gold(en) rules' presentation

Ibn Battuta is writing his first post from Buenos Aires.
I'm about to rent the commercial property that will finance my journey.

What's the journey most important goal?
To help appreciate the great differences within Muslim world and
to strengthen mutual knowledge among people from different cultures and religions.
To highlight what we have in common without downplaying the differences that exists, something extremely dangerous.

I'll never shy away from clear value judgement , whenever there will be ground to sustain them.
No politically correct platitudes, no gratuitous provocation.
Too abstract and wordy? Here's an example:
What would have been my position in the Muhammad cartoons controversy of 2005?

Well, nobody can question the right of individual freedom, but our freedom ends where others people's freedom begins.
The Right is just one side of the coin.
The other being Duty. We are entitled of Rights only as long as we accept the responsibility for the Duties that comes with them.
The Right implies that nobody can prevent you from express any idea that you may feel crucially important(possibly not just to yourself but to your community as well)
Even if we now consider that Human Rights are Natural Rights, it does help to take a more broad historical view to the way in which our ancestors has obtained them.
That is by taking great personal risks fighting centuries of status quo.
We should really blush out of sheer shame whenever we invoke High Principles to justify petty actions.
This is not rocket science, just something that we should teach to our children very early. Hurting other people's (feelings) is bad. And we have to avoid it.
Since life is complicated we can face situations in which as Alessandro Manzoni wrote "non resta che far torto o patirlo"(we have to hurt or being hurt). The ancient Greeks did rationalize this painful process and create one of the most sublime form of art that western civilization have known, it's called tragedy.

Now, doesn't sound grotesquely inappropriate to use the best of our civilization to defend the rights of the authors and publishers of the vignettes.
of course any threat to their incolumity is unacceptable and grossly disproportionate to the offence.
The embarrassing "public debate" reached pretty soon the level of intellectual probity that you can expect in wartime and the necessity for assessing the "Principles of western individual liberties" vibrantly advocated.
We should never forget that so-called Principles have serve pretty well throughout history as a gimmick for chancelleries to induce war-prone sentiment in the public opinion.

I was born in 1975 and I haven't experienced wars from within.
Yugoslavia was close but as a foreigner I wasn't really exposed to the kind of nuances that I mean.
Karl Kraus in his review Die Fackel(The Torch), almost a blog ante-litteram, wrote some the best account of the kind of collective insanity that a war can provoke.


Back to the Blog presentation.
In my journey I'll pay special attention to the differences within Islam and even though I'll visit each and any countries where Muslims lives, I will privilege a reduced number of crucially important ones, namely: Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

The blog isn't about middle-east.
Middle east to me sound geopolitics. And geopolitics sound like "the-world-from-some-state-perspective". That's too much zero-sum-game for my taste!
It's about trying to understanding history in process of making by applying the widest variety of angles and lenses.
It's about trying to be honest and bias-aware.

Currently I'm building a network of people that I will ask for advise.
Academics, Religious leaders, Consultants, Journalist and Artists.
Gold(en) Rules entries will constitute a book in itself, although in the form of a pastiche of juxtaposed genres.

For the first period most of my writing will be dedicated to the current global crisis, although focused on long term trends and imbalances.
Since I'm not an economist it will be mostly an editing process of articles that I find stimulating with some open-ended questions, trying to make the most out of Paul Krugman's "dare-to-be-silly" attitude. I hope it will work also for an economic layman.