[Reader-List] relay

Via: "samit basu"

Speculative fiction and comics have gone hand in hand from the very
beginning; even today, apart from the mainstream superhero comicbooks,
which are essentially spec-fic, the greatest and best-known comic
writers in the world, like Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman, are wildly
popular for SF and fantasy creations which use the comic-book medium's
ability to tell compelling stories and create a sense of scale and
wonder to rival the very best speculative fiction text-only books,
bringing the strengths of both text and art to create a truly
wonderful compound. And in India, the enduring popularity of Asterix,
Tintin, and the home-grown Amar Chitra Katha series serve to underline
the fact the fact that the comic book is a medium the speculative
fiction writer cannot afford not to take seriously.

With the publication of Sarnath Banerjee's Corridor two years ago, the
setting up of comics publisher Phantomville and the arrival in India
of Virgin Comics and Animation, graphic novels have been in the Indian
news fairly consistently for a while.

The term graphic novel is, of course, a controversial one at every
level – attributed to Will Eisners ground-breaking A Contract with
God (1978), though it's the term had been around since 1964. The
phrase was created as a term to help sell comicbooks to serious
literary publishers, to distinguish serious, literary comics from more
pulp fare, building a serious artistic movement aiming, as per Eddie
Campbell's 2004 manisfesto, "to take the form of the comic book, which
has become an embarrassment, and raise it to a more ambitious and
meaningful level."

The next decade should be an extremely exciting time for the comicbook
medium in India – on the one hand, literary graphic novels, and on the
other, high-flying spec-fic comics that revisit myth, history and the
future, should make their presence felt in a very significant way both
among Indian readers and worldwide with Indian themes and settings.

Gotham Chopra, Chief Creative Officer, Virgin Comics and Animation:

"I am proud to be a part of what we think is a creative
renaissance in India. I think India in of itself will become the
dominant market for publishing and other forms of entertainment and
servicing that is certainly our goal. But there is also a richness to
our heritage and stories that we think the world will really fall for
if its package the right way with great quality."

"As with any new business, there are a thousand new challenges every
day! I think the toughest is identifying the best and most real
opportunities amongst the million that come at us every day and
staying focused on them. Also, of course is building the right team.
I have no doubt that the right mix of creative and managerial talent
exists in India but finding them is not the easiest thing in the
world. We also only want to work with dreamers - those who share our
vision and want to be a part of something truly innovative and bold."

"I am a sucker for mythology and have always been a history buff as
well. Of course re-inventing our great myths - the Ramayan and
Mahabharat - is a no-brainer and something we are exploring. But I'd
rather take our rich mythology and our Asian thinking and integrate
it into contemporary stories and dramas. I think we have a type of
story-telling that will increasingly find a global audience, a
richness to our characters and their backstories that roots them in a
greater sense than just themselves and propels good narratives.
In terms of things to dodge, I think super heroes in the classic
mold. The days of tights and capes seem to be passing in terms of teh
emergence if new heroes. I definitely think there is room in the
pantheon for new and dynamic characters that have powers as part of
their arsenal but I generally look away from the classic caped
crusaders as we develop new stories."

Others are more guardedly optimistic, at least about the future of
well-done comics in India.

Sarnath Banerjee, comics writer/artist and co-founder of Phantomville:
"Historically comics reading population was quite narrow-minded,
people could make an acute demographic profile of an average comic
book reader. However that profile has changed already, at least in the
west. It has become a cultural phenomenon since the last ten years, a
lucky number of absolutely brilliant graphic novelists and a vacuumed
in the reading market created this. Pundits says it is here to say,
that is why the top three publishers in the world have developed their
own graphic line, I am talking of Penguin, Random house and Gallimard.
Other powerful words-only publishing houses have joined the band
wagon. Corporations are putting money. The comics form is crossing
over to Cinema and advertising. In short these are exciting times for
comics."

"Unfortunately, I feel we have to wait till it gets filtered down from
the western, particularly the American market. As Phantomville, we are
trying several approaches to sell a larger number of books without
resorting to violence- multiple distributors, presentations in
Universities, word of mouth, keeping the price of book embarrassingly
low etc. yet the progress is very slow. In France the first print run
of comics is 10,000 copies even for a beginner, in India 5,000 copies
is the magic number, it means you are a bestseller."

"This embodies the whole phenomenon of the book trade. India is an
emerging power with a vast middle class, a growing consumer economy,
but not for books. Whether comics or otherwise. However I am told that
self-help and management books are doing well."

"One Corridor is not going to change the outlook to comics. To build a
comics culture in the country a lot of investments have to be made.
Capital has to be spent on training and shaping comics illustrators,
which is a specialised art. As you are aware that although there is
no dearth of good writers is the country comics illustrators are
almost insignificant. I know many talented writers including you,
given an opportunity will want to do and have the capacity to do
brilliant comics, but somehow are crippled by lack of visionary
illustrators"

"In a royalty-oriented publishing house this is almost impossible to
achieve, because the charges of a good illustrator is almost
astronomical, and they tend to charge by panels. Under no
circumstances would the book recover the money spent on creating it.
These are the problems faced by my peers such as Rajesh Devraj, who
conceived this idea of converting the Tamil cowboy, Quickgun Murugan,
into comics, but couldn't justify the capital to be paid to the
illustrators. I feel your trilogy has great possibility to crossover
into comics, but who will support a project of that scale? These are
questions that bother us. Where will the money come from? Which
marketing department will accept a proposal like that?"

"Although, clearly it can't be avoided but speculatively there should
be a five-year ban on any thing on Hanuman, for the sake of Hanuman.
And while you are at it Mahabharata and Jatakas, only for five years.
Let us explore some other stories. I feel these tales have done what
cricket has done to hockey and what Bollywood has done to other
cultural forms that could have come out of India."


Which leads us to the question: But do 'real' writers, even
non-literary genre types, write for comics? Yes, of course, they do
that stuff abroad, but comicbooks are still seen as children's fare in
India, and doesn't SFF get enough flak even in book form? The easy
answer to this is that comicbooks for grownups have only just started
being widely available in Indian bookstores, and it's difficult for
Indian readers to become supremely well-versed in the arts and
sciences of good new comics unless they have access to them. As more
comics are created for and by Indians, a readership seems bound to
follow, because comics do hold immense appeal for the most high-nosed
of readers.

Sarnath Banerjee elaborates:
"Comics can fit in a lot of complex ideas in a single page, they can
create atmosphere and psychological states, a theme can be explored in
all its facets and point of views. This is particularly relevant in
discussing history, sociology, anthropology, natural sciences and
emerging technologies, reproductive or otherwise."
" Informed minds have to come together and collaborate creatively to
get to this phase. "Let's do comics because it has simple funny
pictures that will instruct simple people on simple principles of
watershed management" is merely one way of looking at things."

The Indian comics industry as it stands today is extremely
underdeveloped, and relies heavily on the unrelenting retelling of
classic Indian myths, the unabashed regurgitation of American
superheroes and some original comics that are funny, pacy and work for
children at an entertainment level and for adults, both in India and
among the diaspora, as memorabilia, but don't approach in any sense
the production or stylistic qualities of contemporary international
work. One major reason for this, of course, is a lack of money in the
industry as far as creators, both writers and artists, are concerned;
this needs to change before any indigenous quality comics become
available all over the country, because the production of comics
always has been a laborious, time-consuming and difficult process. But
given the intrinsic appeal of the medium, the kind of devotion that
Indian comics, whatever their defects, inspire in their readers across
ages and countries, and the kind of attention comics have been getting
in the mainstream media, it's not unreasonable at all to be optimistic
about the future of Indian comics.

For speculative fiction writers, this is actually more of an
opportunity than it is for writers of mainstream literary fiction, at
least in terms of finding readers – spec-fic comics are tried and
tested, drive markets in the US and in Japan, the two largest
producers of comics, and are much more likely to sell (and, thus,
attract publishers) even in India, where comics have been selling in
large quantities for about 50 years. The arrival of more comics
publishers in India, if and when it happens, should see even more
opportunities for people who can spin a good spec-fic yarn, but can't
draw to save their lives, to see their work in visual form and
actually make that spectacular movie that runs in their head while
they're writing with their Indian leads that Hollywood would have
rejected, and with the kind of visual effects that Bollywood couldn't
have afforded.

Via: xavier cahen

pourinfos.org
l'actualité du monde de l'art / daily Art news

Via: "Janice Pariat"

Via: Curt Gambetta

Eek! From Democracynow.org... -curt

Thursday, June 29th, 2006
Pentagon Spying on Gay, Antiwar Groups More Widespread
than Previously Acknowledged

Servicemembers Legal Defense Network released
documents earlier this week showing that the Pentagon
conducted surveillance on a more extensive level than
first reported late last year. We speak with the
executive director of SLDN and a staff attorney with
the American Civil Liberties Union who recently filed
a federal lawsuit to force the agency to turn over
additional records. [includes rush transcript] Earlier
this week, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network
released documents showing that the Pentagon conducted
surveillance on a more extensive level than first
reported late last year. De-classified documents show
that the agency spied on "Don't Ask, Do't Tell"
protests and anti-war protests at several universities
around the country. They also show that the government
monitored student e-mails and planted undercover
agents at least one protest.

But the Pentagon has not released all information on
its surveillance activities. The American Civil
Liberties Union recently filed a federal lawsuit to
force the agency to turn over additional records. The
lawsuit charges that the Pentagon is refusing to
comply with Freedom of Information Act requests
seeking records on the ACLU, the American Friends
Service Committee, Greenpeace, Veterans for Peace and
United for Peace and Justice, as well as 26 local
groups and activists.

* Dixon Osburne, co-founder and Executive Director
of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.
* Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the American
Civil Liberties Union.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge. However,
donations help us provide closed captioning for the
deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank
you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

AMY GOODMAN: Dixon Osburne now joins from us
Washington, D.C. He is the Executive Director of the
Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. Can you talk
about what you learned about the Pentagon spying on
your organization?

DIXON OSBURNE: Well, the Pentagon has not released any
documents suggesting that it has spied on
Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. The documents
that they've released have shown that they have spied
on student groups, including student groups at U.C.
Santa Clara, the state universities in New York, NYU
Law School, and what those documents show is that they
were investigating these groups for potential
terrorist activity. They even called a gay kiss-in at
U.C. Santa Cruz that was trying to protest “Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell,” it was, quote, “a credible threat of
terrorism.”

AMY GOODMAN: And how did you learn exactly what was
happening?

DIXON OSBURNE: The story was first reported on NBC
News late last year, and it gave us a window into what
was going on at the Department of Defense. So at SLDN,
we filed FOIAs, Freedom of Information Act requests,
with various agencies within the Department of
Defense, C.I.A., F.B.I., N.S.A. and other agencies,
asking them to release any documents that indicated
that they were spying on student groups or
lesbian/gay/bisexual student groups around the
country.

It was in response to those Freedom of Information Act
requests that the Pentagon started very slowly
dribbling out a few responses, some last year and now
another stack just this past week, confirming that
they indeed were investigating various student groups,
that they were collecting emails, that they, at least
in one case, sent an undercover agent to spy on their
protest and determine what was going on at those
protests, all under this rubric of trying to thwart
terrorism here in the United States.

Instead it's just an indication of how sweeping this
administration's domestic spying program is. They
aren't focused on terrorism. They're focused on
peaceful demonstrations and people exercising their
rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
And so, we are still pressing the Pentagon to release
even more documents.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, this is a stunning revelation,
because clearly now we're talking about a much more
expanded surveillance of, basically, dissent in the
United States under the cover -- or peaceful dissent
under the cover of continuing to fight the war on
terrorism.

DIXON OSBURNE: You're absolutely right. This
administration has said that they are conducting
domestic surveillance only to try to identify
potential links between people living here and
terrorists abroad. And the reality is that that's not
the case, that, in fact, the domestic surveillance
program is extremely grand and extremely sweeping. And
it is very chilling here in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Dixon Osburne,
co-founder and Executive Director of Servicemembers
Legal Defense Network. We're also joined by Ben
Wizner, ACLU staff attorney. The Servicemembers Legal
Defense Network got information under Freedom of
Information Act. You're not having as much luck.

BEN WIZNER: Not yet. I also want to pay my respects to
the Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund. They've been
out on front on this issue. They put in their FOIA
requests early, and they have been able to uncover
through that FOIA request some very important
information that we're talking about today. Following
up on their requests, ACLU affiliates around country
filed a series of FOIA requests on behalf of a whole
litany of antiwar and anti-military recruitment
groups, some of whom had appeared in the Pentagon
database that was released to NBC News.

And we also want to know what kinds of policies and
procedures the Pentagon is relying on. How can they
possibly think that it's appropriate for the United
States military to be maintaining a database of
peaceful protest activities? We've not yet been able
to get any documents. We filed a lawsuit to enforce
that Freedom of Information Act request. We expect
that within the next month or two we will begin to
receive documents in response to our lawsuit.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the responses to your request, have
they been saying that they have no material that meets
your request or that they're precluded, in one way or
another, from releasing it?

BEN WIZNER: No, we have not yet gotten the substantive
request from the military saying that they don't have
responsive material. Essentially they ignore us until
a federal judge requires them to respond to us. But if
we were in a functioning democracy, we wouldn't need
FOIA requests to get to the bottom of what's going on
here. The minute that report was leaked to NBC News,
the minute NBC News reported that grannies and Quakers
and people protesting “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” at law
schools were in a Pentagon secret database, there
would have been hearings the next week, and Don
Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone would have been dragged
up to Capitol Hill, and there would have been a full
airing of what was going on. And that really is what's
needed here. I mean, we will find out more information
through this FOIA, but Congress's silence here is
really remarkable.

AMY GOODMAN: When you say if we were really
functioning in a democracy, what exactly do you mean?

BEN WIZNER: What I mean is that we have not had any
meaningful congressional oversight of any of these
surveillance activities over the last five or six
years. You know, I do know, Amy, I’ve been here on the
program talking about what we've uncovered through our
FOIAs against the F.B.I., F.B.I. surveillance of
peaceful protesters. What's going on with the N.S.A.
really is a constitutional crisis, and Congress has
yet to play a meaningful role. The reason why the
FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, has taken on
such great importance over the last four or five years
is that there is no meaningful oversight whatsoever
going on on Capitol Hill. And so, our only choice is
to get this information, bring it before the public
and hope that there's some pressure on the
administration to change its policies.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania
Republican, really went after the Bush administration
around warrantless spying on Americans, said he was
going to subpoena the telecom executives and then
totally backed off. He's a Republican. What about the
Democrats?

BEN WIZNER: Well, you know, it takes the Republicans,
in order for administration officials to be
subpoenaed, in order for documents to be subpoenaed.
So whatever the Democratic Party might do if it were
in power -- and I’m not confident to answer that
question -- it doesn't have the power to do anything
right now.

AMY GOODMAN: It certainly could make noise.

BEN WIZNER: It could make noise, and I think that it
has made some noise. But I’m not here to defend the
Democrats. I mean, the point is this is not a partisan
question. A president saying that neither the courts
nor the Congress has any role in the defense of the
country is a constitutional crisis, not a Republican
or Democrat issue.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Russ Feingold, among the Democrats, has
repeatedly spoken out and obviously opposed the
PATRIOT Act, in terms of insisting that this kind of
continued government surveillance was unacceptable
through our Constitution. But very few other voices,
even among the Democrats, have spoken out.

BEN WIZNER: No, there aren't, and, you know, I’m glad
you mentioned the PATRIOT Act, and we rightly
celebrate Russ Feingold for being the lone courageous
vote against that act that was written in the dead of
night and not read by anybody. But what's so striking
about the PATRIOT Act is that the administration,
which really demonized Congress for not passing it
more quickly, which threatened Congress that the
American people wouldn't be safe unless it got passed
right away, they then went ahead and ignored it.

I mean, what is the PATRIOT Act? The PATRIOT Act is an
amendment of the FISA law. It makes it easier for the
government to get FISA warrants. And while the
administration is arguing out of one side of its mouth
that it needs the FISA law amended, at the same time
it's completely and secretly ignoring it for years and
saying that FISA is unconstitutional now, once its
crimes are reported in the public. And so it's very
important that we're having these discussions on this
program. It's very important that people understand
the full scope of the power that the administration is
claiming.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think people can do? If
the parties aren't doing it, the elected leaders.

BEN WIZNER: You know, this is a moment of serious
accountability for the democracy. And people need to
demand it, and not just demand it by replacing people
in Congress, but making clear to the people who are in
Congress right now that if they don't rein in the
abuses of power in this administration, they'll be
gone.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, we asked the Pentagon to join us on
this program, and we weren't able to get anyone on.
The Pentagon did say they shouldn't have added peace
groups to the Talon database.

BEN WIZNER: Well, I’m not sure they said it that
clearly. I think, you know, the Pentagon has asked for
audits of these databases. But I’ve looked at the
documents that have been released under the FOIA so
far, and I haven't seen a document where the Pentagon
says straight out that it's improper to have antiwar
protest activity in a database. I do agree that in
contrast to, say, the F.B.I., there has been a
willingness on the part of the Pentagon take a look at
this. And I can assure you that there are people in
the military who are very, very uncomfortable with the
military being seen as another arm of this
administration's political agenda.

AMY GOODMAN: Last question to Dixon Osburne of the
Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. When you learn
you're being spied on, you how does it affect your
work and your group, the servicemembers who work with
you?

DIXON OSBURNE: It affects us in at least two ways.
First, the majority of Americans oppose “Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell.” And they see that the federal government
is now spying on them and keeping personal records on
them if they are trying to protest “Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell,” and that that change in government policy has a
very chilling effect on their freedom of speech.
Secondly, at Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, we
are also a legal services organization, and to the
extent that the government is spying on us, it really
threatens attorney-client confidentiality. So we're
very concerned for our clients if the government is
engaged in as broad a domestic spying program as is
suggested by these documents.

AMY GOODMAN: And the kind of cases you represent?

DIXON OSBURNE: We assist servicemembers who were hurt
by “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” These are individuals
that, if it is known that they are gay, lesbian or
bisexual, they will lose their career in the armed
forces. So if the government is keeping a database on
the individuals who might be our clients – and we
don't have evidence of that right now -- it would be
enormously chilling and would be a violation of
additional fundamental constitutional rights to an
attorney.

AMY GOODMAN: Dixon Osburne, I want to thank you for
being with us, co-founder and Executive Director of
the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, joining from
us a very wet Washington, D.C. And Ben Wizner, thanks
for joining us here in New York with the American
Civil Liberties Union.

Via: Monica Narula

Digressions from the Memory of a Minor Encounter
Raqs Media Collective

The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and
Biennials in Post-Wall Europe,
Edited by Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic, Roomade and The
MIT Press, 2006

Once, not so long ago, on a damp, rainy afternoon in Paris, a stroll
took us across the Avenue d’Iéna, from contemporary art to ancient
and medieval Asian art, from the Palais de Tokyo to the Musée Guimet.
There, standing at the far end of the ground-floor section of the
Guimet’s permanent collection in front of a frieze from the Banteay
Srei temple in Cambodia’s Siem Reap province, we felt the sharp edge
of estrangement in something that also felt downright familiar.

The Banteay Srei frieze narrates a story from the Mahabharata, a
Sanskrit epic. The story is of two brothers, the demons Sunda and
Upasunda, whose tussle over the attentions of Tilottama, an Apsara—a
heavenly courtesan sent by the gods to destroy them with jealousy—was
the cause of their downfall. Like most others who grew up listening
to stories in India, we knew it well, even if only as an annotation
to the main body of the epic. But it wasn’t the details of the story
that intrigued us that afternoon, nor the carved contours of Sunda
and Upasunda’s rage, not even the delicacy of the depiction of
Tilottama’s divisive seduction. Instead, standing before these stone
images, made in a region roughly 3,500 miles to the east of where we
live, in Delhi, and exhibited in a museum roughly 6,500 miles to the
west, we felt compelled to think again about distance and proximity,
and about how stories, images, and ideas travel.

The story of Sunda, Upasunda, and Tilottama was probably first told
around 200 B.C. in the northwestern part of the South Asian
subcontinent. Between the first telling of the story and the carving
of the frieze in a clearing in the forests of Seam Riep in circa 967
lay a little more than a thousand years and an eastward journey of a
few thousand miles. Between its carving and our sudden encounter with
it in Paris, there lay a little more than another millennium and a
westward journey halfway across the world. These intervals in time
and space were overlaid by an elaborate circuit that encompassed
travel, conquest, migration and settlement, wars and violence, the
clearing of forests, the quarrying of stone, slavery and indenture,
skilled artisans, the faces and indiscretions of the men and women
who would become the inspiration for jealous demons and divine
courtesans, a few thousand years of history, the crossing of oceans,
the rise and fall of several empires across different continents, and
the repeated telling and forgetting of a minor story.

Contemporaneity, the sensation of being in a time together is an
ancient, enigma of a feeling. It is the tug we feel when our times
pull at us. But sometimes one has the sense of a paradoxically
asynchronous contemporaneity—the strange tug of more than one time
and place. As if an accumulation or thickening of our attachments to
different times and spaces was manifesting itself in the form of some
unique geological oddity, a richly striated cross section of a rock,
sometimes sharp, sometimes blurred, marked by the passage of many
epochs.

Standing before Sunda, Upasunda, and Tillottama in the Musée Guimet,
we were in Siem Reap, in Indraprastha (an ancient name for Delhi, in
whose vicinity much of the Mahabharata story is located), in New
Delhi, in nineteenth-century Paris, and in the Paris of today. We
were in many places and in many times. Sometimes art, the presence of
an image, moves you. And you find yourself scattered all over the
place, as a consequence.

How can we begin to think about being scattered?

Collections of objects from different parts of the world are indices
of different instances of scattering. The minor encounter that we
experienced in the Musée Guimet is one kind of scattering. It taught
us that sometimes we encounter familiarity in the guise of
strangeness and then suggested that we learn to question the easy
binary shorthand of the familiar and the strange, as ways of thinking
about ourselves, others, and the world. It suggested the possibility
of other less polarized and more layered relationships between
cultural processes. But this is not the only possible kind of
scattering that the presence of images and stories echoing the
familiar in uncanny ways provoke.

An increased intensity of communication creates a new kind of
experiential contagion. It leads to all kind of illegitimate liaisons
between things meant to be unfamiliar. The first thing that dissolves
under the pressure of this promiscuous density of contact across
space is the assumption that different degrees of “now” obtain in
different places, that Delhi or Dar es Salaam are somehow less “now”
than Detroit. The “nows” of different places leach into each other
with increasing force. The realities of different contemporaneities
infect each other. This condition generates active estrangement, a
kind of nervous expulsion, a gladiatorial of repulsion scripted
either through an orientation of contempt or of homage. Why contempt
and homage? They permit the automatic assumption of a chasm between
the beholder and the object of contemplation. The tropes of contempt
and homage are an optic through which some perennially survey others
and then evaluate them along an axis where the production of
estrangement has to be resolved in terms of either positive or
negative regard. The “survey” mode of understanding the world
presumes a stable cyclopean and panoptic center of surveillance to
which the gaze can never adequately be returned, ensuring that a
meeting of visions will never take place on equal footing.

Like Sunda and Upasunda fighting over Tilottama, the more that
different parts of the world come to be aware of each other’s
desires, the more disputes there are over who has the greatest access
to the contemporaneity both desire—the part of the world that has
more confidence in itself or the one that has more of the élan of the
“Other.” Key to this conflict of perceptions is a refusal to
recognize that, like the sudden appearance of a Sanskrit story in a
Khmer frieze in a Parisian museum to a collective of practitioners
from Delhi, the relationships between familiarity and estrangement
are compromised of many folds and cracks in space and time.
Estrangement is only familiarity deferred or held in abeyance.

Rather than recognize the fact that familiarity and estrangement are
only two non-distinct and contiguous instances of cognitive and
affective transfer, this tendency to resolve the unfamiliar into the
binary of the “like” and the “alien” needs constant mechanisms of
reinforcement. The duality of contempt and homage is one such
mechanism. In the first instance (contempt), the object of the survey
is pinned down in taxonomic terms, explained away to require no
further engagement, making impossible the blurring of the distinction
between the surveyor and the surveyed. In the second (homage), the
object is exalted beyond the possibility of an engagement. In either
case, a difference, once identified, becomes a factor of cognitive
and affective excision. This forecloses the possibility of
recognizing that what is identified and estranged may in fact be
disturbingly similar to what is familiar, even though it may be
located in realities that are difficult to translate with coherence
or consistency. It is the inability to recognize the face of a
stranger when you look at your own reflection.

The amalgam of the sensations of familiarity and estrangement evokes
a new register of a tense accommodation, a hospitality to the
presence of the “strange” that is not without attendant unease to the
“familiar.” In the end, this may guarantee the disavowal of mutual
antipathy and the cultivation of some sort of cohabitation. We can
change the framework of the story on the Banteay Srei frieze. Sunda
and Upasunda can both survive by agreeing to stay within the
framework of a generous but awkward polyandry. They can do this by
learning to negotiate with Tilottama’s claims on both their desires,
and displaying a little more effort at being open to unpredictable
encounters.

What does a little more by way of encounter attain in the domain of
contemporary art? An assessment of the amplitude of signals and the
intensity of contact that marks our world today is still waiting to
be made. One of the ways in which this could be undertaken would be
for us to try and account for the implications of the growth in
Internet-based connectivity on a global scale. The Internet, as we
know it today, is barely a decade and a half old, and its expansion
can be dated to as late as the mid-1990s. Curiously, the expansion of
the Internet and the recent expansion in the number of biennials have
been co-incident with each other.

Today, it is estimated that 13.9 percent of the world’s population,
or 888,681,131 people, have some kind of regular Internet access. The
majority of Internet users live in North America, Europe, Australia,
New Zealand, and parts of East Asia (South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan,
Japan, and Singapore). World Internet usage grew by an estimated
146.2 percent from 2000 to early 2005, and the highest growth rates
were in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Chinese is
the second most used language on the Internet, and a country like
India experienced a growth of 684 percent in Internet usage, from
five million people in 2000 to 39.2 million in early 2005. It means
that some thirty-nine million people in India (through labor,
education, correspondence, and entertainment) employ, use, rely on a
medium that enables an exceptional level of global reach. Actual
figures are probably significantly higher, as most people in India
and other similar societies tend to go online not from the computers
that they own (since not that many people 'own' computers) or even
computers that they might access at work, but from street-corner
cybercafés. No other platform of communication in world history can
claim that it has attracted the attention of 13.9 percent of the
world’s population in the span of ten years. Ten years is a very
short time in the history of culture. It is the span between three
Documentas or the time between the founding of the European biennial,
Manifesta, and its fifth edition. If Internet usage continues to
grow, at least at this rate, for the next twenty years, approximately
seventy-five percent of the world’s population will have initiated a
deeply networked existence in the time it takes to produce the next
four Documentas. Nothing has prepared us for the consequences of this
depth and density of communicative engagement on a global scale. And
unlike previous expansions in communicative capacity (print, radio,
cinema, television), this time, with the Internet and new digital
devices, we see readers, who are also writers and editors, users, who
are also producers, viewers, who are also, at least potentially,
creators, entering a global space of cultural production.

While it would be simplistic to argue for a cause-and-effect
relationship between the expansion of the constituencies served by
the Internet and the growth in number of biennials and other
international art events, it would be equally facile to dismiss the
implications of the emergence of this vast augmentation in global
communication for the contemporary art scene.

What are these implications? Firstly, the discursive communities
around contemporary art, like the discursive communities in science
or politics, are poised to undergo a significant transformation.
Secondly, an increasing diversity of positions vis-à-vis the role of
authorship, creativity, and intellectual property in the actual
domain of global cultural practice are challenging the notions of
bounded authorship that have dominated the concept of art production
in the recent past. Both of these formulations need some elaboration.

The discursive framework of contemporary art, like any other domain
of thought and practice today, can no longer be viewed as something
that occurs only between an exclusive cognoscenti of curators,
practitioners, theorists, and critics, residing in Europe and North
America. Discursive networks can afford to practice an exclusionary
mode of existence only at the risk of their own obsolescence. Every
node in such a network survives only if it is able to affect a
critical mass of new connectivities and be a conduit for new
information about a very rapidly changing world.

In politics, it is impossible to conceive of a discursive framework
that does not include an active interest in what is going on in the
majority of the world. The realities of the Middle East, South
America, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and Central, South, and
East Asia affect profoundly what happens in Europe and North America.
The networks of global finance and trade or even of distributed
production that characterize the world economy today would not exist
as they do without the Internet. Similarly, the global production and
dissemination of news is deeply tied into the substance of everyday
politics. It is impossible to separate domestic politics in any major
Asian or European country from, say, what is happening in Iraq today.
To say this is to state the obvious.
But what is obvious in a discussion of the economy, the media, or
politics is somehow seen as novel or esoteric in the realm of
culture. This prevailing surprise about the fact that the
“contemporary” is also “trans-territorial,” that “now” is “elsewhere”
as much as it is “here,” as “strange” as it is “familiar,” is one of
the symptoms of the lag in the levels of informed discussion between
the domains of culture and of political economy. However, while it
may still be possible for some to argue, from a perspective that
privileges the present state of affairs, that a globalization of
contemporary culture may imply an attempt to impose a specifically
Western modernist agenda on a global scale due to the inequalities in
articulative capacity, it would be impossible to sustain this
argument in the long term. The momentum generated by different
processes of cultural articulation set in motion in various local
contexts all over the world indicate a reality of densely networked
yet autonomous tendencies, movements, genres, styles, and affinities
that are far more complex than those for which the discourse of =20
westernization allows. Even a cursory glance at the crosscurrents of
influence in global popular culture, in music, film, cuisine,
fashion, literature, gaming, and comics, reveals the inner workings
of this web. We are in a world where cinema from Mumbai, manga from
Tokyo, music from Dakar, literature from Bogotá, cuisine from
Guangzhou, fashion from Rio de Janeiro, and games from Seoul act as
significant global presences, rivaling, occasionally overshadowing,
the spread and influence of their European and North American
analogues. The trends in contemporary art practice and exhibition
can, in the end, only be an echo of this banal generality of the
everyday life of global cultural traffic and transaction.

The growing presence of art practitioners and works from outside
Europe and North America within major European and North American
exhibitions, and the realization that there are non-Western histories
of modernity have had two ancillary effects. They have demonstrated
that these practices, practitioners, and their histories have a
significant global perspective, speaking to the world from their own
vantage points, as they have done for a while. These two realities
also have created pressure within non-Western spaces and by non-
Western practitioners, curators, and theorists to lay claim to a
global cultural space through the founding of contemporary art
institutions, networks of practitioners, and exhibition circuits. One
implication of this has been the proliferation of biennials and other
international exhibitions of contemporary art in spaces outside
Europe and North America and a corresponding increase in the
discourse generated through and around contemporary art in these areas.

Another implication of this has been the nascent presence of the
curator and the critic of contemporary art in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America or who finds him- or herself located within or at a tangent
to new Asian, African, and Latin American diasporas in Europe and
North America. At first, this new curator may be someone who seems to
speak only to and for his or her place of origin. He or she then may
be perceived as working with other curators and artists within
specific regional (but transnational) settings or with peers in
similar contexts elsewhere in the world. Eventually, he or she will
be seen as laying a claim to working with artists from everywhere,
including Europe and North America. These claims, as and when they
occur (and some are indeed occurring even now), will be based not on
the operation of affiliations based on geo-politics, geography, and
location, but on elective affinities of interest, taste, curiosities,
methodologies, and concerns. This will coincide with the rise of
institutional and non-institutional structures, spaces, and networks
in contemporary art that have significant presences outside Europe
and North America. These entities will become forums for discussion
and exhibition as well as fulcrums that enable the leveraging of
transregional contexts for collaboration and curating. The idea that
contemporary art has to have a central location, privileging a
particular history or cultural framework, will erode and give way to
the idea that contemporaneity is best expressed within the logic of a
flexible and agile network that responds to emergences and tendencies
on a global scale. This means that the logic of spatial and cultural
distance that operated as a perennial handicap for the non-Western
curator, practitioner, or theorist is unlikely to remain of much
significance. Likewise, the European or North American artistic
practitioner or curator increasingly will be called upon to
demonstrate his or her relevance in a multipolar world where European
or North American origins or location will no longer operate as an
automatic set of credentials. In a world that grows more used to
being networked, curators and artists from different spaces will work
together and in each other’s spaces, as a matter of course. In their
everyday practices, they will question, challenge, and subvert stable
identifications of spatiality and cultural affiliation. This will not
necessarily mean better or worse art or discourse; what it will mean
is that the terms “global” and “contemporary” will resonate in a host
of different ways, so as to indicate the active presences of hitherto
absent, silent, or muted voices and expressions.

The formulation regarding the challenge to the notion of bounded
authorship as a result of the expansion of a global platform like the
Internet is perhaps of deeper significance for contemporary art, even
if it is at the moment less visible. The Internet has set in motion
peer-to-peer networks and online communities that do more than share
cultural intelligence: They also occasionally collaborate on the
making of things and of meaning, often on a global scale, in a way
that is at variance with mainstream protocols of intellectual
property. This is most clearly visible in the global open-source
communities, but the influence of the “open-source” idea has
ramifications beyond software. This tendency is increasingly audible
in the domain of a new global musical sensibility based on file
sharing, remixing, and recycling of extant musical material, with
scant regard to the admonitions either of the protectors of
intellectual property or cultural purity. It is also present in peer-
to-peer networks founded by scientists, legal scholars, philosophers,
historians, and other social scientists who have used the internet to
establish a new intellectual common that gains strength through
regular usage, participation, and contribution, often in direct
opposition to the hierarchies prevalent in institutionalized academic
and intellectual life. These new communities of research and
reflection are rapidly establishing today’s bridgeheads of inquiry,
freed from the inherent conservatism founded on concerns for
proprietary or commodifiable utility that ties production in academic
institutions and research spaces to “safe” areas of inquiry through
the instruments of intellectual property. Increasingly, these “open”
spaces are the ones where science, philosophy, social theory are
“hot,” more responsive to the world around them.

By foregrounding an emphasis on the commons and other forms of
collaboration or non-property or anti-property arrangements, open-
source practitioners and theorists (be they in software, music,
science, or the humanities) have initiated a profound turbulence in
cultural economy. The domain of contemporary art cannot remain immune
to this turbulence, which exists all around it. It is perhaps only a
matter of time before the ethic of sharing, collaboration, and
“commoning” becomes commonplace within contemporary art, just as it
has in other domains of culture. It is already visible, in a nascent
sense, in numerous curatorial collaborations and artist-practitioner-
technician-curator-theorist networks that transcend borders and
disciplinary boundaries, that give new twists to the “publicness” of
public art projects, and that raise vexing questions concerning the
“ownership” of the ephemeral and networked creations and processes
that they generate. The increasingly dense cross-referential nature
of practices within contemporary art are also pointers in this
direction, leading us to think of the space of contemporary art not
as a terrain marked by distinct objects, but as one striated by works
that flow in and out of each other or cohabit a semantic territory in
layers of varying opacity. Crucially, a liberality of interpretation
about what constitutes intellectual property and what devolves to the
public domain will be central to defending the freedom of expression
in art. Art grows in dialogue, and if intellectual property acts as a
barrier to the dialogue between works, then it will meet with serious
challenges that arise from the practice of artists and curators.

All this cannot happen without conflict and disruption. The domain of
the sign is the playing field of a new cultural economy where the
generation of value hinges on an adherence to the principles of
intellectual property. Practices that are at variance with the
principles of property in culture for a variety of ethical, social,
intellectual, aesthetic, and pragmatic reasons increasingly, however,
have perforated this domain. The likely consequence of all this is
that the tasteful tranquility that marked the enterprise of aesthetic
contemplation will find itself besieged by disputations, legal suits,
accusations of copyright infringement, and intense, invasive scrutiny
by owners of intellectual property. Making art will increasingly be
about forging new legal concepts and creating new economies of usage,
ownership, and participation. Making and exhibiting art will be
fashioning politics, practicing a new economics, and setting
precedents or challenges in law.

The existence of contemporary art is ultimately predicated on the
conditions of life of its practitioners. The myriad daily acts of
practicing, reading, inscribing, interpreting, and repurposing the
substance of culture, across cultures, constitute these conditions of
life. These acts, in millions of incremental ways, transpose the
“work” of art to a register where boundedness, location, and property
rest uneasily. The work of art, the practitioner, the curator, the
viewer, and the acts of making, exhibiting, and viewing all stand to
be transformed. All that is familiar becomes strange; all that is
strange becomes familiar.


Monica Narula
Raqs Media Collective
Sarai-CSDS
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110054
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net

Via: John Patrick Ojwando

Via: John Patrick Ojwando

Via: "Dilip D'Souza -- Sarai"

June 28

Dear All,

Here's my -- I've lost count -- next post on my theme, "Village in the
City". I want to express here a note of thanks to Mamta Mantri, fellow
fellow, who took me to the film mentioned.

Comments welcome. More on the way.

cheers,
dilip d'souza

Via: "mohd arshad"

NEW TRENDS IN MADRASA JOURNALISM



Though the term madrasa stands for old, oriental and obscurant, new
writings on the same

have proved that the real situation inside these reminiscents of the
old education system

is diverse enough to break the stereotype. So is the case with the
journalism practiced

there. It took me around four months to discover that new things are
taking place in the

domain of the madrasa journalism, though slowly.

It started in January of the year when Maulana Mohd Sajjad Rizvi, one
of my friends,

informed me about a magazine called "Jaam-e-Noor", Delhi and suggested
me to include it in

my study. But as the magazine has seen only three springs of its life
and I have been

looking at the five years of the magazines, I did not take the advice
seriously. Though a

couple of things about it remained fresh in my memory, I could not
decide what to do with

it which was hinting the advent of a new brand of journalism in the
sphere of madrasas.

During the course of my fieldwork, I discovered two more magazines,
Maah-e-Noor and Tooba,

both from Delhi .Now, I was convinced that a wave of new trends was
very soon going to

sweep the field and the process had already been unleashed.
THE JAAM-E-NOOR STORY


What I found interesting about Jaam-e-Noor, the first magazine of this
sort I came across,

was the screaming headline on its laminated title page: "Sania Mirza
ka Libas Koi Masla

Nahi Hai." (What Sania Mirza wears is a non-issue.) .This headline
suggests that the

magazine, in its content and approach, is sailing against the
direction wind blows in

madrasa journalism. The driving force behind bringing out this
magazine is Maulana Khushtar

Noorani, a graduate from the Islamic Call College, Tripoli, Libya in
1998. A chubby and

bearded young man in his late 20s was posing for being photographed by
another bearded but

slim man when I entered 422, Matia Mahal, Jama Masjid, the office of
Jaam-e-Noor to

interview its editor. The person with camera turned out to be a fan of
the magazine and was

trying to capture a moment of his meeting with the editor, Khushtar
Noorani. This visitor

from Lahore was the evidence of name and fame he was enjoying in
Pakistan where 2000 copies

of his magazines are consumed, a record by any standard of the
religious journalism, as the

total circulation of the most of the madrasa journals does not exceed
2000 copies. However,

there are other contributory factors too which set ground for the
heights of popularity

Jaam-e-Noor and his editor is scaling nowadays.


Religious education runs into the family of Khushtar Noorani. Allama
Arshadul Qadri, his

paternal grandfather, is an ideologue and the best-seller pen
of international
fame within the circle of the Ahl-e-Sunnat sect. Though his body
of work is comprised

of more than a dozen books, Zer-o-Zabar, Zalzala and Lalazaar are
supposed to be his magnum

opus in which he engages in the polemics with the Deobandi ulama at an
unprecedented plane.

According to Mohd Arif Barakati, a student of Al Jamiatul Ashrafia,
Mobarakpur, Azamgarh,

Jaam-e-Noor was a familiar name within the circle of Ahl-e-Sunnat as
the personality of

Allama Arshadul Qadri had been associated with it. In 1963, he
started a magazine called

Jaam-e-Noor from Kolkata. But it had to shut down in 1964 because his
involvement in an

increasing number of projects left him with almost no time for the
magazine. When Maulana

Khushtar announced in 2002 on the occasion of the Chehlum ceremony of
Allama Qadri, to

bring out the deceased magazine in a new avatar, every body hailed the
decision. The

magazine is so popular among the students of Al Jamiatul Ashrafia, the
Oxford of the

Ahl-e-Sunnat sect that Paigham-e-Islam, one of the student
associations in the institution

orders for 200 copies of Jaam-e-Noor every month. Imtiaz Ahmed,
President of the

association and also a student at the Ashrafia madrasa, is of the
opinion that "apart from

the subscribers, at least 5-7 talibilms read a copy of the magazine".


Not counting its historical importance, Jaam-e-Noor owes its
unprecedented popularity to

novelty of the approach it adopts towards the content and its
presentation technique as

well. This glaring difference between it and other madrasa journals is
a conscious effort

on the part of the editor Khushtar. During his academic sojourn
(1996-1998) to Libya, he

had closely observed how the journalism is practiced in the Arab
world. Returning to India,

he took a diploma in Print Journalism from Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, New
Delhi in 2001. All

this helped him in evolving his own vision of quality journalism. He
has been a bitter

critic of the madrasa journalism. Articulating his views on the theme,
he says that

"journalism per se has never been taken seriously in madrasas. The
motive behind bringing

out these journals has either been to manage funds or to keep the
community informed of the

daily routine of the pir of the shrine. These magazines have been
reduced to the status of

the mere mouthpiece of the institution". Those who are at the helm of
affairs, Khushtar

continues, "are simply not concerned with what are the current ground
realities of the

Indian Muslims, what they need, what ails them and what the earlier
can offer to the

community through their magazines. One of the reasons responsible for
this phenomenon is

that the editors of madrasa journals are not the professional and
trained ones. Without

having any idea how to plan the content of the magazine and how to
introduce diversity in

it ,they just keep on reproducing stuff relating to namaz , fasting,
miracles and

prophecies. One can find them in the religious books, easily available
in the market. What

new things you are offering through your journal to the readers?
Besides all these, the

editors lament of their low circulation. Obviously, if you are not a
professional editor,

the reading material you are offering are not upto the expectations of
the readers, why

should they buy your magazine? That's why these magazines soon cease
publication".

Jaam-e-Noor is the incarnation of the vision Khushtar has regarding
journalism and bringing

out a magazine. In fact the magazine has introduced, Khushtar claims,
a number of

innovations in the field of madrasa journalism. The magazine contains
64 pages which are

divided into regular columns and it strictly sticks to this column
design. Its editorial

runs into 6-8 pages and is per se a full-fledged article dealing with
an important current

issue. There is a column of Tahriri Mobahasa (debate in writing). He
relates passionately

how the idea of this column originated: "This concept I've borrowed
from The Times of India

which in its Sunday edition provides diverse views of experts on a
chosen theme. I also

select a theme and request experts to express their opinions in 2-3
pages." In one of his

columns entitled Fikr-o-Nazar, he publishes views of those readers who
are not columnists

or scribes but they have some important issue to share with others,
though in brief, say

only in 10 lines. "You can sense a sort of democracy in this column"
informs Khushtar

happily. He has a regular column devoted to interviews, which carries
every month an

interview of one of eminent Muslim personalities or of renowned
literary persons. Letters

of the readers suggest that this column is amazingly popular among
them. Khama Talashi is

another interesting column. In fact; the phrase khama talashi itself
is new to the

dictionary of Urdu. Khama stands for pen and talashi for
interrogation. Thus, khama talashi

means academic interrogation. "I've commissioned one of my most
talented friends for this

column. He writes under the pen name of Abul Faiz Moinee. In his three
paged column, he

critically analyses all what gets published in every issue of
Jaam-e-Noor. He even does not

spare me and I publish his scathing remarks because I want to spread
the message that

democracy and the freedom of expression are two key components of
journalism", exclaims

Khushtar proudly.









What really worked miracles for Jaam-e-Noor is the tone and tenor of
its editorials.

Khushtar, in his long and uncompromising editorials, blasted madrasa
system and attacked

the ulama community vociferously. This created a lot of controversy
among the religious

sphere of the sub-continent, resulting in carving out a niche for the
magazine among both

the critics and the criticized. In his own words, "the ulama were
exercising a sort of

control on the society. There was unstated rules that none could utter
or write a single

word against the mistakes they make….. I wanted to break this hegemony
on the part of the

ulema. In my editorials, I started writing against them and without
paying any heed to

their status or age." Here it will not be out of place to have a look
at some of the issues

discussed in his editorials.








The Ahl-e-Sunnat ulema have a history of polemecising against each
other on a certain

theological issue in the pages of Dabdaba-e-Sikandari, a weekly
newspaper from Rampur which

began its publication around 1864, as Usha Sanyal has mentioned in her
seminal work

Devotional Islam and Politics in British India. (P.188-98.OUP, 1996).
Contrary to this, no

magazine has ever criticized the way they engage the laymen of the
sect or questioned the

efficacy of methods they are employing to counter the arguments of the
'others'. Khushtar

Noorani in his editorial entitled "An overview of the conventional and
path-breaking

activities of the Ahl-e-Sunnat" (April 2005) discusses the following
evils prevalent in his

sect:

1. Craze for the admission in madrasas
2. Obsession with the rebuttal of the Wahabis
3. Eloquence of Oratory
4. Establishment of the Jurisprudential Board
5. Flood of journals






There used to be a time when there was a craze among Muslims to send
their children into

madrasas while the current trend is that only poor students study
there or those children

are spared for madrasas who do not show any penchant for studies. This
attitude of the

Muslims is responsible, according to Khushtar, for the constant
degradation in the standard

of madrasa education and, also, provided 'others' (defined in terms of
Islamists and

secular modernists) with the opportunity to question their relevance.
Lambasting on the

obsession of the ulema of the Ahl-e-Sunnat with rebuttal of the
Wahabism, he says, we have

a tradition of countering the Wahabis with both pen and speech since
the inception of this

stray sect. Though a number of very important areas merit the urgent
attention of the

ulema, the problem is that nobody has time to give them a thought
because of their

obsession with this anti-Wahabi spree. Worse, they are not ready to
mellow down their tone

in rebuttal of the Wahabis. Moving to the next point of the editorial,
Khushtar writes that

there is no denial of the fact that oratory, like writing, is a tested
device of

propagation. So, some of the Ahl-e-Sunnat ulema also started using
oratory to enhance the

mass appeal of the sect. Later on, a number of ulema introduced new
elements in their

oratory to multiply their impact on the masses. As the popularity of
the orator is directly

linked to his monetary income, madrasa students went mad in seeking
excellence in the field

and the whole night oratory session became recurrent phenomena within
the religious circle,

forcing the neighborhood to spend a sleepless night.







In 1992, under the auspices of Al Jamiatul Ashrafia, Mobarakpur, the
Jurisprudential Board

was set up as a splendid body of Muftis, envisioning it as a platform
where important

decisions relating to Sharia, will be finalized with consensus. The
event sent waves of

happiness across the Ahl-e-Sunnat. Though the body made it a point to
incorporate all the

renowned muftis of the sect, it was not long before a number of such
bodies started

mushrooming in the length and breadth of Jahan-e-Riza (the world of
the followers of Imam

Ahmed Riza Khan).Khushtar writes with astonishment: "I am at loss to
understand the use of

establishing all these small and big Jurisprudential Boards if their
decisions are not

followed by others". He, taking a dig on theses muftis or the towering
ulema, bitterly

notes that though they think these enterprises as noble deeds, to me,
the latter are not

more than "just a waste of time and money". The only way to transform
them into a fruitful

exercise, he suggests, is to constitute a co-ordination committee of
these Jurisprudential

Boards which can strive for making decisions of one of them acceptable
to the most of the

rest.









Khushtar has devoted the concluding paragraphs to the religious
journalism practiced within

the circle of the Ahl-e-Sunnat. He, in his own singular style, very
succinctly bares the

fact about it. He says that till date I am at loss to get appropriate
words to describe

these magazines: whether they are "anthology of essays taken from
religious books", "bundle

of personal advertisements", or "dazzling blood-drops of journalism on
white papers".(p.5).

However, there are instances from the history that some magazines
really did well and are

still remembered. .Khushtar is of the opinion that their success can
not be termed as the

success of the magazine per se as they were not different from others
from the pack. It was

the personal writings of their editors the popularity of the magazines
springs from. What

baffles him is the herd mentality prevalent in the Ahl-e-Sunnat sect.
None is ready to do

any sort of experiment. Every body wants to trade on the trodden path,
resulting in

unnecessary crowd in some fields while in want of appropriate man
power in others which are

by no standards less important.



Jaam-e-Noor came as a fresh gust of air to the readers of the madrasa
journals. Khushtar's

editorials provided them with a new vision of journalism. In past, no
body mustered the

courage to express such daring views regarding the shortcomings of the
Ahl-e-Sunnat ulema.

Started in 2002, his magazine is about to successfully complete its
four years in a couple

of months. He says that many persons wonder: "It was very courageous
on your part that you

have written publicly on the issues people were afraid of mentioning
in their private

chambers. We wonder how they have spared you from the fatwa yet".
Maulana Qamar Ahmed

Ashrafi Misbahi, a graduate from Al Jamiatul Ashrafia, Mobarakpur, is
the advisor-in-chief

of Jaam-e-Noor. Trying to analyze the factors behind the success of
the magazine, Qamar

says: "There was a discomfort among the new generation of the
Ahl-e-Sunnat ulema regarding

the scheme of things in the sect. But they were afraid of being
ostracized or the backlash

from the elder ones .So, they were looking for someone who is immune
to this sort of

reaction. Khushtar was a perfect case as he was the grandson of Allama
Arshadul Qadri whose

towering stature and contribution to the Ahl-e-Sunnat was
undisputable. Surrounded by this

hallow of familial linkage to Allama, he was shielded from any direct
reaction on the part

of the elder ulema. Moreover, a number of leading ulema demised during
this decade, leaving

an intellectual and authoritarian vacuum behind them. In addition to
this, he had advantage

of being educated in Libya and was one of those few who had a degree
in journalism from a

recognized government institution. He had a great passion for
journalism and was

impatiently looking for the opportunity to tap his potentials.
Besides, he did not owe

allegiance towards any khanqah, excluding any chance of being
pressurized by his pir. Last

but not the least; Jaam-e-Noor is published by Maktaba Jaam-e-Noor
publishing house, owned

by Ghulam Rabbani, Khushtar's father. In other words, Khushtar is not
a servent-editor but

is the editor cum proprietor. So, he needed not to be afraid of being
thrown out of his

job. Thus, all these factors worked in his favor and he became the
vehicle for the

dissemination of the thoughts of the agitated young ulema who extended
to him tremendous

support: intellectual, moral and in form of articles". Had there been
someone else in his

place, he would have been either silenced or a fatwa would have been
issued against him.

Self-criticism is intrinsic to the vision of Jaam-e-Noor. It is this
call of introspection

which it gives time and again to the laymen and ulema of the
Ahl-e-Sunnat, keeps its

readership graph up. In February 2005, Khushtar as the editor of the
magazine went on a

tour to Pakistan and interacted there with a range of ulema of his
sect. His editorial of

the month of May, 2005 is a sort of travelogue of this trip.
Interestingly, he has

mentioned a couple of differences, which he observed, between the
ulema of India and

Pakistan. "It should be acknowledged that in the period of last 2-3
decades, the

contribution of the Pakistani ulema has outnumbered that of their
Indian counterparts. The

propagation of the thoughts of Imam Ahmad Riza has been carried out on
a scale which is

unparallel in the world."(p5).Consequently, he continues, "Pakistani
literature constitutes

today 70% of what the Indian publishing houses are churning out". It
suggests, on the one

hand, the paucity in the intellectual production of the Ahl-e-Sunnat
ulema of India, and it

speaks volumes about the state of original contribution and
publication in the language of

Urdu on the other hand. He, in the later part of the editorial,
emphasizes that contrary to

the Indian ulema, their Pakistani counterparts are more open to find
out people-friendly

legal solutions of the problems posed by the innovations in the field
of science and

technology. He is amazed at the glaring difference between the ulema
of both countries in

their approach to the day-to-day issues, despite the fact that all of
them adhere to the

same sect. Then he goes on to elaborate it with the help of an
example. On the question of

the legitimacy of Videography and photography, the Ahl-e-Sunnat of
India is divided into

two camps, triggering a series of writings and counter-writings on the issue.

Interestingly, on the other side of the border, it is simply a
non-issue. The Pakistani

ulema find videography and photography useful in spreading the views
of their sect.

Critiquing those who consider the use of videography illegal, Khushtar
argues, what they

mean by "majority" (Jamhoor) when they refer to their stand as
representing that of jamhoor

while the reality is that it is legal in all parts of the Muslim
world, including Pakistan.

So, in majority are those who see its use lawful, contrary to the
arguments of those who

are against it. (p6). It is this position of the editor which makes
Jaam-e-Noor perhaps the

only Ahl-e-Sunnat magazine which publishes blurred photographs of
human beings on its title

page.


Hamrey Masail (Our Problems) is a weekly program telecast by ETV Urdu.
Devoted to the

discussion on one of the current issues relating to Muslims, Obaid
Siddiqui anchors the

programme amidst the invited experts and a number of participant
audiences. In one of its

episodes, Khushtar was invited as the representative of the
Ahl-e-Sunnat sect to express

his view regarding the Division in the All India Muslim Personal Law
Board. His reaction to

the arguments of Shaista Amber, President of Women Personal Law Board
makes an interesting

reading as it provides a glimpse of his thoughts regarding the secular
reformist Muslim

women. He writes in his editorial that the session started with the
question: why Shias,

Barelwis and women, breaking away from the All India Muslim Personal
Law Board, have formed

their own boards? It was Shaista Amber who spoke first. Listening to
her words, I felt

that "she is suffering from the labor pain (emphasis mine) caused by
the birth of

rebellious mentality in the women against men and specially against
ulema, springing from

western thoughts, superficial study of Islam, limited knowledge,
borrowed insights and

ordinary power of perception.".(Jaam-e-Noor, June 2005, pp 3-4). In
the concluding

paragraph of the editorial, he summarizes what he spoke in the
program. In his words: "If

the representatives of the AIMPLB believe that drafting a model
Nikahnama, they can solve

the familial disputes and social tension, and if women, forming their
own personal law

boards, think that this will add to their prestige in the society, and
they will not be

meted with any injustice and atrocities in their homes as well as the
incidents of talaq

will stop, I think, they are chasing the mirage and nothing more". The
tranquility and

peace can not prevail in the society unless initiatives to implement
Islamic injunctions in

the society are taken. (Ibid, p5).




In an editorial on the electoral politics in Bihar, Khushtar has
presented a detailed

analysis of the dynamics of the Laloo Prasad vs. Ram Vilas Paswan
scenario. Subheadings

like the Muslim situation in the post 1990 Bihar, role of media in the
politics of Bihar,

an overview of the Paswan's love for democracy, the reality of the
slogan of Muslim chief

minister, use of puppet ulema by Paswan in the election campaign are
enough to suggest that

the editorial has a pro-Laloo and anti-Paswan tilt. It highlights how
Laloo has made riots

an alien phenomenon in Bihar which had been the worst-hit state by the
recurrent communal

violence under the Congress regime. After the demolition, Muslims got
disenchanted with it

and started voting different secular parties in the different parts of
the country. This

strategy on the part of Muslims divided their votes, culminating in
the emergence of the

BJP as the single largest political party in the 14th Loksabha
election. He has shown how

Paswan's secular credentials kept oscillating from Laloo to NDA to
Congress. That's why he

should not be given a chance any more. Then, Khushtar argues how the
consolidated Muslim

votes to Congress in the general election of 2004 has breathed a new
life into it, reduced

to almost a dead party then. "The need of the hour is that Muslims of
every state, using

their foresight, should vote for only that party which is capable of
stopping the rising

tides of communalism and which guarantees for their development in
different walks of life

", concludes Khushtar.(Jaam-e-Noor, December 2005.p9).




When it comes to the international affairs, Jaam-e-Noor is no
different from other

traditional madrasa magazines. Muslim world and how the US engages it,
is what dominates

most of the writings on international politics in the magazine. Also,
they have great

appetite for the hear-say about the Zionist lobby. Like any other
traditional alim,

Khushtar Noorani too has his own understanding of what takes place in
the arena of

international relations. It will not be out of context to reproduce
here a couple of

paragraphs from one of his editorials entitled: "Well-Planned Designs
of the US against the

Muslim World and the Reality of our Silent Protests":

1. "After the 2nd World War the US and Soviet Russia emerged as two
superpowers on the

world map. But
after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 9th decade of the
20th century, the

United States became the sole super power .Now it got involved in its
retaliatory actions

against the Muslim world, for which the whole western Christianity and
Zionism have been

preparing since 15th century after their defeat in the
Crusades".(Jaam-e-Noor,July

2005,p3).

2. "If we chronologically analyze the meticulous planning behind these
regular attacks on

the Muslim world then we come to know that when Muslim world was
celebrating its victory on

the West in the Crusades, vows were being solemnized in the churches
of the West to erase

the contours of the Muslim world from the world map. According to this
plan when Europe was

struggling hard to wake up afresh, mustering its courage, Muslim
rulers and nobility were

leading lavish life in their palaces and were busy in wine sessions.
In the 16th century,

two movements swept Europe: Renaissance and Reformation. The earlier
made Europe shine with

the light of knowledge and paved the way for establishing of
universities of Oxford and

Cambridge, institutions of international repute, while the latter led
to the emergence of

the Protestants as a sect. At that time the Muslim rulers were busy in
composing verses in

praise of their beloved and were putting all the might of their
kingdom at disposal to

erect wonderful monuments like Taj Mahal to please the souls of their
dead soulmates. In

the 17th century there started an age of scientific and material
development in Europe and

till the 18th century they, to subjugate the world and especially the
Muslim world, were

successful in inventing arms and ammunitions which were earlier beyond
imagination… ".

(Jaam-e-Noor, July 2005, pp3-4).



Among other eye-catching columns of Jaam-e-Noor, those of interview,
tahriri mobahsa and

Khama Talashi worth mentioning here. As far as the interview column is
concerned, it's

really an innovation in the field of madrasa journalism. That the
magazine unfailingly

publishes a fresh interview every month exudes how serious the editor
is about the quality

he promises to his readers. Some of personalities whose interviews
have already been

published in it is : Maulana Mansha Tabish Qasuri ,Lahore; Dr.Syed
Aleem Ashraf Jayesi,UP;

Mohd.Arif Iqbal, editor, the monthly Urdu Book Review; Mosharraf Alam
Zauqi, the novelist;

Maulana Kaukab Noorani,Karachi; Dr.Monazir Aashiq Harganwi,Bhagalpur
University,etc.

Tahriri Mobahsa (discussion) is another interesting column which is
exclusive to

Jaam-e-Noor. It should be borne in the mind that in the Muslim
religious circle, dissenting

voices even in the matters concerning academics are shortly silenced
by one means or

another. This column, through its debate on a range of issues, has
established, on one

hand, how ulema of a particular sect differ from each other in their
opinions on a given

topic while on the other hand; it reiterated the need to tolerate
differences in opinions.

Some of the topics of this column are as follows: How to save the
world from the scourge of

terrorism? , What should be the role of ulema in the general
election?; Should Urdu be

included in the curricula of madrasas?; How useful is the university
education for the

madrasa graduates?.



The last question was thrown for the discussion in the month of April,
2005(pp21-27). Views

of five madrasa graduates on the topic have been published. Here is
what the editor has put

in boxes as the summary of their views:
1. University education widens the mentalscape of the madrasa
graduates, revitalizes

their views and makes their arguments serious and factual. (Tanveer
Arshad, Department of

Arabic, JNU).
2. People should stop bothering about the shortcomings of the modern
educational

institutions because every coin has two sides. (Samrul Hoda Noori, 4th
semester, Faculty of

Medicine, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi).
3. In the contemporary time, one can not properly render his services
to Islam on the

global scale unless one is trained in the modern sciences. This
underlines the need for the

modern education. (Shaukat Ali, Department Urdu, Jamia Millia Islamia).
4. Today it's obligatory for every Muslim child to marry religious
education with

modern one so that he, retaining his identity, can lead a dignified
life. (Sadrul Islam

Misbahi.Department of Arabic, University of Delhi).
5. Modern education, through some of the madrasa graduates, will steer
the course of

the history of the Ahl-e-Sunnat towards a new direction. It's started
making its effects

felt since now. (Zishan Ahmed Misbahi, sub-editor, monthly Jaam-e-Noor).











The column of Khama Talashi (Academic Interrogation) adds one more
feather to the cap of

Jaam-e-Noor. This style of self-criticism is not only praiseworthy but
is a contributory

factor towards emergence of a culture of tolerance and internal
dialogue among religious

elites. Abul Faiz Moinee, who writes the column with unmatched
fearlessness and erudition,

is extremely popular among the readers. He starts one of his columns
narrating an incident

of Josh Malihabadi: "Josh Malihabadi sent a copy of his autobiography
entitled 'Yaadon ki

Baarat' to Mahirul Qadri, editor of the monthly 'Faraan' with this
note: Janab Mahir!

Lijiye bakra hazir hai.Shauq se zabah farmaiye. (Mr.Mahir! The lamb is
here before you.

Please butcher it.).Then Mr. Mahir butchers the lamb with his own
style .i.e., wrote a 60

pages treatise as a critique of the book. My friend Maulana Khushtar
Noorani too every

month sends me a copy of Jaam-e-Noor with an identical note on it.
It's a matter of

coincidence that till date it's his own writings which have been
slaughtered at the altar

of criticism".(Jaam-e-Noor, October 2005, p55). In the present column, he first

congratulated the editor on having designed such a wonderful title
page, and that's without

including any dome or minaret. Then he wonders how the editorial has
adopted a soft line

towards the ulema as the editor has a reputation of being extremely
critical of ulema.

Further, he mentions an article which seeks to analyze observations of
some oriental

scholars regarding the Hadis literature. He writes: "Though the piece
is informative and

analytical, there are few places where my eyes stopped" due to
mistakes in the years of

birth and death mentioned. Commenting on the debate on the topic of
"Whether the suicide

bombing may be a form of jihad or is just a waste of human life", he
criticizes a

participant for the mistake he committed in translating an Arabic
sentence while takes a

dig on the other for using jargon-laden language, almost
incomprehensible for the masses.

Assessing the next piece which is a travelogue by Maulana Kaukab
Noorani, Moinee writes in

a lighter vein: "I went through the piece, the first part of a two
part-series and am

eagerly waiting for the next part as the earlier has nothing
substantial in it." (p 55).

Thus, every column of Khama Talashi makes a hilarious reading,
especially when you are

aware of the content of the previous issue of the magazine.




Besides all these, Jaam-e-Noor is an Ahl-e-Sunnat magazine to the core
of its content.

Though I came across a couple of non-Ahl-e-Sunnat fans of Khushtar's
writings, being an

Ahl-e-Sunnat magazine is central to its identity. That's why themes
which distinguish the

sect from 'others' frequently find place in the pages of the magazine.
Even Khushtar, in

some of his editorials, writes on these issues. Apart from the content
of Shari' Adalat,

the fatwa column, which reinforces the Ahl-e-Sunnat identity of the
magazine, other columns

also time and again keep raising these issues. For example, articles
like 'Of course, there

is no sect called Barelwi' (February, 2006), 'Accounts of Oral
Contestations (Monazara)

with Deobandis' (July, 2005), 'Seeking help from the grave of the
deceased Shah Saud'

(November, 2005) suggest that polemics are not completely out. Thus,
university education

and a degree in journalism has engendered in the editor's approach a
tilt towards providing

choices to the readers but while doing so he has to be careful enough
not to cross lakshman

rekha of the sect. On the other hand, the journalism course has
enabled him to package the

commodity called magazine in an eye-catching manner and then to adopt
marketing techniques

to lure the consumers (here readers) and increase its salability. In a
way, with advent of

this professionalism, a shift, though unacknowledged and not much
pronounced, takes place

in the approach of the madrasa journalism: from dawah-oriented to
economy oriented, though

in a limited sense. Thus, these new trends in this genre of journalism
don't signify a

paradigm shift, rather 'shifts within the paradigm'.


OTHER NEW TRENDS


Maah-e-Noor, another praiseworthy adventure of the Ahl-e-Sunnat sect
into the madrasa

journalism, came into the picture in May, 2005. This monthly is
brought out by a publishing

house named Maktaba Maah-e-Noor, located in Matia Mahal, Jama Masjid,
Delhi. Though the

magazine has just celebrated its first birth anniversary, it has seen
more than one

reshuffling in its editorial board. From the 1st of June, 2006, Afzal
Misbahi has joined it

as the editor, a post which was lying vacant for months. A graduate of
Al Jamiatul Ashrafia

in 1997, Afzal has worked for 7 years with the Delhi and Gorakhpur
bureau of Rashtriya

Sahara, the largest Urdu daily of North India. Enrolled in the
University of Delhi as a PhD

candidate on the theme of "Urdu Journalism in India after
Independence", Afzal has

extensively interviewed veteran political leaders for and considerably
contributed to the

daily in his Sahara days.



As a madrasa monthly, Maah-e-Noor is no different from others of the
pack in any

considerable way when it comes to the content. However, what
distinguishes it from others,

including Jaam-e-Noor, is the remuneration it offers to everybody who
contributes to its

content. "This is the first magazine which pays to its contributors",
exclaims Afzal with

pride. According to the system of gradation it observes, it pays
Rs.300, Rs.400 and Rs.500

to respectively amateurs, regular and senior scribes. Though it's a
meager amount compared

to what a mainstream magazine offers, it is a pointer of the change
which is slowly

creeping in the sphere of madrasa journalism. Even the acquiring
services of someone like

Afzal who has experience of working for years in the mainstream media;
itself has no

parallel in the history of religious journals. As he is just one month
old in his new

office, his own vision of journalism is yet to be translated into the
reality. However, in

the very first issue of the journal under his editorship, under the
heading of Special

Articles, he has published on the contemporary reality of Muslims some
pieces by Dr.Mushtaq

Sadaf, Ahmed Javed and Mohd Aurangzeb Khan, all from the mainstream
media. Also, his

editorial on the controversial film The Da Vince Code reflects his
willingness to make his

magazine relevant to the modern time, not divorced from the current
issues. Though the

editorial is rich in its content, ideologically speaking it mirrors
the concerns of the

religious conservatives. Interestingly, Maulana Abul Hasan Ashrafi
Miyan, the editor

–in-chief cum proprietor of the magazine is based in London and makes
frequent visits to

India. Its finances are met with what Ashrafi Miyan manages to garner
from the Ahl-e-Sunnat

diaspora of UK. It also gets funded by Choksi Brothers & Sisters,
Toronto, a private firm

run by the Indian diaspora.




Unlike these two magazines, Tooba, the next one in this league is the
organ of an

Ahl-e-Hadis madrasa Jamia Ibn-e-Taimiya, Chandanwara, East Champaran
of Bihar and its

research wing Allama Abdul Aziz bin Baz Islamic Studies Centre, Darya
Ganj, Delhi. The

monthly is consistently in publication since it started in 2001.
Maulana Zillur Rehman

Taimi, associated with the magazine since its inception, has been
promoted to the post of

the editor in May, 2006. It is he who was instrumental in bringing the
editorial work of

the magazine to India from Riyadh, its former workplace. As he is
enrolled as a research

scholar with the department of Arabic in JNU, Zillur Rehman has a
degree of journalism from

the same university. In this way, he belongs to the new generation of
the madrasa editors

who, having received religious education in a proper madrasa went to
the government

universities for higher education and, also, have a degree in
journalism under their belt

from a reputed institution. Zillur Rehman says stressing on the fact
that it has the policy

of not publishing any thing which may lead to widening the
intra-community divide among

Muslims. This policy, according to him, "distinguishes Tooba from
other madrasa magazines".

Though the Ahl-e-Hadis have earned a reputation of being obsessed with
the rebuttal of

other Muslim sects, the magazine has, amazingly, sticked to the policy
in its five years of

life span. However, the magazine is open to any piece which observes
the academic

parameters to prove its hypotheses, irrespective of its being against
the popular practices

of the Ahl-e-Hadis. In this connection, Zillur Rehman narrates an
incident that once we

received an article in favor of calling two azans for the prayer of
Juma' .In stead of its

being against the common practice of the Ahl-e-Hadis, we published it.




Running into 66 pages, the magazine is strictly divided into more that
15 regular columns.

Unlike Jaam-e-Noor which has no fixed columnists for its regular
columns, Tooba has its

fixed columnists for all its columns. This column design is a
contributory factor to its

popularity as Shahnawaz Alam, a student of Jamia Salafia, Varanasi
puts it: "It gives you

a sort of satisfaction to go through a range of information
encapsulated in a single issue.

To me it's possible only because of the meticulous column planning on
the part of its

editor". Interestingly, most of its columnists are those who teach at
Jamia Ibn-e-Taimiya,

Chandanwara. It's obligatory for them to contribute to the magazine
under their assigned

columns. However, couple of its columnists doesn't belong to the
teaching community of the

madrasa. For example, Yusuf Nazim, a celebrated satirist of Urdu,
regularly writes a column

for the magazine and is paid for the same, although a very meager
amount of money. In this

respect, Tooba has partial resemblance with Maah-e-Noor which pays for
every word published

in it. Zillur Rehman has been conducting interviews of the Muslim
celebrities for Tooba but

unlike Jaam-e-Noor, it is yet to maintain consistency in this regard.
The total circulation

of the Tooba stands at 3000. That its 1400 subscribers are the
students of Jamia

Ibn-e-Taimiya is an interesting feature of the magazine. Every student
has to subscribe it

as its subscription fee is included in the admission fee of the Jamia.
Though the

institution receives generous donations from the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia, this unique

feature of Tooba is a step towards making it economically independent.


CONCLUDING REMARKS

In the light of what have been discussed till now, it would be fair to
conclude that:

1. Those youngsters who are university educated and trained in journalism are
increasingly donning the cap of editors of madrasa journals.
2. They are trying their best to observe the norms of mainstream
journalism in their
respective journals.
3. They are taking measures to make the magazine more participatory
for the readers.
4. They tend to publish the writings of young ulema who are enrolled
in the government
universities.
5 Some magazines have started paying a token amount of money to the scribes.
6. Self-correction is going to be the buzzword in the case of some of
the magazines,
although the bashing of the 'others' has not lost all of its charm.

arshad amanullah
35,masihgarh,
jamia nagar
new delhi-25.

Via: Zulfiqar Shah