by SALMAN KUREISHY

“Dabashi argues that in the Persian poetic tradition, which Rumi inherited and enriched, the human and the divine, sacred and profane, spiritual and carnal are often tantalisingly mixed”

“I used to recite prayers; now I recite rhymes and poems and songs”

(Rumi – Divan, Ghazal #2351/17)

A spectre has been haunting some Muslim writers and critics over the last few years – the spectre of a popular appreciation of the poetry of Jalal-ad Din Muhammed, better known as Rumi. It is the spectre of ordinary mortals reading some of Rumi’s poems with little or no interest in his piety, Islam or the Qura’n. Allegedly, an unholy alliance of Western interpreters, translators, pop icons and New Age spiritualists have conspired to ‘Erase Islam’, and ‘de-Islamise’ Rumi. He became one of our ‘Best Selling Poets’ because his poetry has been taken out of its Islamic context as part of a ‘spiritual colonisation’; pop stars Madonna and Chris Martin of Coldplay read and quote Rumi; and horror of horrors, his poetry is being used on pillow covers, wedding invitations, and in books on mindfulness-based meditation, a very secular activity. This, allegedly, is one part of the West’s demonisation of Muslims, and characterisation of Islam as a ‘Cancer.’

If you have heard such allegations, you will find their sources- verbatim, including the language and ideas- here: The New Yorker, 5 January 2017: “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi,” by Rozina Ali; New York Times Book Review, 20 January 2017: “How Did Rumi Become One of Our Best-Selling Poets?” by Azadeh Moaveni, and Al Jazeera, 17 December 2023: A tale of two Rumis – of the East and of the West, By Indlieb Farazi Saber. These contributors, in turn, seem indebted to a few Muslim authors and scholars like Omid Safi, Muhammad Ali Mojaradi, or Sharghzadeh (#RumiWasMuslim website), and Ibrahim Gamard, co-author/translator “The Quatrains of Rumi” and manager Rumisite.com. Some of these ideas found their way even to the BBC website (now archived); for example inanities like, “Love is an overwhelming part of Rumi’s work, but for Rumi, this love was a higher love for God, and not for humans.”

Rumi’s encounter with Shams Tabrizi turned him from a preacher to a poet. These allegations turned me from a lay reader of Rumi’s lyric poetry into an amateur, quasi-scholar. I argue here that these allegations are misplaced, unjustified, biased and wrong. Some of them use selective and self-serving citations from Rumi scholarship. My arguments are informed by common sense, and my own understanding of poetry. I have found support in the scholarship of specialists in Persian language and literature, both Western and Iranian. Through a process of ‘deconstruction,’ of arguably one of the most sensual of Rumi’s ghazals (#1826) from the Divan cited by Rozina Ali, I hope to expose the serious flaws in ‘erasure of Islam’ argument. The analysis covers Rumi’s concept of love (ishq), both human and divine. It addresses the ‘Qura’n in Persian’ label often used to stifle discussion. I provide supporting references/links – a kind of literature review and reading list. Those who do not agree with me can directly go to these resources and come to their own conclusion.

Rumi – The Pious and the Poet in Context

I first heard of Rumi as a young boy. In our north-Indian home, my father would often recite verses from Persian poets Hafiz, Sa’di and Rumi. The context most often wasn’t religious. These verses captured and made an everyday emotion or situation memorable, much like a quote from the Bible, Shakespeare, or Wordsworth does in English speaking cultures. One day, in a wistful mood we were reminiscing the premature death of my mother, the separation of our siblings. My father recited, and translated the famous lines from Rumi’s song of the reed flute in the Masnavi– ‘Beshnu as nay chun hikayet mi kunad- Waz judai ha shikayat mi kunad’ (Listen to the reed-flute, the story it tells! How it complains of separation”). I was hooked. Rumi’s words, their music and rhythm, made a permanent home in my heart. Years have passed, and yet, the sound of a flute triggers a flood of memories of my father and mother. Rumi’s words work like the smell of madeleine in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Interestingly, my father also mentioned as an aside, the Persian poet Jami’s hyperbole about the Masnavi being the ‘Qura’n in Persian.’ My preference for the poet rather than the pious Sufi was made there and then.

Friday Times for more

BLACK AGENDA REPORT (Intro)

“This is not high-way robbery; it can be better called international burglary.”

In 1934, Marcus Garvey wrote a short commentary for The Black Man titled “The American Dollar.” Published at the height of the Great Depression, “The American Dollar” is a short and succinct evisceration of the global financial elite – and an impassioned defense of the international working classes against predatory policies. Garvey argues that financial speculators have been able to enrich themselves through the manipulation of the price of international currencies like the British pound, the French franc, the German mark, and the U.S. dollar. This speculation has created a global economy that enriches the already rich, while furthering impoverishing the already poor. For Garvey, such speculators – he calls them “scientific financiers” – make up the most dangerous class in the world.

Garvey must have held a special bitterness towards this class. In 1923, after years of being hounded by the “Garvey Must Go” campaigners and the FBI, Garvey was convicted of one count of mail fraud in relation to the sale of stock in The Black Star Line. He was fined $1,000 and sentenced to five years in prison, the maximum penalty under the law. He served about half his sentence before he was deported to Jamaica in 1927. Meanwhile, Charles E. Mitchell, the president of the National City Bank of New York, and Albert H. Wiggin, President of the Chase National Bank, engaged in years of fraudulent and illegal stock manipulation that cost the US public millions of dollars and pushed the world to economic collapse. Neither Mitchell nor Wiggin faced any sort of punishment.

The resonances between Garvey’s times and our own are obvious – and Garvey’s “The American Dollar” seems as relevant now as it was in the 1930s. We reprinted it below.

The American dollar

by MARCUS GARVEY

The American dollar is still low. The Pound Sterling still values more than the $5 bill, and so another world financial situation is at hand. Business people everywhere who have been dealing with the dollar have had to change suddenly their methods either for good or ill. This will affect America toward one way or the other. Some business people had been dealing with the English pound rather than the American dollar for some time, because it was of greater advantage to them. Now that the dollar is gone down, there is a switch from the pound to the dollar, and so there is an up and down in finance; but have we ever stopped to think why this inflation and deflation go on? It is simply because a school of scientific financiers and speculators have worked out a system by which they can upset the pocket-book of every citizen, and take out of it as much change as they want from time to time. Sometimes they take out extract change for the English pound and then at another time they do the same thing for the American dollar and the French franc and the German mark, but when a totalization takes place, the difference of change goes to the financiers and to the speculators and the citizens go back to work again to fill their pocket-books. This is not high-way robbery; it can be better called international burglary.

Black Agenda Report for more

by KHUDAI NOOR NASAR

Walwala, a refugee from Afghanistan, is in seventh grade and attends school in Peshawar, Pakistan’s capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, along with her sister. As their family prepares to return to Afghanistan, both sisters are anxious and deeply worried about their future in a country where girls’ education is banned beyond sixth grade.

“My sister and I can’t stop worrying about it,” Walwala said. “We know our lives will be confined inside the house, and it breaks our hearts.”

Their parents have already packed their belongings and plan to depart for Afghanistan in the first week of May. Walwala’s father is also panic-stricken. “I don’t have enough money to rent a truck. We don’t have a home there. I don’t know how I will support my family, my children, and won’t be able to attend school,” he said, listing several other concerns.

Afghans who are being forcefully expelled from Pakistan will face many hardships, including limited access to education, especially for girls, widespread unemployment, restrictions on personal freedoms, and inadequate medical care. Many young Afghans, born and raised in Pakistan, are confronting a future they have never known.

The thought of this upheaval weighs heavily on Zahoor (name changed for security reasons), a TikTok influencer with millions of followers. With his long hair, stylish beard, and fashionable outfits, Zahoor became well-known for his videos featuring Pashto songs. But now, he fears he will have to abandon both his online persona and personal style. The Taliban regime has already banned TikTok, western-style haircuts, fashionable beards, and music—although long hair has not been officially outlawed.

“I think my whole life will change there; I will have to change myself,” he told me. 

For the past forty years, millions of Afghans fleeing successive wars have made Pakistan their home, building new lives in exile. While many worked as laborers, others managed to start businesses, pursue education, raise families, and find a measure of peace and stability. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), however, Afghans in Pakistan routinely face discrimination, limited access to formal education, employment, or buying property, and lack of legal protections—conditions that already render their lives precarious. 

This fragile stability began to unravel in 2022, when peace talks between the Pakistani government and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP)—brokered by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan—collapsed. In the aftermath, terrorist attacks surged across Pakistan, and authorities increasingly blamed Afghanistan and the Taliban for supporting the TTP. Officials alleged that many of these attacks were planned inside Afghanistan, with Afghan nationals implicated in some suicide bombings. In response, Pakistan launched an aggressive repatriation campaign. In 2023, the government introduced a stringent one-document regime, sealed its border with Afghanistan, and ordered all undocumented Afghans and foreign nationals to leave.

Pervez Khan was a young man when he migrated to Peshawar with his wife nearly four decades ago. Today, as he prepares to leave Pakistan, he is surrounded by a large family—six sons, three daughters, who are all married, and dozens of grandchildren. “In the four decades since I migrated to Pakistan, neither I nor any of my children have returned to Afghanistan. Leaving now feels like being forced to leave my own homeland,” Pervez said, selling fruit from his cart in Peshawar.

For Pervez, like many others, Pakistan is home. Returning to Afghanistan feels like migrating to an unfamiliar, foreign land. “We’ve endured every hardship over the past forty years, but through hard work, we managed to build meaningful lives here,” he said. “Now, going back to Afghanistan means starting all over again from scratch.”

Although Pervez says there is currently no crackdown on Afghan refugees in Peshawar, he is exhausted by the constant warnings and statements from Pakistani officials. The province’s Chief Minister, Ali Amin Gandapur, recently announced that Afghan refugees would not be expelled from his province. Gandapur, a member of former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, openly criticized the current government under Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, calling its refugee policy “faulty.”

Human rights groups like Amnesty International have condemned the forced repatriation, recognizing that the government’s actions come “amid a campaign to wrongfully demonize Afghan nationals as so-called criminals and terrorists”.  Currently, this process continues in most provinces, particularly in the cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, except for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where voluntary returns are still taking place. 

Center for the Study of Organized Hate for more

by WALTER BAIER

Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio SJ (17 Dec 1936 – 21 Apr 2025)

“Against an Economy That Kills”

Just a few months after his election, Pope Francis startled the world with the words: “We are in a third world war fought piecemeal.” The last public message he shared with the city and the world on Easter Sunday echoed that same concern: “Peace for Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine, and the whole world.” Indeed, concern for peace, the preservation of Mother Earth and care for the poor form the bracket that encloses Francis’ pontificate.

Equally characteristic was his first pilgrimage as pope, to the refugee camp on the island of Lampedusa. There, he condemned the transformation of the Mediterranean into a cemetery without gravestones, calling out the shame of the European Union.

On 13 March 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the first Latin American pope. By choosing the name Francis, he signalled his commitment to the poor. In his first apostolic exhortation, he wrote:

“Just as the commandment ‘You shall not kill’ sets a clear limit to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘no’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.”

The milestones of Francis’ social teaching are his encyclicals Laudato si’ (2015) and Fratelli tutti (2020), where he called for integral ecology, global social justice, and the preservation of nature.

“If nature is seen solely as a source of profit and gain, this has serious consequences for society. The logic that allows the strongest to prevail has led to immense inequality, injustice, and violence affecting the majority of humanity, because resources then become the property of those who arrive first or who are most powerful—the winner takes all.”

To those who accused him of communism for such words, the pope replied that they failed to understand that the poor are at the very heart of the Gospel.

Francis was not a communist, but a man of dialogue. Twice, he welcomed representatives of the European left to the Vatican: Alexis Tsipras and myself in 2014, and a delegation from the Christian-Marxist dialogue initiative DIALOP in 2024—meetings that went far beyond formal protocol.

The Church is a human institution. Pope Francis was not infallible, nor did he wish to be seen as such. Even under his leadership, the progress of women’s emancipation fell short of what was needed, and his stance on homosexual love remained ambivalent. Yet much of what he said and did pointed beyond these limitations—toward the utopia of a Church that stands with the poor and works alongside all people of goodwill to safeguard our common world.

European Left for more

by DAVID SMITH

President says at National Republican Congressional Committee dinner that world leaders are ‘kissing my ass’

Donald Trump has insisted “I know what the hell I’m doing” by imposing sweeping tariffs and bragged that world leaders are “kissing my ass” as they try to negotiate trade deals.

The US president was speaking to political donors at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual fundraising dinner in Washington on Tuesday night.

His rambling 90-minute address came just hours before his latest tariffs went into effect. “I know what the hell I’m doing,” the president said. “I know what I’m doing. And you know what I’m doing too. That’s why you vote for me.”

The administration has given conflicting signals over whether the tariffs are open to negotiation. Trump claimed: “I’m telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are. They are dying to make a deal.”

Mocking the pleas of foreign leaders, he parodied: “Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir!”

Less than a day later, Trump shelved plans to hike tariffs on most countries except China, unveiling a 90-day pause and pulling back from his global trade war after days of market turmoil and warnings of recession.

After insisting for days that he would hold firm on his aggressive trade strategy, Trump announced that all countries that had not retaliated against US tariffs would receive a reprieve – and only face a blanket US tariff of 10% – until July.

It is unclear where that leaves earlier threats of more tariffs to come. On Tuesday, Trump had said: “We’re going to tariff our pharmaceuticals and once we do that they’re going to come rushing back into our country because we’re the big market … So we’re going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals.”

The tariffs, announced last week on what Trump billed as “liberation day”, have wiped trillions of dollars off the US stock market and raised fears of a global recession; on Wednesday China slapped 84% retaliatory tariffs on US goods. Larry Summers, a former treasury secretary, described it as “the biggest self-inflicted wound we’ve put on our economy in history”.

Even Republicans, unswervingly loyal on other issues, are increasingly uneasy. Several senators have signed on to a bipartisan bill that would require presidents to justify new tariffs to Congress. Don Bacon of Nebraska has said he will introduce a House version of the bill, saying that Congress needs to restore its powers over tariffs.

But Trump lashed out at the dissenters on Tuesday night. The author of The Art of the Deal said: “I see some rebel Republican, some guy who wants to grandstand, say, ‘I think that Congress should take over negotiations.’ Let me tell you, you don’t negotiate like I negotiate.

“I just saw it today, a couple of your congressmen, sir. ‘I think we should get involved in the negotiation of the tariffs.’ Oh that’s what I need, I need some guy telling me how to negotiate.”

The Guardian for more

by STEPHANIE WANGARI & GAYATHRI VAIDYANATHAN

New data reveals the hidden network of African workers powering AI, as they push for transparency from the global companies that employ them indirectly.

• The people behind AI data training and other digital work are often hidden.
• A new map shows workers in 39 African nations employed by outsourcing firms in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
• Some intermediaries did not sufficiently comply with legal requests for worker data.

Firms that provide outsourced digital labor for big tech companies tend to be secretive. They are often bound by legal contracts that limit what they can say, allowing tech companies to distance themselves legally and ethically from their workers, experts told Rest of World. 

“This creates a circle of invisibility around this work,” Antonio Casilli, a sociologist at Polytechnic Institute of Paris who studies the human contributors to artificial intelligence, told Rest of World. Casilli was not involved in the research mentioned below. “Sometimes, I interview people that work for a big company, [and] they sometimes don’t even know when and how many workers they have.”

A new dataset, visualized as maps, reveals the extent to which African workers are indirectly employed in the tech sector, doing content moderation, customer service, and data annotation for AI models, among other jobs. 

Outsourcing firms and their African offices

Companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia hire African workers for training AI models, content moderation and other digital jobs

One of the maps shows the flow of data and knowledge out of 39 African nations to subcontractors, mostly located in the United Arab Emirates, North America, and Europe, with  four outsourcing firms in Africa. From there, it goes on to clients such as Meta, OpenAI, and Samsung. The research was conducted by the African Content Moderators Union (ACMU) and Switzerland-based nonprofit, Personaldata.io.  

Rest of World for more

by SARAH BUCHMEIER

As vital to the success of industrial New England as the mill girls who toiled in the factories were the women who oversaw their lodging.

When Amanda Fox arrived in Lowell, Massachusetts, sometime in the 1840s, she joined a female workforce in what was then the center of the American textile industry. But she didn’t work in the factories as one of the famed “mill girls.” She was a boarding-house keeper, one of dozens of women whose domestic work—performed on an industrial scale—helped make Lowell a “model” industrial city.

About twenty years before Fox arrived, a conglomerate of textile corporations took over farm settlements and tribal territory along the Merrimack River northwest of Boston to build a city of large mills. The mills employed hundreds of young women who worked as weavers and spinners and bobbin girls (collectively referred to as “operatives”). While the workforce changed over decades, the original corporations operated in Lowell for roughly a century before migrating to the South in the 1920s and 1930s. The enormous concentration of workers who came to Lowell without their families required a unique system of housing accommodations. Boarding houses, run by an older generation of women, offered the answer.

In Lowell, boarding houses were built into the design of the city and were owned by the corporations where their tenants toiled.

As historian Wendy Gamber shows, boarding houses in nineteenth-century New England weren’t new—in fact, a large portion of the population lived in them—but the system at Lowell was a relatively novel take on the idea. Since there was essentially no housing stock at the time, boarding houses were built into the design of the city and were owned by the corporations where their tenants toiled. These neat rows of brick townhomes were situated close enough to the mills for the workers to be able to march down for their meals and be back at work within a thirty-minute window. The houses also provided a measure of protection for the young women away from home and assumed to be in danger of succumbing to urban corruption. The primary responsibility of the keeper was to support the factory work schedule (typically a twelve-to-fourteen-hour day) by providing the operatives with meals during their breaks and making sure all residents were in by a ten o’clock curfew. They did the regular washing of bed and kitchen linens and kept the house in order.

Often their duties extended far beyond that, however. The Hamilton Manufacturing Company’s regulations for keepers, for example, show that they were also expected to manage the conduct of their residents, report any misbehavior or lapses in church attendance, and maintain the yards and sidewalks of their houses.

JSTOR Daily for more

by YANIS VAROUFAKIS

Faced with President Trump’s economic moves, his centrist critics oscillate between desperation and a touching faith that his tariff frenzy will fizzle out. They assume that Trump will huff and puff until reality exposes the emptiness of his economic rationale. They have not been paying attention: Trump’s tariff fixation is part of a global economic plan that is solid — albeit inherently risky.

Their thinking is hard-wired onto a misconception of how capital, trade and money move around the globe. Like the brewer who gets drunk on his own ale, centrists ended up believing their own propaganda: that we live in a world of competitive markets where money is neutral and prices adjust to balance the demand and the supply of everything. The unsophisticated Trump is, in fact, far more sophisticated than them in that he understands how raw economic power, not marginal productivity, decides who does what to whom — both domestically and internationally.

Though we risk the abyss staring back when we attempt to gaze into Trump’s mind, we do need a grasp of his thinking on three fundamental questions: why does he believe that America is exploited by the rest of the world? What is his vision for a new international order in which America can be “great” again? How does he plan to bring it about? Only then can we produce a sensible critique of Trump’s economic masterplan.

So why does the President believe America has been dealt a bad deal? His chief complaint is that dollar supremacy may confer huge powers on America’s government and ruling class, but, ultimately, foreigners are using it in ways that guarantee US decline. So what most consider to be America’s exorbitant privilege, he sees as its exorbitant burden.

Trump has been lamenting the decline of US manufacturing for decades: “if you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country.” But why blame this on the dollar’s global role? Because, Trump answers, foreign central banks do not let the dollar adjust downwards to the “right” level — at which US exports recover and imports are restrained. It is not that foreign central bankers are conspiring against America. It is just that the dollar is the only safe international reserve they can get their hands on. It is only natural for European and Asian central banks to hoard the dollars that flow to Europe and Asia when Americans import things. By not swapping their stash of dollars for their own currencies, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the People’s Bank of China and the Bank of England suppress the demand for (and thus the value of) their currencies. This helps their own exporters boost their sales to America and earn even more dollars. In a never-ending circle, these fresh dollars accumulate in the coffers of the foreign central bankers who, to gain interest safely, use them to buy US government debt.

And there’s the rub. According to Trump, America imports too much because it is a good global citizen which feels obliged to provide foreigners with the reserve dollar assets they need. In short, US manufacturing has been in decline because America is a good Samaritan: its workers and middle class suffer so that the rest of the world can grow at its expense.

But the dollar’s hegemonic status also underpins American exceptionalism, as Trump knows and appreciates. Foreign central banks’ purchases of US Treasuries enable the US government to run deficits and pay for an oversized military that would bankrupt any other country. And by being the linchpin of international payments, the hegemonic dollar enables the President to exercise the modern-day equivalent of gunboat diplomacy: to sanction at will any person or government.

Yanis Varoufakis for more

Both the BRICS and Bandung revivalism need tough critiques – not quasi-cults

by PATRICK BOND

How to interpret these inspiring words, by one of the most eloquent, prolific exponents of Global South politics and economic development, Vijay Prashad?

The New Bandung Spirit is about Industrial Development“… The original [BRICS] members – Brazil, China, India, Russia, and South Africa – came together in 2009 in response to the US housing market’s subprime crisis that signalled to them the end of the United States as the buyer of last resort for their goods and services. Talk of South-South cooperation in the decades before 2009 had not been taken too seriously; but after the financial crisis morphed into a long period of low growth rates, impacted deeply by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, it became clear that South-South trade might be the way out for the large economies of the Global South. It made sense to expand the BRICS with the addition of the major energy-producing countries (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) as well as large economies in their regions (Egypt, Ethiopia, and now Indonesia)… Indonesia will host a low-profile event to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference in June. The ‘Bandung Spirit’ is not being widely advertised these days, partly because of the lingering internal problems among Global South states. It seems far more logical to simply allow the contradictions of the present to generate their own new spirit, with the fight to establish sovereignty over a nation’s resources at the center of this new mood.”

There are some good and some bad arguments in this passage. Consider, in the pages below, an extended rewrite of those words, given that there are obviously correct observations (repeated verbatim in bold –and see Prashad’s full analysis here), together with what I see as incorrect or misleading assertions. The latter may create the impressions that BRICS leaders are opponents of neo-liberal corporate dominance; that Indonesia as host for Bandung’s 70^th anniversary is appropriate; and that its new president Prabowo Subianto Djojohadikusumo is potentially an ally of progressives who desire cleaner extractive-sector policies, to properly industrialize.

Prashad wrote the passage above and with his usual charisma, reiterated the points orally on George Galloway’s Mother Of All Talk Showson April 19:

Prashad: “Ever since the collapse of the Western economies because of the subprime economic crisis, there has been a resurrection, in a way, of the countries of the Global South, led by China. And this has created a new kind of spirit. It’s not the same as Bandung, I don’t think we should be naive or nostalgic about it. There is definitely a new mood in the Global South. It’s not a repeat of Bandung, but it’s important for us to remember Bandung in order to understand the developments taking place nowadays.”   Galloway: “Amen to that. Does BRICS in any way represent something of the spirit of Bandung? It’s a collection not only of poor countries of course. Some of the richest countries in the world are now members of BRICS. But is it informed or moved by the same kind of spirit?   Prashad: “You see, it’s really interesting, George because in 2007-08 there was this major financial crisis in the United States and in Europe, and these countries really have never recovered from it. This financial crisis was deepened by the COVID pandemic and then further by the war in Ukraine. It’s not really recovered. You can see that the Trump tariffs are going to hurt a little bit, if he puts them back into effect for Europe and other places. But it’s not like Europe has had a boisterous growth rate for the last decade or so. It’s been in really bad shape. For this reason, countries like India, China, Indonesia and so on decided, ‘Look we can’t rely on Europe and the United States to buy our goods and services. We’re going to have to start selling to each other.’ And that was the impetus in 2009 for the first BRICS meeting. Ever since then the BRICS has largely talked about trade: increasing trade South to South. This has been very important. The Belt and Road Initiative from China is very much a part of this.”

In contrast, I argue below, notwithstanding Prashad’s unparalleled experience in global-justice advocacy, he runs the risk of raising expectations and promoting alliances that will set back international and local progressive politics. One false hope is that Prabowo – formerly the son-in-law of Soeharto during the notorious dictator’s last five years of rule – can and will revive the spirit of Bandung. Other unrealistic expectations are Indonesia adopting a constructive version of what’s termed ‘resource-nationalism’; or ‘industrial development’ emerging merely from the predatory corporate extraction of the world’s largest nickel reserves (by the likes of the notorious Brazilian multinational corporation Vale), often opposed by local residents; or the BRICS keeping progressive promises of South-South trade, based on past performance.

ZNetwork for more

The New Bandung Spirit Is About Industrial Development

by VIJAY PRASHAD

In January 2025, Indonesia – the world’s fourth-largest country by population (282 million) with the seventh-largest Gross Domestic Product by purchasing power parity – joined the BRICS+ bloc.  Eleven countries are now in this expanded grouping. The original members – Brazil, China, India, Russia, and South Africa – came together in 2009 in response to the US housing market’s subprime crisis that signalled to them the end of the United States as the buyer of last resort for their goods and services.

Talk of South-South cooperation in the decades before 2009 had not been taken too seriously; but after the financial crisis morphed into a long period of low growth rates, impacted deeply by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, it became clear that South-South trade might be the way out for the large economies of the Global South. It made sense to expand the BRICS with the addition of the major energy-producing countries (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) as well as large economies in their regions (Egypt, Ethiopia, and now Indonesia).

Indonesia’s entry into the BRICS+ comes during the 70th anniversary year of the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. That conference generated what was then called the ‘Bandung Spirit’, a sensibility for the need of the newly freed countries from colonialism to set their own path for development. The communiqué that was published on the last day of the 1955 conference called for the ‘promotion of mutual interests and cooperation’, which would later be known as South-South Cooperation. The Bandung process created two institutions to carry forward this principle: the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), formed in 1961, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), formed in 1964. While the NAM pushed for an agenda of peace against the Cold War, UNCTAD tried to forge an agenda for development. These two terms – peace and development – framed the Bandung Spirit. Whereas the advancement of both had been curtailed for the poorer countries of the world over the past seven decades, the emergence of the BRICS+ revives some of that hope from 1955.

Canary in the Nickel Mine

Nickel is a metal that is found in two types of ores – sulphides and laterites. It became a key part of the world’s industries with the growth of the stainless-steel industry (about two-thirds of global nickel production is still used to make stainless-steel that is used in everything from building construction to medical equipment). With the pressure to decarbonise, there has been greater interest in the role of nickel in producing lithium-ion batteries for high-performance electric vehicles. The best quality nickel – Class 1 – is found in Russia, Canada, and Australia, where the nickel comes from sulphide ores. Indonesia is the world’s largest nickel producer, but it produces Class 2 nickel from laterite ores (and so sells mainly into the stainless steel market). Chinese private companies such as Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt have built large High-Pressure Acid Leach (HPAL) facilities in Indonesia to convert laterite into battery-grade nickel. If the process of HPAL scales up, it would make Indonesia the largest producer of Class 1 nickel by 2030.

Z Network for more