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WSJ: Religion for Everyone

THE SATURDAY ESSAY
FEBRUARY 18, 2012

Religion for Everyone

The decline of religion in the West has brought a decline in community spirit. Could the secular world draw useful lessons from religious life? Alain de Botton offers new ways to find shared meaning.

By ALAIN DE BOTTON

One key thing lacking in much of modern society is the sense of community provided by churches and other religious institutions. In a discussion about his new book, "Religion for Atheists," Alain de Botton talks with WSJ's Gary Rosen about how our sense of kinship and belonging might be reattained in a more-secular age.

One of the losses that modern society feels most keenly is the loss of a sense of community. We tend to imagine that there once existed a degree of neighborliness that has been replaced by ruthless anonymity, by the pursuit of contact with one another primarily for individualistic ends: for financial gain, social advancement or romantic love.

In attempting to understand what has eroded our sense of community, historians have assigned an important role to the privatization of religious belief that occurred in Europe and the U.S. in the 19th century. They have suggested that we began to disregard our neighbors at around the same time that we ceased to honor our gods as a community.

This raises two questions: How did religion once enhance the spirit of community? More practically, can secular society ever recover that spirit without returning to the theological principles that were entwined with it? I, for one, believe that it is possible to reclaim our sense of community—and that we can do so, moreover, without having to build upon a religious foundation.

Insofar as modern society ever promises us access to a community, it is one centered on the worship of professional success. We sense that we are brushing up against its gates when the first question we are asked at a party is "What do you do?," our answer to which will determine whether we are warmly welcomed or conclusively abandoned.

In these competitive, pseudo-communal gatherings, only a few sides of us count as currency with which to buy the goodwill of strangers. What matters above all is what is on our business cards. Those who have opted to spend their lives looking after children, writing poetry or nurturing orchards will be left in no doubt that they have run contrary to the dominant mores of the powerful, who will marginalize them accordingly.

Religion in Secular Life: A Proposal

Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgso

A university alive to its true responsibilities would teach students about things like the tensions of married life, with books like 'Anna Karenina' and 'Madame Bovary' on the syllabus.

Given this level of discrimination, it is no surprise that many of us choose to throw ourselves with a vengeance into our careers. Focusing on work to the exclusion of almost everything else is a plausible strategy in a world that accepts workplace achievements as the main tokens for securing not just the financial means to survive physically but also the attention that we require to thrive psychologically.

Religions seem to know a great deal about our loneliness. Even if we believe very little of what they tell us about the afterlife or the supernatural origins of their doctrines, we can nevertheless admire their understanding of what separates us from strangers and their attempts to melt away one or two of the prejudices that normally prevent us from building connections with others.

Consider Catholicism, which starts to create a sense of community with a setting. It marks off a piece of the earth, puts walls up around it and declares that within their confines there will reign values utterly unlike the ones that hold sway in the world beyond. A church gives us rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger without any danger of being thought predatory or insane.

The composition of the congregation also feels significant. Those in attendance tend not to be uniformly of the same age, race, profession or educational or income level; they are a random sampling of souls united only by their shared commitment to certain values. We are urged to overcome our provincialism and our tendency to be judgmental—and to make a sign of peace to whomever chance has placed on either side of us. The Church asks us to leave behind all references to earthly status. Here no one asks what anyone else "does." It no longer matters who is the bond dealer and who the cleaner.

Zackary Canepari/Panos;

We all stand to learn something from the ways in which religion promotes morality, inspires travel, trains minds and encourages gratitude at the beauty of life.

The Church does more, however, than merely declare that worldly success doesn't matter. In a variety of ways, it enables us to imagine that we could be happy without it. Appreciating the reasons why we try to acquire status in the first place, it establishes conditions under which we can willingly surrender our attachment to it.

It is the genius of the Mass to confront these fears. The building in which it is performed is almost always sumptuous. Though it is technically devoted to celebrating the equality of man, it often surpasses palaces in its beauty. The company is also enticing. As the congregants start to sing "Gloria in Excelsis," we are likely to feel that the crowd is nothing like the one that we encounter at the shopping mall or the bus stop. We gaze up at the vaulted, star-studded ceiling and rehearse in unison the words "Lord, come, live in your people and strengthen them by your grace." We leave thinking that humanity may not be such a wretched thing after all.

As a result, we may start to feel that we could work a little less feverishly, because we see that the respect and security we hope to gain through our careers is already available to us in a warm and impressive community that imposes no worldly requirements on us for its welcome.

If the Mass has done its job and we are awake to its lessons, it should succeed by its close in shifting us at least fractionally off our accustomed egocentric axes. It should also have given us a few ideas for mending some of the more dispiriting aspects of our fractured modern world.

One of these ideas relates to the benefits of taking people into a distinct space where they can be isolated from the usual ideology of the mercantile world. The venue itself ought to be attractive enough to evoke enthusiasm for the notion of a group. It should inspire visitors to suspend their customary frightened egoism in favor of a joyful immersion in a collective spirit—an unlikely scenario in the majority of modern so-called "community centers," insultingly designed structures whose appearance paradoxically serves to confirm the inadvisability of joining anything communal.

The Mass also contains a lesson about the importance of rules for directing people in their interactions with one another. The liturgical complexity of a Missal—the way in which this book of instructions for celebrating a Mass compels the congregants to look up, stand, kneel, sing, pray, drink and eat at given points—speaks to an essential aspect of human nature. To foster a sense of communal intimacy and to ensure that profound and dignified personal bonds can be forged, a tightly choreographed agenda of activities may be more effective than simply leaving a group to mingle aimlessly on its own.

A final lesson from the Mass is closely connected with its history. Before it was a service, before the congregants sat in seats facing an altar behind which a priest held up a wafer and a cup of wine, the Mass was a meal. What we now know as the Eucharist began as an occasion when early Christians put aside their work and domestic obligations and gathered around a table (usually laden with wine, lamb and loaves of unleavened bread) in order to commemorate the Last Supper. They talked, prayed and renewed their commitments to Christ and to one another. Like Jews at the Sabbath meal, Christians understood that it is when we satiate our bodily hunger that we are often readiest to direct our minds to the needs of others.

Kyoko Hamada/Gallery Stock

The contemporary world is not lacking in places where we can dine well in company, but what's significant is that there are almost no venues that can help us to transform strangers into friends.

In honor of the most important Christian virtue, these gatherings became known as agape (love, in Greek) feasts and were regularly held by Christian communities in the period between Jesus's death and the Council of Laodicea in A.D. 364. Complaints about the excessive exuberance of some of these meals eventually led the early Church to the regrettable decision to ban agape feasts and to suggest that the faithful eat at home with their families instead—and only afterward gather for the spiritual banquet that we now know as the Eucharist.

But the Mass is hardly alone as an instructive example, and community is certainly not our only unmet need in the modern world. My premise is that even those who aren't religious can find religion sporadically useful, interesting and consoling and should consider how we might import certain religious ideas and practices into the secular realm.

Everyone stands to learn something from the ways in which religion delivers sermons, promotes morality, engenders a spirit of community, inspires travel, trains minds and encourages gratitude at the beauty of life. In a world beset by fundamentalists of both the believing and the secular variety, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.

Religion serves two central needs that secular society has not been able to meet with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in harmonious communities, despite our deeply-rooted selfish and violent impulses; second, the need to cope with the pain that arises from professional failure, troubled relationships, the death of loved ones and our own decay and demise.

Religions are a repository of occasionally ingenious concepts for trying to assuage some of the most persistent and unattended ills of secular life. They merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition and for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have. They have managed to combine theories about ethics and metaphysics with practical involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, hostelry, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture—a range of interests whose scope puts to shame the achievements of even the greatest secular movements and innovators.

Masterfile

Cathedral La Seu in evening light, Palma de Majorca, Spain

It feels especially relevant to talk of meals, because our modern lack of a proper sense of community is importantly reflected in the way we eat. The contemporary world is not, of course, lacking in places where we can dine well in company—cities typically pride themselves on the sheer number and quality of their restaurants—but what's significant is that there are almost no venues that can help us to transform strangers into friends.

The large number of people who patronize restaurants suggests that they are refuges from anonymity and coldness, but in fact they have no systematic mechanism for introducing patrons to one another, to dispel their mutual suspicions, to break up the clans into which they segregate themselves or to get them to open up their hearts and share their vulnerabilities with others. At a modern restaurant, the focus is on the food and the décor, never on opportunities for extending and deepening affections.

Patrons tend to leave restaurants much as they entered them, the experience having merely reaffirmed existing tribal divisions. Like so many institutions in the modern city (libraries, nightclubs, coffee shops), restaurants know full well how to bring people into the same space, but they lack any means of encouraging them to make meaningful contact with one another once they are there.

With the benefits of the Mass and the drawbacks of contemporary dining in mind, we can imagine an ideal restaurant of the future, an Agape Restaurant. Such a restaurant would have an open door, a modest entrance fee and an attractively designed interior. In its seating arrangement, the groups and ethnicities into which we commonly segregate ourselves would be broken up; family members and couples would be spaced apart. Everyone would be safe to approach and address, without fear of rebuff or reproach. By simple virtue of being in the space, guests would be signaling—as in a church—their allegiance to a spirit of community and friendship.

Though there wouldn't be religious imagery on the walls, some kind of art that displayed examples of human vulnerability, whether in relation to physical suffering, poverty, anxiety or romantic discord, would bring more of who we actually are into the public realm, lending to our connections with others a new and candid tenor.

Religions are aware that the moments around the ingestion of food are propitious to moral education. It is as if the imminent prospect of something to eat seduces our normally resistant selves into showing some of the same generosity to others as the table has shown to us. Religions also know enough about our sensory, nonintellectual dimensions to be aware that we cannot be kept on a virtuous track simply through the medium of words. They know that their captive audience is likely to accept a trade-off between ideas and nourishment—and so they turn meals into disguised ethical lessons.

Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson

Temple to perspective: This structure would represent the age of the Earth, with each centimeter of height equating to 1 million years. A tiny band of gold a mere millimeter thick at the bottom of the roughly 150- foot structure would stand for mankind's time on Earth.

Before our first sip of wine, religious communities offer us a thought that can be swallowed with the liquid like a tablet. They make us listen to a homily in the gratified interval between two courses. And they use specific types of food and drink to represent abstract concepts, telling Christians, for example, that bread stands for the sacred body of Christ, informing Jews that the Passover dish of crushed apples and nuts is the mortar that was used by their enslaved ancestors to build the warehouses of Egypt and teaching Zen Buddhists that their cups of slowly brewing tea are tokens of the transitory nature of happiness in a floating world.

Taking their seats at an Agape Restaurant, guests would find in front of them guidebooks reminiscent of the Haggadah (the text followed at a Passover Seder) or the Missal, laying out the rules for how to behave at the meal. No one would be left alone to find their way to an interesting conversation with another, any more than it would be expected of participants at a Passover meal or in the Eucharist that they might manage independently to alight on the salient aspects of the history of the tribes of Israel or achieve a sense of communion with God.

The Book of Agape would direct diners to speak to one another for prescribed lengths of time on predefined topics. Like the famous questions that the youngest child at the table is assigned by the Haggadah to ask during the Passover ceremony ("Why is this night different from all other nights?" "Why do we eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs?" and so on), these talking points would be carefully crafted for a specific purpose, to coax guests away from customary expressions of pride ("What do you do?" "Where do your children go to school?") and toward a more sincere revelation of themselves ("What do you regret?" "Whom can you not forgive?" "What do you fear?").

The liturgy would inspire charity in the deepest sense, a capacity to respond with complexity and compassion to the existence of our fellow creatures. One would be privy to accounts of fear, guilt, rage, melancholy, unrequited love and infidelity that would generate an impression of our collective insanity and endearing fragility.

Thanks to the Agape Restaurant, our fear of strangers would recede. The poor would eat with the rich, the black with the white, the orthodox with the secular, workers with managers, scientists with artists. The claustrophobic pressure to derive all of our satisfactions from our existing relationships would ease, as would our desire to climb ever higher in social status.

The notion that we could mend some of the tatters in the modern social fabric through an initiative as modest as a communal meal may seem offensive to those who trust in the power of legislative and political solutions to cure society's ills. But these restaurants would not be an alternative to traditional political methods. They would be a prior step, taken to humanize one another in our imaginations.

Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism have made significant contributions to political life, but their relevance to the problems of community are arguably never greater than when they depart from the modern political script and remind us that there is also value to be had in standing in a big hall singing a hymn or in ceremoniously washing a stranger's feet or in sitting at a table with neighbors and partaking of lamb stew and conversation. These rituals, as much as the deliberations inside parliaments and law courts, are what help to hold our fractious and fragile societies together.

—From "Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion" by Alain de Botton, to be published March 6 by Pantheon. Copyright by Alain de Botton.

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FT: A missed chance to quell the fanatics

A missed chance to quell the fanatics

By Clive Crook

Published: August 22 2010 17:43 | Last updated: August 22 2010 17:43

How much trouble Barack Obama and the Democratic party are in as the US heads towards November’s elections is debatable, but few would deny that the past week has set their prospects back. The president may have hoped to calm the controversy over the proposed mosque and Islamic cultural centre near Ground Zero in Manhattan, but he inflamed it. His supporters have divided on the issue, with many accusing the larger part of the electorate of bigotry. This is not good.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Clive Crook - Oct-15

Clive Crook’s Washington blog - Jul-26

Editorial Comment: Obama should lead on American values - Aug-19

The faltering economic recovery is Mr Obama’s and the Democrats’ main political liability, of course. When employment eventually revives, so will their popularity. Presidents later celebrated as great successes – such as Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan – had poll ratings worse than Mr Obama’s at this stage in their first terms and lost seats in Congress two years in.

The worry for the Democrats is that Mr Obama’s approval ratings may not have bottomed out and that his actions lately have made things worse. The needlessly extended controversy over the New York mosque is a case in point. At the very least, this was a missed opportunity for the kind of leadership Mr Obama is capable of exercising.

The row had been simmering for months, receiving little attention outside New York. A week ago, Mr Obama thrust himself into the quarrel. He said the constitution protected religious freedom and that the mosque’s developers were within their rights to build their centre on the chosen site. While many Democrats were still hailing this as an act of great political courage, Mr Obama retreated: he was not commenting on the project’s wisdom, only its legality. He had no intention of saying whether putting the mosque near the site of the Twin Towers was prudent.

With that, the issue went national. Candidates in November will be asked where they stand – and the Democrats are split. Harry Reid, the party’s leader in the Senate, faces a difficult election fight in Nevada: he said the mosque should go somewhere else. Taking the opposite line, Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, said opponents of the project should be asked where their funding was coming from – as though the affair is just another rightwing conspiracy.

If the president had said what he did in a single statement, and explained himself better, the fuss would have been much less. After all, as far as its logic goes, his position is perfectly defensible. But he was clumsy. The two-part statement looked vacillating. It is never a good idea to make your supporters look foolish, as those who praised his first statement soon did. Most of all, it was unwise to seem out of touch with the concerns of the nearly 70 per cent of Americans who oppose putting the mosque so close to Ground Zero, or to imply they needed remedial teaching on the First Amendment.

These errors fit readily into broader themes of criticism levelled at the president: that he is weak (something even his allies complain of) and that he is out of touch with mainstream America. The row over the mosque pales in comparison with the economy as an issue hurting the Democrats’ prospects in November, but it is not nothing. It resonates.

It was a missed opportunity as well. There are powerful strands of fanaticism in US politics. They have been there from the beginning. In many ways, indeed, the country’s political culture celebrates fanatics. This is by no means all bad. You could call it energy and candour, great American virtues, carried to excess. And the genius of the constitution is that it holds the nation’s angry factions in balance, making it much harder than in most systems of democratic government for one to tyrannise another. Still, the dangers are obvious.

The fanatical tendency rises and falls. At the moment, it is in full surge. If you disagree with somebody, you affirm the strength of your conviction by attacking his good faith: he is not just wrong, he is evil. Liberals reflexively accuse conservatives of bigotry; conservatives reflexively accuse liberals of cowardice or communism or other kinds of treason. Even though there are good legitimate arguments on both sides of the mosque debate, these charges were pressed as soon as it went national. Sometimes it seems that the country’s entire political class is just looking for the next excuse to declare war on the other side.

Many Americans, disenchanted with Washington and its ways, hoped that Mr Obama would ameliorate this bitterly divisive culture. This was a large part of his appeal in 2008 and helps explain why expectations of his presidency were so high. For various reasons – not least, Republican intransigence – those hopes have been disappointed. In this case, though, Mr Obama had a chance to assert himself.

When race came to the fore in his presidential campaign, in the form of the Jeremiah Wright scandal, he responded brilliantly, with a fine unifying speech that challenged the country to be calm, sober and enlightened. The mosque debate was a moment for a speech of that kind.

Whether or not he made the case for the project to go ahead – as, on balance, I think he should – he could have reminded the country of its common purposes, he could have sought to unify, he could have insisted on tolerance and understanding on both sides. That was the Barack Obama the country elected. Where did he go?

[email protected]

More columns at www.ft.com/clivecrook

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

Philip Zimbardo on "The Secret Powers of Time"

In this wonderfully animated video, Professor Philip Zimbardo (of the famed Stanford Prison Experiment) "conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world."

FT: Does science need religion?

Does science need religion?

By Harry Eyres

Published: November 13 2009 23:52 | Last updated: November 13 2009 23:52

Galileo Galilei appeared before the Roman Inquisition in 1632

Humility, genuine humility, is always a good place to start from. But it is not the disposition that most of us probably associate with the world’s major organised religions. Individual religious persons may be humble but the churches, orders, mosques and so on tend to project pomp and certainty (otherwise they are accused of faithlessness). I was brought up within a peculiar strain of English Roman Catholicism which, in those days, combined stupendous social snobbery with scientific ignorance and dismissiveness of all who questioned its authoritarian precepts.

You could forgive some of this on the grounds of the centuries of persecution, but I have always struggled to forgive all of it. I was so alarmed at the likely fate of my ungodly, notionally Protestant but generally hard-drinking, rugby-playing grandfather that when he died I spent hours on All Souls’ Day in the school chapel saying prayers (so-called “indulgences”) to get him off years of punishment in purgatory.

We little Catholic boys were encouraged to believe that Catholics were better – that is holier – than Protestants, not to mention agnostics, atheists, Muslims or Methodists (socially beyond the pale). Did this mean that my Catholic mother was better than my Protestant/atheist father? Reproductively, it seemed that Catholics were trumps; if we had children, they would automatically become Catholics, whatever religion or lack of religion their mother professed.

You can imagine then that I came to the New Orleans Symposium on religion, science and the environment armed with a good deal of scepticism. Would the splendidly dressed religious eminences acknowledge the role that the dogmatism and intellectual blinkeredness of their religious traditions had played in creating the ecological crisis, or in generally messing up the world?

Hearteningly, there were signs that they might. Metropolitan John of Pergamon (of the Orthodox church) and one of the world’s most distinguished theologians, set the tone in his background paper. He fingered parts of the Christian tradition, notably neo-Platonism and Gnosticism, for their disdain of the body and nature, and the Calvinist ethos of capitalism, which views the world simply as raw material for exploitation. Heavy and apparently abstruse stuff, but not so abstruse when you looked out of the window and saw the polluted Mississippi flow by, carrying its load of pesticide and fertiliser effluent into the Gulf of Mexico to create the world’s largest marine “dead zone”.

Environmentalists have long berated Christians for following the Biblical injunction to dominate and populate the world with scant regard for the intrinsic value, balance and order of nature. But here on the banks of Old Man River we heard a message from the Pope stressing that “nature is prior to us” and contains its own “grammar which sets forth ends and criteria for its wise use, not its reckless exploitation”. Even more amazingly, we were addressed by the wise and sensible Rev Jim Ball of the Environmental Evangelical Network, proving that not all north American Evangelicals believe in hastening the end of the world.

In the past, and in my own past, religions got a bad name among the open-minded by fearing and opposing science and scholarship. This fear and opposition ranged from the heavy-duty persecutions of the Inquisition, burning Giordano Bruno and forbidding Galileo to disseminate his world-changing observations of planetary movements, to the silliness of those who taught me that the first five books of the Old Testament were dictated directly by God to Moses.

In New Orleans I saw religious scholars and leaders reaching out in genuine humility to other intellectual traditions; not being afraid of science, but actively embracing and using it. Of course you can see that religion needs science; it is no longer possible to deny certain kinds of geophysical and biological evidence without cutting yourself off from the community of the intellectually curious. But the more interesting question is whether science needs religion.

“Science”, according to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “manipulates things and gives up living in them.” Or you could say that science illuminates many things but cannot tell us what they mean to us, in human terms.

What religion can bring to science, and the pressing task of planet-healing, is not the arrogant certitude that brooks no argument but passion and community.

Abused and dangerous words these may be. Passions can be whipped up by obscurantists and community too easily becomes a meaningless token. But the Latin origins of the word “passion” take us to suffering and to the cognate word “compassion”.

Science gives us repeated and intensifying warnings that the earth, our home, is in bad shape, and that we are causing potentially disastrous disruption to the great planetary systems of weather and cleansing and renewal. But it leaves us in the lurch, with the bad news. Religion and religious art, at their best, can offer communal means both of mourning our inescapable losses (think of the Bach Passions) and of celebration. Intellectual proofs on their own have never been enough to change human behaviour; we need emotional reconnection.

[email protected]
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.

Excerpt:

Mortenson told me why he has devoted his life to building 131 secular schools for girls in Pakistan and another 48 in Afghanistan: “The money is money well spent. These are secular schools that will bring a new generation of kids that will have a broader view of the world. We focus on areas where there is no education. Religious extremism flourishes in areas of isolation and conflict.

“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”

===

July 19, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Pushghar, Afghanistan

I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask: Why are we here? Who cares about the Taliban? Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that’s why God created cruise missiles.

But every time I start writing that column, something stills my hand. This week it was something very powerful. I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of “Three Cups of Tea,” open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, “Let’s just get out of here.”

Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.

Which is why it was no accident that Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — spent half a day in order to reach Mortenson’s newest school and cut the ribbon. Getting there was fun. Our Chinook helicopter threaded its way between mountain peaks, from Kabul up through the Panjshir Valley, before landing in a cloud of dust at the village of Pushghar. Imagine if someone put a new, one-story school on the moon, and you’ll appreciate the rocky desolateness of this landscape.

But there, out front, was Mortenson, dressed in traditional Afghan garb. He was surrounded by bearded village elders and scores of young Afghan boys and girls, who were agog at the helicopter, and not quite believing that America’s “warrior chief” — as Admiral Mullen’s title was loosely translated into Urdu — was coming to open the new school.

While the admiral passed out notebooks, Mortenson told me why he has devoted his life to building 131 secular schools for girls in Pakistan and another 48 in Afghanistan: “The money is money well spent. These are secular schools that will bring a new generation of kids that will have a broader view of the world. We focus on areas where there is no education. Religious extremism flourishes in areas of isolation and conflict.

“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”

It is no accident, Mortenson noted, that since 2007, the Taliban and its allies have bombed, burned or shut down more than 640 schools in Afghanistan and 350 schools in Pakistan, of which about 80 percent are schools for girls. This valley, controlled by Tajik fighters, is secure, but down south in Helmand Province, where the worst fighting is today, the deputy minister of education said that Taliban extremists have shut 75 of the 228 schools in the last year. This is the real war of ideas. The Taliban want public mosques, not public schools. The Muslim militants recruit among the illiterate and impoverished in society, so the more of them the better, said Mortenson.

This new school teaches grades one through six. I asked some girls through an interpreter what they wanted to be when they grow up: “Teacher,” shouted one. “Doctor,” shouted another. Living here, those are the only two educated role models these girls encounter. Where were they going to school before Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute and the U.S. State Department joined with the village elders to get this secular public school built? “The mosque,” the girls said.

Mortenson said he was originally critical of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he’s changed his views: “The U.S. military has gone through a huge learning curve. They really get it. It’s all about building relationships from the ground up, listening more and serving the people of Afghanistan.”

So there you have it. In grand strategic terms, I still don’t know if this Afghan war makes sense anymore. I was dubious before I arrived, and I still am. But when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral — as if they were their first dolls — it’s hard to say: “Let’s just walk away.” Not yet.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

NY Times: Iran's Second Sex

June 27, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Iran’s Second Sex

By ROGER COHEN

TEHRAN

From Day 1, Iran’s women stood in the vanguard. Their voices from rooftops were loudest, and their defiance in the streets boldest. “Stand, don’t run,” Nazanine told me as the baton-wielding police charged up handsome Vali Asr avenue on the day after the fraudulent election. She stood.

Images assail me: a slender woman clutching her stomach outside Tehran University after the blow; a tall woman gesticulating to the men behind her to advance on the shiny-shirted Basij militia; women shedding tears of distilled indignation; and that young woman who screamed, “We are all so angry. Will they kill us all?”

How can a revolution kill its children? The post-1979 generation has risen, not alone, but in the lead. Perhaps Iran cannot be an exception to the rule that revolutions devour themselves.

A friend told me he no longer recognizes his wife. She’d been of the reluctantly acquiescent school. Now, “She’s a revolutionary.” I followed as she led us up onto the roof. The “death to the dictator” that surged from her into the night was of rare ferocity.

Women marched in 1979, too. But when the revolution was won, women were pushed out. Their subjugation became a pillar of the Islamic state. One woman told me that she had been 20 when she fought to oust the shah. “It’s simple,” she said. “We wanted freedom then, and we don’t have it now.”

In a way it is simple: laws that can force a girl into marriage at 13; discriminatory laws on inheritance; the segregated beaches on the Caspian; the humiliation of arrest for a neck revealed or an ankle-length skirt (a gust of wind might show a forbidden flash of leg); the suffocation that leads one artist I know to raise her hands to her neck.

Yes, it’s simple. From the outset, the regime targeted women, calculating that the patriarchal culture of the country would embrace the idea of an Islamic diktat that “put women in their place.”

But then again nothing in Iran is simple. One benefit of the massive show of resistance to a stolen vote, and future, has been to awaken Americans to the civic vitality of Iranian society — a real country with real people rather than a bunch of zealous clerics posing a nuclear problem.

This is a sea change. Iran has been denuclearized, not in the sense that the problem has gone away (on the contrary), but in the sense that a rounded picture, beyond to bomb or not to bomb, has formed.

Say Iran and murdered Neda Agha-Sultan surges where a bearded mullah once stood. Young, modern, connected, Neda just wanted to live her life. She personifies a certain Iran I’ve tried to evoke since the beginning of this year.

In some senses, women of her 20-something generation have benefited from the revolution; I told you to forget simplicity. It took an ayatollah to tell traditional families to educate their daughters. Today 60 percent of university students are women, about double the figure in 1982.

Here we stand close to the tragedy of this election. The vote offered an opportunity to bridge the gap between a fast-changing society of highly educated women and the regime. Past elections have served that purpose, nudging the clerical establishment in reformist directions.

Instead, hard-liners around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad opted for schism, a historic error. The Iran of yesterday is gone, the Iran of tomorrow not yet born.

I don’t want to suggest that Iran is a nation of women thirsting to cast off their chadors. As Saeed Leylaz told me before he was thrown in jail along with most of Iran’s reformist brain trust, “Our feet are in traditionalism and our heads in modernism.” Zahra Rahnavard, the strong-willed wife of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, troubled as she inspired.

When a friend asked one Ahmadinejad supporter his reasons, the reply was brusque: because “all the whores are with Moussavi.” Cultural battle lines of great clarity have been drawn since June 12.

Women are angry with the state, of course. But they are also angry with the passive way men have accepted discrimination. Be strong! Fight harder! These are immediate messages summoned from old frustrations.

Their courage and pain haunt me. We need Delacroix to paint them. We need President Obama to put engagement — still the right medium-term objective — on hold in their name.

Islam has a lot to say about the rights of women; the mullahs of Qom have lots of training in how to say the opposite of what they said before. The revolution might have bent toward the women it fashioned. But it has stiffened against what it birthed, never wise.

I asked one woman about her fears. She said sometimes she imagines an earthquake in Tehran. She dashes out but forgets her hijab. She stands in the ruins, hair loose and paralyzed, awaiting her punishment. And she looked at me wide-eyed as if to say: do you understand, does the world understand our desperation?

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: Outside Edge: Wit and wisdom in 140 characters

Outside Edge: Wit and wisdom in 140 characters

By Ben Fenton

Published: April 10 2009 19:03 | Last updated: April 10 2009 19:03

Can one express ideas that would change the world, simply inspire it, or just allow oneself to be heard, in a box containing 140 characters?

That is the test of Twitter, the latest plague of distraction to spread around the world, challenging the verbose and the tongue-tied alike.

Would the seminal thoughts of Man endure the squeeze of Twitter? Could we, in 140 spaces, prove a rose by any other name can spell as Tweet?

The Ten Commandments are tricky: acknowledging God (101 chars), not taking His name in vain (128) or honouring mum and dad (108) fit a Tweet.

Commandments to forsake other gods (515), keep the Sabbath (493) or shun various kinds of coveting (192), though, are too prolix to Twitter.

However, He could safely ban murder, adultery, theft and bearing false witness in one Tweet, leaving 10 spaces for an @Moses repeat twitter.

The New Testament offers us no stronger chance of finding a concise version of enlightenment. After all, parables and beatitudes need space.

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure of heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are those other chaps.

But if divine words may not be clipped, perhaps the profound communications of Man himself lend themselves more to 140-space online editing?

To be or not to be? That is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or, er, not.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable um.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the (cont’d).

So, sonnets are out. Very brief limericks maybe. But no big multiclause sentences. No complexity of ideas. Just the soul of the soul of wit.

On the other hand, one of the greatest ideas of all – e=mc2 – is said and done in 5 keystrokes. Albeit that explaining it takes rather more.

And we can say a very great deal – I♥U – in almost no space at all. So is language to be celebrated for ineffable variety, depth and colour?

Or its use as data? For a 1 or a 0 are all we need to make and keep the A and Ω of life. We got to the moon on the back of a few good nmbrs.

Nxt, the vxt ? of txt. Shd we spk shrt to max msg? Or are there times when, in the frigidity of abbreviation, extenuation is its own reward?

Perhaps we should consider the thoughts of one of those who gave us this strangely addictive form of curt communication, namely Jack Dorsey.

Twitter’s founder said: “One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.” Twice even, given this tweet was a mere 65 long.

Twitter cuts news to telex language: banks unhave hope moneywise. But is that such a bad thing? After all, every reporter needs a good editor.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

IHT: Flying under cover

Flying under cover

By Melati Abdul Hamid

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia:

I travel abroad quite a bit, both for work and for pleasure. Most of the time, I travel alone. Needless to say, whether one would want to admit it or not, traveling on airplanes nowadays is testing to many, especially if you ’re recognizable as Muslim.

One can take it in different ways, either a) with resentment, which does not help the situation much and is bad for your blood pressure if you are a frequent flyer; or b) with a little bit of humor and  amusement.

Most of the time, I choose to be amused, accepting the idiosyncrasies as part of the adventure, acting as if I am a character in a P.G. Wodehouse story, only without Jeeves.

Below are some points that I hope can be of help to you in your  travels.

-Look normal in your passport picture. This is harder than it sounds, I know. It is also an uphill battle, since cameras that take passport photos seem to have a special feature that works like a distorting mirror to make anyone look like a brewing psychopath.

One way to overcome this is by smiling in your passport photo. This may be hard, as the photo is sometimes taken at the passport office, where you have waited for three hours in a badly ventilated and crowded room.

The problem is that sometimes they do not allow you to smile in your photo. The United States, for example, expressly states that one should not be smiling in the visa photo.

I was told that this is for face verification purposes. Apparently smiling distorts the face and may render it unrecognizable by the machine. I guess this makes sense. In the event that you are not allowed to smile, try to make a humble, honorable and decent expression, like you are meeting your mother-in-law for the first time.

-Use headphones to listen to your MP3 player at the airport. If you are like me and live your life with constant background music, you would definitely prefer to spend the time waiting at an airport with your iPod on. However, I have realized that a woman in a headscarf traveling alone and listening to her iPod through earphones is a cause for concern to many.

Why? Because the onlooker can only see a) the headscarf and b) a white wire that suspiciously stretches from her scarf to an unknown device in her pocket.

On one occasion (I swear this is true!) the man who sat across me at the boarding gate at Newark Airport was eyeing my wire so nervously while trying to avoid eye contact that I looked straight at him, slowly took out my iPod and held it out to him. He had to smile.

- If you are taken aside at the airport immigration section, be calm and answer questions with the simple truth. I have had my share of being escorted to a special office at the airport immigration section. Maybe they were on a lookout for a 20-something, 5-foot-tall Oriental-looking Muslim girl in a headscarf traveling alone. They were especially suspicious when I was returning alone to the United States after a five-day trip to the Caribbean.

Flipping through my passport, the officer asked, “Why did you go to St. Maarten?” My answer: “Because travelocity.com was having a great promotion and I wanted to celebrate having sat for the New York Bar exam.”

I also know of a friend who was asked by the airport immigration officer to explain each stamp in his passport.

Officer: ‘‘Why did you go to Egypt?’’

Friend: ‘‘To see the pyramids.’’

I also learned that it helps to slip in that you are a law student/lawyer who specializes in constitutional law. But only use this if it’s true. And no, watching Law & Order is not exactly the same thing.

-Talking points. When one is stuck for hours on a plane sitting elbow-to-elbow with a stranger, there is bound to be interaction. After the polite smile and the ‘‘hellos,’’ a few things may occur.

One, the conversation may die. In this case, one only has to put on the headphones and enjoy the in-flight movies or sleep.

Two, the conversation continues. This can be tricky if the other person does not speak your language. I once had a 45-minute conversation with an Italian lady. She spoke Italian, I spoke English, and we understood each other through hand gestures. Actually, it was fun.

At other times, one is faced with thinly veiled prejudice, with or without malice. There are those who are just a little too surprised when they hear that I am a lawyer and a Harvard graduate, apparently shocked to find out that I was not forced into marriage at 16 and do not have seven kids yet.

There are also those who feel the need to talk to me about “Muslim issues,” perhaps feeling that they should talk to me about something I can relate to. Oppression of women tends to crop up (perhaps because the topic terrorism is a no-no on a plane). I do not mind talking about it, unless I find myself being made personally liable for something that happened in a village in Africa.

Sometimes, I get compliments that are meant well but do not necessarily translate that way. For example, an American next to me once said, “You speak English well.” I smiled and replied, “Thanks. You do too.”

Then there are the people who, for some reason, are overly enthusiastic about being seated next to you. In such situations, I can’t help but feel like an exotic animal under observation. These people are nice, but they sometimes go too far in trying to identify with your Muslim identity. I often feel bad for having to disappoint them, as in this encounter:

Enthusiastic stranger: ‘‘I see that you are wearing a purple scarf. What is the reason you wear purple instead of other colors?’’

Me: ‘‘Um, it matches my top.’’

Once in a while, one does get to meet the perfect stranger, one who does not have any problem wrapping his/her mind around the fact that you are really just another person.

That’s when you find that the journey is too short, even if it is between the farthest points on earth (I believe the Kuala Lumpur-New York route may qualify).

Melati Abdul Hamid is a government lawyer in Malaysia practicing public international law.

IHT: Muslim women in Egypt enter man's realm of the mosque

 

Muslim women in Egypt enter man's realm of the mosque

 

By Hadeel Al-Shalchi

The Associated Press

Monday, January 5, 2009

CAIRO: Amira Khairy is mobbed by housewives kissing her cheeks in greeting as she arrives to give a lesson on reciting the Koran to women at Al Sedeeq Mosque in a Cairo suburb. Students set up chairs for the class, and soon the hum of chanting female voices fills one of the building's larger chambers.

Up to 1,000 women may show up for the Koran lessons or twice-weekly religious lectures by women. On any given day, several hundred women buzz around the mosque, organizing clothing drives, cooking meals for the poor or teaching women to read. Al Sedeeq also has medical clinics and a day care center for children of women who do volunteer work at the mosque.

All the activities are organized by women - not the mosque's administrators, who are men. On one recent day, the only men seen in the building were workers doing renovations and worshipers who popped in to perform one of the five daily prayers required by Islam.

It is a startling sight in Egypt, where mosques have long been a man's realm. The few Egyptian women who appeared at mosques in the past had come to pray - usually in small corners that were partitioned off - or to make appeals at the shrines of holy figures, hoping for marriage, pregnancy or good grades for their children.

While men often socialize in mosques, women have traditionally been encouraged to practice their religion at home, where they can care for their children and husbands.

"When I was young, we wouldn't even go to pray in the mosque," said Khairy, the teacher. "It was a place for us to tour on holidays, like visitors."

Now, with religiosity increasing in Egypt, more women want to engage in public prayer, increase their knowledge of Islam and do volunteer work in the community. Many Egyptian women have already had to balance their traditional place in the home with public roles at universities and jobs, so they tend to ask, "Why not a place in the mosque as well?"

These women are not Western-style feminists seeking to change the faith's teachings on women. But their presence is challenging assumptions on women's place and turning some mosques into women-friendly social hubs.

While no statistics exist on the increasing number of Egyptian women praying outside the home, several religious scholars in Cairo say there is a clear trend of more women attending mosques and playing a greater religious role.

Khairy is typical of much of the new breed of religious women. She is in her 50s; she studied engineering at a university, but rather than pursue a career, she married and stayed home to care for children. About 10 years ago, she wanted to deepen her faith, so she and a group of women started meeting in each other's homes to memorize the Koran.

More women joined the study circle, and several years ago they began meeting at Al Sedeeq Mosque, which had just been built near Cairo's international airport. They found a woman with an Islamic studies degree who volunteered to give lectures on how to pray and perform other rituals and on why women should wear the hijab, or head scarf.

As hundreds of women from across Cairo joined in, the charity projects multiplied. The women are now so organized that the volunteers wear a uniform: white scarf and blue dress.

Al Sedeeq Mosque's administrators expanded its women's section to accommodate the volunteers. But not all are so welcoming.

Egypt is one of the most progressive Middle East nations on the issue of women attending mosques. In the Gulf, many mosques have no space dedicated to women, and more women can be seen at prayers or Friday sermons in Egypt than in many other Arab countries.

Still, Egyptian women are often told, even by some female Islamic thinkers, that they should stay at home.

"The best place for a woman to pray remains her house," said one of them, Souad Saleh, who teaches at Al Azhar University, the pre-eminent Sunni Muslim institution for Islamic studies.

Mosque administrators are universally men, and many are reluctant to allocate greater space to women, saying that more men attend prayers. At most mosques, women must enter through side doors, and women's sections are not always air-conditioned or carpeted.

But Abdel-Moeti Bayoumi, a theology professor at Al Azhar University, said men must realize that times are changing.

"I always tell men that the days of locking up women away from society and useful work or study is backward and dangerous," he said. "It is not permitted in Islam to prevent a woman from praying in the mosque."

Najah Naji, a 22-year-old woman who tries to visit different mosques around Cairo to pray and study, says she is often told that the women's prayer section is closed or otherwise unavailable.

"Men feel like the leadership will be taken from underneath them," said Naji, who has memorized the Koran. "Even an educated man is raised with a mother who stayed at home and served his father, so he'd be worried I wouldn't be able to do the same for him. It's going to take a lot of time for that attitude to change."

Al Sedeeq Mosque is one of the most dramatic examples of women's taking a bigger role. More often, small groups of women make forays into modest neighborhood mosques.

At a tiny mosque tucked between apartment buildings near the Giza Pyramids on the outskirts of Greater Cairo, Hana Muhammad sits with a group of 12 older women. They cram into a small room every week to share stories, exchange news of grandchildren, vent about their lives at home and recite the Koran.

"The mosque is a softer place now that women have entered it," Muhammad said. "If a woman in need comes for help, she'd never knock on the door if only men were inside."

Members of Muhammad's circle said a woman with several university degrees and a career should not be told she cannot enter a mosque.

"Women started to force themselves on the mosque because they realized their faith allowed them to do so," Muhammad said. "It was a religious awakening. We understood we could do it, so we did."