Humanity! Know the Source of HisStory! Melanated People, Claim YOUR LEGACY

 The African Enlightenment

The highest ideals of Locke, Hume and Kant were first proposed more than a century earlier by an Ethiopian in a cave

Near Lalibela, in northern Ethiopia, the location of Zera Yacob’s cave

Beloveds~
Below I share another wonderful gem from my homepage website, Art & Letters Daily.  If you like news from all over the globe, and if you like thought provoking articles, reviews of books, and essays, then you must visit this website Arts & Letters Daily.

I love them because they always have some very interesting pieces that deepen my understanding of the many great contributions from people of African descent to humanity. Too often the Euro-centric perspective of academia and contemporary media, act as if philosophy and creative excellence began and was developed in Europe. Even today, the perspective of these two elements, like to volley 'greatness' between Europe and America as to what is established as noteworthy when discussing excellence, power and art.


I've shared great articles, essays and reviews of books on our authors, scientists, political and cultural leaders with my email family. What's unique about this site is that it draws phenomenal material from a wealth of different literary sources. It's not overly technical or academic, but it is for the person that enjoys using their grey matter, and for those that love to read as a path to discovery and acquiring revelations about Life. And there's a great list of international newspapers, and media outlets so you've got a wide range of sources, to help you define what is 'fake news' that Fox or CNN or NBC might be shoving down our throats. Do check it out.

As the US offers time to reflect on Black History Month (laughable) in February, let this offering deepen love of Self, and fortify the bonds of the excellent gifts of the past, that your Life embody in this moment. Your unique qualities are called to respond to the moment. The clarity, open-mindedness, and creative imagination that focuses on great(er) expectations because we KNOW what absolute wholeness feels like, and we sense what it might look like from OUR perspective. And OUR PERSPECTIVE is VALID and worthy of our honoring what our Hearts KNOW. 

So we focus not on the antics of clowns, buffoons and ignorant fakers, but on Being the place where the dreams of our imagination, and delightful new possibilities coagulate. Focusing inwardly, we keep our minds on ONE SPOT, OUR IDEAL, and work and watch as IT takes form as new expressions of our living in the flow of unlimited Good in 2018.
And So It IS~


As always, I deeply appreciate any Comments, Feedback or Additions to the topic.
lovu,
Kendke

https://aeon.co/essays/yacob-and-amo-africas-precursors-to-locke-hume-and-kant
This article is written by~

Dag Herbjørnsrud

is a historian of ideas and founder of SGOKI (the Center for Global and Comparative History of Ideas) in Oslo. His latest book is Global Knowledge: Renaissance for a New Enlightenment, forthcoming (2016 original in Norwegian).

The ideals of the Enlightenment are the basis of our democracies and universities in the 21st century: belief in reason, science, skepticism, secularism, and equality. In fact, no other era compares with the Age of Enlightenment. Classical Antiquity is inspiring, but a world away from our modern societies. The Middle Ages was more reasonable than its reputation, but still medieval. The Renaissance was glorious, but largely because of its result: the Enlightenment. The Romantic era was a reaction to the Age of Reason – but the ideals of today’s modern states are seldom expressed in terms of romanticism and emotion. Immanuel Kant’s argument in the essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795) that ‘the human race’ should work for ‘a cosmopolitan constitution’ can be seen as a precursor for the United Nations.


As the story usually goes, the Enlightenment began with René Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (1637), continuing on through John Locke, Isaac Newton, David Hume, Voltaire and Kant for around one and a half centuries, and ending with the French Revolution of 1789, or perhaps with the Reign of Terror in 1793. By the time that Thomas Paine published The Age of Reason in 1794, that era had reached its twilight. Napoleon was on the rise.


But what if this story is wrong? What if the Enlightenment can be found in places and thinkers that we often overlook? Such questions have haunted me since I stumbled upon the work of the 17th-century Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob (1599-1692), also spelled Zära Yaqob.


Yacob was born on 28 August 1599 into a rather poor family on a farm outside Axum, the legendary former capital in northern Ethiopia. At school he impressed his teachers, and was sent to a new school to learn rhetoric (siwasiw in Geéz, the local language), poetry and critical thinking (qiné) for four years. Then he went to another school to study the Bible for 10 years, learning the teachings of the Catholics and the Copts, as well as the country’s mainstream Orthodox tradition. (Ethiopia has been Christian since the early 4th century, rivalling Armenia as the world’s oldest Christian nation.)


In the 1620s, a Portuguese Jesuit convinced King Susenyos to convert to Catholicism, which soon became Ethiopia’s official religion. Persecution of free thinkers followed suit, intensifying from 1630. Yacob, who was teaching in the Axum region, had declared that no religion was more right than any other, and his enemies brought charges against him to the king.


Yacob fled at night, taking with him only some gold and the Psalms of David. He headed south to the region of Shewa, where he came upon the Tekezé River. There he found an uninhabited area with a ‘beautiful cave’ at the foot of a valley. Yacob built a fence of stones, and lived in the wilderness to ‘front only the essential facts of life’, as Henry David Thoreau was to describe a similar solitary life a couple of centuries later in Walden (1854).


For two years, until the death of the king in September 1632, Yacob remained in the cave as a hermit, visiting only the nearby market to get food. In the cave, he developed his new, rationalist philosophy. He believed in the supremacy of reason, and that all humans – male and female – are created equal. He argued against slavery, critiqued all established religions and doctrines, and combined these views with a personal belief in a theistic Creator, reasoning that the world’s order makes that the most rational option.


In short: many of the highest ideals of the later European Enlightenment had been conceived and summarised by one man, working in an Ethiopian cave from 1630 to 1632. Yacob’s reason-based philosophy is presented in his main work, Hatäta (meaning ‘the enquiry’). The book was written down in 1667 on the insistence of his student, Walda Heywat, who himself wrote a more practically oriented Hatäta. Today, 350 years later, it’s hard to find a copy of Yacob’s book. The only translation into English was done in 1976, by the Canadian professor and priest Claude Sumner. He published it as part of a five-volume work on Ethiopian philosophy, with the far-from-commercial Commercial Printing Press in Addis Ababa. The book has been translated into German, and last year into Norwegian, but an English version is still basically unavailable.

Ethiopia was no stranger to philosophy before Yacob. Around 1510, the Book of the Wise Philosophers was translated and adapted in Ethiopia by the Egyptian Abba Mikael. It is a collection of sayings from the early Greek Pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle via the neo-Platonic dialogues, and is also influenced by Arabic philosophy and the Ethiopian discussions. In his Hatäta, Yacob criticises his contemporaries for not thinking independently, but rather accepting the claims of astrologers and soothsayers just because their predecessors did so. As a contrast, he recommends an enquiry based on scientific rationality and reason – as every human is born with intelligence and is of equal worth.


Far away, grappling with similar questions, was Yacob’s French contemporary Descartes (1596-1650). A major philosophical difference is that the Catholic Descartes explicitly denounced ‘infidels’ and atheists, whom he called ‘more arrogant than learned’ in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). This perspective is echoed in Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), which concludes that atheists ‘are not at all to be tolerated’. Descartes’s Meditations was dedicated to ‘the dean and doctors of the sacred Faculty of Theology in Paris’, and his premise was ‘to accept by means of faith the fact that the human soul does not perish with the body, and that God exists’.


In contrast, Yacob shows a much more agnostic, secular and enquiring method – which also reflects an openness towards atheistic thought. Chapter four of the Hatäta starts with a radical question: ‘Is everything that is written in the Holy Scriptures true?’ He goes on to point out that all the different religions claim theirs is the true faith:

Indeed each one says: ‘My faith is right, and those who believe in another faith believe in falsehood, and are the enemies of God.’ … As my own faith appears true to me, so does another one find his own faith true; but truth is one.

In this way, Yacob opens up an enlightened discourse on the subjectivity of religion, while still believing in some kind of universal Creator. His discussion of whether or not there is a God is more open-minded than Descartes’s, and possibly more accessible to modern-day readers, as when he incorporates existentialist perspectives:

Who is it that provided me with an ear to hear, who created me as a rational being and how have I come into this world? Where do I come from? Had I lived before the creator of the world, I would have known the beginning of my life and of the consciousness of myself. Who created me?

In chapter five, Yacob applies rational investigation to the different religious laws. He criticises Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Indian religions equally. For example, Yacob points out that the Creator in His wisdom has made blood flow monthly from the womb of women, in order for them to bear children. Thus, he concludes that the law of Moses, which states that menstruating women are impure, is against nature and the Creator, since it ‘impedes marriage and the entire life of a woman, and it spoils the law of mutual help, prevents the bringing up of children and destroys love’.


In this way, Yacob includes the perspectives of solidarity, women and affection in his philosophical argument. And he lived up to these ideals. After Yacob left the cave, he proposed to a poor maiden named Hirut, who served a rich family. Yacob argued with her master, who did not think a servant woman was equal to an educated man, but Yacob prevailed. When Hirut gladly accepted his proposal, Yacob pointed out that she should no longer be a servant, but rather his peer, because ‘husband and wife are equal in marriage’.


In contrast to Yacob’s views, Kant wrote a century later in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764): ‘A woman is embarrassed little that she does not possess certain high insights.’ And in Kant’s lectures on ethics (1760-94) we read that: ‘The desire of a man for a woman is not directed to her as a human being, on the contrary, the woman’s humanity is of no concern to him; and the only object of his desire is her sex.’

Yacob wrote ‘all men are equal’ decades before Locke, the ‘Father of Liberalism’, put pen to paper 

Yacob looked upon the woman in a completely different way, namely as a philosopher’s intellectual peer. Hirut, he wrote: ‘was not beautiful, but she was good-natured, intelligent and patient’. Yacob cherished his wife’s intelligence, and he stressed their mutual and individualistic love for one another: ‘Since she loved me so, I took the decision in my heart to please her as much as I could, and I do not think there is another marriage which is so full of love and blessed as ours.’


Yacob is also more enlightened than his Enlightenment peers when it comes to slavery. In chapter five, he argues against the idea that one can ‘go and buy a man as if he were an animal’. That is because all humans are created equal and with the capacity to reason. Hence, he also puts forward a universal argument against discrimination based on reason:

All men are equal in the presence of God; and all are intelligent, since they are his creatures; he did not assign one people for life, another for death, one for mercy, another for judgment. Our reason teaches us that this sort of discrimination cannot exist.

The words ‘all men are equal’ were written decades before Locke (1632-1704), the ‘Father of Liberalism’, put pen to paper (indeed, he was born the same year that Yacob returned from his cave). But Locke’s social-contract theory did not apply to all in practice: he was secretary during the drafting of The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which gave white men ‘absolute power’ over their African slaves. And he invested heavily in the English Trans-Atlantic slave trade through the Royal African Company. In the Second Treatise (1689), Locke argues that God gave the world ‘to the use of the industrious and rational’ – which the philosopher Julie K Ward at Loyola University in Chicago argues can be read as a colonial attack on the right to land of American Indians. Compared with his philosophical peers, then, Yacob’s philosophy often reads like the epitome of all the ideals we commonly think of as enlightened.


Some months after reading the work of Yacob, I finally got hold of another rare book this summer: a translation of the collected writings of the philosopher Anton Amo (c1703-55), who was born and died in Guinea, today’s Ghana. For two decades, Amo studied and taught at Germany’s foremost universities, writing in Latin. His book, Antonius Gvilielmus Amo Afer of Axim in Ghana, bears a subtitle that describes the author: ‘Student. Doctor of philosophy. Master and lecturer at the universities of Halle, Wittenberg, Jena. 1727-1747.’ According to the World Library Catalogue, just a handful of copies, including those in the original Latin, are available in libraries around the world.


Amo was born a century after Yacob. He seems to have been kidnapped from the Akan people and the coastal city of Axim as a young boy, possibly for slavery, before being brought via Amsterdam to the court of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. Amo was baptised in 1707, and he received a very high-standard education, learning Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, High and Low German, in addition to probably knowing some of his mother tongue, Nzema. The great polymath G W Leibniz (1646-1716) frequently visited Amo’s home in Wolfenbüttel when he was growing up.


Amo matriculated at the University of Halle in 1727, and became well-respected in German academic circles of the time, holding lecturing positions both at the universities of Halle and Jena. In Carl Günther Ludovici’s 1738 book on the Enlightenment thinker Christian Wolff (1679-1754) – a follower of Leibniz and a founder of several academic disciplines in Germany – Amo is described as one of the most prominent Wolffians. While in the dedicatory preface to Amo’s On the Impassivity of the Human Mind (1734), the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Gottfried Kraus, hailed Amo’s compendious knowledge and ‘the praises he received thanks to his genius’. He also set Amo’s contribution to the German Enlightenment in a historical context:

In the past, the veneration given to Africa was enormous, whether for its natural genius, its appreciation for learning, or its religious organisation. This continent nurtured the growth of a number of men of great value, whose genius and assiduousness have made an inestimable contribution to the knowledge of human affairs.

Kraus stresses ‘the development of Christian doctrine, how many were its promoters who came from Africa!’ And he cites intellectuals such as Augustine, Tertullian, and the Amazigh (Berber) Apuleius as examples. The rector also underscores the European Renaissance’s African heritage, ‘as the Moors coming from Africa crossed through Spain, they brought knowledge of the ancient thinkers, while also bringing much assistance to the development of letters which were coming out of the darkness little by little’.

Amo wrote of other theologies than the Christian, including the Turks and the ‘heathens’

Such words from the heart of Germany in the spring of 1733 might make it easier for us to remember that Amo was not the only African to achieve success in 18th-century Europe. At the same time, Abraham Petrovich Gannibal (1696-1781), also kidnapped from sub-Saharan Africa, became the general of Peter the Great of Russia. Gannibal’s great-grandson became Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin. And the French author Alexandre Dumas (1802-70) was the grandson of an enslaved African woman, Louise-Céssette Dumas, and son of a black aristocratic general born on Haiti.


Neither was Amo alone in bringing diversity or cosmopolitanism to the University of Halle in the 1720s and ’30s. Several talented Jewish students studied there and received doctorates. The Arab teacher Salomon Negri of Damascus and the Indian Soltan Gün Achmet from Ahmedabad were others who arrived in Halle to study and teach. Amo himself developed a close relationship with Moses Abraham Wolff, a Jewish medical student, who was one of the students he supervised. And in his thesis, Amo wrote explicitly that there were other theologies than the Christian, including among them the Turks and the ‘heathens’.

Amo discussed such cosmopolitan issues when he defended his first thesis, the legal dissertation On the Right of Moors in Europe in 1729. Amo’s dissertation is not available today. It might be that the defence was given only orally, or that the text has simply been lost. But in the Halle weekly paper of November 1729 there is a short report from his public disputation, which was granted to him so that the ‘argument of the disputation should be appropriate to his situation’. According to the newspaper report, Amo argued against slavery with reference to Roman law, tradition and rationality:

Therein it was not only shown from books and history that the kings of the Moors were enfeoffed [given freedom in exchange for pledged service] by the Roman Emperor, and that every one of them had to obtain a royal patent from him, which Justinian also issued, but it was also investigated how far the freedom or servitude of Moors bought by Christians in Europe extends, according to the usual laws.

Did Amo hold Europe’s first legal disputation against slavery? We can at least see an enlightened argument for universal suffrage, like the one Yacob had advanced 100 years earlier. However, such non-discriminatory perspectives seem to have been lost on the central Enlightenment thinkers later in the 18th century.


In his Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753-4), Hume wrote: ‘I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.’ He added: ‘There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor any individual eminent either in action or speculation.’ Kant (1724-1804) built on Hume (1711-76), and stressed that the fundamental difference between blacks and whites ‘appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in colour’, before concluding in Physical Geography: ‘Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites.’

In France, the most famous Enlightenment thinker, Voltaire (1694-1778), not only described Jews in anti-Semitic terms, as when he wrote that ‘they are all of them born with raging fanaticism in their hearts’; in his Essay on Universal History (1756), he also wrote that if Africans’ ‘intelligence is not of another species than ours, then it is greatly inferior’ (fort inférieure). Like Locke, he invested his money in the slave trade.


Amo’s philosophy is often more theoretical than Yacob’s, but they share an enlightened perspective of reason, treating all humans alike. His work is deeply engaged with the issues of his day, as in Amo’s best-known book, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind (1734), which is built upon a logically deductive method using strict arguments, seemingly in line with his former juridical dissertation. Here he grapples with Cartesian dualism, the idea that there is an absolute difference in substance between mind and body.

At times, Amo seems to oppose Descartes, as the contemporary philosopher Kwasi Wiredu points out in A Companion to African Philosophy (2004), when he writes: ‘Human beings sense material things not with respect to their mind but with respect to their living and organic body.’ Wiredu argues that Amo opposed the Cartesian dualism between mind and body, rather favouring the Akan metaphysics and Nzema language of his early childhood: that you feel pain with your flesh (honam), not with your mind (adwene).


But at the same time, Amo says that he will both defend and speak against Descartes’s view (from his Letters, Part I) that the soul (mind) is able to act and suffer together with the body. Hence, Amo writes: ‘In reply to these words we caution and dissent: we concede that the mind acts together with the body by the mediation of a mutual union. But we deny that it suffers together with the body.’

The examples of Yacob and Amo make it necessary to rethink the Age of Reason 

Amo argues that Descartes’s statements in these matters are contrary to the French philosopher’s ‘own view’. He concludes his thesis by stating that we should avoid confusing the things that belong to the body and the mind. For whatever operates in the mind must be attributed to the mind alone. Perhaps it is as the philosopher Justin E H Smith at the University of Paris points out in Nature, Human Nature and Human Difference (2015): ‘Far from rejecting Cartesian dualism, on the contrary Amo offers a radicalised version of it.’

But could it also be that Wiredu and Smith are both right? For example, if the traditional Akan philosophy and Nzema language had a more precise Cartesian body-mind distinction than Descartes, a way of thinking that Amo then brought into European philosophy? It might be too early to tell, as a critical edition of Amo’s works is still pending publication, possibly at Oxford University Press.

In Amo’s most thorough work, The Art of Philosophising Soberly and Accurately (1738), he seems to anticipate the later Enlightenment thinker Kant. The book deals with the intentions of our mind, and with human actions as natural, rational or in accordance with a norm. In the first chapter, writing in Latin, Amo argues that ‘everything knowable is either a thing in itself, or a sensation, or an operation of the mind’.


He elaborates in the next paragraph, stating that ‘for the sake of which cognition occurs, is the thing in itself’. And in the following demonstration: ‘Real learning is cognition of things in themselves. It thus has the basis of its certainty in the known thing.’ Amo’s original wording is ‘Omne cognoscibile aut res ipsa’, using the Latin notion res ipsa for the ‘thing-in-itself’.

Today, Kant is known for his notion of the ‘thing-in-itself’ (das Ding an sich) in Critique of Pure Reason (1787) – and his argument that we cannot know the thing beyond our mental representation of it. Yet it is acknowledged that this was not the first use of the term in Enlightenment philosophy. As the Merriam-Webster Dictionary writes on the term thing-in-itself: ‘First known use: 1739.’ Still, that is two years after Amo’s main work was turned in at Wittenberg, in 1737.


The examples of these two Enlightenment philosophers, Yacob and Amo, might make it necessary to rethink the Age of Reason in the disciplines of philosophy and history of ideas. Within the discipline of history, new studies have shown that the most successful revolution to spring from the Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity was in Haiti rather than in France. The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the ideas of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743–1803) paved the way for the state’s independence, new constitution, and the abolition of slavery in 1804. The historian Laurent Dubois concludes in Avengers of the New World (2004) that the events in Haiti were ‘the most concrete expression of the idea that the rights proclaimed in France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were indeed universal’. In a similar vein, one might wonder: will Yacob and Amo also one day be elevated to the position they deserve among the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment?

Living Where You Don't Make the Rules - Part I

In an August blog post this year I raised a series of  questions which I hoped would be taken as more than rhetorical. I offered them hoping that readers would regard the questions as invitations to contemplate the ideas and all they entailed. I hoped readers would seriously or playfully, let their imagination run with the thoughts, images and scenarios that might arise. The questions were:

Where....on earth, does our idea of 'heaven' on earth or utopia exist? Where do we thrive? Where are we welcome to continue to bless humanity and the planet with our ideas, astonish others with our systems for harmonious progress, and feed ourselves and all with both the fruit of our wisdom and knowledge of the land? Where do we determine the values that we live by?

Today I'd like to share the first part of a thoughtful article I recently read on a website called, The Globalist. The author, Ebrahim Rasool is the South African Ambassador to the United States. Mr Rasool, a Muslim of Malay origin who grew up in South Africa has penned an interesting piece about  the cultural, religious and political realities of being a member of the Muslim minority in South Africa, the U.S., Europe and India. 

Let me be clear, I am NOT sharing this as a discussion about Islam. I offer his article as food for thought because he describes some universal elements that describe humanities current idea of itself, which regardless of religious affiliation,  are being experienced all over the globe right now. I offer the article solely for the universal concepts he describes which anyone part of a group considered a minority by the dominant culture/political group, might find valuable. 

Part II and Part III will also be presented so you will have the entirety of Mr. Rasool's thoughts.

lovu,

Kendke

Faith and cultural change in the age of globalization.

By Ebrahim Rasool, November 28, 2013

This is part one of a three-part series on Muslims, faith and cultural change in the age of globalization.

One of the touchiest issues in the world today is the Muslim disquiet, especially in countries where Muslims are minorities. We often miss it and call it all kinds of names. 

We call it Islamism. We call it radicalism, we call it extremism, we call it fundamentalism and we call it violence. We claim it springs from conflict-driven communities. 

Those labels have a semblance of truth in them, because on any given day, some Muslims may display some of those characteristics. 

But those labels don’t tell the story about what the causes of the disquiet really are. They don’t even begin to describe how to deal with it and how to manage it. In particular, they don’t tell how to bring peace to the soul of a community that is often uncomfortable in the context of the disquiet.

The existing disquiet, in turn, invites fear, suspicion and often hostility among non-Muslims. In some way, we have to tackle the issue head on. How do we deal with this problem? The way in which I have come to understand it is that the key lies in the theological assumptions of the Muslim community that were formed in times of dominance. 

When Islam was an empire, when Muslims were the rulers and when they moved into Spain, they made theological assumptions about how they could live. They created the rules for how to engage with those who are non-Muslim (and how those others could live). That set the tone of the lifestyle that they could lead.

Muslims in the minority

Now there are a whole host of countries where there are sizable Muslim populations – but where Muslims are in a minority. Rather suddenly (in historical terms), there are a few million Muslims in South Africa, a few million in the United States, a few million in Europe and hundreds of millions in India. Because they are not the majority, they are not dominant. 

The idea of having a traditional set of rules and precepts – and not being able to live by those rules in full and with regard to shaping all aspects of public life – is one of the most unsettling things for Muslims. 

I speak from experience: I am a Muslim who grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. Not living by one’s traditional rules makes us feel that we are not respected for being given time off when the call to prayer is made. 

Muslims feel disrespected for being compelled to work at lunchtime on Fridays – when we should be in mosques. Similar issues arise when choosing to abide by the dress codes we have inherited, by Halal diets or by customs like not shaking women’s hands. 

Together, these things become a phenomenon that manifests itself often very emotionally.

How do we help manage this phenomenon of living where you don’t make the rules? Well, it’s not only Muslims who live in a world where they don’t feel respected, where their rules don’t count and where they don’t even have the closeness to power in order to set them. 

We live in a fundamentally uncertain world and we can either rail against that uncertainty – or we can embrace it.

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment

I was fascinated in the “Masnavi” – the poem written in Persian by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi – when the great Rumi writes, “sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” 

That speaks to us: sell your cleverness, your ability to know all the answers, your ability to be certain, your ability to plot a graph of how you will progress, your ability to know things. Sell that cleverness and buy bewilderment.

Learn to enjoy being bewildered, learn to embrace uncertainty, give up the black and white areas of life and enter the gray area. Master all the creativity and the innovation, all the fascination of not knowing.

Rumi doesn’t merely say to buy bewilderment. He doesn’t leave us up a creek without a paddle. 

Rumi also says to us, “As you start to walk out of the way, the way appears. It is often when we are afraid of the dark that we get trapped in what we know. We are afraid of the unknown, so we only want to be with those who look like, eat like, think like, pray like and dress like us.” 

But as Rumi says, the moment that you actually set out on the path of the unknown is when the path begins to appear. It doesn’t appear to those who want to see it from a safe haven. And it doesn’t appear to those who know they must be on the path, but are afraid of the first step.

The path only appears when you embrace bewilderment and you let your curiosity get the better of you. And you begin to build courage in order to go out on this path. 

How do we apply those very profound philosophical precepts of selling cleverness and buying bewilderment to our lives as a minority population?

Globalization = Equal Opportunity Discriminator?

Through the condition of the world, through globalization, all of us have had to cede some of our knowledge, certainty, power, decision-making and rules. With all that, we have even had to cede autonomy and sovereignty. 

We live in a world that has produced more wealth and more growth than ever before in the history of humankind. Yet, this world has had the unintended consequences of greater poverty and greater inequality. 

We live in a world where there is so much technology, but often at the expense of the natural world and the environment. We live in a world where one can access so much information and knowledge at the click of a button on a phone. 

Yet, we have gained those crisp new insights at the expense of traditional systems, traditional knowledge, faith-based knowledge, culture and other things that have been the anchors in the lives of people all along.

And so suddenly entire faith communities find that every supposition on which their life has been based is questioned. Every value they held dear suddenly appears less valuable.

We live in a world where capital and goods are instantly mobile. One can press a button now and billions of dollars can flow from one continent to another. We load fresh fish onto an airplane in South Africa and serve it in a London restaurant 12 hours later. 

Yet, when people are mobile, want to follow capital and want to follow goods where they are abundant, we don’t know how to handle their mobility. We call them immigrants, migrants or aliens. We make them “the other.” 

So this world that holds so much promise, potential, wealth and so many material things is at the same time a world that creates so much uncertainty, fear, hopelessness, despair and so many mental problems. This world breeds troubled mindsets. 

Continue to part II.

Timbuktu Libraries Burned~ A Major Loss for Humanity

More Sadness in Mali

Libraries like the Ahmed Baba institute were rescuing Africa's history from oblivion.

 Photograph: Sebastien Cailleux/Corbis

Luke Harding in Sévaré
guardian.co.uk,
Monday 28 January 2013 17.07GMT

Timbuktu mayor: Mali rebels torched library of historic manuscripts

Fleeing Islamist insurgents burnt two buildings containing priceless books as French-led troops approached, says mayor.

Islamist insurgents retreating from Timbuktu set fire to a library containing thousands of priceless historic manuscripts, according to the Saharan town's mayor, in an incident he described as a "devastating blow" to world heritage.

Hallé Ousmani Cissé told the Guardian that al-Qaida-allied fighters on Saturday torched two buildings that held the manuscripts, some of which dated back to the 13th century. They also burned down the town hall, the governor's office and an MP's residence, and shot dead a man who was celebrating the arrival of the French military.

French troops and the Malian army reached the gates of Timbuktu on Saturday and secured the town's airport. But they appear to have got there too late to rescue the leather-bound manuscripts that were a unique record of sub-Saharan Africa's rich medieval history. The rebels attacked the airport on Sunday, the mayor said.

"It's true. They have burned the manuscripts," Cissé said in a phone interview from Mali's capital, Bamako. "They also burned down several buildings. There was one guy who was celebrating in the street and they killed him."

He added: "This is terrible news. The manuscripts were a part not only of Mali's heritage but the world's heritage. By destroying them they threaten the world. We have to kill all of the rebels in the north."

On Monday French army officers said French-led forces had entered Timbuktu and secured the town without a shot being fired. A team of French paratroopers crept into the town by moonlight, advancing from the airport, they said. Residents took to the streets to celebrate.

The manuscripts were held in two separate locations: an ageing library and a new South African-funded research centre, the Ahmad Babu Institute, less than a mile away. Completed in 2009 and named after a 17th-century Timbuktu scholar, the centre used state-of-the-art techniques to study and conserve the crumbling scrolls.

Both buildings were burned down, according to the mayor, who said the information came from an informer who had just left the town. Asked whether any of the manuscripts might have survived, Cissé replied: "I don't know."

The manuscripts had survived for centuries in Timbuktu, on the remote south-west fringe of the Sahara desert. They were hidden in wooden trunks, buried in boxes under the sand and in caves. When French colonial rule ended in 1960, Timbuktu residents held preserved manuscripts in 60-80 private libraries.

The vast majority of the texts were written in Arabic. A few were in African languages, such as Songhai, Tamashek and Bambara. There was even one in Hebrew. They covered a diverse range of topics including astronomy, poetry, music, medicine and women's rights. The oldest dated from 1204.

Seydou Traoré, who has worked at the Ahmed Baba Institute since 2003, and fled shortly before the rebels arrived, said only a fraction of the manuscripts had been digitised. "They cover geography, history and religion. We had one in Turkish. We don't know what it said."

He said the manuscripts were important because they exploded the myth that "black Africa" had only an oral history. "You just need to look at the manuscripts to realise how wrong this is."

Some of the most fascinating scrolls included an ancient history of west Africa, the Tarikh al-Soudan, letters of recommendation for the intrepid 19th-century German explorer Heinrich Barth, and a text dealing with erectile dysfunction.

A large number dated from Timbuktu's intellectual heyday in the 14th and 15th centuries, Traoré said. By the late 1500s the town, north of the Niger river, was a wealthy and successful trading centre, attracting scholars and curious travellers from across the Middle East. Some brought books to sell.

Typically, manuscripts were not numbered, Traoré said, but repeated the last word of a previous page on each new one. Scholars had painstakingly numbered several of the manuscripts, but not all, under the direction of an international team of experts.

Mali government forces that had been guarding Timbuktu left the town in late March, as Islamist fighters advanced rapidly across the north. Fighters from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) – the group responsible for the attack on the Algerian gas facility – then swept in and seized the town, pushing out rival militia groups including secular Tuareg nationalists.

Traoré told the Guardian that he decided to leave Timbuktu in January 2012 amid ominous reports of shootings in the area, and after the kidnapping of three European tourists from a Timbuktu hotel. A fourth tourist, a German, resisted and was shot dead. Months later AQIM arrived, he said.

Four or five rebels had been sleeping in the institute, which had comparatively luxurious facilities for staff, he said. As well as the manuscripts, the fighters destroyed almost all of the 333 Sufi shrines dotted around Timbuktu, believing them to be idolatrous. They smashed a civic statue of a man sitting on a winged horse. "They were the masters of the place," Traoré said.

Other residents who fled Timbuktu said the fighters adorned the town with their black flag. Written on it in Arabic were the words "God is great". The rebels enforced their own brutal and arbitrary version of Islam, residents said, with offenders flogged for talking to women and other supposed crimes. The floggings took place in the square outside the 15th-century Sankoré mosque, a Unesco world heritage site.

"They weren't religious men. They were criminals," said Maha Madu, a Timbuktu boatman, now in the Niger river town of Mopti. Madu said the fighters grew enraged if residents wore trousers down to their ankles, which they believed to be western and decadent. He alleged that some fighters kidnapped and raped local women, keeping them as virtual sex slaves. "They were hypocrites. They told us they couldn't smoke. But they smoked themselves," he said.

The rebels took several other towns south of Timbuktu, he said, including nearby Diré. If the rebels spotted a boat flying the Malian national flag, they ripped the flag off and replaced it with their own black one, he said.

The precise fate of the manuscripts was difficult to verify. All phone communication with Timbuktu was cut off. The town was said to be without electricity, water or fuel. According to Traoré, who was in contact with friends there until two weeks ago, many of the rebels left town following France's military intervention.

He added: "My friend [in Timbuktu] told me they were diminishing in number. He doesn't know where they went. But he said they were trying to hide their cars by painting and disguising them with mud."

The recapture of Timbuktu is another success for the French military, which has now secured two out of three of Mali's key rebel-held sites, including the city of Gao on Saturday. The French have yet to reach the third, Kidal. Local Tuareg militia leaders said on Monday they had taken control of Kidal after the abrupt departure of the Islamist fighters who ran the town.

Libraries like the Ahmed Baba institute were rescuing Africa's history from oblivion. Photograph: Sebastien Cailleux/Corbis

 

Destruction of Timbuktu Manuscripts is an Offence Against the Whole of Africa

Jonathan Jones
guardian.co.uk,
Monday 28 January 2013
12.32 EST

The reported destruction of two important manuscript collections by Islamist rebels as they fled Timbuktu is an offence to the whole of Africa and its universally important cultural heritage. Like their systematic destruction of 300 Sufi saints' shrines while they held Timbuktu at their mercy, it is an assault on world heritage comparable with the demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001.

The literary heritage of Timbuktu dates back to the 15th and 16th centuries when the gold-rich kingdoms of Mali and Songhai traded across the Sahara with the Mediterranean world. It took two months for merchant caravans to cross the desert, and while gold and slaves went north, books were going south.

In his Description of Africa, published in 1550, the traveller Leo Africanus marvels that in the bustling markets of Timbuktu, under the towers of its majestic mosques, the richest traders were booksellers.

They were selling manuscripts by Arab scholars on everything from astronomy and arithmetic to Islamic law, as well as mystical texts on Sufism, the otherworldly, saintly style of faith that the al-Qaida-affiliated Ansar Dine finds so offensive.

This legacy of Arab learning that goes back to the great scientists and mathematicians who preserved the classical Greek heritage in the early middle ages is richly represented in the manuscripts of Timbuktu – but not necessarily in its original form. For scribes copied and recopied books in this city that loved leaning, creating a legacy of works transcribed in the 18th and 19th centuries as well as earlier.

They also wrote down their own history and laws, chronicling the families of Timbuktu and preserving the poetry and stories of north Africa – at least, that is what seems to have lain in the many manuscripts of Timbuktu's lost legacy that were just starting to be properly conserved when this terrible religious vandalism plagued the city.

When European empires scrambled for Africa in the 19th century the continent was seen as illiterate and lacking in history, memory, or literature. Its art was seen as "primitive", partly because it lacked a written art history.

Timbuktu is a palimpsest in the sand that proves otherwise. Libraries like the Ahmed Baba institute were rescuing Africa's history from oblivion. Timbuktu is Africa's city of ancient books and learning that disproved racist myths about the continent. That luminous inheritance is what the Islamists have destroyed.

I appreciate this reporter's words, but disagree that the luminous inheritance of the knowledge and wisdom of Africa could ever be destroyed. What has been destroyed are the physical books that held a portion of the ancient knowledge and wisdom, that today's world rests upon. We mourn the loss of these manuscripts and books, but the inheritance and legacy is whole. We contain it.

In my thinking, the luminous inheritance lives within those of us that continue to pull out of what often appears to be a desert of shifting sands, false mirages and harsh unlivable conditions,~ deep understanding about Life, the Cosmos and natural phenomena and apply it to our present existence.

I rest in the truth of Bob's words telling of the Natural Mystics that abound upon the earth. We are indestructible, because we adapt and evolve. We receive the insight that is needed to allow us to continue to live true to a Principal of Wholeness, that is sourced from the Original Nature. And therefore, as Maya said, ".....still I Rise!"
Listen as you read Bob encouraging our Spirits~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqg90Qj2ApU
There's a natural mystic blowing through the air;


If you listen carefully now you will hear.

This could be the first trumpet, might as well be the last:

Many more will have to suffer,

Many more will have to die - don't ask me why.



Things are not the way they used to be,

I won't tell no lie;

One and all have to face reality now.

'Though I've tried to find the answer to all the questions they ask.

'Though I know it's impossible to go livin' through the past -

Don't tell no lie.



There's a natural mystic blowing through the air -

Can't keep them down -

If you listen carefully now you will hear.



There's a natural mystic blowing through the air.



This could be the first trumpet, might as well be the last:

Many more will have to suffer,

Many more will have to die - don't ask me why.



There's a natural mystic blowing through the air -

I won't tell no lie;

If you listen carefully now you will hear:

There's a natural mystic blowing through the air.

Such a natural mystic blowing through the air;

There's a natural mystic blowing through the air;

Such a natural mystic blowing through the air;

Such a natural mystic blowing through the air;

Such a natural mystic blowing through the air.

Peace be unto you.

Lovu,

Kentke





Update on Liberation of Mali's Northern Cities

I've had my eye on Mali's troubles for some time now. My first blog on the nation was posted Dec 3, 2011.
 http://knewzfrommeroewest.blogspot.com/2011/12/al-qaida-in-mali-can-africa-get-break.html
Any student of African history knows the beautiful name Timbuktu, and the history of this remote city as post of Sahara trade and center of early African knowledge and Islamic scholarship. It's a place many have dreamed of visiting.

Hopefully you've followed France's decision to enter the war, and remain in Mali until the radical militant Islamists are routed, and the country is back in the hands of the people of Mali. January 21st, after facing resistance from Islamists, French and Malian troops entered and reclaimed the down of Diabaly.

French forces then extended their deployment northward, and Saturday Jan. 26th, French and Malian forces cleared radical Islamist fighters from Gao. Below are more key facts from two articles on the situation.

Kentke

Reported from France24, an online international news site:

Saturday's seizure of Gao, the most populated town in Mali's northern region, which is roughly the size of Texas, was announced by the French defence ministry and confirmed by Malian security sources.

French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said the troops were currently "around Gao and (will be) soon near Timbuktu," further west. A fabled caravan town on the edge of the Sahara desert, Timbuktu served as a centre of Islamic learning for centuries.

"The objective is that the African multinational force being put together be able to take over, and that Mali be able to begin a process of political stabilisation," Ayrault said.

A Malian security source in Gao told AFP by telephone that a first contingent of Malian, Chadian and Niger troops had arrived in Gao to help secure it, having been flown in from Niamey, capital of neighbouring Niger.
Other soldiers from Chad and Niger were moving by land toward the Malian border from the Niger town of Ouallam, which lies about 100 kilometres southeast of Gao.

Washington's decision to agree to France's request for air refuelling facilities came after two weeks of deliberation. US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta gave the news to his French counterpart, Jean-Yves Le Drian in a telephone conversation Saturday, a Pentagon spokesman said. President Barack Obama made his support for the French operation clear in a phone conversation Friday with French President Francois Hollande.

The US military has an unparalleled fleet of more than 400 tankers equipped to refuel fighters and other warplanes in mid-air. France has about 14 such tankers.   On Saturday, West African defence chiefs meeting in Ivory Coast agreed to boost the their troop pledges for the force to 5,700 from the previous 4,500. So far however, only a fraction of the African troops have arrived in Bamako, the Malian capital in the south of the country. French and Malian forces have done all the fighting to date.   France has already deployed 2,500 troops to Mali and its defence ministry says 1,900 African soldiers are on the ground there and in Niger.

French and Malian forces encircle Timbuktu

By Matthieu Mabin , special correspondent in Mali
Update January 27, 2013


French and Malian forces are preparing an offensive on the symbolic city of Timbuktu, captured by Islamist militants last year. FRANCE 24 special correspondent Matthieu Mabin reports from the outskirts of the ancient town.
After recapturing the city of Gao on Saturday, French and Malian forced have switched their focus to Timbuktu. Early on Sunday morning, masses of heavily-armored troops arrived at the outskirts of the city, stationing themselves some 100 kilometres away from the city centre.

The French air force has laid the groundwork for an all-out offensive, using Dassault Mirage 2000s and Rafle fighter jets to destroy rebel points in the vast desert around the city. So far, the troops have experienced no form of counter-attack on the ground.   Attacking Timbuktu is a symbolic operation for Mali – overrun by Ansar Dine jihadist militants almost a year ago, the ancient city has been ravaged by its captors: its mausoleums destroyed, its people forced to obey Sharia law. The rare accounts we’ve heard depict scenes of social desecration.

Liberated villagers ‘hysterical’

When we travel through liberated villages, the residents become almost hysterical at the sight of the French and Malian tanks. They rush out of their homes with the national flag shouting “Mali!” These people are literally being liberated after experiencing the terror of Sharia law. The accounts we’ve heard are terrible: suspected thieves having their hands cut off; women forced to wear the veil; men banned from wearing long trousers.

Residents tell us that the rebels flee very quickly [when the French and Malian forces arrive], leaving behind weapons and vehicles. They dress like civilians so as not to stand out and then try to head for the border with Mauritania.

Previous blog Posts on Mali

http://knewzfrommeroewest.blogspot.com/search?q=Islam+in+Africa

http://knewzfrommeroewest.blogspot.com/2012/07/mali-islamists-to-continue-destroying.html

http://knewzfrommeroewest.blogspot.com/2012/07/mali-again-government-unraveling.html

Mali Islamists to Continue Destroying Timbuktu World Heritage Cultural Sites

Fighters from Ansar Dine, an al Qaeda-linked Islamist group in northern Mali, have destroyed historic Sufi shrines in the ancient desert city of Timbuktu, triggering international outcry.

I've been terribly upset by the news of the African Islamist group Ansar Dine's actions in the Malian city of Timbuktu. I wrote about their presence in the African nation in December 2011. That post is a good introduction to the this week's escalation of their objectives. (http://knewzfrommeroewest.blogspot.com/search?q=Islam+in+Africa)

They have embarked on a campaign to destroy all of the ancient tombs and Mosques which are both the heart of the local people's religion, and a much needed source of revenue for the remote area. The awesome buildings attract tourists from all over the world for their unique architectural design. The tombs and buildings that date back to the 15th century have been designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and the destruction which began Friday has attracted world attention and alarm.

To familiarize you with the region and situation, here are two articles about what's currently happening, and a very informative 7 minute video made in 2000 that shows the efforts Timbuktu was focused on accomplishing before these invaders arrived area with their agenda of wiping out indigenious culture and establishing the sharia law. I'm also going to add an article link at the end I hope you'll be sure to click as it gives an understanding behind the Ansar Dine group and their leader Ag Ghali.
Keep your head up.
Louv,
Kentke
Sorry about this post's layout. After the first article, please scroll down for the rest of the post.

Photo: A still from a video shows Islamist militants attacking a shrine in Timbuktu on Sunday. Credit: AFP / Getty Images

L A Times

July 2, 2012
Carol J. Williams in Los Angeles

Islamist rebels who have seized control of northern Mali used axes, shovels and automatic weapons to destroy tombs and other cultural and religious monuments for a third day on Monday, including bashing in the door of a 15th century mosque in Timbuktu, news agencies reported.

Rebels of the Ansar Dine faction fighting to assert Sharia law over the African nation at the crossroads of ancient trade routes ignored the appeals of United Nations officials over the weekend to cease the "wanton destruction" of the region's cultural heritage.

In New York, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Sunday called on "all parties to exercise their responsibility to preserve the cultural heritage of Mali," saying the attacks "are totally unjustified.”

Irina Bokova, head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, on Saturday urged the Ansar Dine fighters “to stop these terrible and irreversible acts” after militants smashed mud-walled tombs in Timbuktu.

On Monday, the Islamists, who claim allegiance to Al Qaeda, tore open the door to the Sidi Yahia mosque, telling townspeople they were wiping out "idolatry" at the monuments to Sufi Islamic saints and scholars.

"In legend, it is said that the main gate of Sidi Yahia mosque will not be opened until the last day [of the world]," said the town imam, Alpha Abdoulahi, according to Reuters news agency, which reached him in Timbuktu by telephone.

In radio and television interviews from Senegal, the newly appointed chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, warned the rebels that destruction of religious and cultural heritage could lead to war crimes charges.

“The only tribunal we recognize is the divine court of Sharia,” the Associated Press quoted Ansar Dine spokesmen Oumar Ould Hamaha as saying in response to Bensouda's warning.

The AP said Hamaha justified the destruction as a divine order to pull down idolatrous constructions "so that future generations don't get confused, and start venerating the saints as if they are God.”

Timbuktu had been developed as a tourist attraction, with locals operating hotels, guest houses and guided tours for visitors to the ancient sub-Saharan trading post and Islamic educational center.

Hamaha told the AP that Ansar Dine opposes tourists' coming to the religious sites, saying they "foster debauchery."

UNESCO put Timbuktu and the nearby Tomb of Askia on its List of World Heritage in Danger last week, after the Ansar Dine rebels seized the region that has been beset by a three-way civil war since a March 22 coup deposed Mali's government. The Islamist radicals have been fighting for territory with Taureg separatists since the latter defeated Mali government troops in the spring, leaving the capital Bamako rudderless and incapable of putting down either rebellion in the remote north.

"Timbuktu was an intellectual and spiritual capital and a center for the propagation of Islam throughout Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries," UNESCO notes on its website. "Its three great mosques, Djingareyber, Sankore and Sidi Yahia, recall Timbuktu's golden age."

The sites designated as important cultural heritage represent "the power and riches of the empire that flourished in the 15th and 16th centuries through its control of the trans-Saharan trade," UNESCO recalls in its description.

Fundamentalist Salafist Muslims have also attacked Sufi heritage sites in Libya and Egypt over the past year, and Al Qaeda-allied Taliban militants a decade ago blew up two 6th Century Buddha figures carved into a mountainside near Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan, on the same grounds that they idolized false gods.

Jul 1, 5:32 PM (ET)
By BABA AHMED

BAMAKO, Mali (AP) - Islamist rebels said Sunday they will continue to destroy historic sites in Mali's northern city of Timbuktu before they implement strict Shariah law, as Mali's government compared the destruction to "war crimes" and said they would seek international justice.

"Timbuktu was an Islamic city since the 12th century, and we know what the religion says about the saints' tombs," he said. "Contrary to what the Islamists or the Wahabis of Ansar Dine say, here in Timbuktu, the people don't love the saints like God, but just seek the saints' blessings because they are our spiritual guides."

Ansar Dine spokesman Sanda Abu Mohamed said Sunday that Islamists will continue the destruction they started Saturday. "We're going to destroy everything before we apply Shariah in this city," he said.

Resident Moussa Maiga said the Islamists have expressed disapproval of what they think is worship of the tombs of the Muslim saints. "They say that the population loves the saints like God," he said.
But resident Bouya Ould Sidi Mohamed said the historic city has long had Muslim roots.

Mali's government condemned the destruction, which they say is akin to "war crimes."

"The council of ministers has just approved, in principle, the referral to the International Criminal Court and a working group is working to this end," the government said in a statement.

The U.N. cultural agency on Saturday called for an immediate halt to the destruction of three sacred Muslim tombs. Irina Bokova, who heads the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, cited in a statement Saturday reports the centuries-old mausoleums of Sidi Mahmoud, Sidi, Moctar and Alpha Moya had been destroyed.

On Thursday, UNESCO's World Heritage Committee, meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, placed the mausoleums of Muslim saints on its list of sites in danger at the request of Mali's government.

Islamist fighters from the Ansar Dine group have declared that they now control the northern half of Mali after driving out an ethnic Tuareg separatist group. The rebel groups took advantage of a power vacuum created by a March coup in the capital to seize ground in the north.

The Islamists' growing reach is more worrying news for the landlocked West African nation.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the attacks on the mausoleums "totally unjustified" and urged all sides to preserve Mali's cultural heritage, according to a statement from his spokesperson.

" The secretary general reiterates his support for the ongoing efforts of ECOWAS, the African Union and countries in the region to help the government and people of Mali resolve the current crisis through dialogue," the statement said.
---_
Edith M. Lederer contributed from the United Nations in New York.

Click link for video: ON THE LINE: MALI: INTERNET: ITN Source

Here are some facts about Ansar Dine and its leader, Iyad Ag Ghali:

ANSAR DINE:

* The name means “Defenders of the Faith” and it follows the puritanical form of Islam known as Salafism, which looks to the religion’s 7th-century origins as a guide to conduct.

* Along with Tuareg separatist movement MNLA, Ansar Dine and other Islamists were among rebels who seized northern Mali following a March 22 coup in the capital Bamako, in the south of the country, which paralysed the Western-backed Malian army.

* Diplomats say Ansar Dine – with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), originally from Algeria, and al Qaeda splinter group MUJWA – have hijacked the MNLA’s secular separatist uprising and now control two thirds of Mali’s desert north, territory that includes the regions of Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu.

* Ansar Dine’s leader, renegade Tuareg chieftain Iyad Ag Ghali, has links with AQIM through a cousin who is a local commander, according to diplomats.

* In direct opposition to MNLA’s stated aims, Ag Ghali has rejected any form of independence of the northern half of Mali and has vowed to pursue plans to impose sharia, Islamic law, throughout the now divided west African nation in the Sahel.
* Ansar Dine’s turbaned fighters, who operate under the black Islamist flag, initially gained a reputation in the north for keeping order after outbreaks of looting. But when they started enforcing sharia – making women wear veils, shutting bars and shops selling alcohol, and lashing offenders – they earned hostility from locals who have a long history of practising a more liberal, tolerant style of Islam.
* Niger’s President Mahamadou Issoufou said last month that Afghan and Pakistani jihadists were training recruits for Islamist groups in the Malian north.
* Diplomats and analysts say Ag Ghali, long known as a power broker in the north of Mali, formed Ansar Dine late last year after failing in separate attempts to become head of the MNLA and of his Ifoghas Tuareg clan.
* The Islamist allies said last week they had now secured full control of the north after pushing the Tuareg separatists out of Gao in a battle that killed at least 20 people.

(The black flag of the Ansar Dine Islamic group is posted on a road sign in Kidal in northeastern Mali, June 16, 2012. REUTERS/Adama Diarra)

AG GHALI:
* Ag Ghali, an Ifoghas of the Kel Ireyakkan faction of northern Mali’s Tuareg nomads, was a commander in a 1990 rebellion against the central government in Bamako launched by the fiercely independent “blue men of the desert” warriors, who are known for their distinctive indigo-coloured robes and veils.
* He helped negotiate a peace deal with the Malian government, establishing his reputation as an influential, yet notoriously inscrutable figure among the Tuaregs.
* A leaked U.S. diplomatic cable from 2007 said the Malian government appointed Ag Ghali an adviser to its consulate at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, an Israeli think-tank, says it was at this time that Ag Ghali adopted Salafism before being expelled by the Saudi authorities.
* On his return to Mali he was again involved in 2008 as a mediator in helping to end another Tuareg rebellion, and took part in negotiations to free foreign hostages seized by AQIM.
* Another U.S. diplomatic cable says of the Tuareg leader: “Like the proverbial bad penny, Ag Ghali turns up whenever a cash transaction between a foreign government and Kidal Tuaregs appears forthcoming … Ag Ghali is … adept at playing all sides of the Tuareg conflict to maximize his personal gain.”