Both folktales and formal philosophy unsettle us into thinking anew about our cherished values and views of the world
The Hungarian folktale Pretty Maid Ibronka terri?ed and tantalised me
as a child. In the story, the young Ibronka must tie herself to the
devil with string in order to discover important truths. These days, as a
PhD student in philosophy, I sometimes worry I’ve done the same. I
still believe in philosophy’s capacity to seek truth, but I’m conscious
that I’ve tethered myself to an academic heritage plagued by formidable
demons.
The demons of academic philosophy come in familiar guises:
exclusivity, hegemony and investment in the myth of individual genius.
As the ethicist Jill Hernandez notes,
philosophy has been slower to change than many of its sister
disciplines in the humanities: ‘It may be a surprise to many … given
that theology and, certainly, religious studies tend to be inclusive,
but philosophy is mostly resistant toward including diverse voices.’
Simultaneously, philosophy has grown increasingly specialised due to the
pressures of professionalisation. Academics zero in on narrower and
narrower topics in order to establish unique niches and, in the process,
what was once a discipline that sought answers to humanity’s most
fundamental questions becomes a jargon-riddled puzzle for a narrow group
of insiders.
In recent years, ‘canon-expansion’ has been a hot-button topic, as
philosophers increasingly ?nd the exclusivity of the ?eld antithetical
to its universal aspirations. As Jay Gar?eld remarks, it is as
irrational ‘to ignore everything not written in the Eurosphere’ as it
would be to ‘only read philosophy published on Tuesdays.’ And yet,
academic philosophy largely has done just that. It is only in the past
few decades that the mainstream has begun to engage seriously with the
work of women and non-Western thinkers. Often, this endeavour involves
looking beyond the con?nes of what, historically, has been called
‘philosophy’.
Indonesia’s middle class is shrinking, not growing, despite several economic factors working in the nation’s favor. IMAGE/X Screengrab
Social media-driven consumer culture creates false sense of purchasing power that masks deeper economic insecurities
Indonesia’s middle class is shrinking. After expanding by 21 million
from 2014 to 2018, it contracted by 8.5 million in the past six years,
reducing its size to 52 million, as reported by the Indonesia Economic
Outlook 2024.
This class, which comprised 21-23% of the population
before the pandemic, dropped to 17% last year, as outlined by the World
Bank. This decline is mirrored in the aspiring middle class, rising to
49%, with many slipping into more vulnerable categories.
The
so-called key driver of economic growth has contributed 82.3% of total
consumption and 50.7% of tax revenues. Unfortunately, there remains a
systemic challenge faced by Indonesia’s middle class to ascend to the
upper class, from surviving with stagnant income growth to financing
rising living costs to dwelling in a consumptive culture driven by the
fear of missing out.
This unhealthy trend has emerged in recent
years, where influencers broadcast their instantly acquired wealth,
compelling netizens to pursue a “fake wealth” lifestyle in a
pseudo-affluent society. This phenomenon, largely sustained by the rise
of social media and consumerism, has led to what economists call a false
sense of purchasing power that masks deeper economic insecurities.
Debt-Fueled life
Indonesia commemorates its Independence Day this month. Unfortunately, financial independence is understood superficially, focusing on achieving mere figures and encouraging the ability to possess, buy, and spend as a measure of success. Ultimately, debt in all forms (e.g., credit card, paylater, online loans) becomes an inevitable solution.
The latest National Financial Literacy and Inclusion Survey (SNLIK)
2024 by the Financial Services Authority (OJK) and Statistics Indonesia
reveals a thought-provoking gap: While financial inclusion in Indonesia
has reached 75.02%, financial literacy lags at 65.43%.
This
discrepancy is worrying, as it suggests that many Indonesians are taking
on financial instruments (i.e. debt) without fully understanding its
implications.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on 29 September 2023 that “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” That all changed on October 7 when Hamas attacked Israel, which unsurprisingly invaded Gaza to destroy Hamas.
After more than six months, it appears to many that Israel is losing its war in Gaza. At the same time, Israel is fighting Hezbollah on its northern border, relations between Jerusalem and Washington are strained, and the International Court of Justice has ruled that a plausible case can be made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Meanwhile, there is great danger of escalation across the region, as the fighting between Israel and Iran makes clear. Indeed, there is a possibility the United States, which is already fighting the Houthis, might end up in a war with Iran, which neither country wants.
What might be the lasting consequences of these conflicts? Who will emerge weaker and who stronger? And what does this crisis mean for U.S. foreign policy in the region, Ukraine and East Asia?
Pirmai is the newest city between India and Pakistan. But you won’t find it on a map. Like Khushwant Singh’s Mano Majra from The Train to Pakistan – torn apart by the violence during 1947, it exists as a figment of MG Vassanji’s imagination.
Unlike Manto and Singh – who loved, lost and lived through Partition – Moyez G Vassanji grew up a continent away. Born in 1950 in Nairobi, he inherited the stories of India, the songs of Kabir and Mirabai, and the Gujarati language, but never the loss of this separation. Yet, his latest book Everything There Is, therefore, is remarkable as it is a deeply felt Partition book.
The book is inspired by the life of Abdus Salam
– the Pakistani physicist who became the first Muslim to be awarded the
Nobel Prize in 1979. Nurul Islam, the protagonist – like Salam, is a
physicist and professor at Imperial College London. The book begins when
Islam goes to Harvard to lecture and falls in love with a young
student, Hilary Chase.
Their romance sets off a series of events
that shake Islam’s life. Vassanji uses this relationship as a prism to
reflect on Islam’s life, his beliefs, his work, his faith in God, his
values and his family. Islam is a devout Muslim. He is also very much a
man of science. Vassanji is also very much an inhabitant of the world of
science like Islam – a physicist turned writer. He easily navigates the
world of empirical laws of science and more complex laws of religion to
create a believable portrait of a man who could balance these extremes
gracefully. In many ways, Everything There Is is a book of love, life and betrayal.
But
at the heart of the book is Partition, and Islam’s relationship with
his home that he left before the horrors of 1947. Vassanji evocatively
writes about undivided Punjab – with the longing of a Punjabi –the scar
across the heart and missed possibilities.
A two-time winner of Canada’s Giller Prize for fiction, this is his tenth novel. At 70, Vassanji belongs to a different generation of writers; he is not on social media and the frantic world of marketing books is alien to him. Everything There Is has been written by a writer, who like his main character Islam, is ageing in a rapidly changing world. Yet, like Islam, he still has a lot to share. Haunting, tender, this is a powerful novel about what and who we leave behind.
Everything There Is is about the fictional life of Abdus Salam. It is about love, betrayal and faith. But in many ways, it is a Partition novel. It is not something you experienced. How did you then discover it? Most
people don’t see that but for me, it is just the accident of Partition
for many people. My generation didn’t even know about it. It was all
India, and then Gujarat. Then to come here to see the hatred and the
division. It’s like someone’s asking you to put a line across your
heart, a scar. That, for me, was a very painful experience.
My wife’s family is from Punjab. Her father is from Amritsar. He had gone to Africa already, but the rest of the family had to escape overnight. But she wasn’t quite that aware of it either. It was only when we started talking that I asked her, “Do you realise you are a child of the partition?” Now of course she realises it. The whole family was split – some went to England, some went to Africa, some went to Muscat, and some went to Lahore. It must have happened on both sides to many people. I have often wondered if this Punjabi craze for emigration is not somehow related to the Partition, of never having a home.
Leaving home is a theme that you explore constantly. In an interview after The Gunny Sack your
first novel, you say that when you left Tanzania you never thought it
was forever. In the novel too, Nurul too, when he leaves, he doesn’t
realise he can never go back. There is this aspect of leaving and not
knowing it is forever. Do you think in a way your experience mirrors
his? How would you view that? No, he always had a place to
go back to and to his father and his family. When I left, I thought I
would always go back. Then because of Idi Amin, the pressure and panic
among Asians, people started leaving. My friends left. My family first
went to Kenya and then went all over. A year after I left, I realised
that I didn’t have a home. That was very hard to get over. My classmates
left after me knowing they would not go back.
When you talk about home, where is home actually now? Home is many places. It’s East Africa, Kenya and Tanzania. It’s Toronto, the city. In a very distant way, also India. Even now when I say home, I mean East Africa. There are people of my generation who still feel the same way. I have a friend who’s been away for 50 years now. He has just retired. But he said, “When I say home, I say Dar es Salaam.” Even though he’s been back in all those years maybe twice.
You’ve created this love story very Punjabi on both sides for
Nurul – a sort of Heer Ranjha where he is in love with Sharmila, the
daughter of his teacher. It is an impossible love in many ways. His
world has been informed by his childhood memories of an undivided India.
Can you talk about why you felt it was important to create this love
story? Also, how it informs his life. It might have been
just teenage fantasy, but the way he remembers it, the way he finds out
what happened to her affected him profoundly. Maybe that mythologising
was also kind of a way of mythologising the world he had left behind the
town and the city, the place. The two just became one. But as his wife
says in the end, he never got over it. His stance on nuclear weapons was
partly informed by that.
He grew up in undivided India.
It is interesting that the generation understood the state boundary, but
did not necessarily accept the cultural boundary, cultural division.
How did his worldview clearly shaped by his experience of undivided
India – idealistic, maybe naïve – contrast with his friend Zaffar’s?
[Who is willing to modify his anti-bomb stance once he hears India is
also making one] How do you see that reflecting even in East Africa? There
were communal divisions in East Africa. But for us what community meant
was not what it means here. It was just different sects, Hindu sects,
Muslim sects. We didn’t know much about the others. I’m doing research
on the lower castes in Dar es Salaam, for example, where were they
cremated? Or was it in the same place? I don’t believe it could have
been. There was some communal rivalry at cricket matches. But there was
no hatred as visceral as it seemed when I first came to India. This was
just the months after the Babri Masjid. I couldn’t believe this type of
violence was possible, or even imaginable, in the place where Gandhi was
born.
As a minority in a small country, we lived very sheltered
lives. We did not experience the real evil that exists in the outside
world. The evil that exists within families was not even possible. There
must have been some. What happened with Alice Munro… There was no room for that.
I have read that when Abdus Salam got the best result in Punjab, all the shopkeepers were out celebrating –Hindu and Muslim. Then, when he came back all those years later, all the shop names had been Islamised.
There is this powerful scene when Nurul goes back home after
Partition. The city has changed – different after those who have left.
His mother refuses to talk about Partition. She looks away. There are
expensive things in the house that were never there before but obviously
belonged to a “set” – suggesting that they were taken from the house of
someone who left. I was curious how you created this memory, of the
city that was changing, and silence around Partition, even though you
had never experienced it. This is human nature. People work
to their advantage and don’t want to think about the rest. Unless they
are affluent or thinking people, then they would ask.
Ordinary
people would just say “Okay, nobody’s there to take it so I might as
well.” No questions asked. It was a very revealing moment, even for me
to write about it. The more innocent they are, the easier it is for them
to forget what happened. Maybe that’s how they can go on.
In Partition as one psychologist said, everybody has a little bit of blood in their hands. You look away or you don’t want to hear about it.
Or in taking that object, you’re also guilty of taking part in that moment of madness. My father-in-law was born and raised in Amritsar. He never wanted to speak about it. He came to India many times but never went back to Amritsar. But he told us to go. He found a Sardarji visiting Vancouver and told him exactly where he lived. He was waiting for us.
Did you find the house? Yes. I went again two or
three years ago by myself. The neighbour was still there. The old house
had been partly demolished. there was a prayer house hind. For my wife,
it was a tremendously moving. We met the neighbour. His name was Chadha.
He invited us to sit down. The house, he said, looked exactly like this
one. It was a grand old house. He said, “My sister was a very good
friend of your father’s sister. Do you want to speak to her?” My wife
said, “Yes, I’ll speak to her.” But when she spoke, she was in tears.
The other woman was in tears too – and this was a generational after the
Partition. It was emotional for me too.
It is a loss that
you can’t process. Ritu Menon writes about going to Lahore and being
assaulted by memories that were not her memory but felt like hers. The
woman whom we spoke to was called Madhu. We went to see her at her
house. We had chai. A few months later, we got a call from Los Angeles.
Madhu’s daughter was calling us. My wife spoke to Madhu. My
father-in-law’s younger brother was also in Vancouver. He put on his
best clothes, flew to LA and met her.
You write about Hargobind Khurana’s village being close to Abdus Salam’s home. Salam was, of course, influenced by Ramanujan. But the idea of this Punjab, of science, and as you said in an interview, what this could have been. For a scientist, there’s no boundary. The US government has now established laws for Chinese scientists. But we think in terms of the theories of science. In my own work, we would get preprints from Kyiv and Moscow, which we would use. It is just science. I’’s just physics. The best textbooks, which meant the most difficult, were from Russia. Now, of course, they have just ruined that whole camaraderie of physics.
Turke Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev ILLUSTRATION/Tamar Shvelidze/OC Media
(Bahruz Samadov submitted this article shortly before his arrest on 21 August. He was charged with treason on 23 August, and could face 12–20 years in prison or a life sentence if found guilty.)
Despite long being ‘brotherly’ nations, the Israel-Gaza war
appears to have exacerbated existing tensions between Turkey and
Azerbaijan, potentially pushing the two countries apart irrevocably.
In recent months, relations between
Azerbaijan and Turkey have been uncharacteristically cool. To observers
who have heard the rhetoric around the two countries’ alliance — most
prominently, the phrase that they are ‘two states’ but ‘one nation’ —
this may come as a surprise.
It might also surprise the observer
that a significant factor in this estrangement has been Turkey’s
unconditional support for Palestine compared to Azerbaijan’s relatively
neutral stance.
One example of this came in late
July, when President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s statement about Turkey’s
decisive role in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War prompted
anger, albeit not official, in Azerbaijan. Erdo?an made his statement
in the context of the Israel–Palestine conflict, suggesting that Turkey
might take a similar role in that conflict, and effectively positioning
Palestine and Azerbaijan as equally oppressed nations. Erdo?an’s claim
was met with discomfort in part because it factually contested
Azerbaijan’s narrative around the war, and its ‘monopoly over victory’.
Not only Erdo?an’s claim, but also
Turkey’s support of the Palestinian cause has irritated Azerbaijan. Soon
after Erdo?an’s statement, Turkey declared a day of mourning over Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh — a sentiment that Azerbaijani society neither shares nor comprehends.
While differences between Azerbaijan and Turkey are noticeable to both nations, Azerbaijan’s unwillingness to join anti-Israel rhetoric has become an increasingly significant factor contributing to airing their grievances.
The story behind Azerbaijan’s attitude towards Israel
For many Turks, Azerbaijan’s positive attitude towards Israel and its very limited support for Palestine — for example an absence of any public events or virtual discourse — is frustrating.
But the reasons for Azerbaijan’s difference in attitudes and behaviour
to those of Turkey are multifaceted, and not only attributable to
rational self-interest.
While hostilities between
Azerbaijanis and Armenians living in the territories of present-day
Azerbaijan began more than a century ago, Azerbaijanis and Jews living
in Azerbaijan have never shared negative sentiments towards each other.
Azerbaijan’s present-day Jewish community is centred around the Red
Village, where a Mountainous Jewish community has existed for over two
hundred years.
Another reason for the particular
affection that Muslim-majority Azerbaijanis have towards Jewish people
and Israel is connected to the First Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988–1994).
In 1992, ethnic Mountainous Jew Albert Agarunov died defending the town
of Shusha. In an interview
conducted that year, Agarunov was asked what made him ‘defend
Azerbaijani lands’ despite not being ethnically Azerbaijani. He replied
that he was ‘protect[ing] his homeland’, and that he was ready to fight
‘until the very end of the war’.
This episode gained widespread public
attention, and had a huge impact on the formation of the image of Jews
as a friendly nation in the Azerbaijani social imagination, which is
haunted by an obsessive friend-enemy distinction based on anti-Armenian
antagonism and loyalty to the state as a sacral and security-providing
entity.
Alongside such emotional associations, Israel has also very materially contributed to Azerbaijan’s military achievements. Israel’s arms exports played a profound role in Azerbaijan’s victory in the 2020 war and the 2023 September clashes in Nagorno-Karabakh; specifically the Israel-produced HAROP, a loitering munition. Azerbaijan, in turn, supplies oil to Israel, and also domestically suppresses Iran-sympathising Shia dissidents, leveraging the bogeyman of Islamist extremism with Western partners.
Pan-Turkic anti-Arabism
Attitudes towards Arabic states and
culture also factor into Azerbaijan’s positioning. Since the 2020 war
especially, secular loyalty to the state has been accompanied by
pan-Turkist ideas: the Azerbaijani state is a Turkic state and a part of
the Turkic world, a view stressed
by President Aliyev in his 2024 inaugural speech. Pan-Turkic and
pan-national Turanist ideas have left deep traces in Azerbaijan’s
self-perception since the 1990s.
Alongside such ideas, many Azerbaijanis believe that Arabs brought Islam to them by force, and they in turn fought against Arabic expansionism in the 9th century. Such a perspective on Islam is very marginal in Turkey. In Azerbaijan, however, this narrative has been taught since the Soviet times, when myth-making was a part of the nativisation and anti-religious secularisation policy. For example, Babak, the leader of a neo-Zoroastrian cult who led the resistance movement in the region against the Arabs, was presented as an ethnic Azerbaijani in Soviet Azerbaijani history textbooks as well as in a famous 1979 film, to prove that Azerbaijanis were native to the territory.
Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex by Kathryn Sophia Belle (Oxford University Press, New York, 2024. 376 pp.
Professional philosophy has not been kind to Black women. This
fact is partly reflected by the perturbingly small number of Black women
who have ever earned PhDs in the discipline (somewhere near 50
in the U.S.). It is also reflected by the small (but growing) number of
philosophical works authored by Black women or focused on our
philosophical contributions. Far from contesting it, such anecdotes
merely support the assertion of Marx and Engels in The German Ideology
that ‘the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at
the same time its ruling intellectual force’. The exclusion of Black
women in philosophy thus also says something about the overall power
structure of our society. It shows the continued reach of race, class,
and gender segregation within the superstructure and the influence of
these forces on the field of philosophy.
Such discriminatory legacies serve as a backdrop to Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of the Second Sex.
Kathryn Sophia Belle takes up black feminist thinkers and their efforts
to conceptualize how multiple systems of domination – especially
sexism, racism, and capitalism –interact and converge to marginalize
Black women and other minorities. Alongside black feminist thought on
the oppression of women, Belle takes up philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex (1949) which famously shaped modern feminist
conceptions of these issues. Once discounted as a mere novelist and
interpreter of Sartre, feminist philosophers, with great effort, have
helped promote de Beauvoir and her works to their rightful place in the
history of philosophy. Considered her magnum opus, The Second Sex is
famous for its existentialist account of the nature of sexism and
oppression, the historical and contemporary plight of women, and the
virtues and limits of past efforts to interpret patriarchy in
psychoanalysis and Marxist historical materialism. The Second Sex
is considered a groundbreaking work for influencing a generation of
feminist thinking and giving the issue of sexism its most extensive
philosophical treatment upon its release.
Before de Beauvoir, philosophers like Mary Wollstonecraft, John
Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Engels helped form and shape the aims of the
women’s liberation movement in the 19th century. De
Beauvoir’s monograph arrived in 1949 when many felt that feminism was
stalling after women attained suffrage in liberal democracies and
believed that the movement therefore was ultimately fated to end as an
important but limited reformist development.
Shortly before his death, in a series of writings, Samir Amin
unfolded the two issues that were mainly of concern to him. The first
was the non-subjection of China to financial globalization, that is, to
the totalitarian power of world financial capital; also the non
transformation of the Chinese land into merchandise. The second issue
was the need to build a new, a “Fifth International.”
We had been in China together, invited to a congress on Marxism, at
2018, just before his death and I remember his immense anxiety about
China and financial globalization. One day he woke me up and asked me to
go urgently to his room, where he was interviewed on a Chinese
television. He wanted me to talk also to them, to describe to the
Chinese public what I had experienced in the former USSR, watching as a
journalist the collapse of the Soviet regime and the restoration of
capitalist relations of production and distribution in the ‘90s. He
feared that Beijing might, in some turn of its so sui generis evolution,
make a decisive turn towards capitalism and wanted to ”inoculate ”
somehow the Chinese in advance.
Samir did not believe that the Chinese regime is a socialist one. “I
will not say China is socialist, I will not say China is capitalist,” he
said in a speech at a prestigious University of Peking. Sometimes he
hoped, he thought, that there might be a way to state capitalism, state
socialism and finally socialism. He wanted to keep open such a
possibility.
China has made enormous concessions to capitalism. Still the power in
China is not in the hands of its capitalist class and the economy
remains a planned one. Samir believed that should China make the
qualitative leap to capitalism the USSR has made in 1991, this would
lead to a social catastrophe, reminiscent of the Yeltsin years in Russia
and to the dismantling of China itself as it happened with the Soviet
Union.
Much attention has gone towards the American writer James Baldwin on
the occasion of his centenary this August. This attention is well
deserved because Baldwin is possibly the foremost essayist of the 20th
century in the English language. However, it is important that we use
this occasion to read James Baldwin rather than make assumptions on the
nature of his work, and understand why his incisive analysis of American
society has particular relevance for our time.
Baldwin’s centenary is being celebrated at a time when the United
States is going through an extraordinary political crisis. This is
evidenced by the recent student protests, the attempted assassination of
Donald Trump, and the arbitrary replacement of the Democratic Party
contender for the election. This crisis has been described as a crisis
of legitimacy where the American public has lost all faith in its
institutions.
Since the United States continues to be the foremost power in the
world, the rest of the world is watching and attempting to understand
the nature of this crisis and in particular, the extraordinary behaviour
of the American ruling elites, who have brought the world very close to
another devastating war. It is here that James Baldwin becomes
particularly important for his understanding of American society through
his sophisticated analysis of the complex nature of white supremacy.
Baldwin and the Mirror of White Supremacy
Baldwin theorizes whiteness as the psychology of empire. While
thinkers on the left emphasize the political systems that constitute
imperialism, Baldwin revealed the worldview that defined it. He
understood whiteness not as skin color, but as a pathology that blinded
its victims to reality. This worldview is rooted in a refusal to grow up
and take responsibility for the world, choosing instead to pursue
materialism and a sense of safety. It is this worldview that is
comfortable with war and racism even as it divests the American people
of their humanity.
To describe whiteness, Baldwin used the analogy of a mirror, a
solipsistic view of reality that allows the beholder to see only what
they wish to see. The beholder is terrified of the judgment of the
oppressed, but desperately desires their validation. It is for this
reason that white America is bewildered that they are not beloved around
the world (recall George Bush’s claim that people in the Middle East
hate Americans because Americans are free). The white worldview paints
the non-Western non-White world as authoritarian and oppressive because
it cannot bear to look at the racism of its own society. This is
revealed in America’s historical paranoia of Communism, and its current
stances towards nations like Russia, Iran and China. The infantilism of
the American empire fears what it cannot control, and rather than
reaching out with the aim of peace, it projects its insecurities on the
darker other.
