Mick Hartley

Trim It, But Don't Cut It Off

Further to this, here's Al-Azhar cleric Farahat Said Al-Munji discoursing with what, if one didn't know he was a holy man and therefore above such things, one might almost think was prurient interest on the subject of female circumcision:

The Prophet said that circumcision is obligatory for men, and is noble for women. This means that for the sake of her honor, a woman can be circumcised. This noble act can be either carried out or not. Moreover, this noble act is subject to restrictions nowadays. I once had a discussion with a gynecologist, who said: "A man brought his daughter to me, and I told him she must be circumcised immediately." Why? Because he discovered that her clitoris was so big that it was bound to cause her pain or bother her when she reached puberty, and therefore, she had to be circumcised. He told me that other girls came to him, and he said they should not be circumcised. Why? Because their clitoris was normal in size, and did not bother them. It would be crazy to deal with such a clitoris, which does not protrude to an extent that might bother the woman, when it rubs against her clothing and so on...

Guys, all these things appear in Islamic law. Don't think we are making these things up. It all exists [in religious law] and is determined... We say that if the clitoris is so on and so forth... What am I saying? When the Prophet Muhammad met Umm Salama in Al-Madina – what did he say to her? "Are you still doing what you sued to do in Mecca?" In other words, are you still circumcising girls, like you used to do in Mecca? She said: Yes. He said: "Trim it, but don't cut it off." According to another version, he said: "Shorten it, but don't cut it off." "Trim it" means leaving room for sexual desire. That little bit on top, which looks like the rooster's crest, is shortened, but just the upper part. She needs to cut off the prepuce, the little bit at the top.

And here are some depressing interviews with Egyptian villagers explaining why they still have their daughters circumcised:

Female villager: Circumcision is part of the Sunna of the Prophet. We used to bring a daya, and she would circumcise the children, but when the role of the daya was abolished, we stopped. Now we take our children to the doctor, and he circumcises them.

Interviewer: So it is the doctor who circumcises the girl?

Female villager: Yes. If a girl is not circumcised, she can't stand it. When she is circumcised, she is calm and has self-restraint. The circumcision protects the girl and makes her clam.

[...]

Interviewer: So you think all women should be circumcised to protect their honor.

Female villager: The Prophet said that the men go and wage Jihad for a year. He said that girls should be circumcised so they can bear it for a whole year until the men return.

[...]

Woman: We are all circumcised here. I don't know why you are dealing with the subject of female circumcision.

Interviewer: Why do you think people circumcise their girls?

Woman: For the sake of purity and modesty... So that when the girls grow up, they won't do awful things, but basically, it goes back to education.

Interviewer: Do you think if they are circumcised, they won't do awful things?

Woman: They will anyway.

Cooked Corgi

Art meets cuisine:

Performance artist Mark McGowan has eaten what he claims was a cooked corgi in a protest over the Royal Family's treatment of animals.

McGowan performed the stunt on London radio station Resonance FM, and shared his meal with fellow guest Yoko Ono.

"To me it was, as an art piece, exhilarating," he said after the show.

The artist's protest concerned the alleged mistreatment of a fox during a hunt led by Prince Philip in January. The RSPCA said the fox did not suffer.

McGowan (any relation to Cathy?) has a record of stunningly inappropriate artwork protests. A couple of years back his Running Tap installation poured about 1.4m pints of water down the drain during a period of severe drought, as a protest against, um, water wastage.

He's also vandalised cars (no reason - just being creative), and pushed a monkey nut along the pavement with his nose for seven miles in Westminster as a protest against student debt.

Why he hasn't yet won the Turner Prize must remain one of life's mysteries. In the meantime perhaps Prince Philip, ever a man of style, should counter that his beating of the fox was, as no doubt those present would attest, in itself a work of art.

Eradicating Female Circumcision

Progress in West Africa:

Female circumcision was renounced in 212 villages in Senegal and Gambia May 27, along with weddings featuring child brides.

Some 1,500 inhabitants from the 12 Gambian and 200 Senegalese villages gathered in Diamakouta in southern Senegal near the Gambian border for a ceremony led by Tostan, a local Senegalese nongovernmental organization working to eradicate female circumcision.

Following witness accounts, theater pieces, and dance performances aimed at showing the risks and misery caused by female circumcision and forcing children into wedlock, the ceremony ended with a young girl reading a joint declaration in English, French, and several local languages vowing to halt the practices.

Tostan, which means "breakthrough" in Wolof, the most widely spoken language in Senegal, has been working for a decade to eradicate female circumcision in the country through local actions and education.

Sunday marked the 26th declaration in Senegal vowing to halt female circumcision since 1997.

In all, 2,299 villages, or 45 percent of the 5,000 communities where the rite was still in practice 10 years ago, have vowed to renounce the tradition, according to Tostan.

You Can't at Whim and Fancy Convert from One Religion to Another

Freedom of religion in Malaysia:

Malaysia's highest court has rejected a Muslim convert's six-year battle to be legally recognised as a Christian.

A three-judge panel ruled that only the country's Sharia Court could let Azlina Jailani, now known as Lina Joy, remove the word Islam from her identity card.

Malaysia's constitution guarantees freedom of worship but says all ethnic Malays are Muslim. Under Sharia law, Muslims are not allowed to convert.

Ms Joy said she should not be bound by that law as she is no longer a Muslim.

Malaysia's Chief Justice Ahmad Fairuz Sheikh Abdul Halim said the panel endorsed legal precedents giving Islamic Sharia courts jurisdiction over cases involving Muslims who want to convert.

About 200 protesters shouted "Allah-o-Akbar" (God is great) outside the court when the ruling was announced.

"You can't at whim and fancy convert from one religion to another," Ahmad Fairuz said.

Ms Joy's case has tested the limits of religious freedom in Malaysia.

She started attending church in 1990 and was baptised in 1998.

In 2000, Ms Joy, 42, went to the High Court after the National Registration Department refused to remove "Islam" from the religion column on her identity card. The court said it was a matter for Sharia courts. Tuesday's ruling marked the end of her final appeal.

Ms Joy has been disowned by her family and forced to quit her job. She went into hiding last year. A Muslim lawyer who supported her case received death threats.

Of Pangolins and Swans

In China it's yes to pangolins:

According to wildlife groups, China is the main market for illegally traded exotic species, which are eaten or used in traditional medicine. Pangolins are in great demand because their meat is consider a delicacy and their scales are thought to help mothers breastfeed their babies.

As a result of demand, the pangolin populations of China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have been wiped out. With traders moving further and further south, the animal is declining even in its last habitats in Java, Sumatra and the Malaysian peninsula. It is a similar story for many species of turtle, tortoise, frog and snake.

Despite the ban on pangolins, many restaurants offer their meat. The Chaoxing restaurant in Shenzhen said yesterday that pangolin was available but was only suitable for large dining parties.

"The animal is very big - about 10kg," said a waitress contacted by telephone. "We serve it in hotpot. That is the tastiest way."

According to recent reports in the Chinese media, the price of 1kg of pangolin served in Guangdong or Yunnan is between 600 and 800 yuan per kilogram (between £43 and £50).

A Guangdong chef interviewed last year in the Beijing Science and Technology Daily described how to cook a pangolin.

"We keep them alive in cages until the customer makes an order. Then we hammer them unconscious, cut their throats and drain the blood. It is a slow death. We then boil them to remove the scales. We cut the meat into small pieces and use it to make a number of dishes, including braised meat and soup. Usually the customers take the blood home with them afterwards."

But no to swans:

A farmer in central China was sentenced to 13 years in jail after being convicted of buying state-protected swans and selling the meat, state media reported Friday.

Zhang Yuelin, 48, from Henan province, was accused of buying 38 dead swans and one kilogram of swan down in October and November of last year. He plucked the swans and hid them in his backyard, later selling 37 of the carcasses for 3,000 yuan (about US$392, €291), the official Xinhua News Agency said.

[via A Welsh View]

The Alternative Argument

I missed this on Sunday, from Tony Blair, having a tendency to skip past articles by politicians, but it's worth quoting (via):

I was stopped by someone the other week who said it was not surprising there was so much terrorism in the world when we invaded their countries (meaning Afghanistan and Iraq). No wonder Muslims felt angry.

When he had finished, I said to him: tell me exactly what they feel angry about. We remove two utterly brutal and dictatorial regimes; we replace them with a United Nations-supervised democratic process and the Muslims in both countries get the chance to vote, which incidentally they take in very large numbers. And the only reason it is difficult still is because other Muslims are using terrorism to try to destroy the fledgling democracy and, in doing so, are killing fellow Muslims.

What’s more, British troops are risking their lives trying to prevent the killing. Why should anyone feel angry about us? Why aren’t they angry about the people doing the killing? The odd thing about the conversation is that I could tell it was the first time he had even heard the alternative argument.

This extremism can be defeated. But it will be defeated only by recognising that we have not created it; it cannot be negotiated with; pandering to its sense of grievance will only encourage it; and only by confronting it, the methods and the ideas, will we win.

Berman on Ramadan

There's an excellent - but lengthy - article by Paul Berman in the latest New Republic, which starts out as a look at Tariq Ramadan and his presentation in the media as a model of moderate Islam, and ends up with the extraordinary attacks by supposedly left-liberal writers on the "enlightenment fundamentalism" of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Impossible to extract from it, really:

How did this happen? The equanimity on the part of some well-known intellectuals and journalists in the face of Islamist death threats so numerous as to constitute a campaign; the equanimity in regard to stoning women to death; the journalistic inability even to acknowledge that women's rights have been at stake in the debates over Islamism; the inability to recall the problems faced by Muslim women in European hospitals; the inability to acknowledge how large has been the role of a revived anti-Semitism; the striking number of errors of understanding and even of fact that have entered into the journalistic presentations of Tariq Ramadan and his ideas; the refusal to discuss with any frankness the role of Ramadan's family over the years; the accidental endorsement in the Guardian [by Timothy Garton Ash] of the great-uncle who finds something admirable in the September 11 attacks--what can possibly account for this string of bumbles, timidities, gaffes, omissions, miscomprehensions, and slanders?

Two developments account for it. The first development is the unimaginable rise of Islamism since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second is terrorism.

Looking for Higgs

I like to think of myself as a scientifically-literate kind of person, generally supportive of, if not downright enthusiastic about, pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge. So why do I find myself so totally underwhelmed by the CERN project?

This is science on a gargantuan scale - a device the size of London Underground's Circle Line, engineered to one-billionth of a metre accuracy, which will probe the universe's tiniest constituents and study the Big Bang birth of the cosmos 13 billion years ago.

To this end, thousands of physicists and engineers have laboured for 10 years to set up the most expensive, most complicated scientific experiment ever attempted.

For a start, there's the title of the article: "Looking for God". It's standard practice now for physicists to talk about God particles, and the mind of God. Frank Tipler's even famously written about the physics of immortality. Which suggests to me not that they're dealing with the great profundities of the universe, as they'd clearly like us to think, but that they don't really have a clue what they're talking about.

Then there's the money. Billions of pounds. I wouldn't want to insist that all scientific research should be of demonstrable relevance to the improvement of people's lives, but this does seem to go to some kind of boys' toys science-for-science's-sake extreme:

Scientists at the Fermilab laboratory in Illinois have been hinting that their ageing accelerator, the Tevatron, may be on the threshold of uncovering the Holy Grail of modern physics, the Higgs boson, or "the God particle", as it is sometimes known.

The existence of the Higgs boson was proposed by the Edinburgh University physicist Peter Higgs in 1964 to explain why objects - including people - in our universe have mass. The Higgs interacts with other particles, thus making them heavy, by clinging to them like treacle, he suggested. The idea caught on and has become the cornerstone of modern physics. But no matter how hard scientists have tried, they have failed to get a single glimpse of a Higgs. Such an omission is embarrassing, and scientists badly want to put it right.

Proof of the particle's existence would, if nothing else, confirm that their theories about the universe are broadly right.

"It's probably the closest to God that we'll get," admits Jos Engelen, Cern's chief scientist.

Getting close to God and finding the Higgs was a prime reason for constructing the LHC.

Getting close to God? Well I'm sorry, but that's not want I want to hear when it comes to justifying such enormous expense in the name of science. So...they did these hugely complicated calculations, and the actual results differed from the predicted by about 0.001753 percent, with the result that someone proposed this particle, the Higgs Boson, to explain the difference (the details may be a little hazy here, but you get the point). So will the new results from this colossally expensive piece of equipment exactly match the new - with added Higgs - predictions? Very unlikely. There'll be a discrepancy of, oooh, about 0.0000357219 percent (with such wonderful shiny new technology all results will be to at least 10 decimal places.) So what then? Maybe some bright young physicist will immortalise himself (and no apologies for the gender-specific pronoun) by proposing a new particle, the Werninghaus Meson, which exists as a doughnut shaped particle in the 8th dimension, and clings to the Higgs Boson like - well, metaphors aren't so helpful when you get to this level of sophistication, but imagine sugar-coating on a gyroscope oscillating a million times a second inside an ice-cream cone full of time-travelling wasps the size of a billionth of an electron and you get some kind of an idea of it.

How to prove the existence of the Werninghaus Meson? - what physicists are already calling, no really this one definitely is the God particle. A much larger, more expensive piece of equipment will be required, this time the size of the M25, and engineered to one billion-billionth of a metre's accuracy. It'll provide employment for a whole new generation of physicists wandering around underground in white coats clutching clipboards like in all those Bond films.

Perched on plywood seats at long Formica tables, earnest young researchers swig beer and argue over the minutiae of particle physics. As the LHC reaches readiness, the air of expectation is palpable.

"In a way we are in a perfect situation," says Dr Jo Cole of Britain's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and a leading worker in the CMS experiment hall.

"Either we prove the theoreticians are right and help in the garnering of Nobel prizes. Or we will show they were wrong. We will have found something else that is new and exciting, and will have overturned accepted science."

The intriguing point is that most Cern scientists, if given the choice, would probably plump for the "wrong" scenario. Yes, it would be great to beat the Americans to the Higgs, but it would be even better if Cern found that Higgs did not exist at all, or that it came with a whole new class of sister particles that had never been predicted by theorists.

You see? They can't lose. It's a scam.

Says Evans: "I will happily bet a month's salary, which admittedly is not very much, that we will have thrown up whole new fields of physics within two years of switching on the LHC."

It's not a machine for discovering truths about the universe: it's a machine for generating employment for physicists. And the guy's even got the nerve to drop in a complaint about his salary.

[On a similar theme, here's what I wrote a while back.]

Assad Triumph

Bashar must be pleased: his vote has gone up from 97.29 percent in 2000, when he took over from his father, to 97.62 percent now.

With parliament having unanimously approved Assad's candidature and with vocal opponents of the regime locked up, the result was never in doubt...

With Syria under emergency law since the Baath party came to power in 1963 and opposition parties banned, authorities have clamped down on pro-democracy activists, drawing criticism from Washington and the European Union.

Kamal Labwani, accused of contacts with the United States, was sentenced to 12 years in jail, the harshest sentence since Bashar Al Assad took power.

Update: here's Barry Rubin on Syrian foreign policy (via Michael J. Totten):

In the Middle East, violence is not the result of poor communication but a tool for political gain. Nothing proves that point better than Syria's successful use of violence and terrorism to promote its interests. No amount of dialogue is going to change that reality.

Now Syria is using a Palestinian front group to start a war inside Lebanon, just as it employed another Lebanese client organization, Hezbollah, to battle Israel last year. The Syrian government's message is simple: Lebanon will know no peace until it again becomes our satellite.

In two years, 15 major terrorist attacks targeted Lebanon's independent-minded leaders. Most notorious was the assassination of popular former prime minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005, which also killed 21 bystanders...

What is less understood is how the regime's radical strategy is used at home and why this makes it impossible to gain anything from engaging with Syria. Like other Middle Eastern dictatorships, Syria's rulers face a paradox. How to stay in power after failing so completely? The economy is a mess, there is little freedom, and the regime is dominated by a small Alawite minority which is historically secular.

Since taking power in 2000 on his father's death, Bashar has met this challenge. He sends terrorists against Iraq, Israel, Lebanon and even the U.S. military, but nobody retaliates in kind against him. At home, the regime sounds increasingly Islamist; abroad it is the biggest sponsor of radical Islamist groups in the region.

Bashar has even declared a new doctrine he calls "Resistance," which combines Arab nationalism and Islamism. The West's goal, he claims, is to enslave the Arabs. The mistake made by other Arabs was to abandon war. "The world will not be concerned with us and our interests, feelings, and rights unless we are powerful," and victory requires "adventure and recklessness." Any who disagree are mere "political mercenaries" and "parasites."

This mandatory radicalism ensures that Syria interprets western concessions and confidence-building measures as acts of surrender, proving its strategy is working. Years of dialogue and numerous visits by secretaries of state could not even get Syria to close the terrorist offices in Damascus, much less make any policy changes.

Anwar al-Bunni, a democratic dissident, explained in 2003 that the only thing that held back the regime was fear of America. It was only due to "the fright it gave our rulers, that we reformers stand a chance here."

But once U.S. members of Congress flocked to Damascus, offering words of praise and advocating detente, Bunni was proven right. He was sentenced on trumped-up charges to five years' imprisonment.

What Researchers Found

From a Time article on the potential dangers of herbal supplements:

Researchers found that the most common mistake users of herbal remedies make is believing that the substances they take actually work.

Well yes. Otherwise, you know, they probably wouldn't bother taking them.