1 Ebola as the next HIV (The Guardian) Britain and
the US have issued stark warnings that the international community will be
responsible for a substantial loss of life in west Africa and a greater threat
across the world unless the financial and medical response to the Ebola crisis is
intensified.
As the World Health Organisation admitted
mishandling the early stages of the Ebola outbreak in west Africa, US secretary
of state John Kerry said a failure to respond could turn Ebola into “a scourge
like HIV or polio”. Kerry criticised the international community for providing
only a third of the UN target of $1bn. Kerry called on world leaders to provide
cash, helicopters and treatment centres.
David Cameron wrote to the European council
president, Herman Van Rompuy, to call on EU leaders to agree at a summit next
week to donate an extra €1bn and to despatch 2,000 European clinicians and
workers to the region within a month.
US President Barack Obama named an Ebola “tsar” to
take charge of combating the virus in the US and health officials revealed they
were monitoring 16 people connected to a nurse who has the virus. GlaxoSmithKline,
the pharmaceutical group, said a vaccine it was working on would be “too late
for this epidemic”. The death toll rose to 4,546 out of 9,191 cases in west
Africa.
Médecins Sans Frontières warned that international
pledges were not having any impact on the spread of the virus. Christopher
Stokes, who is leading the charity’s response, welcomed pledges of help, but said
they were “not having any significant impact on the epidemic and it won’t now
for maybe another month or month and a half”.
2 No endgame in Hong Kong (San Francisco Chronicle) The
movement for greater democracy in Hong Kong has spiraled into a volatile and
dangerous crisis over three weeks with no clear endgame. Support for protesters
is fast waning, as days of violent clashes between activists, their opponents
and police overshadow the movement. Vast differences over political reforms divide
the students and the government. Key thoroughfares remain closed.
Some protesters are digging in for the long haul at
the main occupation zone, while others fight to retake ground lost to police. Against
this backdrop, a government offer to negotiate with students appears highly
unlikely to resolve the largest uprising since the former British colony
returned to Chinese control 17 years ago.
"The endgame is nowhere in sight," said
Willy Lam, a China expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "Short of
using a high degree of force, which might exacerbate dissatisfaction among the
public, it looks like neither Beijing nor the Hong Kong government has what it
takes to defuse the crisis." With Beijing appearing to want to avoid both
bloodshed and a compromise with the student leaders, Lam said, "we have
the making of a stalemate."
3 Islamic dogma and decline (Irfan Husain in Dawn) We
blame the world for our woes while feeling sorry for ourselves. The long
decline of Islamic civilisation is placed at the door of scheming Westerners,
and our backwardness is the fault of our colonial experience. But the reality
is that much of North Africa and the Middle East was colonised by Ottoman
Turkey, a Muslim empire. And our fall into despair and irrelevance began long
before the heyday of European colonialism in the 19th century.
The Islamic civilisation had, until a millennium
ago, been a beacon to the world in the sciences and the arts. In a period of
great bigotry in Europe, Muslims had been tolerant of other faiths and had
nurtured ancient Greek learning. The siege and destruction of Baghdad by the
Mongol army under Halaku Khan in 1258 only hastened the decline of the
caliphate as its power had dissipated long ago.
But the decline had begun earlier when Muslim rulers
and clerics turned away from reason and internalised a rigid dogma. Before this
hinge moment in Islamic history, the Mu’tazilah movement had influenced thought
and policy with its emphasis on reason between the eighth and tenth centuries.
The enlightened view was challenged by the
orthodoxy. Led by Abu al-Hasan al-Ashari in the 10th century, this school
argued that “Human reason in and by itself is not capable of establishing with
absolute certainty any truth with respect to morality, the physical world, or
metaphysical ideas”. At around this time, the gates of ijtihad, or independent
reasoning, were firmly shut.
Thus, while the printing press came into use in
Europe in 1460, the Islamic world waited until 1727 before permitting its
introduction. Pervez Hoodbhoy, the physicist and author of Muslims and Science,
an incisive study of the decline of science in the Muslim world, has documented
some depressing facts: with a population of 1.6 billion, Muslims have produced
only two Nobel laureates in the sciences. Forty-six Muslim countries contribute
a mere 1pc of scientific literature.
But while Europe went through its Reformation,
Renaissance and Enlightenment, we are still locked into our Ashari mindset,
determined to stick to a literal interpretation of the faith, and unable to
restore ijtihad to its rightful place. Until we can learn the lessons of the
past thousand years, we are doomed to fall even further behind.
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