The headline in the Bulletin of the Islamic Medical Association of South Africa announces a staggering discovery. Canadian scholar confirms Quran and Ahadith on Human Embryology (1). The story tells us that a certain Dr Keith Moore, Chairman of the anatomy department of the University of Torontos School of Medicine, has discovered the happy marriage between the Islamic revelation and contemporary human developmental anatomy. I am amazed at the scientific accuracy of these statements which were made in the seventh centuryIt is quite reasonable for Muslims to believe that these verses are revelations from God, Moore is reported to have said.

What has Keith Moore discovered that has excited the Muslim doctors, scientists and scholars so much? His paper, Highlights of human embryology in the Koran and the Hadith, was first presented at the Seventh Saudi Medical Meeting, and has since then been reprinted in a number of places (2). It simply reads modern biology into certain Quranic verses, describing the development of a foetus and illustrating them with clinical drawings and text book descriptions. For example, the Quranic verse, verily, we fashioned man from a small quantity of mingled liquids (Nut-fatin Imthjin) (76:2) is explained by Moore as referring to the mixture of a small quantity of sperms with the oocyte and its associated follicular fluid, or the male and female sexual secretion. The resulting mixed drop, made up of the ovum and penetrating sperm, becomes the zygote, the precursor of the embryo. Similarly, explanation, for example, is given of the following verses, Verily, we created man from a product of wet earth; then placed him as a drop (of seed) (Nutfatun) in a safe lodging; then fashioned We the drop a clot (alaga), then fashioned We the clot a little lump, (Mudgha) then fashioned We the little lump bones (Izam), then clothed the bones with flesh and then produced it as another creation. So blessed be Allah, the best Creator! (23:12-14). Reading these verses, Moore made some clay models and showed them to be similar to the description of the verses. He starts with an embryo at 28 days and shows that by the sixth week bones begin to form and muscles appear on the embryo. By the seventh week the bones give a human shape to the embryo. The ears and eyes begin to form in the fourth week and are visible by the sixth, or 42 days after the zygote has been formed. All these developments are in conformity with the Quranic description, Moore tells us.

So what does all this prove? Does it confirm the Divine origins of the Quran? Or does it merely tell us that the Quran is a treasure chest of scientific facts? What is the function of the exercise? This incident throws considerable light on the state of the Muslim mind: its acute inferiority complex; its obsession with science and by extension with modernity; and its pathological concern with seeing the Quran as the end of knowledge rather than as a text that provides an ethical framework for the pursuit of knowledge. On the surface, such attempts to legitimise modern science by equating it with the Quran, or to prove the divine origins of the Quran by showing that it contains scientifically valid facts, appear harmless, indeed, even commendable exercises. However, when pursued on a nave basis, as is often done by Muslim scholars, such methods can be dangerous; and when undertaken deliberately, be it sincerely, often by non-Muslim scholars, it can have mischievous consequences.

The inference drawn by comparing the Quran and science is two-fold: if the facts and theories mentioned in the Quran, which was revealed 1400 years ago, are supported by modern science, the Divine nature of the Quran is confirmed, (if confirmation is indeed what we are looking for); and conversely, if modern scientific facts and theories find a reflection in the Quran, then modern science must also have the same universal and eternal validity as the Quran. My counter arguments is simple and though it will be discussed in detail towards the end, suffice it to say now that the Quran, which is a book of guidance, does not need confirmation from any other source. For Muslims, it is a priori valid and eternal. Any attempt at reading science in the Quran makes the eternal scripture subservient to science; and it elevates science to the level where it becomes the arbitrator of what is and what is not Truth. It further enforces the mythical notion that scientific theories are neutral, universal and eternally valid. Moreover, trying to read science in the allegorical, metaphorical and symbolic verses of the Quran often stretches analogical reasoning beyond its limits and leads to absurd and in some cases, to quite contradictory conclusions not intended by the Quran. It is apologia of the worst type.

Apologetic Muslim authors trying to prove that the Quran is very scientific and modern often start by stating that the Quran places great emphasis, and indeed it does, on the pursuit of knowledge and the use of reason. Some 750 verses, almost one-eighth of the Quran, in contrast to only 250 legislative verse, exhorts the believers to study nature, reflect, make the best use of reason, make scientific enterprise an integral part of the community life. It is further pointed out that the Quran mentions several scientific facts and theories, all of which are supported by the most recent discoveries and advances.

This type of apologetic literature, trying to give scientific legitimation to the Quran, goes back to the early sixties. In fact, one of the earliest pamphlets came out of Cairo: On Cosmic Verses in the Quran by Muhammad Jamaluddin El-Fandy (3). El-Fandy has a sense of religious superiority that manifests itself in his attempts to prove that every astronomical discovery and scientific theory (that is in the 1950s) has already been mentioned in the Quran. He considers the Quran as the best example of scientific expression (an unsuitable claim as the ideal form of scientific expression is a mathematical equation; and there certainly are no equations in the Quran). Thus, from almost any Quranic verse referring to any astronomical phenomenon, El-Fandy can draw modern astronomical parallels and comparisons. For example, from the verse, all is He who raised the heavens without any pillars that you can see, and neither can the night outstrip the day, and each revolve in an orbit, al-Fandy draws the following inference:

If we consider the sky a name given to anything which is over our heads, then it will surely mean the entire universe which surrounds us and which begins with the space around the earth followed by the planets, the sun and other stars found in the depth of space, in our galaxy or in other galaxies. All these heavenly bodies move in their orbits. This is the sky. It is created by Allah and each body in the space is similar to the brick in its lofty structure. All these heavenly bodies split one after the other and are held in their relative positions by centrifugal force and universal gravity. The gravity and this centrifugal force, produced by rotation in semi-circular orbits or ellipses, could be treated as actually built pillars. Although we may not detect such forces with our eyes, yet that does not mean that they are not there in any case, since we can measure and give their specifications correctly. If anyone of us is granted a suitable sense in addition to the normal ones we have, he will be able to feel these (tubes of forces) exactly as we can feel any material body with our normal senses. (4).
El-Fandy does not stop here. He goes on to argue that the atmosphere can be
regarded as a pillar and that light itself is like a pillar, with the colours of the

spectrum being minor pillars! In the other verses of the Quran, El-Fandy finds evidence for the creation of red giants, white dwarfs, existence of ether (?), the evolution of the planets and the big bang theory. And there is more: science supports the Quranic claim, writes al-Fandy, that life exists on other planets. After quoting numerous verse, including, And they Lord best knows those who are in the heavens and the earth and to Him submit whosoever is in the heavens and the earth, he ventures to describe what aliens may look like (here it is not clear whether he is drawing inferences from the Quran or science):

If we try to define the shape or form which developed races living outside our planet will have, we should, in this case, and without inviting complication s act on the assumption that nature has made no dissimilarity whatsoever in its method. Accordingly, such creatures, in their attempt to make good show, share with us the following:

1. The bodys reliance on an inner osteology made of hard material.
2. The existence of a main centre for nerves (the brain) which communicates with various parts of the body directives (thenerves).
3. The best shelter for the brain which exists inside a safe movable organ either in the fore or the top part of the body
4. Creatures dependence upon legs used in motion.
5. The existence of a mouth for speaking and feeding (5)

All this is not just bad science. It makes a mockery of the Quran. However, compared to many others, El-Fandy is quite sane. Azizul Hasan Abbasi, a Pakistani neuropsychiatrist, manages to find in the Quran modern cures for diabetes, tuberculosis, stomach ulcers, rheumatism, arthritis, blood pressure, asthma, dysentery and paralysis! (6).

In recent years, this rather banal comparative approach to science and Islam has been legitimised by the French surgeon, Maurice Bucaille. His book, The Bible, the Quran and Science (7) is essential reading for Muslims with larger than life inferiority complexes and has been translated into almost every Muslim language, from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu to Indonesian. Bucaille sets out to do a detailed and thorough analysis of the holy scriptures in the light of modern knowledge. He focuses on four topics: astronomy, the earth, animal and vegetable kingdom and human reproduction. The methodology followed is the well established one of quoting the Quranic verse and then giving a scientific commentary on them. Bucaille tries to be more objective and takes pains to point out that the Quran contains scientific information that was not available at the time of revelation and, in fact, some of the information contained in it is contrary to what people believed at the time of the Prophet. After going through the standard motions of examining verses about the orbit of the moon and the sun, the water cycle, the reproduction procedure, he concludes:

The Quran most definitely did not contain a single proposition at variance with the most firmly established modern knowledge, nor did it contain any of the ideas current at the time on the subjects it describes. Furthermore, however, a large number of facts are mentioned in the Quran which were not discovered until modern times. So many in fact, that on November 9, 1976, the present author was able to read before the French Academy of Medicine a paper on the Physiological and Embyological data in the Quran. The data like many others on differing subjects constituted a veritable challenge to human explanation in view of what we know about the history of the various sciences through the ages. Modern mans findings concerning the absence of scientific error are therefore in complete agreement with the Muslims exegetes conception of the Quran as a Book of Revelation. It is a consideration which implies that God could not express an erroneous idea.

The bible, of course, did not meet the stringent criteria of modern knowledge and the clear-cut conclusion of Bucaille is that it is impossible not to admit the existence of scientific errors in the Bible. However, all this simply states the obvious with a sense of real discovery: the Muslim belief that the Quran, as the Word of Allah, cannot contain any errors and that the Bible, as it exists today, is not true Divine revelation.

But where Bucaille stops, Bucaillism takes over. A number of recent studies have tried to look further for scientific facts and theories in the Quran. Thus Shamsul Haq, for example, manages to find the seeds of the theory of relativity and quantum ma=echanics in the Quran and produces Quranic evidence to support the Big Bang Theory (The Quran and Modern Cosmology Science and Technology in the Islamic World 1 (1) 47-52 (1983). M Manzoor-I-Khuda manages to find the theory of the development of the biosphere, the water cycles of life on earth in the Quran (Creation and the Cosmos in Islamic Scientific Thought and Muslim Achievements in Science, proceedings of the International Conference on Science in Islamic Polity, Islamabad, 1983, Vol 1, p96-113). Moore notwithstanding, the entire field of embryology has been discovered several times in the Quran.

After all this scientific data and support for numerous theories, it seems that the Quran has not left anything out. And to enforce the point that scientific equations are not missing from the Book of Guidance, Rashad Khalifas statistical analysis (Miracle of the Quran Islamic Productions International, St. Louis, Missouri, 1973) even provides that. Khalifa focuses on Quranic initials letters which appear at the beginning of some surahs (chapters) and feeds the frequency of occurrence of each letter into a computer. The letters are : Alif (A), Ha (H), Ra , Sin (S), Sad (S), Ta (T), Ayn (A), Qaf (Q), Kaf (K), Lam (L), Mim (M), Nun (N), Ha (H), and Ya (Y). His additional data includes the total number of letters in each of 114 Surahs of the Quran and the number of verse in each Surah. He manipulates the data to calculate the percentage value and average frequency of occurrence for each of the 14 letters in each verse of the Quran. For the multi-lettered Quranic initials, such as Ta Ha, Ta Sin and Ya Sin, he calculates the absolute frequency of occurrence, percentage of the frequency value for each of the 114 Surahs, and the average occurrence per verse for each of the multi-lettered Quranic initials in each sura. Finally he arranges all the Surahs of the Quran in the ascending order of the absolute frequency of occurrence of each Quranic initial and percentage frequency of occurrence for each of the 14 sets of Quranic initials. What does Khalifa find? That the chapters which begin with the Quranic initials also contain the highest frequency of the specific letters used at the beginning of the Surah. For example, Surah Qaf contains the highest frequency of the letter qaf than any other Surah of the Quran or there is not one Surah in the Quran where all three values of nun are higher than their counterparts in the non-initialled Surah, al-Qqalam. The analysis for Quranci initials Alif Lam Mim which occur in four Makkan and two Medinan Surahs shows that the four Makkan Surahs are superior to all Makkan Surahs in the overall frequency of Alif Lam Mim.

So what can we conclude from this? In Khalifa's own words:
"The Qur'anic initials as a whole have shown us that every word, indeed every letter, in the Qur'an was carefully calculated. The Qur'an itself states this fact very clearly in the first verse of Surah HudPlacement of the Qur'anic initials in their specific locations proves the existence of advance knowledge of the distribution pattern of the alphabet throughout the Qur'an. No one can claim that such advance knowledge is attainable by man; any man.

To translate this into physical, tangible evidence, the computer was asked to calculate the number of manipulations one should master in order to write a mathematically controlled book such as the Qur'an. The composition of the Qur'an involves 114 chapters where 14 alphabet letters were distributed according to specific combinations. According to the well known mathematical formula, the number of manipulations involved in this case equals 11414This value, 626,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,(626b septillions) is certainly beyond the capacity of any creature, including today's most sophisticated computers. When we look at this number we can readily appreciate the divine statement in Surah Al-Isra (The Night Journey), verse 88 - Say, if all the humans and all the jinns banded together in order to produce a verse like this, they will surely fail. Furthermore, this is the number of controlled manipulations of a specific distribution pattern of the alphabet, without placing them in useful sentences. To place these mathematically distributed alphabetic letters in useful sentences is another complete job"

On the basis of his analysis, Khalifa can also prove that the present order of recording the Qur'anic chapters is divinely inspired, the locations of revelation of the Qur'anic chapters, whether Makkan or Medinan, can be proved to be correct, the Qur'an's specific way of dividing each Surah into verses is divinely prescribed ("the average per verse value is a highly significant property throughout the Qur'an"), that the opening statement "Bismillah r-Rahmani-r-Rahim" (In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful) is an integral part of each Surah, except Surah Al-Tawba and even the particular way of spelling certain words in the Qur'an has a mathematical significance.

All this adds nothing to the sum of our knowledge. It does, however equate Qur'anic truth with the mathematical 'truth' and makes the Qur'an appear more and more like a contemporary data-base. From here, it appears, the next logical stop ought to be to present the Qur'an as a scientific text book. And Afzalur Rahman (Qur'anic Sciences, The Muslim schools Trust, London 1981) has obliged us with exactly that. Rahman, whose knowledge of science as well as his understanding of the Qur'an is on a par with a child at nursery school: "The Qur'an provides a complete picture of the material universe and what is beyond in a scientific and rational manner, appealing to the scientific and rational manner, appealing to the scientific mind as well as to the ordinary layman." He finds almost every secondary school science subject, from heat, light, sound to even electricity, in the Qur'an and presents them as a long list of subject headings with appropriate Qu'ranic quotations. The book is meant to be used in schools (and probably is) and prepare the next generation of Muslims scientists!

The only thing now left for Bucaillism is to be institutionalised and introduced in the school curricula. Muhammad Abdus Sami and Muslim Sajjad (Planning Curricula for Natural Sciences: The Islamic Perspective, Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad, 1983) have produced a plan to accomplish this goal. Every chapter of every textbook on physics, chemistry, biology and Zoology should contain the appropriate verse from the Qur'an. But unlike Rahman, the two Pakistani scientists foresee some problems: for example, how are we going to treat the theory of evolution? "This theory seeks to provide essentially a rational belief in God." Maybe there are, after all, a few things in science that do not tally with what the Qur'an tells us!

Bucaillism appeals particularly to the older generation of Muslim scientists, scholars and intellectuals because of its psychological message value. It reinforces their faith in the Qur'an and Islam on the one hand, and confirms their belief in the superiority and universal validity of western science, on the other. Their naivete is well reflected by Candide: "all is well in this best of all possible worlds."

However, the dangers inherent in Bucaillism are very grave. There is the obvious fact that it generates a strangely dumbfounding theology - as all scientific knowledge is contained in the Qur'an, simply studying the Qur'an from a scientific perspective will reveal everything and lead to new theories and discoveries. While the Qur'an obviously contains some passing references to natural facts, it is by no means a textbook of science. It is a book of guidance. It provides motivation and only motivation, for the pursuit of knowledge. Knowledge begins with the Qur'an and does not end with it.

But, more importantly, by equating the Qur'an with science, Bucaillism elevates science to the realm of the sacred and makes Divine Revelation subject to the verification of western science. Apart form the fact that the Qur'an needs no justification from modern science, Bucaillism opens the Qur'an to the counter argument of Popper's criteria of refutation: would the Qur'an be proved false and written off just as Bucaille writes off the Bible, if a particular scientific fact does not tally with it or if a particular fact mentioned in the Qur'an is refuted by modern science? And what if a particular theory, which is "confirmed" by the Qur'an and is in vogue today is abandoned tomorrow for another theory that presents an opposite picture? Does that mean that the Qur'an is valid today but will not be valid tomorrow?

Moreover, by raising science to the level of sacred knowledge, Bucaillism effectively undermines any criticism of science. Because the pursuit of knowledge is so strongly emphasised in the Qur'an, most Muslim scientists already possess a sense of reverence towards modern science. Bucaillism takes this reverence to a new level: a whole generation of Muslim scientists do not just accept all science as Good and True, but attack anyone who shows a critical or sceptical attitude towards science. Furthermore, the belief in a universally beneficial science leads to a pestiferous kind of fatalism: since science is universal and for the benefit of all humankind, it will eventually make its way to Muslim societies and serve their needs!

Science is not the pursuit of Truth and its "discoveries", and "facts" do not, and cannot have the same validity as the verse of the Qur'an. Science is a problem solving enterprise: it is a method, a technique, for solving problems within a given paradigm and worldview. Just as Abdus Sami and Sajjad find that the theory of evolution is a rational attempt to undermine belief in God, a great deal in the modern system of science is an exercise in control and domination of nature and men. When Bacon said that nature yields her secrets under torture, he made torture and suppression an integral and legitimate part of modern science. Science, as it exists and is practised today, is designed to keep a particular culture and its worldview dominant. Reading the verses of the Qur'an into modern science is not going to change its essential character and style.

That there is something magically objective and neutral about the Scientific Method is a cruel hoax; and bias-free observation is a myth. Nothing "out there" can be perceived without filtering it through our worldview and culture. Scientists too often modify their observation with their own ideas and prejudices, values and norms of their society. Not just observation but experimentation too cannot be made in a cultural vacuum, but have meaning and significance solely in the framework of a theory itself set in the conceptual picture of a worldview. Putting a theory into a mathematical code does not strip the value content of a proposition of modern science. On the contrary, the nature of mathematics is such that its application to the world through science is purely fortuitous. Mathematical propositions, including the geometric propositions of Euclid, are a priori analytic - that is to say, that their status is determined merely by analysing the term of the proposition. That one plus one equals two can be determined as conforming to the principle that one plus one means two. That some theories can be codified in mathematical expression is a matter of scientific convenience. The laws of nature are not expressed in mathematical formulae, in indelible ink across the heavens; they are manufactured in ballpoints in laboratories and institutes.

The fact that some of these manufactured laws and theories agree with what the Qur'an says is not in itself of any significance. It is a non-statement. The Qur'an promotes the pursuit of knowledge within a framework of values: it is these values which should be the focus of our attention and which should shape our scientific activity. Only by turning these values into a living reality can we truly be honest to the Qur'an and fulfil our obligations towards it.


References

1. April 1985.
2. Including, Africa Events May 1985.
3. The Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, 1961.
6. The Quran and Mental Hygiene, Karachi, undated.
7. Seghers, Paris, 1976; and North American Trust Publication, Indianapolis, 1978.

From
Other Than Identity: The Subject, Politics and Art edited by Juliet Steyn, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1997

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Ziauddin Sardar

I. I hate winters.

The one in 1962 was particularly bad. Months of sub-zero temperatures, they skated on the frozen Thames that year - just as Dickens wrote. And the snow! It piled up everywhere and refused to budge, week after week. How on earth could one play guli danda in weather like that? Try as I might it was impossible to shape a snowball into the pointed guli, the torpedo shaped piece of wood, to launch into orbit with a determined whack from the danda, a large flat stick. The snowballs disintegrated on collision with any hard object. Anyway, how can anyone attempt to shape a decent guli through thick gloves with frost bitten fingers that refuse to respond? At home, when I was there, winters were cool respites from the heat. A childs life was spent outdoors marauding with friends, winter was just the addition of a sweater. Now this was home and life outdoors was a painful obstacle course. Not for the first time I ran indoors on the verge of tears.

She ran her fingers through my hair, melting the frozen coconut oil that had given a sculptured look to my hair. I know its very cold, baitay, she said, and it could get colder. You will need something to protect yourself from the harsh European winters, something that warms you from the inside and keeps the cold at bay, something that anchors you to your being. She pulled up a chair and I sat on her lap. Urdu poetry is our most cherished inheritance. It will warm you when everything around you turns into ice. With one arm around me, she picked up the aging, well thumbed copy of Diwan-e-Mir.. Flicking through the pages, her eyes came to rest on a particular poem. She began to hum, the humming turned into words, the words turned into fire, and I was engulfed: Look you: it is emerging from the soul of my heart! Where is this smoke coming from?

II. British

My mother was distraught when she learned that my father was leaving for England. He had to go, he said. But there was nothing to worry about as we would be joining him within a year or so - as soon as I find a job and a place to stay. Within a week of his announcement my father was gone.

It took us a year to work out why my father had to go. The strike was broken. His fellow union leaders were arrested by the martial law administrators. The biscuit factory where he had worked as an engineer was closed down. We received regular letters from him but none of them actually described what he had discovered in London. Then, one day I received a parcel; it contained a number of books none of which I could read, all of them bearing the legend, The Great Books of Mankind. Also enclosed was a short note. Dear son, it read, I know you will find it difficult to read these books, but do try your best. When you come to London, you will meet my friend Lady Birdwood.

Who is this Lady Birdwood?, I remember asking my mother. The answer was long and involved, just the kind of tale from family history that I most enjoyed. It appeared that my grandfather served with the British Army against the Chinese during the Boxer rebellion under the command of a certain Lord Birdwood. The British were impressed by his courage and gave him the title Sardar or Leader. Eventually, Sardar became our surname. Originally, we were Durranis, descendants of Nadir Shah Durrani, a Persian warlord whose most noted achievement was the ransack, and subsequent capture, of Delhi. Sardar seemed less bloodstained then Durrani.
I struggled with the books that my father kept sending me. Sometimes I was helped in this endeavor by my aunts and other regular visitors to our house. I started with Black Beauty. One of my aunties read Treasure Island and Kidnapped aloud to me. Ploughing through Oliver Twist and David Copperfield was a real chore. Wuthering Heights marked the outer limit beyond which I refused to further immerse myself in great literature. Much better to read the dreaded Biggles, old chap! Then I made the independent discovery of the much more approachable escapades of the Famous Five and the Secret Seven, ripping fun!

This eclectic introduction to the English language came with a whole set of associations. I came to think of England through the aura created by what I read. It seemed that England was indeed the centre, possibly the original home of what it claimed were all the great books of mankind. In the pages I stumbled over were all the polite civilities, and the high flown notions of justice, fairness, democracy, order. They were the objective of the high minded all inclusive search for human betterment, the refinement of the mind through science and learning. All this was encoded in the hopefulness with which my father dispatched the books to me and the struggle that went into reading them.

We joined our father two years later. We left Karachi on a bright sunny day and arrived in Hackney on a dark, rainy night. My father had rented two rooms in a terraced house in Randlesham Road belonging to a West Indian couple. Mr. La Verne was a quiet man who spent most of his evenings in the pub. Mrs. La Verne was a big, gregarious woman; I found it strange that she called me Love. Love, she would call me, would you like to watch television?. Then she would escort my sister and I to one of our neighbours who had television. I sat glued to a wobbly chair watching Gunsmoke, Rawhide and Bonanza, interspersed with all our favorite advertisements. Murray Mints, Murray Mints, Too good to hurry mints. John Collier, John Collier, the window to watch, BumBumBum Esso Blue. During the year that we spent at the La Verne house, Lady Birdwood was supposed to come and see us several times. But she always failed to materialize.
It was only when we moved in to a bigger accommodation in nearby Hillsea Street, under the auspices of a white landlord, that the Dowager Lady Birdwood first came to see us. A tall, elegant, meticulously dressed woman, she was accompanied by a playful dog. No sooner had she arrived, than she complained of a smell. Its called curry, I told her in my broken English. She stayed only a short while and left without eating the dinner that my mother had spent half a day preparing in her honour. Before leaving, she placed a couple of pamphlets in my hands and issued a stern order: You must learn to speak pukka English, she said grinding her teeth, and do read these books.

Right in front of our house on Hillsea Street, was the Millfield Primary School. But I never saw the inside of the school. No sooner had we moved to our new address than I began to have strange pains throughout my body. I hated sweaters, pullovers, overcoats, scarves, gloves - all the paraphernalia that while protecting one from the cold also makes one indistinguishable and hence invisible to the outside world. Despite all my parents efforts to cover me with layer upon layer of protection, I would go out in my kurta pajama or the cheese-cotton shirts that we brought with us from Pakistan. The pains increased, and I began to forget all that I had learned naturally - to run, to walk, to laugh. Eventually rheumatic fever was diagnosed and I was hospitalized for almost a year. In Hackney Hospital, the doctors kept me firmly attached to a bed: the only thing I could do was to lie horizontal and read. And I read. All the time. And every thing. I read Lady Birdwoods pamphlets on immigration, on the Jewish conspiracy and on the Holocaust. I read the copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and a book called The Longest Hatred that she sent me through my father. I read the copy of the Bible that some visiting missionaries had left by my bedside. But most of all I read the Urdu books that my mother, fearing I would forget the language, kept discreetly leaving behind everytime she came to visit. Many of them were historical novels: the magnificent Akhri Chatan and Mohammad bin Qasim by Nasim Hijazi, which deal with the early history of Islam; the novels of A R Khatun and Razia Bhatti, mostly about the pain of migration, racial and ethnic hatred and adjusting to change; and my all time favourite, Sadiq Siddiquis Andulus kay do Chand (Two Moons of Andalusia), an epic saga of the rise and fall of Moorish culture in Spain. Occasionally, my mother would treat me to, what she called more serious books: texts on Indian history, eyewitness accounts of the Indian Mutiny, the Indian assessment of the Raj; classical works on Islamic thought, Sufi wisdom, translated anthologies of Islamic literature; and diwans of Urdu poets: apart from Ghalib and Mir, I devoured Diwan-e-Zafar, the tragic poems of the last Moghal Emperor of India. Then there was an Urdu translation of the autobiography of ibn Sina: he had mastered, he told me, Plato and Aristotle by the age of ten. My age, I thought!

When I recovered, I was sent to a convalescent home for children in Broadstairs. Every day of the six months or so that I spent in Broadstairs, was divided into four parts. In the morning, I would learn to walk again: with the aid of nurses, I would take short, gentle, wobbly steps up and down the hall way. After lunch, I would play cricket. I would be totally uninvolved in the game till it was my turn to bat. Then, I would be taken by the nurses and placed in front of the wicket where I stayed till the game concluded. Since I could hardly walk, a runner was assigned to do my running. Within a few days, I became one of the most hated boys in the home. After tea, I would sit with the staff nurse and talk about what I had read or was reading. Nurse Scott was, it seems to me, the most beautiful woman in the world. She was slightly chubby but quite tall. She had classical features just as Sadiq Siddiqui had described in the Two Moons of Andalucia. Indeed, she was one of the moons. She said she was a socialist; and she tried her best to answer my questions. Sometimes when she could not answer my questions, she would go and look for a book and then read out appropriate passages to me. In the evening, I would sit in a rocking chair and think. I could feel an inexplicable anger building up within me. I would conjure up pictures of Lady Birdwood as churail, as one of those ferocious demonic women that try to entrance the hero in all Urdu fairy tales. I was also seething with anger against my father.

When I rejoined my family, I discovered that Lady Birdwood had became a regular visitor to our house. She would come at least twice a month, always with her dog, and during each visit she would make it a point to correct and improve our English. Then she would start lecturing my father, who would occasionally nod in agreement, but would never utter a word. Before leaving, she would inquire about my progress and ask whether I had read all the books she gave me.

The day after I returned from Broadstairs, I walked into Brooke House Secondary School at Clapton Pond and asked to be enrolled. The School secretary to whom I presented my request was astonished but eventually allowed me to see the Headmaster, Mr. Harris. He was a very gentle and considerate man, who, I would later learn, loathed punishing his pupils, but the lack of discipline at the school often left him no choice. Mr. Harris asked me to come back a couple of days later and take an intelligence test. I failed the test - miserably - and consequently joined the bottom stream: 1.6. I had problems at the school right from the start. By far the worst of my problems was Mr. Brilliant, our history teacher. He looked like Einstein, without the mustache, and thought himself pretty clever too. First, I found it difficult to understand how Mr. Brilliant could talk about Victorian England without talking about what Victorian England did to India and Africa. Then, I found his account of the Indian Mutiny too difficult to swallow. But most of all I resented the fact that he was not interested in my history at all: Not in the syllabus, lad. Cant talk about it. I became so incensed with Mr. Brilliants inflexible approach to history that, one day, I stuffed all his textbooks in my desk and attempted to set fire to them. I was brought before Mr. Harris who, reluctantly, administered six of the best.

But it was not just at school that I had problems. It was clear to me that I was not accepted on the streets. The walk to and from school was the most painful part of my day. The gangs of youths I encountered on my daily journey had discovered a new game - Paki bashing. I was the perpetual guli to their danda. I made it a principle to fight back and frequently arrived home with cuts and bruises, and on notable occasions, even with a broken nose and then a leg. I was learning that being British meant foregoing essentials parts of ones anatomy. At school, they castrated chunks of your history. On the streets, they took lumps out of you. It is only over time that I have begun to understand the significance of the lumps considered appropriate for excision and why they could not be conceded. It was in response to this determined process of extraction that I began to learn about proactivity, the resistance that defines the nature of my Britishness.

Not all resistance is aggressive. When all my contemporaries seemed to be gladiators on some new battlefield I found that, as before, my friends were all old people. But there was something very different about the old people I befriended around Hackney. I could not understand why society excluded them and left them lonely. All the old people I knew in Pakistan were the opposite, they were happy tyrants engaged in exercising great power over large families which kept them endlessly busy and at the hub of all affairs. When we moved to Seaton Point, in the white heat of urban renewal, I could look down from the 17th floor at little old ladies standing mournfully at the entrance of adjacent blocks. Why dont they have anywhere to go?, I wondered. Why do they come out of their flats, all dressed for an outing and just stand there?

This was not the mystery I had begun to imagine. The enigma was resolved one day on walking home from school when I stopped to chat to one of the sentinels. Little old ladies found it difficult to battle against the hurricane force winds that whistled between the tower blocks. They had to wait for a convoy to form before setting out across the windswept concrete oceans that separated them from the nearest shop. And thats how I became involved in the Hackney Citizens Rights: at my stall each Saturday in Dalton market, I got to listen to the complaints of old people no one else seemed interested to hear.

There was more than instinctive warmth for old people in these friendships. Or perhaps the instinct was not quite what I expected or thought at the time. These old people in Hackney were like me in ways I only now begin to rationalize: uprooted migrants, people stripped of the community and associations that sustained them, flotsam cast aside by the grand ideas of a society that knew it all and knew it knew best. With these old people and their rambling stories, tortuous complaints and vibrant memories you could see the underside of the utopia Britain proclaimed itself to be. The landscape these old people inhabited was one encrusted by hypercritical cynicism. I was becoming part of the old peoples Britain; a marginal, excluded, unremarked Britain - but one that knew it was real, and that its reality gave the lie to the fictions the nation maintained about itself, to itself and to the rest of the world.

Lady Birdwood was trying, slowly but surely, to indoctrinate me with the ideology of exclusiveness, the rationale of exclusion. Here she was, the grand lady, straight out of some 19th century novel, on her visits to the deserving. But her message had nothing, or seemingly nothing, in common with those works of the great tradition, the great books of mankind I had read. They had taught me of the need to be included. They were the umbrella of great ideas under which everyone should try to find a place safe from too much glare of the sun. The great books of mankind were the civilization to which all peoples had to aspire, because all else was darkness and silence.

On one particular visit, Lady Birdwood concentrated on a exegesis of the recent rivers of blood speech by Enoch Powell. Powell is right, she said, Britain is in danger of being swamped by immigrants. As most immigrants do not and cannot speak proper English, as their uncouth cultures are totally alien to the green pastures of England, as their eating and hygiene habits are so different from ours, theres bound to be strife. There will be running battles in the street. Then she suddenly turned round and spoke directly to me. Zia, would you help? Would you join us in our crusade? I sat motionless. Lady Birdwood continued. Join the British National Movement. It would be such a coup to have a young Asian amongst us. I sat motionless. We are about to start a new magazine. It will be called New Times. We are looking for people to help us with it. You can write for it. And help us distribute it. I looked at my father who was looking at me - there was no expression on his face. Lady Birdwood fidgeted: What do you say? I looked at my father again: this time there was a smile on his face. Not a grin but a suppressed, gentle smile. A smile that spoke directly to me. A smile that gave me permission. Erupt, volcano, erupt. There was an explosion.
Lady Birdwood was stunned. Perhaps she had not expected an articulate and reasoned, but ferocious and loud, attack from this, this - a mere Asian teenager. Perhaps she thought she was getting through to me and was shocked at the extent of her failure. Her pale face turned white, and as I continued my denunciation, she became visibly more and more tense rapidly becoming so rigid that the nerve of her face stuck out like the canals on Mars. I spoke without pause, without commas or full stops; and stopped only when I finished. Sensing that something was wrong with her mistress, the dog barked. Lady Birdwood patted the dog, turned away in visible disgust from me and looked at my father. There was a smile on his face. A smile of relief that slowly spread across his face and became a wide grin. Without saying a single word, Lady Birdwood put the leash on her dog, got up, corrected her composure, and glided towards the door. My sister ran out in front of her and opened the door for her. As Lady Birdwood walked out of the door, my sister shouted out, And I hate your dog too. We never saw Lady Birdwood again.

But Lady Birdwood has always stayed with me. In her contradictions there is something essential about the Britishness that has surrounded me since I came to this home. It is something this home has never allowed my Britishness to attain. Lady Birdwood is and was then a woman full of unresolved, unperceived, unanalysed incommensurables, as such she was not an aberration of Britishness but its quintessence. I am reminded of this by recently reading that she has been fined for disseminating exactly the same literature she used to insist I read. Racism, as overt as that preached by all her hate literature is merely the flip side of the Great Tradition, the underlying but unstated message of The Great Books of Mankind that I read in my childhood. It is the notion of civilization as a one way street, an inexorable path of progress that must take all peoples towards the same pinnacle, by the same route. The definition of what it is to be civilized would have been no different for me had I never left Pakistan. It would always have been what it is: an extrapolation from the experience and history of western civilization, the defining, over-writing civilization of domination that literally dominates not just the globe but the minds of all the worlds peoples.
I have been part of a rapidly changing Britain. But my overall experience is of the changeless nature of Britain. During my adolescence in the heady 60s and 70s, it was conventional for the young revolution to pour scorn on the old ways. Let it Be, there will be an answer, Let it Be. Todays answer to my Britishness is as quintessentially confused, unresolved and unaware as Lady Birdwoods. The politics of identity and its champions have ensured that my presence has rippled through the metropolis of erstwhile empire. Sadly it has left the crumbling heart of that empire shaken, but hardly stirred. The identity I am alleged to have helped forge is an eclectic choice from among an infinite set of possible, potential identities. Personal choice, shifting allegiances, fragmentary, partial people are the order of the postmodern day. Who are these people, the British? Without self-analysis, and unaware of self as ever they were, they are still convinced they are the centre, the unwritten orthodoxy that measures and positions everyone elses identity.

Thats what civilizing mission is all about: to give people identities, not to enable them to discover their own. Such labels as immigrants, Pakistanis, Asians, Blacks are ways of retaining and managing control. Chunks of my being are declared appropriate and fit to be included in the Britishness that is imposed upon me. Now, as in my childhood, bits of my physical and historical being are extracted and discarded; artificially created, superficial identities are grafted. You are thus supposed to behave according to the grotesque stereotype that has been created out of you.

Racism is an abstract term for an abstract personless situation. In real, personal relationships, racism is unease and a certain kind of fear about what the other person may do. It is the actual inheritance of stereotypes that are at large in the culture and its history and in the air we breathe. It does not preclude people interacting, but it surrounds their meetings and dealings with uncertainty. Thats real racism: the package deal of identity British people see sitting on my shoulder whenever they talk to me, their certainty about what I must really be like, that I must at some point conform to the expectations they have created for me. It is a certainty that denies me the right to be sure of who I am, to know that I am not the person British society takes me for.

In the midst of all this fuddled, fudged thoughtlessness I am really British. I am British because I have had to become self-aware: consciously alive in my identity which is not a shifting, infinitely alterable array of poses and positions, a collage of associations. Britain has made me the person I am because of the enduring human need to be whole. Like the old people I befriended during my youth, I live my reality, and like them, I would not allow others to dictate what my reality is. That is why I am such a problem, and pose such a threat that I must be marginalised. Nobody else ever intended that I, or anyone like me, should be self consciously British and proud of it.

III. Muslim

Of course it never occurred to anyone that I would consider myself British because I am also self-consciously Muslim, and proud of it. The obligatory daily ordeal by news media gives one no option but to be conscious of ones Muslim identity. Part of a vast new diaspora, I read of and watch the turmoil within the Muslim world, the plight of Muslims everywhere from Palestine to Bosnia. Hardly a day passes without Islam being in the news, or the news throwing up some question that disturbs the complacency of the conventions of my Muslim inheritance. Where I live and how I live gives me no option except to be conscious of my Muslim identity. I dont take being a Muslim as a given; for me, being a Muslim is a challenge.

The challenge is to walk a tightrope. To fall, in any direction is fraught with danger. On one hand there is the slough of disaffection nourished deep in virtually every Briton on the potentially hazardous topic of the Muslims; and on the other is the vast world of Muslims ready to be offended, or hurt or maddened by omissions or commissions of which I am easily capable. To be a British Muslim means teetering on multiple broncos of identity, concentrating on holding myself upright, with head held high.
My Muslim consciousness lives with the fact that everyone else in Britain is blithely oblivious of what a Muslim is. There is an age old stereotype that lies buried in the subconscious of most people in Britain, rather like the herpes virus - it is there, ever present, and nothing seems able to cure it. Its presence becomes known only when it is triggered. Whenever Muslims make their presence felt in Britain (for example, by making a demand, say for Islamic schools), whenever an Islamic issue emerges in a distant part of the world, whenever Islam is seen as a threat to (Western) civilization, the herpes virus is activated, the Muslims become an unbearable irritant that must be scratched, scraped, chafed. Muslims everywhere now acquire familiar contours: bearded Mullahs waving scimitars, irrational fanatics with a propensity for chauvinism and brutal violence the lot of them. This conventional portrait of Muslims has a deep resonance in the British mind. Otherwise rational and respectable individuals of both the Left and the Right have not the slightest qualm at parading it as an objective, learned, universal representation. The invariance of this Pavlovian response makes me think that ultimately Britain is not comfortable with having a thriving Muslim community in its midst.

My Muslim consciousness is also a reactive, or proactive, product of the overt representation of Islam by contemporary Muslims. Muslims everywhere exist in a time warp; the interpretations of Islam that predominate pertain to the so-called Golden Age of Islam and were first arrived at least a thousand years ago. Islam has been frozen in history, for centuries it has been denied the oxygen of new interpretation, its thought and traditions - from being dynamic and life enhancing - have been fossilized and preserved in stone. To be a conscious and conscientious Muslim today requires constant struggle against obscurantism, against chauvinistic interpretations, against legal opinions that have served their purpose in history, against traditional notions direly in need of transformation, against blind imitation, against the tyranny of out-of-context quotations and anecdotes. The challenge of being a Muslim today is the responsibility to harness a controlled explosion, one that will clear the premises of all the detritus without damaging the foundations that would bring down the house of Islam.
Perhaps this is the common link between my British and Muslim identity, two volcanic imperatives with me the molten and merged lava flow they generate. When I examine my Muslim identity, it is like excavating through a series of volcanic strata, burrowing through overlaid layers that form the ground on which I now stand. My early schooling in Islam was through my mother who taught me to read the Quran as well as the basic tenets and rituals. There is nothing special in this, it is so conventional one might even neglect to mention the fact. It is an experience repeated in households the world over, the Muslim world that is. The intimacy of ones Muslim identity is its domesticity. As I learned from my mother, so I have watched my wife teach my children. Through this most resilient tradition we are always closing the distance between Islamic identity and ourselves, hopefully so that we can take it deep inside ourselves.

I learnt to read the Quran and its sounds percolated deep. Yet like the majority of Muslims the world over I read the Quran without knowing the meaning of the words; I was taught, and read, the Quran as a Pakistani struggling with Arabic as a second language. What is closest to home is a sphere of meaning that constantly challenges my understanding, that I must exert myself to know. Application of energy has never been my problem. From an early age I began joining in on a wide diversity of activities. The Hackney Citizens Rights group was counter-balanced by the London Islamic Circle. I was Chairperson of both even though I was the youngest member of both. Not just a joiner, it seems I am innately attuned to being an organiser.

The London Islamic Circle met at the Regents Park Mosque, a kind of mini united nations where Muslims of every shade and variety from every possible source gathered. If Hackney gave me a distinct feeling of being British, Regents Park gave me citizenship of a whole world and made me acutely aware of and involved with this worlds problems. Unlike many a nascent activist of the 60s and 70s for me the world and its problems had an intimate human face through the friends I acquired. To this day wherever I go in the world there is always an old friend I can look up, and an intriguing number of them have become powers to reckon with in their home countries. Back then we were all young, eager, concerned and committed; what we had to discuss endlessly every Saturday night was how to make a better world. The conundrum was how Islam would feature in and fashion the transformations we considered urgently needed. The thread that bound us together was the conviction that the status quo in the house of Islam was unsustainable.

To be agents of change it was not sufficient just to be a young and committed Muslim, one had to acquire an effective Islamic education. So in my late teens, I became a pupil of Jafaar Shaikh Idris, a Sudanese scholar. Jaafar is a gentle giant, a calm colossus with the most winning smile that crinkles around the tribal marks on his face. He was working for his doctorate in philosophy at Oxford, under no less a luminary than Popper, and was pursuaded to teach me, and a few others, on a regular basis. We met every Thursday, for a period of over seven years, in a usra group: according to tradition we would sit in a circle around the Shaikh while he systematically educated us in Islamic tradition. He took us through the classic texts: commentaries on the Quran, early biographies of the Beloved Prophet, books of authentic traditions, monumental works on Islamic jurisprudence and philosophy. Jafaar taught me all that - but he also taught me something else: the meaning and relevance of tradition in shaping a Muslim identity.

Tradition is the force to be reckoned with in the life of every Muslim and in the Muslim world at large. Tradition, the word evokes a solid object, an edifice of layers of old stone gone quite cold, and now being worn bare through overuse. This is not to say that tradition does not have many pleasing aspects. A few years ago I was making a series of television programmes in Malaysia. One of the Faces of Islam we had engaged to appear in the series was Jaafar Shaikh Idris. He was due to fly in from Pakistan to record his interview. When he arrived he was dressed in his traditional Sudanese garb, snow white cotton gelabeyah topped with white turban, he had lost his luggage enroute, including the suit he planned to wear for the interview. What is more he had allowed himself to be persuaded to have his distinguished, graying hair hennaed while in Pakistan. This traditional specific, hennaing gray hair, had turned, as it sometimes does, his hair a brilliant orange. He was the walking nightmare of a studio lighting man. What better metaphor for traditional innocence abroad? Calm, collected and compliant as ever Jaafar allowed himself to be whisked to a shop to be rapidly outfitted in suit, shirt, tie and shoes and thence to the makeup department, where the only answer to his orange dilemma was to have his hair painstakingly mascaraed. As usual Jaafar smiled and laughed through it all while everyone else was wilting from nervous exhaustion. At last he settled himself into his chair and was microphoned up for the interview. Then the hidden, underground explosive power took over. For there is nothing inert and lifeless about the understanding tradition evokes in his mind. A series of very sharp and pertinent expositions with the volcanic force to overturn the most determined complacency or sweep aside the most naked power ploys was set forth with the most gentle, humble, humourous and lucid clarity.

When I was sitting in the usra circle I liked the sense of timeless continuity of this simple tradition. But tradition itself became a monumentally oppressive force upon me. History is not just continuity; it is an increasing burden, for the most part unrelieved by the gentle intelligence of a Jaafar. Through his teaching and the discussions it provoked I came to realise that tradition is a complex and rich idea. But the wealth of connotations of our Islamic tradition have been buried under the overpowering edifice of an official tradition consciously fashioned out of its worst features. Where Jaafar gave us the spark for thought and discussion most official Islamic education promotes taqlid, the blind following of received unwisdom. Official tradition has been crystallized into a power ploy, a territory meticulously mapped out and signposted as a reserved enclosure for the exclusive use of the faithful. The boundaries and signposts are policed by the ulema, the ones supposedly learned in the traditional sources. Their vision is a straight and narrow path circumscribed by an endless list of dos and donts that obviates any need for thought or even personal reflection. When in doubt the Muslim should simply go to the leader and be told what is to be done. My problem was the array of so called leaders I encountered did not even understand the questions I asked, let alone how to find a prepackaged answer from the traditional storehouse.
By the time I got to university I was able to become an officially active member of FOSIS - the Federation of Students Islamic Societies in UK and Eire; I had been unofficially involved for sometime. In the late sixties and early seventies, the Federation boasted several thousand members from almost every Muslim country. Many of the members were also active in the worldwide Islamic movement. I was brought into direct contact with the two main strands of the Islamic movement: the Jammat-e-Islami of Pakistan and the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. With the help of elder brothers, I embarked on a detailed study of contemporary Muslim thought. I devoured the works of such leaders of the Islamic movement as Maulana Maududi and Syyed Qutb, their numerous followers as well as their critics. I was plunging ever deeper into a realm of ambiguities.

On the one hand I was a student, allegedly reading physics at the City University at the height of flower power and student empowerment through protest. On the other I was spending a great deal of my time with my Muslim brothers whose preoccupation was the antithesis of letting it all hang out. I belonged to both, but was an enigma in both spheres. To fellow British students my Muslimness seemed out of place, while to the brothers my left wing agenda and concerns seemed inimical to their approach. Not for the first time I found myself the only person not in the least perplexed by such a provocative and helpful juxtaposition of ideas and influences.

One other thing was clear: the modernist Islam of the brothers left me cold. In particular, I was disturbed by their instrumental piety - a piety that combined prayer and (self) righteousness with efficacious technology and naked political ambitions. It seems to me that modernist Islam, like official traditional Islam, has imbibed the worst aspects of modernity. It is so gung-ho about the concept of modernising to appropriate the power of the West it excoriates that it has never paused to analyse let alone question what makes the modern world tick. An Islamic A bomb? Why, of course, they say, lets have one, quoting an hadith, an isolated statement of the Prophet, to cover their paucity of intellectual or moral rigor. But where, I keep asking, is there a Muslim ethical debate on nuclear power and its uses and abuses? Where some wrestling with the concepts and ideas that generate the powerful instruments of modernity? Neither in the lexicon of modernists nor traditionalists comes the stark reply. Indeed the modernists seem so set on getting to the point of power and dominance of the West that they effortlessly assume all the aspects of modernity I have consciously rejected: instrumentalism, progress (in the case of Islamic movement political progress) at all costs, expedient use of power and fear and loathing of those with a different perspective. Worse: modernist Islam rests on a foundation of traditional thought from which all the life-enhancing juices have been filtered out.

Both traditional and modernist varieties of Islam leave me frigid because they fail to engage with contemporary concerns. For me being a Muslim means engaging with the world, understanding it, changing it, reforming it; not living in a distant past or some artificially bought over, bussed in modernity. Both of these dominant brands of Islam look at the world with an atomised, black and white lens. They skim over the surface of what perplexes me in the modern world and assume if they call a thing Islamic all will be well. Why? The answer was provided at a seminar I attended in Chicago by a most convinced alim, traditional scholar. While the rest of us had been passionately and vociferously debating hot issues of moral and ethical complexity for days he had sat quietly. Maddened by his silent, contented expression eventually I turned to him and demanded his views. Brothers he said surveying the room with a beatific gaze (and ignoring the female participants) we have no any problem - the ulema have answered all questions. While some engaged in a pantomime exchange of Oh no they havent to his Oh yes they have, I made a mental refusal to shut up shop. Neither for the first nor last time I resolved that someone had to assume responsibility for the unasked questions this otherwise totally innocuous product of the Islamic reservation had made virtually unaskable.

Over the years the no any problem syndrome has become a standing joke I share with group of friends. It is black humour, laughing at our nightmares to keep us going through the endless crises. The worst thing is the world belongs to the No any problem brigade, those who offer the battered and bemused Muslim communities the ready-made, packaged, Islamic-state-on-a-plate scenario. This is why wherever traditional (for example, Iran) or modernist (for example, the Sudan) Islam has triumphed, the introduction of so-called Islamic injunctions has led to an increase in injustice and oppression. I tend to agree with ibn Tayymiah, the classical Muslim political scientist, who argued that it is better to have a just un-Islamic state than a unjust Islamic one!

Because they are seriously out of sync with the contemporary world, both traditional and modernist categories of Islam have generated a perpetual identity crisis amongst their adherents. Muslims of traditional and modernist persuasions have to wear their Islam like a banner around their necks and proclaim their identity as loudly as possible at every juncture. This is largely done by overemphasizing what has come to be seen as the external manifestations of Islam - beards for men, hijab for women; rote prayer and formulaic pieties; Biblical punishments; and unconditional obedience to the leader - shouting banal slogans such as Islam is the answer and the Quran is our Law and by hurling abuse and venom at the West.

Both traditional and modernist Islam seeks to place a barrier between Muslims and their sacred texts. It is the interpretations of the classical scholars that have now become confused and infused with the sharia, or Islamic law, that is supposed to govern Muslim thought and practice. The problem with the No any problem notion is that it is not the historically bound answers of long gone vigorous minds that are important. It is how these thinking Muslims of the past wrestled with the questions of their time and place that we should treasure. It is my questions that bind me to the glorious history of Islamic civilization, and its tradition of provocative, fearless and determined thinkers, not the stock answers that seek to make the history of Muslim thought a permanent full stop. Sharia, the dictionaries tell us, literally means the way to a watering hole, it is therefore a source of unchanging moral and ethical principles that must be regularly revisited, an absolute reference frame to which questions must be subjected for analysis time and time again. By arrogating the monopoly of interpretation largely to classical scholars and partly to contemporary obscurantist, traditional leaders, the Muslim community has been cut off from the basic source that shapes its identity. To be comfortable with my Muslim identity, I had to go back to the source: the Quran.

The Quran speaks to me in its totality, it is its spirit, its principles and conceptual framework that I imbibe; not the list of dos and donts that the scholars have gleaned from it. The challenge of my Islam is to keep making that walk to the watering hole and constantly drink deep of its refreshment. Despite the several outer layers of Muslim identity that I carry with me - the Pakistani, the traditional, the modernist - it is the internalised Islam that is the essence of my true Muslim identity. And because I am quite comfortable with it, I am hardly aware of its existence. I do not have to parade it, underline it or wear it constantly above my person. Its just me. All of me. Including the bit that writes.

IV. Writer
Like food, drink and sex, writing has become a biological necessity for me. It fountains forth, I wish..., most often it dribbles like a rusty faucet, but by whatever means of inducement, cajoling or excruciating pressure of posterior on chair Ive just got to scribble. When the mechanism dams up it is as though bodily functions are on strike, nothing feels, tastes or looks quite right. I cannot remember when I first recognised the basic necessity of this fundamental bodily function but the Hackney Gazette, Brook House Secondary school magazine, Sixth Form Opinion, Zenith the monthly magazine of Muslim youth and The Muslim, the FOSIS journal, all received early outpourings before I had realised the importance of the stream they had tapped. The joiner and organiser soon found himself pressed into service as an editor too.

In writing I am a majority of one, a totality, tackling problems head to head and after all the angst, anguish and agony - in a single bound I am free, setting the words on the page, setting my ideas straight. There were other brothers in the London Islamic Circle and FOSIS who shared my analysis of the Muslim predicament and felt like me. Together we concluded that the havoc caused by suffocating tradition and murderous modernity to Muslim societies is so extensive that it may not be possible, or even desirable, to repair and restore their existing social orders. Our task, as we conceived it, was not to be patchers and potchers but creative thinkers seeking fundamentally different, alternative social, economic, political and scientific systems for Muslim societies throughout the world. But how does one conceive new alternatives? We looked around someone to guide us, channel our youthful energies and nascent ideas in a positive direction. And settled for Kalim Siddiqui.

Siddiqui, then a Marxist writer with Trotskyite leanings, worked for The Guardian. He had just published a typically pugnacious book, Conflict Crisis and War in Pakistan, which had brought him to our notice. He received us enthusiastically, declaring: Yes! I would lead a new movement of ideas. He insisted that the new, avant garde Muslims, who were neither traditionalists nor modernists, should have an institutional base which would serve as a magnet, attracting like minded thinkers and writers. Thus was born the Muslim Institute; its function, as the full title suggested, was to undertake research and planning, conceive new Islamic social, economic and political systems and develop alternative visions of future Muslim societies. Siddiqui appointed himself the Director and I became the Institutes first Research Fellow. But hardly had the Institute started functioning, from Siddiquis house in Slough, than our brave new Muslim world started to look very old and familiar. The search for a potential leader was necessary because we had already been mauled over by so many of the self appointed leaders who abound in the British Muslim community. Each one of these leaders is convinced they are the answer to the multiple dilemmas of the Muslims, who, if they would only listen to the words of the leader, could instantly solve all their problems. Every organisation, whatever its impressive global title turns out to be a one man band dedicated to expressing the views and ideas of as single leader, repeated to the echo by a dedicated band of acolytes. We wanted a tutor, a mentor, a galvaniser, someone above and beyond the Muslim organisation syndrome. We got more of the same. Siddiqui too began to manifest his dictatorial tendencies. There was a mass exit of founder members within a few months and I, having raised a vast sum of money for the Institute, was totally sidelined.

During my FOSIS days, I had became close to Abdullah Naseef, a Saudi from an influential Jeddah family, who was doing his doctorate in geology. A warm and gregarious person, Naseef not only represented all the Arab virtues of hospitality and generosity, he also seemed to have synthesized the best of tradition and modernity in his personality, along with a wicked glint of humour at the absurdity of so much in Muslim circles that would twinkle when you eyed him across a crowded room. Naseef returned home to become the General Secretary of the newly formed King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah; rising rapidly to become the Vice-President and then President. When in 1974 he invited me to join the Universitys Hajj Research Centre the offer seemed too good to be true. It was a way out of Siddiquis tyranny and, Naseef assured me with his usual generous smile, I would have ample time to write. He was right. I did.

Hajj, or the pilgrimage to Makkah, is one of the fundamental pillars of Islam. Every Muslim is required, if he or she can afford it, to undertake the journey to Makkah at least once in their life. The word hajj literally means effort and the actual performance of hajj requires considerable physical and spiritual effort on the part of the pilgrims. The hajj emphasises the equality of all - men as well as women, black as well as white, Arab as well as non-Arab, before God; its the global Muslim fraternity in action. The hajj is the ultimate exercise in humility and submission, a total denunciation of materialism and violence. Its the most sublime, most elevated, most cherished part of a Muslims spiritual life. Research on hajj can only be done by those who have themselves performed the hajj. I performed my first hajj in 1975 and a further four in the subsequent years. The first time I simply went as myself; the second time I tried to assume the personality of a rural Pakistani to experience the hajj through the eyes of poor villager; third time, I traveled in comfort with a group of rich Saudis; the fourth time I joined a group of middle class Egyptians. But my last hajj was perhaps the most ambitious. I walked from Jeddah all the way to Makkah, across the desert and over the mountains, with a donkey. The idea was to follow the ancient caravan route and try and perform the hajj as it was performed, say, a few hundred years ago. When I and my donkey, Ghengis, finally completed our hajj, I removed my pilgrim garb (two towels wrapped around the body) and in considerable pride indulged in my first bath after three weeks on the road. This, I told myself, was something worth writing about. I could almost feel the mantle of special effort wafting down on me as I began to compose a first draft of my exploits. Not only had I returned to the remembrance of the past I had put a special imprint on myself by avoiding the horrors of the hajj ordeal by motorcade. As I wandered around Makkah, still crowded with pilgrims, I almost expected everyone to notice the special aura I exuded. Just then I was stopped by a brother asking for directions and in benign mood I engaged him in conversation. He was from Sudan, and had completed his first hajj - by walking all the way from his home village as he would walk all the way back! The writer I have become was saved and reconstituted right there and then by someone whose name I do not even know.

Hajj research wrestles with the predicaments caused by the rapid rise in the number of pilgrims. Piety, with ill distributed affluence and modern communication brings over two million pilgrims each year to Makkah, all anxious to stand on the same spot at the same time. This not only creates formidable problems of accommodation, transportation, health and safety, it is also having a devastating effect on the geology, ecology and the sacred environment of the holy areas. The intervention of modern technology in the form of new and better multi-lane roads, overhead bridges and spaghetti junctions was only making matters worse. Every technological solution produced a host of new problems. The most sacred territory of Islam was stubbornly defying all the logic of conventional, modernist solutions. And the conclusions one had to draw from research and experience where not things the authorities wanted to hear.

As the President of the University, Abdullah Naseef tried his best to shield me from its vast, Byzantine bureaucracy. An unenviable task. Diplomacy has never been in my repertoire, to me spades are shovels and I am without a scintilla of patience - easy meat for career bureaucrats who know a million ways to get their own back while keeping a sympathetic smile on their face. Without Naseefs protection I would not have been able to realise my plan to systematically travel around the Muslim world. Starting from Morocco, I methodically traveled through every Muslim country right down to Indonesia. I spent as long as I could in each country looking at its academic and research institutions and talking to scientists and administrators. In the February of 1976, at the age of 25, I sat down to write my first book.

I had gathered a truly awesome amount of material and I knew what I wanted to say but had little idea of how to organise it, shift through it, analyse it, turn it into a coherent book. After several months of agony, I turned in desperation to Kalim Siddiqui. His response was short and sharp. I am too busy to help young upstarts with their books, he said dismissively. Anyhow, he continued, the Muslim Institute is not big enough for two writers. I dont want you undermining my authority. Take your book and yourself elsewhere: you are not welcome here anymore. He paused to reflect on what he had said. Then, looking away from me, he uttered his final sentence through the side of his mouth: if you come back here again, you will leave with broken legs. The Muslim Institute was on its way to becoming a mouthpiece for the terror unleashed by the Iranian revolution.

In the classic Golden Age nurturing writers had been the strength of Islamic education and leadership. Now, there was nowhere and no one in the Muslim world I could think of to turn to. So I reached out to my Maimonides. I phoned Jerry Ravetz in Leeds. Get on the train, lad, he said, and well sort it out. I met Jerry when he was the Secretary of the Council for Science and Society, a high-powered body that studied and published reports on the social and cultural problems of science. He had rang out of nowhere to invite me to join the Councils working group on the information explosion. He was a reader in the History and Philosophy of Science at Leeds University. When I arrived we sat closeted for a few days while I poured out my problem and Jerry bobbled, bounced and flapped his hands, in characteristic fashion, as he engaged with my ideas. His advice was invaluable, but his enthusiasm was even more precious. Over the next year, in occasional meetings and by long distance Jerry simply talked me through the process of writing the book.

Eventually, the bureaucracy at the King Abdul Aziz University caught up with me. They simply refused to grant me an exit visa for any purpose whatsoever. Unable to leave Jeddah, I turned to the desert. Every weekend - that is Thursdays and Fridays - I would leave the city and spend the time in the desert with an assortment of Bedouin friends. Smoking my sheesha (hubbly-bubbly) amongst the sand dunes, discoursing on the nature of time with my nomads friends, I dreamt of an oasis: I developed a vision of a future civilization of Islam that fused life-enhancing tradition with the irrigating qualities of modernity. I wrote The Future of Muslim Civilization surrounded by the stillness of the desert, inventing new words as I went along to describe the movement of Muslim societies towards a desirable future. The book sealed my fate; it also expressed something very important about my relationship to the future. My Muslim civilization is an oasis at a crossroads, an open civilization inviting to everyone and closed to no-one, after all the vision it records could not have been conceived without my Maimonides, and probably not without Hackney.

On leaving my job at the King Abdul Aziz University in 1979, I decided to become a full time writer. I had no other option. It was my way of declaring my difference from other Muslims; my way of affirming my unique and distinct identity. I paid my bills by freelancing first for Nature and then for New Scientist but spent most of my time writing, traveling around the Muslim world and published another eight books in rapid succession. It began to dawn on me that while my work found much appreciation and praise in the West, most Muslims, for whom it was largely written, found it undigestible. I craved for criticism, yet none was forthcoming. Slowly I began to notice my intellectual loneliness... My friends from the London Islamic Circle and FOSIS had dispersed to the four corners of the earth, going by different routes to involvement with contemporary problems. I was on my own again, an enigma voyaging through a sea of ambiguities.

As in the worst romances, at my lowest ebb serendipity took over. I began receiving letters and phone calls from places such as Stockholm, Houston and Ottawa bringing invitations to address Muslim gatherings. Invariably I would arrive at an airport to be studious ignored by a welcoming committee who would shoo me aside with Yes brother, well deal with your problem later, but were waiting for an important writer, he must have got lost. I would pester them persistently until I convinced them I was indeed the author for whom they were waiting. They would eye me suspiciously and cautiously and ask why I did not have a long gray beard and arched backed. It seems I have always been too young for the things Ive had to say. But after the initial awkwardness in each of these fortuitous trips I found myself blessed with a new friend, a kindred spirit who knew my aloneness because it was the same as theirs.

After a few dry years this slow meeting of streams achieved critical mass. The channel that brought us together was the formation of a new monthly magazine, Inquiry. I persuaded, brow beat and generally insisted that all my new friends become regular contributors - no was not a possible answer. Together we all began wrestling with words to find expression for our ideas. In Inquiry we were tempered in a common fire and eventually found ourselves in riotous assembly on the same flight to Chicago. Aloft over the Atlantic Ocean we made a pledge to become a group, it took the rest of the flight to determine what the group should be called - one of our members is a linguist with a penchant for etymology. We never discussed the function of the group - that was self evident: mutual support as the antidote to the isolation we had all endured. Ijmal, as we call ourselves, which means the beauty of synthesis, has been in existence for a decade. It is the most formally informal of groups, though it does have ground rules: every member must write. Inquiry, which brought us together is long gone, but the Ijmalis have kept going, they refer to me rather deprecatingly as the Tunku (the Malay word for prince) and I sometimes wonder whether they really appreciate what Ijmal means to me and has enabled me to achieve. For the pooling of our isolation has subtly changed my outlook. Together we have argued and discoursed, often sitting through the night in a noisy circle sprawled over the cushions in the living room of my house and my ideas, aspirations and creative vision has matured exponentially in consequence. Books and articles have been forthcoming from all the Ijmalis, and because there is Ijmal, we all have an image of an audience ready to receive our outpourings. The faceless, amorphous, personless void that initially made it so hard for me to write has acquired a character that makes a sense of communication possible. We have collectively forged a body of ideas on a broad range of topics concerning the future possibilities of the Muslim societies and the present potentialities of Islam in this rapidly changing, battered world.

Thanks to Ijmal I have indeed trekked out of the desert and reached a well water oasis. What is refreshed and sustained by this intellectual home is a new sense of my own identity, not just as a writer but the identity of myself as a whole person, an integral part of an array of communities. It is a beautiful synthesis: this composite self who belongs to many homes with passionate, tough love. But for a world ruled by a linear, binary dialectic, dominated by sequential techniques of quantification and negation and shaped by the perception and perpetual presence of the demonic Other, complex and composite identities are a constant source of irritant. I am not a problem for me; the process I have been forced to undergo has not been a self transformation, but a clarification and deepening understanding of the potential possibilities and unsuspected commensurabilities of all the heritages I am heir to. It is other people who have the problem. By profession other people are dedicated to the ideas that such composite self is impossible, or permissible only when fashioned in differently proportioned chemical recombinations, according to their recipe. There are fundamentalists and totalitarians on all sides whose definition of identity, nationality, culture, society, the nature and purpose of being deny ijmal, the infusion that sustains my joie de vivre. Whether it be right wing Britain or left wing British activism and race relations industry; traditionalist or modernist Muslims; secularist or libertarian ideologists or squads of post-modern intelligentsia - it is they who cannot deal with my ease with myself. From their variety and diversity of directions and approaches they all seek to delimit, to strictly define who I am and what I can, should or ought to be. Yet the oasis and synthesis of my self unfolds beyond arbitrary limits of other peoples horizons. They would have me permanently sprawled on pinheads of their own tangled misconceptions hidebound by answering the question of identity as they define the issue. But I have a life to live, a living to make, a contribution to offer, that cannot passively await other peoples readiness to allow my existence. So I say to all comers the world is richer and more varied than you imagine, now let us begin to tackle its problems from the place where we now stand. I cannot neither reconstruct nor deconstruct myself because I really am a British, Muslim, Writer.

V.
It is autumn. Outside my house in North London the trees are disconsolately shedding their leaves in a gathering gloom. I sit in my eyrie, my study perched at the top of the house, planning things I will write. There is the book on rethinking Islam, an essay on Urdu poetry, another on postmodern religion and that review for The Independent. Then, there will be a third book to complete my trilogy on the future of Muslim civilization to be dedicated to my youngest son, as the previous ones have been dedicated to my older daughter and son. In the warm pool of light inside my study I have the confidence to write as an expression of my identity, that peculiar amalgam that has been forged, merged and nurtured by Britain, the whole gamut of the Muslim world and essentially by my friends. I have found my voice.

I turn and reflect on the gathering dark outside the window. In terms of multicultural expression it seems to me Britain has arrived at autumn without ever having had a summer. I think of Pakistan, in that climate autumn without a summer, where plants flourish, is impossible. In Britain a cold summer of stunted growth is a likely occurrence. The arrival of so many cultures within Britain in the years since the ending of World War II was a potential spring of new growth. but these seedlings have arrived at autumn, the autumn of neo Nazi revival across Europe, of racism, of perpetual prejudice, of the lack of forbearance without ever experiencing a summer, or only such a summer when winter-wear remains a necessity. It is as if everyone has kept hats and scarves and ear muffs on, so that they cannot hear, or can hear only muffled sounds they shape into old received patterns missing the nuances of a new language, a new kind of conversation. Thus Britain today is creatively stunted.

Out of remembrance of all that I am, I write, you can hear what I have to say only if you will. From the stereo the sounds of Muni Begum drifts into my consciousness. She is singing a ghazal, an Urdu poem, by Quateel Shafai:

On damp autumn nights, elusive tales enfold me. I remember.
Glimpses of past experience, memories of her youth. I remember.

As buds trembling to unfold, those blossoming lips
In an idle reverie their words come back to me. I remember.

I had forgotten who left me alone in this world
When I recall my past, one face emerges. I remember.
Road wearied feet, a few tears, loneliness, the dust of travel
Of my lost companion, every single feature I remember.

I, Quateel, the destitute, what have I to say to the world?
Yet in anothers strange story, my youth finds its voice,
I remember.

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I am sitting in my study, in front of my PC, writing this article on how we perceive children nowadays. Behind me my daughter Maha, 7 this month, is drawing on my 'reporter's pad'. Whenever I get stuck, which is about every other sentence, I turn around to ask Maha a few questions. 'Maha', I say at one juncture, 'What would you like to see in the future?'. Even before I have finished the question I begin to feel foolish. After all, what perception can a child of seven possibly have of the future? 'You mean tomorrow?' she asks.
'No. I mean a long time from now.'
'Next month?'
'No many months from now.'
'Let's see'. She closes her eyes. 'I like to see lots of happy children. And grown ups too. I don't want to see those children we saw on television. The ones who had nothing to eat. I would like to see them with lots of toys. I don't like fighting. I do like to see children playing with each other. And grown ups too. I like my teacher Mrs Black. I wish we all have teachers like her. And I like schools. I wish there were lots of schools'. She opens here eyes; and then continues with her drawing.

Talk about imagination, perception, observation and reasoning and how can anyone argue that the child, by virtue of being a child, does not posses these qualities? Whenever I engage the imagination of my children, I discover that they see much more than I do, are much more deductive and in their questions, there may or may not be naivete, but there are always perceptions of the problem that I would never think of. Yet, everything and everybody around me is trying to tell me that the child is an inferior version of the adult: a loveable, unthinking, delicate being 'who should be seen and not heard', and who is also dependent, unreliable, wilful - someone who needs to be controlled, guided, told what is Right and what is Wrong, protected from itself and educated and shepherded into adulthood.

Take, for example, the child's power of reasoning. One of the most eminent of contemporary behaviourist psychologists, Clark Hull, argues that the essence of reasoning lies in the joining together of two 'behaviour segments' in some novel way, never actually performed before, so as to reach a goal. This definition of reasoning is derived from experiments on rats. In a maze, like in the diagram below, the rats are persuaded to run in various directions for small rewards. Suppose that the rat learns to run from A to B to get a small reward; from A to C to get an equally small reward; from C to D to get a much bigger reward. Now if you place him at A and he chooses to take the pat A - C - D, instead of A - B, he must be reasoning that you can get to D from this path as he has never been from A to D that way before. Leaving statistical probability apart, rats do not behave that way. So what about children?

Two proteges of Hull devised a similar, now classic, experiment for children. Howard and Tracy Kendler set up a two stage sequence which involved pressing the correct one of two buttons to get a marble; and of inserting the marble into a small hole to release a toy. The Kendlers found that children could learn the separate bits easily, but could not 'integrate' the two tasks. They could get the marble, and they could use the marble to get the toy; but they not proceed directly from one stage to the next without help. Conclusion: children, like rats, are no capable of deductive reasoning! (1).

So we have scientific proof that children are stupid versions of adults. Yet, when one sees a group of children in action in any classroom, it is researchers like the Kendlers, and child psychologists like Hull who come out as daft. If one treats children like rats and monkeys, it is hardly surprising that they behave like them. Simon Hewson in his doctoral thesis tried to treat children with a little more dignity (2). The work of both the Kendlers and Hewson is described by Margaret Donaldson, in Children's Mind (3). Donaldson replaced the button-placing mechanism in the Kendler experiments with drawers that children could open and close, thus taking away the mystery of the first stage of the experiment. Then she helped the children to understand that there was no 'magic' involved in the selection of marbles - all marbles could lead to the toy. These two changes took the success rate from 30 to 90 per cent for five-year-olds, and 35 to 72.5 per cent for four-year-olds. After all the children could, given the fact that they are treated with dignity and approached at their level of understanding, perform tasks of deductive reasoning.

The key word here is treated. What we learn from them and about them. And we treat them as though they had no imagination, no perception worthy of name and were quite incapable of thinking. Children's toys personify this approach to children. This very moment, Zaid, my younger son, is playing with a toy called the transformer; and Maha is engaged with her Care-bear. A transformer is a humanoid robot that, when a few knobs are turned and a few hinges are twisted, turns into a car. A complex robot with an array of gadgetry, reproduced in all its detail, turns into another complex gadget complete in all detail. And that is it: the transformer does not have any other function: one useless Thing that turns into another useless Thing. Moreover, it is a useless thing that leaves nothing to the imagination: the child cannot even create an alternative function for the toy. It is designed to limit and suffocate the child's imagination. (So why did I give in and buy the silly thing in the first place?)

A Care-bear is a benign looking, colourful, toothless chipmunk, with hearts on his legs and an embroidery of something nice stuck on his stomach. Maha's one is bluish green, with a picture of a sun-flower-shaped little girl on its belly. The blurb accompanying the toy tells you in three languages that 'Care-bears are thirteen roly-poly little bears who live high up in a land of rainbows and fluffy clouds called Care-a lot. They are always keeping an eye on things down on earth and whenever you want to share your feeling with others, they come right down to help.' So, in essence, a Care-bear is a cuddly, all-seeing, all-knowing, nylon fairyland vigilante who has an eye on the child's inner soul. You know where you are with a Care-bear - everything is laid out for you; when you are upset call on your moral guardian who will come down from Care-a-lot to share your feelings.

Care-bears, transformers and so many other toys are designed to replace a child's imagination with the notions of the dominant culture and its world-view. Once upon a time there were dolls: they were bland, blank, sterile things. You gave one to a little girl and left it to her imagination; she invented characters and functions to fill in the blanks a pretend baby, an imaginary friend, a patient, her audience or her punch bag. The doll did not lay down the law. But today there is no such thing as a doll. There are Cindies and Barbies, Cabbage face dolls and Bonnies. They are not toys but concepts; one cannot play with them in the conventional sense of using ones imagination to create a world but the world is created for you, all the details are already fill in. Children have little to do but to follow the conceptual grid laid out for them.
And along with the concept in the shape of a Cindy, a Care-bear or a transformer comes ideology wrapped in the plastic. Most modern toys are not designed with play in mind; they are designed to promote an ideology of consumerism and possession, fashion and trend, violence and domination. Many of these toys are not good for anything except possession. They have one assigned function. Since the child cannot imagine for itself, cannot reason for itself, its mind might as well be filled with a world-view that he or she will inherit.

The crudest manifestation of this manipulation of children is found in children's comics. The vast majority of comics contain stories set firmly in the future, a world of violence and death where brute power is the only law. A recent issue of Eagle (4), a comic that I used to read a as child, contains the lead story called Doomlord, whose evil hero Enok, half-alien, half-human, from the planet Rombos, is out to destroy his even more evil father. A second story has two even more computerised robots battling with each other. In the penultimate frame, one destroys the other with the words: 'You underestimate you computer, you deranged Russky! I may have a few Japanese chips but I am British through and through. I'll never betray my Queen and country!'. Violence, Death and Domination lurk at every turn of the page. One story is actually called 'Death wish'. But Eagle is mild fare compared to Masters of the Universe, an unwitting parody of European civilization and its technological gadgetry. He-Man and other heores of Masters of the Universe are all white Anglo-Saxon All-American luminaries.

But nothing compares with 2000AD for banal violence and unashamed promotion of the ideology of brute power. Here's the scenario as described in recent collected strips: 'Welcome to the 22nd Century! The place is Mega-City One, the man is Judge DreddInvested with the power to hand out justice, Judge Dredd's courtroom is on the streets themselves. When you job is to ensure that 400,000,000 citizens obey the letter of the law, there can be no time for lengthy trials or learned defence pleas. Naturally, Dredd is not alone in this role of judge, jury and sometimes executioner. Were you to be transported to Mega-City One now the first thing you'd see would be the judge waiting, watching!Some judges are close to Judge Fargo, the father of justice. One member of his elite corps is Judge Dredd himself. He has known nothing else but the law. He is the lawThe citizens of Mega-City One do not realise it, but the Judges are vital to their existence as a civilised society

Citizens of Mega-City One, the only remains of a post nuclear holocaust world, live in huge tower blocks which house 60,000 inhabitants each. The block is their sole means of identity; and since all their work is done by robots, they have nothing more to do than fight each other. To ensure that the reader should have no opportunity to question the bases of the story, a vast quantity of information is provided on Mega-City One; even the machine Judge Dredd rides is described in minute detail right down to its engine specifications.

Judge Dredd, Masters of the Universe, Care-Bears, Transformers and their ilk, are not simply toys or comics. They are also television services, films, posters, badges, T-shirt decorationthey are an industry. An industry which has only one subject: to get the children to consume more and more and promote the world-view that is the ideological basis of this industry. Thousands, indeed millions, of children throughout the world grow up wanting to be Judge Dredd or behave like Cindy. Today's fantasies lay the foundations of tomorrow's reality. The comic stories of the fifties and sixties, glorifying laser guns are today transformed into President Reagan's Star Wars programme.

Today's comics and television programmes, not to mention that ultimate tool of cultural subversion, the Hollywood movie, supported by research in child