Mick Hartley

Dylan 100

Paul at Setting the Woods on Fire compiles his 100 Favourite Dylan Songs. They're in alphabetical order, in case you're wondering, as I did for a minute, what "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is doing at number one.

Nothing much to argue with, especially from someone who thinks, as I do, that "Highway 61 Revisited" is Dylan's greatest album. The only omission that occurs to me at the moment is the wonderful "Please Mrs Henry" from the Basement Tapes, but really what's remarkable is the depth of the Dylan catalogue. 100 songs, and there's still plenty of room for argument. As Paul writes, "putting this list together has reinforced my opinion that Bob is the greatest popular music artist of the 20th century".

Religious or Cultural?

Does Islam justify honour kilings? There's nothing in the Koran specifically endorsing them, and Muslim apologists will blame a tribal medieval mentality rather than Islam itself. And certainly honour killings aren't restricted to Muslims. Yet the majority of cases do occur within Muslim societies. Here's Supna Zaidi at Pajamas Media:

An honor killing is defined as the murder of a girl or woman who has allegedly committed an act that has shamed and embarrassed her family. For the family to show its community that it has reasserted control, the woman is killed. Thus, “harm to reputation” is a partial or complete defense to murder. No passage in the Koran discusses honor killings, but Muslim clerics justify them and secular Muslims either do not punish them or pass laws to mitigate punishment for them. With this, Muslims make honor killings a part of Islam.

Honor killings are justified under Islam in some Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia. For example, tenth-grade textbooks teach Saudi children that it is permissible to kill adulterers. In April 2008, a girl was killed by her father for talking to a boy on Facebook, an online social networking website. A leading Saudi cleric, Sheikh Ali al-Maliki, was outraged that girls had access to such websites where they could post pictures of themselves and otherwise “behave badly,” but showed no concern over the girl actually killed.

Honor killings are justified as a necessary part of culture in other Muslim countries such as Jordan, which is technically a secular kingdom with a representative parliament. In 2001 King Abdallah presented a bill outlining stiff penalties for honor killings, but parliament rejected it, stating, “it [punishing honor killings] would encourage adultery and create new social problems.” Four years later, honor killings accounted for one-third of all violent deaths in Jordan in 2005, where perpetrators received as little as six months in prison under the penal code....

The more secular, educated elites of Muslim countries may not be so backward as to commit such crimes themselves, but they know it is happening and prefer to look the other way. The upper and middle classes have a responsibility as civic and political leaders to defend women through education, the law, and enforcement of meaningful punishments....

If moderates reinforce the line that honor killings are “dripping” with Allah or are part of Eastern culture, those prone to such violent acts will continue on the same path. No Muslim will claim theological authority to enforce change from the mosque... But if everyone starts pointing the finger at Muslim society collectively and asks, “why do you let this happen?” maybe change will finally come.

Such reorientation away from divine “Islam” to fallible, human “Muslims” would move violence such as honor killings from the margins of society into the spotlight.

This will allow the current tangential debate of whether such killings are religious or cultural to finally end so we can focus on the girls who continue to be killed daily.

In the background to this discussion of course, though not discussed in the article, is the degree to which the institutionalised subjugation of women in Islam is reinforced by, and reinforces, the "tribal" notion of family honour and women-as-property that leads to honour killings.

Embarrassing Science

The psychologists are at it again: doing brain scans while they get subjects to perform various tasks, then claiming that they're making important discoveries. This time it's embarrassing. No, really:

The moment when dad gets up to strut his stuff on the dancefloor is a toe-curling ordeal familiar to every teenager. While mothers and fathers take pride in watching their adolescent offspring sing, dance or perform, it is a source of acute embarrassment when the roles are reversed.

An explanation has now been advanced by scientists. The adolescent brain seems to process the emotions of embarrassment and guilt differently from those of adults. The first brain-scan study to investigate the issue, conducted at University College London, identified clear differences in brain activity when teenagers and adults were asked to think about social emotions.

While both teens and adults use the same parts of the brain when processing emotions such as disgust and fear, which do not involve the opinions of other people, their scans show pronounced contrasts when they think about embarrassment or guilt.

Adolescents engage a particular part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex when considering these feelings, while adults do not, according to the study, led by Stephanie Burnett and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore.

The findings, which are published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, offer a potential explanation for the way children who, when younger, would have revelled in exuberant parental behaviour start to blush at it after puberty....

The differences in activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in processing social emotions and planning, might explain this. “If teenagers have more activity in this part of the brain when they are thinking about being embarrassed, it might explain why they are more susceptible to embarrassment,” Dr Blakemore said. She added that it remained uncertain whether the brain activity was a cause or an effect of heightened sensitivity to embarrassment.

They don't know if it's cause or effect. They don't know if it has any relevance whatsoever. But that doesn't stop them making all kinds of dubious claims about having found an "explanation" for adolescent embarrassment. This is bad science: they have no theory to test, no alternative explanations which would produce different results. At the moment this is just raw data - a correlation between measured brain activity and various tasks performed by their subjects. It may be of significance; it may not. They don't know anywhere near enough about how the workings of the brain to say.

And it's so reductionist: to feel entitled, when they find a higher blood flow to a different part of the brain for people of different ages, to talk about explanations for behaviour. Even if they knew far more about the workings of the brain than they do, they're still nowhere near providing an explanation for why adolescents get embarrassed so much more easily than young children or adults. They might just as well cite a greater propensity for adolescent cheeks to get flushed - with detailed measurements of capillary blood flow - as an explanation.

What they may have found, at best, is some evidence that adolescents think and worry more about the possibility of social embarrassment than adults. Astonishing news to psychologists maybe, but hardly to the rest of us. But because it's supposedly "hard" data - from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) - they imagine that somehow they're looking at the inner workings of the mind, and so that justifies all this blather.

See here for some doubts about the merits of fMRI technology in psychology, and here on the relentless growth of neurobollocks.

The People He Hates Most

From MEMRI, here's Hamas MP Fathi Hammad, speaking on Al-Aqsa TV:

The approaching victory, about which we are talking, is not limited to Palestine. You are creating the ethos of victory for all Arabs and Muslims, and Allah willing, even on the global level. Why? Because Allah has chosen you to fight the people He hates most – the Jews. Allah said: "You shall find the worst enemies of the believers to be the Jews and the polytheists." In other words, the Jews, who number 15 million all over the world, are equivalent to 4.5 billion infidels in their corruption and their struggle against the religion of Islam. Therefore, our heroic prisoners who were arrested for killing Jews should know that by the grace of Allah, killing a single Jew is the same as killing 30 million Jews. Therefore, the reward of our martyrs is great, and your reward is also great.

Not quite clear on the logic there. Presumably he means, killing a Jew is the same as killing 30 million infidels.

You can imagine the Hamas maths class: "If 15 million Jews are equivalent to 4.5 billion infidels in their corruption and their struggle against the religion of Islam, then killing a single Jew is the same as killing how many infidels?"

I make it 300 using the US billion (a thousand million) and 300,000 using the UK billion (a million million), so unless there's a special Islamic billion of 100 million million (which is, I suppose, entirely possible) then he's miscalculated. Which is maybe why he went into politics rather than pursuing an academic career.

We Successfully Eliminated Our Target

The Taleban must be very pleased with themselves:

Gunmen in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar have killed the country's most prominent policewoman, officials say.

Lt-Col Malalai Kakar, head of Kandahar's department of crimes against women, was shot in her car as she was about to leave for work.

Her son was also wounded in the attack, and is said to be seriously injured.

Taleban rebels, who banned women from joining the police when they were in power, said they had carried out the shooting.

"We killed Malalai Kakar," a Taleban spokesman told AFP news agency.

"She was our target, and we successfully eliminated our target."

A woman police officer - it's unthinkable.

A Spiritual Consolation in a Godless World

The Mark Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern is getting a lot of attention. Everyone agrees, of course, that he's one of the modern masters. His reputation is such that it's inconceivable that a self-respecting art critic could admit that they didn't "get" him - though Rachel Campbell-Johnston of the Times comes perilously close:

I was nervous about going to this show. Mark Rothko, after all, is an icon of Modernism. If there is such a thing as a cult artist, then he is probably it. Important people make pilgrimages to his chapel in Houston. They come to pay homage to his murals at the Tate. And they stand in grave silence before his empty expanses with looks on their faces that bespeak lofty thoughts.

What if nothing happened when I paid my own visit to a new show of his work at Tate Modern? What if I found that I didn't feel anything? [...]

So, does she feel anything? Well...

Rothko is exploring the ways in which the slightest inflections of tone, the subtlest modulations in scale, the smallest changes in proportion, the faintest adjustments of balance, can affect our perception of what we see. His canvases are not messages from their creator. They can't be decoded. Rothko refused explanations. And no wonder. Few works are as open - and as closed - to explanation as these late abstracts. Attempts at description turn to tangles on your tongue. “Silence is so accurate” as the artist said. Perhaps we should see ourselves less as spectators than as participants.

That is why you should not worry about “getting” Rothko. You may at first be aware only of your own body, awkwardly stranded in a difficult place. But this acute consciousness is part of a heightened awareness. By tuning your perceptual processes they help you to see what lies beyond the surface world.

You don't necessarily need Rothko to show you this. But how often in our frenetic modern world do we take the time to consider anything with such careful, scrupulous, meditative intensity? Rothko creates the occasion. His works are a bit like the visual equivalents of Zen koans.

And what if you feel nothing in front of his canvases? Well, that's not nothing because to feel nothing is one of the strongest feelings you can have.

Hmm. I think the answer is, no.

Both Roger Scruton and Waldemar Januszczak try to find something fresh and interesting to say, but it's not easy. Here we have these monumental pictures with slabs of colour melting into each other. What can you say? Is this someone with a very nice eye for the way that browns and purples go together, or is it something much, much more? There are an awful lot of people with a heavy investment in the latter - but how to explain it, put it into words?

Well, there is an all-purpose idea that fills up the void in cases such as this: spirituality. All the critics agree that he's incredibly important as an artist, but no one can quite say why. So...his pictures must be transcendental, religious - or, as this Sunday Times article neatly puts it, "a spiritual consolation in a godless world".

Yes, six "people of faith" offer their considered opinions on the subject of Rothko's paintings. Why? Well, presumably it's because these people are professionals; they're practiced in the business of saying nothing of substance in a deeply portentous way, all the while taking themselves very seriously indeed. This perfectly suits the general flavour of Rothko criticism.

Rukhsana Ahmad is my favourite:

Rothko’s symmetrical squares and straight lines remind me of the geometry and symmetry I was schooled to look for in Islamic art. Muslims believe divinity is exclusive to God. He is separate and different from humankind, at an infinite distance from us, yet equally near. They do not imagine or represent God in any human form; instead, Islamic art uses the abstraction and symmetry of geometry to contemplate divinity and transcend material reality. It is a form of abstraction - just as Rothko uses abstraction.

I find his symmetry pleasing. It speaks to me. Likewise, his use of colour has an emotive force. I am passionate about colour, perhaps because of my eastern side, though, for me, the intensity of Rothko’s colour cuts against the meditative quality that is integral to mystical experience.

Muslims believe divinity is exclusive to God. Ah. Good. That makes sense.

He is separate and different from humankind, at an infinite distance from us, yet equally near. Really? That's absolutely fascinating, Rukhsana. More tea?

The Rev Charles Pickstone isn't bad either:

Rothko was deeply interested in religion and hoped his paintings would enable people to experience a sense of awe. There is, at present, no satisfactory image or analogy for God available to the West after the vaporisation of the whole humanist tradition in the smoke of Hiroshima and the chimneys of Auschwitz. So a whole generation has grown up unchallenged by articulate religious expression. For them, Rothko’s paintings, with their lack of line and consequent terrible dumbness, resonate with a palpable but unnameable sense of presence. For me, though, the paintings are the tablets of stone of Mount Sinai, but with the commandments lost. They are icons of the absence of God. They awaken in us our buried grief for a childhood God.

The vaporisation of the whole humanist tradition in the smoke of Hiroshima and the chimneys of Auschwitz. That's us humanists told. I imagine God made those things happen just to show how empty the whole humanist tradition really is.

Rothko’s paintings...resonate with a palpable but unnameable sense of presence. Indeed they do, Reverend. Indeed they do.

A whole post on writings about Rothko and I've not once mentioned Rorschach inkblot tests. That's self-discipline for you, eh?

Utmost Respect for Islam

This whole sorry saga has an air of weary predictability:

Scotland Yard's counter-terrorist command yesterday foiled an alleged plot by Islamic extremists to kill the publisher of a forthcoming novel featuring sexual encounters between the Prophet Muhammad and his child bride.

Early yesterday armed undercover officers arrested three men after a petrol bomb was pushed through the door of the north London home of the book’s publisher.

The Metropolitan police said the target of the assassination plot, the Dutch publisher Martin Rynja, had not been injured.

The suspected terror gang was being followed by undercover police and the fire was quickly put out after the fire brigade smashed down the front door.

The foiled terrorist attack recalled the death threats and uproar 20 years ago following the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, and the worldwide protests that followed the publication in a Danish newspaper in 2005 of cartoons deemed offensive to Islam, in which more than 100 people died.

Security officials believe Rynja was targeted for assassination because his firm, Gibson Square, is preparing to publish a romantic novel about Aisha, child bride of the Prophet Muhammad. The Jewel of Medina, by the first-time American author Sherry Jones, describes an imaginary sex scene between the prophet and his 14-year-old wife.

It was withdrawn from publication in America last month after its publisher there, Random House, said it feared a violent reaction by “a small radical segment” of Muslims. It said “credible and unrelated sources” had warned that the book could incite violence.

Random House reacted after Islamic scholars objected to its contents, saying it treated the wife of the Prophet as a sex object. One of them, Denise Spellberg, of the University of Texas at Austin, described the novel as “soft-core pornography”, referring to a scene in which Muhammad consummates his marriage to Aisha. She called it “a declaration of war” and a “national security issue”.

At the time, her warnings were dismissed by the author. “Anyone who reads the book will not be offended,” said Jones. “I wrote the book with the utmost respect for Islam.” However, Jones admitted receiving death threats after the book was withdrawn.

There's something almost too naive about the author, Sherry Jones. And her agent:

Yesterday, Natasha Kern, Jones’s agent, said she was shocked to learn of the attack. She said the book had been misinterpreted by its critics and did not contain sex scenes, as had been alleged.

“I honestly believe that if people read the book they will see it is not disrespectful of Muhammad, and moderate Muslims will not be offended. I don’t want anyone to risk their lives but we could never imagine that there would be some madmen who would do something like this. I’m so sad about this act of terrorism. Moderate Muslims will suffer because of a few radicals.”

Of course the principle is clear: no book should be stopped from publication by threats and fear of violence. I find it hard to believe, though, that  they "could never imagine that there would be some madmen who would do something like this". Where on earth have they been living these past few years?

The Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults

Trying - and failing - to stop the western cultural invasion:

Iranian children seem to prefer the popular western dolls, Barbie and Ken, rather than the Islamic Dara and Sara dolls, that were created to instill Islamic values.

"This data is a clear sign of a failed policy adopted by the government with the aim of stopping the western cultural invasion," said website 'Tabnak', which is close to Mohsen Rezaii, former commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

The Dara and Sara dolls are modestly dressed and wear Islamic garments, but have failed to make a name for themselves unlike their 'western' counterparts, Barbie and Ken, which can be found in one out of every two Iranian children's rucksacks and notebooks, claimed Tabnak.

Dara and Sara were marketed by the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, a government agency with links to the Ministry of Education.

Hackney Mean Streets

Modern graffiti, eh? Not like the old days.

 

Grounds for Cautious Optimism

David T at Harry's Place doubts the Eurabia crowd who see Europe doomed to a Sharia-dominated future. Here's another reason for optimism, in today's Times. This initiative is actually coming from British Muslims:

Muslim spiritual leaders could be denounced publicly by their own community as part of a campaign to expose imams whose silence on domestic abuse is leading to women being burnt, lashed and raped in the name of Islam.

Muslim scholars are to present the Government with the names of imams who are alleged by members of their own communities to have refused to help abused women. Imams are also accused of refusing to speak out against domestic abuse in their sermons because they fear losing their clerical salaries and being sacked for broaching a “taboo” subject.

Some of Britain's most prominent moderate imams and female Muslim leaders have backed the campaign, urging the Home Office to vet more carefully Islamic spiritual leaders coming to Britain to weed out hardliners. A four-month inquiry by the Centre for Islamic Pluralism into domestic abuse has uncovered harrowing tales of women being raped, burnt by cigarettes and lashed with belts by their husbands, who believe it is their religious right to mistreat them.

At least 40 female Muslim victims and many social workers from northern England - including Bradford, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham - were interviewed as part of the inquiry, which is expected to be published next month.

During its investigation the organisation - the British arm of a longestablished US think-tank - received a number of complaints about imams who had turned a blind eye to cases of domestic violence, many of whom are followers of Wahabbism, a puritanical interpretation of the Koran espoused by Osama bin Laden.

There have also been similar complaints about clerics from the Tablighi Jamaat movement, which is accused of radicalising young British Muslims with its orthodox teachings.

The organisation's international director, the Muslim scholar Irfan al-Alawi, told The Times that he would be forwarding the names of the imams to the Home Office, which has promised to investigate the allegations. He called for them to be stripped of any government grants that they may be receiving. He is also seeking legal advice about exposing the imams at public lectures and forums throughout the country.

Here's Shiraz Maher:

It might seem perverse, but there are grounds for cautious optimism in today's revelations about domestic violence in the Muslim community, because they come from within the community. Irfan al-Alawi, an Islamic scholar and director of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism, is taking the brave decision to “name and shame” imams who condone violence against women.

This is the kind of response from within the community that we need if these problems are to be eradicated.

Worryingly, it seems that among those who, by their silence or their failure to act, are condoning domestic violence may be the recipients of government grants intended to promote community cohesion. If so, the Government must consider its role in all this. It cannot wade into the quagmire of Islamic theology, nor should it. But it can facilitate those grassroots initiatives that are building the consensus for a genuinely progressive and liberal British Islam.

Getting this wrong can have serious repercussions. Any official representation immediately lends organisations credibility for their views by suggesting that the Government regards them as both legitimate and valid. It also establishes the group as acceptable leaders for the community by making it an interlocutor for grassroots community engagement.

So far the Government has failed to choose the right partners. After the 7/7 terrorist attacks, the Government created the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board, which is supposed to regulate prayer halls and preachers. But two of its four stakeholders are the Muslim Association of Britain and the Muslim Council of Britain, both reactionary Islamist groups regarded by ordinary Muslims as being part of the problem....

Grassroots change within the Muslim community is happening, albeit belatedly. New voices are emerging to challenge the established narrative and to recast a form of Islam that is truly progressive.

Empowering them will be vital to ensuring their success. The Government has struggled so far to develop a coherent set of criteria to identify suitable partners. What is clear, however, is that an objective yardstick is needed with which to measure the groups it chooses to engage with and promote before any more harm is done.