Entries from December 2006 ↓

Tony Blair has announced that the only Muslim organisations who will be allowed to dine at the government trough will be those that espouse an interpretation of Islam that the State approves of.

Religious groups will have to prove their commitment to integration before being awarded taxpayers’ cash, Tony Blair said today, as he reignited the row over Muslim headscarves.

Of course, the real issue is whether a government should be taking so much money from its citizenry that it can afford to engage in these sorts of social and cultural engineering projects; using money that it has confiscated from taxpayers as a carrot to entice Muslim organisations to say what the government likes. One would suggest not: that the citizens themselves are the best people to decide which causes, religious organisations and charities they choose to support with their hard-earned money.
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The Lebanese community, particularly in Sydney, are frequently singled out for criticism for all sorts of anti-social behaviour. At various times, commentators and politicians have accused the community of an indifference to gang rape, car rebirthing, drug dealing, gang violence, arms dealing, and so on. The intimation in much of this commentary has been that there is an Islamic or, at best, Arab cultural dimension to all this: that is to say beneath all the bravado and aggression that characterises the popular portrayal of Lebanese gangs is a kernel of eman (faith) or loyalty to Lebanese or Arab culture.

It seems that there is certainly a cultural dimension to much of the problems of Lebanese youth but it is not Arab culture or Islamic culture that is to blame. Rather, it seems, that a minority of Lebanese youths have been more influenced by the noxious gangsta culture of the ghettos of North America than anything identifiably Arab or Islamic. The following television footage provides a useful insight into the sort of subculture that has developed amongst some Arab — Muslim and Christian — youth in this country.

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Dr Jesse Shapiro has released an interesting paper [pdf] last month that examined ‘media bias’ in a large sample of US newspapers. The abstract reads:

We construct a new index of media slant that measures whether a news outlet’s language is more similar to a congressional Republican or Democrat. We apply the measure to study the market forces that determine political content in the news. We estimate a model of newspaper demand that incorporates slant explicitly, estimate the slant that would be chosen if newspapers independently maximized their own profits, and compare these ideal points with firms’ actual choices. Our analysis confirms an economically significant demand for news slanted toward one’s own political ideology. Firms respond strongly to consumer preferences, which account for roughly 20 percent of the variation in measured slant in our sample. By contrast, the identity of a newspaper’s owner explains far less of the variation in slant, and we find little evidence that media conglomerates homogenize news to minimize fixed costs in the production of content.

Shapiro analysed the speeches of US politicians in order to identify words used predominantly by either Democrats (the Left) or Republicans (the Right). For example, Republicans used ‘death tax’ whereas Democrats preferred ‘estate tax’. He reduced the list to 1,000 terms and then examined the text of several hundred newspapers, drawing in data on the voting habits of people in each newspaper’s circulation.

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Austrolabe has won the Best Group Blog category in the annual Brass Crescent Awards.

A big thanks to everybody that voted for us and congratulations to all the other winners and honourable mentions.

Iktimal Hage-Ali, an Alawi (or Nusayriyya as they are often termed in the classical Islamic texts) member of the now defunct Muslim Community Reference Group (MCRG), has been nominated as Young Australian of the Year.

After being nominated for the award in recognition of her supposed contributions to relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, she drank some alcohol to celebrate. Some Muslims are outraged.

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After one reads things such as this:

Immediately after Saddam was toppled in the Spring of 2003 thousands of Badr Brigade militiamen flooded back across the border from Iran, along with their political leaders who’d spent years waiting for this moment. They wanted the new Iraq to become a pro-Iranian, Islamic country where the Shia, who are 60% of Iraq’s population, would also be the dominant political force.

And:

Those consequences became clear very quickly. In June 2004 an American soldier, Kevin Maries, was looking through his sights of his sniper rifle from his usual position on the top floor of the Ministry of the Interior building when he saw Iraqi police commandos bring hundreds of prisoners into a Ministry compound directly below him.

He took a series of astonishing photographs through his rifle sight showing what happened. ‘They were forced onto their knees, beaten with rubber hoses,’ he remembers, ‘The beatings got more severe, a metal bar was used and they were beating the soles of their feet’. When he thought some of the prisoners might die, Kevin alerted his unit and American troops turned up to stop the torture. But an hour later US Headquarters ordered them to withdraw and leave the prisoners to the mercy of their captors. As far as Kevin knows, most of the prisoners were later moved to an official prison but only after they were beaten again.

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The Sunday Times feature an interesting piece on the Arabs who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust. It’s a story that has never been told and which would be of interest, I am sure, to both Arabs and Jews alike.

“I wanted to look at the long reaches of the Holocaust. Persecution was not just a European story. I wanted to investigate what happened to Jews living among Arabs when the Nazis arrived. Their stories have been overlooked for far too long.” He reminds us that had allied troops not driven the Germans from the African continent in 1943, then the 2,000-year-old Jewish communities of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and maybe Egypt and Palestine too, might have met the fate of their brothers in Europe.

The book likes like it will make fascinating reading.  One can find lectures from the author and various reviews here.

How can Muslims translate their private religious belief to action in a public secular nation, without ending up either in an orange jumpsuit or organizing an act of neo-paganism? Contemporary Australian Muslims know little history beyond the narrative of their own life as long suffering victims, but if they did, they might realize that this issue is the essence of da’wah in a pluralistic society.

Indeed the most transformative force in secular societies has been individual religious conviction. Three examples will highlight this.

The statesman Abraham Lincoln, the most influential American of all time became President of the United States in a period where both the Union and Confederacy appropriated religion and God in defense of their cause. Lincoln was religiously devout, although surprisingly not a Christian. This from his the best of his biographers Josiah Holland:

He was a religious man. The fact may be stated without any reservation — with only an explanation. He believed in God, and in his own personal supervision of the affairs of men. He believed himself to be under his control and guidance. He believed in the power and ultimate triumph of the right, through his belief in God. This unwavering faith in a Divine Providence began at his mother’s knee, and ran like a thread of gold through all the experiences of his life. His constant sense of human duty was one of the forms by which his faith manifested itself. His conscience took a broader grasp than the simple apprehension of right and wrong. He recognized an immediate relation between God and himself, in all the actions and passions of his life. He was not professedly a Christian — that is, he subscribed to no creed — joined no organization of Christian disciples.

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In the last couple of weeks, there have been three stories about companies selling halal products and apparently distressing some of their non-Muslim consumers.

Firstly, we have a McDonalds store in Melbourne that, shortly before Ramadan, decided to use halal meat for their products. There is a sign on the wall next to the counter that advises that the products are now halal and have been certified by some organisation but perhaps some customers may have missed it.

The fast-food chain has introduced halal products at two Melbourne restaurants, significantly boosting sales.

However some non-Muslim customers are furious they were not told their hamburger meat was slaughtered and blessed in accordance with Islamic rules laid down in the Koran.

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