Will the New Silk Road Help Revive the Islamic Golden Age?

[Riaz Haq]

National Geographic's Paul Salopek recently came upon a site in Pakistan's Salt Range where Muslim scientist Abu-Raihan Al-Biruni accurately measured the size of the earth in the 11th century. In it, Salopek sees the revival of the Islamic Golden Age. He characterizes the ancient Silk Road of as "dynamic but collapsed experiment in multilateralism". He thinks the revival of the Islamic Golden Age is linked to "China's 21st century version of the Silk Road". Salopek believes that President Donald Trump's four years in the White House and the COVID19 pandemic have accelerated America's decline and China's rise. Here's how he describes it in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times entitled "Shadows on the Silk Road: Finding omens of American decline on a long walk across Asia": 

"The most memorable archaeological ruins from the Silk Road’s glory years rot atop a hill about 60 miles southeast of Islamabad (the Capital of Pakistan). No monuments or signs mark the Nandana Fort. Few people go there. But it was where, in the early 11th century, the Central Asian scholar al-Biruni became the first person to measure, with astonishing precision, the size of Earth. His calculations, based on brilliant trigonometry, landed within 200 miles of the 24,902-mile circumference of our shared planet". 

Pakistan Postage Stamp Honoring Al-Biruni. Nandana Fort in Background

It was Sultan Mahmood Ghaznavi who took Al-Biruni along with him after his conquest of India. Al-Biruni traveled all over India for 20 years, and studied Indian philosophy, Mathematics and Geography. Pakistan issued a postage stamp honoring Al-Biruni in 1973. The stamp has a picture of Al-Biruni with the ruins of Nandana Fort in the background.

China's New Silk Road. Source: China Daily

Salopek found a lot of history of the Islamic Golden Age as he traveled along the Silk Road. Here's a brief excerpt of his Op Ed in the New York Times:

"The Islamic Golden Age of science and art that predated the Italian Renaissance by 400 years was illuminated by Turkic and Persian thinkers from the eastern rim of the Abbasid Caliphate, in what is today Central Asia, western China and parts of Iran. ..... Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, a ninth-century genius who helped formulate the precepts of algebra, has lent his name to the word “algorithm.” A century later, the brilliant polymathic Abu Rayhan Muhammad al-Biruni wrote more than 140 manuscripts on everything from pharmaceuticals to the anthropology of India. (A typical al-Biruni title: “The Exhaustive Treatise on Shadows.”) Probably the most celebrated Silk Road sage of all was Abu Ali al-Hussein ibn Sina, revered in the West as Avicenna, who in the 11th century compiled an encyclopedia of healing that was still in use by European doctors as late as the 18th century. Avicenna’s “Canon of Medicine” accurately diagnosed diabetes by tasting sweetness in urine. Its pharmacopoeia cataloged more than 800 remedies. A millennium ago, Avicenna advocated quarantines to control epidemics. What would he make, I wondered, of the willed ignorance of today’s anti-maskers in the United States?"  

Salopek sees parallels between America's Trumpism and India's Hindu Nationalism. He is just as pessimistic about India as he is about his home country of the United States. Here's what he sees from the top of Nanada Fort ruins:  

 "I climbed a broken fort wall and peered east. Ahead unspooled 17 months of hiking across India, yet another democracy cartwheeling into an abyss of right-wing populism. Riding a wave of Hindu nationalism, one Indian state all but criminalized marriages between Hindu and Muslim citizens".  

From the top of Nandana Fort, Salopek also sees China which he describes in the following words: 

"In the blue distance beyond sprawled China. Its economic output in 2019, according to one report, hit 67 percent of the United States’ gross domestic product. The gap between China and the United States is shrinking as China is the only major economy expected to report economic growth for 2020 despite the pandemic. And brawling with itself at some crossroad truck stop far over the horizon lay my lost homeland". 

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

South Asia Investor Review

China's New Silk Road

Is Fareed Zakaria Souring on India?

US Needs to Promote Democracy at Home

Rise and Fall of the Islamic Civilization

Al-Khwarizmi: Origins of Artificial Intelligence in Islamic Golden Age

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Riaz Haq's YouTube Channel

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[Riaz Haq]

“For centuries before the early modern era, the intellectual centers of excellence of the world, the Oxfords and Cambridges, the Harvards and Yales, were not located in Europe or the west, but in Baghdad and Balkh, Bukhara and Samarkand,” the British historian Peter Frankopan wrote in “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/16/opinion/walk-across-world-americ...

[Riaz Haq]

China’s Ascent
The rise of China will have far-reaching consequences—the world should get ready
By Keyu Jin

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/06/rise-of-china-ji...

China in 2040 will look on the face of things to be a mighty economic power. Under plausible projections, it will have firmly established itself as the largest economy in the world, with 60 to 70 percent of the US income level. But in 20 years, China will still be a developing economy by many measures—its financial development will lag its economic development, and many economic and policy distortions may still persist.

In that scenario, the world must be prepared for China to be its first systemic emerging market economy. It should brace for greater volatility and uncertainty as China becomes more intermeshed with global financial markets. It should prepare for a China that emits shocks distinctive to developing economies—but on a much larger scale and with greater thrust and impetus.

Every significant policy move, stock market panic, and cyclical upswing or downswing in China can plausibly diffuse and propagate through the web of financial networks that links nations. In China today, 70 percent of investors in capital markets are retail investors, quick to react to noise and changes in sentiment. Mercurial stock markets and volatile exchange rates may become the rule, not the exception.

Currently, China is already inadvertently sending shocks to the rest of the world, despite its small international financial exposure. My own research with Yi Huang shows that it is not only policy shocks (monetary and fiscal) that spill over to the rest of the world but also the shocks of policy uncertainty.

In a country where reforms big and small happen on a regular basis, where policy moves often instigate cyclical fluctuations rather than subdue them, where policy direction and strategy are based on experimentation rather than experience, uncertainty can be a first-order menace to overly sensitized financial markets.

Our research shows that during 2000–18, Chinese policy uncertainty shocks significantly affected not only economic variables, such as world industrial production and commodity prices, but also key financial variables, including global stock prices and bond yields, the MSCI World Index, and financial volatility.

Now imagine China in 2040, more consequential and with a greater number of channels open to the rest of the world—whether cross-border bank lending, portfolio holdings, capital flows, or a more dominant renminbi. In that scenario, shocks emanating from China would not only propagate more swiftly and potently, they would also be amplified and expanded through its increasing and diverse financial channels.

The rise of China today bears much similarity to the ascent of the United States in the late 19th century. Although it was growing rapidly and catching up with European countries, it had the developing economy malaise of unsophisticated capital markets. Corporate governance was riddled with problems and banking crises occurred regularly; weak financial intermediaries and a shortage of financial assets, along with the absence of a lender of last resort, prevented the efficient mobilization of capital. The vagaries of the US economy and the financial panic in 1873 were fully transmitted to Europe and Great Britain, which had significant exposure to the US economy.

[Riaz Haq]

South-East Asian countries are trapped between two superpowers
Balancing China and America will be tough

https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/south-east-asi...


NO PART OF the world risks suffering more from the economic, strategic and military rivalry now playing out between the United States and China than the 11 nations of South-East Asia. And that rivalry will intensify in 2021.

On the one hand, many in the region are wary of President Xi Jinping’s mission to reclaim for China the centrality it enjoyed in East Asia before the imperial depredations by the West and Japan in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is not just that China is aggressively challenging the maritime and territorial claims of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea, through which the majority of China’s seaborne trade passes. It is also that Mr Xi’s call for “Asian people to run the affairs of Asia” sounds like code for China running Asia. As a Chinese foreign minister once told a gathering of the ten-country Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN): “China is a big country and [you] are small countries, and that is just a fact.”

On the other hand, while ASEAN members welcome America as the dominant military power in the region to counter China’s growing heft, they know that conflict would be disastrous for them. South-East Asian diplomats did not loudly cheer the anti-China rhetoric of President Donald Trump’s administration, which is unlikely to soften much under Joe Biden. And no wonder. Many of the region’s governments are hostile to democracy, and few see America’s political model as one to emulate.

Above all, China is too close and already too mighty to turn against. It is by far South-East Asia’s biggest trading partner and its second-biggest investor, behind Japan. ASEAN’s prosperity is as bound to China as its supply chains are. And as Sebastian Strangio, a perceptive observer of the region, points out in a new book, “In the Dragon’s Shadow”, South-East Asia has a powerful stake in China’s growth and stability: historically, turmoil in China has spread instability southward.

So, how not to get caught between the two giants? The region’s strategists remind themselves that, when it comes to great-power rivalry, things have been worse. At the height of the cold war, bloody conflict in Indo-China, along with communist insurgencies elsewhere, threatened to reduce South-East Asian autonomy to zero. Those concerns, and the need for a mechanism to manage their mutual mistrust, were catalysts for Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore to form ASEAN more than 50 years ago. And today? At least, the strategists say, with black humour, China and the United States have not carved up the region between them.

As for 2021, the region’s experience in managing great-power rivalry will come to the fore. South-East Asia has lived under China’s armpit for millennia, and ASEAN’s member countries have dealt with the American presence since the second world war. The approach will be to “hedge, balance and bandwagon” between the two, says Bilahari Kausikan, formerly Singapore’s top diplomat. Students of international relations are usually taught that only one of these three approaches is possible at any time. Yet pragmatic South-East Asians, Mr Kausikan argues, have a knack for doing all three. One example in 2021: just as the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte will keep wooing Mr Xi over Chinese investment, expect a rapid improvement in once-strained military ties with America. South-East Asia in 2021 will also do more to invite other powers, notably Japan, South Korea, Australia and India, to share in both regional prosperity and security.

[Riaz Haq]

South-East Asian countries are trapped between two superpowers
Balancing China and America will be tough

https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/south-east-asi...

So, how not to get caught between the two giants? The region’s strategists remind themselves that, when it comes to great-power rivalry, things have been worse. At the height of the cold war, bloody conflict in Indo-China, along with communist insurgencies elsewhere, threatened to reduce South-East Asian autonomy to zero. Those concerns, and the need for a mechanism to manage their mutual mistrust, were catalysts for Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore to form ASEAN more than 50 years ago. And today? At least, the strategists say, with black humour, China and the United States have not carved up the region between them.

As for 2021, the region’s experience in managing great-power rivalry will come to the fore. South-East Asia has lived under China’s armpit for millennia, and ASEAN’s member countries have dealt with the American presence since the second world war. The approach will be to “hedge, balance and bandwagon” between the two, says Bilahari Kausikan, formerly Singapore’s top diplomat. Students of international relations are usually taught that only one of these three approaches is possible at any time. Yet pragmatic South-East Asians, Mr Kausikan argues, have a knack for doing all three. One example in 2021: just as the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte will keep wooing Mr Xi over Chinese investment, expect a rapid improvement in once-strained military ties with America. South-East Asia in 2021 will also do more to invite other powers, notably Japan, South Korea, Australia and India, to share in both regional prosperity and security.

Hedging, balancing and bandwagoning rests, admittedly, on one big assumption: that neither America nor China really intends to decouple their two economies entirely. That calculation is probably right, and even if hard-nosed competition and negotiation between the two powers reconfigures global supply chains, South-East Asians still intend to profit from that.

Even so, it is a gamble, and other risks loom. Not the least of them is maintaining ASEAN solidarity—China has already tried to drive a wedge into the organisation by turning Cambodia and Laos, for now, into client states. Mr Xi’s increasing claims to speak for all ethnic Chinese overseas, including 30m South-East Asians of Chinese ancestry, raise the risk of nativist demagogues using anti-China feelings to whip up ethnic hatred.

Perhaps the most nail-biting risk of all is of some unintended clash between China and America over the South China Sea. In the event of military conflict, the hedge, the balance and the bandwagon will not get anyone very far at all.

[Riaz Haq]

Focus on Pakistan Navy by Ejaz Haider

https://www.thefridaytimes.com/focus-on-pakistan-navy/

Ahmed Ibn-e Majid was an Arab navigator and cartographer whose book, “The Book of the Benefits of the Principles and Foundations of Seamanship,” was used by navigators right up to the 18th Century. The book discussed the difference between coastal and open-sea sailing, the locations of ports from East Africa to Indonesia, accounts of the monsoon and other seasonal winds, typhoons and other topics for professional navigators.
--------
Pakistan Navy is demonstrably the most neglected service. There are reasons for this state of affairs, all of them bad.

One, as the largest and senior-most service, the Pakistan Army has traditionally dominated military-operational thinking and plans.

Two, the Army’s politico-praetorian streak has added another dimension to its heft and further ensured it gets the lion’s share of defence allocations.

Three, air and naval platforms are almost always big ticket items and require monies that are difficult to find in a poor country like Pakistan.

Four, historically, even when Muslim empires dominated large parts of the world, the ruling dynasts — barring some attempts by the Ottomans — neglected naval power. To stress the salience of this point, one only need contrast the naval exploits of Italian city-states, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English with, for instance, the Muslim rulers of India.

What makes this Muslim reticence even more surprising is the fact that Arabs were great seafarers and navigators and traded with the littoral states of the Indian Ocean. For example, Ahmed Ibn-e Majid was an Arab navigator and cartographer whose book, “The Book of the Benefits of the Principles and Foundations of Seamanship,” was used by navigators right up to the 18th Century. The book discussed the difference between coastal and open-sea sailing, the locations of ports from East Africa to Indonesia, accounts of the monsoon and other seasonal winds, typhoons and other topics for professional navigators. [NB: for a detailed account of how difficult seafaring was and the five different seafaring traditions in the ancient world, the first chapter of Daniel Headrick’s Power Over Peoples… is a great primer. I am thankful to Dr Ilhan Niaz for pointing it to me.]


Five, this land-focused approach to warfare has continued in Pakistan. As mentioned above, this is due to the power of the army which (a) remains bound by traditional thinking and (b) has stymied any fresh thinking about war itself, including maritime security and the importance of naval power to a state’s offensive and defensive capabilities.

As I said earlier, these are all bad reasons.

Yet, despite these handicaps, the PN has acted professionally and remains prepared for the defence of territorial waters. To expect any more from it would be like expecting a sedan to win a Formula 1 race. Accordingly, the Pakistan Navy’s performance has to be evaluated within the functions and framework of a brown-, or at most green-water navy.

The PN is holding its 7th AMAN (Peace) exercise off the coast of Karachi in February. AMAN exercises began in March 2007. The exercise, which has harbour and sea phases, has drawn naval contingents from around the world. This year’s new entrant is a Russian naval contingent from its Baltic Fleet.

According to the Russian Navy’s website, Russia plans to send a frigate, a patrol ship, a tugboat, a sea-based helicopter and some other units. This is also the first time since 2011 that Russia will take part in a naval exercise with naval contingents from NATO countries. The last time Russian naval continent participated in naval drills with NATO vessels was in 2011 in a NATO-led exercise codenamed Bold Monarch held off the coast of Spain.

Exercise AMAN focuses on interoperability with other navies in anti-Piracy and counterterrorism operations. The drill allows navies to discuss best practices and establish operational relationships towards the common goal of maritime security.

[Riaz Haq]

8 facts about Omar Khayyam, the man who gave base to Gregorian calendar
He was a famous astronomer and invented Jalali Calendar became the base of other calendars and is also known to be more accurate than the Gregorian calendar.

https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/...

[Riaz Haq]

Genome of nearly 5000-year-old woman links modern Indians to ancient civilization | Science

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/genome-nearly-5000-year-old...

The Science paper, also led by Reich, notes that modern people from North India also bear the genetic marks of ancient interbreeding with herders from the Eurasian steppe, a vast grassland that stretches across northern Asia, moving southward around 2000 B.C.E. Those steppe herders carried European DNA from previous interbreeding events, the authors note, explaining the once-perplexing genetic link between Europeans and South Asians. Over the next few thousand years, the groups in north and south India intermixed, leading to the modern population’s complex ancestral mix.

One surprise concerns DNA related to ancient Iranians, which was previously found to be prevalent in modern South Asians. The finding seemed to back a popular belief among anthropologists that migrants from the Fertile Crescent—which comprises modern-day Iran and gave rise to the world’s first farmers who began to rove about 10,000 years ago—moved east at some point and mixed with South Asian hunter-gatherers, introducing agriculture to the Indian subcontinent. Yet the new study suggests the Iranian-related DNA in both the Indus individuals and modern Indians actually predates the rise of agriculture in Iran by some 2000 years. In other words, that Iranian-related DNA came from interbreeding with 12,000-year-old hunter-gatherers, not more recent farmers, Reich explains.

[Riaz Haq]

The great Himalayas were formed around ten million years ago by the collision of the Indian continental plate, moving northward through the Indian Ocean, with Eurasia. India today is also the product of collisions of cultures and people. Consider farming. The Indian subcontinent is one of the breadbaskets of the world—today it feeds a quarter of the world’s population—and it has been one of the great population centers ever since modern humans expanded across Eurasia after fifty thousand years ago. Yet farming was not invented in India. Indian farming today is born of the collision of the two great agricultural systems of Eurasia. The Near Eastern winter rainfall crops, wheat and barley, reached the Indus Valley Valley sometime after nine thousand years ago according to archaeological evidence—as attested, for example, in ancient Mehrgarh on the western edge of the Indus Valley in present-day Pakistan.13 Around five thousand years ago, local farmers succeeded in breeding these crops to adapt to monsoon summer rainfall patterns, and the crops spread into peninsular India.14 The Chinese monsoon summer rainfall crops of rice and millet also reached peninsular India around five thousand years ago. India may have been the first place where the Near Eastern and the Chinese crop systems collided. Language is another blend. The Indo-European languages of the north of India are related to the languages of Iran and Europe. The Dravidian languages, spoken mostly by southern Indians, are not closely related to languages outside South Asia. There are also Sino-Tibetan languages spoken by groups living in the mountains fringing the north of India, and small

Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here (pp. 151-152). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[Riaz Haq]

The great Himalayas were formed around ten million years ago by the collision of the Indian continental plate, moving northward through the Indian Ocean, with Eurasia. India today is also the product of collisions of cultures and people. Consider farming. The Indian subcontinent is one of the breadbaskets of the world—today it feeds a quarter of the world’s population—and it has been one of the great population centers ever since modern humans expanded across Eurasia after fifty thousand years ago. Yet farming was not invented in India. Indian farming today is born of the collision of the two great agricultural systems of Eurasia. The Near Eastern winter rainfall crops, wheat and barley, reached the Indus Valley Valley sometime after nine thousand years ago according to archaeological evidence—as attested, for example, in ancient Mehrgarh on the western edge of the Indus Valley in present-day Pakistan.13 Around five thousand years ago, local farmers succeeded in breeding these crops to adapt to monsoon summer rainfall patterns, and the crops spread into peninsular India.14 The Chinese monsoon summer rainfall crops of rice and millet also reached peninsular India around five thousand years ago. India may have been the first place where the Near Eastern and the Chinese crop systems collided. Language is another blend. The Indo-European languages of the north of India are related to the languages of Iran and Europe. The Dravidian languages, spoken mostly by southern Indians, are not closely related to languages outside South Asia. There are also Sino-Tibetan languages spoken by groups living in the mountains fringing the north of India, and small


pockets of tribal groups in the east and center that speak Austroasiatic languages related to Cambodian and Vietnamese, and that are thought to descend from the languages spoken by the peoples who first brought rice farming to South Asia and parts of Southeast Asia. Words borrowed from ancient Dravidian and Austroasiatic languages, which linguists can detect as they are not typical of Indo-European languages, are present in the Rig Veda, implying that these languages have been in contact in India for at least three or four thousand years.15

Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here (pp. 151-152). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[Riaz Haq]

#Pakistan's #GilgitBaltistan regional govt has proposed a new transit and trade route linking #Xinjiang to #Kashmir and extending to #Afghanistan. Will it increase #China-Pak #military interoperability against #Indian forces in the region? #Ladakh #CPEC https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3119850/will-new-r...

In a video posted on social media platforms this month, GB chief minister Khalid Khurshid announced plans to drill a road tunnel through the mountains to connect Astore to the Neelum Valley in the Azad Kashmir region, where much of the LOC is thinly demarcated by the Neelum and Jhelum rivers.

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Proposals floated this month by the government of the Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) region primarily aim to pave the way for a new transit and trade route between China and Pakistan’s neighbours Afghanistan and Iran.
Currently, China and Pakistan are connected only by the Karakoram Highway, completed in 1978, via a single crossing in the Khunjerab Pass.
However, the route of a proposed new border road from Yarkand – on GB’s border with the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region – also suggests strong strategic motivations because it would open a new supply line from China to Pakistani forces deployed along the Line of Control (LOC).
As Pakistan, Bangladesh ties thaw, India keeps close watch on them – and China
14 Jan 2021

The 740km LOC divides Kashmir roughly into two halves governed by India and Pakistan. Its northernmost point, the India-held Siachen Glacier, is located next to the western extreme of the disputed 3,488km China-India border known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC).



The GB government’s public works department was instructed on January 15 to prepare a “project concept clearance proposal” for a 10-metre-wide road capable of being used by trucks, from the Mustagh Pass on the border with the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region via the eastern GB region of Skardu, where the Siachen Glacier is located.
The proposed new road would be linked to Yarkand in Xinjiang, and enter GB 126km west of Ladakh, crossing the major supply artery from the Karakoram Highway near Skardu city. From there, it would run south through the high-altitude Deosai Plateau to the Astore Valley, where the southern flank of GB meets the LOC amid the Himalayas.

Washington-based analyst Sameer Lalwani told This Week In Asia there were potentially three logistics and strategic effects of enhanced China-Pakistan connectivity.
“It could deepen trade links by enhancing transport capacity; enable great Pakistan military mobility in any contingency, threatening India’s hold over the Siachen Glacier; and it can even facilitate greater China-Pakistan military coordination that generates peacetime dilemmas and wartime complications for India,” he said.
The proposed Xinjiang-GB-Kashmir road would “certainly ring alarm bells in New Delhi, which has been acutely sensitive to deepening China-Pakistan strategic and military ties over the past decade”, said Lalwani, who is director of the South Asia programme at the Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank.
“It may also result in the Indian military – which has already sunk considerable resources to retain control of Siachen – concentrating an even greater proportion of money, manpower, and materiel to its continental defences at the expense of maritime power projection,” he said.