Weekend Links: Islam, History, Kashmir and AI

Start your weekend with this thought-provoking excerpt from Rethinking Islam, extracted from Ziauddin Sardar’s “Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures” (emphasis mine):

…But the violence performed to sacred Muslim concepts is insignificant compared to the reductive way the Qur’an and the sayings and examples of the Prophet Muhammad are bandied about. What the late Muslim scholar Fazlur Rahman called the ‘atomistic’ treatment of the Qur’an is now the norm: almost anything and everything is justified by quoting individual bits of verses out of context. After the September 11 event, for example, a number of Taliban supporters, including a few in Britain, justified their actions by quoting the following verse:

‘We will put terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. They serve other gods for whom no sanction has been revealed. Hell shall be their home’ (3:149).

Yet, the apparent meaning attributed to this verse could not be further from the true spirit of the Qur’an. In this particular verse, the Qur’an is addressing the Prophet Muhammad himself. It was revealed during the battle of Uhad, when the small and ill-equipped army of the Prophet faced a much larger and better-equipped enemy. He was concerned about the outcome of the battle. The Qur’an reassures him and promises that the enemy will be terrified by the Prophet’s unprofessional army. Seen in its context, it is not a general instruction to all Muslims; it is a commentary on what was happening at that time.

Similarly hadith are quoted to justify the most extreme behaviours.

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And the Prophet’s own appearance, his beard and clothes, have been turned into a fetish: so now it is not just obligatory for a ‘good Muslim’ to have a beard, but its length and shape must also conform to dictates! The Prophet has been reduced to signs and symbols – the spirit of his behaviour, the moral and ethical dimensions of his actions, his humility and compassion, the general principles he advocated, have all been subsumed by the logic of absurd reduction.

The accumulative effect of the metaphysical catastrophes and endless reduction has transformed the cherished tenets of Islam into instruments of militant expediency and moral bankruptcy. For over two decades, I have been arguing that Muslim civilisation is now so fragmented and shattered that we have to rebuild it, ‘brick by brick’.

It is now obvious that Islam itself has to be rethought, idea by idea. We need to begin with the simple fact that Muslims have no monopoly on truth, on what is right, on what is good, on justice, nor on the intellectual and moral reflexes that promote these necessities.

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Next, excerpts from a superb piece on The Case for History by Anthony J. Aschettino (emphasis mine):

One of the first obligations of any society, immediately after such a thing as ensuring the safety of the society, should be looking after the welfare of the next generation.

…It is not surprising, then, that during the current election cycle both candidates are talking about the need to invest in the future by improving education and issues such as health care, both of which are critical for the development of America’s youth. Yet when it comes to discussing education, the subjects mentioned are always the same: science and math. This is not terribly surprising, since America is a land that values technological improvement and has long been the vanguard when it comes to the development and expropriation of technology in all disiplines. During a time of increasingly complex threats in fields such as medicine and warfare one could forgive this emphasis on those subjects which seem to promise the most advancement against such problems. The general failing in such a mode of thought, however, is the subjugation of history to a second tier when it comes to the subjects stressed in schools and in the general public.

History is a most contentious subject precisely because of its very nature: it is unlike math in that it is filled with debatable arguments instead of concrete proofs, and unlike science in that there are some areas against which no amount of experiments can prove anything conclusively; of all the subjects studied there is perhaps only one in which more conflicting ideas can be held and accepted as legitimate, and religion itself is a product of and falls into the realm of history. It is malleable in many ways: nobody can argue, for example, that the Roman Empire fell; there are dozens of theories about why it fell, when it fell, and how it fell, and most of these are legitimate because they are not exclusive to one another.

So why, then, is history perhaps the most important subject to study? Precisely because it is not something as concrete as math or science; because it does not require the memorization of equations or have a seeming disconnect with human emotion. It is the story of humanity from its inception and the tale of everything we as human beings have experienced since our earliest days. It is filled with stories of extreme bravery and courage as well as callous indifference and malevolent cruelty. It shows how far we have come in our collective understanding of what life is and how we place value on things. Perhaps most of all, it teaches us where we have made mistakes in the past and how we can avoid such things in the future.

Societies that ignore history often find themselves in a place where they have no real connection to the past. They find themselves committing the same errors that have been made before by other civilizations and they cannot explain why their efforts have fallen short just the same. They engage in military ventures that reap a terrible harvest and economic failures that cripple their societies because they are ignorant of how these things have happened before. They fall prey to the axiom of Santayana and, most sadly, do not even understand why.

Even more critical is the fact that history can and often has been manipulated by different powers to suit their whims, and it is this that makes a good understanding of history so important. A mathematician from ancient Greece would have understood that two plus two equaled four; one could have shown him how calculus developed and he would have eventually seen the truth in the math. Gregor Mendel would have nodded approvingly at our understanding of DNA and how it sprang from his simple observations of inheritance traits in pea plants. Yet history can be warped and changed by anyone willing to make a concerted effort. Suddenly, without a solid background in history, people can be made to believe in things so ridiculous as dinosaurs existing at the same time as humans and as disgraceful as a disbelief in the Holocaust.

Religions are usually the biggest perverters of history because they seek not to understand history as it occurred in reality but rather attempt to make it fit within the narrow spectrum of their belief system. They are not alone, however, and one can even see this trend in political issues, such as the argument that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by American forces had nothing to do with the alleged “Weapons of Mass Destruction” but was rather a democracy-building project.

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Next, read A tale of two Kashmirs by S Gurumurthy, from which this extract:

That China too has its Kashmir and problems with Islamist separatists identical to India’s Kashmir is not widely known. ‘Xinjiang’…is China’s Kashmir. Xinjiang actually shares borders with Ladakh in India’s Kashmir. But unlike Kashmir it is not a small area. Its size is 1.8 million sq km; almost one-sixth of China; half as much as India. India’s Kashmir measures some 2,65,000 sq km. Of which some 86,000 sq km is under Pakistan; some 37,500 sq km under China; the balance, 1,41,000 sq km, is with India. The disputed part of India’s Kashmir, some 1,45,000 sq km, is less than one hundredth of Xinjiang. So China’s Kashmir is physically 100 times bigger than India’s and therefore its problem too is bigger. Yet many do not know about it.

The reason is that China prevented Xinjiang, its Kashmir, from becoming an international issue like India’s Kashmir. Xinjiang, which had a majority of Turkish Muslims (Uighurs) in 1949, had a short-lived state of East Turkestan. China invaded it, crushed it, and won back its territory. The name Xinjiang literally means ‘old frontier returns to China’. See the contrast. A year earlier, in 1948, India almost won back most of Kashmir from Pakistan which had invaded it, but voluntarily offered and turned it into an international issue. It was India, not Pakistan, which went to the United Nations; made it an international issue. It is struggling to say it is a bilateral one.

…Xinjiang has a population of 20 million plus. The Uighur Muslims constitute 45 per cent, other Muslims 12 per cent and the Han Chinese 41 per cent. What was the Han population in Xinjiang in 1949? Just six per cent. In six decades it has risen by seven times. This change did not occur by itself. China did not just trust army or administrative control of its territory in Xinjiang. It trusted only its people. It ensured that the Han Chinese slowly began populating Xinjiang. The result is self-evident. But the 41 per cent Han Chinese population does not include defence personnel and families, and unregistered migrant Chinese workers.

…With a vast area, huge resources, and sparse population, Xinjiang benefits China more than the other way round. In contrast the economic cost of India’s Kashmir is very high. It receives a per capita Central grant of Rs 8,092, while for other Indian states it is Rs 1,137.

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…and to round off, this excerpt from The Dearth of Artificial Intelligence by Namit Arora:

As a graduate student of computer engineering in the early 90s, I recall impassioned late night debates on whether machines can ever be intelligent—intelligent, as in mimicking the cognition, common sense, and problem-solving skills of ordinary humans. Neural network research was hot and one of my professors was a star in the field. Scientists and bearded philosophers spoke of ‘humanoid robots.’ A breakthrough seemed inevitable and imminent. Still, I felt certain that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a doomed enterprise.

I argued out of intuition, from a sense of the immersive nature of our life in the world—how much we subconsciously acquire and summon to get through life, how we arrive at meaning and significance not in isolation but through embodied living, and how contextual, fluid, and intertwined this was with our moods, desires, experiences, selective memory, physical body, and so on. How can we program all this into a machine and have it pass the unrestricted Turing test? How could a machine that did not care about its existence as humans do, ever behave as humans do?

…My interlocutors countered that while extremely complex, the human brain is clearly an instance of matter, amenable to the laws of physics. Our intelligence, and everything else that informed our being in the world, had to be somehow ‘coded’ in our brain’s circuitry, including the great many symbols, rules, and associations we relied on to get through a typical day. Was there any reason why we couldn’t ‘decode’ and reproduce it in a machine some day? Couldn’t a future supercomputer mimic our entire neural circuitry and be as smart as us? They posited a reductionist and computational approach to the brain that many, including Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett, continue to champion today. Just three months ago, Dennett declared in his sonorous voice, “We are robots made of robots made of robots made of robots.”

But despite the big advances in computing—for example, today’s supercomputers are ten million times faster than those of the early 90s—AI has fallen woefully short of its ambition and hype. …Machines have done well with tasks that we ourselves pursue, or can pursue, algorithmically, as in searching for the word “ersatz” in an essay, making cappuccino, or restacking books on a library shelf. But so much else that defines our intelligence remains well beyond machines, such as projecting our creativity and imagination to understand new contexts and their significance, or figuring out how and why new sensory stimuli are relevant or not. Why is AI in such a braindead state? Is there any hope for it?

Read more here.

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All the past weekend readings are here.

Have a safe, relaxing weekend. Stay Healthy, Keep Smiling!.