First, Let’s Not Kill All the Lawyers
The odious government of Sudan has convicted a British teacher on the bullshit charge of “insulting Islam.” In an act of “mercy” they’d never dream of settling on one of their own citizens, the judges have decided to forgo the lashes and the full six-month sentence; instead they’ll deport her after 10 more days of jail time. Her boss doubtless feels that the school he runs does enough good that he has to accomodate the tyrants who could shut him down, but he lays it on a bit thick when he pronounces the farce a “very fair verdict” - a curious way of saying, “Clearly it could have been a lot worse with these bastards.”
The actual heroes would appear to be Ali Mohammed Ajab and Abdel Khalig Abdallah. These guys were Gillian Gibbons’ lawyers. Ajab works for the Khartoum International Center for Human Rights. He takes a dimmer public view of the proceedings than Ms. Gibbons’ former principal, calling the verdict “very serious and very unfair.” He blames “[Islamic] hard-liners who are always trying to make some noise.” I don’t know where Abdallah works. I know that he tells AP that “I am threatened, that’s why I’m carrying a gun in court.”
I can’t tell you if their efforts had more to do with getting the so-called court to reduce its sentence of the British foreign office’s efforts did. I can tell you who had the more dangerous job, though.
These guys are Sudanese. They won’t have the British embassy clucking with modulated concern over their fate. The Western press will lose interest in their own fates as soon as, oh - that already happened. They’ll keep doing what they’ve been doing - peacefully opposing tyranny; trying to save a few individuals from it - until they’re jailed or killed or they finally lose hope, or (let’s tell them a happy story to keep them going) Sudan actually turns itself into a better country.
KICHR doesn’t even seem to have a Donate option on their website, but I imagine anyone using the contact page could find out whether and how they accept outside donations.
Comment by Jay Elias —
November 30, 2007 @ 1:32 am
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Great story, and an important cause worth helping.
Comment by Farah —
November 30, 2007 @ 2:23 am
The British Government would be in a very weak position, we still have blasphemy laws on the books which protect only the Anglican Church. While they were last used in 1975, an attempt to repeal them in 2005 was defeated.
Comment by Dave Woycechowsky —
November 30, 2007 @ 6:13 am
If an equivalent situation happened in China we would never even know about it (unless we personally knew the teacher).
This story, while sad and tragic, is so overblown.
Comment by joe —
November 30, 2007 @ 9:39 am
The most depressing part is that the people who claim to be most hostile to Muslim fundamentlist lunacy stand shoulder to shoulder with the Muslim fundies to declare that people like this are not ‘real’ Muslims.
Comment by Thoreau —
November 30, 2007 @ 11:02 am
Amen, joe.
Comment by Eric Martin —
November 30, 2007 @ 11:22 am
Sensible post title if I do say so myself.
Comment by DangerMan —
November 30, 2007 @ 11:33 am
Sensible post title if I do say so myself.
Yes. It is clear we need to start with Judges.
Comment by Derek Copold —
November 30, 2007 @ 1:00 pm
The most depressing part is that the people who claim to be most hostile to Muslim fundamentlist lunacy stand shoulder to shoulder with the Muslim fundies to declare that people like this are not ‘real’ Muslims.
I don’t know about the Sudanese man here, but many of the “moderates” offered up often are, by Muslim standards, apostates. The key test is whether they believe the Quran is a human document or a divine one.
If they say the former, then it’s not just so-called radicals who reject them, but pretty every believing Muslim. That’s not me speaking, it’s the religion’s doctrine. It’s very straightforward on this point, which was settled a millenium ago during the Mutazilite controversy.
Those who fall in the latter category are more like Tariq Ramadan, whose granfather was an associate of Sayyib Qutb, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood. While he may be “moderate” by Muslim standards, he certainly isn’t by Western standards.
Comment by Eric Martin —
November 30, 2007 @ 1:11 pm
Crikey DM. Remind me never to pass your way in a dark alley.
Comment by Thoreau —
November 30, 2007 @ 1:25 pm
many of the “moderates” offered up often are, by Muslim standards, apostates.
Every moderate is an apostate by the standards of an extremist.
Comment by Iron Lungfish —
November 30, 2007 @ 1:34 pm
1. All Muslims are extremists.
2. But what about these moderate Muslims right here?
1. They can’t be real Muslims, because all Muslims are extremists.
QED.
Comment by Derek Copold —
November 30, 2007 @ 3:14 pm
Every moderate is an apostate by the standards of an extremist.
But I haven’t given you “extremist” standards, Thoreau. Mainstream Muslim dogma teaches that the Quran is a divine inerrant work, and that Mohammad is highest example of a human being.
Unfortunately, pretty much all of the moderates I’ve seen offered up fall on either one side or the other of the divide I mentioned above. The neocons often push someone like Irshad Manji, and the lefties go for the Tariq Ramadans. Funny enough, they’d likely hate their “moderate” Muslims if they were of western origin. Manji is a lesbian feminist, and Ramadan a theocrat.
Comment by Jim Henley —
November 30, 2007 @ 3:23 pm
But Derek, once you’ve said “Mainstream Muslim dogma teaches that the Quran is a divine inerrant work,” you’ve still said almost nothing.
Comment by Derek Copold —
November 30, 2007 @ 3:33 pm
1. They can’t be real Muslims, because all Muslims are extremists.
When Southern Baptists and other religious righties propose doing a fraction of the things that are NORMAL practice amongst Muslims, most of you guys go into sneering overdrive.
Ask yourselves this: if it’s extreme for Baptists to take Paul’s verses about women seriously, then why isn’t this so for about 90-95% of Islam, which takes a more restrictive view of women than Paul?
Comment by DangerMan —
November 30, 2007 @ 3:42 pm
Ask yourselves this: if it’s extreme for Baptists to take Paul’s verses about women seriously, then why isn’t this so for about 90-95% of Islam, which takes a more restrictive view of women than Paul?
Cultural arrogance. We assume that the Baptists should know better, but the poor benighted Muslims need to be given a break.
Comment by Mona —
November 30, 2007 @ 3:57 pm
I’ve written about this, but the post disappeared with Inactivist. The appeal failed in 1979, and the gay pub and author that published to “blasphemous” prose poem about Jesus’ Roman guard lover were indeed convicted.
But some have agiated to EXPAND British blasphemy laws to include all religions, including Islam. The whole blasphemy charge, however, needs to go in the UK, not adoption of “equal opportunity punishment.”
Comment by Derek Copold —
November 30, 2007 @ 4:02 pm
But Derek, once you’ve said “Mainstream Muslim dogma teaches that the Quran is a divine inerrant work,” you’ve still said almost nothing.
The moderates put forward often turn out to subscribe to a non-literal belief. They criticize and reject portions of it as being either outdated or “inauthentic.” They use textual criticism of the sort many Christian churches use. But, that’s a non-starter from a Muslim POV. Under that view, the Quran came straight from God’s lips to Mohammed’s ears to his pen and paper (or whatever he used back then). No ifs, ands or buts.
Comment by Iron Lungfish —
November 30, 2007 @ 4:10 pm
But, that’s a non-starter from a Muslim POV
And you know so much about authentic Music perspective because…?
Every denomination and faction in every religion around the world uses interpretation and cherry-picking in its holy texts. The Koran explicitly condemns suicide, as well as the killing of non-combatants, but actual Muslim extremists bend over backwards to interpret it to allow for suicide bombers. See also those war-happy Christians who creatively interpret “love thy enemy” as “do to you enemy what is best for your enemy, which sometimes means killing him.”
There are no real, absolute literalists following these texts, because these texts all contradict themselves. Authentic Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and everything else interpret these texts to arrive at conclusions they’re comfortable with, as religions have for centuries.
Comment by Jim Henley —
November 30, 2007 @ 4:14 pm
Derek: Acknowledging that tautologies spin round and round and round doesn’t mean I have the patience to keep watching you spin them. And in the final analysis, what is your actual point?
Comment by Iron Lungfish —
November 30, 2007 @ 4:23 pm
Typos are embarrassing. “Music” should be “Muslim” in 18.
Comment by Thoreau —
November 30, 2007 @ 4:45 pm
Real Americans support staying in Iraq.
What? 2/3 of Americans no longer support that.
Well, then 2/3 of Americans aren’t real Americans.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
November 30, 2007 @ 5:10 pm
And in the final analysis, what is your actual point?
“If you’re not peeing yourself in abject terror, you’re not paying attention”?
That’s my best guess, anyway.
Comment by Jim Henley —
November 30, 2007 @ 5:36 pm
That doesn’t seem to be Derek’s thing though. He not only doesn’t want to Invade the World Free, he doesn’t seem to have any actual interest in sitting back and bombing the shit out of the entire Ummah. At a guess, it’s an anti-immigration thing. But his argument doesn’t even seem to get you there.
Comment by Derek Copold —
November 30, 2007 @ 5:37 pm
And in the final analysis, what is your actual point?
The POV of Mainstream Islam is far different than what we consider mainstream. Using the word “moderate” in that sense is deceptive.
A moderate to us would be a radical (if not an apostate) to most of Islam.
This doesn’t mean we need to bomb them. I’ve been an opponent of the war for longer than most, but it doesn’t mean we should gloss over real differences using terms like “moderate.”
Comment by Derek Copold —
November 30, 2007 @ 5:41 pm
That doesn’t seem to be Derek’s thing though. He not only doesn’t want to Invade the World Free, he doesn’t seem to have any actual interest in sitting back and bombing the shit out of the entire Ummah. At a guess, it’s an anti-immigration thing. But his argument doesn’t even seem to get you there.
Actually, my point is that the differences between the West and Islam make any attempt to bomb them into freedom foolish and counterproductive. A lot of neocons are wedded to the idea of “moderate Islam”, too, and they argue that democracy will flourish only if we force the Mohammedans to be free.
On the immigration front, it should be more than obvious that importing large numbers of people who think it normal to avenge insults to their religion through legal and extralegal means is probably not a good idea.
Comment by Derek Copold —
November 30, 2007 @ 5:43 pm
Real Americans support staying in Iraq.
Do you really want to equate an assertion by a very few on the right with longstanding Islamic doctrine. Talk about condescending. What ever you want to say about me, I take their religious tenets rather seriously, and when they say they mean it, I believe them.
Comment by Derek Copold —
November 30, 2007 @ 5:56 pm
And you know so much about authentic Mus[lim] perspective because…?
Because I studied Islamic history and theology in grad school. IIRC the details correctly, there was a controversy during the Abbasid period over the divine status of the Quran. The Mutazilites argued it was “Created”, thus open to allegorical interpretation. The other side said, no, it’s “Uncreated”, which sort of puts it on the same level as the Incarnation (that’s a very rough analogy, though). The Mutazilites lost. Arguing for a freer interpretation now is sort of like trying to resurrect Arianism. Some unitarians have tried it, but it doesn’t go very far.
Now this may change in the future. Maybe it’ll change in ten years. I suppose it’s possible, though remote. Until that time, though, we shouldn’t deceive ourselves about their POV. They are not in the same Christianity. In fact, they’re nowhere near it, and likely won’t be for some time.
The Koran explicitly condemns suicide, as well as the killing of non-combatants, but actual Muslim extremists bend over backwards to interpret it to allow for suicide bombers.
Oh, yeah, there it is. It’s so obvious. I guess those hundreds of thousands of Muslims hanging up posters of “Martyrs” don’t understand their own faith.
Please. You’re challenging me on my knowledge of the “Muslim perspective”? Why should we believe YOUR take over THEIRS? Do you think they’re just too stupid to understand their own religion?
The fact is, the priniciple members of the Ulema have endorsed the idea of “suicide bombing.” They just don’t call it suicide. It’s called “martyrdom.” In their view, it’s dying in battle. As for the civilian thing, they get around it by terming all their enemies–men, women and children–”occupants.”
Here’s a link describing one of these Azhar scholars:
The Director of Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London, Mr. Azzam al Tabibi (recently seen on BBC’s “Hard Talk”), has pertinently expressed the importance of Mr. Qaradawi: “When you talk about Sheikh Qaradawi, you talk about an audience of hundreds of millions of Muslims all over the world, someone who really creates public opinion.
…
, Whenever Mr. Qaradawi issues a Fatwa, that Fatwa is recognized in hundreds of places around the world the next day”. Mr. Qaradawi has issued something in the order of 150 Fatwas, and some of these are particularly relevant to suicide bombers.
Suicide is really strictly forbidden within Islam.{This is a heading being discussed).
…
One of the main architects behind the ideology of suicide bombings is even a highly learned scholar with a doctor’s degree from the Al Azhar University in Cairo, namely Mr. Qaradawi.
Mr. Qaradawi has issued several Fatwas which define all adult Jews living in Palestine as “occupants” and “combatants”, and therefore legitimate targets of war. These Fatwas contends that when the suicide bomber looses his life in executing his/her operation, this does not count as suicide but as a sacrifice in holy war and, therefore, as martyrdom.
The rationale for considering all adult Jews in Palestine as combatants is the fact that all adult Israelis, men and women, are registered in the Israeli Defense Force and has status as reservist, also in their civilian life. With reference to Jewish children, Mr. Qaradawi makes clear that even if these cannot be killed as combatants, it is acceptable that some Jewish children be killed in vengeance for Arab children having been killed by Jews. At this point one must add that Mr. Qaradawi condemns the killing or persecution of Jews which are not participating in the “occupation of Palestine”.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
November 30, 2007 @ 6:19 pm
So, is the consensus here then that all members of all religions (and of all all sects, groups, and associations within those religions) lack any particularly religious beliefs that might make them any more or less opposed to liberalism or secular society than any other religious person?
Every religiously-tinted infringement on freedom, every theocracy, every person straight-facedly telling you that God selected GWB to be president…all of that is caused entirely by other things than any human being’s ideas on his/her religion?
Interesting.
No, I don’t share Copold’s subscription to fundie Muslim belief on what defines Islam, but that seems to be the aggregate argument against him - and it makes as little sense to me.
Now I admit, not being religious, I don’t see religions as platonic ideals that have little or nothing to do with religious belief or practice as held or acted by human beings. I see them as things that evolve, change, and differ from each other. The beliefs of some liberal Christian, Jew, Muslim, etc. about God and morality are just as validly “religious” as some guy fervently memorizing the Quran. (Your mileage may vary.)
Stepping back in time, we could probably easily find Christian societies in the past where some woman could face brutal punishment for an act as innocuous as naming a teddy bear. At some point in the future, we could probably expect that a newspaper publishing cartoons of Mohammad wouldn’t see international rioting and death threats as the fallout, but instead rolled eyes and press conferences by groups denouncing them.
However, we don’t live in either of those times; instead, in November of 2007, there are a lot of very fundamentalist Muslims who are hostile to secular society - and who are willing to lean on their neighbors to keep their societies non-secular (or even make them less secular). The “OMG, the Spanish Inquisition!” replies to that sort of thing are just as vacuous as the claim that Islam or Christianity or whatnot is “inherently” anti-liberal.
Comment by Thoreau —
November 30, 2007 @ 7:02 pm
Eric-
I agree that right now the dangerous sort of fundamentalism is more widespread in Islam than in Christianity. The question is whether you regard it as dangerous fundamentalism distinct from more moderate strains, or whether you instead treat it as being “authentic.”
The danger of the second approach is that you (1) grant unintended “legitimacy” to the dangerous fundamentalists while (2) ironically marginalizing the moderates whose help you need most.
I won’t suggest that religious beliefs are irrelevant to how people view the world or respond to liberal values. There may even be some disconcerting reasons why liberals/moderates are more common in one faith than another. However, if there are a variety of different strains of thought among those claiming the same religious label, then there is indeed a variety of strains of thought. It makes no sense for an outsider to point to the worst elements as the most “authentic.”
Whatever the reasons for the different proportions of moderates in different religions, the fact remains that the moderates are real people, and they exist in non-trivial numbers. There is no good reason to insist that they are “inauthentic.”
Comment by turkey turkey turkey —
November 30, 2007 @ 7:23 pm
Let’s not kill all the lawyers. Let’s kill all religious extremists instead.
More seriously, there is a great deal to be said for Richard Dawkins’ position that all religion should be condemned as a threat to human wellbeing rather than trying to split hairs about who’s a fundamentalist whackjob and who isn’t.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
November 30, 2007 @ 7:31 pm
As a gay man living in America in November 2007, I am firmly convinced that radical Christianity poses a greater and more immediate threat to my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness than does radical Islam. It’s that simple.
And what turkey turkey turkey said.
Comment by Thoreau —
November 30, 2007 @ 7:38 pm
Except that if you split the hair between “fundamentalist whackjob” and “moderate” you discover a rather large number of decent people who are remarkably easy to live amongst, befriend, and do business with.
Trackback by Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator —
November 30, 2007 @ 9:22 pm
Calls in Sudan for Teacher’s Execution
…
Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and knives, rallied Friday in a central square and dema…
Comment by Eric the .5b —
December 1, 2007 @ 3:25 am
Folks like Dawkins convinced me a couple of years back that the next big religious war will be militant atheists against everyone else.
I say this as an atheist who wants no part of that.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
December 1, 2007 @ 3:33 am
I think “authenticity” is at best a meaningless term in this context, at worst a dodge for one side of the other to cherry-pick their vision of members of a religion. The “you’re not a real Muslim if you’re not fighting the infidel” line is a bogus as the “Muslim terrorism and theocracy have nothing to do with religion” line.
Comment by matthew hogan —
December 1, 2007 @ 11:20 am
“Folks like Dawkins convinced me a couple of years back that the next big religious war will be militant atheists against everyone else.”
AKA
The Russian Civil War, 1918-1922
The Cold War, 1946ish - 1992
The Cultural Revolution, 1966-1968
Comment by Thoreau —
December 1, 2007 @ 12:41 pm
Eric-
Yeah, I agree that it’s disingenuous to say that religious terrorism and theocracy have nothing to do with each other. I do, however, think that it’s reasonable to acknowledge the existence of multiple groups under the same religious banner. It makes no sense to insist that all members of all groups must be treated with suspicion because one of those groups supports violence. That’s what Derek seems to want to do.
Just from a purely practical perspective, you’re adding more hay to the stack. Instead of focusing on the likely threats, you’re busy confiscating every single water bottle and tweezers.