Sizing up the beards

NICCOLAO MANUCCI was a teenager when he arrived in India in 1653. His evocative descriptions of life under Aurangzeb combine the wonder of Marco Polo with the credulity of an uncertain, and perhaps envious, European. But the eye of this witness is less jaundiced than we might expect. A lifetime in India honed his temperament even if it did not entirely wash away an inherent belief in the superiority of Christian-western culture. One man’s alien can be another man’s barbarian.

One of Manucci’s vignettes is his narrative of Aurangzeb’s crusade against the fertile beard. We shall leave the story to the narrator: “Aurangzeb did another very ridiculous thing to show himself a scrupulous observer of the Faith. This was the issue of an order that no Mahomedan (sic) should wear a beard longer than four finger-breadths. Now the Moguls are much concerned with the preservation of their big beards, using for this many unguents. An official was appointed whose business it was, in company with his attendants and soldiers, to measure beards in the middle of the streets, and, if necessary, dock them.” (This, and much else, can be found in the wonderful compilation, Historic Delhi, chosen and edited by H.K. Kaul and published by Oxford University Press.)

Descent into the ludicrous is a familiar failing of fundamentalism. Here is the precursor of the morality police of the Taliban, who whipped the barber out of the social life of Afghanistan in their pursuit of a code that emanated from a puritanism that had degenerated into a disease. Perhaps the Taliban might have been slightly more scissor-friendly if they had known that Aurangzeb had a prescription for the length of the beard, and thought that anything longer that four finger-breadths was decadent.

It is of course not a matter of the size of beards. It is a question of freedom and imposition. Since beards were virtually involuntary in an age when the razor blade was not common manufacture, and the barber a luxury, Aurangzeb decided that the correct size of an Islamic beard was four finger-breadths. Anything longer was vice.

Typically, the puritan first targets those of his own faith; the apostate invites far greater anger than the infidel. There were no orders given to punish any Hindu beard that had had the temerity to travel beyond four finger-breadths. The definition of apostasy turns whimsical and tortured. Religion, which prospers because it is a liberation, is imprisoned by the narrow mind of a fundamentalist.

So what happens in real life when an emperor sets out such an agenda? Back to Niccolao: “This order was not carried out, except against ordinary people, the official not daring to meddle with the nobles or the soldiers for fear of receiving injury to himself. It was, however, amusing to see the official in charge of beards rushing hither and thither, laying hold of wretched men by the beard, in order to measure and cut off the excess, and clipping their moustaches to uncover their lips... It was equally quaint to see the soldiers and others covering their faces with their shawls when they beheld afar off the said official, for fear of some affront.”

As the portrait of life under Aurangzeb grows larger, there is relief: India is not to be defeated so easily. If the official was the precursor of the Taliban police, then there were others who were not ready to submit. There was an empire and an emperor, but the Mughal system was neither despotic nor ready to surrender easily before despotism. The rich, as usual, ignored orders they did not like, or which they considered silly: the size of beards yesterday, the size of Scotch pegs under the prohibition of a Morarji Desai.

If the official got tough, he was always in danger of being roughed up. The “ordinary people”, again as usual, had to absorb the brunt. The thought of the official rushing about snipping off unreligious hair is comic, but Aurangzeb could not see the comedy. The puritan is burdened by the inability to laugh. How can he possibly even think of laughing at himself? It needs courage, clarity and a heart to laugh. A fundamentalist is essentially heartless.

The heart being cold, he cannot relate to joy. Since there is no joy, there cannot be music in his soul either. The man charged with keeping beards in line was soon given another responsibility. Aurangzeb “ordered the same official to stop music. If in any house or elsewhere he heard the sound of singing and instruments, he should forthwith hasten there and arrest as many as he could, breaking the instruments.”

The musicians retained a sense of humour in the depth of their despair. One Friday about a thousand of them gathered at the mosque where the emperor went for his prayers, holding 20 “highly-ornamented biers” and wailing loudly. Aurangzeb enquired about the reason for their lament. They sobbed that the emperor had killed music, and they were now bearing music to her grave. Aurangzeb “calmly remarked that they should pray for the soul of music, and see that she is thoroughly well buried.” But music has a longer life than emperors. What really happened? Manucci answers: “In spite of this, the nobles did not cease to hear songs in secret.”

The emperor could give an order, but he could not ensure that it was obeyed. Power is a relationship between the throne and the people. It flourishes only by mutual agreement. Once the nobility began to disobey Aurangzeb over beards and music, that relationship became flawed. It took time to die. A relationship constructed over 150 years does not decay with one spell of belligerence. But at some point in that half a century of Aurangzeb, the thought occurred and turned into a belief that the emperor could no longer be trusted to act for the common good. Aurangzeb’s dogma mitigated against the history and culture of a Delhi that had been ruled by Muslims since the end of the twelfth century. Aurangzeb broke with the practice of the faith as Delhi had practised Islam.

Delhi was, and is, the city of Hazrat Amir Khusrau, born in the city of Turkish parents, and disciple of that great sufi divine Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. Khusrau was away on an assignment when he heard that his master had passed away. He was so distraught at the news that he sold off all his possessions, returned to Delhi, donned a black robe, and sat silently by the grave of his master till death took him away as well. Khusrau, who is venerated by Muslims, wrote this of Indian ragas when citing reasons why a Turk like him should live in India:

“The eighth argument in praise of India is our sweet music, the fire of which keeps the heart and soul ablaze. The music attracts artists from far and near. They rush to learn it. But it is so difficult and delicate that even thirty to forty years’ stay does not suffice for a foreigner to learn to produce even a light Indian tune. The ninth argument is that Indian tunes can hypnotize the beautiful spotted deer so much that it does not fear the arrow piercing its heart... the Indian can hunt down the deer with the help of his music.”

So who was the better Muslim? Aurangzeb or Hazrat Amir Khusrau and Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, at whose mazaar (grave) the most beautiful qawwali is still offered as homage? The sufi was inspired by love and his grave is as crowded today as it was centuries ago. The fundamentalist, inspired merely by an aborted doctrine, lost the greatest inheritance a prince could have had — a Mughal empire.

Can a modern “liberal” be a fundamentalist? The question may seem a contradiction, but think about it. Fundamentalism is imposition of your view upon the other; it is the invasion of the other’s space. When a modern “liberal” distorts the privilege of freedom of speech and extends it into slander, he too becomes a fundamentalist. When he converts the right to expression into a right to abuse, he too becomes a fundamentalist. When lie and malice are used to caricature and defame the gods and prophets of hundreds of millions of people, then that too is a form of fundamentalism. When you vilify Lord Ram, or Jesus, or Prophet Mohammad, you too are becoming an intolerant extremist. Those who have faith must respect those who do not have it.

Equally, the agnostic and the atheist must respect the sentiment of those who go to temples, churches and mosques. The malevolence of abuse is violence against both civilization and common sense. Extremists on the sides are squeezing the life out of the mainstream in which we hope to live.

The writer is the editor-in-chief, Asian Age, New Delhi.

NATO’s success story

AFTER its bloody revolution of 1989, when the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were summarily executed, not many people expected that Romania would soon become a functioning democracy.

Neighbouring Bulgaria, home to a secret police that had staged assassinations in Western European capitals and allegedly plotted to kill the pope, seemed equally unpromising. For the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, mere survival was at issue; when the Soviet Union collapsed, the three had only a scant and discouraging modern history as independent states.

That all these countries, together with Slovakia and Slovenia, are being offered membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is something of a marvel, and cause for celebration.

All are now working democracies with free-market economies; human rights are respected, and living standards are steadily growing. The grim austerity and brutal, sometimes murderous regimes of only 15 years ago are now a surprisingly distant memory, hardly real to university students in Bucharest and Sofia and Bratislava.—The Washington Post

Mischief in low turnouts

IN THE elections held recently in three of the more populous countries of the developing world, a significant number of voters abandoned the centre of the political spectrum and marched towards the fringes. In Brazil, the electorate chose a left leaning politician who will become that country’s president on January 1, 2003. In Turkey, voters elected a parliament with a clear majority of representatives belonging to a political party with deep Islamic roots. In Pakistan, voters sent a sizable number of Islamists to the National Assembly and two of the four provincial assemblies. The electoral triumph of the Islamic groups will make it difficult to keep them out of power in the provinces and not to take their politics into account if they remain in opposition at the centre.

It is clear that in all three cases — in Brazil, Pakistan and Turkey — the voters’ march to the fringes was a reflection of people’s extreme unhappiness with mainstream politics and with the politicians who represented that part of the political universe. In a previous article I provided some reasons why the unhappy citizens of Brazil chose a candidate of the left to be their next leader and why, in Pakistan and Turkey, those who voted in the elections breathed new life into the Islamic parties.

The move to the religious right in Pakistan and Turkey was in response to two very different sets of circumstances. In Pakistan the fire was lit by external developments — by the on-going war in Afghanistan and by the growing anti-Muslim sentiment in the West. While these events produced the spark, the political conflagration was caused by the presence of plenty of highly inflammable tinder that had gathered on the ground. By staying with this metaphor, we are led to the obvious question: how can the flames lit by the elections of October 10 be doused so that they don’t spread to other parts of the country?

It would be wrong to interpret Turkey’s swing to the right as part of a phenomenon that is affecting political development in the entire Islamic world. The electorate’s reaction in Turkey was in response to a set of developments that were entirely domestic. Over the last several years and in spite of the help given by the international community, Turkey’s economy has steadily deteriorated. It is now at the point of near collapse. Turkey today is in the situation where Pakistan was three years ago when General Pervez Musharraf brought the military back to power to stop the haemorrhaging of the economy.

In developing a better understanding of the swing to the right in these two large Muslim countries we should focus on a series of events and developments that, on their own, have little to do with Islam per se. The dynamics that produced the results in the countries and gave salience to the Islamic parties had little in common. The only thing common is that in both countries Islamic parties will have a larger political presence for several years to come.

Let us turn to Pakistan. The impressive electoral showing of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal in the elections of October 10 can be explained in terms of four developments, each in its own way reinforcing the remaining three. The four developments I have in mind include, one, the collapse of the public educational system that led to the rise of the madaris. Two, the loss of confidence and with it the decline in interest on the part of a large segment of the population in the political process. This is reflected in the steady decline in voter turnout in the elections held since 1985. Three, the failure of western-style political parties to develop into effective political institutions and gain a loyal following. Four, the way one segment of the population made an electoral issue of the antipathy of the citizenry in the West towards Islam and Muslims.

In several previous articles I have discussed the segmentation of the Pakistani educational system into three parts and how this is producing three different social classes that will eventually come into clash with one another — if that has not begun to happen already. I will not cover this ground here once again. Instead, I will focus on voter turnout, passion in politics and the absence of modern political institutions to which the majority of the population could relate.

Several weeks ago Anwar Syed, one of Dawn’s regular columnists, writing from Washington, provided some interesting data on voter turnout in Pakistan’s elections since 1970. The voters’ participation was very high in the elections of 1970 — the first to be held in the country’s history. This was for two reasons: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s charisma and the passion with which he delivered his message. Bhutto, at the head of a new political party — the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) — was able to draw towards him the kind of political support given only to one other Muslim politician in South Asia, Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

Time and chance helped Bhutto to overthrow the political establishment and introduce a new political order. A large turnout of voters helped him secure an electoral triumph in 1970 that no one — not even he — expected. In just over half a dozen years, Bhutto, however, managed to lose the affection of most of the people who helped him into power.

The next time voters turned out in large numbers and showed some passion for the political process was in 1988, a few months after the death of the long-ruling military dictator, General Ziaul Haq. The circumstances and the messages that brought the voters out were not very dissimilar from those that had galvanized the electorate eighteen years earlier, in 1970. The political stage was now dominated by another extraordinarily charismatic leader, Benazir Bhutto. People’s response to her having assumed her father’s mantle was palpable — they turned out in large numbers to get her back into power.

From 1988 to 1991 — a period described accurately by General Pervez Musharraf as Pakistan’s lost decade — politicians failed the people. People’s respect for politicians, for the political institutions over which they presided, and for the political process itself declined significantly. This was reflected in the voter turnout numbers which reached the lowest proportion in 1997 when only 36 per cent of the electorate voted. In those elections Benazir Bhutto and Mian Nawaz Sharif, leaders respectively of the People’s Party of Pakistan and the Pakistan Muslim League, competed vigorously. No observer then saw any apathy or indifference among the voting public.

The elections of October 10, 2002 were expected to produce an even lower voter turnout. Most observers watching the political scene saw apathy. Several predicted that the absence of the two persons who had led their parties to electoral victories twice in the decade of the 1990s was the reason for the absence of excitement amongst the electorate. But, at least according to the data released by the Election Commission, the voter turnout was 41.8 per cent of the eligible voters, nearly as high as in the elections of 1988.

It is the difference among provincial voter turnouts that is most revealing. The highest turnout was recorded in Punjab, the country’s largest province and the one that is most politicized. By “politicized” I mean the presence of a number of things. Punjab has more developed political infrastructure than is the case in other provinces. Political parties have developed fairly deep roots. Most of them have workers and local organizations that can be mobilized to spread the party’s message — if there is a message to send — bring out people to attend meetings addressed by local candidates and take the people to the polls on the day of election. Sindh is the next most politicized province. And, for obvious reasons, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas — the FATA — are the least politicized of all the Pakistani regions.

It is not surprising that there was a direct correlation between the level of politicization and voter turnout in the elections of October 2002. With 46.3 per cent, Punjab had the highest turnout, 11 per cent more than the national average. Sindh came in second with 38.2 per cent, 9 per cent below the national average. The North-West Frontier Province was third with 34.6 per cent, 17 per cent below the turnout for the country. Then came Balochistan with 28.5 per cent, 32 per cent below the estimate for Pakistan. In FATA the turnout was only 25.5 per cent, 39 per cent below the country’s average.

There is a positive relationship between voter turnout and the success of Islamic parties — lower the turnout, higher the success of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal. Why did that happen? Modern political parties were less well organized in these regions with hardly any institutional structure. The Islamic parties, on the other hand, successfully exploited the mosque and the madrassahs to galvanize their support. They provided the passion that was missing from the campaigns of the mainstream parties. As I said in an earlier article, the lack of enthusiasm among the supporters of the mainstream parties had nothing to do with the absence of their leaders from the electoral scene. It was the consequence of the absence of a message to which the voters could respond. On the other hand, the Islamic parties had a powerful message for the voters.

The coalition of religious parties spoke to the people by using the context of the on-going war against international terrorism which had deeply affected their lives. The message they sent was not pro-terrorism but against America’s handling of the struggle. The American war on terrorism was portrayed successfully as a war against Islam. The fact that well known American evangelists such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham had spoken so disparagingly of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) lent considerable credence to the message that issued forth from the mosques.

I draw a simple conclusion from this analysis. A strong message delivered with great passion was able to pull their voters to the polling stations even though the majority of the voting public stayed home. Having lost its respect for politicians and their parties, it left the stage to the forces of radical Islam, particularly in the regions most affected by America’s war against terrorism. This means the political parties have their job cut out for them: to gain through deeds, and not words, the respect of the people. Only then will a large number of people will be prepared to go to the polls and overwhelm the forces of obscurantism.

We must remain vigilant

TIM Sebastian of BBC’s Hardtalk has been in India and I saw his interview with Yashwant Sinha, India’s foreign minister. Tim Sebastian could have been interviewing Ariel Sharon.

There was an identical bellicosity, the same ordained righteousness, the same contempt for international public opinion, the same sophistry and jugglery of words. A fixed narrow-mindedness of a bigot. He did not have the decency to be even embarrassed when he was asked his assessment of the killings in Gujarat.

He refused to accept that it had been a massacre, disputing the figure of 3000 dead mentioned by Tim Sebastian. Instead, he smugly corrected it to 750, which he said was the “official figure.” He should have been ashamed of even that official figure. But he was not.

As for international human rights organizations which have been critical both of the security forces in occupied Kashmir and the government’s complicity in the killing of Muslims in Gujarat, he blandly said that India had its own human rights organizations and the others did not count. Thus India did not brook interference in India’s “internal affairs.” Case closed.

Perhaps the newly appointed Pakistan foreign minister, Mr Khurshid Kasuri is being naive when he talks of improving relations with India. Yashwant Sinha is a minister of India’s BJP government and is so no loose cannon. To go by his interview, he has shut all doors. He kept harping on cross-border terrorism. Worst of all.

When he was asked why India refused to talk to Pakistan, his answer was mind-boggling. George Bush did not talk to Osama bin Laden! He was playing the terrorist-card in the certainty that the Americans are gullible and throw in the name of Osama bin Laden, Yashwant Sinha believes, and touch a raw nerve.

India is a nuclear power and yet it would like to be seen as a sort of Mother Teresa in the comity of nations. It just doesn’t wash, though India spends millions of dollars lobbying and buying the influence of certain politicians in the United States and Britain. It has still not been able to hide the atrocities being committed on the Kashmiri people, nor the enormity of what happened in Gujarat. India has taken every opportunity to take advantage of the fact that the world’s attention has been distracted by other events, on going and yet to come.

The BJP government in New Delhi is already being critical of the new government installed in occupied Kashmir through highly dubious elections and attempts are being made to hold it complicit in the temple killings because it released some political prisoners. Naturally, the main perpetrators are Pakistan-based militants, the “usual suspects.” This seems to be a signal that there is going to be no let-up in the “terrorism” being unleashed by the Indian security forces on the Kashmiri people.

By way of another distraction, India has accused Pakistan’s ISI intelligence unit in Bangladesh of stirring up trouble for New Delhi from Dhaka. The script is being constantly updated as the goal-posts continued to be shifted. The Indian National Security Adviser, Brajesh Misra, has had a sudden inspiration and says that Kashmir was not necessarily the end of the matter in Pakistan’s calculations because the Pakistan armed forces could not exist without a confrontation with India. At the same time, a supersonic cruise missile jointly developed by India and Russia will be ready for military use within two years.

India is one of the poorest country in the world but has one of the most modern military establishments in the world. At the same time, it claims to be the world’s largest democracy and a provincial government in Gujarat gets ready for elections on the dead bodies of the Muslims killed. India must reconcile its contradictions before it lectures to the world. India should know too that there are no hawks and doves in Pakistan as far as Kashmir is concerned. It is not the Pakistan army alone that stands steadfast on Kashmir, it is the people of Pakistan as well.

India has made so many excuses about talking about Kashmir, from the very outset, that it should have now lost all credibility even with its own people. India once claimed to be a secular country. Those of us who have lived in pre-partition India have had serious misgivings about the nature of that secularism but with the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and people like Advani and Yashwant Sinha at the helm, the much-touted secularism is being routed.

The reality on the ground in India has undergone a profound change, endangering not only relations with Pakistan but imperilling the future of Indian Muslims. The hatred that is being spread is bred in the bones of the Hindu militants. Whether Pakistan has a military or a civilian government matters little to them. India is the neighbourhood bully and it is determined not to give up that role. Pakistan must remain vigilant.

Friends of Homeland Security

The Friends of Homeland Security are happy with the bill President Bush signed, but are sorry he didn’t go far enough.

Allen Sunshine, president of the Friends, told me, “They left out some important things that would have strengthened the law.”

“Such as?”

“They didn’t include geography. For example, a new survey of young adults conducted by National Geographic and Roper revealed that although we’re fighting in Afghanistan and could soon be fighting in Iraq, only 15 per cent of the young people could locate the two countries on the map.”

I said, “It doesn’t surprise me. I was never very good at geography.”

“It probably doesn’t matter except that if we are going to send our boys to fight for their country, they should at least know where the evil empires are located.”

“If Don Rumsfeld thinks it is important, he will make sure the troops know where Iraq is.”

“The Friends of Homeland Security have suggested that every time the president appears on TV, he should have a map behind him and use a pointer to show Americans what they have to fight for.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “If American youths know where Afghanistan, is they may capture bin Laden.”

Allen said, “The second thing they left out of the Homeland Security Act is that although they will have alerts from green to orange, they didn’t tell us what to do when they flash a colour on the screen.

“Orange means the terrorists are at the door and citizens must leave their cities and towns as quickly as possible. On paper this makes sense, but in practice it’s ridiculous. You can’t empty a city in 24 hours.

“The Friends’ solution is that the only people who can leave are those who have health insurance. This is 40 per cent of the population. Sixty per cent will have to remain behind and face the music.”

He also said, “If they are really serious about Homeland Security, they would have a plan for fans fighting at college football games. This includes the release of pepper shots and tear gas. The rioters will be tried in a military court and sentenced to resod the stadium’s turf.” “You have it all thought out. How come the White House didn’t contact you before Congress passed the bill?”

“We lobbied as hard as we could. You know the rider on the law that says you can’t sue a drug company if you are a victim of a terrorist act? It would not have passed if it weren’t for the role we play in Homeland Security.”—Dawn/Tribune Media Services

Blaming religion for terrorism

IT has always been true that many things done in the name of God would be abhorrent to a benign deity. But, with terrorists attacking Israelis in Kenya, Muslims and Christians killing each other in Nigeria, a mission nurse murdered in Lebanon and Hindu worshippers and Muslim assailants shot down in Kashmir, this seems like an especially bad period for the abuse of religion.

Religion continues to be a vehicle for political expression and change, whether peaceful or violent, in a way surprising to those who once expected a progressive secularization to ultimately reach every part of the globe.

What is really going on during religious revivals or in the growth of political movements based on religion, or of terrorist groups claiming religious justification, are vexed issues, but between, say, the Iranian revolution and the emergence of Al Qaeda, there have been some clues.

Those are both dates of developments within the Islamic world, but this is a period which also encompasses the growth of the Christian right in the US, an increase in religious influence in Israel, a war in the Balkans in which religiously derived identities played a baleful part, the emergence of a more extreme form of Hinduism in India and the sometimes intolerant reassertiveness of the Orthodox churches in former communist states.

Such a list suggests a pathology, and that is certainly there, as the Mombasa outrage confirms. But for the more general phenomena of religious politics it might be better to go back to that understanding of religious change which sees it as reflecting the appearance of new classes, but also as shaped by local political tradition. The Middle East, in particular, shows the range of different kinds of religious change that have accompanied similar forces in countries such as Turkey, Iran, Egypt and even Israel.

That suggests it is these forces, foremost among them population growth and rapid urbanization, which are primary, and the religious consequences which are secondary. This in turn suggests that “blaming” religion as such for unwelcome changes and for violent acts misses the point, which is not the same as saying that clerical elites do not have a responsibility to oppose distortions of religion.

As the Islamist movement in Turkey grew, some sympathetic observers a few years ago likened it to the Methodist movement in Britain in its early days. The immigrants from the countryside coming into Turkey’s big cities, and the children born to them there, wanted a religious and political presentation, and representation, which catered to them. The older parties tried, had some success, but usually lost any credit they gained on the campaign trail in government.

Equally, perhaps, Turkish Islam, characterized by state control of the formal structures on the one hand and a Freemason-like network of religious orders for the more privileged on the other, did not meet the needs of the new classes in the cities. It may be that the most important aspect of the recent triumph of the Justice and Development party is that it registers fully this demographic and social shift in Turkey rather than that it brings Islam into Turkish politics in a way not permitted before.

In Iran very similar social changes are having an almost opposite effect, as many have noted. The movement into the cities and the tensions between old and new kinds of businessmen contributed toward the revolution which removed the Shah. But population growth and urbanization have since gone at a pace beyond anything seen in the Shah’s time. So Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution has been faced with new classes and masses and their needs just as was the Turkish establishment.

Since political Islamists are in power in Iran, frustration and anger with the government has taken on an inevitably secular character. A principled opposition among those clerics who were always doubtful about the legitimacy of Khomeini’s innovations has also grown.

President Mohammad Khatami has kept political Islam going by promising reform, but the long struggle between his supporters and the hardliners may now be heading for some kind of resolution. A victory for the reformists might be a kind of Iranian equivalent of the Turkish changes, or, if the Iranian hardliners crack down, to the clash between the new government and the armed forces which is still a remote possibility in Turkey.

In Israel and the occupied territories, the same population growth and urbanization have taken peculiar forms but are still profoundly influential. Palestinian population growth and the lumpen urbanization represented by concentration in refugee shanty towns, on the one hand, and by commuting to work in Israel on the other, happened in areas both inside and outside Israel’s control. Whichever it was, Israel faced problems it had not anticipated.

The Palestinian community in Israel, in the occupied territories and in the countries where Palestinians lived in exile, grew immensely in size, and maintained and strengthened its identity — exactly the opposite of what the Israelis had hoped. In the territories, the new classes had new demands like their equivalents elsewhere, although of course shaped by the distorted and impoverished conditions imposed by the conflict, and movements like Hamas and Islamic Jihad can be seen as responding to those demands in ways the Palestine Liberation Organization and then the Palestine Authority could not or would not.

Meanwhile, Israel’s own Jewish population growth and greater urbanization, reinforced by immigration, played a part in the decline of the Labour party, better fortunes for Likud and the increased influence of the religious parties that have characterized its recent political history.

Egyptian developments show yet another possibility. Where there is little formal political access for those with apparently religious answers to political problems, and where the violent takeover of the state has both failed and been repudiated by a majority in the movement, new leaders responding to new needs can proceed by taking over the informal and non-governmental institutions of society. The success of Islamists in the Middle East can be accounted for by the inadequacy of existing governments, and putting the blame on the US for sustaining such governments.

Those truly devoted to their religion must continue to try to moderate these effects. There is no denying that, whatever the ultimate causes, killing in the name of religion of the sort recently seen represents a moral breakdown.—Dawn/Guardian Service.