The ancient Timbuktu manuscripts of Mali were back in the headlines following internet giant Google’s initiative to host a collection of them at an online gallery. The images of the documents, text in Arabic, can be found at a page called Mali Magic.

No place in West Africa has attracted more attention and resources than the city that has always captivated the imagination of the outside world, Timbuktu. There have been documentaries and books, academic studies and a renewed public interest since some of Timbuktu’s world heritage status buildings were damaged in attacks in 2012. The manuscripts, themselves, some reputed to date as early as the 1400s, were threatened and the international community responded.

While Mali Magic displays 45 very photogenic manuscripts from one private library, the site doesn’t begin to tell the full story of the wealth of West Africa’s manuscripts that are found from the Atlantic to Lake Chad.

But thanks to decades of scholarship and, recently, digitisation, that information is now accessible at a bilingual, open-access, online union catalogue of nearly 80,000 manuscripts at the West African Arabic Manuscript Database. This is a resource I began 30 years ago at the University of Illinois that now provides students access to most of the titles and authors that make up West Africa’s manuscript culture.

It’s at this website that one can access the archive of an association of 35 private Timbuktu manuscript libraries – called SAVAMA-DCI. The association has been working with universities on three continents to secure and record, now digitally, their Arabic and Arabic-script manuscripts.

The West African Arabic Manuscript Database provides an even bigger picture. It is a comprehensive inventory of over 100 public and private West African manuscript libraries. In it, we find one-third of all extant manuscripts with known authors (314 titles), written by 204 scholars, one-quarter of them from West Africa. Most of these manuscripts come from the 1800s, but have very deep historical roots.

The full story of West Africa’s manuscript culture and Islamic learning centres will finally be known when the attention that is lavished on Timbuktu’s manuscripts is also given to libraries in neighbouring Mauritania, Niger and Nigeria. But we already know a good deal.

Centres of learning

Earliest contact between North Africa and Timbuktu focused on West Africa’s gold trade. This commerce also brought Islamic teachings across the Sahara Desert. The first reference to manuscripts in Timbuktu was in the 1400s, contributing to the mystique that has always enveloped the city as a centre of Islamic education.

In fact, Timbuktu was only one of several southern Saharan towns that attracted scholars and offered Islamic learning. In the 1500s, what is called Timbuktu’s ‘Golden Age’, its famous scholars were known across North Africa.

That period waned, but Arabic learning revived again in the 1800s across West Africa in the wake of several Islamic reform movements that stretched from today’s Guinea and the Senegal River Valley to Northern Nigeria. Today’s older manuscripts in West Africa mainly date from this period.

With the decline of scholarship in Timbuktu in the 1600s, Islamic learning emerged in nomadic centres to the west (in today’s Mauritania). There’s also a national collection of manuscripts in Mauritania that is based on the contents of 80-odd private libraries. They give us a good idea of what was traditionally found in manuscript libraries.

What’s in West Africa’s manuscripts?

The exact subject matter in each of the categories would vary somewhat from one library to the next. But the dominant subject – legal writing – tended to account for one-quarter to one-third of all the manuscripts.

West Africa’s manuscript culture evolved, for the most part, outside any state system. In the absence of a central authority, juridical matters were dispensed by local legal scholars who could cite precedent, case law, to resolve thorny problems.

The next most important subject in the manuscripts deals with the Prophet Muhammad, mainly biographical and devotional writing. The ratios of manuscripts dealing with mysticism (Sufism); the Qur’an (including copies of the Holy Book) especially recitation styles; Arabic language (lexicology, syntax, prosody, pre-Islamic poetry); and theology vary, each subject accounting for 7% to 13% of the manuscripts in most libraries.

Locally-written poetry and literature is generally the smallest slice of manuscripts, albeit – with correspondence – some of the most interesting. Oddly, the subject of history, like geography, is almost entirely ignored in many collections.

This reminds us, that Arabic and by extension, Arabic script was at base a religious language used for religious purposes, and its use for secular subjects was not common.

The power of the Arabic alphabet

More significant than these Islamic sciences, or disciplines, are the uses to which the Arabic alphabet was applied across West Africa. Arabic uses a phonetic alphabet; each letter always produces the same sound. What this means is that the Arabic script can be used to write any language.

To explain the Arabic of the Qur’an, teachers frequently translated key words into the students’ African language (written in Arabic script). Many West African manuscripts that were used in teaching show these interlineal insertions. From this practice it was an easy step to write classic legends, or memory aids, or poetry in African languages – all in Arabic script.

The name this writing is given in Arabic is “`ajamī” (writing in a foreign language). These manuscripts make up about 15% of most collections in West Africa today.

In some areas, whole Arabic books are available in `ajamī form. The African languages that have been adapted to Arabic script are many, including: Fulfulde, Soninké, Wolof, Hausa, Bambara, Yoruba, and the colloquial Arabic spoken in Mauritania, Hasaniyya.

In recent times, `ajami writing has been increasingly used, but in historic manuscripts its use tended to focus on traditional healing methods, the properties of plants, the occult sciences and poetry.

More to come

Google’s new online library is drawn from the collection of SAVAMA-DCI’s director, Abdel Kader Haidara. In 2013, he entered a partnership with the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, based in Minnesota, US, to digitise his and 23 other family libraries in Timbuktu.

This is a bigger project that will eventually make available 242,000 manuscripts freely, online, complete with the scholarly apparatus and search capacity necessary for their scientific use.

Additional plans call for that project to include libraries at the town’s three main mosques, and Mali’s other centre of Islamic culture, Djenné. Already, over 15,000 manuscripts are accessible for scholars. Opening these manuscripts to scholars around the world to learn about the intellectual life in Africa before colonial rule promises to help re-balance the continent’s place in world history.

Charles C. Stewart, Professor emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

That isn’t enough. Congress needs to legislate explicitly so that if a Trump wanna-be becomes president in 2025, he can’t just impose such a measure again. The Democrats can do this now, for about 18 months before they likely lose the House of Representatives in 2022 and should put a rush order on it.

Moreover, the Arab press is pointing out that the visa ban could nevertheless have a long arm and harm its victims even after abolition, and that the Biden administration must prevent ongoing harm. For instance, when you apply for a visa, you are asked if you were ever denied a visa before. Obviously, a previous denial could look suspicious and be grounds for being turned down now! You’ve got millions who could be affected.

Trump’s Muslim visa ban wrought enormous harm to innocent Americans. It kept grandchildren from visiting their grandparents. Some died alone and far away. It separated not only families but close friends. It separated colleagues. It broke up research teams. It ruined careers and businesses. It had no basis in fact. Immigrants from the countries singled out were not responsible for any acts of terrorism in the US. All the while, Trump was coddling the real terrorist threat, of white supremacists.

The Executive Order was clearly discriminatory and a violation of the First Amendment (see below). The Republican Supreme Court that prides itself on upholding religious liberty against Democratic Party secularism gave in to the most hateful attack on freedom of religion in decades.

It is worth reviewing what judges said about the first two attempts at a Muslim ban, which failed in the lower courts because they were so egregious. Trump won on the third try by including a few officials in Venezuela and North Korea, while mainly targeting Muslim-majority countries, and SCOTUS let Trump get by with this sleight of hand. What judges said about versions 1.0 and 2.0 of the executive order was also true of 3.0, whatever Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito (two of the worst justices in history) might say. Thomas is inexplicably married to a white nationalist who cheered on the Capitol insurrection.

I wrote in February, 2017, when the first of the three Muslim visa bans was issued by Executive Order (EO) in February, 2017, about the first time it was struck down:

“US District Judge James Robart of Seattle, a Bush appointee, issued a judgment suspending the Executive Order on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and places an undue burden on the state of Washington and on its 25,000 residents from the 7 countries that Trump singled out…

Robart wrote, according to the Seattle Times:

“The executive order adversely affects the state’s residents in areas of employment, education, business, family relations and freedom to travel,” Robart wrote, adding that the order also harmed the state’s public universities and tax base. “These harms are significant and ongoing.”

Robart stood up for the residents of Washington state who were unconstitutionally deprived of basic rights by the EO. He also stood up for the economy of Washington state and its “tax base,” playing turnabout with Trump by arguing that what he did is bad for the economy!

He even mentioned the harm to the state’s great universities, a point I have made in the past.

Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the Neofascists who wrote the EO, were hoping that immigrants would be treated by the US courts as foreigners with no rights or standing.

Robart is saying that residents of a state in the US have rights that the president cannot simply erase by fiat. He is further saying that institutions of the state itself, including universities, have a right to pursue their work unmolested by discriminatory policies . . . The court also accepted the state’s argument that the EO has “inflicted upon the operations and missions of their public universities and other institutions of higher learning, as well as injury to the States’ operations, tax bases, and public funds. These harms are significant and ongoing.”

Then the fascist racists came back with a revised version of the visa ban, which was struck down by Judge Derek Watson in Honolulu. I wrote,

“It is delicious that Hawaii stepped up here, as the most ethnically diverse state in the nation, where the quarter of the population that is Japanese-Americans well remembers the internment camps to which their families were consigned during WW II. Hawaii has a lot of immigrants, and those immigrants found companies and act as entrepreneurs, adding enormous value to the Hawaii economy. 1 in 6 residents of Hawaii is foreign-born, and 20% of business revenue is generated by 16,000 new immigrant businesses. Trump’s white nationalism is completely out of place in Hawaii. And by the way, Hawaii and California, the diverse states, are the future of America. Trumpism can only slow that down, not stop it…

Judge Watson notes, “The clearest command of the Establishment Clause is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.” Larson v. Valente, 456 U.S. 228, 244 (1982). To determine whether the Executive Order runs afoul of that command, the Court is guided by the three-part test for Establishment Clause claims set forth in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 612-13 (1971). According to Lemon, government action (1) must have a primary secular purpose, (2) may not have the principal effect of advancing or inhibiting religion, and (3) may not foster excessive entanglement with religion. Id. “Failure to satisfy any one of the three prongs of the Lemon test is sufficient to invalidate the challenged law or practice.” Newdow v. Rio Linda Union Sch. Dist., 597 F.3d 1007, 1076–77 (9th Cir. 2010)….

The Establishment Clause says that Congress shall make no law affecting the establishment of religion, which is 18th century English for “Congress shall make no law designating a particular religion as the state religion of the Federal Government.” The Clause mandates that the Government be neutral as between religions. Obviously, a Muslim ban is not religiously neutral.

Watson finds that the EO targets six countries with a Muslim population of between 90% and 97% and so obviously primarily targets Muslims…

Judge Watson notes that the State of Hawaii alleged two major harms of the EO. The first is the University of Hawaii system, which is an “arm of the state.” The University, which has 55,756 students, pointed out that it “recruits students, permanent faculty, and visiting faculty from the targeted countries.” The EO harms the whole state of Hawaii “by debasing its culture and tradition of ethnic diversity and inclusion.”

The Iranian, Syrian, Libyan, Somali, Yemeni and Sudanese students who are excluded from the country “are deterred from studying or teaching at the University, now and in the future, irrevocably damaging their personal and professional lives and harming the educational institutions themselves.” …

Not only would some of these persons, and others, be dissuaded from continuing their search for knowledge in the US, “The State argues that the University will also suffer non-monetary losses, including damage to the collaborative exchange of ideas among people of different religions and national backgrounds on which the State’s educational institutions depend.” The EO is interfering not just in finances but in the very purpose of the University, which is the free exchange of ideas.

The EO also interferes with the University’s ability freely to recruit the most qualified faculty and students and with its commitment to being “one of the most diverse institutions of higher education” in the world. Moreover, the university envisages it as difficult to run its Persian Language and culture program without the ability to have visitors from Iran.

The State’s summary of the harm to the University of Hawaii includes educational and intellectual harms (and ethnic diversity is itself an intellectual advantage) as well as financial and monetary ones. In the Lockean tradition, property harms are typically the ones taken most seriously.

Hawaii’s second argument is that the EO will harm its tourism industry, a central component of its economy. The chaotic and arbitrary way the first EO was rolled out, and the uncertainties attending the second one will “depress tourism, business travel, and financial investments in Hawaii.”). Middle East visitors in the month after the first EO fell by 1/5. Tourism brings in $15 billion a year to the Hawaii economy (it is a small state of 1.5 million people).

Hawaii has a point, and Judge Watson recognized it.”

——-

Bonus Video:

Justice for All: “Struggles of Muslim Ban”

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country at over 200 million persons, and it is Africa’s richest country, with a nominal gross domestic product of $444 billion. It is a magnet for foreign investment, the third recipient of Foreign Direct Investment after Egypt and Ethiopia. (Egypt’s nominal GDP is only $300 bn. a year.) It is also Africa’s high tech hub and a potential center of innovation.

The Congressional Research Service wrote just last year,

“Successive Administrations have described the U.S. relationship with Nigeria, Africa’s largest producer of oil and its largest economy, to be among the most important on the continent . . . The country is the United States’ second-largest trading partner in Africa and the third-largest beneficiary of U.S. foreign direct investment on the continent. Nigerians comprise the largest African diaspora group in the United States.”

It adds,

“Two-way trade was over $9 billion in 2017, when U.S. investment stood at $5.8 billion. Given Nigeria’s ranking as one of Africa’s largest consumer markets and its affinity for U.S. products and American culture, opportunities for increasing U.S. exports to the country, and the broader West Africa region, are considerable.”

In 2018, two-way U.S. goods and services trade with Nigeria grew to $11.3 billion.

There are over 300,000 Nigerian-Americans. They are the most highly educated immigrant group, with more post-graduate education than any other set of immigrants. A Nigerian surgeon saved my life last year. Their family reunions have just been disrupted. There is no security issue that would justify injuring so many lives.

Nigerians spend half a billion dollars a year on education in the United States. I’d say we can kiss that money goodbye. Although the Trump regime may offer student visas, they are pretty worthless given how Trump has been summarily deporting Iranian students with valid visas. If I were a Nigerian student, I’d go to Canada or the UK or anywhere but the United States for that higher education, since you never know whether you’ll be allowed to finish the degree.

Nigerian businessmen invested $75 million in the United States in 2018, a sum that increased 25% over the previous year. Since Nigeria is an oil state with some cash around to invest, you’d think the US government would want that investment to keep on growing. But although the US will offer business visas, I think it might be hard for Nigerian investors to get over here from now on, and if I were they, I wouldn’t bother and would take my capital some place African people are welcome.

Nigeria has been traditionally one of the most important sources of imported petroleum for the United States, and US energy companies have heavily invested there.

But there’s trouble on the horizon, since the US is not the only player in town. China has gone into Nigeria in a big way.

The CRS says, “U.S. energy companies may face increasing competition for rights to the country’s energy resources; China, for example, has offered Nigeria favorable loans for infrastructure projects in exchange for oil exploration rights.”

Emily Feng wrote a little over a year ago in The Financial Times that China and Nigeria do $14 bn a year in bilateral trade. In 2018, in addition, Chinese concerns put $7 bn into Nigeria in investments and construction contracts, and these totaled $21 bn. over 2016-2018.

Two-way trade rose to $15 billion last year.

So China is already doing more two-way trade with Nigeria than the United States, and its direct investments are also higher. When Nigeria has a choice of an American bid and a Chinese one, which do you think it will choose, all other things being equal, given that Trump has shut Nigerians out of the United States?

China wants to expand its exports to Nigeria, as the country’s growing middle class seeks manufactured consumer goods. The US isn’t even in the top three of countries from which Nigeria imports most goods (Belgium and the Netherlands were number 2 and 3). In 2017, Nigeria imported $9.6 billion in goods from China, and in the second quarter of 2019 Chinese imports made up 25% of all goods brought into Nigeria. NIgerian buyers routinely trek off to Guangzhou to make bulk purchases, and 10,000 Nigerians are resident there.

The Chinese government and Chinese private firms are also building factories in Nigeria itself to produce for the Nigerian and African markets. As of 2019, Chinese concerns had invested $20 billion in 150 firms operating in Nigeria, with some of these entirely Chinese-owned..

In addition, the Chinese are carrying large scale infrastructure projects in Nigeria. They are building commuter railways in Abuja and Lagos, and doing rail construction projects all over the country, to the tune of $20 billion.

There are problems between China and Nigeria. There is a huge trade imbalance in China’s favor, though if push came to shove China could probably in a politic way take more Nigerian petroleum and cut down on other suppliers. Nigerians are a little worried that a lot of Chinese projects are offered in the form of loans, and there is a notorious debt trap issue with such Chinese aid and investment. These considerations should offer an opening for US investors and companies, but now many doors have been shut by Trump. Being excluded from a country on racial grounds is humiliating and inevitably affects things like trade and investment.

——–

Bonus Video:

CGTN: “Trade volume increase between Nigeria and China.”

Consider, if you will, these two indisputable facts.  First, the United States is today more or less permanently engaged in hostilities in not one faraway place, but at least seven.  Second, the vast majority of the American people could not care less. 

Nor can it be said that we don’t care because we don’t know.  True, government authorities withhold certain aspects of ongoing military operations or release only details that they find convenient.  Yet information describing what U.S. forces are doing (and where) is readily available, even if buried in recent months by barrages of presidential tweets.  Here, for anyone interested, are press releases issued by United States Central Command for just one recent week:

September 19: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 20: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Iraqi Security Forces begin Hawijah offensive

September 21: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 22: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 23: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Operation Inherent Resolve Casualty

September 25: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 26: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Ever since the United States launched its war on terror, oceans of military press releases have poured forth.  And those are just for starters.  To provide updates on the U.S. military’s various ongoing campaigns, generals, admirals, and high-ranking defense officials regularly testify before congressional committees or brief members of the press.  From the field, journalists offer updates that fill in at least some of the details — on civilian casualties, for example — that government authorities prefer not to disclose.  Contributors to newspaper op-ed pages and “experts” booked by network and cable TV news shows, including passels of retired military officers, provide analysis.  Trailing behind come books and documentaries that put things in a broader perspective.

But here’s the truth of it.  None of it matters.

Like traffic jams or robocalls, war has fallen into the category of things that Americans may not welcome, but have learned to live with.  In twenty-first-century America, war is not that big a deal. 

While serving as defense secretary in the 1960s, Robert McNamara once mused that the “greatest contribution” of the Vietnam War might have been to make it possible for the United States “to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.” With regard to the conflict once widely referred to as McNamara’s War, his claim proved grotesquely premature.  Yet a half-century later, his wish has become reality.

Why do Americans today show so little interest in the wars waged in their name and at least nominally on their behalf?  Why, as our wars drag on and on, doesn’t the disparity between effort expended and benefits accrued arouse more than passing curiosity or mild expressions of dismay? Why, in short, don’t we give a [expletive deleted]? 

Perhaps just posing such a question propels us instantly into the realm of the unanswerable, like trying to figure out why people idolize Justin Bieber, shoot birds, or watch golf on television. 

Without any expectation of actually piercing our collective ennui, let me take a stab at explaining why we don’t give a @#$%&!  Here are eight distinctive but mutually reinforcing explanations, offered in a sequence that begins with the blindingly obvious and ends with the more speculative.  

Americans don’t attend all that much to ongoing American wars because: 

1. U.S. casualty rates are low. By using proxies and contractors, and relying heavily on airpower, America’s war managers have been able to keep a tight lid on the number of U.S. troops being killed and wounded.  In all of 2017, for example, a grand total of 11 American soldiers have been lost in Afghanistan — about equal to the number of shooting deaths in Chicago over the course of a typical week. True, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries where the U.S. is engaged in hostilities, whether directly or indirectly, plenty of people who are not Americans are being killed and maimed.  (The estimated number of Iraqi civilians killed this year alone exceeds 12,000.) But those casualties have next to no political salience as far as the United States is concerned.  As long as they don’t impede U.S. military operations, they literally don’t count (and generally aren’t counted).

2. The true costs of Washington’s wars go untabulated.  In a famous speech, dating from early in his presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower said that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”  Dollars spent on weaponry, Ike insisted, translated directly into schools, hospitals, homes, highways, and power plants that would go unbuilt.  “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he continued.  “[I]t is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” More than six decades later, Americans have long since accommodated themselves to that cross of iron.  Many actually see it as a boon, a source of corporate profits, jobs, and, of course, campaign contributions.  As such, they avert their eyes from the opportunity costs of our never-ending wars.  The dollars expended pursuant to our post-9/11 conflicts will ultimately number in the multi-trillions.  Imagine the benefits of investing such sums in upgrading the nation’s aging infrastructure.  Yet don’t count on Congressional leaders, other politicians, or just about anyone else to pursue that connection. 

3. On matters related to war, American citizens have opted out.  Others have made the point so frequently that it’s the equivalent of hearing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” at Christmastime.  Even so, it bears repeating: the American people have defined their obligation to “support the troops” in the narrowest imaginable terms, ensuring above all that such support requires absolutely no sacrifice on their part.  Members of Congress abet this civic apathy, while also taking steps to insulate themselves from responsibility.  In effect, citizens and their elected representatives in Washington agree: supporting the troops means deferring to the commander in chief, without inquiring about whether what he has the troops doing makes the slightest sense.  Yes, we set down our beers long enough to applaud those in uniform and boo those who decline to participate in mandatory rituals of patriotism.  What we don’t do is demand anything remotely approximating actual accountability.

4. Terrorism gets hyped and hyped and hyped some more. While international terrorism isn’t a trivial problem (and wasn’t for decades before 9/11), it comes nowhere close to posing an existential threat to the United States.  Indeed, other threats, notably the impact of climate change, constitute a far greater danger to the wellbeing of Americans.  Worried about the safety of your children or grandchildren?  The opioid epidemic constitutes an infinitely greater danger than “Islamic radicalism.”  Yet having been sold a bill of goods about a “war on terror” that is essential for “keeping America safe,” mere citizens are easily persuaded that scattering U.S. troops throughout the Islamic world while dropping bombs on designated evildoers is helping win the former while guaranteeing the latter.  To question that proposition becomes tantamount to suggesting that God might not have given Moses two stone tablets after all.

5. Blather crowds out substance. When it comes to foreign policy, American public discourse is — not to put too fine a point on it — vacuous, insipid, and mindlessly repetitive.  William Safire of the New York Times once characterized American political rhetoric as BOMFOG, with those running for high office relentlessly touting the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God.  Ask a politician, Republican or Democrat, to expound on this country’s role in the world, and then brace yourself for some variant of WOSFAD, as the speaker insists that it is incumbent upon the World’s Only Superpower to spread Freedom and Democracy.  Terms like leadership and indispensable are introduced, along with warnings about the dangers of isolationism and appeasement, embellished with ominous references to Munich.  Such grandiose posturing makes it unnecessary to probe too deeply into the actual origins and purposes of American wars, past or present, or assess the likelihood of ongoing wars ending in some approximation of actual success. Cheerleading displaces serious thought.

6. Besides, we’re too busy.  Think of this as a corollary to point five.  Even if the present-day American political scene included figures like Senators Robert La Follette or J. William Fulbright, who long ago warned against the dangers of militarizing U.S. policy, Americans may not retain a capacity to attend to such critiques.  Responding to the demands of the Information Age is not, it turns out, conducive to deep reflection.  We live in an era (so we are told) when frantic multitasking has become a sort of duty and when being overscheduled is almost obligatory.  Our attention span shrinks and with it our time horizon.  The matters we attend to are those that happened just hours or minutes ago.  Yet like the great solar eclipse of 2017 — hugely significant and instantly forgotten — those matters will, within another few minutes or hours, be superseded by some other development that briefly captures our attention.  As a result, a dwindling number of Americans — those not compulsively checking Facebook pages and Twitter accounts — have the time or inclination to ponder questions like: When will the Afghanistan War end?  Why has it lasted almost 16 years?  Why doesn’t the finest fighting force in history actually win?  Can’t package an answer in 140 characters or a 30-second made-for-TV sound bite?  Well, then, slowpoke, don’t expect anyone to attend to what you have to say.

7. Anyway, the next president will save us.  At regular intervals, Americans indulge in the fantasy that, if we just install the right person in the White House, all will be well.  Ambitious politicians are quick to exploit this expectation.  Presidential candidates struggle to differentiate themselves from their competitors, but all of them promise in one way or another to wipe the slate clean and Make America Great Again.  Ignoring the historical record of promises broken or unfulfilled, and presidents who turn out not to be deities but flawed human beings, Americans — members of the media above all — pretend to take all this seriously.  Campaigns become longer, more expensive, more circus-like, and ever less substantial.  One might think that the election of Donald Trump would prompt a downward revision in the exalted expectations of presidents putting things right.  Instead, especially in the anti-Trump camp, getting rid of Trump himself (Collusion!  Corruption!  Obstruction!  Impeachment!) has become the overriding imperative, with little attention given to restoring the balance intended by the framers of the Constitution.  The irony of Trump perpetuating wars that he once roundly criticized and then handing the conduct of those wars to generals devoid of ideas for ending them almost entirely escapes notice.

8. Our culturally progressive military has largely immunized itself from criticism.  As recently as the 1990s, the U.S. military establishment aligned itself with the retrograde side of the culture wars.  Who can forget the gays-in-the-military controversy that rocked Bill Clinton’s administration during his first weeks in office, as senior military leaders publicly denounced their commander-in-chief?  Those days are long gone.  Culturally, the armed forces have moved left.  Today, the services go out of their way to project an image of tolerance and a commitment to equality on all matters related to race, gender, and sexuality.  So when President Trump announced his opposition to transgendered persons serving in the armed forces, tweeting that the military “cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail,” senior officers politely but firmly disagreed and pushed back.  Given the ascendency of cultural issues near the top of the U.S. political agenda, the military’s embrace of diversity helps to insulate it from criticism and from being called to account for a less than sterling performance in waging wars.  Put simply, critics who in an earlier day might have blasted military leaders for their inability to bring wars to a successful conclusion hold their fire.  Having women graduate from Ranger School or command Marines in combat more than compensates for not winning.

A collective indifference to war has become an emblem of contemporary America.  But don’t expect your neighbors down the street or the editors of the New York Times to lose any sleep over that fact.  Even to notice it would require them — and us — to care.

Andrew J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is the author, most recently, of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 Andrew J. Bacevich

Via Tomdispatch.com

——–

Related video added by Juan Cole:

AP: “Mattis, NATO pledge continuing support to Afghanistan”

ROME (IPS) – Urgent action is needed to save the lives of people facing famine in North Eastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen, the UN leading food and agriculture agency’s chief on April 28 warned. “If nothing is done, some 20 million people could starve to death in the next six months.”

“Famine does not just kill people, it contributes to social instability and also perpetuates a cycle of poverty and aid dependency that endures for decades,” the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) the Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva added.

At a media briefing ahead of the conclusive session of the this UN specialised agency’s executive arm—the FAO Council, he launched a new appeal for voluntary contributions, that are “of vital importance to FAO, now more than ever.”

“I will be always committed to finding more savings and promoting more efficiency, as I have done over the last five years. But I have already cut to the bone. There is no more fat left.”

On this, Graziano da Silva emphasised the need to work with everyone on the basis of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development –“Leaving No One Behind”, in order to save all the affected people.

He also announced that agreement will be signed among FAO and the other two Rome-based UN agencies: the International Fund for Agriculture (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) on how to tackle the current famine in those 4 countries– Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen.

The FAO Council, which has met in FAO-headquarters in Rome on 24 – 28 April, convenes between sessions of the main Conference to provide advice and oversight related to programmatic and budgetary matters.

The Council’s 49 elected members have been briefed on the extent of the hunger crises, and the steps required to preventing catastrophe.

Making Funds Go Further

The organisation’s executive body has also approved FAO‘s Programme of Work and Budget 2018-2019, which prioritises areas where FAO can deliver the greatest impact to member countries to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, including climate change mitigation and adaptation, sustainable agriculture production, water scarcity management, and building the resilience of poor family farmers.

Ahead of the FAO Council’s meeting, Graziano da Silva had on 25 April stated in Geneva that a combination of food assistance and food production assistance is the only way to avoid famine in conflict-ridden Yemen where two-thirds of the population –17 million people– are suffering from severe food insecurity.

“As the conflict continues, food security and nutrition will also continue to deteriorate,” he stressed in his address to a United Nations High-Level Pledging conference for Yemen organised in Geneva and co-hosted by the governments of Switzerland and Sweden.

“To put these figures into perspective, we are talking about the double of Switzerland’s population being unable to meet their basic daily food needs.”

He stressed how livelihoods support, especially for agriculture and fishing, must be an integral part of the international community’s response to the crisis in Yemen.

Over 17 Million Yemenis, Acutely Food Insecure

More than 17 million people around Yemen’s rugged landscape are acutely food insecure, and the figure is likely to increase as the on-going conflict continues to erode the ability to grow, import, distribute and pay for food, Graziano da Silva wrote on IPS.

“More than 7 million people are on the verge of famine, while the rest are marginally meeting the minimum day-to-day nutritional needs thanks to external humanitarian and livelihoods support. Large-scale famine is a real risk that will cast an awful shadow for generations to come.”
According to Graziano da Silva, only a political solution can end the suffering in Yemen, as there can be no food security without peace. And the longer the delay to draft an adequately funded recovery plan, the more expensive the burden will be in terms of resources and human livelihood.

In 2016, agriculture production in Yemen and the area under cultivation shrank by 38 per cent due to the lack of inputs and investments. Livestock production fell by 35 per cent.

“Agricultural assistance in a humanitarian crisis can no longer be an afterthought,” the FAO Director-General said. “We need to seize every opportunity to support communities in Yemen to continue producing food, even under difficult circumstances.”

In Geneva, Graziano da Silva met Yemen’s Prime Minister Ahmed Obaid Bin Daghr, for talks on FAO’s support to the country to deliver emergency livelihood assistance and kick-start food production, especially when resources pledged to tackle the crisis are concretely made available.

The Geneva pledging conference on April 25 mobilised half of the 2,1 billion dollars urgently required to rescue the starving Yemeni population.

Licensed from Inter Press Service

——–

Related video added by Juan Cole:

UN News Centre from 3 months ago: “UN relief official: International efforts underway to aid the 7 million vulnerable in the Sahel”

“This year it was 100 percent. Every delegation,” organizer Mary Flowers told the media.

An African trade summit organized by the University of Southern California ended up with zero Africans as they were all denied visas to enter the United States just days before the summit despite applying months ahead of time, in what organizers called an act of “discrimination against African nations.”

“Usually we get 40 percent that get rejected but the others come,” Mary Flowers, chair of the African Global Economic and Development Summit, told Voice of America in an interview Friday.

“This year it was 100 percent. Every delegation. And it was sad to see, because these people were so disheartened.”

Many of those who planned to attend were government officials, artists and business people who had paid the US$500 attendance fee and were speakers at the summit. Flowers said that at least 100 people could not attend due to their visas being rejected.

“I have to say that most of us feel it’s a discrimination issue with the African nations,” said Flowers. “We experience it over and over and over, and the people being rejected are legitimate business people with ties to the continent.”

The summit is held every year in Los Angeles where delegations from several African countries have the chance to meet U.S. business people, government officials and artists. The countries affected included Sierra Leone, Guinea, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa.

Prince Kojo Hilton, a Ghanaian artist whose work includes special effects and graphic art, was one of those affected by the last-minute visa rejection. “I was really disappointed when I went to the embassy,” Hilton said in an interview with VOA.

He told the outlet that he had already paid the US$500 fee to attend the event and was asked to lead a session on filmmaking. He was called in for an appointment at the embassy four days before his trip and his visa was denied shortly after. Luckily he held off on buying the plane ticket.

The surge in visa denials by the United States comes almost two months into the presidency of Donald Trump who has made cracking down on immigration one of his main priorities.

Trump has already issued two travel bans on several Muslim-majority countries and both orders have been suspended by federal judges.

Via TeleSur

——

Related video added by Juan Cole:

CGTN: “Nigeria issues advisory against travelling to the United States”

LONDON (IPS) – A recent study supported by the government of Finland has found widespread misconceptions regarding what drives people to join Islamist militant groups like Boko Haram.

Boko Haram is Nigeria’s militant Islamist group, wreaking havoc across the nation through a series of abductions, bombings, and assassinations. The group opposes anything associated with Western society, including any social or political activity. Its military campaign’s sole focus is to wipe out any “non-believers” from the Nigerian state.

“There’s a widespread tendency to oversimplify what drives Nigerians to join a group that advocates such extreme violence like Boko Haram. It’s easy to place the blame on religion without delving any deeper into the subject.” — Anneli Botha

Boko Haram’s official name is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, which in Arabic means “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad”.

The group’s unlawful actions became a topic of international concern in April 2014 when 276 schoolgirls were abducted by the extremists in Chibok, Nigeria. News of the girls’ abduction went viral and the “bring back our girls” social media campaign spread rapidly across the world. Today, 219 of the girls are still missing.

Whilst the majority of mainstream media outlets continue to associate the growth of radicalised groups like Boko Haram with the “perils” of Islam and religious extremism, the study set out to understand what drives people to extremism on a deeper level.

According to Mahdi Abdile, Director of Research at Finn Church Aid (FCA) and at the Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers, before the 9/11 terror attacks, religious motives could be drawn back to engagement in extremist practices, as widespread recruitment for militant groups like Boko Haram frequently took place in mosques and madrasas. Today, that has changed.

“There’s a widespread tendency to oversimplify what drives Nigerians to join a group that advocates such extreme violence like Boko Haram,” said Anneli Botha, an independent consultant on radicalisation, deradicalisation, reintegration and terrorism in Africa and co-author of the study.

“It’s easy to place the blame on religion without delving any deeper into the subject. Our empirical research has shown that there is, in fact, a web of complexities behind the recruitment process that we as a global community need to acknowledge and accept.”

For many, it may come as a shock that the primary factor for joining Boko Haram has little to do with following true “Islamic practices”. The study shows that 60 percent of Boko Haram fighters are recruited by their own family or friends.

In spite of 43 percent of former fighters indicating that religion had a strong influence on their decision to join Boko Haram, many stated that Boko Haram was not following the principles of Islam. Those who joined for religious reasons were described as “vulnerable” and “unfamiliar with the true teachings of the Qu’ran”.

The study also indicated that the most prominent pull factor in the Boko Haram recruitment process came out of deep fear and a thirst for revenge. “Fear of military action drives many people into the hands of Boko Haram,” Botha told IPS. Some interviewees explained that “a need for respect” influenced them to join Boko Haram.

In Northern Nigeria, citizens voiced a need for more rights and access to basic services. They also expressed feelings of frustration over what they considered to be persistent inequalities. They described those residing in Southern Nigeria as being far more “privileged.”

In many ways, questioning the media and public opinion’s tendency to place the blame on Islam for every act of extremism presents itself as one of the greatest challenges to be overcome in the study.

The research compiled also indicated a prominent female presence in the organisation. Most surprisingly, the study uncovered the increasingly active role women play in the operations of the militant group.

“The women interviewed made up of former Boko Haram fighters provided far more than basic services. They described being involved in collecting intelligence and the training process. Some women even considered themselves to be explosive experts,” Botha said. She considered the study to be an “amazing sample” of the significant role women play in what most consider to be a male-dominated militant organisation.

The women interviewed consisted of ex-Boko Haram fighters. The women described the hardship and difficulty the reintegration process had inflicted on them. Although many were kidnapped or forced into the group out of fear, now, they are seen as nothing more than “horrific reminders” of Boko Haram atrocities.

The women’s children, many born out of Boko Haram and now left fatherless, are also considered to be a “violent manifestation” of the extremist group. For the most part, the former Boko Haram women and children are neither accepted nor welcomed back into the community.

Oftentimes, for the women who escape, the gates to freedom remain tightly sealed and the struggle continues. Many former Boko Haram fighters experience Stockholm syndrome which is left untreated and worsened by the stigmatization they are subjected to by their community upon their return home.

Children born out of the Boko Haram process are equally victimized by the community. “There’s a widespread failure to recognize these women and children as victims, whether you’re a first or second-hand victim it has the same effect,” Botha said.

She said the next step must come from the implementation of an efficient reintegration process for both the former fighters and children born out of Boko Haram. The recognition of their strife and discouragement of the demonization of their past actions will help them feel welcomed and accepted in a strong community again.

Licensed from Inter Press Service

——-

Related video added by Juan Cole:

UN High Commission for Refugees: “Free from Boko Haram, Nigerians still need help”

On December 12-13, 2015 Nigerian security forces carried out an attack against the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) in the city of Zaria. The movement’s leader, Ibrahim al-Zakzaky, and his wife, Zeenah were both seriously injured by shooting, and then kept in detention. The incident occurred some 14 months after a previous attack in which three of Zakzaky’s sons were killed. The IMN has claimed that in this latest incident over 700 of its members were killed or detained.

Sisters of the Islamic Movement was held in Kaduna by Sisters of the Islamic Movement on Monday the 15th of Feb, 2016. h/t Islamic Movement

The IMN is often referred to in the media as “Shi’ite”, but it presents itself as including all kinds of Muslims. The incident occurred just a few days before the announcement of the formation of a Saudi led Islamic coalition of Islamic states to fight “terrorism.” It excluded states where Shi’ites are dominant, and also Algeria, which opposes any cross border intervention. The announcement stirred up much opposition in Nigeria stopping the government from joining the coalition.

The timing of the attack on the IMN could lead one to guess that the Saudi government played a role in pushing for it. Such speculation fits with the fact that wealthy Saudis had given financial support to the presidential campaign of Muhammadu Buhari in March 2015 when it was running out of money, helping him to win. But it can also be argued that the main factor behind the attack was provocation of the security forces by the IMN, whose ritual procession had blocked traffic, including a military convoy. Zakzaky had been imprisoned for 9 years under military rule, from 1983 to 1999, so clearly his relationship with the military was not a comfortable one.

Without access to a wide range of reliable information about the incident it is difficult to come up with any clear conclusion. The most useful efforts to understand the incident now may be to put it into historical perspective.

Zakzaky emerged as a student leader at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria in the late 1970s, a time of great turbulence in the Muslim world. One striking event of this time was the disappearance in Libya, on August 31, 1978, of Lebanese Sh’ite leader Musa al-Sadr, who has come to be known as the “vanished imam.” He had been invited to meet with Mu’ammar Gaddafi. It is widely presumed that Gaddafi ordered his killing after being angered by their discussion. Most speculation about what provoked Gaddafi’s anger has focused on Middle East issues.

But it can be useful to look at the African dimension of their encounter. Musa al-Sadr had been working to improve the conditions of Shi’ites in Lebanon, who had been a largely rural and impoverished group up until the 1960s. He realized that a key step for his project could be to make connections with Lebanese Shi’ites in West Africa. Along with Lebanese Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims, they had been working as traders in West Africa since it came under British and French colonial rule, starting in the 1890s. As African states gained their independence the position of Lebanese traders became less secure, and it made sense for them to invest savings in their homeland and prepare to return.

In 1967, al-Sadr spent some five months in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. After returning to Lebanon he sent a colleague to set up a Shi’a Islamic Center in Senegal which would reach out to Senegalese Muslims who were seeking a new vision of Islam that would better fit the demands of modern, urban society.

Discussions of Zakzaky usually focus on his being galvanized by the Iranian revolution as it unfolded in 1978-79. Yet the project that he developed, which focused on drawing young Muslims into modern education and providing basic services such as medical care, bears a strong resemblance to al-Sadr’s Amal movement in Lebanon, suggesting that he may well have been influenced by the Shi’a center in Senegal. While Zakzaky often lauded Khomeini, he has emphasized building cordial relations with other Muslim groups and with Christians, just as al-Sadr did in Lebanon.

Gaddafi also had a strong interest in Africa. But while al-Sadr emphasized building voluntary organizations from the ground up, Gaddafi had an Arab nationalist vision of imposing his views from the top down. At the time of al-Sadr’s disappearance, Gaddafi was planning to move Libyan forces into Chad, just to the south of Libya. But hi’s strident authoritarian style was poorly adapted to the social and cultural diversity of sub-Saharan Africa. So, too, was the Wahhabi vision supported by Saudi Arabia, embodied in the establishment of the Izala movement in Nigeria in 1978. They condemned Sufi orders, which were widespread among Muslims of Nigeria. But Zakzaky was glad to accept Sufi orders, and the IMN’s emphasis on public rituals bears a strong resemblance to Sufi practices.

Zakzaky also drew inspiration from within Nigeria, especially from `Uthman Dan Fodio, who led a jihad to build an Islamic state in what is now northwest and north-cental Nigeria in the early 1800s. One of Zakzaky’s ancestors had moved from Mali to join this jihad. He became the religious adviser for the local ruler of Zaria province. Schools run by the IMN are known as “Fudiyyah” schools, named after Dan Fodio.

One of Dan Fodio’s greatest challenges was to draw Hausa women into Islamic activities, pulling them away from their long established traditions, which included bori, a spirit healing cult. He inspired his daughter Nana Asma`u to form a movement that would help women to develop a thorough understanding of Islamic texts and practices. The IMN has followed in this tradition establishing a Sisters’ Forum, and having Zakzaky’s wife Zeenah play an important public role.

Women take part in the movement’s public rituals, wearing traditional Islamic dress, but with lively movement and facial expressions. If a Wahhabi cleric were to look at their pictures displayed on the
IMN website he might well be terrified.

Allan Christelow is a retired professor of history at Idaho State University. He taught at Bayero University in Kano from 1978 to 1983, living part of that time in the Lebanese cloth market district.