Islam in UK: Losing my religion | The Economist

2015/05/09 Leave a comment

Interesting trend even if the numbers are small as well as observation that many British Muslims have become more religious as a response to feeling that their faith is under attack:

Former Muslims’ reluctance to admit to their lack of faith rarely stems from a fear of violence, as in countries such as Sudan where laws make apostasy punishable by death. Rather the worry in Britain is about the social stigma, moral condemnation and ostracism that follows, says Simon Cottee of the University of Kent, who has written a book on the subject.

Many do not divulge their unbelief to their families, let alone the wider community. At events organised by the CEMB, some come straight from the mosque. Women say they continue to wear their veil at home to conceal their change of heart. Those who are openly godless often use the language of gay rights, talking about “coming out” to those close to them.

Despite such difficulties, the internet is making life easier. Muslims questioning their faith can talk to others online. The CEMB’s forum has over 4,000 users, says Marayam Namazie, the group’s founder. In the past would-be atheists had to sneak off to libraries to explore their doubts. Doing so online is easier and more discreet. Nonetheless the CEMB also offers guidance on concealing such activities, advising those with doubts to erase e-mails and search histories and to use a computer to which others do not have access.

Ibrahim Mogra, an imam in Leicester, says that he has heard of only a handful of cases of Muslims who have openly renounced their religion over the past 30 years. More common, he says, are those who abandon many of the practices of Islam—regular prayers, the dietary laws and dress codes, for example—but still identify as Muslims. This group, which is culturally but less spiritually committed to Islam, is getting larger, suggests Mr Mogra. Growing up in secular Britain leads people, especially the young, to drift away. But many grow out of their doubts, he reckons, and return, especially when they have children.

Religious leaders certainly try to draw them back into the fold. Sermons on Friday, when more backsliders may appear, are an opportunity to boost their faith. Ramadan is a chance to recharge the spiritual batteries of people who will only return again 11 months later for a top-up, says Mr Mogra. But a culture in which youngsters could express their uncertainties openly and discuss them with scholars would be good, he argues. “If, after that, they still have doubts, that’s up to them.”

The difficulty for Muslims with misgivings, at least in revealing them, is the politicisation of Islam. Many British Muslims have become more overtly religious as they perceive their faith to be under attack. Islam has become a greater part of their identity. That makes it harder for doubters to come out—and leaves them in a quandary. Some interviewed by Mr Cottee were wary of putting their testimonies online, anxious to avoid giving ammunition to those who would vilify Islam. Until Muslims feel more at ease in Britain and Britons more relaxed about Islam, the number coming out will be small.

Islam: Losing my religion | The Economist.

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Art Spiegelman: Je Suis Charlie—But I’m Not Pamela Geller

2015/05/08 Leave a comment

Cartoonist Art Spiegelman on the differences between Charlie Hebdo and Pamela Geller. One of the best:

I think that’s when my brain short-circuited. Because superficially, it seems like, well, the same thing is happening in Texas. But it’s not. It’s the anti-matter, Bizarro World, flipside, mirror-logic version of what Charlie Hebdo is about.

The American Freedom Defense Initiative is racist organization. It’s exactly the nightmare version that the writers who were protesting the PEN award thought Charlie was. But Charlie is an anti-racist, political magazine that does not have an agenda that consists of wanting to bait or trouble Muslims.

Pam Geller’s organization is intentionally trying to start war of culture with Islam by saying that all Muslims are terrorists under the surface, and we’re going to prove it. Do the group members deserve free speech protection? Of course. But they’re hiding behind that banner with things that have very little to do with free speech and a lot to do with race hate.

Je suis Charlie, mais je ne suis pas Pam Geller. She and her dim-witted, ugly organization deserve the protection of the free speech mantle that they wrap themselves in. But would I ever give them a courage award? Hardly. Would I ever want to be in the same room with them? No. Do I wish they would stop? Yes.

The PEN writers who protested the event were projecting similar motives and attitudes onto Charlie Hebdo. Dismissing it as French arrogance is quite arrogant. Dismissing it as crude and vulgar is something that makes me suspicious of how cartoons are viewed by the writers who didn’t have enough respect for these images to understand them on their own.

…. I’m stuck having to agree with my bête noir friend Pam Geller that it would be better going forward for newspapers and magazines to take on the responsibility for showing these images. When the Danish Muhammad cartoons appeared in 2006, and when the Mohammad cartoons from Charlie Hebdo appeared, newspapers should have shown these images and talked about them. Many dismissed them as banal and treated them as, “Nothing to see here, move along.”

If it were taken as a matter of course for newspapers and magazines to show these images, they could be normalized, so the many Muslims not offended to the point of grabbing a machine gun could understand that this is how our culture functions with images and issues. It would create a better-informed population dealing with whatever comes next. It would also be useful to have other voices on newspaper and magazine staffs.

What’s the mistake in not publishing images that could be deemed offensive?

There’s no stopping it. What would it be based on? Would it be based on when someone takes up arms against the image? Would it be based on when someone thinks it’s offensive? God knows where the line would be drawn. It can’t be drawn that way. There is an incredible efficiency cartoons have, once you learn to read them, in clarifying the issues at hand, making them memorable.

There’s something basic about cartoons. They work they way the brain works. We think in small, iconic images. An infant can recognize a smiley face before it can recognize its mother’s smile. We think in little bursts of language. This is how cartoons are structured. They’re structured to talk to something deep inside our brains. A cartoon becomes a new kind of word that didn’t exist before.

It’s interesting how little respect they get. “Oh, anyone could draw that crude, vulgar scrawl,” said a number of critics of Charlie Hedbo. That’s not quite true. They’re not totally dismissible. If a writer had made some of the points that Charlie Hebdo had made, I don’t think the writers protesting PEN would have been so condescending and dismissive.

Art Spiegelman: Je Suis Charlie—But I’m Not Pamela Geller | TIME.

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Message for Ontario’s sex ed naysayers: Ignorance is far from bliss

2015/05/08 4 Comments

Commentary by Aparita Bhandari  on the need for sex education and a reminder of some of the culture behind opposition to sex-ed:

I was around seven years old when I was told I was impure. It was at a family get-together in India that involved a religious ceremony. My mother had her period at the time, and had been segregated to a cold, dark room. I had no idea what was wrong with her, only that I never wanted to have what she had. I was impure by association. I was told I needed to take a purifying bath if I wanted to sit with my cousins. Eager to please, I splashed cold water on my shivering body. But I couldn’t wash away the sense of shame.

As a teenager in New Delhi, I hated taking public transit. Men would press their erections into my backside or try to cop a feel as I squeezed my way off the bus. But I did not know how to talk about it to my mother or anyone else. What words could I use? So I kept quiet, and avoided using public transit.

But it’s hard to stay quiet now when many parents in Ontario are removing their children from classrooms to protest the revised sex ed curriculum introduced by Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government. They cite cultural concerns and family values but, as far as I’m concerned, a culture of shame and silence is more dangerous. And given the possibility that many of these parents aren’t going to talk to their kids about sex, it’s even more important that their children receive sex education that’s well researched and takes into account the access young people have to sexual information (and misinformation) today and includes topics such as sexual consent.

Since I attended a public school in Australia from Grades 5 to 8, I happened to learn about menstruation, puberty and my developing body through a mixture of books, sex ed classes and educational films that I caught on TV. But I never learned about sex from an authorized source. Back in New Delhi, there were exactly two pages devoted to reproduction in my Grade 9 biology class, which our Science teacher more or less skipped over. The main take-away was that we should know how to draw anatomical diagrams of male and female sex organs for our annual school examination. Any practical education came from romance novels and whispered conversations with friends.

I never had “the talk” with my parents, but I was repeatedly told by the women in my family that I had to watch what I wore, how I acted. I was warned, “Rape bhi ho sakta hai (You can get raped).” Nobody even told me what rape was, although Bollywood movies at the time had frequent scenes that suggested men sexually assaulting women.

Message for Ontario’s sex ed naysayers: Ignorance is far from bliss – The Globe and Mail.

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Charlie Hebdo Editor Seeks to Distance Newspaper From Anti-Islam Causes – NYTimes.com

2015/05/07 Leave a comment

The numbers tell the story (7 out of 500 or 1.4 percent):

“Out of 500 covers in the past 10 years, only seven were made about Islam,” he [Gérard Biard] said. “So it’s not our obsession. We’re dealing with politics, we’re dealing with other religions.”

Ms. Geller has called the attack in Garland, Tex., in which both assailants were killed, a defeat for “the enemies of freedom” that validated the art contest — which she said had been held in part to honor Charlie Hebdo.

Asked how the Charlie Hebdo attack may have influenced a right-wing surge in French politics, Mr. Biard criticized Ms. Le Pen for portraying herself and her supporters as defenders of free speech.

“Marine Le Pen has a political agenda,” he said. “Her goal is to be elected in two years, to become president. She’s doing what every political leader does. She’s used an event and tried to transform this event into something for her own purpose.”

“The thing is, Marine Le Pen is not credible on that issue, because she is an extreme-right politician,” Mr. Biard said. “She runs an extreme-right party, with religious extremists in there. So when she attacks Islam, she in fact attacks Arab people.”

By contrast, Mr. Biard said, “when we mock a religion, we don’t knock believers, we don’t mock people. We mock institutions. We mock ideas.”

Mr. Biard was in New York to receive an award on Tuesday for “freedom of expression courage” at a literary gala sponsored by PEN American Center, a prominent literary organization that defends writers around the world.

The choice of Charlie Hebdo to receive the award has incited angry contention within the organization. More than 200 of its approximately 4,000 members have signed a letter protesting what they called Charlie Hebdo’s violation of acceptable expression, asserting that the newspaper’s cartoons have promoted anti-Muslim bigotry.

Mr. Biard, who has been the editor in chief of Charlie Hebdo for the past 10 years, said that the PEN protesters were entitled to their opinion but that he rejected their criticism.

“We have always been anti-racist, and we fight against all discrimination,” he said.

Mr. Biard also said that the newspaper, which derives its revenue exclusively from subscriptions, had gone from fewer than 10,000 before the January assault to more than 250,000 today.

Charlie Hebdo Editor Seeks to Distance Newspaper From Anti-Islam Causes – NYTimes.com.

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The moral problem with a Muhammad cartoon contest

2015/05/07 Leave a comment

Noah Feldman on the moral responsibility of Pamela Geller for the Texas shootings:

One goal of the provokers in Texas seems to have been sending a message to Muslims that their faith may be criticized with impunity. Pamela Geller, the organizer, said she chose the venue because Muslims had previously organized an event there. Geller also said that Muslims generally cannot be criticized in the U.S. because of political correctness, and that she wanted to counteract what she perceives as a new social norm.

The desire to condemn Islam by intentionally offending Muslims is morally unpleasant in itself. Insulting the Prophet to make a point is a bit like showing Nazi propaganda to prove that Jews can be subject to criticism: effective, but repulsive.

Yet as moral wrongdoing goes, giving offense isn’t at the top of the list. You shouldn’t do it, but when you do, you’re offensive — nothing more. Compared with intimidation, for example, offense is less wrongful. If offense were all that Geller intended, she’d deserve a stern lecture about civility, not deep condemnation.

By willfully trying to provoke violence, Geller was trying to create a situation in which innocent people could have been harmed or killed.

Geller also had a plausible moral rationale: to strike a blow for free speech itself, after January’s attacks in Paris at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Perhaps, it could be argued, some offense is justified in light of the need to stand up against terrorism that is intended to repress speech.

But there was almost certainly another goal at work in the provocation, too. Geller clearly wanted to get a reaction from Muslims offended by the event’s intentionally offensive speech. The point of the offense was, in part, to generate a response.

Perhaps all Geller wanted was to provoke a counter demonstration that would have drawn attention to her efforts. But assuming for a moment that she didn’t want to provoke a violent attack, Geller could still be held morally responsible for the foreseeable consequences of her provocation.

There’s a moral theory, called the ‘doctrine of double effect’, that says you shouldn’t be blamed for foreseeable consequences that you don’t want. We sometimes rely on it, as in justifying collateral damage as a result of an otherwise morally correct use of force.

This moral doctrine of double effect has no place in evaluating a conscious provocation. Geller was trying to provoke a reaction. If the reaction was reasonably likely to be violent, she can’t hide behind the notion that she didn’t want anyone to get hurt.

Was a violent reaction foreseeable? I’d like the answer to be no. Plenty of insults against Muslims go unremarked, and certainly unavenged. Violent attacks like the one on Charlie Hebdo are extremely rare.

Fairness toward American Muslims would seem to require us to say that the violent reaction wasn’t reasonably likely to occur. We’d then have to absolve Geller on a ground she probably wouldn’t much like.

But that still leaves the question of Geller’s own subjective beliefs and intentions. It’s hard to escape the suspicion that part of her hoped to provoke a violent response.

After all, it’s part of Geller’s worldview to believe that Islam is a violent religion. The bus and subway ads she’s paid for depict Islam in terms of violent jihad. She paid for an armed security guard outside the event, suggesting she considered violence at least possible. What’s more, the value of the free speech she is trumpeting is relevant mostly because cartoons perceived as insulting the Prophet have been met with violence.

If — and I say if — Geller intended to provoke violence, she did something much worse than giving offense. By willfully trying to provoke violence, Geller was trying to create a situation in which innocent people could have been harmed or killed. As it was, a security guard at the event was injured. (By the way, the guard who shot and killed the attackers counts as a hero who saved lives, regardless of Geller’s motives.)

If Geller wanted violence to happen, her actions were morally culpable — even though she obviously didn’t commit it.

And while we’re on the topic of fear

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Shafia, Man who murdered family became jailhouse religious tyrant

2015/05/06 Leave a comment

Interesting account of the prison life and attitudes of Mohammed Shafia:

Canada’s only Muslim prison chaplain would occasionally lead Kingston’s Muslim inmates in Friday prayers. “There would be a general atmosphere of jovial camaraderie among themselves and the non-Muslim,” said Groves, who did psychological counselling at the prison.

But when the Muslim chaplain was frequently absent, it was Shafia who apparently appointed himself spiritual leader and led Friday prayers.

“The normally pleasant atmosphere associated with Muslims gathering for prayers was absent. Inmates on the same range who came to see me expressed fear of him. (About one-third) were not Muslims but believed they dare not refuse to attend Friday prayers. They had no choice. He was an angry little man.”

One, a Christian, “felt so intimated by Shafia and some of his lieutenants that he chose to give up his relative freedom of movement on the range and in the general population for a much more restricted life on a social isolation range. He advised me that confinement was worth it to avoid the hassle of dealing with ‘the Muslims.’

“This form of intimidation is something one finds routinely with zealot extremists. In other circumstances it’s called bullying.”

Man who murdered family became jailhouse religious tyrant | Ottawa Citizen.

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Sex ed protest leaves 1 Toronto school almost empty

2015/05/06 Leave a comment

If memory serves me correctly (School prayer debate creates unlikely allies), this is the same school that allowed the Muslim Friday prayers at the school to combat Friday afternoon absenteeism among Muslim students, with gender-separate seating (girls at the back, not at the side):

A public elementary school in Toronto was left nearly empty on Monday as parents protested against the province’s new sex ed curriculum.

Between 200 and 300 protesters voiced their concerns with changes to the current sex ed system outside Thorncliffe Park Public School, said the CBC’s James Murray. Toronto District School Board spokesman Ryan Bird said 1,220 of the 1,350 Grade 1 to Grade 5 students are not currently in class.

Meanwhile, across the city, the Toronto District School Board recorded 34,762 elementary school absences.

That’s an increase of 144 percent compared to last Monday when there were 14,191 absences reported.

The board did not provide a breakdown of reasons for the absences, such as illness, etc.

In total, there are approximately 171,800 active elementary students at the TDSB.

A Thorncliffe parents’ group is currently running a Facebook campaign called Parents & Students on strike: one week no school is encouraging parents who oppose the 2015 sex ed curriculum to keep their kids at home.

“We are sending them to have their science, math and English and whatever … we are not sending them for sex education,” said parent Fatima Haqdad.

Sex ed protest leaves 1 Toronto school almost empty – Toronto – CBC News.

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China orders Muslim shopkeepers to sell alcohol, cigarettes, to “weaken” Islam

2015/05/06 Leave a comment

Not exactly a positive engagement approach and another signal of the tension between the Chinese government and its Muslim minority:

Chinese authorities have ordered Muslim shopkeepers and restaurant owners in a village in its troubled Xinjiang region to sell alcohol and cigarettes, and promote them in “eye-catching displays,” in an attempt to undermine Islam’s hold on local residents, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported. Establishments that failed to comply were threatened with closure and their owners with prosecution.

Facing widespread discontent over its repressive rule in the mainly Muslim province of Xinjiang, and mounting violence in the past two years, China has launched a series of “strike hard” campaigns to weaken the hold of Islam in the western region. Government employees and children have been barred from attending mosques or observing the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. In many places, women have been barred from wearing face-covering veils, and men discouraged from growing long beards.

In the village of Aktash in southern Xinjiang, Communist Party official Adil Sulayman, told RFA that many local shopkeepers had stopped selling alcohol and cigarettes from 2012 “because they fear public scorn,” while many locals had decided to abstain from drinking and smoking.

The Koran calls the use of “intoxicants” sinful, while some Muslim religious leaders have also forbidden smoking.

Sulayman said authorities in Xinjiang viewed ethnic Uighurs who did not smoke as adhering to “a form of religious extremism,” and had issued the order to counter growing religious sentiment that he said was “affecting stability.”

“We have a campaign to weaken religion here, and this is part of that campaign,” he told the Washington-based news service.

The notice, obtained by RFA and also posted on Twitter, ordered all restaurants and supermarkets in Aktash to sell five different brands of alcohol and cigarettes and display them prominently. “Anybody who neglects this notice and fails to act will see their shops sealed off, their businesses suspended, and legal action pursued against them,” the notice said.

Radio Free Asia, which provides some of the only coverage of events in Xinjiang to escape strict Chinese government controls, said Hotan prefecture, where Aktash is located, had become “a hotbed of violent stabbing and shooting incidents between ethnic Uighurs and Chinese security forces.”

China orders Muslim shopkeepers to sell alcohol, cigarettes, to “weaken” Islam – The Washington Post.

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Citing Religious Beliefs, Muslim Gitmo Inmates Object To Female Guards : NPR

2015/05/05 Leave a comment

I am with General Kelly on this, apart from his comment on whether the prisoners beliefs reflect Islamic teachings (Supreme Court of Canada approach of assessing whether beliefs are sincere, and whether they infringe on rights of others is preferred, rather than commenting on theology).

The right of prisoners has to be balanced between the right of the guards, and I suspect the prisoners are making more of a political point than a religious one.

Of course, in the overall context of due process and respect for human rights at Gitmo, this is minor:

Ruiz says his client refuses to leave his cell if women are on the escort team because Muslim men can only touch women they’re related to.

“It means that we are not able to meet, we are not able to speak with each other on legal issues, and therefore I’m not able to provide the legal services that I am required to provide and the advocacy that I’m required to provide on his behalf,” Ruiz says. “It’s an access to counsel issue.”

Today, no female guards are allowed to handle the defendants in the Sept. 11 case. The judge presiding in that trial, Col. James Pohl, has refused to lift his restraining order.

At a recent Senate hearing, New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte criticized the judge’s decision.

“When the 9-11 attackers don’t want women guarding them, it’s absurd, and I don’t think we should be accommodating that,” she said.

Ayotte directed her remark to Gen. John Kelly, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, who’s in charge of Guantanamo. Kelly told Ayotte he disagreed with the judge’s order, but there was nothing he could do about it. He suggested the judge had been misled.

“Because the high-value detainees felt it was against their religion, which anyone that knows anything about the Muslim religion knows that it’s not against their religion,” Kelly said.

The general said the five Sept. 11 defendants and their lawyers were manipulating the court trying their case.

“And as soon as this is over, it’ll be, ‘We don’t want to be touched by Jews, or we don’t want to be touched by, you know, black soldiers, or we don’t want to be touched by Roman Catholics,” Kelly said. “It’s beyond me why we even consider some of these requests.”

Ruiz, the lawyer for one of the defendants, finds that comment telling.

“When General Kelly makes that kind of statement, it’s very clear that he doesn’t really understand what is happening in the detention center that they’re supposed to be supervising,” Ruiz says.

And that’s not the only issue, says David Nevin, who represents alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Nevin says it’s also a matter of showing respect for a well-established tenet of Islam.

“There’s a problem, a religious problem, protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, with having women touch men,” Nevin says. “It’s just something that’s not done.”

Citing Religious Beliefs, Muslim Gitmo Inmates Object To Female Guards : NPR.

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The former head of Germany’s anti-Islam Pegida movement says ‘sorry’ to Muslims

2015/05/05 Leave a comment

Weird that someone could change 180 degrees so quickly. While her new words are welcome, it would be interesting to know what really prompted such a radical shift?

“Those still belonging to the Pegida movement need to understand that they are advocating for the wrong cause,” she said. “Asylum seekers are blamed for our problems in Europe and Germany. However, they’re not the root cause of our struggle,” she continued before directing her words to the immigrants she had previously condemned.

“I want to apologize to all migrants and to all Muslims among them who live peacefully and are assimilated with German society, who respect our culture and laws. They are in the vast majority and most Germans overlook this fact,” Oertel said.

Oertel had first been the spokeswoman and later the head of the popular movement which shocked the world. Since last November, right-wing extremists and ordinary citizens had marched in joint weekly rallies in opposition to Muslim immigration to Germany. The weekly protests continue, though the number of supporters has dwindled.

“I feel partially responsible for a campaign of hatred we caused. I want to apologize and the only thing I can do is to help resolve those tensions,” Oertel said in the statement which appeared to have been spontaneously recorded in a car.

“To achieve peace, one needs to be ready for dialogue,” Oertel said. “That’s the only way to get rid of prejudices.” The ex-Pegida leader made clear that she was no longer fighting against Islam, but instead for “world peace,” according to her own words. “Someone needs to start to connect people,” she said — implying that she was ready to be that person. She also acknowledged that she had failed to draw huge support for the goal of world peace, so far. “We were even verbally attacked by opponents,” Oertel said, sounding honestly outraged.

The former head of Germany’s anti-Islam Pegida movement says ‘sorry’ to Muslims – The Washington Post.

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