The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, whose 31 December report titled “Six Months of the Lull Arrangement Intelligence Report”, confirmed that the 19 June truce was only “sporadically violated”, and then not by Hamas but instead by “rogue terrorist organizations”. Instead, “the escalation and erosion of the lull arrangement” occurred after Israel killed six Hamas members on 4 November, allegedly after spotting them digging a tunnel, and then placed the entire Gaza Strip under even more intensive siege the next day.

IGNORING FACTS

According to a joint Tel Aviv University-European university study, this fits a larger pattern in which Israeli violence has been responsible for ending 79 percent of all lulls in violence since the outbreak of the second Intifada, compared with only 8 percent for Hamas and other Palestinian factions.
Indeed, the Israeli Foreign Ministry seems to realize that this argument is losing credibility. During a conference call with half a dozen pro-Israel professors, the NY Consul General focused more on the importance of destroying the intricate tunnel system connecting Gaza to the Sinai. He claimed that such tunnels were “as big as the Holland and Lincoln tunnel,”, and offered as proof the “fact” that lions and monkeys had been smuggled through them to a zoo in Gaza. In reality, the lions were two small cubs that were drugged, thrown in sacks, and dragged through a tunnel on their way to a private zoo.

ISRAEL’S SELF-IMAGE

The claim that Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel has proved equally misinformed, as Hamas leaders explicitly announced their intention to do just that in the pages of the Los Angeles Times (as did deputy political head Mousa Abu Marzook in a 6 January Opinion article), or to any international leader or journalist who will meet with them.

With each new family, 10, 20, and 30-strong, buried under the rubble of a building in Gaza, the claim that Israeli forces have gone group at the University College, Irvine, sent out an urgent email to the community explaining that, “Over the past week, increasing amounts of evidence lead us to believe that Hamas is largely responsible for any alleged humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

I have no idea who the “us” is that is referred to in the appeal outside of the membership of the group (which the President of Anteaters has assured me is in fact growing), but I am sure that the number of believers is shrinking. Indeed, one of the sad facts of this latest tragedy is that with each claim publicly refuted by facts on the ground, more and more Americans, including Jews, are refusing to trust the assertions of Israeli and American Jewish leaders.

TRAP

Even worse, in the Arab/Muslim world, the horrific images pouring out of Gaza daily are allowing preachers and politicians to deploy well-worn yet still dangerous and inciteful stereotypes against Jews as they rally the masses against Israel – and through it, their own governments.

What is most frightening is that the most important of Israel’s socalled friends, the American political establishment and the mainstream Jewish leadership, seem clueless to the devastating trap that Israel has led itself into – in good measure with their indulgence and even help. It is one that threatens the country’s existence far more than Hamas’s Qassam rockets, with their 0.4 percent kill rate; even more than the disastrous 2006 invasion of southern Lebanon, whose weakening of Israel’s deterrence capability in some measure made this war inevitable.

First, it is clear that Israel cannot destroy Hamas, it cannot stop the rockets unless it agrees to a truce that will go far to meeting Hamas’s primary demand – an end to the Gaza siege. Merely by surviving (and it surely will survive) Hamas, like Hezbollah in 2006, will have won. Israel is succeeding in doing little more than creating another generation of Palestinians with hearts filled with rage and a need for revenge.

Second, Israel’s main patron, the United States, along with the conservative Arab autocracies and monarchies that are its only al- lies left in the Muslim world, are losing whatever crumbs of legiti- macy they still had with their young and angry populations. The weaker America and its axis becomes in the Middle East, the more precarious becomes Israel’s long-term security. Indeed, any chance that the US could convince the Muslim world to pressure Iran to give up its quest for nuclear weapons has been buried in Gaza.

Third, as Israel brutalizes Palestinians, it brutalizes its own people. You cannot occupy another people and engage in violence against them at this scale without doing even greater damage to your own soul. The high incidence of violent crimes committed by veterans returning from combat duty in Iraq is but one example of how the violence of occupation and war eat away at people’s moral center.

While in the US only a small fraction of the population participates in war; in Israel, most able-bodied men end up participating. The effects of the latest violence perpetrated against Palestinians upon the collective Israeli soul is incalculable; the notion that it can survive as an “ethnocracy” – favoring one ethnic group, Jews, yet by and large democratic – is becoming a fiction.

VIOLENCE-AS-POWER

Who will save Israel from itself? Israelis are clearly incapable. Their addiction as a society to the illusion of violence-as-power has reached the level of collective mental illness. As Haaretz reporter Yossi Melman described it on 10 January, “Israel has created an image of itself of a madman that has lost it.”

Not Palestinians, too many of whom have fallen prey to a similar condition. Not the “Quartet”, the European Union, United Nations, or Arab League, all of whom are utterly powerless to influence Israeli policy. Not the organized Jewish leadership in the United States and Europe, who are even more blind to what’s happening than most Israelis, who at least allow internal debate about the wisdom of their government’s policies. Not the growing progressive Jewish community, which will need years to achieve enough social and political power to challenge the status quo. And not senior American politicians and policy-makers, who are either unwilling to risk alienating American Jewish voters, or have been so brainwashed by the constant barrage of propaganda put out by the “Israel Lobby” that they are incapable of reaching an independent judgement about the conflict.

During the US presidential race, Barack Obama was ridiculed for being a messiah-like figure. The idea doesn’t sound so funny now. It is hard to imagine anyone less saving Israel, the Palestinians, and the world from another four years of mindless violence.

Selemani cupped his hands over his eyes and peered through the dust-mottled windows and saw blue vinyl seats ripped apart, their springs poached by stealthy night visitors, and splatters of rotten fruit and baboon droppings.

The dashboard was gone, as was the steering wheel. He tried the passenger door; it opened, and the smell of stale air and dried ordure swelled out before he could think twice and close it.

“The engine’s gone,” Lemi remarked.

“Nothing in the back,” added Julius.

“Ati. We’re too late.” Selemani put his hands on his hips and stuck his jaw out thoughtfully. “What about the roof?” He looked at Julius, who looked at Lemi, who looked down at his stick forlornly. His limp right leg flopped around it like a creeper. “Julius, you’re lazy. Get up on the bonnet and look at the roof.”

Julius gave Selemani a long stare, bearing no hurt or discomfort at all. It wasn’t even vacant; it was like he was looking at a fascinating painting that couldn’t look back. Selemani hated that look.

With an irritable cluck, Selemani shook off his flip-flops and hopped up onto the bonnet of the dilapidated truck. It was a neat view; hardly anything to be seen but moist fields of tea and a few little plots of banana palms grouped around dog-rib houses of the same raw sienna as the earth they were built from. The mountains stood in a shaggy crescent over to the west, like cloths hung crookedly from a washing line, striped horizontally with staggered terraces and steaming with condensation from the clouds they drew in.

Selemani scrutinised the roof. It was nearly rusted through in one or two places, but on the whole it was spectacularly broad and long, and only slightly convex. It would be big enough, for sure.

At that moment a woman’s yell came faintly from the direction of the village. Lemi craned his neck. “It’s your mother,” he told Selemani. Julius shrieked with laughter. “She’s got that girl round, hasn’t she? The one you’re marrying.”

Selemani ran an appreciative palm over the surface of the truck’s roof, pretending to be absorbed by its rough corroded rosettes. They seemed to make a pattern like the moon in those photos framed over the bar in The Savannah Club. Jamani, the things those white men got up to.

“Selemaaaaaniii!” the voice screeched again. “You’re wanted!”

“We’ll come back tomorrow,” Selemani announced, as if the moment had spurred him to take the decision, and he dropped back to the ground and worked his flip-flops back on with his toes.

The three started back toward the village, meandering through the thin streets of the outskirts with the piles of rotting rubbish and corrugated tin shacks, past the circular TANU meeting spot still not repainted even though TANU became the Revolutionary Party CCM last year – opulated as ever by elderly men with rumpled white embroidered hats and serious mouths, arguing over politics and getting hot under the collar, then sitting down and thinking for long stretches.

The three separated at the marketplace, less a square and more a rhombus bordered by cinnamon trees and whitewashed shops with wooden shutters and padlocks and hand-painted signs. Julius headed south to the far edge of the town near the school. A school and a clinic, that was modernisation. Government-paid nurses in crisply starched uniforms taking blood samples and distributing quinine.

This was one of the pioneer towns; not founded by pioneering homesteaders travelling West, but by the state, inspired by Lenin, funded by Russia and China, determined to lift Africa out of grinding poverty and into the free market. The village had swollen from a cluster of houses built by a stream to a town, a proper town, with public amenities and a registered electorate, all by government decree. Some households were ordered to move 50 feet to come into accordance with the new regulations. Almost everyone who used to live in the scattered cottages nearby now had to walk much farther to reach their plots of land every day. But this was progress. One day this village would be rebuilt in stone and have a bowling alley and a paved market square, and all the streets would be cleaned by professional, government-paid street sweepers. At least, that was how the young ones thought of it.

The old ones saw the land being overtaxed, the latrines being hastily dug too close to the sources of water, the outbreaks of cholera and typhoid laying out whole neighbourhoods clotted with people, heard the party rhetoric of self-reliance and ground their few remaining teeth in the circular TANU hut and sat thinking for long stretches, blinking watery eyes turned blue with age. There wasn’t much else to do about it. This was progress.

Julius reached his house and absently called out “Hodi!” Without waiting for a karibu to welcome him inside, he shook off his sandals and slipped through the door. His father, the rector, was sitting on a church chair, which had lost a leg and therefore been inherited. It leaned against the wall so as to not fall over. In the niche in the wall there was a radio, which Julius’s father was listening to attentively. The news was being broadcast in crackly Kiswahili. He waved a quieting hand at Julius as he came in.

“Shikamoo,” Julius mumbled.

“Did you know they are moving the capital to Dodoma?” his father boomed over the radio set.

“House by house?” Julius inquired.

“Don’t be insolent,” his father replied mildly, turning the volume down. “It was voted. By the people. We are a democratic nation now.”

There was no vote about villagisation, though, Julius thought. Two years as a trainee mechanic in Dar es Salaam and now he was meant to be hoeing onions on a plot of land a 40 minutes’ walk away. “Living in villages is obligatory,” the Father of the Nation had said not six months ago. And Julius was named after him, the man engineering all this progress, Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere, all because Julius Jr had been born on the 29 October 1964 – the day the United Republic of Tanzania was born. Julius turned 18 last week. It was the only way he knew his age.

“You wait, my boy. We’ll soon be snapping at Europe’s heels,” his father said, leaning back in his chair and remembering its precariousness with a jolt. “There will be children in Switzerland learning Kiswahili at school. Mwalimu wasn’t educated at Oxford for nothing, you know.”

Julius stared at him flatly. His father snapped the radio off.

“I don’t know why you kids aren’t more excited about these changes,” he scolded. “You don’t know how strong we’ll be, once people stop thinking in their tribe and start working together as a nation. You’ll see.”

Selemani came alive when he played pool. He would sit on the floor at dinner with one knee up and roll a ball of white, starchy ugali in his right hand and think only of the cool weight of the white ball clanking in the underbelly of the billiards table and rolling tirelessly into the hollow at the table’s foot; then the satisfying knock it made as he clapped it down into the black spot on the green felt, the aged ivory brought back to Africa after being bought by Britons and lathed and polished in India. This was the ball the wazungu, the white man, took their shots with – the shots of scotch, the shots that brought the game down – and there he was, taking their place in Uzunguni. Him and the chaotic thunder of the colours and the stripes hurtling down from the rack, the care taken in arranging them properly and tightening them in the triangle with his slender fingers. Then – ah! then – the climactic crack of the break and the smooth, erratic scattering of the balls – there was something atomic about it. And then there was the way the players slunk low over the table with the cue carried delicately underneath, like panthers, sleekly creeping along a tree branch, eyes trained on the line and the angle and the ricochet each ball would make. None of them could predict the directions and the speeds that would explode out of each shot. And the thunk of the desired ball when it was potted, the satisfied shuffle of the player’s feet as he tested out positions for his next shot, or the bending of his knees in frustration reflex, clenching his fists and hissing as he realises he sank the white too – bahati mbaya, bad luck. It was music. It was a day without sweltering heat or mosquitoes. It was a drug. And in the final, leisurely circumambulation of the table, feeling the gaze of the bartenders in their stiff white waistcoats and red bowties, the whores in nylons and telephonecable weaves crossing their legs on the barstools and elongating their painted eyes at him, he’d think: What more could any man want but to win a game of billiards? And he would dunk the ball of ugali in the tomato mchuzi and wonder how long it would be before he could give up fixing shoes in the muddy streets of the village and go back to The Savannah Club.

The truck was still there, in the clearing between the rows of cotton and the sporadic banana palms and avocado trees. A mongoose scurried into one of them as Lemi approached, oscillating like the finger of a metronome as he walked, leaning heavily into his stick and lurching forward on his good leg. He checked to see that Selemani and Julius hadn’t arrived yet; he wanted to get a good look at the roof before they came so he would be spared the indignity of scrambling up onto the bonnet like a starfish on shore.

Lemi was not his real name. People called him Lemi after mlemavu, disabled boy, ill-formed one, yule aliyelema – the one who grew wrong. At an age when he could still remember how many summers he’d lived, he’d fallen sick with polio and his left leg stopped growing and started to wilt. Lemi sounded better; it was more like a European name – it was French, that was it. Or was it Remy? He didn’t know – everyone in the village mixed up their is and their rs, anyway. Everyone he knew did.

He laid a hand on the truck’s bonnet; it was cool and damp; the day was still being born. He dropped his pole and hopped around the truck’s nose, leaning against it as he went. Lemi got out of working in the fields because of his leg, but he still had to do other things, draw water, feed the goat, burn the rubbish. Today it was getting mwarobaini leaves for his uncle who was sweating in bed with malaria. The intense, bitter green, the dirty taste of quinine that killed intestinal parasites and lice and lowered high blood pressure; one cure for 40 diseases, hence its name – “the 40 tree”. He picked off a few flakes of paint around the crusted patches of rust on the bonnet, then lunged headfirst at it, heaving hard with his arms and kicking against the truck’s mudguard with his right leg and swung himself up, landing clumsily with his shoulder pressing on the murky glass of the windshield. From there, he crawled to the roof and the whole plain opened up to him like a pair of moist green hands. There was the village, toward the crooked crescent of mountains, there were the rippling fields of tea, cotton-wrapped heads ducked over them bobbing like balls in a pool.
It held him there in chilly, breathless awe for longer than he knew how to count; this was what Selemani could bound up and see when- ever he liked! Lemi shivered and tried to com- press as much detail as he could into this briefest of authences: the smoking houses high up on the mountains – they were brewing ba- nana beer this time of year, ready for when the girls came out of puberty seclusion; the galli- maufry of tin and thatched roofs in the rapidly expanding village; the almost invisible troop of colobus monkeys hopping about in the mango trees over there, with long, draping tails as red as the earth; and enlivening it all was the cool bite of the air, before the sun rose high and made the humidity swelter.

The mwarobaini could wait a minute or two more.

The boys set to work as soon as Selemani could smuggle out some tools from his workshop. Selemani was always the one on top, inspecting the coralline encrustations of rust and making supervisory comments. Julius sat on the roof, taking turns with a wooden mallet flattening the surface of the roof as evenly he could. It was an impossible task, all three knew – they didn’t have any felt, and the surface would end up dented and warped all over. But it became their overriding pleasure, of all things, one that made them equal in purpose. They dodged their plots of land and came home late to do it, urged on by the series of tasks which had to be done: strip bark off straight branches for the cues – mwarobaini’s best, get Lemi to do it; roll balls of clay and bake them in a fire and paint them with glossy shop-sign emulsion; sew fishing net into pockets for the corners.

Lemi oscillated back and forth on his stick, finishing the little jobs Julius and Selemani felt too important to do. But while he did them, he thought of the mural he would paint on the sides of the truck, a name for their pool table – make it a pool hall, sell sodas out of the boot! He worked out the lettering in his head as he plodded between his house and the truck each day, every time on the pretext of finding medicines or catching a runaway chicken. It would read: Babu Kubwa Billiards. Big Granddaddy Billiards.

They started attracting small crowds, mostly children wearing scraps of kangas in parrotish colours sewn into ruffled dresses and shirts. The kids stared at the three boys tinkering at this mudscabbed truck with eyes that had never known how their own faces looked and chewed on bits of plastic string. Then the tea-pickers started passing through; it broke the monotony of the work, laughing to each other in veiled interest at the three young men with city heads operating on their useless lump of metal.

“Don’t mind them,” Selemani told the others, though he was the one who minded the most.

In time their other jobs, the shoe-fixing and hoeing and weeding and chopping firewood and finding medicines, began to fade into a sort of translucent, water-skin background, the breakable surface of what really mattered. The more Julius’s father tried to impress upon him the beauty of working together as a nation, the humility of the common labourer and the holy economic balance God held such countries in, the more Julius daydreamed on the plot of land and woke up when smoothing out the roof of the truck. It had to be smooth enough to execute a satisfying break on, that was all; if he could just work that ridge flat and this lump even, it would result in the most ecstatic of sensations. That’s what Selemani said, anyway.

There came a morning, though, with no droppers-by, no idle teapickers or round-eyed children standing around watching the boys at their work. There didn’t even seem to be any birds circling above the plains, no clouds hanging over the mountains. It was as though someone was talking far off and the whole village was hushing its mouth to listen.

Selemani looked at Julius. “Is there somewhere we’re supposed tobe?” he asked.

Julius stared back at him with his eyes slightly apart, one on Selemani and the other on Selemani’s ear. “What month is it?”

“Pumpkin season,” Selemani replied, pressing his closed eyes with the pads of his thumb and forefinger. “E-heeeh. So it can’t be Independence Day. What else is there?”

A round of staccato gunfire studded the air, moving from left to right as if it were lead typewriter lettering on a loose piece of paper. The boys ducked; Selemani climbed inside the truck and instinctively moved to start the engine somehow, yanking desperately at the handbrake and pumping the gas. Julius slid into the back seat.

“There’s no engine,” he reminded his friend. “Or wheels.”

“Where’s Lemi?”

They fell silent. Selemani opened his door gingerly and shouted as quietly as he could through the crack.

“Lemi!” Nothing. “Leeeeemiiiii!” His call seemed to echo back at him from the road to the north, rustling in the dense border of trees that ran alongside it. Perhaps Lemi was over that way, cutting mwarobaini for the cues. Another of its 40 uses.

“The shots came from town. We’ll be safe out here,” Julius croaked. “What about Lemi?” Selemam” hissed. “We have to go find him!”

Julius looked out of the window. “How will we ever finish the truck without him?” he said weakly.

“Come on.” Selemani leapt from the truck and opened the back door for Julius. Then he turned and ran as low as he could, slinking like the panther crouched over the pool table, aligning himself with his prey on an infallible cross-country trajectory. The treelined road over to the north was the cushion running lengthways along the green felt ground; Selemani thought of the impact he would make against the cushion, the angle of the ricochet perfectly mirrored on the other side of the perpendicular. He was the smooth wooden cue, the hand that shunted it forward, the ball it cracked against – the whole, single-minded focus of the game, and he’d win it.

Julius scrambled after Selemani clumsily. He wasn’t used to running; his uncle told him once when his father wasn’t listening that one day he’d get a good job in the government filing documents and writing assessments – who needed to be fit for that? Farmers were fit because they were poor and had nobody to do work for them.

They came to the road into town, sheltered by mango trees crowding their shoulders together and depositing sugary offerings on the soil all around, rotting and stinking of fruit alcohol. Selemani slowed down, ready to make his sharp 40-degree angle turn to look elsewhere for Lemi, when the sound of approaching footsteps killed his momentum. He shot low under a bush. Julius loped into view and Selemani grabbed his shirt and pulled him down beside him.

It was a regiment of askari, young Tanzanian men in slightly faded camouflage fatigues and neatly lopsided caps lit up with a gold emblem and trousers tucked into spit-polished black boots, rifles slung over one shoulder.

“Is Lemi there?” Julius asked.

“Wake up, Julius! They’re going to war!”

“Are we at war?”

“You don’t have a clue, do you?” Selemani frowned. “Idi Amin invaded Kagera last month. These are our troops. They’re going to defend our country.”

Julius sat silently with his arms folded around his knees, staring at the ground. He shivered and a sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead. An ant as long as his thumbnail was struggling to carry the mutilated body of another, its head crushed inwards and its legs flailing miserably in tiny, almost imperceptible death throes. Julius shuddered and watched as the bigger ant held it with two legs and marched on with the other two. Any moment, I could put my toe down and kill the two of them, Julius thought. Perhaps it would be better off; then the dying ant could the quicker and the healthy ant wouldn’t have to go to all that effort. But much as he visualised the act, the quiet snap of crushed exoskeleton, the gradual cessation of movement and the little wet spot on his toe, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“You don’t think they have Lemi, do you?” he asked.

“Of course not. He’s too crippled to go to war. Just as well they didn’t see us, though-we’re old enough for the army now.”

Julius looked back at the ants and wondered if he would do the same if his friend went down. That’s what soldiers did, wasn’t it? He shivered and waited for the ant to cross the patch of dirt and disappear into the base of a hibiscus bush.

“Why did Idi Amin invade, anyway?” he asked.

Selemani shrugged. “I don’t know. It’ll probably be over soon. We’ll fight them off and get back to business.”

“Yeah, we’ll get back to business.”

“Progress!” Selemani smiled.

“We’re going to make Africa the richest place on earth!” Julius replied.

Selemani laughed and punched Julius on the arm, and Julius breathed his relief in deeply and felt good.

The regiment passed and met with a convoy of trucks where their path joined the main road. It was going to get tarmacked soon, that was the news from the town council. Out in the distance, a thin cloth of white mist lay over the mountains and the red-brown strip of earth the askari marched on trailed away into the greenery of the cloud forest. They could see yellow-backed baboons sitting in the trees, munching things thoughtfully and watching as the regiment passed, quick march, hup-two-threefour.

Julius and Selemani leisurely made their way back to the truck. As they neared it, they could see Lemi sitting on the roof waving at them, his stick leaning against the front wheel and a big smile on his face.

“I finished the cues,” he called through cupped hands.

Selemani stopped midfield and stood, leaning his weight on one foot. From here the truck looked like a sculpted mass of powder, a dusty mirage slumped on the earth with no engine, no dashboard, no wheels and no hope of ever moving. And there were boys from his town only a year or two older than him marching off to fight, ranged in formation and ordered to kill so that this country could fulfill its promise to its people – money, running water, jobs with uniforms. Freedom from tyranny, protect the little guy. It all seemed somehow fruitless, the potential pool hall in the midst of tea fields and mango trees, mongoose and mountain cats watching from a distance, mosquitoes and jiggers clamouring for a meal.

Julius kept walking, his hands dangling limply at his sides. He saw the powdery lump, Lemi’s impromptu throne, and his job filing documents for the government and growing fat faded away in that moment. What did it matter, seeing as one of his country’s neighbours might invade whenever it felt like it? The pride he’d felt over his nation’s glorious prospects imploded unceremoniously; when death is so near that you feel its breath on your face, no place is ever rich enough to save you.

From where Lemi sat, though, the whole valley basin looked cool and green, laced with mist and still as Paradise. The sun had crested the mountain ridge and now lay strips of beeswax yellow across the fields, mapping out the pattern of stepped crops and banana palms that ornamented the mountain’s slopes. The farmers were at home, resting-God knows how they needed it. He would sit on the roof of the truck for a while longer and look around at this liquid cure, this moving portrait that concealed the artist’s signature in every line and curve, and then limp home and think himself back there whenever he got tired.

He’d just sit a minute or two more.

Since the scale of the disaster has become known, numerous proposals have been put forward to ameliorate the catastrophe. One is to deepen the existing wells and thereby bypass the tainted water. With millions of wells to deepen, however, the cost could be astronomical with no guarantee of success. Another is to build elaborate rainwater collection systems, but UNICEF has cautioned that there is not enough rainfall in the country to do this. A third and final solution is to develop effective filters for the existing well water. But, as of 2001, the World Bank stated that there is “no proven affordable arsenic removal technology available yet.”

Enter the Grainger Foundation of Lake Forest, Illinois. In 2005, the non-profit foundation announced the Grainger Challenge Prize for Sustainability, a million-dollar award for the most effective, inexpensive, reliable, and environmentally friendly solution to the arsenic problem facing Bangladesh and similar countries with tube-well-related problems. The United States’ National Academy of Engineering was designated its arbitrator and in a little less than a year it received more than 70 entries. In February 2007, after exhaustive tests conducted by United States Environmental Protection Agency, the NAE finally announced the winner: Dr. Abdul Hussam, a chemistry professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

His filter, a marvel of effectiveness and simplicity, costs only $35 to produce and can remove arsenic, iron, manganese, and many other toxic substances. Each unit can filter nearly 500 liters per day – enough water for sixty people. Perhaps most important of all, it is simple to operate and can work without interruption for at least five years.

A Chemical Doppleganger

If the problem of arsenic poisoning sounds unfamiliar – perhaps conjuring up only the ghost of Baudelaire’s Madame Bovary or the play and later screen adaptation of Arsenic and Old Lace – there is good reason: historically it has not been a major problem. Arsenic is generally only concentrated in groundwater found near alluvial plains – areas adjacent to mountains or hills where rivers have slowly eroded the rock and deposited it in the floodplain. Most human beings, however, obtain their water either from surface sources: rivers, lakes, and streams, or using recent technology, from ground water located outside such plains. Bangladesh’s unfortunate location in the Ganges and Brahmaputra river basins means that a huge part of its population lives over sediment carried directly out of the Himalayan Mountains. This sediment is naturally high in arsenic and has over millennia leeched into the ground water below.

Once ingested, arsenic begins its slow assault on the human body. Its potency derives from its ill-fated position in the periodic table. Located directly beneath phosphorous, arsenic acts as its chemical doppleganger, binding with the same elements phosphorous normally binds to. The human body relies heavily upon phosphorous for its energy-storing bonds, but when sufficient levels of arsenic are consumed, arsenic displaces phosphorous. The result is a body starved of energy. In time the liver grows stressed and the skin blotched, eventually forming gangrenous sores. Cancer manifests in the skin, liver, kidneys and bladder, and eventually people die.

The Quest for a Filter

Dr. Hussam’s interest in finding a solution to arsenic poisoning in fact began long before the competition was announced. As a child he grew up in rural Bangladesh, drinking from one of the government’s tube wells that he later suspected, after the first reports of contamination aired, might be contaminated. His father, a physician by training, had inspired him with a love of chemistry, teaching him basic chemical principles and conducting experiments out of books with him. “By the time I was in eighth grade, I knew I wanted to be a chemist.”

In 1982 he received his PhD in analytical chemistry from the University of Minnesota and in 1997 set out to see if his suspicions were founded and if the health of his and family members, whom still drank from the well, was in danger. The hardest part, he says, was designing a method for testing well water in the field. Arsenic is an extremely potent poison and can cause devastating effects when it comprises just one part in twenty million molecules of water – the concentration of a single murderer in all of New York City. After two years of work he had developed a reliable method and tested the well in his family’s village. The results came in at more than three times the World Health Organization’s designated safe limit.

With the help of his brother, a physician, and his chemistry mentor, he began working on a solution immediately and read through the available scientific literature. One study in particular caught his eye: arsenic levels had been shown to decline when allowed to flow over hydrous ferric oxide, or in layman’s terms, rust. The arsenic molecules bound to it firmly leaving the water behind arsenic-free. Most promising of all was that the bond was so strong that the rust could be disposed of without any danger of the arsenic re-entering the soil. The only problem was that he would need a very high surface area of rust, much higher than a few rusted plates could provide.
If Dr. Hussam’s filter was to be successful, it would also have to be practical. It could not depend on electricity as many parts of Bangladesh do not have a reliable source of power. It would have to be easy to install by people with little knowledge of how it worked. It would have to be operable for years without clogging or requiring a filter change. Most importantly, it would have to be inexpensive. Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world, with nearly a third of its citizens living off of less than one dollar per day. A simple table-top Brita filter, which is not sophisticated enough to remove arsenic, could cost more than weeks’ income.

Eventually, the solution came in iron turnings – those curly cues of waste iron and steel that result from lathing metal in machine shops. Dr. Hussam experimented with more than two hundred different designs, varying everything from the chemical pre-treatment of the metal to the size of the buckets containing them. Finally, after two years, he thought he had come up with a design that would work: a two-bucket system of layered charcoal, sand, and specially treated rust. Best of all, the data appeared to confirm its success. When asked what his emotions were during his “Eureka” moment, Dr. Hussam responded that though excited, “a scientist always has skepticism.” The real question, he said, was how long it would work before it wore out.

Despite fears about its longevity, he began building and distributing the filter immediately. His brother, a physician in Bangladesh with a knack for chemistry, supervised the manufacture, quality control and distribution of the filter. A second brother, an economist at the Dhaka University, helped to secure funding from international aid groups. Together they distributed some 21,000 filters with another 10,000 to come – enough to help a quarter of a million people. Charles O’Melia, a Professor of Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and chair of the award’s selection committee, said the extensive deployment of the filter was a key part in their decision.

When asked what his reaction was to receiving the prize, Dr Hussam said that, although he knew he might have a chance, it truly came as a surprise. It solicited a deluge of emails and cards from old colleagues, including his former advisor whose address he had long lost and who was now living in a retirement home.

What is perhaps most surprising of all, however, was his decision to give the entire million-dollar prize away. $250,000 will go to funding further research, including for use in the United States where some twenty-five million people drink water with elevated levels of arsenic. $50,000 will go to the University that made his research possible. The remaining $700,000 will go to building more filters, especially for the poor who are unable to purchase them for themselves.

His decision to give the money away stems, he says, from the values his father taught him and what he regards as the Islamic vision of science: “I see absolutely no conflict between faith and science.” But whereas many have written about the Islam and science discourse at the philosophical level of reason and revelation, for Dr. Hussam the harmony is straightforward. “The Islamic faith means helping people. The goal is the human good.”

I found that there are three roots of Muslim radicalism in Britain: existential conditions, religio-political discourse, and British and U.S. foreign policy.

There are more than 1.6 million Muslims in Britain-close to 3 percent of the population – and two-thirds of them are from South Asia. Muslims, the largest minority in Britain, are the poorest, least educated and most marginalized of all religious communities in Britain.

According to the 2001 census, only 25 percent of British Muslims are engaged in economic activity, less than 20 percent own their homes and nearly 30 percent are described as people with no qualifications. They live in poor housing and have a very high rate of unemployment.

There are alarmingly high levels of segregation between Muslims and non-Muslims and, to some extent, within Muslim groups too. In a heated argument over how to engage with the mainstream, a community leader expostulated to me, “Why do we need all this liberalism? Our people hardly see any goras (white people) in this area. They have no interaction with them for months.” Many British Muslims live in their own ethno-religious universes, not ghettoes. Ghetto implies merely physical segregation. What I witnessed was physical, economical, intellectual, social, cultural and political segregation.

Although physical isolation in the ghettoes does clearly contribute to cultural isolation and political anger, such is not the case everywhere. While Birmingham is a great example of the ills of ghettoes, Oxford is different. Muslims in Oxford are more integrated; five of them are in the city council and community members on the whole seem to be far less angry than those in Birmingham.

Most Muslims acknowledge that in spite of the racism, ethnic and religious discrimination, and Islamophobia they face everyday, particularly in the job market, they still find British society very open and tolerant. In response to my question about racism, an Oxford cabby of Pakistani descent remarked, “Sure there is discrimination bhai sahib [brother], but tell me, who is more racist than us?” He was referring to Muslim prejudice against the mainstream that contributes to self-isolation.

Many scholars whom I spoke to acknowledge that there is growing radicalization of Muslims in Britain. There was anger and frustration among the youth as they watched Israel bomb Lebanon into devastation with American support, and watch chaos reign in Iraq, which they blame on Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Muslim leaders repeatedly assert that as long as there are injustices being meted out to Muslims in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and elsewhere, as long as thousands of innocent Muslims are killed in invasions by Western powers, assisted or supported by Britain, the Muslim youth in Britain will remain angry and frustrated and lean more and more toward radical options.

Community leaders do not believe that rhetoric from angry radical Muslim intellectuals and imams has any significance, since they constitute a fringe minority. It is only the British media that pays them any attention, they say, because of some of their egregious statements. Muslim leaders place the blame for youth radicalization squarely on Tony Blair, who they say follows President Bush’s every lead on foreign policy without thought or criticism and often against the wishes of his own people and colleagues. It is Tony Blair, they say, and not Imam this or Imam that, who is primarily responsible for radicalizing Muslim youth in Britain.

My assessment of the British Muslim leadership is mixed. There are many young Muslim leaders who are successful, who understand and value the multiculturalism that has allowed them to thrive. They are opposed to extremism and racism, and are working hard to create a moderate and balanced Muslim community that fights Islamophobia and radicalism.

Then there is the traditional leadership with deep immigrant roots. They are estranged from the mainstream, have little access to media or government and do not have the linguistic ability to express and defend themselves. They are usually defined by the media, which often looks at them with a jaundiced eye. Some of these traditional leaders are politically liberal and forward looking, but unfortunately many of them are culturally isolationist and theologically conservative and politically Islamized. They live in denial. They do not recognize the threat of extremism and isolationism within the community. Their consciousness is entirely shaped by the geopolitics of Islam and the West. They are keeping the community theologically narrow and segregated from the mainstream. They are themselves marginal in their ability to influence things in Britain and keep their followers on the margins too.

In the absence of enlightened leadership, social alienation combined with anger at British and American foreign policies makes the community’s youth more and more amenable to the radical discourse coming from anti-Western imams and primes them for exploitation by al-Qaeda.

So far the British government has done little to address the problems of its Muslims or to find balance in its foreign policy. The Anglo-American war on terror has failed to diminish anti-American and anti-Western sentiment. On the contrary, misguided policies in Iraq and Lebanon have mainly angered and radicalized Muslims all over the world. Every time Blair says “aye aye” to Bush, some Muslim youth say “aye aye” to Bin Laden.
The British response is premised on a consistent denial that British foreign policy has any role whatsoever in radicalizing Muslims. No concerted effort has been made to address segregation, to empower the Muslim youth and to entice them out of their isolated universes.

Number 10 (the prime minister’s office) has tried to co-opt Muslim leadership by giving inordinate access to the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). The leadership of MCB has created an umbrella organization that can legitimately claim to represent British Muslims. However, their political liberalism is subverted by their theological conservatism; as a result, they are acutely alert to British policy errors but blind to the community’s failure to reform and keep abreast with modernity and with British mainstream society.

Ultimately MCB is failing because it cannot deliver. The British government wants support from Muslims for its foreign policy – MCB cannot deliver that. Muslims want significant changes in British foreign policy – MCB can talk to policymakers, but cannot influence or reshape it. It is a bridge that, at this moment, leads nowhere on either end.

Law enforcement methods alone can preempt terrorism but not address its root causes. They have to be accompanied by a systematic overhaul of domestic and foreign policy. America’s problem with Muslims worldwide is only its foreign policy. Britain’s problem, however, with its Muslim population is twofold – its domestic and foreign policy need urgent revision.

British Muslim leadership, too, must pull its head out of the sand and directly address its own singular obsession with foreign policy. Surely they do not wish to sacrifice the future of British Muslims for causes overseas.

Imaginations ran wild where spices were concerned. The most entertaining-as well as the most informative-versions are in Arabic. Sindbad the Sailor was more of a spice trader than a sailor, and his adventures took him to places that people only went when in pursuit of huge profit. Cloves and cinnamon were two of Sindbad’s most important cargoes around the 9th century. About 700 later, lives were still being staked in the quest for Asia’s most fabled wealth.

As the most respected spices were those that were hardest to obtain, a network of trade needed to be established. This was a prototype of the globalized world in which we now live. The main difference is, that in the past, it would only have been the highest level of society that ever saw the bounty of far-off lands. Nowadays, there are few people who do not own at least some molded plastic from China.

Among the earliest spice traders were Arabs. The importance of their merchandise was enormous. In the Middle East, especially, demand was great enough for spices to be mentioned frequently in the Old Testament. Joseph of the colorful coat was eventually bought by traders who were probably transporting spices. When the Queen of Sheba visited King Solomon, it was south Arabian spices that were her most welcome gifts.

In the Islamic world, people were not just traders in these commodities, they were also avid consumers. From the out- set, Islam emphasized cleanli- ness and hygiene. Luxury was not encouraged, and certainly not the hedonism of ancient Rome or Persia. Still, certain pleasures of the flesh have always been permitted within the official guidelines. People and food were allowed to look and smell good. This was an alien approach to most European societies at the dawn of Islam.
The Qur’an assures those who reach paradise that in addition to a fountain of camphor, they “will be given to drink a cup tempered with ginger.” Ginger and camphor are the two extremes of “hot” and “cold,” a concept explored thoroughly in Medicine of the Prophet, compiled by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawaziyya in the 14th century. Spices were clearly an essential part of early Islamic cuisine and have remained so ever since. The great Sufi master Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi used food as a metaphor in much of his philosophy and organized his dervish brotherhood around the kitchen. Among the spices that appear in his recipes are cumin, black pepper, cinnamon and sumac.

For Sufis in general, and Rumi in particular, food was filled with spiritual significance: “I was raw, I was cooked, I was burned.” For others it was merely filling. The enjoyment of food was a ceaseless quest, and even in Europe of the Dark Ages, chefs were preparing dishes for pleasure rather than for prolonging lives. The influence of Islamic Spain, and the booty of returning Crusaders, revived the gastronomic interest of Roman times. Arab merchants controlled most of this trade, and Arab travelers had some of the most interesting observations. During the 14th-century, Ibn Battuta spent an unhappy three years in southern India, Ceylon and the Maldives. The cause of his misery was the absence of bread: “…eating nothing but rice. I had to help it down with water.” The only consolation was the presence of spices in the pickles that accompanied his joyless repasts.

Spices changed every life they touched, and with greater availability after the 1 7th century, they touched a huge number of lives. As the mystery disappears, scientific discovery proves some of the qualities that were often attributed to spices in the past. Some of the world’s rarest produces have become among the most commonplace. There are a few exceptions, however. Saffron is still worth considerably more than its weight in gold. The most exotic manifestation of spices is now reserved for perfumes. Nina Ricci’s classic L’Air du Temps somehow seems more magical when it is revealed that there is bergamot, sandalwood and clove within, as well as the musk that was such a delight to the Prophet Muhammad. How they came to be there is very much a result of the Islamic world’s contribution to trade.

Before the birth of Islam, spices had been vital to southern Arabian commerce. The Romans had called this land Arabia Felix (“Fortunate Arabia”) because of its prodigious quantities of aromatics. Almost 4,000 years ago, caravans labored from the south of the peninsula to the north. Their cargo was deposited in entrepôts such as Petra or taken to the Mediterranean coast. The Incense Road was among the earliest known trade routes. India was also an essential destination for spice traders. The Romans took a keen interest in the Malabar coast, source of black pepper. They also learned to use the winds of the monsoon cycle. This enabled them to sail without the assistance of Arab middlemen, who had been the cause of much Roman dissatisfaction.
Since then, one stopping place has grown in significance to become the world’s most looked-to city-Mecca. The Prophet Muhammad was part of the Arabian trade route, having married the widow Khadija, a leading Meccan merchant. There are some doubts about exactly what types of goods were traded in Mecca, and the traditional assumption that it was spices has been challenged. One of the most sought aromatic was known as the “balsam of Mecca,” suggesting more than a passing acquaintance with that part of the peninsula. Unquestionably, the Prophet Muhammad would have encountered southern Arabian goods on his travels.

Many historians, such as the pivotal Montgomery Watt, see the development of Islam as a direct response to the social conditions caused by the spice trade. The inequalities that the Prophet Muhammad witnessed in Mecca would not have been possible in a nomadic tribal society. It was the breakdown of the earlier society caused by a mercantile economy that set the spread of Islam on its course. As the new empire grew in the 7th century, it remained inextricably linked to spices. With a spiritual element, commercial success was at last matched by social justice.

Trade opportunities developed as the Arab armies moved out of the peninsula. Their greatest coup came in 641, with the capture of Alexandria, the spice capital of the eastern Mediterranean. New mercantile centers rose and fell. Among the most important of these was Basra, in what is now southern Iraq. This city expanded from a garrison town to being one of the world’s largest metropolises in the 7th and 8th centuries. It was also the birthplace of one of Islam’s greatest writers, Al Jahiz. Despite spending decades in Baghdad, he clearly lost none of his loyalty to Basra, nor a sense of its trading purpose: “Our sea is worth all the others put together, for there is no other into which God has poured so many blessings.”

After the conquests of the Prophet Muhammad and his successors, trade between Europe and the Middle East became as rare as religious dialogue. Christendom sank into the Dark Ages; Islam entered its golden centuries of power and prosperity. From the European point of view, trade with the source of spices dried up, apart from dealings with itinerant Jewish merchants who were considered by Muslims and Christians to be just about acceptable.
While Europeans were doing their best to keep the Roman spirit of gastronomic diversity from dying completely, Muslim traders were venturing farther than ever in search of spices. Tales from the Thousand and One Nights show how far they got. Sindbad may have reached Japan. Closer to home, Ali Baba used the name of a spice to open the cave that housed the wealth of the 40 thieves.

Arab mariners covered vast distances. This was helped by their knowledge of the monsoon winds, which was far greater than the Romans’. The word for monsoon was itself derived from the Arabic word, mamsim, or “season.” Their most profitable destination was Southeast Asia, source of the most expensive of all spices and eventually to become a significant part of the Islamic world. Arab traders had been visiting the Malay Archipelago long before any part of the region had officially become Muslim. Visitors from other Muslim areas, including India and China, had also prepared the way for widespread conversion.

Muslims in the Middle Ages were engaged in more than just trading spices. The medical knowledge that came out of this period shows how important the use of these ingredients was. This extended far beyond the borders of the Islamic Empire. Arabic became the lingua franca of health, and medical treatises were read from northern Europe to Southeast Asia. The image of Islam was never higher than where medicine was involved. The contribution of the 10th-century writers Ibn Sina and Al-Zahrawi was vital to universal knowledge.

In addition to their literary gifts, the practical ability of Muslim physicians was much in demand, and the Persian polymath, Al-Razi, believed: “All that is written in a book is worth less than the experience of one doctor.” Much ofthat experience entailed knowledge of spices. Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and other famous writers were full of praise for everything from cloves to ginger. Later, less well-known authorities were also committed to the power of this medicine. In the 14th-century Rashid al-Din Fadlullah wrote to his son, the governor of Asia Minor, requesting wormwood, anise and agaric for use in his hospital in Tabriz. This facility was equipped with 1,000 Chinese jars, each one labeled with the names of medicinal syrups.

Armed conflict from the 11th-century onward may not have been the highpoint of Christian-Muslim relations, but the Crusades did at least open eyes on both sides to new trade possibilities. Europe had crawled out of the Dark Ages and was ready to improve its diet once again. The facilitator was Venice. Religious zeal on the Crusaders’ part had become such a minor consideration that in 1204, they took the Christian city of Constantinople rather than bothering with Jerusalem. The plan had been devised in Venice, and for the next 300 years, Venetians dominated trade with the Islamic world.

Venice was not alone; the Renaissance was also fuelled by the ports of Genoa, Pisa and Barcelona. Spices were the most popular import in this arrangement, followed by silk. From Europe came the less sensual pleasures of wool and iron. The leading mercantile empires of the Islamic world were the Ottomans and the Mamluks, both of which knew how to harness their economic might. In 1428, the Mamluk Sultan Barsbay is recorded as having imposed a personal monopoly on the pepper trade. As this was Europe’s favorite seasoning, consumers were displeased to find that the price had doubled. The later Mamluk Sultan Qaitbay was more conciliatory in sending the Doge of Venice precious spices, textiles, porcelain and, for unspecified purposes, a civet horn. A few decades later the Venetians reciprocated with gifts of glass, wool, fur, velvet and Parmesan cheese.

The event often thought to have put an end to Venice’s supremacy is the discovery of a sea route from Europe to Asia. With the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, Europe needed an alternative to the Asian overland route. Venice was always happy to deal with the highest bidder, but the Ottomans looked set to becoming a serious barrier. In fact, the new rulers of Constantinople turned out to be more commercially minded than expected. They went so far as to model their sultani gold coins to the same weight and fineness as the most internationally acceptable of all currency-the Venetian ducat.

Portugal was the pioneer in finding a route that would benefit neither the Venetians nor the Turks. In 1498, Vasco da Gama arrived at the Indian kingdom of Calicut. He returned with the ultimate prize of cloves, ginger, cinnamon and pepper. In the short run, this was unfortunate for Venice and the Muslim rulers who controlled the overland routes. The price of pepper in Venice ended up being several times higher than in Portugal, where huge savings were made on taxes at the cost of innumerable mariners’ lives. As the Spanish were also prepared to sacrifice sailors in the cause of cheaper spices, they successfully joined the spice race with Portugal. However, their interests lay more to the West than the East, bringing back previously unknown comestibles such as chocolate and vanilla from the New World, “discovered” by Christopher Columbus in 1492. The findings of Gavin Menzies in his book, 1421: The Year China Discovered America, have aroused strong passions for the suggestion that the Americas were first explored by a Muslim. The 1421 proposal has been abandoned by most scholars, but at least the intrepid Admiral Zheng He is receiving much more attention than he used to for visiting the Malay Peninsula.

Even with the overland route bypassed by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English, a considerable portion of the spice trade was still in Muslim hands. Many of the destinations from which these cargoes came were Muslim, including the most important components of the Spice Islands: Ternate and Tidore. These two islands, mentioned in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, were at one time the only source the world had for clove and nutmeg. Having taken over the area, the Portuguese created a legacy of bad feeling that was continued by the Dutch in their ruthless harvesting of these crops.

Muslim traders were also busy wherever they could avoid the risk of being blasted out of the water by European ships in bitter competition or exercising their monopolies in Southeast Asia. Most of the spice trade was water-borne, although the land route continued to exist. After the initial euphoria over Portugal’s new sea route, complaints about the quality of their cargoes came in. Venice once again prospered, dealing with whichever Muslim rulers were amenable. In the 15th-century, there was considerable trade with the Ottomans, including records of the business of Count Giacomo Badoer, who bartered large amounts of Florentine cloth for spices and incense. The Genoese were especially active in importing saffron and sesame from what was then known as “Turchia.” More surprisingly, the return journey included soap from Europe-a luxury that was not widely associated with Europeans at that time.
The spice route through the Ottoman Empire remained intact for many centuries after the Portuguese discoveries in Asia. In the late 18th-century, Istanbul still controlled a vast amount of trade. A French observer calculated imports from the East at around 5 million piasters, of which “spices and drugs” accounted for 280,000, and pepper 120,000.

Business was by no means a one-way street. Among the most unlikely imports into the Ottoman Empire was coffee. This had originally been introduced into the West by the Turks, but later shortages forced them to buy French coffee from the West Indies. Other reversals occurred with products such as indigo, once an Indian monopoly and then exported from America to Asia. Despite these aberrations, there was still approximately 10 times the volume of goods going from East to West than the other way around. Not much has changed over the centuries. According to U.N. figures, Indonesia is the major exporter of spices, followed by India, China, Madagascar and Malaysia. The total revenue of these five countries is well over U.S.$1 billion, so it is still a market of some importance. It is also clear that Muslim communities are still very much a part of the business.

The exhibition “Spice Journeys: Taste and Trade in the Islamic World” was held at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia from January to April 2007.