A New Road Map: Tawhid in the 21st century
And your Allah is One Allah. There is no god but He, Most Gracious, Most Merciful (Q2:163).Archive for Politics
9/11 Commission Report: Youth Education Recommendations
Some recommendations that the American Muslim community should proactively consider for the short and long term future include:
* Reform of part-time and full-time Muslim school curricula as needed.
This would require a thorough review of the curricula of these institutions. Some would need to de-emphasize certain scholars and ideologies that have the potential to incite hatred. This is not to say that they should be eliminated from curricula, however it is important to have guided instruction and a balanced expression of views. As a profound Muslim thinker teaches, we need to teach people to swim, not prevent them from approaching the ocean.
One issue that we need to consider is the importance of emphasizing ideas and concepts rather than relying almost exclusively on the renown of the author to validate the merit of the content.
* Reform of popular Muslim publications.
The care that needs to define the content of school curricula should also be placed on the editing and publication of the multitude of popular community magazines that exist today. Once again, censorship should never be the tolerated, however the current emphasis on certain scholars rather than on ideas needs to be mitigated.
* Khutbahs, halaqas and MSA events.
Long-term strategies need to be developed at local and national levels that would work towards consistently developing the character, minds and mission of the youth. The current ad-hoc nature of planning results in lost opportunities.
* National resources.
The importing of foreign-born “scholars” or the exporting of our youth to different countries to learn Islam and the Arabic language should be strongly discouraged. The training of the next generation of leaders, imams and citizens needs to happen within the country to ensure that American Muslims do not lose touch with the American aspect of their identity, while maintaining their connection to the sources of their Muslim identity: the Quran and the Sunnah.
The reform of youth education is something that will be done for us if we do not take the initiative ourselves. As American Muslims it is our responsibility to define our own path. A strategic path enabling our own development is a necessity in the context of the scenarios that can play out. The cultivation of a healthy mind needs time and planning; in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “As for the future, your task is not to foresee, but to enable it.”
9/11 Commission Report: Youth Education
Youth Education: A Portent for Our Future
Madrasahs around the globe need reform. There is nary a soul that would disagree with the statement, including their own administrators. Presumably these are the hotspots that teach hatred by indoctrinating their students with teachings from the Quran and scholars labeled extremists like Sayyid Qutb, Ibn Taymiyya and Mawdudi. Their graduates are vilified as having learned no marketable skills and thus are assumed to emerge as frustrated, unemployed youth, prime for the picking of malicious terrorists.
The 9/11 Commission considers the solution to this dilemma to be the opening of primary and secondary schools around the world where the syllabus will be less religious, more secular and thereby safer. We can agree or disagree on the effectiveness of such an endeavor. We can argue the merits of internal reform versus imposed external change. We can debate the acceptance of such policy by various regimes that will be the recipients. What we should not do as an American Muslim community is be complacent and think that such reforms are not setting the precedent for possible future action against our own local Islamic schools.
As any futurist or scenario-planner will tell you, scenarios outline expected or supposed sequences of events. It is no stretch of the imagination to consider that the 9/11 Commission Report’s criticism of schools teaching the Quran in other parts of the world and the labeling of scholars as ‘extremist’ will eventually also be leveled against schools on our home-ground. After all, every Muslim school whether full-time or part-time teaches the Quran; several teach the works of these same scholars. Every MSA event alludes to the same scholars, and even almost every edition of Islamic Horizons does too.
As Muslims, we often protest that extremists quoting Qutb or defining Islam as violent and militant are misinterpreting the texts. At the same time, we proclaim the need to defend Islam and its intellectuals from the attacks of the nefarious “West.”
Strategies are devised to enable people to achieve their objectives within the context of scenarios. What we need to clarify within our community is our objective. National security should be just as much a concern for us as it is for our neighbor across the street. The development of our youth should be of paramount importance for us.
The question we must answer honestly pertains to the priority we give to the development of the character of our youth. Is it truly important or is this merely lip-service? Censorship is not an option, but guided instruction should be. While we all agree that Qutb was an extraordinary activist, we also know that he hated the West. When we give a young, impressionable mind a book written by an author that lashes out against the West we forget that the young mind reading the book is also part of the West. We inadvertently teach our youth to hate themselves.
We do not teach the youth to be close to the Quran and the Sunnah– instead we encourage them to read other peoples interpretations of both. Enabling the child to read revelation directly is not dangerous. What is dangerous is for them to read politically motivated interpretations that were written for a different country, for a different people and for a different time-period.
We need to work towards building the character of our youth and simultaneously prevent the exploitation of vulnerable personalities within our own community. If we fail to do so and are targeted as a result, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
It is easy to don a cloak of paranoia and assume that the Administration is out to get us. What is more productive is to understand that as American Muslims we have a responsibility to fulfill. This includes ensuring the development of our own community in a healthy and productive manner–at peace with the duality of its identity and clear about its mission.
Got Ethanol?
The Middle East is an unstable region by all accounts. With weekly bombings of Iraqi and Saudi pipelines and refineries we need to worry about the security of the US energy supply. Gasoline prices are sky-rocketing past $2/gallon and there has been resurgence in demand for SUVs and trucks low on the fuel-efficiency scale. Before matters get any worse, we need to ask ourselves some tough questions: how can we get out of Mid-East oil in a hurry? What are the alternatives to the status quo?
A shift in our primary energy supply is a national security necessity. Are there stable, clean and most importantly, domestic alternatives that we can tap into? What is our vision and what technologies will enable it? The Department of Energy posits a change some 25 to 30 years away- we cannot afford to wait that long. We need to develop strategies to dramatically and fundamentally change the shape of energy usage in the U.S. and the planet in the next fifteen years.
So, where do we start? The transportation sector relies almost exclusively on oil. Some 70% of all oil consumed in the US is for transportation (the rest is used for heating and industrial uses). 60% of this oil is imported. If we want to solve the problem of dependency on imported oil, changes must occur in the transportation sector first.
The world today- led by the U.S., Europe and Japan- is slowly moving towards hydrogen as a replacement for transportation in the long term. There are many promises hanging in the air and we need to start preparing for this transition. Some of the fundamental considerations in this road to changing our primary energy source are political and economic feasibility, environmental impact, utilization of existing infrastructure and potential geopolitical disruption.
We need a fuel that will be an alternative to oil today, and can also be used as a source for hydrogen when the promised cars of the future are developed. This fuel is ethanol. Currently made with domestic corn, in a few years time it will be made from any type of cellulosic biomass- from sawdust in paper mills to corn husk and grass. Our waste will become our savior.
What about our cars? Research at the Rocky Mountain Institute tells us that if the efficiency of our cars could increase by 6mpg today we would no longer need to import any oil from the Middle East. What can we do to make it happen?
As consumers we can put pressure on auto manufacturers to make more efficient cars with better mileage. However we also have other choices. Without making any changes, cars of today can run on up to 10% ethanol. Also, all auto manufacturers can produce engines that can run on up to 85% ethanol with no changes in engineering and manufacturing costs (E85 engines). They need to start doing so immediately. We need to lobby the Government to make domestic ethanol a priority rather than running the country on the whims of Halliburton.
Imagine the difference! Hundreds of thousands of new vehicles could be using ethanol instead of oil, a domestic fuel that can be distributed through the existing infrastructure with very limited changes needed.
Hybrid cars also have an important role to play. An increasing number of manufacturers already offer them (Toyota’s Prius and the Honda Insight etc). These cars use almost 30-50% less fuel than average cars. By next year almost all auto manufacturers will be releasing new hybrid cars and SUVs.
The ability to change our oil dependency lies in the hands of the consumers. A word of caution however is needed lest we do something foolish in haste. An ethanol and hydrogen future looks rosy and will provide energy independence for us but we will not solve all our problems.
If we pull out of the international oil market and become independent in a hurry we will cause significant crises in the other parts of the world. The unrest in economies that rely heavily on petro-dollars will cause regimes to collapse and the rich-poor divide to deepen. Emotions of our friends and foes alike could turn against us and the world will have terrorism problems for decades. A holistic view must be taken of the system.
We will need to encourage growth in developing countries so that the demand for oil shifts; as the developing world demands more oil from the suppliers our departure from the scene will be less noticeable. For the long term we need to encourage economic diversification for the oil-producing countries- they need to build new and different industries so that oil is not the major source of their income.
A safer America not dependent on imported oil is a hope for us, our environment and the world at large.
Why Iraq?
(This piece was written before the Iraq War started)
Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Dr Stephen Younger, Director of the Defense Threat reduction Agency. These are the folks that try to eliminate the threat of WMDs for the rest of us. The MIT Club of Washington DC had arranged this event. Dr Younger was a wonderful speaker- insightful, frank, informed and able to think systemically. Not surprisingly, he was bombarded with questions at the end of his talk, most of them related to Iraq.
The definition of winning this war was spelled out: General Tommy Franks has to ensure that USA will have the ability to go into Iraq, eliminate WMDs and the ability to create them. Franks will create the safe environment that DTRA needs to complete its job. One of the questions asked was why Iraq? Given the fact that there are numerous cruel and evil rulers in the world who commit outrages in their own countries of the same magnitude as Saddam Hussein (the questioner specifically referred to several regimes in Africa), why is it that we have chosen to attack Iraq, rather than the rest? The second part of this same question was why did we support Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, and why did we change our minds about it now?
The answers, in a nutshell, were startling, if for no other reason than their honesty. To the first question Dr Younger responded while we ought to be helping out those populations too, those other regimes in Africa were “not a threat to Western culture that Iraq is”, and is incidentally not the only country that is considered a threat. In case you did not realize the significance of that statement, let me emphasize the point: Iraq is a threat to “Western Culture”. Apparently there are several other countries that are on notice right now.
A speaker at a previous seminar I attended (Homeland Security Seminar Series, also organized by the MIT Club of DC) had also indicated that there are some countries on the “list”- that speaker had specified there are about six. The answer to the second part of the question was simply that we supported Iraq against Iran because Iraq was the lesser of two evils and that we did not want the Islamic Revolution to spread! Food for thought, eh? Saddam, the intelligent, cruel monster was used to squelch a greater evil: the Islamic Revolution!
These answers of course begged the question that I proceeded to ask: assuming that there is a threat to the Western culture from Iraq and from Iran with its Islamic Revolution and nuclear capabilities, what will we do if a democracy comes in Iraq? This is of course a source of concern because in a democracy the Shiite majority in Iraq will almost certainly have a huge role in the administration, and they have strong leanings with Shiite Iran. What will WE do next?
Dr Younger tried to answer my question without answering my question- he mentioned how Western civilization had grown out of Ancient Sumeria, how it took the US some 100 years to establish a democracy and deal with all or almost all of the minority issues, so we really must give democracy a chance. Fair enough, sort of…
Being a troublemaker, I asked a follow-up question: if it took us 100 years to establish and stabilize a democracy, and maybe optimistically Iraq will do it in 50 years, do WE have the patience to allow administrations that we don’t like to come into power while Iraq’s democracy is evolving? Let me summarize the answer I got: Yes, we should. No, we won’t. I hope we do.
Perhaps it is time that both doves and hawks really thought about the role that humanitarian responsibilities, oil, WMDs and Al-Qaeda actually play in this war? With so much rhetoric it’s sometimes hard to find that kernel of truth.
