Mick Hartley

A Halo of Koranic Steam

Here we are at the cutting edge of Islamic science, from a program on Dubai TV on the healing powers of Koranic holy water. Egyptian Islamic scholar Zaghloul Al-Naggar lays the conceptual groundwork:

We have recently realized the value of the use of amulets. It has been scientifically proven that water is affected by what is recited over it. Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto has had a unique experience. He said that he had read in a book that each snowflake falling from the sky is unique. He said that his scientific instincts told him that this was not true. The geometric shape of the snowflake is determined by its chemical composition. The composition of water is well known – two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. So how come snowflakes that fall from the sky are different from one another? He said: "I was determined to prove that this theory was false." He built a laboratory, consisting of a deep freezer with a regulator, because no liquid, subjected to sudden freezing, can assume a geometric shape. The freezing must be slow, so the atoms have the chance to crystallize into the shape decreed by Allah. There was a deep freezer with a regulator, a cold room at the temperature of -7°C, and several microscopes equipped with cameras, so he could photograph the snowflake before it melted. The scientists working in this room wore warm clothing. He said: "I took samples from two faucets in the laboratory, I froze them, and each sample gave me a different snowflake. The samples came from two different wells, two different rivers, from two different lakes. I almost went crazy and thought this was witchcraft." A Saudi student at the University of Tokyo happened to meet him, and asked him what was wrong. Masaru told him his problem. The student said to him: "We have blessed water, called Zamzam water. I will give you a sample of this water so you can experiment on it. The Zamzam water is not affected by witchcraft or jinns, so using it can prove or disprove the whole theory." Emoto took a sample of Zamzam water, and said: "I couldn't crystallize it, even by diluting the water by 1,000." In other words, he turned one cubic centimeter into one liter. [...]

He said that when he diluted the water by 1,000 and froze it, he got a uniquely-shaped crystal. Two crystals were formed, one on top of the other, but they assumed a unique form. When he asked his Muslim colleague why there were two crystals, he told him it was because "Zamzam" is composed of two words: "Zam" and "Zam." [...]

Emoto said: "My Muslim colleague offered to recite Koranic verses over the water. He brought a tape-recorder and played some Koranic verses, and we got the most perfectly-shaped crystals. Then he played the 99 names of Allah. Each name produced a uniquely-shaped crystal. Then he began cursing the water. We said: Water, you are impure. You are not suited for consumption. The water, in this case, did not freeze, or produced an extremely ugly crystal." When they uttered bad words like "war" or "fighting," the water did not freeze, or else produced an ugly shape. When the man completed these experiments, which lasted 15 years, he published a five-volume book called Messages from Water. He wrote: "I have proven that water, that peculiar liquid, is capable of thinking, fathoming, feeling, getting excited, and expressing itself."

Then engineer Sharif Shukran brings on his special machine for producing Koranic holy water. This needs to be seen in action (Shukran demonstrates in in the clip) to be fully appreciated:

Sharif Shukran: I was trying to deal with a problem that has not been discussed so far – Satan uses humans to record negative thoughts in water. [...]

For 14 centuries, we've known for certain that Koran verses are recorded in water, but we never imagined that everything that is said is recorded in water. I found out that one of the methods employed by Satan is to make human beings think certain thoughts, while cooking, for example. When a human being is near any type of liquid, he might pass his negative thoughts on to the water. [...]

When a mother cooks... I've asked many mothers what they think about when they are cooking, and they said they were thinking about problems. Without realizing it, they insert all the problems into the food. [...]

What does this device do? It supplies enough water to offset the water in the body that carries negative words. A person cannot go every day to someone who would read the Koran over him, nor can he recite it himself all day long.

Interviewer: Let's see how it works.

Sharif Shukran: The entire Koran is recorded inside this device. What I did was to use the same method of recording used by human beings. You can hear the voice, but if we press here, we stop the voice. [...]

A couple on the verge of divorce began using the water. The wife used to complain all the time. After a month and a half, she stopped entirely. Things that she used to make a fuss over seemed simple all of the sudden. I asked myself how this could be, and I realized something – or at least, this makes sense to me. If a person replaces most of the water in his body with Koranic water, his body begins to emit steam which contains the Koran. This creates a halo of steam around him, containing the Koran, which fends off Satan.

Now Again I Am Blindfolded

Michael J. Totten writes about his choice for best Iraq film of the year, Iraq in Fragments:

Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia is the focus of the middle third of the film. Longley was given access to the Mahdi Army’s political meetings where they discuss their revolutionary strategy. It amounts, basically, to one part democracy and one part thuggery. Amazingly, the director was allowed to bring his camera along while some of the militiamen don masks, storm a local market, and beat and kidnap men selling alcohol. The decades-long tragedy in Iraq is summed up in a few short, devastating sentences from a blindfolded and kidnapped man who weeps on the floor.

“We were saved from tyranny,” he says while he cries. “And you brought another. How can it be, brother? When Saddam fell I rejoiced, but now again I am blindfolded.”

Social Stability

The latest pronouncement from Egypt's Al-Azhar:

Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam's highest seat of learning, on Sunday declared that any woman pregnant by rape must abort the baby immediately in order to maintain 'social stability'.

'A raped woman must terminate the pregnancy immediately upon learning of the pregnancy if a trusted doctor gives her clearance for the abortion,' the Islamic Research Council of the Cairo-based institution said in a statement.

This would ensure 'social stability,' it said.

According to the independent Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights (ECWR), two women are raped every hour in this country of 76 million.

Many factors contribute to the increase in sexual harassment including rising unemployment, the huge cost of marriage and the fact that sex outside marriage is forbidden, experts say.

Egyptian law bans abortion except on the grounds of 'necessity", which includes instances when a woman's life or health is in danger or in cases of fetal abnormality.

It's either ban abortion, or make it compulsory. What can't be tolerated is for the pregant woman herself to have any say in the matter.

Kamm on Levitt on Fuller

Oliver Kamm writes about Steve Fuller, and the review of his latest book by Norman Levitt which I posted about here.

[T]here is one issue, to do with his political analysis, on which I take issue with Levitt. He notes "Fuller’s utter failure to come to terms with the political nature of the Intelligent Design movement", i.e. Fuller is a populist of the Left who overlooks the right-wing theocratic inspiration of Intelligent Design. Levitt doubts that "any large segment of the science-studies community, nor of the larger 'academic left' will join [Fuller] in the attempt to find comrades-in-arms in such venues as the Discovery Institute or the wider Intelligent Design movement".

I'm not convinced Fuller is as much of an outlier - in political debate, at least - as is here claimed. The notion that people's deeply held beliefs are entitled to respect is common, and it's not such a great step from that misconception to the principle that those beliefs are entitled to protection. It's unusual to find a professed left-winger (if that is indeed Professor Fuller's position) applying the principle to Protestant fundamentalism, but it's inherently no odder than (to take an entirely typical example) the insistence of my sometime debating opponent Jeremy Corbyn MP, at a rally against "Islamophobia", that: "We demand that people show respect for each other's community, each other's faith and each other's religion."

It's possible that I'm not fully appreciating what he's saying here (it wouldn't be the first time), but I think this is wrong. Fuller didn't testify in the Dover-Kitzmiller case because he believed that we should respect fundamentalist beliefs. He testified because he's a social constructionist. He believes that Darwinism - the theory of natural selection - is in the ascendant in the world of biology simply through the greater power of the evolutionists, who've managed to monopolise scientific discourse by demonising their adversaries.

According to Fuller, what does and does not count as science is the result of a power struggle between the evolutionists, who control the scientific establishment, and a marginalised ID community with a large religious following. "I see myself in an affirmative action position, voicing a point of view that would otherwise be systematically excluded," he says....

For Fuller, religion and science are compatible. He complains that evolutionary theory is being taught as dogma. It needs a "critical foil" and ID satisfies that function as well as anything else.

Although he identifies himself as a secular humanist, Fuller likes to push this line that the separation of science and religion is arbitrary and counterproductive:

In today's secular culture, Darwin is more readily embraced than Newton as a scientific icon although Newton remains unquestionably the greater scientist. The American Museum of Natural History has an exhibit devoted to Darwin's life that includes a reconstruction of his home. This is not surprising. Darwin's biography projects the politically correct image of a Christian who loses his faith through scientific inquiry. We are unlikely to see a similar exhibit for Newton because his life teaches that the Bible can provide a sure path to great science.

So Fuller's support for Intelligent Design is an intellectual support. He's coming from a post-modernist and overwhelmingly leftist tradition (as Levitt notes in his Amazon review, Fuller was a contributor to the famous Social Text issue which contained Alan Sokal's famous hoax article), yet he ended up testifying in court on behalf of the ID crowd. This is why Levitt can write of Fuller's "utter failure to come to terms with the political nature of the Intelligent Design movement". He agrees with the ID line that Darwinism is "just" a theory. He rejects the view that science emerged from the pre-scientific fog of religion to provide us with a clearer picture of reality: we're still in the fog according to him, and we'll always be in the fog; it's just that we're telling ourselves different stories nowadays. This is not at all the same as the position of someone like Jeremy Corbyn, advocating respect for other people's religions in a misguided effort at multiculturalism. Corbyn's concern for Islam, I think it's fair to say, wouldn't go so far as defending the teachings of the Koran: he's interested only in respecting beliefs. Fuller, for reasons of his own, is actually in agreement with much of what the ID crowd are saying.

The Asian Squat

A professor of squat mechanics explains....

Guilty

Further to the post below but moving from Iran to Saudi Arabia, here's Dania Al-Ghalib in Arab News:

The Saudi woman is guilty. She is guilty of being born in a male-dominated society. Her fault is that she grows up in a society that stigmatizes her sex as a sin. She is held accountable because society believes she is underaged — even if she is in her 60s — and implements a guardianship system over her as if she were a second-rate citizen. It is very common for a Saudi woman — a widow or a divorcee — to have her young son as her guardian and she needs his written permission to carry out official paperwork. He is in control of her life and her destiny....

The Saudi woman is born undesired. Everybody wants a male child rather than a female one. This innocent creature is forcibly taught what is prohibited and shameful before even knowing how to speak. She is guilty if she remains silent and guilty if she talks. She is guilty if she is divorced and guilty if she cleaves to her husband and children when someone tries unjustifiably to destroy her marriage. Her only refuge is prison where she has the right to say no. She has lost all her rights and has fought for one that allows her to live only behind bars. Her sin is that she tried to protect her marriage and family. But traditions and customs challenged and destroyed her attempts.

The Saudi woman is guilty of being raped in darkness or in daylight because her society wants her locked in, producing legal children and never leaving her house unless she is dead and of course accompanied by a guardian. She is guilty when brutal beasts tear her body and soul apart, threatening her with weapons and defamation because society believes she subjected herself to them and she deserves what happens to her.

And, reinforcing the point:

In a recent study, a researcher from King Saud University tackled the often-unmentioned subject of suicide in Saudi Arabia. In her study, which concentrated on failed suicide attempts in 2006, the researcher found out that 96 percent of the cases involved women. She told Reuters that in the hospital where she works, they receive around 11 cases every month of women who have failed in their suicide attempts.

So far, we are talking about survivors, but if the figures are correct, then we must assume that there are as many, if not more, who actually manage to kill themselves. The report says that most of those cases are filed at hospitals as drug overdose.

The researcher attributed the high suicide rate among women to social pressures. Within family circles, boys always get preferential treatment. What is more, there is very little or no communication between girls and their parents.

Considered as Adults

As is well known, Iran, contrary to international law, permits the execution of minors. Here's a story from Iran Focus, about a youth of 17 whose death sentence for murder has been confirmed by the Supreme Court. What caught my eye, though, was this:

Under Iranian law, girls above the age of nine and boys above the age of fifteen are considered as adults and could be executed for capital offences.

Can this be true? If so that's surely an astonishing admission of sheer unadulterated misogyny.

It's not, of course, that I wasn't aware of how much women are discriminated against in Iran, and in most other Muslim countries too for that matter. It's a central feature of the whole enterprise. But, perhaps naively, I'd assumed that there was at least some consistency about it, some supposed justification in terms of women's child-like lack of sense; a belief that women are kind of glorified domestic pets who need men to look after them, and are occasionally, when the old sexual urge gets a little strong, unwrapped for some action then wrapped up again and stuck back in the kitchen ready for the next time. Which is to say, women are supposed to be less responsible, less adult, less mature. So you'd expect that they'd be cut some slack, as it were, when it came to being hung. But here we are being told, if Iran Focus is to be believed, that when it comes to being executed women are suddenly more responsible, not less....to the tune of six years.

I haven't managed to confirm that, but I did find this snippet:

The scenario is worse in case of girl child offenders. In Iran, where Sharia or the Islamic Law, rules, a women cannot be executed if she is a virgin and hence permits legal rape.

And again, from a talk by Lily Mazahery at Harvard last year, speaking here of the execution of 16-year-old Atefeh Rajabi for adultery:

The judge who presided over Atefeh's sham trial and sentenced her to death by public hanging is reported to have raped Atefeh himself before he personally placed the noose around her tiny neck. The so-called justification for such despicable act of savagery is the Sharia legal system, put in place by the Islamic Regime and championed by Mr. Khatemi. Under Sharia law, virgin girls are not allowed to be executed, for their purity might open up the doors of heaven to them. To avoid this, virgin girls, such as Atefeh, who are sentenced to death, are raped before execution to ensure their proper place in hell.

All of which strongly suggests that it's not about men being placed over and above the weaker sex: it's about sheer bloody hatred.

A Flotilla of Somewhat Unhinged Idealists

You may remember Steve Fuller as the sociology professor who testified in the Dover case in favour of Intelligent Design. Here's a fine deconstruction by Norman Levitt of Fuller's recent book:

The anti-science of the contemporary academy is a late and petulant echo of Spiritualism, Anthroposophy, Theosophy, Forteanism, and a dozen other cults that once appealed to the culturally fashionable. But now they are bound up in the knotty and constipated jargon of journals and seminar rooms and lack the high spirits that made the original versions pleasantly whimsical. Anti-science in today's university whines and grumbles when it is not busy bedecking itself with the pseudo-virtue of today's eco-Puritanism: the Animal Rights Movement, fulminant opposition to genetic engineering, Deep Ecology, and so forth.

It is easy to mock this development and hard not to scorn it. But perhaps a little sympathy is in order, providing it stops well short of indulgence. Basically, one is dealing here with a community of people who, by common standards, are quite intelligent and imaginative, and certainly diligent enough to carve out large areas of discourse for themselves wherein their assumptions and modes of analysis remain in the saddle for decades at a time. This is not a trivial achievement, think what we may of the fundamental soundness of the enterprise. We can't really speak of a Ship of Fools here, but rather a flotilla of somewhat unhinged idealists who still can put up a pretty good fight. Yet, ultimately, they are cruelly and fatally hemmed in by their inability to come to terms with the deepest and most penetrating ideas that our civilization, or any civilization, has yet been able to generate: the ideas of science and mathematics.

As an Amazon reviewer, Levitt allows himself to be a little less circumspect:

For years, Fuller has been peddling the line that the superior insight vouchsafed him by his ostensible analysis of the social background of science makes him better able to understand science than mere scientists ever can. But his work is shot through with overwhelming evidence that specific scientific theories are well beyond his competence to understand. No matter; he babbles on ad nauseam, citing himself and his voluminous if redundant writings as the supreme authority at every turn. He provides the ultimate example of the academic careerist who can hector and bully his way to the top in a field where nobody is very eager to call anyone else's bluff....

Worth reading in full.

Self-Righteousness

I'm not a fan of Matthew Parris anyway, but this is grotesque:

A festive custom we could do worse than foster would be stringing piano wire across country lanes to decapitate cyclists.

A charming opening line, eh? And it doesn't get any better.

It’s not just the Lycra, though Heaven knows this atrocity alone should be a capital offence; nor the helmets, though these ludicrous items of headgear are designed to protect the only part of a cyclist that is not usefully employed; nor the self-righteousness, though a small band of sports cyclists on winter’s morning emits more of that than a cathedral at evensong; nor even the brutish disregard for all other road users, though the lynching of a cyclist by a mob of mothers with pushchairs would be a joy to witness.

Like many other commentaters who for reasons best known to themselves reserve their bitterest hatred for cyclists, he claims it's the self-righteousness that gets to him. Not that Matthew himself could be accused of being in any way smug:

Bin-liners in hand, a group of us, infused with the seasonal goodwill that illuminates this column, of course, decided to walk a mile of a pretty and winding lane that had become particularly badly littered this winter, and collect it all. It’s amazing how much of the stuff there is when you start looking, and we ended up with a whole sackful.

No self-righteousness there, then.

He's not done yet, unfortunately:

What is the carbon footprint of a panting, sugar-gulping, chocolate-chewing, Lycra-clad leisure-cyclist? a) His or her journey is totally unnecessary; b) whole convoys of cargo boats steam the Atlantic to bring the molasses to be energy-intensively refined for them; and c) the chemical processes that generate the vile materials that clothe, shoe and helmet a cyclist – not a man-made fibre among them – will be poisoning entire provinces of China.

But it’s the bad manners one cannot forgive. Driving or walking, don’t you just hate the way that, riding two or three abreast, they shout and curse at you or whir their angry little bells, as though it’s your problem that they need to clear the way? In just one little posse of these monsters there are levels of self-satisfaction that could power a small religious crusade.

Does cycling turn you into an insolent jerk? Or are insolent jerks drawn disproportionately to cycling?

This is offensive garbage, and not worthy of a response, but it is interesting how common this hatred of cyclists (cyclophobia?) is. Maybe part of it is the old story of fearing most what's just above you in the food chain. Pedestrians dislike cyclists; cyclists dislike cars; cars dislike lorries. And there's also the familiar argument about cyclists disobeying traffic signals, but I'd take that more seriously from pedestrians if they themselves showed the slightest inclination to stop wandering across the road whenever they felt like it.

No, there's more to it than that, and it occurs to me that there's a clue in the phrase "angry little bells".

Imagine Matthew Parris and chums strolling down a country lane. A car comes up behind. They hear it, they move to the side ("There's a car coming") and the car passes happily by, with maybe a wave. If the driver had honked his horn, they'd consider it unnecessarily rude. A bike, though, makes no noise. Parris and friends are oblivious. What's the cyclist to do? Well, the normal procedure is to tinkle the bell. It alerts the strollers to the need to move to the side. But for many pedestrians - especially pompous self-important ones - there's something peremptory about that "angry little bell" that just annoys them. It's the equivalent in terms of etiquette of the car honking it's horn behind them. It's rude. It seems like a demand that the pedestrians make way, when, really, all things considered, they've as much right to the road as the wretched cyclist. So they move with bad grace, if at all.

That's my experience as a cyclist, coming up behind a group of walkers blocking the path. I'm aware as I do it that ringing my bell sounds somehow rude, peremptory, ungracious. If I had a polite-sounding bell that uttered a cough followed by an "excuse me, I'm terribly sorry, but I wonder if I could just slip by if it's not too much trouble", then I'd use it. Sometimes I'll try and make some noise as I approach, by riding over some gravel or something, so as to alert them, as it were, naturally: anything to avoid the cry and start of surprise you sometimes get, as they assume you're bearing down on them at full speed and are just about to run them down - which means they usually jump right into your path. Interestingly my wife, who comes from a culture, Belgium, where bikes and pedestrians have mingled happily for ages, feels no compunction whatever about ringing her bell loudly and frequently. Here in Britain, though, it's not how we do things: pedestrians don't like it.

Normally I'll say a loud "thanks" as I go past, to keep up the good will. If it were Matthew Parris, though, I'd probably come up with something a little stronger.

Behind the Blue Fence

All quiet in the Olympic Park today.

Just piles of rubble.

Remember the factory that caught fire back in November? Of course you do. Well here it is now.