31.5.11

local environmentality, recycling and missing the point

Local Authority Environmentality has transformed the recycling value into something which has harmed the visual environment of residential neighbourhoods, which are now littered with bins. This is especially annoying where space is scarce.

How about:
bin camoflage?
communal facilities?

Setting aside the tinkering for a moment, local authorities are strict on this because land fill taxation is driving their bin deployments.  But what about the over consumption that lies at the front of the problem?

30.5.11

Mark Thomas - Extreme Rambling

The activist comic has been walking around the Israeli-built Wall and is touring towns across the UK disseminating what he saw. Recommended, if a bit humanising of Israeli footsoldiers.

Kun Kaatiman, a poem by Shayk Amadou Bamba

The Shayk is buried in Touba Senegal, a Mouridic Capital in the region.

This beautiful advice is for the seeker of learning, pan disciplinary I guess.


28.5.11

The day their music died

The Awami League of Liars stared
Their version of the past declared,
An exaggerated, Jatra play
A power game, a truth to flay

No party is exhonerated,
Our ranks were still quite decimated,
May the future flow uphill in wonder,
With dignity and hope not blunder.

We recognise that modus operandi,
That can only beg for foreign candy,
Terrorise and halt the nation,
With political emaciation

Noble souls,
Our thoughts controlled,
Questions patrolled,
Now, may His truth unfold.

26.5.11

Bose Condensate, Bangladesh Concentrate

I have been reading Dead Reckoning this week, Sarmila Bose's book that casts a critical eye on a few of the episodes of the Succession to (il)Liberation struggle that brought us Bangladesh. It disturbs the Manichean fairy tale of Liberation quite significantly and I doubt whether anything will be the same again.

Nobody is exonerated in this piece of work, which provides resources for justice-seeking and future-making alike. I feel embarrassed as to how well it depicts the character of the deshi intelligensia. These people seem to confirm themselves with every blow they land on the integrity of the work and author.


  • The question is, so what now?
  • As more deshis realise how shamelessly they have been misled and infantalised, how does the envelope of future becoming expand?
  • Will this book even be available to buy in Bangladesh?
  • What other sense making is possible shortly?

19.5.11

The Battle of Algiers

Is definitely one to watch, pay attention to and read about. Kindles the political imagination. It, the Algerian War of Liberation it represents and Franz Fanon mark the beginning of something potent and post colonial.

16.5.11

The Doctor's Wife

Is an episode of Doctor Who, that I cannot recommend enough, the Tardis comes alive!

IMF scandal

I read a piece in the Guardian (of course) about the accused being a progressive and wanted to laugh.

The IMF, and the World Bank are epistemicidal engines of destrarchitecture.

Impactful groups of alterglobalist, leftist and other stripes would do well to target, defeat, destroy and superscede them.

Bangladeshi Epistemicide | Conference of the Pirates | Dead Reckoning | Abul Kalam Azad | Pacistan

Think of a situation where a press baron forbids his religious wife from bringing up his children with quranic teachings, employing a infantalising editorial policy on family, firm and whatever scale he can muster.

This is (present) Bangladesh.

I wonder if I would rather be beaten within an inch of my life by a spouse, or forbidden from conveying revelatory messages to my child.  I consider both to be domestic abuse. A maqasidi view would recommend remedial action in order to protect and promote faith.

Examination of the local politics of knowing and being suggests that this is not an isolated case. Plenty of Muslim subjectivities have been secularised, by Machines.

I shudder to think of what potential movement has been wasted in recent generations because of this. A post colonial generation taught by teachers who know little of their historical sources, a generation (mis)led by fools who seem to have snatched the keys to the political engine-building machine, trapped by an electoral politics that reduced the magic of political possibilities to spoils distribution and an ever hastier race to the bottom.

Shudder is an overreaction, sorry.

Actually, I shrug and call for epistemic disobedience and a regular Conference of the Pirates (CoP) through which we shall plunder passing ships for their treasures, seeds, spores and talents and assemble a nomadic freedom flotilla.

With each CoP, we shall emerge further from the narrow triangular bumprints of Year Zeroism, Coloniality, Developmentia and Secular Liberal Capitulation. Not for the purposes of establishing culpability/innocence or jumping back into any romanticised frying pan, but for future potentialities.

The raucous and epistemicidal reception of news of the publication of Dead Reckoning, by Sarmila Bose, from the rabid end of the Custodians of the Victims of Liberated Bangladesh was to be expected.  In a book which is based on large amounts of field work, she contests the numerology of and simple angel-devil picture of the Liberation Account, and complicates matters. I suppose when the actual content of the study is digested and compared with other evidences, things will sharpen, unevenness will be accepted and false witness exposed. I await it in the post.  Her work is seen as a threat by those who have invested a lot of time and effort promoting War Crimes Trials.



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On a related note, here's a link to an apparent interview of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in 1946, where he reflects on the difficulties likely to be faced by the Muslims of south asia in the future. He foresaw quite a lot of grim times ahead. I would like to have spent time with him, Abul Hashim and Iqbal. probably in some kind of Tardis.



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On another related note, I think its important to recognise that Pakistan stopped being called Pakistan in 1971. After this time it should be thought of as Pacistan.

9.5.11

Islam's quantum question talk

So I went to the city circle event this friday for a bit to take my mind of my toofache and hear what  Nidhal Guessoum had to say about the Islam and Science debate. His book ' Islam's Quantum Question' is out now.

Nidhal is an astro physicist  from Algeria, with a US PhD and a little NASA Lab post doc experience. Presently he is a prof at the American university of sharjah, is academically quite published, teaches and appears a lot of Gulf TV channels. It was chaired by Ehsan Masood, who knows and writes in the space quite well.

He observed that Islam and science comes up in a couple of variants.

  • The Historical Civilisational Navel Gaze
  • Philosophically natured debates on the Nature of Knowledge
  • Practical applications of science to ritual issues.
  • Modernist-Iman-bolstering Its-in-the-Quranism


I liked his walk though previous serious contributions in the area (Sardar- Ethical, Salam- Universal, Nasr -Sacred) and his problematisation of the Harun Yahya/scientific Miracles in the Quran brigade.

Perhaps he over-egged this last issue as a hat tip to Usamafest. Shades of Hoodhboy Syndrome, 'These ridiculous natives and their ridiculous beliefs' came through at the audience level. I think this is an unfair and naive characterisation of Our collective curiosity but he was talking from his experience and quite a positivist type mind set.

We need tools to move thinking forward on this issue otherwise the level of dialogue and epistemological negotiation will remain at a very post graduate common room/prayer room level. this book is one of those devices I hope.

So far the encounter has me wondering how arab/gulf centric, indicator fed  and blind to politics, dignity and need the presentation was.

If Muslims have a 'childlike' approach to science, especially evolution, then the one I heard was adolescent. I say this because it wasn't a sense of inspiration and wonder that I got, but an 'I am imprisoned by the small mindedness of my people' frustration. Its just not an optimal position from which to speak.

When he reduced the envelope of possibilities of 'Islamic Science' to 'optional interpretive layer'  I felt that he'd dropped the can at the point of the creative step. Just like when Jasser Auda disappointingly dovetails into UN human rights and millennium development goals after beautifully excavating the history of maqasid al sharia thinking.

In today's situation, Islamic social movements  must approach the Islam and Science space with a better approach than any that are readily on offer.  Our politics and programmes must have an epistemic quality. We also mustn't divorce art from science ( from religion ) when bringing up our children as well as when identifying and thinking through our problems .

this is long.

1.5.11

A Survey of Human Affairs

"The world today is in a state of constant internecine war. The flames of war burn the crust of the whole earth; they do not spare either the crowned heads of Windsor Castle, the Dollar-gods of White House of the humble dwellers of some jungle cave in the forests of Africa. Discontent is intensive as it is extensive.  Each individual and each nation has a tendency to suck, with the aid of all available weapons, the blood of the other individuals and nations, whether one needs it or not.  When in its external appearance war is actually visible, there is open mass cannibalism - killing and plundering on a gigantic scale.  Killing provokes more killing and plunder more plunder untill the world frets, foams and is completely exhausted. They take rest for a while and this period of respite they call a state of peace.  In this so-called state of peace, they make for an even greater killing, secret preparations which they in hypocritical and diplomatic language call post-war reconstruction; they have a League of Nations of a United Nations Organisation apparently to end war, but really to secure allies for the next game."


from Abul Hashim's "The Creed of Islam or The Revolutionary Character of the Kalima" (1950)

The author is one of those I believe needs more historical and conceptual consideration from Bakhtiyar and Begum.