Varoufakis on Technofuedalism

If Europe rearms by devoting 5 percent of GNP to Defence spending, while simultaneously seeking to make itself self-sufficient in various strategic industries, there is a good case for an expanded public sector with increased central planning. In other words, markets will play a smaller role in allocating investment capital. One could say that the Economy has become more 'Marxist', or 'Fascist', or subject to 'Command'. Is this what Varoufakis is getting at in his recent article for the Guardian titled- 'In an age of failing economies and a populist backlash, I’ll tell you what we need – Marxism'?

A young woman I met recently remarked that it was not so much the existence of pure evil that drove her berserk, but

the fact that she was mentally ill? 

rather people or institutions with the capacity to do good who instead ended up damaging humanity.

Evil people have the capacity to do good. Hitler could have worked in a soup kitchen.  

Her musing made me think of Karl Marx, whose quarrel with capitalism was precisely that – not so much that it was exploitative but that it dehumanised and alienated us despite being such a progressive force.

Everything could be said to dehumanise and alienate us. Try teaching. It will do your head in. But the same is true of having to write modish nonsense for a living.  

Preceding social systems might have been more oppressive or exploitative than capitalism. However, only under capitalism have humans been so fully alienated from our products and environment,

Varoufakis is alienated from his own products- i.e. his shitty books. He is telling us that he writes that nonsense just to pay the bills. Still, as Finance Minister of Greece, he did a lot to ruin the Greek economic environment.  

so divorced from our labour, so robbed of even a modicum of control over what we think and do.

Varoufakis has no control over his thoughts. This is because of Capitalism. Had he been lucky enough to be born in North Korea he would be able to control his own brain. 

Capitalism, especially after it shifted into its technofeudal phase, turned us all into some version of Caliban or Shylock

Elizabethan Capitalism created both those memorable characters. It was a more feudal age but less technological.  

– monads in an archipelago of isolated selves whose quality of life is inversely related to the abundance of gizmos our newfangled machinery produces.

Varoufakis has invented and owns lots of new-fangled machinery. Elon Musk is jealous of him. It isn't the case that Varoufakis is too stupid to be a tech-entrepreneur.  

This week, alongside a host of other politicians, writers and thinkers, I will be speaking at the Marxism 2025 festival in London,

which is why he feels so alienated and miserable. He had wanted a Glastonbury gig. All his agent could get for him was some shitty Marxist festival.  

and one of the questions that occupies me is the way in which young people today clearly feel this alienation Marx identified.

I'd feel alienated if I was delivering Pizzas I could not myself afford to purchase. But being unemployed might be even more socially isolating and psychologically damaging. 

But the backlash against immigrants and identity politics – not to mention the algorithmic distortion of their voices – paralyses them.

Young Greek people want jihadi nutters to become the majority in their country. At the very least, Erdogan should rule their country.  

Here Marx can re-enter with advice on how to overcome this paralysis – good advice that lies buried under the sands of time.

Marx was buried till Lenin came to power. It was Leninism which gave his stupid shite international currency.  

Take the argument that minorities living in the west should assimilate lest we end up a society of strangers.

As opposed to a Province of the Caliphate?  

When Marx was 25, he read a book by Otto Bauer, a thinker he respected,

because he was as stupid as shit. 

making the case that to qualify for citizenship, German Jews should renounce Judaism.

His father had done so. He himself was baptized at the age of 6.  

Marx was livid. Though the young Marx had no time for Judaism, indeed for any religion, his passionate demolition of Bauer’s argument is a sight for sore eyes: “Does the standpoint of political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion? … Just as the state evangelizes when … it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.”

Marx found it safer to make his demands from exile. Acting politically may mean having to run the fuck away from the authorities. 

The trick that Marx is teaching us here is how to combine a commitment to the religious freedom of Jews, Muslims, Christians etc with the wholesale rejection of the presumption that, in a class society, the state can represent the general interest.

That rejection may involve running the fuck away from your country. States do solve collective action problems in the general interest. Some crazy people may say 'the State is very evil. The Post Office is actually just a cover for a paedophile ring.'  

Yes, Jews, Muslims, people of faiths that we may not share – or even much like – must be emancipated immediately. Yes, women, black people and LGBTQ+ people must be granted equal rights well before any socialist revolution appears on the horizon. But freedom will take a lot more than that.

This silly man doesn't know that socialist revolutions appeared long ago. A guy named Stalin closed down a lot of Churches and Mosques and Synagogues and killed plenty of religious people. Stalin recriminalized homosexuality in 1934. 

Shifting to the topic of immigrant workers suppressing the wages of local workers, another minefield for today’s younger people, a letter Marx sent in 1870 to two associates in New York City offers brilliant clues on how to deal not only with the Nigel Farages of the world but also with some leftists who have bitten the anti-immigration bait.

Marx persuaded the Americans to get rid of Jim Crow- right?  

In his letter, Marx fully acknowledges that American and English employers were purposely exploiting cheap Irish immigrant labour,

Germans became the largest immigrant group. 

pitting them against native-born workers and weakening labour solidarity. But for Marx it was self-defeating for trade unions to turn against the Irish immigrants and espouse anti-immigration narratives. No, the solution was never to banish immigrant workers but to organise them.

This would happen anyway, if workers could afford to pool their savings to create a 'strike fund'. This is a bargaining problem. If you don't have a threat point, you lose. Another way forward is to mobilise public opinion and make 'sweated labour' a 'repugnancy market' which can be curbed by legislation. If demand for labour is inelastic, workers can gain higher real wages or improved working conditions. This can create a virtuous circle of rising productivity and prosperity.  

And if the problem is the weakness of the unions,

because labour demand is elastic 

or fiscal austerity,

because tax revenue is insufficient and borrowing will create a 'crowding out' problem such that tax revenue falls in future years. 

then the solution can never be to scapegoat immigrant workers.

Scapegoating is not a solution. But reducing labour supply can lead to higher real wages if demand is inelastic.  

Speaking of trade unions, Marx also has some splendid advice for them. Yes, it is crucial to boost wages to reduce worker exploitation. But let us not fall for the fantasy of fair wages. The only way to render the workplace fair is to do away with an irrational system based on the strict separation of those who work but do not own and the tiny minority who own but do not work.

Very true. Why are retired people getting money from their pension funds which own shares in companies? Only workers should get money from the enterprise. The shareholders and the lenders should get nothing.  

In his words: “Trade unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital.

They can chase away enterprises. Those who want to work can go and do so elsewhere. Hopefully, they will send remittances.  

[But] [t]hey fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of also trying to change it.”

by killing the golden goose. The problem with running a trade union is that you can't collect union dues if everybody is on strike or the factories have closed down.  

Change it into what? A new corporate structure based on the principle of one-employee-one-share-one vote

In which case the firm will cease to 'internalize externalities'. Everything will be outsourced. Thus Musk would be the contracted by Tesla to supply managerial services for hundreds of millions of dollars. Each janitor will be contracted to supply janitorial services for fifty thousand dollars a year.  

– the kind of agenda that can truly inspire youngsters who crave freedom both from statism and from corporations driven by the bottom lines of private equity firms or an absent owner who may not even know he or she owns part of the firm they work for.

Youngsters will be very happy to learn that grandpa and grandma will no longer get a pension because their Pension fund now owns nothing.  The problem here is that Institutional Investors will have sold out and invested elsewhere if they fear that a Socialist Revolution is around the corner. 

Last, Marx’s freshness shines through when we try to make sense of the technofeudal world that big tech, along with big finance and our states, has surreptitiously encased us in.

There speaks the voice of paranoia. Government agents surreptitiously enter our houses at night and drain us of our precious bodily essence through aggravated acts of fellatio and cunnilingus.   

To understand why this is a form of technofeudalism, something much worse than surveillance capitalism, we need to think as Marx would have of our smartphones, tablets etc.

They are a continuation of improvements in communications technology which date back to the invention of writing, printing, the post office, the telegraph, etc.  

To see them as a mutation of capital – or “cloud capital” – that directly modifies our behaviour.

just as clothes and cars and cats modify our behaviour.  

To grasp how mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical neural networks and imagination-defying AI programs created a world where, while privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains.

Also your smartphone is sucking you off while you sleep. That's why you feel tired when you wake up.  

Only through Marx’s lens can we truly get it: that to own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively.

No. We must do stupid shit so that China ends up owning everything.  

Sharjeel Imam's final fantasy

 Five years ago I put up a couple of posts on Sharjeel Imam who is still in prison awaiting trial on various charges relating to the Shaheen Bagh protests which so greatly helped the BJP and harmed Congress. 

He has recently published the article given below on the 'Polis Project' website. It appears that it was his late father- a small time politician with Nitish Kumar's JDU- who is most to blame for his poor career choices and crazy ideology. The irony here is that Nitish is currently propping up Modi's administration. Daddy, it seems, was on the side of the Fascists.

We should never judge anyone by how their adversaries represent them,

Unless those adversaries are smart and are working in our interest. 

especially when it comes to fellow travelers.

Sharjeel was abandoned by his political chums because he was batshit crazy.  

In my case, a month of working and speaking on the streets of Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh and Jamia during the 2019 protests against the union government’s new citizenship law, and a decade of sustained research and writing, was all ignored because of a clip mischievously propagated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and their supporters.

It was mischievously propagated by Sharjeel because was up to mischief. He wanted Assam to be cut off from the rest of India. He didn't get that the indigenous Assamese would massacre Muslim settlers if this happened. Mohammad Yunus won't be able to do shit. The Army will take over. The plain fact is, Muslims have never had the monopoly of ethnic cleansing. The thing is a two way street. Sharjeel may worship Jinnah but Jinnah had to abandon his property in India and move to Karachi where he didn't even own a house. His descendants are Indians. But they aren't Muslims.  

Also because, having been a victim of “Congress nationalism,”

Manmohan Singh beat him up. Sonia Gandhi stole his lunch money. Rahul's chum, Kanhaiya Kumar pulled down his shorts and made fun of his puny genitals. 

I try to seriously engage with the ideas of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

That idea was 'the two nation theory'. Indian Muslims should become Muhajirs. Sadly, the Pakistanis don't want them. Why not go to the Gulf? The smartest people from all over the world are moving there. 

It was Jawaharlal Nehru, not Jinnah, who sabotaged the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan after it had been agreed upon by all parties (see Maulana Azad’s India Wins Freedom.

It was Nehru, not Jinnah, who was Prime Minister in Delhi when the Muslim population fell from 33 percent to just 5 percent. Nehru passed a law preventing Muslims who had fled across the border in panic from returning and reclaiming their property. Gandhi said that he knew which Congressmen in Bihar had been responsible for killing innocent Muslims. Did he suspend them from the Party? Nope. He collected some money and moved on.  

Also, Aakar Patel’s

who helps BJP get votes in Gujarat.  

The Constitution that wasn’t—or, a Muslim man’s vision of Independent India, National Herald, 26 Jan 2025).

That vision was of a Muslim India engaging in jihad against Israel. 

Jinnah is more important than ever for any conversation around the decentralization of power, minority and community rights, and my invocation of him must be read in that light.

Jinnah protected Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan. Minorities in Pakistan are now a larger percentage of the population than they were in 1947. 

In the words of Parthasarathi Gupta, my plea is “for a federal polity and a confederal association among the countries of South Asia”

Pakistan and Bangladesh will gladly embrace Hindu majority rule. This guy should join the RSS and gas on about 'Akhand (Federal) Bharat'.  

. He further writes, “In our own country, if we were to shed some of the centralist features of GOI Act 1935 and make India a genuine federation of states,

and get the Muslims to stop thinking God wants them to kill kaffirs 

we will set an example to our immediate neighbors and be in a position to make the states of SAARC [the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation] a genuine confederation of peoples…”).

So, India must change its constitution and conquer its neighbours so as to create a Federal Republic corresponding to undivided India. There's just one problem. Pakistan has nukes. It doesn't want anything to do with India. It doesn't even want Indian Muslims. Indeed, they are now deporting even Hanafi Afghans. 

You might disagree with me, but judgements based on the image that the troll army wants of me are problematic.

Sharjeel's problem is that he is stupid. That is what causes his image to be that of a loser who may as well rot in jail because he is bound to make a nuisance of himself sooner or later. 

So is calling me crazy or a BJP agent, only because my adversaries cannot digest my positions.

They are shit. Nobody wants to digest shit.  

The way a section of “progressive” media and opinionmakers (both Muslim and non-Muslim) have sought to silence me and erase our tireless and decisive contributions to Shaheen Bagh from day zero to day 18

the thing failed. BJP and AAP gained votes from Congress and the Left. Delhi now has a BJP CM.  

—I mean books have been written about Shaheen Bagh without even mentioning me, Asif Mujtaba, Afreen Fatima, or others—just goes to show that this section is either disingenuous or intellectually bankrupt.

Shaheel is a Narcissist. Nothing wrong with that. Lots of politicians are. But they need to get someone smart to write their speeches or articles. 

But thankfully, in this day and age, facts cannot be suppressed forever. I have no complaints; I am just pointing it out. Faith in God and the love of my people is enough for me.

His people are safer if he remains in jail.  

“I am a pessimist because of my intelligence and an optimist because of my will.” Gramsci is supposed to have said that.

He did. He was quoting Romain Rolland who came to worship Stalin. What Gramsci meant by this remark is that the proletariat was fucked and would remain fucked till a Leninist party fucked everybody over so thoroughly that, by comparison, the proles would feel less egregiously fucked. Sharjeel's problem is that he is his own Lenin and Stalin. Also he is in jail not fucking up the country big time. 

The same applies to my case although I would prefer a modified version: I am a pessimist because of my intelligence

he is a prisoner because of his stupidity.  

and an optimist because of my faith. For some the two might be the same, but for me and people like me raised in the Islamic faith, “will” is meaningless without “faith” in God and His plans for me. There is the one grand “Will” of God, and the smaller “wills” cannot make sense or be optimistic without having faith in that “Will”—something that one can never fathom and only have faith in.

This is a garbled version of Iqbal's concept of 'khudi'.  God can ensure that a small 'will' is optimistic or pessimistic or as stupid as Sharjeel. But, equally, God may not want Sharjeel to bee so fucking stupid. Predestination may involve non-deterministic algorithms. Indeed, since we know they are superior, we can assume that 'the best of Creators' would use them. Thus 'Qadr' can be non-deterministic in alam-e-khalq, this is not so in alam-e-amr which beyond Time and thus the scope of time hierarchy theorems. 

In other words, one could say history is “unknowable,” present is “unknowable,” and the trajectory of future is also “unknowable.”

Not for Muslims. Prophets prophesy. They convey knowledge of the future.  

All we have are inaccurate approximations and sometimes plain wrong guesses and conceptions.

What Sharjeel has is shit for brains. 

To make sense of one’s contribution or one’s place in the grand scheme of things is impossible without faith.

No. You may lack faith and yet know that you are a stupid piece of shit. That's a good reason not to clutter up the penal system. Just get a job and pay your taxes. The grand scheme of things depends on stupid people acknowledging their stupidity and staying in their fucking lane.  

There are those who are too eager to see change in their own lives, who think that a revolution is just around the corner.

They are called 'nutters'.  

The problem with such an approach is that

it involves being a nutter 

the patience required for fundamental change is missing.

a patient nutter is still a nutter.  

Patience—self-effacing patience—can only come through faith.

No. It can come from not being a fucking nutter. That's how come most people can sit quietly waiting for their train or plane or bus. They understand that such vehicles won't turn up immediately just because you really want it to.  

It is faith in God which drove me towards historical studies

rather than religious studies. I suppose if he had faith in Tooth Fairy he would have been driven towards Queer Theory. 

and it is faith in God which sustains me in prison

this guy is too stupid to understand that he is a Jihadi nutjob. Just because he actually is Muslim doesn't mean he can't really really want to kill kaffirs.  

and it is faith in God which allows me to contextualize my life and my life’s work in a span not of decades but centuries.

His life's work, like that of his Daddy's, was to try to gain some political power or influence. Nothing wrong with that. There's lots of money in politics. But, it appears, he hasn't made much money. Muslim politicians don't want to be associated with this useless nutjob. Owaisi condemned his remarks on Assam.  

I have spent five years in jail now.

Jail is a good place to make contacts. Sharjeel knows IT. Maybe he could be crypto bagman or something of that sort. Perhaps, he is just pretending to be a nutter.  

I would reiterate that these have been the most productive years of my life, not only because I got to read a lot—hundreds of books—but also because I have met a lot of political prisoners, have lived with people from Assam for six months, and have been living with people from Delhi and Haryana for over four years. All this has been a learning experience.

It must be admitted that Jail is more educational than the History Dept. of JNU.  

I am a student of Islamic modernism

of the sort you see in UAE? Plenty of opportunities for IT mavens in Dubai. 

and its scholars such as Jamaluddin Afghani and Muhammad Abduh of Egypt. Our own Akbar Allahabadi, Allama Iqbal and Maulana Azad, and Ali Shariati, the Iranian revolutionary, have shaped my understanding of politics as well as Islam.

In that case, your understanding is zero. Islam is the same whether it is practiced by a British Lord- like Baron Stanley who converted in 1869- or a Iranian or an Indian or an Arab. But politics has changed greatly since the time of even Shariati. Some of his followers tried to kill Khatami. They were slaughtered.  

It is these people who inspired me to take up a study of Islam and history as an engineering graduate.

Nothing wrong with that at all. Get a job in an Arab country and take instruction in different branches of Islamic knowledge. By all means visit leading seminaries and scholars back home. In Europe and America there are many fine seminaries as well as University Departments. 

Alternatively, if you are interested in Indian politics, follow the example of Prashant Kishore. Learn a bit of Statistics and volunteer as a quant for a political campaign. Kishore has set up his own party in Bihar. Will it succeed? Perhaps not. But Kishore changed Indian politics for the better. Parties became more focussed on last mile delivery- particularly to poorer women.  

I was raised in a traditional middle-class household in Bihar’s Patna and Jehanabad. My father was a local politician and contested as an independent from Kurtha in 2000. In 2005,

at a time when Nitish was allied with the BJP as he is now 

he got the Janata Dal United (JDU) symbol from the Jehanabad seat for the state assembly. He lost both seats—coming third in Kurtha and second in Jehanabad—but established himself as someone who had behind him around ten percent votes in multiple state assembly seats and where Muslim population was only 10-12 percent. It gave him some hold in the JDU, which has held power in Bihar since 2005.

Nitish only broke with the BJP in 2013. Perhaps Sharjeel's father thought that his son could use JNU as a launchpad into Bihari politics- a very lucrative field- under Nitish's patronage. Also, it was possible that Rahul would shoulder Manmohan aside and lead the UPA to victory in 2014. 

It is my father’s distributed vote bank that first made me aware of the flaws of the First Past the Post system (FPTP) as opposed to proportional representation.

The former makes for stability. The latter makes for either chaos or coalitions held together by corruption. Weimar made the mistake of going in for P.R because the Jewish Professor who wrote the Constitution thought his own party, which could only gain a few seats through PR, would have a bigger role. It was obvious that there could be legislative gridlock and so there was a clause permitting the President to rule by decree under certain circumstances. 

As I have written earlier, under FPTP, a territory is divided into spatial constituencies, each sending a representative elected through a vote.

Proportional Representation is likely to be territorial in a big country with different languages. 

The candidate receiving the largest number of votes is considered elected, even if they receive, say, less than 20 percent of the votes.

This can also be true of Proportional Representation. What matters is if coalitions are stable. 

It is this system that enables parties with around a third of total votes to achieve a two-thirds majority in an assembly.

Under P.R, a party with 2 percent of the vote can gain 100 percent control of Parliament if there are many other parties none of whom pass a 1 percent threshold. Sharjeel is as stupid as shit.  

India’s Constituent Assembly debates also witnessed disagreements over the issue as the Congress party abolished separate electorates.

Congress presided over the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Delhi itself. Disagreement didn't change this outcome.  

While some Muslims did speak up, demanding proportional representation, it needs to be noted that separate electorates have a significant demerit, too: Hindus can’t vote for Muslims and vice versa.

By and large, Hindus won't vote for Muslims save in countries where White people are the majority. This is because Muslims have been corrupt, stupid and useless when they have not been crazy jihadists.  

People like Hasrat Mohani, the poet freedom fighter and one of the most vocal opponents of FPTP, maintained that joint electorates would eliminate Muslim representation.

Hindu people didn't like Hasrat Mohani who was elected in 1946 on a League ticket. But, he understood he would have no political future in Pakistan. It is fortunate he died before the first proper election under universal franchise was held. He was unelectable.

The alternative was proportional representation where the number of seats would be decided by the percentage of votes received by a party and while Muslims could vote for Hindus and vice versa, minorities couldn’t be silenced.

They could be ethnically cleansed. I suppose if this nutter gets out of jail and runs amok once again, he may himself contribute to this outcome. There's a good reason people like Owaisi condemn him. An Indian whose hero is Jinnah doesn't have a political future unless he crosses the border. But Pakistanis or Bangladeshis won't vote for a nutter. 

My years at IIT

In 2006, at the age of 18, I qualified the Joint Entrance Examination and got admitted to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay to study computer science. Apart from that, I was into religious literature in Arabic and Persian.

Nothing wrong in that at all. Stay away from booze and hit the books.  

I was also reading Islamic history even though I had yet to encounter Islamic modernism.

which was either just 'modernism' or involved fucking off from Hindu India.  

In my second year at the IIT, in a literature class, when the professor started talking about evolution, I objected saying evolution was just a theory and not a fact of science.

Maybe the rumours are true. Biharis are stupid.  

The professors in the IIT were like those in JNU, so he didn’t shut me up.

He was teaching 'literature'. Fuck would he know about science? Anyway, if a hefty Bihari buffalo wants to talk, let him do so. Otherwise he might knife you.  

He asked me to do a presentation on the subject. The next week, standing in front of 200 students of Literature 101, I offered my presentation filled with comments from Christian pseudoscientists I had found in some Islamic books refuting evolution.

Muslims don't even have 'pseudoscientists'. They have to turn to Christians to eke out their ignorance.  To be fair, we are speaking of a Bihari. Most are bright. But some aren't at all. 

Listening to my presentation of half an hour, the professor appreciated the work but asked me to read a few texts. However, more than those texts, what helped me understand evolution was

Richard Dawkins? John Maynard Smith? Nope. This Bihari buffalo 

Iqbal, the poet philosopher of

Pakistan. Khameni rates him though admits that his Farsi was shite.  

the 20th century. Revered among the Muslims of South Asia, people at large remember Iqbal only as the poet who wrote Saare jahan se achha. Iqbal the philosopher has been summarily ignored.

Because he was stupid. You can either be a Muslim or a follower of Nietzsche- unless you are Punjabi and thus can use Punjabi logic. Incidentally, Iqbal fell in love with Mussolini even though the dude was slaughtering Muslims in Libya.  

It was Iqbal who led me to Henri Bergson and his Creative Evolution.

Which was nonsense. 

He also led me to Karl Marx and his Capital.

IIT students should be able to comprehend the mathematics behind evolutionary theory or Capital theory. They shouldn't be taught 'literature' by a cretin.  

Iqbal had his critiques of both, yet with profound respect.

Profound ignorance. To be fair, lots of people who returned to India after higher studies abroad went quietly mad or suffered grave mental impairment. D.D Kosambi took to proving the Reimann hypothesis by 'statistical' methods!  

My point is it wasn’t Marx who opened my eyes about capitalism,

Sadly, Sharjeel's eyes were never opened to anything.  

or Darwin who made me respect evolution,

why not Newton so he could get to respect gravity as well?  

but Iqbal who made me understand these things. The reason is simple:

Iqbal was stupid and Sharjeel is stupid. Stupid reasoning appeals to stupid people.  

the materialist treatment of these ideas by most of the protagonists of the 20th century drove me—a young and curious but faithful Muslim kid looking for answers—away. (I am not anti-communist. I mean their contributions towards the most meaningful political and economic analysis of the recent human history, towards class struggles, against superstition or ugly ideologies of capitalism would naturally be incorporated into any future development of the human thought.

Bihari buffalo thought- maybe. Human thought- not so much.  

What is often problematic about communists, though, is their claim that dialectic materialism is a science,

It can have a mathematical description a la William Lawvere. If the thing generates better predictions or yields a structural causal model which enables better outcomes to be achieved, then the thing is a science.  

even though materialistic ontology was abandoned by physics over a century ago.

Nope. All Physics has a physicalist description which is materialistic in the sense that Energy and matter are interlinked.  

For a longer discussion, see my Worldview in a cell: a Muslim political prisoner’s insight.)

Don't. It is dreck.  

Even though science abandoned deterministic materialism in the early 20th century,

It did so in the Seventeenth century when 'action at a distance' had to be accepted because it was so useful.  

political ideologies still follow the old vocabulary of the Newtonian era.

The ideologies of Bihari buffaloes- maybe.  

This is where a figure like Iqbal breaks new ground

for a Bihari buffalo 

while avoiding the impression that we know everything or that we’re on way to knowing everything.

We know all we need to know about Sharjeel. He is stupid. Should he be in jail? No. He should be running amok thus helping the BJP to win elections. 

This is where faith as the foundational building block of community and individual development comes into play.

Christians and Hindus and Jews have Faith. Sadly, if Muslims try to kill them, they may retaliate. This is bad for the economy and thus bad for everybody. That's why it is worth locking up nutters like Sharjeel.  

Iqbal was one of the few philosophers who attempted to synthesize this post-Newtonian scientific knowledge with questions of faith.

Islam did that long long ago by making the insha/khabar (imperative/alethic) distinction, with Scripture being wholly imperative. Similarly, the alam-al-amr/alam-al-khalq distinction provided a theological workaround for Darwin.  

I am referring here of course to the ontological and epistemological questions raised by the 20th century revolutions in physics—relativity and quantum physics—and the ways in which it shattered metaphysical assumptions of materialist schools of thought as well as most religious schools of thought.

This is ignorant nonsense. What happened was that empirical evidence challenged the 'aether theory'. This in turn opened the door to what Einstein called 'Mach's principle'. Crucial experiments and empirical observations continue to drive paradigm shifts. Nobody gives a shit about 'metaphysical assumptions' or whether you are a good Muslim or Jew or whatever. 

To name a few important texts, for a critique of materialism and determinism one must read Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science by Werner Heisenberg.

No. Heisenberg himself thought that God knew the position of subatomic particles. This is perfectly compatible with physicalism which is a variety of deterministic materialism.  

one of the founders of quantum physics. For an argument in support of the mystical thought, read What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell and Mind and Matter, both by Erwin Schrodinger, another founding figure of quantum physics.

Who took an interest in Vedanta. But his views have been overtaken by something like the law of increasing functional information.  

Further, I’d urge you to see The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics by Max Jammer (specifically its chapter “The Philosophical Background of Nonclassical Interpretations”) to understand the influence of the 19th-century Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard—the Danish precursor of existentialism and neo-orthodox theology—on Niels Bohr, another of the pioneering quantum physics scientists.

Sharjeel does not understand that philosophy or religion or politics or ideology didn't initiate or change anything. The Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 together with technological advances driven by commercial and military considerations did the rest.  

Further, read the letters of Kurt Godel—arguably the greatest mathematician of the 20th century—between 1946 and 1966 for an enunciation of his Christian, monotheistic faith.

Wholly irrelevant. His proof of God was flawed.  

A summary can be found in A Logical Journey: From Godel to Philosophy, a 1996 essay by Hao Wang. For Godel’s engagement with general relativity, read Godel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Godel Universe.

Again irrelevant. Still at least the fucker isn't quoting Zakir Naik.  

And for an early Islamic reaction especially to relativity and evolution, one must go through Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930), Javid Nama (or The Book of Eternity, 1932) and Saqi Nama (or The Book of the Winebringer, 1935).

Iqbal focused on the Arts & became a lecturer in Arabic at a young age. He had some basic exposure to Science & Math in school but was not abreast of recent developments. 

I am cramming these pages with references because

you are a Bihari buffalo who wants to be considered smart by other Bihari buffaloes.  

I want you to enquire and engage with my ideas for themselves.

Your ideas are shit.  

My words are not mere ramblings but philosophical and historical questions rooted in my reading of science, theology and history.

Shite from before the war.  

There is so much to say and explain about these theories that I cannot do presently. I shall, however, try to write in more detail in future.

You wasted your life. It is too late to catch up.  

By the time I graduated from IIT Bombay, I had made up my mind to study philosophy.

Because you were wholly ignorant of it.  

My summer internship in Copenhagen in 2009 also provided some exposure to western universities and the Scandinavian model of welfare states. I had a long conversation about this with Amitabha Sanyal, my favorite professor and project guide. He encouraged me to take up philosophy and gifted me The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler.

So, even his professors were unaware of any of the new mathematical ideas which gained currency in the Sixties and which underlie the IT revolution. The fact is problems of concurrency, complexity, computability and categoricity have fundamentally changed Epistemology. Everybody doing useful work is a pragmatist in practice. Everybody teaching empistemology is a useless wanker.  

Turn to history

I applied for PhD in dozens of American universities but all of them said I needed to have a master’s in philosophy.

He still doesn't have one. But he thinks he is a great philosopher.  

I decided to go to Egypt to study Islamic theology and Arabic at Al-Azhar University but the Arab Spring stalled that plan in 2011.

I'd have suggested applying for a Saudi scholarship.  

So I took up a placement offer in Bangalore and started my corporate job

without having any intention of doing well in it.  

while continuing to study philosophy and Islamic theology. In 2012, I appeared for the MPhil/PhD in Philosophy entrance for Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). I qualified for the viva, where the faculty appreciated my attempt. But they asked me to come back next year since I didn’t have a proposal. By then, however, something transformed and I turned to history instead.

Perhaps his father thought JNU would be a launchpad for his useless son to get into Bihari politics.  

My mind had always been conflicted, coming from a scientific background.

Code monkey background. 

Twentieth-century physics, as discussed above, is a philosophical tinderbox for the religious as well as the irreligious

No. It is wholly unimportant. It turned out that Philosophy was useless and 'Scientific Method' was neither scientific nor methodical.  

but for a community that’s been a victim of Partition

because it couldn't make the majority community a victim and decided against migrating to the 'land of the Pure' 

as well as majoritarian politics and violence,

of the sort he tried to incite 

and as a son of a politician who dedicated his life against such forces,

by joining Nitish at a time when he was an ally of the BJP. 

South Asian history and its fault lines were part of my daily life in a very conscious way.

A very stupid and useless way.  

I had started learning German in 2011. By 2013, I was deep into 20th-century Germany and the history of fascism.

Bihari buffaloes can't go deep into any subject.  

It tilted the balance in favor of history. I realized the philosophical and socio-political questions of the nature of human existence and social justice, of casteism in India and the rise of nationalism, of majoritarianism, Partition and minority rights—the most urgent questions I was seeking answers to—were historical.

The Muslims had once dominated North India. Then they lost dominance. Why? They were stupid, ignorant, and- whenever possible- an active menace to their neighbours.  

Soon I left the corporate world to join JNU for a master’s in modern history. A parttime job paid me Rs 25,000 a month, a mere fraction of what I earned previously.

Bihari buffaloes are downwardly mobile.  

But tragedy struck right after—my father was diagnosed with stomach cancer in January 2014 and my second and third semesters were spent at Delhi’s Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute. When I asked my father if I should leave JNU and find a corporate job again, he prohibited me saying, “Your money will not save me.” It was my uncle (my mother’s brother) who took care of all the expenses as my father, despite being a powerful figure, earned just enough to keep the household running. His possessions included a total of two vehicles, two rifles

because when it comes to killing kaffirs, one gun is never enough?  

and a shop. He didn’t own a house. If not for my uncle, I would have had to abandon my studies and find a job. I will never be able to repay him (an engineer in the state government, he has since retired).

Hopefully, this cretin will be released soon and can trigger some nice communal riots and ethnic cleansing.  

My mother had been a patient and sacrificing partner of my father and she wanted me to go back to my previous career. She weighed in, asking my father to tell me to go back. But my father told her, “Let him be. He will write the history of our struggles.”

He is a footnote in the history of the stupidity of the Bihari buffalo.  

In May 2014, my father was watching television in the hospital when Narendra Modi was sworn in as prime minister. “Sharjeel, you should leave India,” he said. “Go to the United States, study there. If you stay here, you’ll join politics. It will be a struggle, and they’ll send you to jail.”

Fair point. Rahul had funked it. Modi would repeat his success as CM of Gujarat. Nitish would go back to the BJP.  

I thought it was his paternal instinct, because he wouldn’t be around to protect me.

More to the point, he didn't have a political godfather who could protect his idiot son.  

I was such a naive young man.

Stupid is the mot juste.  

He knew the world better than I. He even knew me better than I. He knew I was stubborn and opinionated enough to crash headlong into this emerging fascist ecosystem.

i.e. the Justice system. Did you know that the majority of Judges and police officers in Hindu majority India are Hindu?! That is blatant majoritarianism a.k.a Fascism! No Muslim should ever be arrested for any crime. Let some innocent Hindu be convicted in their stead.  

Not that he would have prohibited me, but he saw it coming.

If he hadn't made money, he too was a failure. Things of that sort can be hereditary you know. 

While I hardly attended classes that year, I wrote tutorials, made software (the small salary was still a lot), and read to my father in the hospital. I remember reading a book on the Iranian revolution and listening to his comments on the events as he recalled his youth.

Oh. The family is Shia. That's why he didn't want to go to Saudi Arabia.  

He passed away in November.

I spent the next semester, my fourth, idly grieving. It was my worst semester in JNU. (I am particularly apologetic to Janaki Nair, one of my professors. I took a course and a seminar but did nothing except reading the whole of Tipu Sultan’s Persian diary.)

Nair had her own problems. Her pension was withheld pending an inquiry into 'misconduct'. The Left was being pushed out of JNU thanks to the antics of people like Sharjeel.  

A father’s lessons

Coming back to my father, I learned two things from him. One, that Partition led to a systemic exclusion of Muslims in the Indian polity

thanks to Jinnah. That's why this nutter idolizes him. But Jinnah got to be the Governor General of the country he created. If this nutter succeeds in provoking another ethnic cleansing, where will he go? Pakistan won't take him. Iran? Maybe. But then he'd be executed as an Israeli spy. 

and that Jinnah was right in his demands against centralization and for a true federal structure and minority rights.

He demanded and got Pakistan where minorities had the right to either be beaten to death or raped to death.  

And, two, that it’s not a democracy if we have only one side to vote for.

It's not a democracy if Muslims are the majority though the Army may pretend otherwise from time to time.  

That is why he said that both the JDU and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) should be strong and competing forces. Otherwise, if one side was left open for the BJP with no strong leaders and parties to keep it in check, then however good the RJD alliances may be, Muslims will not be their voters but their “slaves.”

Muslims should be slaves to this nutter. He is the Jinnah who will lead them to a new 'Pure land' at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.  

The first lesson about Partition and Jinnah led me to the theoretical quest I’m currently following.

I suppose his call to cut off Assam from the rest of India was his attempt to force a Partition. 

The second and more practical lesson about electoral politics has become more evident and urgent in the last decade as Muslims have lost political agency in almost all of India, except probably Tamil Nadu and Kerala and to a lesser extent Andhra and Bihar. Even in Bengal, the emergence of the BJP means we cannot be picky.

Why does this nutter not mention Owaisi?  

It is based on these two lessons from my father that I have been reading and doing research and finding people invested in similar subjects.

Useless JNU jhollawallahs.  

Both my MPhil and PhD are about violence inflicted on Indian Muslims.

In other words, they are propaganda, not works of scholarship.  

Why this line of enquiry is of utmost urgency is visible today around us—the loss of political agency of Muslims is not accidental.

Owaisi has plenty of agency. Abdullah is a C.M. This nutter lost political agency because he was shit at politics. But he also lost agency as an IT maven or a post-grad scholar because he was stupid and did stupid shit.  

It is systemic and historical, just that its most pernicious manifestation has emerged in the post-1990s era because of the alignment of many global and local variables of polity and economy.

Sharjeel was cool with ethnic cleansing of Muslims under Nehru. He was very happy with ethnic cleansing of Hindus from the Vale of Kashmir in the Nineties. Then there was a War on Terror and 1.3 million mainly Muslim people were killed and tens of millions were displaced. Sharjeel thinks this is very pernicious.  

Paying lip service to equality and secularism is not enough.

It is a waste of time. 

Reducing everything to class is also problematic.

Why not get a job instead? 

The only way forward is through realizing that systemic change is necessary to restore agency to Muslims and other minorities of India.

But non-Muslims may exercise their agency to ethnically cleanse jihadi minorities. Why does Sharjeel worship Jinnah and wish to repeat his mistake? Jinnah could emigrate to Pakistan. Indian Muslims will not be welcomed there even if they want to go to that shithole.  

And for this reason, Jinnah is more relevant today than he was in 1947, when he was anticipating the contradicting tendencies of Brahmanical forces

Nehru was a Brahmin. Patel wasn't, thank God.  

and the alienation of Muslims in the narrative of “secular” Gandhian nationalism, which according to both Jinnah and Iqbal was not fundamentally different from Brahmanical revivalism with its imagined nationalist history and a tendency towards centralization and majoritarianism aided by a large section of capitalists.

But Jinnah and Iqbal had shit for brains. Pakistan is a shithole.  

(For more, read Aakar Patel on the centralizing tendencies of the Congress and the possibility of a better future had true federalism been adopted, the kind that Muslim leaders such as Jinnah had hoped for.)

If you love Aakar so much, why don't you marry him?  

The only lacuna in Jinnah’s political expression seems to be his silence on the issue of caste among Muslims, ostensibly because in the context of impending decolonization and Hindu consolidation in the Congress, the most urgent task was to counter centralization and majoritarianism, which required some kind of consolidation of Muslims.

Hilarious! One third of sub-continental Muslims were left on the wrong side of the border. There was no consolidation. There was Partition. Then Bangladesh went its own way and Mujahirs in Pakistan started getting it in the neck.  

Representation and the Muslim League

What was anticipation then has become stark reality today. For Jinnah, the Congress party’s secularism was essentially a tool to silence and exclude Muslims and other minorities.

For Indian Muslims, Jinnah was the dick who fucked them in the ass.  

Recall his assertion about secular majoritarianism and its attempt to erase other identities: “Democracy does not give one community the right to rule over another through the ballot box.”

Being Muslim, and having military or mob power, means killing kaffirs or chasing them away. Sadly, non-Muslims can do this equally well.  

About Jinnah, historian Joya Chatterjee writes in Shadows at Noon (page 67): “From 1906 … until … he died … Jinnah remained a liberal constitutionalist with a rare talent for negotiation.

Not for Indian Muslims. Thanks to Jinnah, they were fucked. True, non-Muslims in Pakistan were equally fucked. J.N Mandal, Jinnah's law minister, had to run away to India. But that would have happened anyway because Muslim majorities kill non-Minorities unless there is a powerful King or Viceroy or Dictator to prevent those fools from killing the golden goose.  

… What changed … in the 1930s and 40s was not Jinnah but the Congress whose leadership became ever more insistent that it represented the entire nation. … Its leadership saw less reason to conciliate those who rejected that claim. This more hegemonic stance drove out those, Jinnah among them, who believed that constitutional safeguards were necessary for minorities in Indian circumstances and that there were identities other than “Indian” that demanded space, recognition and respect. It proved impossible in the end for the arch negotiator to bring about a compromise with the party (Congress) which would not bend.”

In 1937, when elected provincial administrations were formed, it became obvious that Indians were shit at running things. There was no point keeping the country together if it was bound to turn into a shithole. You may as well support some nutter of your own community who could do the job just as well. 

You could also read Iqbal’s presidential address at the All-India Muslim Conference, 1932:

if you have Pakistani citizenship- sure. But if you are an Indian Muslim, what is the point? Pakistan won't give you citizenship even if you claim you are being persecuted by the Hindus. Any way, Pakistan is currently a worse shithole than India.  

“Congress leaders claim that they are the sole representatives of the peoples of India. The last round-table conference made it abundantly clear that they were not. This they (the Congress) naturally resent. … They have therefore started the present campaign … to defeat a pact which they fear may find a place in the coming constitution, and to force the government to settle the matter of minorities with the Congress alone. The Congress resolution … made it perfectly clear that since the government had refused to regard Mahatma Gandhi as the sole representative of the country, the Congress decided on Civil Disobedience. How can then a minority join a campaign which is directed as much against itself as against the government?”

In Kerala there is still a Muslim League. But there was no separatism there. In North India, there is no Muslim League. If the place is 'dar ul harb' do 'hijrat'. Try jihad, and the majority will slaughter you. This is also true of Muslims in Europe and America. Reading Jinnah & Iqbal isn't going to magically make Muslims the majority. London has a Muslim mayor. Is Sadiq Khan reading Iqbal or Jinnah? No. Sharjeel is. But Sharjeel has shit for brains and is rotting in jail. Khan has just been knighted by the King.  

Sharjeel is right that Indian Muslims want Muslims to rule India. But they also understand that they will lose if they start any rough stuff. One final point. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was right when he said reading Urdu poetry rots your brains. Vide

 For instance, read Iqbal on Gautam Buddha:

Qaum ne paigham-e Gautam ki zara parwah na ki
Qadr pehchani na apne gauhar-e-yaqdana ki

The nation paid no heed to the Buddha’s message
Little did it understand the worth of the priceless pearl

India paid great head to the Buddha's message for over a thousand years. That is why invading Muslims took so much trouble rooting it out. 

Or his words on Guru Nanak:

Phir uthi tauheed ki sadaa Punjab se
Hind ko ik mard-e kamil ne jagaya khwab se

Once more has a monotheistic banner been raised in Punjab
India has been raised from slumber by a saintly man

Iqbal lurved Ranjit Singh- right?  

I clarify again that I am neither essentializing any religious community nor passing judgements on individuals.

Nor are you saying anything sensible.  

I am merely discussing the conceptual categories. I agree with Iqbal’s articulation of that delicate idea:

Kafir-e bedar dil pish-e sanam
Beh zi dindari ki khuft andar haram

The pagan idol worshipper with a living heart
Is better than the religious man who sleeps in the haram

Iqbal was wrong. The ahl al Suffah slept in the Medinan mosque.  They were better than the pagans with whom they fought. It must be said, even the most boorish Bihari buffalo can't plumb the depths of Pakistani logic. 

As Ahmad Faraz said:

Main kat girun ki salamat rahun yaqin hai mujhe
Ki ye hisaar-e-sitam koi to girayega
Tamam umr ki iza-nasibiyon ki qasam
Mere qalam ka safar rayegan na jayega

No matter I’m slain or I survive, I believe
This cruel siege will be broken one day
And the tortured destinies of a lifetime bear witness
The journey of my words will not go astray

The fucker ended up as Musharraf's poet laureate. Sadly, the Pakistanis don't want Sharjeel. He is a Bihari buffalo. Let him rot in an Indian jail. He is merely a talker. How many kaffirs has he killed? None. Duffer!

Akeel Bilgrami's magical Anal-ticklishness

When I first came to London, back in 1977, I was pleased to learn that Zulfiqar Ghose was highly regarded as England's own leading 'magical realist novelist'. He had married a Brazilian intellectual and had set his trilogy 'the Incredible Brazilian' in that country. Sadly, I found him unreadable. Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's children', more audaciously, annexed India to Latin America. Kipling, I recalled, was born in Bombay. Perhaps, Rushdie would be his successor.

Then came 'Satanic Verses'. An Indian MP- Syed Shahabuddin- demanded that the book be banned. Khushwant Singh had already warned that the book could not be published in India. It was like 'Rangila Rasool' (the colourful Prophet) which had led Indian legislators to change the law so that books that attacked a particular religion could not be published or imported into the country. A Hindu official at the Home Ministry read the book. He decided the book broke the law. An order was issued banning its import into India. Other countries- Pakistan, South Africa, etc.- followed the Indian example. Imam Khomeini was asked for and gave a 'fatwa' (legal opinion) that if an apostate had indeed written a book defamatory of the Prophet, then capital punishment could be applied. Then something unexpected occurred. Ayatollah Montazeri criticized Khomeini's fatwa. But it was Rafsanjani, not Montazeri, who proved the defter political operator. Iran doubled down on the fatwa. People associated with the book were killed in different countries. The British police foiled one such plot against Rushdie himself on British soil.

Could Rushdie have saved himself? Yes. He should have played the Kashmir card. That way, the  the Mirpuris of Bradford would have praised him and attacked the Indian High Commission. 

What Rushdie should have said was- 'Because I started speaking out on Indian atrocities in Kashmir, a former Indian diplomat and stooge of Atal Behari Vajpayee has attacked me. Those bastards have stolen my motherland! Now they are stealing even my religion from me by branding me an apostate! Allah knows I am 'gunahgar' (sinner) but not munafiq (hypocrite) or kaffir (apostate). I call on Muslims to demand justice for people of Kashmir! No doubt, the Indians- or the Americans, whose Imperialist designs in Nicaragua I denounced in my last book- will send their secret agents to kill me. They will put the blame on Iran! But Iran gave me a prize for my book denouncing the dictator Zia! As for Rajiv Gandhi, he hates me because I denounced his mother as an evil tyrant. I will be killed. I accept it. Will British police protect me? No! I denounced Mrs. Thatcher! They will conspire with my assassins. My death does not matter. But their plots will fail! "Allahu waAllahu khayru almakireen". Allah is the best of plotters!'

Why did Rushdie not take this course? The answer is that he wasn't really Indian. He was a Public School educated, Oxbridge, prancing ninny. Sadly, it turned out, so was Akeel Bilgrami who first came to my attention with an extraordinarily deracinated essay on the Rushdie affair in the London Review of Books published in 1990. 

Let me say a word about the most well argued and thoughtful of these criticisms: a recent letter to the Independent from the philosopher Michael Dummett. Few English men or women have given so much of their time and energy to defending the rights of Muslims and other immigrants in Britain than Ann and Michael Dummett. Here Michael Dummett scolds Rushdie for exciting anxiety among Muslims and generating, in turn, a conservative racialist backlash.

Dummett wasn't Indian. Bilgrami was. It was fucking obvious how Rushdie could have 'spun' the whole thing to his own advantage. He would have become the Edward Said of the Kashmir issue. Anything objectionable in his book could be dismissed as a critique of 'Orientalism' or, as 'majazi' or ' malamati' from the Islamic or Sufi point of view. Why did Rushdie not take the obvious course? The answer is that Cambridge had turned him into a prancing ninny.  

He also argues that Rushdie shows no understanding of the concept of the holy

Nonsense! Rushdie was a bit Jungian and his first two books were inspired by the Mantiq ut Tayr. Sooner or later he was bound to discover Akhbari mysticism and the concept of 'barzakh'. He would have become unreadable without first becoming a great hyphenated-American celebrity novelist. True, he'd have made less money. But he wouldn't have got stabbed. 

and of its importance in the lives of religious people. The first argument betrays a remarkably provincial attitude toward certain questions which emerge from Rushdie’s novel and occupy the minds of moderate Muslims.

A provincial attitude would demand Pakis fuck off to Pakistan.  

There is the question of Islamic tyrannies which have killed and imprisoned thousands.

Secular, Socialist, Ba'athist, tyrannies were worse.   

There is the question of a religion which is exploited to introduce and sustain policies and practices which moderate Muslims find detestable.

Bilgrami wasn't aware that those policies and practices were introduced at the same time that his religion was founded. On the other hand, there is mounting evidence that the Hanif of Mecca were prominent advocates of Queer Theory who, sadly, fought shy of making gender reassignment surgery for heterosexual men free and compulsory. 

There is the question as to whether those policies and practices are separable from the context of dogma and hierarchy in which they are embedded.

That question was settled long ago. Islamic polities could have Tanzimat type reforms similar to European or Japanese or Chinese polities.  

Perhaps there is even the question, relevant to the second of Dummett’s arguments, of whether the concept of the holy in Islam is itself obviously separable from this context.

Islam's subsequent trajectory showed it was. That's why Indian Muslims go on pilgrimage to places like Mashhad or Ajmer.  

Can one attack the policies in their larger context without mounting an attack on the holy as it is found in Islam?

Sure. It had been done and it was being done and will continue to be done. Islam simply isn't, and never has been, some sort of fossil religion only practiced by backward people.  

It is both unfair to Rushdie and beside the point for Muslims who are struggling to understand the future of a world religion to be told that they must not pursue these questions openly, assertively and with the full use of their talents, because that would undermine the status of a migrant community on an island in the North Sea.

Dummett was saying no such thing. The question was whether Rushdie was a prancing ninny or whether he was an Islamic scholar seeking political and socio-economic reform from which everybody would benefit. The answer was Rushdie was a fucking cretin. Why pretend that Salman Farsi, rather than a particular Arab scribe, became an apostate? What's next? Saying Hazrat Bilal was a pimp just because of his skin colour?  

Ruthven’s main criticism of Rushdie is similarly unconvincing. It follows upon a detailed and wholly plausible indictment of the fundamentalist response, after which Rushdie is charged with bad judgment for having failed to see the extremity and magnitude of the feelings he was going to provoke.

Rushdie had in fact started writing about Kashmir- whose politics the boy, Rajiv, had fucked up- and thus his response should have been the one I gave. Suppose he was too grand to do it himself. Then he could have drunk a bottle of whiskey and drunk dialled a couple of Urdu journalists in London.  The fact is, Syed Shahabuddin had made enemies. He wanted to get rid of the Hajj subsidy. Why not kick that former IFS officer (at that time all diasporic Indians hated Indian diplomats) in the goolies? Saying the guy was Atal's stooge may not have been true, but it was deeply satisfying.  The other thing Rushdie had mentioned was that Shias are in position to issue fatwas against Hanafi Sunnis. Back then, the Sipah-e-Sahaban was active in Pakistan. Incidentally, some Iranian diplomats seem to have believed the Bhutto dynasty was Shia. 

This reflects a pervasive shortcoming of Ruthven’s book: in the course of the often scrupulous attention he pays to the fundamentalist response, he does not sufficiently explore the questions which Rushdie’s novel and the aftermath of its publication pose for moderate Muslims, who are as opposed to the extremist element in their societies as they are hurt by the novel.

There were no such questions. A Leftist could write a book stressing Prophet Muhammad's childhood spent with an egalitarian nomadic clan. From there, you could build the case that Islam is inherently Socialistic and Humanistic. In Iran itself, some followers of Shariati tried to kill Khatami because they believed Islam could never have a priestly ruling class- i.e. they denied Khomeini's 'vilayat-e-faqih'.  

The deep question is whether the answers that moderate Muslims will, on reflection, provide to these questions are compatible with a condemnation of the novel.

Was the novel any good? My impression was that Rushdie was moving in an Islamic direction. He appeared reconciled to his alcoholic father at the end of that novel. But for his foolish response to Syed Shahabuddin's open letter (he wrote an open letter to Rajiv Gandhi- a fellow Cambridge man) he might have developed into a sort of Jungian Sufi limning the  vast continents of the collective unconsciousness or the yet greater mysteries which they are liminal to. 

By 1990, Muslims- moderate or otherwise- recognised just as well as Christians or Confucians, that autarkic Command Economies were bound to become autocratic, dynastic, and as poor as fucking fuck. Bilgrami's posh education and Ivy League career kept him from this knowledge. 

It is unlikely that the struggle of moderate against extremist in Muslim society will succeed until the moderates forge models of economic development and of political structure which enable them to avoid the dependency on foreign capital and aid, and ensure that large segments of the population are not left out of the economic and political life of their country.

Moderate Muslims should learn from Pol Pot. The Khalqis in Afghanistan had the right idea. Kill all the priests and the land-lords and then anybody who looks like they might have a brain. Sadly, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to get rid of those nutters and to restore the Parchami moderates.  

One needs to build on a careful diagnosis of why attempts in the past to forge such models, as in Nasser’s Egypt, failed.

Nasser's land reform succeeded. The problem was that bureaucratic Socialism- though providing lots of clerical jobs to the newly educated- hobbled the economy. Still, Egyptians did well in the Gulf and elsewhere. US Aid, however, has worked in the same way as a 'resource curse'. Still, Egypt is bound to do very well out of 'clean energy' and the 'knowledge economy'.  

Perhaps, with the passing of the Cold War, there is a better chance of these societies gaining the help of economically more advanced nations,

Aid budgets would fall because the competitive element had disappeared. The question was whether developing countries could gain foreign direct investment.  

and integrating with more progressive nations, without the danger of being made into satellites.

Satellites are places where you can order the removal of the current Dictator. As the Americans discovered in Vietnam, and the Soviets would discover in Afghanistan, the game was not worth the candle. 

(It is fascinating to see that these issues are being vigorously debated within the Iranian Government in an attempt to reconstruct a war-devastated economy.)

The regime felt more secure. It's battle hardened 'basijis' could crush the M-e-K or any remants of the Tudeh movement. The question was whether the 'bazaari' middle class would gain or whether there would be cronyism. With hindsight, it was a silly question.  

Perhaps in the fullness of time such integration will restore the sense of equality that marked pre-colonial relations.

Then, as now, the rich and powerful were only equal to those as rich and powerful as themselves. 

Until that day comes Islamic fundamentalism will continue to appeal to those demoralised by exclusion and dependence.

In Iran and Afghanistan, there was a choice between Communist craziness or Islamic fundamentalism. The latter was preferable.  

An Islamic Reformation can only come on the coat-tails of these broader changes.

Which is why there was no such person as Ataturk. The Turks don't use the Roman script. They retain the Arabic script- right?  

What is spooky about reading Bilgrami- who is only 13 years older than me and got his first degree in India- is the manner in which he displays naive faith in the shibboleths of bien pensant Analytical philosophy. Consider his notion of identity (which presumably includes his self-image as a 'moderate Muslim' rather than a stupid shithead)

subjective identity requires identification with one’s own tendencies.

This is clearly nonsense. One may subjectively identify oneself as a Christian precisely because one is aware that all one's own tendencies are horrible and deeply antithetical to Christianity.  

What I find strange about Bilgrami is that he ignores Islam's own distinction between insha & khabar (alethic & imperative) and between the 'realm-of-command' (Alam-al-Amr) and 'realm-of-creation' (Alam-al-Khalq) such that STEM subjects and 'positive economics' can proceed on an empirical basis without coming into conflict with normative or theological imperatives. The great advantage in having faith in God is that you don't then have to believe in fairies at the bottom of your garden or some medieval paradise of equality and 'enchantment'. This is what happened to Bilgrami. He rejects the Creator but wants there to be a 'realm of command'- i.e. Magic. 

This implies a distinction between first-order and second-order states of mind.

and thus should be rejected because it leads to an infinite regress of the 'third man' type.  I suppose, you could say, 'goblins or fairies may intervene at the level of the fifth man or the sixth man. Once that happens Neo-Liberalism will disappear and everything will become very very nice.' If that is your view, Bilgrami is the philosopher for ou. 

To be alienated from one’s desires is to have desires (such as in our example, the desire for cocaine) at the first-order level that one disapproves of at the second order.

Nope. It just means you currently have desires which you desire to check. I may continue to take a drug while paying money for treatment to end my dependence on it. This may involve 'tapering off' or gaining peer-support or undergoing psychoanalysis. 

In contrast, to be identified with one’s desires means one approves of those desires. 

Not necessarily. Identification is different from approval. I can imagine a Catholic Bishop revealing that he is homosexual. He never acted on those inclinations for the same reason that heterosexual Bishops did not act on their inclinations. I can imagine a Bishop of this type greatly helping many ordinary people, including those who became infected with 'homophobia' at some early stage in their life.  

To put it differently, we need to have some kind of reflective endorsement of first-order states of mind before we can say we identify with them.

One could equally say the reverse. What you 'reflectively endorse' isn't you. It is some modish availability cascade.  

It is not enough to like the idea of being a Muslim; one has to, in some sense, approve of liking the idea.

only in the sense that you should approve of approving approving of approving and so on. Why did a training in Analytical philosophy not guard Bilgrami against infinite regresses of a type mentioned in Plato's Parminides? 

The plain fact is, 'approval' is a Tarskian primitive. It does not have an impredicative 'extension'. In other words, the term is undefined or understood by its use. It isn't dependent on the entire knowledge base.  

If one disapproved of one’s Islamic tendencies, then one would be alienated from one’s mental, moral, and political tendencies and would lack identity in the subjective sense.

No. I can imagine a good Muslim who is put in charge of catering for the British Army. He disapproves of his own Islamic revulsion from pork. He keeps it in check. His job is to ensure that Tommy Atkins gets his bangers and mash and goes into battle in good spirits. After the war is won, and this Muslim officer is back in Civvy Street, he is welcome to expiate any sins he committed by going on pilgrimage or keeping fasts and giving money to the poor.  

Politically relevant and intensely held desires that their possessors reflectively endorse–this looks like a good, initial working definition of ‘identity.’

Yet, it is no such thing. I firmly believe that cats should be given the vote. I reflectively endorse this view because no cat, to my knowledge, has started a war or caused the country to go off a fiscal cliff. Yet, unlike Chairman Miaow, my identity is not that of a cat- militant or otherwise.  

According to this definition, we might say a Palestinian today, or an Indian in the 1940s, who has strong nationalist first order political tendencies and reflectively endorses them at the second order, has a Palestinian, or an Indian, identity.

Sadly, some such Indians ended up having a Pakistani identity while many Palestinians ended up with a Jordanian or Egyptian identity. Currently, those who gained 'Israeli Arab' identity seem to be doing very much better than those with a Palestinian Gazan identity. 

However, those examples, though roughly right,

completely wrong 

may give the impression that identities in politics are only instrumental,

what else could they be? Politics is an instrument.  Moreover, it costs money. 'Identity classes' are potential markets from which resources can be raised or other types of support garnered. 

needed only in order to mobilize yourself and others similar to you toward certain ends–national independence, racial equality, gender justice,

abolishing death? 

and so on. And this, in turn, may give the impression that the agents in question think of these identities as intended to last only until they achieve the goals these identities serve.

This may be true of evanescent coalitions. It is not the case with political parties or ideological cliques.  

But not all identities have this merely instrumental role in an agent’s psychological economy.

Only in the sense that none do. What is relevant with respect to 'Identity' is Mimetics- more particularly Tardean Mimetics where the superior or more successful is taken as the mimetic target. 'Psychological economy' is about reducing 'cognitive dissonance'. Sadly, Bilgrami's Anal-tickle training prevented him from grasping how psychology or economics or anything human actually works.  

Their role in a psychological economy may be much more subtle than that. They may, for instance, be a source of dignity and self-respect when one is feeling especially vulnerable;

in which case the thing is still instrumental 

they may be a source of solidarity and belonging when one is feeling alienated from one’s social environment; and so on.

Bilgrami says identity can be non-instrumental but can't give any example of this being the case. The plain fact is that an identity has an extension as a class of objects with the same property. Such classes can always be used in an instrumental way. I suppose a mad man may like assembling identity classes without any utility or instrumental value but, if accurately constructed, they are still data-sets which somebody could find useful.  

When they serve much more subtle functions of this kind, it is too crude to describe them by saying that the agents hold these identities instrumentally or temporarily.

Bilgrami is wrong. What he has written isn't crude or rude. It is simply wrong and stupid.  

They may seem to the agents to have an intrinsic and not instrumental value. Others may analyze them by saying, “These identities, even if not explicitly instrumental, as in the case of the Palestinian today or the Indian in the 1940s, are nevertheless serving the function of providing a source of dignity and comfort in a situation of vulnerability and humiliation . . . . ”

Bilgrami doesn't seem to understand that being an Indian in the 1940's- provided you weren't living in a place where a Bengali Muslim was Premier- was preferable to being a Dutchman living in Holland, or a Pole living in Poland. Still, it's good to know that people dying in Gaza are gaining lots of dignity and comfort. The plain fact is, some Palestinians gain from the on-going war. Most don't. But, if Jews run away from Israel, they may well dream of taking over the nice houses they leave behind. Similarly, in India in the 1940's, some Indians did get to move into the mansions the British had constructed for themselves. Sadly, millions lost their homes or even their lives. 

But from their own subjective points of view, the agents will simply think of these identities in intrinsic terms rather than as serving such functions, and so they will not see them as temporary, lasting only while those functions need to be served.

This is certainly true of Muslims who firmly believe in the after-life.  But it is equally true of Christians or Hindus. 

If others are right in their analysis, these identities may well be overturned and revised by the agents in question when these functions cease to be served.

That is the Hindu view. In my next life I will be a cockroach. Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, has a doctrine of bodily resurrection at the end of days. 

But that makes no difference to the fact that, from the agents’ own points of view, the identities are quite intrinsic;

not if you believe in reincarnation rather than bodily resurrection 

therefore, in their own minds the identities are conceived as something they ought to hold permanently and without being vulnerable to revision.

This is not the Sufi view. Your identity, like your ego, is a delusion and an idolatry. Follow the path of Love till there is no alterity and thus no separable identity. 

Bilgrami thinks that

Some reflective endorsements take the following form, which we may call the ‘Ulysses and the Sirens’ model. 

Sirens don't exist. This is a model which has no application to our world.  

It is best to approach the idea with an example. Someone with Islamic commitments might think (and some Muslims, in fact, do): “Sooner or later, the spread of pernicious forms of modernity will affect us, too;

No. They think this has already happened. Bilgrami may not have noticed that every Muslim country had Radio and TV stations and books and magazines and record players and cinema-halls.  

and it may weaken us from our Islamic commitments, so we must protect ourselves from the possibility of such weakening and entrench in our society certain Islamic ways of life that we will live by even if our commitments to Islam were to weaken.”

Saudi Arabia became stricter applying Islamic law after the Grand Mosque seizure in 1979.  

Such endorsement of one’s Islamic commitments at the first order is distinctive.

No. It is strategic. Bilgrami is as stupid as shit. He simply didn't understand why Saudi Arabia and Iran and, later on, Afghanistan, became more strict in the application of Islamic law. In each and every case, there was an element of political calculation. However, another factor was at play. In some countries, Religion has a high Income elasticity of demand. As income rises people can afford to be more religious. Things like observance of hijab, or learning the Quran, are 'positional goods'.  People climbing out of absolute poverty could afford more of such things. 

It doesn’t just approve of those commitments; it entrenches them and guards them against a time when there might well be a weakening or a loss of the commitments.

It has no power to do so. Suppose, Bilgrami jumps up into the air. He backs up his 'first order' commitment to staying aloft with a second order commitment to tell the Law of Gravity to go fuck itself. For this reason he remains floating in the air for all time. 

Still, it is at this point that we begin to understand why Bilgrami took up Anal-tickle philosophy. He could levitate without having to pay Mahesh Yogi for training in 'Yogic flying'.  

 The person with first-order nationalist tendencies under colonial subjugation, for example, may endorse her nationalism at the second order– but she may also know full well that it would not survive the success of her people’s anti-imperialist struggles.

Nonsense! Being independent means having to fight to retain independence and territorial integrity.  

In other words, once independence is won, she may have no particular second-order rationale to preserve her first-order nationalist commitments.

On the contrary. Once you are independent you need an army to regain territory you feel rightfully belongs to you or else to defend territory your neighbouring country thinks rightfully belongs to it. Nationalism increases because it is a desiderata for employment in the Army and Civil Service, not to mention success in Politics. 

And she may actually desire a future in which she lives in a state of independence without a particularly strong Palestinian (or Indian) identity.

Sonia Gandhi may have been Italian but she dressed in a Sari and spoke Hindi. Indeed, she embodied the 'pativrata' Hindu widow better than her sister-in-law which is why Rahul not Varun owns the INC.  

This is even true of many non-instrumental desires. I may intrinsically value the pursuit of philosophy now but not in a way that makes me want to ensure I will be doing it at a time when I don’t value it as much.

To intrinsically value a profession doesn't mean you'd want to go in for it if you were utterly shit at it. 

But the Muslim in the example is quite different. In his case, he does not limit his second-order approval of his first-order Islamic tendencies to the time when he feels a strong commitment to Islam, but reaches out to when he thinks he might not.

This is a fantasy. The Muslim believes God is all-powerful and all merciful. If He has given you the gift of Faith, spread out your hands and ask for that gift in more abundant, indeed everlasting, form. Few people in the world are as well educated as Bilgrami. But even fewer of the sub-continent's Muslims hold such a false and foolish view. There is 'supplication' in Islam (Du'a) not some bogus type of commitment.  

Such a person now values and desires an Islamic future for himself, even if he now thinks that when the future comes he may not have the desire to be in an Islamic society.

He can emigrate. However, the reason Islam is a living religion whereas Magic has all but disappeared is because Human dignity is enhanced by submission to, and supplication of, the all-powerful, all-merciful, Creator. It is diminished by pushing pins into Voodoo dolls or imploring the assistance of fairies or goblins. 

It is tempting to think that this kind of reflective endorsement is irrational. But before we dismiss this form of subjective identity, we should pause because, to a large extent, it characterizes liberal identity as well.

Islam is a path to Heaven. Liberalism, of Bilgrami's type, is a recipe for Economic and Political disaster.  

Let’s ask: why do we entrench some of our commitments and values in the Constitution by calling them ‘fundamental rights’?

Because such rights are 'imprescriptible' and don't derive from prescriptive rights.  

Take free speech. We gave it special status as the First Amendment of the Constitution because we didn’t want to allow ourselves to put it aside too easily, in the event that our commitment to it weakened.

Nonsense! The First Amendment was put in to protect 'dual sovereignty' and reduce the power of the Federal Government. It was only after 1925 that SCOTUS applied it to the States, through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. 

On the other hand, it is true that the people who wrote the First Amendment believed they were immortal. What if, once they reached the age of 300, they suddenly wanted Catholicism to become the State Religion? The problem here is that even if the Founding Fathers were immortal, they had no power to bind themselves for all time. Constitutions can be amended, abrogated or placed in suspension.  

Still, Bilgrami is correct in one respect. If only Newton had listened to the local Witch and amended his laws of motions to permit flying broomsticks, 'Scientific Reason' would not have taken hold in Seventeenth Century Europe. This would have prevented Imperialism, Capitalism and Neo-Liberalism from taking hold. Everybody could get married to a nice fairy or goblin and live happily for ever and ever. The true purpose of Analytical Philosophy is to say 'boo!' to 'Scientific Reason' and the soi disant Enlightenment till 'Moderate Muslims' can fly around the world on broomsticks. What is vitally important is that they make a second-order commitment not to play quidditch. JK Rowling is an Evil TERF.  Fuck you Harry Potter! Fuck you very much!