After I finished writing this post, I realised how long it was, and also how much I have written previously about the re-emergence of religion in global politics. I don’t want to give the impression that this was my primary interest during high school. In fact, it placed a rather distant second to the physics of computation. But I cannot write about that right now, because every time I try to do so my mind freezes — that’s basically the reason I cannot complete my research proposal.
My career as a computer scientist should have ended the night my parents locked me out of the house in high school for doing research on the physics of computation. But it didn’t, and that is due almost entirely to the fact that I turned my attention to the topics discussed below in this post.
There is another reason why I have written so much about my interest in the role of religion in global politics, and of Islam in particular. It is that the importance of this subject is no longer debatable. I had many interests in high school, and my parents have always dismissed all of them as “worthless”. Scientists can (and do) debate whether large-scale quantum computers will or can ever be built; and while a layperson might mistakenly think that a negative answer would imply that quantum computing is a “worthless” subject, from the point of view of the spirit of scientific inquiry, even hypothetical questions about impossible things can lead to new insights about reality. (Of course, my father dismissed quantum computing as “worthless” not because he had an educated opinion about the viability of scalable quantum computing devices, but because he had never heard of the subject.) On the other hand, the importance of Islam in global politics today can be readily seen by opening up any newspaper or newsmagazine — there is, essentially, a unanimous consensus.
In the previous post, I described what I thought and wrote in high school about the effects of the availability of cheap mass media technologies with global reach on science, and in particular on how it is conducted and disseminated. Now, I want to turn to the topic of what I thought and wrote about its effects on another “extreme” of civilisation. The word “extreme” is perhaps appropriate here, because the people who occupy this part of the societal spectrum are often labeled “extremists”.
Communications technologies are tools, and as tools they are morally neutral. They can be used to benefit or to harm, but they have the effect of serving both as magnets and as magnifiers: they draw people together who might otherwise have been kept apart, and as a result they amplify the consequences of their collective actions.
The past few centuries have seen rapid technological advances, spearheaded by the West, i.e., European countries and countries colonised primarily by the descendants of Europeans. These advances were accompanied by certain sociological changes which often came at an enormous expense to these societies — in labour and in bloodshed. The invention of the movable type printing press in Europe and the subsequent spread of literature and literacy greatly weakened centralised systems of authority such as the Catholic Church, and this along with the mechanisation of labour led to an increase in personal autonomy to a degree previously unknown anywhere in the world. We now take for granted in the West as “fundamental rights” such liberties as the freedoms of speech, expression, belief, and association; but these ideas were fought over and firmly established only after numerous struggles over a period spanning centuries, and they are still alien to much of the world.
By design, communications technologies are socially invasive: it is in their very nature to maximize their reach — and the successful ones are precisely the ones which are the best at doing so. It was inescapable that these technologies would permeate into non-Western societies, bringing with them the incredible power accrued over centuries of technological development, and ostensibly without the enormous cost of the attendant centuries of social upheaval. However, in one way or another, this price must be paid in full: many non-Western societies, desirous to master the power of these technologies, have discovered that they must now struggle to manage and contain what should be centuries of social change — compressed into but a few years. Needless to say, the social fabric of many of these societies have been unraveling as a result.
Some of these societies seek to cheat the natural course of development by “leapfrogging” the social changes which are prerequisite for the technologies they wish to assimilate — like a country previously without a telephone network skipping over the laying of copper cables and going directly to the erection of wireless cellular towers. But it is impossible to entirely isolate any society that wishes to adopt a communications technology from the social changes that enabled the technology to be developed in the first place — just as it is impossible for a country to build cellular towers without either hiring engineers from outside, or sending its own engineers abroad for training. Either way, the engineers will have to understand the basic principles of the simplest telephone networks running on copper wires before they can deploy the latest wireless technologies.
It is possible to somewhat minimize and control the exposure, and that is exactly what some countries have been trying to do. The so-called “Great Firewall of China” is one rather drastic example of this. The governments of predominantly Muslim countries too have tried to limit the exposure of their citizens to what they refer to as “Western” ideas. But the point is that while such societies can import and even make quite good use of technologies developed in free and open societies, they will never have the conditions which make the invention of such technologies possible — unless and until they become free and open themselves.
But what interested me the most in high school was not how the governments and ruling classes of these societies reacted to the West’s dominance in science and technology and its movement away from religious and authoritarian rule to secular and individual values, but how their people harmonised the ascendance of the West with their worldviews — especially in societies which have historically considered themselves superior (and the West inferior and even barbaric).
I focused primarily, though not exclusively, on the Muslim world, and particularly at the time on Pakistan. At this point in history, I do not think that I need to bother justifying my belief in the importance of the ideological battles being waged in the Muslim world to the future of human civilisation. (Because that would be like flogging the broken pieces of a hobby horse once held together by animal glue produced from the rendered remains of an expired equine.) But in the early 1990s, when I was in high school, my interest in the Muslim world and my belief in its importance was quite atypical (though I was by no means alone in this belief).
There are many reasons why the Muslim world provided particularly provocative examples of societies (yes, that was in the plural) struggling to come to terms with the success of the West in comparison to themselves. There are of course civilisations — such as the Indian or the Chinese — which are older, and which can even lay claim to being, in the past, grander. But there is a sort of sibling rivalry between Christianity and Islam, between Christendom and Dar al-Islam, which simply does not exist between, for example, Christianity and Hinduism, or Europe and China. The histories of Christendom and of Europe have been shaped by conflict with Islam and Muslims in much more profound ways than by their contact with any other civilisation. They spring from the same Middle Eastern desert roots, and Christendom stretches across a large part of Islam’s borders (its bloody borders, as Samuel Huntington put it). Much of the progress in science made during the Medieval period occurred in the Muslim world, and many Muslims believe, rightly or wrongly, that the Scientific Revolution would not have been possible without the contributions of Muslim scientists. I thought that the poignancy of a Muslim’s feelings (whether it be envy, or rage, or disenchantment), when he surveyed the state of his society and pondered its place on the world stage, and especially in comparison to the West, would be greater than that of other non-Westerners for those reasons.
Besides history, there were also the factors of size, geographic spread, and self-identification to consider. In the 1990s, the Indian, Chinese, and Muslim populations of the Earth were close to a billion each; but the former two were concentrated primarily in the nations of the their respective ethnic origins (with some overseas communities). In contrast, the Muslim community — the ummah — was distributed across the globe. And, being a religious rather than an ethnic or a national identification, Muslims were far more diverse in their racial, cultural, linguistic, and economic composition. At the same time, precisely because Muslim self-identity was centred around religion, many of the people in positions of power in Muslim societies had far more to lose from the threat of the equation of modernity with secularisation championed by the West than in societies based on a common ethnic heritage.
Into this potent and explosive mix was thrown the catalyst of communications technology: at first tape recorders and voice cassettes, then television and videotapes, and finally the Internet. There have been, to be sure, murderous fanatics in the West who have made use of each medium as it was invented to broadcast their violent visions. But their influence was tempered by more rationalist and calmer voices carried by the same media, and by the fact that the mental horizons of their audience expanded with exposure to the media themselves, in proportion to their reach. Even so, the West nevertheless still underwent centuries of religious and nationalistic conflagration before finally settling down as secular societies in the modern world. The Muslim world has yet to have its “World Wars”.
While the West was moving towards modernity, pulling the rest of the world in its wake (and often kicking and screaming), pockets of the world were left behind. There remained these bubbles of the Medieval world, floating within the modern one, but psychologically severed from it as if time had been frozen within them. And these bubbles were burst, one by one, by the penetration of communications technologies, by pamphlets and newspapers, radios and television, and the Internet.
Multiple competing voices raced to breach these bubbles: national governments intending to strengthen their administrative control over a previously remote region, or to spread their new political ideology; outside news agencies such as the BBC or the VOA, with their own agendas; Christian missionaries looking to preach the Gospel. But the message was always one of change — with one glaring exception.
By and large, it was only among Muslims that these new communications technologies were put to the service of a message of stasis — of reversion, even. This voice preached a return to the imagined purity of the early days of Islam as the solution to the present problems of the Muslim ummah. (In reality, as anyone who has actually studied the early sources of Islam without the hindrance of doctrinal blinders can see, it was a period of great confusion and absolute chaos, and horrifically bloody. I will have more to write about historical revisionism by Islam, and more generally by religion, later; but it suffices to remember the adage that “history is written by the victors”. It should not surprise anyone who is not blinded by religious belief that all attempts to “revert” to the conditions of the early days of Islam have resulted in chaos and bloodshed.)
The most advanced technologies were thus used to spread a most retrograde message. This message carried with it a most illiberal view of history, casting Muslims simultaneously — and perhaps paradoxically to an outsider — both as conquerors and the rightful masters of the Earth, and as victims (of Jewish Zionists, Christian Crusaders, and Hindus and every other kind of infidel). It is of course an example of supreme irony that the delivery of the message itself would not have been possible except through technologies developed by the infidel. Indeed, many of the intended recipients of the message would likely not even have been alive were it not for the advances in medicine and food production achieved by infidel scientists.
The poor and dispossessed everywhere are subject to the sting of resentment; and, left to their own devices, they would probably direct this anger at their own government, or at the wealthy members of their own countries. So it is not unexpected that the rulers and educated classes in many non-Western societies place the blame for their failures on Western imperialism or colonialism, while ignoring the benefits brought to their societies by the West and hypocritically forgetting their own imperialist and colonialist pasts. (A large chunk of the western half of the Muslim world, for instance, was once the heart of Christendom, and most of its eastern half comprises formerly Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms.) Nor is it surprising that many would take the bait — it is an unfortunate flaw of human nature that we often succumb to taking the easy route of blaming others for our misfortunes rather than making the difficult effort of uplifting ourselves.
This attitude of blaming the West — or, to use an ethnocultural rather than a geographic descriptor, of blaming European Christians and their descendents — is not unique to Muslims. But it is only among Muslims that the effort is global, and so organised and well-funded. A “radical” preacher in some small town cannot do much harm to the outside world, but when the members of his congregation can view and share videos of large crowds in major cities rallying to the same cause, when they are disproportionately exposed to those with a much greater religious fervour and who are continually praised for their fervour, and when they are connected to others of like mind from distant parts of the world, it re-inforces their worldview — and transforms their personal grievances into cosmic ones. This is something that religion is very good at doing, a fact seemingly forgotten by many secularised Westerners, who seem to be always looking for material reasons — such as poverty, lack of education, or America’s support for Israel — for the anger directed from the Muslim world at the West.
There are many points of similarity between religion and communications technologies — religions are magnets and magnifiers of people, and it is in their nature to expand, to spread their message. Westerners, and in particular educated ones, have become inured to both, having developed the appropriate natural defenses of doubt and sceptical inquiry against the worst aspects of both religion and the media. We are, for the most part, no longer convinced by “special” effects, and though our free press is often distracted by celebrity gossip, it does a mostly adequate job of reminding us not to place too much of our trust in figures of authority. Alternate views are always available to challenge us. An entire multi-billion industry by the name of advertising exists solely for the purpose of convincing us of one thing or another.
In those parts of the world which have skipped over the development of a free press, the introduction of widespread literacy, and a culture of the printed word, and have instead jumped right into audio or audiovisual media, the natural defenses of doubt and scepticism are absent. To make matters even worse, the most sophisticated advertising know-how developed in open societies is brought to bear to deliver the message to those with the fewest defenses against it. The audience identifies with the messengers as fellow Muslims and are thus receptive; they have limited or no access to alternate sources of information, or these are deemed untrustworthy (because, for example, they are controlled by the state); it is easier to accept a message that validates one’s pre-existing beliefs rather than challenges them; and it lifts their self-esteem to have a message specifically calling to them and telling them that theirs is the legacy of the greatest conquerors and brightest scientists in the history of the world (when in fact, many Muslims are descended from conquered peoples whose scientific knowledge was assimilated by their Muslim conquerors).
It is not only the poor and uneducated who are susceptible to such a message. Many extremists, radicals, terrorists, and their sympathisers are in fact quite wealthy and highly educated (but in a very limited and selective way). But the point is that they identify with the poor and dispossessed, and in the case of Muslims this identity is made stronger by a religious bond. A wealthy Chinese, for example, would for the most part not identify with the plight of a poor Chinese peasant. But a religious well-to-do Muslim will sympathise with the injustice suffered by his poorer co-religionists. This is both a strength and a pathology of Islam.
(To give an example of what I mean by a limited and selective education, I have met devout Muslims who were Ph.D. candidates in science and engineering who posited to me “scientific miracles” as a reason to believe in the divine inspiration of the Qur’an. They even provided me with examples, which anyone with an elementary grasp of logic and a basic knowledge of ancient Greek, Persian, and Arab beliefs about the world could have easily refuted in about five seconds. I did not inquire about their politics.)
I have been writing somewhat abstractly above, but in the early 1990s there were a large number of signs that these things would become very important. The Muslim world had been undergoing several decades of Islamisation which had gone largely unnoticed by the West. In the post-colonial period after the Second World War, Muslims in newly independent nations asserted their identities as Muslims. This created the opportunity for Muslim missionaries of self-styled orthodoxy to disseminate their version of the religion, often displacing indigenous forms of Islam which had developed independently for centuries apart from the politics and religious wars of the Middle East.
At the same time, the Persian Gulf War to expel Iraq from Kuwait had just wrapped up, and the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan and the war between Iran and Iraq were still recent memories. It was perfectly obvious that those regions of the world would only increase in geopolitical importance in the next decade — at least, it was obvious to me. I thought that the American actions in those regions, such as the assistance rendered to the mujihadeen, would have repercussions throughout the Muslim world that the Americans seemed not to have clearly thought out. For example, their actions left Pakistan and Saudi Arabia far more influential in Afghanistan than was perhaps in the United States’ best interest; and the weakening of Iraq would result in an increase in the regional status and power of its arch-enemy Iran.
I had been studying Islam and the Muslim world for some time already by the time I was in high school. But at that time, my primary interest was still the physics of computation, and so I could not devote as much time to topics related to the Muslim world as I might have liked. (Of course, this would change after my parents forbid me to study the physics of computation, near the end of high school.) I had to specialise! I turned my attention to Pakistan, and to Urdu, which is its national language.
This choice was actually made for me by happenstance. I had wanted to focus my attention on a specific region or country, and also to learn to speak at least one of the major languages used in the Muslim world. The linguistic options had been narrowed down to Arabic, Persian, Pashto, and Urdu. Arabic was such an obvious choice that I rejected it for precisely that reason. I would, of course, have to learn some amount of Arabic in any case, in order to study the Qur’an and to understand the many Arabic expressions used even by Muslims who do not otherwise know any Arabic. And regardless of which language I chose, I would have to read some variant of the Arabic script. Persian had the advantage that it was Indo-European, and I had already studied a number of Indo-European languages. It was also the historical lingua franca of large parts of the Muslim world, and has a rich tradition of literature and poetry which were available in passable English translations. The downside was that the use of Persian as a vernacular was now restricted primarily to Shi’ite Iran. Pashto was in vogue at the time because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
But I ended up studying Urdu because I was close friends with a Pakistani family. Their son and I had gone to the same elementary school, where we were both in the gifted program, although we were not classmates then because he was one year older. In high school, I was classmates with both him and his sister, in different courses. For whatever reason, their mother took a special liking to me, and I spent a lot of time in their home.
Mrs. Mallo did whatever she could to help me, and I really owe my success in school to her efforts. When my father attacked me for reading scientific papers and books on science at home, she set aside a space for me to keep them in her living room. And when he locked me out of the house for continuing my studies against his wishes, she allowed me to sleep in their spare bedroom and told me that I was welcome there any time. But how she saved my academic career from my parents’ attempts to destroy it is a story for another post.
When I asked her to teach Urdu to me, she readily agreed. She made flash cards for me and supplied me with photocopied materials she had gathered from relatives. We practised speaking together, though I learned mostly by listening to conversations between her family members. We also spent a lot of time discussing the situation in Pakistan and its politics. I told her how important I thought Pakistan would become in geopolitics in the coming years; she must have thought that I was trying to flatter her. When I fasted for the month of Ramadan, she encouraged me and even prepared a special iftar for me on the last day, despite the fact that her family is Christian.
In contrast, my parents did everything they could to discourage my studies — as always. I wish that I had the foresight to tape everything that my father had said to me about how “useless” it was to study Islam and the Muslim world, so that I could’ve played it all back to him after September 11, 2001. When he saw me reading books on Pakistan, he asked me why I was reading them, and I told him it was because Pakistan would become very important in a decade. He said: “Nobody will care about Pakistan in ten years.” I think this was in 1993.
During the entire month of Ramadan, my mother nagged me to stop fasting, in spite of my repeated insistence that what I was doing was very important. I believed, and I continue to believe, that there are certain things that one just cannot learn from reading, that they must be experienced — and fasting for an entire month is most certainly one of those things. (It was especially difficult for me, because I was also a vegetarian at the time, and I took the fasting very seriously. If I didn’t get up before daybreak, I would have had to go without food until sunset, and so I made sure to get up very early each morning.)
It did, in fact, turn out to be very important. In university, I was very involved in interfaith dialogue activities (of which I have much to write about later), and I ended up being something of an unofficial religious counsellor to many students. The fact that I have had the experience of fasting through Ramadan despite not being a Muslim allowed me to communicate with Muslim students, and have them open up to me, in ways that would otherwise not have been possible. There were many other instances where the fact that I had fasted through Ramadan came in handy, but I am not going to write about them now. But this is yet another example of something that my parents dismissed as “worthless” and tried to discourage or prevent me from doing, but which has later, socially or careerwise, helped me in some way or served to distinguish me from my peers.
Because I had indicated to my parents that my primary academic interest was in computer science, they would justify their dismissal of my interests as “worthless” and my activities as “a waste of time” by telling me that these had “nothing to do with computer science”. This is wrong in a lot of ways that I think make it a perfect illustration of why traditional Chinese culture, and more generally any culture that leans towards the authoritarian style of parenting, is necessarily anti-education and anti-science.
The most obvious and egregious error was that many of the topics that they insisted had “nothing to do with computer science” were in fact central to computer science. While I was in high school and as an undergraduate in university, I often heard it remarked that the Chinese students were at an advantage when it came to computer science courses because so many Chinese people (and thus presumably these students’ parents or relatives) worked in the IT industry. To a degree this was true. But what was not apparent from the outside were the disadvantages of such a situation. Because my father used computers in his work and knew others who also worked with computers, he could speak with an absolutely unwarranted sense of confidence when he pontificated on what was or was not computer science. He was certain that complexity classes, Turing machines, Gödel’s theorem, and quantum mechanics all had “nothing to do with computer science” because he had never encountered or heard of them in his work, and he punished me for studying them. The only things that my parents accepted as a part of “computer science” were things which had to do with applications: word processing, programming, graphics, databases, computer-aided design, and so on. I think this is a large part of the reason why there are disproportionately so many students of Chinese descent in undergraduate computer science courses, and so few in graduate school except in application-related areas. The advantage of early exposure to computers is eventually more than negated by the lack of intellectual freedom which is the cornerstone of scientific research.
A more subtle error is the belief that there is any subject whatsoever which is completely unrelated to computer science. I think that the difference between a mediocre scientist and a good one in any field is the ability of the latter to ask the question “How is this related to my field?”, when presented with an unfamiliar subject. My parents were certain that my interest in religion was completely unconnected to anything remotely having to do with computer science and continually reminded me of this. But it was precisely my prediction about the re-emergence of Islam as a force in global politics that inspired me to learn about parsing, natural language processing, and machine translation — because I foresaw the need for tools to process and retrieve information from documents written in Arabic, and long before I ever encountered these subjects in school. And it was these skills — skills which my parents sought to deprive me of — that allowed me to enter graduate school in computer science. And, of course, after 9/11, my knowledge of various subjects related to Islam opened up career opportunities to me in computer science that I would not have been qualified for otherwise.
My parents also told me that what was happening in the Muslim world was “none of [my] business”, presumably because I am not a Muslim or from a Muslim background. There is, of course, a general sense in which I think the turmoil in the Muslim world is the “business” of anyone who has the privilege of a university education in a free society. But there is actually a more personal sense in which it was also my “business”, and which I didn’t realise until I was in university. There, I met a lot of students from Muslim backgrounds, and I realised how similar their experiences were to my own. My parents wanted to acquire Western symbols of prestige, such as for their children to obtain university degrees and have high-paying jobs in the IT industry. But they absolutely refused to allow us to have the intellectual freedom which made such spectacular advances in science and technology possible in the West in the first place. Instead, they kept pretending to themselves that it was due to their traditional Confucianist values that I was so successful at school, when in fact the real reason for my success — especially compared to other students from Chinese backgrounds — was that I managed to get away with doing as many of the things that they discouraged or forbid me from doing as I could.
In Huntington’s thesis of the “clash of civilisations”, the Chinese (Sinic) and Islamic civilisations are two of the major players, and potential allies because they share a number of common goals. But there is a characteristic common to the members of both civilisations which I have not seen remarked upon very often, and that is that the “average man on the street” in both seeks to acquire the wealth and other benefits associated with science and technology, while at the same time shielding his children from the values which make science possible in the first place: the freedom to openly ask questions about anything, the ability to think critically, and the willingness to challenge received wisdom. A child whose parents are “intellectual professionals” (engineers or doctors or what have you), but who is constantly told that his interests are “worthless” and a “waste of time”, is not likely to become a good scientist. He might obtain an undergraduate degree to satisfy his parents’ expectations, but he is unlikely to continue on to graduate school or to succeed in scientific research. I knew many such people, from both Chinese and Muslim backgrounds. In contrast, when one reads the biographies of eminent scientists, one finds that the parents of many of them often engaged in a form of Socratic dialogue with them during their youth, even if they were not very “educated” people. (Richard Feynman, whose father was the sales manager of a uniform company, is a typical example of this; see, for example, his essay “The Making of a Scientist”, which begins the collection “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”.)
I met many students from Muslim backgrounds in university who faced, essentially, the same problems that I did. They could see for themselves that the best students in their programs were those who acted in exactly the opposite manner to how their parents pressured them to behave: these students asked questions and did not believe what they were taught merely on the authority of their professors, and they socialised outside of their ethnic and religious backgrounds. (And to make things worse, many of the top students were Jews!) There were, of course, clusters of Muslim students who stuck mostly to their own group (which could be defined by sect or denomination, language, or ethnicity), and who still managed to do fairly well; I think they are basically analogous to the cliques of Chinese students who studied together. But the brightest students from Muslim backgrounds in my judgment (which, of course, is entirely subjective) were those who had assimilated the skepticism necessary to science, and who inevitably began to apply it to the beliefs they had inherited from their parents. They led a very schizophrenic existence: their success in school was dependent on their ability to reason, which was conterminous with their skepticism towards religion; but at the same time, they had to maintain the appearance of adherence to tradition at home, or even in public, so that their parents could boast to their relatives about how their childrens’ academic success was the result of their being raised according to “strict Islamic values”. Their experiences were, in essence, exactly like mine.
So, ironically, the fact that my parents continually criticised me throughout high school for my interest in the Muslim world, on the grounds that it was none of my business, actually made me a more suitable counsellor in university, when it came to students from Muslim backgrounds — because I could empathise so well with them. And in return, counselling students from Muslim backgrounds with their family problems helped me to cope with my own as well.
But all of these things were still in the future when I was in high school. It was only in retrospect that I could see that my interest in the experience of Muslims and people from Muslim backgrounds who were trying to come to terms with the cultural developments in the West which have made modern science possible was in fact really a vicarious attempt to understand my parents’ actions and behaviour towards me. They criticised me for doing precisely the very things that my teachers and my classmates’ parents praised me for doing, and they demanded that I continued to be successful while simultaneously attacking me for having the values which made me so successful in the first place and doing everything they could to deprive me of the conditions necessary for my continued success. Ideologues of Islam who blasted the West for its intellectual freedom while attributing all of humanity’s scientific progress to Islam were, in some abstract sense, behaving in exactly the same way towards scientists of Muslim background as my parents did towards me.
I do not mean to single out Islamic civilisation for criticism of its anti-scientific tendencies. It just so happened that that was what I was paying attention to in high school. I don’t think anyone who was a fan of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan and Nicholas Negroponte could have looked at the state of the Muslim world in the early 1990s and not thought about how communications technologies would increase the instability of those societies by giving a greater power to “extremists” than they would have been capable of acquiring without them. As I have pointed out, anti-scientific tendencies also exist in Chinese culture, although it does not manifest in quite the same way. And lastly, as the Creationist and anti-vaccination movements have shown, anti-scientific tendencies are certainly alive even in the West.
So how does the above relate to my writer’s block (which, it seems, is now almost gone)? After my parents locked me out of the house and forbid me from studying the physics of computation, and threatened to disallow my brother from attending university if I didn’t obey them, I had no choice but to put up an appearance of doing what they wanted in terms of my undergraduate degree in university. (The alternative was to run away from home, which I chose not to do, to my subsequent regret.) I knew that if I actually did what my parents wanted me to do, I would end up being one of those Chinese students who had moderately high marks in their undergraduate classes, but who were completely unqualified to carry out scientific research. I was going to be enrolled in an engineering program with a very heavy workload, and whatever I did to distinguish myself as a computer scientist I would have to do before I entered university.
So I turned to the topics discussed above. I delayed my entrance into university by a year, so that my brother and I would be in the same classes together, and convinced my parents to agree to this plan. With the year I bought myself, I began to write essays on the above topics with Mrs. Mallo’s help, and started thinking about encoding and processing documents written in Arabic script. When my father saw my writings, he called them “nonsense” and told me that if I continued to “waste time” on those subjects, I would never get into graduate school. (More specifically, he told me that I “would never get into MIT” — I’m sure this would have come as a surprise to Nicholas Negroponte, who seemed to have no trouble remaining at MIT despite writing all the time about the influence of new technologies on society and culture.)
During that year, I actually went to a number of job interviews at various newspapers for a position as a writer for their “Religion” sections (i.e., whatever section covered religious topics, which might be called “Life” or whatever). I figured that this way, I would have an excuse for writing what I wanted to write anyway, and be paid for doing it. Unfortunately, none of the editors agreed with me that religion would soon be playing a major role in world politics, or that stories about terrorism or various conflicts belonged in the “Religion” section of their papers. Instead, all they wanted were fluff pieces about colourful ethnic holidays. I wonder if any of them remember their interviews with me or regret not having hired me.
When I entered university, I was essentially forced to split my attention between what I had to do to appease my parents (and which was very damaging to my career), and what I wanted to do (and which was actually necessary to advance my career). My parents kept attacking me for my writings, and due both to that and to the time constraints imposed by the engineering program, I had to cut back on the amount that I wrote. The criticism that I was the most bitter about was their accusation that I wasn’t using my time wisely because I could have been writing papers on subjects related to my academic interests rather than on subjects that had “nothing to do with” them. Of course, the very reason I had switched my attention away from what had been my primary academic interest was that they had beat me, locked me out of the house, and threatened to disown me if I continued writing about it. In any case, in spite of their attacks, I nevertheless continued to act on what I believed was important, such as provide counselling to students of Muslim background who had difficulties reconciling the skepticism they had acquired from their education with the religious beliefs and practices they were required to have by their parents and their community.
One would think that the 9/11 terrorist attacks would have turned my parents’ attitude towards my interest in the Muslim world around. I would have been perfectly justified to say to them, “I told you so” — but I didn’t. Instead, they took an attitude of “I told you so” towards me. Every time there was any sort of violent incident in the news involving Muslims, my mother would tell me on the phone about how upset my father was that I hadn’t listened to him to drop my interest in the Muslim world, and how right he was that my interest was “worthless”.
I used to visit bookstores very frequently, but I stopped enjoying this activity when books on Islam and the Muslim world began to make bestseller and recommended reading lists by the dozen. When I flipped through these bestsellers and award winners, I saw that they basically contained the exact same things that I had been writing about for years, and which my parents had continually derided as “worthless”. I felt that many of them were poorly or hastily written to satisfy the sudden demand for books on those topics, rather than the products of thorough research by genuinely interested authors. I also felt that I had written about these topics from a unique perspective that nobody else seemed to have considered. But I couldn’t do anything about it, because my parents did everything they could to prevent me from writing about these topics, and besides, the market had already become saturated.
So I couldn’t bear to even pass by the religion, politics, or history sections of any bookstore. And the science section was no better, because the physics of computation had indeed become an important topic for both physicists and computer scientists. Bookstores made me very depressed, and so I stayed away from them altogether — which also meant that I cut down considerably on my reading of books.
It was at this time that I developed a writer’s block. I continued to write whatever was necessary for school projects and assignments (including two Master’s theses and some papers), but there were many things which I simply could no longer write about. And these include, for obvious reasons, anything related to quantum computing. In the mean time, my writer’s block has progressed to the point where I could not write about something even if it was required for school. And that is why I have been unable to work on my research proposal.
– davinci
0 Responses to “Overcoming my writer’s block, part 6: communications technologies and their effects on global politics”