This article sounds nice, but I'm not exactly convinced. Here comes some anecdata... TL/DR I think economic considerations like education, healthcare and income have more to do with uptake of militant Islamism than movies.
You live in a village in Pakistan, working fields for more or less a feudal landlord. Work is hard, long and for relatively little pay. You can't read or write, so have little prospects for a career change apart from other forms of manual labour. You have to support your own family, along with any elderly or sick relatives. In most cases you probably blow some of your wage on drink/gambling.
Once in a while a group comes through your village. They offer free food (a bit like a soup kitchen), spiritual guidance, and in some cases community health services. If you sign up for membership they promise to put your sons through school and pay for healthcare of any ageing/poorly relatives. If you're in a lot of debt or in any other sort of trouble, they promise to handle these things for you if you commit to them. They call themselves the Pakistani Taliban.
This is the story we'd like to believe but it's not true. The 9/11 hijackers were educated as engineers, living well in Europe not in destitute poverty. The solution isn't more money and more education, the 9/11 hijackers had that in spades.
I don't think what you said makes what I said any less true i.e. there's probably a large mix of backgrounds in Islamist movements. I would however be willing to bet that the majority of the TTP are recruited in a way similar to what I described above.
Note that the feudal landlord is my cousin, and the guy/village is based on a real person, so I'm not just pulling this story out of thin air (i.e. anecdata).
For someone who appears to have some insight , I am surprised you are mixing up your "terrorists". There is a fundamental diference between a group like the Taliban whose primary focus appears to be "taking their country back" , and characters like Osama who have delusions about being holy warriors in some imaginary battle with the west.
Note: there's two semi-distinct groups, the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghanistan Taliban. A Pakistani farmer-serf is unlikely to agree with the Taliban on spiritual matters: most rural Pakistanis are Sufists, they worship local saints. The Taliban are hard-line Wahhabi fundamentalists, they consider Sufists to be idol-worshipers. A cultural revolution, like the ones in Afghanistan and Iran, is unlikely in Pakistan.
The Pakistan Taliban has a pretty good reputation in the Pashtun regions. ("Taliban" is a pashtun word) One of the more popular proposed reforms is Sharia law.
Sharia has an appeal that's difficult to understand in the West. Pakistan's official court system is deeply, deeply compromised. The police are hopelessly corrupt. Cases take many years to resolve, and victory goes to the person who paid out the most in bribes.
You can use the parallel legal "system", jirga tribal law. Jirga is less "legal system" and more "binding arbitration". It evolved to end blood feuds by negotiating settlements between tribes, and as such, can be blindingly unfair.
Compared to these two equally terrible alternatives, Sharia looks pretty good. In fact, Muhammed invented it back in ~600CE precisely to stamp out customary law. Compared to jirga, it's positively progressive, esp. in regards to women. (Which makes sense, it's about a thousand years newer than tribal law) (Many interpretations of Sharia allow women to own property, for instance; and Islamic judges typically don't settle blood feuds by trading women)
> Sharia has an appeal that's difficult to understand in the West. Pakistan's official court system is deeply, deeply compromised. The police are hopelessly corrupt. Cases take many years to resolve, and victory goes to the person who paid out the most in bribes.
This resonates with pretty much all personal and anecdotal experience I've had with the Pakistani police/judicial system.
> You can use the parallel legal "system", jirga tribal law. Jirga is less "legal system" and more "binding arbitration". It evolved to end blood feuds by negotiating settlements between tribes, and as such, can be blindingly unfair.
I have a mixed Sindhi/Pathan lineage. My grandfather was a tribal elder in this regard and from the stories my father told me, was responsible for arbitrating disputes under the Jirga system. By all accounts, it's as horrible and unfair as you point out in your comment.
> Compared to these two equally terrible alternatives, Sharia looks pretty good.
Agreed, but the real problem is the aforementioned corruption in the police/judicial system, which will still be there whether or not the local tribal elders operate under a Sharia system. I have no good ideas for solving it though, so this is mostly wishful thinking.
> For someone who appears to have some insight , I am surprised you are mixing up your "terrorists"
Can you let me know which specific part of my comment makes you think I'm "mixing up my terrorists"?
> There is a fundamental diference between a group like the Taliban whose primary focus appears to be "taking their country back" , and characters like Osama who have delusions about being holy warriors in some imaginary battle with the west.
Agree totally. Both the Afghan Taliban (who from what I understand of the current situation, are attempting to cut all association with Al-Qaeda) and the Pakistani Taliban share a relatively hardline interpretation of Islam, but that's about where the similarity stops.
The posted article is about curbing fundamentalist Islamic views in Pakistan through movies. My comment was basically saying that while fundamentalist Islamic groups like the TTP operate and recruit in the manner that they do in rural Pakistan, movies aren't going to make much of a dent.
I don't know how true this is though. It might work in Pakistan, but doesn't seem like it would in the Middle East. For example, the article says that there's a lot of interest in Bollywood in Dubai, but that's because 70% of the population is South Asian[0].
And from another article[1], which has a great analysis of hard vs. soft power and how Bollywood's true influence on its neighbors is actually nonexistent:
> The immense popularity of Bollywood in Pakistan and Afghanistan, for example, has not turned Pakistan into a pro-Indian country, nor does it prevent Afghans (including the educated elite) from spitting on the floor whenever a Hindu idol is shown on TV. The fact is that the Indian entertainment industry has virtually no ability to influence the paradigm of its viewers, and can only bombard them with superficial trash.
The whole point of that article I linked is that things like hardline Islamism can't be combated through the use of movies. From that same article:
> Pakistan’s ideology is based on Islamic ‘nationalism’ where it views itself as part of a greater ‘Ummah’, but is certainly not recognized by the members of the ‘Ummah’ as its leader. In other words, Pakistan does not have native ownership over its own ideology, which inevitably leads to Pakistan associating itself with other, more influential members of the ‘Ummah’ like Saudi Arabia and Iran, at the obvious expense of its own subcontinental origins.
Neither Pakistan nor India wield a significant influence in the Islamic world - that power belongs to the aforementioned Saudi Arabia and Iran. No matter what may or may not happen in Bollywood, its influence in Pakistan/Afghanistan/etc. will always be overshadowed by Saudi & Persian mullahs. The reason why mullahs from those countries have the sort of transnational power they do is because of the unifying nature of Islam, across ethnic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries.
But the further west you go from India, the more the "influence" of Bollywood declines (and it is quite rapid). Regardless of whether the top Bollywood actors are Muslim, India itself is almost 80% Hindu, and that will never be forgotten by those in the Middle East watching Bollywood movies.
Although to those of us in the West, it may be easy to lump India and the Middle East into the same "cultural" category, that couldn't be further from the truth. Shared "conservative" values only go so far, and their respective histories are quite different.
The article you linked merely rejects the potential of pop culture to be soft power, and it does so out of hand. Yes, once it rejects the premise, it finds the premise holds no power.
The whole point of soft power isn't to take on cultural change head on. The meaning of subvert isn't to force change. It's to effect a gradual change, which will be seen over the course of a couple of generations.
Hollywood has immense cultural power over western nations; it can, and definitely has, changed attitudes on a number of topics over just a few generations.
The OP makes some good points that current western media depicts situations too far from the current core islamic nations to carry much weight. The world depicted has to be recognizable, and I'm sure Sex And The City seems completely alien to Karachi (hell, it's still semi-alien to Des Moines). So Hollywood isn't going to carry a lot of weight there.
But the world of Bollywood films are not wholly alien to Pakistan. It doesn't matter if they consciously resist the messages because India is a Hindu nation. That's the whole point of soft power. It works anyway.
Think about this question- did the Mullahs and Imams in faraway lands approve Pakistan opening up to Indian film imports?
"has not turned Pakistan into a pro-Indian country": I would caution against extrapolating the attitude of ordinary folks from the public stand of the govt.
Also, Pakistan is not a homogeneous country. It's got multiple ethnic groups. I'm almost certain that the people of Punjab (largest province afaik), and the descendants of the migrants from India (who live mostly in Karachi), do feel great kinship with Indians. Bollywood does play a role in that. YMMV.
I'm not sure about Bollywood, but I believe Cricket could make a bigger impact on the youth in the region. Cricketers have gained equal celebrity status (or even more) to Bollywood stars and unlike, bollywood it's a dream they can attain themselves.
Especially, in Afganistan the game is spreading fast. Recently, they got to play their first international cricket match against Australia in Sharjah[1]. Also, Afgan team will take part in this year's T20 Cricket World Cup, which is starting next week.
I grew up in Sri Lanka, where there was a 30 year old gruesome war. I know how cricket played a major role in consoling the nation in troubled times and helped people to bond together irrespective of their races. Muttiah Muralitharan, who was one of the best bowlers the game has ever seen, was a Tamil himself. His success became a big influence for kids like myself, to see there's a bigger world outside that you can conquer[2].
The author provides an interesting perspective but his argument misses some subtleties. The prohibition of Indian movies in Pakistan has almost nothing to do with religious arguments. It is basic protectionism. That is, if the ban still even exists.
Pakistan's own film industry produces movies which have all the themes of romantic love, action, etc. The few times I've heard Pakistani opinion on their film industry, they are often embarrassed because these films are often considered vulgar, while many Indian movies are not (vulgar by local standards). Pakistani 'dramas' (basically soap operas broadcast on TV) are well liked (and well watched) by Pakistanis and those dramas not only have the usual romantic stories but too many of them are down right preachy regarding social issues.
As a child, I remember watching extremely popular dramas address fundamentalist violence. The previous generation even had several satirical commentaries on politics, extremism, corruption, lack of literacy, etc.. Shows like Uncle Sargam, 50/50, ...anga teRha were fantastic in their message and their content. If their production quality was brought up, they would surely rank very high among great television programs anywhere.
Conventional wisdom holds that communism collapsed
because America forced the Soviet Union into an
economically ruinous arms race. But the truth is that
the West won the Cold War less because it pointed
nuclear missiles at the Soviet people—and more because
it won their hearts and minds.
This article is just making up facts. Falling oil prices had more to do with the fall of the USSR than probably any other factor.
Falling oil prices made the giant on feet of clay fall. But how it got feet of clay in the first place?
First, it failed to be self-sufficient. USSR failed to make an independent economic ecosystem, it had to export oil and import numerous things it could not make inside (nor buy from other "communist" countries).
But second, communism failed to deliver the quality of life that first world boasted. Quality of life which of course included rock music, movies with violence and sex, and freedom of expression, but also good clothing, abundant tasty food and friendly service sector.
(I think that importance of Beatles is greatly exaggerated in the article, but I was born in 85 so I'm no expert on the exacts)
Soft Power at it's best. Indians excel at inventing weapons of least destruction by packaging them into a harmless psychedelic wrapper of nonsense and escapism. Say what you may, but Indian Cinema's song and dance routines are a balm for a billion souls.
The article is pretty much confused drivel with no clear substantiating data. My observations are that India is unable to control the growing fundamentalist Islamic element within its population. Recent riots and pogroms against native North-Eastern Indians (they have a significant East Asian component to their appearance) by Islamic groups is a clear marker of rapidly increasing instability. India as a state is one of those mixed stable-chaos types that is teetering on the brink of disaster. A mafia driven monarchy (Antonina Malno aka Sonia Gandhi) has effectively injected massive corruption into India's state bureaucracy and destroyed the improvements/gains made in the 1990s by civil society types. It is a mess. I would not invest any hope in India unless there's some massive change in their politics.
While you do use words that are technically correct they stand on the far edge of understanding or reflecting the underlying ground realities.
First your take on the Recent riot and pogroms in NE/Manipur/Assam and the rest of the seven sisters seems to indicate that Islamic fundamentalists are the chief culprits.
Yes it is Islamic adherents who are involved. But their presence is not because of religion but because they are illegal refugees/immigrants from Bangladesh who are encroaching and settling in the traditional lands of the indigenous tribes and Indians who live in those areas.
But this is a situation that has been building up for years, and has at its core a socio-economic cause and the religious coherence of the encroachers is a secondary thing.
I could go on about how the Mumbai riots and later the exodus but that is a separate point.
Secondly - Saying that Sonia Gandhi "has effectively injected massive corruption in India's state bureaucracy" is to take the latest head of state and blame her for the creation of a beast that reared its head first in the time of Indira Gandhi in the 1960s (License Raj)
Saying that it is a mafia driven monarchy further simplifies the situation and ignores the effects of the many corrupt parties and their respective leaders in the coalition government.
If anything India was MORE corrupt in the 1990s just prior to the reforms and a short while after.
It was only with the dismantling of power centers and places for the corrupt to seek rents that a lot of the old guard found themselves shunted out.
If anything I would hold Sonia and Congress responsible for being gutless and focusing on consolidating their power base.
But most of all I would single out the swing coalition partners from Bengal above all.
The Communist party that supported the Govt in the first few years constantly and consistently stymied each and every forward thinking disinvestment and reform oriented bill.
Then came Mamta Bannerjee and her equally if not more anachronistic ideas. IIRC she managed to get rid of the TATA Nano plant which would have created large amounts of employment in her home state. Creating a text book lose-lose situation.
I hold these people far more accountable as they crushed a huge amount of political capital and mired the country down into survival and further casteist politics.
I might get downvoted but i have to say something here.
Most pakistanis do like bollywood movies, but still there are a growing many who resent them. Bollywood movies ( apart from 1 director/actor) are extremely clichéd and many a times just very poor remakes of English movies.
This rant aside i would actually say that cricket diplomacy has more power than this film diplomacy,but that too is minuscule compared to the pakistani nationalism.
Pakistanis are very defence forces loving people, heck i was amazed at people going up to their roofs and saluting a F 16 flying over their heads.
(Also Pakistanis have a bloated sense of self importance.)
The article is only feel good. The fact is the Indian film industry or rather the Hindi Film industry is believed to be in a grasp of Mafia in Pakistan. May be not entirely but there is some truth to it.
The reason why America is not able to defeat Islam is because it has not engaged Islam at an ideological level. Americans or the entire west has kind of dug it's head into some hole on this issue. Consider the brutal and inhuman laws in Saudi Arabia (For example: http://www.niticentral.com/2012/08/womens-eyes-distract-so-b...) . USA wouldnt talk against them. The political class will always say that "Islam is religion of peace" it is only few distracted human beings who are waging the war in the name of Islam.
That stand is fallacious. People are born equal. A Hindu is as likely to commit a crime as Muslim and vice versa. However the ideologies they follow have some behavioral consequences for it's believers. Tibetians in China have gone through a lot of troubles. They are tortured in their own land, they are dirt poor, less educated and disconnected from rest of the world. Still, we dont see a Tibetan monk blowing up a bus or a building. That is because they follow Buddhism which believes that bringing harm to a sentient being is incorrect. That religion is truly a religion of peace. On the other hand believers in Islam believe that they are superior to everyone else and they own the world. So they very easily justify killing the Kafirs/Unbelievers.
The west has not gauged the nuisance value of Islam. It has not engaged it at an ideological level and that is why they are losing to Islam.
That's very interesting. I had never heard about the magnitude of the impact of Western culture in the soviet bloc, but it makes a lot of intuitive sense.
The Beatles was the reason for the breakdown of the soviet union -- this Dalmia guy could come up with more convincing theory.
Well, most indian people like to talk about their Bollywood crap, no wonder why this Dalmia guy is also a fan. But "Beatles brought down communism, so will bollywood do to Islamists"
Do you have evidence for that? The polling data I have seen suggest that that is NOT how self-reported religious preference in the United States is trending. The United States Census does not keep official statistics on religious affiliation in the United States (thank God), but various private organizations do sample surveys on the issue from time to time.
"Barry Kosmin, co-author of three American Religious Identification Surveys, theorizes why None has become the 'default category.' He says, 'Young people are resistant to the authority of institutional religion, older people are turned off by the politicization of religion, and people are simply less into theology than ever before.'"
It's possible that evangelicism is growing even if religiosity on the whole is declining. It's very hard to tell from these sorts of surveys, because what constitutes being religious is extremely difficult to define. Subtle differences in phrasing lead to enormous differences in outcome, e.g. 'are you a Christian' vs 'do you go to church at least once a week' could literally have a 50 point spread in the US. (And god forbid you test if people can recite the ten commandments from memory before counting them as Christian.)
And it gets even more difficult than this because most religions don't look or feel anything like Christianity, but because that's the most common religion in the US most surveys are biased in favor of religions that look like Christianity.
So you have issues like, is the Church of Subgenius a religion? Is science a religion? Is gnosticism the same as Gnosticism? etc.
There are entire college classes you can take on the history of the methodology of the study of religion, that focus on these questions like how do you know if something is a religion and how do you determine if someone is religious or not.
edit: A fun quote I snagged from Overdosed America suggesting that the excessive belief in western medicine may in fact have some commonalities with religion:
"Could it be that, although we define our era by the tremendous scientific and technological progress that is being made (particularly in medicine), our desire to believe in this narrative of biomedical progress predisposes us to uncritical belief in its real merits? In other words, might the shared belief in the potential of medical science be, in large part, our cultural mythology?
We tend to look upon myths with romantic condescension as the stories of primitive societies that provide shared meaning and hope and ease the prospect of suffering and death -- stories that are made of 'facts' that we (scientifically sophisticated as we are) know are not really true. Our belief that we are too scientifically grounded to succumb to such nonrational beliefs may, in fact, be our myth. How else can we explain the widespread agreement that statins or the new antidepressants or the COX-2 inhibitors are genuine breakthroughs that will preserve and restore our health in ways never before possible? These are our myths, merging science and hope into our shared belief."
Slightly OT: calling it "western medicine" is playing into hands of the quacks and woo-meisters who attempt to spin modern medicine as somehow being inferior to various "complementary" and "alternative" therapies.
Download a list of the top 25 most prescribed drugs of 2011 and let me know how many are clinically superior to faith healing. The entire list is dominated by SSRIs, benzos, statins, calcium channel blockers, antipsychotics, and evergreened drugs like Nexium -- all of which are no better than generics or placebos, and in fact are considerably worse, for the vast majority of people they're prescribed to.
Then after that look at a list of the most performed surgeries and let me know how many are more effective than placebo surgery.
That's the point the author is making. The belief that you can eat whatever you want and not exercise and then take a pill to keep you alive is really no different than believing that Jesus is going to save you, at least as far as the evidence is concerned.
Some of it is inferior. Much like most alternative therapies, a lot of "western medicine" doesn't work. But it's superior in one regard.
A faith healer will wave his hands at you + 50 other people for $10/each. In contrast, a doctor will charge you $30 copay + $100 from your insurance company for an equally pointless prostate exam.
It may be louder, but I can't agree that it is stronger than in the past. Most recently, look at the increasing acceptance of homosexuality—and there's a long list of "sins" before that that have gradually become accepted by mainstream America.
Less political influence due in large part to shrinking numbers. Greater chance of terrorism due to increased fanaticism among those who remain. There wasn't anything like Oklahoma City in the 1950s, was there?
Christian Fundamentalism was probably caused by the Second Industrial Revolution (which had a much bigger impact on society).
It took about 100 years for it to finally "go public" (1980s). The rationale behind going public was mostly driven by politics and money - incidentally this is also the time when Christianity started becoming a multi-billion dollar industry.
Christian Fundamentalism is easily traced as a response to Christian Liberalism; you can find pretty good information on both on wikipedia.
Here's a caricature of how it went down:
(mid 1800s, Liberalism): "Hey, it turns out when you look at ancient copies of the Bible from 2 different areas, there are occasional differences in spelling and word order. Therefore, the Bible is totally fiction, but teaches moderately useful lessons, so long as we understand the figurative language it's using."
(late 1800s, Fundamentalism): "What? You guys are quacks. The King James Bible is totally reliable because God specially preserved it. Therefore, there's no figurative language whatsoever, everything is literal."
It's my perception that Fundamentalism's influence is waning; I run into far fewer "fundies" than I did during my childhood (but I live in the same house and attend the same church.) In surveys I've seen, a lower percentage of people self-identify as Fundamentalist, and a lower percentage agree with certain key Fundamentalist doctrines. They may be louder than before, but I don't think they're any more prevalent.
I'm sorry, but do you mean the violent behaviour that didn't cause the bombing of the King David hotel in Jerusalem? Or the persistent treatment of the Palestinians as non-entities in a country in which they account for some 20 percent of the population? Or perhaps you're refering to the hawkish attitude taken towards Iran and syria? Neither of those countries support anything close to democracy, but it's a farce and a damn shame to pretend that the religious extremists in Israel are anything but.
I was referring to religions that go to war vs another for religious reasons. Crusades: Christian vs Islam, for example.
Jerusalem is different, that being a country with displacement/murder of people at its creation. Not that I agree with any sort of treatment towards families killed or kicked out on the founding.
After having read a bit about the bombing of the King David Hotel, well, I guess there are some radical elements there too. Pity.
When we are talk about the need for western enlightenment values to triumph over fundamentalism, this is what it means, not Brzynsky and Kissinger and Cheney's War on Non-Americans.
Question: should links to reason.com, instead of just saying (reason.com) have something like WARNING: Objectivism for people who forget that this site is by people who think free markets still work as a concept. I haven't read this link. If it's taking a pro-intervention stance, I'm ok with that, but many aren't.
If you're assuming, without reading, that it's taking a "pro-intervention stance," you obviously do not know enough about Reason's typical content to make such sweeping claims.
You live in a village in Pakistan, working fields for more or less a feudal landlord. Work is hard, long and for relatively little pay. You can't read or write, so have little prospects for a career change apart from other forms of manual labour. You have to support your own family, along with any elderly or sick relatives. In most cases you probably blow some of your wage on drink/gambling.
Once in a while a group comes through your village. They offer free food (a bit like a soup kitchen), spiritual guidance, and in some cases community health services. If you sign up for membership they promise to put your sons through school and pay for healthcare of any ageing/poorly relatives. If you're in a lot of debt or in any other sort of trouble, they promise to handle these things for you if you commit to them. They call themselves the Pakistani Taliban.