Globalia Magazine (12)

Quarterly - Issue 12 March 2012 EUR 4, USD 5.5, GBP 3.5 AED 20, MYR 20, ZAR 44

MAGAZINE

Economy

Turkey, China set Eyes on $100 bln in Mutual Trade

Culture

Little Man, What Now?

Internet Revolution Confronting the Modern State

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- Issue 12 - March 2012

Contents 5

Editorial

6

Cover Story

12 14 20

CHIEF EDITOR Abu Bakr Rieger PUBLISHER IZ Medien GmbH Beilsteinerstr. 121 12681 Berlin Germany ASSOCIATE EDITOR Sulaiman Wilms DISTRIBUTION IZ Medien GmbH GLOBALIA Magazine reserves the right to shorten letters. Readers’ ­letters, guest articles and quotations do not necessarily represent the opinions of the Editors, nor do ­articles by named authors.

Phone: +49 (0)30 240 48974

Egypt: Revolution 2.0 versus the Modern State Internet Revolution in Pakistan Masters of the Internet or its hostages?

Salam World hits the Internet

24

Interview

28

Economy & Finance

32 34 CONCEPT & EDITORIAL

Chief Editor - Abu Bakr Rieger

38 40

“The Crisis of Finanztechnik”

The Pirate Isles Republic capitalises on Muslim Heritage Turkey and China create $100 bln in Trade

Europe

Anniversary: Small but Essential State-mosque relations in Europe

42

Asia

46

Africa

48

Culture

51

Imran Khan - A Destiny Entwined

Leaders discuss Cape to Cairo trade zone

Little Man, What Now? Lessons from History

Mobile: +49 (0)179 967 8018 Fax:

+49 (0)30 240 48975

E-mail: info@globaliamagazine.com Website: www.globaliamagazine.com

Issue 12 - March 2012 -

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EDITORIAL

Editorial

by Abu Bakr Rieger: Chief Editor, Globalia Magazine

Dear Readers, We are very pleased to be presenting what is now the 12th edition of our magazine.

The world’s largest technology exhibition, CEBIT, began in the city of Hanover a few days ago. Launched under the slogan ‘Trust’, this year’s overall theme is the fundamental relationship between man and technology. Many Europeans doubt however whether the rapid proliferation of technology in our societies will bring good alone. Some observers fear instead that new technologies herald new catastrophes, unemployment, even a kind of police state.

At the heart of our technological evolution are microchips, and they are developing so fast that what was once impossible is now considered artificial intelligence. In many areas of industry and research, manpower will soon no longer be needed.

An army of computers, robots and appa­ ratus has arrived to challenge man’s for­ mer rule on earth.

Technological development seems openended. The performance of our computers grows year on year. ‘Clouds’ float above us; swarms of thought representing humanity’s collective knowledge about our planet. According to Moore’s Law the number of transistors on a silicon chip doubles approximately every 18-24 months. Artificial intelligence, therefore, looks set to keep changing our lives in fields such as medicine, transport and the world of work.

The Internet is surely one of the foremost symbols of this era. Giants like Facebook and Google have enabled interconnection of the cumulative power of all the world’s microprocessors. Scientists, students and scholars are effectively able to gather in one enormous virtual classroom to combine their intelligence. Like no other achievement

of the age, it is a network that fascinates and frightens us, and being such a large and important topic we are bound to dedicate other editions to it before long.

This edition of GLOBALIA discusses the foundations of the Internet. In it we will be considering the geopolitics of the Internet and the purport of virtual communities.

in order to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon. A vital critique of tech­ nology evolved within German philosophy over the course of the 20th century. At its heart is a warning against a fundamental misunderstanding; for while technology may increase our power, it can also dis­ empower us.

Muslims clearly have also considered the Internet’s political possibilities, especially since what has become known as the ‘Facebook Revolution’.

Social networks are doubtless ideal places for arranging things, maintaining contacts and ex­­chan­g ing political messages. Few have failed to understand that national politics cannot altogether escape the power of the Web.

But what Western philosophy cannot teach us is how to set limits to the tech­ nological process. To Muslims, the Reve­ lation remains our timeless orientation, even in the age of the technological project.

It is here that Western thinking would be well advised to take from the Muslims. This magazine considers itself the platform for such a dialogue.

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, on the other hand, believes that the users of social networks are no more than motley groups, coincidentally thrown together and that the cohesiveness of virtual networks should not be overestimated.

They certainly should not be equated with genuine groups of people exposed to the same circumstances and sharing the same fate.

Assabiyya, which Ibn Khaldun described as the everyday social cohesiveness of the Muslims, is based on really knowing each other and doing things together. No virtual community can simply replace this social foundation of our human existence.

A question certain to occupy GLOBALIA in future editions is the elemental relationship between the Muslims and technology.

Muslims are intelligent enough to know that you cannot simply call a halt to or abolish all the technological innovations of the age.

We must acquire a relationship to new technology that neither blindly romanticises it nor simply condemns it. It would serve Muslims to look into European philosophy

So what does Islam say about technology?

We don’t have the space here to go into detail on all the various discussions, from nuclear power to biotechnology. To take one example: in the current crisis of the euro and finance in general, Western intellectuals are looking for ways to limit the out-and-out power of capital, where financial technology has not just enabled people to finance mega projects but is also threatening the very foundations of Western society.

Islamic jurisprudence is now being rediscovered by many intellectuals in the West as the source for reasonable limitation. To put it simply: not everything that is technically possible is allowed in Islam.

We hope that the GLOBALIA project will be able to deliver plenty of exciting food for thought this year. As always, GLOBALIA depends on effective infrastructure. We are looking for sales channels and talking to potential advertising customers.

We hope that as many readers as possible will support us in this mission.

Issue 12 - March 2012 -

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COVER STORY

Egypt: Revolution 2.0 versus the Modern State

by Parvez Asad Sheikh

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- Issue 12 - March 2012

COVER STORY

The Internet’s full potential as a political space and a political tool remains an amorphous issue that is slowly taking shape with the various political superstitions being attributed to it after recent political events in the Middle East.

The very exercise of trying to unlock this potential or attempting to foresee the political implications of the internet is fascinating exactly because it remains a new landscape in human interaction, not quite real and yet not quite disconnected from us. It is the perfect simulacrum of a newly discovered land; anarchic and idealistic while at the same time at the mercy of the ploys of foreign empires. The danger inherent in wandering too far into this landscape is that one might forget that while it certainly is there, a man-made hyperreality, it is not real; you cannot throw an Apple at it.

Egypt was heralded as the perfect nar­ rative example of the Arab Spring with its spec­tacle, its pathos and its seeming success as a Democratic Revolution. A year on we can see that while the instability created by the use of social media resulted in a crisis of legitimacy for the Egyptian Military, acute enough to necessitate an internal coup, there is a realisation on the part of those young revolutionaries who were flung against a brutal police state by their belief in positive change that in fact nothing has changed.

The young Egyptian men and women who remain on the streets to this day, albeit surrounded by various other dubious elements such as the hooligan ‘Ultras’, deserve recognition for their purely revolutionary nature. It is because of them that it is important to look at the cause they were sold - the revolution they were sold - in such a way as to clarify where their struggle stands in the light of history as well as the possibility of success in the near future. Essential aspects of any analysis of the events in Egypt lie in the internet itself, as a political phenomenon, as well as a return to the concept of what a revolution had been up until the advent of its post-modern Democratic ideal: the

so-called ‘Facebook Revolution’ or ‘Revolution 2.0’.

Geopolitics: The Big Picture The geopolitics of the internet is comprised of two elements, the first infrastructural and the second functional. Along with traditional extensions of geo-strategic power such as roads, energy routes and other communication infrastructure, the ownership and control of internet infra­ structure follows similar patterns. We see that American control over crucial struc­ tural aspects such as its inherent political patronage of ICANN and its near monopoly of terminal servers continues despite gripes from other countries. According to James Cowie of Renesys, the sale and provision of internet connection in poli­ti­ cally crucial areas such as the North Afri­ can littoral and Central Asia is simply a strategic extension of the interests of pla­ yers such as the European states or the sometimes antagonistic China and Russia in their respective regions.

In the functional sphere, when approaching the aspect of state-to-state cyber attacks, one is reminded of the story about Wins­ ton Churchill at the Teheran Conference of 1943 when he mentioned in passing one evening that his gin and tonic would do well with some lemon juice only for a bemused British security attaché to find a freshly transplanted lemon tree growing in the garden the following morning. The actual extent of cyber attacks between state actors is unknown (the levels of their plausible denial would be a Cold Warrior’s dream) however, in a hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on the issue that was held in April of 2011, the chairman pointed to the view of U.S investigators that “China has stolen terabytes of data” from the U.S. In January of the same year, Americans

couldn’t help but be slightly jolted by the news that the new Chinese Chengdu J-20 stealth aircraft had been test flown for the first time, an event which incidentally coincided with a visit by the American Secretary of Defence to the Middle Kingdom.

Yet, if the American Senators sat in dismay on that chilly Friday to hear the horrors of Chinese cyber-espionage, America is not to be outdone in its ability to use the inter­ net to further its geo-political interests. The Stuxnet attack on the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility in 2009 highlighted a far more menacing potential of cyberattack.

The intricate Stuxnet virus attack was engineered in such a devastating manner that it made a successful precision strike on the software used by the Natanz centri­ fuges that are manufactured by Siemens, causing the actual centrifuges to be phy­ sically destroyed. It remains an unproven but winked-at consensus that Stuxnet was a joint US-Israeli project.

To return to Egypt, the fact that members of the April 6 Youth Movement which pla­ yed a major role in instigating the protests using social media on 25 January 2011 were hosted by the American government at a summit of the Alliance of Youth Move­ ments in 2008 has led to some speculation as to what role Americans have played in promoting the use of the so-called ‘Internet 2.0’ as a means of facilitating social unrest with the aim of regime change. Indeed one cable amongst the cache released by Wikileaks from the Egyptian ambassador, dated November 2008, mentions a discussion that touched on garnering sup­ port for several opposition groups, inclu­ ding the April 6 Movement. The purpose of the discussion was described as aiming to develop means to facilitate change in the internal situation in Egypt, in which the ambassador agreed to “support an unwritten plan for a transition to a par­lia­ mentary democracy… before the sche­ duled elections of 2011”.

The catalyst of the Egyptian Uprising was not directly American but rather it was the

Issue 12 - March 2012 -

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COVER STORY

Protesters gathering in Tahrir Square, Cairo

convergence of several factors which created a perfect storm in which a new generation who, without the exposure to the political myths of Nasserism from the days of their parents, were pushed to make a clear demand for change, albeit an as-ofyet undefined change.

With just over half the Egyptian population under the age of twenty-five and a significant portion of them unemployed to a large extent despite being university graduates, the youth were the tinder awaiting the spark. There are differing views on the actual socio-political and economic factors which gave rise to the protests of 2011 with one overtly proRussian study going so far as to illustrate how well Egyptians lived in contrast to the inhabitants of the Kibira slum of Nairobi.

The single factor that stands out as the underlying cause and which exacerbated the State’s inability to keep this ‘youth bulge’ from breaking at the seam was the phenomenon of the economic aftershocks of the economic crisis. With higher food

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prices, less buying power, the opportunity to work abroad and remittances from overseas drying up, instability was already an inevitability prior to the Tunisian example which preceded and to a large extent inspired Egypt.

One pronounced feature emerging from the unfolding of the Egyptian uprising is that it represents an attempt at a new technique of regime change. This is a technique that was modelled somewhat on the failed Green Revolution in Iran of 2009 and of similar guise to the ‘colour revolutions’ of Eastern Europe. The initial protests were organised strategically by the April 6 Movement; there was a clear technique to it, as a former strategist for the movement, Ahmed Salah, stated in an interview with the International Centre on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC): “So, this brought the idea to me to make an unconventional way of building the 25th of January. The point was to start these small rallies in densely populated areas, and to come out from the back streets and

into the main central points in every city.

This way the security could not mass their troops in one particular area, because whatever is happening is happening everywhere. By the time the numbers reach the central designated areas where the dense police presence is, you already have large numbers of people that can get through these police numbers, and you can take that ground.”

One may call it an attempt to stage the Post-Modern coup d’etat or revolution. The question remains, however, as to whether it is indeed a technique for a true revolution and/or, more importantly, whether it proved a successful technique for the young Egyptians.

The Technique of the Coup D’Etat The modern State is a chessboard; in order to take political power in a revolution or coup one must make moves as one would in a game of chess. While in our Postmodern age the traditional political pro­ cesses and structures of modern states

COVER STORY

are rusting and have been effectively overrun by an economic reality that trumps the sovereignty of a state in its traditional sense; in order for any chance of revolution to be successful, any modern technique worth its salt must become a basic template on which a successful political revolution can be built.

Curzio Malaparte’s Technique of the Coup d’Etat is an essential appraisal of the modern coup or revolution. This handbook was written by a man who lived through the upheavals of the early 20th century, who was free enough as a man to both participate in the revolution which brought Mussolini to power and later to have his membership of the same party revoked because of the tenacity of his freedom of thought. Malaparte’s analytical model may be used to compare and contrast the modern technique of revo­lu­ tion with the technique of the internet-ins­ tigated ‘Revolution 2.0’ that was attempted in Egypt.

According to Malaparte, a theorist of the modern coup d’etat was Napoleon Bonaparte, also the father of the modern state. The pivotal moment he faced was with an outraged Council of the Five Hundred in the Orangerie; the first coup that necessitated the legitimation of taking power through the use of force within the setting of a state with all the basic struc­tures of parliament and legislation intact. From Napoleon came the Bolshevik Revolution which in turn brought Lenin to power. Lenin however was the ‘State’ and it was Trotsky who refined the technique of the revolution to insurrection as “a piece of noiseless machinery”, as opposed to the dramatic “art” of Marx which Lenin adhe­red to. Trotsky’s technique seconded the parliamentary focus of Napoleon with the need to take control of the technical apparatus of state-communications and transport - as a means to bring the state to its knees.

Between Napoleon and Trotsky lie the strata of techniques used in the coups and revolutions that followed, whether

Have social networks helped forge a new Egypt?

successful or foiled, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist or Fascist etc. The major features of this modern technique of revolution were; the necessity of leadership and a core group that acts as the technical fulcrum of power transition, the need to take hold of the technical apparatus of the state, the need to legalise the exchange of power in a legislative manner and the use of the ‘masses’ or popular upheaval.

This last element, that of popular upheaval, was used by both attacking revolutionary and defensive state as a means to throw a wrench in the works of the opponent’s strategy.

After Fascism fell out of fashion following the Second World War and with the onset of the Cold War, most revolutionary movements took on a red hue. So we see that nearly all the revolutionary movements born during the Cold War, from the Naxa­ lites of India, the Zapatistas of Mexico to the ANC of South Africa, held to a MarxistLeninist technique of revolution that was in fact the very same as that born with Bonaparte, explored by Bakunin and carried out successfully by Trotsky. We also see that the military coups in countries such as Pakistan, Chile and Egypt itself follow the same pattern. Such techniques

therefore are not ideological but the result of innovations and complexities brought on by both revolutionary movements and the states often headed by men placed there through earlier successful coups.

The revolution that the Egyptian youth were sold in 2011 lacked technique in the Malapartian sense. They did not revolve on any discernible leadership, they occu­ pied the square and allowed the State to protect the essential technical apparatus, it was not the working of a piece of “noise­ less machinery” but rather depended on creating popular instability, which according to the modern technique, is not the arena of revolution but a tool. Here it is important to point out the inability for there to be any effective ‘Democratic’ revolution; the French Revolution led to the Terror and the Terror led to Napoleon.

The focus on popular instability in Egypt as opposed to traditional technique has allowed the military time to defend its main technical arteries by brute police force, identified by Malaparte as the simplest and most essential means of the state to protect itself. The Egyptian state even managed to close down the internet by ordering private providers such as Vodaphone.

Issue 12 - March 2012 -

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COVER STORY

henceforth have to adapt to a more fluid and dynamic reality.

With the political door now shut to young revolutionaries, there remains only one domain in which a true cause can prove fruitful; namely, Economics. With the financial crisis continuing to unfold before our eyes and despite the forecasts of certain delusional analysts, the true revo­ lution today lies in the economic sphere upon which the pageantry of politics is staged.

Mohammed Badie, head of the Muslim Brotherhood

The popular protest did manage to force the military to lose their figurehead, Mubarak. However, the military maintain their hold on power and have successfully managed to ‘Parliamentarise’ (a defensive technique identified by Malaparte) the revolutionary movement by approaching the Muslim Brotherhood, which will inevitably see that the military’s economic and legislative interests are maintained.

One only has to look to the Muslim Bro­ therhood’s call against mass protest on the anniversary of Mubarak’s ousting, called for by the revolutionaries still camped out in Tahrir Square. In all of this the young revolutionaries have found themselves isolated in their fight against SCAF. By analysing the technique of the ‘Revo­ lution 2.0’, it is starkly evident that it was not successful. And while the use of social networking proved well-suited as a means to circumvent the censorship of the state, in the physical realm, its focus on mass protest meant that the state could use the simplest and the most brutal techniques available to it to defend and maintain its

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- Issue 12 - March 2012

position. By co-opting the support of an anachronistic Muslim Brotherhood organised to be able to act as a traditional parliamentary party, the young revo­lu­ tionaries have been isolated.

The Idea of a Post-Modern Revolution The process of complexifying the tech­ niques of political revolution and the tech­ niques of defence is at checkmate. The definitive illustration of this lies in the last decade of the War on Terror, where para­ noia of ‘terror’ cells which, by any analysis of popular narrative, were simply following an extreme version of the same traditional revolutionary technique and were met with extreme defensive mea­sures adopted by states.

The age of the political revolution has passed, having reached its technical limit.

While there remain examples of successful coups in regions such as Africa or the latest developments in the Maldives, the age of the Newtonian Republic is over; the techniques of revolutions, therefore will

We must begin to question the fundamental ideas upon which the economics of our age are founded. Who benefits from the seemingly benign acceptance of the use of a currency that holds the key to our enslavement or to our freedom? It is not an ideological question and neither is it an emotional one. The reality of our economic dilemma is plain to see. When I accept the use of paper as currency, founded on a web of debt, of which I too become a part, am I not giving my freedom to those who benefit from this web?

It is revolution enough if this question has been asked and understood. As the struc­ tures of modern politics and the economic foundations on which they rest fall away in the face of a yet unknown future, such an economic consciousness will provoke the wisdom needed to make sure that any future change will be real and not merely political or emotional.

Once this question is asked by the youth of Egypt, they will be able to see that the success of their cause lies not in the parliament nor in the square but in economics, not Capitalist or Marxist, but through key aspects of their history as a distinguished Muslim land. The youth of Egypt will be successful against the SCAF only once the enormous wealth that the military controls, deemed more valuable than the lives of their youth, changes hands. For this to begin to unfold, a leadership must emerge from amongst them.

Issue 12 - March 2012 -

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COVER STORY

Internet use has rapidly become widespread amongst the young of pakistan

Internet Revolution in Pakistan

by Amna Nasir Jamal The Internet plays a significant role in a variety of aspects in the life of the masses. It has evolved, in various technological modes, into a near indis­pen­sable source to meet their needs, whether to do with information, education, entertainment or business.

The country which has seen a boom in its telecom sector and information technology services in recent years, recorded around a 46.2% growth of subscribers and is placed fourth in the ranking list is Pakistan. With internet usage in Pakistan increasing at such a pace, internet service providers are also expanding their national horizons with their unmatched broadband services.

Pakistan’s digital growth prospects have begun to look bright.

Besides having a large bilingual (English and Urdu) internet population, the estimated number of readers of blogs has reached

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- Issue 12 - March 2012

nearly 3.4 million. According to a Freedom on the Net survey and 2011’s annual report, ‘there has been rise at an accelerated pace in Pakistani internet users, crossing 20 million users, accessing the internet via mobile phones too”. The report by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) also estimates that “users have been surging significantly on a monthly basis”.

The Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan (ISPAK) however estimate a far lower number of internet users, with a figure closer to 10 million.

The reports state that “the internet is available in all the major cities of the country including remote areas. Although the majority of people still use a dial-up connection, broadband internet has been growing speedily in big cities.”

“With the explosion in mobile-phone use and the gradual spread of broadband internet in Pakistan, access to information and

COVER STORY

communication technologies (ICTs) has increased, as have citizen journalism and online activism,” the report said.

After the privatisation of Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) the number of internet users grew rapidly. It has been reported that about 2.2 percent of all internet users in Asia belong to Pakistan. In 2011, Internet Explorer’s market share decreased from 54.5% to 45.44%. The browser Firefox still holds the second position with 30.37%, while the market share of Google Chrome increased to 16.54% since last year. Other browsers such as Opera and Safari remained stable throughout the year with 5.08% and 2% respectively of the market share as of Feb 2011.

A very recent development is “Pakistan’s first international social media summit, 2011” which took place in Karachi, with discussions on “Social activism in the New Era of Media and Monetizing Your Social Media Space.” The summit was an initiative to stimulate progress within the social media community in Pakistan. Over 200 Top bloggers, Twitter users, and other social media mavericks attended the conference from all over Pakistan and interested parties from Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, USA and Netherlands also attended.

From the meeting it is evident that Pakistan is actively taking part in freedom of information and freedom of speech through the use of the different social media platforms. By delivering such a multiplicity of voices, life is potentially richer for us all, Pakistanis are using their liberty of expression every day on social media.

The tentacles of social media have revolutionized Pakistan and as internet usage increases in urbanized Pakistan the dynamic social media could be major agents of socio-political transformation.

By social media a few social websites come to mind; Facebook, Twitter, Linked in and various blogging sites. The basic dilemma faced in Pakistan is the way people use the social media.

The social media giant, Facebook, has reported to have crossed the 20 million user line, with an increase of 2 million Facebookers in just the last 8 months. According to a Pakistan online IT portal, “3.4 million users from Pakistan on Facebook are male, 1.6 million female. 76 percent of these users from Pakistan are aged between 18-34”. The upcoming social networking site from Google, Google Plus, has already attained nearly 10,000 users in its beta version.

“Internet usage is converging in Pakistan, which is helping new and social media,” said Badar Khushnood, Google Pakistan’s country consultant. “There is always a certain level of noise and hype but in my belief, blogs have done a lot of good to citizen journalism.” Khushnood said that “Twitter and Facebook initiatives

Reporters access news via the internet

and comments have the power to change people’s minds.” He continued, “Social media really generate a worldwide community and it is delightful to see so many of its illustrious citizens. Everyone is struck by the aptitude, the mind’s eye and devotion of the young bloggers. Among them are people who are committed visionaries who will help realise the vast potential of the people of Pakistan.”

A silent revolution is building up in Pakistan, the bloggers being a vital part of the revolution. Blogging is reinforcing the fight of the democratic system – freedom of speech – a freedom that everyone in Pakistan is hoping for.

“One could gauge the importance of the new media from the fact that almost every news organisation’s website has a blog now,” said Sana Saleem, a blogger. “Pakistani blogs have quantity, but don’t have quality. We are a nation of complainers, not advocacy.

We should be more responsible about our content,” she added.

Saleem continued, “Journalists and business are taking social media seriously for a number of activities, focusing on different aspects whether negative or positive.”

On a more pessimistic note, Dr. Muhammad Hafeez, Professor and Director of the Institute of Social & Cultural Studies, University of the Punjab, Lahore, commented that, “Boys and girls use the internet merely as an entertainment device with most of them playing games on Facebook, chatting, surfing indecent websites or just watching video songs on YouTube and hence their time is void.”

“They must make the best use of the opportunity they are provided with” Hafeez said, “social media if not regulated properly, like any untamed beast, could unleash great havoc and pain in Pakistani society, with the violent videos on the web having done permanent damage to many already.”

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COVER STORY

Masters of the Internet or its hostages?

by Sulaiman Wilms

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- Issue 12 - March 2012

COVER STORY

The Internet, with its giant corporations seemingly earning money out of nothing and all the hardware involved, has changed our world. Few people realise the extent to which our everyday lives have been turned upside down by Facebook, Google, Twitter and the rest. Does the digital world liberate us, or are we becoming an amorphous mass of undiscriminating end-consumers, more entrapped than we suspect?

Our world consists of meanings manifest in the form of images, a simple truth and a fundamental part of basic Islamic knowledge. It is hardly possible to write about the Internet, its main players or its effect on our lives without resorting to anecdotes to shed light on the subject.

A case in point: I was recently in the Arab world, where I visited a global coffee chain in whose store around sixty students were sitting. As I left the store with coffee in hand I turned round, for despite the students, the shop was utterly quiet. All of them – and I mean all of them – were transfixed by the displays of their digital communication devices.

A Web-addict myself for reasons of work, I am often amazed at how long I can spend absent-mindedly checking Facebook or surfing the Net. This of course is not a personal foible of mine, it is an experience shared by many. As Pulitzer-prize winner Nicolas Carr puts it, “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”

World on a wire With the exception of technicians and engineers – those who work on the tangible side of the World Wide Web – there are few people who really know what the Internet is all about. Ironically it is the end consumers, and most especially young users (who, in Europe, spend a statistical 5.4 hours every day operating digital media), who find it most difficult to say what the Internet actually is. It is, after all, more

than just the sum total of endless miles of cables, servers and plugs.

We should not forget that the idea of globally networked computers is not a new one, and was certainly not invented by Al Gore. From the early 1960s, information technology experts began to hammer out the theoretical foundations of what would later become the ARPANET, which finally came into being in 1969. The computers involved communicated with one another via telephone lines and using a system of data packets, a system which is still today largely in use. What was revolutionary about this network was its decentralised structure.

In the end one has to resort to thinking if one is to understand the emergence and supposed triumph of the Internet. In conversation with a friend, we found it helpful to attribute the Internet as being an “inauthentic revelation”. While having all the appearance of a revelation since it leads its users to believe in the existence of a reality, it is inauthentic because it neither originates from a real source, nor behaves in compliance with recognized fundamental human modes of behavior.

Our neighbours would look askance at us if we suddenly addressed them as “Paul35” or some other virtual tag. The triumph of the Internet is only hypothetical since it all depends on the power staying on. If you pull the plug or disconnect the computer, then the whole virtual reality reveals itself as unreal.

It is not without reason that Internet veteran David Gelernter is now advising people to keep a careful distance when it comes to the Internet. He calls it a “mirror reality,” or,

“a virtual construct which is problematic precisely because it appears to reflect reality,” as quoted in the weekly German magazine Die Zeit.

Virtual journeys The growth rates that most popular websites and successful social networks post monthly make real industry companies green with envy. Smaller web firms either disappear or are swallowed up by larger ones, with industry giants like Google and Facebook having only succeeded so quickly because, backed by generous investment, they have been able to outstrip rival service providers with tantalising new technologies.

The virtual world can earn real capital (and with it, power), as demonstrated by the people who operate the biggest websites.

Shareholders in Google, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, PayPal and iTunes own companies that amass billions in profits each year.

Once Facebook has completed the first stage of its flotation it will be in the topleague in terms of its capital sum. It is already the market leader for banner advertising in the USA. Following financial injections from Mail.ru, Microsoft and Goldman Sachs, the company is now valued at around 50 billion US Dollars.

Anything but passive Muslims, who constitute between a fifth and a quarter of the world’s population, clearly play an important role in all of this.

According to statistics there were well over 300 million Muslims online in 2011, and Internet coverage is growing steadily in many member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

Yet a quick look at the physical location of the 20 biggest websites shows that the top 19 are still in the USA. This means that Muslims are present on the Internet as users, consumers and content-suppliers, but their influence as major players is so far minimal.

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COVER STORY

It is not just since the start of the Arab uprisings in Spring 2011 that the Muslims have been using the Internet – especially the younger generation. In regions where Muslims have traditionally formed a minority, the Internet is proving an important part of their search for identity.

According to a study conducted in Germany in 2010, the Internet plays a growing role in the debate about what is Islamic.

“Militant attitudes are few and far between, and are immediately shut out by the Internet community,” explains project director Daniela Schlicht. According to Schlicht, more and more Muslim students are discussing identity issues on social networks.

Michael Wolfe, an American journalist, ­­film-maker and Muslim, works for com­ panies like PBS and CNN. In his view, the no-longer-very-new media and social networks are even more important than we might think. “The soaring dominance of new media is an extremely important moment in the history of relations between Muslims and their neighbours. For the first time, ordinary Muslims can speak directly

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to their non-Muslim neighbours, able to share their views on just about anything, without the mainstream media acting as intermediaries; selecting their talking heads, pundits and experts.”

What is the Internet turning us into?

Adil Morrison wrote recently in this magazine about social networks and their dangers. Regardless of how you deal with them, he says, “Social networking is here to stay. Almost fifty per cent of all online users are involved in such activities. (…)

Online social networks are more than just a fad amongst the younger generation.

They have become an integral part of our personal and professional lives.”

When it comes to Internet users in general, many scientists are reaching uncomfor­ table conclusions: “Researchers at the Annenberg Centre for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California report that an increasing number of people say their use of the Internet, including social networking sites, is eroding away at the time they spend with their family.” Studies

from the USA and the United Kingdom prove that students who use Facebook achieve worse grades on average than their contemporaries who do not.

In the USA, young people now spend more time on digital media – computers, smart phones, tablets and cable channels – than they do sleeping. The German Press Agency describes what is surely a typical case of one young German: “Seventeenyear old Franciska can no longer imagine life without Facebook. ‘It’s something of a minor addiction. You feel you just have to look and see what’s going on,’ she says.”

German psychologist Manfred Spitzer, who is the medical director of the Psychiatric University Hospital in Ulm, has authored a critical essay on the reciprocal relationship between new media, learning progress, and brain research. In How the Internet is changing our lives, he poses important questions and provides thought-provoking answers. “Rather like when television was introduced around half a century ago, people began by thinking that digital media could only have a positive affect on

COVER STORY

educational processes (…). Television consumption, however, correlates nega­ tively with consumers’ level of education.

The same could be said about the digital media: a computer at home correlates with inferior school grades among 15-year olds.”

From brain research we know that our brains are organs that change permanently when used. “Everything you perceive, think, experience, feel and do leaves tra­ ces, traces that for over 100 years we have precisely referred to as traces of memory.”

Because the brain is constantly learning and cannot do otherwise, the time spent using digital media leaves traces behind in our memory.

According to Spitzer, children learn in a holistic way, which is why they are not able to understand digital content until around the age of three. Before that they require a combination of all the senses and social contact. Older children, he says, are finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate, read, understand or write things coherently. Their ability to focus their attention and articulate thoughts has declined, along with their social skills. “Intellectual inability is ac­com­ panied by a strange numbness: young people no longer know how to behave appropriately.” This may go some way to explain the strange behaviour of the students in the café.

A study conducted by the University of San Diego in 2009 reached the conclusion that social networks have the tendency to stimulate narcissistic traits among their members. The majority of students asked stated that they use social web services to promote themselves and gain attention.

Psychologist Rolf Haubl believes that this has only increased as the media age has progressed: “Children and teenagers are nowadays exposed to an excess of stimuli for which the media is of course largely responsible. They have to do more and more to become noticed and acknowledged, all of which exerts a social pressure on them.”

President Obama holds Town Hall meeting at facebook headquarters

Unholy alliance The relationship between state control and the innate dynamic of Internet giants is not a simple one. State institutions wish on the one hand to harness the expertise of these monsters – and not only under oppressive regimes; often these corporations have more resources at hand than the governments themselves. On the other hand they are outright opponents when it comes to controlling the Internet. Most state Internet supervisors would love to make use of Facebook’s potential for information, harboured in the profiles of its more than 700 million members.

Hidden to the man on the street is the ­greyzone between the secret services and commercial Internet companies. In Washington alone there are purported to be hundreds of companies who monitor the Internet through what is known as ‘data mining’. In every industrialised nation, electronic correspondence is automatically monitored using certain keywords. The steadily rising volume of data is inevitably going to be more of a cause of concern for state control bodies.

Evgeny Morozov is a co-publisher of the magazine Foreign Policy. His assessment of the relationship between politics and the Internet giants is significant: “These companies have their own commercial agendas. They are more interested in earning money than propagating Ameri­ can ideals. (…) So the actual question is how we can utilise the undeniable power of these companies to our advantage without allowing them to come across like an ex­tension of American foreign policy.

People view this sudden closeness between politicians and businessmen skeptically, especially now that Google is cooperating with the NSA.” Morozov then raises an inevitable question: “Do we really want Google to become the next Halliburton?”

Similar considerations apply in Germany.

The latest edition of the journal of the German Council on Foreign Relations states that Web 2.0 forums can be used for “professional political campaigns”.

People, especially those who live in the “crisis regions” of the world can, they state, become “active players” in German foreign policy by these means. What they describe

Issue 12 - March 2012 -

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COVER STORY

Googleplex Headquarters in Santa Clara

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- Issue 12 - March 2012

COVER STORY

as the cumulative global “creative poten­ tial” of Web 2.0 communities can be used to advantage not only by multinational corporations, but also by German politicians.

As American political scientist Jakub Grygiel explains, the phenomenon of “cyber mobilisation” allows “the rapid emergence of groups that have a widespread reach and ability to inflict damage.” He continues: “The state, with its large logistical infrastructure and management capacity, is not only supp­ lanted by these networked groups but also is unable to control them.” Fur­ther­more, “technologies are giving power to a mélange of previously irrelevant groups whose individuals’ minority interests and passions can find expression,” writes Grygiel.

An example of the interplay between economic players and governmental bodies is the still-controversial ACTA Agreement. For the benefit of copyright owners, Internet service providers (ISPs) are obliged to check up on what their clients are doing on the Internet in order to facilitate proceedings against file sharers. As has happened already in the privatisation of prisons, areas of state sovereignty are being farmed out to private entities. And because ACTA is still for­ mulated in imprecise terms, many fear that repressive regimes could use it to assert their own interests.

In February 2012, members of the American Congress criticised the monitoring of social networks by the Department of Homeland Security. They called the automatic combing of words posted on Twitter, Facebook, etc. as, “a threat to freedom of expression on the Internet and the freedom of our citizens.” The company, General Dynamics, is said to have been paid 11 million US Dollars for an automated system that monitors public postings.

Is there freedom on the Internet?

Every day aspects of the virtual world

penetrate our lives more and more. This does not simply create more opportunities for us, but also endangers our freedom, for which a fine balance is necessary; between that of a Luddite reaction and an undis­cri­ minating acceptance.

David Gelernter advises us well when he tells parents to give their children a simple mobile phone so that they can call home and speak to their friends when necessary, but otherwise to send them outside to play.

Online users, especially young people, need to become more discriminating in their use of the media, especially digital media. This should begin at a very young age and continue right through into tertiary education. Parents would be well advised to steer a healthy middle-course. While it cannot be in the interests of their children’s future to allow them to remain electronically illiterate, still they should intervene before their children’s involvement in the virtual world begins to do damage.

In social and political terms, what is needed is a collective awareness of the dangers of the Internet for people and societies.

This has to be understood, and it has to be acted upon. Before changing office, the former German Minister of Home Affairs, Thomas de Maizière, called for a ‘forget’ function to be built into the Internet so as to help prevent it from ending up as a new manifestation of the dreaded secret police, replete with secret service files.

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COVER STORY

Salamworld Hits the Internet

Salamworld could become the first commercially successful Muslim community on the Internet.

by Khalil Breuer Ciragan Palace, Istanbul, February 2012.

Salamworld, a new global IT project, has chosen one of the city’s best locations from which to launch itself. This young Internet company has invited a host of public figures to the Turkish metropolis to show to them one of the most ambitious projects of the Internet age.

Singer Sami Yusuf sings to congratulate the young IT experts and their guests from all over the Islamic world. Abdulvahid Nyazov, head of the Board of Directors, is visibly proud as he presents the concept and the project’s motto: “Meet the world”.

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It is clear that Salamworld has acquired substantial capital and professional intelligence from the Islamic world on its way to offering Muslims their own social platform. The 60-staff company has been working busily for some months in its Istanbul offices.

The new website aims to compete with big competitors such as Facebook and Google+ for virtual members, although its initiators prefer to avoid branding it a Muslim Facebook. “We are not rivalling other communities, we are adding to them,” explains Nyazov.

Their chances of success are not bad. Not one of the twenty largest networks and websites in the world today is a Muslim project, but, according to the makers of Salamworld, that is about

COVER STORY

Delegates from all over the Muslim world gather at the Salamworld Inaugural Global Summit in Istanbul

to change. With its own apps, services directed towards Muslims such as simultaneous translations into major languages of the Islamic world, and a balanced “halal” content, the community aims to bring something new to Muslims all over the world. A virtual marketplace with a modern means of payment is also intended.

The demand among Muslims for online activities is enormous.

There are now 1.5 billion Muslims, 54% of whom are under 25.

Between 250 and 300 million Muslims now use the Internet, which fact alone would appear to speak in favour of a commercially successful Internet community. The company should not have to do much advertising among Muslims. Since what has become known as the ‘Facebook Revolution’ in the Arab world, the role of websites among Muslims has become widely discussed.

In order to better understand the expectations and needs of its target group, Salamworld organised special workshops in Cairo, Kuala Lumpur and Istanbul.

These meetings evaluated numerous proposals by potential users, studied the expectations that young Muslims have of a new network, and heatedly debated what “halal” could actually mean in a virtual context.

It became clear at these meetings just how serious the technical obstacles were, but also how high Muslim expectations are, and how difficult it will be to provide a better service than Salamworld’s

famous rivals do. It is therefore important that the project works closely with the community from the outset.

In a specially established Executive Board, the most important communities will be given a permanent voice on the content and direction of their website, and able to advise management.

Furthermore, each year, well-known personalities, IT experts and scholars will meet under the Salamworld banner in order to review the development of the project. Salamworld is also looking for young IT experts and talents who can help to cope with the rush of new members expected when the site is launched. The aim is to get everything ready by the end of the year.

When Salamworld toured Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, the project attracted political supporters as well as other Internet players. It has already sponsored a large-scale Muslim event in Canada, and over the next few months a Salamworld team will be travelling through the rest of the Islamic world.

This new community has already struck up agreements with other large Islamic groupings, promising further potential for large user numbers. In Indonesia there are Muslim communities with millions of members. Such groups would be able to maintain their own pages on Salamworld and moderate them themselves. Such Muslim networks will in turn form the core of Salamworld once established and within the first three years, the project is expected to attract up to 50 million users.

Issue 12 - March 2012 -

21

Salamworld

Wake up to a new world - it’s yours.

without borders, without prejudice Salamworld Network unites the modern Islamic community via a universal communication channel, promoting correct understanding of Islamic cultures and traditions, supporting Muslims all over the world with their identity and their spiritual realisation.

www.salamworld.com

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INTERVIEW

Martin Heidegger

“The crisis of Finanztechnik” Interview with Alfred Denker

A conversation with Alfred Denker about the work of the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the relevance of his thinking today.

Martin Heidegger remains the subject of much confusion and polarisation.

Some love him, while others consider him a Nazi philosopher. Yet both critics and defenders of Heidegger agree on one thing: he cannot be ignored as a philosopher of the twentieth century.

His magnum opus, Being and Time, is obligatory reading for anyone with an interest in philosophy. So why is it that

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a thinker like Heidegger can still polarise so many people today?

Alfred Denker: Alongside Wittgenstein, Heidegger was the twentieth century’s most influential philosopher. Even if you consider his philosophy unimportant, you will not be able to understand the history of twentieth century philosophy without his thinking. His philosophy was influential in

many very different areas. These include – aside from philosophy itself – the fields of theology, psychiatry, literary science and ecology; his thinking even affecting scientists like Heisenberg or von Weiz­ säcker. His influence was especially strong in France, from Sartre and Levinas to Ricoeur and Foucault.

Given Heidegger’s rectorate at the Uni­ versity of Freiburg, people have always asked whether or to what extent he was involved in National Socialism and what the implications of that are for the philosophy Heidegger inspired. On top of

INTERVIEW

that he was to some extent an existentialist avant la lettre, and extremely interesting as a person. One need only recall his affair with Hannah Arendt. He is somebody people either love or hate, which is why he polarises so many people to this day.

You have devoted a lot of study to Heidegger. You recently wrote a book called “Unterwegs in Sein und Zeit” (Travelling in Being and Time), which is a kind of introduction to Heidegger’s thinking and Heidegger as a person.

What is your position on the accu­ sation that Heidegger was involved with National Socialism? The French philosopher Emmanuel Faye even called him an intellectual pioneer of Nazism.

Alfred Denker: First of all, anyone seriously interested in Heidegger has to take these accusations seriously. Secondly, I should state that I abhor National Socialism and I would not be so intimately involved with Heidegger if he had actually been a Nazi.

It is important to look very carefully at where Heidegger was actually involved in National Socialism and where he distanced himself critically from it. In doing so, we can also learn why National Socialism was so popular with so many people.

It is very difficult to imagine oneself back into the world of 1933. The claim that Hei­ degger was some kind of mastermind of National Socialism is easy to refute. Even if Hitler had read Martin Heidegger, he would only have been able to read material that was politically completely uninteres­ ting. It is impossible to trace a line from Hei­degger’s dissertation, post-doctoral treatise and Being and Time, to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

In his later works Heidegger reflected on the nature of technology. What kind of relationship does Heidegger’s later work have with – and what kind of contribution can it make towards – our understanding of an ever-shrinking

modern world, poised between the frenzy of globalisation and the quasirevelation of the internet?

Alfred Denker: The great contribution of Heidegger’s thinking has always been able to make is to question. He questions what we take for granted. A good example is his assertion that science itself cannot think.

By that he means that the existential questions of human life cannot be solved by science. My choice of career, whether I marry or not and so on, are not scientific problems.

It is a wonderful thing that we can have access to limitless information in a split second these days, but Heidegger would say that information is not the same as recognition. Another thing we can learn from Heidegger is that globalisation is a

process which is not being controlled by people, and which is disempowering us.

This means that there are no easy solutions, which is a shame for politicians, who are expected to solve every problem within the space of four years.

Do you think it is possible for someone who studies Heidegger’s work to be politically partisan, given that he did not see the solution to the fundamental issues of our time as located inside old political ideologies? In the legendary Spiegel interview published in 1976 he said, “Only a god can save us.”

Alfred Denker: What I understood him to have meant by that is that as a philosopher you have to keep asking and you have to keep questioning what people take for granted. An ideology is a theory which

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25

INTERVIEW

New York Stock Exchange, financial hubb of the world

people no longer question, which is why it is dangerous. Unfortunately there are no simple solutions, nor is there a recipe for heaven on earth. Death and illness are part of human existence. We cannot live forever either.

I think that the statement “Only a god can save us” is an unfortunate one, because it cannot be proven. On top of that, we have seen the danger of religious ideologies in our time. It is only a small step from “Only a god can save us” to “Only this god can save us.” I would prefer to say (and I believe this was what Heidegger was thinking): “There is no person that can save us.” Only we limited

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- Issue 12 - March 2012

people living together can attempt to solve these problems. It is not much, but at least it is something.

In this time of financial crisis, can we apply Heidegger’s analysis of tech­ nology to the abyss of modern Finanz­ t­echnik, or financial technology? When one observes the extent of global Finanztechnik, it is difficult to resist the idea that “it is not we who have tech­ nology in our hands, rather it has us in its hands,” to use Heidegger’s own words.

Alfred Denker: It is important to pick up on Heidegger’s thinking in order to continue

to evolve in directions in which Heidegger himself did not go. Finanztechnik could indeed be interpreted as a new manifes­ tation of the Gestell, as Heidegger called the enmeshing framework of technology.

If so we could then say that money has become an end in itself, and so lost its true character. Heidegger would have said that the crisis of Finanztechnik cannot be sol­ ved by financial technique.

Attempts to rescue Greece from bankruptcy using such techniques are only proof of this. What this means is that a change of system is necessary, and this can only be achieved by political means.

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ECONOMY & FINANCE

The Pirate Isles

by Raphael-Maria Grünwald

London is the centre of global speculative capital. Its transactions take place in what is known as “The City”, a district of the capital with its own sovereignty.

British Prime Minister David Cameron spectacularly vetoed a new European Union Treaty at the last EU summit in midDecember 2011. Aside from the justified criticisms he levelled at the intended fiscal union, the factor most fundamental to Cameron’s move in Brussels will have been the financial transaction tax planned for introduction in 2014.

Cameron demanded that the City of London – a kind of sate-within-a-state

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with its own legislation – be exempted from future financial market regulations, otherwise he would not approve a modification of the Treaty.

David Cameron has good reason for such obstinacy. The financial sector makes up around a quarter of the United Kingdom’s economic output, and a large chunk of the world’s financial transactions pass through the City of London. Mark Burgess of invest­ ment company Threadneedle Asset

Management explained to Süddeutsche Zeitung the thinking behind the Prime Minister’s decision: “The financial industry is much more important to the British economy as a whole than it is on the European continent. A special tax would therefore cause serious damage.”

Meanwhile the insolvency of American derivative trader MF Global in early 2011, itself a direct result of lax British financial market regulation, shows just how serious such regulation could be for London as a financial centre. According to financial information service Thomson Reuters, this kind of bankruptcy is proof that the finan­ ­­cial markets have developed into “an

ECONOMY & FINANCE

uncontrolled pyramid scheme”. MF Global was forced to admit having helped itself to its clients’ accounts in order to offset its own financial difficulties. To do this the company took advantage of a loophole in British regulations which allows customer assets to be used for large-scale investments in European government bonds.

This lack of regulation is the reason why American brokers and investment banks place large proportions of their customers’ assets with their subsidiaries in the City of London. The magic formula which lures these gamblers from the USA and elsewhere is called “re-hypothecation”, according to which a bank can – for instance – secure a second loan using a property which has been signed over to it as security for an existing loan. There are clear limitations on such practices on the Continent and in the USA, but not in the City of London, where a building with a loan already attached to it can be used to generate amounts many times greater than the building’s real value. That makes the City a magnet for speculators in need of ‘fresh money’.

The City of London is home to Europe’s biggest financial marketplace; according to the London’s government, the biggest in the world in fact. They state that there are 241 foreign banks registered there.

The City’s special status evolved over cen­ turies. The English kings used it to finance their campaigns, which led to an accu­mu­ lation of special rights which have endured up to this day.

According to social scientist David Harvey, the City was always “a bastion of resistance against all forms of regulated capitalism” because of its position within the British colonial system. Just how central this finan­cial marketplace was for the British Empire has been demonstrated by his­ torians Peter J. Cain and Anthony G. Hop­ kins in their monumental study entitled British Imperialism 1688-2000 (2nd edition 2002), where they show that the history of the Empire was above all a history of

One of the great lions of Trafalgar square, symbolising the power of the British Empire

financial capital, international lending, and the City of London itself, and that it was these things which gave the British Empire its actual dynamism.

Today the City maintains an “osmotic relationship to the world’s largest circle of financial oases,” in the words of German journalist Werner Rügemer. These tax havens include the British Crown Depen­ dencies Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, as well as Gibraltar, the Cayman Islands, the Virgin Islands, and Bermuda: pirate islands all, independent both economically and from a tax point of view, which means British law does not apply there; nor do European Union Directives.

They are however, de facto, as Rügemer explains, “an extended arm of the City of London,” which itself represents the “philosophical centre of the neo-liberal globalised world.”

According to British author Nicholas Shaxson (Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World, Bodley Head 2011) the City only managed to remain at the heart of global financial capitalism, after the demise of Britain as a world power, through the emergence of the “EuroDollar” offshore financial market from the mid to late 1950s.

This was the period during which the British Empire broke up, culminating in the crisis of the Middle East in 1956. Egypt’s pre­si­ dent Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal that year, threatening the sup­ remacy of Britain and France in the Arab region. Together with Israel, the two nations attempted an invasion which ended in disaster. The USA refused to step in and the British were forced to withdraw in humiliation. “The Suez Crisis,” says British historian David Kynaston, marked “with

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29

ECONOMY & FINANCE

brutal clarity (…) the end of Britain as a world power.” At this time the island nation was not only as good as bankrupt, the Pound Sterling was also precarious in its position as an international currency which earlier that same decade had still been the medium for around 40% of world trade.

This precipitated a dispute between the Bank of England and the British government; the latter wanting to stop capital flowing abroad and therefore keen to limit cross-border lending. This was diametrically opposed to the interests of the Bank of England, because, as Shaxton explains, it would have “messed up busi­ ness” for London’s bankers. The Bank of England advocated the raising of interest rates instead in order to attract new money to London and stabilise the Pound. This however would have dampened consumption and the demand for imports, which was not what the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan wanted, since he feared a recession. What he came to realise, however, was that he had no authority whatsoever over the Bank of England, despite its nationalisation on 1 March 1946. When he announced his intention to change the state of affairs by legislative means, the Bank of England responded by threatening to let the country go bankrupt.

Harold Macmillan gave up but with a concession: the government would be allowed to limit the loans issued by Lon­ don’s commercial banks in Pound Sterling.

This would have restricted business painfully if it had not been for the momen­ tous dodge which the banks thenceforth devised to circumvent it: instead of lending in Pounds, they began more and more to issue credit in Dollars.

That was an open violation of the Bretton Woods system of 1944 in which the Wes­ tern states had agreed that only a country’s national central bank would be allowed to issue that country’s national currency.

When London’s private banks violated this by issuing loans in Dollars, the Bank of

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Bank of England, London

England ought to have intervened and threatened to withdraw their licenses. But the Bank of England did nothing because, as it said, these transactions did not take place in the United Kingdom at all – the City being, as mentioned earlier, ex-territorial. Nor could other countries’ authorities do anything about it – such as the financial supervisory authorities of the USA or the American Federal Reserve, because in reality there was no doubt that the City of London was British sovereign territory. Thus formed what economist Ronen Palan described as a “regulatory vacuum”.

The flow of American Dollars into this vacuum prompted action from the Federal Reserve in the early 1960s. As far as they were concerned, the unmonitorable Euro­ dollar market in the ex-territorial City had a severe impact on their own autonomous monetary policies.

Yet the Americans soon came to terms with the EuroDollar market because in the end

it upheld the Dollar’s hegemony as the world’s leading currency. To this day people still prefer to conduct global trade on a Dollar basis, not least because borrowers find it much easier to obtain Dollar loans through the City of London than elsewhere, since lending is scantily regulated there and the creditworthiness of debtors only cursorily checked.

Dollars issued from the City spread out “along a clear geographical path,” accor­ ding to Ronen Palan: first they go to the Channel Islands, then to the British ter­ ritories in the Caribbean, onwards to Asia, finally landing up in the British atolls in the Pacific.

The predatory investment funds that buy up companies around the world are almost all based on these British pirate islands: 63% of them in the Caymans, another 13% in the Channel Islands, 11% on Bermuda, and 5 percent in the Baha­ mas. It is a web of speculation that covers the whole globe.

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ECONOMY & FINANCE

Republic capitalises on 足Muslim Heritage

by Nick Watson

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ECONOMY & FINANCE

The Muslim-majority region has proved to be an interesting investment destination for funds with Muslim shareholders or that are based in Muslim countries.

Although there has been much speculation about Muslim investors moving into Russia, the situation has been one of all talk and no action — until now. Two Islamic funds have recently launched operations in the Muslim-majority Republic of Tatarstan.

The first is the Malaysian private equity firm Amanah Raya Capital Group, which has launched several projects in the republic.

In the 1990s, most foreign investors headed straight for Moscow. The game changed after 2000, however, and Russia’s regions have become the new frontier; Kazan caters to the 80 million Russians that live in the cities lining the Volga River.

“We bypassed Moscow and came to Kazan, as it offers the most attractive investment climate,” said Dato Ahmad Rodzi Pawanteh, AmanahRaya’s mana­ ging director.

The fund’s first project was the Kazan Halal hub, which imports halal meat and other products for the region’s Muslim majority.

Once established, the fund financed the construction of a halal meat processing plant in Baltash, 62 miles from Kazan, where local producers can also bring their meat to be processed according to Islamic rules.

The latest phase of the project was to set up an Islamic fund management company that will invest in halal-related enterprises.

The management company will also hold a pilgrimage fund to finance a Hajj for local residents.

“We have been very successful with this sort of fund in Malysia, and it was an obvious product to bring to Tatarstan,” said

Kazan - International trade exhibition on nanotechnologies in industry

Pawanteh. “But we are also working with the local government to raise funds on a private equity basis to bring in foreign investment to the region.” According to Pawanteh, the local government has been very active in promoting foreign investment in the region, and has taken a stake in these funds as a way of reassuring foreign investors that it is willing to share the risks with investors.

The second fund that recently established itself in Tatarstan is the Foras International Investment Company, which represents Saudi money and has launched a classic investment vehicle together with the newly established Tatarstan International Invest­ ment Company, or TIIC. The $50 million fund will focus on the region’s strengths in bio-technology, nanotechnology and IT. The company was inaugurated in June; the founding investors have already contributed $10 million and are in the process of raising the balance.

“We are focused on the Volga region and the attractive investment climate the government has created here with tax breaks and incubators,” said Amizan bin

Mohd Nor of Foras. “One of the most attractive elements in this region is the high level of science and engineering, especially in things like civil aviation.”

Kazan was known in the Soviet era as a center of learning, and its universities still churn out many of Russia’s best engineers.

It is also home to a flourishing aviation industry as well as a burgeoning automotive sector. “We have 20 projects in the pipeline, and 80 percent of them are brownfield that we will develop over the next three years,” said Nor. “But probably the most prospective are in the technical aviation sector.” Nor said he can’t reveal the details of the projects yet as they are still in negotiations, but that he is particularly excited by a project to make aviation rescue vehicles.

“The companies here are advanced, and the level of technology is as good as anything I have seen in Europe,” said Nor. “And the trouble with Europe is it is a highly saturated market. In Russia, we can easily find companies where we can really increase the value, with willing buyers in the Middle East and beyond.” (Source: RBTH)

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ECONOMY & FINANCE

Turkey and China create $100 bln in Trade

by Engin Have Turkey and China Wednesday announced a goal

to boost bilateral trade from the current $24 billion to $100 billion over the next eight years as senior

government officials from two of the world’s fastest growing economies met in Istanbul to discuss measures to facilitate trade.

One of the largest buyers of Chinese products, Turkey has long complained about an imbalance in bilateral trade, seeking ways to attract as much foreign direct investment (FDI) from the Asian country as possible. Turkish ministers did not hesitate to use the

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Turkey-China Business Forum, which brought 200 Chinese businessmen together with their Turkish counterparts, as an opportunity to reiterate calls for increased efforts to minimise a widening trade deficit with China.

Pressure on China to effect a rebalance is on the rise, with Turkey not the only country complaining about Chinese products swamping their markets. Chinese firms were accompanying China’s leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping, who arrived the previous day in Ankara to meet President Abdullah Gül as part of a two-day visit. Delivering a speech at the meeting, the Turkish Economy Minister, Zafer Çalayan, said the government was not happy with the current trade imbalance with China, adding that new Chinese

ECONOMY & FINANCE

investments in Turkey would help remedy the situation. Çalayan complained that Chinese investments in Turkey were below the desired level, but he also underlined the lack of good information about the trade opportunities Turkey offers. “We must increase the number and scale of such mutual business forums and trade fairs to better understand each other,” he added. Çalayan announced that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan planned to visit Beijing in April, commenting that this visit could be an opportunity to cement trade ties for the future.

Turkish and Chinese businesses signed deals worth $1.38 billion in 28 separate deals during the forum. Çalayan said a $500 million portion related to Turkish exports to China, $570 million to financial support from Chinese firms to Turkey and $308.5 million to a package of contractor and energy investments. The meeting was followed by a series of accords signed between the two countries in Ankara. Among them were a three-year currency swap deal between the central banks of Turkey and China, enabling the use of local currency in bilateral trade.

Speaking at the forum, Xi said the two countries, located at opposite ends of the Asian continent, could use their high-growth potential to boost cooperation within the region. “Our economies are not competing, but they are complementary to each other …

We should see this potential and work accordingly for joint projects on both sides as well as in third countries,” Xi explained.

Acknowledging that mutual investments did not reflect the real potential that exists between the two countries, Xi said the Chinese government encouraged entrepreneurs to this end, “the value of deals Chinese companies have signed in Turkey in the past decade have reached $10 billion with projects worth $4 billion already finalised.”

Noting that Chinese companies were particularly interested in infrastructure and transportation projects in Turkey, Çalayan said the multi-billion Dollar Kanal Istanbul – a canal linking the Black Sea and the Marmara Sea – and a third bridge project over Istanbul’s Bosphorus were examples that were attracting Chinese investors’ interest.

Later, Xi proceeded to Istanbul where he met the prime minister, who is recovering from surgery; Istanbul was his final station in his week-long tour. Observers argued Xi’s Turkey visit following that of the US and Ireland was a clear indicator of the importance China’s new leadership attach to Ankara, which is boosting its influence in the political arena as well. Xi is almost certain to become the new Chinese president in October, a post held for 10 years.

“China could build a nuclear plant in Turkey” Aspiring to minimise its dependency on foreign energy resources, Turkey has set in motion the construction of nuclear power plants

Vice President Xi Jinping at the China-Turkey Trade Forum, Istanbul

as one of its top priorities. The country expects to have three plants by the year 2023. China remains a strong candidate for Turkey to cooperate with in this respect, government officials earlier said.

Speaking to reporters following the meeting, Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan said the Turkish government sought ways to see Chinese firms support Turkey in its nuclear energy bid. Turkey expects its first nuclear power plant to be built by a Russian firm, while it has already communicated with Japan and South Korea regarding the construction of two others. Babacan also said the government would like to see Turkish banks open branches in China and that Chinese finance institutions should feel free to enter Turkey.

Representatives from the Turkish business world who participated in Wednesday’s meeting are as excited as government officials with regard to boosting trade with China. Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists (TUSKON) President Rızanur Meral told the Today’s Zaman paper that the confederation was working to diversify products sold to China. Also speaking to Zaman, the head of the Turkish-Chinese Industrialists and Businessmen Association (TÜÇSAD), Murat Sungurlu, said only 43 out of the 29,144 foreign-owned firms in Turkey were from China and that this number should be increased through mutual effort. Turkish Exporters’ Assembly President, Mehmet Büyükeki, said he had faith that the new Chinese investments in Turkey would help minimise the trade deficit for the country.

National flag carrier Turkish Airlines (THY) General Manager Temel Kotil told Today’s Zaman that the carrier expected to fly to five new destinations in China and have conveyed this request to Chinese officials. THY currently flies to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

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ECONOMY & FINANCE

A growing number of Chinese tourists visit Istanbul each year

The head of the Delegation of Turkey to the OSCE PA MP Emin Önen told Today’s Zaman that the number of tourists from China to Turkey could increase from 100,000 to 1 million a year in the middle term, provided effective promotion was conducted in China.

“We are celebrating this year as ‘the year of China in Turkey, and China announced 2013 as the year of Turkey. We should use this opportunity,” he noted.

Turkish Hattat Holding’s CEO, Mehmet Hattat, told Today’s Zaman that they expected to establish a fossil fuel plant worth $1 billion in Turkey’s Black Sea jointly with a Chinese partner. Hattat said the facility should be finalised within the next four years with an annual electricity generation capacity of 4,000 megawatts in the mid term.

Statistics show around 60 percent of Turkey’s sales to China come from mining. Murat Akyüz told Today’s Zaman that they expected Chinese companies to switch to processing mining products inside Turkey rather than importing the raw material. “We are ready to engage in joint ventures with the Chinese, of great benefit to the Turkish chemical market where there is significant growth potential.”

Besides many state-owned companies, some entrepreneurs from local Chinese firms also attended this forum to explore business opportunities. One Chinese businessman, Chen Chi, said he was very interested in importing magnesium and other minerals from Turkey.

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Zhao Xiaobin from Huawei Technologies Ltd. told Today’s Zaman that Huawei chose Istanbul as the site for its headquarters to manage its whole Central Asia business. “Turkey has an important geographical location and a booming economy. I am very optimistic about our business,” Zhao said. “We cooperated closely with local academic institutes to set up research projects. By now, more than 700 Turkish researchers are working at Huawei’s technology department.”

The president of the Export-Import Bank of China told Today’s Zaman that a $700 million deal had been signed with Turkey’s Global Investment Holding, “the $700 million loan agreement of export buyer credit will be used by Turkey’s Global Investment Holding to buy four bulk carriers from China’s AVIC Weihai Shipyard. Directors from the China National Chemical Fibre Corporation said they would import $225 million of acrylic fibre and carbon fibre from Turkey in 2012.

Representatives from the China General Technology Holding Ltd. said their company was engaged in the Ankara to Istanbul highspeed railway project through the providing of financial support and machine products.

Gina Ding, the client relationship manager for the Yingke law firm, said their company was cooperating with Turkish lawyers to pro­ vide consultancy services for Chinese companies who wanted to invest directly in Turkey. (Source: Today’s Zaman)

Serving the Muslims of Europe

www.emunion.eu THE EUROPEAN MUSLIM UNION 10, Place du Temple Neuf, 67000 Strasbourg. FRANCE Tel.: +33-38-8357520, Fax: +33-1-57317454 Email: office@emunion.eu

Issue 12 - March 2012 -

37

EUROPE

Anniversary: Small but Essential

by Khalil Breuer

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- Issue 12 - March 2012

EUROPE

What would our European media landscape be without all its small newspapers, unusual magazines and fringe products? What would be the point of freedom of opinion if minorities no longer had a way to present themselves professionally in public?

Not only would the soup be unsalted, as it were, but also we would soon have nothing to consume but monotonous gruel. That at least is how the small publishers see it. Small newspapers must live on!

One such small newspaper, the Islamische Zeitung, has been around for 17 years now, and its 200th edition is about to be published in Berlin. It gives us Muslims an opportunity to explain our view of things. Instead of prejudice and oversim­ plifications, Islamische Zeitung provides space for illustrating background and in-depth stories and explains why millions of Muslims find their spiritual home in Islam.

The need for the Muslims to have their own media remains pressing. Without our own newspaper, Muslims in Germany would not be able to articulate how Islam offers economic solutions or that its tea­ chings have nothing to do with suicide attacks – and, that there exists such a thing as a German Muslim at all.

There are more than three million Mus­lims in the country, reason enough for an Islamic newspaper to exist. But let us be clear: today, it is more difficult than ever for small publications to survive. Fur­ther­ more, at Islamische Zeitung we value absolute editorial independence, so of course the publication remains subject to economic difficulties. However you struc­ ture a niche product, financially the mountains of invoices just get bigger and bigger.

The Islamische Zeitung is a Muslim forum for communication: During a life recording of an interview in Cologne

Complex distribution is a tough nut to crack. Selling through newsstands is sadly an expensive loss-maker. Good sales staff cost money. The Internet is now host to hundreds of inexpensive rivals, whether news-sites by pros or by amateurs.

A regularly published subscription news­ paper needs one thing above all else, and that is, subscribers – of which there are always too few.

This therefore is a good moment to thank our subscribers and supporters, without whom there would no 200th edition. If we want to see the 300th edition then we will have to work hard to acquire new sub­ scribers. Over the years to come we will have to keep working towards the goal of making our newspaper sustainable, by converting it into a non-profit foundation or cooperative society.

Those however are tomorrow’s concerns.

Today we are glad that Islamische Zeitung exists at all as an independent mouthpiece for the Muslims of Germany. In spite of the economic worries attendant on every small publisher we will continue to strive to deliver a quality product, a newspaper that prefers to differentiate rather than be polemical, one which values Islamic foundations.

Islamische Zeitung will remain an open, media product bringing together authors and readers fascinated by the Revelation, who love our Prophet, and who wish to explore the diversity of Muslims throughout the world.

In short, Islamische Zeitung is a solid part of the German cultural landscape, not least of all, thanks to the many subscribers who are not even Muslim.

Issue 12 - March 2012 -

39

EUROPE

Former German President Christian Wulff visits the Blue Mosque, Istanbul

State-mosque relations in Europe

by Jonathan Laurence

Just over one per cent of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims reside in Western Europe, yet this minority has had a dis­proportionate impact on religion and politics in its new home.

In just 50 years, the Muslim population has ballooned from some tens of thousands to 16 or 17 million in 2010 — approximately one out of every 25 Western Europeans.

On the one hand, there is a growing belief among native European populations that

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Islam, once allowed to flourish unchecked in post-war Europe, must be halted. This worldview exhorts Europeans to awaken from their slumber and defeat ‘Eurabia.’

Against this narrative is the view, held by some Muslim community leaders, that European governments are uniformly

repressive and intolerant of diversity. Both narratives are inadequate and, more importantly, each misses the broader trend of what is actually happening on the ground.

Europeans and Muslims have been successfully negotiating with and adapting to one another over the past 10 years. This is affirmed by several crucial nation-buil­ ding moments. In what are mundane but arguably critical domains for religious inte­ gration — such as mosque construction, the training of imams and chaplains, the

EUROPE

availability of halal food and visas for the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca – Muslim communities and European governments have begun to talk and act in concert.

Contrast this with 10 or 15 years ago, when Islam remained basically unknown as a domestic policy issue to European politicians and administrators. To the extent religious questions were addressed, it was the domain of immigration authorities and diplomats – not parliaments and interior ministries.

Islamic community organisations in European cities also reflected this state of affairs; far from being organically rooted in local European culture and politics, they were still dominated by foreign governments and international non­ governmental organisations (NGOs).

A new landscape is taking shape in which Muslim leaders are increasingly finding a place in the society and institutions of their adoptive countries. A new political con­ sensus – and administrative praxis – is taking hold, reflecting the spreading pragmatic recognition of Muslims’ irre­ versible presence in Europe.

The decade from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s was a period of major growth in state-Islam relations in Europe. The most striking illustration of a Europe-wide move toward the integration of Islam came with the development of national con­ sultations on ‘prayer spaces’ and civil society organisations.

Gone were governments’ ad-hoc res­ ponses to questions facing Muslim communities and the inter-ministerial working groups of previous decades, and in came corporatist-style institution building and the establishment of institutions to negotiate “state-mosque” relations.

Across Europe, the summit of institutional recognition and domestication took the form of Islamic boards.

Paris - French politicians and officials gather for the opening of a new mosque

Boards such as the French Council of the Muslim Faith, the Spanish Islamic Council, the German Islam Conference and the Italian Islam Committee helped resolve practical issues of religious infrastructure.

Organisations and leadership, which pre­ viously looked only beyond European borders for Islamic authority and authen­ti­ city, are slowly gaining domestic insti­tu­tio­ nal references as well.

As this new reality continues, a new order of community leadership and imams is emerging, one that mixes more with local society — including Muslims of all backgrounds as well as non-Muslims – and is better acquainted with pluralist systems of state-religion relations, European cultural norms as well as languages.

There is still plenty of room for improvement within the new spaces of mediation. But that will only take place if the gains of the past decade are not conceded to the exaggerated pessimism of negative narratives about the future of Muslims in Europe. If progress is to continue, both ‘sides’ need to look up and mentally register that the sky is not falling. (Source: Common Ground News Service/CGNews)

As Muslim organisations navigate the institutions that govern religious exercise, authorities can enjoy consultative oppor­ tunities as well as provide an incentive structure to encourage inter-religious dia­ logue and security cooperation with local officials.

Jonathan Laurence is an associate professor of political science at Boston College and nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. (Website: www. jonathanlaurence.net)

Issue 12 - March 2012 -

41

ASIA

Imran Khan at the conference “Rule of Law: The Case of Pakistan”

Imran Khan - A Destiny Entwined

by Mohammed Dockrat

Lahore, a once imperial city, and in recent years the stronghold of the former president, Nawaz Sharif, was hit by a tsunami when waves of people flooded the Minar-e-Pakistan ground, carrying with them the green and red flag of the Tahreek-e-Insaaf.

Two months later, in Karachi, another hundred thousand people rallied, this time in the stronghold of the Sindhi based MQM and PPP parties. Peshawar, the tribal areas and Baluchistan too have all erupted to the call for the famed captain. “Imran Khan, Zindabad,” rang out as he spoke to each about their plight and the plight Pakistan has endured all these years.

Commentators said: Never before, have so many, from all walks of life, from all cults

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and creed, from all segments and strata gathered together and heard a man with pure joy and oneness. The rallies that took place in the Punjab and Karachi were the largest in over two decades.

Imran was born in Lahore only five years after the partition of 1947. Pakistan was brimming with a bright future; it was the ‘Land of the Pure’ for Muslims of the Subcontinent.

The reality however was that soon after its inception, it would fall into disarray.

Corruption was rife; injustice had entrenched itself in every strata of society.

Each change in government, whether civilian or military, was plagued by externally prompted reforms. From that time until today, Pakistani affairs have been strange at the very least; the current president having gone from the official residence to prison; from prison back to the presidential house, and even now faces calls by the Supreme Court for his arrest again since details of the Memogate scandal emerged. Perhaps the most significant moment since Partition was Imran Khan leading his troops to victory in the 1992 Cricket World Cup.

ASIA

Born in 1952, his father Ikramullah Khan Niazi and his mother Shaukat Khanum hail from the Pushtu Niazi tribe. The Niazi tribe moved to the Punjab at an early period.

Thanks to his coming from a wealthy family, he had a classical western education at the Cathedral School in Lahore, the Royal Grammar School in Worcester, England and Aitchison College, Lahore.

Once out of school, he enrolled at Keble College, Oxford, to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Although gaining a second-class degree in Politics and a third in Economics, Khan’s real passion was cricket.

Known as ‘the sport of kings’, cricket has been a means of moulding leaders and the intellects of young men over the course of centuries in the UK, and the only sport where the captain sustains more res­ ponsibility and pressure than a coach.

As a team sport, it nevertheless exhibits elements that can be identified as com­ pletely personal. In its unfolding it is ever changing and can be compared to a game of chess for its tactical dynamics. It plays an important role in the Pakistani identity and it is one of the few unifying factors of the nation.

Imran made his international Test debut in 1971 against England at the age of 18. At the time, players and fans saw him as just a privileged teenager and an outsider with not much to offer but to make up the squad numbers.

The divide in Pakistani society was evident with many of his team mates coming from Urdu schools or public school. Khan was of a privileged class. In fact, two of his cousins also played for the national team.

Family ties are important in dynastic socie­ ties. After his debut series, he was dropped for a short period. This only spurred the young Imran Khan to better every part of his game.

The next few years were telling as he transformed himself into one of the leading

Imran Khan led his team to victory in the 1992 world cup

fast bowlers in world cricket and an accomplished batsman, a great all-rounder and a charismatic captain.

The seventies and eighties produced four of the world’s leading all-rounders. All regarded as giants of cricket, Richard Hadlee of New-Zealand, Kapil Dev of India, Ian Botham of England and Khan. His adversary, Richard Hadlee, praised his remarkable ability in his book, Rhythm and Swing as “the best of the age”.

He gained the captaincy of Pakistan at the age of thirty in 1982, following a rebellion in the dressing room. Ever shy from his time as a boy at Zamman Park, it followed him to the player’s box: “When I became the cricket captain, I couldn’t speak to the team directly, I was so shy. I had to tell the manager, I said, ‘listen, can you talk to them? This is what I want to convey to the team. I mean, in early team meetings I used to be so shy and embarrassed; I couldn’t talk to the team.”

Much of his success as a captain stemmed from many match-winning performances.

His ability to lead a troublesome squad only helped his reputation as the leading figure of international sport.

The mid eighties were tumultuous for the cricket captain. In 1984, his mother was diagnosed with cancer and passed away the following year. Cancer in Pakistan was known as a rich man’s disease since only they could fly out to get treatment in Europe. Khan travelled to many hospitals in Pakistan only to find that none of the cancer patients were able to afford treat­ ment. This inspired him to build the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hos­pital and Research Centre.

In 1987, a nagging injury forced him to retire, only to be approached a year later

by Pakistani President Zia ul Haq who appealed to him to return to lead the team towards the 1992 World Cup to be held in Australia.

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ASIA

Prior to founding the Tahreek-e-Insaaf , Khan met many politically minded people, who had seen Pakistan deteriorate over the previous decades. All had the same perception of Pakistani leaders; that they used the country to amass millions of Dollars only to leave it worse off than when they had begun. Khan looked for people he could support outside of the present or previous ruling elite. He found none willing to take such daring a step as to oppose them.

His journey into politics came not from his studies at Oxford, as he found politicians appalling. It came from a much deeper source. After his mother had passed away, he found solace in the company of Mian Bashir, a man with a great spiritual gift.

Imran Khan waves to crowds at his Lahore rally

The tournament began poorly for the Pakistani team, who were put on the back foot after losing their opening two matches.

The team, hand-picked by Imran, seemed too lightweight, filled with young players.

The thirty eight-year old captain called on his players to “fight like cornered tigers”.

They famously went on to beat England in the final at the MGM ground, Melbourne.

Not only did he lead a young team to victory, but he also developed some of the best players to grace the field, namely: Wasim Akram, Saeed Anwar, Waqar Yunus and Inzamam ul Haq. Two of whom went on to captain the national squad.

After the final, he retired and took on the project of building the cancer hospital.

Imran’s understanding of social respon­ sibility comes from two sources. The social set up of Europe during his early years in England and, later, the actual make up of Muslim cities during the Mughal period. He says in his book, Pakistan: A personal history: “India had a decentralised system of education before the arrival of the British.

Each village had its own schools supported by revenues generated locally, while colleges and madrasas of higher education were run by educational trusts, or waqf

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boards … when Bengal was conquered by the East India Company in 1757, it was discovered that 34 percent of the land generated no taxes because it was owned by various trusts, giving free education and healthcare. According to a survey by G.W Leitner in 1850, some of the madrassas were of an extremely high standard - as good as Oxford and Cambridge.”

Once the cancer hospital was built and was in operation Khan began new projects. Two more hospitals were to be built, one in Karachi and another in Peshawar, together with a ‘knowledge city’ based on the Oxford model, in the lovely countryside of Mianwali, the first of its kind in rural Pakistan.

His own philosophy, that of “the more you challenge yourself, the more you discover the greater reserves of strength within you” has kept him constantly seeking new goals to conquer.

In May 1995, Khan married the heiress, Jemima Marcelle Goldsmith in a grand wedding in Paris. The marriage was strained however through his overriding ambition to bring about justice and a socioeconomic revolution in Pakistan. In 1996, he founded the Tahreek-e-Insaaf, Pakis­ tan’s Movement for Justice (PTI).

As Khan was not religious, Mian Bashir taught him, with great patience, the meanings to the different rituals performed

by Muslims. He made him understand the need for devotion instead of doing things merely through having to. He taught him the practices of the Prophet Muhammed, peace and blessing be upon him, not only in worship but in living daily life. This knowledge, eventually lead him to the forefront of politics.

His ambition to be the leader of Pakistan was put on the back foot after the 97 elections when he failed to win a single seat. This election run battered him, he was hurled to the media as a Zionist agent trying to take over Pakistan; his young wife was used as proof; forged pictures showing his father-in-law handing him a 40 million pound cheque, accusations serving to ensure that he remains a political outcast. He describes this defeat “like the Charge of the Light brigade; without the horses and without the arms”.

Nawaz Sharif had won his second term as Prime Minister. Sharif’s industrial steel mill empire had grown by 4,000 percent since he had entered politics under Ziaul-Haq. Much like the Bhutto’s the Sharif family looted Pakistani coffers.

ASIA

In 1999, another coup d’etat took place.

Gen. Musharraf took over the seat of power after the ordered disaster in Kargil, Kashmir.

The Kargil war, as it is known, pitted Nawaz Sharif against the army. The Pakistani military had gained a superior position across the Line of Control (LOC); they were finally in a position to exact revenge for the loss of East Pakistan in 1971. To the surprise of the army, the prime minister called for a retreat. The army was outraged.

The tension it caused led to a coup.

The prowess of the army was supported by the PTI as they felt it was a move away from the plunder that had taken place under the Bhutto and Sharif regimes. After three years, elections were due to take place. The former head of the ISI won the 2002 elections. The PTI won its first seat in parliament; Imran represented Mianwali from 2002 until 2007. This period however, was marked by the events of 11 September 2001 and its aftermath.

The war in Afghanistan had far reaching affects on Pakistan. Gen. Musharraf’s alliance and kowtowing to every US demand bathed his era in Pakistani blood.

The brutal use of force along the western boarder led to thousands of dead civilians and millions of people displaced. The slaughter at the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in 2007, when the army killed woman and children; the extra judicial killings of Nawab Akbar Bhukti of Baluchistan and the amnesty brokered by Musharraf, the US and Benazir Bhutto to drop all charges against Asif Ali Zardari, all were what Gen. Musharraf left as a legacy.

After the elections of 2007, an election that the PTI boycotted, Musharraf declared a state of emergency. All media houses were blocked; politicians from opposition parties were held under house arrest, the only figure sent to prison was Imran Khan. After two weeks of evading arrest, he gave himself up at the University of Lahore. After

Chairman Imran Khan addresses members at a major PTI rally in Swabi

eight days in prison, Imran was released.

Pakistan experienced more of the same, with the recently widowed Zardari, known as ‘Mr. Ten Percent’ at the helm of the country. Yet, something was changing, in all the chaos, it seemed that people had veered towards the former cricket star. His speeches struck a chord with more people each time. Once shy, he was now talking to hundreds of thousands of people.

The message was simple – a sovereign Pakistan, standing on its own – no more killing of its own people; no more imprisoning people without due process; no more relying on foreign subsidies from the US, the UK, the World bank or the IMF. The ones who were previously tax exempt, the wealthy families, would be taxed; the foundations of a welfare state (waqf) as is the way of Muslim cities would be implemented. Khan was a fervent believer that Pakistan should not fight the war on terror and that US aid only served to debilitate the country.

These issues led many of his opponents from inside and outside Pakistan to label Khan an ‘Islamist’, a recently coined term used to conjure up those who were not apologetic about being Muslim, who

believed in their own sovereignty and did not adhere to US foreign policy.

Today, the PTI are the leading party in Pakistan, Khan’s following comes from all sections of society; from the educated urban youth to the rural farmers, the women and elderly.

The chants at each rally in Lahore, Karachi and other Pakistani cities show a leader whom the people trust. They once suppor­ted him as a captain. They held mass fundraising to build his hospital and now they see him as the only hope after decades of being left to fend for themselves.

The support he has from the people is one of hope; they believe in him. Tenacious in his will to succeed, Khan is the person who has the potential to attain the long looked for leadership qualities – that certain measure of man in Pakistan – in whom faith and national interests, Deen wa Dawlet, are combined.

Pakistan’s future lies in the hands of Imran Khan. The experience he has gained from the previous elections has undoubtedly been a means for gaining familiarity with the field he is on. As he has proved in his cricket career, once he has the opposition on the mat, the only bet is on him.

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AFRICA

Leaders discuss Cape to Cairo trade zone

by Laslo Trankovits and Carola Frentzen

“A large common market from Cairo to Cape Town,” is how Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete recently described his vision for the future of a Continental Free Trade Zone (CFTA), even though today’s reality looks very different.

Nevertheless, the intention is to bring this dream within grasp during the annual African Union (AU) summit, whose main session started in Addis Ababa on Sunday this last weekend. A roadmap has set

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2017 as the target date, but there are considerable obstacles.

Renewed talks have been launched, combining at least three of the eight

overlapping African economic com­mu­ nities – EAC, SADC and COMESA – in the east and south of the continent.

But despite endless conferences, alliances and treaties, trade within Africa makes up just 12% of the continent’s total, according to figures for 2010 from the African Development Bank.

Africa has little commercial significance even for South Africa, the only state on

AFRICA

the continent characterised as a “Newly Industrialised Country”. More than 85 percent of South African trade goes outside Africa.

An economic community could be a decisive step in the battle against poverty and towards sustained development, just as wider economic groupings are playing a dominant role in the economies of South East Asia, Europe and North America.

“The AU summit will, on the one hand, discuss a plan of action with a view to boosting the internal African trade, and on the other, be the starting gun for the creation of the continental free trade zone,” said Stephen Karingi, director of the Department for Regional Integration, Infrastructure and Trade at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). A central aim is to export more finished goods, not just natural resources, to the rest of the world.

Africa’s oft-cited economic boom in recent years has been nourished largely by a single source – raw materials – consisting by more than two-thirds of the export of resources such as oil, uranium, titanium, copper and gold.

Demand within Africa has risen moderately, but serious problems stand in the way of a real economic boom that would improve the lot of the majority of Africans. Firstly, there are too few locally manufactured products.

Asian producers fill the shelves of African stores with laptops, mobile phones, clothing, pots, tools, television sets and even ready-made meals, quite apart from machine tools and other heavy industry products.

Industrial production declined as a proportion of output from 15 to 10% over the past 20 years, according to UNECA. By comparison, in Asia it rose over the same period from 23.5 to 30%.

Delegates at the recent AU Summit

Another barrier to trade is the poor state of African transport infrastructure.

Trading structures and warehouses, trucks, railways and roads are all lacking – everything, in fact, needed to promote trade.

“Where there is a road network, traders often lose too much time at border stations,” Karingi says.

All of this leads to a situation in which even countries with plenty of fertile soil, like Nigeria, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, continue to import food – or depend on international food aid.

Nevertheless, projects are underway to improve infrastructure, including the

planned Trans-West African Coastal Highway from Mauritania to Nigeria, and the Northern Corridor intended to facilitate sea access for landlocked countries like Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda, through the Kenyan port of Mombasa.

Africa has everything needed to emulate the Asian tigers – cheap labour, plentiful natural resources, good soil, potential markets, and a plan for the future.

But the political structures are lacking, along with investment of the proceeds from natural resources into infrastructure and education.

“We can achieve all of this, if the political will is there,” said Kikwete, summarising Africa’s prospects. (Source: Bloomberg)

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C U LT U R E

Little Man, What Now? How does an isolated individual man or woman maintain decency and dignity amid economic crisis?

by Abu Bakr Rieger

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C U LT U R E

It is no coincidence that Hans Fallada, one of Germany’s great authors, is now being rediscovered. English translations of his works are attracting worldwide interest.

A rediscovery is underway. Germany’s Aufbau-Verlag has scored a success by reprinting almost all of the works of one of Germany’s most important authors: Hans Fallada.

Who was this man? That is not an easy question to answer.

Hans Fallada, real name Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen, was by all accounts one the most contradictory and intriguing figures of the last century. If you want to understand the lot of the Germans between the World Wars and how it was to live under the rule of ideology, then his moving social portraits are compulsory reading.

In post Great-War Germany, amid inflation and mass unemployment, the populace staggered beneath ideological experimentation. However Fallada was more interested in the harshness of those people’s everyday lives than he was in the grandiose political concepts of the epoch. In his novels, the protagonists wrestle more with their private plights than they do with great political solutions.

Things back then were certainly much more severe than they are today in terms of mass unemployment, bitter, widespread poverty and gross monetary devaluation. Today’s renaissance of Fallada’s works is anything but a coincidence. The fundamental questions which confront the Fallada reader are once again occupying Europe’s reading public: how does the individual preserve his integrity and decency in the midst of economic crisis? The spectre of inflation is once again on the loose in Europe.

Fallada’s artistic creativity was born out of friction between adverse circumstances in his own life; intoxication, drugs, excess, as well as financial struggles and ceaseless work – all characterised the master’s erratic existence. He walked a fine line even in his youth. Most of the time between 1917 and 1919 was spent in rehabilitation and private sanatoriums on account of his alcohol and morphine addictions. It was during that period that he first attempted to write. Fallada was given penal sentences twice for fraud and embezzlement, crimes he had committed to finance his addictions. He made use of his time on the fringes of society, observing unnoticed many figures for his subsequent novels.

The love of a woman proved a lifeline, at least for a while. In 1928, having been released from his second term in prison, he became acquainted with Anna “Suse” Issel in Hamburg, who

Hans Fallada during his early years

was to become the model for his famous character Lämmchen and whom he married the following year.

The publisher Ernst Rowohlt organised a part-time job for Fallada at his company so that he could at last dedicate himself to his writing without serious financial worries. That was how the worldfamous novel Little Man, What Now? the book that gave Fallada his breakthrough as an author along with international acclaim was written. In the novel, its principal characters Pinneberg and Lämmchen struggle to sustain their little private world amid general economic tumult. In a series of painful episodes, Fallada depicts Pinneberg running the gauntlet as he tries to establish himself in Berlin in the 1930s. Although the little man’s demise seems inevitable, the couple’s love for one another provides a steady glimmer of hope and an incentive to press on. Yet, in the words of the Berlin playwright Tankred Dorst, “the solace they find in one another and one which makes them so appealing to readers and audiences proves a dangerous delusion in the end.”

Lämmchen is among the most intriguing female figures of German literature. Despite her remarkable spiritual support for her husband, she has neither political solutions nor any economic alternative to offer in the face of personal and general catastrophe.

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C U LT U R E

Hans Fallada working at his desk in 1947

The couple remain isolated and cut off from the possibility of any broader political involvement. It is a dilemma which many married couples may be able to empathise with, especially in our big Western cities but also in an Arab world recently so agitated by globalisation.

The catastrophe which followed and emerged out of this economic drama in Germany also became a subject of Fallada’s, and not only in theory. In March 1933, Fallada was denounced to the local Sturmabteilung by his landlord, who had eavesdropped on a conversation with Ernst von Salomon which he claimed had been subversive. Fallada was taken briefly into custody, after which he had to leave Berlin hastily.

Living at his country estate in Carwitz in the Uckermark region of Brandenburg, where he moved in 1933 to find some kind of physical and spiritual asylum, he began to describe the social and political plight of the Germans in those difficult years. It was there that he wrote novels such as Wolf Among Wolves, in which Fallada deals in depth with the subject of inflation, the paper money crisis which was to become a collective trauma for the German population.

Today you can visit the Fallada Museum in Carwitz and spend some hours enjoying the unique idyll which he created there as an avid agricultural enthusiast. There must have been enough

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to eat there even during wartime, and he spent many a happy day at Carwitz, but when you visit it is easy to imagine the stark contradictions in the life of the man. His work and personality continue to exercise remarkable magnetism. According to the museum director Dr Stefan Knüppel there were 1,500 more visitors in 2011 than there had been the year before.

Sadly the author did not manage to make his wholesome little private world last. In 1944 Fallada’s marriage broke up and the couple divorced. In August of that year, during an altercation with his ex-wife, he fired a shot into a table with a small muzzle loading pistol called a Terzerol, for which he was accused of attempted manslaughter, judged mentally unaccountable and locked up in Strelitz Asylum from September to December 1944.

In 1946 Fallada was admitted to the psychiatric clinic at Berlin’s Charité Hospital for treatment of alcohol and morphine addiction.

There, in poor physical health, he composed his 900-page book Every Man Dies Alone in less than a month. The book describes the authentic story of the downfall of Otto and Elise Hampel, a married couple who distributed postcard fliers criticising Hitler and were found out. It is considered the first book by a nonémigré German author to describe the tragedy of resistance against National Socialism. In 1947, three months after completing the manuscript, Fallada died in Berlin of heart failure.

C U LT U R E

Lessons from History

by Luqman Nieto

Issue 12 during - March 2012Depression 51 Seattle’s Hooverville squatter settlements the Great of the 1930′s

C U LT U R E

Taking a long view of history, charting the inevitable rises and falls of political, cultural and economic systems can be an invaluable lesson in these times of crisis.

We are currently living through tumultuous times. The system that many thought to be definitive is proving to have serious flaws.

Greece, celebrated as the birthplace of national democracy, has become the deathbed of global capitalism. It would seem we have truly reached the end of a cycle.

It is important now, more than ever, to look at this event in the light of history, whilst perhaps pondering the words of the poet Mathew Arnold. Are we indeed, “wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born”?

Ironically, the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia, a member of the Romanov family, was spared his life thanks to his direct involvement in the death of Rasputin – when after the murder he was sent to the Persian front and subsequently escaped the Bolshevik massacre of his family. It has been recounted that at dinner parties in London, the Duke would state that the reason why the Russian aristocracy suffered such a fate was because they thought they would be there forever. We must avoid making the same mistake.

It is part of what Ortega y Gasset called “the plenitude of times,” to believe that we have arrived at the end of civilization, that we are in the most advanced stage of human progress and that this system will perpetuate. Believing this is itself a cha­ racteristic of its opposite, that everything is about to change.

This belief also includes a lack of motivation within the people, for they think that all that could be done has been achieved, and now they are only left to reap the rewards.

We saw this in Imperial Rome before the

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The signing of the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648

Vandals conquered it. We are seeing it again in the U.S., as the Latin American people proceed to conquer it. Europe is no different. In fact, this is part of its history.

Germany cannot ignore the growing population of Turkish origin; neither England with the people of the Subcontinent, already third generation British citizens; nor France with the North Africans.

Therefore, it is important to know how the current nomos started and what preceded it, in order to understand the current situation and a possible future.

There are a few dates and events that can help as an introduction and furnish a timeline on which to peg the wider and more abstract subject of power-change through industrial and ideological revolution.

Beginning with the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648, which created what Carl Schmitt called, the ‘ius publicum europeum’, a social and diplomatic system to regulate the relations between European powers.

This system began its demise with the French Revolution in 1789, followed by the Napoleonic Wars, 1799-1815, despite attempts by European powers to re-establish it at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The French Revolution did not deal the definitive blow however, but the first of a series of blows that brought it to its knees in World War I. It was a gradual process, which included the revolutions of 1848, the ultimate creation of the state, as evidenced in Germany in 1871, together with the social and economic change for it to completely disappear by the end of the Great War. The ‘ius publicum europeum’ was based on a sovereign state system abstractly known to most historians as the “Ancien Régime”. The system encompassed all the monarchies of Europe and was cha­ racterised by a hierarchical division of the state. There was the monarchy, the nobility, the church and the people. The monarchy was divinely legitimized by the church as the ruler of the temporal affairs of the world.

C U LT U R E

Government was based upon the division of territory controlled by the nobility, which provided justice and protection within the lands allocated to them by the king. In exchange for that privilege, the aristocracy provided the king with soldiers and the taxes collected. The power thus held by the king and the aristocracy was held through armed force, maintaining as they did the monopoly on violence.

The church governed all spiritual matters, including education and propaganda, and because they had the right to crown the king and the sole privilege to admit people into heaven, they became sha­ reholders of power with the king and the aristocracy.

Those who were ruled by these three classes were the people, the great majority; who obeyed in exchange for protection and justice and the guarantee of being accepted into heaven.

Nevertheless, this hierarchical order was not centralized and individuals were left a great deal of freedom. It was not a totalitarian state, but rather, as Schmitt called it, “a consensus agreed upon”.

The Industrial Revolution, which some historians date from 1750 onwards, brought major change. The “Ancien Régime” was primarily based on land, and wealth was tied to it.

The Industrial Revolution brought a new class of wealthy people and professionals into the scope of society and produced a flight from the countryside into the cities amongst the lower classes.

Machiavelli, the great Italian political thinker and writer of The Prince, in the chapter on “Principalities Acquired by Civil Strife”, says that there are two dynamic energies within any state: the nobles and the people.

The nobles were those with a monopoly on land and on trade, whereas by the people he meant the rich business class

Statue of Oliver Cromwell outside the Houses of Parliament, London

and professionals, not the plebs. The strife between these two classes produced every change in government.

The Industrial Revolution brought this new city-class into pre-eminence. Together, with them, a liberal ideology was developed in contra-distinction to the conservative ideology of the nobles. Therefore, the strife of this class to achieve political repre­sen­ tation and economic benefits from the nobles produced a clash and a dislocation of power from the “Ancien Régime” in order to create a new one.

In England this political strife manifested in the civil war of 1642-51, which culminated with the puritanical dictatorship imposed

by Oliver Cromwell and was constitutionally established by the ascension to the throne of the puppet king William III. Germany was still under the lingering effects of an abstract Holy Roman Empire and in Russia it happened later, in 1917.

It was in France where this political strife acquired the more crude characteristics of a civil war and which set a precedent for the rest of Europe. It is not in vain that

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C U LT U R E

Napoleon’s last victory at the battle of Wagram, 1809

Prince Metternich, the Austrian statesman said: “When France sneezes, Europe catches a cold”; a quote still relevant at this moment.

The French Revolution of 1789 toppled the monarchy of Louis XVI and ending the old nomos and brought into power a new system, the modern state. The new revo­ lutionary state started through civil war. It had its foundations in the widespread discontent with the monarchy by the masses because of famine, economic recession and military defeat.

hierarchical order and the domination of the church ended. The cult of god was abolished and replaced with the doctrine of human rights and equality. The army was separated from the aristocracy, rein­ vented through mass conscription and controlled by the Assembly.

Through demagogy it brought into power the new bourgeoisie, a new rich and professional class, supported by the masses lured into a frenzy of change, but which realistically little changed the way they lived.

The domination of the church was abolished; where before men had been sinners, they were now citizens. The land was no longer divided according to the seigniorial contract; rather it belonged to the state. Elections and universal male suffrage took the place of agreement between the king and nobility, and between nobility and the people. As would happen, however, the Assembly was dominated by alternating political groupings, who, for all their high ideals, soon established a dictatorship of the few.

The new regime ended the old divisions of society and replacing them with a centralized state; the place previously occupied by the king now occupied by an assembly of elected representatives. The

In 1799 Napoleon, previously a general of the French Republic, executed a coup d’état and became First Consul for life, establishing a dictatorship in the style of the Roman dictators.

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Through a series of wars (1799-1814/15) Napoleon developed a new type of totalitarian state based on the centralization of power, the control of the army and control of currency. In fact, what the French Revolution achieved, and which Napoleon perfected, was a system entirely different to that of the “Ancien Régime”.

Instead of a divine claim, it claimed legitimacy through secular means and achieved control over the populace in more aggressive but subtler ways.

The bourgeoisie class did not bring down the monarchy to protect the interests of the people, but rather to take their place and privileges. The new revolutionary secular system introduced an irreversible change to the ‘ius publicum europeum’ and altered the balance of power.

When Europe’s regents defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 and tried to re-establish the “Ancien Régime” at the Congress of Vienna, they were in effect trying to revive something which was already a corpse.

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