Partial Readings: Dreams amid Destitution

Partial Readings: Dreams amid Destitution

Partial Readings: Dreams amid Destitution

Dreams amid Destitution
George Packer waxes eloquent on the visceral appeal of the nineteenth-century, social realist novel in the slums of Lagos:

The concerns of that literature?the individual caught in an encompassing social web, the sensitive young mind trapped inside an indifferent world, the beguiling journey from countryside to metropolis, the dismal inventiveness with which people survive, the permanent gap between imagination and opportunity, the big families whose problems are lived out in the street, the tragic pregnancies, the ubiquity of corruption, the earnest efforts at self-education, the preciousness of books, the squalid factories and debtor?s prisons, the valuable garbage, the complex rules of patronage and extortion, the sudden turns of fortune, the sidewalk con men and legless beggars, the slum as theater of the grotesque: long after these things dropped out of Western literature, they became the stuff of ordinary life elsewhere, in places where modernity is arriving but hasn?t begun to solve the problems of people thrown together in the urban cauldron.

Daylight
The Wall Street Journal?s Daniel Henninger has claimed the rescue of Chilean miners as ?a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.? James Downie skewers this silly thesis over at the New Republic, while In These Times? Mike Elk tells a tale of corporate misconduct. The mining company initially refused to pay wages to the miners prevented from working due to the mine collapse, and it will not be paying the cost of the rescue mission?the Chilean government is footing that bill.

Central European Nationalism
Der Spiegel reports that a new study reveals increasingly xenophobic attitudes throughout Germany. Over 50 percent of those polled?and over 75 percent in former East Germany?agree that ?the practice of Islam should be significantly restricted in Germany.? More than 35 percent believe that ?Germany is in serious danger of being overrun by foreigners,? and around 17 percent claimed that ?even today, Jews have too much influence.?

These figures seem slight when viewed against the rise of the neo-fascist Jobbik party in Hungary, which won 16.7 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections this spring. György Konrád loves his home city of Budapest. ?But now I no longer think it’s impossible that I could feel compelled to leave Hungary for good,? he said. ?I survived two dictatorships. It’s possible that the third one is now on its way.? A Der Spiegel reporter describes Jobbik?s philosophy as ?a crude blend of inferiority complex and megalomania, coupled with a clear set of bogeymen, including the Jews, Gypsies, globalization, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.? Jobbik?s press chief airs goals both irredentist??More than half of our brothers live outside their fatherland, and we want to bring them back??and metaphysical?they desire a ?spiritually healthy society based on Christian values.? Other Jobbik officials use less guarded language, in dark echoes of the past: ?The Jewish people are violently invading aggressors who threaten the existence of the original Hungarian land.?

Women?s Justice through Sharia
At Guernica, Rafia Zakaria tells the story of ?Zainab,? a Muslim woman from Pakistan who moved to the American Midwest, following an arranged (though romantic) marriage. Zainab soon suffered abuse at the hands of her husband, who openly maintained a relationship with a mistress. Zainab?s husband fraudulently completed the forms for a civil, no-fault divorce, leaving Zainab penniless; Zakaria, who provided Zainab with legal assistance, decided instead to look at their Islamic marriage contract. ?After a discussion with some colleagues, I found that the contract, because it had been so carefully worded, fulfilled all the requirements of an enforceable contract under U.S. law.? An American court order then secured an alimony settlement for Zainab.

For Zakaria, the case demonstrated the possibility for liberalizing sharia from within:

Cases like Zainab?s, even when they occur in faraway America, represent for Muslim women strategic ways to take back the instruments of law that have been appropriated by male jurists and interpreters for centuries….Zainab was empowered by the outcome of the case not merely because she had received a monetary settlement crucial to her survival, but also because she had, in an elemental way, been able to use her faith to define her empowerment, a prospect denied to too many Muslim women, for too long.