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Moviegoers’ Gift: Kashf or The Lifting of the Veil

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The film Kashf: The Lifting of the Veil  is a captivating homage to a Pakistan of tolerance, grace, aspiration and good humor, a Sufi-influenced Pakistan that is tragically under threat today from violent, grimly-puritanical, Saudi-financed salafism.  So real and well-publicized is the political black veil of looming Talibanization that most outsiders see Pakistan only in those terms. 

This sad, pervasive blindness has been inhibiting distribution efforts in the U.S., according to Ayesha Khan, who wrote, directed on location in Lahore and acted in Kashf.   “Film festival organizers are looking for honor killings and shuttlecock burkhas,” she says, with a sigh.  “They want bombs and terrorists and ski masks. But there’s another Pakistan, the real Pakistan, of ordinary people with ordinary lives. I wanted to show that.”* 

She did, beautifully, and fortunately I was able to see Kashf, which was featured in the clearly more venturesome Santa Fe film festival, then given a longer run by the Cinema Café.  I’ve lived in Pakistan, even in Lahore, the setting for Kashf, and I instantly recognized everything I saw in the film. The wet streets in a monsoon rain. The Mall jammed with traffic.  The old mosques of red sandstone and white marble.  The mazars and shrines, like the featured Datta Durbar, nightly resplendent with the equivalent of Christmas lights.   People’s casual intermixing of English and Urdu.  (The dialogue is perfectly subtitled, where needed.)  The upper middle class milieu, where mothers and aunties hover anxiously over sons and nephews, especially those who don’t slide seamlessly into “proper” upper middle class life, in which context becoming a Sufi pir would be as shockingly declassé as becoming a Lollywood star, the relevant aspirations of the young co-protagonists in Kashf.   There’s love here, love, exasperation and endless hope, all depicted with a fond, delicate hint of ridicule that serves as a rebuke to the  slapsticky stereotypes that populate Urdu soap operas on TV or Lollywood productions. 

So, let me pause here to say that Kashf, for all its deep seriousness, has some very funny moments. The call center scenes are masterpieces of absurdity. A car sequence that has a hallucinated Armaghan weaving through traffic is hilarious—and scarier by far than most crash-bang-and-explode set pieces.  Ali’s manic dance sequence is a hoot of skipping, scarf-play and coy tree-hugging along the banks of the Ravi River, not least because he’s aping a choreography that’s meant only for women in Lollywood film productions, according to Ayesha.

Movie-lovers should not imitate the cinema gate-keepers.  If Kashf comes your way, see it and be enchanted.  It’s human.  It’s funny.  But it’s much much more.  It reminds us of the redemptive Sufi appreciation that the paths to happiness and fulfillment (and God), though obscured or veiled, are many and findable, with effort and determination.  What’s more, the physical and the spiritual are not natural antagonists. Every path has many stepping stones. 

The garish veils that Ali twirls, wrings and twiddles with as he struggles to master the hero’s role in a remake of a classic Pakistani farce are not merely frivolous bits of silk. He’ll succeed only when he gets rid of his self-defeating hangups and gives himself freely to the process of realization.  He won’t need drugs or meditation tapes to relax and banish panic attacks. His natural ebullience will shine out.  He will be (and is) irresistible, even though Ali Tariq, who plays the character Ali, is not a cookie-cutter hunk.  Once he’s on the right path, moreover, he’ll not only attain his dream, he’ll have fun and be happy, too, the very antithesis of character-building, puritan-style, though denial and humorlessness—and no music or dance, for sure!  

Armaghan’s search-and-struggle is a a more difficult assignment for an actor because it's an internal process, because this thread is never played for laughs and because Armaghan's face is often much obscured by a seeker’s hippie-like beard, which of course does not prevent us from knowing that Bilal Zaman is achingly handsome.  At times I found myself thinking (Sorry!) that this is what a handsome young Christ must have looked like. At other times, I just wanted Armaghan to get a good trim, the sort of thing a mother would think. 

Armaghan is puzzled.  He has hallucinations or visions that he must decipher or lose his sanity.  He must find and follow the enigmatic beautiful woman who is the Messenger and he must open the green (Muslim green?) door behind which, he intuits, something or someone important  awaits him.  He must discover his fate, his kismet, his karma/dharma.  I’m not kidding here.  We are, after all, right next door to India.  Advaitic mysticism was congenial to the Sufis who, in turn, made Islam palatable to Hindu converts.  Sufi pirs are still revered today by Hindus, which of course does not boost their stock with Islamists.

Emile Nakhleh’s A Necessary Engagement – Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

If I were teaching a class in Islam and Politics, Emile Nakhleh’s A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World (Princeton University Press, 2009, pp 162) would be required reading. In fact, if I were advising the new administration on US foreign policy towards the Islamic world, I would make sure that I had carefully read and digested Dr. Nakhleh’s book before opening my mouth or applying fingers to keyboard.

The book in and of itself carries the weight of authority. First, its author was Senior Intelligence Officer and Director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program in the CIA’s Director of Intelligence until 2006 when he retired and moved from Langley to New Mexico where, he tells readers, he curtailed hikes in the Sandia Mountains to write this book. Second, the book is tightly constructed and written for the educated lay person. It contains neither bureaucratic language nor political science jargon.

And third, what Nakhleh writes and the proposals he offers are based on careful research, analysis, lengthy personal experience and reflection. Furthermore, most, if not all of his proposals are doable. Some will be expensive; others far less so. Some will require major adjustments in US government and private sector thinking, training and structure. All make eminent sense, however, and are crucial for the future well being of this nation.

This small book is grounded in Nakhleh’s vast historical knowledge of Islam as well as today’s Islamic world. Most importantly it is based on interviews that he conducted - often in Arabic - with hundreds of Muslims in more than thirty countries around the globe during his government career. The Muslims he talked with ranged from the person in the street to religious clerics, journalists and university professors and even two Guantanamo prisoners. He corroborates the findings of his interviews with analysis of numerous surveys of Muslim attitudes since 2001. An aside: Nakhleh, a native Arabic speaker, was born in Galilee. A Greek Catholic, he was educated by Roman Catholics and his higher education was in the United States. Before joining the analytical side of the CIA in 1991 after the Agency became concerned about the political dimensions and implications of radical Islam for the US, he was a professor of international relations at a Catholic college in Maryland. As an academic and a Fulbright scholar, he wrote scores of articles and books on the politics of the Muslim world.

No Bush administration fan

It is clear that Emile Nakhleh is no fan of the Bush administration and I don’t blame him. His eye-witness testimony in the book’s second chapter concerning Dick Cheney’s bullying of Agency analysts to produce the story the administration wanted to hear as opposed to the story that was true regarding Saddam Hussein’s supposed possession of WMD and his supposed links to Al Qaeda prior to the 2003 invasion rings loud and clear.

No administration, repeat, no administration should ever again be able to “cook the intelligence evidence” like the Bush administration did in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Nakhleh refutes charge after erroneous charge that the administration and its neoconservative supporters have flung at agency analysts in the right wing’s attempts to cover up for its own failings – false charges that they continue to trot out today to rewrite history in their favor.

Yet what makes A Necessary Engagement particularly well worth reading is
Nakhleh’s nuanced description of the developing political awareness of the 1.4 billion people – many young, undereducated and unemployed – in the Muslim world but, in particular, the increasingly important and largely constructive role being played in that world by reformist thinkers and mainstream Islamic political parties – from AKP in Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, the Islamic Party in Malaysia to Hamas in Palestine. Many of these parties, he points out, have won elections fair and square, and despite rhetoric to the contrary, participate in the rules of the democratic game. Nakhleh further argues that for the Israelis and the Bush administration to have refused to recognize the Hamas electoral victory in Gaza after insisting upon free and fair elections there is perceived as the height of hypocrisy throughout the Islamic world.

THE MOTHS OF WINTER '08-'09

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I could
and should
have predicted this.
Denial
was easier.
Then winter came.
I reached
into a stack of sweaters
for a favorite, a mossy green cashmere,
unfolded it, laid it out, made to put it on and saw
the worm,
munching away,
as if it hadn’t already consumed
yarn enough
to give it cramps
and pause.
I saw
so many holes
the most dedicated expert weaver
couldn’t make this very pricey sweater
I liked so much
whole again.

The stack
also contained
a plum merino,
a dove gray alpaca,
an itchily ordinary pink wool turtleneck,
the first two equally gnawed at,
the latter hardly touched.
Moth larvae have good taste.
How comforting!

Disaster unblocks memory.
There had indeed been
a nondescript tan moth
fluttering boldly around one day,
its wings going so fast it had the look
of a bit of fuzz.
I tried to catch it.  It got away. 
I shrugged. 
Maybe it wasn’t a moth.
Most probably it was nothing at all
to worry about. 

Precedent established, I shrugged off
the next one, too, or almost,
in another room, where—I can’t believe
I didn’t focus on this—I’d stashed some modest
Orientals, rolled up, out of the way,
in a dark closet corner,
toward which,
come to think of it,
that second moth was headed
when I made one careless futile attempt
to smash it
between my palms.  

The rugs didn’t have holes
so much as squiggly
little channels
in the nap. 
How nice!  Sculpted carpets. 
And very chic, in a way.
Orientals need
a touch of  history,
which I’ll embroider a bit,
as carpet sellers usually do,
and be rid of them.

Meanwhile, the house stinks
of the mothballs I deluded myself into not
needing, a double dose, to be extra
sure, as if I could ever
make up
for the loss.

Central Asia Now a Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone

by Cheryl Rofer

The parliaments of five central Asian nations have ratified the Central Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. They are Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

This is the newest of the nuclear weapon free zones. The Central Asian states have added some features to their agreement, most notably that all will adhere to the IAEA’s Additional Protocol, which specifies a greater degree of transparency and has only recently been accepted by the United States in one of George Bush’s last acts in office.

It’s also significant that these five states are in what could be considered a bad nuclear neighborhood. They’re surrounded by nuclear powers: China, India, Russia, Pakistan and, a little further to the west, Israel.

Treaties on nuclear weapon free zones require protocols from the five nuclear weapons states recognized by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Those states must agree not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against members of the zone. Seems reasonable enough, but the United States has found reasons not to ratify the South Pacific or the Southeast Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zones; none of the other five have signed on to the latter.

Russia and China have come out in favor of the Central Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zone, but the United States, the United Kingdom, and France are holding back. Their objection is to an ambiguity that might allow Russia to station nuclear weapons in the zone. Negotiations continue on this issue, which may be more easily resolved now that the United States is no longer allergic to treaties.

William C. Potter, Togzhan Kassenova and Anya Loukianova have more on the subject, including a couple of possible ways around the impasse. Check it out.

Comet Lulin is Coming!

by Cheryl Rofer

We have a new comet, one that is going backwards through the solar system!

It's rising before the sun, and reports are that it's easily visible through binoculars at about magnitude 7. Photographs show the beginnings of a tail, and an anti-tail too, the whole thing a nice green.

Sky and Telescope has locator charts and other information. More photos and history can be found here, and here is a growing list of links to articles on Comet Lulin.

All the articles will tell you that it's very hard to predict how bright a comet will get, or how long its tail, but Lulin is expected to reach magnitude 5. That's visible with the naked eye, but just barely.

And, since I've printed out the locator charts and see that it will be going near the constellation Corvus, I'll post a photo of our local corvids. A great flock of ravens settled in the yard on Sunday, trying to figure out how to attack the seed block, which I have set within a juniper tree. They were unsuccessful. These two are on top of my garage, as seen from my office.

No Missiles in Kaliningrad?

by Cheryl Rofer

The news hasn't reached the US MSM yet, but a number of European news outlets are reporting that Russia is putting a hold on deploying Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad. The Russian news service Interfax is the source of many of these reports. According to the International Herald Tribune, the Russian defense ministry dismissed the reports.

The move is apparently in response to President Barack Obama's stated willingness to take another look at the antimissile and radar deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Another report that has surfaced but hasn't gotten much play is that the Russian and American presidents talked by telephone a few days back.

Add in the conversations about Russian cooperation with NATO in Central Asia and elsewhere, and things are definitely looking up for Russian-American relations.

The Guardian

Richard Norwich in The Guardian. (Caution: he repeats the nonsense about Iran having enough uranium for a nuclear bomb in another year.)

Financial Times

Deutsche Welle

Reuters - UK

Sky News

Response from NATO (via Reuters)

RIA Novosti livens things up with a report of new Iskander missile tests.

Just starting to wake up on this side of the Atlantic: Washington Post has a Reuters report.

And Fox News piggybacks on The Times of London.

Threats in the Age of Obama

by Cheryl Rofer

It's this year's must reading! Buy copies for your friends, in-laws, and business associates!

Michael Tanji very kindly asked me to contribute a chapter on nuclear nonproliferation to this book. I in turn asked Molly Cernicek to write it with me, because she has the most innovative ideas on how to counter nuclear proliferation that I know of.

The authors and the editor are all bloggers, some of whom comment here at WhirledView. Fellow author Shane Deichman has very kindly assembled links to their blogs.

I've been very impressed by the speed with which Nimble Books has gotten it out, with Michael's able, er, encouragement of us chapter authors, of course. I'm looking forward to holding my author copy in my hands.

You can buy it directly from Nimble Books at that link, or you can go to Amazon.

Facebook Notes

by Cheryl Rofer

Activity on Facebook seems to be increasing. I've had friend requests from several fellow bloggers in the last week. I've also had a couple of others whose names I don't recognize. If you're a WhirledView reader and want to be my friend, please add a note to that effect to your friend request. I'm happy to be friends with our readers, but I'm old-fashioned enough that it's hard for me to say I'm "friends" with someone I don't know in some way.

I haven't really done much on Facebook, but maybe I'll have to get with the program if I have enough connections there. I have had three people contact me though Facebook whom I might not have heard from any other way.

Supply Lines

by Cheryl Rofer

NATO troops in Afghanistan have been supplied through western Pakistan and the Khyber Pass, but recently there have been numerous problems in that area. Early this month, the Taliban burned supply trucks in Peshawar, the gateway to the Khyber in Pakistan. Pakistan then launched an attack on the militants that closed the Khyber for three days. Pakistani authorities later arrested seven men who they said planned those attacks. (Click on maps to enlarge.)

So General David Petraeus made a whirlwind tour of Central Asia to work out an alternative. He visited Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and talked with government leaders to secure their cooperation.

But the last four of those once belonged to Russia, which is not pleased about a US presence there. The US has had a base located at Manas, Kyrgyzstan. On January 12, a Russian newspaper, Vremya Novostei, reported that President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was willing to expel the US military in return for up to $2 billion in Russian assistance. The president would sign an executive decree that would close down the Manas facility by the end of the first half of 2009.

What Exactly Did Hillary Say To The Senate About Public Diplomacy?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Years ago I learned to check the text of a written transcript rather than rely on the reports of others – even those by the best and most experienced reporters. So after reading Walter Pincus’ January 19 Washington Post report of Hillary’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony, I decided to see if I could locate his source (a 79 page written Q and A that accompanied Clinton’s verbal testimony) which I did earlier today.

Here’s what Pincus reported in his January 19 WaPo article “Clinton’s Goals Detailed:”

“In the battle of ideas, she said, the United States would go on the offensive implementing President-elect Barack Obama's pledges to open "America Houses" in cities across the Arab world. These facilities, fashioned after a Cold War-era program, would have Internet libraries, English lessons and stories about Muslims in America. An initiative labeled "America's Voice Corps" would recruit young Americans with language and public diplomacy skills to speak with and listen to people in the area. Completing the package would be a Global Education Fund to provide $2 billion for primary education around the world. But, she said, there would not be a return of the independent U.S. Information Agency.”

Here’ s what that 79 page transcript shows Clinton wrote in response to Senator Kerry’s questions about America Houses and an independent USIA. The text is found on pages 61 and 62:

Q # 109 (Kerry): What measures do you think are necessary to improve U.S. public diplomacy efforts and restore America’s image in the world?