promised he’d see what he could do and was in Badkshan looking to keep that promise. The riders were employees of Sadhar Khan, and they had related the story of the schools and water projects Dr. Greg was fomenting.

Three Cups of Tea has won numerous prizes. The CAI, Central Asia Institute, lists them on their website:
Kiriyama Prize - Nonfiction Award, Time Magazine - Asia Book of The Year, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association - Nonfiction Award, Borders Bookstore - Original Voices Selection, Banff Mountain Festival - Book Award Finalist, Montana Honor Book Award. Throughout the book, however, come allusions to the ultimate prize, the Nobel Peace Prize. Cynics might point to the softcover subtitle as evidence of a campaign to garner that for Mortenson and his CAI. The hagiographic treatment of Dr. Greg’s career might offer support for that view, if not for the actual good that inheres in building schools for girls in the middle of a culture that putatively forbids that type of education.

There may be a segment of reader who would dismiss Three Cups of Tea as one of the “blame America first” crowd. The “fighting terrorism” spin might support that view. For example, as the book draws to a close we see Mortenson meeting Donald Rumsfeld and being fascinated by the man’s expensive and highly polished shoes. Mortenson addresses a military audience at the Pentagon and relates the contradiction between the U.S. war machine and the need for security, telling them:

“these figures might not be exactly right. But as best as I can tell, we’ve launched 114 Tomahawk cruise missiles into Afghanistan so far. Now take the cost of one of those missile tipped with a Raytheon guidance system, which I think is about $840,000. For that much money, you could build dozens of schools that could provide tens of thousands of students with a balanced nonextremist education over the course of a generation. Which do you think will make us more secure?”

Mortenson has his day before the military to no impact, except for a man who offers him unlimited funds to build schools. But Mortenson recognizes his doom would come from any association with the military and he turns down the bribe. Later, he discusses terrorism and security with a Pakistani Major General. They are watching CNN images of civilian casualties in Baghdad. (p. 310)

“Your President Bush has done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years.”

“Osama had something to do with it, too,” Mortensen said.

“Osama, baah!” Bashir roared. “Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy’s strength. In America’s case, that’s not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance.”

To writer David Oliver Relin’s credit, he controls the political spin exemplified here, spinning out just enough politics to contrast with the warmth and love that fill the first two hundred pages of the book. It’s clear why the hardcover came out with the “fighting terrorism” tag, given the closing pages’ focus on the existing conditions Mortenson works under. That he’s continuing the work building schools for girls in Muslim countries—and finding support from religious and ordinary citizens—is truly encouraging. Wouldn’t it be great if some reader in political authority is reading and learning the cultural lessons of this hopeful book?

That’s the final Tuesday of leap year February. La Bloga welcomes your comments and responses to what you read, or don’t read here. And, as we frequently offer, we welcome guest columnists. Let us know by leaving a comment, or email here, that you have something to say.

Ate,
mvs.

Oxford Islamic Studies Online brings together the best current scholarship in the field and promotes accurate and informed understanding of the Islamic world.  Editor-in-Chief John L. Esposito is University Professor of Religion and International Affairs and Founding Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University. A past president of the Middle East Studies Association, he is editor-in-chief of the four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of Islam, and the author of numerous books, including What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam, Unholy War, Islam: The Straight Path and The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? He lives in Washington, D.C.  In the article below he reflects upon Benazir Bhutto’s assassination and what it means for Pakistan.

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto and its aftermath are an instructive lesson in the checkered history of Pakistan and its critical situation today. Both President Bush and President Musharraf were quick to blame al-Qaeda and other Muslim extremists and to simply place the assassination within the context of the war on global terrorism and the forces opposed to democracy. But as dangerous as these forces are, especially with the growth of Pakistani rather than foreign fighters, this facile single-minded scenario ignores the long-standing conflicting currents in Pakistani politics. (more…)

Share This

It's hard for children to understand that life for other children around the world can be so different from their own experience. Most American children have a home and clothes and go to school. Four Feet, Two Sandals puts a human face on the refugee crisis around the world. Even though this story focuses on a refugee camp on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, it is a story that could be placed in any refugee camp.

This story of friendship found in the most unlikely of places reflects the experience of many refugee children and is, in fact, based on real experiences of the authors. It is a testament to how strong our human need for connection and friendship actually is. When a family is displaced, separated from their home, community, extended family and without a means to support themselves, they become dependent on the kindness of governments and relief organizations. Without control over where they will be relocated, some refugees can live in camps for years.

To realize that friendship can spark and live in a place of such uncertainty and fear is a powerful story of hope and survival. And one which all children should learn about and understand. No matter how bad our situation is, we always have a choice about how to respond to others. We choose whether to stand together or apart.

Refugee camps have some similarity to real life as there are always the routines of every day life that need to be created. Gathering water, washing clothes, cooking food, and care of the family. Impermanance, insecurity and fear fuels the concerns and conversation of everyone living in a camp. Caught between an old life that is gone forever and a new life that cannot yet be glimpsed is frightening.

Yet in the midst of that, two girls find each other and share a pair of shoes. Their friendship helps them humanize their situation reminding them that there are still wonderful things that life will offer them. Illustrator Doug Chayka uses soft, warm colors to convey the desert, tents, primitive conditions, and clothing of the people in the camp.

This is a wonderful story of friendship and hope that should be shared as widely as possible. When we know the face of the "other", we are more likely to greet them as friends than as enemies.

Fast sketch - caricature of Pevez Musharraf - Prime Minister of Pakistan.
:)

--Studio69

I realize that this week’s link round-up is very heavily biased towards 3quarksdaily, but what can I say, they are doing a great job over there, I had to stop myself from linking to more of their posts. Happy Friday to all. I hope you are enjoying August while you can, before you know it Fall will be here.

Biofuels: All You Need To Know for a Bar Conversation.

On resistance to the great Raul Hilberg.

An Obituary For Hilberg. (more…)

Share This