SACW - 4 Sept 2017 | Pakistan - India: Holy men / Pakistan: alarm at US Afghanistan policy / Myanmar: Buddhist Nationalism / India: TV welcomes Malegaon blast accused / Anarchism in Spain / Svetlana Alexievich on life in the Putin's era / Saudi Trillions

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 4 Sept 2017 - No. 2950 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Partition of 1947 - In conversation with Ayesha Jalal: Separating a once historically indivisible people
2. Pakistan - India: Holy men — theirs and ours | Pervez Hoodbhoy
3. Remembering Lala Rukh in Colombo - Transcript of talk by Subha Wijesiriwardena (23 August 2017)
4. India: News Broadcasting Standards Authority holds ZEE news channel liable for their false, malicious and distorted coverage of 2016 poetry recitation by Gauhar Raza
5. Anarcho-syndicalism, Internationalism and The Federación Anarquista Ibérica in Spain

6. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - Video: crackdown on beef now extended to all forms of non-vegetarian foods in NOIDA, Uttar Pradesh | Newsclick
 - Lebanon, Hezbollah, Sectarianism: We need a large movement from below! | by Joseph Daher, Katrina van den Heuvel
 - Did RSS Really Participate in the Freedom Movement? | Ram Puniyani
 - India - Religious Noise: Bombay High Court stays Centre notification, silence zones back for now
 - India: Read history before making controversial statement on Taj Mahal - Historian's advice to Aditya Nath, the Chief Minister of UP
 - India: A hero’s welcome accorded by Times Now and Republic TV to Lt Col Purohit, malegaon blast accused (released on bail) | Jyoti Punwani / The Hoot
 - India: The man who assassinated Punjab chief minister Beant Singh in 1995 is hailed at a ceremony in Golden temple complex in Amritsar
 - India: DGMI report on Col. Purohit - was deeply invested in the activities of Abhinav Bharat and in liaison with the RSS, the VHP, the Ram Sene among others | CatchNews
 - India: Secularism indeed is in Great Danger | Kuldip Nayar
 - India: 2008 Malegaon blasts case - Did Hemant Karkare ‘fix’ Lt Col Purohit? | Rajdeep Sardesai
 - US conservatives made Trump denounce hate. RSS can learn from them | Javed Anand
 - India: Unsteady state (Edit, TOI, 31 August 2017)
 - India: A mob of 80 attacks school and hostels run by Baptist Church situated in front of Lt. Governor’s house in Delhi
 - USA: Liberals can’t hope to beat Trump until they truly understand him | John Harris
 - India: Alt-Right and Hindutva | Arunabha Bagchi (The Statesman, Aug 31, 2017)
 - India - Kerala: Love jihad bogey - Judiciary has arbitrarily taken away citizen's liberty, citing ‘Indian tradition’
 - India: Religion At State Expense | Faizan Mustafa

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
7. Trump’s new Afghanistan policy has Pakistan angry and alarmed | Pamela Constable
8. India - China: How the Doklam withdrawal was carefully choreographed | Bharat Bhushan
9. Political Violence in Ancient India | Upinder Singh
10. Migrants, Refugees and the Stateless in South Asia: Review by Jatin Desai 
11. African rulers of India: That part of our history we choose to forget | Adrija Roychowdhury
12. “Why Were We Untouchables?” - An Indian author’s quest to understand her country’s entrenched and debilitating caste system—and her family’s place in it. | Isaac Chotiner
13. The Epic City review – a love letter to Kolkata | William Dalrymple
14. Buddhist nationalism challenges Myanmar's government | Melyn McKay and Richard Horsey
15. Waiting for a Perfect Protest? | Michael Mcbride, Traci Blackmon, Frank Reid and Barbara Williams Skinner
16. Turd Reich: San Francisco dog owners lay minefield of poo for rightwing rally | Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco
17. Svetlana Alexievich: ‘After communism we thought everything would be fine. But people don’t understand freedom’ | Shaun Walker, The Guardian
18. The Saudi Trillions | Malise Ruthven

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1. PARTITION OF 1947 - IN CONVERSATION WITH AYESHA JALAL: SEPARATING A ONCE HISTORICALLY INDIVISIBLE PEOPLE
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The Star Weekend interviewed Professor Jalal over email about her work and insights on the 70th anniversary of the partition.
http://sacw.net/article13453.html

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2. PAKISTAN - INDIA: HOLY MEN — THEIRS AND OURS
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
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India and Pakistan have more influential holy men per square mile than anyone has ever counted. Some are just rich, others both powerful and rich. Once upon a time their followers were only the poor, superstitious and illiterate. But after the massive resurgence of religion in both countries this base has expanded to include politicians, film and cricket stars, and college-educated people who speak English and drive posh cars.
http://sacw.net/article13456.html

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3. REMEMBERING LALA RUKH IN COLOMBO - TRANSCRIPT OF TALK BY SUBHA WIJESIRIWARDENA (23 AUGUST 2017)
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This evening is very important to me – to us. I was born into the arms of South Asian feminists – into a delivery room populated by my mother’s friends – I was raised on the stories of their struggles, loves and losses. I was sung their revolutionary songs as lullabies. I was raised by them.
http://sacw.net/article13454.html

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4. INDIA: NEWS BROADCASTING STANDARDS AUTHORITY HOLDS ZEE NEWS CHANNEL LIABLE FOR THEIR FALSE, MALICIOUS AND DISTORTED COVERAGE OF 2016 POETRY RECITATION BY GAUHAR RAZA
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Mr. Gauhar Raza, an eminent scientist and poet, was maligned, defamed and hate engineered against him by the malicious, concocted and motivated news telecast carried by Zee News in March, 2016. Mr. Raza was branded as a part of an “Afzal Premi Gang” for reciting his poems in the ‘Shankar - Shaad Mushaira’.
A complaint was then filed by Mr. Raza with the News Broadcasting Standards Authority against Zee News along with another joint complaint filed by eminent artists like Mr. Ashok Vajpeyi, Ms. Shubha Mudgal, Ms. Sharmila Tagore and Dr. Syeda Hameed. Advocate Vrinda Grover argued on behalf of Gauhar Raza and other complainants.
http://sacw.net/article13455.html

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5. ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM, INTERNATIONALISM AND THE FEDERACIÓN ANARQUISTA IBÉRICA IN SPAIN
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At her speech at the last interwar congress of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) in 1938, Emma Goldman pointed out how “anarchists ... were a sore in the eye of an entire school of Marxists and liberals.”[1] Goldman’s remark still applies for the postwar era as the Spanish anarchist movement has been vilified by both Marxist and liberal historians.
http://sacw.net/article13394.html

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6. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
 - Video: crackdown on beef now extended to all forms of non-vegetarian foods in NOIDA, Uttar Pradesh | Newsclick
 - Lebanon, Hezbollah, Sectarianism: We need a large movement from below! | by Joseph Daher, Katrina van den Heuvel
 - Did RSS Really Participate in the Freedom Movement? | Ram Puniyani
 - India - Religious Noise: Bombay High Court stays Centre notification, silence zones back for now
 - India: Read history before making controversial statement on Taj Mahal - Historian's advice to Aditya Nath, the Chief Minister of UP
 - India: A hero’s welcome accorded by Times Now and Republic TV to Lt Col Purohit, malegaon blast accused (released on bail) | Jyoti Punwani / The Hoot
 - India: The man who assassinated Punjab chief minister Beant Singh in 1995 is hailed at a ceremony in Golden temple complex in Amritsar
 - India: DGMI report on Col. Purohit - was deeply invested in the activities of Abhinav Bharat and in liaison with the RSS, the VHP, the Ram Sene among others | CatchNews
 - India: Secularism indeed is in Great Danger | KULDIP NAYAR
 - India: 2008 Malegaon blasts case - Did Hemant Karkare ‘fix’ Lt Col Purohit? | Rajdeep Sardesai
 - US conservatives made Trump denounce hate. RSS can learn from them | Javed Anand
 - India: Unsteady state (Edit, TOI, 31 August 2017)
 - India: A mob of 80 attacks school and hostels run by Baptist Church situated in front of Lt. Governor’s house in Delhi
 - USA: Liberals can’t hope to beat Trump until they truly understand him | John Harris
 - India: Alt-Right and Hindutva | Arunabha Bagchi (The Statesman, Aug 31, 2017)
 - India - Kerala: Love jihad bogey - Judiciary has arbitrarily taken away citizen's liberty, citing ‘Indian tradition’
 - India: Mix of Religion, Welfare and Politics at Dera Sacha Sauda | Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta (The Wire)
 - India: Col. Purohit granted bail and will be reinstated in the Army! - Condemn the double standards practiced by the Indian State!! - Statement by Platform for Social Justice Maharashtra
 - India: Religion At State Expense | Faizan Mustafa

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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7. TRUMP’S NEW AFGHANISTAN POLICY HAS PAKISTAN ANGRY AND ALARMED 
by Pamela Constable
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(Washington Post, August 29, 2017)

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A wave of anti-American anger has swept Pakistan this past week, triggered both by President Trump’s threat to punish the country for harboring insurgents and by his invitation to India, Pakistan’s longtime rival, to become more involved in Afghanistan’s future.

Tribal and religious leaders have held protests at border crossings, and banners urging “Say no to America!” have appeared across the capital. Officials have canceled trips to Washington and asked a State Department official to postpone her planned visit here this week. Across the country’s fractious political spectrum, leaders have raised a collective fist at Trump.

In a stern speech Aug. 21, the U.S. president laid out a new militarized policy for the region, saying he would send more American troops to Afghanistan and insisting that Pakistan must “do more” to rein in Islamist militants or face possible sanctions, such as cutting aid or revoking its status as a major non-NATO ally. 
Play Video 2:58
Trump's speech on Afghanistan, in three minutes
President Trump unveiled a new strategy for the U.S. war in Afghanistan on Aug. 21. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)

Afghan officials welcomed Trump’s message, but Pakistanis accused him of “bullying” their country despite its history of cooperating with the United States in foreign conflicts. They said he had betrayed them by reaching out to India, which Pakistan views as a persistent threat to its existence. 

“President Trump wants to portray us as a villain despite the huge losses­ we have suffered in the so-called anti-terrorism war,” said Hafiz Hamdullah, a conservative Muslim cleric and legislator. “Both India and the U.S. want to use Afghanistan against us. These charges of terrorist hideouts are just to destabilize Pakistan.”

Mian Raza Rabbani, the left-leaning chairman of Pakistan’s Senate, denounced Trump in similar terms. “No country in the world has done more than Pakistan to counter the menace of terrorism,” he declared. Invoking the “legacy of Vietnam,” he said that if Trump “wants Pakistan to become a graveyard for U.S. troops, let him do so.”

In tribal regions along the border, where U.S. drone strikes have killed hundreds of suspected militants and civilians, one crowd of tribesmen chanted, “Long live Pakistan.” In another spot, religious activists held up placards saying, “India, America and Afghanistan are conspiring against Pakistan.”

Pakistan’s National Security Committee, which comprises top military and civilian officials, sharply rejected Trump’s charges of sheltering insurgents and demanded that the U.S. military “eliminate sanctuaries for terrorists” on the Afghan side. “The Afghan war cannot be fought in Pakistan,” the group declared.

Pakistani officials took other steps to show their unhappiness. They requested that a planned visit by Alice Wells, the senior State Department official dealing with the region, be indefinitely postponed. Pakistan’s foreign minister, who had been planning a trip to Washington, instead announced that he would travel to China, Russia and Turkey. 

Supporters of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N carry banners as they protest Aug. 23 in Multan. (Faisal Kareem/European Pressphoto Agency)

Despite the hostile rhetoric, there were signs that U.S.-Pakistan relations are far from collapsing. Over the past few weeks, several low-profile meetings were held between current and former officials from both governments to discuss how to keep relations on an even keel.

Pakistani newspapers ran headlines that blasted Trump as a hectoring bully but also published nuanced commentaries calling for pragmatism and patience. The editors of Dawn, the country’s most influential daily paper, counseled that “there is still space and time for constructive dialog. A strategic rupture is in neither the U.S. nor Pakistan’s interest.”

For Pakistan, the issue of militant sanctuaries is a familiar one; both of Trump’s immediate predecessors pressed Pakistan to crack down on them but did not take harsh measures, especially because Pakistan was cooperating in the broader anti-terrorism war. This time, though, Pakistani officials are said to be far more worried that Trump, an unpredictable leader, may follow through.

“Trump’s threats are real. . . . Madness on our doorstep has already arrived,” commentator Syed Talat Hussain wrote in the News International on Monday. He suggested that if Trump, “an ignoramus addicted to creating sensation,” ordered a drone strike in Pakistani territory — as opposed to the border tribal areas — it could “get us embroiled in a war with the U.S. This is deadly serious business.”

Protesters burn portraits of Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Aug. 23 in Multan. (Faisal Kareem/European Pressphoto Agency)

Pakistanis have been even more deeply rattled by Trump’s warm embrace of India, where the current prime minister is an ardent Hindu nationalist and Indian army troops have been waging an aggressive, months-long campaign against Muslim protesters in the disputed Kashmir region.

Pakistan has long pursued influence in Afghanistan largely as a foil to India, a larger and more powerful rival, only to see New Delhi become a major benefactor of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul. 

“Trump’s comments about India were more unsettling for Pakistanis than his threats to Pakistan,” said Michael Kugelman, a Pakistan expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “The U.S. calling for a deeper Indian footprint in Afghanistan sets off alarm bells across Pakistan. It will cause very real fear.”

A few Pakistani voices here have called for a rethinking of Pakistan’s efforts to influence Afghanistan, noting this has created a burden on its resources and a spillover of Islamist radicalization. But virtually no one questions the notion that India, the world’s largest democracy, is their mortal enemy — a premise that has long kept Pakistan’s army in a position of extraordinary power but has left the country increasingly isolated. 

Today, the dominant sentiment here is one of betrayal by an old friend that owes a large debt to Pakistan.

“We have sacrificed for so many years to help the United States, and this Afghan war has destroyed us,” said Rehman Malik, a Pakistani senator and former interior minister. “We don’t want anything but their respect. We are a victim of terrorism, not a cause of it. We want peace in Afghanistan, not war. Now America is befriending India at the expense of Pakistan. And that really hurts.”

Supporters of the Defense of Pakistan Council, a coalition of about 40 religious and political parties, protest President Trump on Friday in Karachi. (Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Images)

Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad and Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar contributed to this report. 

Pamela Constable is The Post’s bureau chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She previously served as a South Asia bureau chief and most recently covered immigration in the Washington area for several years.
Follow @pamconstable1

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8. INDIA - CHINA: HOW THE DOKLAM WITHDRAWAL WAS CAREFULLY CHOREOGRAPHED | Bharat Bhushan
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The India-China stand-off ended with a choreographed disengagement at Doklam plateau on August 28 after night long negotiations in Beijing. India agreed to withdraw its troops in a designated two hour period before noon on Monday August 28 and the Chinese did the same in a similar window that afternoon.

http://www.catchnews.com/international-news/how-the-doklam-withdrawal-was-carefully-choreographed-79756.html

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9. POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN ANCIENT INDIA | Upinder Singh
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HARDCOVER
$45.00 • £35.95 • €40.50
ISBN 9780674975279
Publication: September 2017
616 pages

Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru helped create the myth of a nonviolent ancient India while building a modern independence movement on the principle of nonviolence (ahimsa). But this myth obscures a troubled and complex heritage: a long struggle to reconcile the ethics of nonviolence with the need to use violence to rule. Upinder Singh documents the dynamic tension between violence and nonviolence in ancient Indian political thought and practice over twelve hundred years.

Political Violence in Ancient India looks at representations of kingship and political violence in epics, religious texts, political treatises, plays, poems, inscriptions, and art from 600 BCE to 600 CE. As kings controlled their realms, fought battles, and meted out justice, intellectuals debated the boundary between the force required to sustain power and the excess that led to tyranny and oppression. Duty (dharma) and renunciation were important in this discussion, as were punishment, war, forest tribes, and the royal hunt. Singh reveals a range of perspectives that defy rigid religious categorization. Buddhists, Jainas, and even the pacifist Maurya emperor Ashoka recognized that absolute nonviolence was impossible for kings.

By 600 CE religious thinkers, political theorists, and poets had justified and aestheticized political violence to a great extent. Nevertheless, questions, doubt, and dissent remained. These debates are as important for understanding political ideas in the ancient world as for thinking about the problem of political violence in our own time.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674975279

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10. MIGRANTS, REFUGEES AND THE STATELESS IN SOUTH ASIA: REVIEW
by Jatin Desai 
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(Free Press Journal, September 03, 2017)

Title: Migrants, Refugees and the Stateless in South Asia
Author: Partha S. Ghosh
Publisher: SAGE
Price: Rs. 995

The book Migrants, Refugees and the Stateless in South Asia addresses the important issue of migrants, refugees and stateless people. The author Partha Ghosh has done meticulous research on the complex issue.  It is not a recent phenomenon. It is happening in the South Asia for years. It is estimated that so far around 50 million South Asians have crossed borders intra-regionally for either permanent or semi-permanent settlement in their new abodes.

Out of refugees, migrants and stateless people only refugees are a legal category and that too in those countries which have signed the international refugee convention. Unfortunately, in South Asia, only Afghanistan has signed the international refugee covenants of 1951 and 1967. It is often difficult to distinguish between migrants, refugees, and stateless people.

In 1954, the term ‘stateless person’ was first defined. The stateless person is defined as ‘a person who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law’ in a convention on September 28, 1954, relating to the status of stateless persons. Migration can be internal or international. Internal migration is a change in the place of residence from one administrative boundary to another within the same country. International migration is a move over a national boundary.

“The Indian statutory framework does not recognize refugees as a separate category of people who deserve separate treatment. But although the refugees are treated in an ad hoc basis and usually on par with foreigners and illegal migrants or entrants, certain laws and procedures are in place which governs the Indian state’s response to the refugee question,” writes Ghosh.

Migration is also some time connected with racial, ethnic discrimination. People do take shelter, many times, because of religious persecutions. They also come with their earlier political, religious orientation. Many times they come with the hawkish ideology. If they were persecuted for religious reasons then they easily become pawn in the hands of extreme elements where they have taken shelter.

The author says,” Even without any refugee specific legal regime, India and Pakistan have handled millions of refugees starting with the arrival of massive number of refugees during and after the partition.” India is getting refugees regularly from Afghanistan, Myanmar and Bangladesh. Pakistan is getting refugees from Afghanistan in big number. At the same time, many of them are also returning back to Afghanistan. Bangladesh is refugee generating as well as receiving country. Chakma and Hindu community are leaving Bangladesh for India in big numbers. At the same, Bangladesh is receiving Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. Now, Bangladesh has stopped receiving them. Rohingya community is primarily based in Rakhine province of Myanmar. They are leaving Myanmar primarily because of persecution.

Sir Cyril Radcliffe was assigned the task of dividing India. He did his job. Before he left India he burnt all his notes and never thereafter did he write anything about his experience in India.

Maldives is a unique country of South Asia with a population of little over three lakh. Strict Sunni Muslim order does not permit non-Sunni to settle in the country, not even as a spouse of its citizens. They have thousands of Bangladeshi workers. Sinhala-Tamil conflict led exodus of thousands of Tamils to India’s Tamil Nadu.  Nepal has seven camps of Lhotshampa (Nepali ethnic origin) refugees from Bhutan numbering around 1.25 lakh.

Migration is always not welcomed. Migrant workers are always cheap labourers as they have to survive. Many times it changes the politics of the region where they settle. The Assam agitation of the early eighties was against foreigners (read Bangladesh) settling in Assam. In August 1985, the Assam Accord was signed between the Indian government and All Assam Students’ Union (AASU). The issue of infiltration of Chakma became a major issue in Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh in nineties. Sri Lankan Tamil refugees continued to influence Tamil Nadu’s politics till Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was defeated in 2009.

Muslims from East Punjab migrated to West Punjab and Muslims from UP and Central India settled down in Pakistan’s Sindh province. They are known as Mohajirs. They were important players in the Muslim League. But, over the years they were sidelined. Ahmediya were in the forefront in demanding Pakistan. But, they lost importance and subsequently were declared non-Muslim in 1974. Similarly, Biharis who migrated to then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and later on could not migrate to Pakistan are marginalized. They were viewed as ‘collaborators’ with the Pakistan Army and Razakars against the liberation war. Even today, couples of lakh Urdu speaking Biharis in Bangladesh are waiting to go to Pakistan and settle down.

Unlike other refugees, the Tibetans refugees need to be seen differently. They started coming to India from early 1950s. India’s then PM Jawaharlal Nehru welcomed Dalai Lama and his thousands of colleagues in 1959 on the humanitarian ground and allow them to settle down. But, at the same time India did not took an anti-Chinese position. It was a mixture of humanitarian attitude and diplomacy. The book gives complete picture of the status of refugees and migrants in South Asia.

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11. AFRICAN RULERS OF INDIA: THAT PART OF OUR HISTORY WE CHOOSE TO FORGET | Adrija Roychowdhury
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(The Indian Express, June 5, 2016)

The elite status of the African slaves in India ensured that a number of them had access to political authority and secrets which they could make use of to become rulers in their own right, reigning over parts of India.

http://indianexpress.com/article/research/african-rulers-of-india-that-part-of-our-history-we-choose-to-forget/

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12. “WHY WERE WE UNTOUCHABLES?” - An Indian author’s quest to understand her country’s entrenched and debilitating caste system—and her family’s place in it.
by Isaac Chotiner
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(Slate - August 30, 2017)
Sujatha Gidla’s new book, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, is the author’s story of discovering—and wrestling with—her family’s fraught and wrenching history. Gidla comes from a line of Christian “untouchables” in southern India who are at the bottom of India’s caste-defined social system; by recounting the experiences of her mother and uncles, she explains how the country has stayed mired in discrimination, even after gaining independence in 1947, and the barriers that still exist to social change.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2017/08/sujatha_gidla_on_india_s_caste_system_and_ants_among_elephants.html

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13. THE EPIC CITY REVIEW – A LOVE LETTER TO KOLKATA | William Dalrymple
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(The Observer - 27 August 2017)

Kushanava Choudhury’s beautifully observed account of life in the West Bengal metropolis is full of humour and wonder

In 1690, the East India Company established a new base in Bengal. To the evident surprise of his contemporaries, Job Charnock planted his new settlement at Kalikata between a swamp and the boggy banks of the Hooghly river, next to a temple of Kali, one of Hinduism’s most fearsome goddesses. Charnock was said to have bought the site “for the sake of a large shady tree”, an odd choice, wrote a 17th-century commentator, “for he could not have found a more unhealthful place on all the river”. It was “contrary to all reason”. Soon so many settlers died there that it “become a saying that they live like Englishmen, and die like rotten sheep”. Only a year later there were 1,000 living in the settlement, but no less than 460 burials in the graveyard.

Over the years since then, Calcutta, now known as Kolkata, has rarely had a good press. “Calcutta,” wrote Robert Clive, “is one of the most wicked places in the universe... rapacious and luxurious beyond conception.” By the late 18th century, the British bridgehead in Bengal may have become a city of palaces, but it was still most famous for its notorious black hole prison and had a reputation as an edgy city where great wealth could be accumulated in a matter of months, then lost in minutes in a wager or at the whist table. Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and the constant presence of mortality made men callous: they would mourn briefly for some perished friend, then bid drunkenly for his effects.

A century later, Calcutta had become the second city of the British empire, but such was the deprivation, overcrowding and general chaos that Kipling still thought of it as the city of dreadful night, while Mark Twain remarked that its climate “was enough to make a brass doorknob mushy”. As late as 1971, the cover blurb for Geoffery Moorhouse’s Calcutta described it as “a city of unspeakable poverty, of famine, riot and disease… this living hell”.

Nor have more recent post-colonial commentators been much kinder. As Kushanava Choudhury notes in his engaging prose portrait, The Epic City, “even Anita Desai and Günter Grass, who came to live here for a while, and wrote books about the city, ultimately fell back upon the trope of an urban hellhole.

“Kali became emblematic of the dark forces they felt seething here. Shocked and fascinated by Kali, whose long red tongue, black body and garland of skulls peer out from every sweet-shop calendar and taxi dashboard, they saw in her the embodiment of the soul-crushing force of the city.”

Choudhury himself admits that Calcutta is no easy place to live: “For six months of the year, you are never dry. You take two or three showers a day to keep cool, but start sweating the moment you turn off the tap.” From April until October, your clothes “adhere to your body like duct tape”.

Newly settled in the city after college in the US, “I woke up some mornings,” he writes, “feeling my chest was on fire. Breathing in Calcutta was like smoking a packet of cigarettes a day. Keeping the dust and grime off my body, out of my nails, hair and lungs was a daily struggle. Then there was the mosquitoes, which arrived in swarms at sundown and often came bearing malaria.” There was something about the climate that seemed to cause endemic “entropy… sprawling decline… There was so much which you have to react to that there is little time left to act. You arrive with grand plans and soon you are merely surviving.” It even smells terrible: “The city was simply one big pisspot,” he writes. “There are no uncontaminated piss-free zones in Calcutta”; even in the smartest offices it is impossible to escape “that unmistakable bouquet”.

And yet for all this, The Epic City is a wonderful, beautifully written and even more beautifully observed love letter to Calcutta’s greatness: to its high culture, its music and film, its festivals, its people, its cuisine, its urban rhythms and, above all, to its rooted Bengaliness. At a time when so many brilliant Indians – and perhaps particularly the hyper-educated Bengalis – are leaving India to find employment abroad, Choudhury, born in Buffalo and brought up in New Jersey, headed in the opposite direction, to the place he thinks of as his real home.

While the rest of his generation of overachieving Princeton graduates were beating a path towards Wall Street to become “corporate conquistadors”, Choudhury turns his face in the opposite direction, to Calcutta to rediscover his family roots. This is even though an entire generation there has emigrated to “Delhi, Dubai, London, Chicago and California” and Calcutta now feels like a “retirement home, or worse, a necropolis that the young had abandoned… my generation had gone missing, leaving behind a city of geriatrics”. Calcutta felt like a place whose greatest days had passed: “Our golden age was when Calcutta had been the capital of the empire, its port the conduit to the loot of Asia. With the sahibs gone, our best days were done.”
'But what about the railways ...?' ​​The myth of Britain's gifts to India

But Choudhury finds the city still has ample compensations. With witty, sharp and sometimes beautifully chiselled prose, he evokes the world of Tagore, Satyajit Ray and the Bengali poets, with their little magazines and literary gatherings, and of the secondhand bookshops of College Street (“a labyrinth made of books”) where “shopkeepers sell books the way dealers elsewhere sell crack”.

It is a world where conversation, reading and verse have not yet been overwhelmed by screens, the internet or television and where overexcited writers “derail each other’s sentences in locomotive Bengali”. In modern Delhi, he writes, no one really belongs, but in Calcutta, everyone is fiercely possessive of their city: “Ask for directions in any Calcutta street corner and half-a-dozen mustachioed men will appear out of nowhere, determined to direct you somewhere. They may offer radically different views on the subject, a street fight may break out, rival political camps may emerge and traffic be barricaded the rest of the afternoon. But it is their city, their streets, their neighbourhood.”

We hear of the beauties of Bengali women and Chaudhury’s courtship of Durba in a world where couples who wish to be alone together have to sit discretely at the back of parks, hiding behind raised umbrellas: “We just stood there, looking at each other lustfully. In Calcutta, Durba and I felt like actors who had wandered off the set of an indie romantic comedy and on to an instructional video for the Taliban.”

There is also a lot about the great landmarks of the Bengali year such as the great city festival of Durga puja, and the wonders of Bengali cooking: kochuris, luchis, “rice, dal, fritters and greens” and “14-course meals brimming with… platefuls of rich goat curry and hilsa fish in mustard sauce.”

Very occasionally, Choudhury can fall short as a guide to the deeply eccentric city he loves so much and he is notably rusty on his history and architecture. The Victoria memorial is not Indo-Saracenic, as he says, so much as a sort of Romano-Mughal, and Calcutta was the largest port in India long before the 1770s. This is overwhelmingly a book about Bengalis and I longed for more on the remarkable minorities who played such a role in the building of the city and who still, just, cling on in their own enclaves today – the Armenians, the Jews, the Chinese, the Anglo-Indians and particularly the Marwaris. But these are small complaints. This is a first book any author would be proud to have written and The Epic City clearly marks the arrival of a new star. Witty, polished, honest and insightful, The Epic City is likely to become for Calcutta what Suketu Mehta’s classic Maximum City is for Mumbai.

William Dalrymple is the author of City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, and most recently, with Anita Anand, Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond.

• The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta by Kushanava Choudhury is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

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14. BUDDHIST NATIONALISM CHALLENGES MYANMAR'S GOVERNMENT | Melyn McKay and Richard Horsey
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(Nikkei Asian Review, August 30, 2017)

Monastic leaders signal fear of sudden social change as public protests resume

Buddhist nuns visit the famed Shwedagon Pagoda during the Full Moon of Waso on July 8 in Yangon. © AP

The current crisis in Myanmar's Rakhine State, following coordinated attacks by a Rohingya militant group on some 30 police posts, is a grave threat to the security and stability of that restive state. While driven by mainly local dynamics and grievances, it also feeds Buddhist nationalism across the country.

Recent weeks have seen some striking scenes in Myanmar: a renewed military crackdown on Rohingya Muslim communities in western Rakhine State after militants attacked a series of police checkpoints and bases; prominent monks rallying outside courts in Yangon in support of nationalist agitators on trial for inciting anti-Muslim violence; heavily armed militia in Kayin State guarding Buddhist nationalist signboards to prevent their removal by the authorities; and the forcible clearing of anti-government protest camps at some of the country's most sacred pagodas. Together with a worrying spate of small-scale communal clashes outside of Rakhine. Even before the tensions in Rakhine peaked, some observers are drawing parallels with the months leading up to the deadly 2013 religious riots across Myanmar.

This was not how it was supposed to be. After the 2015 landslide election victory by Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy and the vanquishing of nationalist parties and candidates, many declared that Burmese Buddhist nationalist groups had been effectively neutralized. This message was reinforced by the willingness of the new government to confront Buddhist nationalist organizations -- the NLD chief minister of Yangon last year called them "unnecessary and redundant," and gained the full backing of his party amid nationalist demands for his ouster.

Then in May this year, Myanmar's high Buddhist authority took the extreme step of imposing a ban on the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, the most prominent Buddhist nationalist group better known by its Burmese-language acronym, MaBaTha.

Yet, far from sustaining a decisive blow against the movement, nationalist organizations have bounced back, and their problematic ideologies appear as popular as ever. Understanding the difficulties for the government in addressing the challenges posed by Buddhist nationalism and the associated risk of communal conflict requires a more nuanced understanding of MaBaTha's ideology and organizational activities.

MaBaTha rose to prominence rallying for the adoption of four "protection of race and religion" laws, through which the movement's leaders were able to extend awareness of nationalist ideology and the MaBaTha brand far into rural and remote parts of the country. As the 2015 elections drew closer, some -- although not all -- leaders of the group began urging people to vote for the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party rather than the NLD, which they said did not prioritize the protection of Buddhism.

The election results were a shock to many nationalists. But they were commonly misinterpreted by observers: Widespread adoration of Aung San Suu Kyi, and hatred of the former military regime with which the USDP was closely associated, had won out over nationalist concerns. But as subsequent events have made clear, the NLD landslide was not a rejection of MaBaTha's ideology, merely a vote for hope and change.

Spiralling communal tensions

The October 2016 attacks on several Border Guard Police bases along Myanmar's northern border with Bangladesh by a new Rohingya militant group boosted Buddhist nationalist rhetoric across Myanmar. Communal tensions rose in neighborhoods of Yangon with large Muslim populations amid growing activism by nationalist organizations.

There were violent protests demanding the shuttering of two Muslim schools that doubled as prayer centers, as well as demands by young nationalists that police raid an apartment they alleged to be a safehouse for illegal "Bengali" migrants as Rohingya Muslims are commonly called (none were found). There have been other threatening or violent incidents aimed at Muslim communities throughout the country. The recent attacks by Muslim militants in Rakhine State, which the government claims were carried out by the same group behind the October raids, have fuelled further hostility from Buddhist groups.

Monastic leaders signal fear of sudden social change as public protests resume

The Sangha Council, a government-appointed body of monks that oversees and regulates the Myanmar Buddhist clergy, then issued a statement declaring MaBaTha in violation of Sangha Law. The decision -- issued on May 23 in the presence of MaBaTha leaders -- banned use of the MaBaTha name and logo and required all MaBaTha signboards across the country to be removed by July 15. The leaders signed their acceptance.
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The decision pitted a government widely seen as weak on religious issues and a Sangha Council regarded as a rubber stamp for government against a popular organization led by some of the most revered -- if often controversial -- monks in the country. Some of MaBaTha's local chapters easily sidestepped the Sangha Council decision by rebranding under a new name. Many others have simply refused to comply, daring the authorities to enforce their decision.

MaBaTha's real agenda

The confrontation in Myanmar is about far more than Buddhist nationalism and anti-Muslim hate speech. These are just populist elements of a much larger debate over the role of Buddhism in a rapidly modernizing country, and the latest chapter in the never-ending negotiation of relations between Buddhism and the state. This includes not only moral and religious issues but the broader wellbeing of society, seen in monastic tradition as indistinguishable from the vitality of monasteries and the monastic order, and the social and educational services they provide.

Generally portrayed in international media as a fundamentally political entity, MaBaTha bases its efforts for "promotion and protection of Buddhism"  around a range of activities that greatly enhance its grassroots support: running a large network of Buddhist Sunday schools, promoting shared Buddhist cultural values, providing a social safety net, disaster relief, secular education, dispute resolution, women's rights and pro bono legal aid.

The role of women in religious nationalist and extremist movements throughout Asia offers a unique insight into how these groups develop and nurture grassroot support in the face of concerted national and international efforts to deter or delegitimize them.

In Myanmar, although MaBaTha is often seen as pursuing a misogynistic agenda, it enjoys strong support from many women and nuns, who see themselves as protecting women's freedom of choice -- in who they marry and how they practice their religion. This is overlooked by accounts that do not take MaBaTha's grassroot popularity seriously.

Female lawyers provide pro bono pastoral support and legal aid through MaBaTha to women in abusive family or work situations who would not otherwise have the means to bring a case through the courts. To many in the justice sector, MaBaTha's prominent role in local dispute resolution comes as a surprise. However, it reflects the often unseen work of monastic communities in supporting local society -- a result of the absence of accessible and credible official channels for redress, and the moral authority that monks command.

Many women's groups across Myanmar came to MaBaTha to offer their support for its mission. They were not co-opted by influential monks as is typically assumed; they approached MaBaTha because they supported the group's message and objectives, or felt that working through the organization would help them achieve their own goals.

These are views widely held among members of the country's most prestigious nunneries  and among highly educated women, including lawyers, educators and medical professionals. In addition to many women in their 40s and 50s, there is a dedicated cadre of tertiary-educated, feminist-identifying women and nuns in their 20s and 30s.

Although many community supporters of MaBaTha do not see themselves as pursuing an extreme nationalist or anti-Muslim agenda, the popularity and profile gained by the group's community activities lend momentum to more extreme political agendas; and the popularity of its leading monks and large membership is used to boost their credibility and dissemination.

While there is strong support in Buddhist communities for MaBaTha and its nationalist agenda, this is by no means universal. Even those who support the organization and others like it do not necessarily endorse all its viewpoints and activities. But while many people are uncomfortable with the involvement of monks in secular activities, particularly party politics, most Myanmar Buddhists see their participation as a reflection of the government's failings -- not necessarily those of the Sangha.

In Myanmar's new, more democratic era, debate over the proper place of Buddhism and the role of political leadership in protecting it is being recast. This debate is unlikely to end soon, and it cannot be seen merely in terms of politics and nationalism, divorced from moral and spiritual issues.

In light of the realities of simmering intercommunal tensions and outbreaks of violence linked to hate speech and nationalist provocations, the stakes for the country are extremely high. Religious nationalists play an important role in promoting such provocations -- and, even more worryingly, normalizing and legitimizing bigoted agendas. To craft effective responses, an accurate and nuanced understanding of the situation -- rather than simplistic one-dimensional portrayals -- is vital.

While the government must continue to take robust action against hate speech, incitement and violence, it is unlikely that confrontation and legal action will be effective in dealing with the broader phenomenon of Buddhist nationalism and groups such as MaBaTha -- and may even play to their advantage. Rather, it should address the underlying causes, which is much more difficult.

Fundamentally, these relate to the angst in monastic communities and society at large over the rapid changes in Myanmar's social and political make up. Such shifts have generated worries about secularism and modernity that threaten the traditional role of Buddhism and see success defined in material terms rather than religious achievements. More broadly, many disaffected and unemployed youth are searching for a cause, a sense of belonging and of direction. The government, the NLD and society as a whole must find ways to channel this enormous energy in a positive direction.

Yet the NLD has a new handicap with which it has not yet fully grappled. Until it came to power, the party embodied Myanmar's biggest cause -- the struggle against authoritarianism and repression. But once in government, it has been unable to harness the energy of the grassroots and the youth who supported that cause. Nationalist organizations are partly filling this space. Better opportunities for people to participate in community development, social welfare, education and environmental conservation would all resonate strongly and give people a greater sense of control of their destiny.

Also underlying the popularity of nationalist narratives is a sense of economic anxiety and a feeling that ordinary people are not seeing tangible benefits from the reforms. This increases their concern about the future and the resilience of their communities. A much more visible focus on the economy by government would give people confidence that it is prioritizing better opportunities and jobs, and a more prosperous future for ordinary people.

Melyn McKay is a research anthropologist and DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford specializing in women's participation in religious nationalist movements, and peace building. Richard Horsey is a Yangon-based political analyst; he serves as Myanmar adviser to the International Crisis Group, and to various organizations on political and conflict risk.

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15. WAITING FOR A PERFECT PROTEST?
by Michael Mcbride, Traci Blackmon, Frank Reid and Barbara Williams Skinner
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(The New York Times, SEPT. 1, 2017)

Media outlets and commentators representing a range of political persuasions have called attention to recent outbreaks of violence in Berkeley, Calif., Boston and other locations where anti-racist and anti-fascist demonstrators have gathered. Intentionally or not, they have often promoted a false equivalency between groups that advocate white supremacy and those that seek to eliminate it.

Even mainstream media outlets that typically fact-check the president seem to have subtly bought into Mr. Trump’s “both sides” narrative regarding right- and left-wing extremism. They’ve run headlines that highlight small violent skirmishes while ignoring the thousands who marched and protested peacefully, to say nothing of the injustices that inspired the protests.
Photo
A demonstrator clashed with a policeman during a civil rights protest in Nashville in 1964. Credit Bettmann Archive/Getty Images 

Our complaint here is not about the right-wing media outlets that we know will continue to delegitimize anti-racist protest in any form — whether it’s peacefully sitting during the national anthem, marching in the streets, staging boycotts or simply making the apparently radical claim that “black lives matter.” Rather, our concern at this moment is with our moderate brothers and sisters who voice support for the cause of racial justice but simultaneously cling to paralyzingly unrealistic standards when it comes to what protest should look like.

As Christian clergy members, we place a high value on nonviolence. We are part of a national campaign that promotes proven solutions to reducing gun violence in our cities, and each of us has worked to achieve peace in our neighborhoods. But we know there has never been a time in American history in which movements for justice have been devoid of violent outbreaks.
Thanks to the sanitized images of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement that dominate our nation’s classrooms and our national discourse, many Americans imagine that protests organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and countless local organizations fighting for justice did not fall victim to violent outbreaks. That’s a myth. In spite of extensive training in nonviolent protest and civil disobedience, individuals and factions within the larger movement engaged in violent skirmishes, and many insisted on their right to physically defend themselves even while they proclaimed nonviolence as an ideal (examples include leaders of the SNCC and the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Mississippi).

The reality — which is underdiscussed but essential to an understanding of our current situation — is that the civil rights work of Dr. King and other leaders was loudly opposed by overt racists and quietly sabotaged by cautious moderates. We believe that current moderates sincerely want to condemn racism and to see an end to its effects. The problem is that this desire is outweighed by the comfort of their current circumstances and a perception of themselves as above some of the messy implications of fighting for liberation. This is nothing new. In fact, Dr. King’s 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail” is as relevant today as it was then. He wrote in part (emphasis in bold added):

    I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action.”

National polling from the 1960s shows that even during that celebrated “golden age” of nonviolent protest, most Americans were against marches and demonstrations. A 1961 Gallup poll revealed that 57 percent of the public thought that lunch counter sit-ins and other demonstrations would hurt integration efforts. A 1963 poll showed that 60 percent had an unfavorable feeling toward the planned March on Washington, where Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. A year later, 74 percent said that since black people had made some progress, they should stop their demonstrations; and by 1969, 74 percent said that marching, picketing and demonstrations were hurting the civil rights cause. As for Dr. King personally, the figure who current moderates most readily point to as a model, 50 percent of people polled in 1966 thought that he was hurting the civil rights movement; only 36 percent believed he was helping.

The civil rights movement was messy, disorderly, confrontational and yes, sometimes violent. Those standing on the sidelines of the current racial-justice movement, waiting for a pristine or flawless exercise of righteous protest, will have a long wait. They, we suspect, will be this generation’s version of the millions who claim that they were one of the thousands who marched with Dr. King. Each of us should realize that what we do now is most likely what we would have done during those celebrated protests 50 years ago. Rather than critique from afar, come out of your homes, follow those who are closest to the pain, and help us to redeem this country, and yourselves, in the process.

Michael McBride is a pastor and the director of PICO National Network’s “Live Free” campaign. Traci Blackmon is the United Church of Christ’s executive minister of justice and witness.
Frank Reid is the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s bishop of ecumenical affairs and social action. Barbara Williams Skinner is a co-convener of the National African American Clergy Network.

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16. TURD REICH: SAN FRANCISCO DOG OWNERS LAY MINEFIELD OF POO FOR RIGHTWING RALLY | Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco
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(The Guardian - 24 August 2017)

‘I just had this image of alt-right people stomping around in the poop,’ says the organizer of an unusual protest ahead of Saturday’s Patriot Prayer rally

When a group of far-right activists come to San Francisco to hold a rally this Saturday, they will be met by peace activists offering them flowers to wear in their hair.

Also, dog shit. Lots and lots of dog shit.

Hundreds of San Franciscans plan to prepare Crissy Field, the picturesque beach in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge where rightwing protest group Patriot Prayer will gather, with a generous carpeting of excrement.

“I just had this image of alt-right people stomping around in the poop,” Tuffy Tuffington said of the epiphany he had while walking Bob and Chuck, his two Patterdale terriers, and trying to think of the best way to respond to rightwing extremists in the wake of Charlottesville. “It seemed like a little bit of civil disobedience where we didn’t have to engage with them face to face.”

Tuffington, a 45-year-old artist and designer, created a Facebook event page based on the concept, and the dog owners of San Francisco responded in droves. Many have declared their intention to stockpile their shitpiles for days in advance, then deliver them in bags for the site. (The group is also planning to reconvene on Sunday to “clean up the mess and hug each other”.)

The presence of Patriot Prayer, whose “free speech” events in the Pacific north-west have frequently sparked violent street battles, in notoriously liberal San Francisco has city authorities on edge. Elected officials unsuccessfully pressured the National Park Service to deny the group a permit, and the police department is planning to deploy every available officer.

But for many San Franciscans, an unwelcome visit from members of the “alt-right” is an opportunity to fight back in the spirit of the city by the bay – with flower power, drag queens, a little creativity, and an assist from the animal kingdom.

Shannon Bolt, a behavior scientist who works at Crissy Field, intends to confront Patriot Prayer in the spirit of the Summer of Love. “As white supremacists and neo-Nazis gather in our midst, we’ll tune into the love frequency again and meet their hatred with flowers for their hair,” she wrote in a Facebook event description.

If security forces keep the protest and counter-protest separate, Bolt told the Guardian, “We will have to offer our Flowers Against Fascism to them symbolically.”

There will also be contingents of clowns, kayakers, cars, and kids – all hoping to use their particular strengths (humor, seaworthiness, the ability to monopolize parking spaces, and cuteness, respectively) to thumb their noses at hate.

“You have a significant number of people who would like to go and punch Nazis, and then you have people who think they should be entirely ignored,” said veteran labor and LGBTQ rights activist Cleve Jones. “In between you have all sorts of creative and crazy ideas. I kind of like that.”

Jones is working with local drag queen Juanita More to host a rally and march for equality beginning at Harvey Milk Plaza in the city’s Castro district. “There’s this desire to create fear,” he said of media coverage showing torch-wielding racists spewing hateful chants. “With these kinds of creative actions, we dispel fear. We say we’re going to fight you and we’re going to have a ball doing it and we’re going to laugh and love each other.”

Jones is also taking inspiration from the German town of Wunsiedel, where residents have responded to an annual neo-Nazi march by sponsoring an “involuntary walkathon” that raises funds for anti-extremist causes.

He is raising money for ten local organizations that reflect the diversity of San Francisco, including the Transgender Law Center, Disability Rights and Education Defense Fund, and Muslim Advocates. A similar Wunsiedel-inspired effort has been launched by Jewish Bar Association of San Francisco, which has raised more than $100,000 for the the Southern Poverty Law Center under the banner “Adopt-a-Nazi”.

“When the dust has settled and the smoke has cleared,” Jones said, “I hope that the appearance of rightwing extremists in San Francisco will raise a significant amount of money for the people they seek to harm.”

    Update: This article has been amended to add that the dog poop protesters’ plan to clean up after themselves.

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17. SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: ‘AFTER COMMUNISM WE THOUGHT EVERYTHING WOULD BE FINE. BUT PEOPLE DON’T UNDERSTAND FREEDOM’ | Shaun Walker, The Guardian
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(The Guardian - 21 July 2017)

The Nobel prize-winning author talks about the pressures of life in the Putin era, as her bestselling book on Russian women’s wartime heroism is republished

In conversations with Svetlana Alexievich, it quickly becomes apparent that she is more comfortable listening than she is talking. That’s hardly surprising: the Belarusian writer has spent decades in listening mode. Alexievich, now 69, put in thousands of hours with her tape recorder across the lands of the former Soviet Union, collecting and collating stories from ordinary people. She wove those tales into elegant books of such power and insight, that in 2015 she received the Nobel prize for literature.

In today’s Russia, Alexievich’s work is a Rorschach test for political beliefs: among the beleaguered, liberal opposition, she is frequently seen as the conscience of the nation, a uniquely incisive commentator on the disappointments and complexities of the post-Soviet condition. Mainstream opinion sees her as a turncoat whose books degrade Russia and Russians.

When I meet her in a cosy basement café in her home city of Minsk, the entrance nestled in an amphitheatre of imposing, late-Soviet apartment blocks, she has just returned from a book tour of South Korea, and is about to embark on a trip to Moscow. “It’s tiring to have the attention on yourself; I want to closet myself away and start writing properly again,” she says, looking visibly wearied by the travel and spotlight. Alexievich reluctantly agreed to deliver a talk about a book she wrote more than three decades ago, The Unwomanly Face of War, which has been republished in a new English translation this month. It was written in the early 1980s, and for many years she could not find a publisher, but during the soul-searching of the late-Soviet perestroika period, it tapped into the zeitgeist of reflection and critical thinking, and was published in a print run of 2m, briefly turning Alexievich into a household name. Later, the merciless flashlight Alexievich shone on to the Soviet war experience became less welcome in Russia. Since the Nobel win, her work has found a new international audience, giving her a second stint of fame 30 years after the first.

The original inspiration for the book was an article Alexievich read in the local Minsk press during the 1970s, about a retirement party for the accountant at a local car factory, a decorated sniper who had killed 75 Germans during the war. After that first interview, she began to seek out female war veterans across the Soviet Union. A million Soviet women served at the front, but they were absent from the official war narrative. “Before this book, the only female character in our war literature was the nurse who improved the life of some heroic lieutenant,” she says. “But these women were steeped in the filth of war as deeply as the men.”

It took a long time, Alexievich concedes, to get the women to stop speaking in rehearsed platitudes. Many were embarrassed about the reality of their war memories. “They would say, ‘OK, we’ll tell you, but you have to write it differently, more heroically.’” After a frank interview with a woman who served as the medical assistant to a tank battalion, Alexievich recounts, she sent the transcript as promised and received a package through the post in response, full of newspaper clippings about wartime feats and most of the interview text crossed out in pen. “More than once afterward I met with these two truths that live in the same human being,” Alexievich writes. “One’s own truth, driven underground, and the common one, filled with the spirit of the time.”

The book touches on topics that were taboo during the Soviet period and have once again been excised from Putin’s Russia: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, by which Stalin and Hitler carved up Europe, the executions of deserters and the psychological effects of war for years to come. Her subjects recall sweaty nightmares, grinding teeth, short tempers and an inability to see forests without thinking of twisted bodies in shallow graves.

In modern Russia, Putin has turned the war victory into a national building block of almost religious significance, and questioning the black-and-white history of glorious victory is considered heresy. This makes the testimony of the women in Alexievich’s book, most of whom are now dead, feel all the more important today. There is no lack of heroism in the book; the feats and the bravery and the enormous burden that fell on the shoulders of these women shine from every page. But she does not erase the horror from the story, either. In the end, the book is a far more powerful testament to the extraordinary price paid by the Soviet people to defeat Nazi Germany than the sight of intercontinental missiles rolling across Red Square on 9 May, or the endless bombastic war films shown on Russian television.

After The Unwomanly Face of War, Alexievich wrote books that dealt with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, two tragedies that accompanied the death throes of the Soviet Union, both of them simultaneously causes and symptoms of its impending collapse.

More recently, she published the doorstop-sized Second-Hand Time, which reads as a requiem for the Soviet era. It chronicles the shock and the existential void that characterised the 1990s after the Soviet Union disintegrated, and helps explain the appeal of Putin’s promises to bring pride back to a wounded, post-imperial nation.

‘Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse, it was a shock for everyone,” she says. Everyone had to adapt to a new and painful reality as the rules, behavioural codes and everyday language of the Soviet experience dissolved almost overnight. Taken together, Alexievich’s books remain perhaps the single most impressive document of the late Soviet Union and its aftermath. Alexievich became a harsh critic of Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of newly independent Belarus. She left the country “as a protest”, and spent 11 years living in exile in various European countries, returning only a few years ago. “When you’re on the barricades, all you can see is a target, not a human, which is what a writer should see. From the point of view of art, the butcher and the victim are equal as people. You need to see the people.”

Lukashenko has made it clear he is no fan of Alexievich’s work, and while the Nobel prize has given her some security, her books have not been published in Belarus, and she is de facto banned from making public appearances. As a writer of Ukrainian and Belarusian heritage, but who writes essentially about the whole post-Soviet space, she is confused about modern Russia. She is unsure whether to say “we” or “they” when she speaks about Russians. Where she is more certain is in her opinions of Putin and the current political climate. “We thought we’d leave communism behind and everything would turn out fine. But it turns out you can’t leave this and become free, because these people don’t understand what freedom is.”

She has repeatedly criticised the Russian annexation of Crimea and intervention in east Ukraine, which has led to a falling-out with many Russian friends, she says. She never quite knows how conversations will go when she visits Moscow. She recalls a recent visit when she entered the apartment of an old acquaintance: “I had just walked in the door and taken my coat off, when she sits me down and says, ‘Svetochka, so that everything is clear, let me just say that Crimea isn’t ours.’ It’s like a password! ‘Thank God,’ I told her.”

During her trip to Moscow, she gives a talk at Gogol Centre, an edgy theatre space known for its outspoken director and controversial productions. The lecture is rambling and in places barely coherent, but receives multiple rounds of applause from an audience eager to display their liberalism and disdain for Putin’s militarism. The questions are mainly gushing odes to her work.

Shortly after, she grants an interview to a Russian news agency. This time, the questions are rude and provocative, and a flustered Alexievich appears to suggest she understands the motivations of the murderers of a pro-Russian journalist in Kiev, and appears uneasy and unsure of herself. The Russian-language internet explodes with debates over the scandal.

She has two new projects she wants to finish: one about love, which will look at 100 relationships from the perspective of the man and the woman involved, and a second book about the process of ageing. It is something she has been thinking about, as she approaches her 70th birthday.

“In youth, we don’t think much about it and then suddenly all these questions arrive,” she says. After a little more than an hour of discussion, her already quiet voice has become almost inaudible, and she seems tired and distracted. “What was the point of life, why did all of that happen?”

Not wanting to outstay my welcome any further, I turn off my recorder and thank her for the interview, assuming she will make a speedy beeline for the exit. “Excellent,” she says, immediately brightening. “Shall we have some lunch?” Surprised, I stay, and we talk for another hour. Now it’s mainly her asking the questions: about my views on Russia but also Donald Trump, the European far right and the Queen. Ever the listener, Alexievich is much more at ease asking the questions than answering them.

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18. THE SAUDI TRILLIONS | Malise Ruthven
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(London Review of Books, Vol. 39 No. 17 · 7 September 2017, pages 12-16)

It made perfect sense that the first port of call on President Trump’s first foreign trip, in May, was Riyadh. Saudi Arabia – the world’s second largest oil producer (after Russia), the world’s biggest military spender as a proportion of GDP, the main sponsor of Islamist fighting groups across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Iraq, the leader of a coalition in a devastating war against Yemeni rebels now in its third year – is a country one can do business with, even as the most ardent Kremlinologists in the West struggle to understand it. It is a place often defined by its contradictions, in which tribal codes of desert and oasis – puritanical, patriarchal, frugal and austere – co-exist and frequently clash with lavish displays of wealth and such emblems of modernity as air-conditioned shopping malls, designer boutiques and six-lane highways flashing with supercharged vehicles exclusively driven by men. Trump returned from his visit with a promise – he claimed – of $350 billion in Saudi spending on American armaments over the next ten years, with $110 billion right away, of benefit particularly to Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. The State Department celebrated the deal as supporting ‘the long-term security of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region in the face of malign Iranian influence and Iranian-related threats’.

But the last few months have seen a series of changes in the kingdom that make its future more unpredictable than ever. At the beginning of June, Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic ties with its neighbour Qatar, demanding that its al-Jazeera network be shut down for broadcasting propaganda and launching a regional stand-off that is far from being resolved. Then, two weeks later, there was what appeared to be a palace coup. Since the death in 1953 of the modern kingdom’s founder, Abd al-Aziz Al Saud (generally known as Ibn Saud), succession has passed down the line of his sons. The present king, Salman, reportedly Ibn Saud’s 25th son, inherited the throne in 2015 on the death of his half-brother Abdullah and is close to being the last of his generation. At 81 Salman is in fragile health: he has had two strokes and suffers from Alzheimer’s. On 21 June the doting king promoted his favourite son, the 31-year-old Prince Mohammed bin Salman (widely known by the initials MBS), to the position of crown prince, putting him in line to be the first of the third generation – Ibn Saud’s grandsons – to occupy the throne. According to the New York Times, MBS’s elevation at the expense of his older cousin, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef (known as MBN), was the result of a well-executed plot. MBN had been highly regarded by the US and its allies: as head of the interior ministry and chief of Saudi intelligence he presided over operations against al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP); he had attended training sessions with the FBI and was a powerful advocate of continued close relations with the Americans. In February the CIA honoured him with the George Tenet medal, in recognition of his ‘excellent intelligence performance in the domain of counterterrorism and his unbounded contribution to realise world security and peace’.

On the night of 20 June, the eve of the Eid al-Fitr festival that ends the holy month of Ramadan, MBN was summoned along with other senior princes for an audience with the king. Shortly before midnight courtiers answering to MBS – who was already chief of the royal court as well as the world’s youngest minister of defence – removed his phones and pressured him to relinquish his posts. MBN at first refused but eventually gave in and is now said to be under palace arrest. Afterwards clips of MBN paying allegiance to his younger cousin were shown on Saudi media, to demonstrate a smooth transition, and it was put about – this time by US as well as Saudi officials – that MBN had been suffering from the effects of the ‘arsehole bomb’ attack in 2009, when an al-Qaida operative masquerading as a petitioner approached him and blew himself up with an IED hidden in his rectum. MBN survived the attack but was said to have become addicted to medication he had been taking to mitigate the effects of the trauma. Members of the Allegiance Council, a body of 34 senior princes established by King Abdullah in 2006 to resolve disputes by approving changes in the line of succession, were told that MBN had a drug problem and was unfit to be king. Despite private reservations, the council deferred to King Salman and rubber-stamped its approval, in a vote of 31 to three.
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While not dismissing the claims about his health, at least one foreign diplomat and a well-placed Saudi source suggested that MBN had opposed the Saudi-led embargo on Qatar, and that this was the real reason for his fall. As in early modern Europe, palace politics in Arabia and the Gulf are not driven just by private ambitions but reflect wider geopolitical struggles. MBS is said to be close to his mentor Muhammad bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy commander of the armed forces of the United Arab Emirates, the region’s most effective – and most interventionist – military power. Recent Emirati successes include taking the ports of Mukalla and Shihr in southern Yemen from AQAP, as well as two strategic islands in the Bab al-Mandab strait between Arabia and Africa, through which tankers carrying four million barrels of oil pass each day. Bin Zayed is thought to be the driving force behind the UAE-Saudi rivalry with Qatar which MBN was resisting. As one commentator tweeted after the coup, ‘bin Zayed has become the real ruler of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the two largest Arab countries. Congratulations to the people of these two countries …’

In this scenario MBS – now abetted by Trump – appears as the useful idiot. As defence minister, he was in charge of launching the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, which has been responsible for the killing of thousands of civilians in airstrikes and the displacement of more than three million people. According to the UN, 80 per cent of Yemen’s population is now in need of humanitarian aid that can’t reach the country thanks to the Saudi blockade; the lack of food and clean water has led to widespread malnutrition and at least 500,000 cases of cholera. Meanwhile, the Saudis’ military targets, the Houthi rebels who oppose the president they have protected in office, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, show no signs of giving up. Saudi Arabia has consistently accused the Houthis of being Iranian proxies, a charge that was once untrue but which effectively had the force of a prediction, since as the war has ground on Iran has stepped up its military aid to the rebels, partly to prevent total devastation.

The diplomatic and economic campaign against Qatar, too, can be seen as an expansionist move, part of a Saudi-UAE effort to counter what they present as Iranian influence. As Richard Sokolsky and Aaron David Miller put it in an article for Politico,

    The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis, whose own citizens have provided funding to radical extremists over the years), but rather to end Qatar’s independent foreign policy and especially its support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its ties with Iran. Simply put, the Saudis want to turn Qatar into a vassal state – as they have done with Bahrain – as part of their plan to establish Saudi hegemony over the entire Persian Gulf.

But Qatar has its reasons to co-operate with Iran – not least the fact that the countries share ownership of the world’s largest natural gas field – and, partly through the offices of al-Jazeera, the only measurably independent news organisation in the region, it has shown itself more tolerant than any of its neighbours of the dissenting political movements whose fortunes improved with the Arab Spring. For the Saudi princes, the Muslim Brotherhood et al are an internal threat not to be countenanced. In this sense, the Saudi offensives against Yemen and Qatar seem less part of a plan for regional domination than a defensive operation designed to stoke up anti-Iranian and anti-Shia feeling at home – even when the Iranian influence is largely invented. ‘We are a primary target for the Iranian regime,’ MBS said in May, shortly before Trump’s visit, accusing the Iranians of seeking to take over Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia. ‘We won’t wait for the battle to be in Saudi Arabia. Instead, we’ll work so that the battle is for them in Iran.’ Chauvinism can be a useful asset for a ruler.

And Saudi chauvinism is far from being unpopular, even though half the population is 25 or younger. Tweets such as ‘I pledge allegiance to my Lord, his Royal Highness the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to listen and to obey,’ though recirculated by Saudi media, may reflect reality in a country where more than 90 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds are avid internet users: there is less noise to the contrary. But then again, obtrusively not obeying rarely ends well. And there is another reason the rise of MBS has been widely applauded by younger people: he has promised social and economic change, as well as an end to the filial gerontocracy that has endured for more than half a century. In a country where 40 per cent of people between the ages of 20 and 24 are unemployed, where 40 per cent of Saudis live in relative poverty and at least 60 per cent can’t afford to buy homes because of the princely grip on real estate, prospects for reform under a dynamic new leader who could rule for decades are enticing.

Last year MBS – by then already in charge of economic policy – announced plans to implement ‘Vision 2030’, a formidable project aimed at weaning the kingdom off hydrocarbons at a time when the price of oil hovers at less than $50 a barrel, driven down by the fracking revolution in the US and the falling off in global demand. Oil won’t sustain the Saudi economy for ever, and MBS’s programme – developed with considerable input from McKinsey – is aimed at curbing public spending and diversifying the economy. The plans include investing in Islamic tourism and in a revamped financial district in Riyadh, as well as expanding revenue streams generally and increasing job opportunities for young Saudis. Blue-collar foreign workers are to be replaced by Saudi nationals in areas such as mobile phone technology and engineering. As the Economist noted, though, Saudis tend to lack the technical skills needed for such a programme: ‘Schools stuff young heads with religion, but neglect more practical subjects such as maths and science.’

All this investment will require significant resources, and a central part of the plan is to sell off 5 per cent of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest corporation, worth possibly $2 trillion, dwarfing Apple, Google, Amazon or ExxonMobil, and listing it on a foreign stock exchange in the world’s biggest ever IPO: Hong Kong, Singapore and London are among the contenders for the listing. Oil revenue – until recently Aramco’s profits were taxed at 85 per cent by the Saudi government – will be replaced by a vast sovereign wealth fund, to be invested in property and businesses abroad as well as at home, much as Qatar already does; the as yet relatively small Saudi fund began its overseas adventures last year with a $3.5 billion investment in Uber. But getting hold of the hundreds of billions that would be generated by an IPO means acceding to transparency rules that a company still 95 per cent owned by the Saudi state would find it hard to comply with. The London Stock Exchange, in its desperation for the prize, has shown that it is perfectly prepared to bend the rules in Aramco’s favour. Even so, a public listing – at the level Saudi Arabia expects – depends on the price of oil rising or at least not falling further; it also depends on the Saudis’ oil reserves being quite as large as they claim. In the face of all this uncertainty, Nick Butler, an ex-BP executive, recently suggested in the Financial Times that Saudi Arabia’s best option may be a private sale to China.

The kingdom has more trivial money worries too. The Al Saud are a royal family like no other: there are thousands of them, descending from the 22 wives Ibn Saud had while technically observing the Sharia requirement of four wives – max – at any one time. He was ‘father to the nation’ in more than a metaphorical sense. In the context of a tribal society, these prudential intermarriages had the benefit of binding together a number of different groups at a time when Ibn Saud was merely the head of a coalition of tribes who founded the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 after he invaded the Hejaz, with its holy cities, Mecca and Medina. The trouble, presently, is that his descendants all expect their emoluments. The scale of this burden can be gauged from a classified cable sent by Wyche Fowler, then US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, to his government in November 1996, exposed by WikiLeaks, in which he reports that members of the Al Saud family receive stipends ranging from $270,000 a month for more senior princes to $8000 ‘for the lowliest member of the most remote branch of the family’. The system is calibrated by generation, with surviving sons and daughters of Ibn Saud receiving between $200,000 and $270,000, grandchildren around $27,000, great-grandchildren around $13,000 and great-great-grandchildren the minimum $8000 per month. According to the US embassy’s calculations, in 1996 the budget for around sixty surviving sons and daughters, 420 grandchildren, 2900 great-grandchildren and ‘probably only about 2000 great-great-grandchildren at this point’ amounted to more than $2 billion, with the stipends providing ‘a substantial incentive for royals to procreate’ since – in addition to bonuses received on marriage for palace construction – a royal stipend begins at birth. One minor prince, according to a Saudi source, had persuaded a community college in the state of Oregon to enrol him even though he had no intention of attending classes: his principal goal in life was to have more children so he could increase his monthly allowance.

In addition to the stipends, senior princes enriched themselves via ‘off budget’ programmes that ‘are widely viewed as sources of royal rake-offs’. The largest of these, according to the cable, was thought to relate to the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina – around $5 billion annually – and the Ministry of Defence’s strategic storage project, worth around $1 billion. Both were highly secretive and ‘widely believed to be a source of substantial revenues for the king’ – at that time King Fahd – ‘and a few of his full brothers’. Other ways the princes obtained money included borrowing from banks without paying them back (Saudi banks have been reluctant to lend to royals unless they have proven repayment records) and using princely ‘clout to confiscate land from commoners, especially if it is known to be the site for an upcoming project and can be quickly sold to the government for a profit’. King Abdullah, whose ten-year rule between 2005 and 2015 was seen as a period of modest reform, curbed some of these excesses by stopping handouts to family members going on holiday and discouraging them from using the national airline as a ‘private jet service’. As Karen Elliott House writes in On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Faultlines – and Future (2012), probably the best account of the country written so far by a Western observer (as a woman she had access to the half of the population that is off-limits to male reporters), ‘this plethora of princes is so large and so diverse that little if anything links them except some Al Saud genes … Collectively, they increasingly are viewed by the rest of Saudi society as a burdensome privileged caste.’ Though, thanks to another aspect of tribalism, even being an Al Saud doesn’t guarantee great privilege: sons and grandsons of Ibn Saud whose mothers don’t belong to elite Arabian lineages are considered ineligible for the throne. And as a recent BBC investigation showed, a number of dissident princes have recently vanished, or been disappeared.
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The faith tradition that holds the Saudi system together – for now – is Wahhabi Islam, the iconoclastic creed of the 18th-century Islamic reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, whose pact with the Al Saud family led to the creation of the modern kingdom in 1932. Al-Wahhab’s stormtroopers, the Ikhwan, enabled Ibn Saud’s rise to power. They killed unarmed villagers regarded as apostates, thought nothing of slaughtering women and children, and routinely slit the throats of male captives. Contemporary accounts describe the horrors afflicted on the city of Taif in 1924, when the Ikhwan murdered hundreds of civilians, in a massacre similar to the violence committed by Islamic State or al-Qaida today. As an Arab witness wrote, Ibn Saud’s forces ‘normally give no quarter, sparing neither boys nor old men, veritable messengers of death from whose grasp no one escapes’. Some 400,000 people are reported to have been massacred by the Ikhwan during the early days of the Saudi state. The Wahhabi understanding of tawhid, the theology of monotheism or divine unicity, which forbids the veneration of any person or object other than Allah, is still used today to justify the ban on all forms of non-Muslim public worship in the kingdom, as well as the confiscation of non-Wahhabi textual sources such as Quranic commentaries brought in by pilgrims from South Asia, who have had them removed by the religious police while attending the Hajj. But tawhid, a theology that claims to be fundamentally opposed to polytheism, has an unexpected consequence. It mines the Islamic discourse to sustain a totalitarian outlook whose actual purpose is the preservation and enrichment of the tribal dynasty that owns and governs this enormous country in its exclusive interest.

Al-Wahhab’s views on the veneration of Muslim holy men – exemplified by his destruction of the tomb of Zayd ibn al-Khattab, brother of Umar, the most revered of the early caliphs and a companion of the Prophet – are now used to legitimise the orgy of cultural vandalism inflicted on Mecca and Medina, over which the king claims religious guardianship as custodian of the Two Holy Shrines, a status that is quasi-caliphal (the Al Saud lack the lineage formally to declare themselves caliphs). The centre of Mecca, the sacred hub of Islam, now resembles Las Vegas, with hotels such as the Raffles Makkah Palace and the Makkah Hilton towering over the Kaaba, the cube-shaped temple to which Muslims everywhere bow in the direction of prayer. Beyond the sacred mosque is the Mekkah Clock Royal Tower, a kitsch rendition of Big Ben around five times as high – one of the world’s tallest buildings. Wealthy Gulf pilgrims are expected to pay premium prices for rooms and apartments in these buildings, as part of the effort to make up for the decline in oil prices. Even the Prophet Muhammad himself is not immune from the corrosive effects of Wahhabi iconoclasm, on the grounds that the veneration of the Prophet (as distinct from the worship of God) constitutes forbidden idolatry. The Prophet’s mawlid or birthday festival – widely observed with processions and family gatherings in other Muslim countries – is banned in the Saudi kingdom, while the name ‘Muhammad’ is often used disparagingly, as a catch-all for despised Muslim immigrants working as menials. The site of Muhammad’s first wife’s house, where it is believed he received his first revelations and where five of his children were born, is now occupied by a row of public toilets.

In the kingdom at large, Wahhabi doctrine is enforced by the five thousand-strong religious police force – known as the mutawaeen – controlled by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. These religious thugs, institutional descendants of the Ikhwan stormtroopers, patrol cities in expensive white SUVs enforcing prayer times and dress codes, as well as bans on music, sexual mingling and non-Wahhabi forms of religious worship. Even the international opprobrium heaped on the mutawaeen after 2002 – when they prevented 15 schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building, causing them to be burned alive – didn’t lead to their disbandment, though MBS has promised to curtail their powers. According to foreigners who have lived outside the privileged enclaves of expat colonies such as the Aramco-run city of Dhahran – known as Little America, with its manicured golf courses, where men and women mix freely and women are permitted to drive within the fenced-in corporate compound – the sense of fear is ubiquitous.

Simon Valentine, a British academic who spent four years in the kingdom teaching English, says that ‘meeting and talking with Saudis one soon perceives the fear that lurks behind the smiles, the sense that people are constantly aware of being watched, censored and condemned.’ Pascal Menoret, an anthropologist who formed close relationships with the young male tearaways he describes in his brilliant ethnographic essay Joyriding in Riyadh (2014), reports that

    surveillance, repression and eventually torture are realities that shape everyday life and deeply modify people’s interactions with each other – and with the anthropologist or field worker … This is a country where 12,000 to 30,000 political prisoners and prisoners of opinion rot in overcrowded, violent jails; a country where repression is organised by security forces that report to a handful of senior princes, out of the reach of an abrupt, arbitrary judicial system; a country where physical punishment, torture and the threat thereof, in the absence of transparent and fair procedures, are the alpha and omega of the judiciary and the ultima ratio of political acquiescence.

Saudi Arabia has no written constitution or written penal code, claiming that its laws are based only on the Quran and the Sunna (the teachings and practice of the Prophet). Those accused of political offences are often sentenced by the Specialised Criminal Court (SCC), set up to try terrorism-related cases, which routinely denies defendants the most basic fair trial guarantees, including the right to a lawyer, and passes sentences in closed proceedings. Authorities continue to hold prominent rights activists in prolonged incommunicado detention, completely cut off from their families and the outside world. According to the now disbanded Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, one in every six hundred Saudis is in jail because of their opinions or political activities. Since the whole judicial system is based on confessions extracted under torture or the threat of torture, it is physical violence, not the Quran, that is the ‘true foundation of the law’.

Viewed through any kind of lens, social, cultural or economic, Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most repressive polities. On the rankings devised by Freedom House, a US-funded NGO, America’s leading ally in the Arab world occupies the bottom percentile (5.8 per cent) in terms of political rights and civil liberties, belonging with Syria, North Korea, Somalia and the Central African Republic in the category designated ‘the worst of the worst’. Executions are conducted in public, and are not infrequent, with sickening examples circulating on YouTube. Last year the kingdom executed 149 people, including a mass execution of 47 men on 2 January 2016; 43 of them were reported to have been associated with al-Qaida attacks in the 2000s, but four were members of the country’s Shia minority, including the prominent cleric Nimr al-Nimr, an outspoken critic of the regime, certainly, but no terrorist. Recent protests in Sheikh Nimr’s home town of Awamiya have led to a siege by the Saudi authorities, with tensions flaring over plans to demolish the historic district, which the government claims is being used by armed insurgents. At least a dozen people are said to have been killed, while 15 Shia citizens are now on death row, awaiting a Supreme Court decision on their execution.

The kingdom’s defenders, including Philip Hammond, who as British foreign secretary at the time of Nimr’s execution said, ‘Let us be clear, first of all, that these people were convicted terrorists,’ like to point out Saudi Arabia doesn’t execute as many people as Iran – in 2014, there were more than 750 executions in the Islamic Republic. But then again, Iran, unlike Saudi Arabia, doesn’t impose the death penalty medieval-style, with beheading by scimitar as a public spectacle, a technique adapted by Islamic State to great effect. The British government’s defence of its ally has been unwavering over the years: on her visit to the kingdom in April, Theresa May celebrated the value of Saudi intelligence-sharing, with a spokesman for Number Ten explaining that the ‘security relationship’ between the UK and Saudi Arabia had saved ‘many lives’. It doesn’t hurt that another part of that security relationship involves the Saudis being the UK’s best customer for armaments by a factor of at least four; in July, despite pressure from campaigners, who questioned the legality of selling British weapons to a country that was using them against Yemeni civilians, the UK high court ruled that the world’s second biggest arms exporter could happily continue its sales to Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi strategy towards the Shia minority – around three million people in the oil-bearing Eastern Province and 250,000 in the southwest region of Najran – has been carefully calculated over the years, as Toby Matthiesen explains in The Other Saudis: Shiism, Dissent and Sectarianism (2014). When Ibn Saud took over the Eastern Province in 1913 its Shia inhabitants, mostly sedentary people engaged in agriculture, trade, fishing and pearl diving, who had enjoyed relative autonomy for centuries under Ottoman rule, became ‘subjects of a political entity that does not treat Shia Muslims as equal citizens’. The Ikhwan demanded that the Shia ‘deviants’ convert, which a number of notables did, pledging that they would hold their religious rituals in accordance with Wahhabi practice. Those co-opted by the government were given a degree of control over their own affairs, being allowed to run their own courts and legal system. From then on, Shia leaders found themselves in a see-saw predicament, with their degree of autonomy determined by the regime’s feeling of security. Late in 1979, after the Iranian revolution brought political Islam to the fore, a group of militants protesting against the corruption of the Al Saud took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca; with the help of French and Pakistani special forces the Saudis recaptured it after a two-week siege. Even though the militants had been devout Sunnis from the same tribe as the former Ikhwan, the regime and its American backers responded to the incident by cracking down on the Shia, especially those working in the oil industry. After 1979, Matthiesen writes, there was an unwritten rule that Shia – who constituted a quarter of the workforce – ‘should not be hired in security or any other key sector in the oil industry’ and that if they were employed at all, it would be as ‘drivers, clerks, gardeners, or in storehouses, food and community services’.

Since the 1980s, it has been difficult for anyone in the Shia opposition to find solidarity across sectarian boundaries. Radical opposition activists such as Sheikh Abdullah ibn Jibrin, who with others founded the London-based Committee for the Defence of Legitimate Rights, issued fatwas denouncing Shia as infidels deserving death; in the 1990s, Safar al-Hawali, former dean of Islamic Studies at the Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca and a leading critic of the Al Saud, circulated audio cassettes denouncing Shias as deviants. Loyalist Wahhabi scholars operating under the regime’s protective umbrella ensure that boundaries are maintained, issuing fatwas forbidding intermarriage between Sunnis and Shias, and forbidding Sunnis from eating meat slaughtered by Shia butchers. All this appears to have been part of a deliberate government strategy to persuade the Shia that, as Matthiesen puts it, ‘they would fare even worse under Islamists than they would under the royal family.’ Madawi al-Rasheed, a leading historian of the kingdom, writes that ‘the regime sees the perverse benefit of attacks on Shia worshippers by radical Sunni groups’: such attacks allow it to present itself ‘as the best protector of the Shia’, since the only alternative ‘would be radical jihadists’.

But the state has a simpler means of keeping the majority population in check. As an oil-rich monarchy Saudi Arabia, like other Gulf principalities, is a rentier state: there is no general taxation, which means that there is no basic social contract between people and their rulers. As the UN Arab Human Development Report put it in 2004, taxation makes a government ‘subject to questioning about how it allocates state resources. In a rentier mode of production, however, the government can act as a generous provider that demands no taxes or duties in return. The hand that gives can also take away, and the government is therefore entitled to require loyalty from its citizens invoking the mentality of the clan.’ The culture of dependency in Saudi Arabia, as elsewhere in the Gulf, relies above all on individual patronage. Pascal Menoret’s young interlocutors, most of them members of the kingdom’s displaced Bedouin tribes, found that Riyadh ‘had little to offer if one was not closely connected to the royal family’ or part of the oil-rent distribution networks controlled by them. They saw the Saudi capital as a ‘selective El Dorado where only a handful became rich, while the majority of residents, parsimoniously financed by the state or their employer, struggled to cover astronomic housing, transport and living costs’. For all the brazen affluence of princely palaces, the low-income areas of Riyadh ‘match the ghettos, banlieues, problemområde and favelas of other cities and testify to the fact that, in liberal societies as in those systems that are described as “authoritarian”, political power is equally based on economic violence’.

Menoret shows the way an atomised society is perpetuated by the control of public space:

    Riyadh was a gigantic suburb where families and individuals lived scattered in individual houses and small apartment buildings, far away from each other but under the surveillance of the state … Saudi Arabia was one of the rare Muslim majority countries where, for fear of political mobilisation, mosques were closed outside of prayer times. Malls were not more welcoming, and private security companies filtered out and chased bachelors and members of the lower classes. Even streets were repulsive and pedestrian-unfriendly; large and busy, deprived of shade, difficult to cross, their asphalt nearly melting under a scorching sun, they were abandoned to cars, trucks and taxis.

In this sexually segregated society, where marriage is seen as a calming influence, unmarried men are ‘feared as unruly and disruptive’ but, as House points out, most of the 40 per cent of unemployed Saudi men under the age of 24 who would like to marry can’t afford the bride price.

Menoret witnessed the consequences, spending many hours with frustrated young men whose idea of fun was to drive cars at 150 mph, ‘drifting’ into high-speed arabesques in parking lots and highways, or slaloming through traffic using a skilful combination of handbrake and steering wheel. Car drifting, imported from Japan, is now an official sport in Dubai and the Saudi kingdom, with Red Bull as a sponsor, but the illicit version is strictly forbidden, with fines of 10,000 riyals (more than £2000) and two months’ jail for offenders. The newly asphalted roads of Riyadh’s expanding grid – a city that has grown from a population of 300,000 in 1970 to six million today – provide perfect spaces for drifters as they wait for the urban expansion that will enrich their owners in the course of time. Like the monarchs of early modern Europe, the Saudi kings have bought loyalty, or rewarded their courtiers and members of his family, by giving out grants of land for future development. The Al Saud family was given the nickname Al Subuk – ‘the fences’ – for the hundreds of miles of wire they planted in the desert to keep intruders out of their properties, while waiting for the city’s sprawl to reach them. As Menoret found, there was an improbable community of interest between developers and drifters, with developers constructing ‘miles of straight asphalt that the drifters used as a playground, far away from people’s eyes’. Whenever the builders arrived and constructed new boulevards of suburban villas along with speed bumps and police stations, the drifters would move on to the next undeveloped site.

Among his community of outsiders, Menoret saw signs that the flouting of Wahhabi strictures isn’t confined to billionaire princes with their holiday compounds in Marbella, Tangier or Aspen. Escaping ‘the strict behavioral and spatial order promoted by the state’, ‘boys and girls and boys and boys flirted from car to car on select avenues’ in outlying parts of Riyadh, ‘throwing their phone number to each other on scraps of paper, texting each other or following the other’s car’. Alcohol was easy to find, ‘provided that you had the right contact and a car to get there’. A colourless local hooch made from dates, known as al-kuhul al-watani or ‘national alcohol’, was widely available, and when kept in water bottles was undetectable to visual inspection. After picking it up from your dealer ‘you would mix the alcohol with non-alcoholic beer and quickly reach inebriation. As Saudis would say, what’s prohibited is highly desirable.’ The pressure against religious control may be building.

This could be to MBS’s advantage as he seeks to update the Saudi economy. Most of Menoret’s tearaways are likely to remain among those left behind, but for others there are opportunities: 200,000 young Saudis are now studying on scholarships overseas, and 45,000 students have now graduated from the world’s largest all-female university. Saudi religious textbooks – which as recently as 2014 were imported into Mosul by Islamic State for use in schools, thanks to their hard line on infidels and dissidents – are now being modified to acknowledge examples of the Prophet Muhammad’s kindness to Jews. But whatever superficial modernisation ensues, the Saudi state still depends for its legitimacy on its long-standing accommodation with the Wahhabi faith. It is largely because of Saudi-funded evangelism that the violently anti-Shia Salafist movements inspired by Wahhabi ideology – from Islamic State to the al-Qaida affiliate formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra – are still spreading through the world today.

On his visit to the kingdom in May, Trump commended MBS’s Vision 2030 as ‘an important and encouraging statement of tolerance, respect, empowering women and economic development’. But most of his speech, given in the presence of fifty leaders of Muslim-majority states, was devoted to condemning extremism. In rhetoric worthy of any village imam or mullah, he proclaimed: ‘A better future is only possible if your nations drive out the terrorists and extremists. Drive. Them. Out. Drive them out of your places of worship. Drive them out of your communities. Drive them out of your holy land, and drive them out of this earth.’ Trump’s hosts no doubt found it pleasing that he bracketed Iran and Hizbullah – two Shia-based entities – with Islamic State and al-Qaida as the primary causes of extremism in the region. He made no reference to the fact that during the course of his visit to one of the world’s most tyrannical and theocratic states – the first country to be so honoured by his administration – Iranians were going to the polls in a general election that would have been unthinkable in the Saudi kingdom. The outcome saw Hassan Rouhani, a moderate leader keen to ease the Islamic Republic’s isolation, chosen to serve a second term as president. Rather than reinforcing the anti-Shia dynamic with multi-billion-dollar arms packages, the West should be using its power to counter the force of reactionary Sunni sectarianism that is the curse of modern Islam and the real source of extremism in the region.


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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: 
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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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