Mick Hartley

New Ways to Read the Qur'an

The third International Congress on Islamic Feminism has just taken place in Barcelona. Here's Asma Barlas, one of the participants, in a piece entitled "Towards a feminist view of Islam":

Some of us think of ourselves as "believing women", and, among other things, we hold that as long as Muslims continue to read gender inequalities into the Qur'an, we will not be able to ensure gender equality in Muslim societies. What we need, then, are new ways to read the Qur'an.

Well.....good luck with that. As that Irishman is supposed to have said, if I were you I wouldn't start from here.

Objectifying the Subjective

More psychologists playing around with brain scans:

Love and hate are intimately linked within the human brain, according to a study that has discovered the biological basis for the two most intense emotions.

Discovered the biological basis, in this case, means found parts of the brain that were active in both cases. Doesn't sound as good though.

Scientists studying the physical nature of hate have found that some of the nervous circuits in the brain responsible for it are the same as those that are used during the feeling of romantic love – although love and hate appear to be polar opposites.

Well that's a paradox and no mistake.

A study using a brain scanner to investigate the neural circuits that become active when people look at a photograph of someone they say they hate has found that the "hate circuit" shares something in common with the love circuit.

Could it be - just a thought - that rather than a "hate circuit" and a "love circuit", which, extraordinarily, share something in common, they've found an "emotion circuit"? Too late though: the psychologists are already out of the blocks and halfway up the track with their excited speculations:

The findings could explain why both hate and romantic love can result in similar acts of extreme behaviour – both heroic and evil – said Professor Semir Zeki of University College London, who led the study published in the on-line journal PloS ONE.

"Hate is often considered to be an evil passion that should, in a better world, be tamed, controlled and eradicated. Yet to the biologist, hate is a passion that is of equal interest to love," Professor Zeki said.

"Like love, it is often seemingly irrational and can lead individual to heroic and evil deeds. How can two opposite sentiments lead to the same behaviour?"

How indeed. No doubt they'll find the answer by doing more - lots more - brain scans. And, in case someone's wondering if all this research has any practical applications, why, certainly it has:

"Interestingly, the activity of some of these structures in response to a hated face is proportional in strength to the declared intensity of hate, thus allowing the subjective state of hate to be objectively quantified. This finding may have implications in criminal cases."

Oh dear. "Yes, there were signs of a break-in, m'lud, but given the defendant's brain scan showed strong levels of hatred towards the deceased, of a strength correlated with murderous impulses, we maintain that they were a red herring, and that the defendant is guilty as charged.

But, surely, she was his wife. He says he loved her. Can you be sure it's hatred you're measuring?

Absolutely. This is a thoroughly objective and scientific measurement. A brain scan doesn't lie."

[Previous brain scan larks here and here]

A New Vision for Our Times

It's a commonplace among literary critics - or at least it used to be in those happy days pre-post-modernism - that in our godless age writers have taken over from the clergy as the voice of our conscience. In this opinion piece in the Times today, novelist Ben Okri not only puts himself forward as a new moral voice for these troubled times, he even manages to echo that peculiarly pious yet vacuous style that I remember from Anglican clergymen in the pulpit, back in the days of my youth when I was regularly dragged off to church:

The crisis affecting the economy is a crisis of our civilisation. The values that we hold dear are the very same that got us to this point. The meltdown in the economy is a harsh metaphor of the meltdown of some of our value systems. A house is on fire; we see flames coming through the windows on the second floor and we think that that is where the fire is raging. In fact it is raging elsewhere.

For decades poets and artists have been crying in the wilderness about the wasteland, the debacle, the apocalypse. But apparent economic triumph has deafened us to these warnings. Now it is necessary to look at this crisis as a symptom of things gone wrong in our culture.

Individualism has been raised almost to a religion, appearance made more important than substance. Success justifies greed, and greed justifies indifference to fellow human beings. We thought that our actions affected only our own sphere but the way that appalling decisions made in America have set off a domino effect makes it necessary to bring new ideas to the forefront of our civilisation. The most important is that we are more connected than we suspected. A visible and invisible mesh links economies and cultures around the globe to the great military and economic centres.

The only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the values that we have lived by in the past 30 years. It wouldn't do just to improve the banking system - we need to redesign the whole edifice.

There ought to be great cries in the land, great anger. But there is a strange silence. Why? Because we are all implicated. We have drifted to this dark unacceptable place together. We took the success of our economy as proof of the rightness of its underlying philosophy. We are now at a crossroad. Our future depends not on whether we get through this, but on how deeply and truthfully we examine its causes.

And so it goes on....and on, and on. We need a new vision apparently, though what it should be remains unclear. Will Okri provide it for us? (And what were those "appalling decisions made in America"?) 

If we need a new vision for our times, what might it be? A vision that arises from necessity or one that orientates us towards a new future? I favour the latter. It is too late to react only from necessity. One of our much neglected qualities is our creative ability to reshape our world. Our planet is under threat. We need a new one-planet thinking.

Could you perhaps be a little more specific?

We must bring back into society a deeper sense of the purpose of living. The unhappiness in so many lives ought to tell us that success alone is not enough. Material success has brought us to a strange spiritual and moral bankruptcy....

We can enter a new future only by reconnecting what is best in us, and adapting it to our times. Education ought to be more global; we need to restore the pre-eminence of character over show, and wisdom over cleverness. We need to be more a people of the world.

Wise words indeed. But will Okri, like so many prophets of the past, be merely a voice crying in the wilderness? Or will we listen to him, and learn to reconnect with what is best in us? Will we bring back into society a deeper sense of the purpose of living, engage in some one-planet thinking, make education more global, restore the pre-eminence of character over show and wisdom over cleverness, and cherish a vision that orientates us towards a new future? Look deep into your hearts, for there you will find the answer - the answer that our planet so desperately needs.

And now, hymn 234, "Lead Kindly Light"....

Stinging like a Bee

I've never shared what seems to be a general adulation, particularly among ageing sports writers, for Cassius Clay, aka Muhammed Ali. In particular his taunting of his opponents, particularly Joe Frazier, always struck me as offensive - as confirmed here:

It was one of the most iconic boxing matches of all time, and the culmination of an intense rivalry between the fight legends Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Yet the so-called Thriller in Manila, as argued in a new documentary of the same name, was marred by the racist antics and erratic behaviour of Ali, whose relentless abuse of Frazier became strangely obsessional and ultimately revealed the dark heart of a beloved sporting hero....

During Ali’s three-year ban from boxing because of his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, it was Frazier who offered him support, financially and professionally (by appealing to boxing commissions to revoke their withdrawal of Ali’s licence). But after Ali’s return to the ring in 1970 the relationship soured, and by their third and final fight in Manila in October 1975 Ali’s traditional pre-fight antics had become ugly, obsessive (he stalked Frazier’s hotel even when the media weren’t around), and defined by sinister racist rhetoric — Ali’s team caricatured Frazier as a gorilla, wore gorilla T-shirts and regularly humiliated him in public, while Ali called him an “Uncle Tom”, a “flat-nose”, and implied that he was intellectually inferior.

“He’s the other type negro, he’s not like me!” Ali famously said, during his Parkinson interview in 1974, alluding to his status as a racially superior African American. “There are two types of slaves, and Joe Frazier is worse than you [pointing to Parky] to me!”

There's also this:

The smoking gun in the avalanche of racial abuse is a short interview that Ali gave to New Zealand television in 1975, just weeks before the fight. Here, as Ali espouses his strident racial beliefs (including a complete separation of the races), he boasts about attending a Ku Klux Klan rally. “It was a hell of a scene, all those white hoods, the bonfire, and me on the platform talking,” he begins, with something approaching pride. “I says: ‘Black people should marry their own women!’ I says: ‘Blue birds with blue birds, red birds with red birds, pigeons with pigeons, eagles with eagles! God didn’t make no mistake!’ And they say [imitates cheering]: ‘Yeahhhhh! Now you teach the rest of them niggers and everything’ll be all right!’ ”

That kind of talk was in the air back in the Seventies - see this post of a couple of weeks back about Marcus Garvey and the rhetoric of racial separation in Rastafarianism. It was all part of that kind of radical chic / shock tactics that Ali seemed to thrive on. I don't think it's worth taking particularly seriously, or that it deserves the kind of condemnation that you'd want to give to comparative stuff coming from a white guy. But it does lend weight to the idea, as the article suggests, that it's Joe Frazier rather than Ali who deserves more of our respect.

On Increasing the Cement Production

Just in time for Christmas:

The Workers' Party of Korea Publishing House brought out "Complete Collection of Kim Il Sung's Works" Vol. 77, a library of the immortal Juche idea, which systematically and comprehensively deals with his works in a chronological order.

The book contains 33 works of President Kim Il Sung including his speeches, conclusions and talks between January and June, Juche 72 (1983).

For example...

In his work "On the Korean People's Struggle to Apply the Juche Idea" the President explained the historical course in which the immortal Juche idea was founded and developed in depth and put forward the tasks to be fulfilled to realize the modeling of the whole society on the Juche idea.

"On Establishing the Revolutionary Trait of Upholding and Implementing the Party's Line and Policies and Minutely Organizing the Economic Work" and "A Concluding Speech at the 7th Plenary Meeting of the 6th Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea" and his other works indicate the tasks and ways to accelerate the socialist economic construction.

In "On Making a Fresh Advance in Scientific Research" and "On Increasing the Cement Production and Successfully Providing Material Guarantee for Scientific Researches" and other works the President laid down the policy for further developing the nation's science and technology.

"A Congratulatory Message to the 13th Congress of the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan" and his other works set forth tasks which would serve as guidelines for the activities of Chongryon including the issue of consolidating the foundation for the future development of the movement of the Koreans in Japan and strengthening its chapters and branches.

"Talk to the Chief of the Government Council for National Reconstruction of the Republic of Nicaragua, Member of the National Leadership of the Sandinist National Liberation Front of Nicaragua" and "We Highly Appreciate the Successes Made by the Seychellois People in Creating a New Life" and his other works clarify the fundamental principles to be maintained by the non-aligned countries.

O for the Wings of a Fly

We've already come across Dr. Ahmad Al-Muzain, Palestinian expert on Koranic science, talking about the difference between male and female urine. Here he is again, on Al-Aqsa TV, discoursing on the Prophet Muhammad, flys' wings, and AIDS:

The Prophet Muhammad said: "If a fly falls into your drink, you should dip it in the drink, and then dispose of the fly, because one of its wings bears a disease, and the other wing bears the cure." This hadith was included in the Al-Bukhari collection. This hadith makes it absolutely clear that the Prophet Muhammad confirmed a clear scientific fact: If a fly falls into a vessel – before a person drinks from this vessel, he should dip the fly in his drink, before disposing of it. Then he should drink the beverage, because it won't do him any harm. Why? Because one of the fly's wings bears the disease, and the other one bears the cure.   [...]

In Germany, the Church paid a very large sum of money to two scientists to disprove this hadith. Since this hadith appears in the Al-Bukhari collection, we cannot claim that it is unreliable or anything, and so they thought that if they could prove that this hadith contradicts science, they would be dealing a devastating blow to Islam.   [...]

The scientists took samples from the wings of flies, and began to examine them, analyze them, and take samples from their surface, in order to expose what existed on each wing. The devastating result constituted a slap in the face. The truth was devastating, and it backfired on them. The two scientists reached an astounding conclusion. They said that on one of its wings, the fly carries a huge amount of different types of bacteria, which adhere to it when it lands on rotting pieces of food that it eats. As for the other wing, Allah has given the fly the great ability to carry antidotes to these microbes.   [...]

When Bayer, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, learned about this study, it derived great benefit from it. It established biological breeding farms, where they would raise flies and extract antibiotics from their wings – the strongest antibiotics in the whole world. This antibiotic was made into a course of five pills, which is given to the patients, and it is used – believe it or not, my brothers – to treat AIDS patients. It strengthens their immune system, and destroys all types of microbes with which they are afflicted. This is all thanks to the power of this antibiotic. Obviously, this antibiotic is very expensive, and one course costs more than $500, but it is very strong and effective. How did they discover it? From this hadith.   [...]

Did the Prophet Muhammad have labs to carry out research? Did Abu Bakr know anything about entomology, parasitology, or bacteriology? Of course not. Absolutely not. So how did they make all these scientific accomplishments? The only logical conclusion is that this science was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad by the Creator.

Confused Worldview

At least Mary Midgley is consistent. Here she is - in common with about half the contributors at CiF, it sometimes seems - having a go at Dawkins:

Recent converts to creationism, when asked to explain their conversion, often say that this move is their only alternative to "scientific atheism" or "Darwinism" which they find intolerable. What then is the "Darwinism" they fear? It is actually Dawkinsism. Richard Dawkins expounds it, not only in the brutally egoistic rhetoric of The Selfish Gene but, more explicitly, in River out of Eden, a book which he has subtitled "A Darwinian View of Life" – "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference … DNA neither cares nor knows; DNA just is. And we dance to its music" (p 155).

So it's Dawkins who's responsible for all these recent converts to creationism - whoever they may be. Rather than, say, the creationists - whose view was, effectively, the only view until very recently - having to dress their doctrine up in the garb of Intelligent Design and go on the offensive as a direct result of the increasing success of Dawkins at al.

But it's that phrase "the brutally egoistic rhetoric of The Selfish Gene" which is the throw-back to her original review of The Selfish Gene some thirty odd years ago. I posted about it here. Although she never quite stated it explicitly, she gave the strong impression of believing Dawkins to have been suggesting that genes themselves had selfish motives. As she said later, after having been accused of completely missing the point, "I understand Dawkins thinks he was talking about the survival potential of certain lines rather than the motives of the genes themselves, but I believe he is mistaken." And, "Dawkins may argue that he is using selfishness as a metaphor but he must have been aware of how the concept might be interpreted and used. And Dawkins has to take some responsibility for that." This despite Dawkins' relentless insistence that we can, and should, rise above our genes.

And now here she is again:

This is clearly not Darwin's vision. He would not have dogmatised so hastily about matters that he was convinced are totally mysterious to us. Nor, certainly, would he have made the mistake of mixing claims to scientific objectivity with melodramatic rhetoric based on personifying the gene – a mixture which gives Dawkins his own grand conclusion that the cosmos is both a random, meaningless jumble and also a callous, brutal fate-figure that manipulates us. Small wonder that his readers say "If that is evolution I don't want it".

Evolutionary theory calls for no such confused worldview....

"Melodramatic rhetoric based on personifying the gene". As I said, she's consistent.

Uses d' Fraudulent Ends

Those fake e-mail requests from banks asking you to verify your details are certainly getting more sophisticated. I've just received this:

We recently determined that various computers connect on your account Lloyds TSB, Password and of multiples checs taient present before connection. We now need assure you again information of your Lloyds TSB account. If this n' d' is not completed; here on October 29, 2008, we will be constrained to suspend your account indefinitely, Because it can have uses d' fraudulent ends. We thank you for your comprehention in this manner. To confirm your online banking of the files, click on the following bond:

>>> Click Here <<<

Thank you for your patience. Lloyds TSB service customers. S' you like it do not answer has this e-mail because c' is only one notification. Email to send has this address cannot be answered. 1999-2008 Lloyds TSB. All rights reserved.

Luckily I wasn't fooled. I don't know...something about it...

Plus I don't bank with Lloyds TSB.

Death by Sharia

From the BBC:

A woman in Somalia has been stoned to death after an Islamic Sharia law court found her guilty of adultery.

The woman was buried up to her neck and then pelted to death with stones in front of a large crowd in Kismayo.

It was the first such execution in the southern port city since Islamist insurgents captured it from government-allied forces in August.

A local Islamist leader said the woman, Aisho Ibrahim Dhuhulow, had pleaded guilty to committing adultery.

"She was asked several times to review her confession but she stressed that she wanted Sharia law and the deserved punishment to apply," said Sheikh Hayakallah.

A group of men performed the execution in one of the city's main squares in front of thousands of people, AFP news agency said.

The Gold Jewish Shekel

A presentation by a Syrian economist on Al-Kawthar TV - an Iranian station which broadcasts in Arabic across the Middle East - in which are revealed the real movers behind both the current financial crisis and the assassination of President Kennedy:

The economic crisis began on August 15, 1971, when President Nixon canceled the Bretton Woods agreement, which linked the old gold dollar to the Jewish gold. Thus, the dollar was severed from gold, and became subjected to the whims and schemes of the Zionist lobby, whose goal was, and still is, to take control of the world's gold, which is deposited in Swiss banks or in the central banks of countries as gold reserves for their banknotes, as well as to enslave the peoples and then to impoverish them. With the American political and economic pressure on governments around the world to sever their currencies from the gold standard, the crisis – or the Zionist economic war against the peoples of the world – began.  [...]

The economic research that we conducted in 1989 revealed the economic war planned by the Zionists even before 1944, when they promised the US government to back the US dollar with their gold. Since the America government does not have its own federal banks, it agreed to sign the Bretton Woods agreement, which gave an ounce of gold for every $35 that reached the Federal Reserve Bank, and its branches throughout America, which are owned by the Ashkenazi Jews.  [...]

In the 1960s, President John Kennedy decided to establish governmental banks to protect the dollar, in which the gold that was pouring into America would be deposited. What became of Kennedy? He was killed by the Zionist lobby. This is a fact that nobody is aware of – but a fact it is. That was the reason Kennedy was killed.  [...]

Global Jewry is trying to prepare the ground for a strong currency. What would that strong currency be? People have no confidence in the euro, and they don't keep gold. This strong currency is what [Israel] is preparing now, and even issued in Gaza – the gold Jewish shekel.