I would like to propose the name of Julian Assange, Founder of WikiLeaks, for Nobel Peace Prize 2011, Oslo are you listening? More important, are you reading those leaks that expose US war crimes? Expose Iran war Crimes? Expose Iraq war crimes?
This is not just worthy of a Pulitzer. It's worthy of a Nobel. You heard the recommendation here first folks. Bigger than The Pentagon papers, which the NYTimes also published. I scooped it, in all humility, because Assange is enormously ethical.
================================================
WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Chased by Turmoil
By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: October 23, 2010
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/24assange.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Chased by Turmoil
By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: October 23, 2010
LONDON — Julian Assange moves like a hunted man. In a noisy Ethiopian restaurant in London’s rundown Paddington district, he pitches his voice barely above a whisper to foil the Western intelligence agencies he fears.
He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own as other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends.
“By being determined to be on this path, and not to compromise, I’ve wound up in an extraordinary situation,” Mr. Assange said over lunch last Sunday, when he arrived sporting a woolen beanie and a wispy stubble and trailing a youthful entourage that included a filmmaker assigned to document any unpleasant surprises.
In his remarkable journey to notoriety, Mr. Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowers’ Web site, sees the next few weeks as his most hazardous. Now he is making his most brazen disclosure yet: 391,832 secret documents on the Iraq war. He held a news conference in London on Saturday, saying that the release “constituted the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record.”
Twelve weeks earlier, he posted on his organization’s Web site some 77,000 classified Pentagon documents on the Afghan conflict.
Much has changed since 2006, when Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, used years of computer hacking and what friends call a near genius I.Q. to establish WikiLeaks, redefining whistle-blowing by gathering secrets in bulk, storing them beyond the reach of governments and others determined to retrieve them, then releasing them instantly, and globally.
Now it is not just governments that denounce him: some of his own comrades are abandoning him for what they see as erratic and imperious behavior, and a nearly delusional grandeur unmatched by an awareness that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood.
Several WikiLeaks colleagues say he alone decided to release the Afghan documents without removing the names of Afghan intelligence sources for NATO troops. “We were very, very upset with that, and with the way he spoke about it afterwards,” said Birgitta Jonsdottir, a core WikiLeaks volunteer and a member of Iceland’s Parliament. “If he could just focus on the important things he does, it would be better.”
He is also being investigated in connection with accusations of rape and molestation involving two Swedish women. Mr. Assange denied the allegations, saying the relations were consensual. But prosecutors in Sweden have yet to formally approve charges or dismiss the case eight weeks after the complaints against Mr. Assange were filed, damaging his quest for a secure base for himself and WikiLeaks. Though he characterizes the claims as “a smear campaign,” the scandal has compounded the pressures of his cloaked life.
“When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like,” he said over the London lunch.
Exposing Secrets
Mr. Assange has come a long way from an unsettled childhood in Australia as a self-acknowledged social misfit who narrowly avoided prison after being convicted on 25 charges of computer hacking in 1995. History is punctuated by spies, defectors and others who revealed the most inflammatory secrets of their age. Mr. Assange has become that figure for the Internet era, with as yet unreckoned consequences for himself and for the keepers of the world’s secrets.
“I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone to disclose information on a scale that might really make a difference,” said Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed a 1,000-page secret study of the Vietnam War in 1971 that became known as the Pentagon Papers.
Mr. Ellsberg said he saw kindred spirits in Mr. Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old former Army intelligence operative under detention in Quantico, Va., suspected of leaking the Iraq and Afghan documents.
“They were willing to go to prison for life, or be executed, to put out this information,” Mr. Ellsberg said.
Underlying Mr. Assange’s anxieties is deep uncertainty about what the United States and its allies may do next. Pentagon and Justice department officials have said they are weighing his actions under the 1917 Espionage Act. They have demanded that Mr. Assange “return” all government documents in his possession, undertake not to publish any new ones and not “solicit” further American materials.
Mr. Assange has responded by going on the run, but has found no refuge. Amid the Afghan documents controversy, he flew to Sweden, seeking a residence permit and protection under that country’s broad press freedoms. His initial welcome was euphoric.
“They called me the James Bond of journalism,” he recalled wryly. “It got me a lot of fans, and some of them ended up causing me a bit of trouble.”
In late September, he left Stockholm for Berlin. A bag he checked on the almost empty flight disappeared, with three encrypted laptops. It has not resurfaced; Mr. Assange suspects it was intercepted. From Germany, he traveled to London, wary at being detained on arrival. Iceland, a country with generous press freedoms , has also lost its appeal, with Mr. Assange concluding that its government is too easily influenced by Washington.
He faces attack from within, too.
After the Sweden scandal, strains within WikiLeaks reached a breaking point, with some of Mr. Assange’s closest collaborators publicly defecting. The New York Times spoke with dozens of people who have worked with and supported him in Iceland, Sweden, Germany, Britain and the United States. What emerged was a picture of the founder of WikiLeaks as its prime innovator and charismatic force but as someone whose growing celebrity has been matched by an increasingly dictatorial, eccentric and capricious style.
Internal Turmoil
Effectively, as Mr. Assange pursues his fugitive’s life, his leadership is enforced over the Internet. Even remotely, his style is imperious. When Herbert Snorrason, a 25-year-old political activist in Iceland, questioned Mr. Assange’s judgment over a number of issues in an online exchange last month, Mr. Assange was uncompromising. “I don’t like your tone,” he said, according to a transcript. “If it continues, you’re out.”
Mr. Assange cast himself as indispensable. “I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest,” he said. “If you have a problem with me,” he told Mr. Snorrason, using an expletive, he should quit.
In an interview about the exchange, Mr. Snorrason’s conclusion was stark. “He is not in his right mind,” he said. In London, Mr. Assange was dismissive of all those who have criticized him. “These are not consequential people,” he said.
“About a dozen” disillusioned volunteers have left recently, said Smari McCarthy, an Icelandic volunteer who has distanced himself in the recent turmoil. In late summer, Mr. Assange suspended Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German who had been the WikiLeaks spokesman under the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt, accusing him of unspecified “bad behavior.” Many more activists, Mr. McCarthy said, are likely to follow.
Mr. Assange denied that any important volunteers had quit, apart from Mr. Domscheit-Berg. But further defections could paralyze an organization that Mr. Assange says has 40 core volunteers and about 800 mostly unpaid followers to maintain a diffuse web of computer servers and to secure the system against attack — to guard against the kind of infiltration that WikiLeaks itself has used to generate its revelations.
Mr. Assange’s detractors also accuse him of pursuing a vendetta against the United States. In London, Mr. Assange said America was an increasingly militarized society and a threat to democracy. Moreover, he said, “we have been attacked by the United States, so we are forced into a position where we must defend ourselves.”
Even among those challenging Mr. Assange’s leadership style, there is recognition that the intricate computer and financial architecture WikiLeaks uses to shield it against its enemies has depended on its founder. “He’s very unique and extremely capable,” said Ms. Jonsdottir, the Icelandic lawmaker.
A Rash of Scoops
Before posting the documents on Afghanistan and Iraq, WikiLeaks enjoyed a string of coups.
Supporters were thrilled when the organization posted documents on the Guantánamo Bay detention operation, Sarah Palin’s e-mail, reports of extrajudicial killings in Kenya and East Timor, the membership rolls of the neo-Nazi British National Party and a combat video showing American Apache helicopters in Baghdad in 2007 gunning down at least 12 people, including two Reuters journalists.
But now, WikiLeaks has been met with new doubts. Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have joined the Pentagon in criticizing the organization for risking people’s lives by publishing war logs identifying Afghans working for the Americans or acting as informers.
A Taliban spokesman in Afghanistan using the pseudonym Zabiullah Mujahid said in a telephone interview that the Taliban had formed a nine-member “commission” after the Afghan documents were posted “to find about people who are spying.” He said the Taliban had a “wanted” list of 1,800 Afghans and was comparing that with names WikiLeaks provided.
“After the process is completed, our Taliban court will decide about such people,” he said.
Mr. Assange defended posting unredacted documents, saying he balanced his decision “with the knowledge of the tremendous good and prevention of harm that is caused” by putting the information into the public domain. “There are no easy choices on the table for this organization,” he said.
But if Mr. Assange is sustained by his sense of mission, faith is fading among his fellow conspirators. His mood was caught vividly in an exchange on Sept. 20 with another senior WikiLeaks figure. In an encrypted online chat, a transcript of which was passed to The Times, Mr. Assange was dismissive of his colleagues. He described them as “a confederacy of fools,” and asked his interlocutor, “Am I dealing with a complete retard?”
In London, Mr. Assange was angered when asked about the rifts. He responded testily to questions about WikiLeaks’s opaque finances, Private Manning’s fate and WikiLeaks’s apparent lack of accountability to anybody but himself, calling the questions “cretinous,” “facile” and reminiscent of “kindergarten.”
Mr. Assange has been equivocal about Private Manning, talking in late summer as though the soldier was unavoidable collateral damage, much like the Afghans named as informers in the secret Pentagon documents.
But in London, he took a more sympathetic view, describing Private Manning as a “political prisoner” facing a jail term of up to 52 years, without confirming that he was the source of the disclosed war logs. “We have a duty to assist Mr. Manning and other people who are facing legal and other consequences,” Mr. Assange said.
Mr. Assange’s own fate seems as imperiled as Private Manning’s. His British visa will expire early next year. When he left the London restaurant at twilight, heading into the shadows, he declined to say where he was going. The man who has put some of the world’s most powerful institutions on his watch list was on the move again.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Dexter Filkins from Kabul, Afghanistan.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 24, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
US/CIA Impedes South Asia's Efforts To Find Place In The Global Social Justice Order
US/CIA Impedes South Asia's Efforts to Find a Place in the Global Social Justice Order
The US Govt's foreign policy imperatives, which are, as always, driven and directed by the CIA, are seriously impeding efforts by neighbor states' attempts to find its rightful place in the Global Social Justice Order.
The out-of the-box thinking needed is really just common sense. India-Pak AMITY/UNITY is the need of the hour. But the US will not allow this to happen.
Out-of-the-Box Thinking -- Is it Out of Reach?
The "out-of-the-box" thinking we need in the South Asia context, pragmatically speaking, is out of reach for the foreseeable future. Why?
1. The US has gained "strategic depth" in South Asia. The US is now firmly entrenched in Afghanistan and Pakistan and has a brand-name, AkPak, to underscore its entrenchment.
Q. Who can get the US out of South Asia? Not India, certainly not Pakistan, and certainly not Afghanistan.
2. The US has therefore secured a geopolitical advantage in South Asia, on the Pak-Afghan border, from where it can a) monitor and threaten Iran, b) stand within striking distance of Russia, 3) monitor the underbelly of several republics that once formed the USSR. ALL these sovereign nation-states are resource-rich in oil and natural gas. Afghanistan is bursting at the seams with minerals estimated in the trillions, according to a recent New York Times report quoting the US. Geological Survey.
3. The US "strategic depth" achievement, at the cost of the entire South Asia region, is a direct consequence of activities by the US since the early 1950's to turn Pakistan into a DEPENDENT client-state. The US State Department had carefully fostered Pakistan as a dependent client-state (Israel in contrast is a DOMINANT client-state of the US), during its own invented Cold War against the Soviets.
Pakistan, weakened by Partition, especially forced separation of Muslims from their Muslim brother and sisters, fell prey to US manipulation and inducements and Paks's own knee-jerk anti-India policy from the 1950's, stumbled and fell right into the open claw of the American Eagle. Pakistan is a hapless VICTIM of US Cold War strategy, Pakistan's ISI is financed and controlled by the CIA.
Who governs Pakistan does not much matter, the USCIA is in charge, with the ISI in PAID subordination to US strategic goals.
4. The US is on Pakistani soil and and there is nothing Pakistan can do about it. The US is on Afghan soil and Afghanistan can do nothing about it.
The US has NEVER been able to place even ONE US soldier on Indian soil but still India cannot do anything about the US occupation and dominance of the South Asia region.
5. The main and for now, intractable problem is that Pakistan has ACCEPTED the US as its MASTER, instead of CHOOSING India as its ALLY.
6. The out-of-the-box solution, actually the common sense solution that has been there all along, is for India and Pakistan to have a joint political and economic strategy, to make South Asia strong and independent in the global economic and geopolitical order.
Q. Can that happen in our lifetime? Some of us hope so. Some of us dream of that possibility and act everyday to bring that possibility closer to reality.
Until then, the out-of-the-box solution, to build India-Pak AMITY/UNITY, to counter US power in the South Asia region, is out of reach.
Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York (CUNY)
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
The US Govt's foreign policy imperatives, which are, as always, driven and directed by the CIA, are seriously impeding efforts by neighbor states' attempts to find its rightful place in the Global Social Justice Order.
The out-of the-box thinking needed is really just common sense. India-Pak AMITY/UNITY is the need of the hour. But the US will not allow this to happen.
Out-of-the-Box Thinking -- Is it Out of Reach?
The "out-of-the-box" thinking we need in the South Asia context, pragmatically speaking, is out of reach for the foreseeable future. Why?
1. The US has gained "strategic depth" in South Asia. The US is now firmly entrenched in Afghanistan and Pakistan and has a brand-name, AkPak, to underscore its entrenchment.
Q. Who can get the US out of South Asia? Not India, certainly not Pakistan, and certainly not Afghanistan.
2. The US has therefore secured a geopolitical advantage in South Asia, on the Pak-Afghan border, from where it can a) monitor and threaten Iran, b) stand within striking distance of Russia, 3) monitor the underbelly of several republics that once formed the USSR. ALL these sovereign nation-states are resource-rich in oil and natural gas. Afghanistan is bursting at the seams with minerals estimated in the trillions, according to a recent New York Times report quoting the US. Geological Survey.
3. The US "strategic depth" achievement, at the cost of the entire South Asia region, is a direct consequence of activities by the US since the early 1950's to turn Pakistan into a DEPENDENT client-state. The US State Department had carefully fostered Pakistan as a dependent client-state (Israel in contrast is a DOMINANT client-state of the US), during its own invented Cold War against the Soviets.
Pakistan, weakened by Partition, especially forced separation of Muslims from their Muslim brother and sisters, fell prey to US manipulation and inducements and Paks's own knee-jerk anti-India policy from the 1950's, stumbled and fell right into the open claw of the American Eagle. Pakistan is a hapless VICTIM of US Cold War strategy, Pakistan's ISI is financed and controlled by the CIA.
Who governs Pakistan does not much matter, the USCIA is in charge, with the ISI in PAID subordination to US strategic goals.
4. The US is on Pakistani soil and and there is nothing Pakistan can do about it. The US is on Afghan soil and Afghanistan can do nothing about it.
The US has NEVER been able to place even ONE US soldier on Indian soil but still India cannot do anything about the US occupation and dominance of the South Asia region.
5. The main and for now, intractable problem is that Pakistan has ACCEPTED the US as its MASTER, instead of CHOOSING India as its ALLY.
6. The out-of-the-box solution, actually the common sense solution that has been there all along, is for India and Pakistan to have a joint political and economic strategy, to make South Asia strong and independent in the global economic and geopolitical order.
Q. Can that happen in our lifetime? Some of us hope so. Some of us dream of that possibility and act everyday to bring that possibility closer to reality.
Until then, the out-of-the-box solution, to build India-Pak AMITY/UNITY, to counter US power in the South Asia region, is out of reach.
Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York (CUNY)
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
Monday, October 18, 2010
"Culture" of Poverty? POWER is Missing from this Equation
NYTimes Comment #155.
EthicalDemocracy
NYC
October 18th, 2010
11:22 am
\"Culture\" of Poverty? Corrupt POWER is Missing from this Equation
Ever since Oscar Lewis used the now (in)famous phrase, anthropology students, social justice activists, economists and of course politicians have been debating how culture and poverty have became conflated.
I think the missing part of this critical social equation is POWER and its obverse, Disempowerment.
It is directly harmful to POOR PEOPLE (yes, Poverty is all about PEOPLE, haves and havenots)to construe these POOR PEOPLE as sharing a Culture of Poverty. To merely say, like Harvard's Sampson, quoted above in your article, that culture is merely shared understandings is to conceal the role of POWER in the construction of the concept of Poverty.
Let me cite a personal example:
This summer, while I was volunteering in the Kashmir Valley, I spoke at a large meeting of career bureaucrats, clerics, politicians, on the topic of feminization of poverty in the Valley. I was in the process of trying to get govt. agencies to release goats to psychiatrically ill women, because these women has ASKED for GOATS, so they could earn their livelihood. These women understood perfectly they were sick BECAUSE they were POOR.
A henna-bearded Hajj-returned, indubitably devout and very sincere academician turned to me and then stated to the gathering \"Madam is right. Poverty is a curse.\"
I said \"Sir, I did not say that. I said Poverty is a CRIME committed by the government against its people.\"
You could have heard a pin drop. All the power-holders in the room kept silent.
I was never invited to speak again!
Poverty and Power are inextricably conflated. \"Culture\" is a misleading term, when applied to human rights and the right NOT to be poor is a human right.
Dr. Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
==========================================
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html?scp=1&sq=culture%20of%20poverty&st=cse
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html?sort=newest
‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback
William C. Eckenberg/The New York Times
[Picture]A vacant lot on East 110th Street in New York in 1952: the study of urban blight has long been influenced by political fashions.
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: October 17, 2010
For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.
Enlarge This Image
George Tames/The New York Times
Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his office at Harvard in 1971.
The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.
Moynihan’s analysis never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers, whose arguments ultimately succeeded when President Bill Clinton signed a bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.” But in the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned.
Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.
“We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned.
The old debate has shaped the new. Last month Princeton and the Brookings Institution released a collection of papers on unmarried parents, a subject, it noted, that became off-limits after the Moynihan report. At the recent annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, attendees discussed the resurgence of scholarship on culture. And in Washington last spring, social scientists participated in a Congressional briefing on culture and poverty linked to a special issue of The Annals, the journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
“Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.
The topic has generated interest on Capitol Hill because so much of the research intersects with policy debates. Views of the cultural roots of poverty “play important roles in shaping how lawmakers choose to address poverty issues,” Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, noted at the briefing.
This surge of academic research also comes as the percentage of Americans living in poverty hit a 15-year high: one in seven, or 44 million.
With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture, but they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects: Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.
To Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, culture is best understood as “shared understandings.”
“I study inequality, and the dominant focus is on structures of poverty,” he said. But he added that the reason a neighborhood turns into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,” believing that “laws were made to be broken”?
As part of a large research project in Chicago, Professor Sampson walked through different neighborhoods this summer, dropping stamped, addressed envelopes to see how many people would pick up an apparently lost letter and mail it, a sign that looking out for others is part of the community’s culture.
In some neighborhoods, like Grand Boulevard, where the notorious Robert Taylor public housing projects once stood, almost no envelopes were mailed; in others researchers received more than half of the letters back. Income levels did not necessarily explain the difference, Professor Sampson said, but rather the community’s cultural norms, the levels of moral cynicism and disorder.
The shared perception of a neighborhood — is it on the rise or stagnant? — does a better job of predicting a community’s future than the actual level of poverty, he said.
William Julius Wilson, whose pioneering work boldly confronted ghetto life while focusing on economic explanations for persistent poverty, defines culture as the way “individuals in a community develop an understanding of how the world works and make decisions based on that understanding.”
For some young black men, Professor Wilson, a Harvard sociologist, said, the world works like this: “If you don’t develop a tough demeanor, you won’t survive. If you have access to weapons, you get them, and if you get into a fight, you have to use them.”
Seeking to recapture the topic from economists, sociologists have ventured into poor neighborhoods to delve deeper into the attitudes of residents. Their results have challenged some common assumptions, like the belief that poor mothers remain single because they don’t value marriage.
Enlarge This Image
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
A Chicago mother and child in 1997 at the notorious Robert Taylor Homes, since demolished.
In Philadelphia, for example, low-income mothers told the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas that they thought marriage was profoundly important, even sacred, but doubted that their partners were “marriage material.” Their results have prompted some lawmakers and poverty experts to conclude that programs that promote marriage without changing economic and social conditions are unlikely to work.
Mario Luis Small, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and an editor of The Annals’ special issue, tried to figure out why some New York City mothers with children in day care developed networks of support while others did not. As he explained in his 2009 book, “Unanticipated Gains,” the answer did not depend on income or ethnicity, but rather the rules of the day-care institution. Centers that held frequent field trips, organized parents’ associations and had pick-up and drop-off procedures created more opportunities for parents to connect.
Younger academics like Professor Small, 35, attributed the upswing in cultural explanations to a “new generation of scholars without the baggage of that debate.”
Scholars like Professor Wilson, 74, who have tilled the field much longer, mentioned the development of more sophisticated data and analytical tools. He said he felt compelled to look more closely at culture after the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which attributed African-Americans’ lower I.Q. scores to genetics.
The authors claimed to have taken family background into account, Professor Wilson said, but “they had not captured the cumulative effects of living in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods.”
He added, “I realized we needed a comprehensive measure of the environment, that we must consider structural and cultural forces.”
He mentioned a study by Professor Sampson, 54, that found that growing up in areas where violence limits socializing outside the family and where parents haven’t attended college stunts verbal ability, lowering I.Q. scores by as much as six points, the equivalent of missing more than a year in school.
Changes outside campuses have made conversation about the cultural roots of poverty easier than it was in the ’60s. Divorce, living together without marrying, and single motherhood are now commonplace. At the same time prominent African-Americans have begun to speak out on the subject. In 2004 the comedian Bill Cosby made headlines when he criticized poor blacks for “not parenting” and dropping out of school. President Obama, who was abandoned by his father, has repeatedly talked about “responsible fatherhood.”
Conservatives also deserve credit, said Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, for their sustained focus on family values and marriage even when cultural explanations were disparaged.
Still, worries about blaming the victim persist. Policy makers and the public still tend to view poverty through one of two competing lenses, Michèle Lamont, another editor of the special issue of The Annals, said: “Are the poor poor because they are lazy, or are the poor poor because they are a victim of the markets?”
So even now some sociologists avoid words like “values” and “morals” or reject the idea that, as The Annals put it, “a group’s culture is more or less coherent.” Watered-down definitions of culture, Ms. Hymowitz complained, reduce some of the new work to “sociological pablum.”
“If anthropologists had come away from doing field work in New Guinea concluding ‘everyone’s different,’ but sometimes people help each other out,” she wrote in an e-mail, “there would be no field of anthropology — and no word culture for cultural sociologists to bend to their will.”
Fuzzy definitions or not, culture is back. This prompted mock surprise from Rep. Woolsey at last spring’s Congressional briefing: “What a concept. Values, norms, beliefs play very important roles in the way people meet the challenges of poverty.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
EthicalDemocracy
NYC
October 18th, 2010
11:22 am
\"Culture\" of Poverty? Corrupt POWER is Missing from this Equation
Ever since Oscar Lewis used the now (in)famous phrase, anthropology students, social justice activists, economists and of course politicians have been debating how culture and poverty have became conflated.
I think the missing part of this critical social equation is POWER and its obverse, Disempowerment.
It is directly harmful to POOR PEOPLE (yes, Poverty is all about PEOPLE, haves and havenots)to construe these POOR PEOPLE as sharing a Culture of Poverty. To merely say, like Harvard's Sampson, quoted above in your article, that culture is merely shared understandings is to conceal the role of POWER in the construction of the concept of Poverty.
Let me cite a personal example:
This summer, while I was volunteering in the Kashmir Valley, I spoke at a large meeting of career bureaucrats, clerics, politicians, on the topic of feminization of poverty in the Valley. I was in the process of trying to get govt. agencies to release goats to psychiatrically ill women, because these women has ASKED for GOATS, so they could earn their livelihood. These women understood perfectly they were sick BECAUSE they were POOR.
A henna-bearded Hajj-returned, indubitably devout and very sincere academician turned to me and then stated to the gathering \"Madam is right. Poverty is a curse.\"
I said \"Sir, I did not say that. I said Poverty is a CRIME committed by the government against its people.\"
You could have heard a pin drop. All the power-holders in the room kept silent.
I was never invited to speak again!
Poverty and Power are inextricably conflated. \"Culture\" is a misleading term, when applied to human rights and the right NOT to be poor is a human right.
Dr. Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
==========================================
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html?scp=1&sq=culture%20of%20poverty&st=cse
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html?sort=newest
‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback
William C. Eckenberg/The New York Times
[Picture]A vacant lot on East 110th Street in New York in 1952: the study of urban blight has long been influenced by political fashions.
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: October 17, 2010
For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.
Enlarge This Image
George Tames/The New York Times
Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his office at Harvard in 1971.
The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.
Moynihan’s analysis never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers, whose arguments ultimately succeeded when President Bill Clinton signed a bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.” But in the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned.
Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.
“We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned.
The old debate has shaped the new. Last month Princeton and the Brookings Institution released a collection of papers on unmarried parents, a subject, it noted, that became off-limits after the Moynihan report. At the recent annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, attendees discussed the resurgence of scholarship on culture. And in Washington last spring, social scientists participated in a Congressional briefing on culture and poverty linked to a special issue of The Annals, the journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
“Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.
The topic has generated interest on Capitol Hill because so much of the research intersects with policy debates. Views of the cultural roots of poverty “play important roles in shaping how lawmakers choose to address poverty issues,” Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, noted at the briefing.
This surge of academic research also comes as the percentage of Americans living in poverty hit a 15-year high: one in seven, or 44 million.
With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture, but they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects: Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.
To Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, culture is best understood as “shared understandings.”
“I study inequality, and the dominant focus is on structures of poverty,” he said. But he added that the reason a neighborhood turns into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,” believing that “laws were made to be broken”?
As part of a large research project in Chicago, Professor Sampson walked through different neighborhoods this summer, dropping stamped, addressed envelopes to see how many people would pick up an apparently lost letter and mail it, a sign that looking out for others is part of the community’s culture.
In some neighborhoods, like Grand Boulevard, where the notorious Robert Taylor public housing projects once stood, almost no envelopes were mailed; in others researchers received more than half of the letters back. Income levels did not necessarily explain the difference, Professor Sampson said, but rather the community’s cultural norms, the levels of moral cynicism and disorder.
The shared perception of a neighborhood — is it on the rise or stagnant? — does a better job of predicting a community’s future than the actual level of poverty, he said.
William Julius Wilson, whose pioneering work boldly confronted ghetto life while focusing on economic explanations for persistent poverty, defines culture as the way “individuals in a community develop an understanding of how the world works and make decisions based on that understanding.”
For some young black men, Professor Wilson, a Harvard sociologist, said, the world works like this: “If you don’t develop a tough demeanor, you won’t survive. If you have access to weapons, you get them, and if you get into a fight, you have to use them.”
Seeking to recapture the topic from economists, sociologists have ventured into poor neighborhoods to delve deeper into the attitudes of residents. Their results have challenged some common assumptions, like the belief that poor mothers remain single because they don’t value marriage.
Enlarge This Image
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
A Chicago mother and child in 1997 at the notorious Robert Taylor Homes, since demolished.
In Philadelphia, for example, low-income mothers told the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas that they thought marriage was profoundly important, even sacred, but doubted that their partners were “marriage material.” Their results have prompted some lawmakers and poverty experts to conclude that programs that promote marriage without changing economic and social conditions are unlikely to work.
Mario Luis Small, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and an editor of The Annals’ special issue, tried to figure out why some New York City mothers with children in day care developed networks of support while others did not. As he explained in his 2009 book, “Unanticipated Gains,” the answer did not depend on income or ethnicity, but rather the rules of the day-care institution. Centers that held frequent field trips, organized parents’ associations and had pick-up and drop-off procedures created more opportunities for parents to connect.
Younger academics like Professor Small, 35, attributed the upswing in cultural explanations to a “new generation of scholars without the baggage of that debate.”
Scholars like Professor Wilson, 74, who have tilled the field much longer, mentioned the development of more sophisticated data and analytical tools. He said he felt compelled to look more closely at culture after the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which attributed African-Americans’ lower I.Q. scores to genetics.
The authors claimed to have taken family background into account, Professor Wilson said, but “they had not captured the cumulative effects of living in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods.”
He added, “I realized we needed a comprehensive measure of the environment, that we must consider structural and cultural forces.”
He mentioned a study by Professor Sampson, 54, that found that growing up in areas where violence limits socializing outside the family and where parents haven’t attended college stunts verbal ability, lowering I.Q. scores by as much as six points, the equivalent of missing more than a year in school.
Changes outside campuses have made conversation about the cultural roots of poverty easier than it was in the ’60s. Divorce, living together without marrying, and single motherhood are now commonplace. At the same time prominent African-Americans have begun to speak out on the subject. In 2004 the comedian Bill Cosby made headlines when he criticized poor blacks for “not parenting” and dropping out of school. President Obama, who was abandoned by his father, has repeatedly talked about “responsible fatherhood.”
Conservatives also deserve credit, said Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, for their sustained focus on family values and marriage even when cultural explanations were disparaged.
Still, worries about blaming the victim persist. Policy makers and the public still tend to view poverty through one of two competing lenses, Michèle Lamont, another editor of the special issue of The Annals, said: “Are the poor poor because they are lazy, or are the poor poor because they are a victim of the markets?”
So even now some sociologists avoid words like “values” and “morals” or reject the idea that, as The Annals put it, “a group’s culture is more or less coherent.” Watered-down definitions of culture, Ms. Hymowitz complained, reduce some of the new work to “sociological pablum.”
“If anthropologists had come away from doing field work in New Guinea concluding ‘everyone’s different,’ but sometimes people help each other out,” she wrote in an e-mail, “there would be no field of anthropology — and no word culture for cultural sociologists to bend to their will.”
Fuzzy definitions or not, culture is back. This prompted mock surprise from Rep. Woolsey at last spring’s Congressional briefing: “What a concept. Values, norms, beliefs play very important roles in the way people meet the challenges of poverty.”
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Saturday, October 16, 2010
Why Neither India nor Pak can Trust the US: The Headley Instance
Q. Why was the India Gov so wretchedly uninformed?
Q. Why has India, the world's largest democracy not positioned itself to take cognizance of US-Pak intelligence-gathering and collusion in cross-border terrorism?
See my additional comments [ ] within the text of this NYTimes article, still working on it.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------
NYTimes copyright
U.S. Had Warnings on Plotter of Mumbai Attack
David Guttenfelder/Associated Press
Indian soldiers fought terrorists at the Taj Mahal Hotel in 2008.
By JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and GINGER THOMPSON
Published: October 16, 2010
This article is by Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt and Ginger Thompson.
Enlarge This Image
Verna Sadock/Associated Press
David Headley in federal court in Chicago in 2009. In March, he pleaded guilty to helping plan the 2008 attacks on Mumbai.
Less than a year before terrorists killed at least 163 people in Mumbai, India, a young Moroccan woman went to American authorities in Pakistan to warn them that she believed her husband, David Headley, was plotting just such an attack.[What did the US do?]
It was not the first time American law enforcement authorities were warned about Mr. Headley, a longtime informer in Pakistan for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration whose roots in Pakistan and the United States allowed him to move easily in both worlds.
Two years earlier, in 2005, an American woman who was also married to the 50-year-old Mr. Headley told federal investigators in New York that she believed that he was a member of the militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, created and sponsored by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency.[What did the US do?]
Despite those warnings by two of his three wives Mr. Headley roamed far and wide on Lashkar’s behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving small arms and counter surveillance training, scouting targets for attack, and building a network of connections that extended from Chicago to Pakistan’s lawless frontier.
Then in 2008, it was his handiwork as chief reconnaissance scout that set the stage for Lashkar’s strike against Mumbai, an assault intended to provoke a conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, Pakistan and India.
It is unclear what United States officials did with the warnings they had gotten about Mr. Headley — who has pleaded guilty to the crimes and is cooperating with authorities — or whether they saw them as complaints from wives whose motives might be colored by their strained relations with their husband.
A senior administration official said Saturday, “We took the information, passed it around to the relevant agencies, and what came back was that the F.B.I. had a file on Headley, but it didn’t link him to terrorism.”[Example of continuing turf war between FBI and CIA. Who benefits? ISI]
Mr. Headley’s ability to hide for years in plain sight has rekindled concerns that the Mumbai bombings are another instance of a communications breakdown among the agencies involved in combating terrorism, much like the enormous intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
It also raises the question of whether United States officials were reluctant to dig deeper into Mr. Headley’s movements because he had been an informant for the D.E.A.[ ] More significantly, it may provide another instance of American reluctance to pursue evidence that some officials in Pakistan, its major ally in the war against Al Qaeda, were involved in planning an attack that killed six Americans.[the US neo-imperial project wqwhether in Iraq or Palestine or South Asia, is impervious to ethical geopolitical considerations]
The Pakistani government has insisted that its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, a close partner of the C.I.A., did not know of the attack. The United States says it has no evidence to counter this, though officials acknowledge that some current or retired ISI officers probably played some role.[ ]
State Department officials and the F.B.I. said that they investigated the warnings they received about Mr. Headley, but that they could not confirm any connections between him and Lashkar-e-Taiba. And D.E.A. officials said they ended their association with him at the end of 2001, at least two months before Mr. Headley reportedly attended his first terrorist training.
The investigative news organization ProPublica reported the 2005 warning from Mr. Headley’s American ex-wife on its Web site and in the Saturday issue of The Washington Post. By ProPublica’s account, she told authorities that Mr. Headley boasted about working as an American informant while he trained with Lashkar. According to that report, she gave authorities audio cassettes and ideological material, and described e-mails she believed he exchanged with extremists.
But she was not the only one to come forward. An examination of Mr. Headley’s movements shows that United States authorities also heard from his Moroccan wife that he was involved in a terrorist group that was actively plotting against targets in India. Beyond these warnings, interviews illustrate his longstanding connections to American law enforcement and the ISI.
Among the findings:
¶ An officer of the Pakistani spy agency handed Mr. Headley $25,000 in early 2006 to open an office and set up a house in Mumbai to be used as a front during his scouting trips, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to Indian investigators in Chicago in June.[ ]
¶ The ISI officer who gave Mr. Headley the cash, known as Maj. Iqbal, served as the supervisor of Lashkar’s planning, helping to arrange a communications system for the attack, and overseeing a model of the Taj Mahal Hotel, so that gunmen could find their way around, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to the Indians.
¶ While working for Lashkar, which has close ties to the ISI, Mr. Headley was also enlisted by the Pakistani spy agency to recruit Indian agents to monitor Indian troop levels and movements, an American official said.[ ]
Mr. Headley was well known both to Pakistani and American security officials long before his arrest as a terrorist. He went to an elite military high school in Pakistan, whose graduates went on to become high-ranking military officers and intelligence operatives. After arrests in 1988 and 1997 on drug-trafficking charges, Mr. Headley became such a valued D.E.A. informant that the drug agency sent him back and forth between Pakistan and the United States.[Yet another example of the US agencies' turf war, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing]
Q. Why has India, the world's largest democracy not positioned itself to take cognizance of US-Pak intelligence-gathering and collusion in cross-border terrorism?
See my additional comments [ ] within the text of this NYTimes article, still working on it.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------
NYTimes copyright
U.S. Had Warnings on Plotter of Mumbai Attack
David Guttenfelder/Associated Press
Indian soldiers fought terrorists at the Taj Mahal Hotel in 2008.
By JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and GINGER THOMPSON
Published: October 16, 2010
This article is by Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt and Ginger Thompson.
Enlarge This Image
Verna Sadock/Associated Press
David Headley in federal court in Chicago in 2009. In March, he pleaded guilty to helping plan the 2008 attacks on Mumbai.
Less than a year before terrorists killed at least 163 people in Mumbai, India, a young Moroccan woman went to American authorities in Pakistan to warn them that she believed her husband, David Headley, was plotting just such an attack.[What did the US do?]
It was not the first time American law enforcement authorities were warned about Mr. Headley, a longtime informer in Pakistan for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration whose roots in Pakistan and the United States allowed him to move easily in both worlds.
Two years earlier, in 2005, an American woman who was also married to the 50-year-old Mr. Headley told federal investigators in New York that she believed that he was a member of the militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, created and sponsored by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency.[What did the US do?]
Despite those warnings by two of his three wives Mr. Headley roamed far and wide on Lashkar’s behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving small arms and counter surveillance training, scouting targets for attack, and building a network of connections that extended from Chicago to Pakistan’s lawless frontier.
Then in 2008, it was his handiwork as chief reconnaissance scout that set the stage for Lashkar’s strike against Mumbai, an assault intended to provoke a conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, Pakistan and India.
It is unclear what United States officials did with the warnings they had gotten about Mr. Headley — who has pleaded guilty to the crimes and is cooperating with authorities — or whether they saw them as complaints from wives whose motives might be colored by their strained relations with their husband.
A senior administration official said Saturday, “We took the information, passed it around to the relevant agencies, and what came back was that the F.B.I. had a file on Headley, but it didn’t link him to terrorism.”[Example of continuing turf war between FBI and CIA. Who benefits? ISI]
Mr. Headley’s ability to hide for years in plain sight has rekindled concerns that the Mumbai bombings are another instance of a communications breakdown among the agencies involved in combating terrorism, much like the enormous intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
It also raises the question of whether United States officials were reluctant to dig deeper into Mr. Headley’s movements because he had been an informant for the D.E.A.[ ] More significantly, it may provide another instance of American reluctance to pursue evidence that some officials in Pakistan, its major ally in the war against Al Qaeda, were involved in planning an attack that killed six Americans.[the US neo-imperial project wqwhether in Iraq or Palestine or South Asia, is impervious to ethical geopolitical considerations]
The Pakistani government has insisted that its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, a close partner of the C.I.A., did not know of the attack. The United States says it has no evidence to counter this, though officials acknowledge that some current or retired ISI officers probably played some role.[ ]
State Department officials and the F.B.I. said that they investigated the warnings they received about Mr. Headley, but that they could not confirm any connections between him and Lashkar-e-Taiba. And D.E.A. officials said they ended their association with him at the end of 2001, at least two months before Mr. Headley reportedly attended his first terrorist training.
The investigative news organization ProPublica reported the 2005 warning from Mr. Headley’s American ex-wife on its Web site and in the Saturday issue of The Washington Post. By ProPublica’s account, she told authorities that Mr. Headley boasted about working as an American informant while he trained with Lashkar. According to that report, she gave authorities audio cassettes and ideological material, and described e-mails she believed he exchanged with extremists.
But she was not the only one to come forward. An examination of Mr. Headley’s movements shows that United States authorities also heard from his Moroccan wife that he was involved in a terrorist group that was actively plotting against targets in India. Beyond these warnings, interviews illustrate his longstanding connections to American law enforcement and the ISI.
Among the findings:
¶ An officer of the Pakistani spy agency handed Mr. Headley $25,000 in early 2006 to open an office and set up a house in Mumbai to be used as a front during his scouting trips, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to Indian investigators in Chicago in June.[ ]
¶ The ISI officer who gave Mr. Headley the cash, known as Maj. Iqbal, served as the supervisor of Lashkar’s planning, helping to arrange a communications system for the attack, and overseeing a model of the Taj Mahal Hotel, so that gunmen could find their way around, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to the Indians.
¶ While working for Lashkar, which has close ties to the ISI, Mr. Headley was also enlisted by the Pakistani spy agency to recruit Indian agents to monitor Indian troop levels and movements, an American official said.[ ]
Mr. Headley was well known both to Pakistani and American security officials long before his arrest as a terrorist. He went to an elite military high school in Pakistan, whose graduates went on to become high-ranking military officers and intelligence operatives. After arrests in 1988 and 1997 on drug-trafficking charges, Mr. Headley became such a valued D.E.A. informant that the drug agency sent him back and forth between Pakistan and the United States.[Yet another example of the US agencies' turf war, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing]
Saturday, October 9, 2010
1586 NOT 1947
1586 not 1947
In 1586 NOT 1947 Kashmir Became part of Mughal India. A Date we can ALL be Proud of
Critical Readers of Subcontinental and Global South history know that the British colonial Divide and Rule strategy grievously harmed aam janta interests everywhere in Africa and Asia.
On our own subcontinent, Muslims and Hindus, Buddhists and Christians, Sikhs and Jains, adivasis and other indigenous peoples, had lived with a reasonable measure of peaceful co-existence and prosperity for several millennia.
The British imperial project changed all that. The British played Divide and Rule in EVERY region of the subcontinent,. The Instrument of Accession is just one more British divisive invention (like Lord Curzon's disastrous Partition of Bengal in 1905) to fabricate an artificial disconnect between Kashmir and the rest of India.
Jinnah fell for Britain's Divide and Rule strategy. Jinnah managed to do what even the British failed to do -- Jinnah separated Muslims from Muslims -- just as Geelani is trying to do now.
Pakistan is the tragic product of such painful and unnecessary division -- and the results can be read every day in the newspapers, seen online and on TV. Pakistan for 60+ years has fallen victim to US neo-imperial strategy, after the geopolitical power vacuum created by the departure of the Brits. As contemporary events have shown, Pakistan has jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.
If Kashmiris follow the Valley Warlord and his criminal calendar of enforced unrest, loss of education and employment, Kashmir will predictably see the same conclusion as Pakistan.
In 1586, the greatest of the Mughals, India's foremost secularist Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, the pioneer of open-court philosophical and strategic discourse, sent Hindu generals to overthrow an upstart Turki ruler of Kashmir. Akbar annexed Kashmir and made Kashmir part of Mughal India.
Q. Do Kashmiris want to fall victim to the Divide and Rule legacy of the British?
Q. Do Kashmiris want to embrace our shared history under Akbar the Great?
1586 not 1947.
Dr. Chithra Karunakaran
City University of New York (CUNY)
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
===============================================
Rising Kashmir copyrighted article
JK India’s integral part: Congress
Agencies
New Delhi: Congress Friday said Kashmir is an integral part of India and that the question of merger of the state with India was decided on October 26, 1947.
''The question of the merger of Jammu and Kashmir with India was decided on October 26, 1947 when late Maharaja Hari Singh
had announced accession of the entire state with the country, including parts of the state under the illegal occupation by Pakistan,'' Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari told reporters here, apparently in reference to the speech by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly.
He, however, did not make any comment on Omar.
''From the time of the first Prime Minister late Jawaharlal Nehru to the present Manmohan Singh, the Congress has believed that Kashmir is an integral part of India,'' Tiwari said.
In reply to a question, he said the situation in Jammu and Kashmir had improved.
''It is the duty of all national parties and parties in the state to make responsible statements about Jammu and Kashmir to help improve the situation,'' he added.
In 1586 NOT 1947 Kashmir Became part of Mughal India. A Date we can ALL be Proud of
Critical Readers of Subcontinental and Global South history know that the British colonial Divide and Rule strategy grievously harmed aam janta interests everywhere in Africa and Asia.
On our own subcontinent, Muslims and Hindus, Buddhists and Christians, Sikhs and Jains, adivasis and other indigenous peoples, had lived with a reasonable measure of peaceful co-existence and prosperity for several millennia.
The British imperial project changed all that. The British played Divide and Rule in EVERY region of the subcontinent,. The Instrument of Accession is just one more British divisive invention (like Lord Curzon's disastrous Partition of Bengal in 1905) to fabricate an artificial disconnect between Kashmir and the rest of India.
Jinnah fell for Britain's Divide and Rule strategy. Jinnah managed to do what even the British failed to do -- Jinnah separated Muslims from Muslims -- just as Geelani is trying to do now.
Pakistan is the tragic product of such painful and unnecessary division -- and the results can be read every day in the newspapers, seen online and on TV. Pakistan for 60+ years has fallen victim to US neo-imperial strategy, after the geopolitical power vacuum created by the departure of the Brits. As contemporary events have shown, Pakistan has jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.
If Kashmiris follow the Valley Warlord and his criminal calendar of enforced unrest, loss of education and employment, Kashmir will predictably see the same conclusion as Pakistan.
In 1586, the greatest of the Mughals, India's foremost secularist Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, the pioneer of open-court philosophical and strategic discourse, sent Hindu generals to overthrow an upstart Turki ruler of Kashmir. Akbar annexed Kashmir and made Kashmir part of Mughal India.
Q. Do Kashmiris want to fall victim to the Divide and Rule legacy of the British?
Q. Do Kashmiris want to embrace our shared history under Akbar the Great?
1586 not 1947.
Dr. Chithra Karunakaran
City University of New York (CUNY)
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
===============================================
Rising Kashmir copyrighted article
JK India’s integral part: Congress
Agencies
New Delhi: Congress Friday said Kashmir is an integral part of India and that the question of merger of the state with India was decided on October 26, 1947.
''The question of the merger of Jammu and Kashmir with India was decided on October 26, 1947 when late Maharaja Hari Singh
had announced accession of the entire state with the country, including parts of the state under the illegal occupation by Pakistan,'' Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari told reporters here, apparently in reference to the speech by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly.
He, however, did not make any comment on Omar.
''From the time of the first Prime Minister late Jawaharlal Nehru to the present Manmohan Singh, the Congress has believed that Kashmir is an integral part of India,'' Tiwari said.
In reply to a question, he said the situation in Jammu and Kashmir had improved.
''It is the duty of all national parties and parties in the state to make responsible statements about Jammu and Kashmir to help improve the situation,'' he added.
Monday, October 4, 2010
US Midterm Elections Impact Kashmir?
According to a news report from Srinagar, Kashmir, India, Obama has sent two Indian-origin US envoys to Kashmir, from the US Embassy in New Delhi.
The envoys met the JKLF leader and are slated to meet others. Pushpinder Dhillon and Kailash Jha, met the leader, preceding Obama's scheduled visit to India in November.
Wait a minute. Isn't that just around the time that the Democrats (I voted Democrat, I voted Obama/Biden), under Obama's leadership are predicted to get a swift kick in the gut during the U.S. midterm elections, Tuesday November 2? Read on.....
Any US interference in the internal affairs of Kashmir, India will be a grave mistake for the US. But the US has made catastrophic mistakes in foreign policy -- and profited by them. In this case, I don't think Obama will initiate any such direct interference. Sending his career diplomats (read bureaucrats) from the State Department to Kashmir is just a game to counter Republicans before the US midterm elections in November.
I am a US citizen. I voted for Obama in order to end the Bush administration policy in Iraq. But Obama has proven to be even worse than Bush, Obama is Bush with a more likeable, smiley face and a smooth tongue. He is still strongly preferable to Bush-style Republicans, particularly on US DOMESTIC policy which I endorse and support, but OBAMA is a flag carrier for the CIA on US FOREIGN policy.
Every US President is controlled by the CIA, just like every Pakistani leader is controlled by the ISI!
Ironical but factually correct, perhaps that is why the US has been able to exploit Pakistan so successfully for 60+ years.
Obama has initiated this action to meet Kashmiri "leaders" (he has not made any attempt to meet authentic aam Kashmiris' leaders like the J&K RTI), because this is the period of midterm elections in the US and the Democrats are going to lose seats. Obama wants to look tough to show the American people that he is as violently militaristic and as business-for-profit-driven as most of the Republican leadership in the House and in the Senate. Obama's overture to Kashmir's inexperienced, unsophisticated and factional 'leaders' is a midterm election maneuver to thwart people like Representative Dan Burton of Indiana, who is facing 5 challengers in his re-election bid in November. Burton, this week, urged Obama to intervene on Kashmir.
Does anyone really believe that a midwestern US politician cares about Kashmir? Burton and his constituents probably cannot even find Kashmir on a map!
India of course will politely say NO to Obama, about interfering in India's internal affairs. And Obama will have no option except to agree with India, because India is a sovereign state, of which Kashmir is an integral and inalienable part.
However, Obama will continue to play the US midterm election game on Kashmir, until approximately November 2, when Americans, including me, will vote.
For 60 years the US has pursued a superpower policy of INVASION, OCCUPATION, and EXPLOITATION in Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador,, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Does anyone in the Valley think the US should be flying unmanned spy drones against so-called "militants" INSIDE the territory of Pakistan and Afghanistan? How many innocent Iraqi, Pakistani and Afghan civilians has the US killed in Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan? Are they not our sisters and brothers, our friends and neighbors?
INDIA, in sharp contrast to Pakistan, has NEVER EVER allowed even ONE US/CIA soldier/spy to ever be stationed anywhere on INDIA's territory.
Poor Pakistan has been a paid political prostitute (the real PPP!) of the US since the early 1950's of the John Foster Dulles State Department. Today, Pakistan has been so exploited by the US, Pakistan has become an international source of terror. Pak is most unfortunately a client-state (read slave) of the US/CIA, its land is overrun by US/NATO troops, who are far more powerful than the J&K police and Indian army,
The US is the #1 source of international terror in Palestine, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Having lived in the US for 45 years, I can credibly say that the US, in its foreign policy, is completely focused on predatory market-driven and geopolitical imperatives to secure resources, markets and geopolitical influence.
Saudi Arabia is the main supporter of the US, supplying cheap oil to the US consumer, so that medieval Saudi princes with a sharp eye on their personal wealth, can prevent democracy and human rights for the ordinary people of Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile US consumers are happy driving their Hummers and SUVs (I use only public transportation in India, the US, everywhere, including of course the J&KSRTC, my favorite!),
With the subservience of Pakistan and connivance of Saudi Arabia, The US has now gained a foothold in South Asia so that it can control Iran and Russia for their oil and natural gas reserves.
Look at the FACTS.
Examine the EVIDENCE.
Wake up and smell the fumes of US/CIA invasion and occupation going on right now, right this minute, in South Asia.
Is that what aam janta Kashmiris need? Kashmiris deserve better than the opportunistic leaders they currently have.
They need to look more towards leaders like the J&K, RTI, we need to allow aam Kashmiris to lead themselves
Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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Rising Kashmir copyrighted article
http://www.risingkashmir.com/news/us-envoys-call-on-malik-2064.aspx
US envoys call on Malik
‘Obama should help resolve Kashmir dispute’
Ishfaq Ahmad Shah
Srinagar, Oct 03: Amid speculations of Kashmir being on the agenda of US President Barak Obama during his visit to India in November, two top US diplomats called upon Chairman Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, Muhammad Yasin Malik here on Sunday.
The two diplomats of US Embassy in New Delhi, Pushpinder Dhillion and Kailash Jha met the JKLF chief at the party headquarters. The meeting, which lasted for more than an hour, discussed several issues including the prevailing situation in the valley.
Briefing mediapersons after the meeting, Malik said he urged the diplomats to persuade Obama to use his influence over India and Pakistan to resolve Kashmir issue as per the aspirations of its people.
“I appealed the delegation that they should aware America and the world community that three Kashmiri generations have been consumed by the 63-year-old conflict and it is the duty of Obama and other world leaders to impress upon India and Pakistan to resolve the issue amicably,” he said.
Malik said he urged the delegation to recognize the transition of Kashmiri movement from violent to non-violent means.
“It was America which suggested change in our movement from violent to a non-violent mode. Now that we have changed the mode of our movement, the world community has still maintained a criminal silence,” he told the diplomats.
The JKLF chief said that if Obama and the world leaders fail to impress a resolution over Kashmir, the youth who are leading a peaceful agitation from the past four months will be forced to take up guns again.
“It is the moral and diplomatic responsibility of US to help resolve the Kashmir issue,” he added.
Meanwhile, the delegation which is on a three-day visit to the valley, is likely to hold meetings with Syed Ali Geelani and Mirwiaz Umar Farooq besides the civil society members.
As per sources, the delegation will also be meeting Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, Governor NN Vohra and other mainstream politicians.
The envoys met the JKLF leader and are slated to meet others. Pushpinder Dhillon and Kailash Jha, met the leader, preceding Obama's scheduled visit to India in November.
Wait a minute. Isn't that just around the time that the Democrats (I voted Democrat, I voted Obama/Biden), under Obama's leadership are predicted to get a swift kick in the gut during the U.S. midterm elections, Tuesday November 2? Read on.....
Any US interference in the internal affairs of Kashmir, India will be a grave mistake for the US. But the US has made catastrophic mistakes in foreign policy -- and profited by them. In this case, I don't think Obama will initiate any such direct interference. Sending his career diplomats (read bureaucrats) from the State Department to Kashmir is just a game to counter Republicans before the US midterm elections in November.
I am a US citizen. I voted for Obama in order to end the Bush administration policy in Iraq. But Obama has proven to be even worse than Bush, Obama is Bush with a more likeable, smiley face and a smooth tongue. He is still strongly preferable to Bush-style Republicans, particularly on US DOMESTIC policy which I endorse and support, but OBAMA is a flag carrier for the CIA on US FOREIGN policy.
Every US President is controlled by the CIA, just like every Pakistani leader is controlled by the ISI!
Ironical but factually correct, perhaps that is why the US has been able to exploit Pakistan so successfully for 60+ years.
Obama has initiated this action to meet Kashmiri "leaders" (he has not made any attempt to meet authentic aam Kashmiris' leaders like the J&K RTI), because this is the period of midterm elections in the US and the Democrats are going to lose seats. Obama wants to look tough to show the American people that he is as violently militaristic and as business-for-profit-driven as most of the Republican leadership in the House and in the Senate. Obama's overture to Kashmir's inexperienced, unsophisticated and factional 'leaders' is a midterm election maneuver to thwart people like Representative Dan Burton of Indiana, who is facing 5 challengers in his re-election bid in November. Burton, this week, urged Obama to intervene on Kashmir.
Does anyone really believe that a midwestern US politician cares about Kashmir? Burton and his constituents probably cannot even find Kashmir on a map!
India of course will politely say NO to Obama, about interfering in India's internal affairs. And Obama will have no option except to agree with India, because India is a sovereign state, of which Kashmir is an integral and inalienable part.
However, Obama will continue to play the US midterm election game on Kashmir, until approximately November 2, when Americans, including me, will vote.
For 60 years the US has pursued a superpower policy of INVASION, OCCUPATION, and EXPLOITATION in Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador,, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Does anyone in the Valley think the US should be flying unmanned spy drones against so-called "militants" INSIDE the territory of Pakistan and Afghanistan? How many innocent Iraqi, Pakistani and Afghan civilians has the US killed in Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan? Are they not our sisters and brothers, our friends and neighbors?
INDIA, in sharp contrast to Pakistan, has NEVER EVER allowed even ONE US/CIA soldier/spy to ever be stationed anywhere on INDIA's territory.
Poor Pakistan has been a paid political prostitute (the real PPP!) of the US since the early 1950's of the John Foster Dulles State Department. Today, Pakistan has been so exploited by the US, Pakistan has become an international source of terror. Pak is most unfortunately a client-state (read slave) of the US/CIA, its land is overrun by US/NATO troops, who are far more powerful than the J&K police and Indian army,
The US is the #1 source of international terror in Palestine, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Having lived in the US for 45 years, I can credibly say that the US, in its foreign policy, is completely focused on predatory market-driven and geopolitical imperatives to secure resources, markets and geopolitical influence.
Saudi Arabia is the main supporter of the US, supplying cheap oil to the US consumer, so that medieval Saudi princes with a sharp eye on their personal wealth, can prevent democracy and human rights for the ordinary people of Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile US consumers are happy driving their Hummers and SUVs (I use only public transportation in India, the US, everywhere, including of course the J&KSRTC, my favorite!),
With the subservience of Pakistan and connivance of Saudi Arabia, The US has now gained a foothold in South Asia so that it can control Iran and Russia for their oil and natural gas reserves.
Look at the FACTS.
Examine the EVIDENCE.
Wake up and smell the fumes of US/CIA invasion and occupation going on right now, right this minute, in South Asia.
Is that what aam janta Kashmiris need? Kashmiris deserve better than the opportunistic leaders they currently have.
They need to look more towards leaders like the J&K, RTI, we need to allow aam Kashmiris to lead themselves
Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------------------------------
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Rising Kashmir copyrighted article
http://www.risingkashmir.com/news/us-envoys-call-on-malik-2064.aspx
US envoys call on Malik
‘Obama should help resolve Kashmir dispute’
Ishfaq Ahmad Shah
Srinagar, Oct 03: Amid speculations of Kashmir being on the agenda of US President Barak Obama during his visit to India in November, two top US diplomats called upon Chairman Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, Muhammad Yasin Malik here on Sunday.
The two diplomats of US Embassy in New Delhi, Pushpinder Dhillion and Kailash Jha met the JKLF chief at the party headquarters. The meeting, which lasted for more than an hour, discussed several issues including the prevailing situation in the valley.
Briefing mediapersons after the meeting, Malik said he urged the diplomats to persuade Obama to use his influence over India and Pakistan to resolve Kashmir issue as per the aspirations of its people.
“I appealed the delegation that they should aware America and the world community that three Kashmiri generations have been consumed by the 63-year-old conflict and it is the duty of Obama and other world leaders to impress upon India and Pakistan to resolve the issue amicably,” he said.
Malik said he urged the delegation to recognize the transition of Kashmiri movement from violent to non-violent means.
“It was America which suggested change in our movement from violent to a non-violent mode. Now that we have changed the mode of our movement, the world community has still maintained a criminal silence,” he told the diplomats.
The JKLF chief said that if Obama and the world leaders fail to impress a resolution over Kashmir, the youth who are leading a peaceful agitation from the past four months will be forced to take up guns again.
“It is the moral and diplomatic responsibility of US to help resolve the Kashmir issue,” he added.
Meanwhile, the delegation which is on a three-day visit to the valley, is likely to hold meetings with Syed Ali Geelani and Mirwiaz Umar Farooq besides the civil society members.
As per sources, the delegation will also be meeting Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, Governor NN Vohra and other mainstream politicians.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Let the Games Begin: Collective Sigh of Embarrassed Relief CWG 2010!
NYTimes Comment #40.
EthicalDemocracy
NYC
October 2nd, 2010
11:18 pm
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/world/asia/03india.html
Let the Games Begin (collective sigh of embarrassed relief)
The fact is, India is finally, finally, finally ready to open the CWG Games, right on deadline.
Read the relentless, expose-bent, hard-hitting Indian media online.
India is ready. Just Barely. Finally.
So Jim Yardley's reporting is a trifle belated, understandably so.
Jim Yardley hits the nail on the head when he notes:
\"The answer, to many of those involved with the games, is that India’s political culture, if prized for its commitment to democracy, often seems unable to transcend its own dysfunction.\"
He adds:There were at least 21 governmental or quasi-governmental agencies involved in preparing for the Games, yet none were ultimately in charge, forcing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to try to personally take command as things went awry in August. Analysts say the absence of a clear line of authority translated into an absence of urgency and accountability.
Moreover, crucial figures in organizing the games had almost no experience in staging international events and were products of an insular Indian political culture where cronyism and nepotism often trump competence. End of quote.
Yardley's right.
As an Indian, I can say from lived experience (and I am in India volunteering five months every year), that almost every task/ venture/enterprise, is fraught with needless and wasteful uncertainty, delays, obstructionism, red tapism, ineptness, corruption, lack of basic hygiene in public spaces, overcrowding, etc etc, whether it's a train trip from point A to Point B, 35 km apart, or a rocket launch by ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization), or in this case the organizing of the CWG.
India Exasperates, India Endures, India Improves, Incredible India!
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------
New York Times copyrighted article by Jim Yardley and Hari Kumar
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/world/asia/03india.html
EthicalDemocracy
NYC
October 2nd, 2010
11:18 pm
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/world/asia/03india.html
Let the Games Begin (collective sigh of embarrassed relief)
The fact is, India is finally, finally, finally ready to open the CWG Games, right on deadline.
Read the relentless, expose-bent, hard-hitting Indian media online.
India is ready. Just Barely. Finally.
So Jim Yardley's reporting is a trifle belated, understandably so.
Jim Yardley hits the nail on the head when he notes:
\"The answer, to many of those involved with the games, is that India’s political culture, if prized for its commitment to democracy, often seems unable to transcend its own dysfunction.\"
He adds:There were at least 21 governmental or quasi-governmental agencies involved in preparing for the Games, yet none were ultimately in charge, forcing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to try to personally take command as things went awry in August. Analysts say the absence of a clear line of authority translated into an absence of urgency and accountability.
Moreover, crucial figures in organizing the games had almost no experience in staging international events and were products of an insular Indian political culture where cronyism and nepotism often trump competence. End of quote.
Yardley's right.
As an Indian, I can say from lived experience (and I am in India volunteering five months every year), that almost every task/ venture/enterprise, is fraught with needless and wasteful uncertainty, delays, obstructionism, red tapism, ineptness, corruption, lack of basic hygiene in public spaces, overcrowding, etc etc, whether it's a train trip from point A to Point B, 35 km apart, or a rocket launch by ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization), or in this case the organizing of the CWG.
India Exasperates, India Endures, India Improves, Incredible India!
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------
New York Times copyrighted article by Jim Yardley and Hari Kumar
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/world/asia/03india.html
The Art of the Deal: Ayodhya, Babri & the Secular Beyond
It's Gandhiji's Birthday today. Gandhi Jayanti. Mohandas was born today. Cheers and salutations.
I started this blog on Gandhiji's birthday five years ago, beginning with a street protest against Hindu right wing religionists attempting to politicize an observance of Gandhi's birthday in New York City. In all humility try to make my life my message, as Gandhiji did for the inspiration of the entire world. On this celebratory day, I quote Einstein, when he noted upon hearing of Gandhi's death -- " “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood.”
It's a great day to discuss the debate the Ayodhya/Babri verdict.
---------------
http://www.risingkashmir.com/news/babri-verdict-2008.aspx
I posted substantially this same comment (see below) on the website of the New York Times in response to an article by Jim Yardley, on the Ayodhya/Babri Allahabad High Court Verdict
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/world/asia/01india.html?scp=1&sq=babri&st=cse
EthicalDemocracy
NYC
September 30th, 2010
5:38 pm
Everybody gets something -- that's the Art of the Deal.
The Allahabad High Court has wisely, if laggardly, decided to apportion the Ayodhya/Babri site among the three contesting parties, the three direct stakeholders, so that each can have, at least part of what they sought to obtain.
The court has also shrewdly ordered a 3-month status quo, to allow the judgment to be discussed and debated locally and nationally without precipitous action by anyone.
The right to appeal the Allahabad High Court judgment to the Supreme Court is guaranteed to all three litigants in the suit.
Compromise, accommodation, equity and fairness are necessary to resolve a 600 year old blood and emotion-soaked contestation that is steeped in antiquity, myth, narrative, faith, conquest.
Is politics central to this judgment? Of course.
India now can continue, sometimes resolutely, usually stumbling, on its secular path, two steps forward -- one half-step back.
To be secular is to include, to become inclusive. To include is to become human, since we become human only through lifelong experiences as social beings.
A threatened Quran burning in the US did not make America less secular. The falling twin towers that crushed lives, dreams and exposed US neo-imperialism (non-inclusion of Palestinians as humans with full human rights, for example) in the so-called Middle East, did not make Americans, We the People, as a whole, less secular.
In India secularism is many many centuries older, more textured, more nuanced, more organic. In India, Secularism as a formal geopolitical strategy and governance ideal, begins with the greatest of the Mughals, India's foremost SECULARIST and prime architect of open-court religious discourse, Jalaluddin Mohammad Akbar. That same Akbar, in 1586, sent two Hindu Rajputs (yes there are Rajput Muslims and they bear testimony to South Asia's secular mosaic)to restive Kashmir (so, what's new!) to overthrow its Turki (Muslim) ruler. Akbar annexed Kashmir into Mughal India. Since then, no matter who has ruled Kashmir -- Dogras, Jats, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Brits -- Kashmir has been a territorially integral part of India. As it turns out, a critical reading yields the chronologically sequential fact that 1586, not 1947 is the date of Kashmir's union within India.
1586, not 1947.. A Mughal, a Muslim secured Kashmir for India! Jai Ho or something to that effect.
Jai Ho, to salute India's most recent as well as ancient tests of secularism in Kashmir and Allahabad. Extremists among Hindus and Muslims, will have a field day however, it does appear education and jobs, not faith and belief, are foremost in the minds of the polity. Secularism advances.
That's the lesson of Democracy as Lived Practice, especially secular democracy, that Democracy is an imperfect, fumbling, stumbling exercise in real time, all the while hewing to a (sometimes) unrealized ideal of freedom equality and fraternity for India's Muslims and Hindus -- and all the other faiths represented there.
Eyes on the Prize -- Secular Democracy.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
---------------
Article is the copyrighted property of the New York Times
Indian Court Divides Disputed Ayodhya Holy Site
pic by Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Hindu holy men awaiting a ruling Thursday on a site claimed by Hindus and by Muslims. More Photos »
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: September 30, 2010
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NEW DELHI — In a case that spanned centuries of religious history and languished in the legal system for six decades, an Indian court issued a historic ruling Thursday on the ownership of the country’s most disputed religious site by effectively handing down a split decision: granting part of the land to Hindus and another part to Muslims.
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Hindus and Muslims to Share Holy Site
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The Lede Blog: Indian Judges Rule on a Matter of Faith (September 30, 2010)
Rajanish Kakade/Associated Press
Indian soldiers in front of a mosque in Mumbai on Thursday after a court ruled that a disputed holy site in Ayodhya that has set off bloody communal riots across the country in the past should be divided between the Hindu and Muslim communities. More Photos »
Enlarge This Image
Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated Press
An Indian Muslim walked past security personnel in Ayodhya, India, on Thursday More Photos »
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The unorthodox decision by a three-judge panel in the state of Uttar Pradesh provided a Solomonic resolution — if one likely to be appealed to India’s Supreme Court — to a case the authorities had feared might unleash religious violence across India.
Nearly 200,000 state and federal officers were deployed across Uttar Pradesh as a precaution, as almost every major political figure in the nation, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, appealed for calm and harmony.
The case was considered especially combustible because the contested site, in the city of Ayodhya, was the scene of a searing act of religious violence in 1992 when Hindu extremists tore down an ancient mosque known as the Babri Masjid on the property. The destruction sparked riots that spilled into the following year and have been blamed for about 2,000 deaths.
Yet that violence did not repeat itself on Thursday evening, as the Indian public absorbed the ruling with a calm that leaders framed as evidence of the nation’s maturation and commitment to religious tolerance.
“I have full faith in the people of India,” Mr. Singh said in a statement issued after the decision, even as he cautioned against “mischief makers.” “I also have full confidence in the traditions of secularism, brotherhood and tolerance of our great country.”
The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., which rose to national prominence in the 1990s partly because of its advocacy of rebuilding a Hindu temple on the contested site, issued a statement Thursday praising the public’s controlled response as “a new chapter for national integration and a new era for intercommunity relations.”
“The B.J.P. is gratified that the nation has received the verdict with maturity,” the statement added.
The unexpected decision to divide the property initially suggested a political solution as much as a legal one. But Harish Salve, a former solicitor general of India, said the court had apparently based its decision on historical accounts suggesting that for centuries Hindus and Muslims had worshiped together at the site before they were segregated during British rule in the 1850s.
With this legacy, the court concluded that the entire property should be considered jointly held by Muslims and Hindus and distributed under relevant Indian property statutes, Mr. Salve said, which divide contested properties on the principle of fairness.
“It looks pretty good,” Mr. Salve said, rating the decision as “9 points out of 10.”
Under the court’s ruling, two-thirds of the land will go to Hindu groups while the remaining third will be awarded to Muslims. Lawyers for Hindus and for Muslims expressed dissatisfaction and promised to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.
“There is no reason of any loss of hope,” said Zafaryab Jilana, a lawyer representing one of the Muslim parties to the case, speaking on national television. “We do not agree with the formula of giving one-third of the land to Muslims.”
The case required the judicial panel to wade deeply into India’s contested religious history. Lawyers for Hindu groups had argued that the Ayodhya site was the birthplace of one of Hinduism’s most revered deities, Ram. They contended that a temple to Ram had existed on the site until it was demolished to make way for the Babri Masjid, constructed in the 16th century by India’s first Mughal ruler.
Soon after the judges read the decision in a closed hearing, lawyers rushed to hundreds of reporters waiting outside the courthouse in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh. “The judgment is in favor of Hindus,” said H. S. Jain, a lawyer for one of the Hindu groups in the case. “The belief of Hindus that this is the birthplace of Ram is upheld.”
But each of the three judges issued a separate opinion, diverging in interpretation of certain facts, including over whether Ram was born precisely on the contested site. Yet the court did hand a significant victory to Hindus, who had argued that Ram was born beneath the central dome of the destroyed structure. That portion of the contested property was granted to Hindus as part of their two-thirds share, presumably to erect a new temple to Ram.
The original case was filed in 1950 and then expanded over the years as more parties claimed title to the property. The Indian government now controls the property, and the court ordered that the status quo remain intact for the next three months. Assuming both sides follow through with filing appeals to the Supreme Court, the case could continue indefinitely.
The initial quiet public response was a relief to Indian officials. Earlier, Palaniappan Chidambaram, the home minister, had predicted that the public would respect the court’s finding.
“I think India has moved on, young people have moved on,” he told the Indian news media.
The oldest plaintiff, Hashim Ansari, 90, a Muslim tailor who had prayed at the Babri Masjid as a boy, said he would not take part in any appeal. He joined the case in 1961 and had looked forward to a ruling as a matter of closure. He called Thursday’s decision a good judgment and hoped that efforts could soon begin to rebuild a mosque on the land granted to Muslims.
Of course, he added, the timing will depend on appeals.
“It took 60 years to get this decision,” he said by telephone. “I do not know how many years the Supreme Court will take. At least I could hear this judgment on my own. Will I hear the Supreme Court judgment from my grave?”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 1, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition.
---------------
Times of India copyright
Muslim Religious Leaders Respond
LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh's remarks that the Muslim community felt cheated by the Ayodhya title suit verdict has evoked sharp reaction from the community leaders, who dubbed it as "unwise" to make politically motivated statements at this time.
"The atmosphere at the national level has been positive with religious leaders of both the communities, political leadership as well as the media. It would not be wise if politically motivated statements which could vitiate communal harmony are issued now," said Maulana Khalid Rasheed Firangimahli, the Naib Imam of Idgah and member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board.
He told PTI that it was heartening that "no one has so far shown immaturity... not even the Sangh Parivar and there should be restraint from now on to ensure that nothing is done which could give strength to fundamentalist forces."
He said though there is disappointment among the community over the verdict, it is in the larger interest of the country and communal harmony that restraint should be exercised.
Echoing Firangimahli's views, Maulana Mohammad Umer of Islami research institute Darul Musinnfeen termed Yadav's statement "ill-timed".
"Though he is expressing the views held by the community, the timing is not correct," Maulana Umer said.
Maulana Mohammad Mirza Athar of Shia Personal Law Board said that it was unbecoming of a senior leader like Mulayam Singh Yadav to issue such a statement at a time when everyone is trying their best to ensure peace and harmony.
"In a court case, there is bound to be one side on the losing side and after this verdict by the High Court, the option of approaching the Supreme Court or making an effort to resolve the issue through mutual understanding is still open and in this backdrop such statements are unnecessary," he said.
Noted Shia leader and member of the AIMPLB, Hamidul Hasan refused to comment on Yadav's statement, but appeal to everyone to desist from issuing statements which could hurt unity and peace of the country.
Maulana Mohammad Mushtaq of the All India Sunni Board asserted that none of the Muslim leaders have said anything adverse on the verdict.
"It is the time to ensure peace and communal harmony and an appeal in this regard was also made after the Firday prayers to not politicise the issue", Mohammad Mushtaq added.
The SP chief had yesterday said he was disappointed by the Ayodhya title suits verdict as he felt faith was given "priority" over legal procedures.
Read more: Mulayam's remark on Ayodhya verdict evokes sharp response from Muslim leaders - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6671581.cms#ixzz11DQ6kpzf
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I started this blog on Gandhiji's birthday five years ago, beginning with a street protest against Hindu right wing religionists attempting to politicize an observance of Gandhi's birthday in New York City. In all humility try to make my life my message, as Gandhiji did for the inspiration of the entire world. On this celebratory day, I quote Einstein, when he noted upon hearing of Gandhi's death -- " “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood.”
It's a great day to discuss the debate the Ayodhya/Babri verdict.
---------------
http://www.risingkashmir.com/news/babri-verdict-2008.aspx
I posted substantially this same comment (see below) on the website of the New York Times in response to an article by Jim Yardley, on the Ayodhya/Babri Allahabad High Court Verdict
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/world/asia/01india.html?scp=1&sq=babri&st=cse
EthicalDemocracy
NYC
September 30th, 2010
5:38 pm
Everybody gets something -- that's the Art of the Deal.
The Allahabad High Court has wisely, if laggardly, decided to apportion the Ayodhya/Babri site among the three contesting parties, the three direct stakeholders, so that each can have, at least part of what they sought to obtain.
The court has also shrewdly ordered a 3-month status quo, to allow the judgment to be discussed and debated locally and nationally without precipitous action by anyone.
The right to appeal the Allahabad High Court judgment to the Supreme Court is guaranteed to all three litigants in the suit.
Compromise, accommodation, equity and fairness are necessary to resolve a 600 year old blood and emotion-soaked contestation that is steeped in antiquity, myth, narrative, faith, conquest.
Is politics central to this judgment? Of course.
India now can continue, sometimes resolutely, usually stumbling, on its secular path, two steps forward -- one half-step back.
To be secular is to include, to become inclusive. To include is to become human, since we become human only through lifelong experiences as social beings.
A threatened Quran burning in the US did not make America less secular. The falling twin towers that crushed lives, dreams and exposed US neo-imperialism (non-inclusion of Palestinians as humans with full human rights, for example) in the so-called Middle East, did not make Americans, We the People, as a whole, less secular.
In India secularism is many many centuries older, more textured, more nuanced, more organic. In India, Secularism as a formal geopolitical strategy and governance ideal, begins with the greatest of the Mughals, India's foremost SECULARIST and prime architect of open-court religious discourse, Jalaluddin Mohammad Akbar. That same Akbar, in 1586, sent two Hindu Rajputs (yes there are Rajput Muslims and they bear testimony to South Asia's secular mosaic)to restive Kashmir (so, what's new!) to overthrow its Turki (Muslim) ruler. Akbar annexed Kashmir into Mughal India. Since then, no matter who has ruled Kashmir -- Dogras, Jats, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Brits -- Kashmir has been a territorially integral part of India. As it turns out, a critical reading yields the chronologically sequential fact that 1586, not 1947 is the date of Kashmir's union within India.
1586, not 1947.. A Mughal, a Muslim secured Kashmir for India! Jai Ho or something to that effect.
Jai Ho, to salute India's most recent as well as ancient tests of secularism in Kashmir and Allahabad. Extremists among Hindus and Muslims, will have a field day however, it does appear education and jobs, not faith and belief, are foremost in the minds of the polity. Secularism advances.
That's the lesson of Democracy as Lived Practice, especially secular democracy, that Democracy is an imperfect, fumbling, stumbling exercise in real time, all the while hewing to a (sometimes) unrealized ideal of freedom equality and fraternity for India's Muslims and Hindus -- and all the other faiths represented there.
Eyes on the Prize -- Secular Democracy.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
---------------
Article is the copyrighted property of the New York Times
Indian Court Divides Disputed Ayodhya Holy Site
pic by Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Hindu holy men awaiting a ruling Thursday on a site claimed by Hindus and by Muslims. More Photos »
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: September 30, 2010
* Recommend
* comments (230)
*
* Send To Phone
*
Reprints
* ShareClose
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NEW DELHI — In a case that spanned centuries of religious history and languished in the legal system for six decades, an Indian court issued a historic ruling Thursday on the ownership of the country’s most disputed religious site by effectively handing down a split decision: granting part of the land to Hindus and another part to Muslims.
Multimedia
Slide Show
Hindus and Muslims to Share Holy Site
Related
*
The Lede Blog: Indian Judges Rule on a Matter of Faith (September 30, 2010)
Rajanish Kakade/Associated Press
Indian soldiers in front of a mosque in Mumbai on Thursday after a court ruled that a disputed holy site in Ayodhya that has set off bloody communal riots across the country in the past should be divided between the Hindu and Muslim communities. More Photos »
Enlarge This Image
Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated Press
An Indian Muslim walked past security personnel in Ayodhya, India, on Thursday More Photos »
Readers' Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
* Read All Comments (230) »
The unorthodox decision by a three-judge panel in the state of Uttar Pradesh provided a Solomonic resolution — if one likely to be appealed to India’s Supreme Court — to a case the authorities had feared might unleash religious violence across India.
Nearly 200,000 state and federal officers were deployed across Uttar Pradesh as a precaution, as almost every major political figure in the nation, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, appealed for calm and harmony.
The case was considered especially combustible because the contested site, in the city of Ayodhya, was the scene of a searing act of religious violence in 1992 when Hindu extremists tore down an ancient mosque known as the Babri Masjid on the property. The destruction sparked riots that spilled into the following year and have been blamed for about 2,000 deaths.
Yet that violence did not repeat itself on Thursday evening, as the Indian public absorbed the ruling with a calm that leaders framed as evidence of the nation’s maturation and commitment to religious tolerance.
“I have full faith in the people of India,” Mr. Singh said in a statement issued after the decision, even as he cautioned against “mischief makers.” “I also have full confidence in the traditions of secularism, brotherhood and tolerance of our great country.”
The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., which rose to national prominence in the 1990s partly because of its advocacy of rebuilding a Hindu temple on the contested site, issued a statement Thursday praising the public’s controlled response as “a new chapter for national integration and a new era for intercommunity relations.”
“The B.J.P. is gratified that the nation has received the verdict with maturity,” the statement added.
The unexpected decision to divide the property initially suggested a political solution as much as a legal one. But Harish Salve, a former solicitor general of India, said the court had apparently based its decision on historical accounts suggesting that for centuries Hindus and Muslims had worshiped together at the site before they were segregated during British rule in the 1850s.
With this legacy, the court concluded that the entire property should be considered jointly held by Muslims and Hindus and distributed under relevant Indian property statutes, Mr. Salve said, which divide contested properties on the principle of fairness.
“It looks pretty good,” Mr. Salve said, rating the decision as “9 points out of 10.”
Under the court’s ruling, two-thirds of the land will go to Hindu groups while the remaining third will be awarded to Muslims. Lawyers for Hindus and for Muslims expressed dissatisfaction and promised to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.
“There is no reason of any loss of hope,” said Zafaryab Jilana, a lawyer representing one of the Muslim parties to the case, speaking on national television. “We do not agree with the formula of giving one-third of the land to Muslims.”
The case required the judicial panel to wade deeply into India’s contested religious history. Lawyers for Hindu groups had argued that the Ayodhya site was the birthplace of one of Hinduism’s most revered deities, Ram. They contended that a temple to Ram had existed on the site until it was demolished to make way for the Babri Masjid, constructed in the 16th century by India’s first Mughal ruler.
Soon after the judges read the decision in a closed hearing, lawyers rushed to hundreds of reporters waiting outside the courthouse in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh. “The judgment is in favor of Hindus,” said H. S. Jain, a lawyer for one of the Hindu groups in the case. “The belief of Hindus that this is the birthplace of Ram is upheld.”
But each of the three judges issued a separate opinion, diverging in interpretation of certain facts, including over whether Ram was born precisely on the contested site. Yet the court did hand a significant victory to Hindus, who had argued that Ram was born beneath the central dome of the destroyed structure. That portion of the contested property was granted to Hindus as part of their two-thirds share, presumably to erect a new temple to Ram.
The original case was filed in 1950 and then expanded over the years as more parties claimed title to the property. The Indian government now controls the property, and the court ordered that the status quo remain intact for the next three months. Assuming both sides follow through with filing appeals to the Supreme Court, the case could continue indefinitely.
The initial quiet public response was a relief to Indian officials. Earlier, Palaniappan Chidambaram, the home minister, had predicted that the public would respect the court’s finding.
“I think India has moved on, young people have moved on,” he told the Indian news media.
The oldest plaintiff, Hashim Ansari, 90, a Muslim tailor who had prayed at the Babri Masjid as a boy, said he would not take part in any appeal. He joined the case in 1961 and had looked forward to a ruling as a matter of closure. He called Thursday’s decision a good judgment and hoped that efforts could soon begin to rebuild a mosque on the land granted to Muslims.
Of course, he added, the timing will depend on appeals.
“It took 60 years to get this decision,” he said by telephone. “I do not know how many years the Supreme Court will take. At least I could hear this judgment on my own. Will I hear the Supreme Court judgment from my grave?”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 1, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition.
---------------
Times of India copyright
Muslim Religious Leaders Respond
LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh's remarks that the Muslim community felt cheated by the Ayodhya title suit verdict has evoked sharp reaction from the community leaders, who dubbed it as "unwise" to make politically motivated statements at this time.
"The atmosphere at the national level has been positive with religious leaders of both the communities, political leadership as well as the media. It would not be wise if politically motivated statements which could vitiate communal harmony are issued now," said Maulana Khalid Rasheed Firangimahli, the Naib Imam of Idgah and member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board.
He told PTI that it was heartening that "no one has so far shown immaturity... not even the Sangh Parivar and there should be restraint from now on to ensure that nothing is done which could give strength to fundamentalist forces."
He said though there is disappointment among the community over the verdict, it is in the larger interest of the country and communal harmony that restraint should be exercised.
Echoing Firangimahli's views, Maulana Mohammad Umer of Islami research institute Darul Musinnfeen termed Yadav's statement "ill-timed".
"Though he is expressing the views held by the community, the timing is not correct," Maulana Umer said.
Maulana Mohammad Mirza Athar of Shia Personal Law Board said that it was unbecoming of a senior leader like Mulayam Singh Yadav to issue such a statement at a time when everyone is trying their best to ensure peace and harmony.
"In a court case, there is bound to be one side on the losing side and after this verdict by the High Court, the option of approaching the Supreme Court or making an effort to resolve the issue through mutual understanding is still open and in this backdrop such statements are unnecessary," he said.
Noted Shia leader and member of the AIMPLB, Hamidul Hasan refused to comment on Yadav's statement, but appeal to everyone to desist from issuing statements which could hurt unity and peace of the country.
Maulana Mohammad Mushtaq of the All India Sunni Board asserted that none of the Muslim leaders have said anything adverse on the verdict.
"It is the time to ensure peace and communal harmony and an appeal in this regard was also made after the Firday prayers to not politicise the issue", Mohammad Mushtaq added.
The SP chief had yesterday said he was disappointed by the Ayodhya title suits verdict as he felt faith was given "priority" over legal procedures.
Read more: Mulayam's remark on Ayodhya verdict evokes sharp response from Muslim leaders - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6671581.cms#ixzz11DQ6kpzf
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Thursday, May 13, 2010
Democracy, Diversity & The Public Sphere: Practising Citizenship in New York City
I am fortunate today, on my birthday no less, to actively participate in a lesson in Democracy, Diversity and how to participate in the Public Sphere, upon which the 2 D's mentioned here, are dependent.
I am taking a birthday run up to Fort Tryon in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan where I live. As I approach Fort Tryon Park I notice, aided by the dazzling spring sunlight, the thinnest line of clear picture or fishing wire strung up way, way above my head. I could easily have missed seeing it.
Flashback: Years ago I had happened to read about the practice by members of a certain Jews who "define" themselves as a community, by putting up such -- I am going to call them (note, this is my word, not theirs) -- 'encirclements'.
In any event, I approach a mini-truck carrying the NYC Parks Department decal on its door and I draw the driver's attention to the wire above. There are other persons in the Parks mini-truck.
I say "Can you see this wire?" At first they could not. So I say "Well if you step out you can see it really clearly." The driver steps out of the truck, while the other Parks employee accompanying him, leans out of her window and said "Oh yeah, now I see it."
I continue "I am not going to name the group that carries out this practice on a public road in a public area. I have nothing against this group and I have no reason to have anything against this or any other group. But I am pretty sure it is illegal for any person or group to string a wire above a public space to advance their own private beliefs."
The driver thinks a minute then says, "This is a diverse community. I am going to go right now to my supervisor and report it."
I say "NOW you get it." We hi-5.
[I'll add more to this blog entry when I find out more what happened as a result of this moment of ethical reckoning in the context of the diverse secular public sphere in a democracy].
Whether it is a woman in niqab driving on a public tax-paid road, or a group that strings wire on a public tax-paid road to indicate they are exclusive, the consequence is the same -- such acts are an unwarranted intrusion into the Public Sphere of participatory civil society in a diverse democracy.
We have no empirical evidence of any contemporary society, democratic or otherwise, from Rio to Riyadh that is not DIVERSE. Therefore it seems to me, public spaces cannot be constrained by exclusionary acts of persons and groups.
Happy Birthday to me. Today, I feel even more energized than I usually am.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
copyright owned by:
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/practices/Ritual/Shabbat_The_Sabbath/In_the_Community/Eruv.shtml
Sharonne Cohen is an Israeli-Canadian writer, editor, translator, and teacher. She currently lives in Montreal.
---
Shabbat is a day set apart from all others, differentiating between the sacred (kodesh) and the mundane (hol), between the work week and the day designated for rest, family, and spirituality. On Shabbat all activities associated with work are prohibited, and according to traditional Jewish law include formal employment as well as traveling, spending money, and carrying items outside the home, in the public domain.
shabbat eruvThe prohibition against carrying includes house keys, prayer books, canes or walkers, and even children who cannot walk on their own. Recognizing the difficulties this rule imposes, the sages of the Talmud devised a way to allow for carrying in public without breaking the rule. Through this means, called an eruv, communities are able to turn a large area into one that is considered, for Jewish law purposes, a large private domain, in which items may be carried.
What It Is
The term eruv refers to the act of mixing or combining, and is shorthand for eruv hazerot--the mixing of domains, in this case, the private (rashut hayahid) and the public (rashut harabim). An eruv does not allow for carrying items otherwise prohibited by Jewish law on Shabbat, such as money or cell phones.
Having an eruv does not mean that a city or neighborhood is enclosed entirely by a wall. Rather, the eruv can be comprised of a series of pre-existing structures (walls, fences, electrical poles and wires) and/or structures created expressly for the eruv, often a wire mounted on poles. In practice, then, the eruv is a symbolic demarcation of the private sphere, one that communities come together to create.
To many people, the eruv sounds like a legal fiction, a way to circumvent the spirit and possibly letter of the law against carrying. To them, the eruv risks making the entire Jewish legal process seem absurd to non-Jews and non-observant Jews.
The talmudic Rabbis, however, were concerned with maintaining the integrity of the halakhic (Jewish legal) system while ensuring that the law is livable. Though the eruv makes use of a legal technicality, the fact that it is used--rather than allowing people to just carry anything, anywhere--is itself considered a form of respect for and submission to a legal system that is central and indispensable to traditionalist Jewish life.
The eruv helps enhance an aspect of Shabbat that the Rabbis considered vital-- "oneg Shabbat," the injunction to enjoy the Sabbath. With an eruv, Shabbat events are available to all families--young and old, mobile and less mobile--and individuals are able to carry house keys, reading glasses, or books outside their homes.
How It Works
Public domains are defined by Jewish law as non-residential areas, including streets, thoroughfares, plazas (open areas), and highways. Private domains are residential areas, and were originally referred to as homes surrounded by a wall, considered closed off from the surrounding public domains.
A designated space may be considered a private domain only when several conditions are met: It must cover an area of at least 12 square feet and must be somehow demarcated from its surroundings--either by a wall of some kind or by its actual topography (it must be all lower or all higher than its surroundings). If a space is frequented by more than 600,000 people each day it is considered too big to turn "private" with an eruv (which is why a large city like New York cannot have a single eruv constructed around it, though individual neighborhoods do). And an eruv cannot encompass two separate public spaces, so for instance, it may not cross over a river that cuts through town.
When eruvim (the plural of eruv) or parts of eruvim are constructed (as opposed to using pre-existing structures), they generally consist of a wire surrounding the designated area. The eruv, therefore, is unlikely to be noticed except by those looking for it, which fulfills a talmudic guideline that the eruvbe an integral part of the city, as unobtrusive and unnoticeable as possible.
Despite its symbolic nature, the eruv is intended to mimic in some way the form of walls, which need doorways--defined as two posts with a crossbeam over them, strong enough to withstand an ordinary wind. The eruv likewise needs openings, consisting of crossbeams resting or passing directly over the top of the doorpost (lehi). This is how modern rabbis arrived at the solution of having the eruv be made of a wire: The poles holding up the wire represent the "doorposts," and the wire itself represents the "crossbeam."
Many communities construct their eruvim by using lighting (or utility) poles to fulfill the requirement of doorposts and a continuous cable, string, or wire to represent the crossbeam. In order for this arrangement to be acceptable, the "beam" must rest directly above the top of the doorposts. Since this is not typically the case with utility poles--where the cable is attached either to the side or to an element that is held away from the pole--communities often attach a thin rod to the pole to serve as a substitute for the doorpost.
In areas where poles and lines do not exist, new arrangements must be made. The design of an eruv can make use of existing fences, overhead wires, hillsides, buildings, bridges, and other means that may serve as indicators of the eruv boundaries. This often requires communities to obtain permission from the appropriate authorities and property owners, and to work with local governments, power, telephone, and cable companies--a lengthy and often difficult process.
Those who use an eruv are obliged to ensure that it is intact before carrying on Shabbat. In most cases there is a group that is responsible for maintaining the eruv, providing information regarding its status, conducting weekly inspections to ensure that it hasn't been damaged, and dispensing repair crews when necessary. Many communities provide current information regarding their eruv by phone (eruv hotlines) and the web. They also provide maps delineating the exact boundaries of the eruv. (While Orthodox and Conservative understandings of Jewish law recognizes the restrictions that make an eruv necessary, other denominations generally do not.)
There are hundreds of eruvim in communities throughout the Jewish Diaspora (the U.S, Europe, South Africa, Australia), and many more in Israel. The challenge for these communities is incorporating the eruv into the streets of their cities. They must conduct traffic density studies in order to ensure that the number of people frequenting the area does not exceed 600,000 on a given day, while attempting to make use of existing urban structures to avoid wherever possible the need to construct the entire eruv themselves.
Controversies
Unlike other religious Jewish practices, which usually take place within private spaces, the eruv places signs in the public sphere; several communities have, therefore, encountered difficulty, controversy, and even major public battles in their attempt to receive the necessary authorization from authorities to establish their eruv.
The proposal submitted in 1992 for the North London eruv, for example, was met with public uproar, and was refused by the Town Planning Committee on the grounds that it would constitute a disturbance of visual amenity. Following an appeal made to the Secretary of State for the Environment, who found that the construction of the poles in chosen sites did not present any legal complication, the initial refusal was reversed.
Another controversy surrounding an eruv occurred in Palo Alto, California, in the summer of 1999. Residents of the city debated the eruv in a religious context, arguing over the distinction between temporary and permanent accommodations, and raising the concept of neighborliness as the underlying nature of a community. Some argued that the eruv created a walled city, and compromised property rights and the separation of Church and State, while others asserted that the eruv is not only harmless, but is a positive contribution to the larger community.
In addition, there are other controversies regarding eruvim among Jews as well. Rabbis debate the nature and specifications of the eruv amongst themselves, attempting to ensure standards that fulfill all halakhic (Jewish law) requirements. Many secular Jews are concerned about increased interaction with Orthodox Jews if many new families move to a neighborhood because of the eruv; they fear they may face pressure to change their lifestyle and become more observant. A public discussion over a religious issue such as an eruv tends to bring up many fissures within Jewish communities, often leading to harsh battles between secular and observant Jews over Jewish practice in a modern, secular society.
The eruv has been referred to as "an invisible wall of freedom." It brings about social liberation and an increase in the potential for interaction within the public sphere. It has also been nicknamed--using the Yiddish word for carrying--"the magic schlepping circle." Since the social aspect of Shabbat is one of the most significant elements fostering community bonding, the eruv proves to be instrumental in enhancing the Shabbat experience, though disagreements and disputes surrounding its very nature and essence are likely to continue.
======================================================================================
I am taking a birthday run up to Fort Tryon in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan where I live. As I approach Fort Tryon Park I notice, aided by the dazzling spring sunlight, the thinnest line of clear picture or fishing wire strung up way, way above my head. I could easily have missed seeing it.
Flashback: Years ago I had happened to read about the practice by members of a certain Jews who "define" themselves as a community, by putting up such -- I am going to call them (note, this is my word, not theirs) -- 'encirclements'.
In any event, I approach a mini-truck carrying the NYC Parks Department decal on its door and I draw the driver's attention to the wire above. There are other persons in the Parks mini-truck.
I say "Can you see this wire?" At first they could not. So I say "Well if you step out you can see it really clearly." The driver steps out of the truck, while the other Parks employee accompanying him, leans out of her window and said "Oh yeah, now I see it."
I continue "I am not going to name the group that carries out this practice on a public road in a public area. I have nothing against this group and I have no reason to have anything against this or any other group. But I am pretty sure it is illegal for any person or group to string a wire above a public space to advance their own private beliefs."
The driver thinks a minute then says, "This is a diverse community. I am going to go right now to my supervisor and report it."
I say "NOW you get it." We hi-5.
[I'll add more to this blog entry when I find out more what happened as a result of this moment of ethical reckoning in the context of the diverse secular public sphere in a democracy].
Whether it is a woman in niqab driving on a public tax-paid road, or a group that strings wire on a public tax-paid road to indicate they are exclusive, the consequence is the same -- such acts are an unwarranted intrusion into the Public Sphere of participatory civil society in a diverse democracy.
We have no empirical evidence of any contemporary society, democratic or otherwise, from Rio to Riyadh that is not DIVERSE. Therefore it seems to me, public spaces cannot be constrained by exclusionary acts of persons and groups.
Happy Birthday to me. Today, I feel even more energized than I usually am.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
copyright owned by:
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/practices/Ritual/Shabbat_The_Sabbath/In_the_Community/Eruv.shtml
Sharonne Cohen is an Israeli-Canadian writer, editor, translator, and teacher. She currently lives in Montreal.
---
Shabbat is a day set apart from all others, differentiating between the sacred (kodesh) and the mundane (hol), between the work week and the day designated for rest, family, and spirituality. On Shabbat all activities associated with work are prohibited, and according to traditional Jewish law include formal employment as well as traveling, spending money, and carrying items outside the home, in the public domain.
shabbat eruvThe prohibition against carrying includes house keys, prayer books, canes or walkers, and even children who cannot walk on their own. Recognizing the difficulties this rule imposes, the sages of the Talmud devised a way to allow for carrying in public without breaking the rule. Through this means, called an eruv, communities are able to turn a large area into one that is considered, for Jewish law purposes, a large private domain, in which items may be carried.
What It Is
The term eruv refers to the act of mixing or combining, and is shorthand for eruv hazerot--the mixing of domains, in this case, the private (rashut hayahid) and the public (rashut harabim). An eruv does not allow for carrying items otherwise prohibited by Jewish law on Shabbat, such as money or cell phones.
Having an eruv does not mean that a city or neighborhood is enclosed entirely by a wall. Rather, the eruv can be comprised of a series of pre-existing structures (walls, fences, electrical poles and wires) and/or structures created expressly for the eruv, often a wire mounted on poles. In practice, then, the eruv is a symbolic demarcation of the private sphere, one that communities come together to create.
To many people, the eruv sounds like a legal fiction, a way to circumvent the spirit and possibly letter of the law against carrying. To them, the eruv risks making the entire Jewish legal process seem absurd to non-Jews and non-observant Jews.
The talmudic Rabbis, however, were concerned with maintaining the integrity of the halakhic (Jewish legal) system while ensuring that the law is livable. Though the eruv makes use of a legal technicality, the fact that it is used--rather than allowing people to just carry anything, anywhere--is itself considered a form of respect for and submission to a legal system that is central and indispensable to traditionalist Jewish life.
The eruv helps enhance an aspect of Shabbat that the Rabbis considered vital-- "oneg Shabbat," the injunction to enjoy the Sabbath. With an eruv, Shabbat events are available to all families--young and old, mobile and less mobile--and individuals are able to carry house keys, reading glasses, or books outside their homes.
How It Works
Public domains are defined by Jewish law as non-residential areas, including streets, thoroughfares, plazas (open areas), and highways. Private domains are residential areas, and were originally referred to as homes surrounded by a wall, considered closed off from the surrounding public domains.
A designated space may be considered a private domain only when several conditions are met: It must cover an area of at least 12 square feet and must be somehow demarcated from its surroundings--either by a wall of some kind or by its actual topography (it must be all lower or all higher than its surroundings). If a space is frequented by more than 600,000 people each day it is considered too big to turn "private" with an eruv (which is why a large city like New York cannot have a single eruv constructed around it, though individual neighborhoods do). And an eruv cannot encompass two separate public spaces, so for instance, it may not cross over a river that cuts through town.
When eruvim (the plural of eruv) or parts of eruvim are constructed (as opposed to using pre-existing structures), they generally consist of a wire surrounding the designated area. The eruv, therefore, is unlikely to be noticed except by those looking for it, which fulfills a talmudic guideline that the eruvbe an integral part of the city, as unobtrusive and unnoticeable as possible.
Despite its symbolic nature, the eruv is intended to mimic in some way the form of walls, which need doorways--defined as two posts with a crossbeam over them, strong enough to withstand an ordinary wind. The eruv likewise needs openings, consisting of crossbeams resting or passing directly over the top of the doorpost (lehi). This is how modern rabbis arrived at the solution of having the eruv be made of a wire: The poles holding up the wire represent the "doorposts," and the wire itself represents the "crossbeam."
Many communities construct their eruvim by using lighting (or utility) poles to fulfill the requirement of doorposts and a continuous cable, string, or wire to represent the crossbeam. In order for this arrangement to be acceptable, the "beam" must rest directly above the top of the doorposts. Since this is not typically the case with utility poles--where the cable is attached either to the side or to an element that is held away from the pole--communities often attach a thin rod to the pole to serve as a substitute for the doorpost.
In areas where poles and lines do not exist, new arrangements must be made. The design of an eruv can make use of existing fences, overhead wires, hillsides, buildings, bridges, and other means that may serve as indicators of the eruv boundaries. This often requires communities to obtain permission from the appropriate authorities and property owners, and to work with local governments, power, telephone, and cable companies--a lengthy and often difficult process.
Those who use an eruv are obliged to ensure that it is intact before carrying on Shabbat. In most cases there is a group that is responsible for maintaining the eruv, providing information regarding its status, conducting weekly inspections to ensure that it hasn't been damaged, and dispensing repair crews when necessary. Many communities provide current information regarding their eruv by phone (eruv hotlines) and the web. They also provide maps delineating the exact boundaries of the eruv. (While Orthodox and Conservative understandings of Jewish law recognizes the restrictions that make an eruv necessary, other denominations generally do not.)
There are hundreds of eruvim in communities throughout the Jewish Diaspora (the U.S, Europe, South Africa, Australia), and many more in Israel. The challenge for these communities is incorporating the eruv into the streets of their cities. They must conduct traffic density studies in order to ensure that the number of people frequenting the area does not exceed 600,000 on a given day, while attempting to make use of existing urban structures to avoid wherever possible the need to construct the entire eruv themselves.
Controversies
Unlike other religious Jewish practices, which usually take place within private spaces, the eruv places signs in the public sphere; several communities have, therefore, encountered difficulty, controversy, and even major public battles in their attempt to receive the necessary authorization from authorities to establish their eruv.
The proposal submitted in 1992 for the North London eruv, for example, was met with public uproar, and was refused by the Town Planning Committee on the grounds that it would constitute a disturbance of visual amenity. Following an appeal made to the Secretary of State for the Environment, who found that the construction of the poles in chosen sites did not present any legal complication, the initial refusal was reversed.
Another controversy surrounding an eruv occurred in Palo Alto, California, in the summer of 1999. Residents of the city debated the eruv in a religious context, arguing over the distinction between temporary and permanent accommodations, and raising the concept of neighborliness as the underlying nature of a community. Some argued that the eruv created a walled city, and compromised property rights and the separation of Church and State, while others asserted that the eruv is not only harmless, but is a positive contribution to the larger community.
In addition, there are other controversies regarding eruvim among Jews as well. Rabbis debate the nature and specifications of the eruv amongst themselves, attempting to ensure standards that fulfill all halakhic (Jewish law) requirements. Many secular Jews are concerned about increased interaction with Orthodox Jews if many new families move to a neighborhood because of the eruv; they fear they may face pressure to change their lifestyle and become more observant. A public discussion over a religious issue such as an eruv tends to bring up many fissures within Jewish communities, often leading to harsh battles between secular and observant Jews over Jewish practice in a modern, secular society.
The eruv has been referred to as "an invisible wall of freedom." It brings about social liberation and an increase in the potential for interaction within the public sphere. It has also been nicknamed--using the Yiddish word for carrying--"the magic schlepping circle." Since the social aspect of Shabbat is one of the most significant elements fostering community bonding, the eruv proves to be instrumental in enhancing the Shabbat experience, though disagreements and disputes surrounding its very nature and essence are likely to continue.
======================================================================================
Sunday, May 9, 2010
A Tale of 2 Faisals -- and the Nation-States that Shaped them
Two Faisals -- one became a topper, the other a terrorist. How did this happen?
Thousands of Indians from all over the world sent messages of congratulation through newspapers, phone calls and sms, to a 28 year old doctor, Faesal Rasool Shah from Kashmir. Faesal topped the IAS exam conducted by the Union Public Service Commission.
Indians everywhere exulted at young Faisal's success.
Indians get to celebrate doctors -- not terrorists.
Q.How that did that chain of events materialize? Out of thin air? Or from an ETHICAL path chosen 65 years ago?
The scene shifts earlier in the very same week, to another Faisal, to an image of a smiling young man in designer sunglasses, Fisal Shahzad. But this time the young man, a Pakistani-American from an upper middle class, privileged, influential air force family has clumsily detonated a bomb in Times Square in the US, country of his adoption.
Q.How that did that chain of events materialize? Out of thin air? Or from a less- than-ethical path chosen by a colonized nation-state 65 years ago? A path that was forged against its own people? A path of destruction, bloodshed and an embittering border where none before had existed? Is young Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American the direct descendant in a six-decade history of Brit colonialism, Brit-driven Partition, Pakistan's puppet-state collusion with US neo-imperialism?
And that other more enduring and ever inspiring Faisal from India's Kashmir, how did he survive against tragic adversity? How did he accomplish excellence?
Which Nation-state withstood neo-imperialism of the US military-Corporate-Complex and produced a topper instead of a terrorist?
-----------
more....that's what a blog is for...reflection....
Thousands of Indians from all over the world sent messages of congratulation through newspapers, phone calls and sms, to a 28 year old doctor, Faesal Rasool Shah from Kashmir. Faesal topped the IAS exam conducted by the Union Public Service Commission.
Indians everywhere exulted at young Faisal's success.
Indians get to celebrate doctors -- not terrorists.
Q.How that did that chain of events materialize? Out of thin air? Or from an ETHICAL path chosen 65 years ago?
The scene shifts earlier in the very same week, to another Faisal, to an image of a smiling young man in designer sunglasses, Fisal Shahzad. But this time the young man, a Pakistani-American from an upper middle class, privileged, influential air force family has clumsily detonated a bomb in Times Square in the US, country of his adoption.
Q.How that did that chain of events materialize? Out of thin air? Or from a less- than-ethical path chosen by a colonized nation-state 65 years ago? A path that was forged against its own people? A path of destruction, bloodshed and an embittering border where none before had existed? Is young Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American the direct descendant in a six-decade history of Brit colonialism, Brit-driven Partition, Pakistan's puppet-state collusion with US neo-imperialism?
And that other more enduring and ever inspiring Faisal from India's Kashmir, how did he survive against tragic adversity? How did he accomplish excellence?
Which Nation-state withstood neo-imperialism of the US military-Corporate-Complex and produced a topper instead of a terrorist?
-----------
more....that's what a blog is for...reflection....
Thursday, April 22, 2010
37.2%. A Number to Remember. A Number to Lower to ZERO.
37.2%. THIRTY-SEVEN point TWO PER CENT.
A Number to Remember. A Number to be Ashamed of.
A Number to be Repelled by.
A Number to Recoil from.
A Number to Lower to ZERO.
The India Government has finally admitted that more than ONE-THIRD of our entire population lives Below the Poverty Line. 400 Million children, women and men.
Millions more have died in previous decades from hunger, malnutrition, starvation and the diseases and disorders resulting from such horrific deprivation.
Now finally the heartlessly cynical netas, babus and armchair economists of the India Govt. at least on paper, have faced up to the grim facts.
37.2%. 400 million plus children, women and men.
But a number on paper is not enough.
We the People cannot rest until that figure reaches ZERO.
We the People cannot rest until 37.2 PLUMMETS to zero.
It must not take India another 63 years to make it zero.
37.2%
THIRTY-SEVEN point TWO PER CENT.
Now make it 0. NOW.
ZERO
Each One Feed One.
Each one Feed More. TODAY. NOW. ASAP.
Then India has a chance of becoming a DEMOCRACY worth the name.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------------
http://www.righttofoodindia.org/
------------
infochangeindia.org copyright
India raises official poverty estimate
India’s Planning Commission has adopted the Suresh Tendulkar Committee’s methodology for poverty estimation, which includes spending on education and health, besides calorie intake, taking the number of the country’s poor to a whopping 37.2% from the 27.5% earlier estimated
After a lot of deliberation, the Indian government has concluded that it has around 100 million more people living below the poverty line than in 2004. This was after the country’s top policy planning body raised its estimate of the nation’s official poverty rate to 37.2% of the population, from 27.5%, a key development as the government drafts legislation to give the poorest Indians a right to state-subsidised foodgrain.
The move by the Planning Commission, which wasn’t announced formally but was confirmed by a senior government official, pegs the number of Indians in poverty at around 410 million -- more than 100 million above the previous estimate.
The change comes after critics said the earlier poverty estimate left too many destitute households out of the government’s food entitlement programmes. But the new poverty figure is unlikely to please food activists and politicians who feel it still vastly underestimates the number of people in need of assistance.
The 37.2% poverty line is based on a new methodology recommended by a panel headed by former economic advisor Suresh Tendulkar, in a report submitted to Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia in December 2009. Although the report still has to be officially accepted, for the limited purposes of food security the Planning Commission agreed to Tendulkar’s recommendations at a recent meeting of its members.
The earlier definition of poverty was based on calorie intake, according to which only 27.5% of people were living below the poverty line and the number of BPL families was around 65 million. With the Plan panel accepting the Tendulkar methodology, 37.2% of the total population, or 81 million families, will be placed below the poverty line.
The new poverty estimate, which will reflect the impact of high growth recorded during the decade, will be available in 2011. Computation of the number of BPL families at this stage assumes significance in view of the government’s decision to enact a food security law under which 25 kg of foodgrain will be provided every month, at Rs 3 per kg, to every BPL family.
The Planning Commission, mandated by the empowered group of ministers, chaired by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, to finalise the BPL numbers, will now meet the secretaries of food and expenditure to calculate the cost of providing food security to so many poor.
The burden on the central exchequer for implementing the food security law will depend on the number of BPL households and the quantity of subsidised foodgrain available with the government. Food subsidy stood at around Rs 72,000 crore in the last financial year.
“Two different poverty lines -- one for food security and the other for all other purposes -- for one country sounds odd. But this has been the most expedient solution for the time being,” said an official who did not wish to be named.
This will raise the number of those eligible for free food significantly -- but nobody’s sure how much. The widely quoted number is close to 10 crore families; some states put it at over 11 crore; the Planning Commission puts it somewhere between 7.5 and 8 crore. The worry is that it demonstrates, again, a dangerously halfhearted commitment to food security: dangerous because it will neither be abandoned nor effectively implemented, and the country could end up with a system that feeds too few and costs too much.
“This is a very low, suppressed poverty line. We reject it,” Kavita Srivastava, an activist who led a ‘right to food’ rally in the capital recently, said. “As far as we’re concerned, it still doesn’t tell us the real number of poor.”
Among the protesters at the rally was 50-year-old Kesar Sahu who lives in a slum in Rajasthan’s capital, Jaipur, and supports herself and two daughters by sweeping floors and cutting vegetables at schools. The Rs 1,000 she earns in a good month isn’t enough to make do, even with existing government subsidies, she said. “We’re only getting 35 kg (of foodgrain) now. We really need 50 kg to get by. Everyone should get that much.”
Though India’s economy emerged from the global downturn with a solid gross domestic product growth of 7.2% in the year ended March 31, the country’s poor are struggling to deal with year-on-year food inflation that is hovering around 17%. Even before rising food prices, India was struggling with high malnutrition rates.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government has pushed for legislation that will provide 25 kg of wheat and rice per month to households deemed officially below the poverty line. India already has a programme in place to distribute about 35 kg of subsidised foodgrain to poor households, but the rate is about 50% more expensive than what’s now being proposed.
Moreover, there is no law that guarantees food subsidies -- they are given at the central government’s discretion. And the current programme is plagued by corruption, with one-third of grain pilfered or rotting before it reaches needy households.
Experts say a third of the world’s poor are in India, living on less than $ 2 per day, worse than in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Source: The Indian Express, April 19, 2010
Press Trust of India, April 19, 2010
The Economic Times, April 18, 2010
Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2010
--------------------------------------
Economic Times copyright
NEW DELHI: India
now has 100 million more people living below the poverty line than in 2004, according to official estimates released on Sunday.
The poverty rate has risen to 37.2 percent of the population from 27.5 percent in 2004, a change that will require the Congress-ruled government to spend more money on the poor.
The new estimate comes weeks after Sonia Gandhi, head of the Congress party, asked the government to revise a Food Security Bill to include more women, children and destitutes. [my emphasis added]
"The Planning Commission has accepted the report on poverty figures," Abhijit Sen, a member of the Planning Commission told Reuters, referring to the new poverty estimate report submitted by a government panel last December.
India now has 410 million people living below the U.N. estimated poverty line of $1.25 a day, 100 million more than was estimated earlier, officials said.
India calculates how much of its population is living below the poverty line by checking whether families can afford one square meal a day that meets minimum nutrition needs.
It was not immediately clear how much more the federal government would have to spend on the poor, as that would depend on the Food Security Bill when it is presented to the government after the necessary changes, officials say.
India's Planning Commission will meet the food and expenditure secretaries next week to estimate the cost aspects of the bill, government officials said.
A third of the world's poor are believed to be in India, living on less than $2 per day, worse than in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa
, experts say.
The government spends only 1 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on healthcare facilities, forcing millions to struggle to get medicines, Oxfam and 62 other agencies said in a report called: "Your Money
or Your Life" last year.
While India's economy is slowly recovering from a global recession with a GDP growth of 7.2 percent, millions of poor in rural India are finding it difficult to cope with around 17 percent food price inflation.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Number to Remember. A Number to be Ashamed of.
A Number to be Repelled by.
A Number to Recoil from.
A Number to Lower to ZERO.
The India Government has finally admitted that more than ONE-THIRD of our entire population lives Below the Poverty Line. 400 Million children, women and men.
Millions more have died in previous decades from hunger, malnutrition, starvation and the diseases and disorders resulting from such horrific deprivation.
Now finally the heartlessly cynical netas, babus and armchair economists of the India Govt. at least on paper, have faced up to the grim facts.
37.2%. 400 million plus children, women and men.
But a number on paper is not enough.
We the People cannot rest until that figure reaches ZERO.
We the People cannot rest until 37.2 PLUMMETS to zero.
It must not take India another 63 years to make it zero.
37.2%
THIRTY-SEVEN point TWO PER CENT.
Now make it 0. NOW.
ZERO
Each One Feed One.
Each one Feed More. TODAY. NOW. ASAP.
Then India has a chance of becoming a DEMOCRACY worth the name.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------------
http://www.righttofoodindia.org/
------------
infochangeindia.org copyright
India raises official poverty estimate
India’s Planning Commission has adopted the Suresh Tendulkar Committee’s methodology for poverty estimation, which includes spending on education and health, besides calorie intake, taking the number of the country’s poor to a whopping 37.2% from the 27.5% earlier estimated
After a lot of deliberation, the Indian government has concluded that it has around 100 million more people living below the poverty line than in 2004. This was after the country’s top policy planning body raised its estimate of the nation’s official poverty rate to 37.2% of the population, from 27.5%, a key development as the government drafts legislation to give the poorest Indians a right to state-subsidised foodgrain.
The move by the Planning Commission, which wasn’t announced formally but was confirmed by a senior government official, pegs the number of Indians in poverty at around 410 million -- more than 100 million above the previous estimate.
The change comes after critics said the earlier poverty estimate left too many destitute households out of the government’s food entitlement programmes. But the new poverty figure is unlikely to please food activists and politicians who feel it still vastly underestimates the number of people in need of assistance.
The 37.2% poverty line is based on a new methodology recommended by a panel headed by former economic advisor Suresh Tendulkar, in a report submitted to Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia in December 2009. Although the report still has to be officially accepted, for the limited purposes of food security the Planning Commission agreed to Tendulkar’s recommendations at a recent meeting of its members.
The earlier definition of poverty was based on calorie intake, according to which only 27.5% of people were living below the poverty line and the number of BPL families was around 65 million. With the Plan panel accepting the Tendulkar methodology, 37.2% of the total population, or 81 million families, will be placed below the poverty line.
The new poverty estimate, which will reflect the impact of high growth recorded during the decade, will be available in 2011. Computation of the number of BPL families at this stage assumes significance in view of the government’s decision to enact a food security law under which 25 kg of foodgrain will be provided every month, at Rs 3 per kg, to every BPL family.
The Planning Commission, mandated by the empowered group of ministers, chaired by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, to finalise the BPL numbers, will now meet the secretaries of food and expenditure to calculate the cost of providing food security to so many poor.
The burden on the central exchequer for implementing the food security law will depend on the number of BPL households and the quantity of subsidised foodgrain available with the government. Food subsidy stood at around Rs 72,000 crore in the last financial year.
“Two different poverty lines -- one for food security and the other for all other purposes -- for one country sounds odd. But this has been the most expedient solution for the time being,” said an official who did not wish to be named.
This will raise the number of those eligible for free food significantly -- but nobody’s sure how much. The widely quoted number is close to 10 crore families; some states put it at over 11 crore; the Planning Commission puts it somewhere between 7.5 and 8 crore. The worry is that it demonstrates, again, a dangerously halfhearted commitment to food security: dangerous because it will neither be abandoned nor effectively implemented, and the country could end up with a system that feeds too few and costs too much.
“This is a very low, suppressed poverty line. We reject it,” Kavita Srivastava, an activist who led a ‘right to food’ rally in the capital recently, said. “As far as we’re concerned, it still doesn’t tell us the real number of poor.”
Among the protesters at the rally was 50-year-old Kesar Sahu who lives in a slum in Rajasthan’s capital, Jaipur, and supports herself and two daughters by sweeping floors and cutting vegetables at schools. The Rs 1,000 she earns in a good month isn’t enough to make do, even with existing government subsidies, she said. “We’re only getting 35 kg (of foodgrain) now. We really need 50 kg to get by. Everyone should get that much.”
Though India’s economy emerged from the global downturn with a solid gross domestic product growth of 7.2% in the year ended March 31, the country’s poor are struggling to deal with year-on-year food inflation that is hovering around 17%. Even before rising food prices, India was struggling with high malnutrition rates.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government has pushed for legislation that will provide 25 kg of wheat and rice per month to households deemed officially below the poverty line. India already has a programme in place to distribute about 35 kg of subsidised foodgrain to poor households, but the rate is about 50% more expensive than what’s now being proposed.
Moreover, there is no law that guarantees food subsidies -- they are given at the central government’s discretion. And the current programme is plagued by corruption, with one-third of grain pilfered or rotting before it reaches needy households.
Experts say a third of the world’s poor are in India, living on less than $ 2 per day, worse than in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Source: The Indian Express, April 19, 2010
Press Trust of India, April 19, 2010
The Economic Times, April 18, 2010
Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2010
--------------------------------------
Economic Times copyright
NEW DELHI: India
now has 100 million more people living below the poverty line than in 2004, according to official estimates released on Sunday.
The poverty rate has risen to 37.2 percent of the population from 27.5 percent in 2004, a change that will require the Congress-ruled government to spend more money on the poor.
The new estimate comes weeks after Sonia Gandhi, head of the Congress party, asked the government to revise a Food Security Bill to include more women, children and destitutes. [my emphasis added]
"The Planning Commission has accepted the report on poverty figures," Abhijit Sen, a member of the Planning Commission told Reuters, referring to the new poverty estimate report submitted by a government panel last December.
India now has 410 million people living below the U.N. estimated poverty line of $1.25 a day, 100 million more than was estimated earlier, officials said.
India calculates how much of its population is living below the poverty line by checking whether families can afford one square meal a day that meets minimum nutrition needs.
It was not immediately clear how much more the federal government would have to spend on the poor, as that would depend on the Food Security Bill when it is presented to the government after the necessary changes, officials say.
India's Planning Commission will meet the food and expenditure secretaries next week to estimate the cost aspects of the bill, government officials said.
A third of the world's poor are believed to be in India, living on less than $2 per day, worse than in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa
, experts say.
The government spends only 1 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on healthcare facilities, forcing millions to struggle to get medicines, Oxfam and 62 other agencies said in a report called: "Your Money
or Your Life" last year.
While India's economy is slowly recovering from a global recession with a GDP growth of 7.2 percent, millions of poor in rural India are finding it difficult to cope with around 17 percent food price inflation.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Greenpeace India Alert! Grow Food, Plant Trees, Don't Just Say NO!
Dear Greenpeace,
Greenpeace should GROW FOOD on Delhi sidewalks, PLANT TREES in India's cities.
Stand FOR something, not always as a naysayer. It's just not enough to just say NO.
Of course we can and must criticize Chavan but it is ridiculous to "arrest" Chavan. Chavan is a policy maker and that is his legal responsibility -- to make policy.
It is of course our responsibility, as Indians, as citizens, as residents, as people who care, to stop the BRAI from taking healthy food from the hungry mouths of millions of our sisters and brothers, our children suffering from malnutrition and from developmental delays.
Maybe Greenpeace could plant an organic vegetable garden in Parliament as well as in the space in front of Chavan's official Delhi residence. Let's DO it.
I am an ardent supporter of Greenpeace India activism. I usually sign up on all your excellent petitions.
But in addition to protest, Greenpeace must say YES and Do YES.
Otherwise all you do is protest. That is not good enough for Greenpeace India. Protest is a necessary but not sufficient strategy for Greenpeace India.
Greenpeace India has to build a new democratic model for energizing civil society in India.
Remember Gandhi? His life was his message. He DID something. He cleaned toilets. He spun. He made salt. His life was his message. He didn't just protest.
The old India is still the New India, an inspiring, ethical continuity from old to new. That's what we want for our country, our unprecedented democracy.
So Greenpeace India, Tweak your strategy. DO what you stand for, don't just protest. DO MORE and BE More.
Sincere Regards,
Chithra KarunaKaran
New York, NY
USA
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice blog
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Greenpeace should GROW FOOD on Delhi sidewalks, PLANT TREES in India's cities.
Stand FOR something, not always as a naysayer. It's just not enough to just say NO.
Of course we can and must criticize Chavan but it is ridiculous to "arrest" Chavan. Chavan is a policy maker and that is his legal responsibility -- to make policy.
It is of course our responsibility, as Indians, as citizens, as residents, as people who care, to stop the BRAI from taking healthy food from the hungry mouths of millions of our sisters and brothers, our children suffering from malnutrition and from developmental delays.
Maybe Greenpeace could plant an organic vegetable garden in Parliament as well as in the space in front of Chavan's official Delhi residence. Let's DO it.
I am an ardent supporter of Greenpeace India activism. I usually sign up on all your excellent petitions.
But in addition to protest, Greenpeace must say YES and Do YES.
Otherwise all you do is protest. That is not good enough for Greenpeace India. Protest is a necessary but not sufficient strategy for Greenpeace India.
Greenpeace India has to build a new democratic model for energizing civil society in India.
Remember Gandhi? His life was his message. He DID something. He cleaned toilets. He spun. He made salt. His life was his message. He didn't just protest.
The old India is still the New India, an inspiring, ethical continuity from old to new. That's what we want for our country, our unprecedented democracy.
So Greenpeace India, Tweak your strategy. DO what you stand for, don't just protest. DO MORE and BE More.
Sincere Regards,
Chithra KarunaKaran
New York, NY
USA
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice blog
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Putting a Spin on Nowruz: Erasing Crimes, Denying Truths
Who stole Nowruz? The US, The UN, UNESCO and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Q.Have they each, separately but yet collectively, cynically engaged in a series of half-truths (aka half-lies) to gain some narrow geopolitical self-advantage, without caring for the Greater Collective Good?
Yesterday,on Nowruz, I went to a Reception, hosted by the Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran at the United Nations.
Q. Why is Nowruz being singled out among all festivals, for attention by the UNESCO and the UNGA? Why not Onam, Holi, Basanth, Kwanzaa? An ancient festival heralding spring or harvest is not unique to Iran. EVERY group of people on earth has some ritual that marks some aspect of some season in the ecological niche in which they thrive.
So, why the special emphasis on Nowruz? The reasons are geopolitical of course.
None of the above-named players is ethical. However they are not equally unethical. Let us not forget that blatant acts in 1953, of the US Govt., specifically the CIA, when the CIA deposed the popularly elected Mossadegh who proposed state control of Iran's vital petroleum resources and won election. To prevent Mossadegh from nationalizing Iran's precious oil, The US Military-Corporate Complex (MCC) set in motion an unprecedented chain of events in Iran that led to US/UK installation of the Shah, establishment of the dreaded SAVAK, the humiliating taking of US hostages by Iran during the Carter administration and the triumphal but regrettable return of the exiled Ayatollahs.
Let us put the blame where it belongs. US meddling and US corporate greed (not forgetting to mention Brit empire/British Petroleum) led to the current state of affairs in Iran. Iran's domestic affairs, which are its own business, have been derailed, disrupted and negatively influenced by US/Israel ambitions in the so-called Middle East, which is actually West Asia and North Africa. The "Middle East" is a Brit-devised colonial/imperial construct embraced and expanded by the neo-imperial US.
Then in the 1990's we had the controversial though cynically simplistic Clash of Civilizations concept advanced by Harvard's Samuel Huntington. This incendiary lecture/book combo apparently gave the totalitarian Iran government the needed momentum to become the self-declared champion in UN intergovernmental circles, of the Dialogue among Civilizations.
It is this diplomatic counter-offensive that has placed Iran's undemocratic and misogynistic government in the unlikely and thoroughly unmerited role of *** champion*** of cultural and religious freedom and human rights at the UN and UNESCO. Iran champions human rights? Not. Ask Shirin Ebadi.
The reception I I attended was billed as a double celebration of Nowruz and a celebration of the adoption of the UN General Assembly resolution declaring Nowruz an "intangible heritage of humanity". The event as noted above was hosted by the Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The ceremony I attended deliberately distorted and erased the story of persecution and dispossession that led to the Persian diaspora, after the Islamic conquest of Iran.
Growing up in India, I remember celebrating Navroze with my Parsi friends and neighbors. I still celebrate Navroze when I am in India. Those Parsis were surviving members of the Persian diaspora that fled to India, following the destruction of their fire temples and the slaying of the Zarathustrians by Islam's zealots.
To erase history, to erase collective memory, to deny dispossession, is unethical and produces unanticipated geopolitcal consequences.
Will the US govt. ever learn from the tragedies it has unleashed in various parts of the world, in its Empire Project?
Obama's threatening Nowruz message is only the latest mis-step in the US plan to destabilize Iran. And Iran's own ***reactive*** (yes reactive, not preemptive like the US) hardening totalitarianism prevents Iranian voices of freedom from being heard, even within its borders. And Iran gets unmerited prestige at the UN and UNESCO as a champion of freedom.
Navroze Mubarak everybody! May collective memory survive geopolitics. That's the ethical choice.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Putting the Spin on Nowruz article
---------------------------------------------------
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice Blog
Spring Festivals are universal.
Harvest festivals are universal.
Such celebrations of sowing and reaping don't belong exclusively to any group of people. No particular rite of any people anywhere -- so that they can gather to be joyful within nature -- can receive a position of special privilege over other similar celebrations. If Nowruz is privileged by the UNESCO, why not Onam or Holi or Thanksgiving or Basanth or Kwanzaa?
Nowruz, Navroze and its variants represent a universal human yearning to celebrate Nature as it blooms once again,all over the world, as part of the eternal cycle of the the seasons. Whether in Africa or Asia, Peru or New Zealand, Tibet or Tanzania, festivals to celebrate agriculture within the context of Nature's own bounty, are as natural and essential as the breath we breathe.
Yesterday, I went to a Reception, hosted by the Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran at the United Nations.
What has happened to Nowruz? Has a Spring Festival been hijacked? What's the spin on Nowruz? To erase memory? To conceal religious persecution? To mask dispossession? To construct a persuasive fiction? To advance a geopolitical strategy? To withstand a supremacist geopolitical entity? All of the above?
Who are the makers of the persuasive fiction?
Who stole Nowruz?
The UN General Assembly, The UN Secretariat, UNESCO, Iran and the US.
Q.Have they separately but yet collectively engaged in a series of half-truths (aka half-lies) which seek to gain some narrow geopolitical self-advantage.
--------------
NOWRUZ
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For Coptic New Year, see Nayrouz. For other uses, see Nowruz (disambiguation).
Nowrūz
Nowrūz
Also called Also spelled Norouz, Norooz, Narooz, Nawruz, Newroz, Newruz, Nauruz, Nawroz, Noruz, Nohrooz, Novruz, Nauroz, Navroz, Naw-Rúz, Nowroj, Navroj, Nevruz, Наврӯз, Navruz, Navrez, Nooruz, Nauryz, Nevruz, Nowrouz,ნავრუზი (Georgian)
Observed by Principally in:
Iran Iran
Afghanistan Afghanistan
Albania Albania
Uzbekistan Uzbekistan
Kazakhstan Kazakhstan
Azerbaijan Azerbaijan
Tajikistan Tajikistan
Georgia (country) Azeris in Georgia (country) Georgia[1]
Iraqi Kurdistan Iraqi Kurdistan
Turkmenistan Turkmenistan
Kyrgyzstan Kyrgyzstan
Republic of Kosovo Kosovo
ethnic & religious groups worldwide:Kurdish diaspora
Zoroastrians, Some Sufis, Ismailis, Bahá'ís and the Iranian diaspora. Also observed in Bosnia, Caucasus, Crimea, Georgia, India, Kashmir, Macedonia, Pakistan, Serbia, and among Uyghurs and Salars of China.
Significance New year holiday
Date March 20, 21 or 22
2010 date Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 17:32 UTC *
2011 date Monday, March 20, 2011 at 23:21 UTC *
2012 date Wednesday, March 20, 2012 at 29:18 UTC *
Celebrations The Haftsin setting, Chahârshanbe Sûrî, Sizdah Bedar, etc.
Nowrūz (Persian: نوروز, IPA: [nouˈɾuːz], originally "New Light") is the name of the New Year in Iranian calendars and the corresponding traditional celebrations.[2] Nowruz is also widely referred to as the Persian New Year.[3][4][5][6]
Nowruz is celebrated and observed by Iranic peoples and the related cultural continent and has spread in many other parts of the world, including parts of Central Asia, Caucasus, South Asia, Northwestern China, the Crimea and some groups in the Balkans.
Nowruz marks the first day of spring and the beginning of the year in Iranian calendar. It is celebrated on the day of the astronomical vernal equinox, which usually occurs on March 21 or the previous/following day depending on where it is observed. As well as being a Zoroastrian holiday and having significance amongst the Zoroastrian ancestors of modern Iranians, the same time is celebrated in parts of the South Asian sub-continent as the new year. The moment the Sun crosses the celestial equator and equalizes night and day is calculated exactly every year and Iranian families gather together to observe the rituals.
Originally being a Zoroastrian festival, and the holiest of them all, Nowruz is believed to have been invented by Zoroaster himself, although there is no clear date of origin.[7] Since the Achaemenid era the official year has begun with the New Day when the Sun leaves the zodiac of Pisces and enters the zodiacal sign of Aries, signifying the Spring Equinox.
The Jewish festival of Purim is probably adopted from the Persian New Year.[8] It is also a holy day for Sufis, Ismailis, Alawites,[9] Alevis, and adherents of the Bahá'í Faith.[10]
The term Nowruz in writing, first appeared in Persian records in the 2nd century AD, but it was also an important day during the time of the Achaemenids (c. 548-330 BC), where kings from different nations under the Persian empire used to bring gifts to the Emperor, also called King of Kings (Shahanshah), of Persia on Nowruz. The significance of Nowruz in the Achaemenid empire was such that the great Persian king Cambyses II's appointing as the king of Babylon was legitimized only after his participation in the New Year festival (Nowruz).[11]
The UN's General Assembly in 2010 recognized the International Day of Nowruz, describing it a spring festival of Persian origin which has been celebrated for over 3,000 years.[12][13] During the meeting of The Inter-governmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage of the United Nations, held between 28 September – 2 October 2009 in Abu Dhabi, Nowrūz was officially registered on the UNESCO List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.[14][15][16][17]
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Etymology
* 2 Nowruz and the spring equinox
* 3 History and tradition
o 3.1 Tradition and mythology
o 3.2 History
* 4 Local variations
o 4.1 Nowruz around the world
+ 4.1.1 Countries that have Nowruz as a public holiday
o 4.2 Nowruz celebration in Iran
+ 4.2.1 Spring cleaning and visiting one another
+ 4.2.2 Chahārshanbe Sūrī
+ 4.2.3 Haft Sīn
+ 4.2.4 Haji Firouz
+ 4.2.5 New Year dishes
+ 4.2.6 Sizdah Bedar
o 4.3 Nouwruz in Afghanistan
o 4.4 Newroz celebration by Kurds
o 4.5 Novruz in Azerbaijan
o 4.6 Nowruz in the Zoroastrian faith
o 4.7 Nowruz in the Twelver Shi’a faith
o 4.8 Naw-Rúz in the Bahá'í Faith
o 4.9 Navroz celebration by Parsis
o 4.10 Navroz celebration by Kashmiri Pandits
o 4.11 UN recognition
* 5 Spelling variations in English
* 6 See also
* 7 References
* 8 External links
Etymology
The term Nowruz is a Persian compound-word and consists of:
* now (Old Persian nava) means "new" and has the following cognates, in English new, in Latin novus, German neu, Sanskrit nava, etc. The Persian pronunciation differs in the many dialects of the language: while the eastern dialects have preserved the original diphthong (IPA: [næuˈɾoːz]), the western dialects usually pronounce it with a different diphthong (IPA: [nouˈɾuːz]), and some colloquial variants (such as the Tehrani accent) pronounce it with a monophtong (IPA: [noˈɾuːz]).
* rōz (also with various pronuciations, such as rūz, rozh, or roj) means "day" in Middle- and Modern Persian, as well as related languages, such as Kurdish. The original meaning of the word, however, was "light". The term is derived from Avestan *rowch-, itself derived from Proto-Indo-European *leuk- (l <-> r and k <-> ch sound changes are common in Indo-European languages), and is related to Sanskrit ruci, Latin lux and, in fact, English light.
Nowruz and the spring equinox
Main article: Equinox
Illumination of the Earth by the Sun on the day of equinox, (ignoring twilight).
The first day on the Iranian calendar falls on the March equinox, the first day of spring. At the time of the equinox, the sun is observed to be directly over the equator, and the north and south poles of the Earth lie along the solar terminator; sunlight is evenly divided between the north and south hemispheres.
In ca. 11 century CE major reforms of Iranian calendars took place and whose principal purpose was to fix the beginning of the calendar year, i.e. Nowrūz, at the vernal equinox. Accordingly, the definition of Nowruz given by the Iranian scientist Ṭūsī was the following: "the first day of the official new year [Nowruz] was always the day on which the sun entered Aries before noon".[18]
History and tradition
Tradition and mythology
Bas-relief in Persepolis. A Zoroastrian symbol of Nowruz - on the vernal equinox the powers of the eternally fighting bull (personifying the Earth) and lion (personifying the Sun) are equal.
The celebration has its roots in Ancient Iran. Due to its antiquity, there exist various foundation myths for Nowruz in Iranian mythology. In the Zoroastrian tradition, the seven most important Zoroastrian festivals are the six Gahambars and Nowruz, which occurs at the spring equinox. According to Mary Boyce,[19]
“ It seems a reasonable surmise that Nowruz, the holiest of them all, with deep doctrinal significance, was founded by Zoroaster himself. ”
Between sunset of the day of the 6th Gahanbar and sunrise of Nowruz was celebrated Hamaspathmaedaya (later known, in its extended form, as Frawardinegan). This and the Gahanbar are the only festivals named in the surviving text of the Avesta.
The Shahnameh, dates Nowruz as far back to the reign of Jamshid, who in Zoroastrian texts saved mankind from a killer winter that was destined to kill every living creature.[20] The mythical Persian King Jamshid (Yima or Yama of the Indo-Iranian lore) perhaps symbolizes the transition of the Indo-Iranians from animal hunting to animal husbandry and a more settled life in human history. In the Shahnameh and Iranian mythology, he is credited with the foundation of Nowruz. In the Shahnama, Jamshid constructed a throne studded with gems. He had demons raise him above the earth into the heavens; there he sat on his throne like the sun shining in the sky. The world's creatures gathered in wonder about him and scattered jewels around him, and called this day the New Day or No/Now-Ruz. This was the first day of the month of Farvardin (the first month of the Persian calendar).[21]
The Persian scholar Abu Rayhan Biruni of the 10th century AD, in his Persian work "Kitab al-Tafhim li Awa'il Sina'at al-Tanjim" provides a description of the calendar of various nations. Besides the Persian calendar, various festivals of Arabs, Jews, Sabians, Greeks and other nations are mentioned in this book. In the section on the Persian calendar(تقویم پارسیان), he mentions Nowruz, Sadeh, Tiregan, Mehregan, the six Gahanbar, Parvardegaan, Bahmanja, Isfandarmazh and several other festivals. According to him: It is the belief of the Persians that Nowruz marks the first day when the universe started its motion.[22] The Persian historian Abu Saʿīd Gardēzī[23] in his work titled Zayn al-Akhbār under the section of the Zoroastrians festivals mentions Nowruz (among other festivals) and specifically points out that Zoroaster highly emphasized the celebration of Nowruz and Mehregan.[24]
History
Persepolis (Persian: تخت جمشید meaning the throne of Jamshid) all nations stair case. Notice the people from across the Achaemenid Persian Empire bringing gifts. Some scholars have associated the occasion to be either Mehregan or Nowruz.[25]
Although it is not clear whether proto-Indo-Iranians celebrated a feast as the first day of the calendar, there are indications that both Iranians and Indians assumed the first day of autumn as the beginning of new year season. There are reasons that Iranians may have observed the beginning both autumn and spring.[26]
Boyce and Grenet explain the traditions for seasonal festivals and comment:"It is possible that the splendor of the Babylonian festivities at this season led the Persians to develop their own spring festival into an established new year feast, with the name Navasarda 'New Year' (a name which, though first attested through Middle Persian derivatives, is attributed to the Achaemenian period). Since the communal observations of the ancient Iranians appear in general to have been a seasonal ones, it is probable, however, that they traditionally held festivals in both autumn and spring, to mark the major turning points of the natural year".[26]
We have reasons to believe that the celebration is much older than that date and was surely celebrated by the people and royalty during the Achaemenid times (555-330 BC). It was, therefore, a highly auspicious occasion for the ancient Iranian peoples. It has been suggested that the famous Persepolis complex, or at least the palace of Apadana and the Hundred Columns Hall, were built for the specific purpose of celebrating Nowruz. Although, there may be no mention of Nowruz in recorded Achaemenid inscriptions (see picture)[27] There is a detailed account by Xenophon of Nowruz celebration taking place in Persepolis and the continuity of this festival in the Achaemenid tradition.[28] According to Britannica, the Jewish festival of Purim, is probably adopted from the Persian New Year. [8]
Nowruz was the holiday of Arsacid/Parthian dynastic Empires who ruled Iran (248 BC-224 AD). There are specific references to the celebration of Nowruz during the reign of Vologases I (51-78 AD), but these include no details.[27] Before Sassanids established their power in West Asia around 300 AD, Parthians celebrated Nowruz in Autumn and 1st of Farvardin began at the Autumn Equinox. During Parthian dynasty the Spring Festival was Mehragan, a Zoroastrian and Iranian festival celebrated in honor of Mithra.[29]
Extensive records on the celebration of Nowruz appear following the accession of Ardashir I of Persia, the founder of the Sassanid dynasty (224-651 AD). Under the Sassanid Emperors, Nowruz was celebrated as the most important day of the year. Most royal traditions of Nowruz such as royal audiences with the public, cash gifts, and the pardoning of prisoners, were established during the Sassanian era and persisted unchanged until modern times.
Nowruz, along with Sadeh (celebrated in mid-winter), survived in society following the introduction of Islam in 650 AD. Other celebrations such Gahanbar and Mehragan were eventually side-lined or were only followed by the Zoroastrians, who carried them. There are records of the Four Great Caliphs presiding over Nowruz celebrations, and it was adopted as the main royal holiday during the Abbasid period.
In his work titled the Nowruznama, Omar Khayyam, a well known Persian poet and Mathematician provides a vivid description of the celebration in the courts of the Kings of Persia:[30]
“ From the era of Kai Khusraw till the days of Yazdegard, last of the pre-Islamic kings of Persia, the royal custom was thus: on the first day of the New Year, Now Ruz, the King's first visitor was the High Mobad of the Zoroastrians, who brought with him as gifts a golden goblet full of wine, a ring, some gold coins, a fistful of green sprigs of wheat, a sword, and a bow. In the language of Persia he would then glorify God and praise the monarch. This was the address of the High Mobad to the king : "O Majesty, on this feast of the Equinox, first day of the first month of the year, seeing that thou hast freely chosen God and the Faith of the Ancient ones; may Surush, the Angel-messenger, grant thee wisdom and insight and sagacity in thy affairs. Live long in praise, be happy and fortunate upon thy golden throne, drink immortality from the Cup of Jamshid; and keep in solemn trust the customs of our ancestors, their noble aspirations, fair gestures and the exercise of justice and righteousness. May thy soul flourish; may thy youth be as the new-grown grain; may thy horse be puissant, victorious; thy sword bright and deadly against foes; thy hawk swift against its prey; thy every act straight as the arrow's shaft. Go forth from thy rich throne, conquer new lands. Honor the craftsman and the sage in equal degree; disdain the acquisition of wealth. May thy house prosper and thy life be long!" ”
Following the demise of the Caliphate and the subsequent re-emergence of Persian dynasties such as the Samanids and Buyids, Nowruz was elevated to an even more important event. The Buyids revived the ancient traditions of Sassanian times and restored many smaller celebrations that had been eliminated by the Caliphate. Even the Turkic and Mongol invaders did not attempt to abolish Nowruz in favor of any other celebration. Thus, Nowruz remained as the main celebration in the Persian lands by both the officials and the people.
Kurds celebrating. Fire is the symbol of Nowruz
Local variations
Today, the festival of Nowruz is celebrated in many countries that were territories of, or influenced by, the Persian Empire: Iran, Various Iranian Peoples including Kurds, Afghanistan, parts of the Middle East, as well as in the former Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. It is also celebrated by the Zoroastrians as well by certain Iranic inhabitants in Pakistan's Chitral region and Northern Areas. It is also celebrated by the Iranian immigrants from Shiraz in Zanzibar.[31] it is called Nevruz in Turkic, Uyghurs who live in Northwestern China call it "Noruz", and it is called Sultan Nevruz in Albanian. In Kurdish communities located in parts of western Iran, the holiday is referred to as Newroz, which is a variant of the Persian word Nowruz.[32]
Nowruz around the world
Nowruz is celebrated in Greater Iran, Caucasus, Central Asia and by Iranians worldwide. It is a public holiday in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan,[33] Iraqi Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan,[34] Uzbekistan,[35] Kashmir,[36] and Kyrgyzstan.[37] Also the Canadian parliament by unanimous consent, has passed a bill to add Nowruz to the national calendar of Canada, on March 30, 2009.[38][39]
In Albania Sultan Nevruz is celebrated as a mainly mystical day by the Bektashi sect, and there are special ceremonies in the Tekke led by the clergy and large meals are served there. They celebrate this day as the birthday of Ali. Also all Albanians celebrate a secular version of Nowruz, called Spring Day. Nowruz is also celebrated by Kurds in Iraq[40] and Turkey[41] as well as by Parsis in the Indian subcontinent.
Other notable celebrations take place by Iranians around the world, such as Los Angeles, Toronto, Cologne and in United Kingdom, mainly in London.[42] But because Los Angeles is prone to devastating fires, there are very strict fire codes in the city. No fires are allowed even on one's own property. Usually, Iranians living in Southern California go to the beaches to celebrate the event where it is permissible to build fires.[43] On 15 March 2010, The United States House of Representatives passed The Nowruz Resolution (H.Res. 267), by a 384-2 vote,[44] "Recognizing the cultural and historical significance of Nowruz, ... .".[45]
In Iran, the Islamic Regime attempted to suppress Nowruz following the Iranian Revolution and was met with very little success. The Ayatollahs considered Nowruz a pagan holiday and a distraction from more important things such as Islamic holidays.[46]
In Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban, Nowruz was banned and considered an "ancient pagan holiday centered on fire worship" but until 2001 it came back and now it is as popular as it was before the extremist Taliban.[47]
It is also a holy day for Alawites,[9] Alevis, and adherents of the Bahá'í Faith.[10]
Countries that have Nowruz as a public holiday
* Afghanistan Afghanistan (20 March to 23 March)[48]
* Albania Albania (20 March to 23 March, total of 4 days)[49]
* Azerbaijan Azerbaijan (20 March to 26 March, total of 7 days)[50]
* Georgia (country) Azeris in Georgia (country), Georgia[1]
* Iran Iran (20 March to 23 March, total of 4 days in general + total of 13 days for schools and universities)[51]
* Iraq (regional only in Iraqi Kurdistan Iraqi Kurdistan) (21 March)[52]
* Kazakhstan Kazakhstan (21 March to 24 March, total of 4 days)[53]
* Republic of Kosovo Kosovo) (21 March)
* Kyrgyzstan Kyrgyzstan (21 March)[54]
* Tajikistan Tajikistan (20 March to 23 March, total of 4 days)[55]
* Turkmenistan Turkmenistan (20 March to 23 March, total of 4 days)[56]
* Uzbekistan Uzbekistan (21 March)[57]
Nowruz celebration in Iran
A Haft sin table in Tehran.
Nowruz is the most important holiday in Iran. Preparations for Nowruz begin in the month Esfand (or Espand), the last month of winter in the Persian solar calendar.
Spring cleaning and visiting one another
Further information: Spring cleaning
Spring cleaning, or Khouneh Tekouni (literally means 'shaking the house') or 'complete cleaning of the house' is commonly performed before Nowruz. Persians (Iranians, Afghans and Tajiks) and other Indo-Iranian groups (Kurds, Azarbaijanis and Balochs) start preparing for the Nowruz with a major spring-cleaning of their houses, the purchase of new clothes to wear for the new year and the purchase of flowers (in particular the hyacinth and the tulip are popular and conspicuous).
In association with the "rebirth of nature", extensive spring-cleaning is a national tradition observed by almost every household in Iran. This is also extended to personal attire, and it is customary to buy at least one set of new clothes. On the New Year's Day, families dress in their new clothes and start the twelve-day celebrations by visiting the elders of their family, then the rest of their family and finally their friends. On the thirteenth day families leave their homes and picnic outdoors.
During the Nowruz holidays, people are expected to visit one another (mostly limited to families, friends and neighbors) in the form of short house visits, which are usually reciprocated. Typically, on the first day of Nowruz, family members gather around the table, with the Haft Seen on the table or set next to it, and await the exact moment of the arrival of the spring. At that time gifts are exchanged. Later in the day, the first house visits are paid to the most senior family members. Typically, the youth will visit the elders first, and the elders return their visit later. When in previous year, a family member is deceased, the tradition is to visit that family first (among the elders). The visits naturally have to be relatively short, otherwise one will not be able to visit everybody on their list. A typical visit is around 30 minutes, where you often run into other visiting relatives and friends who happen to be paying a visit to the same house at that time. Because of the house visits, you make sure you have a sufficient supply of pastry, cookies, fresh and dried fruits and special nuts on hand, as you typically serve your visitors with these items with tea or sherbet. Many Iranians will throw large Nowruz parties in a central location as a way of dealing with the long distances between groups of friends and family.
Some Nowruz celebrants believe that whatever a person does on Nowruz will affect the rest of the year. So, if a person is warm and kind to their relatives, friends and neighbors on Nowruz, then the new year will be a good one. On the other hand, if there are fights and disagreements, the year will be a bad one.As a extended tradition to the holiday, men may or may not choose to shave their faces until the night of the "New Day" as a sign of removal of old habits and tendencies and the rebirht of their faith and being.
One tradition that may not be very widespread (that is, it may belong to only a few families)[citation needed] is to place something sweet, such as honey or candy, in a safe place outside overnight. On the first morning of the new year, the first person up brings the sweet stuff into the house as another means of attaining a good new year.
Chahārshanbe Sūrī
Main article: Chaharshanbe Suri
Chehel Sotoun's Wall painting, that dates back to the Safavid era, depicts a Chaharshanbe Suri celebration.
The night before the last Wednesday of the year is celebrated by the Iranian people as Chahârshanbe Sûrî (Persian: چهارشنبه سوری Sour means feast, party or festival in Persian [58], Azerbaijani: Od çərşənbəsi, Kurdish: Çarşema Sor[59][60] چوارشهمه سوورێ (meaning Wednesday Festival) in Persian [58], the Iranian festival of fire. This festival is the celebration of the light (the good) winning over the darkness (the bad); the symbolism behind the rituals are all rooted back to Zoroastrianism.
The tradition includes people going into the streets and alleys to make bonfires, and jump over them while singing the traditional song Zardî-ye man az (ane) to, sorkhî-ye to az (ane) man ("az-ane to" means belongs to you); This literally translates to "My yellowness is yours, your redness is mine," with the figurative message "My paleness (pain, sickness) for you (the fire), your strength (health) for me." The fire is believed to burn out all the fear (yellowness) in their subconscious or their spirit, in preparation for new year.
Serving different kinds of pastry and nuts known as Ajīl-e Moshkel-Goshā (lit. problem-solving nuts) is the Chahārshanbe Sūrī way of giving thanks for the previous year's health and happiness, while exchanging any remaining paleness and evil for the warmth and vibrancy of the fire.
According to tradition, the living are visited by the spirit of their ancestors on the last days of the year, and many children wrap themselves in shrouds, symbolically re-enacting the visits. They also run through the streets banging on pots and pans with spoons and knocking on doors to ask for treats. The ritual is called qashogh-zany (spoon beating) and symbolizes the beating out of the last unlucky Wednesday of the year ( See also Trick-or-treating).
There are several other traditions on this night, including: the rituals of Kūze Shekastan, the breaking of earthen jars which symbolically hold one's bad fortune; the ritual of Fal-Gûsh (lit.Divination by ear), or inferring one's future from the conversations of those passing by;[61] and the ritual of Gereh-goshā’ī, making a knot in the corner of a handkerchief or garment and asking the first passerby to unravel it in order to remove ones misfortune.
Haft Sīn
Main article: Haft-Sin
Haft Sîn (Persian: هفت سین) or the seven 'S's is a major traditional table setting of Nowruz, the traditional Iranian spring celebration.Today The haft sin table includes seven specific items starting with the letter 'S' or Sīn (س) in the Persian alphabet. The items symbolically correspond to seven creations and holy immortals called Amesha Sepanta protecting them. The seven elements of Life, namely Fire, Earth, Water, Air, Plants, Animals, and Human, are represented. They also have Astrological correlations to five planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Sun and Moon. With the advent of Islam the word Amesha Sepanta shortened to and eventually was remembered by just the letter S and the number 7. The Haft Sin has evolved over time, but has kept its symbolism. Traditionally, families attempt to set as beautiful a Haft Sīn table as they can, as it is not only of traditional and spiritual value, but also noticed by visitors during Nowruzi visitations and is a reflection of their good taste.
Haft-Sin
The Haft Sīn items are:
* sabzeh - wheat, barley or lentil sprouts growing in a dish - symbolizing rebirth
* samanu - a sweet pudding made from wheat germ - symbolizing affluence
* senjed - the dried fruit of the oleaster tree - symbolizing love
* sīr - garlic - symbolizing medicine
* sīb - apples - symbolizing beauty and health
* somaq - sumac berries - symbolizing (the color of) sunrise
* serkeh - vinegar - symbolizing age and patience.
Other items on the table may include:
* Sonbol - Hyacinth (plant)
* Sekkeh - Coins - representative of wealth
* traditional Iranian pastries such as baghlava, toot, naan-nokhodchi
* Aajeel - dried nuts, berries and raisins
* lit candles (enlightenment and happiness)
* a mirror (symbolizing cleanness and honesty)
* decorated eggs, sometimes one for each member of the family (fertility)
* a bowl of water with goldfish (life within life, and the sign of Pisces which the sun is leaving). As an essential object of the Nowruz table, this goldfish is also "very ancient and meaningful" and with Zoroastrian connection.[62]
* rosewater, believed to have magical cleansing powers
* the national colours, for a patriotic touch
* a holy book (e.g., the Avesta, Qur'an, Bible, Torah, or Kitáb-i-Aqdas) and/or a poetry book (almost always either the Shahnameh or the Divan of Hafez)
Haji Firouz
Main article: Haji firouz
Haji Firuz in Tehran
The traditional herald of the Nowruz season is a man called Hājī Fīrūz (or Khwāja Pīrūz). He symbolizes the rebirth of the Sumerian god of sacrifice, Domuzi, who was killed at the end of each year and reborn at the beginning of the New Year.
He usually uses face paint to make his skin black (black is an ancient Persian symbol of good luck) and wears a red costume. Then he sings and dances through the streets with tambourines and trumpets spreading good cheer and heralds the coming of the New Year.
New Year dishes
* Sabzi Polo Mahi: The New Year's Day traditional meal is called Sabzi Polo Mahi, which is rice with green herbs served with fish. The traditional seasoning for Sabzi Polo are parsley, coriander, chives, dill and fenugreek.
* Reshteh Polo: rice cooked with noodles which is said to symbolically help one succeed in life.
* Dolme Barg : A traditional dish of Azeri people, cooked just before the new year. It includes some vegetables, meat and rice which have been cooked and embedded in grape leaves and cooked again. It is considered useful in reaching to wishes.
* Kookoo sabzi : Herbs and vegetable souffle, traditionally served for dinner at New Year. A light and fluffy omelet style made from parsley, dill, coriander, spinach, spring onion ends, and chives, mixed with eggs and walnut.
Sizdah Bedar
Main article: Sizdah Bedar
The thirteenth day of the new year festival is Sizdah Bedar (literally meaning "passing the thirteenth day", figuratively meaning "Passing the bad luck of the thirteenth day"). This is a day of festivity in the open, often accompanied by music and dancing, usually at family picnics.
Sizdah bedar celebrations stem from the ancient Persians' belief that the twelve constellations in the Zodiac controlled the months of the year, and each ruled the earth for a thousand years at the end of which the sky and earth collapsed in chaos. Hence Nowruz lasts twelve days and the thirteenth day represents the time of chaos when families put order aside and avoid the bad luck associated with the number thirteen by going outdoors and having picnics and parties.
At the end of the celebrations on this day, the sabzeh grown for the Haft Seen (which has symbolically collected all sickness and bad luck) is thrown into running water to exorcise the demons (divs) from the household. It is also customary for young single women to tie the leaves of the sabzeh before discarding it, so expressing a wish to be married before the next year's Sizdah Bedar. Another tradition associated with this day is Dorugh-e Sizdah, literally meaning "the lie of the thirteenth", which is the process of lying to someone and making them believe it (similar to April Fools Day).
Nouwruz in Afghanistan
Cooking samanu (or samanak) is a Nowruz tradition in Afghanistan and Tajikistan
In Afghanistan, Nouwroz festival is traditionally celebrated for 2 weeks. Preparations for Nouwroz start several days beforehand, at least after Chaharshanbe Suri, the last Wednesday before the New Year. Among various traditions and customs, the most important ones are:
* Haft Mēwa: In Afghanistan, they prepare Haft Mēwa (Seven Fruits) instead of Haft Sin which is common in Iran. Haft Mewa is like a Fruit salad made from 7 different Dried fruits, served in their own syrup. The 7 dried fruits are: Raisin, Senjed (the dried fruit of the oleaster tree), Pistachio, Hazelnut, Prune (dry fruit of Apricot), Walnut and whether Almond or another species of Plum fruit.
* Samanak: It is a special type of sweet dish made from Wheat germ. Women take a special party for it during the night, and cook it from late in the evening till the daylight, singing a special song: Samanak dar Josh o mā Kafcha zanem - Degarān dar Khwāb o mā Dafcha zanem
* Mēla-e Gul-e Surkh (Persian: ميلهى گل سرخ): The Guli Surkh festival which literally means Red Flower Festival (referring to the red Tulip flowers) is an old festival celebrated only in Mazari Sharif during the first 40 days of the year when the Tulip flowers grow. People travel from different parts of the country to Mazar in order to attend the festival. It is celebrated along with the Jahenda Bālā ceremony which is a specific religious ceremony performed in the holy blue mosque of Mazar that is believed (mostly by Sunnite Afghans) to be the site of the tomb of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth caliph of Islam. The ceremony is performed by raising a special banner (whose color configuration resembles Derafsh Kaviani) in the blue mosque in the first day of year (i.e. Nowroz). This is the biggest recorded Nowroz gathering where up to 200,000 people from all over Afghanistan get together in Mazar central park around blue mosque to celebrate the banner raising (Jahenda Bālā ) ceremony. The Guli Surkh party continues with other special activities among people in the Tulip fields and around the blue mosque for 40 days.
* Buzkashi: Along with other customs and celebrations, normally a Buzkashi tournament is held. The Buzkashi matches take place in northern cities of Afghanistan and in Kabul.
* Special cuisines: People cook special types of dishes for Nowroz, especially on the eve of Nowroz. Normally they cook Sabzi Chalaw, a dish made from rice and spinach, separately. Moreover, the bakeries prepare a special type of cookie, called Kulcha-e Nowrozī, which is only baked for Nowroz. Another dish which is prepared mostly for the Nowroz days is Māhī wa Jelabī (Fried Fish and Jelabi) and it is the most often meal in picnics. In Afghanistan, it is a common custom among the affianced families that the fiancé's family give presents to or prepare special dishes for the fiancée's family on special occasions such as in the two Eids, Barā'at and in Nowroz. Hence, the special dish for Nowroz is Māhī wa Jelabī.
* Sightseeing to Cercis fields: The citizens of Kabul go to Istalif, Charikar or other green places around where the Cercis flowers grow. They go for picnic with their families during the first 2 weeks of New Year.
* Jashn-e Dehqān: Jashn-e Dehqan means The Festival of Farmers. It is celebrated in the first day of year, in which the farmers walk in the cities as a sign of encouragement for the agricultural productions. In recent years, this activity is being performed only in Kabul and other major cities, in which the mayor and other high governmental personalities participate for watching and observing.
* Kampirak: Like "Haji Nowruz" he is an old bearded man wearing colorful clothes with a long hat and rosary who symbolizes beneficence and the power of nature yielding the forces of winter. He and his retinue pass village by village distributing gathered charities among people and do his shows like reciting poems. The tradition is observed in central provinces specially Bamyan and Daykundi.[63]
Newroz celebration by Kurds
Main article: Newroz as celebrated by Kurds
"Churshama Kulla" is the tradition where people jump over the fire. It is celebrated as a national emblem in Kurdistan. In this Picture Kurds in Istanbul celebrate Newroz through coming together and showing their cultural unity.
Although the Kurds celebrate Nowruz, it was not however until 2005 that Kurdish population of Turkey could celebrate their new year openly.[64] "Thousands of people have been detained in Turkey, as the authorities take action against suspected supporters of the Kurdish rebel movement, the PKK.[65] The holiday is now official in Turkey after international pressure on the Turkish government to lift culture bans. Turkish government renamed the holiday Nevroz in 1995, and reclaimed it as a Turkish holiday.[66]
The word 'Newroz' is Kurdish for 'Nowruz'. The Kurds celebrate this feast between 18th till 21 March. It is one of the few ‘people's celebrations’ that has survived and predates all the major religious festivals. The holiday is considered by Kurds to be the single most important holiday of every year.
With this festival Kurds gather into the fairgrounds mostly outside the cities to welcome spring. Women wear colored dresses and spangled head scarves and young men wave flags of green, yellow and red, the colors of the Kurdish people. They hold this festival by lighting fire and dancing around it.[67]
The main Kurdish greeting that accompanies the festival is Newroz pîroz be! literally translating to "Congratulations on the New Year" or equivalent to Happy Newroz!. Another greeting used is, Bijî Newroz!, simply meaning Long live Newroz!
Newroz is still largely considered as a potent symbol of Kurdish identity in Turkey. Newroz celebrations are usually organised by Kurdish cultural associations and pro-Kurdish political parties. Thus, the Democratic Society Party was a leading force in the organisation of the 2006 Newroz events throughout Turkey. In recent years the Newroz celebration gathers around 1 million participants in Diyarbakır, the biggest city of the Kurdish dominated Southeastern Turkey. As the Kurdish Newroz celebrations in Turkey often are theater for political messages, the events are frequently criticized for being political rallies rather than cultural celebrations.
In other largely populated Kurdish regions in the Middle East including Iraq and Syria, similar celebrations are carried out with fire, dancing and music. In Iran, it is the most important festival of the whole year.
In Kurdistan, jumping over the fire (known as Chuwarshama Kulla) happens on New Year's Eve (rather the last Tuesday of the year).
Novruz in Azerbaijan
Main article: Novruz in Azerbaijan
Azerbaijani youth celebrating Novruz.
Usually preparation for Novruz begins a month prior to the festival. Each of forthcoming 4 weeks is devoted to one of the four elements and called accordingly in Azerbaijan. Each Tuesday people celebrate the day of one of the four elements - water, fire, earth and wind.[68] People do house cleaning, plant trees, make new dresses, paint eggs, make national pastries such as shakarbura, pakhlava and a great variety of "national cuisine".[69] Wheat is fried with kishmish (raisins) and nuts (govurga). As a tribute to fire-worshiping every Tuesday during four weeks before the holiday kids jump over small bonfires and candles are lit. On the holiday eve the graves of relatives are visited and tended.[70]
Novruz is a family holiday. In the evening before the holiday the whole family gathers around the holiday table laid with various dishes to make the New Year rich. The holiday goes on for several days and ends with festive public dancing and other entertainment of folk bands, contests of national sports. In rural areas crop holidays are marked.[71]
The decoration of the festive table is khoncha, a big silver or copper tray with Samani placed in the centre and candles and dyed eggs by the number of family members around it. The table should be set, at least, with seven dishes.[68]
On the last Tuesday prior to Novruz, according to old traditions children slip around to their neighbours' homes and apartments, knock at their doors, and leave their caps or little basket on the thresholds all the while hiding nearby waiting for candies, pastries and nuts.[68]
Nowruz in the Zoroastrian faith
Zoroastrians worldwide celebrate Nowruz as the first day of the New Year. Parsi Zoroastrians of South Asian origin celebrate it as "Nowroj", "Navroz", or "Navroj" on the fixed day of March 21, while Zoroastrians of Iranian background generally celebrate, like other Iranians, on the actual Spring Equinox date. Because different Zoroastrian communities in India/Pakistan and Iran have evolved slightly different calendar systems, there is some variance. Adherents of the Fasli variant of the Zoroastrian calendar celebrate Nowruz in March, but today, most other Zoroastrians also celebrate on this day.
Other variants of the Zoroastrian calendar celebrate the Nowruz twice: once as Jamshedi Nowruz on March 21 as the start of spring, and a second Nowruz, in July/August (see Variations of the Zoroastrian calendar), as either New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. That the second Nowruz is celebrated after the last day of the year, known as Pateti, which comes after a Muktad period of days remembering the dead. Many Parsis are confused by this, and mistakenly celebrate Pateti as if it were Nowruz, when in fact Nowruz is the day after. Some attribute this confusion by some as celebrating the last day of the year (contrary to what might be expected from a term that means "new day"), may be due to the fact that in ancient Persia the day began at sunset, while in later Persian belief the day began at sunrise.
Zoroastrians of Iranian origin generally put up a Haft Sin table as do other Iranians. Zoroastrians of Parsi (South Asian) origin do not traditionally use a Haft Sin. They set up a standard "sesh" tray- generally a silver tray, with a container of rose water, a container with betel nut, raw rice, raw sugar, flowers, a picture of Zarathustra the prophet, and either a floating wick in a glass filled with water topped with oil for fuel, or an "afargania", a silver urn with a small fire nourished by sandalwood and other fragrant resins.
Nowruz in the Twelver Shi’a faith
Along with Ismaili’s, Alawites and Alevis, the Twelver Shi’a also hold the day of Nowruz in high regard. The day upon which Nowruz falls has been recommended as a day of fasting for Twelver Shi’a Muslims by Shi’a scholars, including Abul-Qassim al-Khoei, Imam Khomeini[72] and Ali al-Sistani.[73] The day also assumes special significance for Shias as it was on 21 March 656 AD when the first Imam Hazrat Ali assumed the office of Caliphate.
Naw-Rúz in the Bahá'í Faith
Main article: Bahá'í Naw-Rúz
Naw-Rúz in the Bahá'í Faith is one of nine holy days for adherents of the Bahá'í Faith worldwide and the first day of the Bahá'í calendar occurring on the vernal equinox, around March 21.[74] The Bahá'í calendar is composed of 19 months, each of 19 days,[75] and each of the months is named after an attribute of God; similarly each of the nineteen days in the month also are named after an attribute of God.[75] The first day and the first month were given the attribute of Bahá, an Arabic word meaning splendour or glory, and thus the first day of the year was the day of Bahá in the month of Bahá.[74][76] Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith, explained that Naw-Rúz was associated with the Most Great Name of God,[74][76] and was instituted as a festival for those who observed the Nineteen day fast.[77][78]
The day is also used to symbolize the renewal of time in each religious dispensation.[79] `Abdu'l-Bahá, Bahá'u'lláh's son and successor, explained that significance of Naw-Rúz in terms of spring and the new life it brings.[74] He explained that the equinox is a symbol of the messengers of God and the message that they proclaim is like a spiritual springtime, and that Naw-Rúz is used to commemorate it.[80]
As with all Bahá'í holy days, there are few fixed rules for observing Naw-Rúz, and Bahá'ís all over the world celebrate it as a festive day, according to local custom.[74] Persian Bahá'ís still observe many of the Iranian customs associated with Nowruz such as the Haft Sîn, but American Bahá'í communities, for example, may have a potluck dinner, along with prayers and readings from Bahá'í scripture.
Navroz celebration by Parsis
In the Fasli/Bastani variant of the Zoroastrian calendar, Navroz is always the day of the vernal equinox (nominally falling on March 21). In the Shahenshahi and Kadmi calendars, which do not account for leap years, the New Year's Day has drifted ahead by over 200 days. These latter two variants of the calendar, which are only followed by the Zoroastrians of India, celebrate the spring equinox as Jamshed-i Nouroz, with New Year's Day then being celebrated in July–August as Pateti "(day) of penitence" (from patet "confession," hence also repentance and penitence).
Navroz celebration by Kashmiri Pandits
The Kashmiri Pandits celebrate Navroz (or Navreh in Kashmiri) on a date around the vernal equinox. The date, which usually falls between mid-March and mid-April, is determined by the Hindu lunar calendar every year.
Thal Bharun (meaning 'filling the platter') is a major Kashmiri Pandit Navroz tradition. It is similar to the Iranian Haft Sin. The items placed on the tray or platter generally include wheat or rice , a sweet pudding made from milk and cereal, fruits, walnuts, rosewater, a coin (sikkeh), a pen, an ink-holder, a mirror (for introspection, purity of thought and honesty), and a lit diya or clay lamp (representing satyaprakasa, the Light of the Truth). Besides, new clothes are worn and presents are exchanged. Some adults, particularly women, fast on this day.
UN recognition
The UN's General Assembly in 2010 recognized March 21 as the International Day of Nowruz, describing it a spring festival of Persian origin which has been celebrated for over 3,000 years and calling on world countries to draw on the holiday's rich history to promote peace and goodwill. During the meeting of The Inter-governmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage of the United Nations, held between 28 September – 2 October 2009 in Abu Dhabi, Nowrūz was officially registered on the UNESCO List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In response to the UN recognition, Iran unveiled a postage stamp. The stamp was made public in the presence of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the first International Nowruz Celebrations in Tehran on Saturday, 27 March 2010. President Ahmadinejad also called for joint efforts to further acquaint the world about the meaningful holiday, adding that it could significantly promote global peace and justice: “Observing Nowruz will not only promote cultural values, but it will also help nations establish relations based on friendship, peace, justice and respect.”[81]
Spelling variations in English
A variety of spelling variations for the word "nowruz" exist in English-language usage. Random House (unabridged) provides the spelling "nowruz".[82] Merriam-Webster (2006) recognizes only the spelling "nauruz" (and a contestant in the final session of the 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee, Allion Salvador, in the United States was disqualified on that basis[83][84]). In the USA, many respected figures in the field of language such as Dr. Yarshater at Columbia University have suggested to use Nowruz[citation needed].
See also
Calendar icon.svg Holidays portal
* Iranian calendar
* Iranian festivals
* Sham el-Nessim
* Kha b-Nisan
* Assyrian new year
* Earth Day
* New Year's Day
* Nowruz Eve among Mazandarani people
* Public holidays in Iran
References
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22. ^ برگرفته از: «گنجينهي سخن»، تأليف دكتر ذبيح الله صفا، انتشارات اميركبير، 1370، جلد يكم، ص 292 Original excerpt: نخستين روز است از فروردين ماه و از اين جهت، روز نو نام كردهاند؛ زيرا كه پيشاني سال نو است و آن چه از پس اوست از اين پنج روز [= پنج روز اول فروردين] همه جشنهاست. و ششم فروردين ماه را «نوروز بزرگ» دارند؛ زيرا كه خسروان بدان پنج روز حقهاي حشم و گروهان و بزرگان بگزاردندي و حاجتها روا كردني، آن گاه بدين روز ششم خلوت كردندي خاصگان را. و اعتقاد پارسيان اندر نوروز نخستين آن است كه اول روزي است از زمانه و بدو، فلك آغازيد گشتن.
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59. ^ [1]). Among the Yazidis, this festival is celebrated on the first Wednesday of Nisan (April) which marks the first day of their new year (rather than March 21st). It is also called Cejna Sersal(New Year's Feast)Berbang.org
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External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Nowruz
* Noruz @ Encyclopedia Britannica
* UN Recognizes Nowruz as an International day
* Ancient Iran History @ Noruz
* Countdown to Nowruz (2009/1388) - timeanddate.com (IRST time) - UTC time
* Persian Rite of Spring performance
* شمارش معکوس تا تحويل سال 1390 شمسی Nowruz Countdown to March 20,2011
* 7sine 1390 photos and history
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Iran’s Leaders Respond to Obama
By ROBERT MACKEY
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/irans-leaders-respond-to-obama/#preview
NYTimes copyright
Q.Have they each, separately but yet collectively, cynically engaged in a series of half-truths (aka half-lies) to gain some narrow geopolitical self-advantage, without caring for the Greater Collective Good?
Yesterday,on Nowruz, I went to a Reception, hosted by the Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran at the United Nations.
Q. Why is Nowruz being singled out among all festivals, for attention by the UNESCO and the UNGA? Why not Onam, Holi, Basanth, Kwanzaa? An ancient festival heralding spring or harvest is not unique to Iran. EVERY group of people on earth has some ritual that marks some aspect of some season in the ecological niche in which they thrive.
So, why the special emphasis on Nowruz? The reasons are geopolitical of course.
None of the above-named players is ethical. However they are not equally unethical. Let us not forget that blatant acts in 1953, of the US Govt., specifically the CIA, when the CIA deposed the popularly elected Mossadegh who proposed state control of Iran's vital petroleum resources and won election. To prevent Mossadegh from nationalizing Iran's precious oil, The US Military-Corporate Complex (MCC) set in motion an unprecedented chain of events in Iran that led to US/UK installation of the Shah, establishment of the dreaded SAVAK, the humiliating taking of US hostages by Iran during the Carter administration and the triumphal but regrettable return of the exiled Ayatollahs.
Let us put the blame where it belongs. US meddling and US corporate greed (not forgetting to mention Brit empire/British Petroleum) led to the current state of affairs in Iran. Iran's domestic affairs, which are its own business, have been derailed, disrupted and negatively influenced by US/Israel ambitions in the so-called Middle East, which is actually West Asia and North Africa. The "Middle East" is a Brit-devised colonial/imperial construct embraced and expanded by the neo-imperial US.
Then in the 1990's we had the controversial though cynically simplistic Clash of Civilizations concept advanced by Harvard's Samuel Huntington. This incendiary lecture/book combo apparently gave the totalitarian Iran government the needed momentum to become the self-declared champion in UN intergovernmental circles, of the Dialogue among Civilizations.
It is this diplomatic counter-offensive that has placed Iran's undemocratic and misogynistic government in the unlikely and thoroughly unmerited role of *** champion*** of cultural and religious freedom and human rights at the UN and UNESCO. Iran champions human rights? Not. Ask Shirin Ebadi.
The reception I I attended was billed as a double celebration of Nowruz and a celebration of the adoption of the UN General Assembly resolution declaring Nowruz an "intangible heritage of humanity". The event as noted above was hosted by the Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The ceremony I attended deliberately distorted and erased the story of persecution and dispossession that led to the Persian diaspora, after the Islamic conquest of Iran.
Growing up in India, I remember celebrating Navroze with my Parsi friends and neighbors. I still celebrate Navroze when I am in India. Those Parsis were surviving members of the Persian diaspora that fled to India, following the destruction of their fire temples and the slaying of the Zarathustrians by Islam's zealots.
To erase history, to erase collective memory, to deny dispossession, is unethical and produces unanticipated geopolitcal consequences.
Will the US govt. ever learn from the tragedies it has unleashed in various parts of the world, in its Empire Project?
Obama's threatening Nowruz message is only the latest mis-step in the US plan to destabilize Iran. And Iran's own ***reactive*** (yes reactive, not preemptive like the US) hardening totalitarianism prevents Iranian voices of freedom from being heard, even within its borders. And Iran gets unmerited prestige at the UN and UNESCO as a champion of freedom.
Navroze Mubarak everybody! May collective memory survive geopolitics. That's the ethical choice.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Putting the Spin on Nowruz article
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Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice Blog
Spring Festivals are universal.
Harvest festivals are universal.
Such celebrations of sowing and reaping don't belong exclusively to any group of people. No particular rite of any people anywhere -- so that they can gather to be joyful within nature -- can receive a position of special privilege over other similar celebrations. If Nowruz is privileged by the UNESCO, why not Onam or Holi or Thanksgiving or Basanth or Kwanzaa?
Nowruz, Navroze and its variants represent a universal human yearning to celebrate Nature as it blooms once again,all over the world, as part of the eternal cycle of the the seasons. Whether in Africa or Asia, Peru or New Zealand, Tibet or Tanzania, festivals to celebrate agriculture within the context of Nature's own bounty, are as natural and essential as the breath we breathe.
Yesterday, I went to a Reception, hosted by the Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran at the United Nations.
What has happened to Nowruz? Has a Spring Festival been hijacked? What's the spin on Nowruz? To erase memory? To conceal religious persecution? To mask dispossession? To construct a persuasive fiction? To advance a geopolitical strategy? To withstand a supremacist geopolitical entity? All of the above?
Who are the makers of the persuasive fiction?
Who stole Nowruz?
The UN General Assembly, The UN Secretariat, UNESCO, Iran and the US.
Q.Have they separately but yet collectively engaged in a series of half-truths (aka half-lies) which seek to gain some narrow geopolitical self-advantage.
--------------
NOWRUZ
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For Coptic New Year, see Nayrouz. For other uses, see Nowruz (disambiguation).
Nowrūz
Nowrūz
Also called Also spelled Norouz, Norooz, Narooz, Nawruz, Newroz, Newruz, Nauruz, Nawroz, Noruz, Nohrooz, Novruz, Nauroz, Navroz, Naw-Rúz, Nowroj, Navroj, Nevruz, Наврӯз, Navruz, Navrez, Nooruz, Nauryz, Nevruz, Nowrouz,ნავრუზი (Georgian)
Observed by Principally in:
Iran Iran
Afghanistan Afghanistan
Albania Albania
Uzbekistan Uzbekistan
Kazakhstan Kazakhstan
Azerbaijan Azerbaijan
Tajikistan Tajikistan
Georgia (country) Azeris in Georgia (country) Georgia[1]
Iraqi Kurdistan Iraqi Kurdistan
Turkmenistan Turkmenistan
Kyrgyzstan Kyrgyzstan
Republic of Kosovo Kosovo
ethnic & religious groups worldwide:Kurdish diaspora
Zoroastrians, Some Sufis, Ismailis, Bahá'ís and the Iranian diaspora. Also observed in Bosnia, Caucasus, Crimea, Georgia, India, Kashmir, Macedonia, Pakistan, Serbia, and among Uyghurs and Salars of China.
Significance New year holiday
Date March 20, 21 or 22
2010 date Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 17:32 UTC *
2011 date Monday, March 20, 2011 at 23:21 UTC *
2012 date Wednesday, March 20, 2012 at 29:18 UTC *
Celebrations The Haftsin setting, Chahârshanbe Sûrî, Sizdah Bedar, etc.
Nowrūz (Persian: نوروز, IPA: [nouˈɾuːz], originally "New Light") is the name of the New Year in Iranian calendars and the corresponding traditional celebrations.[2] Nowruz is also widely referred to as the Persian New Year.[3][4][5][6]
Nowruz is celebrated and observed by Iranic peoples and the related cultural continent and has spread in many other parts of the world, including parts of Central Asia, Caucasus, South Asia, Northwestern China, the Crimea and some groups in the Balkans.
Nowruz marks the first day of spring and the beginning of the year in Iranian calendar. It is celebrated on the day of the astronomical vernal equinox, which usually occurs on March 21 or the previous/following day depending on where it is observed. As well as being a Zoroastrian holiday and having significance amongst the Zoroastrian ancestors of modern Iranians, the same time is celebrated in parts of the South Asian sub-continent as the new year. The moment the Sun crosses the celestial equator and equalizes night and day is calculated exactly every year and Iranian families gather together to observe the rituals.
Originally being a Zoroastrian festival, and the holiest of them all, Nowruz is believed to have been invented by Zoroaster himself, although there is no clear date of origin.[7] Since the Achaemenid era the official year has begun with the New Day when the Sun leaves the zodiac of Pisces and enters the zodiacal sign of Aries, signifying the Spring Equinox.
The Jewish festival of Purim is probably adopted from the Persian New Year.[8] It is also a holy day for Sufis, Ismailis, Alawites,[9] Alevis, and adherents of the Bahá'í Faith.[10]
The term Nowruz in writing, first appeared in Persian records in the 2nd century AD, but it was also an important day during the time of the Achaemenids (c. 548-330 BC), where kings from different nations under the Persian empire used to bring gifts to the Emperor, also called King of Kings (Shahanshah), of Persia on Nowruz. The significance of Nowruz in the Achaemenid empire was such that the great Persian king Cambyses II's appointing as the king of Babylon was legitimized only after his participation in the New Year festival (Nowruz).[11]
The UN's General Assembly in 2010 recognized the International Day of Nowruz, describing it a spring festival of Persian origin which has been celebrated for over 3,000 years.[12][13] During the meeting of The Inter-governmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage of the United Nations, held between 28 September – 2 October 2009 in Abu Dhabi, Nowrūz was officially registered on the UNESCO List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.[14][15][16][17]
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Etymology
* 2 Nowruz and the spring equinox
* 3 History and tradition
o 3.1 Tradition and mythology
o 3.2 History
* 4 Local variations
o 4.1 Nowruz around the world
+ 4.1.1 Countries that have Nowruz as a public holiday
o 4.2 Nowruz celebration in Iran
+ 4.2.1 Spring cleaning and visiting one another
+ 4.2.2 Chahārshanbe Sūrī
+ 4.2.3 Haft Sīn
+ 4.2.4 Haji Firouz
+ 4.2.5 New Year dishes
+ 4.2.6 Sizdah Bedar
o 4.3 Nouwruz in Afghanistan
o 4.4 Newroz celebration by Kurds
o 4.5 Novruz in Azerbaijan
o 4.6 Nowruz in the Zoroastrian faith
o 4.7 Nowruz in the Twelver Shi’a faith
o 4.8 Naw-Rúz in the Bahá'í Faith
o 4.9 Navroz celebration by Parsis
o 4.10 Navroz celebration by Kashmiri Pandits
o 4.11 UN recognition
* 5 Spelling variations in English
* 6 See also
* 7 References
* 8 External links
Etymology
The term Nowruz is a Persian compound-word and consists of:
* now (Old Persian nava) means "new" and has the following cognates, in English new, in Latin novus, German neu, Sanskrit nava, etc. The Persian pronunciation differs in the many dialects of the language: while the eastern dialects have preserved the original diphthong (IPA: [næuˈɾoːz]), the western dialects usually pronounce it with a different diphthong (IPA: [nouˈɾuːz]), and some colloquial variants (such as the Tehrani accent) pronounce it with a monophtong (IPA: [noˈɾuːz]).
* rōz (also with various pronuciations, such as rūz, rozh, or roj) means "day" in Middle- and Modern Persian, as well as related languages, such as Kurdish. The original meaning of the word, however, was "light". The term is derived from Avestan *rowch-, itself derived from Proto-Indo-European *leuk- (l <-> r and k <-> ch sound changes are common in Indo-European languages), and is related to Sanskrit ruci, Latin lux and, in fact, English light.
Nowruz and the spring equinox
Main article: Equinox
Illumination of the Earth by the Sun on the day of equinox, (ignoring twilight).
The first day on the Iranian calendar falls on the March equinox, the first day of spring. At the time of the equinox, the sun is observed to be directly over the equator, and the north and south poles of the Earth lie along the solar terminator; sunlight is evenly divided between the north and south hemispheres.
In ca. 11 century CE major reforms of Iranian calendars took place and whose principal purpose was to fix the beginning of the calendar year, i.e. Nowrūz, at the vernal equinox. Accordingly, the definition of Nowruz given by the Iranian scientist Ṭūsī was the following: "the first day of the official new year [Nowruz] was always the day on which the sun entered Aries before noon".[18]
History and tradition
Tradition and mythology
Bas-relief in Persepolis. A Zoroastrian symbol of Nowruz - on the vernal equinox the powers of the eternally fighting bull (personifying the Earth) and lion (personifying the Sun) are equal.
The celebration has its roots in Ancient Iran. Due to its antiquity, there exist various foundation myths for Nowruz in Iranian mythology. In the Zoroastrian tradition, the seven most important Zoroastrian festivals are the six Gahambars and Nowruz, which occurs at the spring equinox. According to Mary Boyce,[19]
“ It seems a reasonable surmise that Nowruz, the holiest of them all, with deep doctrinal significance, was founded by Zoroaster himself. ”
Between sunset of the day of the 6th Gahanbar and sunrise of Nowruz was celebrated Hamaspathmaedaya (later known, in its extended form, as Frawardinegan). This and the Gahanbar are the only festivals named in the surviving text of the Avesta.
The Shahnameh, dates Nowruz as far back to the reign of Jamshid, who in Zoroastrian texts saved mankind from a killer winter that was destined to kill every living creature.[20] The mythical Persian King Jamshid (Yima or Yama of the Indo-Iranian lore) perhaps symbolizes the transition of the Indo-Iranians from animal hunting to animal husbandry and a more settled life in human history. In the Shahnameh and Iranian mythology, he is credited with the foundation of Nowruz. In the Shahnama, Jamshid constructed a throne studded with gems. He had demons raise him above the earth into the heavens; there he sat on his throne like the sun shining in the sky. The world's creatures gathered in wonder about him and scattered jewels around him, and called this day the New Day or No/Now-Ruz. This was the first day of the month of Farvardin (the first month of the Persian calendar).[21]
The Persian scholar Abu Rayhan Biruni of the 10th century AD, in his Persian work "Kitab al-Tafhim li Awa'il Sina'at al-Tanjim" provides a description of the calendar of various nations. Besides the Persian calendar, various festivals of Arabs, Jews, Sabians, Greeks and other nations are mentioned in this book. In the section on the Persian calendar(تقویم پارسیان), he mentions Nowruz, Sadeh, Tiregan, Mehregan, the six Gahanbar, Parvardegaan, Bahmanja, Isfandarmazh and several other festivals. According to him: It is the belief of the Persians that Nowruz marks the first day when the universe started its motion.[22] The Persian historian Abu Saʿīd Gardēzī[23] in his work titled Zayn al-Akhbār under the section of the Zoroastrians festivals mentions Nowruz (among other festivals) and specifically points out that Zoroaster highly emphasized the celebration of Nowruz and Mehregan.[24]
History
Persepolis (Persian: تخت جمشید meaning the throne of Jamshid) all nations stair case. Notice the people from across the Achaemenid Persian Empire bringing gifts. Some scholars have associated the occasion to be either Mehregan or Nowruz.[25]
Although it is not clear whether proto-Indo-Iranians celebrated a feast as the first day of the calendar, there are indications that both Iranians and Indians assumed the first day of autumn as the beginning of new year season. There are reasons that Iranians may have observed the beginning both autumn and spring.[26]
Boyce and Grenet explain the traditions for seasonal festivals and comment:"It is possible that the splendor of the Babylonian festivities at this season led the Persians to develop their own spring festival into an established new year feast, with the name Navasarda 'New Year' (a name which, though first attested through Middle Persian derivatives, is attributed to the Achaemenian period). Since the communal observations of the ancient Iranians appear in general to have been a seasonal ones, it is probable, however, that they traditionally held festivals in both autumn and spring, to mark the major turning points of the natural year".[26]
We have reasons to believe that the celebration is much older than that date and was surely celebrated by the people and royalty during the Achaemenid times (555-330 BC). It was, therefore, a highly auspicious occasion for the ancient Iranian peoples. It has been suggested that the famous Persepolis complex, or at least the palace of Apadana and the Hundred Columns Hall, were built for the specific purpose of celebrating Nowruz. Although, there may be no mention of Nowruz in recorded Achaemenid inscriptions (see picture)[27] There is a detailed account by Xenophon of Nowruz celebration taking place in Persepolis and the continuity of this festival in the Achaemenid tradition.[28] According to Britannica, the Jewish festival of Purim, is probably adopted from the Persian New Year. [8]
Nowruz was the holiday of Arsacid/Parthian dynastic Empires who ruled Iran (248 BC-224 AD). There are specific references to the celebration of Nowruz during the reign of Vologases I (51-78 AD), but these include no details.[27] Before Sassanids established their power in West Asia around 300 AD, Parthians celebrated Nowruz in Autumn and 1st of Farvardin began at the Autumn Equinox. During Parthian dynasty the Spring Festival was Mehragan, a Zoroastrian and Iranian festival celebrated in honor of Mithra.[29]
Extensive records on the celebration of Nowruz appear following the accession of Ardashir I of Persia, the founder of the Sassanid dynasty (224-651 AD). Under the Sassanid Emperors, Nowruz was celebrated as the most important day of the year. Most royal traditions of Nowruz such as royal audiences with the public, cash gifts, and the pardoning of prisoners, were established during the Sassanian era and persisted unchanged until modern times.
Nowruz, along with Sadeh (celebrated in mid-winter), survived in society following the introduction of Islam in 650 AD. Other celebrations such Gahanbar and Mehragan were eventually side-lined or were only followed by the Zoroastrians, who carried them. There are records of the Four Great Caliphs presiding over Nowruz celebrations, and it was adopted as the main royal holiday during the Abbasid period.
In his work titled the Nowruznama, Omar Khayyam, a well known Persian poet and Mathematician provides a vivid description of the celebration in the courts of the Kings of Persia:[30]
“ From the era of Kai Khusraw till the days of Yazdegard, last of the pre-Islamic kings of Persia, the royal custom was thus: on the first day of the New Year, Now Ruz, the King's first visitor was the High Mobad of the Zoroastrians, who brought with him as gifts a golden goblet full of wine, a ring, some gold coins, a fistful of green sprigs of wheat, a sword, and a bow. In the language of Persia he would then glorify God and praise the monarch. This was the address of the High Mobad to the king : "O Majesty, on this feast of the Equinox, first day of the first month of the year, seeing that thou hast freely chosen God and the Faith of the Ancient ones; may Surush, the Angel-messenger, grant thee wisdom and insight and sagacity in thy affairs. Live long in praise, be happy and fortunate upon thy golden throne, drink immortality from the Cup of Jamshid; and keep in solemn trust the customs of our ancestors, their noble aspirations, fair gestures and the exercise of justice and righteousness. May thy soul flourish; may thy youth be as the new-grown grain; may thy horse be puissant, victorious; thy sword bright and deadly against foes; thy hawk swift against its prey; thy every act straight as the arrow's shaft. Go forth from thy rich throne, conquer new lands. Honor the craftsman and the sage in equal degree; disdain the acquisition of wealth. May thy house prosper and thy life be long!" ”
Following the demise of the Caliphate and the subsequent re-emergence of Persian dynasties such as the Samanids and Buyids, Nowruz was elevated to an even more important event. The Buyids revived the ancient traditions of Sassanian times and restored many smaller celebrations that had been eliminated by the Caliphate. Even the Turkic and Mongol invaders did not attempt to abolish Nowruz in favor of any other celebration. Thus, Nowruz remained as the main celebration in the Persian lands by both the officials and the people.
Kurds celebrating. Fire is the symbol of Nowruz
Local variations
Today, the festival of Nowruz is celebrated in many countries that were territories of, or influenced by, the Persian Empire: Iran, Various Iranian Peoples including Kurds, Afghanistan, parts of the Middle East, as well as in the former Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. It is also celebrated by the Zoroastrians as well by certain Iranic inhabitants in Pakistan's Chitral region and Northern Areas. It is also celebrated by the Iranian immigrants from Shiraz in Zanzibar.[31] it is called Nevruz in Turkic, Uyghurs who live in Northwestern China call it "Noruz", and it is called Sultan Nevruz in Albanian. In Kurdish communities located in parts of western Iran, the holiday is referred to as Newroz, which is a variant of the Persian word Nowruz.[32]
Nowruz around the world
Nowruz is celebrated in Greater Iran, Caucasus, Central Asia and by Iranians worldwide. It is a public holiday in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan,[33] Iraqi Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan,[34] Uzbekistan,[35] Kashmir,[36] and Kyrgyzstan.[37] Also the Canadian parliament by unanimous consent, has passed a bill to add Nowruz to the national calendar of Canada, on March 30, 2009.[38][39]
In Albania Sultan Nevruz is celebrated as a mainly mystical day by the Bektashi sect, and there are special ceremonies in the Tekke led by the clergy and large meals are served there. They celebrate this day as the birthday of Ali. Also all Albanians celebrate a secular version of Nowruz, called Spring Day. Nowruz is also celebrated by Kurds in Iraq[40] and Turkey[41] as well as by Parsis in the Indian subcontinent.
Other notable celebrations take place by Iranians around the world, such as Los Angeles, Toronto, Cologne and in United Kingdom, mainly in London.[42] But because Los Angeles is prone to devastating fires, there are very strict fire codes in the city. No fires are allowed even on one's own property. Usually, Iranians living in Southern California go to the beaches to celebrate the event where it is permissible to build fires.[43] On 15 March 2010, The United States House of Representatives passed The Nowruz Resolution (H.Res. 267), by a 384-2 vote,[44] "Recognizing the cultural and historical significance of Nowruz, ... .".[45]
In Iran, the Islamic Regime attempted to suppress Nowruz following the Iranian Revolution and was met with very little success. The Ayatollahs considered Nowruz a pagan holiday and a distraction from more important things such as Islamic holidays.[46]
In Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban, Nowruz was banned and considered an "ancient pagan holiday centered on fire worship" but until 2001 it came back and now it is as popular as it was before the extremist Taliban.[47]
It is also a holy day for Alawites,[9] Alevis, and adherents of the Bahá'í Faith.[10]
Countries that have Nowruz as a public holiday
* Afghanistan Afghanistan (20 March to 23 March)[48]
* Albania Albania (20 March to 23 March, total of 4 days)[49]
* Azerbaijan Azerbaijan (20 March to 26 March, total of 7 days)[50]
* Georgia (country) Azeris in Georgia (country), Georgia[1]
* Iran Iran (20 March to 23 March, total of 4 days in general + total of 13 days for schools and universities)[51]
* Iraq (regional only in Iraqi Kurdistan Iraqi Kurdistan) (21 March)[52]
* Kazakhstan Kazakhstan (21 March to 24 March, total of 4 days)[53]
* Republic of Kosovo Kosovo) (21 March)
* Kyrgyzstan Kyrgyzstan (21 March)[54]
* Tajikistan Tajikistan (20 March to 23 March, total of 4 days)[55]
* Turkmenistan Turkmenistan (20 March to 23 March, total of 4 days)[56]
* Uzbekistan Uzbekistan (21 March)[57]
Nowruz celebration in Iran
A Haft sin table in Tehran.
Nowruz is the most important holiday in Iran. Preparations for Nowruz begin in the month Esfand (or Espand), the last month of winter in the Persian solar calendar.
Spring cleaning and visiting one another
Further information: Spring cleaning
Spring cleaning, or Khouneh Tekouni (literally means 'shaking the house') or 'complete cleaning of the house' is commonly performed before Nowruz. Persians (Iranians, Afghans and Tajiks) and other Indo-Iranian groups (Kurds, Azarbaijanis and Balochs) start preparing for the Nowruz with a major spring-cleaning of their houses, the purchase of new clothes to wear for the new year and the purchase of flowers (in particular the hyacinth and the tulip are popular and conspicuous).
In association with the "rebirth of nature", extensive spring-cleaning is a national tradition observed by almost every household in Iran. This is also extended to personal attire, and it is customary to buy at least one set of new clothes. On the New Year's Day, families dress in their new clothes and start the twelve-day celebrations by visiting the elders of their family, then the rest of their family and finally their friends. On the thirteenth day families leave their homes and picnic outdoors.
During the Nowruz holidays, people are expected to visit one another (mostly limited to families, friends and neighbors) in the form of short house visits, which are usually reciprocated. Typically, on the first day of Nowruz, family members gather around the table, with the Haft Seen on the table or set next to it, and await the exact moment of the arrival of the spring. At that time gifts are exchanged. Later in the day, the first house visits are paid to the most senior family members. Typically, the youth will visit the elders first, and the elders return their visit later. When in previous year, a family member is deceased, the tradition is to visit that family first (among the elders). The visits naturally have to be relatively short, otherwise one will not be able to visit everybody on their list. A typical visit is around 30 minutes, where you often run into other visiting relatives and friends who happen to be paying a visit to the same house at that time. Because of the house visits, you make sure you have a sufficient supply of pastry, cookies, fresh and dried fruits and special nuts on hand, as you typically serve your visitors with these items with tea or sherbet. Many Iranians will throw large Nowruz parties in a central location as a way of dealing with the long distances between groups of friends and family.
Some Nowruz celebrants believe that whatever a person does on Nowruz will affect the rest of the year. So, if a person is warm and kind to their relatives, friends and neighbors on Nowruz, then the new year will be a good one. On the other hand, if there are fights and disagreements, the year will be a bad one.As a extended tradition to the holiday, men may or may not choose to shave their faces until the night of the "New Day" as a sign of removal of old habits and tendencies and the rebirht of their faith and being.
One tradition that may not be very widespread (that is, it may belong to only a few families)[citation needed] is to place something sweet, such as honey or candy, in a safe place outside overnight. On the first morning of the new year, the first person up brings the sweet stuff into the house as another means of attaining a good new year.
Chahārshanbe Sūrī
Main article: Chaharshanbe Suri
Chehel Sotoun's Wall painting, that dates back to the Safavid era, depicts a Chaharshanbe Suri celebration.
The night before the last Wednesday of the year is celebrated by the Iranian people as Chahârshanbe Sûrî (Persian: چهارشنبه سوری Sour means feast, party or festival in Persian [58], Azerbaijani: Od çərşənbəsi, Kurdish: Çarşema Sor[59][60] چوارشهمه سوورێ (meaning Wednesday Festival) in Persian [58], the Iranian festival of fire. This festival is the celebration of the light (the good) winning over the darkness (the bad); the symbolism behind the rituals are all rooted back to Zoroastrianism.
The tradition includes people going into the streets and alleys to make bonfires, and jump over them while singing the traditional song Zardî-ye man az (ane) to, sorkhî-ye to az (ane) man ("az-ane to" means belongs to you); This literally translates to "My yellowness is yours, your redness is mine," with the figurative message "My paleness (pain, sickness) for you (the fire), your strength (health) for me." The fire is believed to burn out all the fear (yellowness) in their subconscious or their spirit, in preparation for new year.
Serving different kinds of pastry and nuts known as Ajīl-e Moshkel-Goshā (lit. problem-solving nuts) is the Chahārshanbe Sūrī way of giving thanks for the previous year's health and happiness, while exchanging any remaining paleness and evil for the warmth and vibrancy of the fire.
According to tradition, the living are visited by the spirit of their ancestors on the last days of the year, and many children wrap themselves in shrouds, symbolically re-enacting the visits. They also run through the streets banging on pots and pans with spoons and knocking on doors to ask for treats. The ritual is called qashogh-zany (spoon beating) and symbolizes the beating out of the last unlucky Wednesday of the year ( See also Trick-or-treating).
There are several other traditions on this night, including: the rituals of Kūze Shekastan, the breaking of earthen jars which symbolically hold one's bad fortune; the ritual of Fal-Gûsh (lit.Divination by ear), or inferring one's future from the conversations of those passing by;[61] and the ritual of Gereh-goshā’ī, making a knot in the corner of a handkerchief or garment and asking the first passerby to unravel it in order to remove ones misfortune.
Haft Sīn
Main article: Haft-Sin
Haft Sîn (Persian: هفت سین) or the seven 'S's is a major traditional table setting of Nowruz, the traditional Iranian spring celebration.Today The haft sin table includes seven specific items starting with the letter 'S' or Sīn (س) in the Persian alphabet. The items symbolically correspond to seven creations and holy immortals called Amesha Sepanta protecting them. The seven elements of Life, namely Fire, Earth, Water, Air, Plants, Animals, and Human, are represented. They also have Astrological correlations to five planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Sun and Moon. With the advent of Islam the word Amesha Sepanta shortened to and eventually was remembered by just the letter S and the number 7. The Haft Sin has evolved over time, but has kept its symbolism. Traditionally, families attempt to set as beautiful a Haft Sīn table as they can, as it is not only of traditional and spiritual value, but also noticed by visitors during Nowruzi visitations and is a reflection of their good taste.
Haft-Sin
The Haft Sīn items are:
* sabzeh - wheat, barley or lentil sprouts growing in a dish - symbolizing rebirth
* samanu - a sweet pudding made from wheat germ - symbolizing affluence
* senjed - the dried fruit of the oleaster tree - symbolizing love
* sīr - garlic - symbolizing medicine
* sīb - apples - symbolizing beauty and health
* somaq - sumac berries - symbolizing (the color of) sunrise
* serkeh - vinegar - symbolizing age and patience.
Other items on the table may include:
* Sonbol - Hyacinth (plant)
* Sekkeh - Coins - representative of wealth
* traditional Iranian pastries such as baghlava, toot, naan-nokhodchi
* Aajeel - dried nuts, berries and raisins
* lit candles (enlightenment and happiness)
* a mirror (symbolizing cleanness and honesty)
* decorated eggs, sometimes one for each member of the family (fertility)
* a bowl of water with goldfish (life within life, and the sign of Pisces which the sun is leaving). As an essential object of the Nowruz table, this goldfish is also "very ancient and meaningful" and with Zoroastrian connection.[62]
* rosewater, believed to have magical cleansing powers
* the national colours, for a patriotic touch
* a holy book (e.g., the Avesta, Qur'an, Bible, Torah, or Kitáb-i-Aqdas) and/or a poetry book (almost always either the Shahnameh or the Divan of Hafez)
Haji Firouz
Main article: Haji firouz
Haji Firuz in Tehran
The traditional herald of the Nowruz season is a man called Hājī Fīrūz (or Khwāja Pīrūz). He symbolizes the rebirth of the Sumerian god of sacrifice, Domuzi, who was killed at the end of each year and reborn at the beginning of the New Year.
He usually uses face paint to make his skin black (black is an ancient Persian symbol of good luck) and wears a red costume. Then he sings and dances through the streets with tambourines and trumpets spreading good cheer and heralds the coming of the New Year.
New Year dishes
* Sabzi Polo Mahi: The New Year's Day traditional meal is called Sabzi Polo Mahi, which is rice with green herbs served with fish. The traditional seasoning for Sabzi Polo are parsley, coriander, chives, dill and fenugreek.
* Reshteh Polo: rice cooked with noodles which is said to symbolically help one succeed in life.
* Dolme Barg : A traditional dish of Azeri people, cooked just before the new year. It includes some vegetables, meat and rice which have been cooked and embedded in grape leaves and cooked again. It is considered useful in reaching to wishes.
* Kookoo sabzi : Herbs and vegetable souffle, traditionally served for dinner at New Year. A light and fluffy omelet style made from parsley, dill, coriander, spinach, spring onion ends, and chives, mixed with eggs and walnut.
Sizdah Bedar
Main article: Sizdah Bedar
The thirteenth day of the new year festival is Sizdah Bedar (literally meaning "passing the thirteenth day", figuratively meaning "Passing the bad luck of the thirteenth day"). This is a day of festivity in the open, often accompanied by music and dancing, usually at family picnics.
Sizdah bedar celebrations stem from the ancient Persians' belief that the twelve constellations in the Zodiac controlled the months of the year, and each ruled the earth for a thousand years at the end of which the sky and earth collapsed in chaos. Hence Nowruz lasts twelve days and the thirteenth day represents the time of chaos when families put order aside and avoid the bad luck associated with the number thirteen by going outdoors and having picnics and parties.
At the end of the celebrations on this day, the sabzeh grown for the Haft Seen (which has symbolically collected all sickness and bad luck) is thrown into running water to exorcise the demons (divs) from the household. It is also customary for young single women to tie the leaves of the sabzeh before discarding it, so expressing a wish to be married before the next year's Sizdah Bedar. Another tradition associated with this day is Dorugh-e Sizdah, literally meaning "the lie of the thirteenth", which is the process of lying to someone and making them believe it (similar to April Fools Day).
Nouwruz in Afghanistan
Cooking samanu (or samanak) is a Nowruz tradition in Afghanistan and Tajikistan
In Afghanistan, Nouwroz festival is traditionally celebrated for 2 weeks. Preparations for Nouwroz start several days beforehand, at least after Chaharshanbe Suri, the last Wednesday before the New Year. Among various traditions and customs, the most important ones are:
* Haft Mēwa: In Afghanistan, they prepare Haft Mēwa (Seven Fruits) instead of Haft Sin which is common in Iran. Haft Mewa is like a Fruit salad made from 7 different Dried fruits, served in their own syrup. The 7 dried fruits are: Raisin, Senjed (the dried fruit of the oleaster tree), Pistachio, Hazelnut, Prune (dry fruit of Apricot), Walnut and whether Almond or another species of Plum fruit.
* Samanak: It is a special type of sweet dish made from Wheat germ. Women take a special party for it during the night, and cook it from late in the evening till the daylight, singing a special song: Samanak dar Josh o mā Kafcha zanem - Degarān dar Khwāb o mā Dafcha zanem
* Mēla-e Gul-e Surkh (Persian: ميلهى گل سرخ): The Guli Surkh festival which literally means Red Flower Festival (referring to the red Tulip flowers) is an old festival celebrated only in Mazari Sharif during the first 40 days of the year when the Tulip flowers grow. People travel from different parts of the country to Mazar in order to attend the festival. It is celebrated along with the Jahenda Bālā ceremony which is a specific religious ceremony performed in the holy blue mosque of Mazar that is believed (mostly by Sunnite Afghans) to be the site of the tomb of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth caliph of Islam. The ceremony is performed by raising a special banner (whose color configuration resembles Derafsh Kaviani) in the blue mosque in the first day of year (i.e. Nowroz). This is the biggest recorded Nowroz gathering where up to 200,000 people from all over Afghanistan get together in Mazar central park around blue mosque to celebrate the banner raising (Jahenda Bālā ) ceremony. The Guli Surkh party continues with other special activities among people in the Tulip fields and around the blue mosque for 40 days.
* Buzkashi: Along with other customs and celebrations, normally a Buzkashi tournament is held. The Buzkashi matches take place in northern cities of Afghanistan and in Kabul.
* Special cuisines: People cook special types of dishes for Nowroz, especially on the eve of Nowroz. Normally they cook Sabzi Chalaw, a dish made from rice and spinach, separately. Moreover, the bakeries prepare a special type of cookie, called Kulcha-e Nowrozī, which is only baked for Nowroz. Another dish which is prepared mostly for the Nowroz days is Māhī wa Jelabī (Fried Fish and Jelabi) and it is the most often meal in picnics. In Afghanistan, it is a common custom among the affianced families that the fiancé's family give presents to or prepare special dishes for the fiancée's family on special occasions such as in the two Eids, Barā'at and in Nowroz. Hence, the special dish for Nowroz is Māhī wa Jelabī.
* Sightseeing to Cercis fields: The citizens of Kabul go to Istalif, Charikar or other green places around where the Cercis flowers grow. They go for picnic with their families during the first 2 weeks of New Year.
* Jashn-e Dehqān: Jashn-e Dehqan means The Festival of Farmers. It is celebrated in the first day of year, in which the farmers walk in the cities as a sign of encouragement for the agricultural productions. In recent years, this activity is being performed only in Kabul and other major cities, in which the mayor and other high governmental personalities participate for watching and observing.
* Kampirak: Like "Haji Nowruz" he is an old bearded man wearing colorful clothes with a long hat and rosary who symbolizes beneficence and the power of nature yielding the forces of winter. He and his retinue pass village by village distributing gathered charities among people and do his shows like reciting poems. The tradition is observed in central provinces specially Bamyan and Daykundi.[63]
Newroz celebration by Kurds
Main article: Newroz as celebrated by Kurds
"Churshama Kulla" is the tradition where people jump over the fire. It is celebrated as a national emblem in Kurdistan. In this Picture Kurds in Istanbul celebrate Newroz through coming together and showing their cultural unity.
Although the Kurds celebrate Nowruz, it was not however until 2005 that Kurdish population of Turkey could celebrate their new year openly.[64] "Thousands of people have been detained in Turkey, as the authorities take action against suspected supporters of the Kurdish rebel movement, the PKK.[65] The holiday is now official in Turkey after international pressure on the Turkish government to lift culture bans. Turkish government renamed the holiday Nevroz in 1995, and reclaimed it as a Turkish holiday.[66]
The word 'Newroz' is Kurdish for 'Nowruz'. The Kurds celebrate this feast between 18th till 21 March. It is one of the few ‘people's celebrations’ that has survived and predates all the major religious festivals. The holiday is considered by Kurds to be the single most important holiday of every year.
With this festival Kurds gather into the fairgrounds mostly outside the cities to welcome spring. Women wear colored dresses and spangled head scarves and young men wave flags of green, yellow and red, the colors of the Kurdish people. They hold this festival by lighting fire and dancing around it.[67]
The main Kurdish greeting that accompanies the festival is Newroz pîroz be! literally translating to "Congratulations on the New Year" or equivalent to Happy Newroz!. Another greeting used is, Bijî Newroz!, simply meaning Long live Newroz!
Newroz is still largely considered as a potent symbol of Kurdish identity in Turkey. Newroz celebrations are usually organised by Kurdish cultural associations and pro-Kurdish political parties. Thus, the Democratic Society Party was a leading force in the organisation of the 2006 Newroz events throughout Turkey. In recent years the Newroz celebration gathers around 1 million participants in Diyarbakır, the biggest city of the Kurdish dominated Southeastern Turkey. As the Kurdish Newroz celebrations in Turkey often are theater for political messages, the events are frequently criticized for being political rallies rather than cultural celebrations.
In other largely populated Kurdish regions in the Middle East including Iraq and Syria, similar celebrations are carried out with fire, dancing and music. In Iran, it is the most important festival of the whole year.
In Kurdistan, jumping over the fire (known as Chuwarshama Kulla) happens on New Year's Eve (rather the last Tuesday of the year).
Novruz in Azerbaijan
Main article: Novruz in Azerbaijan
Azerbaijani youth celebrating Novruz.
Usually preparation for Novruz begins a month prior to the festival. Each of forthcoming 4 weeks is devoted to one of the four elements and called accordingly in Azerbaijan. Each Tuesday people celebrate the day of one of the four elements - water, fire, earth and wind.[68] People do house cleaning, plant trees, make new dresses, paint eggs, make national pastries such as shakarbura, pakhlava and a great variety of "national cuisine".[69] Wheat is fried with kishmish (raisins) and nuts (govurga). As a tribute to fire-worshiping every Tuesday during four weeks before the holiday kids jump over small bonfires and candles are lit. On the holiday eve the graves of relatives are visited and tended.[70]
Novruz is a family holiday. In the evening before the holiday the whole family gathers around the holiday table laid with various dishes to make the New Year rich. The holiday goes on for several days and ends with festive public dancing and other entertainment of folk bands, contests of national sports. In rural areas crop holidays are marked.[71]
The decoration of the festive table is khoncha, a big silver or copper tray with Samani placed in the centre and candles and dyed eggs by the number of family members around it. The table should be set, at least, with seven dishes.[68]
On the last Tuesday prior to Novruz, according to old traditions children slip around to their neighbours' homes and apartments, knock at their doors, and leave their caps or little basket on the thresholds all the while hiding nearby waiting for candies, pastries and nuts.[68]
Nowruz in the Zoroastrian faith
Zoroastrians worldwide celebrate Nowruz as the first day of the New Year. Parsi Zoroastrians of South Asian origin celebrate it as "Nowroj", "Navroz", or "Navroj" on the fixed day of March 21, while Zoroastrians of Iranian background generally celebrate, like other Iranians, on the actual Spring Equinox date. Because different Zoroastrian communities in India/Pakistan and Iran have evolved slightly different calendar systems, there is some variance. Adherents of the Fasli variant of the Zoroastrian calendar celebrate Nowruz in March, but today, most other Zoroastrians also celebrate on this day.
Other variants of the Zoroastrian calendar celebrate the Nowruz twice: once as Jamshedi Nowruz on March 21 as the start of spring, and a second Nowruz, in July/August (see Variations of the Zoroastrian calendar), as either New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. That the second Nowruz is celebrated after the last day of the year, known as Pateti, which comes after a Muktad period of days remembering the dead. Many Parsis are confused by this, and mistakenly celebrate Pateti as if it were Nowruz, when in fact Nowruz is the day after. Some attribute this confusion by some as celebrating the last day of the year (contrary to what might be expected from a term that means "new day"), may be due to the fact that in ancient Persia the day began at sunset, while in later Persian belief the day began at sunrise.
Zoroastrians of Iranian origin generally put up a Haft Sin table as do other Iranians. Zoroastrians of Parsi (South Asian) origin do not traditionally use a Haft Sin. They set up a standard "sesh" tray- generally a silver tray, with a container of rose water, a container with betel nut, raw rice, raw sugar, flowers, a picture of Zarathustra the prophet, and either a floating wick in a glass filled with water topped with oil for fuel, or an "afargania", a silver urn with a small fire nourished by sandalwood and other fragrant resins.
Nowruz in the Twelver Shi’a faith
Along with Ismaili’s, Alawites and Alevis, the Twelver Shi’a also hold the day of Nowruz in high regard. The day upon which Nowruz falls has been recommended as a day of fasting for Twelver Shi’a Muslims by Shi’a scholars, including Abul-Qassim al-Khoei, Imam Khomeini[72] and Ali al-Sistani.[73] The day also assumes special significance for Shias as it was on 21 March 656 AD when the first Imam Hazrat Ali assumed the office of Caliphate.
Naw-Rúz in the Bahá'í Faith
Main article: Bahá'í Naw-Rúz
Naw-Rúz in the Bahá'í Faith is one of nine holy days for adherents of the Bahá'í Faith worldwide and the first day of the Bahá'í calendar occurring on the vernal equinox, around March 21.[74] The Bahá'í calendar is composed of 19 months, each of 19 days,[75] and each of the months is named after an attribute of God; similarly each of the nineteen days in the month also are named after an attribute of God.[75] The first day and the first month were given the attribute of Bahá, an Arabic word meaning splendour or glory, and thus the first day of the year was the day of Bahá in the month of Bahá.[74][76] Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith, explained that Naw-Rúz was associated with the Most Great Name of God,[74][76] and was instituted as a festival for those who observed the Nineteen day fast.[77][78]
The day is also used to symbolize the renewal of time in each religious dispensation.[79] `Abdu'l-Bahá, Bahá'u'lláh's son and successor, explained that significance of Naw-Rúz in terms of spring and the new life it brings.[74] He explained that the equinox is a symbol of the messengers of God and the message that they proclaim is like a spiritual springtime, and that Naw-Rúz is used to commemorate it.[80]
As with all Bahá'í holy days, there are few fixed rules for observing Naw-Rúz, and Bahá'ís all over the world celebrate it as a festive day, according to local custom.[74] Persian Bahá'ís still observe many of the Iranian customs associated with Nowruz such as the Haft Sîn, but American Bahá'í communities, for example, may have a potluck dinner, along with prayers and readings from Bahá'í scripture.
Navroz celebration by Parsis
In the Fasli/Bastani variant of the Zoroastrian calendar, Navroz is always the day of the vernal equinox (nominally falling on March 21). In the Shahenshahi and Kadmi calendars, which do not account for leap years, the New Year's Day has drifted ahead by over 200 days. These latter two variants of the calendar, which are only followed by the Zoroastrians of India, celebrate the spring equinox as Jamshed-i Nouroz, with New Year's Day then being celebrated in July–August as Pateti "(day) of penitence" (from patet "confession," hence also repentance and penitence).
Navroz celebration by Kashmiri Pandits
The Kashmiri Pandits celebrate Navroz (or Navreh in Kashmiri) on a date around the vernal equinox. The date, which usually falls between mid-March and mid-April, is determined by the Hindu lunar calendar every year.
Thal Bharun (meaning 'filling the platter') is a major Kashmiri Pandit Navroz tradition. It is similar to the Iranian Haft Sin. The items placed on the tray or platter generally include wheat or rice , a sweet pudding made from milk and cereal, fruits, walnuts, rosewater, a coin (sikkeh), a pen, an ink-holder, a mirror (for introspection, purity of thought and honesty), and a lit diya or clay lamp (representing satyaprakasa, the Light of the Truth). Besides, new clothes are worn and presents are exchanged. Some adults, particularly women, fast on this day.
UN recognition
The UN's General Assembly in 2010 recognized March 21 as the International Day of Nowruz, describing it a spring festival of Persian origin which has been celebrated for over 3,000 years and calling on world countries to draw on the holiday's rich history to promote peace and goodwill. During the meeting of The Inter-governmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage of the United Nations, held between 28 September – 2 October 2009 in Abu Dhabi, Nowrūz was officially registered on the UNESCO List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In response to the UN recognition, Iran unveiled a postage stamp. The stamp was made public in the presence of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the first International Nowruz Celebrations in Tehran on Saturday, 27 March 2010. President Ahmadinejad also called for joint efforts to further acquaint the world about the meaningful holiday, adding that it could significantly promote global peace and justice: “Observing Nowruz will not only promote cultural values, but it will also help nations establish relations based on friendship, peace, justice and respect.”[81]
Spelling variations in English
A variety of spelling variations for the word "nowruz" exist in English-language usage. Random House (unabridged) provides the spelling "nowruz".[82] Merriam-Webster (2006) recognizes only the spelling "nauruz" (and a contestant in the final session of the 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee, Allion Salvador, in the United States was disqualified on that basis[83][84]). In the USA, many respected figures in the field of language such as Dr. Yarshater at Columbia University have suggested to use Nowruz[citation needed].
See also
Calendar icon.svg Holidays portal
* Iranian calendar
* Iranian festivals
* Sham el-Nessim
* Kha b-Nisan
* Assyrian new year
* Earth Day
* New Year's Day
* Nowruz Eve among Mazandarani people
* Public holidays in Iran
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3. ^ "Norouz Persian New Year". British Museum. 2010-03-25. http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/events_calendar/march_2010/norouz_persian_new_year.aspx. Retrieved 2010-04-06.
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7. ^ Boyce, M. Festivals. i. Zoroastrian. Encyclopaedia Iranica.
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9. ^ a b "But they also celebrate some of the same festivals as the Christians, like Christmas and Epiphany, as well as Nawruz, which originally is the Zoroastrian New Year.". I-cias.com. http://i-cias.com/e.o/alawites.htm. Retrieved 2010-04-06.
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14. ^ Novruz, Nowrouz, Nooruz, Navruz, Nauroz, Nevruz: Inscribed in 2009 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, UNESCO.
15. ^ Noruz and Iranian radifs registered on UNESCO list, Tehran Times, 1 October 2009, TehranTimes.com.
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19. ^ Encyclopedia Iranica, "Festivals: Zoroastrian" Boyce, Mary[dead link]
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22. ^ برگرفته از: «گنجينهي سخن»، تأليف دكتر ذبيح الله صفا، انتشارات اميركبير، 1370، جلد يكم، ص 292 Original excerpt: نخستين روز است از فروردين ماه و از اين جهت، روز نو نام كردهاند؛ زيرا كه پيشاني سال نو است و آن چه از پس اوست از اين پنج روز [= پنج روز اول فروردين] همه جشنهاست. و ششم فروردين ماه را «نوروز بزرگ» دارند؛ زيرا كه خسروان بدان پنج روز حقهاي حشم و گروهان و بزرگان بگزاردندي و حاجتها روا كردني، آن گاه بدين روز ششم خلوت كردندي خاصگان را. و اعتقاد پارسيان اندر نوروز نخستين آن است كه اول روزي است از زمانه و بدو، فلك آغازيد گشتن.
23. ^ Gardīzī, Abu Saʿīd ʿAbd-al-Ḥayy b. Żaḥḥāk b. Maḥmūd in Encyclopedia Iranica by C. Edmund Bosworth Iranica.com
24. ^ Tārīkh-i Gardīzī / taʾlīf, Abū Saʻīd ʻAbd al-Ḥayy ibn Zahāk ibn Maḥmūd Gardīzī ; bih taṣḥīḥ va taḥshiyah va taʻlīq, ʻAbd al-Ḥayy Ḥabībī. Tihrān : Dunyā-yi Kitāb, 1363 [1984 or 1985]. excerpt from page 520: مهرگان بزرگ باشد، و بعضی از مغان چنین گویند: که این فیروزی فریدون بر بیوراسپ، رام روز بودست از مهرماه، و زردشت که مغان او را به پیغمبری دارند، ایشان را فرموده است بزرگ داشتن این روز، و روز نوروز را.
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External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Nowruz
* Noruz @ Encyclopedia Britannica
* UN Recognizes Nowruz as an International day
* Ancient Iran History @ Noruz
* Countdown to Nowruz (2009/1388) - timeanddate.com (IRST time) - UTC time
* Persian Rite of Spring performance
* شمارش معکوس تا تحويل سال 1390 شمسی Nowruz Countdown to March 20,2011
* 7sine 1390 photos and history
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Iran’s Leaders Respond to Obama
By ROBERT MACKEY
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/irans-leaders-respond-to-obama/#preview
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