We may not like the cultural blender or centrifuge fashioning the humanity of humanity and coalescing most in the monotheist traditions around a monotheist humanism (the proposed universal values and virtues I apply for that are compassion, humility, inclusion, and integrity), but that may be where we’re going. The so-called “real” Islam, which carries the burden of the Banu Qurayza legend (was that a good thing or a bad thing? Was the slaughter just? Today, Aafia Siddiqui — heroine or villain?) or the “real” Christianity, which owes much of its “realness” to Constantine’s marches (that one had a colossus made of himself), or the “real” Judaism that preoccupies Kirs Joel in New York State spin out in schism, separation, and war. Those come apart and the “humanity of humanuty” recovers its main and progressing regions.
Every child born comes equipped with a legacy in culture, customs, family, language, and religion. ย Perhaps the greater the separation from others, say the tribe from the greater family of man — or here the person from social anchorage — the more autonomously evolving, eclectic, and narcissistic.
The narcissistic bubble, the house of mirrors, even perhaps Plato’s cave afford freedom within their interior boundary responsive entirely to its inhabitants — or inhabitant — but introduce some cultural and political commerce to that sealed environment (and should you hear in that phrase an echo of the “sealed nectar”, enjoy the faint metonymy) and something is going to change.
In what direction always — and tragically after much fighting, shouting, suffering, and dying?
Call that the “humanity of humanity”.
Analog: Lincoln’s “better angels”.
Inspiration for the thought here: my uncle’s old Haggadah in which was stated in Jewish memory of the exodus from Egypt: “With each generation, a little more freedom is won.”
As we enter an era of dangerous and delicate energy technology, i.e., more nuclear power plants, expansive solar panel arrays, their vulnerability in war and our dependence on them for living plus improving qualities of living wants the clearing away of those who trouble lands with their own romantic mythos borne of deeply evolved isolation (evolved in thought in language) and once unhindered by any consideration of others.
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Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, Monday, March 4, 1861:
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Notably, Lincoln’s message preceded the greater carnage of the Civil War.
The cynical may say he gambled.
The believing, however, may believe Lincoln knew and wrote the end of the matter at the beginning.
ย . . . as we are advancing towards one Global Humanity in which all religions and faith(s), irrespective need to be respected and respected with the greatest of dignity, therefore, the question of Dhimmis is over with. Islam believes in the equality of one global humanity and not to enslave humanity because of their different religious backgrounds, and faith. Islam protects the weak against the strong, who do not know how to absorb Power and to Practice Power in form of good and credible Justice to be done to humanity, irrespective of their backgrounds in religion and faith. Today’s Muslims or the so called Muslims who have taken Law into their own hands, and violate the law of ONE GOD ALL-MIGHTY of how well to treat ONE GOD’s humans on this earth, are perhaps far and very far from the Principles of Islam. Such violent Muslims, may call themselves Muslims a hundred times, makes no difference, because their hypocrisy has grown so much on them, that they cannot think aright. Their minds have been corrupted to the core and their hearts have been blackened by the demons’ spell, so how can such so called Muslims in name, be the Worshipers’ and followers’ of ONE ALL-MIGHTY GOD, Who, Loves HIS Creation, and then Humans being HIS Most Creative Creation. Islam is Peace, Love for humanity and a crave for Universal Justice among’st all humans.
The bold italics are mine.
The writer is Muslim, vigorously so.
The awesome conversation continues.
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. . . but I will suggest this much: every human has an interior life, some kind of life of the mind, and the images in that mind float around in there with language. Where there’s abundance and any ability to distribute that, fighting involves something in the head, and we can discern what that is when the head talks and out of its mouth come its attitudes and beliefs, some about the universe, and those entertain us, and some about others, and those words are the ones that may comfort or terrify everyone who hears them.
That voice is my narcissistic own.
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We can experience a great many things in our own heads, but we cannot share them without the creation of sign and symbol, and we do that most often with the words we speak (this not discounting the effects of aural, culinary, and visual fine art).
What we have in our heads too may be put there by language, the “cultural tool”, a powerful one with which each generation of sufficient mien and reach must be careful with in service to themselves and others.
When a Muslim gentleman in Pakistan tells me through the awesome conversation — a term of art on this blog — that “the question of Dhimmis is over with” it is a little like hearing Spielberg’s Lincoln say, “Slavery, Mr. ____, it’s done.”
Of course, it is different when a Lincoln says it, but even from out of the sea of more than a billion voices, the one voice confirms his faith in submission to God but not through himself or others submission to himself or others.
One appreciates your resolve, would that the instructions, historically enforced, regarding dhimmi status for Jews and Christians were absent from the text. That one element alone lends dignity to the Muslim’s position at the expense of Christians and Jews, not to mention what’s in store for everyone else. It’s a flattering concept; it probably feels large (as in “living large”) but that seems to me a facet of an unbridled and untenable narcissism of a sort to which the world, Muslims first, must respond.
Islam shimmers with this aspect that may embrace and welcome in one part while also reserving to itself the mission to destroy others without restraint. That part today it wishes to cast off, which it must to save itself culturally and socially, but its head meets its tail in this again and again and again across time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros
With either, we may drown in our own reflection or, same thing, devour ourselves, such is the nature of all closed ideological and tribal systems.
A good architect would not only design in some path of retreat out of his magnum opus but also a gateway to other gardens and a window to other worlds.
In “The Origins and History of Consciousness,” he writes, “It slays, weds, and impregnates itself. It is man and woman, begetting and conceiving, devouring and giving birth, active and passive, above and below, at once.”
Confronting the challenge posed by an uncomfortable truth may be more compassionate and productive than the passive enjoyment of a comforting, patronizing, or placating word. To get a little improvement in “qualities of living”, which might include psychological and spiritual variables as well as physical indices, wants for accuracy in observation and analysis in regard to things that are wrong or not so good, and things that are possible, if not always ideal.
What can be done?
Whether with the geopolitical transitional edges between the medieval and modern; whether with the political psychology related to narcissism in power; whether with capital and communal tensions involving resource allocation, development, and trade — one wants to see into states of affairs with both comprehensive and comprehending means.
That much would be helpful.
Greed is not good; money should not be everything: from household to state, even from the flower box to the lands held by an estate, multiple cultural, environmental, and social ecological systems bear on their productivity and sense of well-being: we should get our heads around that and act to produce law and policy accordingly.
Ahmed is convinced that only the Muslims themselves could be the answer to the “Islamists” and that the moderate Muslims must find the resources to counter what she called the “multi-head Medusa.”
“Only if we tell ourselves the truth, that the Islamists are a threat within us, can we confront them. The chasm between Muslims and Islamists is a deep one,” she said.
Between Islamic Jihad and Western Anti-Jihad, or perhaps better phrased, between the Islamist’s Believers and the More Strident of the Crusader West — that’s got the Kavkaz Center obsession working in it — reside the lives of approximately 1.2 billion persons.
Where the true religion mixes time in a forever present, leaving the virulent segment of believers forever fighting the Battle of the Trench, “another kind of Islam” would seem to want to join with the nations inย progressย acrossย the many qualities of living. ย As sensible as that may seem, as easy as it may be to do — just switch off the “contempt” and “hate” buttons — language-based perception — start with the child’s command of a globally antagonistic and misfitted social grammar; move on to the compression of time integrated with a powerfully romantic and barbaric scripture (for example, reference At-Tawba 29 — the binary or split Jihad/anti-Jihad views of the literature are abundant on the web); and wrap-up with alignment of ahadith, essential hearsay, to suit political interest, and don’t forget to add the black-and-white thinking (acceptable / not acceptable) accompanying it — precludes so convenient an answer.
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Narrators who took the side of Abu Bakr and Umar rather than Ali, in the disputes over leadership that followed the death of Muhammad, are seen as unreliable by the Shia; narrations sourced to Ali and the family of Muhammad, and to their supporters, are preferred. Sunni scholars put trust in narrators, such as Aisha, whom Shia reject. Differences in hadith collections have contributed to differences in worship practices and shari’a law and have hardened the dividing line between the two traditions.
With Muhammad’s death, apparently, the Religion of Peace seems to have become the Religion of Eternal Conflict, starting with the conflict between the Shiite and Sunni camps in their exercise of a) tribal choice in the b) absence of more clear successionary ย instructions. ย In the medieval fields of battle in an age much less comprehending of empiricism, enlightened reason (Shakespeare’s contribution to a pagan humanism that he would weave within and around the separate character of the Church — or ever mindful of it — more than 700 years later), it would be said that “God decides” even though what “decided” then (as now) would have been diplomacy, energy (brought to bear in battle), strategy, and steel.
The Jews have had issues with language too, but where the Torah teases minds into arguments — what is the meaning of an action, a passage, a moment? — injunctions to act as programmed in the adoption of attitudes and beliefs about others and with reference primarily to one’s own grandiose image as licensed to subjugate whole populations, a thing well demonstrated by either the invention or favored adoption of the Banu Quarayza legend, that behavior as primarily language behavior has and indeed has had other effects.
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For Muslim readers, perhaps the toughest chapters deal with Muhammadโs slaughter of the Banu Qurayza. Fatah denounces the story as invented by influential scholar Ibn Ishaq nearly 100 years after the Prophetโs death. No archeological evidence supports it. No Jewish text corroborates it. Yet the story forms part of Islamโs Hadith literature and the Sira, the biography of the Prophet, and has come to be regarded as divine truth, Fatah says.
The problem, the author says, is that Islam lacks a tradition of questioning religious texts. So far, no Toronto imam has joined him to reject the Banu Qurayza story. So far, no mosque has invited him to speak.
More than merely modernity or opportunity, the “humanity of humanity” — there will be a page on that here — has long tempered Islam in its treatment of Jews, albeit capriciously, much in line with the fate of the Jews left exposed to the will of more powerful others whenever and wherever Jews have been in the minority position, and that from Roman times to this day.
As with the quintessential Jewish desire to band in the desert — in human evolutionary reality, who were those people who first gathered together and determined a good way, their way, and way of life that would leave dictators to their fates — or, as with Haman, defeat them? — Islamic humanism and humanists seem to me a more natural course for Muslims than that conceived, promoted, and disciplined by the God Mob even though their stripe seems to have been there at the beginning.
There may be in the above thought a patently Jewish perspective, but a glance at Islam’s more beneficent and merciful humans, certainly more so than the miscreants often mentioned on this blog, tells of something deeply universal operating across cultures and languagesย as one slips into the modernity of any epoch: ย Eman Fahad Al Nafjan,ย Irshad Manji,ย M. Zuhdi Jasser,ย Pervez Hoodbhoy, Mudar Zahran,ย Qanta Ahmed,ย Tarek Fatah have each taken firm stances against “Islamist” drift while deeply acknowledging or affirming their relationship with Islam. ย With such good people and scholars, every one of them, one wants to know whether theirs collectively will become the voice of a powerful Muslim “silent majority” — I don’t think they are that today in the world’s Muslim-majority states — rather than the expression of a highly educated, intellectual, western-oriented elite, which (look ’em up on YouTube) is how some may be played by the more Brotherhoodly among zealous coreligionists.
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It’s hard to look into the heart except through the mouth using for an instrument one’s ears.
Those I’ve named speak bravely, consistently, reliably and seem ever good voices and great souls.
They are influential in our global online village, and they’re not in the least alone — the fan base is pretty good, but perhaps its development may be likened to depositing vaporized precious metal on a suitable substrate — it takes a little bit of time and repetition to get from that process something solid and strong.
For the time being, I suspect the English speaking and Express Tribuneย reading Muslim complement to a still emerging global intelligentsia — we have each shared with the other a hearty “welcome aboard!” although aboard what may remain in contention — indeed comprises but a thin layer and kind in the amalgam of the earth-wide communicating whole.
Will Islamic humanism and humanists contain what needs to be contained?
Tune in (after the Sabbath).
Additional Reference
VCU Menorah Review, “An Open Letter to Tarek Fatah” by Richard Sherwin, Winter/Spring 2012.
During the reign of the Almoravids, the position of the Jews was free of significant abuses,[14] but after another Berber dynasty, the Almohads, conquered Cรณrdoba in 1148, they abolished the dhimma status (i.e. state protection of life and wealth) in some of their territories. The loss of this protected status threatened the Jewish and Christian communities with conversion to Islam, death, or exile.[13]
Maimonides fled to Egypt and became the personal physician to the Kurdish general and sultan Saladin and his family.
The coexistence of Muslims, Jews, and Christians during this time is revered by many writers. Al-Andalus was a key center of Jewish life during the early Middle Ages, producing important scholars and one of the most stable and wealthy Jewish communities and a relatively educated society for the Muslim occupiers and their Jewish collaborators, as well as some Christians who openly collaborated with the Muslims and Jews. Marรญa Rosa Menocal, a specialist in Iberian literature at Yale University claims that “Tolerance was an inherent aspect of Andalusian society”.[1]
American-based groups promoting an anti-Muslim worldview took in more than $119 million in revenue between 2008 and 2011, a new report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations has found.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) conceals donations from overseas through a series of shell organizations, according to documents from court actions involving the Muslim advocacy group.
Since its founding in 1994, CAIR has presented itself to American Muslims and the media as a single organization centered on American concerns. But it shows a different face to the IRS, with multiple corporate entities that conceal the large financial donations that come to CAIR from Middle East sources.
“Trust me,” says the big brother, and fearing him, one might; however, with “big brothers” and others, it may be better to know what they’re about than to pin fate on loyalty and the business of being liked, favored, allowed to live, etc. by a perceived greater power.
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After three years of litigation in federal court in Washington, D.C., AFLC has uncovered facts demonstrating that CAIR has been running a global criminal money laundering operation out of the nationโs capitol. The scheme was discovered in the course of legal discovery in two separate federal lawsuits arising out of allegations by five of CAIRโs former clients that CAIR defrauded them by failing to provide the legal services they had been promised.
I owe absolutely no allegiance to either the American Freedom Law Center or CAIR — or anyone else cited in this blog — but some I trust more than others on the basis of other than affiliation, affinity, identity, or loyalty.
I trust on the basis of the shared ethical and spiritual investment in the nobility of certain values and virtues, integrity first and foremost among them. ย This is religion-as-way and if the way is good, the good way may be more universal than specifically affiliated, cultural, or tribal, the appreciation I’ve developed for reform Judaism’s ethos notwithstanding as I have seen the same shared in others carrying within them other cultural legacies and traditions.
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Who speaks straight across contexts?
Whose claims may be investigated, reviewed, studied and whose methods and findings may be recapitulated?
Who says one thing one day and changes it the next?
Who has to change their name to hide their reputation?
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If the reader is of another sort — “my flag vs your flag” in most manners of thinking — this division between the perception of an objective reality that may be investigated and a subjective desire that must be defended and hidden (remember!) becomes cause for fretting and tension.
How must it feel to feel clever?
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Relatives, friends and neighbors of a Minneapolis teen killed in Somalia pressed their argument Thursday that a Muslim civil rights group is hampering a federal investigation into the disappearances of dozens of Twin Cities Somali men.
Autocrats and dictators, their handlers and sycophants indeed lie to get something: power — and, specifically, power over others: to sell them clothes that don’t exist (we focus more on the emperor in the tale than the evil tailors, but without the tailors . . . read on) for the sake of glorious claims that have no substance — or good substance — either.
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CAIR has attempted to create many misconceptions about ALAC legislation which require correction and clarification.
For instance, CAIR suggests that the purpose of ALAC legislation is to target religious practices. This accusation is baseless.
In recognition that the United States Constitution and the Constitution of North Carolina constitute the supreme law of this State, the General Assembly hereby declares it to be theย public policy of this State to protect its citizens from the application of foreign law that would result in the violation of a fundamental constitutional right of a natural person. The public policies expressed in this section shall apply only to actual or foreseeable violations of a fundamental constitutional right resulting from the application of the foreign law.
Enacted on Friday, July 19, 2013, the bill frequently characterized as “anti-sharia” — that shorthand for practiced Islamic doctrine and code associated with, say, for example, Saudi Arabia — more readily defends the Federal and North Carolina state constitutions and their laying out of quintessential American rights.
The American “anti-Jihad” as one might call those aligned against CAIR and whom CAIR would seem to attempt to bite back has been all over the above legislation. ย In fact, it took me a few minutes to peg “North Carolina House Bill 522” because web searching, say, “American law ALAC initiatives” would seem to lay bare a fair portion of the community without pointing toward the above noted PDF!
Acronym ALAC (for any foreign readers of BackChannels) stands for “American Laws for American Courts”.
“It has been a long three years, but the resolution we obtained made every step worth it,” said Hani Khan, who spoke at this morning’s press conference. “I am hopeful that my struggle and this victory will ensure that what happened to me at Abercrombie never happens to any other employees there. All Americans have the right to religious accommodation in the workplace, and we must challenge discrimination when it happens.”
Hani Khan may now wear her hijab at Abercrombie & Fitch, essentially nullifying the retailer’s instructions on employee dress.
Oddly, perhaps, North Carolinians would find the ruling ALAC compliant, although, perhaps, it might violate the retailer’s control of its fashion expression.
On the other hand, perhaps (and, perhaps, I have developed a “perhaps” verbal tic), the A&F look — “Authentic American clothing since 1892” shouts its slogan on the web search listings — has just gotten an upgrade.
I have altered the provocative voice to maintain only the line of thought pursued.
The answering voice, and more at length here, enough so to justify my noting that I have Martin Pembroke Harries’ permission to reprint his views here, takes an atheist’s stance in the formulation of ethics. ย We’ve had some back-and-forth about circumcision, Abraham, obedience, and conscience, but here the topic around which the notes weave is grrrrrl power, which he defends well.
Other editing: I’ve added line breaks for readability and italicized the “point” voice to Pembroke’s counterpoint.
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Women are shy in the Koran and won’t perceive the crime the way a male would.
Is this a wind-up? I can’t decide whether you’re serious orย a master of sarcasm.
If you are being serious, when you suggest to, say, Sheikh Hasina the prime Minister of Bangladesh, or Cristina Fernรกndez de Kirchner, the prime Minister of Argentina, or Hilary Clinton, the former US Secretary of State, that their testimony would be worth half that of yours simply because you are a man, you would be well to stand well beyond their swinging fist distance!
While the Koran authorizes beating a wife after other steps have been tried, it tells us not to maim them. ย In the west, it seems there are no rules.about how to beat one’s wife.
Again, is this for real?
If so, this is what religion can do to a nominally decent man, it forces him to justify the indefensible.
Do you think that because Sharia states that you can’t break her face when you beat your wife, that is some how a reflection of the nobility of Islam?
That is so sad first of all, but monstrously embarrassing soon afterward.
And let’s be honest, there is nothing in the Quran that states you can’t break your wife’s face when you’re beating her – If you actually read the Quran 4:34, you’ll find that there is no restriction at all.
Please don’t tell me I can find on the book shelves of my local mosque library “101 Halal ways to beat your wife!”, or “How to lovingly protect your wife from the shame of her disobedience through the use of a good timely thrashing” or “Sharia Wife-beating made simple and with a Smile – avoid the face, and Carry On!”
A woman in Islam may be a wife, mother, sister, or daughter. ย There is no disrespect in that.
I’ve read numerous Muslims state that there is this nominal respect for one’s OWN mother and one’s OWN sister, but once your average MENA Muslim male leaves the house, that’s where respect for women, in general, ends.
Women lead in the percentage of Muslim reverts in the United States. ย If the religion was so bad for them, why would they revert?
Yes, This is the case because non-Muslim females are marrying Muslim males – for love no less!
It’s probably to please the groom’s parents more than actually believing Mohamed’s story; whereas Muslim females are forbidden to marry non-Muslim men – often at the threat of her life. Again, this a shameful example of not giving equal rights to women. If Muslim men were forbidden to marry non-Muslim women the number of ‘converts’ would plummet.
Lastly, have you got the statistic of how many ‘converts’ have subsequently unconverted? Or how many have converted only nominally in order to facilitate the marriage? Those numbers would be far less flattering wouldn’t they?
Islam disallows Muslim daughters from marrying non-Muslims. ย If you have a problem with that, it’s your problem.
Well, first of all it’s the daughters’ problem.
I respect your atheism. ย I want you tor respect my belief in Allah.
No. I respect *your right to believe* what you want, but there is no way you should expect me to automatically respect *what you believe*. Nor should you expect me to automatically respect your right to practice your religion if the tenets of the religion are anathema to rational social harmony – and on those grounds masking the face would be contrary to those ideals. I’ll respect what you believe with respect to Mohamed’s story and social mores only if it reflects justice, morality and rationality – and there is your problem. But it shouldn’t be a big problem, it’s only unsubstantiated religion – folklore – after all.
There are probably a number of non-religious issues upon which we might agree. For instance, I reckon chicken biryani is a food of the gods!
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Harries is entitled to his opinion, but I myself never regard folklore as trivial: language is always (always) a cultural tool and what is invented in it, whether out of necessity and the need for useful signals or out of desire or play or the want of excitement and greatness (even if only in our own heads), each language and its lore and literature becomes a suspension for cultural self-concept.
With that, I’ll take this post a little further.
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Surat 4:34:
“Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah has guarded. As for those from whom you fear rebellion,ย admonishย them andย banish them to beds apart, andย scourgeย them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo! Allah is ever High Exalted, Great.” (Pickthall’s version of the Koran, Quran, 4:34)
Dr. Shafaat gets into the matter of entangled loyalty well with this statement on the violence involved:
“Beat them”. If even separation fails to work, then it is suggested that men use beating. To this suggestion of the Holy Qur’an there have been two extreme reactions on the part of some Muslims. The first reaction is being apologetic or ashamed of the suggestion. The second is to use it as a justification for indulging in habitual wife battering. Needless to say that both these reactions are wrong. The Quran as we believe is the word of God and is thus every word in it is full of wisdom and love. To be apologetic about any part of the Quran is to lack both knowledge and faith.
For every word to be “full of wisdom and love”, some additional exegesis seems necessary, for Dr. Shafaat continues:
In regard to the suggestion about beating, the following further points should also be noted:
a) According to some traditions the Prophet said in his famous and well-attended speech on the occasion of his farewell pilgrimage that the beating done according to the present verse should be ghayr mubarrih, i.e. in such a way that it should not cause injury, bruise or serious hurt. On this basis some scholars like Tabari and Razi say even that it should be largely symbolic and should be administered “with a folded scarf” or “with a miswak or some such thing”. However, to be effective in its purpose of shaking the wife out of her nasty mood it is important that it should provide an energetic demonstration of the anger, frustration and love of the husband. In other words, it should neither seriously hurt the wife nor reduce it to a set of meaningless motions devoid of emotions.
That power continues to reside in the man (this is a locus-of-control issue) and not in the woman (how should one of the fair sex respond to or treat a “rebellious man”?) seems less an issue than the management of the degree of violence expressed, either physically or symbolically.
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In working with thought as language behavior subject to modification by context in time plus the relative insularity of minds and the language-inventing cultures that create content and self-concept as well as a righteous sense of both license and prohibition, there’s much conversation needed about what I’ve started calling the “humanity of humanity”, i.e., mankind’s better potential in character, and in relation to that, a reconciled psychological outlook.
It’s worth a look, especially to men who may have doubts about how tough may be the “rebellious” woman they have been otherwise so licensed to beat, they themselves having been so pandered to as to have been granted by power on high exclusive control over what many other humans might as fervently and justifiably believe ideal as an equally empowered and inclusive love and partnership.
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One more note on the laying on of hands by either partner in a marriage: when it has come to that, somebody, one or the other, please, leave the home, call a lawyer, and arrange for a separation.
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