Columnist article

Between them the Arab Spring and Boko Haram of northern Nigeria are doing a good job of putting Sharia law on the map. These two extremes in fact show dramatically how Sharia interpretations can vary from destructive madness as in Nigeria to calm accommodation, even liberalism, as in Tunisia. Sharia law is not only a legacy of Mohammed – he only devoted a handful of pages in the Koran to the dos and don’ts of moral life. Much comes from the Hadith, the collection of thoughts and sayings from the first couple of centuries after Mohammed’s death. Much of the Hadith is even more remote from the central text and Mohammed than some of the reflections of St Paul and the final chapter of the New Testament, the Apocalypse of John, are from Jesus and the Gospels. Boko Haram, with its bombings, appears to be causing mayhem, drawing support in...

Even if sublimated an abiding fear among Western watchers of the Arab Spring is that the dictators’ successors in power will be militant Islamists who once elected will stop at nothing, even violence, to stay in power. A decade ago when Islamists won an election in Algeria the US and France were visibly happy that the secular-orientated military stepped in and annulled the election. The Western powers would not support such a move today, but anxiousness about the Islamists will remain. But why? As the Harvard professor, Steven Pinker, writes in his new monumental study of violence, “The Better Angels Of Our Nature”, “The laws and many practices of many Muslim countries seemed to have missed out on the Humanitarian Revolution”. According to Amnesty International three-quarters of Muslim countries execute their criminals and adultery can be a capital crime. Every year more than a hundred million girls in Islamic countries...

The further north one travels in Europe the fewer immigrants there are. This, of course, has something to do with the weather and by the time one gets to Finland the proportion of immigrants in the population is only 3%, far less than France, Germany, Italy or even the damp UK. Finland has the added deterrent of having a near impenetrable language. But Finland is a highly industrialised country. Not just the home of Nokia but of a large number of high tech companies that do business all over the world. The question is how can Finland manage without large scale immigration? Every other industrialised country has argued that it needs them. Ever since the 1950s, when post war economic growth got into its stride, immigrants have been recruited to do the menial jobs that natives increasingly would rather be unemployed than do- to clean the streets, empty the dustbins...

This is a big week for the Palestinians and a big week for mankind. Whether it will end up being a big step forward remains to be seen. A BBC poll published yesterday reveals that there are large majorities in favour of admitting the state of Palestine to the United Nations – in Europe, in China and all the Muslim nations. Even in the US there is a significant majority in favour. The US seems adamant it will use its veto in the UN Security Council. It’s not that President Barack Obama disagrees with the Palestinian urge to be recognised it is because he fears the (unrepresentative) Jewish lobby and the loss of votes and money it can bring him. The Europeans are still equivocating although there are powerful European voices trying to push the European Union into the “yes” camp. Saudi Arabia, author of the best compromise yet tabled in the...

s and a third of what they were during the Cold War years. Terrible though 9/11 was, it barely registers compared with the siege of Leningrad, the battle of the Somme or Vietnam. One thing has certainly changed. We didn’t know much about either the Somme or Leningrad, merely the bare bones of events, until months afterwards. Now we get war reporting in real time- either from reporters on the ground with their satellite communications or, as in the case of Syria, from the mobile phones of locals. Thus we feel ourselves caught up in endless conflicts. But it is an illusion. There have been no interstate wars for some time and the number of civil and ethnic wars has fallen steadily almost every year of the last twenty. There are about a quarter fewer than in 1990 and the last sustained territorial war between two regular armies was between Ethiopia...

This week Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is back. Who, you might say? She is the person, in the early 2000s, who as finance minister under Nigeria’s democratically elected president, Olusegun Obasanjo, turned the Nigerian economy around 180 degrees. Before that, under the military dictatorship which had ruled Nigeria, Africa’s most populated country, for 18 years, economic growth, despite the huge oil wealth, had not risen above 3% a year. The economy was badly sick and billions of dollars were skimmed off by the dictator, Sani Abacha, and those around him. Inflation and bank indiscipline brought havoc and instability to the economy. The poor got poorer. With success under her belt she departed Nigeria to be a vice president of the World Bank. Now the new president, an Obasanjo protégé, Goodluck Jonathan, has brought her back, presumably to engineer another surge. On her last watch she killed inflation, paid off Nigeria’s huge...

There are questions that even today the historians don’t seem moved to investigate. Two important ones come to mind. Why was it that Pharonic Egypt never went to war for hundreds of years until Ramesses 11 became pharaoh in 1303 AD? Isn’t it a fact that Jews in Europe were unmolested for most of the first millennium after the death of Jesus? The Egyptian question is a bit of an idle curiosity since an answer probably won’t affect our behaviour today, although it should. Still, it is nice to know that we human beings aren’t constituted to make war and that we don’t have to live like we did over hundreds of years in Europe – going to war at the seeming drop of a hat and making the continent the most war-like place on earth. To learn more about the persecution of the Jews is highly relevant to today’s...

, Washington approved the visit of a Taliban delegation to the Texas headquarters of Unical, the big oil company, to discuss the construction of a trans-Afghan gas pipeline. The Taliban emerged in the south of Afghanistan as recently as late 1994. It was in reaction to the chaos that followed the retreat of the invading Soviet army when for five years the mujahideen – who were made up of many separate elements – vied for supremacy, killing over a hundred thousand in the process. The Taliban had three main aims- the stop the violence, to stabilize the country, to restore the practice of Islamic law, albeit at the less tolerant end of the spectrum, and to wipe out the trade in opium. They had no trouble in welcoming both domestic and foreign NGOs. But the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, made a dreadful mistake- he gave sanctuary to bin Laden when he fled Sudan....

Amnesty International, founded fifty years ago this week, was almost immediately dubbed “one of the larger lunacies of our time”. The then bizarre idea was to collect information on people incarcerated in prison solely for their political views and then, by means of an army of volunteer activists, bombard the offending governments with massive numbers of letters, postcards and telegrams, calling for the prisoner’s swift release. Other critics called it “subversive” and “an agent of Satan”. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomieni, Uganda’s Idi Amin, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and France’s President Jacques Chirac are all heavyweights who have gone into the ring to try and squash it. In the 1990s and the new century the criticism has been subtler. The attacks came not only from government leaders but from sceptics in the media as well. Some have argued that Amnesty has become respectable, a part of the...

These days I pick up the paper or switch on the news and find that the UN is fighting- one battle here and another there. The UN never used to fight quite like this. It was the peace-keeper. UN soldiers and helicopters have been fighting in the Congo and now Libya and Ivory Coast. No one seems outraged. When journalists asked Alain Le Roy, the head of UN peace-keeping, why the UN was deployed in this non-traditional peace-keeping role in the Ivory Coast, he replied that the Security Council had adopted unanimously (as they did for Libya) a resolution that sanctioned “all necessary means…. to prevent the use of heavy weapons against the civilian population”. When diplomats at the Security Council quizzed Mr Le Roy, arguing that shelling the presidential palace could not be called protecting innocent civilians, Le Roy argued that the true target was heavy weapons in the...

To intervene or not to intervene in Libya, that is the question. Indeed, the next two lines of Hamlet’s soliloquy are also apposite: “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against the sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?” The way the civil war is raging it is becoming clear that, as James Clapper, director of US National Intelligence, said last week, “Over the longer term the regime will prevail.” Only outside intervention can save the rebel cause. But, as the US Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, has pointed out, anyone who advocates a third large scale army military intervention in Asia “needs his head examined”. Iraq and Afghanistan are a full enough plate. Moreover, both show up as living examples the dangers of intervention even thought at the onset it all looked so right- to end the...

Non-violence works! This is one of the important messages of the revolution in Egypt – just as it was when the Soviet bloc collapsed, just as it was when Indonesia threw off its dictatorship and just as it was when Gandhi drove the British out of India. Yet for thousands of years violence has too often been the tool of politics and political change. All the major religions of the world have accepted war and violence but it is Christianity, whose founder besought us “to turn the other cheek”, that has the worst record of going to war. Moslem countries haven’t gone to war as half as much. Islamic countries have never been tolerant of Nazism, fascism and communism. The Christian countries spawned all three. Today countries with a Christian heritage have the most violent crime, the Muslim the least. Of course it is true that that the Arab world...