That means you, David Brooks. For shame. Who's next, Josef Mengele?

I was merely peeved a few weeks ago when the Times cited the detestable Steve Sailer's "analysis" of the likely intelligence of Bush vs. Kerry. Now I'm furious. Either Brooks hasn't done his homework on Sailer, or Bobo wants to be associated with this particular brand of toxic racialism disingenuously dressed up as science. Neither explanation is flattering.

Good work, Garance.

UPDATE: Rivka, barefoot and pregnant, finds some other problems with Brooks' column. I doubt tha PZ Myers is barefoot and pregnant, but he does have some concerns as well.

This isn't a life and death matter, but it does illustrate the absurd traps our legislation or regulations often set for our foreign policy when we try to address one issue and end up producing other problems. Somewhere there ought to be an administrative proceeding for the State Department or other agencies to administer exemptions from blanket prohibitions. The problem has received increasing attention in the area of visas and foreign students, where our more stringent recent policies are being applied in a fashion that undermines all too frequently the strong economic, political and cultural interests America has in openness.

For a society that prides itself especially on openness to ideas and freedom of speech, this episode is postively perverse. It was described originally in the Christian Science Monitor by Farzaneh Milani, a native of Iranian who is director of Studies in Women and Gender at the University of Virginia.

Shirin Ebadi - a human rights lawyer and one of Iran's first women judges - is however, forbidden to publish her memoirs in the United States because of a trade embargo against three countries: Sudan, Cuba and Iran. Coming from a land that has no exact equivalent for the term "to sue," the 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate is suing the American government. Challenging the regulations imposed by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, Ebadi calls the ban "a critical missed opportunity both for Americans to learn more about my country and its people from a variety of Iranian voices, and for a better understanding to be achieved between our two countries."

Ebadi has a point. Only a tiny percentage of the tens of thousands of new titles made available to the American reading public every year are translated works. Furthermore, with no official relations with the Iranian government, with new prohibitions on direct access to the people, with travel and tourism virtually stopped, it is hard for Americans to see Iran beyond the headlines. Misunderstandings and misperceptions are rampant.

In spite of its long history of cooperation and friendship with the U.S., which was interrupted by the 1979 revolution, especially the hostage crisis, Iran is represented as an intractable enemy. Its dominant image now is that of a country-turned-jailer; a country taking Americans, no less diplomats and emissaries, hostage.
[...]
For well over a century, women have been a moderating, modernizing force in Iran with Shirin Ebadi as one of its most articulate and successful representatives. Her voice, like Sheherazade's, is a beacon of hope and temperance. It should not be silenced. It ought to be heard.

Our friend the Brooding Persian would agree with the importance of women to Iran's ancient past and future, with a somewhat different take in his recent post "Warrior Woman."

And the past generally helps put present in perspective. I mean, who can really be surprised by the existence of warrior women knowing what woman in Iran have done and continue to do every day. It must be in the genes!

As I have said before,... Iranian women are poised to take the helm of this nation in a dazzling sort of way. They are the one consistently belligerent group incessantly challenging boundaries and refusing to be cowered.

The Persian's post is full of great links to materials about Iranian women both past and present. I was especially taken by his recommendation of the author of a forthcoming book dealing with gender and modernity in Iran, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards : Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, by Afsaneh Najmabadi.

The issue of identity and modernity, and the gender dimension of identity , is a recurring theme in a number of publications about Iran. Another book to be published early in 2005 is reviewed in Beirut's Daily Star. Portrait Photographs from Isfahan : Faces in Transition, 1920-1950 is a collection of several hundred photographs from the period, assembled by Iranian artist, academic and activist Parisa Damandan.

[The book] focuses on a tight but tumultuous time frame, when Iran was undergoing rapid social, political and economic transformation. Damandan, who was born in Isfahan and remembers her own early experiments with having her picture taken by a professional photographer, returned to her hometown to find evidence of the old studios and commercial practices that once flourished in the ancient city.

The book resulting from her research reveals as much about how photographers worked in the first half of the 20th century as it does about how people in those times saw themselves, how they constructed their identities before the camera and, in turn, how the identity of a nation took shape, fell apart and reformed against a backdrop of industrialization, modernity, political change and looming revolution and upheaval.
[...]
[In addition to telling the story of individual photographers] Damandan adds the story of a city, a country and a people. The book is full of surprises - cross-dressing women, Isfahan's community of Russian prostitutes and the flood of Polish refugees who took up temporary residence in Iran during World War II. And it captures telling evidence of changing times - women casting off and taking up the veil, the significance of gymnasiums as a social space in men's lives, family configurations, gender roles at social events and the growth of industry (textile factories, workers on strike) that is evident both on the landscape and in the photographs themselves.

In addition to Damandan's narrative, "Portrait Photographs from Isfahan" includes essays by Iranian writer Reza Sheikh (who looks at the relationship between portraiture and democracy) and Dutch writer Josephine van Bennekom (who explores the differences between and encounters among Iranian and European portraiture).
[...]

As an interesting aside, the Persian has also been concerned about the problem of Iranian writings being blocked from publication in the US. In this case, the focus was on poetry.

Warning: fairly shameless praise. Professor Haqqani — who I believe may be reading this blog — may want to cover his ears.   more »

Listen up, geniuses. Say you'd rather take a chance on hydrogen. Say you don't care. Say the Kyoto treaty is a flawed document. Say there's no political will. Say you don't want to anger your contributors in the coal business. But don't accuse the rest of the world of not following "sound science" when you're the only people denying that climate change is real and is caused by humans. (Okay, maybe not the only people) You don't think that hurts our ability to crack down on nuclear proliferation? You think people around the world just say, well, they're a bunch of transparent liars when it comes to climate change, but I sure believe them when they say that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons ...

I had no idea that the World Trade Center was deeply influenced by Islamic architecture. But the story's even more interesting than that:

[World Trade Center architect Yamasaki's] subsequent work in Saudi Arabia, where his projects included the 1961 airport terminal in Dhahran and the 1982 Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency Headquarters in Riyadh, solidified his love of Muslim architecture.

The Saudi government liked Yamasaki's interpretations of Muslim arches so much, AlSayyad says, that it called them Yamasaki arches and copied them in other Saudi projects, such as the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran. The government also featured Yamasaki's Dhahran terminal on a Saudi bank note.

It's in the context of all these projects that Yamasaki's World Trade Center fits in. The New York project wasn't an aberration but part of a 20- year pattern in which Yamasaki worked to integrate architecture from lands where Islam was prominent.

After Sept. 11, a smattering of experts, including Kerr, pointed out the links between the World Trade Center and Muslim architecture, but Yamasaki's architecture firm, Minoru Yamasaki Associates, has been reluctant to discuss the connections and did not return calls for this story. (Yamasaki died in 1986.)

Kerr and other experts say that, in a post-Sept. 11 environment where the word "Islam" has been closely associated with terrorism, some architects are reluctant to admit that their buildings have been influenced by Islamic architecture.

That last part is deeply sad -- I'm a huge fan of Islamic architecture, which has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. The wordly and erudite Sepoy links to some of the world's finest examples. Don't miss thabet's virtual tour of Istanbul's mosques, the reading of which made me wonder anew why I'm moving to Cairo (an intimidating, smog-ridden, congested city that has let its monuments decay while been ruined by Nasserism and everything that followed it) rather than Istanbul (a welcoming, beautiful, modern, livable city that has managed to preserve its architectural heritage).

At least now we can return our focus to regulating our financial markets as national markets, within global markets. Consumer protection is a great thing, and the federal regulators fell asleep at the switch. But the answer is not to have fifty states competing for litigation awards, or to revive fifty Blue Sky laws, and then extend them to every other part of the financial services industry.

Hope the next NYAG won't have quite such grandiose political ambitions as our lad Eliot.

I don't think much of Treasury Secretary John Snow. But isn't it clear from the way he's being treated that George W. Bush is not the decent person he's made out to be?

UPDATE: What on earth is John Podhoretz talking about? I can't make head or tails of this column.

For those of you who don't follow doings in Asia closely but want to keep abreast of goings on, the best place I've found by far is Simon World's twice-weekly roundup of Asia blogs (and blogs writing about things Asian). He selects posts with lots of good insight on newsworthy events and cultural trends with lots of color and wit as well. Highly entertaining and extremely informative all in one. Yum!

The Chef's Uyghur article is featured in the newest installment of Asia by Blog. Check both out.

And to all Simon World readers, welcome to chez Nadezhda.

Revised December 6, primarily illustrations and format

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Uyghur Separatism and the Politics of Islam in China's Western Frontier

Colin Cookman

From its earliest inception, the modern Islamic terrorist movement has been transnational and pan-Islamic in character. Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network had its origins in the corps of volunteers known as the "Islamic Internationale", or "Arab Afghans": young men hailing from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the whole breadth of the Middle East who flocked under the banner of jihad to the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the training camps of Peshawar. There they gathered to wage guerrilla war in the name of Islam against the godless Soviet Communists, while the American government looked on with grim satisfaction as it covertly supported efforts to bleed the Russians in their own "Soviet Vietnam".

Following the United States' campaign to topple the Taliban and disrupt Al Qaeda's base in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, news reports tracking captured fighters and key figures in the Al Qaeda leadership regularly reiterated, either explicitly or through non-commental labels of ethnicity, the multinational character of the terrorists' network: U.S. President George W. Bush's "coalition of the willing" was facing off against a stateless, loosely affiliated coalition of the dispossessed, the globally marginalized, and the violently revivalist. Although the biggest names and largest percentage of captured Al Qaeda members continue to be primarily of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin, every now and then reports mention other, more exotic figures in the mix of captured and killed: Chechens from the Caucuses, Uzbeks, Filipino Moros, and, infrequently but not unnoticed, Uyghurs from China's Xinjiang province.

What motivates those small handfuls of anonymous young men to cross the Pamir mountains into Afghanistan and fight alongside the militants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban? In order to attempt an answer, we must examine the origins of Xinjiang's oasis peoples, the Uyghurs, and their aspirations for nationhood; the nature of Chinese rule over them today, and its effects on those aspirations; and the extent to which militant Islamic revivalism may have infiltrated China's western hinterlands, and what implications that holds for the Uyghurs and their region. This paper argues that China's discriminatory policies have, more than any other factor, served to alienate the Uyghurs and increase the appeal of militant Islam, in effect making Beijing's worst fears a reality.
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