Islamic Liberation Theology?

This passage from an article in the Monthly Review by Qalandar Bux Memon suggests that liberation theology may not just be confined to Catholic Latin America. The article is called "Blood on the Path of Love: The Striking Workers of Faisalabad Pakistan," which you can read in its entirety here.

Bawa Lalif Ansari is famous among workers for his oratory and in particular for leading an energizing tarana [a call and response between leader and crowd.]. He is an entertainer and pedagogue, who hosts most of the workers’ rallies for LQM [Labour Quami Movement]. Bawa is of short and slim stature, with long black hair carefully combed backwards and a small and trim jet-black beard—a look that made more sense to me as our conversation developed.

“I used to be part of Lashkar-e-Taiba. I joined them when I was young.” LeT is a militant Islamist organization, suspected of involvement in the 2008 Mumbai attacks. It is banned in Pakistan but continues to operate openly in many areas. Sipah-e-Sahaba, another extremist organization, he tells me, was founded in the Jhang area, which neighbors Faisalabad, and is where he has been working with the LQM. He explains,

They have a strong grip on the people and tell the poor to direct their frustration against the Shi’as. The local feudals and zamindars, who are extremely rich, are generally Shi’a, while the common bounded laborer is Sunni. The hate manifested over years of exploitation can easily be directed by these originations against all Shi’as. But many Shi’a are also laborers and workers, as are Christians. I came across Mian Qayyum and the LQM and their analysis made more sense. The religious parties wanted me to merely seethe with rage but didn’t tell me how my material situation was going to change. What good does it do me to hate someone for being a Shi’a or a Sunni or a Christian? They too are poor people trying to work and feed their children. What good does it do a worker to fight a worker. I didn’t agree with this.

Bawa believes in Islam, but for him, it is a radical philosophy of liberation [my emphasis]. A few hours later, at a workers’ gathering he said, “God is sovereign and god asks us to fight for justice. The bosses are nothing; we will not bow to them, these pharaohs. What we work we should be paid fairly for.” Lashkar’s loss has been the Labour Quami Movement’s gain.

Religion, with its concern for the poor and disadvantaged, is a natural ally of Marxism. Surely Catholics aren't the only ones that have made the link.

Update (April 12, 2011): It turns out I was right; there is Islamic liberation theology out there! Dr. Ali Ashgar Engineer, a Pakistani Islamic scholar, has a book, available online, with just that title.

The Mathematics of Social Life

Introduction
We can think of a person's personality as a vector in Fⁿ. The dimensions of F represent the dimensions of the goals and interests that one might entertain—what one values, broadly speaking. Some people are more interested in pursuing money than others; some people have more an inclination towards spirituality than others; some people give more importance to their family than others. Thus, we can say that money, spirituality, and family represent some of the nearly infinite dimensions of this space (but we think of n as finite for simplicity). The zero vector would signify balance within all dimensions.

Like R, F is continuous, infinite, and contains postive and negative values; just as value traits come in shades of grey, have no known limits, and always work in pairs of opposites. Although personality doesn't just include values, they are its most important component. Values are what drive action and shape our life's trajectory, which is what we're interested in modeling.

These personality vectors represent a static snapshot of a person's personality. However, people's goals and interests are, of course, constantly changing: at any given moment, a person has a certain place she's at in life, and a certain place she'd like to go. This defines what we'll call a change vector in Fⁿ. The vector points towards the new personality vector one wants to have, and the magnitude represents the rate at which the change is happening. Continuing the previous example, we can say that a person with a penitant heart who wants to focus more attention on his family rather than on money would have a change vector that points 1) less on the money dimension 2) more on the spirtuality dimension and 3) more on the family dimension.

Over the course of our lives, the personality vector traces a trajectory through Fⁿ that describes how our goals and interests have changed. These trajectories are useful in describing, characterizing, and categorizing people's lives. When we say, for example, that someone has meandered through life, we may mean that the distance traveled along the trajectory is much larger than the distance traveled in Fⁿ.

The change vectors are first derivatives of our life's trajectory. At each moment in time, the vectors are tangent to the trajectory, and mark where we're immediately heading. Because our personalities have inertia, our life's trajectory follows the vector unless the vector changes: until we receive some new information, or have some new experience, our thought pattern will not change.

Society
A society is a well-defined set of people. Societies can be both big and small, ranging from small towns, to nations, to the entire world. Societies can also be defined in terms other than geography, such as national origin, occupation, or marital status.

Societies do not have a uniform distribution of personalities. Instead, they tend to cluster in certain regions of the space (this is where stereotypes come from). We can describe the distribution of personalities of a society with a density map on Fⁿ.

Not all people within a society are equally important to us; we tend to think that some have more of a claim on our consideration than others. A social network is thus defined as a graph of all social claims on oneself that one considers meaningful. The graph is organized as a series of concentric rings, with us at the center and each progressively farther rings representing more distant/less valued relationships.

Hypothesis on Nature vs. Nurture
When we are born, we have an initial personality vector in Fⁿ. This is the nature component, since it limits the possibility of our life's trajectory to within the neighborhood of that point. However, once that point is established, we can move in any direction. This is the nurture component.

An analogy is a cow tied by a rope to a tree: the cow can only move as far as the rope will let her, but within the radius of the rope she can move in any direction.

It's hard to say whether babies are born with change vectors as well, i.e. whether they have a conception of what they want to do with life. But even if they did, it would be almost inseparable from the immediate influence that the family exerts on the newborn.

Interaction
Interaction is comprised of two components: liking and influence. They are separate matters, since we are often influenced by people that we do not necessarily like.

We often gauge how much we like something or someone by how much it aligns with our goals and interests. That is, liking is a measure of the similarity between two vectors, i.e. the angle between them. An angle of 0 measures complete liking and an angle of pi measures complete dislike. If a vector is perpendicular to another, then it is neither heading in a similar direction on any dimension, nor is it heading away; perpendicular vectors thus signal indifference.

Note that we are talking about personalities, not genes. People with very similar personalities may look completely different, talk different, and manifest their goals and interests in different ways—but their goals and interests are similar.

Liking, like influence, happens not just through face-to-face encounters with other people, but also by learning about the work they produce. Our work crystallizes our personality in time, making it possible for distant, unknown people to like and be influenced by us, even without directly meeting. Reading the works of an author reveals the idea vector of the author at that time; learning about the social works of a great leader is a way of meeting their vector.

Influence is a question of what influences the change vectors. Since influence can occur to varying degrees, we can think of it as lying on a spectrum. One one extreme, we have complete influence, where both parties fully and equally influence each other. In complete influence, two people leave the interaction with the same new "goal" personality vector, one that is the sum of their previous individual personality vectors: components of the vector moving in opposite directions would cancel out, and components moving in the same direction would build on each other. However, because personality change is continuous, and occurs over time, the change in personality vector is not instantaneous. Instead, after the interaction, both parties leave with change vectors that now point towards their new goal personality vector. Over time, if these change vectors are unaltered, then their personalities will become the same.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have a complete lack of influence, where the interaction does not affect the change vectors at all. Most interaction is either of this latter type (since we can't afford to constantly reevaluate ourselves every time we interact), or somewhere in between.

Because individuals have free will, personality change is a stochastic event, and hard to pin down. However, we do know that a person is more likely to be influenced one direction or another based on the distribution of her social network within Fⁿ.

We can simplify the process of influence by thinking of it as a random event where a person chooses to be influenced from someone in her social network. That is, every t periods a person decides to be influenced. She samples someone at random from her social network and is influenced, let's say completely influenced. Because her social network is unevenly distributed, she is more likely to sample certain people over others, causing her to be more influenced in a certain direction. The family, as a child's first social network, has the first say in influencing the child's change vector. However, as the child begins her process of socialization within larger society, the familial claims weaken and other people gain stronger influence.

Social Life
When we find ourselves in good company, it is because the personalities of the people involved complement each other. Similarly, in tight knit circles of friends, the personality vectors are linearly dependent on each other.

Social cliques are subspaces of Fⁿ. These cliques are, by definition, closed and bounded, and represent clusters of a socially defined personality type.

Large social gatherings, such as parties, are also home to the formation of subspaces. Like-minded people tend to gravitate towards each other and form social circles, and at times these circles don't even mix. A good party, though, is one where the maximal subspace of the party includes every member, meaning that everyone has interest in each other.

History
We can think of all the people in the world as also representing a bounded region in Fⁿ. The edges of the space represent the boundaries of the present human experience. As people have interacted more and more throughout history, they have provided more and more opportunities for ideas to change, pushing personality vectors in new directions and expanding the human experience.

The region of high density of a density map on all of humanity is the zeitgeist of the era. It represents the certain general paradigm of thinking, acting, and being for people at that time.

Paradigm Shift

When I arrived on campus this semester I noticed a marked difference in the way I thought about the university compared to when I first arrived. As a freshman, and even as a sophomore, I'd think of the university as a separate entity from me—an institution that runs by the grace of other people, with programs designed and run by other people, and a culture set by other people. I'd evaluate the university as an outsider would: What are U of A kids like? Are the clubs run well? Do they offer fun programs and activities?

Now that I'm a junior, neck-deep in activities and programs, I realized that I'm no longer on the outside looking in. The incoming freshman class must be evaluating the university the same way I did (What are U of A kids like? Are the clubs run well?...), but now I realize that whom they're judging is really us, the upperclassmen. The questions I used to ask of others are now directed at me—What are we like? Do we run our clubs well? Do we come up with new, fun, and innovative programs and activities?—because in your junior year you realize that there's no one else who make the university run but ourselves. Our culture is the university's culture. Our brains are the university's brains. Our drive is the university's drive.

Here's an example of what I mean. Currently the International Studies program offers a colloquium series on various regions of the world. It's an innovative idea, most of all because the colloquia are taught and designed by undergraduate students who have visited the regions they discuss. As a freshman or sophomore, I would have thought it was the university who was giving the opportunity, and students were simply receiving the benefits. However, when I learned that the colloquium was actually the brainchild of a student here at the U of A, I saw the student-university relation in a broader light: The university may provide opportunities to students, but students can also provide opportunities to the university. The plethora of programs and activities that we have exist because of someone, and continue to exist because someone is working to maintain them.

Every part of the university is supported by the students that form it. On a more day-to-day basis, take for example the tutoring center. If I were a student who came for help and had a bad experience, I would think that the university had a bad tutoring center. I'd tend to interpret the faults of individuals as the faults of the university. But since I work at the tutoring center, my thinking goes the other way. The quality of the university's tutoring center becomes partly my responsibility when I realize that students anxiously waiting for help at the tutoring center are relying on meto do a good job.

---

I think this personal shift in thinking also represents a broader sociological principle. Although we like to think of institutions as formal, abstract concepts, when you get into the details, as in this example, you realize that everything about an institution remits back to the people who form it. Some people are, of course, more involved than others, and that seems to influence the degree to which you identify yourself with the institution. But everyone plays a role, whether they realize it or not; and perhaps the bigger the stake that everyone has, the more successful the institution will be.

Not My Problem

Ever since I can remember I've been taught not to be racist, particularly against blacks. We would learn about MLK Jr., Frederick Douglass, and tolerance; and we'd learn the flipside: slavery, Jim Crow, the ugly bleeding stain of American history.

Before, I didn't think much of blacks: they were there just like the rest of us, just another part of society. But now I can't meet a black person without thinking of Harriet Tubman and affirmative action debates and studies claiming we're all entrenched with subtle, "symbolic" racism.

Ironically, I think all this education is making me a racist—in that I have ended up committing the cardinal sin of looking at individuals in terms of categories. I don't see John; I only see a living, walking struggle for equality.

All this education has also changed how I see myself. I used to think that Civil Rights, racism, and all that jazz were things that Whites and Blacks needed to sort out, that it was their problem. But the more I learn about it, the more I'm drawn in, and the more white guilt and black anxiety become mine.

Hippies

I was thinking about hippies today and realized that really they're just Americans who have adopted elements of Indian culture. I started going down the list of things I think make a hippie a hippie, and I came up with:

1. Practicing yoga rigorously (not that stuff at the gym)
   
2. Sympathy or explicit belief in an Eastern Religion (Hinduism, Buddhism)
3. Belief in relative morality
4. Pacifistic or non-violent bent
5. Tendency to prefer natural remedies and cures over chemicals (exemplified in, e.g., ayurveda)
6. A tendency to renounce the world (derived from the concept of sannyasa)
   

Notice how all of these ideas have roots in, or are affiliated with, India and Indian culture! Of course, there are fundamental differences, and [full disclosure: I'm Indian] I think hippies understand these ideas in more naive ways than Indians (epitomized by the hippie saying "Why can't we just all get along?"). But still I'm fascinated by the connection.

From my personal experience, I always thought Indian culture was confined to the Indian culture, mostly because no one around me knew anything about it at all. But now that seems not to be the case—and it makes sense. Although Indians and Americans have begun to interact only recently (beginning, chiefly, with Swami Vivekananda), the effects of this interaction cannot just vanish into thin air. I think today I found at least one of the effects.