SACW - 29 April 2016 | Afghanistan: Women Leaving Journalism / Maldives: radicalisation / Sri Lanka: Self determination; refugees / Bangladesh: Islamist hit jobs / Pakistan: murky scholarly renditions / India: drought of action/ Kashmir: Conflicting Narratives / Indonesia 1965-66 anti-communist purge / Remembering Communist Playground / Birds

Thu Apr 28 23:10:19 EDT 2016

South Asia Citizens Wire - 29 April 2016 - No. 2893 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Sri Lanka: Communalism or Nationalism? Revisiting Tamil self determination | Rajan Hoole
2. South Asia Editorials on the April 2016 killing spree by muslim fundamentalists in Bangladesh
3. Pakistan: The murky middle ground | Afiya Shehrbano 
4. Bangladesh: Global brands’ obligation to protect workers’ right to form trade unions | Chaumtoli Huq
5. Conflicting Narratives Make Kashmir a House Divided Against Itself | Nyla Ali Khan
6. India: A drought of action | Jean Drèze
7. India: Section 377 - An archaic, discriminatory law | Shashi Tharoor
8. How should Indonesia resolve atrocities of the 1965-66 anti-communist purge? | Saskia E. Wieringa
9. Recent On Communalism Watch:
 - Violence in Bangladesh - Campaign of terror against Bangladesh’s liberal voices (The Economist)
 - India: Madhya Pradesh Police, Bajrang Dal stop church wedding in Satna
 - Article on on 2006 Malegaon blasts: 'The truth speaks and asserts itself’ - The Hindu - 26 April 2016
 - No houses on rent for minorities: UN expert hits out at Indian mindset (catchnews)
 - Economies of Offense: Hatred, Speech, and Violence in India by Rupa Viswanath (Journal of the American Academy of Religion)
 - The Malegaon reminder (editorial in The Hindu, 27 april 2016)
 - Reportage by Allison Joyce on The Islamic State and Islamic fundamentalism on the rise in Bangladesh
 -"Hindutva distorting Hinduism": Nayantara Sahgal
 - India: Prof. Shamsul Islam on RSS's False love for Ambedkar
 - India: Dalit moral police against liquor shop in Jodhpur using a buddhism card

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. Afghan Women Leaving Journalism | Akmal Zaher
11. Sri Lanka: The Refugees Who Don’t Want to Go Back Home | Laura Secorun Palet
12. Why are Indian students angry | Harsh Mander
13. Bangladesh: The new normal | Tanvir Haider Chaudhury
14. India: The disgrace at Malegaon  - Editorial, The Tribune
15. Politics of Radicalisation: How the Maldives is Failing to Stem Violent Extremism | Azim Zahir 
16. Ricculli on Coopersmith, 'Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine'
17. In the Communist Playground | Neda Neynska
18. ‘Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?’ and ‘The Genius of Birds’ | Jon Mooallem

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1. SRI LANKA: COMMUNALISM OR NATIONALISM? REVISITING TAMIL SELF DETERMINATION
by Rajan Hoole
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Communalism has wreaked havoc in Lanka. It is embedded in our prejudices and our backwardness. The Sri Lankan political establishment’s complicity in violence against a minority is a scandal that would impede us for years to come
http://sacw.net/article12639.html

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2. SOUTH ASIA EDITORIALS ON THE APRIL 2016 KILLING SPREE BY MUSLIM FUNDAMENTALISTS IN BANGLADESH
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select editorials on the April 2016 killing spree by muslim fundamentalists in Bangladesh, from daily newspapers in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan 
http://www.sacw.net/article12642.html

SEE RELATED:

BANGLADESH: THE DEFENESTRATION OF SECULARISM | IKHTISAD AHMED
In her Pohela Boishakh address after Nazimuddin’s murder, the same prime minister who had so passionately showed solidarity with Rajib, secularism, and the oppressed secularists, chose to be on the wrong side of history.
http://sacw.net/article12624.html

BANGLADESH: LGBT EDITOR KILLED, OTHERS ATTACKED AND THREATENED - MEDIA REPORTS AND STATEMENTS BY PEN, AMNESTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH 
http://sacw.net/article12631.html

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3. PAKISTAN: THE MURKY MIDDLE GROUND
by Afiya Shehrbano
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The Islamists in Pakistan are not impressed by sympathetic scholars’ defence of their politics over the last decade. These religious groups refuse to comply with the scholarly renditions of them as moderate, reformist and rational.
http://www.sacw.net/article12633.html

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4. BANGLADESH: GLOBAL BRANDS’ OBLIGATION TO PROTECT WORKERS’ RIGHT TO FORM TRADE UNIONS | Chaumtoli Huq
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Beyond the Government’s role in ensuring that workers are able to form trade unions, the global brands have a key role to play here. When asked what brands could do, workers consistently said that brands should only source from factories where there exists a trade union or give preference to companies who have a worker formed trade union in place.
http://www.sacw.net/article12627.html

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5. CONFLICTING NARRATIVES MAKE KASHMIR A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF
by Nyla Ali Khan
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J & K is a palimpsest that has been inscribed upon two or three times, yet the previous texts have been imperfectly erased and, therefore, remain partially visible. A history of unfulfilled pledges, broken promises, political deception, military oppression, illegal political detentions, a scathing human rights record, sterile political alliances, mass exodus, and New Delhi’s malignant interference have created a gangrenous body politic, which hasn’t even started to heal. The various political, religious, and cultural discourses written on the palimpsest of the state may have created alternative epistemologies but without an epicenter.
http://sacw.net/article12641.html

see also:

FOR ONCE ASK NOT WHAT KASHMIR CAN DO FOR YOU, ASK WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR KASHMIR
by Nyla Ali Khan
The aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir point the way toward a workable democratic pluralism in the state – where the reigning principle is discussion leading to free elections, not autocratic decision-making either by elected legislators or separatists.
http://sacw.net/article12636.html

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6. INDIA: A DROUGHT OF ACTION
by Jean Drèze
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India has a lasting infrastructure of public support that can, in principle, be expanded in drought years to provide relief. But business as usual seems to be the motto
http://www.sacw.net/article12638.html

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7. INDIA: SECTION 377 - AN ARCHAIC, DISCRIMINATORY LAW | Shashi Tharoor
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SIXTY-SIX years after adopting one of the world’s most liberal constitutions, India is being convulsed by a searing debate over a colonial-era provision in its penal code, Section 377, which criminalises “whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman, or animal.” Though not widely used – there were 578 arrests under Section 377 last year – the law is a tool for the harassment, persecution, and blackmail of sexual minorities within India. It must be changed.
http://sacw.net/article12597.html

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8. HOW SHOULD INDONESIA RESOLVE ATROCITIES OF THE 1965-66 ANTI-COMMUNIST PURGE?
by Saskia E. Wieringa
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More than 50 years after the arbitrary killing, torture and imprisonment of more than a million communists and their sympathisers in Indonesia, the government has for the first time hosted a two-day national symposium on the 1965-66 violence.
http://sacw.net/article12637.html

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9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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 - Violence in Bangladesh - Campaign of terror against Bangladesh’s liberal voices (The Economist)
 - India: Madhya Pradesh Police, Bajrang Dal stop church wedding in Satna
 - Article on on 2006 Malegaon blasts: 'The truth speaks and asserts itself’ - The Hindu - 26 April 2016
 - No houses on rent for minorities: UN expert hits out at Indian mindset (catchnews)
 - Economies of Offense: Hatred, Speech, and Violence in India by Rupa Viswanath (Journal of the American Academy of Religion)
 - The Malegaon reminder (editorial in The Hindu, 27 april 2016)
 - India: So Col Purohit was just keeping a tab on hindutva right, was he? a TOI report says a letter has been found ...
 - India: Civil suit in Barabanki to take possession of Ayodhya temple complex
 - Reportage by Allison Joyce on The Islamic State and Islamic fundamentalism on the rise in Bangladesh
 -"Hindutva distorting Hinduism": Nayantara Sahgal
 - Killing spree continues in Bangladesh LGBT activist among two hacked to death (25 April 2016)
 - Malegaon Blast: After 5 Years In Jail, Charges Dropped Against 8 Muslim Men
 - India: Why Malegaon blasts witnesses and accused are retracting statements in court (Saba Naqvi)
 - Bangladesh: Rajshahi University teacher murder case transferred to Detective Branch; one held
 - India: Tete a Tete with Piyush Goyal was embarrassed about wearing khaki shorts | Radhika Ramaseshan
 - India: Prof. Shamsul Islam on RSS's False love for Ambedkar
 - India: Dalit moral police against liquor shop in Jodhpur using a buddhism card
 - Bangladesh: Islamist Thugs kill again - English professor Rezaul Karim Siddique, 58 hacked to death in Rajshahi
 - India: It is unfortunate that courts have become arbiters of what constitutes true religion (Ronojoy Sen)
 - India: 'Which Ambedkar?' Ramachandra Guha asks the RSS
 - India: pathetic state of secular institutions - Dadri's Hindu-Muslim couple refused marriage registration

 -> available at: http://communalism.blogspot.com/

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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10. AFGHAN WOMEN LEAVING JOURNALISM | Akmal Zaher
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(Institute for War & Peace Reporting - 27 April 2016)

A combination of rising violence and family pressure means that the numbers of female reporters are dwindling.

Hila used to love her job at a privately-owned radio station in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar. She was heartbroken when the deteriorating security situation forced to give up her work as a journalist.
"I used to work in a local media outlet, but my family no longer allows me to do that,” Hila said. “They tell me not to leave the house, because the security situation is not good."
Media professionals in Afghanistan warn that the number of women working in journalism has fallen dramatically over the last three years due to a combination of security threats and family pressure.
The flourishing Afghan media scene was hailed as one of the success stories of the post-Taleban era. Female journalists played a particularly important role as they were able to report on social issues that male colleagues in this deeply conservative society found it harder to access.
Now, experts warn that women may be completely excluded from this field if the situation continued.
Mohammad Yusuf Jabarkhel, the head of the privately-owned Sharq TV channel in Nangarhar, said that his station had employed many women in the years following the fall of the Taleban.

Rising violence meant that most had left the field of media, he explained, although some continued to work in radio.

"When security was relatively fine, women wanted to work in the media alongside men, but female reporters do not feel safe now,” Jabarkhel continued. “A number of female activists and members of the provincial council were attacked here. Now families no longer allow their female members to work in the media."
Shazia, another former reporter, agreed that it was a combination of family pressure and fear of attack that made her give up work.
"I used to work for various media outlets in Nangarhar, but my family doesn’t let me work any more. It is not just the fear of the Taleban here. Our own relatives also threaten us in one way or another. They tell me that if I go to the radio again, I might be killed."
Pashtana, from Nangarhar’s department of information and culture, said that men needed to ensure women had a safe working environment.
Local officials had a particular responsibility to do so if they wanted women to be part of the media landscape, she said. Part of this involved confidence-building measures.
"If the government wants the media to develop, it must work on general attitudes,” Pashtana continued. “People are scared. They feel that security is bad and going to work in an office is not safe."
Abdullah Hod, head of the private Mazal local radio station, agreed that that the number of female workers had fallen, but said that this was due more to economic factors rather than the fear of violence.
“Female reporters face many problems such as a lack of security and restrictions form their families, but the biggest problem is that radios don’t have enough money to pay salaries."

Ataullah Khugyani, the spokesman for Nangarhar’s governor, said that the administration was committed to helping women continue working in the media.
“Female reporters really have problems in Nangarhar, but the provincial government has done more to help them than their male counterparts. We have received reports of the main problems and we aim to work closely with female reporters."
Abdul Muhid Hashimi, the head of an Afghan journalist advocacy group, agreed that female journalists faced challenges all around the country. The situation was particularly bad in Nangarhar, he added, calling for the government and media officials to try and find tailor-made solutions to keep women working in this field.
“Female reporters face all kinds of problems,” he continued. “Security officials and those who own the media outlets must pay close attention to the concerns of female reporters. They should provide them with job opportunities and take into consideration both the security problems and the restrictions imposed by their families."

This report was produced under IWPR’s Promoting Human Rights and Good Governance in Afghanistan initiative, funded by the European Union Delegation to Afghanistan.

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11. SRI LANKA: THE REFUGEES WHO DON’T WANT TO GO BACK HOME
by Laura Secorun Palet
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(OZY - April 26, 2016)

It’s been six years since Sri Lanka’s long civil war came to an end. Now this island-state of 20 million seems to have entered a new era of peace and prosperity: The economy is growing at 6 percent, reconciliation is under way and the new government is saying it will welcome any refugees who want to return. There’s only one little hiccup: Many refugees don’t want to go back.
There are about 100,000 Sri Lankan refugees (mostly Tamil) living in camps in the south of India.

Though you might think they’d jump at the chance of returning to their homeland (especially if the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is paying for the plane ticket), it’s not so uncomplicated. “There is a lot of anxiety over whether to leave or to stay,” says Miriam George, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Social Work who conducts research on the issue. “Having to choose is causing trauma between generations.”

Many of the older generation, those who fled in the ’80s and early ’90s, want to return home, eager to reconnect with the friends and family members they left behind. Yet for others, “returning is risking their lives,” says Aran Mylvaganam, spokesman for the Tamil Refugee Council. The country’s decades-long civil conflict ended after 100,000 people died, with the Tamil Tigers’ defeat and both sides accusing each other of crimes against humanity. Refugees from the region of Jaffna, which saw some of the heaviest fighting between government forces and the Tamil Tigers, are likely to be greeted with suspicion upon their return. A recent report by the International Truth and Justice Project found 20 cases of returnees in 2015 who were victims of torture and rape at the hands of Sri Lankan security forces in what the authors described as a “predatory climate against Tamils.” (The Sri Lankan government did not reply to request for comment.)

The younger generation of Tamil refugees isn’t exactly queuing at the airport either, but not out of fear of retaliation. For the thousands who were born in camps, India is their home country, where their roots, friends and studies are. Many are already in their 20s, and some have even attended college in India. And while career prospects for refugees are limited (India does not grant Tamils nationality even if they are born there), the prospect of starting from zero in a foreign land sounds even less enticing.

Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan government continues to campaign for Tamil return. Between 2002 and 2015, more than 12,000 refugees were repatriated voluntarily to Sri Lanka; according to UNHCR India, another 41 have returned since the start of 2016. Those who choose to stay face an uncertain future since India is not likely to allow them citizenship anytime soon. (The Indian government did not reply to request for comment.). Yet Tamil refugees “are full of resilience and hope for the future,” says George. Which, after 30 years in limbo, is a victory in itself.

Laura is a foreign correspondent obsessed with borders and everything that crosses them. Born in Barcelona, based in Nairobi, she writes about national identity, migration and trafficking of all kinds. She considers herself a professional eavesdropper. Which is ironic because she is known to speak loudly.

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12. WHY ARE INDIAN STUDENTS ANGRY
by Harsh Mander
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(Hindustan Times - April 24, 2016)

India’s public universities and technical institutes are suddenly transforming into sites of youthful turmoil and bitter contestations. Unfolding within their walls are battles for freedom of speech in universities, and less edifying skirmishes about nationalism. But my recent visit to Hyderabad Central University (HCU) reminded me that in some educational centres disquiet springs from long-thwarted yearning and suppressed struggles of students from disadvantaged and stigmatised castes and religions for a climate of equality and welcome in institutions of higher learning.

The HCU ferment refuses even today to die down. At its main gate, policepersons block entry to any ‘outsider’. However, I was able briefly to meet the protesting students and some faculty at the university. Invited for a lecture, I was let in by a side gate. After my talk, I went to the protest site to talk to the students — and also some faculty — who sent word that they wanted to meet me.

The protest site is the courtyard of a small student shopping arcade called shop.com. This became the epicentre of struggles ever since PhD Dalit scholars Rohith Vemula and his four friends — suspended by the university administration — launched a relay hunger strike in January. The frayed tent still stands at the same location. It bears the sardonic sign ‘veli vada’ or Dalit ghetto, students continue their protest under it, now against the continuation in office as vice-chancellor of the man who ordered Vemula’s suspension. On a screen behind the tent, among pictures of Dalit icons BR Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi, and Savitribai Phule is a smiling photograph of their lost comrade Rohith Vemula. A few steps away, his friends have erected a white plaster-of-Paris bust of Vemula.

The student protests in HCU only partly resemble those in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), insofar as both seek to defend the rights of students to dissent, mainly against what they see as anti-poor, majoritarian and communal politics and policies. But it is important to recognise that unlike in JNU, the central issue in HCU student and faculty protests is the embedded institutional bias within the university against students and faculty from socially disadvantaged backgrounds.

The splendid, possibly paramount contribution of public-funded universities like JNU and HCU is that among the students admitted to these universities are growing numbers of young women and men whose childhoods were marked by want and social discrimination. Kanhaiya and Rohith are not exceptional in their deprived backgrounds, as the numbers of young people like them who battle and overcome extremely deprived backgrounds — socially, economically and educationally — to qualify for the country’s best public universities, have risen rapidly.

The critical difference between JNU and HCU is that the large majority of the JNU faculty nurture these young students of disadvantage. JNU students may feel compelled to battle injustice outside the university, in the larger world, but not within their campuses. The Dalit and Muslim students in HCU are not so fortunate. Senior professors from Hyderabad tell me that large sections of the university faculty are openly anti-Dalit and communal. Rohith was not the first Dalit student to have taken his life in HCU. Nine students committed suicide on the campus in the last decade, yet corrective steps were not taken to understand and change why the university remains threatening and unwelcoming to Dalit students.

One hundred and thirty scholars from around the world wrote to the VC of “the hostile, casteist environment of higher education in India. A university where students turn away from life with the regularity they have at the University of Hyderabad requires urgent and massive rehauling …This suicide is not an individual act. It is the failure of premier higher educational institutions in democratic India to meet their most basic obligation: To foster the intellectual and personal growth of India’s most vulnerable young people. Instead, Rohith now joins a long list of victims of prejudice at premier institutions in the country, where pervasive discrimination drives so many Dalit students to depression and suicide, when not simply forcing them to quietly drop out”.

The last of these suicides occurred in the last week of November 2013, when PhD scholar M Venkatesh killed himself. Rohith’s close friend Ch. Ramji recalled to Deccan Herald that Rohith was disturbed by his passing. He had said: “These protests and media coverage will die out in a few days. Dalit students will continue to be harassed here”. Months later, Rohith was suspended for his ‘anti-national’ activities by a committee constituted by vice-chancellor Appa Rao, comprising four out of five upper-caste faculty. This action was taken even without hearing the students. Rohith wrote a month before his suicide to the VC to supply Dalit students “sodium azide and a nice rope” at the time of admission itself.

Unmindful of the anguish and anger of students — Dalit, Muslim, Left and liberal — in HCU, the same VC Appa Rao who ordered Rohith’s suspension recently re-joined his duties. After the violent protests that followed, 24 students and 2 faculty members were arrested. It is hardly a coincidence that 14 students and both staff were Dalit, and most of the rest Muslim.

This is not only a battle for freedom of speech in universities. It is a demand, a struggle, for a climate of equality and acceptance in universities from students who emerge from disadvantaged and stigmatised castes and religions. Faculty members spoke to me about their concerns about the targeting of these students by other faculty and the police. The students agonised about their futures, convinced that they would continue to be beleaguered by a university administration led by a VC they believe to be anti-Dalit. Their teachers worried even more about their mental health. Their depression, their loneliness, their despondency. All these students are demanding is a fair, accepting, egalitarian space for them to study, understand the world, and dream.

Harsh Mander is convener, Aman Biradari

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13. BANGLADESH: THE NEW NORMAL
by Tanvir Haider Chaudhury
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(Dhaka Tribune - April 27, 2016)

Being a thinking, feeling human being is a crime

So they keep coming for you.

All that talk about religious sentiments being hurt and the devout being outraged is a sham, you know. They come after you because they can’t stand the way you live.
They don’t like the books you read, the questions you ask. They don’t like your sitar, your guitar, your dotara, your tanpura, or your ukulele.
They hate that tune you whistle, those notes you hum. That piece of canvas you paint on, that notebook in which you doodle, that computer where you do your spreadsheets -- they have their eyes on those too.
They don’t like the people you love, and the way you love them. The hues of the rainbow you associate yourself with makes their eyes hurt.
They despise the food you eat, the beverages you drink, the places you go to for entertainment. They hold what you do for a living in contempt, and disapprove of the way you spend your leisure hours in the privacy of your own home.
Why arrange screenings of Citizen Kane, Bicycle Thief, or Meghe Dhaka Tara for your proteges? Why attend football matches knowing the team of your students will lose? Why organise art schools for young children, infusing their eager minds with the heretical idea that the world is joyous and filled with beauty?
Why attend musical programs that celebrate your folk traditions, your cultural heritage? Why learn to play a difficult musical instrument and subject young souls to your performances, which are average at best?
Why publish magazines that address the lifestyles and concerns of the disenfranchised and the marginalised? Like the rest of us, why do you simply not pretend they don’t exist?
Those thoughts you keep writing down? You need to stop. Whether you’re making up stories, or commenting on how you see the world, or, heaven forbid, proposing new hypotheses on how things work in this universe. Just stop. Who is it that you think you are? How dare you make your presence felt? What an appalling display of hubris!
And you’d better be praying to the right God, the right way. If you’re worshipping too many gods, the wrong god, or no god -- they may pay you a visit. And you won’t like what happens after, brother.
Get it? Do nothing that gives them the impression that you are a thinking, feeling human being, that you are engaged with the world and are curious about it, that there is joy, rage, confusion, gratitude, and despair in your soul, that you have existed in this infinite cosmos and have longed to leave your mark on it. They don’t like all that uppity stuff, see. Lay low, that’s what you need to do.
And if you’ve ever thought that the powers-that-be have any interest in your well-being, in ensuring that you get to continue to serve whatever purpose you think you’re serving through all your irresponsible actions -- speaking and writing and painting and music-making and whatnot -- well, think again.
There’s that ol’ hubris rearing its ugly head again.
Who are you in the scheme of things, my friend? Of what consequence are your ramblings? Can you move and shake what needs to be moved and shaken? How many wheels can you grease? What percentage of the voting constituency do you constitute, for crying out loud?
Do you see now? Has it finally dawned on you? This is how it is around here, my friend. Welcome to the new normal. 

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14. INDIA: THE DISGRACE AT MALEGAON  - EDITORIAL, THE TRIBUNE
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(The Tribune, April 27, 2016)

Right-wing terror cases to test NIA credibility

The discharge of the nine accused Muslims in the 2006 Malegaon blasts case leaves a blot on the functioning of India’s premier investigative agencies. A failure to hold top bosses accountable encourages them to misuse anti-terror laws. Framing innocents in crimes they have not committed has become almost an everyday occurrence in this country. When Maharashtra’s ATS (anti-terror squad) picked up nine Muslims after the Malegaon blasts that left 37 people dead, few eyebrows were raised. When the CBI took over the investigation and filed a charge-sheet, their guilt stood almost established in the national conscience. Post 9/11, members of certain communities, including Muslims, have unfortunately been stereotyped as terrorists. 

It came as a huge surprise when the third agency to probe the case, NIA (National Investigation Agency formed after 26/11), stumbled upon a confession by Swami Aseemanand, picked up for the 2007 Mecca Masjid blast, saying that a right-wing group was involved in the Malegaon blasts. For the first time four right-wing terrorists were arrested and the term “saffron terror” gained currency thereafter. The innocent Muslim accused got bail finally but not before spending five years in jail. After the change of government at the Centre in 2014 an allegation of bias has frequently been thrown at the NIA and not just by human rights activists. The NIA has filed a charge-sheet against the four right-wing suspects in the Malegaon case but done little else. It has so far found no evidence against them. What lends credence to the charge is the fact that about 40 witnesses have turned hostile in the 2007 Ajmer Dargah and Samjhauta Express blast cases.

The discharge of the accused in the Malegaon case and possible acquittals in other right-wing terror cases will dent the NIA’s image. Its credibility is at stake. Already its Pathankot handling has raised questions. If terror cases are pursued on communal lines, as an impression to this effect is gaining ground, it would jeopardise India’s fight against terror and its right to ask Pakistan to proceed against its own Masood Azhars and Hafiz Saeeds. There cannot be “good terrorists” and “bad terrorists”.

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15. POLITICS OF RADICALISATION: HOW THE MALDIVES IS FAILING TO STEM VIOLENT EXTREMISM
by Azim Zahir 
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(The Wire - 27 April 2016)

Unless this politics of radicalisation is managed, it will be difficult to address the real issue of religious radicalisation and “Islamisation” of non-religious radicals.

Twelve people related to one family from the Maldives left for Syria in December 2015, reportedly to join the ISIS. They included four sisters, three brothers, the wife of one of the brothers, two husbands of two of the four sisters, their two-year son and a six-month old daughter. The family of the eight siblings comes from the remote island of Kondey in Gaaf Alif Atoll with a population of just 544 people. This latter fact may not be significant, as they lived in the capital Malé.
This is just one of the latest reported cases of foreign fighters from the Maldives going to Syria. The Soufan Group, a think tank monitoring the flow of foreign fighters in Syria, says the official count – defined as count based on either government sources, or quoting government sources, or from the UN, or a research or an academic source – for the Maldives is 200.

However, the official Maldivian government count fluctuates between 20 and 100. This month, the country’s Counter-Terrorism Centre said the count was at most a two-digit figure.
Based on media reports of actual cases since 2014, there seems to be a steady flow of Maldivians going to Syria since at least mid 2013. The government has so far failed to stem this flow. But the flow itself does not necessarily show the government has not taken measures against violent extremism. After all, the numbers from other parts like the Western Europe also climbed between 2013 and 2016 despite international efforts to stem the flow.
But when it comes to states like the Maldives gripped by political turmoil, there is a politics of radicalisation that further aggravates the issue. In the Maldives, this politics includes: 1) “block thinking” that does not bother to understand complexities; 2) trivialising of the issue of violent extremism by the government; 3) instrumentalisation of religion by all political parties; and 4) politics through radical gangs susceptible to “Islamisation”.

Religion’s big story in the Maldives: the context

As far as Islam is concerned, the really big story coming from Maldives is the fragmentation of religious consciousness. Contrast this with the observation by anthropologist Clarence Maloney in the 1970s: Islam in the Maldives was limited to washing, fasting and praying. What he meant was that Islam was largely a practice. There was no talk. No conversation. No argumentation.
Enter the new millennium. Welcome to the phenomenon of some have called “objectification of Muslim consciousness”. Islam has by now become the contest of vigorous disagreements. Islam is an object of vigorous talk, dispute, and theorisation. It has become even more an object of conspiracy theories and sensationalist journalism.
Disagreements are not just between Salafists and non-Islamist Maldivians. Fragmentations exist within Islamists and Salafists, on issues of women, democracy, human rights, and violent jihad. In short, different groups envision different utopias for the country.

That is the broader sociological reality of religion in the country. We don’t yet know the precise implications of this reality for successful democratisation in the country. We, however, know that most Maldivians support democracy. Most associate it with such notions as freedom of expression and assembly. We also know Islamists have so far failed to translate whatever support their ideology has into votes.
But we also do not know the long-term implications of fragmentation of religious consciousness for broader security for Maldives and even for other countries, including India. I take up here the story of the unhelpful politics surrounding radicalisation that further facilitates current violent extremism.
The politics of radicalisation

Block thinking and radicalisation

On September 29, 2007, a group of Maldivian violent extremists detonated a homemade bomb at Male Sultan Park, injuring 12 tourists. Since the Sultan Park terror attack, no act of terrorism has taken place in Maldives. Maldivians, however, have joined violent jihadi forces in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and now increasingly in Syria. It is not clear how, if at all, the people behind the 2007 attack in Malé are connected to today’s jihadists.
According to Maldivians who have joined Al Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, Maldives is not a strategic priority for them. Instead, an Islamic state (IS) in the Indian subcontinent, they argue, can be a more fruitful goal. If such an endeavour can be successful, ‘conquering Maldives would be simple’.

To be sure, for them, the Maldives is under jahiliyya/irreligious darkness (as in pre-Islamic Mecca), ruled under a taghut/idolatrous system. Maldivians, they believe, must refrain from participating in elections. The reality is: 90% voted in the 2013 presidential elections.
At least, the Maldivians who have joined al-Nusra don’t support any political party in the Maldives. They condemn President Abdulla Yameen’s government. It can hardly be true the Yameen government or his party, the Progressive Party of the Maldives (PPM), directly supports them either.
Moreover, there is an ideological disconnect between the Maldivians in Syria and the modernist Islam espoused by former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom of PPM. The non-religious modernism of the Maldivian generation educated at the American University in Beirut (which includes President Yameen) is a far cry from the religious ideologies of violent extremism. President Gayoom might have attended rallies by Sayyid Qutb in his student days in Egypt. But ideologically he is closer to the reformist Islam of Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani and Muhammed Abduh that aspired to show Islam was fully compatible with modernity.

The point is Maldivian actors like Jamiyyatul Salaf/Al Asr, Islamist Adhalath Party, PPM, Sharia4Maldives, Maldivians in ISIS and al-Nusra, are not ideologically on the same page on all issues.
Yet some people in the current opposition and sensationalist media reports do not bother to make out these differences.
It is an outcome of the tendency to lump together all who do not support secularist ideologies in a single fold. This is an example of what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls “block thinking”. Under block thinking, differences and discriminations do not matter. “Islam” is taken as a monolithic unit and seen as somehow antithetical to secular modernity and dangerous to politics. I think there are several dangers associated with this kind of thinking.
Consider for example a possible implication when we see Maldivian foreign fighters in Syria with a same perspective. We know that Maldivians who have joined al-Nusra or would desire to join al-Nusra would not necessarily like the ISIS. There is a pretty sophisticated treatise by one of the Maldivian fighters in al-Nusra (who has now died in Syria) decrying ISIS and its ideology of IS in the current mode. Maldivian fighters who are with al-Nusra continue to portray the ISIS as a deviant group. The implication of this is really huge if one is serious about understanding who may be behind the ISIS or al-Nusra recruitment from the Maldives. It may not be the same group.
Or consider another example. Sheikh Adam Shameem of the Salafi NGO Al Asr is accused of recruiting people for violent jihad without credible evidence. It is true he does not support secular democracy. He may condemn Western atrocities in Muslim countries, or even support jihad in principle. He also made a Facebook remark making a prayer for Muslim foreign fighters, including two Maldivians who died in Syria. But the reality is he has a complex view on jihad, including defensive violent jihad.

Shameem condemned the Sultan Park bomb attack, condemned Maldivians joining extremist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and reasoned the command by an amir as a condition of violent jihad, and argued jihad becomes an individual obligation upon citizens of a country only in cases of foreign aggression (or when commanded by their leader). In another piece he says people should go for violent jihad when requested by the people of a Muslim country under aggression and when the neighbouring countries are incapable of helping them.
Through the failure to make differences we may fail to differentiate between potential allies to stop radicalisation for violent extremism and the real culprits. That’s the first aspect of politics of radicalisation in the Maldives: block thinking, sometimes informed by secularist biases.

Trivialising radicalisation

President Yameen’s government does not of course appear to be seriously working to eradicate the fighter flow from the Maldives. The fact that at different times, depending on the political platform, the government has said different things about the extent and reality of violent extremism, is a matter of grave concern.
The openness with which some jihadist fighters have operated on social media supporting violent jihad and their continued interaction with local people, is another indication of how radicalisation is trivialised. If an individual like myself (not even with primary focus on radicalisation) could know that an Ahmed Atheeq from Addu Atoll went to Syria, and could find out his Facebook page by asking a friend in Addu who knows him personally, and for months could read his Facebook updates supporting violent jihad and encouraging violent jihad, to me, that is an indication of how government trivialises the issue.
This will not be surprising if one takes into account that the police force is disproportionately mobilised to meet the narrow political ends of the government of the day. A counter-terrorism centre was only established in February this year.
Political trivialising of the issue of radicalisation is then the second aspect of politics of radicalisation in the Maldives.

Instrumentalisation of religion

The third aspect of politics of radicalisation is political instrumentalisation of religion in general by all parties.
Politicians instrumentalise Islam in selfish ways. PPM and the Gayooms portray political opponents in the Maldivian Democratic Party as Christian missionaries or anti-Islamic secularists. This is done to incite local religious sentiments.
But the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), in turn, portrays the Maldives as a hotbed of fundamentalism, encouraged by PPM and/or Islamist Adhaalath Party depending the time and shifting of alliances. MDP no doubt uses this approach to solicit international support. This appeals to some Indian and western audiences who see the Muslim world through the War on Terror.

In reality, both PPM and MDP have been ready to make alliances and flirt with the puritan Salafists.

Part of this instrumentalisation is to do with the nature of the electoral system of the country. The Maldives has a majoritarian electoral system that requires 50% +1 votes to win the presidential election. The winner-takes-all system for parliamentary system also encourages tactical partnerships. This, together with the competitive nature of elections since 2008, have meant that otherwise non-religious parties have a strong incentive to solicit support of every segment of the political and religious spectrum.
The Islamist Adhaalath Party became part of every government not because of popular votes but because of their coalition with major political parties. But parties have also solicited support from more puritan Salafi end of this spectrum that in principle supports violent jihad and portrays Muslim issues in a Manichean worldview of Good (Muslims) vs Evil (West/Israel).
The outcome of the free reign given to puritan Salafists over the state resources, and other funds and facilitation in exchange of political support, is that Salafi activism and outreach have grown at mindboggling levels.
We do not know the extent of public support for Salafist ideologies but if one subscribes to some of the Salafist views, even though not an extremist, one may be more sympathetic to violent jihad, or be more susceptible to religion-based recruitment for jihad.
That is, at a minimum, how political instrumentalisation of Islam is related to radicalisation.

Islamisation of gang members

The fourth aspect of politics of radicalisation is related to the rise of gang politics. “Islamisation” of gang members may be the most significant route to the journey to Syria.
An assessment on gangs in 2012 suggests that all political parties use these gangs for politics ends. Partly as a result, no government has seriously tackled the issues of youth delinquency and their radicalisation in gangs. But in recent years, gangs are believed to have become dangerous political instruments. It is suspected that politicians sponsored the gang members in the murder of parliament member Dr Afrasheem Ali in 2013 (ahead of presidential election primaries) and the abduction of journalist Ahmed Rilwan in 2014.
But this dangerous connection of gangs to politics and related political failure to address the issue, have opened gangs to a totally different and new phenomenon. The concept of “Islamisation of radicalism” explains this: a lot of today’s violent extremists joining groups like the ISIS are already radicals, before they get “Islamised”.
Several Maldivians who have joined the ISIS come from backgrounds of past (non-religious) radicalism, crimes, and gangs. These people were already radicals before they were “Islamised” to become foreign fighters.
The 2012 gang assessment also indicates there were no links between religious figures and gangs (who in fact distrusted the country’s religious scholars). This suggests “Islamisation” of gang members is a more recent phenomenon.
These facets of the politics of radicalisation may not be surprising in a state gripped by deep political turmoil since 2003. But unless this politics of radicalisation is managed, it will be difficult to address the real issue of religious radicalisation and “Islamisation” of non-religious radicals.

Azim Zahir is a PhD student at the Centre for Muslim States and Societies, the University of Western Australia. His research focuses on Islam, secularism and democratisation. 

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16. RICCULLI ON COOPERSMITH, 'FAXED: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE FAX MACHINE'
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Jonathan Coopersmith. Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. x + 308 pp. $54.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4214-1591-8.

Reviewed by Anne M. Ricculli
Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (April, 2016)
Commissioned by Sean Seyer

Victorian-era journalists recognized that telegraph technology had revolutionized British communications, and the word "cable" swiftly entered the nineteenth-century English lexicon as both a noun and a verb. Yet as Jonathan Coopersmith has skillfully documented, a contemporary and competing technology--the fax machine--struggled to capture its anticipated market share and public attention despite manufacturers’ claims to superior accuracy and confidentiality in message transmission. This failure to match supply with demand, what Coopersmith identifies as “push and pull,” persisted throughout the 150-year history of faxing. Meticulously researched and deftly narrated, Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine is the first historical account of the life cycle of fax technology. Coopersmith’s primary contribution, however, is his powerful framing of faxing as a series of isolated yet unsustainable advances in the highly competitive arena of electronic communications. 

Coopersmith’s study proceeds chronologically in six chapters, offering a multigenerational, multinational history of the fax machine from the 1840s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. The author situates the chapters around various external forces that shaped fax research in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Military and aerospace sectors promoted fax technology because of its potential for the transmission of sensitive documents. Business and industrial demands for rapid printed communication during the rise of what Coopersmith termed the Xerox copying culture in the 1960s contributed to the development of the desktop machine. Persistent throughout this narrative, moreover, were internal negotiations between manufacturers and marketers regarding product compatibility and compliance with regulatory standards. Deliberations surrounding the acceptance of the G3 standards in Tokyo during the late 1970s, Coopersmith observes, centered on the technology's ability to transmit high-resolution images of culturally esteemed handwritten characters and imprint seals. The resolution of these debates contributed directly to the explosion of fax machine production in Japan during the following decade.

Throughout its history, fax technology has been viewed as an alternative communication tool. Coopersmith reveals his skill as a researcher and analyst of corporate archives, government documents, and historical periodicals in his discussion of the development of essential niche markets for fax technology. Newspapers favored picture clarity over cost of transmission and selected faxed photographs over telegraphed images during the interwar years. The media circulated images of events including the succession of Japanese emperor Hirohito in 1928, the abdication of British king Edward VIII, and the Berlin Olympics in 1936. American visual culture was transformed, he notes, because pictures sold papers. The use of fax by early adopters including libraries, hospitals, banks, railroads, interstate trucking firms, and the automotive industry required the concurrent acceptance of the security and legality of these ephemeral documents. Coopersmith scours the archives to disclose transnational trends in advertising and marketing. Within two decades following World War II, the number of fax receivers in Japan exceeded the number of transmitters by a ratio of three to one, suggesting a pattern in the proliferation of faxed messages from central offices. By the end of the twentieth century, half of Japanese households used faxes routinely. Manufacturers leveraged the successful business fax culture in Japan with promotions, including machine loans for students communicating with tutors and instructional magazines that widened the appeal of faxing and broadened domestic applications. At the peak of its popularity, Coopersmith argues, fax “helped change expectations" about the accessibility and dissemination of visual culture (p. 145). Faxing ultimately failed, however, as consumers increasingly turned towards digital technologies to satisfy these same expectations. 

Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine is a forceful reminder that the technical history of the fax was indeed multinational. The technology originated in Britain, America, and continental Europe, and its subsequent trajectory was accelerated through Japanese innovation and manufacturing. The global story of the fax, however, remains to be written. Coopersmith briefly explores the use of fax machines in China, Russia, and the Middle East as salient examples of the potential of the technology to widely and rapidly circulate political ideas. From Tiananmen Square to Moscow, in the midst of the Gulf War and Polish Solidarity Movement, individuals used fax machines as essential communication tools during times of political unrest. Yet these networks of machines were located in households, offices, and shops, implying an established and perhaps vibrant fax culture. Coopersmith's book invites an extension of his research into the social, economic, and cultural impact of fax technology in the international context during the twentieth century.

As an historian of technology, Jonathan Coopersmith recognizes that narratives about innovation tend to highlight triumph over defeat, success over failure. His exploration of a consistently underperforming technology documents that the process of design and marketing is rarely linear and often tortuous. Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine demonstrates the value of longitudinal studies of specific elements of communications technology, successfully integrating social and economic histories. Juxtaposing the obvious and the obscure, the momentous and the mundane, Coopersmith leads us inside the black box of fax history, and we emerge with fresh perspectives of one technology whose time has passed but legacy remains.

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17. IN THE COMMUNIST PLAYGROUND
by Neda Neynska
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(London Review of Books Blog - 26 April 2016)

In one of the oldest playgrounds in Sofia, where I grew up, there are some new toddler attractions among the old rusting ones, but the potholes in the tarmac haven’t been repaired. For the last six years, flowers have been appearing in them, as part of an ongoing project devised by the artist Veronika Tzekova. She calls it WUMAMPAROI (‘When you make a mistake put a rose on it’). We are a long way from the Soviet cult of childhood, in which the playground played a key role, shifting children’s emotional focus away from home and setting them on the road to the Party.

When Mikhail Gorbachev took power, Komsomol, the Soviet youth organisation, had more than 42 million members. At the age of 14, children across the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc became komsomoltsi. Many Bulgarian children had been Septemberists since the age of six, and Pioneers at ten. As Lenin understood, the sooner you start, the better.

The vast, ideologically charged infrastructure that supported the youth organisations was where socialism in Bulgaria came to life: the communal youth homes (mladejki dom), the pioneer camps and cultural and labour brigades, the sports halls and playgrounds, all financed by the state and free for children.

Most playgrounds like the ones I was taken to in Sofia as a child now look like archaeological sites, the remains of a civilisation that came to an abrupt end. We were catapulted out of the structured environment of the ‘advanced socialist society’ into a world of ‘choice’, where there seemed to be very few choices. We were left with the relics of a grand idea: wide boulevards, monolithic architectural projects, empty palaces of culture, space-themed jungle gyms. But even before 1989 it had all begun to look dated, and defeated. Gagarin and Tereshkova were ancient and drab; we had seen Lego and Barbie.

In the spirit of egalitarianism, all playgrounds were designed to look the same: celebrations of Soviet ironmongery and ideology. Spacecraft were intermingled with boats and tractors. There were animals, too, and here was a difference I spotted early on: the nearer you were to an affluent part of town, the more exotic the species were likely to be. I never understood what the elephant was doing there; space seemed a more realistic destination than the African savannah.

After the fall of communism, the youth centres closed down as the organisations they represented became defunct. But no one thought of playgrounds as politicised spaces: they survived into the post-communist era, with minimal upkeep, and remained important for local communities. Parents and minders had always been able to talk freely there, sitting on benches under awning-like structures without any actual awnings. They suggested shelter, but did not provide it.

Playground benches were used by the former Pioneers and komsomoltsi to barricade the streets when Bulgaria’s last socialist government was brought down.

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18. ‘ARE WE SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW HOW SMART ANIMALS ARE?’ AND ‘THE GENIUS OF BIRDS’
by Jon Mooallem
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 (The New York Times, April 26, 2016)

BOOK REVIEW

It used to happen every day at the London Zoo: Out came the dainty table and chairs, the china cups and saucers — afternoon tea, set out for the inhabitants of the ape enclosure to throw and smash. It was supposed to be amusing — a comic, reckless collision of beasts and high culture. But, as Frans de Waal explains in “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?,” apes are actually innovative, agile tool-users. For example — one of many examples — wild chimps in Gabon have been observed employing five different tools, in a methodical sequence, to break open beehives, pry the chambers apart, scoop out the honey and convey it to their mouths. Not surprisingly — to de Waal, at least — the apes in London quickly mastered the teacups and teapot too. They sat there civilly, having tea.

“When the public tea parties began to threaten the human ego, something had to be done,” de Waal writes. “The apes were retrained to spill the tea, throw food around, drink from the teapot’s spout,” and so on. The animals had to be taught to be as stupid as we assumed they were. But, of course, the fact that they could be taught to be stupid is only more perverse evidence of their intelligence.

For centuries, our understanding of animal intelligence has been obscured in just this kind of cloud of false assumptions and human egotism. De Waal, a primatologist and ethologist who has been examining the fuzzy boundary between our species and others for 30 years, painstakingly untangles the confusion, then walks us through research revealing what a wide range of animal species are actually capable of. Tool use, cooperation, awareness of individual identity, theory of mind, planning, metacognition and perceptions of time — we now know that all these archetypically human, cognitive feats are performed by some animals as well. And not just primates: By the middle of Chapter 6, we’re reading about cooperation among leopard coral trout. (The book’s main weakness is that de Waal has too much evidence, from too many corners of the animal kingdom, to convince us with; eventually, it feels a little repetitive — we’re not at all surprised that the bonobo knows to look in the stupid tube for the piece of food.)

Frankly, it all deals a pretty fierce wallop to our sense of specialness. And it can provoke some desperate resistance. De Waal quotes one American psychologist, insistently holding the line of our humanness at our ability, even as children, to work together toward a shared goal: “It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together,” the psychologist says. But then, 25 apes at a Dutch zoo prop a tree trunk against the wall of their enclosure, climb out and raid the restaurant. What is true, it becomes clear, is that you’ll never see animals doing such intelligent things if you smugly refuse to look for them, or — and this is de Waal’s real point — if you don’t know how to look.

De Waal argues that we should attempt to understand a species’ intelligence only within its own context, or umwelt: the animal’s “self-centered subjective world, which represents only a small tranche of all available worlds.” There are many different forms of intelligence; each should be valuated only relative to its environment. “It seems highly unfair to ask if a squirrel can count to 10 if counting is not really what a squirrel’s life is about,” de Waal writes. (A squirrel’s life is about remembering where it stored its nuts; its intelligence is geospatial intelligence.) And yet, there’s apparently a long history of scientists ignoring this truth. For example, they’ve investigated chimpanzees’ ability to recognize faces by testing whether the chimps can recognize human faces, instead of faces of other chimps. (They do the former poorly and the latter quite well.) They’ve performed the famous mirror test — to gauge whether an animal recognizes the figure in a mirror as itself — on elephants using a too-small, human-size mirror. Such blind spots are, ultimately, a failure of empathy — a failure to imagine the experiment, or the form of intelligence it’s testing for, through the animal’s eyes. De Waal compares it to “throwing both fish and cats into a swimming pool” and seeing who can swim.

We sometimes fall into what de Waal calls “neo-creationist” thinking: We accept evolution but assume “evolution stopped at the human head” — believing our bodies may have evolved from monkeys, but that our brains are their own miraculous and discrete inventions. But cognition must be understood as an evolutionary product, like any other biological phenomenon; it exists on a spectrum, de Waal argues, with familiar forms shading into absolutely alien-looking ones. He introduces what he calls the rule of “cognitive ripples”: We tend to notice intelligence in primates because it’s most conspicuous. It looks the most like our intelligence. But “after the apes break down the dam between the humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, the floodgates often open to include species after species.”

And that brings us to bird smarts, and the science journalist Jennifer Ackerman’s lovely, celebratory survey, “The Genius of Birds.”

Somehow, it’s hard to imagine these cognitive ripples rippling anywhere weirder than a bird. Look closely at one: how it chirps and twitches and flies. It’s chastening to imagine a comprehensible intelligence operating inside a body so different from ours. And then there’s the issue of scale: There are as many as 400 billion birds flitting around the planet; pondering their individual, perspicacious consciousnesses can be jaw-dropping, almost sublime. But, Ackerman writes, “One by one, the bellwether differences between birds and our closest primate relatives seem to be falling away.”

Ackerman writes about birds’ genius for wayfinding; their memories; the neuro-scientific overlap of bird song and human language; avian architecture (a bird called the long-tailed tit builds a nest out of “roughly 6,000 pieces”); their canny, sophisticated social intelligence, their social learning and the evidence of their empathy. She goes to New Caledonia, an island between Australia and Fiji, where “free from the burden of vigilance” — against predators — a race of crows can futz and experiment with the materials around them until they’ve fashioned all kinds of hooklike, food-procuring tools. They’re like Silicon Valley start-up founders, aimlessly tinkering and disrupting on a cushion of privilege.

Like de Waal, Ackerman wants us to “appreciate the complex cognitive abilities of birds in their own right and not because they look like some aspect of our own.” Scientists see innovation as a key measure of intelligence in the avian world: the sparrow that builds its nest in the tailpipe of an abandoned Toyota; the bullfinches in Barbados, which Ackerman discovers have learned to snatch the sugar packets from outdoor cafes as though snagging worms from dirt — these are small exertions of “genius,” Ackerman writes, a talent for “catching on” to your surroundings and exploiting them. And for all the belittling of “bird brains,” she shows them to be uniquely impressive machines within their own evolutionary contexts — unrecognizably so to science, at first, because, though they have equally high concentrations of neurons, they’re quite differently designed from our primate brains. (And, Ackerman explains, that’s because bird brains are dinosaur brains! Really!) Here’s one scientist’s Zen-like distillation: “There’s the mammal way. And there’s the bird way” — two distinct cognitive operating systems, honed through convergent evolution.

The science gets mind-bending. If you want sentences like “Not only could the pigeons pick out a new Monet or Picasso, they could also tell other Impressionists (Renoir, for instance) from other Cubists (such as Braque),” then this is the book for you. And it’s elevated by Ackerman’s prose — the joy she takes in thinking and noticing. She homes in on “the taut, quick vitality that seems almost too much for their tiny bodies to contain” and describes a flock of 400 birds changing direction midflight as “almost instantaneous ripples of movement in what appears to be one living curtain of bird.”

Often, you feel her wonderment, faintly recognizing another, strange intelligence covertly operating in a world we presume to be ours: the one pecking at our muffin crumbs, the quick specks in the sky.

ARE WE SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW HOW SMART ANIMALS ARE?
By Frans de Waal
Illustrated. 340 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $27.95.

THE GENIUS OF BIRDS
By Jennifer Ackerman
Illustrated. 340 pp. Penguin Press. $28.

Jon Mooallem is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine and the author of “Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.”

A version of this review appears in print on May 1, 2016, on page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Wildly Intelligent. 

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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: 
www.sacw.net/

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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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