Ganümédeszi űrhajók 3723 év

These women protesting here… in Gaza they wouldn’t be allowed to open their mouth

A man says that the people in the West who attend anti-Israel marches are doing so because:

“It has become a fashion. These women protesting here… in Gaza they wouldn’t be allowed to open their mouth”
pic.twitter.com/LxF9mdnbZ3

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) November 14, 2023

The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise

 October 8, 2014 By ISI Archive

The existence of a Muslim kingdom in Medieval Spain where different races and religions lived harmoniously in multicultural tolerance is one of today’s most widespread myths. University professors teach it. Journalists repeat it. Tourists visiting the Alhambra accept it. It has reached the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, which sings the virtues of the “pan-confessional humanism” of Andalusian Spain (July 18, 2003). The Economist echoes the belief: “Muslim rulers of the past were far more tolerant of people of other faiths than were Catholic ones. For example, al-Andalus’s multi-cultural, multi-religious states ruled by Muslims gave way to a Christian regime that was grossly intolerant even of dissident Christians, and that offered Jews and Muslims a choice only between being forcibly converted and being expelled (or worse).”1 The problem with this belief is that it is historically unfounded, a myth. The fascinating cultural achievements of Islamic Spain cannot obscure the fact that it was never an example of peaceful convivencia.

The history of Islamic Spain begins, of course, with violent conquest. Helped by internal dissension among the Visigoths, in 711 A.D. Islamic warriors entered Christian Spain and defeated the Visigothic king Rodrigo. These Muslims were a mixture of North African Berbers, or “Moors,” who made up the majority, and Syrians, all led by a small number of Arabs proper (from the Arabian peninsula). The Crónica Bizantina of 741 A.D., the Crónica mozárabe of 754 A.D. and the illustrations to the thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa María chronicle the brutality with which the Muslims subjugated the Catholic population. From then on, the best rulers of al- Andalus were autocrats who through brute force kept the peace in the face of religious, dynastic, racial, and other divisions.

These divisions, and the ruthless methods of dealing with them, were not unique to Muslim Spain. The jihad launched around 634 against the then-Christian Middle East by the successors of Muhammad was marked by internal conflict after the assassination of the third Caliph, Uthman (644-656). The founder of the Emirate of Cordoba, Abd al-Rahman I (734?-788), “The Emigrant,” had to flee Syria to avoid the extermination ordered against his Umayyad family by the rival Abassids. Allied with Berbers from North Africa and helped by Yemenite and Syriansettlers in Spain willing to betray their masters, he proceeded to enter Spain from Africa, defeat the governor of al- Andalus in 756, and make himself Emir. He kept peace among Muslims and between Muslims, Catholics, and Jews by means of an army of more than 40,000 soldiers. It was he who ordered the demolition of the ancient Catholic church of Cordoba to build the much admired mosque. During his reign and that of Abd al-Rahman II (822-852), the conqueror of Barcelona, Catholics suffered confiscations of property, enslavement, and increases in their exacted tribute, which helped finance the embellishment of Islamic Cordoba.

Under Abd al-Rahman II and Muhammad I (822-886), a number of Catholics were killed in Cordoba for preaching against Islam, while others were expelled from the city. Among these victims was Saint Eulogio, beheaded by the Islamic authorities.2 Muhammad I ordered that “newly constructed churches be destroyed as well as anything in the way of refinements that might adorn the old churches added since the Arab conquest.”3

Abd al-Rahman III (912-961), “The Servant of the Merciful,” declared himself Caliph of Cordoba. He took the city to heights of splendor not seen since the days of Harunal- Rashid’s Baghdad, financed largely through the taxation of Catholics and Jews and the booty and tribute obtained in military incursions against Catholic lands. He also punished Muslim rebellions mercilessly, thereby keeping the lid on the boiling cauldron that was multicultural al- Andalus. His rule presumably marks the zenith of Islamic tolerance. Al-Mansur (d. 1002), “The One Made Victorious by Allah,” implemented in al-Andalus in 978 a ferocious military dictatorship backed by a huge army. In addition to building more palaces and subsidizing the arts and sciences in Cordoba, he burned heretical booksand terrorized Catholics, sacking Zaragoza, Osma, Zamora, Leon, Astorga, Coimbra, and Santiago de Compostela. In 985 he burned down Barcelona, enslaving all those he did not kill.

By 1031 the internal divisions of al- Andalus had caused its fragmentation into several tyrannical little “kingdoms,” the socalled taifas. Between 1086 and 1212, new waves of Islamic jihadists from North Africa washed over the land. The first wave were the almoravides, fundamentalist warriors invited by the taifa rulers to help them against the growing strength of the Catholic kingdoms. With the support of the Muslim Andalusian masses and of Muslim legal scholars, who resented the heavy taxation and what they regarded as the debauched and impious life of their princely rulers, the almoravides deposed the taifa kings and unified Andalusia. They pushed back the Catholic advances and made the life of both Catholics and Jews much more difficult than before. By 1138, however, their empire was falling apart under pressure from the Catholic kingdoms and another wave of North African fundamentalist Muslims, the almohades. The almohades thought that the almoravides had become too lax in their practice of Islam—perhaps, one may surmise, because of contagion from the Catholics. By 1170 the almohades had taken control of Andalusia and unleashed new horrors on Catholics, Jews, and other Muslims. That the ruthless almohades also produced marvelous architecture and were responsible for the beauty of some mozarabic buildings, such as Santa María la Blanca in Toledo, captures nicely the true nature of Andalusian Spain. But the almohades were decisively beaten by the allied kings of Castile, Aragon, and Navarra at Navas de Tolosa in 1212. From then on the Catholics kept the military initiative, finally defeating the last Muslim kingdom, Granada, in 1492.

The early Muslim invaders were relatively small in numbers, so it was politically prudent to grant religious autonomy to Catholics, while trying to protect themselves from the “contagion” of Catholic influence by segregating themselves from the subject majority.4 Therefore they maintained the Catholics in a state of dhimmitude —as a “protected” class curtailed from any possibility of sharing political power or compromising the hegemonic position of Islam. In times of war or political turmoil, the Catholics’ freedom was further restricted. Catholics fleeing Muslim rule lost all “protection,” and their property was confiscated by the conquerors. “Tolerance at this extreme,” notices historian Robert I. Burns, “is not easily distinguished from intolerance.”5

For similar reasons of strategy, not “tolerance,” the invaders obtained the help of Jewish leaders unhappy with their treatment under the Visigoths. Contrary to popular opinion, Jews were not very numerous, either in Andalusia or in Catholic Spain,6 but for a time Jewish garrisons kept an eye on Catholics populations in key cities like Cordoba, Granada, and Toledo.7 Jewish leaders achieved positions of power, as visirs (prime ministers), bankers, and counselors. Others wrote brilliant literary works, mostly in Arabic. Jews thus formed for a time an intermediary class between the hegemonic Muslims and the defeated Catholics. This was the so-called “Spanish Jewish Golden Age.” But Jews remained dhimmi, a group subject to and serving the Muslim rulers.

These presumably “best of times” ended in any event with the arrival of the jihadist almoravides and almohades. Jews as well as Catholics fell victim to their religious zeal. Many Jews migrated to Catholic lands, where some became important writers (the author of the Zohar) and men of influence (diplomats, bankers, tax collectors, finance ministers to kings). They participated in the achievements of the reign of Alfonso X “The Learned” of Leon and Castile (1221- 1284), who gathered in Toledo speakers of many languages and ordered the translation of Arabic moral works such as the Calila e Dimna along with the production of Spanish scientific, legal, and historical treatises, and who himself wrote lyric poems in Spanish and a classic of Galician literature, the Cantigas de Santa María.

Upon conversion, some members of formerly Jewish families (conversos) reached important positions within the government (the wealthy Luis de Santangel, tax collector and financial officer to Ferdinand and Isabella, and Gabriel Sanchez, treasurer of the kingdom of Aragon) and the church (bishop Pablo de Santa María, and Tomás de Torquemada), and even intermarried with the nobility. They also suffered periodic bloody persecutions at the hands of peasants and the urban lower classes while being generally protected by the upper nobility and the higher echelons of the church, in a way reminiscent of Islamic “protection.”8 This pattern had been evident under Muslim rule as well: in Granada in 1066—before the arrival of the almoravides—rioting Muslim mobs assassinated the rabbi and visir Joseph Ibn Naghrela and destroyed the entire Jewish community; thousands perished—more than those killed by mobs in the Rhineland at the beginning of the First Crusade.9 Commenting on these events, the memoirs of king Abd Allah of Granada (c. 1090) muster familiar anti-Jewish accusations against the visir: avarice, deception, treason, and favoritism toward coreligionists.10 Muslim suspicion of the Jewish community lasted until the end of Islamic rule: before surrendering Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, Muslims inserted a clause in the peace treaty protecting themselves fromfeared Jewish hegemony: “their Highnesses [the Catholic monarchs] will not allow Jews to lord or be tax collectors over Moors.”11 “The Golden Age of equal rights was a myth,” writes historian Bernard Lewis, “and belief in it was a result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam.” 12 Nevertheless, some writers continue to insist that “Jews lived happily and productively in Spain for hundreds of years before the Inquisition and the Expulsion of 1492.”13

Let us then consider more closely the evidence for the supposed Andalusian multicultural harmony. This enlightened state presumably culminated under the exemplary reign of Abd-al-Rahman III, “The Servant of the Merciful” (912-961). The admiring words of the contemporary Muslim historian Ibn Hayyan, however, reveal a different picture: Abd-al-Rahman III, we are told, kept Islam safe from religious dissension, “saving us from the trouble of having to think for ourselves”; under him “the people were one, obedient, quiet, submissive, not self-sufficient, governed rather than governing”; he succeeded by applying religious inquisition efficiently, “persecuting factions by all means available…chastising the innovations of those who drifted away from the views of the community.”14 This tenth-century ruler, long before the almoravids and almohads, was as effective as he was at maintaining control, thanks to the thoroughness so admired by his chronicler, which included the exhumation of the muladí (a Muslim of partly or wholly Catholic ancestry) rebel Omar ben Hafsun and his son—in order to prove that both had died as Catholics and thus justify the public desecration of their bodies. With the money collected from the taxation of Catholics and Jews and from the booty and tribute obtained through military incursions into Catholic lands, Abd-al-Rahman III not onlyembellished Cordoba, but built for his favorite female slave a splendid palace, Medina-Zahara. It contained 300 baths, 400 horses, 15,000 eunuchs and servants, and a harem—not a Catholic institution— of 6,300 women. In 1010 the Berbers destroyed the palace in the course of their jihad and knifed all its occupants.

In the eleventh century, again before the invasion of almoravides and almohades, the man of letters Ibn Hazm saw his books burned and was imprisoned several times. And long after almoravid and almohad rule, the fourteenth-century thinker Ibn al-Jatib was persecuted, exiled to Morocco, and assassinated in prison. Indeed, already in the first century after the conquest, the malikite way of Islam “configured a closed society in which alfaquis, muftis, and cadis exercised an iron control over the Muslim and non-Muslim population.”15 No wonder that when political correctness did not yet exist, the great historian of Islam Evariste Lévi-Provençal observed: “The Muslim Andalusian state appears from its earliest origins as the defender and champion of a jealous orthodoxy, more and more ossified in a blind respect for a rigid doctrine, suspecting and condemning in advance the least effort of rational speculation.”16

The majority of Andalusian Muslims belonged to this malikite way. A sample of its teachings can be found in the dhimma writings of jurist Ibn Abdun (Seville, c. 1100):

A Muslim must not act as a masseur to a Jew or Christian; he must not clear their rubbish nor clean their latrines. In fact, the Jew and the Christian are more suited for such work…A Muslim must not act as a guide or stableman for an animal owned by a [non-Muslim]…. It is forbidden to sell a coat that once belonged to a leper, a Jew, or a Christian, unless the buyer is informed of its origin; likewise if this garment once belonged to a debauched person…. No…Jew or Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual…. In effect, “Satan has gained the mastery over them, and caused them to forget God’s Remembrance. Those are Satan’s party” (Quran S. lviii. 19). A distinctive sign must be imposed upon them so they may be recognized and this will be for them a form of disgrace; the sound of bells must be prohibited in Muslim territories and reserved only for the lands of the infidels; it is forbidden to sell to Jews and Christians scientific books unless they treat of their particular law. They have translated scientific books and attributed them to their coreligionists and their bishops, whereas they are really the work of Muslims! It would be preferable not to let Jewish or Christian physicians heal Muslims. Since they are incapable of noble sentiments toward Muslims, let them treat their fellow infidels; knowing their feelings, how is it possible to entrust the lives of Muslims to them?17

Of course, such official injunctions were not always obeyed. But laxity of enforcement was not unique to Andalusia. It has existed also in other societies, most often for the powerful or rich. As Ibn Abdun again wisely writes, “No one will be absolved because of a transgression against religious law, except in the case of people of high social position, who will be treated accordingly, as the Hadith stipulates: ‘Forgive those in elevated social position,’ since for them corporal punishment is more painful.”

Let us next examine racial tolerance. The Quran does not proclaim the innate superiority of any racial group. But the enslavement of black Africans was an entrenched part of the culture of Andalusia. So was racial prejudice. In his Proverbs, al-Maydani (d. 1124) wrote, “the African black, when hungry, steals; and when sated, he fornicates.” 18 Traveling through Africa, Ibn Battuta (1207-1377?) claimed that blacks were stupid, ignorant, cowardly, and infantile. 19 These attitudes could be found throughout the Islamic world. Early in the wonderful Arabian Nights, the worst thing about the adultery of the wives of kings Sahzman and his brother Shariyar is that their infidelity was with blacks. In Nights 468, a black slave is rewarded for his goodness by being transformed into a white man. A similar case occurs in the eleventhcentury “Epistle of the Pardon” by al- Ma’arri, where a black woman, because of her good behavior, ends up as a white huri in Paradise.20

In 1068, before the arrival of the almoravids, the cadi of Muslim Toledo, the Arab Sa’id Ibn Ahmadi, wrote a book classifying the nations of the world. In it he accounted the inhabitants of the extreme North and South as barbarians, describing Europeans as white and mentally deficient because of undercooking by the sun, and Africans as black, stupid, and violent because of overcooking. In contrast, Arabs were done just right.21 Racial self-consciousness led the Andalusian Ibn Hazm to insist that the Prophet Muhammad, his family, and his predecessors, were all white and ruddy-skinned.

What about the claim regarding the “progressive” status of women in Andalusia? Muslim treatises tell a different story. Ibn Abdun lists numerous rules for female behavior in everyday life: “boat trips of women with men on the Guadalquivir must be suppressed”; “one must forbid women to wash clothes on the fields, because the fields will turn into brothels. Women must not sit on the river shore in the summer, when men do”; “one must especially watch out for women, since error is most common among them.” Elsewhere he also condemns wine drinking, gambling, and homosexuality, following the Quran and the Hadith.22 Truly “liberated” women like the now much admired Wallada bint al-Mustafki (994-1091) were exceptions. The average woman inAndalusia was treated much the same as elsewhere under Islamic sharia, with practices like wearing the hijab (following Quran S. xxxiii. 59), separation from men, confinement to the household, and other limitations that did not exist in Catholic lands. Even the much praised poetry of El collar de la paloma displays attitudes that would be called misogynistic today.

What misleads some observers is a phenomenon occurring in many societies: on the one hand, men treat their wives, sisters, and daughters as worthy of respect in certain ways the men consider well-intentioned, which may include sheltering them in the house, keeping them away from opportunities to have sex outside accepted channels, or even hiding their faces and the contours of their bodies; on the other hand, the same men grant much “freedom” to women they do not consider worthy of respect, such as dancers, singers, concubines, mistresses, slaves, or prostitutes, who may display greater “knowledge” and “intellectual sophistication” than their more respected sisters. This was the case, for example, in ancient Greece, where Pericles could have his mistress, the hetaira Aspasia, participate in areas of public life unthinkable for a proper Greek wife, sister, or daughter. Yet no one speaks of the remarkable freedom granted by ancient Greece to its women. This difference in treatment was in fact noticed by Muslim writers, such as al- Yahiz in the ninth-century Middle East; and after three hundred years, the great Andalusian philosopher Averroes observed that things had not changed: the lives of free women, he noticed, were plant-like, revolving around birthing and caring for the family.23 Averroes deplored the situation, but such disagreements were precisely what contributed to his persecution and eventual banishment from al-Andalus.

The justly celebrated artistic achievements of Islamic Spain suffer from relatedlimitations. The lack of a central authority in Sunni Islam, the ruling form in al- Andalus, has allowed clerics a range of interpretation that runs from looking down upon certain activities to rejecting them altogether. Thus, artistic representations of Muhammad and of the human form in general have been almost unanimously rejected throughout Islam—although one finds exceptions in some countries at some point or another, for example in Persia and Turkey. This fundamental prohibition has curtailed the artistic range of Islam, with the human body finding no representation and painting confined to abstract lines and curves.

An even greater problem exists with music. Islam does not forbid the creation of music. And again, greater freedom has been enjoyed by the powerful and the wealthy, who could at times patronize musicians and singers who in al-Andalus pleased rich and poor alike. But the dominant religious position has been to impede the existence of music as much as possible. Malik ben Anas (713-795), founder of the Sunni malikite Islamic “way,” to which a majority of Andalusian Muslims belonged, considered music an enemy of piety. Hence Ibn Abdun: “musicians must be suppressed, and, if this cannot be done, at least they must be stopped from playing unless they get permission from the cadi.” Even today, some Islamic ascetics forbid the use of music in religious acts. In fact, the music one hears in mosques does not go beyond the sound of tambourines, an instrument not conducive to the creation of great musical scores. The curious result was that, in Andalusia, the best “Arabic” music turns out to be mozarabic— that is, the music of Catholics under Muslim domination: Catholics could and did adapt “Muslim” sounds to a religious ritual—the Mass—which had no problems with using music for spiritual purposes and which as a result has produced impressiveorchestral and choral compositions.

Similarly, other violations of Muslim practices (such as the prohibition on drinking wine) by the powerful of Andalusia, often pointed out as proof of the unique tolerance of Muslim Spain, resulted from the corrupting influence of Catholics, who drank wine liberally. Such exceptions were not unique to Andalusia. They can also be found in other Muslim communities along the Mediterranean where historic Catholic influence has remained relatively strong, such as Tunisia. The influence of non-Muslim civilizations may account also for other deviations from orthodoxy, not only in Andalusia, but in places like Persia (Iran) and India. The risqué quality of many tales in the Arabian Nights may well trace its origin to the pre-Muslim Persians and even the Christian Byzantines. The Muslim poet Omar Khayyam sang the beauties of wine, song, and sex, but he was Persian. Another instance is the Andalusian poet Ibn Quzman, much praised today for his singing of eroticism and homosexuality: his admirers overlook that he was blond and blue-eyed, and that these facts, together with a name like Ibn Quzman (Guzmán or Guttman), mean that he was of Hispanic (indeed Visigothic, that is, Germanic) origin.24

In fairness to Islam, it must be said that convivencia was not furthered by the other two religious groups of al-Andalus either. The Catholic lower classes did not harbor much good will toward Muslims, Jews, or those of their own who converted to Islam— whom they called “renegades.” Their position on the Andalusian totem pole prevented their acting on these feelings, which they at times vented amply in Catholic lands; but in Andalusia Catholics were an integral part of a multicultural social system characterized by “group isolation, superficial contacts, and reciprocal hatreds.” 25 True, the Quran claims that Christians are dearer to Muslims than are Jews (S. v. 82), but this theoretical advantage was not of much help in practice. Catholics even suffered mass deportations: at the beginning of the twelfth-century, Muslims expelled the Catholics (mozarabs) of Malaga and Granada en masse to Morocco.26 Muslims rarely authorized the building of new churches, the repair of old ones, or the tolling of bells. In twelfth century Granada, Muslims destroyed the entire Catholic population. 27 Even the muladies, unhappy with their inferior status, revolted against their rulers (cf. Omar ben Hafsun), while the mozarabs also resented their condition and occasionally colluded with their brethren in the Catholic kingdoms.

The Spanish Jewish community was not much more harmonious, perhaps because of “contagion” from the zeal of Spanish Muslims and Catholics. The autonomy granted by their dhimmi status in Andalusia may also have favored intolerance.28 In Granada, rabbi and visir Ibn Naghrela “The Prince” boasted that “[Andalusian] Jews were free of heresy, except for a few towns near Christian kingdoms, where there is suspicion that some heretics live in secret. Our predecessors have flogged a part of those who deserved to be flogged, and they have died from flogging.”29 In Catholic lands in the eleventh century, Orthodox Jews persecuted the then thriving Karaite Jewish community, which rejected the authority of the Talmud, and expelled it.30 Spanish Jewish literature was not averse to showing hostility towards Muslims and Catholics: Abraham bar Hiyya (d. c. 1136) concentrated on the Catholics, while theCancionero of Antón de Montoro preferred to satirize the mudéjares.31 Both the Muslims and the Catholics were treated harshly in some of the works of the Andalusian Talmudic commentator and philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135-1204).32 His views could have been affected by his unhappy experiences: the almohades’ enforced conversions caused Maimonides and his family to escape first to the Catholic kingdoms and later to Morocco and Egypt. No wonder that in a letter to Jewish Yemenites he wrote that no “nation” compared to Islam in the damage and humiliation it had inflicted on “Israel.”33

By any objective standards, then, and in spite of its undeniable artistic, literary, and scientific accomplishments, and of modern wishful “let-us-all-get-along” thinking that tries to gloss over evidence to the contrary, Islamic Spain was not a model of multicultural harmony. Andalusia was beset by religious, political, and racial conflicts controlled in the best of times only by the application of tyrannical force. Its achievements are inseparable from its turmoil.

How then can one explain the persistence of the belief that Andalusia was a land of peaceful coexistence? The historian Richard Fletcher has attempted one possible explanation: “[In] the cultural conditions that prevail in the West today the past has to be marketed, and to be successfully marketed it has to be attractively packaged. Medieval Spain in a state of nature lacks wide appeal. Self-indulgent fantasies of glamour…do wonders for sharpening up its image. But Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.”34

Another explanation could be what one might call Spanish self-hatred, the obverse of what once was Spanish self-aggrandizement. Such a view allies itself effortlessly with many non-Spaniards’ hatred of CatholicSpain, in an attitude that sooner or later brings up Las Casas’ condemnation of the Spanish conquest of the Americas—while ignoring the question of why there was not an English, Dutch, or French Las Casas to criticize the English, the French, and the Dutch. As if these nations carried out conquests that left undisturbed the native populations of their colonial lands.

A more convincing explanation may be that extolling al-Andalus offers the double advantage of surreptitiously favoring multiculturalism and deprecating Christianity, which is one of the foundations of Western civilization. This mechanism is not unlike that in the mind of those who dislike Western culture intensely, but who with the fall of Communism find themselves without any clear alternative and so grab Islam as a castaway grabs anything that floats. So anyone who dislikes Western culture or Christianity—for any reason, be it religious, political, or cultural—goes on happily pointing out, regardless of the facts, how bad Catholic Spain was when compared to the Muslim paradise.

---

Darío Fernández-Morera is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. A former member of the National Council on the Humanities, he holds a BA from Stanford University, an MA from the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD from Harvard University.

To learn more about this subject, read Dr. Fernández-Morera’s acclaimed book The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain, which the Financial Times hails as “one of the best books of the year.”

 

1. “Islam and the West: Never the twain shall peacefully meet?” The Economist, November 15, 2001.
2. Kenneth Baxter Wolf, E. Pupo-Walker, and A.AR.D. Pagden, eds. Christian Martirs in Muslim Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Serafín Fanjul, La quimera de al-Andalus (Madrid: Siglo xxi, 2004), 42.
3. Kenneth Baxter Wolf et al., chap 1, n. 4.
4. Kenneth Baxter Wolf et al, 7.
5. Robert I. Burns, Islam under the Crusaders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 186-87.
6. Isaac Baer, Historia de los judíos en la España cristiana (Madrid: Altalena, 1981), I, 5, who calculates less than 50,000 in the eleventh century; Fanjul, 35.
7. Kenneth Baxter Wolf et al., 20, n. 2, which cites Islamic chroniclers’ testimony that this was a standard Muslim “conquer and divide” method.
8. Cf. Alexander II, Clement VI; also Gregory X’s decree of Papal Protection, 1272; and similar efforts on the part of bishops. The Spanish Inquisition concentrated not on Jews or Muslims, but on Jews or Muslims who pretended to be Catholics while practicing Muslim or Jewish rites—“marranos.” Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), XIII, 34. It must be remembered that some Muslim clerics have condemned and continue to condemn to death Muslims guilty or even suspected of apostasy or blasphemy, just as Catholic authorities did four centuries ago at a time of intense fear of a powerful Islam and its former and potential allies.
9. Bat Ye’or and David Maisel, The Dhimmi Jews and Christians Under Islam (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985) and Bat Ye’or, Miriam Kochan, and David Litman, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001).
10. El siglo xi en primera persona. Las “memorias” de Abd Allah, último rey zirí de Granada, destronado por los almorávides (1090), trans. E. Lévi-Provençal and Emilio García Gómez (Madrid: Alianza, 1980), 106- 119.
11. Fanjul, 38-39.
12. Bernard Lewis, “The Pro-Islamic Jews,” Judaism (Fall 1968), 401.
13. Harold S. Kushner, To Life! A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking (Boston: Warner Books, 1993), 273.
14. Fanjul, 40, n. 73.
15. Fanjul, 40.
16. Evariste Lévi-Provençal, Histoire de l’Espagne Musulmane (1950; Paris: Maisonneuve, 1953), I, 150.
17. Fanjul, 38; Bat Ye’or and David Maisel, The Dhimmi, 108-128. Such views could be justified by the Quran: S. v. 51; ix. 29.
18. Fanjul, 32.
19. Fanjul, 32.
20. Bernard Lewis, “Raza y color en el Islam,” al- Andalus (1968), 21.
21. Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 68 and Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Inquiry(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 36.
22. Quran S. ii. 219; v. 91; iv. 15; xxvi. 165-66; xxvii. 55; xxix. 28-29. Hadith 7, 513, 72.61.773: “Allah’s Messenger cursed those men who assume the sexual behavior of women and women who assume the sexual behavior of men” in César Vidal, España frente al Islam (Madrid: La esfera de los libros, 2004), 485.
23. Fanjul, 10.
24. Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, El Islam de España y el Occidente (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1974), 110.
25. Fanjul, 28-29.
26. The mozarabs were suspect of colluding with fellow Catholics in the Catholic kingdoms. Fanjul, 42. Interestingly, suspicion of collusion with North African and Turkish coreligionists was also one of the main reasons for the deportation of the moriscos (former Muslims living in Catholic land) by the Catholics early in the seventeenth century.
27. Fanjul, 42.
28. Fanjul, 203.
29. Simha Assaf, Haonshin (Achrei Chasimath Hatalmud) (Jerusalem, 1922), 62. I thank my colleague Rifka Cook for her help with this book.
30. Daniel J. Lasker, “Rabbinism and Karaism: The Contest for Supremacy,” in R. Jospe and S.M. Wagner, Great Schisms in Jewish History (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1981), 47-72.
31. Fanjul, 35-36; Daniel J. Lasker, “Polémica judeocristiana en Al-Andalus,” in Carlos del Valle Rodríguez, ed. La Controversia judeochristiana en España (Desde los orígenes hasta el siglo xiii). Homenaje a Domingo Muñoz León, (Madrid : 1998), 161-179.
32. Mishneh Torah [Code of Maimonides], “The Laws of Murder and of the Protection of Human Life,” Chapters 4. 11 and 12. 7-14 trans. Rabbi Eliyahu Touger (New York/Jerusalem: Moznaim Publishing Corporation, 1997), 534, 592-594.
33. Rambam: Selected Letters of Maimonides. Letter to Yemen. Discourse on Martirdom trans. Abraham Yaakov Finkel (Scranton: Yeshivah Beth Moshe, 1994).
34. Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (New York: Henry Holt, 1992), 14.

916 house song

 

Segovia aqueduct

 

Mother Nature

 

Egyptian Researcher Islam Behery: Mainstream Islamic Scholarship Is Radical, Leads To Terrorism – It Seeks To Wage Jihad, Spread Islam

 

Jan 29, 2023

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Source: Sky News Arabia (UAE)

Egyptian researcher Islam Behery said in a January 29, 2023 interview on Sky News Arabia (UAE) that like other fields of study, Islamic jurisprudence will not survive if it does not undergo reform. He said that Islam currently has “a problem” with modernity, women, politics, banking, medicine, science, human rights, and personal liberties, and he predicted that it will lose followers if this does not change. In addition, Behery said that Islamic institutions are currently preaching the same man-made extremist Islamic heritage that gave rise to organizations such as ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Al-Jama’a Al-Islamiyya, and the Muslim Brotherhood, and he argued that extremism leads to terrorism. He also asserted that the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence are all extremist because they claim that all non-Muslims are infidels and seek to wage Jihad and spread Islam throughout the world.

Islam Behery: "[Islamic] heritage is the problem — the man-made ideological heritage. Any religion, any field of science, anything that cannot be reformed... They call [Islamic jurisprudence] 'science,' and I accept this, but science can be reformed. Any field of science that cannot be reformed is dead and should be studied as history. They claim that Islam is suitable for all times and all places, and I agree wholeheartedly. But right now, how is it 'suitable for all times and all places'? Simply put, if we wanted to put labels on it, Islam has a problem with everything in our lives. Islam has a problem with women. This leads to many other problems, but Islam has a general problem with women."

Interviewer: "We will discuss this in the final part of the show."

Behery: "Islam has a problem with man-made laws and constitutions. Islam has a problem with the modern state — or even with the notion of a state with a flag and with borders. Islam has a problem with the economy, with banks, with interest, which they call 'usury'... Islam has a problem with medicine, science, modern achievements, organ transplants, and all that. Islam has a problem with other religions, with human rights, with civil values, and with personal liberties.

[...]

"Islam has a problem with everything in our lives. And yet, in their view, it is suitable for all times and all places. Unless this religion undergoes reform, it will have no followers left."

[...]

"The religious institutions are teaching this heritage, and it is forbidden to defy it or criticize it. The problem is not only that they oppose the enlightened, reformist movement. The problem is that this heritage that they are defending is what gave rise to ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Al-Jama'a Al-Islamiyya in the 1970's, and the Muslim Brotherhood before them. This is beyond doubt. This fountain never dries, and the religious establishment defends this same heritage, which is its foundation. The religious establishment ostensibly condemns these terrorist acts, but knowingly or not, it serves as the main source for all these terrorist groups.

[...]

"We could say that extremism is an ideology. It is not terrorism, but it leads to terrorism — a person implementing what he believes in. In my opinion, extremism is more dangerous than the actual terrorist acts, because after all, even if there are hundreds of thousands [of terrorists], there are still millions of Arabs. But the real problem is the extremism that is in the hearts — the ideology. Even if it appears that someone is leading an ordinary life, he could be thinking that everyone in the world is an infidel, except him. This is a completely extremist idea. Let's put these ideas in the right context. Extremism is the most intense manifestation of any idea. Who came up with these ideas, consolidated them, spread them? The four schools of Islamic jurisprudence that believe that all the religions in world — if you can even call them 'religions' — constitute heresy, and are just like not believing in God at all, and only Islam allows you to enter Paradise. Isn't this extremism?"

Interviewer: "So these four schools of Islamic jurisprudence are responsible for what is happening now?"

Behery: "Absolutely.

[...]

"The entire world are infidels, the Jihad... Where do these ideas come from? From all four schools of jurisprudence, as well as from the books of Hadith and books of exegesis, without the slightest doubt. If you ask someone, even from the official religious establishment, about Jihad, he says [we will wage Jihad] when we become stronger — then we will raid the world and spread Islam."

The Man Who Tried To Feed The World

 

Aired December 21, 2022

A tale of good deeds and unintended consequences

Transcript

Narrator: It was in the spring of 1966, in northeastern India, that Norman Borlaug came face-to-face with the enemy he had been fighting all his life. Borlaug was a driven man, a scientist obsessed by hunger. And he was tormented by the thought that all of this could have been prevented, if only people had listened sooner. 
For years, Borlaug had traveled the globe, preaching a radically new approach to agriculture, one that he had helped develop over the course of twenty years. Unprecedented population growth was straining the food supply of countries around the world, raising the specter of widespread famine and social chaos.

Lyndon Johnson: Next to the pursuit of peace, the greatest challenge to the human family is the race between food supply and population increase. That race tonight is being lost. 

Walter Cronkite: Dr. Norman Borlaug, an Iowa-born crop expert, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday for his work toward easing the world’s hunger problem.

Narrator: Within just five years Borlaug would be hailed around the world for saving countless lives through what was called “The Green Revolution.” But Borlaug’s stunning successes had also unleashed vast, turbulent forces. 

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: The number of people who are hungry declined dramatically. But there was enormous social upheaval. There is huge environmental damage. 

Raj Patel, Writer: Norman Borlaug was responsible for the spread of large-scale industrial agricultural production around the world. I certainly don't think that it's any credit to the Nobel Prize that Norman Borlaug got it. 

Narrator: Half a century later, Borlaug’s revolution continues to shape our world.

Tore Olsson, Historian: It’s really impossible to understand the massive growth of the human population, to understand the urbanization of our species, and our tremendous, increasing ecological impact on the world, unless we understand Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution.

Iowa

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: Borlaug grew up in a small farm in northeastern Iowa that was isolated in a way that is very hard for a 21st century person to imagine. 

Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist: On very quiet winter nights Norm and his sisters would go out; they could hear the train whistle, which was fourteen, fifteen miles away. It was the only connection they had to the rest of humanity. 

Narrator: Norman Borlaug was born in 1914, into a clan of immigrant farmers. His great-grandparents had fled Norway in 1847, driven by the same potato blight that ravaged Ireland. As children, Norm and his two younger sisters rose before dawn and worked on the family’s hundred-acre farm until after sunset, in a manner that would have been familiar to the ancient Romans.

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: Every year he harvested himself a quarter of a million ears of corn. He worked very, very hard, but he hated it. 

Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist: Norm had no prospects whatever. He had to stay on the farm and work. And then when his father died, he would take over.

Narrator: In the late 1920s, when Norm was finishing grade school, he saw signs of a technological revolution that was transforming rural life.

Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist: Henry Ford produced a little tractor and that tractor did for farmers what his Model T did for the general public. 

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: The Fordson it's called. Typically in those days about forty percent of a farm was devoted to growing the food for the oxen and the horses. When you had a tractor, that land became available to grow food, and the farm’s effective size doubled. Their income doubled. 

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: To have the corn harvested in a couple of days in a tractor, it was an incredibly liberating experience for him. Anybody would draw a lesson from that. And he certainly did that, that this kind of technology equaled freedom from toil.

Narrator: “The fabled future had arrived,” Borlaug recalled, “and it was even more fabulous than anything we’d dared wish for.”
Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist: That's how he got some education beyond eighth grade. Because of the tractor and these modern things he had confidence in technology for the rest of his days. 

Minneapolis

Narrator: Within a few years Borlaug’s bright hopes had been swallowed up by the Great Depression. In Iowa the rains stopped, clouds of locusts blotted out the sun, dust storms buried farms and towns alike.

Borlaug’s high school graduation was an eerie affair; no one mentioned the future. In the fall of 1933, with just sixty-one dollars in his pocket, he left the farm for Minneapolis.

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: He hoped to get an athletic scholarship at the University of Minnesota. He didn't think he was very smart. He didn't think he was well educated or anything like that and he hoped this was his way into a better life.

Narrator: Not only was there no sports scholarship, it took an entire term and three separate applications before the University of Minnesota opened its doors. He chose to study forestry, then something of a campus cult, representing both a rebellion against capitalism, and an escape from its collapse. Food and shelter were a constant struggle, but there were consolations: Borlaug was moonlighting as a waiter when he met Margaret Gibson. 

Jeanie Borlaug, Daughter: My mother was waiting tables to pay for her education. I think she thought he was very serious. My mother was not real serious but she had a great personality. 

Narrator: In the fall of 1937, with graduation around the corner and a job waiting at the Forestry Service, Norm married Margaret in a quiet ceremony at her brother’s home. But their tidy future vanished just three months later, when Norm’s forestry job fell victim to budget cuts. Suddenly at loose ends, he went back to school for graduate studies in plant pathology. But the most indelible lesson of his college years took place in the streets of Minneapolis.

Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist: He walked around a corner and there was a milk plant and Norm could see behind a big fence a bunch of corporate goons with batons.

Narrator: Across the Midwest, desperate farmers were trying to shore up commodity prices by cutting off the supply of food to the cities. “We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs,” they chanted, “and let them eat their gold.” 

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: Dairy farmers were going to dump the milk because they couldn't sell it for enough to make a living. Hungry people descended on these trucks and demanded the milk. 

Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist:  And all of a sudden they charged. And Norm was trapped by the crowd, and these batons were coming right towards him swinging and hitting people over the head. 

Narrator: “Bodies and blood were scattered and spattered all over the street,” Borlaug wrote. “I took off running, trembling, frightened. I’d seen how fast violence springs to life when hunger, misery, and desperation infect the public mind.” 

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: It was terrifying to him and he saw how hunger can just turn, you know, as he sort of put it, men into beasts. 

Food and Politics

Narrator: Scenes like the one in Minneapolis were all too common in the 1930s: hunger and deprivation were fueling political instability around the world, dragging humanity into a brutish struggle for resources. 

Tore Olsson, Historian: The Second World War in many ways is a struggle about food. Hitler and the Nazis looked eastward at Poland and Russia as sort of settling ground for prosperous Aryan farmers who would then produce for the larger German nation. Japan, as well, saw China as a potential feeding ground for the Japanese nation. But these big dreams are dependent upon the subjugation if not murder of millions of people.

Narrator: By 1940 Japan had invaded Manchuria, and Germany occupied much of Europe. As the Roosevelt administration braced for what was quickly becoming a Second World War, it looked nervously to its southern border. The Mexican government was working to liberate the country’s citizens from grinding poverty, but prosperity and stability remained elusive. 

Nick Cullather, Historian: Mexico was coming out of years of revolution, civil war. Rural Mexicans had at best a kind of a loose and sometimes hostile relationship with the central government. It began to look as if social unrest south of the border would be a vulnerability for the United States.

Narrator: The Roosevelt administration and the Mexican government both wanted peace in the countryside. The Rockefeller Foundation, a wealthy philanthropy with White House connections, offered to help.

Tore Olsson, Historian: The Rockefeller Foundation had been involved in teaching poor black and white cotton farmers in the U.S. South. And this gave them a sort of proven formula for how they could attack questions of poverty and backwardness as they saw it.

Narrator: By 1942 the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government had negotiated a carefully targeted plan. 

Tore Olsson, Historian: They wanted to raise the economic standard of living among the impoverished farmers who tended to live in the densely-settled plateau around Mexico City. 

Nick Cullather, Historian: The United States is anxious to stabilize Mexico, and the Mexican government was eager for this. This was a kind of counterinsurgency effort, to improve the livelihoods of people in the villages and also to connect those villages more closely to the national government. 

Chapingo

Narrator: On the 7th of December 1941, Norman and Margaret Borlaug were driving east from Minneapolis to Wilmington Delaware, where Norman was due to start his first job at DuPont Chemical. So it wasn’t until the following day that they heard about Pearl Harbor.

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: Borlaug graduated from Minnesota into the Second World War. And he wanted to do something that mattered. He wanted to make a contribution. 

Narrator: For two and a half years Borlaug put his PhD in plant pathology to use, waging a quiet war on the microbes that were ravaging soldiers and materials in the jungles of the South Pacific. But he’d never meant to spend his life in a laboratory, so when the Rockefeller Foundation contacted him about an exotic job in Mexico, Borlaug took the plunge. On the 11th of September 1944 he loaded up the family’s old Pontiac and headed south, leaving behind a very pregnant Margaret and their young daughter, Jeanie. 

Borlaug had only a vague sense of what lay ahead when he joined three other American scientists at a research station near Chapingo, twenty-five miles east of Mexico City. Still, he was surprised when he was given a side project: while everyone else worked on the staples of the Mexican diet – corn and beans – Borlaug was to focus on wheat. As the junior member of the team, he had no choice but to take on a fiendishly difficult challenge. 

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: He was to look at a kind of fungus called stem rust, which is one of the oldest enemies of the human race.  The Romans had a god of stem rust that they would sacrifice, propitiate, to keep it away.
Narrator: Stem rust had driven Borlaug’s family out of the wheat business back in 1878. Now, it was killing half of Mexico’s small wheat crop, year after year. 

Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist: Stem rust migrates. These are trillions and trillions of spores that are sailing on the wind. And when they find wheat plants of the right maturity it just destroys them.

Nick Cullather, Historian: His background was actually in forestry, so he didn't have a lot of training in the breeding of wheat. 

Narrator: Borlaug was already reeling when a telegram arrived at the end of November 1944: Margaret had given birth to a boy with spina bifida. For three agonizing days Norm waited for a flight back to Wilmington. He found Margaret at the hospital with an awful predicament: Scotty was in an isolation ward; they couldn’t touch or comfort him. His affliction was essentially a death sentence. Norm announced that he was taking back his old job at Dupont so they could all be together. “My husband has a future,” Margaret insisted; “my baby has none. You go back; I’ll come when I can.” A few weeks later Margaret and Jeanie followed Norm to Mexico City. 

The First Harvest

Narrator: Back in Mexico, tormented by guilt and unsure how to proceed, Borlaug drove around in the station’s green pickup, gathering thousands of different varieties of local wheat. He was joined by Pepe Rodriguez and Jose Guevara, young Mexican agronomists hired out of college by the Rockefeller Foundation. In that spring of 1945 the three young men planted out one hundred and ten thousand of the seeds Borlaug had collected. 

Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist: Borlaug was just hoping like hell that some of those wheats can withstand the trillions of spores that are going to be landing. 

Narrator: Through the summer they trudged through the rows, weeding out every seedling that showed the telltale pustules. Of the one hundred and ten thousand plants, just four were still alive at harvest time. 

Already Borlaug was haunted by the malnutrition he’d seen in Mexico, and now the cause seemed abundantly clear. “Can you imagine trying to feed a family?” he wrote Margaret. “We’ve got to do something.” He had found his life’s work.

Going It Alone

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: When he settled on the goal of trying to feed more people it was like he snapped into focus. And he worked phenomenally hard. That perseverance, that intense, laser-like focus, is the thing that I think most distinguished him in his life. He was sort like a spotlight. Spotlights cast certain things in very bright light, but also cast very deep shadows. 

Narrator: Driven by a new sense of mission, Borlaug devised a plan to speed up the breeding process. After the fall harvest at Chapingo, he would head north with his most promising seeds and plant them in Sonora, where wheat is grown during the winter. When spring came he would harvest that generation, rush back to Chapingo with the new winners, and start the process over again. By growing two generations every year Borlaug could solve Mexico’s wheat problem - and ease malnutrition - in half the time. “Shuttle breeding,” he called it. 

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: What Borlaug didn't know was that all the textbooks - literally the textbooks - said you can't do this.
Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist: Wheat breeders believed that you had to breed the wheat for the place where it was going to be grown, and nowhere else you know.

Narrator: Borlaug’s boss, George Harrar, hated the idea. Not only did shuttle breeding ignore conventional wisdom, but Harrar worried that Borlaug’s wheat would end up benefitting the well-heeled farmers of Sonora, rather than the campesinos of central Mexico. 

Tore Olsson, Historian: Farmers in Sonora were not peasant farmers. They tended to be larger in terms of their land holdings. They tended to be commercially-oriented, growing wheat for exports. 

Narrator: Harrar told Borlaug to drop it, several times, but the younger man wouldn’t let up. Borlaug finally got grudging permission to go to Sonora, but there was to be no budget, no support, no machinery, accommodations, or vehicle. No matter: at the beginning of November 1945, Norman Borlaug packed up the seeds from the four plants that survived the summer epidemic, and headed north. 

Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist: He went up to Sonora and he squatted in a derelict old research station that had been abandoned. It had no running water. The windows had been broken out and there were rats everywhere. 

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: He didn’t have a tractor. He didn't have a horse, so he was actually taking a harness that normally was attached a draft animal, to a horse or an oxen or whatever, strapping it around his chest and arms, and plowing himself. 

Narrator: There was in fact a method to Borlaug’s madness. By cross-breeding his four survivors with other successful varieties, he hoped to produce the perfect wheat. The critical moment arrived when the wheat began to flower. 

Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist: Wheat is self-pollinating, so to make a cross pollination you have to cut the female floret when it's just at the right point, and remove all of its pollen so that it can't pollinate itself; you've got to get every last one. And then you have to cover it with paper to stop any foreign pollen blowing in on the wind. Four days later, when the male is producing pollen then you bring that one over and pour its pollen down so you've got a cross pollinated plant. It's very, very complicated, and Norm had to teach himself.

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: This is something that plant breeders have been doing for, you know, a very, very long time at this point. What they haven't done is to do it on a massive scale. It's such a phenomenal amount of work that nobody in their right mind would think of doing it.

Narrator: At night, as Borlaug lay on the floor with rats scampering over his bedroll, the ghosts crowded in. “I was certain,” he wrote, “that I had made a dreadful mistake.”

The Deal With The Devil

Narrator: Over the next years, Borlaug’s doubts slowly gave way to the realization that he was on to something big. By 1948 he had wheat that resisted stem rust, grew anywhere, in any season, and delivered huge quantities of high-quality grain. 

But that remarkable achievement came with one, big, catch. In order to deliver those yields, his wheat needed unprecedented levels of chemical fertilizer and lots of water. 

Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist: Fertilizer was the key to getting the absolute greatest productivity out of these plants – ten times what the average wheat farmer was getting. 

Narrator: Borlaug wanted to fight hunger by producing lots of food. But his wheat relied on a costly recipe; only farmers who could afford that fertilizer and had access to irrigation water stood to benefit. Poor farmers - the ones the Rockefeller Foundation had come to help - would be largely left behind.

Tore Olsson, Historian: Borlaug is coming to challenge in many ways the established direction of the program, which was trying to help small scale poor farmers in central Mexico. And George Harrar, who is Borlaug’s boss, basically tells him, “you've got to stop this. It is a fundamental distraction from what we're trying to accomplish.” Borlaug throws down the towel and says, “I'm quitting.”

John Perkins, Environmental Historian: Borlaug had very definite thoughts about the way that agriculture should develop: you make it possible for very few people to raise vast amounts of food. And the surplus labor - which is what most people in rural areas became - they were going to be city people.

Narrator: Borlaug marched out of Harrar’s office and began making plans to leave the country, but the next day he was unexpectedly summoned back. “Forget what I said,” Harrar told an astonished Borlaug. “Go on working in Sonora.” Borlaug couldn’t know it, but a political earthquake on the other side of the globe was upending the Rockefeller program. 

The Salvation of The World

Nick Cullather, Historian: Chinese Communist troops march south singing about rice and beans. Americans interpreted the Chinese Civil War as a conflict that was based on resources, and particularly on food. 

Narrator: By that summer of 1948, Mao Zedong’s Communists were sweeping across China. In Washington, alarm bells were ringing.  

Tore Olsson, Historian: There was a growing sense that the Cold War was spiraling out of Americans’ control. The fear especially that what was going to tilt the Cold War in the Soviets’ favor was discontented peasants around the world.

Narrator: This new threat gave American policymakers an urgent priority.

Tore Olsson, Historian: There was a rather simple idea that “no one becomes a Communist on a full belly,” that we can tilt the scales in favor of the free capitalist democratic world, if we can just produce enough food.

Narrator: Borlaug’s miracle wheat might not help peasant farmers in Mexico, but it could win hearts and minds in the struggle against Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. 

Tore Olsson, Historian: The Rockefeller Foundation bosses in New York, who are working quite collaboratively with the State Department, come to realize that Borlaug is actually doing something that might be valuable for the global Cold War: a universal program to feed a hungry world.

Narrator: The Rockefeller Foundation began recasting the Mexico program. Not only was Borlaug given a free hand in Sonora, but his agenda began to eclipse the original mission. 

Over the next few years a large staff of Mexican and American scientists and administrators was assigned to Borlaug’s wheat project, and a bright new facility built. He would soon need all of those resources, and more. The problem appeared in the early 1950s, as Borlaug was achieving unprecedented yields. 

Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist: He was getting plants with so much grain up there that the five foot long stem just couldn't hold it up. Towards the end of the season, winds would blow whole fields over. He had to find some way to strengthen the stems. And the only way he could see to do that was to shrink the plant. 

Narrator: Borlaug began crossing his top lines with what was called a “dwarf” wheat, descended from varieties developed in Japan a century before. This time there were no shortcuts, no lucky breaks, just thousands and thousands of crosses, and years of frustration. Finally, in 1962, after seven years and 8156 crosses, the dwarf wheat program came through.

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: He has developed what you can think of as the complete wheat – you know, wheat that would yield like crazy with fertilizer and water, that’s shorter so all the extra growth will go into the grain, will grow anywhere, and is as resistant to stem rust as you can possibly be. 
Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist: It was this amazing development. And Norm patented nothing - nothing.

Narrator: Borlaug’s new wheat transformed the program’s potential.
Nick Cullather, Historian: The Rockefeller Foundation began to see places in the world where the techniques Borlaug developed in Mexico might be practically used. They started out in a particular place, with a particular set of political goals. But increasingly they began to see it as a program for the salvation of the world.

To India

Narrator: In January of 1963, just a few months after Borlaug’s masterstroke, an invitation from an Indian agricultural scientist landed on his desk. Within weeks Borlaug was on his way to New Delhi. One of the most far-reaching enterprises of the 20th century had begun. 

Howard K. Smith: India's problem is easily stated. India is one third the size of the United States, but it has a population greater than that of all North America and South America together: some 400 million people. In the next twenty-five years, if nothing happens, that huge population will double to 800 million. If India has trouble feeding 400 millions now, how can she feed twice that number within a generation?

Reporter: The man whose ambition is to turn India into a food exporting country is Dr Swaminathan. 

Nick Cullather, Historian: Swaminathan had begun to do his own research on wheat. He came across some research materials about the dwarf wheat varieties and he conceives of the idea of inviting Norman Borlaug.

Narrator: Over the course of a three-week road trip through India’s wheat country, the bull-headed American and the cultured Brahmin discovered a bond of common purpose. 

Ms Swaminathan, Agronomist: We had the same ideas, we had the same rules in life. And I liked his approach. 

George Varughese, Agronomist: Dr. Swaminathan is an excellent politician. He is so quiet, slow operator. Dr. Borlaug is not that way. He will start very polite, but if at one stage he finds things are not going very well, you cannot hold him back. 

Nick Cullather, Historian: Borlaug is playing a very different role than the role he played in Mexico. In Mexico Borlaug is working largely as a scientist. When he gets to India he's working with Swaminathan, reaching out as a salesman to a skeptical population and government.

Narrator: The political challenge was enormous. The wholesale adoption of high yield wheat entailed massive investments. Fertilizer would have to be imported until a domestic industry could meet the demand, and irrigation built up across thousands of square miles. The government would also have to guarantee a minimum price to farmers, so they could afford to adapt to the new practices. 

Prakash Kumar, Historian: There were all kinds of suspicions. Is this opening the floodgates to American corporations to sell their seeds, chemicals and other things? And there was this huge question whether this model of farming is applicable to India.

Narrator: After returning to Mexico, Borlaug loaded seven hundred and fifty pounds of seed into the cargo hold of a Pan Am jet, and sent it to Swaminathan for field trials. By harvest time he was in India again, in time to savor the result: where the plants had been fed and watered as directed, they had delivered almost incredible yields. But Borlaug was outraged to discover that scientists at several sites had used traditional methods. With no fertilizer, chemicals, or extra water, the plants fared poorly. This, they insisted, was how wheat was grown in South Asia. 

Prakash Kumar, Historian: Most of Indian farming was for subsistence. Gandhian ideology talks in terms of restraint in use. It talks in terms of less greed, less acquisition. It was the brute capitalism of the Norman Borlaug model that was irreconcilable with Gandhian thought. 

Narrator: As far as Borlaug was concerned, India was in danger of widespread famine, and it was almost criminal to object to a solution. “This was utter folly,” he noted, “and we ignored it.” But folly or not, Borlaug and Swaminathan couldn’t bring the authorities around: it was going to take more than a few field tests to shake up the world’s largest democracy.  

The United States and India

Prakash Kumar, Historian: There was a real fear in the American State Department that hunger would lead to Communist takeover. So they came up with this solution: using food aid as a tool of foreign policy.

Narrator: In the mid-1950s, the United States began sending its surplus grain to countries like India, under a program called “Food For Peace.” It was a powerful strategy, but unsustainable. In 1965 India consumed one fifth of America’s wheat crop; by 1970 it was projected to need one half. 

Howard K. Smith: Two thirds of the world goes to bed hungry every night. Most children eat less than two meals a day. The population problem has clearly graduated to the point where it has to be faced and discussed openly and in deadly seriousness. 

Nick Cullather, Historian: The idea that population growth had gone out of control became a major political concern. The United Nations began holding sessions on the question of population. The US Congress began wondering whether the food supply would keep up with global population growth. 

Narrator: If present trends continued, mankind would run out of arable land, and the food supply would fall short. Famine and social chaos seemed inevitable. 

John Perkins, Environmental Historian: Most of the good acres are already in cultivation. So you have to get more food from every acre you harvest. 

Narrator: American policymakers began pushing strategies to grow larger yields, in an effort to contain the looming crisis. For many people, India was the bellwether. “The future of mankind is now being ground out there,” a witness told Congress. “If no solution is found, all the world will live as India does now.” In 1966, that was a terrifying prospect.

Bihar

Announcer: Even in good years, millions of Indians suffer from malnutrition. This year, seventy million lives may be in peril, in the worst drought in India’s history as an independent nation.

Announcer: One third of Bihar has been declared as famine area.  Water is a major problem. Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi:

Indira Gandhi: All of us must come together to alleviate the agony of millions of our stricken people. 

Prakash Kumar, Historian: I was born in 1966 in the state of Bihar, when my state was passing through this famine. That famine was real and it led to death.

Narrator: “During those terrible days,” Borlaug wrote, “I saw miserable homeless kids pleading for scraps of bread. Each morning trucks circled the streets, picking up corpses. That’s when my patience ran out.” Borlaug’s frustration boiled over in a meeting with one of their leading Indian opponents. 

George Varughese, Agronomist: Ashok Mehta, the head of the Planning Commission, determines the priorities, where to allocate the money, how the policies are set. He was person who was holding back. 
Charles C. Mann, Biographer: Borlaug barges into the guy's office and explodes. 

Narrator: “Unless the policy is changed soon,” Borlaug shouted, “farmers will riot and social and political disorder will spread across the countryside…and you personally will be to blame!” 

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: He's red-faced, he's slamming the table, yelling and screaming at a high Indian government official who has never met him before.

Narrator: Borlaug’s tirade went hand-in-hand with a harsh new American policy. By the summer of 1966 the United States’ wheat surplus was dwindling. President Lyndon Johnson, anxious to force the pace of agricultural reform in India, shut down the food pipeline at the height of the drought. “He was toying with people’s lives,” Borlaug wrote. “But,” he added, “what he was attempting was just what was needed.” Few Indians saw it that way.
Raj Patel, Writer: That moment of understanding that your food supply in your country was hostage to whether you did what the United States wanted to do or not was a moment of indelible national shame.

Narrator: Indians resolved to throw off this new colonialism. There were to be no more grain imports, the government declared, even if it meant that Indians would starve. In these new circumstances, Borlaug’s program took on a different aspect. It offered a path to Indian self-sufficiency and independence, a goal that now outweighed worries about ecology and social equity. 
Not long after Borlaug’s showdown with Mehta, India announced a fundamental change in its agricultural policy. Fertilizer imports and factories, irrigation, price supports: everything was in place now. For years Borlaug had promised that he could save India. Now it was time to prove it. 

The Miracle

Nick Cullather, Historian: Fertilizer had been distributed around the country. The test plots had been stretched out to almost a million acres. And the rains cooperated. 

Narrator: By the time Borlaug and Swaminathan headed into the countryside in the spring of 1968, the atmosphere was electric. 

Nick Cullather, Historian: Reports began to arrive in New Delhi of grain silos that were being overwhelmed. Railroad depots were stacking grain on the tracks because there was no place else to put it.

Noel Vietmeyer, Agronomist: They closed the schools and filled the school rooms with the sacks of grain. There was food everywhere. There was grain everywhere.

Narrator: “Punjabi towns were buried in wheat,” Borlaug wrote, “There weren’t bags to hold the grain, carts to haul away the bags, bullocks to pull the carts, or trucks and trains to haul it all away.” When it was all done and counted, the 1968 harvest was almost one and a half times larger than the previous record. It marked the beginning of a movement that would change the face of the world. Soon afterward, an American diplomat gave that movement a name, and an ideology.

Nick Cullather, Historian: The term Green Revolution was meant to contrast this program, which was now seen as a tremendous global success, with the Red Revolution which was at that time sweeping the world and particularly in Asia. 

Prakash Kumar, Historian: At the end of the day the Green Revolution was ideological in nature. Borlaug represented American faith in agricultural capitalism.

Nobel Prize

Narrator: By 1970 the impact of Borlaug’s work was being felt around the world. Variants of his wheat produced record-breaking harvests in Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. With the help of the State Department and the World Bank, Green Revolution techniques were spreading around the world. Borlaug’s research had inspired programs that developed high yield rice, maize and other crops. Those higher yields had largely banished the specter of global famine. After years of apocalyptic forecasts, it seemed almost miraculous, and Borlaug had been at the center of it. Still, he had no idea what to expect when strangers started showing up at work one morning.

Reporter: Doctor, a few hours ago you were informed that you had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Why do you think you won it?

Norman Borlaug: Well Mr. White, I suppose it had something to do with the Green Revolution…

Walter Cronkite: The 1970 Nobel Peace prize was awarded today to Doctor Norman Ernest Borlaug...

Anchor: His efforts are credited with saving millions of persons from malnutrition and starvation. 

Narrator: Overnight, Borlaug’s life became a whirlwind. Everywhere he was revered for having saved the world from disaster. But Borlaug remained deeply apprehensive, sure that he had only delayed mankind’s reckoning.

Norman Borlaug: We are making progress at the present time. We can't relax. We must continue. 

Norman Borlaug: The Green Revolution has bought twenty to twenty-five years. The world can support so many individuals, at a certain population level. 

Norman Borlaug: I think we might be able to cope and buy twenty to thirty years of time.

Nick Cullather, Historian: He believed he had bought time for the world to deal with the population problem and to bring it under control.

Epilogue

Narrator: Borlaug had warned that the Green Revolution was just a delaying action, a fix that bought twenty or thirty years. But by the turn of the century those decades had passed, the population was still growing, and the Green Revolution was deeply entrenched around the world. 

John Perkins, Environmental Historian: The revolution happened and the revolution became the standard operating procedure. It really doesn't matter which country you're in. And it would be very hard to feed the human population at seven billion and still growing without Green Revolution technology.

Narrator: Borlaug was still lionized, but the legacy of the Green Revolution was becoming ever more troubled.

Charles C. Mann, Biographer: What the Green Revolution did was increase the global food supply, by a lot. But that was accomplished in tremendous social and environmental costs. 

Prakash Kumar, Historian: There is no doubt that the Green Revolution resolved the question of food scarcity in India. But in parts of India the impact can be seen in the degradation of soil, in the reduction of water table, a broken agrarian community, a broken society. 

John Perkins, Environmental Historian: After the Green Revolution most people ended up living in cities. People were not needed in the rural areas. There was nothing for them to do. 

Tore Olson, Historian: Not only does much of Mexico come to be soaked in toxic chemicals, we see this massive outmigration of Mexican farmers out of the countryside and into cities. Millions of Mexicans who've chosen to emigrate to the United States in the last thirty, forty years or so are former campesino farmers.  

Narrator: Most disturbing of all, no matter how much food the Green Revolution created, hunger remained. 

Norman Borlaug: It's particularly frustrating to me that there are still 700 million people approximately who are short of food. We have at least two different aspects of these this food problem. One is to produce enough and the second is the problem of poverty and lack of purchasing power for a large part of the world's population. 

Tore Olsson, Historian: The problem is not a lack of food. It is about inequality and class and poverty.

Narrator: Norman Borlaug died in the fall of 2009. To the end he remained outspoken, stubborn, selfless, and obsessed by his war on hunger. Over the course of his life, he rarely reflected on his place in history. But once, not long after he won the Nobel Prize, Borlaug visited his ancestral homestead in Norway, where he wandered alone, contemplating his role in what he called “the great sweep of human events.” “Lurking in the edges of my consciousness,” he recalled, “I could see the point at which an over-burgeoning humanity becomes too much for Mother Earth to bear.” In fact, Borlaug allowed the earth to feed far more people than had been thought possible. But there would be no final victory in his war on hunger; it endures as a consequence not of want, but of human nature. 

Saving Private Ryan Jackson bible quotes

 All of the Bible quotes Jackson mentioned were from the book of Psalms: • Psalms 22:11 Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help me. • Psalms 25:2 I trust in you; do not let me be put to shame, nor let my enemies triumph over me. • Psalms 144:1-2 Praise be to the Lord my rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle. He is my loving God and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield, in whom I take refuge, who subdues people under me.