Author Archives: Editors

For Mandela, Reverence, but Criticism, Too

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At his death, Nelson Mandela received a saint like praise around the world, but he has his critics also. Rick Lyman looks at him from critic’s point of view. ( F. Sheikh)  Some excerpts;

“When Andile Mngxitama, a black-consciousness advocate and frequent critic of Mr. Mandela, fired yet another broadside at the former leader before he died — comparing him unfavorably to neighboring Zimbabwe’s authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe — it certainly caught the attention of South Africa’s political class.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say Mandela’s leadership style, characterized by accommodation with the oppressors, will be forgotten, if not rejected within a generation,” he wrote in June.

““There isn’t this kind of mania about him here that there is in some quarters overseas,” Mr. Friedman said of Mr. Mandela. “This sanctified image of him has always been more extreme elsewhere in the world than the local attitude.”

“Often, criticism of Mandela was disguised as criticism of others,” said Adam Habib, vice chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. “Some of the things that his successor, Thabo Mbeki, was criticized for were actually things that Mandela had initiated or supported.”

“The criticism has been that he made too many concessions, while the real victims of apartheid still have to live with the consequences,” Mr. Habib said. “He is a global icon, a great leader, but he was not perfect.”

In a widely noted 2010 interview with Nadira Naipaul in The London Evening Standard, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela leveled blistering criticisms at her ex-husband.

“Mandela let us down,” she is quoted as saying. “He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside.”

“Who really gains from the elevation of a political figure into an untouchable icon?” Anthony Butler, a University of Cape Town political science professor, wrote in his column in the June 28 issue of South Africa’s Business Day newspaper. “Not Mandela himself, who does not need our plaudits. The mythmakers who claim that a leader is beyond fault are ultimately seeking to shield a whole political class, and not just one individual, from the public scrutiny upon which democracy depends.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/07/world/africa/mandela-politics.html?pagewanted=2&emc=eta1

Should Chimpanzees be given a legal ‘personhood’ status?

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By Kenan Malik

apes 1

The Nonhuman Rights Project, an organization founded by Massachusetts lawyer and animal rights activist Steven Wise, has this week filed a series of lawsuits in New York demanding that chimpanzees be granted ‘legal personhood’. The lawsuit seeks to extend the concept of habeas corpus to chimpanzees, drawing an analogy with one of the most famous anti-slavery cases, that of James Somerset in 1772, an American slave

who had been taken to London by his owner, escaped, was recaptured and was being held in chains on a ship that was about to set sail for the slave markets of Jamaica. With help from a group of abolitionist attorneys, Somerset’s godparents filed a writ of habeas corpus on Somerset’s behalf in order to challenge Somerset’s classification as a legal thing, and the case went before the Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, Lord Mansfield. In what became one of the most important trials in Anglo-American history, Lord Mansfield ruled that Somerset was not a piece of property, but instead a legal person, and he set him free.

 

Click link for full article;

 

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/human-rights-and-animal-rights/

 

Life is plugged in today

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LIFE IS PLUGGED IN TODAY

Today, children are being robbed of their childhood by science. Playing together used to
be the way children discovered themselves and explore the world around them through their own perception, imagination, and individual as well as group contacts and
interactions. They would argue with friends, draw lots, chase each other,
sometimes laughing, sometimes tumbling, bumping and bumbling around. They
talked, fought, and resolved their conflicts face-to-face. This helped them to
be connected with each other, with their parents, siblings, and friends. Life
was not only physically active and immediate, but also was spiritually
connected, in which every interaction was direct: body to body and soul to
soul.

Modern technology has changed all that was a charm in life. Adults, as well as kids
now contact on face book, twitter, and text messages. Information, learning,
knowledge, and life experiences, all come to everyone pre-managed,
scientifically prepared, readymade, and above all filtered through digital devices. Today even before the babies can walk they are exposed to screen media, and our children are plugged in 7 to 8 hours daily, relating to each other differently–without any
physical or spiritual contact. Teen-agers woo each other by text; be-friend or
break up on twitter, tease and taunt, cheat and deceive each other–in some
extreme case commit criminal acts or get depressed to the point of
suicide– all being performed in cyberspace. Whereas the consequences of such a hyper-wired life style is physical crippling, social isolation, intellectual introversion,
imaginational stagnation, it is dangerously emotional decadence and spiritual
dissipation. The new generation is depriving itself of direct intellectual
investigation, interpersonal social skills, emotional bonds, spiritual quest,
and morality as a virtue, that the older generation learned through common
interaction. Today, before all of us is a big question: Is modern science
tyrannously changing our course of evolution? Is science taking over the
divinely designed or the naturally evolved man and arbitrarily shaping him
as an emotionless and spiritless figure servant to technology’s
sovereignty?

Mirza Ashraf

Religious Consciousness & Fragmentation of Society By Mubarik Ali

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A worth reading article ( shared by Zafar Khizer) by Mubarik ALi on historical perspective of religious consciousness that lead to the partition of India and is further fragmenting the society in Pakistan. ( F. Sheikh ).

In medieval India, people were conscious of their social cast and ethnic identity but in the colonial period right up to 1813, new political and social changes significantly shaped religious identity and its consciousness.

In its earlier days the East India Company, being solely interested in economic expansion, but also aware of the religious sensitivities of the subcontinent, discouraged missionaries from coming to India. Later, as the government became more stable, their policies changed and they supported the missionaries who arrived in the subcontinent to convert people to Christianity. The government believed that if the people converted and became Christians, it would be relatively easier to govern them on the basis of sharing the same religious beliefs.

The missionaries condemned the religions of the subcontinent and persuaded people to embrace the Christian faith. They openly preached in public places like Lahore’s Anarkali bazaar. Their activity intensified when in 1837, a German missionary known as Karl Pfander arrived in the subcontinent at a time when the Muslim community had lost its political power, vitality and energy. He believed that the society was backward and degenerate, so it would be easy to convert people to Christianity, which was — in his view — an advanced and progressive religion. But his argument was refuted by Dr Nazir and Maulvi Rehmat Ali in public discussions and a disappointed Pfander left India in 1857.

The activities of the missionaries alarmed people who began to feel insecure about their religious beliefs. The Hindu and Muslim religious leaders came forward to defend their religion through munazra or public debates held in different cities, where people would gather to listen to religious scholars criticising each other’s faith while defending their own religion. These debates created a religious consciousness among the masses while elevating the social status of the religious scholars within the community.

Religious activity was further enhanced when religious organisations such as the Arya Samaj for the Hindu community; and the Tablighi Jamaat and Tanzim for the Muslim community, were founded in order to protect their respective religions. To reach out to the masses, newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets were published to highlight the truth of their avowed faith. Hostility and conflict increased between the communities and riots broke out that continued up to partition in 1947.

http://dawn.com/news/1058176/past-present-a-deadly-consciousness