Even the Egyptian Grand Mufti has become exasperated with the soaring number of fatwas (religious edicts) and the confusion surrounding them in the media. He has recently called for increased supervision and the appointment off a specialist body as the sole authority to issue these edicts. I see no future for his suggestion as fatwas increasingly resemble alternative medicine with its sorcerers and experts in a vast array of herbs and potions. The growth of the Internet meant such people can now run unlicensed clinics and pharmacies which sell everything from volcanic rocks to the latest untested products.
He raises a number of salient points but the most important relates to how consumers of religious knowledge can assess the quality of information (fatawa) that is being provided. In other words, how do we assess whether an individual is trustworthy and suitably qualified to be providing this sort of information?
Although it is quite expensive by the time it reaches the shelves of my local Borders store, City Journal is nonetheless a very worthwhile investment as a magazine filled with incisive and useful social commentary. In the latest issue is a nice essay by Theodore Dalrymple on the subject of language; responding, in part, to arguments advanced by Professor Steven Pinker in his The Language Instinct but which have since grown in popularity and acceptance.
Dalrymple takes aim at the idea that the acquisition of language is part ofhuman nature and all humans therefore naturally acquire the level of expression needed for their own social and cultural circumstances. As he summarises:
Well, according to this piece in Britain’s Prospect Magazine anyway. In Breeding for God, the author Eric Kaufman argues that in the battle between secularism and religion, religion is winning because, put simply, religious people breed.
The share of the world’s population that is religious is growing, after nearly a century of modest decline. This effect has been produced by the younger generations in the developing world rejecting secularisation, combined with higher religious fertility levels. Throughout the world, the religious tend to have more children, irrespective of age, education or wealth. “Secular” Europe is no exception. In an analysis of European data from ten west European countries in the period 1981-2004 I found that next to age and marital status, a woman’s religiosity was the strongest predictor of her number of offspring.
As a postscript to Baybers’ recent post, here is a paragraph taken from a pamphlet produced by the Australian division of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) entited Education System in Islam [PDF]. This one paragraph provides a pretty good illustration of some of the points made in Baybers’ post. Hizb ut-Tahrir explain how things will work under their model of the Islamic state:
The Islamic State will have its own media department that will use every means possible to propagate Islam and the Islamic values throughout the world and refute all the lies and misconceptions that have been propagated by the disbelievers. All the latest technological and scientific means of communications, such as satellite, electronic mail, teleconferencing etc. will be tapped, used and explored by the State in its quest to educate the citizens of the Khilafah. Foreign media sources like BBC World Service, CNN, and Voice of America etc. that exist in the Muslim world to confuse, attack and divert Muslims from Islam will be banned.
If you like the sound of an authoritarian state determined to control the thinking of its population lest they become “confused” and “diverted” from state objectives, you will have to wait for HT’s utopia to arrive. Alternatively, if you are impatient, you could just move to North Korea.
Britain’s Channel Four recently screened an expose of Iraq’s Shi’a death squads that are working to ethnically cleanse Iraq of Sunnis. It’s a disturbing but entirely unsurprising picture.
The torture and slaughter of Iraqi civilians is reaching unprecedented heights with estimates of up to 655,000 dead.
Night after night death squads rampage through Iraq’s main cities. In Baghdad, up to a hundred bodies a day are dumped on the streets. Often they’ve been tortured with electric drills. Yet those doing the killing have little to do with al Qaeda or Sunni insurgents. The majority of the killings are carried out by Shia death squads who want to turn Iraq into a Shia state aligned to Iran.
This shocking film investigates the links between the death squads and high-ranking Shia politicians. It reveals how the Shia militia that these politicians control have systematically infiltrated and taken over police units and even entire government ministeries. It investigates how these units are closely linked to the death squads, indeed they often are the death squads. And the killers act with impunity — there’s little investigation into their activities.
I define Islamism as the twentieth century political movement to instill “Islamic” governments in Muslim countries. The intellectual architects of this movement were Sayyid Qutb, Maududi, Ayatollah Khomeini and Hassan al-Turabi, amongst others. They have formed the political and governance template for movements in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, Palestine, Somali, Sudan and Pakistan. The Islamist movements begin with a small, religiously purified elite of the wider group of believers that are welded into a group that form the nucleus for political and community action. It is interesting to observe that this type of Qutb Islamism is now employed as a modus operandi for Christian groups who wish to transform their community support into political power. The RNC’s flirtation with the evangelicals has parallels with Ikhwan’s links to the Nasserites, right down to the betrayal, (but not the executions).
Islam is of course what we all understand it to be, the religious belief and codified ritual practice contained in the Quran and Prophetic (PBUH) Sunnah. It is the basis of what a Muslim does.
In light of Sheikh Taj’s unfortunate comments on rape and dress, a number of Christian ministers of various denominations have entered the debate about whether there is a relationship between “unwanted sexual attention” and a woman’s dress.
On Sunday, ABC2’s Asia-Pacific Focus program featured a story entitled, The Future of Australia’s Muslim Community. Although ABC2 is a digital station and therefore not as popular as the free-to-air ABC channel, this program arguably offered one of the more interesting insights into the federal government’s relationship with particular groups within the Muslim community. Most notably, it explores the role of a sect known as al-Ahbash (Habashies) that, despite being a minority within the Muslim community and rejected by many Muslim groups, have managed to become, in the words of the program, the Australian government’s “preferred model of Islam”.
The key question, for me, isn’t whether al-Habash should be the “preferred model of Islam” but why should a secular government have any preference at all?
UPDATE: Due to relentless comments spamming by members of al-AhbashI’ve had to turn comments off.
UPDATE 2:Yusuf Smith has posted a link to a very interesting summary and discussion of the group and their beliefs that was posted to Usenet some years ago by Idris Palmer.
UPDATE 3: Irfan Yusuf makes some disturbing allegations against a member of the Prime Minister’s Muslim Community Reference Group:
This favouritism has led to suggestions that the government is openly favouring projects of the al-Ahbash sect in distributing funds for its $30 million-plus program to combat extremism and promote harmony. Now a former member of the executive of the Islamic Charitable Projects Association (an al-Ahbash front body) and of the Prime Minister’s Muslim Reference Group now publicly boasting on Muslim e-mail lists of receiving otherwise confidential information by people he describes as “DIMA bureaucrats”.
In the aftermath of the Sheikh Taj brouhaha there have been two forums held on national TV in which a group of Muslim and non-Muslim commentators, ‘experts’ and laypeople were brought together to discuss the issues. The first was held on SBS, Australia’s multicultural broadcaster, and was broadcast on the Insight program. They have a transcript available here but also provide video streaming of the episode here.
The second forum was held on channel Nine’s Sunday program and was entitled, Good Muslim/Bad Aussie. They also provide video streaming but, unfortunately or maybe fortunately, no transcript.
There isn’t much to say about either performance except that both were, in my opinion, woeful and demonstrate that, from a Muslim’s perspective, there is little to be gained from these sorts of ‘open discussions’. The Sunday discussion was particularly embarrassing with Muslims making takfir on one another, lots of yelling and silly comments. The problem, of course, is that any Muslim invited to appear faces a variation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. If more reasonable people don’t attend, there is the fear that the less reasonable people will attend and thus monopolise the discussion.
Tariq Nelson has opened up a can, actually a few cans, of worms and sent them racing across the floor over on his blog. After warning readers to leave their emotional baggage at the door, Tariq writes about African-Americans (AA) marrying other races and some of the motivations for it. For Muslims living outside the United States, the problems faced by AA Muslims don’t get much coverage.
But, as Tariq frequently points out, the AA community faces some serious challenges.
Of particular interest is the observation that there is a correlation between income and education, and mixed race marriages.
To illustrate this, at the highest income level ($100,000 and above) there are nearly as many black/non-black couples as there are black/black couples. (86,443 both-black couples vs 75,410 mixed race couples). On educational attainment, couples with graduate or professional degrees were again almost even, with 160,367 black/black couples vs 146,763 black/non-black couples (More information on this can be found athere) One also has to wonder how many of those high SES black/black couples include high-yellow (’Yella’)or redbonewives
The reason, Tariq suggests, is that as people rise in income, there comes with it the opportunity to effectively “opt out” of being black. In other words, ensuring the future children and grandchildren are “lightened up”.