Pico Iyer and the Californication of mystical Islam: “…(I)n his latest novel, Abandon, he has turned inward, ostensibly to an exploration of the Islamic mystical tradition called Sufism in search of an alternative to a globalized world. Strangely, the location for his inward search is California, the capital of ultimate banality. One would like to explain this away as a deep Sufi parable, but, a travel writer, Iyer’s approach to Sufism remains that of a tourist among tourists. His Sufism is a marketable mysticism, reduced to small bites of tranquility and enlightenment.” A review by Stephen Schwartz, author of The Two Faces of Islam, who essentially says Iyer gets it wrong. Weekly Standard

“Disruptive pupils are making it impossible to improve Britain’s secondary schools.” A Prospect Magazine article on the growth of unruliness in school age children, from a British gradeschool teacher’s perspective. It gives short shrift to what for me is the interesting question:

Why do so many schoolchildren behave badly? The broader cultural and family background is clearly a factor, albeit an unquantifiable one. The combination of an “instant gratification” mass culture and more unstable families has led to rising insecurity and aggression in some children. High teacher turnover in key subjects reinforces the emotional instability of many modern families. Moreover, parents themselves have become more aggressive towards teachers and other authority figures; consider the increased assaults on GPs.

Most films and TV shows I’ve seen in recent years reflecting modern British social conditions, it strikes me, indeed show schools as places where the breakdown in decorum is the central fact.

Most of the article is spent arguing what seems to be the gospel in American schools, that the teaching profession has in most contexts become of necessity merely a disciplinary exercise.

…(E)ven in an anti-authoritarian age, schools should be able to offer the security, discipline and stimulation which disaffected young people need. To ensure that this is more often the case, schools need a core of committed teachers with the training to command a class and the freedom to inspire it. Is that too much too ask?

Is this all that education is destined to be in most settings?

Investigating Danny Pearl’s murder, Lévy says he had to die for what he discovered, the shape of the next terrorist attack from the jihadist alliance that killed him, which will “make 9/11 look prehistoric.” The opening paragraphs of Ron Rosenbaum’s New York Observer review of Lévy’s book are surprisingly, incongruously flip (perhaps Rosenbaum is imbued with Bushite anti-French fever?). Despite saying the two books don’t compete, he is far more enamored of the forthcoming memoir by Pearl’s widow Mariane, A Mighty Heart, which he says, perhaps abit boastfully, that he has read in galleys. The comments are gratuitous and tangential to the chilling details he describes in the rest of the article.

With the recent focus on Iraq, we have lost sight of the very real need for concern about the unholy, hypocritical, dangerous alliances the Bush cabal has forged with nations like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, both the provinces of sophisticated, angry and well-endowed radical Islamists with fragile vulnerable governments only tentatively willing to or capable of containing them, not to mention that they receive support from official elements such as Pakistani intelligence. Lévy’s book, and Rosenbaum’s précis, are a horrific reminder of what seeds of our own destruction we may have sown.

The narrative hinges on the moment after Pearl’s kidnapping when his abductors drop their ransom demands and change tack, deciding to kill Pearl. Rosenbaum notes that Lévy’s narrative from here on is speculative, although ackonwledging that it is the speculation of a daring reporter with seasoned instincts.

…Mr. Lévy seeks to convince us that Pearl was on the trail of the nexus that he, Lévy, discovered in his investigation of the crime: the nexus between Pakistani intelligence, Al Qaeda, Pakistani nuclear scientists and rogue states such as North Korea that portends the sum of all fears: a handover of the Islamic bomb—or, at the very least, lethal nuclear materials—to Al Qaeda terrorists. The genesis of the next 9/11. Mr. Lévy not only believes this was the subject of Pearl’s investigation, the reason he sought the ill-fated interview with Sheikh Gilani that led to his kidnapping, but that in the course of his captivity he learned even more from his captors, learned too much to be allowed to live.

Rosenbaum demurs, “All of Mr. Lévy’s speculations may be true, but that doesn’t mean they were Danny Pearl’s.” But why use the vehicle of an exploration of Pearl’s death if one has the scoop of the century to claim as the fruits of one’s own investigations? And why would Lévy’s attribution of this discovery to Pearl prompt such vehement disavowals from his employer (“Paul Steiger, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, said the newspaper had no evidence that Mr. Pearl was investigating any such conspiracy” — NY Times), and his family, which favors the more prosaic theory, essentially that Pearl was killed because his kidnappers had an opportunity to produce a snuff video of a Jewish American?

Rosenbaum speculates that Lévy is “using the notoriety of the Pearl death, using his own fame and his own investigation, as an opportunity to issue a heartfelt warning to the West of the apocalyptic developments brewing in Pakistan…”, but comes to favor instead the possibility that Lévy lovingly identified so thoroughly with Pearl that he was moved to give him a posthumous gift of attributing his own insights to the younger man.

Related? Special Report: Saudis consider the bomb. Guardian.UK

“Why do we wallow in tales of priests and boys, when most targets of unwanted priestly attention are girls?” The Nation

“VeriSign Inc., which oversees the popular ”.com” Internet domain, has ignited a digital firestorm with its new method for dealing with mistyped Internet addresses. Experts say it will lead to a surge in spam, or unwanted e-mail, and that Verisign has no right to impose the system on millions of Internet users.” Boston Globe

In fact, some ISPs say the predicted increase in spam is already being seen. In redirecting mistyped internet addresses ending in ‘.com’ to a search engine (for which hits VeriSign is paid) rather than generating an error message, VeriSign is crippling many spam filters which work by recognizing the error messages associated with spam that originates from nonexistent domains.

”You can actually make a mail connection to nonexistent domains now,” said Lauren Weinstein, cofounder of People for Internet Responsibility. ”This is the kiss of death for ISPs.”

VeriSign says it is “working to address the problem”… as unilaterally as they instituted the new scheme in the first place.

Book review: The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, integration and dissociation ed. by Axel Cleeremans:

“The brain operates like a highly distributed anarchist collective with separate modules each doing their own thing. But we generally perceive, think and act as if ‘we’ were an indissoluble individual. In some as yet only guessed at way, the activity of all the brain modules must be bound together to produce this sense of self.

So is consciousness unitary, and how can we solve the ‘binding problem’? This is the question addressed by the 22-strong ensemble who met at a consciousness conference in Brussels 3 years ago and whose ruminations are brought together in Axel Cleeremans’s collection.” New Scientist