True Islam or Islamic formalism?

BERNARD Lewis, a western scholar of Islam recently wrote a book with the title “What went wrong?” in which he analyses the causes of Muslim decline. It is a pity that non-Muslims are writing more books about Islam than we Muslims. That in itself is one of the causes of our present plight. It is time we started the process of introspection, for without it we will continue to remain divided and backward.

So let us begin by looking at the present state of the world of Islam. There may be disagreement on many things Islamic, but no one can deny that the world of Islam is in a state of turmoil, confusion and demoralization. The only countries out of 196 members of the UN that are under foreign occupation today are all Islamic: Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. Muslims all over the world are like blind a man groping in the dark for the right way in the labyrinth of tradition, religion and superstitions. They are being pulled in two opposite directions at the same time: past and present; dogma and reason; status quo and progress.

The Muslims would like to believe and claim that they are one “Umma” (nation/people), but except having a common religion, they differ from each other as much as they differ from other nations — in politics, in economy, in culture, in race and even in religious beliefs.

They do not have a common political system as the Christian West has — democracy. The political systems currently prevalent in the Muslim countries encompass all forms of government that ever existed in human history. There is monarchy (Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait UAE, Brunei), absolute dictatorship (Libya), mixed dictatorship (Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Uganda and Eritrea), democracy (Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh), mixed democracy (Algeria and Nigeria), militarized democracy (Pakistan), theocratic democracy (Iran), and a foreign power-propped democracy (Afghanistan), which was a theocracy until recently.

Most of the Muslim countries have no working constitutions; no fixed tenure for its head of government and state, and no established form of transfer of power. Consequently, the death of a ruler requiring a change of government is almost always accompanied by confusion and uncertainty.

For instance, in the case of monarchies the successor may be a brother or son of the deposed or deceased king.

In the case of dictatorship, there is no system at all and transfer of power remains totally unpredictable. It can be to a son, to the next man in the hierarchy of power, to a military general and, if the people are sufficiently fed up with the previous ruler and stage a populist movement, to some form of short-term elected government. Even in the case of three democracies, it is only in regard to Malaysia that one feels reasonably confident that democracy has taken firm roots.

Since most Muslim countries do not have a working constitution, they do not have a stable political system either. Federalism is almost nonexistent and all powers are concentrated in the hands of a few at the centre. The concept of checks and balance or separation of power between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary is almost non-existent. Similarly, the rule of law is no more than the rule of the feudals, the oligarchs or the people in power whoever they may be. They consider themselves above the law, which applies mainly to the poor and the disadvantaged. The police generally behave like the henchmen of the powerful rather than as the protectors of the victim. The judiciary, supposed to be fiercely independent of the executive in an Islamic country, is weak and deficient and often subservient to it.

There is no common legal system prevalent in the Islamic countries. Most of these having been colonies of the West, have inherited the legal systems bequeathed to them by their colonial rulers. There is nothing inherently wrong with them because the same system is delivering justice in the western countries. However, since the religious class in Muslim countries believes that the implementation of Shariah is an indispensable responsibility of an Islamic state, some of these like Pakistan, Iran, (Afghanistan under the Taliban) and some others have been trying to incorporate Islamic laws in their legal system without much success.

This is so not only because of a lack of consensus among the Ulema of various sects on a common Shariah but also because of the difficulty of applying Shariah laws in the present-day circumstances. For example, take the case of theft for which the Quran prescribes the punishment of amputation of an arm.

The first difficulty one faces in this regard is, in what circumstances is theft regarded as theft in an Islamic state? If a hungry man steals food to live does it constitute theft? And how to categorize crimes like bribery, kickbacks, bank loan, and co-operative societies scams and tens of other types of theft?

Gen Ziaul-Haq introduced the Hudood and Blasphemy ordinances, but both have produced disastrous consequences. They have encouraged honour killings, made victims of rape guilty of adultery and let the rapist go scot free, innocent persons are arrested on a charge of blasphemy without prior investigation of the charge, and at times have been killed in prison or in public places after being acquitted.

The law of blasphemy is being used to take revenge, misappropriate property of the weak by the strong and incite the mob to lynch sweepers if they throw anything written in Arabic such as a piece of an Arabic newspaper.

In the realm of economy the situation is no different. The economic system ranges from a totally state-controlled sector to a free market economy. Even on important Islamic economic concepts such as Riba (interest), Zakat, Usher, Jizia and Kharaj a consensus is missing. No attempt has ever been made by any Islamic government or scholar to review or reinterpret them to meet the needs or aspirations of some-Islamic countries whose economies have nevertheless been integrated with the global economy. Consequently, most Islamic countries have abandoned the Islamic economic tenets in practice while paying lip-service to their continued desirability and relevance in the present-day context.

An attempt by General Ziaul Haq to impose compulsory deduction of Zakat from the savings account in banks only led to deeper polarization between Sunnis and Shias. More revealing of the real state of affairs was the use of several kinds of circumvention by a large number of Sunni Pakistanis with the active connivance of the banks to avoid compulsory deduction of Zakat.

Two most prevalent methods are 1) withdrawal of the amount from the savings account a few days prior to the deduction of the Zakat and putting it back in the savings account after the date for compulsory deduction has passed; 2) submission of a false affidavit by Sunnis that they belonged to the Shia sect to be exempted from compulsory deduction of Zakat. However, since the judgment of the Supreme Court exempting others two from it if they make a declaration that it is not compulsory in their sect, the same Sunnis have started reverting to their original sect.

Many Islamic countries are trying to introduce an interest-free banking system by allowing banks to operate interest-free accounts by those Muslims who would not like to pay or receive interest on their accounts. But all that is happening is a change of name from interest to “profit and loss” accounts or some other name, which operates on the same basis as the old interest bearing accounts.

So, where are we heading, towards Islam or away from it by trying to implement laws that are no longer relevant or implementable? Are long beards, short trousers, head-to-foot Hijab, change of names, etc., real Islam? The answer clearly is no; otherwise attire and appearance alone would determine the faith of a person. We, therefore, need to think deeply about the issues more realistically and accept the necessary changes rather than merely put a veneer of Islam on everything to deceive ourselves.

There are many causes of our decline but the one that stands out in our history is our refusal to think, reason, and question as we fear that it will destroy our faith. In the process we have also arrogated to ourselves the responsibility of protecting God, forgetting that God can take care of Himself and is not afraid of man’s attempt to understand the true nature of His creation and the outcome of such efforts. Man’s empowerment as manifested in his ability to determine gender of an unconceived child, to clone a living thing and even invent something frightfully destructive cannot happen without God’s knowledge or acquiescence.

We should have faith in the teaching of our Holy Quran that nothing happens without the will of God. That being so, let us make use of God’s greatest gift to mankind — the power to think and reason.

We should not be afraid of reason, logic and science because, while all the Biblical prophets were endowed with the power of miracles, our Prophet (pbuh) was endowed with the power of reason to turn the non-believers into believers.

The writer is a former ambassador.

Power play in Central Asia

WHILE most of the world, and especially local analysts like us, have remained focused (for understandable reasons) on the “formalization” of the Indo-US strategic ties during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington, important developments have been taking place elsewhere, especially in Central Asia, which deserve our close attention as well.

The Chinese, in conformity with the wisdom and experience acquired over the ages, have maintained a mature and detached attitude to the games their neighbour has been playing, in league with the Americans, to enhance its influence in the region. The Chinese have been “cool”, as the Americans would say. But this does not mean that they, or for that matter the Russians, have been oblivious to the momentous developments taking place in their neighbourhood.

It will be recalled that in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, its constituent provinces, known as republics, suddenly and unexpectedly found their umbilical cord to Moscow severed. Though there may have been no independence movement worth the name in any of these republics (except those in the Baltic, which had never accepted their forced incorporation into the Union in 1940), the local party chiefs lost no time in declaring their republics as independent states. But they continued to look towards Moscow for political guidance, as well as economic sustenance and military support. Caught in a struggle for its own bearings, Moscow presumed that these Central Asian republics — acquired through bloody military subjugation over the past centuries — would continue to rotate around the Russian “sun”.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the situation in Central Asia, as with any other place, underwent a dramatic change. With American fury having been ignited in the smouldering flames of the Pentagon, Bush was on the warpath. Both Russian and Chinese leaders may have calculated that helping the US in its invasion of Afghanistan would not only bring an end to the much feared Taliban regime (which both loathed as well), it would also earn them important “brownie points” with Bush, that they could cash in later. Neither Beijing nor Moscow had calculated on the neo-cons in DC having a blueprint for a long and rapidly expanding presence in Central Asia.

The first fallout was the inevitable coming together of Russia and China, on a wide-ranging agenda. They then took the initiative to bring the Central Asians back to their fold as well. The first step was to transform the old talking shop known as the Shanghai Five, into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Apart from its original five, Uzbekistan joined it in 2001, while Mongolia, India, Pakistan and Iran have been recently accepted as observers. Others, including Japan, Australia and even the US have expressed a wish to join this organization, which they all recognize is likely to play an important role in determining the course of events in Central Asia.

The SCO’s primary aim is to preserve peace and stability in the region and this is to be achieved by promoting mutual trade and investment, the best possible use of regional resources and a gradual transition to free movement of goods, money, services and technology. Their most significant area of cooperation may, however, turn out to be energy. The leaders are already discussing implementation of major projects relating to pipelines from Central Asia to China’s Xinjiang province and another from Russia to China, which has already aroused considerable interest in the US. There are also plans for auto trains and motorways linking Europe to China — and some time in the future coming all the way to the Gulf.

The SCO claims, with some justification, to be a unique political opportunity and a fundamentally new model of geopolitical integration. Embracing almost two-thirds of mainland Eurasia, uniting countries with different civilizations, cultures and economic systems, its magnitude and trans-regional status make it an unprecedented experiment.

But what accelerated the coming together of Moscow and Beijing so rapidly and so overtly, was the impression in both capitals that the Bush administration was not satisfied with merely obtaining base facilities in Central Asian states to prosecute the war on terror in Afghanistan, but that Washington was now engaged in a concerted effort to bring about “regime change” in all of them.

First, it was the Rose Revolution in Georgia that brought into power an avowedly pro-American government. Then it was Ukraine, where the Orange Revolution ended Moscow’s influence in an area long considered part of the Russian heartland. When Moscow saw its ally being drummed out of the capital in Kyrgyzstan and an attempt being made to oust the Uzbek leader, Islam Karimov, both Russia and China realized the frightening scale and dimension of America’s plans.

It was at this stage that Moscow stepped in. First, it managed to salvage the situation in Kyrgyzstan by engineering a compromise, which kept power in the hands of its friends. Then it came out strongly and publicly in support of the Uzbek leader, even though there were reports to the effect that hundreds of Uzbeks may have been killed in anti-government disturbances. It was at this stage that the July 2 Sino-Russian summit in Moscow became the setting for a major pronouncement by their leaders. In the declaration, significantly called the “World order in the 21st century”, Presidents Hu and Putin rejected attempts to “ignore objective processes of social development of sovereign states and impose on them alien models of social and political systems”.

This was a clear and categorical rejection of all that the Bush administration has been proclaiming as its goal in the coming years. The stage having been set for a clear delineation of competing philosophies, the SCO summit a couple of days later came out with a statement that was even tougher than what had emerged from Moscow.

In a ringing declaration, the summit rejected “attempts at monopoly and domination in international affairs” and warned that “concrete models of social development cannot be exported”. Even more significantly, the Shanghai Group called upon the US to set a deadline for the withdrawal of its bases from the region now that the anti-terror campaign in Afghanistan was coming to an end. More significantly, the signatories, while affirming their opposition to extremism and terrorism, declared their resolve to fight these evils “by their own forces”.

The SCO declaration was surely the product of the close coordination between the Chinese and Russian leaderships. It was reflective of their conviction that now was the time to remind the Americans that Central Asia was in their backyard (not in America’s), and that these two would henceforth be taking the initiative to ensure peace and security in this region.

More importantly, Beijing and Moscow wanted to give a clear signal to the world that they had a better and more equitable alternative to the unilateralism of the Bush Administration. The “new security architecture” that they proposed would promote “a just and rational world order based on the respect of the right of all countries to equal security”. In other words, Russia and China are opposed to foreign inspired attempts to trigger changes in these countries, while espousing their belief that the “evolutionary path to development” was the only legitimate and acceptable available option to the region.

The SCO declaration was not mere rhetoric. It was followed by Uzbekistan’s demand that the Americans vacate within six months the military base that they have been occupying since 9/11. Surprised and discomfited by this public demand, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had to engage in a quick damage-limitation exercise, while also refraining from criticizing Karimov. His trip was however, only partly successful, in that he got only Kyrgyzstan — where the US also maintains a base — to allow continued use of the Ganci base but after he had to cough up over $ 200 million. Incidentally, the Chinese, too, are keen to establish their military presence in Kyrgyzstan.

China has made it clear that it now recognizes that the US is engaged in a bitter struggle for influence in Central Asia. That Washington’s plan is to spin a web of interlocking arrangements with the small but strategically important states of the region, so as to keep Beijing off balance and at the same time, deny China the hydrocarbon riches of the region, is no longer a secret. This is also what explains Washington’s sudden interest in Mongolia, a truly lost continent, were I had the good fortune of spending over a week in 1972. A huge country, with 20 times more sheep than humans, it may also have major oil deposits.

No less significantly, Mongolia is geographically sandwiched between Russia and China, which have always vied for influence in Ulaan Bator. But now it is the Americans who are talking in terms of “a new era of comprehensive partnership with Mongolia. Surely, China could not be unaware of the fact that virtually all of its neighbours, other than North Korea and Burma, and to some extent Pakistan, are now part of what Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations of New York, calls “the strategic net” being woven by the US in Asia, to persuade China to keep its ambitions within reason.

What do all these developments mean? One, that though the Chinese and the Russians have been rivals for centuries for influence in Central Asia, both appear to have reached the conclusion that their differences are minor, compared to the common challenge they face from America’s growing ambitions in the region. (This is also the view of a Chicago-based think tank). Two, America’s aggressive support for democratic revolutions has unnerved Central Asian rulers.

Three, Russia is therefore being welcomed back and has accordingly decided to come out more forcefully in defence of its interests in the region. Four, China will continue to expand its influence in the region, especially in the less developed states, but do so with greater subtlety and sensitivity to local views. Five, China’s energy requirement is so great and growing so rapidly that it has no option but to enter into long-term arrangements with Russia and the Central Asian republics, to secure guaranteed oil and gas supplies from the region. Six, Iran must have been greatly relieved to see the US being challenged, even if gingerly, by a powerful regional coalition.

Seven, India’s role will be critical in the success of this arrangement. While it has joined the SCO, it is too big and too clever to be tied down to any one option, especially at a time when it is being courted assiduously by the US, China and Russia. It will want to keep its options open, to draw maximum advantage from all.

Can Pakistan play a similar game? It can, if it is able to resolve its internal contradictions, and learns to maximize its human, economic and geographical advantages in a manner that they acquire a strategic dimension, that can then be brought into play with skill and acumen. The coming years are one of great challenges, but equally great opportunities, for Pakistan and the region.

The writer is a former ambassador.

Intelligent design

ALL is not lost in America. When George Bush came out a couple of weeks ago in favour of teaching “intelligent design” — the new manifestation of creationism — the press gave him a tremendous kicking. The Christian Taliban have not yet won.

But they are gaining on us. So far there have been legislative attempts in 13 states to have intelligent design added to the school curriculum. In Kansas, Texas and Philadelphia, it already has a foot in the door. In April a new “museum of earth history” opened in Arkansas, which instructs visitors that “dinosaurs and humans did coexist”, and that juvenile dinosaurs, though God forgot to mention it, hitched a ride on Noah’s Ark.

Similar museums are being built in Texas and Kentucky. Some 45% of Americans, according to a Gallup poll last year, believe that “human beings did not evolve, but instead were created by God ... essentially in their current form about 10,000 years ago”.

And not just in America. Last month Vienna’s Catholic archbishop, Cardinal Christoph Schvnborn, asserted that “any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science”. He appears to have the support of the Pope. Last week the Australian education minister, Brendan Nelson, announced that “if schools also want to present students with intelligent design, I don’t have any difficulty with that”. In the UK, the headmaster of one of Tony Blair’s new business-sponsored academies claims that evolution is merely a “faith position”.

The controversy fascinates me, partly because of its similarity to the dispute about climate change. Like the climate-change deniers, advocates of intelligent design cherry-pick the data that appears to support their case. They ask for evidence, then ignore it when it’s presented to them. They invoke a conspiracy to explain the scientific consensus, and are unembarrassed by their own scientific illiteracy.

In an article published in the American Chronicle last week, the journalist Thomas Dawson asserted that “all of the vertebrate groups, from fish to mammals, appear [in the fossil record] at one time”, and that if evolution “were true, there would be animal-life fossils of particular animals without vision and others with varying degrees of eye development ... Such fossils do not exist”. (The first fish and the first mammals are in fact separated by some 300m years, and the fossil record has more eyes, in all stages of development, than the CIA).

But it also fascinates me because natural selection is such a barren field for the fundamentalists to till. For 146 years Darwinian evolution has seen off all comers. There is a massive accumulation of evidence — from the fossil record, to genetics, to direct observation — that appears to support it. Were they to concentrate instead on the questions now assailing big bang theory, or on the failure so far to reconcile gravity with quantum physics, or on the stubborn non-appearance of the Higgs boson and the abiding mystery of the phenomenon of mass, the Christian conservatives would be much harder to confront. Why pick on Darwin?

It is surely because, as soon as you consider the implications, you must cease to believe that either Life or life are affected by purpose. As G Thomas Sharp, chairman of the Creation Truth Foundation, admitted to the Chicago Tribune, “if we lose Genesis as a legitimate scientific and historical explanation for man, then we lose the validity of Christianity. Period”.

We lose far more than that. Darwinian evolution tells us that we are incipient compost: assemblages of complex molecules that - for no greater purpose than to secure sources of energy against competing claims - have developed the ability to speculate. After a few score years, the molecules disaggregate and return whence they came. Period.

As a gardener and ecologist, I find this oddly comforting. I like the idea of literal reincarnation: that the molecules of which I am composed will, once I have rotted, be incorporated into other organisms. Bits of me will be pushing through the growing tips of trees, will creep over them as caterpillars, will hunt those caterpillars as birds. When I die, I’d like to be buried in a fashion which ensures that no part of me is wasted. Then I can claim to have been of some use after all.

Is this not better than the awful lottery of judgment? Is a future we can predict not more comforting than one committed to the whims of inscrutable authority? Is eternal death not a happier prospect than eternal life? The atoms of which we are composed, which we have borrowed momentarily from the ecosphere, will be recycled until the universe collapses. This is our continuity, our eternity. Why should anyone want more?

Two days ago I would have claimed that the demand for more was universal — that every society has or had its creation story and, as Joseph Campbell put it, “it will always be the one shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find”. But yesterday I read a study by the anthropologist Daniel Everett of the language of the Piraha people of the Brazilian Amazon, published in the latest edition of Current Anthropology. Its findings could scarcely be more disturbing, or more profound. The Piraha, Everett reveals, possess “the most complex verbal morphology I am aware of [and] are some of the brightest, pleasantest, most fun-loving people that I know”. Yet they have no numbers of any kind, no terms for quantification (such as all, each, every, most and some), no colour terms and no perfect tense. They appear to have borrowed their pronouns from another language, having previously possessed none. They have no “individual or collective memory of more than two generations past”, no drawing or other art, no fiction and “no creation stories or myths”.

All this, Everett believes, can be explained by a single characteristic: “Piraha culture constrains communication to non-abstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of [the speaker].” What can be discussed, in other words, is what has been seen. When it can no longer be perceived, it ceases, in this realm at least, to exist. After struggling with one grammatical curiosity, he realised that the Piraha were “talking about liminality - situations in which an item goes in and out of the boundaries of their experience. [Their] excitement at seeing a canoe go around a river bend is hard to describe; they see this almost as travelling into another dimension”. The Piraha, still living, watch the sparrow flit in and out of the banqueting hall.

“Happy the hare at morning,” WH Auden wrote, “for she cannot read/ The Hunter’s waking thoughts. Lucky the leaf/ Unable to predict the fall ... But what shall man do, who can whistle tunes by heart,/ Know to the bar when death shall cut him short, like the cry of the shearwater?”

It seems to me that we are the happy ones. We, alone among organisms, who perceive eternity, and know that the world will carry on without us. —Dawn/Guardian Service

Killed in the line of duty

AN American newspaperman once wrote that a reader can’t acquire complete knowledge of a happening, unless the report is accompanied by an illustration — be it a photograph, caricature or picture, which, according to the Chinese is worth ten thousand words.

The majority of the illustrations are produced by press photographers who unfortunately don’t always get the recognition they deserve, especially in this country.

Columnists and feature writers usually create their essays in the comfort of familiar surroundings; but not the press photographer and the reporter who often work in tandem when covering a story. In fact, one can’t help feeling a little sorry for these gentlemen of the Fourth Estate. They have to often attend a succession of boring assignments, and their duties at times expose them to hardships and danger; especially when they are covering a riot or a peace march which suddenly turns violent and sorely tests the patience of the police.

The press, in its attempts to tell a story as it is, is often seen as an opponent of the law enforcement agencies, rather than as a chronicler of events; and the press photographer, identified by the equipment he carries, presents a natural target to the police sergeant who is invariably a lower order tyrant with a short fuse, who believes his job is to ensure that information on skirmishes that take place on the highways and byways of the nation does not reach the public.

Occasionally one hears of a press photographer having died in an accident when covering a story, or becoming the victim of an unfortunate political incident, like the case of Mohammed Yasin who was employed by a local newspaper. He was sent to Karachi airport to cover the transit visit of the Polish foreign minister. A PIA catering van, driven by a frenzied member of an extremist, rightist religious organization, ran down and killed the foreign minister, a few government functionaries and a couple of members of the flash bulb fraternity who had lined up to capture the visitor on film.

This happened over 30 years ago when Poland was still part of the Soviet bloc. In the condolence meeting held in the Karachi Press Club the next day a colleague of the deceased photographer, after strongly condemning the assassination, made the wry comment that one should take cold comfort from the fact that Mohammed Yasin was never the intended victim. Apparently things were also bad in those days. There is, however, a more recent example which demonstrates that a press cameraman was the subject of a targeted killing. On February 7, 2005, when the Pakistani military had been cracking down on suspected Al Qaeda fighters in the northwest, armed tribesmen in South Waziristan fatally shot Mir Nawab, a freelance cameraman for Associated Press Television News and a reporter for the Frontier Post newspaper, and Wana Allah Noor, who was working for the Peshawar-based Khyber TV.

The journalists were on their way back from the town of Sargodha, where they were covering the surrender of a suspected tribal militant, Baitullah Mehsud. Around 7:30pm near the town of Wana a car overtook the bus carrying the journalists, and assailants opened fire with assault rifles, according to The Associated Press, which quoted Mahmood Shah, chief of security for Pakistan’s tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

According to news reports Anwar Shakir, a stringer for Agence France-Presse, was wounded in the back during the attack and was later said to be in stable condition. A fourth reporter, Zardad Khan, who was working for Al-Jazeera, was not seriously injured.

Between the early ‘80s and 2005 human rights organizations have listed depressing accounts of man’s inhumanity to man.

Each year in January, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) publishes a list of journalists killed in the line of duty around the world, which does give some sense of the range of risks that journalists face in reporting the news. This list has become the most widely cited press freedom statistic and is often seen as a barometer of the state of global press freedom.

The committee considers a case confirmed only if their research confirms or strongly suggests that a journalist was likely killed in direct reprisal for his or her work or in crossfire while carrying out a dangerous assignment. They do not include journalists who are killed in accidents — such as car or plane crashes — unless the crash was caused by hostile action (for example, if a plane were shot down or a car crashed trying to avoid gunfire).

While the correlation between the number of journalists killed and the state of press freedom in a particular country is far from exact, the committee has come up with some startling statistics. No journalists have been killed in Cuba, for example, and only one has been killed in China during the last decade, where the casualty figure for the rest of the world is 341 journalists ‘killed in the line of duty’.

So against a constant background of considerable danger the local press photographer should be excused if he at times breezes into a hall in the middle of a function, takes a few mug shots of people on the stage, a couple of overhead shots of the audience — arms stretched way above his cranium — and breezes out of the place en route to his next inconsequential assignment. And he should be also excused for the occasional faux pas he makes, because nobody has ever told him that there are certain things one just doesn’t do when capturing that magic moment.

Once when a Chinese circus was in town and had bivouacked at the Arts Council under a huge tarpaulin dome, the audience was treated to an act which was not really on the programme. The lights had been switched off and the place was in total darkness. A gong sounded in the distance and a piercing yellow spotlight focused on a juggler balancing six furiously rotating melamine plates on the edge of six quivering sticks, while he pirouetted on a large ball.

Suddenly, two press photographers cunningly concealed between an oboe and a French horn in the orchestra produced a series of blinding flashes that disoriented the juggler and sent the plates in the direction of the audience.

On another occasion at the Alliance Francaise when the lights had been dimmed and a French soprano had just hit the highest note in the Bell aria from Lakme, a photographer emerged stealthily from the shadows at the back of the stage, struck an attitude and sent a blinding flash across the patio. This caused the soprano to lose her balance and trip over the piano, while members of the audience kept seeing huge white sparks every time they closed their eyes.

Fortunately, these worthy gentlemen of the Fourth Estate didn’t spend more than a few minutes in either place. They still believe their job is to record life as it is, not as they would like it to be. One wishes them well, even when they disorient a performer in a cultural function with one of those searchlights the British used to spot Messerschmitt off the coast of Dover.

Apology accepted

JAPAN’S army was ruthless in its colonization of Korea and invasion and occupation of other Asian nations during World War II. Its leaders in recent years have apologized for the depredations, yet some onetime enemies seem to believe nothing will do but for the prime minister to commit hara-kiri on the Imperial Palace grounds. Enough already.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi became the latest leader to express sorrow this week, visiting a tomb for the unknown war dead on the 60th anniversary of Japan’s unconditional surrender and announcing his “deep remorse and heartfelt apology” for the nation’s actions.

Koizumi pointedly avoided visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which commemorates Class-A war criminals (those convicted of particularly egregious offences) among its dead. That was wise; previous visits by Koizumi and others have brought blasts from China and South and North Korea. There’s no sense in waving the red flag before the bulls.

This year the government did little while protesters attacked the Japanese Embassy and Japanese businesses in Beijing to protest the whitewashing of World War II aggression in some new Japanese textbooks. Beijing has also blocked Japan’s attempt to gain a deserved seat on an expanded UN Security Council, as China vies to become the most powerful nation on the Asian block.

No one can confuse Japan of Imperial Army days with today’s successful democracy. It’s true that Tokyo could do more, especially in ensuring the truth of its textbooks, which leave out such salient occurrences as the Nanking massacre.

—Los Angeles Times