Manju Gupta
Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza, Sara Roy, Princeton University Press, Pp 321(HB), $ 35
The Islamic resistance movement called Hamas was established at the beginning of the first Palestinian uprising which began in December 1987. Typically Hamas is “misportrayed” as an insular, one-dimensional entity, dedicated solely to violence and to the destruction of Jewish state, says the author.
After September 11, 2001, the US government added Hamas to its list of terrorist organisations on November 2 the same year as it perceives Islamic social institutions in Palestine as inherently evil, leading it to freeze assets of US-based charities that had contributed to Hamas’s social organisation.
While there can be no doubt that since its inception in 1987, Hamas has been engaged in violence, armed struggle and terrorism as the primary forces behind the horrific suicide bombings inside Israel, it is also a broad-based movement that has evolved into an increasingly complex, varied and sophisticated activity vital to Palestinian life. This book seeks to challenge the conventional frame of reference that defines Hamas only as a terrorist organisation; it pursues a more nuanced view of Palestinian Islamism that deliberately seeks to reinterpret its dynamics, challenging the accepted assumption that all Islamic institutions are parts of a larger terrorist infrastructure and that the people who use them are passive victims of religious fanaticism joined in a desire to inflict harm.
The book addresses the social components of the Islamist movement, the nature of Islamic socio-economic work and the impact of this work on community development and stability. It also looks at certain institutions’ agendas and work methods, administration, clientele and operational spheres. It also examines the nature of Islamic social work, particularly with regard to its strengths and weaknesses, the possibilities created by the institutions and the external constraints imposed. It examines the notion of changes from below and working from the bottom up – the inclusion of women, minorities and non Muslims (non-believers); the role of political and religious ideology versus professionalism; the interrelationship between Islamist social institutions; and the nature of Islamic civism particularly as it regards the role of Islamist associations in strengthening or weakening the state-society relations and in promoting or delimiting an ethos of civic engagement.
The book is divided into 7 chapters. The first three chapters provide the necessary context and conceptual frameworks for understanding the data. Chapter 1 explains the origin of the study and introduces key research questions, arguments and areas of analyses. Chapter 2 provides a background and a general context for examining Hamas’s specific role as social actor. Chapter 3 articulates a conceptual framework for ideas about Islamic civil society and explains the meaning of civil society to Islamists themselves. Chapter 4 explores the evolution and role of Islamist social institutions in Gaza and the West Bank, beginning with the reformist work and philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood and continuing through the first Intifida and the Oslo period. Chapter 5 describes the major social and economic institutions that existed in the territories during the Oslo period. Chapter 6 examines the Islamist social sector, the nature of the Islamist social project and the successes and failures of Islamist mobilisation at the social level. The last chapter considers the evolution of Hamas, its social institutions and the Israel-Palestine conflict generally in the post-Oslo period. It assesses the political impact on the Islamist movement and its social institutions – the second Intifida, Israel’s 2005 ‘disengagement’ from Gaza, Hamas’s 2006 electoral victory, the subsequent international boycott of the Hamas-led government and Hamas’s June 2007 military action of Gaza.
The book speaks on behalf of the Palestinians by incorporating personal stress and accounts in the voices of individual Palestinian men, women and children, who are part of the Islamist social sector. It renders visible the complexities of Palestinian life and in so doing, provides a more differentiated understanding of the forces that shape it.
(Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540.)
Manju Gupta
This book takes a very broad view of the dynamics of classics in the 19th century, not just in looking at art, opera and fiction, but also in seeing how these different areas interact and how each area, generally and collectively, can be properly understood only within multiple frames of cultural reference, multiple questions of cultural significance. Several micro histories are included in the book because detailed examples are integral to its exposition but whether it is a classical picture on the walls of the Royal Academy or an opera performance by amateurs at Cambridge, or a blockbuster novel about the Roman Empire, in each case we need to know in order to understand the artwork in its historical context and how such multiple social, intellectual, aesthetic, political frames together form an image of Victorian culture. That the first contribution this book makes to help in understanding of the development of classics as a subject in the 19th century and of the integral and essential place of classical antiquity in Victorian culture.
In the 1880s and 1990s, the art galleries of London flared with a burst of painting on classical subjects. Alma-Tadema Poynter, Leighton, Waterhouse and a host of less celebrated figures produced an extraordinary profusion of classic canvasses, especially for the Royal Academy, but also for other galleries in London and for exhibitions around the country – pictures which were gazed at by hundreds of thousands of visitors, discussed intently in the press and which helped form the visual imagination of a generation.
Classical antiquity reached a height with ancient Greece and Rome as is evident in the cultural milieu of 19th-century Europe. Classics was an integral part of the furniture of the Victorian mind, bolstered through the elite educational system, spread periodically through popular culture, visible in the “physicality of the architecture and sculpture of the capital; disseminated in opera, in theatre, in literature and even in the battles over religion that dominated the spiritual crises that commentators loved to decry in the final year of the century.”
The literature that was written spoke of Victorian English, which saw a great era of progress and was acutely aware of it. Romantic poets wrote longingly for the “isles of Greece, the isles of Greece when burning sappho loved and sung.”
“Ye olden days of medieval England, the Renaissance glories of Elizabethan imperialism – Shakespeare and the Armada – and, above all, biblical times and the past of Greece and Rome” provided a repertoire of narratives and images, whereby modernity found its ancestors, explanations and alibis.
In the first part, the book looks at how paintings depicting the classical past, became a way of talking about sexual drive in a period that had become known for discovery of sexual science, especially with the advent of Sigmund Freud.
The second chapter looks in detail at a single painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema and which depicts a Greek scene in which the gap between a man and a woman is executed and where Waterhouse is specifically discussed.
Part II and the IIIrd chapter is devoted to classical music, especially the revolutionary Christoph Willibald Gluck who had been tutor to Marie Antoinette in Vienna and even when she shifted residence to Paris after marrying King Louis XVI. The chapter is devoted entirely to Gluck and his opera, which also entered the debated on classicism – the powerful emotions his operas released in the audience. But Gluck’s moment didn’t last in Napoleon’s Paris when Hector Berlioz entered as a composer.
Part III concentrates on Victorian novels of ancient Rome, the protagonist being Fred Farrar who taught Classics at Harrow before rising to become Dean at Canterbury Cathedral. He earned fame for a schoolboy fiction titled Eric or Little by Little. In this period, classics became an alibi for sex and violence. Classics gave space to self-reflection about identity and the past.
In short, the book shows how Victorian culture and classical antiquity spread across genres, across the divide between high art and popular culture, across the “injunctions of cultural memory and cultural forgetting, that is, across the boundaries of the Victorian era.
This is a subject-specific book meant for scholars and intellectuals.
(Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540.)
Manju Gupta
Written by one who believes firstly that India is capable of being a true world power, not just an aspiring one and secondly, the world needs India to become a true global power, this book provides the prescriptions meant to guide India to become in the coming decades a global power.
Today the world in undergoing a shift in economic activity from the West (the US and Europe) to the East (Asia) and as this shift accelerates, a small number of Asian nations will have the opportunity to convert their increased wealth into increased power. Once the shift is complete, a greater share of global power will be concentrated in the hands of those Asian nations who dare to grasp this opportunity, while the rest will be consigned to second tier or regional power status.
This book is about what India needs to do, as this shift takes place in the coming decades, to emerge as a great power. It tells the story of where India has come from (great wealth over much of the last two millennia); how far it has declined (hitting rock bottom in 1991); where it is today (still an emerging power, but full of natural advantages); and what it must do now to retain its rightful place in the world (convert those advantages into raw power).
China is now on its way to building its economic and military strength required to become a great power. Its leaders may be hoping that, having achieved this level of power, it will be able to dominate Asia. India is the only Asian nation standing in its way. An India that pursues and achieves great status power is China’s worst geopolitical nightmare.
The US, meanwhile, faces a future when an increasingly active and perhaps increasingly aggressive China will challenge American global military and economic supremacy. Furthermore, the US knows it can no longer rely on the United Kingdom to help extend Anglo-American power far and wide.
Divided into three parts, the first part of the book presents a brief review of India’s history. It shows that India’s recent economic and political weakness is a temporary phase, and sets the context for the central argument of the book – that with the right policies and leadership – India can return to its historical position of wealth and power.
The book describes how and why India, wealthy for much of its history, became impoverished by the time of Independence. Here the author ridicules James Mills, who wrote The History of British India, published in 1817, in which the historian without even setting foot in India once, made general criticism of India and disowned specifically Indian achievements in mathematics and sciences. “He gives no credence to the claim that Indian mathematicians invented the decimal system, and mocks the notion that Indian astronomers (including Aryabhata and Brahmagupta) once postulated the existence of gravity and a rotating earth.” The British narrative of India – materially poor, yet spiritually rich – was to be the dominant image of the nation for the next two centuries.
It recounts “India’s anus horribilis of 1991” when two crises – the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and a balance of payments (BoP) shortfall converged to push the nation to the edge of political and economic ruin.
India’s current economic advantages relative to much of the rest of the world, driven by positive demographic and strong industrial base is part of this study. These advantages offer India a window of opportunity to become one of the world’s leading economies.
Corporate India has to move away from ‘back’ office work to ‘front’ office work in which it develops its own intellectual property and markets its own brands. To do so, India must build a world-class university system that will direct brains and capital to innovation-intensive industries.
It surveys India’s foreign policy in recent decades and finds that the policy is timid to the point of neglecting national security. To close the power gap with China, India will have to increase its currently planned military spending and adopt an aggressive stance towards any incursion by China or any other power in its sphere of influence.
Part III offers a framework for how an increasingly wealthy and assertive India can exercise real power in the 21st century through an alliance with the US.
Speed is the need of the hour, says the author, so that India and the US fraternal association is fully in place by 2020, especially in the context of an aggressively expansionist China, nuclear arsenals in Iran and North Korea, hike in oil prices and all-round inflation and a steep fall in global market.
(Amaryllis, J-39, Ground Floor, Jor Bagh Lane, New Delhi: 110 003; www.amaryllis.co.in)
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