Essay Questions

What is Ansary’s ideology concerning the government of Afghanistan’s irrigation scheme?

Ansary writes, “ WHEN THE GOVERNMENT of Afghanistan decided to irrigate the desert, the administrators never intended for the water to bring up slat and ruin the soil, which caused the official government farms to fail. They fail afoul of the law of unintended consequences-apparently the one law in history you can really count on…when the government built dams to tame the Helmand river, it did not take into account the remote villages downstream had developed intricate systems over the centuries, based on the river’s erratic patterns. When the river’s patterns suddenly grew regular, the ancient systems no longer worked.” Ansary’s critique of the government’s project accentuates his philosophy on the quintessence of contingency forecasts. Contingency preparations would have dealt with the salt before it deleteriously damaged the soil. Additionally, the contingency strategies would have warrantied that the ‘remote villages’ lifestyle was not unfavourably impacted by the dams. Ansary underscores that ‘unintended consequences’ can be alleviated rapidly as long as contingency procedures are sketched before the inauguration of the task.

Compare and contrast the ‘Muslim versus non-Muslim worlds’.

Ansary explicates, “In Communist and capitalist societies, there are three important words-the state, the people and the leader. But in Islam, these words are irrelevant-because they are abstractions used to justify exploitation. In non-Muslim world, political; organization is from the top down .In Islam, it is from the bottom up. Every individual is free from the tyranny of other individuals because all are obedient to the single law of Allah.” Clearly, the Muslim worlds unequivocally endorse Sharia law which does not sanction either communism or capitalism. Comparatively, in the non-Muslim worlds, leaders select to either insitigate capitalist or communist ideals. Consequently, the political undercurrents in the two worlds are contradictory occasioning the downward versus upward political functioning in the non-Muslim and Islam worlds respectively. Islam countries cannot sponsor either communism or capitalism because Sharia law is more superlative than the political creeds.