The reality of occupation of Palestine

If a martian observer looks objectively to the question of Palestine he would be paying special attention to the facts.
The first principle is that we should pay heed to historical documented facts if we are to discern the truth.

The reality of occupation of Palestine is described eloquently by the Jewish-Israeli Historian Benny Morris:

"Israelis like to believe, and tell the world, that they were running an "enlightened" or "bening" occupation,qualitatively different from other military occupations the world had seen. The truth was radically different. Like all occupations, Israel's was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliatin, and manipulation. True, the relative lack of resistance and civil disobedience over the years enabled Israelis to maintain a facade of normalcy and implement their rule with a relatively small force, consisting of a handful of IDF battalions, a few dozen police officers (rank-and-file policemen were recruited from among the palestinians), and a hundred or so general security service (GSS) case officers and investigators."(Benny Morris , Righteous victims (vintage, 2001), p. 341

Since its creation and in particular since 1967 Israel has preferred expansion over security and has continously blocked peace initiatives thanks to the support of the super power.
There is considerable evidence to believe that prior to 1973 Israel could have successfully negotiated a peaceful settlement and possibly entering into a federal arrangement in mandatory Palestine.

Israel not only opted out of any negotiations but has effectively made them an impossibility by ruling out any hope of any rights for the palestinian people.
Saying the fate of territories will be settled " in accordance with the basic guidelines of the [Israeli] governement.... there will be no addtitional Palestinian state....Jordan being already a Palestinian state"

Israel with the help of US refuses to accept the international consensus on two state solution with Israel withdrawing to pre -1967 borders, dismantling the illegal settlements in the west bank and complying with the UN resolution 242 which calls "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security" the resolution specifically calls for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" the resolution also reminds Israel that "all claims or states of belligerency and respect for... the sovereignty... of every state in the area and their right to live in peace... free from threats or acts of force".

Israel is portrayed, by its friends, to be a weak, peace loving country surrounded by hostile arab and muslim states and is threatened to be "wiped off the map" the fact that Israel is the fourth biggest military power (biggest outside Nato) armed with the most sophisticated and dangerous weapons of mass destruction including nuclear and biological weapons are irrelevant.
It is also irrelevant that Israel has attacked all its neighbours and occupied land by naked aggression including the Golan heights and Sheba Farms from Syria and Lebanon respectively.
Facts have no meaning when it comes to Israel's crimes against humanity condemned by virtually all international human rights organistions. The genocide of Sabra and Shatella is out of history, the systemic land expropriation and settlement expansion in the west bank (inspite of international consensus on their illegality) , bull-dozing of Palestinian homes, the killing of children and elderly including the assisination of a quadraplegic man in his wheel chair are mere nonsense.
Another incident rarely mentioned in the media and scholarship is the massacre of Deir Yassin where 250 men,women, and children were ruthlessly murdered in cold blood,planned and executed by Menachem Begin's Irgun.

Contempt for reality such as those mentioned above, from a catalogue of crimes, is not uncommon when they are against you, dismissed as anti-semitic diatribe.
Its interesting that the race card is played so gratuitously when it comes to dismissing the critical voices but is not pertinent to inherent racism in the ideology of zionism and its supporters.

When Churchill was reminded that Jews cannot go to Palestine because there are already people living in Palestine called the Palestinians he declared that "I do not accept that the dog in the manger has the final right to that manger”

Racism is acceptable depending who is the victime ,sometimes pronouced with amusing candidness as Moshe Dayan put the matter to the labour cabinet in the 1970s, we must say to Palestinians that " we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads".

More than 4 million Palestinian refugees live in miserable conditions in nieghbouring countries and yet they are the fortunate ones.
More than 3 million Gazans live in the biggest prison in the world, cut off from the rest of world with scant water supplies, squalid living conditions with more than 80% of the population unemployed and dependent on food rations.

Israeli journalist Amira Hass writes in Ha'aretz ( the Israeli newspaper):

" A thousand words and a thousand images cannot describe it. That's not because of the weakness of words and photos, but because of the ability of most Israelis not to see and not to grasp the extent of the vineyards and groves and orchards and fields that the people's army of Israel turned into desert, the green that it painted yellow and gray, the sand turned over and the exposed land, the thorns, the weeds.
To ensure the safety of settlers.... the IDF [Israeli defense forces] spent five years uprooting the green lungs of Gaza, mutilating its most beautiful areas and cutting off the livelihood of tens of thousands of families. The Israeli talent for ignoring the enormous destruction that we caused leads to the wrong political assessments. Ignoring it enables the IDF to continue destroying Palestinian territory in the West Bank. Along the [separation] fence, around the settlements, in the Jordan Valley, the destruction goes on as a means to continue creating facts on the ground and to guarantee that the future Palestinian entity remains as divided and split and territory-less as possible." Ha'aretz Semptember 2005

Afghanistan six years on: public healthcare in war-thorn country ( Part one)

Hepatitis B: prevalence, behavioural groups, treatment and drugs availability

According to official statistics published by ministry of public health in Kabul hepatitis B kills 11, 000 people annually, with 7% of the country's population infected.

The ministry of health spokesman says it is a major health problem in Afghanistan, each year approximately 100,000 people are infected and results in considerable loss of life. The cash-strapped government of Kabul is unable to do much.
However the figures published are somewhat encouraging: there is a nationwide campaign to vaccinate children under two, this mass immunization is conducted in Afghanistan for the first time but if there is not enough cash flow to fund the campaign it will be halted very soon.
In the Antoni infectious disease hospital in Kabul, supported by a charity, there are only 200 beds available and the number of patients referring to the facility is increasing.
When a patient is suffering from a chronic conditin it affects the whole family, particulary if the bread-winner of the house is the victim.
My uncle had chronic Hepatitis B which progressed to cirrhosis within a few years; he died at a very young age, like our family was, many are devastated by the viral infection.
Each patient in the hospital has a sad tale of how it all started. Mohammad Amin's symptoms started by just mild abdominal pain and fatigue but slowly deteriorated to a point where he cannot move without feeling the excruciating pain in his abdomen and thorax which spreads throughout his body.
The blood-borne virus is spread through sexual contact, sharing needles and contaminated blood. The bevioural groups affected by the disease are mostly drug addicts who returned to Afghanistan from neighbouring Pakistan and Iran and re-using contaminated needles without proper sterilisation.
The lack of public awareness of the disease has made the small efforts by the government and some NGOs very difficult. Social engineering is a key element in preventing the spread of the disease especially among the newborns and infants.
During the acute phase of the disease the symptom which is quickly recognized by people is skin jaundice, but most seek traditional herbal and folk remedies.
The quality of the medical treatment has affected people's trust in evidence-based medicine and this is further aggravated by generic (counterfeit) drugs with very low or zero efficacy.
The policy of most hospitals; is to refuse confirmed carriers admission.
Most nurses are apprehensive about cross-infection and will not admit any HBV+ patients in to the wards. This causes a lot of grief for pregnant women who are financially unable to get treatment for pregnancy complications in private clinics and often end up in the hands of midwives who are just relying on their experience.

The Crisis of Identity: The plight of young Muslim in the Modern World

A vast subject that is seemingly not comprehensible and it is extremely difficult to choose which aspect of this pertinent issue to discuss, certainly I have no authority or expertise to analyse and opine on this topic. The problem is aggravated by the chaos and disparity of the modern world with its complete loss of orientation.

Erik Erikson who coined the term believes that its one of the eight developmental crises that someone in his/her teenage years will face but he explicitly acknowledges that it is a recurring issue regardless of age, specifically when “a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity" is lost. A young Muslim in Egypt or Pakistan will not experience the effects of this crisis the same as a Muslim in the UK.

To my understanding not many contemporary Muslim thinkers have dealt with this issue, in fact Professor Seyyed Hussain Nasr is the only intellectual to have undertaken such a task. His books have both depth and gravitas and are highly recommended for any Muslim in search of a life compass. ‘A young Muslims guide to the modern world’ & ‘Islam and the plight of modern man’.
I am writing this not as a knowledgeable specialist of this area which draws thought, study, examination, scrutiny and reading from many areas but as a Muslim youth in academia who lives in the west and has religious, moral apprehension and foreboding.

I have deep concerns of the challenges faced by Muslims in general and youth in particular in confronting the unremitting continuous avalanche of difficult, confusing and often perplexing questions.
We live at the heart of the modern world, a continent which is unique in that it has produced and established atheism as a signature of modernism (Marx was not Chinese but German).
We live in a continent which broke with its static, lazy and dark medieval past and based its worldview on conflict which persists throughout from Hegel’s dialectics to Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations. Moreover a place of social and political upheaval with its violent, acrimonious past which only in space of two decades more than sixty million people lost their lives in conflict of attrition and supremacy.

We live in a country which once ruled most of the world with its deep historical development in terms of its ideology and ideals, social structure and fabric, the essence of its existence woven in a complex, capricious and confounding tapestry.

I have a feeling which is not possible to eloquently describe but if painted in a picture and conjured in a canvass would be that of Edwards Monks scream.
The massive explosion of information, the staggering technological advancement, the fluidity and speed by which social, political and philosophical ideals of the society changes, the current and dynamism of thought; just to mention a few ,What outcome is expected from this? Natural man and the artificial world a virtual world of so much that would make us end our short life in just wondering about it before we would be able to comprehend it let alone live it and experience it.

Its paramount for a Muslim to face these challenges as far as possible armoured with the deep understanding of his culture and heritage coupled with equally profound and scholarly understating of the modern world. It’s easy to dismiss west as dynamic, hardworking or materialistic savages but an accurate picture which is not just the simulacrum of reality but closer to it will emerge after studying it.

I would like to zoom in and to point to a few things which I think are important

Islamic world view, be it jurisprudential or ontological, mystic or philosophical, is based on certain principles and premises which lay the foundation of its colossal body. A blue print of its tenets a master plan of its structure, this foundation shapes its morals, socio- economic system , political organization and ipso facto its world view.

Undoubtedly if my great great grand father travelled from Afghanistan to England in 1700 AD although he would have found the food and weather of London extraordinary but would not have felt that he had left the earth and landed on Mars. He would have seen a society based on some ethical and moral code, different in form but similar in essence. God, afterlife, prophecy, spirituality, eschatology and religiosity would not have been alien concepts to his hospitable hosts. The differences would have manifested themselves more like contrasts in a family.

Today its different, you face a culture and civilization where godlessness is pride, morality is reduced to sitcom sketches, consumerism is rampant, materialism and hyper reality has replaced everything known to a dignified civilized man of 1700 AD.
The soul of natural man has been hijacked by a poisonous artificiality.

The scourge of globalisation has whipped the world entire and we are in reality living in a global village not isolated islands so where ever one lives he would not be completely immune from modernism and its effects.
The difference in cultures and ideas and the constant challenges that they pose to a young Muslim with a vacuous and shallow understanding of the world give rise to a debilitating crisis of identity, who am I ? What makes me the person I am? What I want? What I don’t want? What is the answer and what/who to follow? Do I have a culture or something to be proud of? Should I forget my past and embrace the new culture? Should I be ashamed of my heritage?
In effect there is a clash between different cultures and ideas, two opposing world view of materialism against monotheism.
On one side a militant ferocious secular ideology with enormous power and hubris with all the triumphalism, and rightly so, that sees itself as pinnacle of human civilization.
This was declared clearly by Francis Fukuyama in his the end of history and the last man
‘What we may be witnessing is ….the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’
Although he referred specifically to political system that same idea is dominant theme in all areas.

Not only conservative traditional Muslims but many influential figures in the western intellectual tradition oppose modern technological and scientific achievements which are all born out of empirical progress through a gradual and laborious history.
Needless to say all scientific disciplines studied worldwide in educational institutions from chemistry to anthropology are more or less the same.
The synthesis of these techniques and the behavioural changes they have brought about are all modern phenomena and could be best described by the term modernism.
To these thinkers modernism as an ideological construct shaped by technology and application of scientific ideas are not only positive but inherently destructive and an anathema to happiness and prosperity of mankind.
Modernism is responsible for mechanisation of life, subjectivity of beauty, destruction of environment, hyper reality, restricting natural thinking and virtual world of stupidity and laziness.
I would not wish to dwell on this issue much, but would mention what professor Nasr has iterated in his book.
Darwinian evolution has reduced the status of man viewed in Islam as Allah’s vicegerent and appointed successor on earth. A supreme being unique and great whom gets the spirit of existence from an infinitely great being, “I breathed into him from my spirit “(XXXVIII: 72), is demoted to the rank of a staphylococcus, an animal a bacterium whose sole aim in life is to multiply and pass on the genes to future generations.
Evolutionary man has no dignity he is not honoured, he has no value.
Darwin meant what he said” Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible ink of his lowly origin” W.S Gilbert quickly seized that idea and made it plainer “Darwinian man though well behaved is really just a monkey shaved”.
What we learn as a revealed truth with no objection is a subject to be studied in epistemology, the theory of knowledge. It should be eviscerated and viewed with a critical eye armed with necessary tools. The implications of desecrating human being and his existence are far wider than could be fathomed.

A never land for Muslim youth: three discourses
Predominantly there are three views uttered amongst those who have expressed views on this. The merits of each will not be discussed but it’s necessary to raise them.

I) The west was and is an alien world to Muslim, its ideology, way of life, customs, traditions and societal norms are in contrast to Islamic ideals and values, the two will never be compatible. A sensible man will try to change it but since the tide is so strong that it is impossible to strive for change a lucid (mu’men) believer will try to avoid it all together.

II) Its superficial and shallow to dismiss west as a cesspool of inhumanity. Modern civilization is the pinnacle of human achievements; we should revel in its majestic beauty and unparalleled success. It has added to the quality of life and is striding to conquer and dominate territories that ancient civilizations only dreamed. It’s a rose-garden which has thorns and one should take care to avoid those.
Western Muslims and the Future of Islam Tariq Ramadan

III) A middle ground is possible, modern world is like an ocean and a good swimmer should know its dangers and benefits. Any moment you could be hit by a shark or drown in despair , to evade them you need to be trained to recognise the threats, educate yourself of what you should expect and how to deal with every condition. Be ready and prepare for the worst and always move, don’t stand still otherwise you risk going down.

Self abnegation: revival of Islamic self-esteem
“One who does not realize his own value is condemned to utter failure. (Every kind of complex, superiority or inferiority is harmful to man).”Imam Ali
A young Muslim unaware of history and culture would think that after more than 1400 years Islam has achieved nothing. Muslim countries stretching from Indonesia to Balkans live in abject poverty, destitution and underdevelopment. Political, economic and social infrastructures have hardly developed; scientific, technological and educational breakthroughs are unheard of and almost all of these countries are dependent on the west.

At home, constant attack on the principles of Islamic belief from many influential circles and massive propaganda to discredit the prophet of this religion would certainly do irreparable damage to the psyche of young men, its not surprising that some resort to violence to avenge what they see as a crusade waged against them.




In defence of identity: blind self-confidence and cultural knowledge
Science and civilization in Islam seyyed hussain Nasr

Islamic identity and Islamic reality:

Youth-centric culture:

Parallel worlds, nightlife, and day life:

A Concomitant state of change:

Hero worship, youth culture:

The 'wicked' culture and the 'face book'

Pi magazine for those who keep up to date with the latest pub crawl news and also some ‘other events’ at UCL is a student magazine.
To some ‘lecherous slavering’ undergrad’s dismay in this issue they have broken with the longstanding tradition and haven’t published the lurid, voyeuristic, offensive and mundane photographs of union pub crawls.
Instead it has put a serious and critical ‘face and look’ by having a go at what it calls ‘a barrier to true communication’ and if you haven’t guessed what I am on about it is the indispensable, every students must have social networking tool the face book.

There is no doubt that to most people who are addicted to this evil it is the worst and most unrewarding way to waste time if it is used in a way that it has become synonymous to the word ‘socialising’ which often means foul language, booze fuelled profanity, steamy antics and unprotected sex.

Like many words in English language socialising has been raped and disrobed of its meaning which is a real shame. There was a time where socialising meant sharing ideas and enjoying the company of each other in a civilized and humane manner. University was a place to meet highbrow and big headed intellectual students who were both intelligent and witty without being offensive and outrageous.

Most grand ideas from metaphysics to microphysics were developed through this form of communication over a coffee or tea in great archaic establishments of the good old universities.
The biographies of great thinkers are all full of enticing anecdotes of their encounters with friends and colleagues who enlightened them by their stimulating ideas and insights.
To my annoyance students who chat at library’s quite study spaces is nothing but unadulterated vulgar gossips and boastings of how they got ‘pissed’ the week before provided they remember of their shenanigans.
Now thanks to face book they don’t even need to wait until the next morning but can share a pictorial and textual account of their night as soon as they get sober.

What the author of the pi article berates as a ‘procrastinators dream and ultimate time-waster’s idyll’ is nothing but the student culture which has been given a voluptuous yet a corrosive name of ‘cool’. Being cool is to be wicked and speak in a manner that would butcher the English language. To borrow Gillian Mckeith's holistic idea ' you are what you think' and ultimately the product of their life style and thinking is reflected on their walls and 'my notes'.

Sadly, university has come to be a place where students analytical and critical thought is suppressed and is replaced by a modus Vivendi of binge drinking, anti-social behaviour and sexual pantomimes.
Like any means of communication, face book which is the product of technological modernism has both liberatory and enslaving potential. It could be used to promote civility, knowledge, insights and views or could be used like it is done by most.

Having said this I am going to sign on my face book account to post this ‘blabber’.

Random stuff from my diary

Contrary to what I thought the level of enthusiasm and interest in interfaith dialogue has been tremendous. I hope this will boost the society and counter our doubts and fears of disaffiliation and disappointment. Any number above ten is good enough to make a society viable I don’t understand union’s arbitrary number of 20, it is a bit pedantic and frankly silly, that a side Mathew is right to say that we have to do much more than try to make a society above the membership threshold; to start with I have a few suggestions:

We can use this opportunity to draw up a constitution for the society. I passionately believe that interfaith can be much more than a socialising and discussion forum.
We should not shy away from taking a principled and ideological stance on “sensitive issues” arguing, criticising and opposing those who have been using religion for their mere sectional and personal interests. Neutrality shouldn’t mean pacifism; this should not foster a climate of numbness and docility. We should be able to call a spade a spade, speak in favour of justice and fairness and do not blur the clear boundaries of truth and falsehood in the name of pluralistic attitude.

All great prophets’ message was striding towards a world of justice, fairness and truth, from Moses to Mohammad they were all dissidents, thinking against the imposed beliefs and seeking actively to change the world for better.

Those who attended the last few meetings of faith link at Lancaster gate know that we have been discussing a project about Israel and Palestine. This is an issue which concerns all three abrahamic faiths we could ask members for suggestions and maybe participation. We may corporate and have events with friends of Palestine society and also with all other religious societies.

We live at a time where vacuous materialism is rampaging on people’s lives, where religiosity is the biggest sin and any meaning of life and existence has been made devoid of any substance under the thralls of ultra-liberalism. Capitalism and consumerism hand in hand has changed modern society to a lazy, passive and docile spectator in otherwise beautiful world of action and activity. The system has systematically destroyed the soul of collectivism and replaced it by individual material gains.

Famous philosopher and historian Will Durant asked an interesting question. What would you say if it is found that all our progress has been in the field of making the means better without knowing the aim of life or thinking where are we heading? It is not only the concern of academic philosophers, thinkers or intellectuals in fact anyone with a sound mind can contemplate about the meaning of life and existence.

It might well be the case that the world is a vast vat of sperm and egg and that each mate in random for mere statistical reasons. A bacterium lives to multiply it has no other reason as was famously pronounced by the then noble laureate “what then could be the aim of the bacterium? What does it want to produce that justifies its existence, determines its organisation and underlies it work? There is apparently only one answer to this question. A bacterium constantly strives to produce two bacteria. This seems to be its one project, its sole ambition.” Inadvertently or intentionally we have reduced human status to that of a bacterium. What is the difference between a human being a bi-pedal homo sapiens and a multi or mono cellular bacterium. To start with one would say that there are huge morphological, genetical, biochemical and anatomical differences between these two species but at close inspection it transpires that we are not having a discussion about the differences in those areas which are indeed quite distinctly dissimilar. We want to find out the reason for the very purpose of our being.
The established belief among the scientific elite is that there is a very vivid explanation for our life and we need not delude ourselves with complicated metaphysical and theological arguments but look at the undeniable facts, Facts which are reproducible and stand the test of time and scrutiny of inquisitive mind. We are not only something distinct from a staphylococcus but we are related, a pathogen which kills anyone if untreated is indeed our distant ancestor.
Evolution has been working since the big bang, when the seeds of life started to bud on earth. Four billion years ago that enormous explosion occurred, we don’t know quite for sure how loud and big it was but it was big enough to make millions and millions of galaxies that one shivers at the enormity and greatness of our universe.

The champion of this belief, now the darling of all imminent scientists who relate almost everything in science to his proposed theory, was Charles Robert Darwin, born in a wealthy family of land owners, educated and groomed in the great tradition of Georgian –Victorian England he sailed with HMS beagle to south America and landed in Galapagos islands.
Darwin was a smart cookie and a quintessential English naturalist, observing everything he found around him with a glaring eye, collecting and recording enormous amount of data and analysing them with an incisive mind , then as it is said by his disciples in a eureka moment with a sudden flush of insight he found the answer to his questions. Darwin was now in a hurry to let the world know what he discovered but it took him until 1859 after a hideous and painstaking labour to compile his findings and publish them under a long and dull title On the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life……

Identity by Ignorance

Marx sees a society in the grip of a savage and brutal economic system.A system which has taken the essence of humanity from the masses and turned them into selfless numbers used to maximise profit.
Capitalism is both evil and destructive said Marx, to counter that he envisaged a society based on the values of solidarity and corporation. This collective community of individuals would build a utopia on the ruins of a bourgeoisie regime which is bound to be obliterated by a universal spontaneous explosion of the proletariat rebellion.

To bring about revolution one should educate the masses about the ills and evils of the very system which has subordinated and enslaved them, in other words to raise class consciousness among the people and make them aware of their miseries and encourage them to revolt.

Whether class consciousness is a necessary precursor for the revolution or whether it is inevitable that a structure based on an old means of production would gradually be destroyed by a new order, is an academic debate.

Marx’s simple dialectic is based on historical determinism, the idea that every thesis will have an antithesis and this internal opposition will destroy the thesis until history reaches it’s pinnacle where dialectic stops because the antagonistic forces and factors which were acting as a catalyst for antithesis disappears.

The day I read Marx and his brilliant critique of capitalism was introduced to me through a very passionate Marxist-Leninist activist who happens to be a close friend; I was impressed by his breadth of work and the depth of his analysis.

My passion and love affair with Marxism was short lived when he presented his alternative system in a famous piece of literature which still adorns my shelf today with it's gripping red cover. The communist manifesto is a well written pamphlet, it has a confident tone and an epic note ; in short it promises everything but delivers nothing, it is a sad tale of a genius that got it all wrong.

However Marx’s grand idea was spectacularly off beam, at least he morphed a system and curved an identity based on consciousness and education.
The key to success according to Marx is to educate the masses that they are subjected to exploitation and abuse by the ruling class. The status quo is maintained by stupefying the people, denying them knowledge and access to the means of information. The book ends in a climax ‘workers of the world unite you have nothing to lose but your chains’.

Nationalism and love for the motherland also give people a sense of belonging and identity. Each individual feels a part of a whole a piece of a collective entity. What is nationalism, its history, development and influence in the world specifically in the 20th century and what constitutes a collective identity and finally what are its subjective and objective parameters is not my concern here and it’s purely academic.

What I intend here is to show that a hysterical, blind love for something you quite do not know, sometimes gives you an identity which I call it ‘identity by ignorance’. Your proud and made to be proud of your identity but what exactly defines that and how you can explain it , is not known and maybe not meant to be known.
George Orwell first in his 1945 ‘Notes on nationalism’ and then in his seminal work '1984 ' went through nationalism and its different forms with great insight that was characteristic of him. He describes nationalism as ‘power hunger tempered by self-deception’ this is at least for the rulers that use this phenomena to demand an unconditional subordination to power and hegemony as was demonstrated in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany ‘Germany is Hitler , Hitler is Germany’.
A friend once said that an English woman was so distraught by what she saw as a rapid erosion of Englishness by mass migration that she joined a far right party. When asked what constituted Englishness she was honest to reply 'going to the pub with her husband and drinking until late'.

Like that woman patriotism is an inseparable part of any Afghan’s identity. As an Afghan I was taught to be proud of my culture, country and nation which I am but most of my pride stems from the values which are either not exclusive to Afghanistan or it got it from a higher culture over the course of history.

I have read volumes of history written by often very jingoistic patriots and cannot see a trace of anything distinctly characteristic to the inhabitants of current Afghanistan before Islam. However I don’t deny the fact that certain behavioural characteristics like hospitality, bravery, persistence and heroism are better associated with Afghans than other people of the region which is perhaps due to weather,nutrition and other geographical factors.

The rest is more complex, most of what Afghanistan has in terms of culture, art and knowledge it owes to Islamic civilization which reached the country and made it the centre of knowledge and commerce for several centuries. Afghans soon assimilated Islamic values into their own and gave it an Afghan feel and taste.

It is natural that those aspects which were more compatible with the physical and spiritual traits of Afghans were developed and incorporated better. The geographical realities of Afghanistan with its harsh climate and terrains, the genetic nature of its inhabitants made them brave warriors adapted to doing hard manuel labour.

Over the last two hundred years Afghanistan has been a hub of social and political unrest most of which were imposed wars by superior powers that wanted to dominate and control this part of the world.

continued

The beheading of love

Modernism as an ideological construct has committed many crimes among those are : machinization of life,subjectivity of beauty, and the worst of all the unceremonious beheading of love. I am obsessed with Hardy's lamentations for this abattoir called "The modern world".

"Ah, are you digging on my grave, My loved one? -- planting rue?" -- "No: yesterday he went to wed One of the brightest wealth has bred. 'It cannot hurt her now,' he said, 'That I should not be true.'" "Then who is digging on my grave, My nearest dearest kin?" -- "Ah, no: they sit and think, 'What use! What good will planting flowers produce? No tendance of her mound can loose Her spirit from Death's gin.'" "But someone digs upon my grave? My enemy? -- prodding sly?" -- "Nay: when she heard you had passed the Gate That shuts on all flesh soon or late, She thought you no more worth her hate, And cares not where you lie. "Then, who is digging on my grave? Say -- since I have not guessed!" -- "O it is I, my mistress dear, Your little dog, who still lives near, And much I hope my movements here Have not disturbed your rest?" "Ah yes! You dig upon my grave... Why flashed it not to me That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find To equal among human kind A dog's fidelity!" "Mistress, I dug upon your grave To bury a bone, in case I should be hungry near this spot When passing on my daily trot. I am sorry, but I quite forgot It was your resting place."

Thomas Hardy