A law like this

Knowledge & power

Mahathir Mohamad’s exhortations at the world’s largest Muslim organisation last week still ripple in the western media. Jews control the world, Malaysia’s outgoing PM told heads of state at the 57-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference, and Muslims should learn from them. But this week, another exhortation to the ‘‘Muslim world’’ — of a very different kind.

There are no dark suggestions of sinister conspiracies in the second Arab Human Development Report recently released in Jordan. AHDR 2003 is written by specialists from across the Arab region and published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development (AFESD). The ECONOMIST predicted that the ‘‘candid language and shocking statistics’’ of the report, which focuses on the poor Arab performance in generating knowledge and stimulating inquiry, will stoke furious debate in the region. The report is a ‘‘cry for freedom’’, it said.

Egypt’s AL AHRAM WEEKLY described it as ‘‘Reclaiming the Initiative’’. The paper recalled that when the first AHDR was released, Arab critics argued that it failed to give sufficient weight to the Arab-Israeli conflict as an obstacle to human development in the region and was used to support anti-Arab policies internationally. Writers of the second AHDR were well aware of this context, the WEEKLY pointed out. Yet, ‘‘… to leave the initiative to others would be the more ominous choice. Self-reform stemming from open, scrupulous and balanced self-criticism is the right, if not the only, alternative to plans that are apparently being drawn up outside the Arab world for restructuring the area…’’.

AHDR 2003 defines the mass media as the most important agent of the public diffusion of knowledge.

Three Laureates

One reason why it is so important to close the educational gaps, said Amartya Sen, is to make the world more secure. Sen was speaking to the Commonwealth education conference in Edinburgh; this week the GUARDIAN carried the full text of his speech. ‘‘If we continue to leave vast sections of the people of the world outside the orbit of education, we make the world not only less just, but also less secure’’.

Sen spoke of the greater precariousness of the world we live in, especially since September 11 and counted out the ways in which schooling can play a ‘‘powerfully preventive’’ role in reducing human insecurity. One, illiteracy and innumeracy are forms of insecurity in themselves, bringing as they do the ‘‘certainty of deprivation’’. Two, basic education is critical in a rapidly globalising world; it largely determines nations’ participation in the global economy. Three, educational neglect can lead to other kinds of deprivation — when people are illiterate, their ability to exercise their legal rights can be severely limited. This distances the deprived from the ways and means of fighting out of their deprivation and leads to insecurity. Four, illiteracy can deprive the political underdog of the opportunity to gain a political voice.

But merely closing the gaps won’t be enough. Sen also touched upon the necessity for curricula to be non-sectarian and non-parochial. ‘‘Indeed, the nature of education is quite central to peace in the world’’

• Peace is possible only when human rights are respected, Shireen Ebadi told Amir Taheri, editor of French quarterly POLITIQUE INTERNATIONALE. Taheri was interviewing the 2003 peace laureate and Iranian human rights lawyer and activist, for America’s WEEKLY STANDARD.

Ebadi saw her prize as a message from the international community ‘‘to the people of Iran, especially to women and beyond them, to the Muslim world… that fighting for human rights in Iran is not a lonely pursuit’’. In response to a question, she claimed that Iran is different from Iraq and Afghanistan. Because ‘‘There were no mechanisms for internal change in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iran, there are.’’

• In the GUARDIAN again, Joseph Stiglitz, also a Nobel prize winner, wrote as someone who was ‘‘intimately involved in economic policy making in the US’’. He said he has always been struck by the divergence between policies that America pushes on developing countries and those it practices at home.

Stiglitz gave examples. Free marketers rant against industrial policy, but in the US the government has actively supported new technologies. The US federal government built the first telegraph line; the US military developed the internet. Much of modern American technological progress is founded on government-funded research in bio-technology and defence. While it advises other countries to privatise social security, America’s own public social security system is extremely efficient. ‘‘Occasionally, America has experimented with free-market ideology and deregulation — sometimes with disastrous effects’’.

For India, Mexico and Brazil, Stiglitz had a new message: don’t strive for a free-market economy which has never existed. Look closely, not at what the US says, but at what it did when it emerged as an industrial power, and at what it does today.