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a real meritocracy would promote a lot more women

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this won’t be a long post. like i’ve said elsewhere, i’m not going to repeat arguments that others have made much more eloquently and more thoroughly than i have: you can find strong cases for affirmative action on the internet. i just wanted to highlight this fascinating little detail from some of the research on women in the workplace.

i’ve added a screenshot below, but the short version is that there’s strong support for the quota argument: that imbalances in the workplace such as a dearth of women in senior roles isn’t because men just have more ability than women, that it’s because of social or cultural factors holding women back, and that something like quotas mean that talented women, who otherwise might have been passed up for less talented men, are now able to get the roles they would deserve on merit.

the common argument against affirmative action is the idea that it’s not a meritocracy and that guaranteed positions for women will bring in less qualified women by squeezing out more qualified men. i mean, for starters, i know, looking around at all the brilliant and talented women i know, that the distribution of women in positions of power is nowhere near the actual distribution of ability or talent.

a common argument against affirmative action is that the natural order of things is a meritocracy because it technically is one, and then ignoring the fact that context exists or that policies happen in society, not in a vacuum. (technically, i’m allowed to contest elections too. by the letter of the law. if you ignore that context exists). but regardless, let’s check. does the evidence suggest that: a) as things stand, more talented women get squeezed out in favor of men with less ability as a result of some kind of societal sexism, or b) that with a quota, less talented women take up slots that, ostensibly, would have gone to other men if it were based purely on merit?

it’s not a perfect proxy, but the proportion of women on the board of a major company (over a few hundred companies, to smooth out results and be sure we aren’t seeing a freak case) roughly reflects corporate governance policy built to retain and promote women. in a control case, where companies operate in a perfect meritocracy, the gender balance making up a company’s top management would have zero correlation with its performance, because in all of them the top ranks would be filled by those who most merited it. if departments heavy on women perform significantly better, it’d be a strong case for the argument that these women are taking the place of less talented replacements. if departments heavy on women perform significantly worse, it’d be a strong indicator that these promoted women are taking the place of more talented male candidates.

let’s take a look at the results… there we go. the quartile of firms with the largest proportion of women in top management had a return 35.1% higher than the quartile with the lowest proportion of women. odds are, talented women around you aren’t getting their fair dues. policies that actively identify, retain, train, and promote talented women help address some of that to make it more meritocratic. bring on the quotas, and make them sizable.

women return on equity meritocracy

there’s more:

women return on equity meritocracy 2 vox

this is also borne out in a study carried out for indian village councils by two of the world’s leading development economists, abhijit banerjee and esther duflo:

One specific example of such top-down intervention is to restrict whom villagers can elect as representatives. These restrictions may be needed in order to ensure adequate representation of the minorities, and they make a difference.

India’s system of village government, or gram panchayat (the GP, or village council), has such restrictions. Elected every five years at the local level, the GP administers the local collective infrastructure, such as wells, school buildings, local roads, and so on. To protect underrepresented groups, the rules reserve leadership positions in a fraction of GPs for women and for members of various minorities (including the lower castes). If the elites had completely captured the panchayat, however, mandated representation of women or minorities would make no difference. The real bosses of the villages would continue to rule, presumably fronted by their wives, or by their lower-caste servants, whenever the bosses themselves are prevented from running for office.

Indeed, when Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, of the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata, and Esther embarked on a panchayat survey in 2000 to find out whether women leaders invested in different types of local infrastructure, they were warned by everyone, from the minister of rural development in Kolkata to their survey staff (and including many local academics), that this was a futile quest. The show, everyone claimed, was run by pradhan patis (the husband of the pradhan, or chief of the GP), and the shy, often illiterate women, many of them with their heads covered, were certainly not making any decisions on their own.

The survey, however, revealed the opposite. In the state of West Bengal, under the quota system, one-third of the GPs were randomly selected every five years to be “reserved” for women to be the village head: In these villages, only women can run for office. Chattopadhyay and Esther compared the local infrastructure available in reserved and unreserved villages, just two years after the reservation system was first put in place.27 They found that women invested much more of their (fixed) budget in the local infrastructure that women wanted—in West Bengal, that meant roads and drinking water—and less in schools. They then replicated these findings in Rajasthan, reputed to be one of India’s most male chauvinist states. There, they found that women wanted closer sources of drinking water above all, and men wanted roads. And sure enough, women leaders invested more in drinking water, less on roads.

Further studies elsewhere in India have made it clear that women leaders almost always make a difference. Furthermore, over time, women also appear to be doing more than men with the same limited budget and are reported to be less inclined to take bribes. Yet whenever we present these results in India, there is someone who will tell us this has to be wrong: They have gone personally to a village and have talked to a woman pradhan, under her husband’s supervision; they have seen political posters where the picture of the candidate’s husband figured more prominently than the candidate herself. They are right: We, too, have had those conversations and seen those posters. Ensuring women run as political leaders is not the instant revolution that it is sometimes made out to be, with powerful women aggressively taking charge and reforming their villages. The women who are elected are often related to someone who was in politics before. They are less likely to chair the village meetings, and they speak less at them. They are less educated and less politically experienced. But despite all this, and despite the evident prejudice they face, many women are quietly taking charge.

Voters adjust their views based on what they see happening on the ground, even when they are initially biased. The female policy makers in India are an example. Whereas the Delhi elite remained convinced that women could not be empowered by legal fiat, citizens on the ground were much more open to the opposite view.

Before the policy of setting aside one-third of the seats of panchayat leaders to women, very few women were ever elected to a position of power. In West Bengal, in GPs that had never been reserved for women leaders, 10 percent of the pradhans in 2008 were women. Not surprisingly, the share jumped to 100 percent when the seats were reserved for women. But, once a seat that had been reserved went back to being open, women were more likely to be elected again: The share of women elected increased to 13 percent for currently unreserved seats that had been reserved once in the past and to 17 percent if they had been reserved twice. The same thing applied to city government representatives in Mumbai.

One reason for this is that voters’ attitudes toward women changed. In West Bengal, to measure prejudices about competence, villagers were asked to listen to a recording of a leader’s speech. All villagers heard the same speech, but some heard it spoken in a male voice, and others in a female voice. After they heard the recording, they were asked to judge its quality. In villages that had never had reserved seats for women, and therefore had no experience of a woman leader, men who heard the “male” speech gave higher approval ratings than those who heard the “female” speech. On the other hand, in villages that had been reserved for women before, men tended to like the “female” speech better. Men did recognize that women were capable of implementing good policies and changed their opinion of women leaders. The temporary reservation of one-third of the seats for women could thus lead not only to some additional drinking water sources but also to a permanent transformation of the role of women in politics.

so what we’re seeing here from having quotas in government is:

  1. women did more with the same limited budget and took less bribes
  2. voter attitudes towards women improve, especially views on competence
  3. more women got elected, even after the quota was removed
  4. previously restricted or less empowered women grew into their roles and took charge
  5. men recognized women can implement good policies and changed their view of female leaders
  6. it directly led to policy changes women wanted but hadn’t got under mostly male leadership
  7. even a temporary quota caused a permanent shift in the role of women in politics

it also seems pretty obvious. if you believe men and women are both equally capable, then the distribution of figures in power should roughly reflect their distribution in society. we should be seeing a roughly fifty-fifty split, most likely. if any given capable person has an equal likelihood of being a man or a woman. since there’s such a massive gender imbalance, then women must be facing some kind of structural advantage. the only other option is women being less capable, so if you still defend the idea of it being a meritocracy, you need to question whether that’s your ultimate belief.

arguing that this is just how the dice fell in a genuine meritocracy is ridiculous. in an equal society with perfect meritocracy, here are the odds that representation of women in parliament would be only around 6.5%:

odds maldives women mps

yeah, that’s not coincidence.

men have no reason to be committed to the way things are

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when colonists took over populations, they faced a major problem. how would you keep a massive population of men, who feel increasingly powerless as power was transferred to colonists, from rioting and maintain some kind of peace? they came upon something people have referred to as the patriarchal bargain: easing the sense of powerlessness of the men by enshrining, in the details of legal and cultural practice and in how they governed, by effectively giving men complete control over women and children. women and children wouldn’t be protected. women and children would be the domain of men, who could take out their sense of powerlessness by tyrannically controlling the units of their families that were made subservient to them.

the colonists had stumbled upon an interesting sociological insight: the ability to exercise power is at the core of societal views of masculinity, and society allows men to displace their humiliation at feelings of lack of power in their lives by wantonly exercising the power they can exercise over others. you can see this in rates of domestic violence by unemployed men, or in controlling behavior by jealous and threatened men. a lot of the research on societal dynamics describes it. it’s something you might have experienced. growing up, boys have the entire framework of their lives based, very subtly but very completely, around power. social status is about jostling for dominance and in every social setting, every year of school, you’re squeezed into a spot in the pecking order. you prove yourself by demonstrating physical ability or sexual exploits. you avoid the tiniest implication of femininity or non-heterosexuality because they will be ruthlessly used to push you lower on the ladder of power. you act in ways to try dispel even the possibility. even in its healthier aspects, masculinity is still framed in terms of power: the power to provide for your family, the power to protect those you love, even the power to keep your girlfriends or wives satisfied. and to round it all off, boys are told the absolute worst possible thing that can happen to them is humiliation- not hurt, not sorrow, not loss, not isolation, not fear, but humiliation.

power and humiliation. power, meaning that from boyhood onward we constantly scrutinize each other, even subconsciously, for either the smallest threat or the smallest sign of weakness, and if any are spotted- any kind of difference, any softness, any emotions expressed outside of a particular way, any misgivings- the result is ruthless. sociologists call it “policing masculinity”, and the term seems about right. it’s not about cruelty, or about the innate nature of boys. it’s that so much underlying everything we absorb about society growing up is about power. it’s about the threat of humiliation for not having the power to protect yourself from it, and then the humiliation of not having had the power to have protected yourself.

i know some of you are getting defensive right now, but that’s part of it, isn’t it? we’re taught to take this kind of thing really badly. power and humiliation are the governing forces of the male psyche, often in ways that can be incredibly harmful not just to ourselves but to people around us. the place humiliation holds for men is why, in a world where most of the women you know probably have faced and definitely have to worry everyday about facing horrific violence, men say with a straight face that we’re terrified to talk to women because we worry about being laughed at or humiliated. i think that statement is as absurd as it sounds in the context of that sentence, but i understand what drives it.

but i mean harmful. as in, men often bottle up their feelings because they don’t want to seem vulnerable. and i mean harmful, as in, intense misogyny both as a way to assert power over women and a way to tell the men around you that you’re repulsed by qualities associated with femininity or sensitivity and that you don’t think of women confidants where you can escape the policing. i mean harmful, as in, showing your friends sexts you’ve received without the permission of the sender because you’re asserting your power over someone’s body. i mean harmful, as in, cussing out or attacking a woman for rejecting you. i mean harmful, as in, turning on women who speak out about sexism or assault or violence and trying to tear down their claims or credibility on social media.

not all of us do that, sure, but power and the threat of humiliation being dominant in our collective psyches fuels some of us to do all that, and it definitely has a toxic and poisonous hold on all of us that warps our ability to exist as ourselves and compels us to keep sustaining this thing that does none of us any good.

this state of things feels normal, yeah. it feels like it’s perfectly fine, and a perfectly reasonable way for things to be. but look at any child, someone still completely innocent and learning about the world: would you wish all your views of yourself, all your neuroses and fears and insecurities, everything you were made to experience growing up, upon that child? would you want them to have to deal with all the things that made you the way you are now? that’s what we do today, to thousands and thousands of children. i think we owe it to them to try start with thinking deeply about ourselves.

bell hooks discusses this:

As a daughter I was taught that it was my role to serve, to be weak, to be free from the burden of thinking, to caretake and nurture others. My brother was taught that it was his role to be served; to provide; to be strong; to think, strategize, and plan; and to refuse to caretake or nurture others. I was taught that it was not proper for a female to be violent, that it was “unnatural.” My brother was taught hat his value would be determined by his will to do violence (albeit in appropriate settings). He was taught that for a boy, enjoying violence was a good thing (albeit in appropriate settings). He was taught that a boy should not express feelings. I was taught that girls could and should express feelings, or at least some of them.

Family therapist Terrence Real tells how his sons were initiated into patriarchal thinking even as their parents worked to create a loving home in which anti-patriarchal values prevailed. He tells of how his young son Alexander enjoyed dressing as Barbie until boys playing with his older brother witnessed his Barbie persona and let him know by their gaze and their shocked, disapproving silence that his behavior was unacceptable:

“Without a shred of malevolence, the stare my son received transmitted a message. You are not to do this. And the medium that message was broadcast in was a potent emotion: shame. At three, Alexander was learning the rules. A ten second wordless transaction was powerful enough to dissuade my son from that instant forward from what had been a favorite activity. I call such moments of induction the “normal traumatization” of boys.”

To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings. Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples.

Until we can collectively acknowledge the damage patriarchy causes and the suffering it creates, we cannot address male pain. We cannot demand for men the right to be whole, to be givers and sustainers of life. Obviously some patriarchal men are reliable and even benevolent caretakers and providers, but still they are imprisoned by a system that undermines their mental health.

Patriarchy as a system has denied males access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful, or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others. To truly address male pain and male crisis we must as a nation be willing to expose the harsh reality that patriarchy has damaged men in the past and continues to damage them in the present. If patriarchy were truly rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family life that is so all-pervasive would not exist. This violence was not created by feminism.

The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat. Terrence Real makes clear that the patriarchy damaging us all is embedded in our psyches:

“Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed “masculine” and “feminine” in which half of our human traits are exalted while the other half is devalued. Both men and women participate in this tortured value system. Psychological patriarchy is a “dance of contempt,” a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation. It is the unacknowledged paradigm of relationships that has suffused Western civilization generation after generation, deforming both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond between them.”

To end male pain, to respond effectively to male crisis, we have to name the problem. We have to both acknowledge that the problem is patriarchy and work to end patriarchy. Terrence Real offers this valuable insight: “The reclamation of wholeness is a process even more fraught for men than it has been for women, more difficult and more profoundly threatening to the culture at large.” If men are to reclaim the essential goodness of male being, if they are to regain the space of openheartedness and emotional expressiveness that is the foundation of well-being, we must envision alternatives to patriarchal masculinity. We must all change.

what’s one of a thousand ways this can play out? when male unemployment rates rise and the lack of jobs makes men feel powerless and unable to provide, we see sexual harassment claims rise [1, 2]. i’m not suggesting that the onus on preventing harassment and violence is on the job market, but that maybe, as men, we need to spend a good amount of time being real introspective about what really deep down drives us, what the root under the root is that we usually never think about, how the ways we were shaped by society might warp us in ways that might be harmful, about whether we’re a forgiving and free environment for our friends to express their feelings and whether we push them towards healthier behavior while holding them accountable, whether we will perpetuate this onto our children or we’ll end the cycle here.

the necessity of doubt

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we all probably got that chain e-mail in the early 2000s about a girl who did something blasphemous and got turned into some kind of strange beast, as physical proof of the power and presence of god. proof that we could see in not-quite-high-quality photographs, back before we knew about photoshop. i only got internet access once a week back then and my mom gathered the entire family around the computer screen so we’d all know too.

i think it did touch at a need i think many of us have: a need to know, a sense that without knowing for sure you’d be experiencing that dreaded feeling of doubt. we live in a culture that’s generally hush-hush about the experience of doubt. you know the drill: if you have doubts, you’re not a good muslim, god needs to be as real to you as everything you can see and feel and touch, cognitively you need to be able to file your belief in god in the same folder as your belief that the sun is real.

i was lucky enough to have once had a teacher who was also a sufi scholar. one day in class we ended up talking about doubt, and he gave us these scenarios.

one: he pours a cup of coffee from a jug in front of us and hands it to us. we know as a physical fact that in front of us is a cup of coffee. we saw it being poured. we smelled it in the air. there’s no faith required to believe that he was giving me a cup of coffee, because we know it happened. there’s no choice to believe. there’s only a reaction to a physical reality. there’s no way to justify a belief that it isn’t coffee, and i’d have to have no sense of self-interest to act like it isn’t.

two: he leaves the classroom and comes back with cups of coffee. mccafe, with a lid, so you can’t see or smell the contents. if he hands this cup to me and i take a sip, without the concrete physical knowledge that it contains coffee instead of water or even poison, that’s a show of faith. i trusted him. i chose to believe that he’d have poured coffee, and took a sip with the belief that i’m drinking coffee. it required no faith when i knew for sure, but the inability to know is what gives weight to the decision. having faith in god isn’t about knowing, it’s about the choice to believe even in the face of the possibility that you might be wrong.

doubt gives weight to your choice to believe. the lack of physical proof is what makes your sacrifices, or anything you do in the service of your religion, an exercise of faith. if we were sent undeniable, concrete physical evidence like a woman actually getting struck down and turned into a beast, then good deeds to avoid guaranteed punishment would be the purely self-interested way to act. being a believer while not knowing for sure means having faith.

to sign off, i want to introduce one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists along with a quote about his experience with doubt:

this is sufjan stevens talking about the above song:

“I was a teenager and this was my first experience with death. At that age, you’re easily confused. I couldn’t understand why she had to die. Experiences like this always cause doubt. Because we don’t cope well with the idea of evil in this world. Then you doubt the existence of God and His intentions… actually everything. But that’s good. One of the foundations of faith is the lack of it, the disbelief. It’s very important. Firm belief is a bit unreal. That leads to religious fanaticism. Doubt is inseparable from belief. With every figure in religion you find doubt: Abraham, Moses, all the kings and the apostles. Even Jesus doubted. So isn’t it funny how religions–especially institutions–have eliminated all doubt? They don’t understand how important it is to doubt, with all its consequences.”

you can’t know for sure. you can’t understand the inner workings of god. all you can do is have faith.

radical empathy and a relationship with god

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this is what we know about god:

god is all-knowing and all-seeing. god is in everything; god is as close to us as the jugular vein. before we do anything, we say that we do it in the name of god, the most compassionate and the most merciful. the first two names of god translate to either compassion or grace, and to mercy. at the start of our prayers, we recite a passage that asks god, the compassionate and the merciful, to guide us on the path of those that have received His grace.

we know that the names of god that we use to describe Him are attributes which can only be fully possessed by god. humans are inherently limited. we cannot understand those attributes in full, let alone possess them. but what we do know is:

god sees all. god knows all. god doesn’t only know your actions, He knows what led you to them, what you were thinking, what the context was. god understands what drives you. god understands what led to your mistakes. god understands that you are fallible, that all humans are fallible, that humans have flaws and that we all have our weaknesses, that humans feel selfishness or jealousy or temptation. god understands what could lead someone astray. god knows and understands how you felt, because god knows all there is to know, and that means He knows what it is you felt, and He understands all that there is to understand.

and with all that knowledge, god is compassionate. god is merciful. god bestows His grace. ar-rahman, ar-raheem.

there’s a word for knowing, understanding, and having compassion: empathy. it’s something we have to practice constantly in our daily lives. we empathize with the people around us, and the people we hear about, and with ourselves or the people we once were.

empathizing is an act of radical power, a flash of light that makes you, for a second, part of something bigger. empathy dissolves all that keeps us apart. empathy is the quantum mechanics of human social relationships: bring it close enough and the rules that bind us, our norms, our in-groups, our loyalties, everything we thought fixed in our identities, all become malleable.

the practice of empathy is to honor god, a form of faith that transcends faith. empathy is the most inspired we can be by god, and the practice of empathy is the purest thing a human can do.

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:

Annotation 2020-06-14 140343

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

Annotation 2020-06-14 140701

Annotation 2020-06-14 140725

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.

–

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.

Image result for panopticon

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.