Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

Sally Struthers, biblical prophet

We Americans are rather quick to preach to the rest of the world, but controversial ethicist Peter Singer points out in a cogent essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education that there is one area in which we as a nation are scandalously derelict: Though the wealthiest nation in the world--not to mention one that benefits handsomely from selling all manner of goods and services to the Developing World--we are unconscionable skin-flints when it comes to aid to the world's poorest.  That' s an ugly reality that Americans desperately need to confront.

It has a lot of eye-opening facts and insights, but for me the most interesting part of his piece is his philosophical indictment of rank and file American consumers.  It's by no means "out of our hands." When we look away from the suffering, individuals like you and me are not merely selfish but morally culpable by not doing more. He argues that when you factor in how negligible the financial outlay required would be for most of us along with the gravity of the situation, it is somewhat akin to letting somebody drown when you could easily intervene.

Over a billion still subsist---"live" is not really the right word--on less than a dollar a day, and 27,000 children die of preventable diseases every day. Remember Sally Struthers' famous pitch from the "Save the Children" commercials during the 1980s? ("For the price of just a cup of coffee a day, you can save a life.") That's even more true in our day as we fork out several dollars for designer drinks without a thought to the expense. 

America's Shame - ChronicleReview.com (behind a pay wall, alas)

Reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty throughout the world is clearly one of the great moral challenges of our time. Although the issue is by no means absent from what we study and teach, as educators in the United States we appear to be falling short in the task of ensuring that our students are adequately informed about world poverty, its consequences, and the ways in which it can be reduced. Is it possible that some of the reluctance to deal with the topic stems from the fact that it may have uncomfortable conclusions for our own lives?

Struthers' slogan, so widely parodied, was a profound call to arms that many of us still fail to heed.

Speaking of this travesty of misplaced priorities, listen to Esther Duflo and Jeffrey Sachs piercing insights on world poverty and how little we actually do as a nation at a conference organized by The New Yorker:

I find the discussion inspiring, a reminder of how noble and important a calling economic development work can be.

Jerry Falwell infamously blamed the terrible destruction of Hurrican Katrina on America's (to his mind) overly tolerant attitudes towards gays and abortion.  I find such neat, monocausal explanations for modern disasters hard to swallow for a variety of reasons (one being that if you look at historical context surrounding events that are invoked by preachers, one often sees far worse offenses going unpunished or even seemingly being  "rewarded" with good fortune; to be taken literally, these narratives require a very selective review of history).

But if we're going to take such a fire & brimstone approach, I say that if something screams out to the heavens for judgment, it surely must be how the world's most wealthy, pampered and blessed societies basically sit by as huge numbers of people around the globe die or  suffer from a host of problems that could easily be prevented, remedied, or significantly mitigated if we really cared.

Update: I'm going to be naughty and post Singer's entire article. It's just so powerful and enlightening. Information wants to be free. I understand the economic imperatives that publishers must contend with, but given the importance of the topic doubly unfortunate (and ironic) for this piece to be locked away behind a subscription wall.  The people that most need to ponder these observations are the least likely to subscribe to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Don't tell his critics, but his proposed tax is eminently "Islamic" in spirit. Islam is very supportive of free enterprise and hard work, but with the critical difference that wealth that is purified through regular, modest donations to charity (i.e., zakat) is little better than ill gotten gains.

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America's Shame
PETER SINGER

Reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty throughout the world is clearly one of the great moral challenges of our time. Although the issue is by no means absent from what we study and teach, as educators in the United States we appear to be falling short in the task of ensuring that our students are adequately informed about world poverty, its consequences, and the ways in which it can be reduced. Is it possible that some of the reluctance to deal with the topic stems from the fact that it may have uncomfortable conclusions for our own lives? If we take seriously the idea that the value of a human life does not diminish when we cross national boundaries, then we ought to be giving a much higher priority to reducing world poverty. I have in mind a broad re-envisioning of what we teach.

We should not limit so important a topic to specialized courses on international development (valuable as they are). The issue should be prominent in anthropology, cultural studies, economics, ethics and sociology. In political-science courses, we should ask why we pay so little attention to people living in poverty outside our borders. Psychology courses could take up the factors that limit our willingness to give to distant strangers. Engineers might increase the amount of class time they devote to how their skills can be applied to assist the world's poorest people. Medical schools could focus more on the global burden of disease and how it might be reduced, and law students should be prompted to think about an international legal regime that allows American oil companies to buy oil from dictators who pocket most of the proceeds. Programs could also be produced to help to educate the broader public. Nor should we shy away from reconsidering our emphasis on teaching in fields that have timeless artistic and cultural value. It is legitimate to ask: In a situation in which more people die each year from poverty-related causes than
died in any one year during World War II, how much should we be spending on the refinement of our artistic sensitivities and those of our students?

I began to think about our obligations to the poor in 1971, when I was a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Oxford. A few years earlier, such a question would not have been considered one for philosophers to discuss. The prevailing view then was that the business of philosophy was to analyze the meanings of words. The linguistic analysis that preoccupied philosophers was supposed to be ethically neutral. We would discuss whether the statement "You ought to return the book you borrowed" expressed an attitude or stated a fact, but not whether it was always obligatory to return a borrowed book -- let alone to give to the poor.

The student movement of the 1960s demanded that the university become "relevant." In response, with war raging in Vietnam and civil disobedience against it at draft offices across the United States, a few philosophers began to revive discussions of the criteria for a just war, and of our obligations to obey the law. When a crisis broke out in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and nine million refugees poured across the border into India, I wrote an article, "Famine, Affluence and Morality," which appeared in the first volume of Philosophy & Public Affairs. (The journal's title was itself a manifesto, an assertion that philosophy did, after all, have something to say about public affairs.)

Over the 37 years since that article appeared, I've written about many other issues in applied ethics -- our treatment of animals, new reproductive technology, euthanasia, globalization, climate change, and what we eat. At the core of my work is a desire to draw attention to points at which conventional morality causes, or fails to alleviate, a significant amount of suffering that could be reduced. What we owe the poor is part of that core.

The World Bank defines extreme poverty as not having enough income to meet the most basic human needs for adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation, health care, or education. One widely quoted statistic is that a billion people are living on less than one U.S. dollar per day. That was the World Bank's poverty line until 2008, when better data led to a new poverty line of $1.25 per day. As a result, the number of people whose income puts them under the new poverty line is 1.4 billion.

On hearing the "$1.25 a day" figure, the thought may cross your mind that in many developing countries it is possible to live much more cheaply than in industrialized nations. But the World Bank has already made that adjustment in purchasing power, so those it classifies as living in extreme poverty are existing on a daily total consumption of goods and services -- whether earned or homegrown -- comparable to the amount of goods and services that can be bought in the United States for $1.25.

The 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty are likely to be hungry for at least a part of every year. Even if they can get enough food to fill their stomachs, they will probably be malnourished because their diet lacks essential nutrients. In children, malnutrition stunts growth and can cause permanent brain damage. The poor may not be able to afford to send their children to school. Even the most basic health-care services are usually beyond their means.

That kind of poverty kills. While life expectancy in rich nations averages 78 years, in the poorest nations -- those classified by the United Nations as "least developed" -- it is below 50. In rich countries, fewer than one child in 100 dies before the age of 5; in the poorest countries, one in five does. Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, estimates that nearly 10 million children under 5 die each year from causes related to poverty. That's 27,000 a day -- a football stadium full of young children, dying every day (along with thousands of older children and adults who die from poverty every day as well). Some children die because they don't have enough to eat or clean water to drink. More die from measles, malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia -- diseases that don't exist in developed nations, or if they do, are easily cured and rarely fatal.

Describing a case in Ghana, a man told a researcher from the World Bank: "Take the death of this small boy this morning, for example. The boy died of measles. We all know he could have been cured at the hospital. But the parents had no money, and so the boy died a slow and painful death, not of measles but out of poverty."

Unicef, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, and many other organizations are working to reduce poverty and provide clean water and basic health care, and those efforts are reducing the toll. If the groups had more money, they could do more, and more lives would be saved.

Despite the recent economic downturn, we are nevertheless living in a time that is particularly opportune for reducing extreme poverty worldwide. The first decade of the 21st century has seen the proportion of people unable to meet their basic physical needs shrink to less than it has been at any time in history, and perhaps at any time since human beings came into existence. At the same time, the proportion of people with far more than they need is also unprecedented. Those in affluent societies work an average of only six hours a week to earn enough to buy an adequate amount of food.

Most important, rich and poor are now linked in ways they never were before. Real-time moving images of people on the edge of survival are beamed into our living rooms. Not only do we know a lot about the desperately poor, but we also have much more than before to offer them in terms of better health care, improved seeds and agricultural techniques, and new technologies for generating electricity. More amazing, through instant communications and open access to a wealth of information that surpasses the greatest libraries of the pre-Internet age, we can enable them to join the worldwide community -- if only we can help them to get far enough out of poverty to seize the opportunity.

The economist Jeffrey Sachs has argued convincingly in The End of Poverty (Penguin Press, 2005) and Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (Penguin, 2008) that extreme poverty can be virtually eliminated by the middle of this century. We are already making progress. Although the figure of 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty is an increase from the one billion that we thought there were before the World Bank recalculated its poverty line, in 1981 the comparable figure was 1.9 billion. In 1960, according to Unicef, 20 million children died before their fifth birthday because of poverty. In 2007, Unicef announced that, for the first time since record keeping began, the number of deaths of young children had fallen below 10 million a year. Public-health campaigns against smallpox, measles, and malaria have contributed to the drop in child mortality, as has economic progress in several countries. The decline is even more impressive because the world's population has more than doubled since 1960.

To do better, however, we need to dispel some prevalent myths -- myths that our students too often embrace. When I speak about world poverty at Princeton University, where I teach, or at campuses around the country, students often suggest that America is a generous country: It's already doing its part.

When my students cite American generosity, I show them figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on the amounts given by all the group's donor members. The students are astonished to find that the United States has, for many years, been at or near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries in terms of the proportion of national income given as foreign aid. After several years of vying with Portugal and Greece, we fell to the absolute bottom in 2007. Norway led the way, giving 95 cents per $100, followed by Sweden, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, and Austria. Other rich countries give less than 50 cents, with the average that year 45 cents; the United States gave only 16 cents of every $100 earned.

The ignorance of Americans about their nation's role in aiding the world's poorest people is widespread, and it has been shown in many surveys. Asked by the Gallup International Association in 2005 whether the United States gives more, less, or about the same amount of aid as other wealthy countries do in terms of percentage of national income, only 9 percent of Americans gave the correct answer; 42 percent of the respondents said the nation gave more than four times as much as was true at the time. At the extreme, 8 percent of Americans thought that the United States gave more
than a quarter of its national income as aid, a portion that is more than 100 times as great as the actual amount.

Americans also suffer from gross misconceptions about how significant the country's aid is as a percentage of all federal spending. In four surveys that asked Americans what portion of government spending goes to foreign aid, the median answers ranged from 15 percent to 20 percent. The correct answer is less than 1 percent.

A majority of people in those surveys further said that America gives too much aid -- but when asked how much America should give, the median answers ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent of government spending. In other words, people wanted foreign aid cut -- to an amount that is five to 10 times as much as their country actually gives.

Some observers contend that such figures are misleading because the United States gives more than other countries in private aid. But although we give more private aid than most rich nations do, we still trail Canada, Ireland, and Switzerland in private aid as a percentage of national income. Adding nongovernment aid, of 8 cents per $100 earned, to government aid leaves the nation's total contribution at no more than 24 cents of every $100 earned, still near the bottom of the international aid league.

Moreover, the majority of U.S. aid is not directed to helping the extremely poor. The leading recipients of official U.S. development aid are, in descending order, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Colombia, and Egypt. Iraq alone received about one-fifth of the U.S. foreign-aid budget in 2007. Iraq and Afghanistan are the top recipients because of their central role in the war on terror; Egypt has ranked near the top for decades because it is an important partner in U.S. efforts to stabilize the Middle East. Colombia is not an especially poor country -- its aid is associated with the attempt to suppress cocaine cartels. Only about a quarter of U.S. aid goes to countries classified by the OECD as "least developed."

Another obstacle to giving is the belief that most aid is wasted by corrupt regimes and never reaches the people for whom it is intended. That things sometimes go wrong is inevitable in any large-scale human enterprise, but most critiques of aid focus on government-to-government assistance or on giving by institutions like the World Bank. Aid by nongovernment organizations is less susceptible to diversion because it is given not to governments but directly to communities and grass-roots organizations working with the poor. Misappropriation happens, of course -- but the poor
live on so little, and need assistance so much, that even if some aid is wasted, the remainder will almost certainly do much more good than the money we donate would have done for us, had we retained it.

A 1995 Duke University study of more than 500 lifesaving interventions in the United States put the median cost of saving a life at $2.2-million. In 2008 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency valued a generic American life at $7.22-million, while the Department of Transportation uses a figure of $5.8-million. (Government agencies use such figures to judge whether measures that save lives by, for example, reducing air pollution or building safer roads are economically justifiable.) In contrast, when GiveWell.net, an organization dedicated to rigorous evaluation of the
cost-effectiveness of aid, studied the work of the nonprofit group Population Services International in preventing HIV infection in Africa, it calculated a cost of $200 to $700 per infection avoided. Bear in mind: In countries where antiretroviral drugs are not available, an infection prevented is likely to be a life saved. Other organizations, according to GiveWell, save lives for amounts ranging from $250 to $3,500.

It is reasonable for governments to spend more to save the lives of their own citizens than to save the lives of people in other countries. We all give more when our compatriots are facing tragedy. The tsunami that struck Southeast Asia just after Christmas 2004 killed 220,000 people and rendered millions homeless and destitute. It prompted Americans to give $1.54-billion for disaster-relief work, the largest amount that they have ever given after any natural disaster outside the United States. But that was less than a quarter of the $6.5-billion that Americans gave the following year to help those affected by Hurricane Katrina, which killed about 1,600 people and left far fewer homeless than the tsunami did. An earthquake in Pakistan in October 2005 that killed 73,000 people elicited a comparatively small $150-million in donations from Americans.

But how great should the contrast be between what we are prepared to spend to save an American life and what we are prepared to spend to save the life of someone in another country? A hundred times greater? A thousand times greater? Ten thousand times greater? The last of those figures seems to be the current approximate ratio, and that should make us uncomfortable.

Ignorance is paralyzing. If people believe that their country is doing vastly more to fight world poverty than it really is, they will see no need to add to the effort. The same is true if they believe that aid given to nongovernment organizations will never reach the poor. On those issues, the facts are clear. They simply need to be better known.

On the effectiveness of aid, there is, admittedly, more room for debate. To settle it, we need more research of the kind carried out by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. To show that an experimental drug is effective, pharmaceutical companies carry out trials in which they randomly choose who will receive a new drug and who gets the standard treatment. Duflo and Banerjee have applied the same method -- as far as the circumstances permit -- to aid interventions. If you want to know whether offering a free, nourishing meal to schoolchildren in poor areas will improve attendance and educational achievement, start by randomly selecting some schools to receive that assistance, matching them with other schools that do not. (If that sounds tough on the children, remember that aid organizations don't have the resources to provide interventions wherever they are needed.) That particular intervention does work, but some others that look plausible do not.

We also need support for trial aid projects that can, if successful, be scaled up. The Earth Institute at Columbia University, under the direction of Jeffrey Sachs, has joined with the United Nations Development Programme and Millennium Promise, a nongovernment agency, to provide expertise for the Millennium Villages project, which tests the impact of a modest amount of assistance in agriculture, education, health, and infrastructure on extremely poor rural villages in sub-Saharan Africa. More universities should be doing that kind of work, which has an aid component and a
research element.

Once we and our students have a better understanding of the facts about extreme poverty and aid, the next step is to discuss the moral implications: What obligations do affluent people have in a world in which more than a billion people live in extreme poverty? In my new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, I draw a parallel with a situation in which you come across a small child who has fallen into a pond and is in danger of drowning. You know that you can easily and safely rescue him, but you are wearing an expensive pair of shoes that will be ruined if you do. We all think it would be seriously wrong to walk on past the pond -- in fact, most people think it would be monstrous. Yet most people don't think it wrong to buy expensive shoes that they don't need rather than give the money to an organization that would put it toward interventions that could save a child's life. Although the parallel between the two situations is not exact, even after exploring the differences, I do not think we can justify our sharply differing moral judgments. We should conclude that when we can save the life of an innocent human being at a modest cost to ourselves, we should do so.

If I am correct, the vast majority of us who live in developed nations are not living an even minimally decent ethical life. Almost all of us spend money on luxuries -- after all, even bottled water is a luxury when the water that comes out of the tap is free. Should we be spending money on that, and on other unnecessary items with much larger price tags, when the money we are spending on things we don't need could save a life?

To answer that question, we and our students should read, think, and reach our own decisions. There is a growing philosophical literature on the topic, most of which agrees that we have some obligations to the poor (although there is no consensus on how demanding those obligations are). Relevant books include Peter K. Unger's Living High and Letting Die (Oxford University Press, 1996); Brad Hooker's Ideal Code, Real World (Oxford, 2000); Liam B. Murphy's Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory (Oxford, 2000); Garrett Cullity's The Moral Demands of Affluence (Oxford,
2004); Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism (Norton, 2006); and Thomas Pogge's World Poverty and Human Rights (Polity Press, 2002, 2nd ed., 2008). Libertarians, like the Canadian philosopher Jan Narveson, remain outside that consensus. They argue -- for example, in Narveson's 2003 article "We Don't Owe Them a Thing! A Tough-Minded but Soft-Hearted View of Aid to the Faraway Needy" -- that since we have not harmed the poor, we have no obligation to help them. The moral foundations of that position are difficult to swallow, but even if we could accept them, the fact
that climate change is being caused largely by industrialized nations, while the harm it causes falls predominantly on developing nations, undermines the factual basis for the claim that we have not harmed the poor, or at least not many of them.

If we grant that the United States ought to be giving more foreign aid, we should be led to give more ourselves. That means reaching for our checkbooks and credit cards. Both in my book and on its related Web site, http://www.thelifeyoucansave.com, I've suggested a realistic standard for how much we can ask of people, proportionate to their income. The standard is not overly demanding, but it will still challenge many people -- including educators -- to give more than they are giving now. Since our students may ask us how well we are living up to the moral arguments we are presenting to them, failing to meet the challenge could lead to awkward moments in class.

My argument raises another question for psychologists: How can we encourage people to give more, and change the culture of our society so that giving a significant amount becomes normal for people who think of themselves as living an ethical life? (I suggest a progressive scale, starting at 1 percent of annual income for those who are middle class and earn less than $105,000 a year, and rising to 33.3 percent for those earning more than $10-million.) There is a body of research on giving behavior, but the experimental exploration of what can motivate people to give to distant
strangers is still in its infancy. Deborah Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic have done pioneering work on the difference between giving to help identifiable victims and to help statistical victims. They and others doing experimental work in the field were brought together in July 2007 at a conference at Princeton on "Experimental Approaches to the Study of Charitable Giving."

My argument about our moral obligations to the poor has led me to suggest that our educational institutions give more emphasis to teaching and research that focus on world poverty and what can be done about it. The converse is that we should give a lower priority to areas of study that have no obvious connection with world poverty or with, say, climate change or avoiding war or, indeed, with any similarly large and pressing problem. That will no doubt incense some of my colleagues who think that we should study art, languages, history, mathematics, or philosophy for its own sake. I agree that, in an ideal world, studying epistemology, classical music, and Italian Renaissance art would be part of every cultivated person's education. But we live in a world in which 27,000 children die every day from preventable causes.

In such a world, it is difficult to deny that some areas of study are an indulgence. It's not wrong to pursue them. Arguably we need some indulgences, some pursuits that broaden our gaze and refresh our spirits before we turn back to more-urgent problems. But indulgences need to be placed in a setting in which it is clear that they are not the most important thing in our lives, or in the education we offer.

Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. His latest book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, was published this month by Random House.

A grisly crime from a bygone era...or so we thought

This tragedy is really shocking, both for its savagery and the way it seems to confirm every cliché about American politics and culture in the book.

Census Worker Hanged with "Fed" on Body - CBS News

A U.S. Census worker found hanged from a tree near a Kentucky cemetery had the word "fed" scrawled on his chest, a law enforcement official said Wednesday, and the FBI is investigating whether he was a victim of anti-government sentiment.

[...] He was found Sept. 12 in a remote patch of the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky.

In terms of psychological and popcultural resonance, this is akin to a missionary getting cooked in pot in Africa (though I think the last record case of such cannibalism was in Irian Jaya in the 1960s). And it's just as explosive politically.

First the Oklahoma City bombing (or the "Murrah Building bombing", as they call it here in OK) by a rightwing anti-government militia in 1995, and now this.  I have to say it: This is what you eventually get when you demonize government for a generation. No one in the government-is-evil cottage industry (a de facto corporate lobby, really) would obviously advocate such a crime, but they certainly make it a lot easier for such irrational hatred and conspiratorial lunacy to develop among those so inclined.

Poor man. The guy was just doing his damn job, not to mention providing a service that's ultimately to the benefit of these rural communities (which get undercounted in the census and denied the resources and political pull they deserve as a result).

I don't mean to make light of the crime, but this could be the worst thing for Southern PR since "Deliverance". Not that it'll probably make a huge practical difference these days, given how so much economic and political power has shifted southward over the last 2 generations.

The surprisingly modest religiosity of the Founding Fathers

I recently read David L. Holmes' The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, which I heartily recommend.

He makes a compelling case against the widespread claim that Founding Fathers were recognizably "Christian" in their worldviews and that the US was founded a Christian Nation. If by "Christian" one means theologically traditional (i.e., subscribing to the Trinity, Christ's Resurrection, miracles, a personal God, ...) Christians--much less evangelical "Bible-believing" ones--the historical evidence seems overwhelmingly against it. He takes a close look at the writings, documented behavior and impressions of contemporaries regarding the personal beliefs of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and with the exception of my fellow Bostonian John Adams--who was a staunch Christian--the patriarchs of the American Revolution seem to have been impeccably Deist (albeit of the moderate English as opposed to radical French variety) in their outlooks, like many 18th century intellectuals.

That's not to say they were hostile to Christianity or even that they all had the same religious sensibilities (hence the plural in the book's title, which was a nice touch). Their attitude towards the specific tenets of Christian faith varied and they clearly saw Christianity itself as a positive force in American society, to the extent that some were quite regular in attending church.

But their involvement in the rituals and religious life of their day was strikingly circumscribed. When they attended church, they did so as spectators rather than participants. Most chose not to get confirmed, even after it became easy to do so (in early colonial American history, many people weren't able to get confirmed per Anglican tradition due to  a shortage of bishops in the Colonies). And most of the Founding Fathers under review here consistently skipped Holy Communion entirely when they did attend church (in fact, if memory serves, there is no evidence of George Washington ever receiving communion as an adult, a fact that by no means went unnoticed by his contemporaries).

Another intriguing aspect of this pattern is how unmoved most of the presidents' wives were by the Deist philosophy that had captured the minds and hearts of so many leading American intellectuals in the late 18th century. Aside from Abigail Adams and Dolley Madison, the founding mothers if you will seem to have been as pious and traditional as their husbands were freethinking and religiously lukewarm. You get the sense that Deism was at least as much a social club as a bona fide worldview, especially given how these to all appearances quite sceptical men left the religious instruction of their children in the hands of their "unenlightened" wives without complaint.

Incidentally, I don't find claims of America being founded as a "Christian nation" threatening or troubling. They just don't seem to be supported by the facts. And even if they had the weight of history on their side, the point would be academic, as we sure aren't one now.

Moreover, it's quite natural that Christianity should have a special place in Americans collective heart--I was raised a Muslim, but I have a very strong attachment to Christianity, albeit in its IMHO more historically rooted non-evangelical variants--given its ubiquity in American intellectual and cultural life until the late 20th century. But that doesn't change how secular and/or eclectic many of us are today. In fact, if one national poll is to be believed most Americans can't even name all four authors of the Gospels, but can name the four Beatles (fortunately, there's a bit of overlap). Sad commentary on both our cultural literacy and priorities.

An aesthetic aside: Reading these excerpts from presidential letters and proclamations, I was struck by how bloodless and dry Deist, umm, "inspirational" language was. As a Muslim I obviously don't do the Trinity, but from an stylistic standpoint I almost prefer hearing prayers to Jesus Christ to these cold, dreary invocations of "Heaven" or "Providence". The latter are almost maledictions to my ears, so euphemistic and devoid of passion are they.

A few other interesting reviews: Ben Witherington and Ponderings on a Faith Journey.

Update: Thanks to my woolly memory of reading Stephen Prothero's also recommended Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't a while back, I mangled that religious literacy poll bit, merging a real poll with an, ahem, skit on "The Jay Leno Show".  Don't have the book handy--it was a library book--but here is an excerpt of an article by the same author in The Chronicle of Higher Education that gives some more information. The Chronicle piece is now behind a subscription wall, but the One Eternal Day blog has an excerpt with the particulars.

One Eternal Day: Religious illiteracy:

For the past two years, I have given students in my introductory religious-studies course at Boston University a religious-literacy quiz. I ask them to list the four Gospels, Roman Catholicism's seven sacraments, and the Ten Commandments. I ask them to name the holy book of Islam. They do not fare well.

In their quizzes, they inform me that Ramadan is a Jewish holiday, that Revelation is one of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, and that Paul led the Israelites on the Exodus out of Egypt. This year I had a Hindu student who couldn't name one Hindu scripture, a Baptist student who didn't know that "Blessed are the poor in spirit" is a Bible quote, and Catholic students unfamiliar with the golden rule. Over the past two years, only 17 percent of my students passed the quiz.

"Cultural literacy" has been hotly debated ever since E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s best seller of that name injected the desideratum into the culture wars in 1987. Today religious illiteracy is at least as pervasive as cultural illiteracy, and certainly more dangerous. Religious illiteracy is more dangerous because religion is the most volatile constituent of culture. Religion has been, in addition to one of the greatest forces for good in world history, one of the greatest forces for evil.

Nonetheless, Americans remain profoundly ignorant about their own religions and those of others. According to recent polls, most American adults cannot name even one of the four Gospels, and many high-school seniors think that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife. A few years ago, no one in Jay Leno's The Tonight Show audience could name any of the Twelve Apostles, but everyone was able to shout out the four Beatles.

Emphasis added.

PDF musings

Having been working a lot with PDFs lately and thought I'd share a few tips.

1. Try Infix for editing

If you find yourself editing PDF files a lot and don't have the hugely overpriced Adobe Acrobat installed, I've found Infix really handy. I have a lot of scans of articles,  book chapters and so on and often need to edit them (reverse page order, delete/add pages, crop, ...). Have found this application powerful and user-friendly. 

There's a free version (which is fully enabled, but adds a small watermark to the bottom of the 1st page) and, of course, a premium version.

There are more and more competing PDF tools out there, but so far I haven't come across anything cheaper (much less free) that has the same feature set and ease of use. (And if you can live with the little watermark--which can be removed later--then it doesn't have to cost you anything.)

2. Ditch Adobe Reader

Adobe Reader is a slow, bloated program that runs in the background all the time under the pretext of keeping itself updated. It slows down your system and nags you needlessly about silly add-ons that have nothing to do with its purpose. 

The slim and totally free Foxit Reader plugin is a big improvement in terms of speed and resource consumption, which it has taken the Web by storm. For most people, there's little reason to keep using Adobe Reader.

3. Use PDF995 to generate PDFs

If you're looking for a free way to generate PDFs, there's a free, ad-supported alternative product that in my experience works just as well as Adobe Distiller. It's called PDF995.

Local activism from abroad

This is quite random (not to mention old, as it's dated Nov 3, 2008), but having a background in ICT4D I found this report on a technology blog intriguing. It goes without saying that the Internet allows people to keep in touch in radically new ways while on the go and Skype is so widespread that its very name has become a handy verb for millions of Internet users, but who would've thought you could use the Internet to volunteer in a political campaign back home while sitting on another continent?

Wendy’s Blog: Skype for Obama, from Cairo to Colorado

I’m spending this election season in Cairo, Egypt, attending an ICANN meeting. Thanks to the Internet, that hasn’t stopped me from some final get-out-the-vote efforts. The time zones mesh up so that after meetings conclude here, I’ve been able to log in to my.barackobama.com, find a list of voters and a calling script, and call via Skype to remind them of polling places and encourage them to vote.

Isn’t the Internet grand? I’m at the ICANN meeting trying to keep ICANN from interfering with the flexibility that allowed that unexpected political outreach.

Lucky McCain's campaign didn't get wind of this. I can hear Palin's inevitable slogan now: "Obama campaign gets support from Al-Qaeda member."*

*  Swiftboat-ese for a person residing in the Middle East.

Two Israelis in Cairo

In keeping with my vow to make use of my many abandoned drafts, here's a now somewhat stale tidbit.

Came across this welcome report of the warm reception given by an audience in Egypt to famous Israeli conductor. BBC NEWS | Middle East | Barenboim gets ovation in Cairo

In a rare performance by a prominent Israeli musician in Egypt, Daniel Barenboim has received a rapturous reception at the Cairo Opera House.

Mr Barenboim conducted the Cairo Symphony Orchestra playing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

The famed conductor and pianist has long strived to use music to bring people together in the region.

It is nice to see such signs of civility and popular (if one can describe the patrons of classical music thus) moderation. No doubt it helped that Barenboim happens to be a staunch critic of the Israeli government's treatment of the Palestinians and its reliance on ironfisted measures over diplomacy and dialogue.

Speaking of boycotts, I'm all for holding Israel (and any other nation with blood or injustice on its hands) politically and economically accountable  for their misdeeds, and I see no nothing wrong with popular boycotts and activism to support such efforts, but if those endeavors aren't grounded in an awareness of the fact that collective punishment is no less wrong for Israelis than for Palestinians they're likely to lose their bearings and degenerate into senseless, counterproductive agitation and posturing. Sure, a strong political message needs to be sent in situations like this--and in polarized times innocent people will occasionally be denied the benefit of the doubt they deserve because of their background--but if you're unable to see the humanity normal people on the other side of a conflict, you're probably not going to be very convincing advocate for the justice of your cause.

Now, whether an Israeli Prime Minister, much less Netanyahu, ought be received at all in Cairo--Mubarak invited him in April and he arrived for a brief visit a few weeks later--seems a far more complicated question. I'm not sure he or his government earned it, to put it mildly, especially as Gaza's ashes still smolder and as Israel continues to illegally and immorally impede reconstruction efforts 8 months after reducing the place to a burning slag heap. (Speaking of Gaza's suffering, Egypt's tacit but critical support for Israel's blockade during the Gaza offenseive didn't do it any credit in my view. I don't care how afraid Mubarak is of strengthening Hamas--as if anything Egypt could've done would've given it a hundredth of the political boost that the Israeli attacks did--the people of Gaza needed help.)

Still, Mubarak's gesture was a smart move, and anything that blurs the neat lines of the MSM's Manichean, peace-loving Israeli/war-mongering Arab narrative is probably a good thing.

Speaking of the immorality of indiscriminate collective punishment, the suffering that continues to be visited on Gaza and this ongoing tragedy's utter invisibility in American political debate on foreign affairs (such as it is) shows you just how near worthless our modern corporate media often are, for all the geography-defying technology and pretensions of round-the-clock coverage. Today, 8 months after one of the world's most powerful air forces ruthlessly bombarded a civilian population, Gazans aren't even allowed to import @#*(&@#$ chalk for their schools--not to the mention the obvious instances of "dual-use technology" items such as pots and pans, tents and basic medical supplies--yet the conflict is "over" as far as the MSM is concerned.

Gazans have been  reduced to pre-industrial life, eking out a harsh life in the shadows of their own bombed-out homes (e.g., see the picture of some of them breaking the fast recently) and actively and illegally prevented by Israel from rebuilding their lives--the UN report observes that the result of Israel's ever more inhumane blockade has been "a gradual process of de-development across all sectors, devastating livelihoods, increasing unemployment and resulting in increased aid dependency amongst the population"--but their suffering is utterly absent from discussions of the Middle East in the Beltway.

Don't limit your outrage to the politicians, though. The most serious "WMD" uncovered since 9/11 is surely the attention span of American journalists.

Update: For more info on the report and current situation, see Steve Lendman's post.

Après cela, le déluge

Speaking of Eid, عيد مبارك / Eid mubarak!

And  שנה טובה לכולם  / L'shana tova tikatevu , to Jews, for that matter. (What a nice overlap we have this year.)

I have a habit that is lamentable enough in real life, but positively lethal when you blog (and one of the reasons I've often vowed to quit entirely). I'll be charged up with outrage/fascination/amusement  by this or that development, and start  pounding out a post, only to immediately be rudely interrupted and thus put the post aside. 

When I later get a chance to sit down, I'm usually not in the mood to revisit in-my-mind-old topics. So I start a new post, begin to write, get yanked away the minute the post starts to assume a quasi-presentable shape, and thus the cycle of blogging Samsara begins anew. (I'm sure many bloggers share this vice, but I suspect that the sheer volume and hoary vintage my drafts would put most self-declared slackers to shame.)

One of the reasons sometimes given by Muslim scholars for the wholesale ban on interest in traditional Islamic economics* is that the use of interest in modern Western banking encourages the hoarding of wealth in bank accounts as opposed to its reinvestment into the economy. Money should circulate and be put to productive use, the reasoning goes, not locked up in vaults.

The same goes for useful information, I say, so I'm going to promote these poor, lost posts out of "draft" limbo even if it means unleashing some painfully wooden or hopelessly rambling posts.  I think many include of these drafts contain if nothing else some information that people might find of value. And it would be nice to get a little use out of these drafts, too.

So forgive me if some of my upcoming posts are dated, typo-ridden or otherwise underdeveloped. I have a drafts folder to clean out.

* One with which I do not entirely agree, but that's another discussion. 

On the myth that the Quran forbids friendship with non-Muslims

Since I'm blogging up a storm tonight, I direct your attention to this useful discussion of "Friendship with Non-Muslims according to the Qur'an" by Afroz Ali of the Australian Al-Ghazzali Centre for Islamic Sciences and Human Development.

This is a topic about which one hears so much utter drivel today, so Br. Ali's short but thougthful and pretty systematic overview of Quranic verses relating to social relations between Muslims and non-Muslims is very handy and enlightening.

The article shows that contrary to the conventional wisdom among Islamophobes and hardline Islamists today, the Quran "allows and recognizes friendship on the basis of common interest, dignity, understanding and respect, with whoever exercises these commendable human qualities." The verses customarily cited as proof of enmity between Islam and Christianity or Judaism do not concern friendship at all, but refer to the dangers of over-dependency on outsiders in a time of  great religious conflict.

Also, as a fan of puns, I note approvingly that this center publishes a "ghazzette".

Rednecks and the Eid Stamp

Sabiwabi pointed out a new and sure-fire way of gauging redneck-itude.* Being up in arms about the Eid stamp. 

My point isn't that everyone can be reasonably expected to welcome it with open arms in these contentious times. In our ever changing society with all its competing worldviews and lifestyles, to find all developments in cultural and social life to be equally welcome would seem more likely a sign of a cognitive disorder than tolerance or enlightenment.  If a person is ambivalent or even downright uncomfortable with what they perceive Islam or Muslim culture to be --as many undoubtedly well meaning non-Muslim observers today are (thanks IMO as much to sensationalized and dumbed-down media coverage as to the actual conflicts that wrack modern life)--I can't blame her for greeting the Eid Stamp with indifference or even a bit of anxiety. It's not unlike how a person from a previous, less culturally eclectic generation of American might react to the sight of bilingual English/Spanish signs in the hospital, seeing them as the latest evidence of his side losing a zero-sum game for cultural influence. 

Still, it is one thing to be dismayed by cultural or demographic developments one finds unwelcome and another to neurotically view them as an existential threat to Ma, Dad and apple pie.  The latter reaction signals intense prejudice in the overwhelming majority of cases.

An aside: There was a time when one could reasonably have argued that anti-Muslim sentiment didn't warrant being cast as a "phobia" in American life, but, boy, are those halcyon days long gone. The paranoia and prejudice polluting our culture today about Islam (whether it be the latest conspiracy theory about the Eid Stamp** or this bizarre hoax among Islam-bashers about Hamas and pedophilia ) is only getting more shrill and psychologically disturbed.

It's ironic: The people most likely to object to comparisons between Muslims and Jews in terms of prejudice are busy undermining their case and making that comparison seem ever more commonsensical and uncontroversial. With our air thick with all this of hate and fear, how can a reasonably well informed person deny that, at least for some important segments of the Right, Muslims are indeed the new "Jews", second-class citizens to be marginalized and openly ridiculed? (Some--such as the  neo-Nazi British National Party--are already openly acknowledging that they have moved their cross-hairs off Jews and retrained them on Muslims.)

* With all due apologies to the many decent "rednecks" out there, some of whom I call kin.

** See Sheila Musaji's article for more.

Some perspective on your and my problems

If you think you have it bad, read this simply heart-breaking article in McClatchy on the brutal life of a woman horribly disfigured at the age of 9 months old 30 years ago when thrown into a campfire by her hallucinating mother. Subhanallah, what do you say when you encounter such madness and tragedy? It just makes you want to cry.

There but for the grace of God, go we all.

God bless her and the many other innocent young victims of abuse and neglect.

Such examples remind one, I think, why the philosophers' Problem of Evil remains a source of great doubt for many.