Month: July 2018

what do you owe your country?

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do you owe your country loyalty?

do you owe the state your time, your money?

do you feel a need to repay the state, somehow?

to give back? to stay?

ok, now. what does your country owe you?

does it owe you freedom?

does it owe you safety? does it offer you protection from violence?

does it value what you have to give?

would it accept you if it saw you for all you were?

would it cause you harm?

should you honor a social contract that your country won’t?

should it be demanded? should it be expected?

is being, giving, staying anyway an act of duty or an act of love?

will your country return your love?

is it okay to love yourself if it won’t?

religious law and human fallibility

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i’ve been asked about my views on institutionalizing religion as part of the state, especially in matters of regulating or punishing behavior, or my views on the theology of having the state. my feelings about it aren’t very subtle. the idea of people being intent on playing god about who gets joy, misery, freedom, pain, life, or death is deeply creepy to me. it either requires certainty in your own infallibility, or not caring about the possible consequences of your fallibility. both of those are things that should disqualify you from any religious authority, or any authority at all.

i don’t even mean a belief in infallibility in the sense of, an innocent man being punished or a guilty one let go, though that’s part of it. i mean the belief that your particular interpretation is the right one, a belief that of all the brilliant and pious minds with differing interpretations of doctrine around the world, that you are more correct whether by luck or character than anyone else, that you are guided by god in a way that others, coming to different conclusions from the same fundamental sources of religious knowledge. of ten thousand scholars throughout history with a devotion to their faith and access to the same scripture who have ever opined on this topic, believing that you must be the most right one is a certainty in your own infallibility that denies your human nature and ascribes something to you that is the sole domain of god.

god is omniscient and all-knowing. no human is. the first step on our relationship with god is understanding that we don’t really know much about it. god is unknowable, god is incomprehensible to humankind; what we know the word of god and the attributes of god. filling in the rest of a vast belief system to this degree of specificity requires plucking a level of certainty from the fourteen-hundred-year history of a faith with a billion adherents across multiple continents that might not be possible without

there are aspects that we know for sure: we know muhammad (pbuh) and we know the quran. beyond that, it’s an exercise of which particular lineage of scholarship you end up having followed down the centuries. and not just any history, either- the material history of islam wasn’t just a matter of interest for the history books, but a cornerstone of the way people practiced their entire faith, and either a potential source of or threat to the legitimacy of the current ruling establishment. control over that history was, and remains, extremely powerful. i am aware of my own fallibility. i don’t know if the history i know is the right history. i don’t know which details might have been shifted by conservative leaders to justify establishment power, or which details may have been added by ideologues in academia. i don’t know which translations of arabic, a famously subtle and complex language with more ambiguity and possibilities of interpretation than any other major world language, back up my positions, or even whether verbal and oral histories would have captured those subtleties in their exact form instead of as the listener heard and understood it. i don’t know which philosophical and judicial scholarship over the centuries was brought into this history, and which were left out, and what selection bias might have shaped my knowledge of islamic history, thought, and practice.

for example, there might have been ideological changes like this:

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or more indirect ways of power trying to shape our literal body of knowledge on religion in ways that bolsters their objectives:

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all in all, i don’t think any of us can know if we’re the ones that have it right. there are scholars throughout history with at least as much knowledge as, if not more than, anyone else living who have had a thousand different exegeses, muhammad (pbuh) was privy to divine knowledge, and the khulafa ur-rashidun lived alongside muhammad (pbuh) and knew him and his thinking firsthand, knew directly how to interpret all the various details of the quran and quranic law. they could trust that they knew how to apply their state power accordingly. we don’t concretely have that knowledge: we have historical records of them, but no certainty about how true and accurate those records are; we have the quran, but no certainty about the exact interpretations used then.

with that absence of knowledge, it’s an act of near blasphemy to consider yourself to know enough, to think yourself infallible in your knowledge and judgement enough to apply god’s law on earth. in the absence of that knowledge, religious judgement should be left to god in all his justice. all nations need laws and need to apply those laws. it is likely, even, that those laws will be influenced by the religious culture and norms of that nation. this isn’t necessarily an argument against law or even punishment, but one about ascribing the weight of religion to the judgements of man. god will pass judgement on your sins come the afterlife and do so with perfect divine justice. the domain of man is a fully secular legal system built purely to maintain a state and administer to its people, ensure peace and prosperity, and provide for the vulnerable.

here is something we do know, that i think illustrates everything above about the multitude of interpretations, histories, traditions, practices, identities that shift and evolve but, at each point during that evolution, insists that the way things are now is in fact how they always were.. let’s take a zoomed-out view and try to describe the maldives as an observer. confirm this with your own memories: think about dragonfly season from your childhood and try to visualize how you saw faith practiced then. think about old men reading salawat, or about amulets or pieces of paper with written dua that your grandparents told you to keep. dhivehi islamic identity from our first conversion, through to as recently as my childhood, was a form of indigenous-traditional sufi-inspired sunnism. abu barakat al-barbari was a somalian with sufi inspirations. religious leaders’ tombs, zikr, mawlud, barakai kiyevun, all sufism inspired. the idea that it was always wahhabi-inspired sunnism, and the idea that modern political religious figures are upholding our traditional identity is revisionism. half our traditional islam, as practiced by generations and generations before us, would be considered bid’a now.

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who decided that, anyway? how did that happen, and how did i not even notice? why was there no real public interrogation of such a drastic shift in how institutions defined what religion was and how we should practice it? how does a country that literally defines itself by its faith switch completely from one interpretation to the other? i mean, the maldives considers its muslim identity such a crucial part of national identity that it’s a condition for citizenship. a huge change in what constitutes muslim identity is a crucial question. and i think it’s an important one.

note: see also this post.

 

foucault’s panopticon and understanding power

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Michel Foucault’s concept of the Panopticon as a theory of society and power was inspired by a plan for a highly efficient model for a prison originally designed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. This system, for Bentham, allows for a highly efficient prison in which only one guard can supervise many prisoner, and in fact even no guard since the prisoners act on their own as if they are being watched. Here’s how Wikipedia describes a panopticon prison:

Residing within cells flooded with light, occupants would be readily distinguishable and visible to an official invisibly positioned in the central tower. Conversely, occupants would be invisible to each other, with concrete walls dividing their cells. Due to the bright lighting emitted from the watch tower, occupants would not be able to tell if and when they are being watched at any given, making discipline a passive rather than an active action. Strangely, the cell-mates act in matters as if they are being watched, though they cannot be certain eyes are actually on them. There is a type of invisible discipline that reigns through the prison, for each prisoner self-regulates, in fear that someone is watching their every move.

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Foucault wrote about the Panopticon as an analogy in a theory of power. Discipline works to produce individuals who act “on their own” within the interest of power. Society is structured in ways that constantly polices and disciplines your individual expression of the self whenever it deviates too much from what is considered acceptable by authority, or those that hold power. This isn’t just legal consequences, but personal. The fear of punishment means people monitor each other for deviations that might draw the wrath of the Panopticon, from challenging the established social order such as the patriarchy, to challenging wealth and power through means like union recruiting, to challenging the legitimacy of a ruling regime. The Panopticon applies in many of what we consider the organizing units of society. Schools, the workplace, out in public, around family, on social media, around your friends, all contain a set of implicit rules about how you must behave and the sense that the guards are always watching, ready to discipline you for any transgression from those rules.

The power of the Panopticon lies in the constant monitoring of ourselves. Prisoners in the Panopticon jail can’t see each other or the guard, but the guard can see everybody and in fact does not even have to be there in order to discipline the prisoners. The prisoner, not knowing if he is being watched or not, must at all times act as if he is being watched by the guard, and in time he himself becomes his own guard.

This type of power is long-lasting, anonymous and highly disciplinary. The Panopticon is an instrument for the transformation of individuals. It allows the system to observe, document and study them, and the knowledge of being documented and classified means individuals conform to categories and boundaries of what each institution of power can and cannot accept. With enough self-policing and conformance, practices become habits and habit becomes character, and the individual exists completely shaped by whichever Panopticon has had him in its gaze.

religion as revolutionary social justice

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the spirit of religion is inherently revolutionary.

the prophets were sent to challenge the social order to bring about justice. the prophets challenged the establishment. the prophets faced ridicule and exile. the prophets stood up for the weak and befriended the socially outcast, often drawing their first followers from among them. the prophets were persecuted by conservative establishment.

the prophet (pbuh) brought a transformation of the rights of women in an era where women lived in terror. he brought together a coalition of different ethnicities and city-state nationalities. in the 7th century, the reforms brought about by muhammad and the rightly guided caliphs propelled the region centuries forward in its conception of rights and social duty. the caliphs established an administrative welfare state that maintained the economic security of all its citizens.

muslim activism and critique, even of a muslim government, has existed almost as long as islam itself. abu zhar al-ghifari, the fifth person to convert to islam and one of the sahabah guaranteed paradise, was an activist for a socialist interpretation of the faith as early as during the caliphate of usman (ra): traversing the muslim empire of the time, reminding leaders that the hoarding of wealth by the rich was a path to hell and that the wealth of a society should be distributed among the poor.

the growth of the muslim empire transformed the middle east into what was, for almost half a millennium, among the most developed and advanced civilizations in the world. its citizens had a charter of rights well ahead of europe’s dark ages and were able to thrive under economic security ensured by the state. the progressive revolution kickstarted by the spread of islam kept the muslim empire at the forefront of the world for a period of time longer than the entire history of the british colonial empire and american empire up to the present.

conservatism has a vested interest in only ever teaching you the most reactionary strains of exegesis and labeling the rest as blasphemy. i never even knew other interpretations existed until i’d reached adulthood, because we’ve always been taught that the version conservative establishment insists on teaching is the one true interpretation of faith, which to me feels like claiming to know the mind of god.

what we’re arriving at here is: the original arrival of islam was the great revolution of thought and philosophy, a sweeping set of new rights and protections for the vulnerable, the toppling of a corrupt establishment and a new understanding that the state had duties towards the public. the prophets all challenged the establishment, brought rights to the marginalized, challenged the corrupting nature of power, and spoke out against the greed of the wealthy.

there are interpretations that practicing faith is about following the spirit of the messengers, not conforming to a historical record of them. it’s not even that radical a view. writers and theologians over the centuries have discussed the concept of the spirit of faith as being revolutionary justice. there have been scholars that have made the case for the struggle to improve the lot of the marginalized as being truer to the spirit of religion than any figure in the establishment, hoarding wealth and restricting the rights of the vulnerable.

no more: religious radicalism is an obsession with replicating the conditions of a historical time considered to be pure.

now: religious radicalism is following the spirit of the messengers in upending a cruel social order and bringing justice to the oppressed.

any of you that’s campaigned against domestic violence or for bidheysee rights, any of you that’s tried to help the vulnerable and challenge a cruel establishment has been more #dheenee than any wealthy religious-conservative politician can hope to be.

universal basic income

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i was really disappointed recently to hear that the newly elected conservative government in ontario scrapped their pilot program for a universal basic income. i’ve been a fan of basic income for years and i’ve been thrilled to see it enter the mainstream recently around the world. i don’t know the numbers for how much revenue we can get with income and/or land taxes established to know whether the maldives would be able to get into a fiscal position that would allow us to have one in the immediate future, but i genuinely believe that a lot of the world is going to transition to a basic income in my lifetime.

that’s one of the reasons this setback is so disappointing. ontario was going to be a pioneer in one of the most important economic policies possibly in history, one that’ll be a fundamental change in the way humanity lives and works and what we create or produce as a society.

a universal basic income will change the basic social contract of how humankind sees its relationship with the state and each other. it’ll liberate people from the coercion of paying for survival. it’ll reshape society towards a flourishing of art and research and innovation and helping each other. people won’t be forced to shape their entire lives around paying for existence, and that means people will be freer to follow their dreams, make art, collaborate, research, educate and spread ideas. imagine the possibilities! the person who will discover the cure to cancer might be working in a minimum wage job to make ends meet right now, putting off going to university. and there’s going to be millions of people like that, around the world. tens of millions. it’ll be a flourishing unlike anything we’ve ever seen. and all the while, it lets us allow automation to boost our quality of life dramatically, without the need to keep thousands employed in manual labor so they can survive.

something even more powerful:  much like other social programs before it, universal basic income fundamentally changes what we expect of our governments and what we consider our basic rights. the rights won by suffragettes and protesters seemed distant once. the rights written down in the universal declaration of human rights felt revolutionary at the time. soon, at least in some countries around the world, the freedom to exist without paying for existence will be as obvious and natural a demand as the basic rights people expect by default now.

development as freedom – amartya sen

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This is an excerpt from the first chapter of Amartya Sen’s seminal book, Development as Freedom. I’ve always really liked the way it articulates a much stronger reading of human rights and development:

Development can be seen, it is argued here, as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy. Focusing on human freedoms contrasts with narrower views of development, such as identifying development with the growth of gross national product, or with the rise in personal incomes, or with industrialization, or with technological advance, or with social modernization. Growth of GNP or of individual incomes can, of course, be very important as means to expanding the freedoms enjoyed by the members of the society. But freedoms depend also on other determinants, such as special and economic arrangements (for example, facilities for education and health care) as well as political and civil rights (for example, the liberty to participate in public discussion and voting). Similarly, industrialization or technological progress or social modernization can substantially contribute to expanding human freedom, but freedom depends on other influences as well. If freedom is what development advances, then there is a major argument for concentrating on that overarching objective, rather than on some particular means, or some specially chosen list of instruments.

Viewing development in terms of expanding substantive freedoms directs attention to the ends that make development important, rather that merely some of the means that play a prominent part in the process. Development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states.

Despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies. What people can positively achieve is influenced by economic opportunities, political liberties, social powers, and the enabling conditions of good health, basic education, and the encouragement and cultivation of initiative. The institutional arrangements for these opportunities are also influenced by the exercise of people’s freedoms, through the liberty to participate in social choice and in the making of public decisions that impel the progress of these opportunities. These interconnections are also investigated here.

POLITICAL FREEDOM AND QUALITY OF LIFE: The difference that is made by seeing freedom as the principal ends of development can be illustrated with a few simple examples. Even though the full reach of this perspective can only emerge from a much more extensive analysis (attempted in the chapters to follow), the radical nature of the idea of “development as freedom” can easily be illustrated with some elementary examples.

First, in the context of the narrower views of development in terms of GNP growth or industrialization, it is often asked whether certain political or social freedoms, such as the liberty of political participation and dissent, or opportunities to receive basic education, are or are not conducive to development. In the light of the more foundational view of development as freedom, this way of posing the question tends to miss the important understanding that these substantive freedoms (that is, the liberty of political participation or the opportunity to receive basic education or health care) are among the constitutive components of development. Their relevance for development does not have to be freshly established through their indirect contribution to the growth of GNP or to the promotion of industrialization.

As it happens, the freedoms and rights are also very effective in contributing to economic progress: this connection will receive extensive attention in this book. But while the causal relation is indeed significant, the vindication of freedoms and rights provided by this causal linkage is over and above the directly constitutive role of these freedoms in development. A second illustration relates to the dissonance between income per head (even after correction for price variations) and the freedom of individuals to live long and live well. For example, the citizens of Gabon or South Africa or Namibia or Brazil nay be much richer in terms of per capita GNP than the citizens of Sri Lanka or China or the state of Kerala in India, bur the latter have very substantially higher life expectancy than do the former.

To take a different type of example, the point is often made that African Americans in the United States are relatively poor compared with American whites, though much richer than people in the third world. It is, however important to recognize that African Americans have an absolutely lower chance of reaching mature age than do people of many third world societies, such as China, or Sri Lanka, or part, of India (with different arrangements of health care, education, and community relations). If development analysis is relevant even for richer countries (it is argued in this work that it is indeed so), the presence of such inter-group contrasts within the richer countries can be seen to be an important aspect of the understanding of development and underdevelopment.