Mick Hartley

In the Blasphemers' Unit

From the Daily Mash:

The British teacher who allowed her pupils to name a teddy bear after a person has been sent to the maximum security, toy-namers' wing of Sudan's toughest women's prison.

Gillian Gibbons will spend 15 days in the Blasphemers' Unit in Omdurman Penitentiary, surrounded by some of the country's most vicious and notorious toy-namers.

Her cell-mates will include Razi Al-Kamari, serving 12 years for suggesting the Prophet Muhammad would have admired the silky, golden hair of her daughter's Barbie doll.

Gibbons will also be forced to eat alongside Mina Al-Bashir, half way through a 10 year sentence for naming a Kermit the Frog pyjama case after the third century mystic, Abu Yazid al-Bestami.

But most feared is Allana Al-Magri, the Terror of Khartoum, serving three life sentences for telling her seven year-old son that the Prophet Muhammad was 'basically a Transformer with a beard'.

And, for sale on eBay...

A Free Society

Timothy Garton Ash returns to the "vital conversation" - "how people with different religions, ethnicities and values can live together as full citizens of free societies". There's a history to this, starting, more or less, with attacks by TGA and Ian Buruma on Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She was, we were informed, an enlightenment fundamentalist. She's not mentioned here, but much of what he says echoes back to that debate. Take, for instance, his discussion of secularism and atheism. It's a familiar enough distinction, but the way he then uses it is curious:

That distinction [between secularism and atheism] would, of course, no longer hold if being a devout Muslim were in fact incompatible with being a full citizen of a free society. I feel this is what quite a few participants in the current debate, both atheist and Christian, really believe, while seldom spelling it out so clearly. Yet the thought keeps peeping through, for example in the formula "Islam is incompatible with democracy". But as a non-Muslim I can only agree with the author Edward Mortimer who, in his book Faith and Power, concluded that there is no single, unchanging Islam, "there is only what I hear Muslims say, and see them do". What Muslims say and do in the name of Islam has varied enormously through history, and varies enormously today. Yes, of course, there is the Qur'an and the Hadith, just as there is the Bible. But, as in all great religions, these are complex texts, subject to diverse interpretations.

When a Muslim letter-writer in yesterday's Guardian tells us, with the aid of Qur'anic references, that Islam, properly understood, supports "the vital principle of freedom of speech", what possible interest have we non-Muslim liberals in arguing against him? If a Christian supports the rule of law, as we understand it in a 21st-century secular liberal state, we don't cry: "But your Old Testament says 'life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth'!" Unless, of course, an atheist agenda - to show that religion is not just nonsense but dangerous nonsense - trumps the secular liberal agenda, which is to find the ways in which people with different beliefs can live together peacefully in freedom.

The problem, then, would seem to be those naughty people, like, um, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who claim that Islam is incompatible with democracy. It's they who confuse secularism with atheism, and thereby deny the possibility of people with different beliefs living together peacefully in freedom.

But of course we have very good reason for doubting that devout Muslims can live happily in a liberal democracy. They've told us this themselves, loudly, clearly, and at tedious length. Not only have they told us: they've also demonstrated the fact. It requires a considerable effort not to be aware of this. So to be persuaded by a Muslim letter-writer in yesterday's Guardian that Islam, properly understood, supports "the vital principle of freedom of speech", displays a remarkable propensity for wishful thinking. What possible interest have we non-Muslim liberals in arguing against him? It's not a question of arguing against him: we'd all be very happy if that was in fact the case, and Islam, properly understood, did support freedom of speech and mutual tolerance. It's more a question of having the strong suspicion that he is, sadly, incorrect.

It's another case, it seems to me, of deflecting criticism away from Muslims, and onto Islam's critics.

Singling Out Zimbabwe

He's presiding over the slow death of his country, but he's not to be criticised:

A group of 14 African nations raised the stakes yesterday before next week’s EU-Africa summit by threatening to pull out unless European leaders agreed not to single out Zimbabwe for criticism. Officials in Brussels, however, said there was no way that President Mugabe could escape a lecture on the dire straits of his countrymen if he turned up to the meeting in Lisbon.

The threat from the Southern African Development Community was seen last night in Brussels as a provocative attempt to influence the agenda being drawn up by the Portuguese hosts and certain to put Africa at loggerheads with the EU.

The SADC threat heightened the pre-summit row over Mr Mugabe’s attendance which has already meant Gordon Brown confirming his own boycott of the summit, a move followed by Mirek Topolanek, the Czech Prime Minister. Tomaz Salomão, executive secretary of the SADC, said that its 14 members including South Africa, Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania as well as Zimbabwe, would pull out if Zimbabwe was on the agenda.

“SADC will not go to Lisbon to discuss Zimbabwe because the summit is not about Zimbabwe, but about relations between the EU and Africa,” he said.

A Big Problem for Muslims

You might be forgiven for thinking that this was another case of militants giving Islam a bad name by claiming to speak for all. Unfortunately it isn't:

Members of a moderate Sufi sect spent the day leafleting Khartoum’s Arab market in front of the city’s Great Mosque, urging the faithful to protest. “What has been done by this infidel lady is considered a matter of contempt and an insult to Muslims’ feelings and also the pollution of children’s mentality as an attempt to wipe their identity,” the leaflet said. It called on a million people to take to the streets after prayers tomorrow.

Ms Gibbons, a former deputy head teacher from Liverpool, spent yesterday locked in a cell at a police station in a suburb of Khartoum. Her toilet is a hole in the ground; her window a small, barred opening high in the wall. She looked tired and pale as she was escorted across the courtyard with a blanket across her shoulders to meet British consular officials.

Professor Eltyeb Hag Ateya, the director of the Khartoum University Peace Research Institute, said that the notion of naming a bear was alien to most Sudanese. “People are angry because the bear does not exist in Sudanese folklore,” he said. “It is not seen as a nice thing that children carry around. If you call someone a bear they will be angry, just as if you have called someone a camel in England.”

Does that make any sense? No, it doesn't make any sense.

Ms Gibbon’s plight moves to Khartoum’s courts today when she is due to appear before a judge who will decide whether there is a case to answer. As the demonstration on the campus wound down, a group of young men huddled over a sheet of paper drafting an angry statement on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Elsheikh El Nour, a veterinary scientist, summed up their position. “If she made an innocent mistake and did not mean Muhammad the Prophet there is no problem,” he said, sipping sweet tea. “But if she meant Muhammad the Prophet, this is a big problem for Muslims. She must die.”

Distant Docklands

From Coppermill Lane, Walthamstow.

The Vision Thing

It's lucky we have literary academics to advise us. Terry Eagleton takes up space at the Guardian's CiF to inform us that - shockingly - Gordon Brown's vision is not the same as William Blake's:

One reason Gordon Brown gave for not holding an election was to have time to roll out his vision. It is not a meaning of the word that Britain's greatest revolutionary poet would have recognised; William Blake, born 250 years ago today, had what George Bush Sr called "the vision thing" in the way other people have headaches or fits of laughter. At four he glimpsed God's head at the window, at eight a tree shimmering with angels. For Blake, being a visionary meant seeing beyond a version of politics centred chiefly on parliament. "House of Commons and House of Lords seem to me to be fools," he wrote. "They seem to me to be something other than human life."

Unlike Eagleton, I'm on the whole quite pleased that Gordon Brown doesn't have visions or wander around naked in the garden of No. 10. It's not a politician's job to point us towards heaven. Ahmadinejad does altogether too much of that kind of thing, and I'm not really a great fan.

The energy captured in Blake's watercolours and engravings is his riposte to mechanistic thought. In a land of dark Satanic mills, the exuberant uselessness of art was a scandal to hard-headed pragmatists. Art set its face against abstraction and calculation: "To generalise is to be an Idiot," Blake writes. And again: "The whole business of Man is the arts, and all things in common." The middle-class Anglicans who sing his great hymn Jerusalem are unwittingly celebrating a communist future.

But not, I think it's fair to say, a Communist future.

No commentary on Blake is complete without a sneer at the witless middle classes (well, it's normally the Women's Institute) who supposedly don't understand the lyrics to Jerusalem. Personally I find Blake's Swedenborgian mythology impossibly recondite, and make no claim to know what he was on about most of the time. The apparent simplicity and beauty of his poetry though make it easy for those with a radical agenda to claim they understand him, and to be quite certain that he was on their side (despite that great big warning sign, "To generalise is to be an Idiot"). Somewhere down the line (the Sixties?) he became the all-purpose visionary poet; a kind of last refuge of the revolutionary scoundrel. Which is where Eagleton comes in.

I've seen it suggested that "dark satanic mills" in fact referred to institutions of learning, and by extension academics in general.

[See also Norm]

Sheep-Dyeing Incidents

From the Guardian, a question we've all at some point asked ourselves - Is it wrong to dye sheep? The RSPCA have criticised Madonna for dyeing some of her sheep for a Vogue photoshoot: "it could lead to a spate of cack-handed copycat sheep-dyeing incidents". Indeed.

If you decide to go ahead anyway, there's some sound advice on how to proceed: "first ensure that it is your own sheep..."

And Thus Deserved the Punishment She Received

Arab News has the latest on the "Qatif girl", the gang-rape victim whose sentence was recently increased to 200 lashes and six months in prison. The Saudi Justice Ministry issued a statement a couple of days ago claiming that the woman had confessed to adultery - and was therefore unworthy of any sympathy. Her lawyer and her husband are now fighting back:

The lawyer for a victim of kidnapping and rape who was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison said yesterday he would file a complaint that states the Ministry of Justice defamed his client.

The defamation suit would be filed through the Ministry of Culture and Information because the defamation of his client occurred through a statement the Ministry of Justice issued through the Saudi Press Agency on Saturday.

The lawyer, Abdul Rahman Al-Lahem, is disputing claims made by the ministry, including that his 19-year-old client had confessed to the moral crime of having an “illegal affair” with an unrelated man.

Arab News has made several attempts to get the Justice Ministry’s reply to this case, but since the ministry doesn’t have an official spokesperson all media requests are submitted by fax. Replies, if they come, take weeks, making it difficult to get the ministry’s response to breaking news. A fax with questions regarding the case was sent to the ministry’s Public Relations Department last week requesting a reply by today due to the urgency of the case.

On Sunday, Sheikh Abdul Mohsen Al-Obeikan, a former judge and current member of the Saudi Fatwa Committee (responsible for issuing religious edicts), represented the ministry on a program aired on Lebanon’s LBC network. Al-Lahem faced off with the sheikh as the two debated the course of this case. The victim’s husband also called in and confronted the sheikh. (The victim and her husband have signed a marriage contract but have never lived together because they have not had a public wedding yet, which is the final step of marriage under Saudi custom that allows them to live together.)

The lawyer and the husband reject claims by the ministry that the young woman had confessed to her moral crime. They said the judges were using witness testimony by the men who were found guilty of abducting and gang-raping not only the woman but the man she was with at the time.

“The ministry’s official statement, concerning the girl, was cited directly from the assaulters’ testimony,” Al-Lahem said during the program on Sunday.

On Saturday the Ministry of Justice said the basis of the decision to punish the woman was because she had arranged to meet the man to “exchange forbidden affairs through illegal khalwa ... they both confessed to doing what God forbids.”

“All she said during the police investigation and her only testimony in front of the judges was that she went to meet that guy to get back the pictures with which he was blackmailing her,” the woman’s husband told Arab News. “It’s obvious now that they published this because they wanted the husband to feel ashamed and shut up.” [...]

The local Arabic press has marginalized the story and have published only the ministry statements verbatim. One headline declared “Ministry Reveals Qatif Story” while some newspapers headlines have called the rape victim an “adulteress.”

Avoiding the words “rape” or “adultery”, Sheikh Al-Obeikan blamed the girl for “what has happened” and underscored the court’s belief that she committed a crime of illegal affair and “stained the matrimonial bed” and thus deserved the punishment she received.

At that point Al-Lahem interrupted and objected to the ambiguous language being used by the sheikh. “What illegal affair are you accusing her of? Khalwa is a minor crime in Shariah,” said Al-Lahem.

Sheikh Al-Obeikan repeated what was said in Saturday’s ministry statement: “Doing what God forbids.”

“Are you accusing her of adultery?” asked Al-Lahem.

Al-Obeikan: “We all know what forbidden act. The ministry does not want to announce that word.”

A Heinous Sycophantic Traitor

South Korean elections are coming up in December. The main contenders to succeed current president Roh Moo-hyun, as far as I can tell (South Korean politics is complicated), are Chung Dong-young, Roh's successor and advocate of a continuation of the Sunshine Policy towards North Korea, and two candidates on the conservative side, Lee Myung-bak and the more hardline Lee Hoi-chang (aka Ri Hoe Chang), who's a fierce critic of the current regime's rapprochement with Pyongyang.

The North Koreans aren't shy about making their views known. From the KCNA (the official DPRK news agency):

The south Koreans should decisively eliminate such traitor to the nation and confrontation and war maniac as Ri Hoe Chang so that he may not raise his head again.

A spokesman for the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland said this in a statement issued Saturday.

The statement continued: Shortly ago, Ri let loose a spate of vituperation, asserting that "the north should be forced to dismantle its nukes" and "it is necessary to make a switchover in the south-north relations and south Korea's policy towards the north." He went the lengths of foolishly taking issue with even the dignified system in the DPRK.

This only brought into bolder relief his true colors as a wicked anti-reunification traitor and anti-DPRK confrontational maniac dead-set against the improved inter-Korean relations, peace on the Korean Peninsula and prosperity common to the nation and reunification.

He is so wicked a traitor and charlatan that he does not bother to speak ill of not only others but of his own clan to gratify his dirty political ambition.

What he uttered can never be tolerated as it is a product of his criminal intention to bar the present north-south relations from making progress at any cost and stem the trend of the national history in a bid to bring back the past era of confrontation. He has gone so mad with north-south confrontation that he made no scruple of ballyhooing about even the "theory of war."

The reality once again clearly proves that his nature as a pro-U.S. ultra-right conservative without an equal and a vicious advocate of showdown with the DPRK can never change.

If such guy is allowed to come to power it is as clear as noonday that south Korea will witness again the dark era of fascism and the divided Korean nation will suffer a disaster of another war.

Clear enough? There's more:

The General Association of Koreans in China Wednesday issued a statement titled "Let's decisively eliminate Ri Hoe Chang, a heinous sycophantic traitor and anti-reunification element, in the name of nation."

The statement accused Ri, a political imposter in south Korea, of going mad with his ambition to become "president" these days, noting that he is a wicked sycophantic traitor, an anti-reunification element and a kingpin of irregularities and corruption.

The traitor at a press conference slandered pro-reform forces, ballyhooing about "a decade wasted," and not content with this, he not only blustered that "he would radically reshape the policy toward the north" but also openly revealed his sinister attempt to bar the inter-Korean relations from improving, the statement said, and continued:

This guy, who is no more than human scum, was forsaken by the times and the public and eliminated from the political arena for his despicable sycophantic and traitorous and anti-reunification acts and irregularities and corruption. His bid to take "presidential office" is, therefore, an intolerable insult to the south Korean people and an unpardonable mockery of justice and conscience.

The south Korean people from all walks of life desirous of the June 15 era should properly see through the danger of the present situation and mete out a stern judgement to such dregs of history as Ri Hoe Chang and decisively eliminate him so that he may not raise his head again.

And more:

The Federation of Korean National Economic Workers in China released a statement on November 20 denouncing traitor Ri Hoe Chang for his desperate efforts to seize power.

The statement accused Ri Hoe Chang, a politician whose days are numbered, of declaring his candidacy for the "presidential elections" recently though he was forsaken by the times and the nation for being dregs of history and working with bloodshot eyes to win people's favor.

Branding Ri as a die-hard anti-reunification element, political charlatan and kingpin of irregularities and corruption, the statement assailed him for letting loose a spate of vituperation, blustering in his declaration on running for the elections that he would "radically reshape the policy toward the north" and it was inevitable for him to run for the elections in order to make up for the " decade wasted".

And yet more:

The Solidarity for Implementing the South-North Joint Declaration reportedly issued a statement on November 20 calling for an all-out struggle against Ri Hoe Chang.

Calling on the entire progressive camp to roundly disclose the irregularities and corruption committed by traitor Ri Hoe Chang including the cases of "Pyongphung," "Sephung," "Chongphung" and "Anphung," the statement underscored the need to form an all-people front of the struggle against Ri Hoe Chang.

The key to frustrating Ri Hoe Chang's attempt to seize power is to form the all-people front of the struggle against irregularities and conservatism, the statement noted, and went on:

Let people from all walks of life wage a dynamic struggle under the slogan "No Ri Hoe Chang, kingpin of irregularities and corruption, running for the presidential elections!" Ri is not qualified to run for the "presidential elections."

I get the impression they don't like Ri Hoe Chang very much.

(via The Marmot's Hole)

Learning English

An advert for learning English, from Holland (via, language nsfw):

And from Germany.

This has been around for a while, but in the context it's irresistible: teaching English in Japan.