Entries from November 2006 ↓

Dezhen’s Creative Morality blog has some interesting thoughts on the situation of Muslims in Australia and what is to be done about it.

One of the key issues that I believe to be the case right now, though, is that of knowledge. Specifically our relationship to our religious tradition. My last blog post was a rather long time ago – unfortunately “real” life has intruded on my “online” life – but I feel that it has been culminating in this post.

So the issue of knowledge is a serious issue. As plenty of scholars are saying today (noteably the likes of Tariq Ramadan and Sh. Hamza), we need to be able to delve in to our Islamic heritage in order to retain our Muslim identity while becoming Western. This is the key issue.

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In light of a recent but now temporarily removed post in which three people decided to flood the moderation queue with abusive and profanity-laden remarks, I am wondering if anybody can recommend a Wordpress plugin for managing comments. Firstly, it needs to allow people to be banned based on IP address or email and, secondly, incorporate some sort of filter for profanity. If it allowed some users to be put on moderate and others to be allowed to post freely, that would be good too.

If anybody can recommend a Wordpress plugin to handle this, please let me know via the comments. Once I figure out a way to manage this increasingly frustrating issue, normal service will be restored insha’Allah.

Writing in The New Yorker Rebecca Mead discusses the ‘cult’ of cosmetic surgery:

Like certain strains of Christian mysticism, cosmetic surgery is founded on a notion of human perfectibility, although the means of achieving perfection, and the rewards thereof, are the opposite of those in a Christian theology. If for St. Teresa perfection required transcending the allures of the material and the sensual, adherents of the cult of plastic surgery undergo surgical mortification of the flesh in order to embrace the sensual life more fully. Ultimately, Kuczynski argues, what the beauty junkie is pursuing, and what our culture values most, is not simply aesthetic improvement but the preservation of apparent youthfulness at any cost. One of her interviewees is a Bel Air matron who—having already had liposuction, a tummy tuck, a brow-lift, two face-lifts, two eye-lifts, and two successive sets of breast implants—has recently undergone labiaplasty, an operation to rejuvenate the vagina. A culture that insists on the appearance of nubile availability among women old enough to be grandmothers may be as tyrannical as one that requires the syphilitic to wander noseless forever, reviled by all. Kuczynski’s book vividly documents such a culture; it also conforms in every measure to that culture’s catechism.

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To adapt the now well reported statement of the embattled Mufti of Australia, 90 percent of Muslim PR disasters usually start with a cleric: He makes some remark; then a seductive headline; then a denial; then a claim that it’s taken out of context; then a media pack that has no mercy; and then an apology. And meanwhile Muslims, to borrow another analogy, become the meat in the sandwich.

Whilst people, clerics included, are free to say whatever they wish, the problem here is that a diverse community of 300,000 Muslims is being made accountable for the pronouncements of anyone that the media anoints as a “Muslim cleric”. There seems to be the understandable belief that any statement issued by a man in a turban or, in this most recent case, a man identified as Australia’s Most Senior Cleric carries the same spiritual weight as a Papal decree. However, this is far from the truth.

Sunni Islam is one of the world’s few laissez-faire religions: there is no clerical class, hierarchy, or Supreme Leader. Each individual Muslim is responsible for the practice and interpretation of their own faith. Although they may refer to scholars, no individual scholar holds absolute authority over the interpretation of the religion; and for most Australian Muslims, the scholar they refer to is the Imam of their local mosque or some other respected figure in their community or sect.

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Whilst not quite from the Neil Armstrong Become Muslim After Hearing The Adhan On The Moon department, the Discovery News report on some fascinating research into Leonardo da Vinci’s fingerprints.

Leonardo da Vinci may have had an Arab heritage, according to Italian researchers who have isolated and reconstructed the Renaissance master’s fingerprint.

The fingerprint represents the only biological trace of the Florentine genius, said Luigi Capasso, an anthropologist at Chieti University.

“It is actually the first evidence of Leonardo’s corporeality,” Capasso told Discovery News.

And on a related note, Nature Magazine have a special feature on Islam and Science that is worth a visit.

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Peter Hitchens‘ excellent Channel Four documentary, Stealing your Freedom, is now available on Google Video.

Political commentator Peter Hitchens takes a look at how the recent avalanche of security legislation has affected the civil liberties of ordinary people in Britain. He argues that the government’s measures, designed to protect us from crime and terrorism, are in fact a menace to freedom and not a threat to criminals.

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After reports of Sheikh Taj’s Ramadan speech sparked an outrage in the media, Crikey asked prominent Melbourne barrister and broadcaster Peter Faris, QC whether defence lawyers in rape trials ever refer to the behaviour of female rape victims. Sadly, the idea that some rape victims can be made to appear responsible for their own victimisation is not as medieval as some commentators have led us to believe. He wrote the following:

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Professor Gary Becker has some interesting comments on the illegality of polygamy and the likely effects of its legalisation. In part, he writes:

The claim that polygyny is unfair to women is strange since polygyny increases the demand for women as spouses in the same way that polyandry would increase the demand for men. If men were to take multiple wives, that increases the overall competition for women compared to a situation where each man can have at most one wife. This argument against polygyny is like arguing that a way to increase the economic prospects of minorities is to place an upper bound on how many members of these groups a company can employ. Of course, actual laws that try to improve the economic circumstances of minorities often in effect take the opposite form by placing lower, not upper, bounds on their employment in different companies. That too is not sensible but I save that for another day.

The entire article makes a number of worthwhile points. For example, as more and more societies move towards the recognition of civil unions between homosexuals as contracts equivalent to marriage, the traditional arguments against polygamy seem to be weakening.