COVER

Summer Journey 2011

DOMINIC NAHR / MAGNUM FOR TIME

Travels Through Islam

Discovering a world of change and challenge in the footsteps of the 14th century explorer Ibn Battuta

World Wanderer
By Reza Aslan Thursday, July 21, 201 On a summer day in 1325, a 21-year-old legal scholar named Muhammad Ibn Battuta set off from his home in Tangier, Morocco, on a pilgrimage to the sacred city of Mecca. "I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones, female and male, and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests," a much older Ibn Battuta rhapsodized in the celebrated account of his journey, the Rihla. That journey would last nearly 30 years and cover more than 100,000 km. By the time Ibn Battuta returned to Tangier, he

The world that Ibn Battuta experienced in his travels nearly 700 years ago was as globalized as the world we live in today
ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID JOHNSON FOR TIME

had traversed by foot, by donkey, by camel and by boat nearly the entire length of the Muslim world and beyond on a quest for knowledge and experience. And while that quest would ultimately take him as far as China (for did not the Prophet Muhammad encourage his followers to "seek knowledge, even in China"?), for the most part, Ibn Battuta kept within the boundaries of what was known at the time as Dar al-Islam, "the abode of Islam" that region of the world where Muslims ruled and Islamic law prevailed. As a purely geographic designation, Dar al-Islam referred to the stretch of land that fell under Muslim sovereignty, with Mecca the "congress of the Muslim world," as Ibn Battuta termed it pulsing at its heart. Yet for him and his contemporaries, Dar al-Islam connoted more than mere geography. It was above all else an ideal, an aspiration, a shared sense of consciousness held by a global collection of like-minded individuals who maintained more or less the same beliefs and practices and who, as such, composed a single, unified and divine community: the ummah. This is what the pilgrim and the merchant, the warrior and the peasant would have understood as the source of his or her identity. Indeed, as U.S. historian Ross Dunn notes, Ibn Battuta "was a member of the literate, mobile, world-minded elite" and would have regarded himself as a citizen "not of Morocco, but of Dar al-Islam, to whose universalist spiritual, moral, and social values he was loyal above any other allegiance." Although Muslims made up the majority of Dar al-Islam's population, and while the norms, values and customs of the people aligned with the fundamental precepts of Islam, it was the enormous diversity of the ummah scattered across these lands that so struck Ibn Battuta. He saw things in his travels through the Muslim world that were as foreign to him as they would have been to a stranger. In Turkey, he was taken aback by the behavior of certain Muslim women who seemed to dominate their husbands. In the Maldives, he was scandalized by the clothing and customs of the natives. Across central Asia, he was constantly shocked by the practices of the Mongols that so drastically conflicted with his orthodox sensibilities. In other words, while the population of Dar al-Islam may have shared Ibn Battuta's allegiance to the One God and his Final Messenger, it in no way shared his culture, customs, habits and worldview. What was true of the Muslim world in Ibn Battuta's time is equally true today. In fact, the diversity and eclecticism that have always marked the ummah have, over the centuries, become a veritable cornucopia of contrasting beliefs, practices, customs and traditions among the world's 1.6 billion Muslims. At the same time, mass migration and the steady flow of people across national borders have dramatically extended the reach of the ummah far beyond anything that could be defined as Dar al-Islam. Nowadays, we call this phenomenon globalization: "the intensification of economic, political, social and cultural relations across borders," as the Danish political philosophers Hans-Henrik Holm and Georg Sorensen define it. But make no mistake: the world that Ibn Battuta experienced in his travels nearly 700 years ago was as globalized as the world we live in today. This was in large part due to the Pax Islamica that existed under the rule of the Mongols, who had, by Ibn Battuta's time, conquered nearly the whole of Central Asia, Russia and China. By creating the largest territorial empire in history, the Mongols who had a penchant for allowing merchants free rein in their territory encouraged the flow of goods and people across the vast distances under their domain. With the expansion of trade routes came an increase in cultural interactions, as merchants, scholars, mystics and pilgrims Ibn Battuta was, at one point or another, all these things during his long journey moved

freely along the Silk Road from one city to another, from one kingdom to another, from one principality to another. It was indeed the golden age of Islam, which, as historian Marshall Hodgson wrote, "came closer than any other medieval society to establishing a common world order of social and even cultural standards." Age of Change That golden luster has dulled a bit in the centuries since Ibn Battuta's glorious expedition across Dar al-Islam. The supremacy that medieval Islam enjoyed in the fields of science, trade, mathematics and architecture has, in many parts of the Muslim world, given way to stagnation and decline. Colonialism, Western imperialism, corruption, civil wars, extremism and terrorism have exacted their toll on the cultural and artistic dominance that marked the Islam of Ibn Battuta's time. The end of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 and the resulting geopolitical fragmentation of the Middle East punctured whatever lofty visions the dream of a unified ummah once engendered among Muslim intellectuals. Over the past century, a great many Muslims have come to regard themselves less as members of a worldwide community of faith than as citizens of individual nation-states. At the same time, the religious and political institutions that once dominated the lives of Muslims have begun to disintegrate as greater education and widespread access to new ideas and sources of information allow individuals the freedom and confidence to interpret Islam for themselves. The result: a cacophony of disparate voices vying with one another to define the future of what will soon be the largest religion in the world. As with any shouting match, the loudest voices the extremists and radicals get heard. Hence the abiding image in Western media of Islam as a religion of violence and terrorism. Yet something remarkable has been taking place in what is left of Dar al-Islam in the 21st century. A new kind of global identity is forming across North Africa and the Middle East as young people who make up the overwhelming majority of the region's population are beginning to rise up and demand a voice in their political and economic destinies. While this so-called Arab Spring has progressed in fits and starts and though it has been more successful in transforming certain societies (Tunisia, Egypt) than others (Libya, Syria), what is taking place across the lands that Ibn Battuta traveled centuries ago is not, as it has so often been portrayed in the West, merely a nationalist phenomenon. On the contrary, this generation which is intimately interconnected by new communication technologies like satellite television, social media and the Internet has formed a new kind of transnational identity, one that cannot be contained by any ethnic, national or sectarian borders. It is an identity founded on young people's shared ambition to free themselves from the grip of their corrupt and inept political, religious and economic institutions and thus to return their culture and society to the days of glory it achieved in Ibn Battuta's time. No doubt, there are great cultural, ideological and even religious differences in this new generation of Muslims. One should expect nothing less. The notion that there could ever be unanimity in beliefs and practices among more than a billion people scattered across the globe is utterly absurd. Only a fool or an ideologue they are often one and the same would claim otherwise. What cannot be denied, however, is that thanks to this global youth generation, whose reach extends from Asia to Europe and North America, Dar al-Islam once again signifies more than a geographic designation. Once more, it has become an ideal, an aspiration, a shared sense of consciousness. The

ummah, which has always been a virtual idea, is now quite literally virtual, with Muslim communities forming on the Internet, unconstrained by the boundaries of space and time. Where this new generation will take Islam remains to be seen. It will be many more years before we know the full implications of the Arab Spring. But one thing we may be confident about is that the new world being built one protest at a time across much of the Muslim world is one that the peripatetic traveler Hajji Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, as he came to be known on his return to Tangier in 1354, would not have found all that unfamiliar. Aslan is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and founder of AslanMedia.com. His books include No god but God, Beyond Fundamentalism and Tablet & Pen

The Rise of Moderate Islam

By Bobby Ghosh / Cairo Thursday, July 21, 2011 As we wait for the Salafi leader Kamal Habib at the Cairo Journalists' Union, a sudden panic comes over me. I've just noticed that my translator, Shahira Amin, an Egyptian journalist, is wearing a sleeveless top and that her hair is uncovered. In my experience, Salafis, adherents of a very strict school of Islam, take a dim view of such displays of femininity. I recall a time in Baghdad when a Salafi preacher cursed me for bringing a female photographer to our

The Times They Are A-Changin' The young Egyptians gathered in this Cairo caf are the kind of voters the Islamists covet
Photograph by Yuri Kozyrev for TIME

interview,

and

an

occasion

in

the

Jordanian city of Salt when another Salafi leaped from his chair and

thwacked his teenage daughter on the arm when she accidentally entered the

room without covering her face from my infidel eyes. I've heard reports that Habib is not the hard-liner he was in the 1970s, when he co-founded the radical Egyptian Islamic Jihad, or the 1980s, when he was jailed in connection with the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. He gave up politics after a decade in prison, but in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, he has reinvented himself as a leader of a more moderate party. He has held press conferences at the union, so presumably he's had to make his peace with women who don't cover their hair. But I fear he may draw the line at a sleeveless top.

I needn't have worried. When Habib arrives, he shouts a jolly greeting from across the room and then bounds over. He's wearing a blue blazer and clutching a smart phone. He looks my translator straight in the eye and extends his hand to shake. They exchange complaints about the beastly humidity. Would Shahira like a Pepsi? he asks solicitously. Only weeks before my arrival in Cairo, Salafis had burned down Coptic Christian churches in the Imbaba neighborhood, perhaps 15 minutes from where we're sitting. Salafi men had menaced women who strayed into their neighborhood without adequate covering. Long hounded by the police and secret service of the dictator Hosni Mubarak, the Salafis seemed to be celebrating their newfound freedom with an orgy of violence. But a few weeks are an eternity in post-Mubarak Egypt. Several Salafi leaders have decided to join the political fray, and they can't afford to let a few thugs make them all look bad. So Habib has decided to organize a big reconciliation meeting with Coptic leaders, and he wants me to know he has no truck with the reactionaries who burned churches. "Khalas. Finished," he says, spreading his hands in a gesture of finality. "The past is the past, and the people who did this terrible thing are from the past. Their time is over." I had to wonder if Habib's message was custom-made for a Western journalist or whether it offered a glimpse of a new possibility. Over the next few days, in the incipient Arab democracies of Egypt and Tunisia, I find that Islamists of all stripes from extremist Salafis to members of more orthodox groups like the Muslim Brotherhood say they are breaking with the past and reinventing themselves as the moderate mainstream. "We can no longer be the party that says 'Down with this' and 'Down with that,'" says Essam el-Erian, a top Brotherhood leader. "The thing we stood against is gone, so now we have to re-examine what we stand for." As the Arab Spring turns to blazing summer, Islamist movements have quickly formed political parties and mobilized national campaigns designed to unveil their new image before elections in the fall and winter. Paranoid rhetoric about threats to Muslim identity have given way to political messaging that could have been lifted from the party platforms of any Western democracy: It's all about jobs, investments, inclusiveness. A new broom to sweep clean decades of corruption. A new dawn of can-do Islamism. It's not easy to tell how this is playing outside the political parlors. Many Egyptians, especially the young, are not thinking about their next government; they're still focused on the one they've got. Activists continue to organize weekly demonstrations in Tahrir Square, pressuring the military-led transitional authority to prosecute Mubarak-era crimes. "They're permanently in revolution mode," says liberal politician Hisham Kassem. "They're just not organized for politics."

Organization, by contrast, has always been the Muslim Brotherhood's strong suit. Founded in 1928 to promote Islamic law and values, it has endured brutal suppression by a succession of Egyptian leaders. Estimates of its membership vary from 100,000 to many times that number. In the Mubarak years, open association with the Brotherhood was an invitation to police harassment or worse. The group has long been feared in the West as the source and exporter of radical Islamist ideology: violent groups like Hamas are direct offshoots of the Brotherhood. Some scholars trace the origins of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda to the Islamists. In Egypt, however, the group long ago rejected the rhetoric of violent jihad, and it is seen as a social movement as much as a political entity. Egypt's poor have long associated the Brotherhood with its social services, like free clinics and schools. Now the Brotherhood needs to broaden its base to include middle-class and affluent Egyptians. Many of the young men and women hanging out on the October 6 Bridge on a Thursday evening enjoying a cool breeze off the Nile and the chance for some mild flirting seem comfortable with the idea of an Islamist-led government. "We know these guys. We go to school with them, eat with them, play soccer with them," says Fadel, a 20-year-old university student. "If they come to power, we'll judge them by their results, not the size of their beards." Under the circumstances, you might expect the Islamists to be reveling in their ascendancy, seeing it as an endorsement of their extreme views. They're doing no such thing. Instead they are herding toward the political center, adopting positions that would be entirely familiar in Western democracies. Leaders of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia's Ennahda (Renaissance) talk about economic priorities: creating jobs, reducing debt, attracting foreign investment, halting the exodus of skilled labor. There's little talk of Shari'a or of restricting the rights of women or non-Muslim minorities. To reassure critics who fear that the Islamists will seek to remake Egypt as a theocratic state, the Brotherhood is entering the ring with one hand tied voluntarily behind its back: its new political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, will contest only half the seats in the first post-Mubarak general elections, expected in the late fall, and will not field a candidate for the presidential election in early 2012. (When a Brotherhood stalwart, Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fatouh, declared his candidacy in May, he was expelled.) This guarantees that the party will not have anything like a majority in the new parliament, which will take on the highly sensitive task of rewriting the constitution. All parties, says el-Erian, will have a say in framing new laws. Why is the Brotherhood giving up a shot at political dominance? El-Erian says it's because "we recognize that it would create fear, and the absence of fear is good for us as much as it is good for Egypt." The liberals I meet aren't buying this. Some tell me it's an empty gesture: the Brotherhood knows it can't win a majority anyway. Alaa al Aswany, Cairo's most famous living novelist and a prominent liberal, claims that the Brotherhood doesn't have broad support, pointing to recent wins by liberal candidates in bellwether student-union elections at several universities. But he is nonetheless apprehensive. For all its vaunted political principles, al Aswany says, "in the Brotherhood, anything is allowed [in the pursuit of] power, so we can never trust them." Others smell a ruse: the Brotherhood will simply have proxies contest the rest of the seats as independents and will try to win a majority, allowing it to drown out liberal voices in parliament.

It doesn't help that liberal groups are in disarray. The kids who brought down dictators in Egypt and Tunisia have shown little interest in forming political parties. Wael Ghonim, the young Google executive who became the most recognized face of the Tahrir Square revolution, has dropped out of sight. Older liberal pols, who lack the revolutionary credentials of the youth and the organizational skill of the Islamists, are struggling to keep up. Mohamed ElBaradei, the former U.N. nuclear watchdog and Nobel Peace laureate, can't seem to make up his mind whether to run for President. The liberals are also showing themselves to be poor democrats. Several prominent liberals ElBaradei among them have launched a signature campaign to force postponement of the parliamentary elections and get an unelected panel of experts to first remake the constitution. The Constitution First campaign, a Western diplomat in Cairo tells me, "reflects the liberals' uncertainty about how they will do in elections and a desire to lock in some protections." Politically, too, the liberals' call for postponement is nakedly self-serving: it would give them time to try and match the Brotherhood's grass-roots organization. Can the liberals and the Islamists learn to play fairly with each other? The question is being asked not just in Cairo and Tunis but also in Damascus and Sana'a: if religious and secular groups can work together in Egypt and Tunisia, that would send a powerful message to Syria, Yemen and other Arab countries where revolutionary winds are blowing. Western governments, too, have a stake in the answer. Since the fall of Mubarak, much of the discussion in the U.S. and Europe has been about whether his successors can come to terms with the West and maintain peace with Israel. But the first and most important test of the new Arab democracy may be whether its conflicting political tendencies can accommodate each other. Thus far, the Islamists have shown the greater willingness to deal, and the Obama Administration seems to think they can be expected to behave rationally, not like reactionaries or radicals. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confirmed reports in late June that the Administration will upgrade its interaction with the Brotherhood from indirect communication through Egyptian parliamentarians connected to the Islamists to direct contact. But the Islamists' conciliatory gestures are not really directed at a Western audience. It's their own countrymen, Egyptians and Tunisians, they want to reassure. (It's remarkable how rarely the U.S. or Israel comes up in my conversations.) The Islamists may have recognized that their radical tune is played out. They've seen in Iran and Gaza the crippling consequences of extremist behavior: Western aid and foreign investment would dry up and possibly be replaced by economic sanctions. As much as they desire power, the Islamists don't want to inherit bankrupt states. It's also conceivable that they are playing for time to consolidate their position, although there are other plausible explanations. One is that the Arab revolution unshackled the moderate majority within Islamist groups. During the decades of oppressive rule, only the extremists dared speak out, allowing the rest of the world to believe they spoke for the entire movement. With their oppressors gone, moderate Islamists are now in the ascendancy within the Brotherhood. They vastly outnumber the extremists, and in the emerging democracy, this gives them power. They are setting the agenda. Then there's the sobering prospect of having to run a government, perhaps as the dominant partner in a coalition. El-Erian looks positively gloomy as he ponders the challenges that await. "Jobs, where will they come from?" he says. "We need to create jobs. We need investments, not loans. We need businesses.

We need to export more. If we work very hard, in five years Egypt will be a great market." In other words, this is no time to debate the finer points of Koranic jurisprudence. There is yet one other factor influencing the Islamists to redefine themselves: the powerful political gravity of Tahrir Square. Islamists recognize that the revolution that liberated them was led by an iPad generation with universal, not religious, demands: jobs, justice, dignity. "The young people have told us all what they want, and our agenda should be close to theirs," says el-Erian. As the Islamists stampede to the political center, there's still room for the outlier, the unreconstructed Salafi. I arrange to meet Abdelmajid Habibi at a caf in Tunis. He's a leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an extremist group that has not yet been given license to operate as a political party. By coincidence, my Tunisian translator, Salma Mahfoudh, is also a woman; she is dressed in jeans and has her hair uncovered. Habibi is uncomfortable in her presence and keeps his eyes on me even as she speaks with him. It doesn't matter very much if he can't form a political party, he says, because he's not sure he approves of an election or a constitution. "Why do we need a constitution? We already have the Koran, which has all the laws we need as a society." He doesn't believe in modern borders or nations either: the entire Islamic world should submit to a single enlightened ruler. This is the Salafi worldview I've encountered for nearly 15 years. But wait. As we talk some more, Habibi's line softens. "We think people can only be happy if they follow the Koran," he says. "But if they don't want it, we shouldn't force it on them." As he rises to say goodbye, he smiles at us both. He shakes my hand. And then Salma's.

It Takes Neighborhood
2011

By Karl Vick / Istanbul Thursday, July 21,

A few years ago, there were still sheep in some of the new apartment buildings, so there must have been grass somewhere. In a city famed for panoramas water, bridges, sky most of its 13 million residents navigate a surfeit of concrete. Setting out today from a three-bedroom

Far from Home Many of the employees in this jeans workshop came to Istanbul from Malatya, in eastern Anatolia
PHOTOGRAPH BY CAROLYN DRAKE FOR TIME

apartment shared not with livestock but with 11 relatives, a man who six months ago was reclining on an Anatolian hillside, thinking of Istanbul but keeping his flock in sight, might walk a dozen blocks through a neighborhood like Bagcilar, midway between downtown and the airport, halfway between one life and another, before finally coming upon a ragged strip of grass. Commuters on the O-3 highway have grown accustomed to seeing people like him up on the embankment, elbows on knees, gazes held above eight lanes of traffic, trying to feel at home. "They bring the east with them," says Yldirim Ciftci of the migrants to Istanbul hailing from Turkey's Anatolia hinterland. Ciftci made shoes when he first got off the bus 13 years ago from the eastern Anatolian city of Mus. Today he manages a furniture store stocked with the signature items of modern Turkey: sofas and chairs that at the end of the day collapse into a bed for the visitor from back home. In a nation transformed by economic migration, there's always someone crashing in the living room. "People from Corum make socks," Ciftci continues, stating what everyone already knows in Bagcilar, home to three-quarters of a million people following the money: geography is destiny. "The people from Mardin work in confectionary. Konya people are in foodstuffs." Ciftci, whose name means "farmer," appears mildly ashamed that it took him all of two weeks to find a job in a city so obsessed with moving up the ladder that grave diggers market themselves by etching their cell numbers into headstones: MADE BY CEMAL USTA 0532 266 1276. "I'm not changing my telephone number," says Cemal, who stayed with a relative when he arrived from Erzurum, also in eastern Anatolia, at 15. That was 51 years ago. "The cemetery was a lot emptier then." So was Istanbul. The city was still Constantinople and Christian when the Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta passed through and declared it the world's largest city. It's no longer that, but a population of 13 million is not small, and the welcome mat is still out. MAY OUR SUCCESS CONTINUE AND ISTANBUL GROW, say the mammoth billboard sheets covering office buildings, advertising Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister whose Justice and Development Party (AKP by its Turkish initials) is of a piece with what Istanbul has become: a place made for one people, overwhelmed by another. Erdogan is Istanbul-born, but he, like Bagcilar's residents, belongs to Anatolia's black Turks. Tied to the land and piously Muslim, they served as a mute contrast to Istanbul's white-Turk secular elite, whose long and tight grip on national affairs stemmed in no small part from a mistrust of the masses. Now the black Turks have remade the city, even as they have recast the country's politics. Erdogan and his AKP have been elected three times, most recently in June, by riding a black-Turk wave comfortable with both Islam and nationalism (which in Turkey is synonymous with modernity). Weighing the Scales It's an equipoise the Turkish system has never before managed, this balance of God and country. Four times in as many decades, the military mounted coups in the name of safeguarding the state against assorted threats, including Islam. But a coup is a mechanical solution not available to individuals, who must face their own inner battles of allegiance from the cradle. In Turkey, the first words whispered in a

newborn's ear are a verse from the Koran. Yet from kindergarten, one is taught to worship a man in a tuxedo. "As Muslim parents, we want our children to live in Islam as well as we can," says Sertas Gunes, a Bagcilar real estate agent just up the street from the furniture store. "And as Turks, we want our children to understand how the commander created the country." Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the man in evening wear smiling from every banknote and town square, abolished the Ottoman caliphate that nominally united all Muslims. In its stead, he elevated its antithesis, the nation-state, with a ferocity that would seem to defy reconciling national and religious identities. Yet something very like reconciliation call it accommodation suffuses every conversation on the topic in Bagcilar, where both identities are worn comfortably, one atop the other. "There's nothing confusing about it," says Ramazan Gunes, Sertas' uncle and the oldest of the Gunes real estate agents. "What we have here," says Sertas, "is a country that likes to make it confusing." A good bit of that country is visible from the Gunes' office window. The thoroughfare below looks like a street in any provincial city of Anatolia or some blend of them all. On weekdays, mothers in headscarves and raincoats hold the hands of their youngest, who hold the hands of the oldest. On a holiday, the family proceeds behind the paterfamilias, a man leaning back a proud 10 cm, hands in his pockets. Fifteen years ago, the streetscape of aspirational clothes stores (Will Power Jeans) and cell-phone emporiums was a mud track best navigated by tractors. It became part of Istanbul with the arrival of the city's ubiquitous feature, the six-story apartment building, which is to Istanbul what pile is to rugs. Ramazan Kirbiyik put up "50, easy" of them in the 1990s, when Bagcilar absorbed most of its current residents almost all of them, like him, straight from the village. A wheat farmer on the Black Sea coast, he became a builder in Istanbul by asking a lot of questions while working construction, then just throwing up the blocks himself, one every four months. "You don't have the animals living in the buildings anymore," says Erkan Gunes, yet another of the real estate brokers. "People adapt quickly." It's the way of the world. "A guy sells his tractor, sells his animals, sells his land, and he comes here," says Metin Unes. "Starts as a renter in the neighborhood, builds a house, puts a workshop in the ground floor. And that's how he gets started." It worked for Unes, who, being from Corum, makes socks. His workshop is on his first floor: three fantastically complex machines surrounded by bags of inventory and, catching the light in the back room, splendid towers of thread. Downstairs, a half-dozen women prepare the product while Kurdish pop plays at full blast. Before being laid in pairs and stapled into a package, each sock is stretched taut over a flat model of a leg. The man in the corner moves among six upright flats with a rocking step that suggests a polar bear in too small a cage. The men get paid 300 Turkish lira (about $190) for a six-day workweek, the women 100 lira less. These are the jobs that beckon those from Anatolia. Back east, "there's work but no jobs," says Hashim Cetimbas, six months after selling his cows for the down payment on a $40,000 apartment for his nine kids. Turkey's manufacturing juggernaut has helped make the country a genuine power in the region try to find a Middle Eastern city without an Istikbal furniture store while cementing the primacy of Erdogan's party, which Turks associate not with faith but with employment. "Everything is business," says Mutlu Kaygisiz behind the counter of his Bagcilar photography studio. His first name means "happy," and as he talks, his eyes never stop dancing. Nor do his fingers, keyboarding

changes on a wedding photo he's Photoshopping to place the happy couple in front of any number of landmarks they have never actually visited, including the Bosporus, the spectacular strait that defines Istanbul to the world and that a heartbreaking number of migrants have never seen in person. "You've got a lot of people who work 12-, 13-hour days," says Kaygisiz. "This is not a lazy society. This is not a government that will pay people to not work, like in Europe." Identity Card Europe, of course, is what Ataturk wanted Turkey to be. Turkey wanted it too, but the E.U. did not too Muslim, too big and so the republic is finding its own way. Lately it's been touted as a democratic model for the nations of the Arab Spring. Ataturk's republic was never going to fulfill the Koran's injunction that Muslims live under Shari'a. Some might have expected Erdogan's Turkey to do so, but political Islam's moment has passed. Any Turk can glance across the border at Iran and see a nation with the same number of people but fewer freedoms and prospects. After seven decades of secular conditioning, the news from Bagcilar is that most Turks have reconciled the tension between God and country by making faith a private matter. "It lives in the heart," says Rukiye Altutas outside the textile workshop in Bagcilar where her shift has just ended. She is 24, was born 800 km due east and is striking in a silk headscarf and gray raincoat cut on the bias, a look that manages both piety and style. "But it's also something you can show," adds her co-worker Hidayet Ceran, 20. "You have women who wear the headscarf." Hers is pink. "You also have people who believe but would never show it." Does that describe many Arab societies? Her withering look is answer enough, but she goes ahead and says it. "Obviously, we're different."

Urban legend the Pull of Tangier

By Laila Lalami Thursday, July 21, 2011 In 1977, when I was 9 years old, my parents took my siblings and me on a trip to Tangier in the north of Morocco. It was the middle of summer, and a fierce wind blew through the hilly streets of the city, bringing with it the smell of frying fish and cigarette smoke. In the medina, the city's old quarter, women in wide-brimmed straw hats, their hips girded in red-and-white-striped blankets, sold mint and turnip along the alleys. Boys sat behind open cartons filled with contraband from Spain transistor radios, plastic watches, disposable razors calling out prices not in dirhams, but rials, the older unit of currency. Outside their stores, middle-aged shopkeepers, the hoods of their djellabas pulled back behind their ears, spoke in dulcet voices, with long vowels and soft consonants. To a little girl from the capital, Rabat, these regional differences in dress, customs and dialect were proof that Tangier was different. Tangier was legendary. Tangier was mythical. That year, in my picture encyclopedia, I had been reading about Greek myths including that of Hercules, who was said to have rested near Tangier after finishing his 12 labors. So I was particularly

excited when, the next day, we went to see the Caves of Hercules, 14 km outside the city. What awaited us inside was a breathtaking view: a gap in the wall in the shape of a reverse Africa and, silhouetted against it, the turquoise blue sky and the deeper blue of the Atlantic Ocean. While I held on to my father's hand, afraid I might fall into the water, a few teenage boys fearlessly jumped in the ocean. Whether the Caves of Hercules were a geological wonder or the result of the painstaking work of indigenous tribes, no one could really tell me. In Tangier, the line between myth and reality is a fine one. Hercules wasn't the only traveler to have found haven in the city. The Romans arrived in the 1st century B.C.; then came the Vandals, Umayyads, Abbasids, Idrisids, Marinids and many other

Truth or Myth? The caves near Tangier that are said to have been created by the Greek demigod Hercules
HERBERT LIST / MAGNUM

dynasties, Berber or Arab, Muslim or Christian, local or foreign. The Portuguese invaded in the 15th century, before they as well as Tangier itself

fell to Spanish rule. The English turned up a few years later. They all wanted the same thing: a city whose strategic location at the tip of the continent would enable them to control much of the trade from the interior. And they all left although, like Hercules, they left behind something of themselves in Tangier. The Spanish have the Gran Teatro Cervantes, a 1,400-seat theater where their biggest musical and opera stars performed in the years between the two World Wars. The British have the Church of St. Andrew, built on land donated to their community by Sultan Hassan I, and whose bell tower is shaped like a minaret. Tangier has a way of seducing you, then rejecting you, only to invite you to return. Even after nearly 25 years away, its most famous native son, Ibn Battuta, went back, too. So did I again and again. I was in Tangier most recently two years ago, this time with my husband. At first sight, the city seemed to me exactly the way I had left it: the medina's alleyways slowly filling up with

people returning from afternoon prayers; the caf where a man sat quietly smoking his sebsi, the local hash pipe. Yet many of the medina's oldest homes had been turned into bed-and-breakfasts, renovated in styles reflecting the idiosyncratic tastes of their European owners. The Caf Central, where William Burroughs was said to have smoked his kef and which had the reputation of being seedy, looked downright respectable; men and women sipped lemonade on its terrace. Leaving the medina, I walked across the Gran Socco to the Cinma Rif, a cultural center run by the Moroccan visual artist Yto Barrada. I ordered some mint tea and sat down to drink it. Staring at me from a colorful poster on the wall was a smiling Jack Palance in Flight to Tangier. His goal, in all its Technicolor glory, was to recover a lost treasure. Perhaps, I thought, that is why so many keep coming back: they have left something of themselves in Tangier. Lalami, a Moroccan novelist living in Los Angeles, is the author of Secret Son

Somalia's Sea Wolves

By Alex Perry / Galcayo Thursday, July 21, 2011 I have arranged to meet our pirate, somewhat incongruously, in the desert. I board a 1960s prop airplane that smells of goat and is piloted by four portly Russians. After a series of short hops across Somalia's northern wastes, we touch down on a red-dirt strip outside the town of Galcayo. The government in the capital, Mogadishu, doesn't control even half that city, let alone the hinterland, and the day before we arrive, seven people

Guarding the Loot A pirate in the Somalian town of Hobyo stands against the backdrop of a hijacked Greek freighter
PHOTOGRAPH BY MO DAHIR

die in a gunfight in Galcayo. So at the airport, I hire eight men with AK-47s at $15 a day each, then drive across town to the high-walled aid-group compound where I'm staying. I am here to talk to a

pirate king called Mohamed Noor, better known to his shipmates as Farayere, or Fingers. I want to ask Fingers why, when Somalia's pirates face an international armada at sea, when some 1,000 pirates have been arrested and scores more have died, piracy is still rocketing. Fingers arrives alone. He is skinny and sun-creased for his 32 years. We introduce ourselves, tea is poured, and Fingers indicates I should start. How do you organize a pirate attack? I ask. There are no

fixed pirate crews, Fingers replies. Instead, a few investors pool the money to hire two skiffs with fast outboards, employ five to 10 young men with guns whoever shows up and buy them enough food, water and fuel for a month. The investors then send their pirates out with orders not to return until they have captured a ship. That's it. Hundreds of pirates never return at all, says Fingers. Some drown at sea. Many more run out of food, water or fuel and die, starved and parched, adrift on the ocean. "One time there was this group I knew that ran out of food and a guy died and the other guys ate him," Fingers says, speaking in Somali through an interpreter. "They ate their friend?" I ask. Fingers laughs. "It's not a crime if you're about to die," he explains. Fingers says he has invested in scores of pirate crews. I want to know about the ships he has captured and ransomed himself. In five years, he says, there have been two. The first earned him a split of $75,000, the second $280,000. Of that $355,000, he invested $50,000 in a money-lending business in Nairobi, the capital of neighboring Kenya. That still leaves more than $300,000, a sizable haul anywhere but a fortune in Somalia, the world's most failed state, a place that has been at war with itself for 20 years and where annual incomes are normally measured in the hundreds of dollars. Yet when I examine Fingers, I see no signs of wealth. He is squatting on the floor and is dressed like any East African deckhand: cheap thongs, a thin shirt and an old kikoi. "Fingers," I ask, "where did all the money go?" "Gone," he laughs. "You spent it all?" "I bought houses and cars. I bought a couple of Land Cruisers. I spent the money on friends. I enjoyed it. Now it's gone. That's why I'm still a pirate. I need the money. Besides, it's fun." Then Fingers shrugs and gives me a look that says: What did you expect from a pirate? Responsibility? The Somalia Syndrome straddling the trade route between East and West, the Indian Ocean has been a favored haunt for pirates for centuries, as pirate graveyards on Runion and the Seychelles attest. But Somali pirates are a relatively recent phenomenon. When Ibn Battuta visited Mogadishu in the 14th century, it was the pre-eminent city of the Berbers and noted for its merchants and clothmakers and Somalis would have been more prey than predator.

That's all changed now. Somalia hasn't had a central government since 1991. In some 20 years of civil conflict, the fighting has morphed from battles among local warlords and Islamist militias to war on the U.N. and the U.S. to, today, the African Union against al-Shabab, an affiliate of al-Qaeda. The chaos and lawlessness such a history implies inevitably reduce the chances of earning a legitimate wage and turn illicit trades like arms dealing, drug smuggling and piracy into industries. According to the Kuala Lumpur based International Maritime Bureau, Somali pirates attacked 117 ships in the first three months of 2011. That's an all-time high, more than double the figure for the same period last year, raising the number of ships held in Somalia to 28 and sailors to 600. (The totals for the past decade are 160 ships and 4,000 sailors.) The pirates are increasing not just the frequency of their attacks but also their range. They now take ships across the Indian Ocean as far south as Mozambique, as far north as the United Arab Emirates and as far east as India. An area that large is all but impossible to police. And just as they always did, the pirates are targeting an artery of world trade: 40% of global seaborne trade, or 300 cargo ships a day, makes the passage between East and West through the Indian Ocean. That means the ransoms paid to the pirates by shipowners and their insurers are a mere fraction of piracy's true cost. Risk consultancy Geopolicity said in May that higher insurance premiums, extra security, longer routes taken to avoid attacks and the consequent rise in prices of goods transported added up to anywhere from $4.9 billion to $8.3 billion. Increasingly, there is a price to be paid in blood as well. Whereas Somali pirates once rarely used violence, from January to March they killed seven sailors. Shippers also report frequent beatings and torture of sailors, even a few instances of keelhauling. The rise in bloodshed is explained partly by the pirates' discovery that it speeds and raises ransoms and partly by the increasingly lethal nature of contacts between pirates and foreign warships belonging to a 25-nation antipiracy armada. In January, South Korean commandos killed eight pirates while rescuing 21 hostages from a hijacked freighter. In February, as U.S. forces closed in, pirates shot dead four American hostages who had been on an around-the-world sailing trip. When forces from Puntland, a semiautonomous region of northern Somalia, tried to free a Danish yachting couple, their three children ages 13 to 17 and two other adults in March, another group of pirates killed five of the soldiers. In May, a Taiwanese skipper was killed in a shoot-out between pirates and the U.S.S. Stephen W. Groves, a frigate that is part of the antipiracy patrol. Press-Ganged A few days before I meet Fingers, I hear a firsthand account of the pirates' growing industriousness in a Kenyan caf on the edge of Mombasa's old town. Last year, Joseck Amere was one of 39 Kenyans crewing for a South Korean captain on the Golden Wave, a 300-ton, 85-m trawler fishing for tuna, crab, lobster and prawns off Kenya's northern coast. Just after dawn on Sept. 9, Amere saw two skiffs skid across the horizon. He fetched some binoculars. "I can see five or six guys, and they have weapons," he says. "Two RPGs, two heavy machine guns, six AK-47s. They start firing. They signal us to stop. The captain tries to escape, but the pirates put a ladder over the side, climb aboard, run to the wheelhouse and punch the captain. 'If you want your lives, cooperate or we will kill you all,' they say. 'We are not scared of anything. We know we can die any minute, but we'll kill you all first.'" The pirates sailed for Haradheere, a pirate base a day's drive from Galcayo. There a group of town elders boarded the ship, denounced the crew for stealing Somali fish and told the captain he had three

choices: "Cooperate and use your ship to hijack a tanker. Pay us $6 million. Or we'll behead you and sink your boat." The captain chose to hijack a tanker. Which is how the Golden Wave became a pirate mother ship. For the next six months, using Amere and his crewmates as human shields, the pirates roamed the Indian Ocean. First to fall, on Oct. 24, was a Singapore-flagged, 5,076-ton liquid-natural-gas tanker, the York, boarded at anchor off Mombasa. The Golden Wave then moved to the Seychelles, where, after attempting 17 ambushes in 21 days all of which failed the pirates captured a German cargo vessel, the Beluga Nomination, on Jan. 22. The hijack turned violent when the Seychelles coast guard opened fire: one pirate and two crewmen were killed. Two days later, the pirates hijacked an Iranian fishing boat. Then they boarded a Pakistani fishing boat and stole its radio, laptops and fuel. Finally, running low on fuel again, they ambushed a third boat. By this time, Amere said, he was a member of the boarding team, albeit one with a gun to his head. In early February, the pirates returned to Haradheere. Amid celebratory drinking, dancing, gunfire and chewing of khat (a stimulant), one pirate took pity on the Kenyan crew. Amere says the pirate gave him a satellite phone and enough fuel for a day, and at 4 a.m. the Golden Wave slipped out of Haradheere. Once at sea, the crew picked up an escort from a Finnish warship, and they finally returned home to Mombasa on Feb. 17, six months after they set out. Surface Tension The pirates' ability to act seemingly with impunity illustrates an uncomfortable realization now dawning on the navies of the world: that even in the 21st century, when warships can fire cruise missiles through a window in downtown Tripoli, controlling piracy is beyond them. Peter Hinchliffe, secretary general of the International Chamber of Shipping and the International Shipping Federation, says that while the warships created a small secure corridor through the Gulf of Aden, "no one asked, If we do this, what will the pirates do? And, of course, they simply moved elsewhere." Even if the world's navies agree on a plan Hinchliffe suggests targeting mother ships it's not certain that military muscle alone can end piracy. When the international armada began arresting pirates, Kenya initially volunteered to imprison them, then balked when it realized how many there would be: 1,007 by May 2011, according to the U.N. Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC). In an attempt to meet the size of the problem, the UNODC has rehabilitated a jail in Hargeysa, Somalia, that can hold 460 inmates. Small numbers of pirates are also working their way through the justice systems of 20 countries from the U.S. to Japan. But piracy is potentially limitless. While the UNODC reckons there are currently some 2,500 Somali pirates, the number of unemployed Somali men available to replace any who are detained runs to hundreds of thousands. The biggest single obstacle to ending piracy is that it pays so well. Not so long ago, a few hundred thousand dollars would free a ship. Today a tanker goes for $5 million to $10 million. Hinchliffe estimates total ransoms paid in 2010 at anywhere from $75 million to $238 million and the return for a pirate investor at around 10,000%. With no other way of freeing sailors, shipowners or their insurers continue to pay. Says Alan Cole, a Nairobi-based piracy specialist at the UNODC: "The shipowners say, 'There's no way we can get people back apart from paying ransoms.' And the governments say, 'If you keep paying ransoms, there is no way we're going to be able to stop this.'"

One recent development might put a spanner in this flourishing industry: consistent reports that al-Shabab is now taxing pirates and funding its own hijackings. "All the guys who have been arrested recently came out of Kismayo," says a Nairobi-based piracy expert. (Kismayo is a southern Somali port under al-Shabab's control.) Anyone paying ransom to a group allied with al-Qaeda especially one that became an international terror group in its own right when it killed 76 people in a bomb attack last year in Kampala, Uganda would be liable for prosecution in the West. But while al-Shabab's involvement may dampen the ransom business, it will not end it. Many northern Somali pirates have no relationship with al-Shabab. The nightmare scenarios are bleak. Hinchliffe speculates about an environmental disaster involving a hijacked oil tanker. Cole warns of the possibility of a humanitarian catastrophe on a pirated cruise ship. Andrew Mwangura, an independent Mombasa-based piracy monitor, sketches out a scenario in which terrorists use hijacked ships to block the Gulf of Aden at its narrowest point, the 30-km Bab-el-Mandeb. Pirate Heaven There is a bay on the northern shore of Madagascar in whose thick forests, legend has it, lie the ruins of Libertalia. Some 300 years ago, the Indian Ocean was a favorite for European brigands who made their living on the high seas. But as Captain Charles Johnson recounts in his 1724 General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, piracy wasn't all rum and yo-ho-ho. Johnson portrays Libertalia's founders James Misson, a former French navy officer, and Signor Caraccioli, a lapsed Italian priest who sailed with him as revolutionaries. Caraccioli was something of a radical, and he convinced Misson and his crew "that every Man was born free, and had as much Right to what would support him as to the Air he respired ... The vast Difference betwixt Man and Man, the one wallowing in Luxury, and the other in the most pinching Necessity, was owing only to Avarice and Ambition on the one Hand, and a pusillanimous Subjection on the other." Caraccioli persuaded the men to use robbery to punish the wealthy and buy their freedom. With their takings, they built a utopia on Madagascar in which a rotating leadership replaced kings and captains, religion had no hierarchy and private wealth was banned. Misson's crewmen, Caraccioli declared, "were no Pyrates, but Men who were resolved to assert that Liberty which God and Nature gave them [and] were Barriers against the Rich and Powerful." Libertalia is most likely a myth. Its ruins have never been found, Misson himself may not have existed, and Charles Johnson is a pseudonym, perhaps Daniel Defoe's. But the legend contains elements of truth. In the 17th century, a band of English dissidents did establish a settlement in Ranter's Bay, on Madagascar, where they rejected organized religion and lived off piracy. Libertalia's founding ideals would also have been familiar to any 17th century rebel. Libertalia holds lessons for those trying to end piracy today. To Misson's men, piracy was a means to an end fighting oppression and building a future of fairness and prosperity. Likewise, Somali pirates will often claim, as Fingers does, to be former fishermen who first attacked Asian fishing trawlers that were devastating Somali fish stocks. If that was once true, it isn't now: kidnapped crewmen report that many pirates can't swim, let alone sail, while the recovery in fish stocks engendered by piracy's deterrent effect has not been accompanied by a revival in the Somali fishing industry. Nevertheless, the notion that the world has dealt Somalis a cruel hand and that piracy will never be fixed unless some genuine Somali grievances are addressed is widely supported. "The only real solution is on land," says Graham Westgarth, chairman of the International Association of Independent Tanker Owners, a trade body.

It wouldn't take utopia. A more modest vision a little less lawlessness, a little more development has brought Omar Mohamoud Omarsuuri, a onetime IT teacher in Birmingham, in the U.K., back to the land of his birth. "The root cause of piracy is lack of strong authority onshore," says Omar. Despairing of a functioning national government, he and a selection of clan leaders have formed a regional one in a new state they have founded in central Somalia, Galmudug, at whose core is a new police force of 400 men. Omar hopes they will be the foundation of a state-level normalization that will lead eventually to legitimate businesses and legal jobs. Their initiative finds strong support from Somalis, even those linked to piracy. Adar Abdirahman, 40, is mother of Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, who was sentenced to 33 years in jail in New York City in February for piracy. Adar says her son was just 15 "a child soldier" when he became a pirate and 16 when he was arrested by a U.S. Special Operations team. "If you're going to tackle piracy, do it properly," she says, "not by arresting children but attacking the root cause: a failed state with no government, schools or jobs." It's a brave project. But standing in its way, I can't help but feel, is Fingers. When I ask him if he's happy, he replies, "I am. I don't depend on anyone. When I want a woman, I give her money and she becomes my mistress. When I need a ship, I go out and take one. No one can stop me. The sea is as big as Somalia. No one can control Somalia. And no one controls the sea." Ending piracy will require building a better Somalia for tomorrow. Trouble is, Fingers and thousands like him are already living their Libertalia today.

The Making of an Emirate

By Michael Schuman / Dubai Thursday, July 21, 2011 No one who has visited Dubai would be surprised that some crafty property developer has devoted an entire mall to the great Ibn Battuta. Its hallways may be lined with the H&M shops and food courts familiar to any New Jersey mall rat, but the complex has been designed in the spirit of Ibn Battuta's historic travels, or so its managers tell us. In the China hall, a life-size model of a square-sailed Chinese junk hovers over a babbling

View from the Top Dubai's striking cityscape camouflages multiple challenges for its economy and wider society
PAOLO PELLEGRIN / MAGNUM

fountain outside the multiplex. The India section boasts an ornately decorated fake elephant. A few steps away, an exhibition educates shoppers about the explorer's achievements. Panels detail

his exploits along his long journey, and an abacus and other paraphernalia of his time sit in plastic cases. In the middle is a Starbucks. Is this any way to honor the most famous of Muslim explorers? Actually, it is. The mall may be tacky, but it is also a symbol of the Islamic world's quest to reclaim the economic grandeur it had in Ibn Battuta's age. The display by the Starbucks reminds us of the wealth the Arab lands possessed when he traveled through them. A century after the explorer's death, however, the Muslims' economic power began to wane, Europe came to dominate the global economy and the Islamic world never closed the gap. Arab nationalists are quick to blame European colonialism for holding the region back, but that's a symptom of economic decline, not the cause. Others have pointed fingers at Islam's prohibition of usury, which, critics claim, hampered the development of modern finance. It doesn't fly. Muhammad was a merchant, and he chose Mecca, a city enriched by the caravan trade, to be the spiritual center for his new faith. For centuries, Islamic countries were every bit as economically progressive as Christian Europe. In his new book, The Long Divergence, economist Timur Kuran argues that Islamic law is to blame. Its strictures on business partnerships and inheritance made it difficult for the Islamic world to match the institutions of capitalism forged in the West. While the Europeans reshaped the global economy with joint-stock companies and modern banking networks, the Islamic world never did. That's what makes Dubai so interesting. In many ways, the emirate is an attempt to re-create the vibrant, cosmopolitan trading entrepts that were once such an important part of the Middle East's economy. This has meant introducing institutions that make modern economies work. In 2000, Dubai launched a stock market. The government has set up special economic zones (SEZs) in which foreign investors can easily start businesses, and built a top-class airport and superhighways. Underpinning everything is a tolerance for foreign religious and cultural practices that has permitted people of all stripes to live and work freely. The lanky blondes in tank tops emerging from the gym at the Ibn Battuta Mall are a testament to that. "Dubai has the type of institutions and regulations in place that have brought it very close to competing with Frankfurt or Singapore," says Ayman Khaleq, a partner at law firm Vinson & Elkins. As a result, Dubai has become the primary trade and finance hub in the region. Up from the sand dunes has risen a forest of modern skyscrapers, including the 163-story Burj Khalifa, the tallest in the world. The swish Capital Club is bursting with well-dressed bankers and private-equity specialists from around the world. The hallways of the Ibn Battuta Mall are a cacophony of languages, skin tones and clothing styles. Yet despite its success, Dubai's transformation is far from complete. The sudden 2009 revelation that state-owned Dubai World (whose property arm built the Ibn Battuta Mall) couldn't pay its debts exposed a

dangerous lack of transparency in the emirate's corporate and financial systems. That contributed to a property boom and bust that is dragging on the economy and testing the city's nascent bankruptcy law. The SEZs have been created by little more than the whim of Dubai's rulers decrees that can just as easily be torn up. The economy is managed by an incestuous clique of local Arabs, each of them usually holding multiple posts among the city's banks, companies and government agencies. Ahmed Humaid al-Tayer, governor of the Dubai International Financial Centre, insists, however, that Dubai's leaders are committed to strengthening the city's institutions to create a healthier economy. "After the crisis, the government put emphasis on transparency and governance," he says. The melting pot at Ibn Battuta Mall is also something of a mirage. The reality of Dubai society is darker: a privileged local elite lives off the labor of foreign workers with few rights. The locals are probably about a tenth of Dubai's 2 million people, but they control the government and enjoy all sorts of special perquisites, such as heavily subsidized electricity and water and free health care. Every company founded outside of the SEZs must have a local partner with majority ownership. Meanwhile, the rest of the population can stay only as long as their work visas remain valid. Many, therefore, feel like Bharat Butaney who can't call home home. The India-born doctor arrived in Dubai in 1990 and can't imagine living anywhere else, but he worries that one day, his decades in the emirate might come to nothing. "I have given my youth for the development of this place," he says. "Say at 70, I'm told to go back to my country. How do I survive?" The truth is that Dubai has been built by people like Butaney. There is nothing particularly Arab or Islamic about the Dubai success story. The majority of economic activity takes place outside Islamic law; most business is based on Western legal principles, not Shari'a. Dubai is not an example of an Islamic economy catching up to the West. It's a case of a Muslim country growing rich by copying the economic principles of the West. Could Dubai have succeeded on Islam alone? We have no idea. There is no model that proves an economy built entirely on Islamic law can thrive in the modern world. It is true that Islamic finance is growing rapidly and becoming more complex, and some argue that the strictures of Islamic law are a much needed tonic for a world economy stricken with the fallout from financial excess. "There is a movement [in global finance] that you need to go back to basics," says Yavar Moini, an Islamic-finance specialist at investment bank Morgan Stanley. "One of the basic principles of Islamic finance is: Don't bet on speculation." But the steps needed to confirm that an investment adheres to Islamic beliefs add to costs. A real estate investor can't own a building with a whiskey company or pork brand as a tenant, and restrictions on debt tend to make Islamic investments heavier on equity than Western-style deals, adding to risk. Still, Dubai has proved that an Islamic state can return to the glory days of Ibn Battuta's time by embracing the global economy and the tools to compete within it. If Ibn Battuta passed through Dubai today, he'd probably marvel at the shopping mall dedicated to his legacy, and take a seat at the Starbucks. But what would he make of a Java Chip Frappuccino? with reporting by Angela Shah / Dubai

In Pursuit of Romance
By Aryn Baker / Riyadh Thursday, July 21, 2011 It's 10 minutes to midnight on a Thursday in Riyadh, the start of the Saudi weekend, and even though it's the middle of finals, Tahlia Street swarms with kids in Porsches and Ferraris looking for a good time. Throbbing bass beats back the syncopated rhythm of bleating car horns. The aim is not so much to get through the traffic as to draw attention to the young men in the driver's seats. They lounge in their leather thrones, AC on high and a forearm draped nonchalantly over a rolled-down window, luxury watch on display. Both peacocks and hunters, they have relaxed postures that belie eyes on alert for signs of prey in the passing cars: a foreign driver alone up front, and in the backseat, partially obscured by tinted windows rolled up tight, a woman's vague form. I survey the scene from the backseat of my friend's SUV, confident in the relative anonymity of her darkened windows. The urgent honking of a nearby car breaks my reverie. A gleaming white Chrysler pulls up alongside. Inside, a young man, the starched and folded peaks of his red-and-white-checked headscarf pulled low in the Stetson-like style popular with hipsters, is waving for my attention. He swerves erratically as he attempts to steer with his knees, giving me a double thumbs-up and a broad grin. Then he raises a laminated placard stenciled with a phone number. After a few seconds, enough time for me to jot down the digits, he shouts across the lane, "Khalas? You got it?" As if to seal the deal, he licks his lips lasciviously, kisses his index finger with an exaggerated pout and blows it like Marilyn Monroe in my direction, then roars off. Welcome to the pickup, Saudi-style. Salman must have been disappointed to get a phone call from an American journalist. When we meet at a popular caf a few days later, he confesses that he received at least 10 calls that night and wasn't entirely sure which car had been mine. Ever the player, he tries to convince me that he "numbered" me, in local parlance, because I was "so beautiful." When I point out that a grandmother could have been behind that tinted window, he shrugs. "How else can I meet girls?" Over virgin mojitos, Salman describes to me a dating scene like no other. There are no movie theaters in Saudi Arabia, and no bars. Weddings are segregated, as are schools. In Saudi Arabia, where culture and religion conspire to prevent all unregulated contact between men and women, young singles resort to extreme methods in pursuit of romance. In Riyadh, says Salman, numbering can be competitive. Preening males sometimes rent fancy cars in hopes of increasing their chances. "Girls don't give a damn if the boy is good-looking or nice," he complains. "They only care if he is rich." In the five years Salman has been numbering, he has managed to go on several dates and even had a girlfriend for a short while. But at 24, he's looking for something more serious. "Definitely

romance," he says. "If I can find a nice, respectable girl this way, I wouldn't mind getting married." Worlds Apart "(I can't get no) satisfaction" was certainly not on the sound track to the Arab revolts. But it might very well have been their subtext, according to the well-known Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, who argued in an interview with the Jerusalem Post that the uprisings were fueled in part by sexual frustration. "In the Muslim world, casual sex, Western-style, doesn't exist," Lewis said. "If a young man wants sex, there are only two possibilities marriage and the brothel. You have these vast numbers of young men growing up without the money either for the brothel or the bride-price, with raging sexual desire. On the one hand, it can lead to the suicide bomber. On the other hand, sheer frustration." The theory has drawn virulent rebuttals from some and slow nods of acceptance from others. Some, like Egyptian sexologist Heba Qotb, say the idea that men can't afford to get married is nonsense. Just look at the rate of early marriage in lower-class communities compared with that of the rich. "Late marriages," Qotb says, "are by choice." But Mahmood Takey, a 19-year-old Egyptian university student, says that without a job, he would hardly be considered a good catch. "A guy might have to wait until he is 30 before he gets a job, so of course he is frustrated. We were protesting because of corruption, injustice and unemployment, but absolutely sexual frustration was a part of it." Some men, he says, go to prostitutes, but not if they are religious. Of course, a 19-year-old might be more concerned about sex than, say, marriage. (Ibn Battuta was obsessed with both: he possessed a strong libido and married numerous times during his travels.) But the reality for many in the Middle East is that marriage isn't just about religiously sanctioned sex. It's about finding a place in society. Prostitutes and Internet porn help assuage some frustrations, even as they introduce guilt and shame, says Qotb, but they can't provide intimacy and social maturity. While most marriages are still arranged, single Saudis are increasingly captivated by Hollywood-style romances beamed in via satellite and the Internet. As they attempt to navigate between tradition and modern love, they stumble over the obstacles of Saudi culture, resulting in a unique form of dating that is both an earnest search for connection and fraught with danger. Segregation of the sexes has its origins in both Islam and the early traditions of the peninsula's Bedouin tribes, in which hiding women from the public eye was considered a point of honor and, in an era predating genetic testing, a way of ensuring that offspring were legitimate. This Bedouin culture has spread across the peninsula, though it is weaker in the Red Sea city of Jidda, where over centuries, pilgrims on their way to nearby Mecca have left a more liberal and cosmopolitan imprint. Men and women had always prayed together in Mecca, but conservative clerics argue that stringent laws originally concerning the Prophet Muhammad's wives should apply to all women. Others justify the ban on mixing by pointing to social problems elsewhere. "These rules help society avoid the mess you see in the West: illegitimate children, single mothers, abortions and children in orphanages," says Sheik Abdallah al-Oweardi, a self-described moderate religious scholar, citing a recent statistic that 40% of all pregnancies in the U.S. are out of wedlock. The laws against mixing mean that single men and women rarely have an opportunity to meet. Most workplaces are segregated as well, except in medicine, where separation could affect the quality of care. That's one of the reasons, say several young female medical students out celebrating the end of finals, that they chose the profession.

"Just like in America, the best place to meet someone is at work," one told me. "And for us, that means the hospital." She asked me not to use her name, mortified that she might be perceived as loose for admitting she was interested in meeting men. (Dating in Saudi Arabia is such a sensitive topic that most people I met spoke on the condition that I use their first name only or no name at all.) Girls Just Want to Have Fun Saudi girls go out on the prowl just like boys, ducking even stricter rules. And when they do, they have to make sure they dress the part. Women in Saudi Arabia are required to wear a headscarf and an abaya, a loose, full-length gown. In Riyadh, black predominates. But what looks like a uniform from a distance can be at close range a daring code of communication a flash of color on the sleeves, enough Swarovski crystals to complete a chandelier. "Of course boys pay attention to our abayas," says Maha, 22. Hers features artfully slashed sleeves that reveal a white satin lining. It's a Friday evening at the mall, and she is fully made up, complete with false eyelashes. "All the girls want to look good. We do our makeup and hair before coming out," she says. And it works. She met her boyfriend at the mall when he walked up to her and offered his number. He didn't have a good line, but he was handsome, she says. Still, the international rules of flirting applied: "I called after a week, so he wouldn't think I was easy." For two months, their "dates" were limited to two-hour-long phone calls nearly every night. Now she sometimes goes to his house for dinner, chaperoned by his mother or older sister. Occasionally, they hold hands or sneak a chaste kiss if no one is looking. But it never goes further than that. She French-kissed a boy once, she admits, but would never do so with her current boyfriend. "That wouldn't be proper," she says. "He is the man I want to marry." Once a couple gets past the numbering stage and the phone calls, finding places to go is challenging. Unmarried couples are not allowed to be together in public; if caught, they can be fined or thrown in jail. For a woman, it can mean a humiliating call to her father and a stain on her reputation. Fear of being busted can turn an otherwise pleasant outing into a stressful evening. A mention of the mutaween, or religious police, invokes shudders. "Oh, don't say their name," one woman tells me, looking around nervously. "It will make them come." Just a few weeks before, she and her boyfriend cowered behind a partition for what seemed like hours as the mutaween swept through a restaurant popular with young couples. Yousuf, a suave bioengineering student with several years of successful pickups, recommends taking dates out to breakfast, when the "bearded ones," as he calls them, are less likely to be prowling around. Another trick, he says, is to go to a mall or hotel owned by one of the prominent princes who have a tacit agreement with the mutaween that they don't go to his properties. Yousuf's favorite place is the top of Riyadh's ritzy Kingdom Tower, where a sky bridge provides a breathtaking view of the city along with an added perk. "If you are lucky, she pretends to feel dizzy and leans against you," he says, grinning. Sometimes the challenge of dating is part of the fun. Manal, who just married her boyfriend of two years, says a part of her misses the drama. "Our dates are so much more boring now that we are married," she says with a laugh. Not all dates lead to marriage, of course. "You are always hoping you will find the right one," admits Yousuf, "but mostly, you just want to have fun." Besides, he says, when the time comes, his parents will

pick a suitable wife for him. "Families should protect their daughters. If they flirt with boys, they probably aren't the kind of girls you want to marry." Your Reputation Counts Today's Saudi Arabia is a world Jane Austen would recognize. Marriages are as much about finding mates as they are about forging family alliances. A young bride is expected to have a spotless reputation; loitering too long with a boy in public can scar her chances at making a good match. It used to be that a girl's virginity was the most important thing, but today, when virginity can be cosmetically resurrected with a quick trip to Beirut or Europe, reputation is paramount. Prospective parents-in-law can demand to scrutinize a girl's mobile-phone records to ensure she hasn't had a prior relationship. For that reason, some more-affluent Saudis, with their parents' permission, choose to date outside the country. They flock to Beirut, Paris or London, where they can meet other eligible Saudis without fear of repercussions back home. See why an Iraqi woman in Arizona fell victim to honor killing. Sex, though rare, does happen. So taboo is sex outside marriage that few singles have access to contraception. If a girl gets pregnant, her family will often force a marriage. Another drawback to clandestine dating, says one Saudi psychologist, is that young women are not taught that they have the right to say no. "So she falls into rape very easily. And then she falls into the spiral of 'I lost my virginity. What am I going to do, and who will marry me?' The psychological turmoil is horrendous." The strict segregation of genders often leads to same-sex experimentation, according to one university student. Like porn, it is for some a religiously acceptable alternative to the greater sin of fornication, particularly if it happens between young women. "The most precious thing is a girl's virginity," says al-Oweardi. "If she has relationships with her female friends, that is O.K. it is only temporary." For their part, many young Saudi men postpone marriage until they have a decent job. With an 11% official unemployment rate, however, that's becoming more difficult. In any event, says Ahmad al-Shugairi, a Saudi televangelist who focuses on youth issues, such thinking is out of sync with biology and a culture that emphasizes chastity. The No. 1 preoccupation with young men everywhere is sex, he says. But unlike in the U.S., where it's socially O.K. to date, Saudi "society and religion [are] saying you cannot release that desire unless you are married, which these days can be as late as 30. So what are we expecting to happen from the age of 14 to 30? It's a bomb waiting to explode, and all that the clerics can tell them is that they need to fast." He proposes that the age of marriage be lowered to better mesh with biology. Dating, even if it goes no further than a peck on the cheek at the end of the day, serves as a pressure valve, says Salman, my would-be beau in the Chrysler. When he's waiting for his phone to ring after a night out numbering, he's not thinking about sex so much as that dopamine hit that presages potential love. If there were other, more natural ways of meeting girls, he and his friends would be less likely to engage in such aggressive behavior. He wistfully talks about Jidda, where folks go to loosen their headscarves a little. "In Jidda, you can meet girls at the caf or at the beach," he says. "It's so much more normal." Of course, by Saudi standards, Jidda is anything but normal. There, at the numerous private beach colonies lining the coast, young men and women from Saudi Arabia's "velvet class" the upwardly

mobile intelligentsia play beach volleyball and share a hubble-bubble as the sun goes down. But as one of the young volleyball players points out, just because men and women have a little more freedom to meet in Jidda, it doesn't mean love is any closer to hand. "At my age, I am starting to worry about getting married," says 28-year-old Roua, who runs her own promotions company. "But I have to marry someone I love, and that's not easy to find." That's true in Saudi Arabia, and everywhere else.

The Sands, and Waters, of Time

By Ishaan Tharoor Thursday, July 21, 2011
In February 1352, Ibn Battuta set off from the city of Sijilmasa at the edge of the Sahara to journey with a camel caravan to lands far to the south. The voyage across the desert was a grueling two-month ordeal through salt wastes and terrain "haunted by demons," yet it was a trek made by many then. Trade goods and Islam meant the Sahara was a crossroads, not a sandy oblivion. In almost every town he visited in the kingdom of Mali, Ibn Battuta was gifted

Washed Up A passenger got off his bus to watch a flash flood coursing through part of the Sahara's northern edge
Photograph by Dominic Nahr / Magnum for TIME boat." TIME photographer Dominic Nahr followed Ibn Battuta's path into sub-Saharan Africa. Starting at tourist-trodden Fez, he went to Sijilmasa, whose ruins, says Nahr, "feel forgotten." Through the desert and into Mali, Nahr passed the ancient mud town of Djenn, much the same now as it was in Ibn Battuta's time. At the shores of the Niger River, Nahr captured the panorama of an age-old festival, with fishermen sinking their nets en masse. Says Nahr: "My heart beat faster as I entered the waters." Ibn Battuta would have known the feeling.

calabashes and cucumbers by men who had made the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Upon seeing the Niger River, Ibn Battuta mistakenly concluded he was by the Nile. A crocodile to him looked "just like a small

The New Great Game

By Hannah Beech / Atyrau Thursday, July 21, 2011 At the confluence of East and West stands a city at the mouth of the Ural River, which cleaves the Eurasian landmass into two continents. Atyrau was the first Russian settlement in modern-day Kazakhstan; it was a fort constantly imperiled by steppe nomads and marauding Cossacks. Yet there is almost nothing here for the modern traveler: no compelling historic sites, no

Culture Clash Kazakh women in traditional dress in an Atyrau hotel that is popular with expat oil workers
Photograph by Carolyn Drake for TIME

exceptional landscapes, no quirky cultural traditions. Even the nearby Caspian Sea fails to provide respite brackish marsh stretches for miles, the ideal breeding ground for the mosquitoes that swarm even during daylight. Touring

the outskirts of the city, where Ibn Battuta once traded his horses for camels in the Golden Horde oasis of Saraichik, my eyes crave anything to break up the monotony of salt-stained scrubland. But the ruins of Saraichik offer only a few lumps of mud brick and a human skull sitting on the Ural riverbank. Desolate as this place may be, flights to Atyrau are invariably full. Swatting away clouds of mosquitoes at baggage claim with me are muscled Filipinos, sunburned Houston executives, unflappable Indians and scented Russians wearing fine shoes and watches. Atyrau may feel like the barren epicenter of Eurasia, but it is also the booming oil capital of a young, resource-rich nation. Because of the influx of oil money, rooms at the uninspired top hotel in town, with its thin walls and bountiful adult-TV programming, rent at Tokyo or London prices. New-model MercedesBenz and Land Cruisers purr amid the clattering Ladas and Skodas. A gated community of cream-colored California-style villas each with a patch of lawn, a Weber grill and an American-made trash can provides refuge for expat oil barons unimpressed with Atyrau's Soviet architecture. Although the Caspian is famous for its caviar, gastronomic civilization has arrived in another form: a TGI Friday's and a Baskin-Robbins. Such are the totems of a new Central Asia. Islam as a political force once dominated this vast, forbidding land. But when Ibn Battuta (and Marco Polo before him) coursed through, no single imperium ruled. Eventually the Russians prevailed. By the 1920s, the godless Soviet Union had gobbled up Central Asia. Moscow's influence persisted even after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., with the landlocked region dependent on Russian trade ties. The U.S. has since tried to undercut Russia by pouring money into the energy sector of

Kazakhstan, the biggest and richest of the Central Asian republics. Relations between the U.S. and Kazakh leader Nursultan Nazarbayev have even taken on an opportunistic, Cold War style friendliness, despite the strongman's indifference to Washington's lectures about democratic virtues. Enter Beijing. Where oil gushes in the developing world, the Chinese have a habit of appearing. Eager to fuel its voracious economic engine, Beijing has scoured the globe for untapped oil reserves and mineral deposits. Kazakhstan happens to be the world's largest uranium producer, and recent oil-field discoveries in the country's west are among the planet's biggest in more than two decades. The Middle Kingdom's power only increased after the 2009 financial crisis left Western firms temporarily less equipped to compete with the cash-rich Chinese. In that year alone, Beijing lavished $10 billion in financing on Kazakhstan, helping build roads, railways and telecommunications networks. This spring, China Petroleum and Chemical Corp., or Sinopec, began work on a $1 billion expansion of the Atyrau oil refinery. Chinese firms now control roughly one-quarter of Kazakhstan's oil production. Some of it flows to China via a pipeline that gives Beijing a crucial alternative to the Strait of Malacca choke point through which most of its oil imports must pass. The pipeline, which is expected to carry 20 million tons of oil a year by 2013, stretches from western Kazakhstan and tunnels through the Tian Shan Mountains to Xinjiang, the fractious, Muslim-majority autonomous region in northwestern China. A giant uranium deal and acquisition of a major natural gas field have also given China Inc. a bigger stake in Kazakhstan, a country the size of Western Europe. When Chinese President Hu Jintao visited Kazakhstan in June, he took with him $2.5 billion in investment and currency deals. This year, Kazakhstan's trade with China will likely surpass its trade with Russia; Hu has predicted trade levels will double within four years to $40 billion. "The whole of Kazakhstan has a population that's smaller than one of our big cities," says Liu Wei, a Sinopec employee in Atyrau, referring to the Central Asian nation's 16 million people. "But it has so many natural resources. What's the problem if we want to buy them and help make Kazakhstan rich?" But money is just part of the equation. China is leveraging its growing clout in neighboring Kazakhstan to put pressure on the tens of thousands of ethnic Uighurs who over the decades have fled across the border from Xinjiang to escape persecution by the Chinese. Central Asia's latest Great Game thus has it all: intense competition among three big powers, high stakes for natural resources and communal strife. But there is little question about who is now ahead in the game. Says Nurlan Keikin, the managing director for capital construction and reconstruction at the Atyrau refinery: "We all know the future is China's." The Chinese Connection Since President Nazarbayev turned an outpost on a windswept steppe into Kazakhstan's new capital in 1997, Astana has grown with an astonishing architectural exuberance. The Finance Ministry is shaped like a giant dollar sign. On one block I pass a Korean-style edifice, a Swedish beer hall and a collection of yurts, the traditional tents used by Kazakhs. There is a Nazarbayev University. And reinforcing China's place in the city is the Beijing Palace a Chinese-roofed hotel tower, complete with a revolving restaurant that would look perfectly at home on the Avenue of Eternal Peace.

Beijing's influence on Kazakhstan is still not as pervasive as Moscow's. After the long years of Russian domination, one-third of Kazakhstan's population is ethnically Russian. Many Kazakhs speak Russian to each other, despite Kazakh language instruction in school. Nevertheless, it is the incursion of China, the populous behemoth to the east, that is raising nationalist hackles, not the specter of Russia. In May, Kazakhstan's biggest opposition party sponsored a hundreds-strong demonstration against China. Protesters were riled by rumors that Kazakhstan might lease land to Chinese farmers; posters at the rally depicted a Kazakh yoked to a plow helmed by a Chinese mandarin. Throughout my travels in Kazakhstan I hear tales of an invading Chinese horde. Some local NGOs estimate that half a million Chinese have descended on this sparsely populated land. I see no evidence of such numbers, and the Kazakh Ministry of Labor and Social Protection has set quotas limiting the number of foreign workers in Kazakhstan. But a 2009 U.S. embassy cable from Astana released by WikiLeaks reported, "Once Chinese companies sign a contract, they 'close the circle,' bring in their own personnel and equipment often illegally and control the project tightly, under close supervision from Beijing. A Chinese Embassy official ... acknowledged that Chinese companies sometimes violate Kazakhstan's immigration and customs laws." So where are all those Chinese? I finally find one group living in a concrete box atop the roof of the Golden Dragon restaurant and hotel in downtown Almaty, Kazakhstan's biggest city. Chef Yang isn't here for the adventure. "I'm in Kazakhstan for one reason only money," he says. From his spartan barracks, which he shares with several other Chinese, I can see the snowcapped Tian Shan Mountains, the celestial peaks straddling the borders of China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Does he find them pretty, I ask? He shrugs. "When I'm up here I'm too tired to look at them," he says, buttoning up his chef's whites. "I have to go to work now." The Uighur Question Others have weightier things on their minds. In a tidy residential part of Almaty, I catch sight of a flag on a car dashboard: a Muslim crescent and star on a sky-blue background. It is the flag of East Turkestan, the short-lived, self-proclaimed republic (1933 34 and 1944 49, by history's most generous estimation) of the Uighur people who are spread across what is now the Xinjiang autonomous region. Today, the Uighurs are losing out, even outside their ancient homeland. No longer able to gain licenses from the government, Uighur activists in Kazakhstan cannot publicly convene to discuss political issues. That East Turkestan flag I saw? Displaying one can result in police harassment. "My family and I escaped China in 1962 after a massacre in my hometown," says Usanzhan Hassan, 68, a Uighur who was born in Xinjiang and now lives in Almaty. "I never thought the Chinese would become powerful enough to control us even outside of their territory." The Chinese campaign against Uighurs has intensified since 2009, when riots in Xinjiang between Uighurs, China's Han majority and jittery security forces resulted in the deaths of some 200 people. Since then, China has used the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a security group that also includes Central Asian nations and Russia, to garner international support for what human-rights groups call systematic ethnic repression. In May, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan held SCO-sponsored military drills with China aimed at combatting what Beijing dubs "East Turkestan terrorist forces." Though China claims the existence of major Uighur terrorist groups, foreign academics doubt their reach and size. "China is trying

to convince the world that we are all terrorists," says Abdureshit Turdiev, a Uighur community leader in Almaty. "But all most of us want is dignity and freedom to practice our traditions." In June the SCO held its 10th-anniversary summit in Kazakhstan. Shortly before the SCO meeting, Uighurs with Kazakh citizenship were prevented from leaving the country to attend a Uighur conference in Washington. (The same thing happened in Kyrgyzstan.) Then Ershidin Israil, a Uighur who escaped to Kazakhstan from China in 2009 and was initially granted U.N. refugee status to resettle in Sweden, was deported back to the People's Republic, a pattern of forced Uighur repatriation that has been repeated across Central Asia. Ershidin was officially charged in June with terrorism; the U.N. revoked his refugee status earlier in the year. But his relatives in Kazakhstan say he is no radical. The Washington-based nonprofit media group Radio Free Asia believes the 38-year-old is being punished for talking to it, particularly about the security crackdown following the 2009 riots. "We have no word where Ershidin is now," says his sister-in-law Asiye Kerimova. "But I am sure we will never see him again." Game On Back in Atyrau, a dusty Chinese flag flutters on the side of a broad Soviet-era avenue. Yet even though Kazakhstan is pumping ever more oil, the number of foreign flags flying in the country's oil capital is falling. In May, Royal Dutch Shell shut its offices in Atyrau, putting on hold its development of the offshore Kashagan field, the world's biggest such oil discovery in more than 20 years. The following month a Norwegian company also pulled out of Kashagan. Western companies are wrangling over costs with the Kazakh government, which appears keen for the state to control greater percentages of the country's oil wealth. Kazakh Oil and Gas Minister Sauat Mynbayev has cast doubt on the plan of a Western consortium of firms from the U.S., Russia, Britain and Italy to develop another major oil-and-gas field called Karachaganak. Other potential partners are waiting in the wings. A U.S. embassy cable from Astana in January 2010 disseminated by WikiLeaks described a former Kazakh oil-company vice president confiding that Chinese and Russian interests "'continue to circle like vultures,' hoping that the Kashagan and Karachaganak consortia will implode, and then they can pick up the pieces." Makhambet Khakimov, head of local environmental NGO Caspian Nature, speculates on why the Chinese bid for the refinery refurbishment was $2 billion lower than the competing foreign tenders. "What will lose out? Our ecology. Our workforce," he says. "If there are so many countries interested in our oil, we should play them against each other to get the best deal for the Kazakh people, not make them victims." A Great Game may turn on rival foreign powers, but its outcome depends also on the cunning of local players. Kazakhstan's tale of international intrigue has only just begun.

The Exodus from Bukhara

By Michael Schuman Thursday, July 21, 2011 As I walked through winding alleyways into old Bukhara, other Jews were headed in the opposite direction. For centuries, the Jewish community had thrived in this Central Asian trading outpost in Uzbekistan. They lived much like their Muslim neighbors in adobe homes and walled compounds sheltering apricot trees and shaded pavilions. But by the time I visited in 2002, most of the Jews had already departed, some so quickly that they left

Little to Celebrate A Jewish family in Bukhara, pictured in 2000, having a meal to mark a holy day
Leo Erken / Panos

many of their cherished possessions behind. Muslim families sold worn Hebrew prayer books on the street to tourists for a few dollars. At the synagogue, little more than a plain room in an old building, the few

remaining Jews were desperate to get out as well to Israel, to the U.S., anywhere they could find refuge. How heartbreaking, I thought. An entire civilization was evaporating. No one knows with certainty when the Jews first arrived in Central Asia. One tradition has it that they came after the Persians freed the Israelites from exile in Babylonia more than 2,500 years ago. They had certainly been there long enough to develop their own special sort of Judaism and language, a dialect of Farsi called Bukharian. And then, in just a few years, they were gone. Alanna Cooper, an anthropologist who has studied the community, estimates that some 50,000 Bukharan Jews lived in Central Asia on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union; today, she believes, fewer than 1,000 remain. The struggle between Zionists and Arabs over Israel has morphed into a wider religious conflict between Jews and Muslims. That has sparked a mass flight of Jews from the entire Islamic world. Over the past 60 years, hundreds of thousands of Jews have fled homelands in Muslim countries from Algeria to Iran. This exodus is a reversal of history. Though the Jews and Muslims had their moments of tension dating back to the early days of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina Jews generally experienced better treatment in Muslim lands than in Christian ones. The Crusaders slaughtered Jews; Muslim leaders like Saladin protected them. Jews aided the 8th century Muslim conquest of Spain to end persecution by the Christian Visigoths. When Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the

Jews in 1492, many found safety in Islamic lands. In modern Central Asia, Muslims and Jews were bound together by a common enemy the Soviets, who tried to stamp out both religions. But that changed in 1991 with the independence of Uzbekistan. In a nationalist frenzy, the new government propagated the Uzbek language and mosques proliferated, making the Jews feel like foreigners in their own country. Worse still, their longtime Muslim neighbors turned on them. "People started saying: 'Go back to where you came from. You don't belong here,'" says Tamara Benjamin, formerly of Tashkent. Benjamin, together with thousands of other Bukharan Jews, relocated to the borough of Queens in New York City, where they have tried to re-create their old life. Bakeries sell the crusty, spongy, round non bread omnipresent on the streets of Samarkand. Kosher eateries dish out kebabs and lamb noodle soup. In the synagogues rabbis deliver their sermons in Bukharian. Yet the melting pot that is America dramatically dilutes, over the generations, what Bukharan tradition might be left. Aron Aronov, a 73-year-old from Tashkent, wants to stop that trend. Inside a local yeshiva, or traditional Jewish school, Aronov opened a museum to preserve his culture. The cramped rooms are cluttered with yellowed photographs, old clothing and crumbling books like memories stashed in a grandfather's attic. At home, Aronov has converted his Queens backyard into a replica of a Bukharan garden. He waters his freshly planted apricot trees and serves tea in a pavilion. More than 20 years after moving to the U.S., he still longs for the winding lanes and adobe houses of his youth. Will he ever go back? Says Aronov, sadness in his voice: "It's too late."

History on a Plate
By Annia Ciezadlo / Beirut Thursday, July 21, 2011 In the labyrinthine convention center hosting Beirut's annual food-and-restaurant-industry trade show, visitors are crowded around a celebrity chef presenting a modern twist on a staple of Middle Eastern cuisine: three pinkie-size stuffed grape leaves on a plate with a nouvelle cuisine smear of sauce. Suddenly, a word ripples through the crowd: harisa! The chef is swiftly abandoned as everyone rushes across the hall to another counter, where a balding, rotund cook is stirring a

Pot Luck Nawal Hariz and her husband Hisham cook a batch of harisa at a picnic in the woods near the village of Arsoun, Lebanon
Photograph by Bryan Denton for TIME

pot almost as wide around as he is. Soon, people are emerging from the scrum, triumphantly bearing paper plates brimming with what looks like a gray porridge. But appearances are deceptive: harisa, a mixture of meat, spices and grains, is a dish worth stampeding for. People have been savoring this slow-cooked sludge for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. Today, harisa or its Persian and South Asian equivalent, haleem can be found from the eastern Mediterranean to Kashmir, a sizable swath of the Islamic world Ibn Battuta explored. Harisa, however, is not merely a Muslim delicacy. According to food historian and cookbook author Claudia Roden, medieval Andalusian Jews ate it on Saturdays, 20th century Iraqi Jews hired Muslim cooks to pound the wheat and meat for them, and Yemeni Jews make it to this day. In Syria and Lebanon, Christians make harisa to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption. And in Iraq and Lebanon, Shi'ite Muslims make it to commemorate the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Hussein. In the Indian city of Hyderabad, Hindus argue about the best place to get the dish and whether it tastes better with goat or lamb meat. The faith, like some of the ingredients, may vary, but all harisa has one thing in common: it is meant to be shared. "What's interesting is that you find the tradition of sharing [it] across all the religions," says Anissa Helou, a cookbook author and expert on Middle Eastern cuisine. Helou, whose grandmother used to make harisa for the poor at the Feast of St. Mary in the Lebanese village of Rechmaya, describes it as a "generosity dish." References to harisa abound in Middle Eastern history. In the late 7th century, Caliph Mu'awiya of Damascus, leader of the rapidly expanding Islamic world, received a delegation of Arabian Jews from Yemen. No doubt they discussed important matters of state, religion and commerce. But according to medieval historians who wrote about the encounter, the Caliph's first question to his visitors addressed something more urgent: Years earlier, on a journey to Arabia, he had eaten an exquisite dish, a porridge of meat and wheat. Did they know how to make it? They did. The first written recipe that we know of for harisa dates from the 10th century, when a scribe named Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq compiled a cookbook of the dishes favored by the caliphs of Islam's so-called golden age. The version described in his Kitab al-Tabikh (Book of Dishes), the world's oldest surviving Arabic cookbook, is strikingly similar to the one people in the Middle East eat to this day. By 1325, the year Ibn Battuta left home, that golden age had come and gone. But the empire of Islam was still considerable, and when Ibn Battuta traveled through it, a wide network of way stations, maintained mostly by religious scholars and mystics, gave folk a place to rest and mingle with strangers from all four corners of the earth. They shared language, prayer, travel tips, slaves and harisa. In the Persian outpost of Kazarun, the young adventurer stayed at a way station run by Abu Ishaq, a Muslim holy man famous for his hospitality. "It is their custom to serve every visitor, whoever he may be, harisa made from flesh, wheat and ghee," Ibn Battuta noted decades later. The method of making the dish has remained unchanged for centuries: cooks simmer the wheat overnight, stirring it until the wheat berries burst open and surrender their insides. Then the cooks add the meat and its rich stock, stirring until the flesh disintegrates and joins the general mass of harisa. All

this takes hours up to a day, even. When it's done, the cooks form an assembly line, sometimes directly from the cauldron, and pass the harisa out to all comers: pilgrims, the poor, neighbors and strangers. Nowadays, most people use a pressure cooker, which speeds up the cooking and requires less stirring. But in a village in southern Lebanon, my friend Raed Elamine's extended family still makes harisa the old-fashioned way and distributes vast amounts to visitors and the poor during the Shi'ite holiday of Ashura. A few years ago, he invited me to join them. In a sunny kitchen, a large aluminum pot simmered on the stove next to a giant tray full of chicken bones. On the floor, a large aluminum vat, bigger and thicker than a garbage can, balanced precariously on top of an ancient-looking metal burner attached to a propane tank. Eight women wearing cardigans dusted with flour down the front started shouting contradictory recipes the minute I walked in the kitchen. Some soak the wheat overnight; others consider this blasphemy. Some use equal parts water and meat, while some adjust the water as they go. Some swear by equal parts wheat and meat, but others skimp on meat. Northern Lebanese cooks like to use cinnamon and allspice; southern cooks might be more likely to use cardamom. Middle Easterners usually top the porridge with cinnamon and melted butter, South Asians with caramelized onions. The women of Raed's family started working at 3 p.m. the day before, stayed up until 2 in the morning, then woke up five hours later to stir the harisa. It seemed like a lot of work, and I asked why they went through the grind. "It's a symbol, a tradition," said a woman named Malak. "In the church, when they drink the wine and eat the bread it's like that." In other words, a sacrament: a sentiment I think Abu Ishaq might have approved of. They scooped out a large dollop for me and sprinkled it with cinnamon. It was creamy and savory, with a glow of cinnamon, clove and allspice that unfurled across the tongue. Empires and caliphs may come and go, but some things outlive them all: tradition, hospitality, harisa. Ciezadlo is the author of Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love and War

One Faith, Many Strains

By Zoher Abdoolcarim Thursday, July 21, 2011 Sometimes the path to spiritual awareness runs through a Turkish suq. Nearly 20 years ago, my wife and I were carpet shopping at Istanbul's vast Ottoman Grand Bazaar. One salesman, a clean-shaven Muslim youth, invited us to a Sufi do not one of the whirling-dervish performances so worshipped by tourists but a genuine prayer meeting at the home of his effendi.

Sufism holds that you can commune personally and directly with God through, among other avenues, meditative chanting. That's what we witnessed. The effendi's rooms were filled with men young and old sitting on colorful floor rugs, all repeating in rhythmic Arabic the first clause of the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith: "There is no God but Allah." Many appeared to be in a

Passion and Tragedy By inflicting pain on themselves, Iraqi Shi'ites in Karbala mark, with great grief, the killing of the Prophet's grandson Hussein
Yuri Kozyrev / Noor other strains of Islam, this mystical form is so cool, so mellow.

trancelike state. My wife, who is Chinese American, was the only woman present, somehow let in even without a veil. Whatever the reason, we found the experience mesmerizing, soulful and uplifting. I remember thinking, Unlike

Many Muslims think differently. For centuries, Sufis have been persecuted by fellow Muslims puritans who believe that Sufism's individuality and DIY doctrines do not sufficiently adhere to Shari'a law, the sunna (practices attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) and conventional interpretations of the Koran. This antagonism can get murderous. If Ibn Battuta, an otherwise conservative Muslim who loved to visit places holy to Sufis, had been at Lahore's venerated Data Darbar shrine a year ago, he might have gotten killed. Suicide bombers, probably Pakistani Taliban, caused scores of deaths and injuries. And it's not just the Sufis many Muslim groups are bitterly at odds with one another. The truth is that while Islam is proudly monotheistic, it is fiercely, even violently, nonmonolithic. Contemporary Islam tends to be viewed in two polar dimensions of light and darkness: a religion of peace and moderation that lives with the rest of the world, or a creed of hate and extremism that conspires to create its own world. Both exist, but the faith is also fragmented in myriad other ways. A veritable Arabic alphabet of Islamic branches and splinters abounds. Between fanatics at one end and reformers at the other lies a full spectrum of grades of belief and practice. While the West asks, Why do they hate us? Muslims could well ponder, Why do we hate one another? The first and biggest schism in Islam Sunnis vs. Shi'ites originated immediately after Muhammad's passing in 632, over whether the Meccan merchant Abu Bakr or Muhammad's son-in-law Ali should succeed the Prophet. A quarter-century later, Ali's son Hussein and his small band of family and friends were pretty much annihilated by an Umayyad army at Karbala in what is today Iraq. Every year, Shi'ites ("followers of the party" of Ali) mark the terrible calamity in a paroxysm of grief and anger. The 1980 88

war between Sunni Iraq and Shi'ite Iran had to do largely with security and territory, and this year's incursion by a Gulf force into Bahrain, whose population is majority Shi'ite, with self-preservation and geopolitics. But in both cases, the deep root was a centuries-old mutual mistrust. It's fair to ask, What's the big deal? Other great religions are split too. But it needn't be that way for Islam, which can, and should, be more unified. Being a Muslim is remarkably straightforward: you simply have to believe in the shahada (whose second part is "Muhammad is the messenger of Allah"). There's nothing as arcane as Christianity's Holy Trinity, as complex as Buddhism's levels of rebirth or as traumatic as Judaism's pain over which to agonize. Islam's fractures have less to do with theology than matters of leadership, interpretation and degree. "The divisions of Islam," Irish scholar Malise Ruthven wrote in his seminal work Islam in the World, "have their origins in politics rather than dogma." Once a year, Muslims forget their differences. During the hajj, an astonishing diversity of Muslims join together in singular devotion a breathtaking display of oneness that no other faith can match. Muslims who deny the Islam of others deny that spirit and, indeed, what the Koran itself says: "Allah invites all to the home of peace."

Shades of Radicalism
By Jyoti Thottam / Kozhikode Thursday, July 21, 2011 'Qaliqut in Mulaybar is visited by vessels from China, Sumatra, Ceylon, the Maldives, Yemen and Fars, and in it gather merchants from all quarters ... We entered the harbour in great pomp, the like of which I have never seen in those lands, but it was bound to be a joy to be followed by distress.' The port where Ibn Battuta made his grand entrance still welcomes the wide wooden vessels that have plied the Indian Ocean trade for centuries. The boats, called urus, carry construction

The Living is Easy For now. The beach is a popular gathering place for the residents of Kozhikode, still a busy gateway for Kerala
Chiara Goia for TIME

material instead of coir and spices, and Malabar is now part of the Indian state of Kerala. But the old Calicut harbor is still a symbol of the free exchange of people, goods and ideas that lies at the heart of

Kerala's culture. (See pictures of the Hindu spring festival.) That tradition of openness goes back to at least the 4th century, when a Syrian Christian merchant arrived in Calicut and was welcomed with a land grant by a Hindu king. Then, in the 7th century, Arab traders inspired a Hindu king to travel to Mecca, where he converted to Islam and became the legendary founding father of Kerala's Muslims. The tradition endured into the 20th century, as Malayalis people from Kerala are called Malayalis, after their language, Malayalam joined a new global wave of migrants. My own Syrian Christian family went to the U.S. in the 1970s, the same time that many Muslims left for Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi. They sent money home, propping up a sleepy rural economy, and by the late 1980s, Kerala had achieved first-world health standards and near universal literacy. In 1995 the environmentalist Bill McKibben tried to explain "the enigma of Kerala." He marveled, "Not even the diversity of its population 60% Hindu, 20% Muslim, 20% Christian, a recipe for chronic low-grade warfare in the rest of India has stood in its way." Yet as Ibn Battuta predicted, joy has been followed by distress. The dark currents swirling around the Indian Ocean have brought a new cycle of change to Kerala. Security experts have warned for years that migrants to the Persian Gulf were taking extremist ideology home. The wake-up call came in October 2008, when four young Malayalis were killed by Indian security forces in an alleged jihadi training camp in Kashmir. Last July a different threat emerged when a group of young Muslims cut off the hand of a Christian professor, condemning him for writing an exam question they said insulted the Prophet Muhammad. How did these islands of radicalism take shape in a place that was once a model of tolerance and prosperity? To find out, I traveled through Malabar, the heart of Kerala's Muslim community, interviewing religious conservatives, political activists and the families of men accused of waging holy war. The extremists, of course, are a tiny minority, but their ideology has taken root, fed on the growing disaffection of those left out of Kerala's economic and social miracle. Paths to Anger Heading north along the Kerala coast from Calicut (now called Kozhikode) to Kannur, the roads are dominated by billboards advertising gold jewelry and silk saris and by construction crews building new houses all the visible signs of wealth from the Gulf. Kannur is where the four men who were killed in Kashmir began their journey. Indian authorities say they made 10 calls to Kerala before they were killed. A yearlong investigation, beginning with those calls, led to charges against 24 people. Police say the four men were taken to Kashmir via safe houses in Hyderabad and New Delhi by the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), whose operatives, investigators assert, directed their activities from Pakistani Kashmir and funded them with money channeled from Oman. (The Indians also blame LeT for the November 2008 assault on Mumbai.)

The alleged link between LeT and Kerala is a Kannur man named Thadiyantevida Naseer. In 2006, Naseer met Sarfaraz Nawaz, a Malayali working in Oman who was on a trip home to Kerala. Authorities say Nawaz, who has been extradited from Oman to Indian custody, is an LeT operative. Based on wire-transfer records and other communications, the police have accused Naseer of recruiting men from Kerala to join the global jihad. "He believes that he is innocent," Naseer's brother Sohail says. "He's not scared. He's only interested in a better life in the next world." Sohail narrates Naseer's story from the veranda of their family home, built by their father with money earned from 20 years of working in a bakery in Abu Dhabi. Naseer wanted to become an ustad, a religious teacher, but his father insisted he learn a trade, so Naseer spent two years as an air-conditioner mechanic in Saudi Arabia. He sent money home sporadically prior to returning in 2002, subtly changed. "Before, all his friends were people like us. Some of them used to drink and smoke, have a good time," Sohail says. After returning, Naseer found a new group of friends. "We didn't really know who they were." See "Diwali, the Pan-Indian Festival of Lights." Back in Kannur, Naseer worked as a painter, leaving home for weeks at a time. His father urged Naseer, "Why don't you go back to Saudi Arabia?" They quarreled, and Naseer moved out. During those years of estrangement, Naseer began leading religious classes for a group called Nooresha Tareeqat. Investigators call it a front to recruit jihadis, but it has a reputation in Kannur for helping lost young men break free of their desire for money and worldly pleasures. Sufiya Muhammad's son Fayas, 22, left for one of its centers in Hyderabad in the early morning of Sept. 10, 2008. Fayas had never held a job, and Sufiya hoped the move would put him on a better path. "I told him, 'Listen, if you get involved in something bad, just don't come back,'" she says. Fayas was killed in Kashmir a few weeks later. After the deaths, Naseer crossed the border into Bangladesh. He was extradited and has been in Indian custody since mid-2009. Police have charged Naseer with involvement in a 2005 hijacking of two buses to protest the detention of a radical preacher, a 2006 twin bomb blast in Kozhikode to decry the treatment of Muslims accused of violence against Hindus in a 2003 village riot and the 2008 Bangalore blasts. "Allah knows everything," Naseer told his brother. "I haven't done anything against my conscience." As Indian officials see it, Naseer and Nawaz are a textbook case of how extremists prey on migrant workers in the Gulf. "Once they have helped you out, they have got you into their clutches," Home Secretary G.K. Pillai told the Indian magazine Tehelka. But that logic doesn't explain their influence among those, like Fayas, who never left Kerala. Malayalis can be radicalized at home too. Take the Popular Front of India. Spokesman P. Koya describes it as an antiglobalization, antineoliberalism, pro-poor-Muslim movement. The front has 50,000 members with an average age of 20, Koya says. It was some of them who chopped off the hand of the university professor. Koya is a retired professor of English, and in his library, James Joyce finds a place alongside the Koran. He says the culprits have been suspended: "It is not [our] policy to be a vigilante group." But he does not disavow their anger. Kerala's openness has allowed these young radicals to thrive alongside the traders, the preachers, the migrants and the militants. It isn't clear if Calicut's harbor is still big enough for them all.

Spain's Identity Crisis

By Lisa Abend / Granada Thursday, July 21, 2011 For the past 24 years, Jos Antonio Gonzlez has risen early one morning in June and carefully applied black eyeliner to the creases behind his lashes. Instead of the Oxford shirt and pressed trousers the 45-year-old accountant usually wears, he slips on a satin blouse and shimmery pantaloons. And then, dangling a scabbard from his waist and planting a turban on his head, Gonzlez goes out and joins hundreds of other Moors in the southern Spanish town of Mojcar as they make

Pomp and Circumstance Girls dressed as medieval Christians take part in Mojcar's Moros y Cristianos festival
Photograph by Lucia Herrero for TIME

their last stand against the Christians. There may be no more curious remnant of the Muslim kingdom that Ibn Battuta knew as al-Andalus than the festival of Moros y

Cristianos (Moors and Christians). Commemorated in towns throughout Spain, it enlists entire populations into elaborately costumed "battalions" to re-enact the medieval surrender of Spain's last Muslim rulers to the conquering Catholic kings. But Moros y Cristianos is hardly the only trace of Spain's 800 years of Islamic rule. From architecture to cuisine to the most common vocabulary including the ubiquitous ol, a distant relative of Allah the country's Muslim past is deeply woven into its present. For centuries, this was a characteristic to be denied, an almost shameful identity against which "true" (read: Catholic) Spaniards defined themselves. In today's Spain, physical and symbolic remnants of the glorious civilization that was once al-Andalus are celebrated as tourist attractions and, more important, as a part of Spain's newly heralded multiculturalism. But Spain has a more complicated relationship with real Muslims the ones who pick Europe's vegetables and open schools and businesses and build mosques. Immigration came later to Spain than to Britain, France or Germany; indeed, most Muslims in Spain are first-generation arrivals. Only when the Spanish economy took off after the country joined the E.U. did Muslims, particularly from Morocco, begin migrating in significant numbers. Now there are an estimated 1.5 million Muslims in Spain, and they are not always easily assimilated into a culture that characterizes itself as conservative, homogeneous and very, very Catholic. Already, the city of Lleida, along with several other towns in the eastern province of Catalonia, has moved to ban the veil. And in local elections on May 22, anti-immigrant parties won seats in both

regional and municipal governments. In today's Spain, the imagined past is always rubbing up against the conflicted present. Back to the Future You could start at the beginning, with Crdoba, the seat of the Moorish caliphate. When Abderrahman I came to power in 756, he remade this city into a vision of earthly paradise. In subsequent decades, Crdoba's poets would pen exquisite odes to romantic love, its astrologers would track the heavens more accurately than ever before, and sewage shockingly would run through neatly enclosed pipes. But of all the accomplishments of the Umayyad dynasty, none was so breathtaking as the Mezquita, the stunning mosque built on the remains of a Visigoth church (and a pagan temple before that). Eight hundred striped arches ran through its 24,000 sq m, tricking the eye into thinking they were an endless forest of red and white. After the success of his 16th century reconquest, the Habsburg Emperor Charles V had the Mezquita's center arches ripped out and replaced with a heavy, carved nave appropriate to the building's new status as Crdoba's cathedral a status it retains to this day. To reach the cathedral, Demetrio Fernndez crosses the Moorish-style patio of the Bishop's Palace. He is a heavyset man, but elegant in his bearing as he strolls past stands selling filigree hands of Our Lady of Ftima and restaurants serving gazpacho, then walks under orange trees irrigated with canals built more than a millennium ago. All this before he passes under those rows of striped Islamic archways. And yet, the bishop of Crdoba harbors no ambivalence about the structure's meaning. "Why should Muslims be allowed to pray there?" Fernndez asks. "The real question is, Why do people find it strange that they shouldn't be? It's a cathedral." He is referring to a campaign begun years ago by the Junta Islmica, a group of mostly Spanish converts to Islam. Arguing that the Mezquita, with its glittering mihrab and intricately carved choir stalls, could serve as an important example of convivencia (social harmony) in an age of cultural conflict, the Junta Islmica requested that it be opened to Muslim prayer. Crdoba's bishopric refused. When 120 Muslims from Austria entered the building in 2010 and began to pray, the Mezquita's security guards, who work for the diocese, moved to eject them, and a scuffle ensued. More recently, Fernndez has argued that the building itself should be referred to as the catedral and not the mezquita, and asked the municipal government to rewrite street signs identifying it as such. Junta spokesperson Isabel Romero is against that effort: "To try to erase history is a great error." Bishop Fernndez deploys the same tactic, noting that the building was a Visigoth church before it was a mosque, that Christian architects imported from Constantinople helped transform it into the Mezquita. Most important, he says, it's been a cathedral for the past four centuries: "It's an anachronism to call it anything else." The wrangling over the past is of course merely a means of talking about the present. For Romero, the bishop's concern for the building's name is motivated by a fear of Islam, a fear that has risen in Spain since the March 2004 train bombing in Madrid by Muslim extremists. Fernndez points out that simply having the debate is a sign of the Church's openness. "Would activists in Saudi Arabia be allowed to demand that a mosque be opened to Christian prayer?" he asks. "The fact that these discussions take place in Spain, which was and is a Christian country, is an indication of Christianity's tolerance."

A Matter of Faith Is Spain still a fundamentally Christian place? The percentage of practicing Catholics is at its lowest in history (57.8% say they never or almost never attend Mass) while religious observance among Muslims continues to rise. Though Muslims currently make up a tiny portion of Spain's population (estimates run from 1% to 3%), in places like El Ejido in Andalusia in southern Spain, they are rapidly displacing those born Catholic. Some 40 years ago, El Ejido barely existed. But that was before farmers in the surrounding region of Almera developed makeshift plastic greenhouses allowing them to grow vegetables in the area's poor soils year-round. Now the region supplies more produce to Europe than any other on the continent. And that has made Almera a major draw for migrant labor. More than a third of the city's 85,000 residents are immigrants; of those, a full 65% are from Morocco. "I came to improve my life," says Azouz Damani, 27, who left his home in Nador, Morocco, seven years ago. For the first four years in Spain, he worked in the greenhouses, earning about $43 for a 10-hour day spent picking peppers and tomatoes in temperatures that routinely rounded 48C. "It was a really awful job," he says. "But I wish I had it now." He has been unemployed since Spain's recession began in 2008 and lives now off welfare and odd jobs. From his bench in a rundown neighborhood of El Ejido, Damani oozes resentment. He knows that in El Ejido's center, the broad, shady boulevards are tended daily by gardeners and street sweepers, but here, he says, gesturing sharply, no one comes to clean. "Look at this place! The city doesn't care about it. No one comes to get the trash; all the trees are dead." He is angry at the municipal government that, he says, refused to license the mosque where he prays, and he is angry at Andalusians who, he says, are "more racist than people in Madrid." Eleven years ago, El Ejido was home to the worst race riots in Spain's history. After a Moroccan man was arrested in the stabbing death of a Spanish woman, hundreds of longtime residents, fed up with that attack as well as the growing incidence of petty crime, marched through the city, shouting racist slogans, destroying Moroccan-owned property, and throwing stones at immigrants. The violence lasted several days, yet neither that outburst nor the dangers of the crossing nor attempts by the E.U. to strengthen its borders has reduced the number of new immigrants. While the economic crisis has slowed the flow, it has not halted it for the simple reason that, however hard the conditions in Spain, the country still offers more opportunities to industrious migrants than they would get back home. Since the riots, El Ejido has maintained an uneasy peace. Improved working conditions have helped, as have better social services. "We've achieved convivencia," says Manuel Ariza, head of social services for the city. "Just not integration." There are still separate Moroccan neighborhoods, and apartment buildings that despite municipal attempts to create mixed residencies are filled entirely by Moroccan families. Few Muslim immigrants have married native Spaniards. And some of El Ejido's schools remain voluntarily segregated. "What we've learned is that you can affect the peripheral elements the policies, the economic opportunities," says Ariza. "But core things religion, family values those are very difficult to change." It's a sentiment with which Damani instinctively agrees. Asked whether he could imagine himself ever identifying with his new home, he shakes his head dismissively. "No way," he says. "I don't think I'll ever consider myself Spanish."

Blending Beliefs Ramn Rubio feels an affinity for Islam as he works on the lacy plasterwork of the Alhambra's Salon of Kings in Granada. Built around the 13th century, the Alhambra was once the palace city for the Nasrids, Spain's last Muslim dynasty. Today it draws about 3 million tourists annually, making it Spain's most popular attraction. All those years and people have taken a toll, which is why the complex is undergoing a major restoration. Rubio, director of the Alhambra's tile and plaster workshops, spends his days pressed close to the ceilings, delicately repairing the polychrome domes that Nazari artisans adorned with tiny designs, hand painted in lapis lazuli, even though no one would see them from the ground. "Working here, you start to identify with them, even though they lived seven centuries ago," he says. "I'm not Arab, but I am Granadino, so there's this bond." Across the river from the Alhambra, another Islamic complex has risen on another hill. It is a gleaming white mosque, the first purpose-built one in Granada in 500 years. Its construction took more than 22 years, a delay prompted in part by the resistance of many residents who especially after 9/11 worried that it represented an effort, both by local Muslims, and by the United Arab Emirates that helped fund it, to "reclaim al-Andalus." But eight years after its inauguration, the new mosque seems an integral part of the landscape of Albaicn, Granada's old Moorish quarter. Tourists flood its bloom-filled patio to get a better view of the Alhambra across the way, while worshippers enter through their own portals, divided by gender. The Muslims who built the mosque, and staff it still, are Spaniards who have converted to Islam. They owe their origins to a Scottish convert who arrived in Granada in 1975, just as the dictator Francisco Franco was dying, and began reintroducing Spain to the Islam it had suppressed. Today, there are roughly 20,000 Muslim converts in Spain. Although they have long since fractured into different ideological groups, the importance of al-Andalus not as a land to be reconquered, but as an example to be emulated unites them. "We recognize ourselves as members of a community that managed to give to the world one of the most beautiful civilizations that man has known," convert Mehdi Flores has written. "A civilization that, with its light and shadows, was able to reach levels of humanity that still serve today as an example in our quest for models of how to live and live together." Granada's convert community soon drew native-born Muslims as well. "We started here because Granada was more emblematic, the flavor of Andalusian culture was fresher, more recent," says Zakarias Maza, a schoolteacher who converted 30 years ago. "But then North African immigrants started coming here from the coast because they heard there was a community, because we had a mosque." Today it has three, including the new one on the hill. Maza still prays at the first one, inside an apartment building in the center of town (a sign advises worshippers not to disturb the "Christian family" living above it). "The upper one is mostly Spanish, and maybe more liberal," he says. "Mine, the lower one, is mixed." Religious variation isn't the only sign that Granada's Muslim community is one of the most developed in Spain. There is a EuroArab management school here; the country's first "Islamically inspired" political party, the Party of Spanish Renaissance and Unity, was founded here in 2009. And then there are the sloping streets behind the Plaza Nueva, given over largely to Muslim-owned businesses. A Nation Divided To travel today through Andalusia is to come face to face with a peculiar brand of schizophrenia. Historic

Islam is reflected by the monuments from the days of the caliphate that have been restored to splendor, by the old quarters in all the major cities that have been given over to tearooms and "Arab" baths, and by a romanticized image of an al-Andalus in which Muslims lived peacefully with people of other faiths. All this is embraced and even held out as a model for society. But contemporary Islam of immigrants from North Africa who start their own businesses or huddle in makeshift huts; of women who wear veils but aren't nuns; of varieties that run from Sufi-inflected mysticism to Salafist puritanism that living Islam remains unassimilated, and unresolved. In Mojcar, Jos Antonio Gonzlez jokes that he chose to join the Moors over the Christians because they had better costumes. But he also admits to a more serious affinity. "I'm a great defender of Arab culture," he says. "What al-Andalus gave us was a lighthouse that illuminated the world." Still, he doesn't agree with the efforts to open Crdoba's Mezquita to Muslim prayer, and he was as bothered as anyone when complaints of insensitivity forced another town to remove its Muhammed statue from its own Moros y Cristianos celebration. "I love what Arabic culture has given us in the good sense. But the culture they're trying to impose now? That I don't like." One of his neighbors, Kachina Ghaddaf, strikes a similarly complicated balance. Half Egyptian, half Moroccan and a practicing Muslim, she and her husband arrived in Spain less than a year ago, and recently opened a jewelry store in Mojcar. She has never attended Moros y Cristianos, but she has heard about the spectacular pageantry and is eagerly looking forward to the festivities. "Oh yes, my neighbor has said she'll help with my costume," she gushes. "I'll be one of the Christians."

A Voyager for the Ages

By Pico Iyer / Dubai Thursday, July 21, 2011 In China, Ibn Battuta writes, he heard once of a cave-dwelling man, more than 200 years old, who never ate, never drank and never spoke. Upon seeking him out, the intrepid Moroccan traveler watched the sage seize his hand, smell it, then pronounce, "This man is just as much attached to this world as we are to the next." With that, the aged ascetic apparently breaking his vow of silence also told his visitor that they had met

Transfixed Traditionally garbed Muslim women seem entranced by an exhibit at the Atlantis aquarium in Dubai
Chiara Goia for TIME

before and then stepped into his cave, never to appear again. A pious, well-trained magistrate, Ibn Battuta reported this puzzling encounter to a local judge and heard of a businessman who had previously visited the sage, imagined himself in a large palace before a crowned sheik, seen what looked to be "fruits falling into streams" and, having eaten of these hallucinated fruits, was sick for many months. There, perhaps, you have Ibn Battuta in miniature: an engaging mix of mystery and precision, throwing together matter-of-fact accounts of signs and wonders with savory details of life as it was. The reason we still read him more than 650 years after his travels concluded is that his attitudes, travails and writerly gambits are startlingly similar to those we might meet or deploy today yet are flavored with his incorrigible personality and details of a world nobody evoked quite as he did. Ibn Battuta set out from his native Tangier in 1325 as a devout Sufi pilgrim and something of a religious anthropologist, eager to record the sacred sites, saints and small fables of pride and devotion he discovered along the way to Mecca. But having completed the hajj in a year and a half, he kept traveling for 28 more years. As with the very best travelers, he seems to have begun by taking a journey and then found that the journey had taken him over. The result was not just the Muslim Pilgrim's Progress he had intended but a global anthology of marvels. Ibn Battuta spoke for a kind of archetype we still see everywhere even in the age of MapQuest. The Rihla, or travel book, was a common form in the North Africa of his day, commissioned by sultans to give readers back home a sense of the great intercontinental network of Islamic fellowship and prayer. Ibn Battuta was doing nothing very unusual when he set out from his family of legal scholars not unlike the wellborn and well-connected Englishmen of four centuries later who embarked on a grand tour to visit such centers of learning and culture as Paris and Florence and Venice. (Though Ibn Battuta went to Damascus and Cairo and Medina.) Wherever he traveled in the Dar al-Islam, he ran into other learned jurists like himself, who offered him shelter and hospitality, gave him slave girls and commissions and sometimes set him up with traveling partners. Yet even as he moved in high style, the fact that he kept on and on traveling, well beyond his original itinerary, ensured that his adventures were often uncannily close to those of many an every tourist of today: he caught malaria, he found his guides turning treacherous, and at one point he saw the Chinese junk that he was due to board go down at sea while another vessel, transporting his servants and his concubines (one of whom was carrying an unborn child of his), sailed off toward an unknown port. We see him set upon by bandits, hiding in a ditch to avoid attackers, passing through a Cairo in which 21,000 people every day are dying of the plague. Strange New World So the man who begins his account presented as a figure of "courage, religious confidence and indefatigable perseverance," recording the wisdom of saints one clairvoyantly tells him to look up colleagues in faraway India and China, and lo and behold, the young traveler ends up doing so goes on to offer wide-eyed descriptions of places that to many of his readers must have seemed as remote as the moon. He writes of a magician who "assumed the form of a cube and arose from the earth" and of women who could kill men with a glance; he tells of seeing a man cut off his own head as a sign of

devotion to his ruler and of a palace constructed so as to collapse on anyone who enters as soon as an elephant comes in contact with it. Assembling a kind of Thousand and One Nights in reverse, Ibn Battuta was like a thousand travelers today who eagerly inform us that getting lost proved more fruitful than finding their hoped-for destination. The other thing that marks him out is the way he cannot fail to remake every place he sees (as many a defining traveler does) in the light of his own beliefs and opinions. When affronted by the sound of Catholic bells in Crimea, he runs up to the top of a minaret and begins chanting from the Koran. Taking a job as a magistrate in the Maldives, he institutes a system whereby men who fail to attend Friday prayers are "whipped and publicly disgraced." In Mali a Sultan declines to give him enough presents, and Ibn Battuta threatens him with bad reviews. (The Sultan promptly gives him a house.) In Delhi, when condemned to seeming death, he tells us that he recites a prayer 33,000 times and somehow survives. As Ross Dunn and other scholars have pointed out, some of Ibn Battuta's passages (and he's not alone in this) are taken verbatim from earlier Islamic travelers' accounts; his descriptions of the Pyramids, say, are so vague that (as with Marco Polo) it seems likely that he never saw them or some of the other places he describes. His chronology in many places makes no sense at all, and in dictating his book after his return to Morocco, apparently without notes, to a young Andalusian scholar he had met in Granada, he seems to have either misremembered many dates or, like a proto Bruce Chatwin, created composites and taken shortcuts in the interest of storytelling. We turn to Polo for the practical information he collects and the unexpected accuracy of many of his details; we read Ibn Battuta who set out a year after Polo died for his digressions and the flavor of his often orientalizing personality. In India, for example, he goes out of his way to describe most of the people he meets as "infidels" and to tell of how a blind man is dragged by his feet for 10 days and condemned men are cut to pieces by elephants. In the Maldives he suggests that he has picked up so many wives along the way (six on that set of islands alone) and fathered so many children that a vizier is fearful of the fast-growing Ibn Battuta clan. It almost makes for apt poetic justice that the only English-language version of his travels I could find in a huge bookstore in the Middle East this spring was the 1829 translation edited by the British Rev. (and professor of Arabic at Cambridge) Samuel Lee, its footnotes bristling with references to Genesis and harrumphs about how Ibn Battuta is "superstitious, and addicted to the marvellous." When we read his Rihla today, we are struck at how Genghis Khan, memories of whom were still fresh when Ibn Battuta was writing, is described as "a liberal-minded, powerful and corpulent person"; Yemen, so mired in chaotic poverty these days, is in parts "abounding with every commodity." China, for the traveling Muslim, was "the safest and most agreeable country in the world," though Ibn Battuta could not bear to go out often because of its godlessness. As in any "as told to" version, it's hard to know what exactly can be ascribed to the official author and what to his ghost. But the curiosity that constantly pushes Ibn Battuta forward flashes into life as, having dispensed with a visit to Mecca in a sentence, he lavishes a long paragraph on the cuisine of Mogadishu roasted plantain fruit boiled in new milk and served with "bundles of preserved pepper-pods, salted and pickled" and grapes and green ginger. Completing the Circle Just as I was reading such Anthony Bourdain-worthy passages recently, I found myself, by chance, in the

Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai. Filipinas were modeling sarongs outside a L'Occitane outlet. A friendly Indian invited me to sample language tapes that could make me fluent in Dari and Albanian and Quechua, even "American." An Iranian restaurant sat next to Tony Roma's (with a Pizza Express across the courtyard). With six large zones devoted to areas that Ibn Battuta visited and a central display on Ibn Battuta himself (right next to a Starbucks and across from a Nine West), the mall did its earnest best to honor both the exoticism of his itinerary and his spirit of inquiry. Yet the deepest memory of the pious Muslim came for me at exactly noon: a quiet call to prayer passed over all the glossy corridors, floating over the Body Shop and the Tipsy Gypsy store, over the Laughing Buddha stall and the 21-screen cinema showing Space Chimps in digital 3-D. For a moment, the blown-up photo of Elvis in one window and the Hello Kitty display in another were put into place by something more eternal. And the far-off cultures represented by every other customer and salesperson might almost have borne out the spirit and the purpose of the indomitable Moroccan's journey. He may not have planned it, I thought, but Ibn Battuta had done what many great travelers surely dream about: he had become a site, a destination in himself. Iyer, a writer for TIME since 1982, is the author of many books about travel, among them Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul

The Enduring Message of Hangzhou

By Michael Elliott Thursday, July 21, 2011
One glorious fall day last year, I was walking the backstreets of Hangzhou, in Zhejiang province, China, enjoying the sights fungi as big as cart wheels, tourists posing for snapshots in Song-dynasty costumes when I saw men hurrying into a quiet, dignified building. It took me a minute to realize that it was a mosque, the so-called Phoenix Mosque of Hangzhou, founded in the Tang dynasty, more than 1,000 years ago. In all likelihood, it was in this mosque that

Meeting Point Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo and Zheng He might all have reflected on their travels at West Lake
Chien-Chi Chang / Magnum

Ibn Battuta worshipped when he visited Hangzhou in the 1340s. He noted the city's size and charm Hangzhou, then as now, sat on a beautiful lake, cradled by gentle green hills and he wasn't the first

traveler to do so. Some 50 years before, Marco Polo, a Venetian merchant, had spent time in Hangzhou and rhapsodized about it as "without doubt the finest and most splendid city in the world," which indeed it was. (See "At the Water's Edge in Hangzhou.") Some 60 years after Ibn Battuta's visit, the culture that had built the wonders of Hangzhou sponsored expeditions of its own: seven epic voyages, led by the great admiral Zheng He, that ranged from the Pacific to the Swahili coast of Africa. I don't know for sure that Zheng He ever visited Hangzhou (Ma Huan, his scribe, was from the neighboring town of Shaoxing), but given its eminence, it seems likely that he did. In which case, the city on the West Lake is the one place that all three great explorers knew. That is worth pondering. It was a great Chinese city that the three men had in common, rather than a town of northwestern Europe such as London or Paris not much more than pestilential collections of hovels in the 14th century whose merchants and thinkers would soon shape the world as it started its long turn on an Atlantic axis. That Chinese city, moreover, was cosmopolitan. It wasn't just Muslims who were well represented there; Ibn Battuta noted the presence of a Jewish community, and there were surely plenty of Buddhists in Hangzhou practicing a religion that had migrated from India as well as Nestorian Christians, who flourished under the Yuan dynasty. There are obvious lessons here. The lives of the three explorers remind us that what we think of as the modern world, dominated by Atlantic technology and intellectual inquiry, is not the only world there has been and, surely, as economic power shifts to the south and east, not the only world there will ever be. China's inexorable rise is part of that coming story. But Hangzhou also reminds us that when China was the greatest power on earth, it was a society open to influences from all the known world. It sometimes suits both Chinese authorities and those who fear China's power to imagine that its culture and history have existed in a hermetic space, distinct and different from those of the West. That's always been nonsense, and Hangzhou is the place to remind yourself of it. Finally, remember that whatever their linguistic skills, two of those three men would have had no trouble communicating with each other. Ibn Battuta, a jurist from Tangier, and Zheng He, a soldier from Yunnan, nearly 10,000 km distant, were both Muslim, sharing a god and a culture. In the past 25 years, we have lazily allowed ourselves to think that the only way the world is knit together is through economics, business and finance that this is what globalization means. But that is not true now, and it was not true when, within 100 years of one another or so we can imagine Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo and Zheng He each took a boat onto the West Lake under a full moon, gazed at the sky, remembered his journey and knew that the world was one.

One Man's Odyssey

Ibn Battuta is one of history's great explorers. He set out from his native Tangier in 1325, when he was just 21. By the time he returned home for good almost 30 years later, he had covered some 120,000 km and nearly every part of the Islamic world

Editor's Desk: An Islamic Odyssey

By Michael Elliott, editor, TIME International Thursday, July 21, 2011 Although he did not know it at the time, when a jurist from Tangier named Ibn Battuta left his home in 1325, he was commencing 29 years of travel, visiting everywhere from the Sahara to the China coast. Yet wherever he went, Ibn Battuta found one constant: the shared culture and faith of Islam, which knit together a community around the world long before anyone had thought of the word globalization. With the Arab Spring still playing itself out and with the Islamic world steeped in both change and challenge, Ibn Battuta's travels seemed the perfect topic for our annual Summer Journey double issue. We wanted to see how the world had and had not changed in the years since he traversed it. Our correspondents, as they always do with this project, leaped at the chance to get in some serious reporting. Alex Perry went in search of Somali pirates (of course, being Alex, he found some), while Lisa Abend ruminated on Spain's new identity crisis, some 500 years after al-Andalus fell. Karl Vick explored Istanbul, Aryn Baker looked at the uniquely Saudi way of dating with a bit of participant observation, and photographer Dominic Nahr captured the sand and water of the Sahara. The editing of the issue was in the experienced hands of Zoher Abdoolcarim in Hong Kong and Bobby Ghosh in New York City. (Bobby did double duty, contributing a terrific piece on the rise of a moderate political Islam.) Patrick Witty looked after the photography, Heather Jones drew the maps, and the elegant design was the work of our international art director, Victor Williams. In an issue like this, it's vital that someone sets priorities and enforces deadlines fortunately, we have Andrea Dorfman to do that for us. I'm grateful to them all. Putting together the Summer Journey issue has always been a special time of the year for me. This is the eighth I've worked on, and it will be the last in fact, this is the last issue of TIME International I will edit. I'm about to start a new job as president and CEO of ONE, the global advocacy group working to eradicate extreme poverty and preventable diseases. I'm proud to have been colleagues with scores of talented journalists at TIME men and women who work flat out, often in challenging environments, to bring the news to you, our readers. And now I'm looking forward to joining your distinguished ranks.

BUSINESS

India's Leading Export: CEOs

By CARLA POWER Monday, Aug. 01, 2011

What on earth did the Banga brothers' mother feed them for breakfast? Whatever it was, it worked: Vindi Banga grew up to become a top executive at the food and personal-care giant Unilever, then a partner at the private-equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. His younger brother Ajay, after heading Citigroup's Asian operations, was last year named CEO of MasterCard all without a degree from a Western business school and without abandoning his Sikh turban. When Ajay took over at the credit-card company's suburban New York City headquarters, the Times of India crowed that he was the first "entirely India-minted executive" at a multinational's helm. The brothers laugh when asked for their mother's breakfast menu, deflecting suggestions that they were raised by a Bengal-tiger mom. Instead, they cite an MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga, left, and his brother Vindi Banga, right, a partner at Clayton Dubilier & Rice, both earned M.B.A.s at the elite Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad itinerant childhood as a key ingredient in their success. The sons of a lieutenant general in the Indian army, they moved to a new posting every couple of years perfect training, it turns out, for global executives facing new markets and uncertain conditions. "You had to adapt to new friends, new places," recalls Vindi. "You had to create your ecosystem wherever you went." The Banga brothers are two of a growing roster of global Indian business leaders, a roster that includes CEOs such as Citigroup's Vikram Pandit and PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi as well as the deans of both Harvard Business School and INSEAD. Yes, ArcelorMittal's Lakshmi Mittal had the advantage of growing up in the family business, but now the family business has grown into a global powerhouse under his leadership. What factors account for the rise and rise of India-trained business minds? "Our colleagues in our Asian offices are asking the same question," laughs Jill Ader, head of CEO succession at the executive-search firm Egon Zehnder International. "Their clients in China and Southeast Asia are saying, 'How come it's the Indians getting all the top jobs?'" It could be because today's generation of Indian managers grew up in a country that provided them with the experience so critical for today's global boss. Multiculturalism?

Check. Complex competitive environment? Check. Resource-constrained developing economy? You got that right. And they grew up speaking English, the global business language. It's risky to generalize about India, a subcontinent of 1.2 billion people, just as it's simplistic to stereotype the Western executive or the Chinese business leader. Motorola's Sanjay Jha or Berkshire Hathaway's Ajit Jain, one of those tipped as Warren Buffett's successor, succeed due to talent and drive, not because they're Indian. And bosses like Nooyi spend most of their formative career years outside the country. Is it that they may just happen to be Indian? As Ajay Banga notes, "You are who you are because of what you do, not the color of your skin." The data suggest Indians are scaling corporate heights. In a study of S&P 500 companies, Egon Zehnder found more Indian CEOs than any other nationality except American. Indians lead seven companies; Canadians, four. Among the C-suite executives in the 2009 FORTUNE 500 were two mainland Chinese, two North American Chinese and 13 Indians, according to a study by two professors from Wharton and China Europe International Business School. For multinationals, it makes good sense to have leaders experienced in working with expanding Asian markets. And India is already the location of many of their operations. "If you look at companies like Pepsi or Hewlett-Packard or IBM, a huge chunk of their global workforce is sitting out in India," says Anshuman Das, a co-founder of CareerNet, a Bangalore executive-search company. "India and China are also the countries of future profits for the multinationals, so they may want their global leaders to come out of them." Competitive and complex, India has evolved from a poorly run, centrally controlled economy into the perfect petri dish in which to grow a 21st century CEO. "The Indians are the friendly and familiar faces of Asia," says Ader. "They think in English, they're used to multinationals in their country, they're very adaptive, and they're supremely confident." The subcontinent has been global for centuries, having endured, and absorbed, waves of foreign colonizers, from the Mughals to the British. Practiced traders and migrants, Indians have impressive transnational networks. "The earth is full of Indians," wrote Salman Rushdie. "We get everywhere." Unlike, say, a Swede or a German, an Indian executive is raised in a multiethnic, multifaith, multilingual society, one nearly as diverse as the modern global marketplace. Unlike Americans, they're well versed in negotiating India's byzantine bureaucracy, a key skill to have in emerging markets. And unlike the Chinese, they can handle the messiness of a litigious democracy. "In China, you want something done, you talk to a bureaucrat and a politician it gets done," observes Ajay. "In India, if you talk to a bureaucrat or a politician, there are going to be 600 other people with their own points of view." There's an old saw about Asian business cultures: "The Chinese roll out the red carpet; Indians roll out the red tape." Maybe that's why Indian managers are good at managing it. They have cut their teeth in a country ranked 134th by the World Bank for ease of doing business. To be fair, it's also the reason some of them left home. They're practiced in the exasperating culture of local, state and national permits. "To build a factory in China, a CEO will have to get two or three different permissions from various departments," observes Signe Spencer, a co-author of The Indian CEO, a 2007 study from the HayGroup consultancy. "An Indian CEO may have to get 80 different permissions from 80 different places." No wonder Indian

executives spend much of their time networking and lobbying tasks Western CEOs leave to their corporate public-affairs departments. India's economic liberalization, which began in 1991, was another blessing for this generation of executives. It gave them exposure to a young and fast-growing consumer market. "Liberalization unleashed a level of competition that makes you stand on your toes," recalls Vindi. "We had to learn to compete with international players but also with very good, extremely fast local ones." In 1987, when Vindi was CEO of Hindustan Unilever, the company's leading detergent, Surf, faced off against Nirma, a locally produced brand. "It didn't cost 5% less, or 10% less," says Vindi, shaking his head. "It cost a third of our product. We had to make a product that was better, for the same price." Within 12 months, they had. Competition starts early in India, as students vie for admission to the state-funded Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Management. The system produces a self-selecting and highly disciplined elite; there are tales of children starting to study at age 7 for the exam they take a decade later. When the current crop of CEOs came of age, it was typical for 300,000 applicants to vie for 2,000 places. "People in India think Harvard and MIT are second choices and an IIT is their first," says Spencer. (Ajay Banga, an IIM alum, just like his brother, disagrees: "I'd have given my right arm to go to a Harvard or MIT!") There's a spartan quality to these institutions, including shabby buildings and tiny dorm rooms. Two years ago, 1,500 IIT faculty members went on a Gandhian fast to protest their low pay. But what the institutions lack in glamour they make up in prestige and a tight-knit global network. "They all still know each other's test scores and class rank when they're 60 years old!" says Spencer. Once they leave and begin climbing the ranks, Indian managers tend to look abroad or to multinationals within their country more than their Chinese peers do. "In China a lot of the senior executives are political appointees," says Ader. "You get much more credibility leading a Chinese organization. If I call a Chinese candidate and say, 'Do you want to go on a board in the U.K. or U.S.?' they say, 'Why would I?' If you call an Indian, they will." The HayGroup study on the Indian CEO found Indian leaders' networking to be particularly "bold and focused," with the intent of obtaining useful information. One of Indian managers' great advantages is their native disadvantage: they have learned their skills in a country with huge aspirations but an often faulty infrastructure. Ajay remembers his first day at Citibank in Chennai, when he wondered what the banks of machines "big enough to power jet engines" did preserve data in case of power cuts and then found out that this was only the first line of defense. "I learned that not only do you need a backup, you need a backup to the backup to the backup," he says. "That's not a bad way to think about management. You've got to have a Plan B and a Plan C, and they have to be somewhat robust." Indian managers suit tough times, accustomed as they are to making complex systems work, even with finite resources. For Indians, "navigating uncertainties is an art, not a source of complaint," says INSEAD's dean, Dipak Jain. "We have the training to deal with complexities." Growing up in a nation where resources are often tight "forces you to blow through the constraints and find the answer," agrees

Nikesh Arora, Google's senior vice president and chief business officer. "You tend to take a look at the problem, argue about the constraints, argue about the boundaries and see how to solve it within those boundaries." Early in the 1980s, when Ajay Banga was first working at Nestl, he had the job of selling chocolate in India, where temperatures can hover above 38C for months. Try selling Kit Kats in towns that don't have electricity, let alone refrigeration. Banga ended up having to create a refrigerated supply chain with specially designed carts for cooling the chocolate en route to villages then installing generators to run the air conditioners to keep shop storage spaces cool. "And we were doing it having been schooled in the fact that 'You will not compromise on the Nestl products or value,'" recalls Banga. "Think about that. Think about trying to live that dichotomy!" In Hindi, such adaptability using finite resources has a name: jugaad. Jugaad is the spirit behind Indian products like the $2,500 Nano car, designed to be assembled using chemical glues rather than expensive factory-based welding. It's also what Vindi Banga employed when trying to figure out how to sell Unilever products to rural Indian women. Instead of spending on advertising, the company established the women as small-business operators, providing loans to buy Unilever products and resell them in their communities. The women got jobs, and Unilever got a new distribution channel, notes Banga. "These ladies became brand ambassadors, brand teachers and brand distributors all in one." It is not surprising that Indian executives tend to pay particular attention to the lower-middle-class consumer and the so-called bottom billion, the poorest customers. After all, more Indians live on $2 or less a day than don't. But attention to value pays dividends when profit margins and pocketbooks are shrinking. "In emerging markets, companies work very hard to get the value equation right," Vindi observes. That's an ever more valuable skill in a climate where even wealthy consumers are looking for value. Another reason Indian executives are thriving in a world traumatized by the global meltdown: a sense that businesses need to do more than just make money. "When you talk to these top CEOs, there's a sense that the corporation is embedded in society," says Harbir Singh, a Wharton professor and a co-author of The India Way. "Most of the executives we surveyed said, 'You cannot succeed if you don't help society around you to have a better life.'" Research on top executives shows South Asians tend to be guided less by the bottom line than by a bigger goal. "They think about what will not only benefit them but the greater good," says Spencer. "When they make business decisions, they take that seriously into account. You interview an American CEO and it's classic McKinsey strategic thinking: How do we make money in this market? But the Indians are showing us a level of business ethics that we don't see in the West." Those ethics may get tested as Indians wrestle with the demands of institutional shareholders in the large corporations they are now running. But the HayGroup's leadership survey includes an inner-strength category, examining how morals and values affect leadership. The only groups that scored as high on inner strength as Indian CEOs did? Catholic nuns and monks.

LETTERS

Inbox
Monday, Aug. 01, 2011

Over the Borderline Tim Padgett's article on drug-cartel violence was a well-written, sobering look at what's going on in Mexico ["Day of the Dead," July 11]. But the text merely touched on the claim of the cover line, "Why its drug violence is America's problem too." The role of U.S. weapons trafficking and drug use should have been addressed more thoroughly. Derek Dyer, San Diego The U.S.-backed war on drugs in Mexico is creating the conditions for a mass Mexican exodus to the U.S. As a retired U.S. Border Patrol agent, I support mass asylum as a means to protest failed wars on drugs and immigration. The elite on both sides of the border profit from this nightmare, and it is all at the expense of U.S. taxpayers and the Mexican poor. John Randolph, Ridgway, Colo., U.S. Did anyone else get the chills after reading your cover story and then reading "Elizabethan Drama," on Elizabeth Warren and the new federal consumer-protection agency [July 11]? The stories were so much alike: Mexico has the billionaire drug crooks, and we have the billionaire corporate crooks, each working so hard against the governments and us regular folks. J.P. Ryskamp, South Haven, Mich., U.S. I have seen how ineffective drug-use-prevention programs in schools are. The focus of these classes is on how drugs destroy the body, the mind, the family. From the violent drug wars of Mexico to the Taliban's use of opium to fund death, drugs affect the broader world, and it is time students learned that too. Ashita Gona, Cary, N.C., U.S. Northern Exposure It is ethically flawed to dismiss the value of banning arms flowing into Mexico from the U.S. by reasoning that the drug barons would still be able to obtain them on the open market ["The Way Forward," July 11]. After all it is the U.S. that has the voracious appetite for illicit drugs fueling the present mayhem; doesn't the U.S. government have a moral obligation to curb the flow of these weapons that are contributing to the horrendous bloodletting? Allan de Sousa, Caldas Da Rainha, Portugal Devoting only a few lines to the subject of legalization does not do the subject justice. Many of the problems that we generally attribute to drugs are most often more closely related to prohibitionist policies.

From addiction and overdose to corruption and murder, prohibition causes more harm than the drugs themselves by far. Grant Moore, Copenhagen Bachmann's Chances Mike Murphy's assessment of Michele Bachmann fails to acknowledge that her gaffes are irrelevant ["The Bachmann Boomlet," July 11]. George W. Bush committed them repeatedly without repercussions. Iowans love antiabortion, tax-cutting, corporation-deregulating pols. Bachmann is also an attractive, charismatic, natural-born Iowan. You watch: she will win the Iowa caucuses. Mark Challis, West Des Moines, Iowa, U.S. Murphy's excellent piece captures the current state of U.S. political theater. Bachmann may win an award for her performance, but not the GOP nomination. Lila Moberg, Minneapolis Buying the Farm Re "Want to Make More than a Banker? Become a Farmer!" [July 11]: It should have read, "If you want to make more than a banker, work like a farmer." A banker works a five-day, 40-hour week. Many farmers work a seven-day, 100-hour week and don't enjoy the banker's benefits, security and working conditions. William Burns, Bath, Mich., U.S. Those guys in that article aren't farmers; they're corporate plowboys enjoying taxpayer subsidies while sitting on their gigantic tractors so they never have to put their lily-white hands in the dirt. Nancy Allen, Brooksville, Maine, U.S. Texas Pride As a Texan, I was deeply offended by the photo of two men dancing in New York's gay-pride parade [World, July 11]. No, not because two men were dancing. But come on, man: Cowboy boots and shorts? Michael J. Lopez, Nederland, Texas, U.S. Weather's Windfall Your Briefing page states that $485 billion is the estimated amount the weather costs the U.S. each year [July 11]. I presume you mean bad weather. But harvesting and feasting on upsides while simultaneously decrying inexplicably linked downsides illustrates much of human behavior. Peter Aspinall, Holmfirth, England