Question of ‘image’
A MAJOR problem to be tackled by the Islamic summit conference opening in Makkah today is one of image of the Muslims, especially in the West. The challenge for the Muslim ummah is real, because there is no dearth of politicians in the West who would like to capitalize on all that has been going on since 9/11 to whip up emotions. At the same time, certain sections of the media have turned Muslim-bashing into a fine art. More often than not, barring some exceptions, western mediapersons speak of “Islamic terrorism”, making their readers and viewers believe that Islam sanctions terrorism. The ad nauseam repetition of this theme reminds one of the western media’s obsession with “communist threats”, spawned by the communist world. With that, however, the West came to terms and started believing in co-existence long before the Soviet system collapsed. More or less the same situation exists today, though the analogy cannot be pressed too far at a time when the leading western power, the US, regards some Muslim countries as its allies, while sections of European opinion would like Turkey to join the European Union.
Nevertheless, the image problem is real, because people in countries subjected to terrorist attacks of the kind seen in New York, Madrid and London cannot but have serious misgivings about a religion some of whose followers — even if tiny in numbers — inflict death and destruction on innocent people. To make them believe that the men behind these slaughters did not represent the Muslim world is a difficult task. At the same time, an equally greater challenge is to address what Bernard Lewis calls “the roots of the Muslim rage”. There is no doubt that non-Muslims have been guilty of the slaughter of the innocent — Kashmir, Palestine and Bosnia, with such specific names as Deir Yassin, Sabra-Chatilla and Gujarat, coming to one’s mind. But the point to note is that those angry among the Muslim world over these tragedies and the continued occupation of some Islamic lands need to be told that the slaughter of innocent men, women and children cannot bring the days of the liberation of Palestine and Kashmir any nearer. In fact, carnages of the kind seen on 9/11 and 7/7 serve to retard rather than advance these causes. Those believing in terrorism forget that large sections of western people do not approve of the policies of their governments. The peace rallies in London and Rome and other western cities on the eve of the Anglo-American attack on Iraq were much larger than those seen anywhere in the Muslim world.
Muslim rulers have also to realize one major but awkward truth: those resorting to terrorism are equally angry with their own governments, whom they see as collaborators. Their “rage” needs to be understood, because civilian and military dictators and kings and potentates have blocked all avenues of peaceful dissent. Denied democratic rights for airing their views, young men fall victim to fanatics whose worldview is as flawed as their concept of the interaction that is possible, and needed, at a time when 20 million Muslims are part of mainstream life in Europe alone. Ultimately, a two-way interaction between the Muslim world and the West would be fruitful only when the Islamic world reforms and democratizes itself. The absence of democratic institutions is one of the sources of terrorism directed not only against the West but also against the Muslim world’s own elites. But the movement for democratic reform has to come from within Muslim societies; democracy cannot be imposed from outside.
New parliamentary year
THE first day of the inaugural session of the current National Assembly’s fourth parliamentary year was marred by opposition allegations against the government regarding the failure of the president to address a joint sitting of parliament. The opposition was united in its criticism of the president’s inability or unwillingness to address a joint session at the beginning of the new parliamentary year as required by Article 56 of the Constitution. The federal parliamentary affairs minister claimed that the language of the Constitution has left the issue of the presidential address to the president’s discretion. Asked to give his opinion on this matter by the opposition, the speaker chose to reserve his ruling. All this ignores a statement made in April 2003 by the minister of state for parliamentary affairs who had admitted that the president was constitutionally required to address a joint session at the start of a new parliamentary year.
But the issue here is not even of the president’s address per se but that of the proper working of parliament. There is a parliamentary committee, with representation from the government and the opposition, which of late has been meeting before each NA session to lay out rules for smoothly running the house. Why can’t the issue of the president’s address be amicably settled in this forum? Both sides can present their viewpoints and come to an agreed settlement. The government should commit itself to allowing a comprehensive discussion on the president’s speech while the opposition should promise not to interrupt when he speaks. This aside, the opposition does have valid grievances. On many occasions its members are not allowed to speak or their microphones are switched off while the treasury bench members they claim are treated differently. At other times questions related to matters of public interest are disallowed on flimsy grounds. The last time the president addressed a joint sitting was in 2004. The government and the opposition should work together to ensure that this constitutional requirement is met and to make parliament a place where dissent can be aired in a civilized fashion in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.
New parliamentary year
THE first day of the inaugural session of the current National Assembly’s fourth parliamentary year was marred by opposition allegations against the government regarding the failure of the president to address a joint sitting of parliament. The opposition was united in its criticism of the president’s inability or unwillingness to address a joint session at the beginning of the new parliamentary year as required by Article 56 of the Constitution. The federal parliamentary affairs minister claimed that the language of the Constitution has left the issue of the presidential address to the president’s discretion. Asked to give his opinion on this matter by the opposition, the speaker chose to reserve his ruling. All this ignores a statement made in April 2003 by the minister of state for parliamentary affairs who had admitted that the president was constitutionally required to address a joint session at the start of a new parliamentary year.
But the issue here is not even of the president’s address per se but that of the proper working of parliament. There is a parliamentary committee, with representation from the government and the opposition, which of late has been meeting before each NA session to lay out rules for smoothly running the house. Why can’t the issue of the president’s address be amicably settled in this forum? Both sides can present their viewpoints and come to an agreed settlement. The government should commit itself to allowing a comprehensive discussion on the president’s speech while the opposition should promise not to interrupt when he speaks. This aside, the opposition does have valid grievances. On many occasions its members are not allowed to speak or their microphones are switched off while the treasury bench members they claim are treated differently. At other times questions related to matters of public interest are disallowed on flimsy grounds. The last time the president addressed a joint sitting was in 2004. The government and the opposition should work together to ensure that this constitutional requirement is met and to make parliament a place where dissent can be aired in a civilized fashion in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.
A legacy of cultural dissent
THIRTY-SIX years ago — on November 15, 1969, to be precise — an estimated half a million Americans gathered in the heart of Washington D.C. in one of the largest protests against the war their government was waging in Vietnam. There were plenty of speeches on the menu, and the interludes were taken up by songs. But entertaining and motivating a diverse crowd of that size was no easy task, as the veteran folk singer and activist Pete Seeger discovered when he tried organizing a singalong.
Seeger’s ability to get all sorts of audiences — from recalcitrant toddlers to crowds unfamiliar with English — to latch on to catchy choruses is legendary. Yet on that day, one of his best antiwar songs fell flat. Another song suffered the same fate. Seeger decided to have one last go. This time he gently hurled into the throng a simple refrain that he had first encountered just three days earlier. “All we are saying,” it went, “is give peace a chance.”
“We sang it over and over,” recalls Seeger. “After 30 seconds, a few thousand were singing it with us. After a minute, tens of thousands...Two, three, four minutes went by as 500,000 sang it over and over.
“Looking out at that sea of faces, it was like a huge ballet: flags, banners, signs would move to the right for three beats and then left for the next measure. Parents had children on their shoulders, swaying in rhythm...Finally, we let it end softly as in a gospel church when a hymn has been sung till no one can add more.”
Thousands of miles away, on the other sides of the Atlantic, the composer of Give Peace a Chance swelled with pride on hearing a few snatches of the Washington performance on a news broadcast. This is precisely what John Lennon had wanted to achieve: to come up with a few verses that could be sung by people marching on the streets, a substitute for the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome.
The refrain was, of course, utterly apt for the times: it unambiguously summarized how people the world over, including a rapidly growing number of Americans, felt about the Vietnam war.
Unfortunately, it has lost little of its validity in the interim. It’s the obvious song for demonstrators to spontaneously burst into when marching for peace. And it may well, by the looks of it, retain that status for as long as there is a human race.
It was, inevitably, one of the songs that large crowds of mourners chose to chant after Lennon was gunned down 25 years ago tomorrow outside the apartment block in New York where he lived. They also sang songs associated with the decade that Lennon had spent as one-fourth of The Beatles — She Loves You, the anthemic All You Need is Love — and there can be little question that in that capacity alone the sudden death of the singer, songwriter and guitarist would have occasioned a mass outpouring of emotions. But his status in posterity owes more than a little to the poses he struck and the music he made in the all-too-brief post-Beatles phase of his career.
Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Japanese artist he married in 1969, attracted a great deal of flak for staging antics that they described as advertisements for peace. But perhaps their most cherished legacy as a couple is a simple song titled Imaginewhich claimed the top spot a few years ago when the BBC conducted a poll to pick the Song of the Millennium.
That may be too great a burden for any tune to bear, but Imagine does undoubtedly stand out as an epitome of 1960s idealism, envisaging a world without barriers, without blind faith, without property, without war. Although the song is invariably credited exclusively to Lennon, its lyrics are actually based on a poem by Ono.
Lennon wasn’t by any means the first popular performer to take on board social and political issues, but the significance of his advocacy can be understood only in the context of the unprecedented cachet of The Beatles in western culture. Long before any of them plucked up the courage to publicly voice an opinion on any political matter, a substantial section of humanity looked upon them as some kind of avatars. Millions of fans dissected their songs — and album covers — in a futile quest for revelation. Overt political engagement by any of them was therefore bound to be taken seriously, and to attract a backlash.
The Nixon administration considered Lennon a threat and tried for years to get him deported from the US after he settled in New York in 1971. The FBI maintained voluminous surveillance files on him, and refused to release all the pages in the face of freedom-of-information requests in the 1980s and 1990s; and in the hundreds of pages that were released, substantial sections had been blacked out. Such evidence of the state’s antagonism prompted conspiracy theories to the effect that Lennon was the victim of a CIA hit or something of that nature, but even the circumstantial evidence does not point to such a conclusion.
Yoko Ono recently suggested that were her husband still alive (he would have turned 65 last October), he would have been mighty upset with the state of the world. There is little reason to doubt that, given that the antics of the Bush administration and its cronies have succeeded in eliciting angry diatribes even from artists who had previously professed no interest in international affairs: from George Michael and the Dixie Chicks to Dolly Parton and Burt Bacharach.
They are part of a tradition that stretches back hundreds of years in anglophone culture. (Comparable practices can, of course, be found in various other cultures across the world, most notably in parts of Africa and Latin America).
In the United States it is a relatively more recent phenomenon, but even so it goes back at least to the era of slavery, when African-Americans surreptitiously began to recast gospel hymns as songs of freedom. The discontent bred by industrialization led to the emergence of a parallel genre, whereby new words were put to the popular tunes of the day.
The two trends crossed paths in the mid-20th century, and the civil rights movement that climaxed in the early 1960s arguably combined the best of both worlds, yielding some of the most powerful protest songs of the century — as well as some of its greatest songwriters, including Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. Martin Scorsese’s recent film No Direction Home serves as a reminder of what a remarkably potent talent Dylan represented in those restless days. The more’s the pity that for him the expansion of his horizons, musically and lyrically, meant a drift away from the poignant polemics and ballads of his youth.
Not a single Dylan song refers directly to Vietnam, even though — or perhaps because — all around him there was a veritable explosion of antiwar creativity as the US aggression in Indochina entered its deadliest phase. Arguably the catchiest composition of the era was a satire by Country Joe McDonald that goes “One two three, what are we fighting for?/ Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn/ The next stop is Vietnam” — a style that owed more to Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie than to Dylan.
It no longer comes as a surprise that Dylan has had nothing to say about the Iraq war either, although several of his comrades from the civil rights struggle — including Pete Seeger and Joan Baez — are deeply involved in the cultural resistance to the neo-conservative onslaught.
A couple of years ago, I recall reading a comment that lamented the dearth of antiwar protest music in comparison with the Vietnam era. But that was a misplaced comment. It’s true that mainstream radio and television stations in the US are averse to broadcasting music that challenges the status quo. But it has always been thus, and this phenomenon is hardly a sound basis for postulating that such music is an endangered species. Quite to the contrary, it seems that no vein of America’s rich musical tradition, from punk and hip-hop to traditional folk, has been left unmined by those who beg to differ with the ruling ideology. Besides, in the age of the internet, wide dissemination is no longer an insurmountable problem.
And there are plenty of relatively new voices chiming in with the ones that have grown hoarse over the decades. Among middle-aged rockers who have come into their own as early 21st-century preachers, Billy Bragg and Steve Earle deserve a mention. Mick Jagger’s Sweet Neo Con, on the latest Rolling Stones album, offers a reasonably potent example of sexagenarian angst. And among scores of excellent younger performers, Ani DiFranco (whose Self Evident was one of the best responses to 9/11 that I have come across) and David Rovics (a singing journalist in the Phil Ochs mould with a particular interest in Palestine, whose entire catalogue can be downloaded for free at www.davidrovics.com) stand out.
Meanwhile, there’s a recent Ono-endorsed remix of Give Peace a Chance, featuring the Voices of Asia (including Junoon), that’s well worth a listen. We started on a high note, so let’s end with a related cautionary tale. “Dozens of television cameras recorded the afternoon’s songs and speeches,” says Pete Seeger of the November 1969 moratorium. “A few days later I asked a friend at CBS if there was a chance to get a copy of the tape of that song. He said that one day after the demonstration, orders came down from the top to destroy all tapes.”
Email: mahirali1@gmail.com