American Muslims and Kamala Harris

Shafiq R · January 29, 2019 · 18 comments

The number of Democrats who have thrown their hats in to run as President has already approached double digits or crossed it; its difficult to keep tab. So far the most impressive launch was Kamala Harris, who declared from a huge rally in her homeground, Oakland, California. It’s not hard to see more than a similarity with another hugely famous biracial candidate, Barak Obama, who declared in his homeground Illinois with much fanfare.

Everybody understands that Kamala Harris will be a formidable candidate. Apart from all her personal and professional qualifications, liberal America may just want to recitify the Trump presidency with another emphatic progressive statement.

However, for now I am curious about how Muslims in America will regard Kamala Harris. I find it interesting that several Muslims media personalities have been twitting about Harris with barely disguised antipathy and are quickly delving into oppo research of Harris’s background.

Ofcourse, any sober political observer understands that people like Mehdi Hassan are fanatics who cares for only one issue, how good is the candidate for global Muslims and the way to judge that is probably position on Israeli-Palestine issue. But I believe people like Mehdi Hassan and his cohort do not move in own ways. These guys either coordinate intesely or their ideological lodestar acts as an Schelling point for coordination.

I am curious to see if general American Muslims show hesitancy about Kamala Harris. If they do, what could be reason for such luckwarmth?

 

(Machine) Learning Biases

Omar Ali · January 28, 2019 · 4 comments

Cross posting from Ali Minai’s excellent “Barbarikon” blog (this is, of course, Ali Minai’s writing, not mine)

 In a recent tweet, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – widely known as AOC – responded to a report from Amazon that facial recognition technology sometimes identified women as men when they have darker skin. She said:

“When you don’t address human bias, that bias gets automated. Machines are reflections of their creators, which means they are flawed, & we should be mindful of that. It’s one good reason why diversity isn’t just “nice,” it’s a safeguard against trends like this”

While I agree with the sentiment underlying her tweet, she is profoundly wrong about what is at play here, which can happen when you apply your worldview (i.e. biases) to things you’re not really familiar with. To be fair, we all do it, but here it is AOC, who is an opinion-maker and should be more careful. The error she makes here, though, is an interesting one, and get to some deep issues in AI.

The fact that machine learning algorithms misclassify people with respect to gender, or even confuse them with animals, is not because they are picking up human biases as AOC claims here. In fact, it because they are not picking up human biases – those pesky intuitions gained from instinct and experience that allow us to perceive subtle cues and make correct decisions. The machine, lacking both instinct and experience, focuses only on visual correlations in the data used to train it, making stupid errors such as relating darker skin with male gender. This is also why machine learning algorithms end up identifying humans as apes, dogs, or pigs – with all of whom humans do share many visual similarities. As humans, we have a bias to look past those superficial similarities in deciding whether someone is a human. Indeed, it is when we decide to override our natural biases and sink (deliberately) to the same superficial level as the machine that we start calling people apes and pigs. The errors being made by machines do not reflect human biases; they expose the superficial and flimsy nature of human bigotry.

There is also a deeper lesson in this for humans as well. Our “good” biases are not all just coded in our genes. They are mostly picked up through experience. When human experience becoming limited, we can end up having the same problem as the machine. If a human has never seen a person of a race other than their own, it is completely natural for them to initially identify such a person as radically different or even non-human. That is the result of a bias in the data (experience, in this case), not a fundamental bias in the mind. This is why travelers in ancient times brought back stories of alien beings in distant lands, which were then exaggerated into monstrous figures on maps etc. This situation no longer exists in the modern world, except when humans try to create it artificially through racist policies.

The machine too is at the mercy of data bias, but its situation is far worse than that of a human. Even if it is given an “unbiased” data set that includes faces of all races, genders, etc., fairly, it is being asked to learn to recognize gender (in this instance) purely from pictures. We recognize gender not only from a person’s looks, but also from how they sound, how they behave, what they say, their name, their expressions, and a thousand other things. We deprive the machine of all this information and then ask it to make the right choice. That is a huge data bias, comparable to learning about the humanity of people from distant lands through travelers’ tales. On top of that, the machine also has much simpler learning mechanisms. It is simply trying to minimize its error based on the data it was given. Human learning involves much more complicated things that we cannot even fully describe yet except in the most simplistic or metaphorical terms.

The immediate danger in handing over important decision-making to intelligent machines is not so much that they will replicate human bigotries, but that,within their limited capacities and limited data, they will fail to replicate the biases that make us fair, considerate, compassionate, and, well, human.

‘In the milk of OBCs and Dalits, Muslims have added sugar’

X.T.M · January 28, 2019 · 4 comments

Catch our latest Episode 10 of BrownCast on Libsyn, iTunes and Stitcher. 

Back to the Post. I was thinking that usually Jinnah (I prefer to use QeA but this time I’ll dispense with honorifics) is contrasted with Nehru or Mahatma Gandhi. Nevertheless a better basis of comparison would be Ambedkar.

When All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen President Asaduddin Owaisi, MP, and Bharip Bahujan Mahasangh leader Prakash Ambedkar addressed a rally in Aurangabad on Gandhi Jayanti, it marked a milestone in contemporary Indian politics.

It was the first time a Dalit party has tied up with a Muslim outfit.

In pre-Partition India, Muslim League leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah understood the power of this vote bank and quickly latched on to the idea of separate electorates when the British proposed it.

But the plan came a cropper when the more astute Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi convinced Dr B R Ambedkar that separate electorates were not the way forward and sealed the Poona Pact.

Then in the 1980s, Kanshi Ram realised the potential of Dalit votes and went on to form the Bahujan Samaj Party. It reached its zenith under his chosen successor Mayawati, a four time chief minister of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh.

See Also: Pakistan’s Forgotten Dalit Minority

Continue reading ‘In the milk of OBCs and Dalits, Muslims have added sugar’

Why doesn’t Arundhati Roy move to Pakistan?

X.T.M · January 28, 2019 · 16 comments

Catch our latest Episode 10 of BrownCast on Libsyn, iTunes and Stitcher. 

Back to the Post:

The Short Answer is that Indians have Privilege and Pakistanis do not. Omar has a tweet to that effect that I couldn’t find but explained it very well.

I was inspired to write this by VijayVan‘s important comment:

When people like Audrey Truschke are denied visas instead of being called to festivals, then the coloniser will be reticent .

Vidhi and I were listening to Arundhati Roy the other day. She was so spectacular and brilliant in her eloquence; I genuinely began to believe that India was simply one large casteocracry.

Then clarity hit me and I asked Vidhi that why hadn’t Arundhati said anything about Pakistan. The greatest moral question in the Subcontinent is the near martyrdom of Hazrat Asia by Holy Pedophile’s orc armies. Continue reading Why doesn’t Arundhati Roy move to Pakistan?

the British “created” India according to this Coloniser

X.T.M · January 27, 2019 · 25 comments

I observe a moratorium on all electronics between dinner and bedtime but I’ve commandeered V’s laptop (with her permission) to express my profound outrage. I’m also sorry to detract attention from the excellent Episode 10.

I am reading “The Shortest History of Germany” by James Hawes and on page 13:

“Rather like the British in India, the Romans in Germany found a patchwork of warring statelets and imposed upon it, for their own convenience, the notion of a single vast Nation. Like the British, they then created for this invented land a class of semi-acculturated leaders from whom they expected loyalty.”

I just tweeted him this link but this coloniser has no shame in writing such ahistorical filth and must be called out. Any reading of Indian history shows that there has always been an intrinsic geographic identity that stems back as far as IVC and that centralised authority has existed twice (in the Maurya dynasty and the Mughals) pre-British (I was going through the Numismatics podcasts). Continue reading the British “created” India according to this Coloniser

Brown Pundits BrownCast episode 10, with Josiah Neeley

Razib Khan · January 27, 2019 · 3 comments

The latest BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, iTunes and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above. You can also support the podcast as a patron (the primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than everyone else).

Continue reading Brown Pundits BrownCast episode 10, with Josiah Neeley

Watching Shtisel.. (and Turkish TV)

Omar Ali · January 27, 2019 · 1 comment

We have been watching the Israeli TV serial “Shtisel” the last few days  (it is available on Netflix). I find the availability of foreign serials on Netflix a very good development; We watched Yunus Emre (a Turkish serial about the Turkish Sufi poet; a sort of less famous Rumi) and enjoyed it.  Turkish serials have good production values, though the propaganda requirements of modern Turkey can be heavy handed (and therefore the depictions of 13th Century Turks are likely to be not even close to accurate), but even so, at least they shed light on what contemporary Turkish media mavens regard as desirable. Yunus Emre is about “spiritual” matters, so the propaganda is not a huge issue (no more than what it would be in a Western production), but it is a much bigger element in Ertrugul.. another series worth sampling (though it is extremely long, so don’t even try to watch it all). The propaganda in this series completely dominates any actual historical record that may be buried under it. Still, at least one can see what kind of founding myth the neo-Ottomans want to project (short version: The torch of Islamdom is passed to the vigorous (though as yet insignificant) Ottomans as the Seljuks and others are falling to the Mongols and the vicious conspiracies of the Crusaders; the spiritual side of this great clash is being handled by Ibn ul Arabi on the Islamic side and the Templar Grand Master on the Christian side). 

Shtisel is far closer to reality than either of the Turkish serials I mentioned (it is also set in contemporary times, so that makes a difference, though the Turkish serials set in current times are much more crudely propagandistic as well). I have never been to Israel and don’t know a lot about the Haredi community, but what little I know (mostly from reading the news and from conversations with a couple of Israeli colleagues), this seems to be a very realistic (and very sympathetic) portrayal of this ultra-orthodox community. Some of the subtler plot elements may be missed by viewers who have no knowledge of Israeli society, but maybe the serial will be gateway to learning more?

I have only seen about 6 episodes, so I have no idea how it holds up later.. still, check it out.

1857: The Central Indian Campaign

Omar Ali · January 27, 2019 · 5 comments

This is a chapter from Major Amin’s history of the Sepoy Rebellion (“The Sepoy Rebellion Reinterpreted“). The formatting needs work, but I wanted to post it anyway just to give readers an idea of the kind of campaigning that took place in that region. For a quick overview of the entire rebellion, see here. 

CENTRAL INDIA CAMPAIGN ; A SMALL AFFAIR APART FROM MUCH RHETORIC

Chapter Seven: The Central India Campaign 1857-1859

Maj (Retd) AGHA HUMAYUN AMIN

The Central India Campaign was fought over the widest area in terms of length and breadth as compared to all the other campaigns of 1857. It took the British longer in terms of time to suppress the rebellion in Central India as compared to all other regions involved in the rebellion. Yet the Central India Campaign in terms of forces involved and casualties suffered was only a very minor campaign of the Sepoy Rebellion. The smallest number of units of Bengal Army were actively involved in this campaign, as far as the Sepoys were concerned. The conflict in Central India was a minor one because nothing strategic was at stake. The Bengal Army before the outbreak of the rebellion had a sizable strength in Central India in terms of number of units. However as soon as these units rebelled most of them marched towards Delhi because Delhi was the most popular point of concentration of the Bengal Army Rebels. Some units however did march to Cawnpore, Kalpi or to Banda. Banda was the hot choice because of the prospects of looting. The Nawab of Banda who had rebelled was active in looting and his leadership inspired many rebels to go to Banda. Three units of infantry entered Central India because of geographical compulsions. These were led by the indomitable Hindu Rajput Talukdar Kanwar Singh and came to Central India because they could not move to the north because of the Ganges River and because of proximity of European units who were marching on the main Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Benares.

The Central India Campaign however was significant because of presence of three charismatic figures who caused a lot of trouble to the British. There were the Rani of Jhansi a Hindu contemporary of Hazrat Mahal of Lucknow, Tantia Topi the only sepoy leader who executed an offensive plan of strategic level to sever the British Army’s communications with Calcutta and Feroz Shah a Mughal Prince who fought valiantly and also later on managed to escape and survive the rebellion by almost twenty years. The Rani we admire because although a woman by sex she was more of a man than most of our worthy feudals whose grandsons later on became our Prime Ministers and Chief Ministers! Tantia Topi we admire because without any formal military education or background he did at least effectively and physically threaten the British communications. Something in which our Generals Rajinder Prasad and Nasir Ahmed Khan  years later failed miserably despite possessing much more in terms of education, manpower and material superiority ! Feroz Shah we admire because despite being a Muslim he inspired many Hindus to fight for a just cause at a time when Muslims in Muslim majority areas were soldiering for a foreign nation ! After the failure of the rebellion he also made many attempts to convince Muslim Kings of “martial races” like Afghanistan or Iran to resist the British. But all praise to General Nott and Pollock, the lesson taught by them to the Afghans in 1842 in the Grand Bazar of Kabul was too hard to forget. And that handsome subsidy of Rs. 12 lakh the Afghan King was getting was so hard to refuse !!

INITIAL DEVELOPMENT OF TROOPS

Various Bengal Army troops and princely state contingents were present in Central India and Western Rajputana in 1857. We have included the following areas in Central India for the purposes of analysis / discussion:– (1) Central India Agency comprising various princely states in the area between Narbadda River and Jumna River. (2) The Southern and Eastern Rajputana area of Ajmer Jodhpur Tonk etc. (3) The Bundelkhand, Saugor and Narbadda territories. Rough deployment of various units and contingents was as following356 : a. Bengal Army Infantry:- (1) 12 NI -Wing each at Jhansi and Nowgong. (2) 15 NI -Naseerabad (3) 30 NI -Naseerabad (4) 72 NI -Nimach (5) 23 NI -Mhow (6) 31 NI -Saugor (7) 42 NI -Jubbulpur (8) 52 NI -Jubbulpur (9) 50 NI -Nagode b. Bengal Army Cavalry (1) 1 LC -Wing each at Mhow and Nimach. (2) 14 Irregular Cavalry – Wing each at Jhansi and Nowgong. (3) 3rd Irregular Cavalry- Saugor. c. Gwalior Contingent (8318 men) (1) Infantry-Seven Regiments at Gwalior, Goonah, Sipri, Nimach etc. (2) Cavalry-Two Regiments. (3) Artillery-Four Field Batteries and a Light Siege Train. c. Jodhpur Contingent. A Composite Force of infantry, cavalry and artillery comprising approximately three Troops of Cavalry, eleven Companies of Infantry, and two Nine Pounder Camel Guns stationed at Erinpura in Jodhpur State. Cavalry entirely Hindustani Muslim/Ranghar/Kaimkhani Muslim and eight Infantry companies out of the total entirely consisting of Hindustanis. d. Malwa Contingent. Similar to Jodhpur Contingent. e. Other Contingents. There were similar other but smaller contingents of other states like Jaipur State Troops and Kotah Contingent.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE REBELLION IN CENTRAL INDIA AND RAJPUTANA

On 28 May 1857 the sepoys at Nasirabad comprising of 15 and 30 NI regiments rebelled, killed their British officers and after plundering the town marched towards Delhi. In Central India the initial development of the rebellion was slower than Eastern Rajputana. Here on 9 June the Malwa contingent rebelled and on 14 June the Gwalior contingent rebelled at Gwalior and Sipri. The wings of 12 NI and 14 Irregular cavalry stationed at Jhansi and Nowgong rebelled on 6th and 9th June respectively. On 1st of July the Indore contingent rebelled. The Indore contingent was soon joined by the Bhopal contingent comprising mostly Pathans and some Hindustanis. However most of its Sikh troops who constituted a minority stayed loyal. The Begum of Bhopal like the Rani of Jhansi was a woman, but was made of the same passive fibre as most of the Muslim Hindu and Sikh Feudals of that era. Thus she stayed loyal to the British. The 23 NI and the wing of 1st Light Cavalry stationed at Mhow rebelled on 1st July and marched towards Gwalior on the Grand Trunk Road. They reached Gwalior on 31st of July 1857 and from here marched to Delhi via Agra. The 23 NI and 1st Light Cavalry sepoys played an important role in reviving the spirits of the Gwalior contingent troops who after their initial rebellion on 14 June had subsequently become very demoralized because of clever propaganda by their ruler the Sindhia who was secretly in League with the British at Agra. Another factor in the earlier demoralization of the Gwalior contingent troops stationed at Gwalior was the arrival of remnants of the 6th Infantry Regiment of Gwalior contingent who had earlier rebelled at Lalitpur and had joined the Nana Sahib at Cawnpore. These troops withdrew from Cawnpore to Gwalior after having been routed by General Havelock in July 1857. Anyhow after 31 July the Gwalior Contingent troops gained greater resolution, thanks to successful exhortation by the 23 NI and 1st Light Cavalry who stopped at Gwalior on their way to Delhi for a few days.

Meanwhile following was the situation in eastern half of Central India: – a. The 42 NI and 3rd Irregular Cavalry stationed at Saugor rebelled on 1st July. The 31 NI stationed at Saugor however remained loyal. The 3rd Irregular Cavalry and the 42 NI for some time marched around Saugor looting and plundering but finally they marched towards Banda which they reached around September 1857. Here they joined the Nawab of Banda who had declared himself independent in the aftermath of a rebellion led by sepoys of the detachment of 1st NI stationed at Banda on 14 June 1857. (Subsequently they went to Kalpi)

Prince Ferozeshah who had gone to Mecca for Haj in 1857 meanwhile was in Central India after returning via the port of Surat. Ferozeshah was in area inhabited mostly by Hindus and had no army. It is an irony of history that the two finest Muslim military commanders Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan offered the toughest resistance to the British despite the fact that they were ruling a Hindu majority state. This clearly proves that it is not mere majority in population but superiority in terms of quality of leadership which is the deciding factor. On the other hand we see that many Muslim majority areas were rendered impotent merely because of absence of good leadership. Ferozeshah managed to reach Mandesar in Gwalior state territory with some followers. He was still wearing the ahram which pilgrims on Haj wear. He reached Mandesar on 26 August 1857. There was a detachment of Gwalior troops stationed here. These being mostly Hindus but from Northwest province immediately joined Ferozeshah and raised the standard of revolt in Mandesar ! Continue reading 1857: The Central Indian Campaign

Notes on Brown Pundits “BrownCast”

Razib Khan · January 26, 2019 · 1 comment

I’ll be interviewing my friend Josiah Neeley tomorrow about politics and policy in Trump’s America. Since this is Brown Pundits my outline has a lot of brown-themed questions, but we’ll range. If you are reading this before ~2 PM PDT feel free to drop-in questions. Josiah’s podcast, Urbane Cowboys, has had several brown people on. Of these, three are Bengali American. Myself, Reihan Salam, and Avik Roy.

On Sunday I’ll be talking to Carl Zha, who produces the popular CLASH! podcast. Feel free to suggest questions for Carl.

To paid-up patrons: I am posting the podcasts ahead of time on the patron page. These two podcasts won’t drop until February, so if you want to hear them earlier, you know how. I’ve already posted Zach’s podcast on Indian numismatics. That will probably drop tomorrow or Sunday, when Zach writes up some show-notes and pushes it live.

Indian Numismatics Browncast Podcast Coming Up –

X.T.M · January 24, 2019 · 8 comments

Mohit Kapoor and I just completed a podcast on Indian Numismatics (study of coins). It was probably one of the most interesting and informative discussions I’ve ever had.

It’s all the topics we love to talk about in Brown Pundits (language, religion, history, geography and identity) in a concise, factual and precise manner as per Mohit.

I’m very excited about this podcast since it was fairly well-structured and Mohit’s a really good explainer. It’s obvious from his “nooks” of information that he just throws at us the listeners (all of them fascinating) that we are going to have to re-examine this topic time and time again.

There’s something in it for the Mughalists and there’s also stuff there about the Guptas, which was controversial but sort of also expected. I don’t want to reveal too much about it just yet but I did mention time and time again how much I was learning on the podcast; my excitement was palpable and at some times I was simply astonished at the might and majesty of the Empire.

I’m going to release show notes with this as well but there are several blog posts worth of information on the podcast. As one can see I’m quite proud of this one; fingers crossed all the technical details work out!

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