“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: TheNew 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.
“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.
A young refugee carries drinking water to his home in the Zhar Karez Afghan Refugee Camp in Balochistan. IMAGE/ 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.
Pope Francis poses for a boy’s selfie during an audience at the Vatican on May 7, 2015. IMAGE/Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images/CNN
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.
They are kissing my ass’: Trump says countries are pleading to negotiate tariffs – video
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.
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!”
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.”
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.
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.
Donald Trump delivers an economic policy speech to the Detroit Economic Club, Monday, Aug. 8, 2016, in Detroit. IMAGE/AP/Politico
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.
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 70th 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.
The New Bandung Spirit Is About Industrial Development
by VIJAY PRASHAD
IMAGE/ STX
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.
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