U.S. professor gives Israeli prize money to Palestinian university

A US professor of Mathematics (and former Field’s Medal winner - David Mumford) has decided to donate his prize money from a prestigious Israeli award to Bir Zeit University in Palestine. I am struck by the depth of Prof. Mumford’s comments regarding his otherwise simple act of philanthropy. It was not about trying to solve a problem, nor even about trying to help build peace in the world - it was about realizing what brought success to him and then using his prize money to make those factors more available to scientists in an otherwise besieged part of the world. Brilliant.

I was just telling a friend this weekend that i want to support world class higher education in the developing parts of the world, and especially in Pakistan and Palestine. I truly believe that higher education, especially in the sciences, can enlighten, emancipate, encourage, and motivate people like no other thing. Education brings confidence and an ability to start rationalizing situations and problems so at least a solution can be imagined, if not immediately implemented. Prof. Mumford is right: Education brings hope. And that part of the world really needs hope.

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U.S. prof. gives Israeli prize money to Palestinian university
By Ofri Ilani
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/986898.html

The American mathematician David Mumford, co-winner of the 2008 Wolf Foundation Prize in Mathematics, announced upon receiving the award yesterday that he will donate the money to Bir Zeit University, near Ramallah, and to Gisha, an Israeli organization that advocates for Palestinian freedom of movement.

“I decided to donate my share of the Wolf Prize to enable the academic community in occupied Palestine to survive and thrive,” Mumford told Haaretz. “I am very grateful for the prize, but I believe that Palestinian students should have an opportunity to go elsewhere to acquire an education. Students in the West Bank and Gaza today do not have an opportunity to do that.”

NY Times: Branded a radical by hate-groups, a Muslim educator loses her school

Apalling…..When something like this happens, we all suffer. Americans, Jews, Muslims, Christians…Everyone.

From The New York Times

April 28, 2008

Battle in Brooklyn | A Principal’s Rise and Fall

Critics Cost Muslim Educator Her Dream School

By ANDREA ELLIOTT

Debbie Almontaser dreamed of starting a public school like no other in New York City. Children of Arab descent would join students of other ethnicities, learning Arabic together. By graduation, they would be fluent in the language and groomed for the country’s elite colleges. They would be ready, in Ms. Almontaser’s words, to become “ambassadors of peace and hope.”

Things have not gone according to plan. Only one-fifth of the 60 students at the Khalil Gibran International Academy are Arab-American. Since the school opened in Brooklyn last fall, children have been suspended for carrying weapons, repeatedly gotten into fights and taunted an Arabic teacher by calling her a “terrorist,” staff members and students said in interviews.

The academy’s troubles reach well beyond its cramped corridors in Boerum Hill. The school’s creation provoked a controversy so incendiary that Ms. Almontaser stepped down as the founding principal just weeks before classes began last September. Ms. Almontaser, a teacher by training and an activist who had carefully built ties with Christians and Jews, said she was forced to resign by the mayor’s office following a campaign that pitted her against a chorus of critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda.

In newspaper articles and Internet postings, on television and talk radio, Ms. Almontaser was branded a “radical,” a “jihadist” and a “9/11 denier.” She stood accused of harboring unpatriotic leanings and of secretly planning to proselytize her students. Despite Ms. Almontaser’s longstanding reputation as a Muslim moderate, her critics quickly succeeded in recasting her image.

The conflict tapped into a well of post-9/11 anxieties. But Ms. Almontaser’s downfall was not merely the result of a spontaneous outcry by concerned parents and neighborhood activists. It was also the work of a growing and organized movement to stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life. The fight against the school, participants in the effort say, was only an early skirmish in a broader, national struggle.

KAUST in Saudi Arabia announces its Global Research Partnership Investigators

Oil prices are at a record high, Middle East economies are flush with cash, but something is different! The new generation of Arab leaders have realized that (a) petro-dollars may not be there forever, (b) they cannot allow the ‘Dutch Disease’ to cripple their long-term growth, (c) their population is growing faster than their oil revenues , (d) they cannot continue to spend as a socialist welfare state, and (e) they need to link their economies to the value-add of energy inputs and not to the oil and gas prices in international markets.

Hence, you see a fast growth of economic zones and theme-cities, which in reality are just a creative way to create from scratch eco-systems that can cultivate, grow and sustain the technological and business innovations for the future. One important part of this city-creation is the renewed focus on education and research. As would be expected, these rich countries are reaching out to the very best of the best and luring their talents with money to help build local research institutions. This is happening Middle East wide, and I will hopefully find time to write a bit more on it later….but for now, I wanted to share the news from Green Car Congress that KAUST in Saudi Arabia has just announced its list of inaugural Global Research Partnership Investigators. A majority of research themes are clearly clean-tech oriented, and I am enthused by it. I have high hopes.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology Announces Inaugural Global Research Partnership Investigator Winners
from Green Car Congress by Mike Millikin

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia has named the winners of its Global Research Partnership (GRP) Investigator competition. Twelve international scientists—among them Dr. Yi Cui at Stanford (silicon nanowires for li-ion batteries) and Dr. Bruce Logan at Penn State (microbial fuel cells)—were selected as KAUST GRP investigators for the 2007 round of nominations, which featured more than 60 submissions from 38 of the world’s leading research universities.

GRP investigators receive five-year individual grants to investigate a wide range of research topics. As an example, Dr. Logan’s grant is for $10 million.

Each KAUST Investigator is expected to spend between three weeks and three months per year on the KAUST campus in Saudi Arabia participating in the research and academic life of the institution. Additional personnel exchanges including the Investigators or their research personnel will be arranged according to the needs of the collaborative work established with KAUST’s faculty.

Research topics include water desalination, renewable and sustainable next-generation energy sources, genomics of salt-tolerant plants, durable and environmentally friendly construction materials, hydrocarbon utility, low-cost solar cell efficiency, and disease immunization.

Thank you to New York on Eid!

Despite all that has been wrong with American foreign and domestic policies, I give a lot of credit to Americans for this. Muslim hijackers brought down the tallest buildings in their largest city - and what do they do (eventually)? They light up the next tallest building in the same city (Empire State Building) in green lights to mark the most important Muslim festival of Eid. Thank you, New York! Thank you, USA!

Eid ul-Fitr Mubarak - 2007

A good bye to the wonderful month of Ramadan:

and Eid Mubarik to all of you:

Eid in Space: A great day for Malaysia

EID IN SPACE: BAIKONUR (Kazakhstan): Malaysian astronaut Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor (top), Russian Yury Malenchenko and Nasa’s Peggy Whitson wave before boarding a space capsule at the cosmodrome here on Wednesday. The capsule, Soyuz, later thrust into a clear evening sky over the Kazakh steppe towards the International Space Station. Muszaphar has said his trip, paid for by the Malaysian government, is a great step for his nation. Arriving near the end of Ramazan, he will celebrate Eid on the space station and plans to treat the other crew to festive Malaysian food. The 35-year-old doctor who has spent a year training for the flight in Russia, is one of very few Muslims to have travelled to space. In Kuala Lumpur, his parents recited prayers and were tearful as they watched the rocket carrying their son streak up into the sky.—Reuters

Baby Arab Dabke - how cute!

A dear friend, who is herself pregnant with a baby girl, just sent this. How cute is this? … Watch and enjoy. It will make you smile, esp. if you have ever tried dancing dabke yourself. Click on image below (in center) to play the video.

NPR debates: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

This is bound to be an interesting discussion on the nature, role, and power of the Israel Lobby in the USA. Lots of very harsh and extreme charges flying either way. But American democracy and freedom of speech at its best…

You can listen online at your convenience.
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http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2007/09/20070905_a_main.asp

Debating ‘The Israel Lobby’
Aired: Wednesday, September 05, 2007 10-11AM ET
By host Tom Ashbrook:

A-list scholars Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer are out with a new book that has sparked furious denunciation. It’s called “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” It says the deep U.S. embrace of Israel is no longer in America’s national interest, but goes on anyway because of a sprawling, well-funded, well-placed world of pro-Israel lobbyists. It says that lobby drove the U.S. to war in Iraq.

These are incendiary charges. The authors have been denounced as sloppy, defamatory, and anti-Semitic. They’ve also been credited with airing a tough issue.

This hour On Point: Walt and Mearsheimer make their case and former chief Mideast envoy Dennis Ross pushes back.
=================
GUESTS:
. Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and co-author, with John Mearsheimer, of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”
· John Mearsheimer, professor of political science and co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago
· Dennis Ross, Middle East envoy for presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, currently a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of “Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World” (2007)
· Aaron David Miller, advisor to six U.S. secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations, currently a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and author of the forthcoming “America and the Much Too Promised Land: The Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace”

Science and the Islamic world—The quest for rapprochement

My dear friend, and a mentor, Pervez Hoodbhoy just guided me to an article he has written that got published in Physics Today. Readers here won’t be surprised that I want to share it with them. We must all read this carefully and try to understand for ourselves what has gone wrong with the Islamic civilization of today that has so shunned academic, artistic, and creative knowledge. Why do we not seek truths about the nature of this world, just as our religion teaches us to seek truth in matters of God and religion? Everyone else has moved on. Why haven’t we?

Science and the Islamic world—The quest for rapprochement

Internal causes led to the decline of Islam’s scientific greatness long before the era of mercantile imperialism. To contribute once again, Muslims must be introspective and ask what went wrong.

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy

August 2007, page 49

This article grew out of the Max von Laue Lecture that I delivered earlier this year to celebrate that eminent physicist and man of strong social conscience. When Adolf Hitler was on the ascendancy, Laue was one of the very few German physicists of stature who dared to defend Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity. It therefore seems appropriate that a matter concerning science and civilization should be my concern here.

The question I want to pose—perhaps as much to myself as to anyone else—is this: With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge? To be definite, I am here using the 57 countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) as a proxy for the Islamic world.

It was not always this way. Islam’s magnificent Golden Age in the 9th–13th centuries brought about major advances in mathematics, science, and medicine. The Arabic language held sway in an age that created algebra, elucidated principles of optics, established the body’s circulation of blood, named stars, and created universities. But with the end of that period, science in the Islamic world essentially collapsed. No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now. That arrested scientific development is one important element—although by no means the only one—that contributes to the present marginalization of Muslims and a growing sense of injustice and victimhood.

Such negative feelings must be checked before the gulf widens further. A bloody clash of civilizations, should it actually transpire, will surely rank along with the two other most dangerous challenges to life on our planet—climate change and nuclear proliferation.

First encounters

Islam’s encounter with science has had happy and unhappy periods. There was no science in Arab culture in the initial period of Islam, around 610 AD. But as Islam established itself politically and militarily, its territory expanded. In the mid-eighth century, Muslim conquerors came upon the ancient treasures of Greek learning. Translations from Greek into Arabic were ordered by liberal and enlightened caliphs, who filled their courts in Baghdad with visiting scholars from near and far. Politics was dominated by the rationalist Mutazilites, who sought to combine faith and reason in opposition to their rivals, the dogmatic Asharites. A generally tolerant and pluralistic Islamic culture allowed Muslims, Christians, and Jews to create new works of art and science together. But over time, the theological tensions between liberal and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam—such as on the issue of free will versus predestination—became intense and turned bloody. A resurgent religious orthodoxy eventually inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mutazilites. Thereafter, the open-minded pursuits of philosophy, mathematics, and science were increasingly relegated to the margins of Islam.¹

Javed Ghamidi: The Fundamentalist Moderate?

I must admit I was not aware of Javed Ahmad Ghamidi very much before reading the article below from The Boston Globe. But what I read below about his interpretation of the literal or the fundamentalist Islam is certainly intriguing. I am definitely interested in gaining more information about him, some of his scholarly works, and the general religious philosophy/theology that he subscribes to. I also just read a large chunk of his work titled Burhan (published in 2002, caution: large 6MB file in Urdu), which is essentially a dissertation that critically analyzes, and articulates against, important issues such as monetary compensation in case of a murder, the need for witnesses in the case of a woman’s rape, adultery, militant action against state, etc.

The work he is doing is quite admirable, even if I disagree with the specifics of some of his interpretations, for at least he is prying open a tiny window for serious scholarly debate and discussion in the Muslim community of Pakistan on some of the very issues that not only divide us much, but for the past many years have also kept our development and prosperity as a nation hostage and captive.

I was first introduced to the idea that a strict and fundamentalist interpretation of Qur’an and Islam, while upholding and in fact elevating the commonly understood global human rights of people, was indeed possible by Dr. Riffat Hassan. I was introduced to her work on women’s rights, and honor killings, where she argued that Qur’anic teachings left no uncertainty about the rights of women and that all the atrocities being leveled at women in the name of Islam were not only misplaced, but also cast a serious blow to the proper understanding and interpretation of the divine text and Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) message to his followers. I was struck not just by the simplicity of her message, and the solid scholarly support she found for her views from within Islamic texts, but also at the power of conveying such a message in Muslim communities in present times.

Over the past few years the socio-religio-political crises that have plunged most of the Muslim world, and especially Pakistan, in an internal strife and that has pitched them in an armed confrontation with the West, has made it glaringly clear that the real Jihad that Muslims need to be fighting at this time is an internal one - an academic one - one where Islamic fundamentals are understood in the context of a modern world that would no longer ascribe to, or tolerate, bigotry, racism, sexism, and any other form of religion-sponsored terrorism. While some may consider such an idea for reform as alarming - as though a community of 1 billion muslims is being forced to reform and change their ideology of life and religion - I see this as a most necessary step to prevent our society from being war with itself, the non-scholarly type that we have seen play out in the form of the Red Mosque debacle and the recent suicide bombings in Pakistan.

It is an unfortunate reality that over the past few centuries a twisted, perverted, and most probably male-oriented, Islam has been perpetuated among the masses via organized orthodox movements and their pet state-functionaries. Real scholarship within Islam, including a discussion on taboo topics, a revisit to clarify and clean up previously held beliefs, and a scholarship that allowed for dissension and debate, has not only been scoffed at, but also sometimes violently suppressed. Now a few brave people like Ghamidi and Riffat Hassan, just to name the few I am now familiar with, are making a genuine effort to not just speak of reform within the practiced Islam simply for reform sake, and only as a response to Western demands or ideologies, but as a necessity towards a more complete and correct implementation of Islamic rules in our own every day lives. They deserve credit and support whenever possible. It is our chance to actually cleanse the society of the malice that has been perptuated in the name of religion for far too long.

LETTER FROM PAKISTAN

The Fundamentalist Moderate

Religious scholar Javed Ahmad Ghamidi has become a popular figure in Pakistan for his strict reading of the Koran — which, he says, dictates against gender discrimination, terrorist jihad, and other favorites of modern Islamists

By Shahan Mufti | July 22, 2007

AFTER THE SUICIDE bombing in Islamabad last week that killed 17 civilians, I picked up a slick hardbound book called “The Islamic Shari’ah of Jihad” in a local bookstore. As I read through the first few pages it became clear to me that this was no apology for Islamic holy war. The book analyzed every verse of the Koran that mentions the word “jihad” and related it to its precise social context in seventh-century Arabia in order, it said, to “remove some grave misconceptions.”

I opened to the chapter titled “Suicide Bombers.” I was disturbed by the events in the city — the joyous mood of a pro-democracy rally, with thousands swaying to anthems, snuffed away in a moment of scattered body parts — and I wondered about the Islamic basis for what I had witnessed.

The chapter was brief, barely two pages long, and it focused on one verse (5:32) of the Koran: “He who killed a human being without the latter being guilty of killing another or being guilty of spreading disorder in the land should be looked upon as if he has killed all mankind.”

There was little else left to say.