Monty Python’s Life of Brian meets real life as this woman gets to speak in public as if she knows what she is talking about. Yes, Saracen-slayer Ayaan Hirsi Ali was speaking at the National Press Club. I accidentally heard it on the radio; I didn’t know who it was at first but the stream of simple-minded inanities about Islam and the West made it easy to narrow down. No transcript available, only memory, but I had to belly-laugh and just about stop driving while she explained how Islam is rigidly fixed in theology since it takes its Scriptures as literal and as divinely authored unlike, um, Christianity. For in the Christian Scriptures, she explained, the books are not fixed as being written by God, but are said to be written “by people . . . like Paul . . . and Deuteronomy.” ( I kid you not, folks.) Yes, she is the one who will guide the liberation of civilizations and insight into religious progress. O, why did I have to be a Monty Python fan?
Tariq Nelson and Umar Lee both have pieces up about the so-called Mapping Sharia in America Project. Apparently, someone ‘converted’ to Islam at a mosque open day and then went on to engage Umar in a very strange email conversation that includes such questions such as:
2. From reading the various articles you wrote on Salafism and my being a new convert, do we at Dar Al Hijrah strive for a Caliphate State in America? From my readings I understand Saudi Arabia practices the purest form of Islam in regards to Sharia Law.
The “convert” then proceeded to publish a number of claims supposedly based on his experiences at the mosque open day and after his “conversion”.
Both articles make for interesting (and disturbing) reading. The email exchange between Umar and the “convert” and then his concerned “father” are especially bizarre.
Although the Australian Muslim community has a booming cottage industry in stupid ideas, we are usually forced to import the bigger ones from overseas. Islamism, jihadiism, super-salafiism and, of course, Anthony Robbins-style motivational schtick are four such examples of dodgy things we’ve brought into our community from elsewhere because we were unable to produce them locally. However, the cultural cringe may be over with the news that British Muslims have expressed an initial interest in importing one of our own stupid ideas and making it available in the United Kingdom. Yes, after apparently witnessing the miserable failure of our own confected mufti project, British Muslims want one too.
It could, of course, be that some British Muslims are suffering from a particular form of Munchausen by Proxy (common even here) that compels them to seek increasingly audacious solutions to problems that don’t really exist. Or maybe it is a defensive move because they fear that it is only a matter of time before our Mufti of Australia, Ashmore Island, Cartier Island, Christmas Islands, Cocas Islands, North Keeling Island, Coral Sea Islands, Thousand Island, Heard Island, McDonald Islands, Norfolk Island, Phillip Island, Coode Island, Australian territories in Antarctica, and New Zealand has his role expanded slightly to become Mufti of the Commonwealth?
I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. This is what happens when you appoint one man as the representative of 300,000 Muslims: every word he has ever said and will say is analysed, politicised and/or given an importance surpassing what it would ordinarily receive. Every word that Sheikh Fehmi has ever uttered on the public record, every letter of support he has written to the Immigration Review Tribunal, every lecture ever held at the sheikh’s mosque, and every other detail of the sheikh’s life is going to be scrutinised by those with an interest in selling papers or selling a particular agenda. This is one of the many reasons why this position of mufti should have been abolished. Sheikh Fehmi is a decent man who has, over many decades, served Islam and the Muslims of this country. He deserves better than this.
DEMAND for Muslim schools has soared in Victoria, with waiting lists of more than 300 students at some campuses.
Australian Council for Islamic Education in Schools chairman Abdul Rahman Najmeddine said demand for Islamic education was unprecedented, with a need to build more schools.
This is not surprising and would seem to reflect the overall trend towards private education. Whether or not one views children being educated outside of the state system as a good thing depends largely on whether one believes parents have more right to decide what and how their children are taught than public servants.
The Age and ABC are reporting today that Sheikh Taj ad-Din al-Hilaly, the so-called mufti of Australia and New Zealand, has stood down. He has been replaced by Sheikh Fehmi Naji El-Imam, the imam of Preston Mosque in Melbourne’s north.
Controversial muslim cleric, Sheik Taj el-Din Al Hilali has declined the position of Mufti of Australia and a new mufti has been elected.
Imams from across the country were at Melbourne’s Preston Mosque for a meeting of the National Imam’s Council.
The Council has announced Sheik Fehmi Naji El-Imam as the Mufti of Australia for a two-year term.
The Council said Sheik Al Hilali was appointed first, however he declined the position and proposed Sheikh Fehmi to be appointed Mufti.
Time will, of course, tell whether the appointment of Sheikh Fehmi is an improvement or not. Nobody can doubt his moderate credentials and he is certainly well respected in the Victorian Muslim community. If we must have one imam as the face of Islam, then I suppose Sheikh Fehmi is a relatively safe choice.
However, rather than appointing a new mufti (and therefore exposing the Muslim community to the same problems that plagued Sheikh Taj’s tenure) the National Imam’s Council should have just abolished the position forever. There is no need for a ‘mufti’ in this country and it causes more problems than it solves by making the entire Muslim community, in all its heterogeneity, hostage to the pronouncements — past and present — of one man. It is also a poisoned chalice for the imam who takes the position: there will, almost certainly, be a frenzied rush to find anything controversial about the new mufti so that he too can be placed on the front page of the nation’s newspapers.
Did Western European Christians stop having children because they became secularised, or did they become secularised because they stopped having children? In the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review Mary Eberstadt looks for an answer.
And therein lies a real defect with the conventional story line about how and why religion collapsed in Western Europe. For what has not been explained, but rather assumed throughout that chain of argument, is why the causal relationship between belief and practice should always run that way instead of the other, at least some of the time. It is as if recent intellectual history had lined up all the right puzzle pieces — modernity, belief and disbelief, technology, shrinking and absent families — only to press them together in a way that looks whole from a distance but leaves something critical out.
This essay is a preliminary attempt to supply that missing piece. It moves the human family from the periphery to the center of this debate over secularization — and not as a theoretical exercise, but rather because compelling empirical evidence suggests an alternative account of what Nietzsche’s madman really saw in the “tombs” (read, the churches and cathedrals) of Europe.
In brief, it is not only possible but highly plausible that many Western European Christians did not just stop having children and families because they became secular. At least some of the time, the record suggests, they also became secular because they stopped having children and families. If this way of augmenting the conventional explanation for the collapse of faith in Europe is correct, then certain things, including some radical things, follow from it.
Islamic Awarenesshave published an excellent critique of some of the more popular allegations against the Qu’ran, such as the allegation that Islam is really a heretical Jewish sect or that the Qu’ran is simply a byproduct of Syriac Christianity (popularised by Christoph Luxenberg). They explain:
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