Drawing the prophet: Islam’s hidden history of Muhammad images

2015/01/13 Leave a comment

Interesting article on the history of devotional Islamic art that depicts the prophet Muhammad. Again, a sad forgetting of some of the rich traditions within Islam:

To many Muslims, any image of the prophet Muhammad is sacrilegious, but the ban has not always been absolute and there is a small but rich tradition of devotional Islamic art going back more than seven centuries that does depict God’s messenger.

It began with exquisite miniatures from the 13th century, scholars say. Commissioned from Muslim artists by the rich and powerful of their day, they show almost every episode of Muhammad’s life as recounted in the Qur’an and other texts, from birth to death and ascension into heaven.

Intended as private aids to devotion and prayer, these detailed scenes were made for both Sunni and Shia worshippers, and surviving examples can be found in dozens of major museum and library collections.

They also laid the foundations for a popular, if minority, tradition of devotional and inspirational images that still exists today, from icons cherished in homes to a five-storey government-commissioned mural in the heart of Tehran and even to revolutionary street art in Cairo – although the prophet’s face is obscured in both those public drawings.

In the wake of the murder of cartoonists at French magazine Charlie Hebdo, many Muslims and non-Muslims have argued that Islam has always banned any representation of the prophet, in part because of strong warnings in the Qu’ran and other religious texts against idolatry or anything that could be seen as a pathway towards idolatry.

This position is rarely challenged, perhaps because the existence of images of Muhammad is little known and almost never discussed outside communities that create, study or buy them. But their obscurity frustrates experts who see them as a rich part of Islam’s artistic heritage and resent the misconception that the only depictions of the prophet are mocking or racist creations by non-believers. “It’s really important for audiences that have never seen the pietistic images of Muhammad to make a radical distinction between the mystical and beautiful images that have been produced over the last 1,000 years by Muslims and for Muslims, and the offensive and sometimes pornographic images [currently in the news],” said Omid Safi, director of the Islamic Studies Centre at Duke University in North Carolina.

Drawing the prophet: Islam’s hidden history of Muhammad images | World news | The Observer.

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Canada vows to accept 13,000 more refugees from Syria and Iraq

2015/01/09 1 Comment

Good commitment – finally, now the challenge will be in implementation:

Canada has already accepted 20,000 Iraqis and since mid-2013 has brought 1,060 Syrian refugees to Canada. Total approvals for resettled Syrian refugees now exceed 1,275, with thousands more applications still being processed. This number doesn’t include the many more Syrians who’ve been accepted as refugees after making “inland claims” from within Canada.

The government also announced another $90-million in humanitarian assistance for people affected by the intensifying violence in both Iraq and Syria, home to a long-running civil war as well as battles between Islamic jihadis and government forces. The assistance will be distributed via UN agencies, the Red Cross and aid groups.

Mr. Alexander said the 10,000 new Syrian refugees will be resettled in Canada through both government and private-organization sponsorship. He said he expects roughly 60 per cent will be supported by private sponsors such as church groups and 40 per cent through government arrangements – “roughly the same proportions we’ve always had.”

Refugee sponsor groups said it will be a huge task to help 6,000, or 60 per cent of Syrian refugees, settle in Canada over 36 months. This is on top of the 3,000 additional Iraqi refugees Canada is now accepting.

Some said they hadn’t been officially informed of the proportion that private sponsors are expected to shoulder.

“Over three years, it will be probably on the edge of possible,” Alexandra Kotyk, director of sponsorship at AURA, a charitable organization representing the Anglican Diocese of Toronto and the Toronto Conference of the United Church of Canada.

I have less of an issue than some critics on the issue of need and possible preference given to Christian refugees, as it is hard to argue that Christians, and other minorities, are not likely at more risk than others.

Canada vows to accept 13,000 more refugees from Syria and Iraq – The Globe and Mail.

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Radical Islam, Nihilist Rage – Kenan Malik

2015/01/05 Leave a comment

Kenan Malik on radicalization and rejection of modernity (apart from using social media and weaponry of course!):

Anti-imperialists of the past saw themselves as part of a wider political project that sought to modernize the non-Western world, politically and economically. Today, however, that wider political project is itself seen as the problem. There is considerable disenchantment with many aspects of modernity, from individualism to globalization, from the breakdown of traditional cultures to the fragmentation of societies, from the blurring of moral boundaries to the seeming soullessness of the contemporary world.

In the past, racists often viewed modernity as the property of the West and regarded the non-Western world as incapable of modernizing. Today, it is radicals who often regard modernity as a Western product, and reject both it and the West as tainted goods.

The consequence has been the transformation of anti-Western sentiment from a political challenge to imperialist policy to an inchoate rage against modernity. Many strands of contemporary thought, including those embraced by “deep greens” and the far left, express aspects of such discontent. But it is radical Islam that has become the lightning rod for this fury.

There are many forms of Islamism, from the Taliban to Hamas, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Boko Haram. What they have in common is a capacity to fuse hostility toward the West with hatred for modernity and, seemingly, to provide an alternative to both. Islamists marry political militancy with a conservative social sensibility, a hostility to globalization with the embrace of a global ummah (the worldwide community of Muslim believers). In so doing, they turn the contradictory aspects of their rage against modernity into a strength.

Jihadism provides Islamist ideology with a military form and seemingly creates a global social movement, at a time when radical alternatives have collapsed. What jihadism does not possess is the moral and philosophical framework that guided anti-imperialist movements. Shorn of that framework, and reduced to raging at the world, jihadists have turned terror into an end in itself.

Radical Islam, Nihilist Rage – NYTimes.com.

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The state and Islam: Converting the preachers | The Economist

2014/12/13 Leave a comment

Good article in The Economist regarding state control of mosques and Imams to reduce radicalization:

In fact, the Saudi effort to tone down its clerics is mild, hesitant and belated compared to what some Muslim states do. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan already routinely use cameras. Kuwait has long installed tape-recorders to monitor Friday sermons. Preachers in the neighbouring United Arab Emirates need not write their own sermons. Except for a few trusted senior clerics, they read instead from a text delivered weekly by the government department for religious affairs that also pays all their salaries. “Protecting Youth from Destructive Ideas” and “Our National Flag, Symbol of Affiliation and Loyalty” provided two stimulating recent topics. Similarly, Turkey has for decades enforced a monopoly of Islamic discourse via a religious bureaucracy, known as Diyanet, that wields 121,000 employees and a budget of $2.3 billion.

Other governments aspire to such dominance. Tunisia’s government has in recent months restored strict state control of mosques that had slipped following its revolution of January 2011, leading to a brief flowering of Wahhabist-style jihad promotion. Morocco, whose king has traditionally posed as Commander of the Faithful, delivering televised Ramadan sermons, has steeply boosted state promotion of a relatively tolerant version of the faith. Its budget for training imams, including a growing number of foreign students, has swollen tenfold in the past three years. The unspoken aim is to counter the spread of extreme Salafist ideas in places such as Mali and northern Nigeria.

…Egypt’s government has of late clamped unprecedented controls. In January it decreed that all Friday sermons must adhere to a weekly theme set by the religious-affairs ministry, establishing a hotline to allow worshippers to denounce preachers daring to voice political dissent. Further decrees required all preachers to be government-licensed, imposed a code of ethics forbidding discussion of politics in mosques, and banned smaller prayer halls from holding Friday prayers. The ministry fired 12,000 preachers and now allows only those trained in government-approved institutes to deliver sermons.

…As a foil to the powerful Brotherhood, the [Egyptian] state had long allowed followers of quietist forms of Salafism to run some 7,000 mosques. But the ministry in September decreed it would take over their mosques too, after reports of a sermon forbidding the faithful from buying interest-bearing government bonds.

Amr Ezzat, an Egyptian researcher, sees the effort to impose state-ordained orthodoxy as misguided and possibly dangerous. Religious institutions will lose legitimacy with time, pushing more Muslims towards radical margins. And by acting in effect as the imam, the state takes upon itself a duty to enforce morality. It is perhaps as a sop to religious conservatives, for instance, that Egyptian authorities have mounted an increasingly lurid campaign against homosexuality, most recently by staging a midnight raid on a Cairo bathhouse on national television, dragging a score of naked men to prison.

The state and Islam: Converting the preachers | The Economist.

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Religion and spending: Prudent but not puritan | The Economist

2014/12/09 Leave a comment

Interesting study by Vince Showers, a US finance professor, on the spending patterns of the religious (no breakdown by religion):

After using a lot of fancy statistical tools, they came up with some expected findings, and some rather unexpected ones. Households “with a strong commitment to faith”— demonstrated by higher spending on religious activities—are less likely to be weighed down by excessive mortgage outgoings or loan payments for cars. Compared with other households, they are more likely to be home owners but their property tax burden tends to be less—suggesting that “some moderation in [the] selection of home in terms of extravagance or location….”

Devout households seem keener on mitigating risk and therefore spend more on life insurance and health insurance; they lay out less on alcohol and tobacco and more on domestic appliances, including cooking utensils. Such homely behaviour is most heavily correlated with religious belief in the American South and Midwest, which are also the regions with “the most conservative interpretation of scripture,” Mr Showers notes, in an article in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion. (The research more-or-less conflates the term “religious” with “Christian” or “Judeo-Christian” which in the American context is only a smallish distortion.)

But religious families do allow themselves some earthly pleasures. Indeed, they are if anything a little more likely than other households to spend spare money on clothing or jewellery, although the amount each household splurges on jewellery is a bit less. Some of that jewellery, of course, might be devotional: silver crosses or stars of David. They are as likely as anybody else to be spending money on child support or alimony—a proxy for failed marriages—and they are as inclined as other folk to incur interest payments on credit cards.

Religion and spending: Prudent but not puritan | The Economist.

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National Post editorial board: When church and state collide

2014/12/06 Leave a comment

National Post on Alberta’s Bill 10 on allowing gay-straight student clubs and the broader issue of separation of church and state (no funding is the cleanest option):

Above all else, this situation is simply undesirable: Governments shouldn’t be telling churches how to worship, and churches shouldn’t be telling legislators how to govern. And the gap between acceptable religious and political opinion seems unlikely to shrink.

Eventually, Canadian governments may have to make a decision: Fund religious schools and other alternatives to the secular public system — directly or through a portable subsidy — and let them teach according to the tenets of their faith or ideology; or don’t fund them at all. It would cause serious political headaches in the short term, but save many more in the long term.

National Post editorial board: When church and state collide

And Don Braid’s harsh criticism of the Bill and the Alberta government’s handling of the issue:

Bill 10 began life by voicing support for formation of alliances, but then allowing schools or school boards to refuse them. This was “balancing” the rights of students with those of parents and elected trustees, the government said.

If the students still wanted their alliances, well, they could appeal to Court of Queen’s Bench.

From the heart of the legislature gasbag, the PCs were actually serious about making gay teenage children march into court like a pack of government lawyers.

Greeted by torrents of scorn, the government backed up — into further absurdity, unfortunately.

Kids would no longer need appeal to the courts. Instead, if a school board refused an alliance, the minister of education would simply approve it.

There was no longer any thought to the precious “right” of schools to refuse gay-straight alliances. Apparently it never meant much to begin with.

But schools could still say no, which seems absurd when the minister would then say yes. How would children feel about that? Worse, the amended bill gives no guarantee that after ministerial approval, kids would be able to meet on school property.

Further ridicule ensued. This sounded like segregation — “normal” kids are welcome to have their club meetings at school, but gay students have to go down the street.

This bill can’t be allowed to stand in modern Alberta — and the government may finally know it.

Don Braid: Alberta backs away from bullying bill that treats gay students as unequal

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Father Raymond J. de Souza: ‘Islamophobia’ is not the problem

2014/12/06 1 Comment

While his argument that criticizing Islamic extremism and violence is not Islamophobic is of course correct, de Souza appears to dismiss the possibility of Islamphobia (or anti-Muslim prejudice and discrimination) as well as being silent on the language used (e.g., Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer are prime examples of the use of intemperate and overly broad condemnation of all Muslims as potential or actual extremists):

On the weekend Pope Francis was in Turkey to visit the leader of world Orthodoxy, Bartholomew, Patriarch of Constantinople. Like John Paul and Benedict before him, Francis went to show his esteem for the Orthodox Church and to foster the bonds of unity. But since Constantinople long ago fell to the Turks, this Christian meeting took place in a country that is 98% Muslim — and more to the point, in a country now led by an ambitious man, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is not above using Islamism to advance his desire to be the leader of global Islam, recapturing the influence of his Ottoman predecessors.

Erdoğan took advantage of the Holy Father’s visit to argue that Western leaders who seek his aid in combatting jihadism need to clean up their own house first. Erdoğan urged the Pope in his welcome address to combat the “the very serious and rapid trend of growth in racism, discrimination, and hatred of others, especially Islamophobia in the West.”

The point was further amplified by Mehmet Görmez, the minister of religious affairs. “We feel anxiety and concern for the future, that the Islamophobic paranoia that has already been spread among Western public opinion is being used as a pretext for massive pressures, intimidation, discrimination, alienation, and actual attacks against our Muslim brothers and sisters living in the West,” he said.

It is hardly phobic or paranoid for Christians on Turkey’s borders in Syria and Iraq to fear the jihadism that is slaughtering their communities

Like most countries that have government departments for religious affairs, Turkey does not permit full religious liberty. The Orthodox Patriarchate, present in Constantinople since before Islam existed, is being strangled by the state, with heavy restrictions placed on its institutions and freedom of governance. So it is a bit much to hear from Turkey about “Islamophobia” inflaming public opinion abroad when “Christophobia” is practiced by law at home. Moreover, it is hardly phobic or paranoid for Christians on Turkey’s borders in Syria and Iraq to fear the jihadism that is slaughtering their communities.

Erdoğan and his ministers were offering a sort of pact: We will combat jihadism in our backyard if you condemn “Islamophobia” in yours. It is an offer that merits firm rejection.

Drawing moral equivalence between lethal jihadism and people who say nasty things about the co-religionists of such jihadis is meant to be disabling, as was the case in the days of the anti-anti-communists. It sows confusion by suggesting that any challenge even to Muslim pathologies is ill-motivated and illegitimate.

The obligation of Turkey and other Muslim states to combat extremist violence in the name of Islam binds independent of what is being done elsewhere. Indeed, one might argue that reducing jihadist attacks would do more to reduce “Islamophobia” than any number of pieties about Islam being a religion of peace.

More outrageously, to juxtapose “Islamophobia” and Islamist violence ignores that the vast majority of victims of jihadism are Muslims themselves. For every Muslim in the West anxious about “Islamophobia,” there are far, far more within the house of Islam who fear for their lives.

Jihadism is a clear, present and lethal danger, for Muslims first, and it is waxing rather than waning. It is not “phobic” to condemn it.

Father Raymond J. de Souza: ‘Islamophobia’ is not the problem

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Pope says it is wrong to equate Islam with violence

2014/12/02 Leave a comment

Much more productive approach than his predecessor:

The Argentine pope, who has been trying to foster cooperation with moderate Islam in order to work for peace and protect Christians in the Middle East, said it was wrong for anyone to react to terrorism by being “enraged” against Islam.

“You just can’t say that, just as you can’t say that all Christians are fundamentalists. We have our share of them fundamentalists. All religions have these little groups,” he said.

“They Muslims say: ‘No, we are not this, the Koran is a book of peace, it is a prophetic book of peace.”

Francis said he had made the suggestion of a global condemnation of terrorism by Islamic leaders in talks on Friday with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.

“I told the president that it would be beautiful if all Islamic leaders, whether they are political, religious or academic leaders, would speak out clearly and condemn this because this would help the majority of Muslim people,” he said.

Francis several times condemned Islamic States insurgents during his three-day trip. On the plane, he said some Christians had been forced to abandon everything: “They are driving us out of the Middle East.”

Pope says it is wrong to equate Islam with violence | Reuters.

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My radicalized son chose the other Islam

2014/11/27 Leave a comment

Powerful statement from an obviously distraught mother:

My son embraced the harsh, isolating view of the Wahhabis. He was encouraged to reject any information from non-Saudi sources. He scorned moderate imams and his parents. He learned to speak Arabic, read the Koran and form his own legal rulings. But since he’d never lived under a totalitarian regime, he broadcast their teachings openly. You mix a few ounces of religious fervour with a pound of a dogmatic, irrational ideology and you end up with extremists and terrorists. That’s the concoction ultraconservatism offers. His teachers and friends criticized him and withdrew. Now they claim they don’t know him.

They offer no guidance to men who take Wahhabism to its inevitable extreme. There is no authority among them who can rein in people who let their emotions or lusts inform their religion. No one among them takes responsibility for what they teach. If a follower becomes mentally ill, he will be scorned, perhaps accused of demonic possession.

Wahhabism or Salafism is the same Dr. Frankenstein that created the monstrous Islamic State, Boko Haram and al-Qaeda. It’s a politically motivated, pseudo-religious cult designed to extinguish the free-thinking liberality of moderate, traditional Islam. Salafism, fed by petro-dollars, teaches political obedience to Muslim rulers as a religious obligation.

Wahhabism is one of the vehicles by which ignorance is spread. Ignorance of Islamic history, Islamic law and modern politics fuel that vehicle. Ignorance should not be spread by religious leaders.

Here in Canada, religious teachers should be held responsible for what they teach and how their students interpret their teachings, especially when those teachings have led to the kind of chaos, strife and destruction Wahhabism has caused. Men like my son have taken sail on the ship of ultraconservatism, and his mentors have abandoned him and set him adrift. He was not a radical until he was radicalized.

And even when it does not lead to violence, extreme fundamentalism, in any religion, means living apart from society, with little or no integration.

My radicalized son chose the other Islam – The Globe and Mail.

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BBC News – Radicalisation risk at six Muslim private schools, says Ofsted

2014/11/24 Leave a comment

Ongoing issue in UK schools, this time at private faith-based Muslim schools:

At one school, inspectors found pupils did not know the difference between sharia and British law.

And they said the curriculum at Mazahirul Uloom School in Tower Hamlets “focused solely” on Islamic themes.

In a letter to Ms Morgan, Sir Michael said he was “extremely concerned about the large number of failings” in each of the six schools and was “not convinced” current managers were capable of making necessary improvements.

“I believe that, in all six schools, pupils physical and educational welfare is at serious risk,” he wrote.

“Given the evidence gathered from these inspections, particularly in relation to the narrowness of the curriculum, I am concerned that pupils in these schools may be vulnerable to extremist influences and radicalisation.”

BBC News – Radicalisation risk at six Muslim private schools, says Ofsted.

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