Tag: Religion

Embattled Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman has been sentenced to 4 years in jail for insulting religion. A philosophically-minded person might observe that the thug regime which sentenced him is itself an insult to religion. In the Middle East, the pot is never afraid to call the kettle black. I doubt anyone expected a different outcome. However, kudos to the people at freekareem.org, most of whom are practicing Muslims, for giving it their best shot.

I don't particularly like Kareem. His ideas are cheap self-hating propaganda and his blog often reads like an imaginative anti-establishment effort to pick up girls. (Strangely enough, the Egyptian government has not yet managed to block it.) Kareem is a kid from an increasingly decrepit, impoverished Alexandria who has had a tough life and is angry--you can't blame him for that. But that doesn't make him a visionary or a reformer. 

However, the kid has guts. Real guts. I couldn't smile if I was staring an all-expenses-paid vacation in the infamous Tura Prison in the face, yet in his BBC photo, that's exactly what Kareem is doing. Now that is gravitas.

I don't like defending people I don't respect on principle. However, there are times when one has to suck it up and do so anyway, and this is one of them. Kareem does not deserve what will inevitably happen to him in that prison; this is not justice. Egypt does not even pretend to endorse freedom of speech, so it would be a little bit comical to rant about the lack of it--instead I will just say that a young guy who has had it rough his whole life is getting yet another tough break he does not deserve. God be with him. 

Aziz recently asked why Muslims aren't involved with Daily Kos. Then I asked American Progressives, both secular and religious, to pay more attention to American Muslims.

Already, there is positive response from a popular religious progressive website, StreetProphets. Pastor Dan links to my post in the midst of his discussion with progressive evangelical Jim Wallis (of Daily Show fame) and then states:

If we're going to talk about religion in the public sphere, we need to talk about all the religions, particularly the one upon whose body the discussion is all too literally inflicted. [Islam]

I am going to ask you guys to go to StreetProphets, make an account and maybe make a reader diary from time to time. At the least, add them to your RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/streetprophets/index 

Why is that, when we study the contemporary Islamic world, we look to several centuries ago -- a la Irshad Manji -- and expect that mindsets from ages back can somehow explain contemporary affairs? Why is it that non-religious, or at least avowedly more secular persons, seek religious (i.e., "cultural") explanations for perceived shortcomings that should have material causes, economic, demographic, agricultural, mercantile, political, etc.? Islam is idealized, idolized and demonized as the "uber-religion" -- it exists as religion in place of the concept of religion, and as a normative ideal (or nemesis) it transcends space and time. Fascinating, isn't it? 

For a word so easy to use, 'faith' is difficult to define. Webster's calls it "belief that is not based on proof", which seems perfectly correct, but strikes me as a little dry. Many people of faith seem eventually to pass from belief into something more like certainty; God ceases to be something you believe to exist, and becomes something you see and feel and of which you are keenly aware. Faith, then, can be much more than a belief in that which cannot be proven. Cultivated, it becomes the function of a new sense, one that isn't quite touch or taste or hearing or sight or smell, but moves elusively between each.

The magnitude of this idea, the testament it is to human imagination, didn't really strike me until a day several years ago in the Valley of the Kings, while I was walking through the mazes of pharaonic tombs built into the sides of the mountains there. Most of the tombs are fairly eroded and crumbling by now, but a few are still brilliantly painted in unbelievable detail: messes of stars against royal-blue ceilings, ochre-skinned gods leading funeral processions, trains of livestock, offerings of gold, slaves carrying platters of food. The tombs were the life's work of thousands of artisans. It struck me as I stood in one what incredible discipline and depth of feeling it would take to create such a work of art and then seal it up forever, thinking no human eye would ever witness it again. To be at peace with that fact, because you had faith: you were certain of its purpose. Standing in the tomb, I thought, that is faith; to treasure and adorn and glorify what no one ever sees. 

It's a thread that runs through many of the world's religions, existing and lost. Only a handful of people see the inside of the Kaaba every year, though millions make pilgrimages to it. All over the globe people bury or burn the dead with flowers and mementos. There is something very spiritually cathartic about putting beautiful things away; not to see them, and yet to know that they are there. In a way, it's an earthly affirmation of greater hidden things: Heaven, the divine presence. It reminds us of that unnamable sense that is both belief without proof, and in and of itself all the proof that belief could ever need. 

In an interview with one of those awful free newspapers that can be found littering London tubes, buses and pavements, Ayan Hirsi WhateverHerSurnameReallyIs was asked the following question:

Do you see any positive sides to Islam?

Her response?

That’s like asking if I see positive sides to Nazism, communism, Catholicism.

I wonder if there are any Catholic members of the AEI, where she now works, and how they take their religious beliefs being compared to Nazism and communism (and Islam).

this isn't really a diary so much as it is a request for a discussion:

i would like to ask a question about sources in the Qur'an, 'ayat and hadith which support the idea of an islamic tradition of "non-violence", or non-retaliation. i am particularly interested in:

1. the episode where muhammad gets stoned by the worshippers of al-lat in taif and then declines to take gabriel up on his offer of angelic retaliation.

2. sources for the sufi story of the old man who was beaten up by a rich man and then said "may you have everything you wish for", said to be based upon the example of muhammad.

3. the episode where muhammad sits with his unpleasant and abusive jewish neighbour on the latter's deathbed.

i would also be interested in (hopefully positive) responses from indian/pakistani/bangladeshi islamic scholars in particular, but islamic thinkers in general to gandhi's doctrine of satyagraha ( Satyagraha - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) which he explicitly considered to be an expression of jihad.

so far, the only people i've found who seem to want to discuss this (see discussion thread at comparative-religion.com, where i am a moderator) is this one ahmadi and i'd prefer something more, y'know, normative.

b'shalom

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Promoted to the front page 

It seems there is a serious issue emerging from what many people still believe is an online computer game. Second Life (SL), the user-defined 3-D virtual reality space which now has around 2.5 million members, now hosts a headquarters to the far-right French anti-immigrant party, Front National. It’s leader, Jean Marie Le Pen, is famous for describing the holocaust as a ‘detail in history’ and his party is often compared to its less successful British counterpart, the British National Party (BNP), except that FN has been more successful in grooming itself as a populist, democratic and respectable political entity. Both parties have no qualms in opposing mosque building and in exploiting popular fears of Muslims post 9/11 and both are widely viewed by their opponents as nothing more than Nazis in smart suits.

Spiegel's English language online edition has a couple of interesting articles I thought would be worth bringing to your attention.

First, they ask whether Western Europe remains the last bastion of secularism. The article notes the return of religion to the global scene (for better or for worse), and how the 'secularisation thesis' of the 1960s no longer explains the relationship between 'religion' and 'modernity' (that is religion has not been vanquished as was suggested by 19th-century modernists). Admist all this is secular Western Europe.

Back in November 2006, Eric Kaufman, writing in Britain's left-leaning Prospect Magazine, suggested a revival of religion Europe, based largely on birth rates of religious Europeans and the prescence of Muslims on the continent. Spiegel cite Jürgen Hambermas who says rather than seeing secularisation as a "zero-sum game", religious communities can flourish in a secular society:

Just weeks after 9/11, Jürgen Habermas, Germany's most famous liberal thinker and leading proponent of reason on the international stage, took the opportunity to speak about secularism and religion when accepting the German Book Retailers Peace Prize. He described the tension between the twin powers as a deep conflict "between the productive forces unleashed by capitalism" and the "stabilizing forces of religion and the church."

Both sides of the debate had made the same mistake in viewing secularization as "a kind of zero-sum game," according to Habermas, where "one side can only win at the expense of the other." In fact, it was symptomatic of our "postsecular" society, he continued, that religious communities could flourish "in a progressively secularizing environment."

This observation is not as original as the term "post-secular" would seem to suggest. For many centuries, religions have existed in progressively secular environments. It is Habermas and his new line of thinking that are "post-secular," rather than the society itself.

Did Habermas get religion? No, but he, too, now views its demise with some regret: "When sin became guilt and the violation of God's commandments a breach of human laws, humankind lost something ... the lost hope of resurrection has left behind a palpable void."

Surprising affinities between reason and religion also came to light between Habermas, the philosopher of reason, and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at their highprofile debate, the Munich Dialog in 2004. The now Pope Benedict XVI conceded that religion needed to be placed under the "tutelage of reason" wherever it helped legitimize terrorism. The secular Habermas, on the other hand, emphasized the social and moral force of religious communities as places where something could still be preserved, even if it had "been lost elsewhere: a sensitivity towards misspent lives, social pathologies, and failed life strategies."

There is also a detailed look, from a secular European perspective, of religious America.