Benefits of doubt

February 4, 2007
Benefits of Doubt
By SIMON BLACKBURN

Book Review:
DESCARTES
The Life and Times of a Genius.

By A. C. Grayling.

Illustrated. 303 pp. Walker & Company. $26.95.

You need not be much of a mathematician to know of Cartesian coordinates. And even people who have only a slender acquaintance with philosophy have often heard of “Cogito ergo sum” — I think therefore I am. They may even have heard of Cartesian skepticism and Cartesian dualism, and may know that it was in the course of pursuing the first, and establishing the second, that Descartes relied on his famous remark. The brilliant, enigmatic Frenchman whose name is thus remembered comes vividly to life in this fascinating new biography, by one of Britain’s foremost literary figures and philosophers.

Descartes lived in interesting times. He was born just before the 17th century, in the sunny Touraine region of France, and died exactly halfway through it, in the bitter northern winter at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden. For most of this time Europe was racked by the Thirty Years’ War, a dreary, vicious contest between Protestants and Catholics, which so exhausted the Old World that religion never really recovered there, and had to be exported to the New.

In “Descartes,” A. C. Grayling (whom I know as a professional colleague) deftly conjures up the political and religious conflicts of Bohemia and France, Spain and Holland, and brings to life those distant characters and events that began to shape modern Europe: the Holy Roman Emperor, the Winter King, Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus, among others, pursuing their gigantic conflict with countless lesser players at the Defenestration of Prague, the Synod of Dort, the Battle of the White Mountain or the Treaty of Westphalia. He makes a convincing case that Descartes had a minor role as some kind of intelligence agent in the affairs of the day. He was certainly suited for the part, being solitary, unsociable and secretive, and he undoubtedly had an uncanny habit of turning up in the thick of the action. The idea also offers an explanation of some strange aspects of his subsequent life, like his choosing to live outside France. A devout Catholic, he had an apparently unswerving loyalty to the Jesuits who conducted his schooling, and the Society of Jesus had interests that would not necessarily have been those of France.

Whether or not he was a spy, Descartes skulked in the shadows of Europe’s great events for a fairly short time. After following the armies and conducting secretive travels for some seven years, he settled down to the life of a savant in the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The rest of his story belongs not so much to political history as to the history of natural science, mathematics and philosophy. It has been told before, and Grayling does not seek to compete with such renowned scholars as Charles Adam or Stephen Gaukroger. But his strength lies in how he provides context, drawing the strange world from which modern science was emerging. Like his rough contemporary Francis Bacon in England, Descartes wanted the key to a method that would separate astrology, necromancy, alchemy and dark hermeneutic claptrap on the one hand from astronomy, chemistry, physics and real science on the other. Bacon was in one way farther on the right track than Descartes, emphasizing experiment and observation where Descartes pinned his faith in the powers of reason. But whereas Bacon is often compared to Moses, who led people to within sight of the promised land but never entered it, Descartes went ahead and did so. He experimented and observed and made real progress in optics, physiology and mathematics, all the time hoping to synthesize what he found into a unified system, a crystalline structure of “clear and distinct” ideas. He wanted to know not just how events do fall out, but why they have to fall out as they do, why it stands to reason that the laws of nature have to be as they are. And he thought that by finding that out we would, quite literally, be reading the mind of God.

If we hope that the lives of great scientists, mathematicians or philosophers will be ones of moral grandeur, Descartes will disappoint us. He could not stand criticism, and seems to have exhausted much of his energy conducting bitter academic quarrels. At various times he showed himself ungrateful and less than scrupulous in his conduct of his various controversies. A more attractive side comes out in his love for his illegitimate daughter, whose early death prostrated him, and in the avuncular correspondence he had with the gifted Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, who put her finger on the insoluble problem of mind-body interaction, given Descartes’s strict separation of consciousness from the physical world. The problem is with us still, under the new name “the hard problem of consciousness.” It is a pity that Elizabeth had no fortune to share with him (she later became a nun), leaving him open to an offer from the autocratic Christina. Descartes’s preferred habit was to stay warmly in bed in the mornings; Christina had him give her intellectual nourishment, bareheaded and standing in deference to her royalty, in her icy palace at 5 a.m. Pneumonia set in, fatally, but perhaps he had the last laugh when, some years later, she turned Catholic and relinquished her throne.

Simon Blackburn is professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His most recent books are “Truth: A Guide” and “Plato’s Republic.”

The New Philosophy

Decemeber 7 2007: New York Times
Idea Lab
The New New Philosophy
By KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

Suppose the chairman of a company has to decide whether to adopt a new program. It would increase profits and help the environment too. “I don’t care at all about helping the environment,” the chairman says. “I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” Would you say that the chairman intended to help the environment?

O.K., same circumstance. Except this time the program would harm the environment. The chairman, who still couldn’t care less about the environment, authorizes the program in order to get those profits. As expected, the bottom line goes up, the environment goes down. Would you say the chairman harmed the environment intentionally?

I don’t know where you ended up, but in one survey, only 23 percent of people said that the chairman in the first situation had intentionally helped the environment. When they had to think about the second situation, though, fully 82 percent thought that the chairman had intentionally harmed the environment. There’s plenty to be said about these interestingly asymmetrical results. But perhaps the most striking thing is this: The study was conducted by a philosopher, as a philosopher, in order to produce a piece of . . . philosophy.

It’s part of a recent movement known as “experimental philosophy,” which has rudely challenged the way professional philosophers like to think of themselves. Not only are philosophers unaccustomed to gathering data; many have also come to define themselves by their disinclination to do so. The professional bailiwick we’ve staked out is the empyrean of pure thought. Colleagues in biology have P.C.R. machines to run and microscope slides to dye; political scientists have demographic trends to crunch; psychologists have their rats and mazes. We philosophers wave them on with kindly looks. We know the experimental sciences are terribly important, but the role we prefer is that of the Catholic priest presiding at a wedding, confident that his support for the practice carries all the more weight for being entirely theoretical. Philosophers don’t observe; we don’t experiment; we don’t measure; and we don’t count. We reflect. We love nothing more than our “thought experiments,” but the key word there is thought. As the president of one of philosophy’s more illustrious professional associations, the Aristotelian Society, said a few years ago, “If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can.”

But now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought experiments. The newborn movement (“x-phi” to its younger practitioners) has come trailing blogs of glory, not to mention Web sites, special journal issues and panels at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association. At the University of California at San Diego and the University of Arizona, students and faculty members have set up what they call Experimental Philosophy Laboratories, while Indiana University now specializes with its Experimental Epistemology Laboratory. Neurology has been enlisted, too. More and more, you hear about philosophy grad students who are teaching themselves how to read f.M.R.I. brain scans in order to try to figure out what’s going on when people contemplate moral quandaries. (Which decisions seem to arise from cool calculation? Which decisions seem to involve amygdala-associated emotion?) The publisher Springer is starting a new journal called Neuroethics, which, pointedly, is about not just what ethics has to say about neurology but also what neurology has to say about ethics. (Have you noticed that neuro- has become the new nano-?) In online discussion groups, grad students confer about which philosophy programs are “experimentally friendly” the way, in the 1970s, they might have conferred about which programs were welcoming toward homosexuals, or Heideggerians. Oh, and earlier this fall, a music video of an “Experimental Philosophy Anthem” was posted on YouTube. It shows an armchair being torched.

Can you really do philosophy with clipboards and questionnaires? It seems that you can. Joshua Knobe, of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is the philosopher who investigated how people responded to those two stories about the company chairman. (Full disclosure: I examined him on his dissertation.) You might have supposed that whether we judge an action to be (say) blameworthy depends on whether we think it was intentional, and the nature of intentional action is something philosophers have had plenty to say about. But the so-called Knobe effect suggests that — oddly enough — it may not be clear to us whether an action is intentional until we’ve decided whether it’s good or bad.

Philosophers being a quarrelsome group, lots of rival explanations have been offered for what’s going on, leading to new rounds of experiments. And to new rounds of arguments over what the experiments show. Edouard Machery, a philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh by way of the Sorbonne, told subjects about a man named Joe who visits the local smoothie shop and asks for the largest drink available. Joe is informed that the megasmoothies come in a special commemorative cup. He doesn’t care one way or the other about the cup. He just wants the megasmoothie. Did he get the commemorative cup intentionally? Most people said no. What if, instead, he’s informed that the megasmoothie has gone up in price and that he’ll have to pay an extra dollar for it? Joe doesn’t care about the extra dollar; he just wants the megasmoothie. Did he pay the extra dollar intentionally? Most people said yes. Machery concluded that foreseen side effects of our actions are taken to be intended when we conceive them as costs incurred for a benefit. In the case of the blameworthy company chairman, then, more pollution was taken to be a harm incurred to gain more profit. Not so, a philosopher at the University of Utah has argued — bolstering his claims with another battery of field-tested thought experiments.

But even while the experimentalists wrangle over exactly what they’ve shown (experimental philosophy is still philosophy, after all), their work offers some good cautionary lessons. Wittgenstein once declared, “We do in fact call ‘Isn’t the weather glorious today?’ a question, although it is used as a statement.” If you actually proposed to do some research to make sure, he would have thought you mad, or impertinent. Philosophers have always been wonderfully confident in their ability to say what “it would be natural to say.” This confidence, experiments show, can sometimes lead us astray.

In one of the most famous arguments of postwar philosophy of language, Saul Kripke addressed a question that had long preoccupied philosophers: how do names refer to people or things? (The larger question here is: How does language get traction on reality?) In a theory that Bertrand Russell made canonical, a name is basically shorthand for a description that specifies the person or thing in question. Kripke was skeptical. He suggested that the way names come to refer to something is akin to baptism: once upon a time, someone or some group conferred the name on an object, and, through the causal chains of history, we borrow that original designation.

To support his case, Kripke offered a thought experiment: Suppose, he asked us to imagine, that Gödel’s theorem was actually the work of a fellow named Schmidt; it’s just that Gödel somehow got hold of the manuscript and thereafter was wrongly credited with its authorship. When those of us who know about “Gödel” only as the theorem’s author invoke that name, whom are we referring to? According to Russell’s view of reference, we’re actually referring to Schmidt: “Gödel” is merely shorthand for the fellow who devised the famous theorem, and Schmidt is the creature who answers to that description. “But it seems to me that we are not,” Kripke declared. “We simply are not.”

To which experimentalists reply: What do you mean “we,” kemo sabe? Recently, a team of philosophers led by Machery came up with situations that had the same form as Kripke’s and presented them to two groups of undergraduates — one in New Jersey and another in Hong Kong. The Americans, it turned out, were significantly more likely to give the responses that Kripke took to be obvious; the Chinese students had intuitions that were consonant with the older theory of reference. Maybe this relates to the supposed individualism of Westerners; maybe their concern that we get Schmidt’s name right isn’t shared by the supposedly more group-minded East Asians. Whatever the explanation, it’s a discomforting result. “We simply are not”: well, that may be so at Princeton or Rutgers. On the other side of the planet, it might seem we are. What should philosophers make of that?

I’m not sure. Because here’s the thing about the theory of reference: Versions of both views — Kripke’s and the one he was challenging — have plentiful adherents among philosophers. Both intuitions have their advocates, and the right answer, if there is one, isn’t necessarily to be determined by a head count. The best work in experimental philosophy would be valuable and suggestive even if it skipped the actual experiments. (“It would be natural to say,” Knobe might have written, “that the chairman in one situation had harmed the environment intentionally, whereas. . . .”) X-phi helps keep us honest and enforces a useful modesty about how much weight to give one’s personal hunches, even when they’re shared by the guy in the next office. But — this is my own empirical observation — although experiments can illuminate philosophical arguments, they don’t settle them.

For instance, is it a good thing that we attribute intention in the curious way that we do, and if so, why? (Is the Knobe effect a bug or a feature?) You can conduct more research to try to clarify matters, but you’re left having to interpret the findings; they don’t interpret themselves. There always comes a point where the clipboards and questionnaires and M.R.I. scans have to be put aside. To sort things out, it seems, another powerful instrument is needed. Let’s see — there’s one in the corner, over there. The springs are sagging a bit, and the cushions are worn, but never mind. That armchair will do nicely.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher at Princeton University, is the author of “Experiments in Ethics,” which will be published next month. His last article for the magazine was about the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire.

In the Footsteps of the Prophet

In the Footsteps of the Prophet Lessons From the Life of Muhammad. By Tariq Ramadan. 242 pages. $23. Oxford University Press; ?20. Allen Lane.
Friday, March 30, 2007 International Herald Tribune
For some years now, the Swiss philosopher and Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan has been saying he wants to reconcile Islamic tradition with Western democracy, conservative religious values with liberal political ones, writes the reviewer Stanie Giry. But not everyone finds him credible. And being the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, doesn't help. Skeptics say he is a radical in disguise? a Janus-faced rhetorician who presents a moderate's face to Western audiences and a reactionary's to Muslim ones.
The government is taking no chances: it has twice denied him a visa to teach in the United States, ostensibly for giving about $800 to a charity later blacklisted by the government because of suspected ties with Hamas. (Ramadan is now a fellow at Oxford.) Ian Buruma concluded a recent profile of him in The New York Times Magazine with this uncertain endorsement: "From what I understand of Ramadan's enterprise," the values he espouses "are neither secular, nor always liberal, but they are not part of a holy war against Western democracy either. His politics offer an alternative to violence, which, in the end, is reason enough to engage with him, critically, but without fear."
Ramadan, meanwhile, continues to defend himself and his project. In his new book, "In the Footsteps of the Prophet," he seeks to illustrate that Islam and Western democracy are inherently compatible by extracting lessons from the prophet's life.
Returning to the roots of Islam, he believes, makes the parallels clear. Ramadan's Muhammad is a kind man and a wise leader. He is fair to his wives, openly affectionate with his daughters, generally good to women - he lets them into the mosques. ("Gentleness" is one of Ramadan's favorite words.) Muhammad knows when to encourage patience and faith in his followers and when to indulge their craving for rest and sex. He consults before making decisions, and wages war only when necessary. He is tolerant of non-Muslims and fair to his enemies. His faith is unflappable, but he is also a critical thinker: he uses reason to translate the word of God into a practicable ethics. If Muhammad is the embodiment of Islam, Islam is a religion of moderation, common sense, resilience and love.
Some will challenge Ramadan's understated, if not euphemistic, treatment of the Muslims' conquest of the Arabian Peninsula and his claim that armed jihad is justified only in self-defense. But judging this avowedly interpretive biography by its historical accuracy or the quality of its Koranic interpretation is to miss the more relevant question: What does the book reveal about Ramadan's political philosophy? Ramadan's vision of Islam comes down to just a few universal principles. Everything else ? the cultures of Muslim countries, the politics often pursued in Islam's name ? is historically contingent, and so up for negotiation.
(Elsewhere, Ramadan has said, "Arabic is the language of Islam, but Arabic culture is not the culture of Islam.") For just this reason, Islam can be a complement to modern democracies. "Islam does not establish a closed universe of reference," Ramadan argues, "but rather relies on a set of universal principles that can coincide with the fundamentals and values of other beliefs and religious traditions." In other words, "In the Footsteps of the Prophet" is a brief. But it is also an apologia for some of Ramadan's most controversial positions. In 2003, he was criticized for calling for a moratorium on the stoning of adulterers rather than condemning the practice outright. He replied that while he personally opposed the sentence - and the death penalty in general - advocating a sweeping ban might have alienated hard-liners in majority-Muslim countries and delayed reform there. This claim seemed feeble to his detractors, but it was probably less sinister than it sounded. As this book suggests, Ramadan's response wasn't a tacit endorsement of stoning so much as an expression of his view that each society must decide for itself how to put into practice the values of Islam.
Likewise, his portrayal of those values as universal may shed a different light on his alleged bigotry. He was called an anti-Semite after he wrote an article in 2003 chiding French-Jewish intellectuals like Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard-Henri Levin and Bernard Kouchner for reflexively backing the war in Iraq and Israel's foreign policy. He didn't help his case by including on his list the sociologist Pierre-André頔aguieff, who isn't Jewish. Yet even prejudice, if that's what accounted for the slip, needn't have undermined his warning about the danger of sectarian politics. Ramadan was making the point about these writers as a prelude to discouraging Muslims from resorting to ethnic politics themselves - even though, as Ramadan told me when I interviewed him in 2005, their greater numbers in France suggest it's a strategy that might serve them well. By invoking universalism ? a mantra of French republicanism ? as a higher good, Ramadan has tried to show that even as a practicing Muslim he can be a better citoyen than his critics.
So why the controversy? To those who say his discourse is double talk, Ramadan responds that they practice "double hearing" (and sometimes it does seem as though they have a stake in his not being what he claims). More important, Ramadan's intentions ? Whatever they are - ultimately matter less than the arguments themselves. Taking him literally could be one way to get beyond his critics' accusations, as well as the paranoid legalism of the State Department. In fact, it could yield just the kind of accommodation that the secular establishment in France and the multiculturalists in the Netherlands are struggling to reach with their growing Muslim populations. Ramadan's universalist, apolitical view of Islam could actually facilitate the pragmatic resolution of social frictions.
Ramadan, who encourages modesty among Muslim women, opposed the 2004 French law banning head scarves in public schools, for instance. But he did so on classic libertarian grounds? the right of Muslim girls to choose for themselves whether to cover up ? And has been advising girls forced to choose between attending class and wearing the veil to "go to school and learn." He has said of last year's controversy over cartoons lampooning Muhammad both that "Muslims have to understand that there is an old tradition in secular Western society to make fun of everything" and that "we should not forget wisdom and decency." Sensible arguments all, whatever plans are lurking in the recesses of the mind that produced them.
So why the controversy? To those who say his discourse is double talk, Ramadan responds that they practice ‘double hearing’’
Muhammad may not have been as sober and sensible as Ramadan writes, but why take issue with this portrayal if it can help reconcile Islam with Western liberalism today? The project that Ramadan states is his own is worth pursuing even if, for some, Ramadan himself cannot be entrusted with it.

Response:

No Grounds for Patronizing the Hunza

I was deeply disappointed by the bias against the Hunza of northern Pakistan that was evident in "Fighting the good fight" (The Conflict, Nov. 26). Should it really have escaped your research that the Aga Khan has been weighed in gold by his followers, mostly the Hunza people, so he could amass his tremendous wealth? To speak of him as a benefactor if he spends so little of this fortune for charity programs in the region is the height of irony.

Fifty years ago, no expedition in the Karakorum region was possible without the endurance and surefootedness of Hunza men. At the beginning of the 20th century, no country on earth, regardless of its civilized status, could match the happiness and health of the Hunza. Life expectancy was by far above that of the U.S. or Britain.

Now the Hunza are applauded if they speak flawless English and export some honey or dried fruit to England. What can be said of this state of arrogance and ignorance?

Rolf Schurian
Zankenhause, Germany

Fighting the good fight

Fighting the Good Fight

The Aga Khan's millions are helping improve Pakistan


Gari Khan is renowned among his neighbors for his moving recitations of the Koran. Regularly, hundreds of fellow Muslims gather to marvel at his performances. Khan, 35, is known for something else, too: His prowess as a beekeeper. Six years ago, he and his wife, Shamin, 28, got loans and technical assistance from the Aga Khan Rural Support Program to raise honeybees. This year, the Khans' Hunza Honey company repaid its loans and raked in $5,000 in revenues. "Our lives have been turned around," says Shamin. "Before, we were traditional people growing our crops. Now we are thinking like business people."

That's an impressive achievement when you consider where the Khans live: in the mountain village of Aliabad, in Pakistan's rugged Northern Area. In this part of the world, people are lucky to scrape together $100 a year. Remote doesn't begin to describe the Khans' hometown, a dot in the Hunza District, one of the most inhospitable and beautiful landscapes on earth, 16 bumpy hours by road from the capital of Islamabad. Until recently, the town boasted few real businesses, infrastructure such as electricity was nonexistent, and its schools were rudimentary. In fact, Aliabad and its neighboring villages were as poor as present-day Afghanistan, just 60 kilometers north.

GRASSROOTS. Today, the grinding poverty endured for centuries is a fading memory in Aliabad and such neighboring towns as Ghulkin and Karimabad. These villages owe their prosperity to the man who helped give the Khans their start, a moderate Shia Muslim living thousands of miles away in France, 64-year old Prince Karim Aga Khan. Since the 1950s, the family of the Aga Khan, who is spiritual leader to some 15 million Ismaili Muslims worldwide, has been devoting its considerable wealth--much of it donated by the Aga Khan's flock--to good works. The Aga Khan Development Network has spent millions over the years, bringing running water and electricity to remote hamlets, teaching farmers entrepreneurial skills, and educating girls.

The successes in such villages as Aliabad are especially important at this point in history, since they have helped curb the spread of radical Islam. Elsewhere in Pakistan--and Afghanistan--poverty has driven young men into the embrace of mullahs who fill their heads with perverse religious notions, press AK-47s into their hands, and send them off to fight holy wars. "If 15 years ago I had no education, health opportunities, or community support," says Ghulkin resident Mujood Ali, "I'd be one of the terrorists, too." Instead, he runs the microcredit scheme in his village.

What makes the Aga Khan's rural development work so effective is its emphasis on grassroots participation in setting development goals, the mobilization of community savings, and the development of civil society. Moreover, it lends aid regardless of religious affiliation. While the group originally focused its Pakistan programs on the 300,000 Ismailis in the Northern Area, it has since expanded them to non-Ismailis. Its grassroots philosophy could be a model as the world seeks to rebuild a post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Of course, it helps that the Aga Khan continuously pours new funds into his programs, relying on the donations of the Ismaili diaspora. Outside observers note that the progress achieved in the Northern Area is in no way free-standing. Moreover, the Aga Khan Network is the region's largest employer, with 370 on the payroll. "If the Aga Khan Network disappeared tomorrow," says an Islamabad-based U.N. official, "there's a very high risk the whole thing would collapse."

Still, it is hard to overstate the impact that the Aga Khan Network has had in that area. The group has built more than 100 schools for girls, developed dozens of small businesses, and helped construct bridges, irrigation canals, and mini hydropower plants. Its rural support program has introduced new breeds of livestock and better seeds, enabling farmers to increase yields and produce cash crops, such as almonds and dried apricots, that they sell as far away as Britain.

Nowhere, perhaps, is the Aga Khan's contribution more profound than in the schools he builds and finances. They are often the only schools of any kind in remote areas neglected by the government. Recently, the Aga Khan Network has expanded its education program by building elite schools for especially promising students, such as the Aga Khan Girls Academy in Karimabad, the former royal capital of Hunza. Located on a steep mountainside, the school provides a stunning learning environment at 2,450 meters. The stone and concrete facility boasts chemistry labs, a library with daily newspapers flown in from Islamabad, and a computer lab where girls work with Excel and Microsoft Windows. (The community only got phone service last year, and the Internet is still not available.)

ADULT TRAINING. A recent lesson featured a discussion of the life of Mohammed, and what he meant when he talked about jihad, or holy war. "Jihad is a struggle against evil. The best jihad is a fight with ourselves, inner struggle," says 15-year-old Hussun Nawaz. After class, Nawaz and her classmates stress the difference between their education and the dogma taught at fundamentalist madrassahs in other parts of the country. "They're just reciting the Koran in Arabic, a language they don't understand," says Nawaz in flawless English. "Islam preaches to fight against evil, not human life." Fatima Raza, a 16-year-old who plans to become an accountant, nods vigorously: "Nothing in the Koran says we should cover our face or wear a gown from head to foot."

While young people attend school, their elders learn basic business skills from the Aga Khan's local representatives. The training stresses better crop and animal management, and making goods such as carpets that will provide income. Local microcredit facilities, in turn, provide both an incentive to save and a source of credit in regions where banks are nonexistent. From 1982 to 2000, some $2.2 million was lent out in the northern villages.

While the bulk of these loans goes to buy fertilizer, seeds, and tools, more recently the credit has been expanded to support enterprise. A community-owned company called Hunza Threadnet turns out embroidered caps, bags, and carpets, providing jobs for 2,400 women working in their homes. Sales this year, the company says, are expected to reach $50,000. The beekeeping Khans are considered role models of the program. Having paid off their loans, they now plan to boost the number of bee colonies they keep by 50% next year and then start exporting honey as far afield as the Middle East.

Only a generation ago, life in Ghulkin was a daily struggle. Today, the 1,000 village residents enjoy running water, electricity, and English-language schools. About 70% are literate--well above Pakistan's national average of less than 50%. "When I was young, there was only poverty and problems," says Ainul, a woman in late middle age wearing a traditional needlework pillbox crowned by a white scarf. "Now, life is easy." Easy is a relative term, of course. But even the rough level of comfort enjoyed by Ainul and her neighbors wouldn't be possible without the help of their distant benefactor in France, who has helped locals put into practice a moderate, forward-looking Islamic vision.

By Frederik Balfour in Hunza, Pakistan