Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
This week, three events — the continuing political brawl over Donald Trump‘s indecent assault on the grieving parents of an American war hero, who was a Muslim; the death of one of the world’s leading scientists, who was a Muslim; and a new intervention by Pope Francis in defense of the Muslim community — all challenge the narrative that reduces Muslim identity to acts of terror.
As a new poll shows that 7 out of 10 Americans view Trump as “out of bounds” in his attack on the parents of Humayun Khan, the Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq, Dean Obeidallah is happily surprised that “the Khans were not viewed by our fellow Americans as Muslims, immigrants or in any way as foreigners. Rather, they were viewed as Americans who had lost a son while fighting heroically for the United States of America.” We also report on a new documentary in the works about Muslims in the U.S. military.
Turk Pipkin eulogizes Ahmed Zewail, the Egyptian-born Muslim scientist and the first Arab to have been awarded a Nobel Prize in science, who died this week. Zewail became a dual Egyptian-American citizen and taught at the California Institute of Technology for four decades. In recent years, he realized his lifelong dream of establishing the Zewail City of Science and Technology in Cairo, an institution he envisioned as a sort of MIT for the Middle East. As Pipkin notes, Zewail believed the message of Islam was to live peacefully with others and seek knowledge. “The binding force of science is its common language extending rational thinking across borders, cultures and religions to the benefit of all,” Pipkin quotes Zewail as saying.
In a blurb for his last book, “Reflections on World Affairs: Peace and Politics,” I wrote:
Ahmed Zewail is a rare individual indeed. His remarkable scope ranges from exploring the minutest interactions of particles to engaging the complexity of global politics and culture to pondering the far reaches of the universe. His unique qualities as a foundational scientist with a strong moral voice recalls other great figures of the past, such as Albert Einstein, whose clarity of mind and deeply humane nobility of spirit the world today so sorely lacks.
Writing from Italy, theologian Massimo Faggioli reflects on Pope Francis’ declaration this week that it is wrong to identify Islam with violence. “With his words,” says Faggioli, “Francis keeps the church, and the entire Western world, safe from the abyss that would open up in the event of a theological retaliation on global Islam — which remains to be the primary victim of terrorism worldwide.” In an earlier commentary in The WorldPost, Akbar Ahmed traced the long history of Muslim contributions in Europe.
Writing from Paris, philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy wants to end the media’s “mixture of trivialization and glorification” of terrorists and relegate them to “the obscurity of their own infamy.”
Writing from Germany, Elif Zehra Kandemir is offended that so many Germans see Turkish immigrants who opposed the recent coup as sympathizers of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan instead of as defenders of democracy. Yusuf Muftuoglu, a top advisor to former Turkish President Abdullah Gul, laments how, once again, the West fails to understand reality on the ground in Turkey in the wake of last month’s coup attempt. WorldPost Fellow Jesselyn Cook reports on an unusual protest in Iran — men donned women’s hijabs to challenge the compulsory veiling law.
This week, Yuriko Koike was the first woman to be elected governor of Tokyo. As the world’s largest city gears up for the 2020 Olympics, which it will host, Koike sees a new future rooted in her favorite period of the past — “the Tokyo of 1900, when the city stood for Asian modernity after a millennium of being overshadowed by the West.”
Writing from Manila, Richard Javad Heydarian worries that new divisions in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations over how to deal with China as it lashes out over a United Nations tribunal ruling against its claims in the South China Sea could spell the institution’s demise. “For now,” he says, “it seems that not only has China managed to tame the response of the international community, but ASEAN itself also has missed a historic opportunity to reassert any semblance of relevance in the South China Sea. Failing to embrace wholesale institutional innovation, the only way forward is ‘ASEAN minilateralism,’ where likeminded and influential countries in the region coordinate their diplomatic and strategic calculations vis-à-vis the South China Sea disputes.”
Writing from Shanghai, philosopher Bai Tongdong recalls an ancient rebellion against the opening up to the world of the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States periods (roughly from 770 B.C.E. to 221 B.C.E.) in China and compares it to the anti-globalization backlash today seen in the Brexit and the Trump campaign.
With China’s accelerating economic slowdown and the consequent drop in global commodity prices, Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden see an end to the China-Africa honeymoon of recent years. Steven Hoffer reports on a novel transportation solution in China that is now operational: a bus that travels over traffic along side rails on either side of congested highways.
As the Olympics get underway in Rio, Chandran Nair writes from Hong Kong that the Olympic Committee seems to favor sports of the developed world in the international competition, such as golf and basketball, while ignoring the champions of globally popular sports like squash. Reporting from Recife, Brazil, Poppie Mphuthing profiles a clinic that treats up to 15 children a day with microcephaly linked to the Zika virus.
Writing from Bastoy Island, Norway, Baz Dreisinger visits a prison that demonstrates that treating prisoners as human beings works. “Treat people like dirt, and they will be dirt,” she quotes the prison governor as saying. “Treat them like human beings, and they will act like human beings.”
Our Singularity series this week examines how poor countries are leaping over the need for fossil fuels by pioneering new renewable energy technologies.
WHO WE ARE
EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost’s news coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.
CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul.
EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).
VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.
The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.
Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the “whole mind” way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.
ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council — as well as regular contributors — to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.
From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.
MISSION STATEMENT
The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.
We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.
