Category Archives: Religion

FTAC – On De-Energizing Conflict-Creating Language

16 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Selahattin Ülkümen

There are more Muslims entered into the rolls of Yad Vashem and altogether a larger story.

Here I would like to suggest a few things not mentioned.

First, the role of religion, any, may be less important as regards the energizing of a seemingly religious conflict than the attitudes, beliefs, characteristics in personality (e.g., charisma, narcissism) and self-concept of leaders and the followers attracted to them that together comprise malignant subcultures and, at times, malignant societies.

Next: I believe, albeit not quite superstitiously, that language holds the content, shape, and interests of each mind together, and that “language uptake” includes the internalization of intergenerational attitudes, beliefs, and social behaviors. To de-energize what drives some men, usually, although there have been “black widows”, to blow up innocents, much less offing 14-year-old Pashtun school girls, wants for getting into that living language machinery at perhaps overlooked and very early developmental levels.

For this educated and highly literate group, I’ll stop here: the basic experience of language is mouth-to-ear, not text-based, and ears are conduits to signal discerning minds.

We’re a curious species, always listening (from womb to tomb, probably), always filtering and discerning.

The behavior that deflects attention from culpability for crime or disaster, that extols virtue, virtuously, on one hand and denies all presence of or association with evil in some part gets its start somewhere in the narrative of personal development.

A tank (or drone) cannot be aimed at that, but a switch in signal — example, expression — can (or so one may hope).

M. Zuhdi Jasser — “Muslims Facing Tomorrow” — Start at 0:45

12 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

At least that’s where I have started.

Pour the cup of coffee or the drink, depending on background or proclivity, and give the speaker his due.

These days, events recorded are not in the least confined to the event space, so, having already moved this video around on Facebook, I thought to post it here and give it just that little bit more context and permanence that Backchannels may be able to create for those tracking conflict and related themes.

A Note on Geller’s Poster

28 Friday Sep 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Free Speech, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Religion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , ,

This morning on Facebook, I found that Marcia Kannry, founder of the Dialogue Project, a combined Israeli-Palestinian peace mission, had pasted beside one of Pamela Geller’s posters a note stating, “On Yom Kippur, I am fasting and reflecting.  I am a Jewish Jihadi.

“Jihad is an Islamic process of reflection and struggle to bring thoughts, words, and actions in alignment with prayer and best ethical practices.  So too as Jews we practice sleichot (asking for forgiveness from the humans whom we have offended).”

There’s a little more to the note, but that’s the gist, and in threaded discussion, a Facebooker noted that some would make peace and some, with hate, create divisiveness.

So I asked a question.

* * *

Is Geller’s poster hateful? Let’s get beyond the lockstep response “Everybody knows . . .” http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/victims.html The recent behavior and speech of Presidents Ahmadinejad, Erdogan, and Morsi have played heavily against “The Zionist Entity” — the Jewish State of Israel. The greater world will always look over the evidence, from the IHH in the Gaza Flotilla’s Mavi Marmara fiasco to Morsi’s still recent libel that it is “Israel that has always broken its treaty with Egypt” — time code 1:23.

What is President Morsi when he says, ” . . . the peace treaty between us and Israel have always been violated by the Israelis.”

No sooner does an AQ-type raid on an Egyptian army controlled border take place, resulting in Egyptian casualties and Egyptian Army action to chase down other and similar miscreants in the Sinai, then the episode in a good chunk of “Arab street” becomes chalked off to Mossad.

What is that if not barbaraism?

Geller’s poster is a cry for peace. Real peace. Reliable peace. Friendship-based peace.

Is it too broad?

Perhaps.

I have met via Facebook a good share of Arabs and Muslims who support Israel or, otherwise, prove themselves caring, independent, and prudent thinkers and speakers: still, Geller has touched a nerve having to do with truth and with telling the truth and with the refraining of telling libelous gossip and lies.

* * *

By the way: where in the poster was religion criticized?

Where was Islam criticized?

Reference

Facebook.  Side-by-side posters photograph.  Posted on Facebook by Hamid Dabashi: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=477248908962060&set=a.268551769831776.65317.267326509954302&type=1&theater

Geller, Pamela.  Atlas Shrugs on YouTube.

Geller, Pamela.  “I’m Offending ‘Savages’?  Guilty as Charged.”  September 27, 2012.

Geller, Pamela.  “Muslim Brotherhood President Morsi Asks Egyptian Consulate to ‘Monitor Eltahawy Case'”.  Atlas Shrugs, September 28, 2012.

Geller, Pamela.  “Savage Left Fascists and Jihadis War Against Free Speech.”  Atlas Shrugs, September 27, 2012.

Jewish Virtual Library.  “Terrorism Against Israel:Comprehensive Listing of Fatalities (September 1993 – September 2012)”.

Murray, Ben.  “Will ‘Defeat Jihad’ Posters in New York’s Subways Help Anything?”  Take Part, September 24, 2012.

A Comment on Struggle with K2 as Metaphor

27 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

One acquaintance on Facebook promoted conciliation from a Muslim perspective, and another, Catholic, while appreciating the thought noted the speaker was perhaps unique.  I know better than to buy that, but even with just one person expressing a lonesome thought, that thought has significance.

Herewith my response.

* * *

One may take exception to the concept “a minority of 1″ — even just one human consciousness, just one soul, just one believer, just one good person can be and become any army, a civilization, a universe. ” . . . We ordained for the Children of Isra`il that if any one slew a person – unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land – it would be as if he slew the whole humanity.” (http://islamicperspectives.com/tafsirofsurah5_32.html) It would seem that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim literature — the language of each everywhere and the related recapitulation of each culture religious precepts through language — contains this most ancient of divine and human thought.

Recently, I asked a Pakistani progressive — and he was genuinely Pakistani (I am merely visiting in mind and spirit) — how many of us are there: “About one-half of one percent,” he said, speaking loosely and little cynically.

Whatever the numbers may be, IF you are reading this, YOU are a part of an extraordinary intellectual front in human history.

Diplomats and international traders have been this way too, but never the broad swath of a democratized global population, one socialized with each possessing at least a little of a common language currency by way of English plus access to the World Wide Web.

If there’s change coming — we know it is, for the history of human affairs everywhere always transforms — it’s coming through you, with jinn or without, with some foundation in the Talmud, Second Testament, or Quran, and out of the civilizational and cultural anchors of Asia, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere.

Elsewhere, I’ve used K2, the great and dangerous mountain, as a metaphor for the scale of the work. The sight of that mountain alone is awesome — easy to stare at a long time and fear, but some who have had the urge to climb have gotten past that and every other obstacle.

So it is here with much confusion, fretting, and, near or far, too much blood.

With the physical mountain, the climbers arrive by choice confirmed by the struggle to get to it; with this mountain, we’re already on it. It’s history itself, larger than any one soul and yet comprised — created — only by souls, one at a time, climbing, fighting that mountain — that is a global malevolence welling up from some portion of our own humanity — and constructing a new, more beneficent, more altogether free and secure and natural peace, word by word.

* * *

When I was growing up, and hardly then one to love the synagogue, I was lucky, perhaps, to have attended in childhood a service in which the rabbi had talked about making a difference.  Old readers know the old cliche: a pebble in a pond (or a fish feeding from beneath the surface of the water) sends out ripples that will find their reflection in energy at the very edges of their boundary.

These days, it’s “the butterfly effect”.

Still, whether a pebble, a fish feeding, two busy butterfly wings, or a lonesome human voice mumbling poetry somewhere or chatyping from the most obscure corner of the planet, such signals need be never lost.

An Opinion on Circumcision

26 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

The religious and resulting ethnic basis: “10 This is My covenant, which ye shall keep, between Me and you and thy seed after thee: every male among you shall be circumcised. 11 And ye shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of a covenant betwixt Me and you. 12 And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every male throughout your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any foreigner, that is not of thy seed. 13 He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised; and My covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. 14 And the uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken My covenant.”[1]

I survived it.

Should I ever have a son, I’m sure he’ll survive it too.

The Chomskyesque internationalism that has set out to erase differences — ethnic, linguistic, religious — seems to want its dismal end in a colorless, faceless, godless, joyless, technocratic slum.

Perhaps older and wiser than intended, I still prefer to believe in magic, and that a signal of the presence of freedom and faith.

Reference

Rose, Joshua.  “The Intolerable Chutzpah of the Anti-Circumcision Movement.”  A Grain of Sand, June 5, 2011.

Sharon, Jeremy, Lahav Harkov, Benjamin Weinth.  “Yishai to Merkel: Stop criminalization of brit mila.”  The Jerusalem Post, August 23, 2012.

Wikipedia.  “Brit Milah”.

From the Awesome Conversation — “I Am Not An Atheist . . . .”

23 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

I guess I love to talk by “chatyping”.

Even back in my Booz (Allen and Hamilton) days, lunch and bbc-type intranet went together, not necessarily a good thing because in some corporate environments, people may track what others say with interest in evaluating or stinging the same down the road.

Then too, there are some “thought police” scattered around the world: the existence of state-controlled media tells as much, and the various wars on various nasty cabal and larger organizations involve every kind of intelligence “listening post” and cyber-scanning.

The machines want to know some things, one may suppose, and certainly all those offices also want to know the nature of the various species crawling across their once pristine and easily defined battlespace: forget about cartel kingpins and venal state lobbyists — what do with so many friendlies zipping and zapping everywhere in shark tank cyberspace?

God bless ’em.

And God bless us, one and all.

In any case, come forward about 17 years from the olden days and upwards of, I don’t know, maybe 30,000 or more messages typed online in various communities, and here am I (and you perhaps) with Facebook and both of us — all of us — somewhere in the middle of an awesome conversation, and it turns out I like what I type in short form.

Of course, I’ve had a lot of practice.

The subject was an aphorism that I “Liked” in the Facebook way: “Morality is doing the right thing regardless of what you were told; Religion is doing what you were told regardless of what is right.”

I laughed too.

And then I thought about it.

—–

Although I got a chuckle out of this, I feel I should mention that I am not an atheist, do not advocate “no religion”, and do believe that the cultivation of “good conscience” may be derived from and integrated with culture, cultural values, language in general, language metonymy more specifically, language behavior (sensibility and timbre in expression), and the vagaries of individual psychology and various social processes. If we follow the black-and-white inversion that may formulate as Too Much Religion –> No Religion, the barren quality in that may force even the most rigorous intellectuals to advocate as healthy the presence and persistence of magical, romantic, and universal thought.

The matter of resisting malicious ideas and impulses comprise a large part of moral and religious instruction, but a few can and do get their grip on the levers of institutions and in the pursuit of their own “dreams of glory” lose the better part of their humanity. They are those who exceed limits, cannot contain themselves, become the worst hypocrites, and, when so empowered, lead their people to ruin.

# # #

“Freedom of Belief in the Islamic World” — A Video Featuring Moroccan Expatriate Deist Kacem El Ghazzali

20 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

As noted, I participate in the Rationalist Society of Pakistan’s forum hosted by Facebook, and the breadth of arguments and presentations of evidence should surprise those in the “anti-Jihad” who have taken the most pessimistic approach available toward all things Islam.  The above video comes by way of that forum and may be making the rounds today — I posted the same to my wall a few minutes ago — in that medium.

Kacem El Ghazzali, who blogs in English at Atheistica (now listed also to the left) strikes me as a young Moroccan version of the literary icon long familiar to English souls who have dipped into the whirlpools swirling around religion: Christopher Hitchens.

“Hitch” left us late last year, and, God willing, he will not have met his maker, nor heaven nor hell or any of that, but from my sentimental view may God bless him anyway, as he fought relentlessly for a better, more kind and thoughtful humanity.

Again, Hitch has left his mark and is gone, and as so much having to do with The English, the voices of others, even if in English in addition to some other more primary language for each,  have been surfacing on the radars of a rapidly developing international and typing-in-English (soon to become Skyping, I’m sure) intelligentsia.

Welcome then Kacem el Ghazzali, who is just starting his long journey across a short leg in the overall journey of Man.

If one takes “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as template, Ghazzali, who is by no means as innocent of power as the boy in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, has in the boy’s place spoken to the powers that be (and those that merely roam about) — and he’s heard back in snarky comments and death threats.

“I have the fear,” Ghazzali says to Michael Coren, “but I can’t really submit, I can’t really stop what I’m doing because the cause I have is not only for me but for the thousands of young people who are living the Islamist’s war, and their conditions of life and conditions of security are much, much, much bad than what I have here.”

A mensch!

Coren goes on to bring up Hitchens, so here too is Hitchens, who has perhaps set a standard for toughened and unsentimental reasoning:

My own stance: Jewish.  I prefer to throw in with God, my people, and the ancient and customary one-sided Friday evening chit-chat with the Almighty, but I am ever mindful of nature too and within it our human potential in evolution that runs alongside the stupidity in some that finds necessity in fashioning by their own grandiose aspirations the suffering of others.

Mobarak Haider’s Diagnosis — Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg

17 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Library, Religion

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Civilizational Narcissism

Everything you wanted to know about why what is wrong with Islam — that abysmal present soaked in blood, dependence, hate, ignorance, and failed or failing or drifted states from Asia to Africa to the Middle East — may be covered in Mobarak Haider’s 2008 (Urdu version; English version, 2010) Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg.

“Narcissism is a psychic state of extreme subjectivity.  The civilizational narcissists have mostly two alternating mental states: either they are perfectly unaware of the role of the world around them or if they are aware, they are sure that it admires or envies them.  This infatuation with their own charm renders them totally impervious to the beauty and merit of others.  Civilizational narcissism is therefore collective to the extent that all the admirers of their own civilization admire only abstract concepts; no living human or the existing pattern of civilization impresses them.”

With Pakistani street cred and cosmopolitan ivory tower brights and insight, Haider walks the reader through each dimension of cultural, geopolitical, linguistic, psychological, and social history and thought in laying out the case for an unbridled narcissism as the core component promoting the misery the Muslim Ummah continues to deal to itself and to others in the name of Allah.

In addition to the psychology, which I regard as rich and spot-on, Haider’s honesty and integrity in scholarship in and of itself stands signal to the kind of change the whole world wants as regards Islam’s ability to accept criticism, to develop by first developing itself (through other than alms and arms) and to enjoy — now these are my words — the world’s present and most assuredly future “cultural polyphony”.

I have found an implacability in conservative Muslim and American circles in which one party or the other is not only being victimized by the other, but reverting, or stuck, in the mechanics of the most woeful prejudice, which may be reduced to the statement, “they are all like that.” For some, every Muslim is a Jihadi-head (and it may be tragic for Muslims that whatever potential lay in the term “Jihad”, it really has become synonymous with “bombs on two legs” and the like); and for some opposite, every “right-winger” is Pamela Geller  or Robert Spencer (I like them both): my way out of that debacle has been through the window of a term I refer to as “shimmer” — i.e., for what’s coming over the berm, uncertainty as to who, in impassioned numbers, really wants what.

Not to be the “useful idiot” in this crowd, I have at this point engaged many Muslim friends (around the world too), most of whom I genuinely enjoy in an atmosphere as generous in mutual regard as I have ever experienced in conversation.

Nonetheless, in the hands of clerics, the Taliban, and the Arabs who profit mightily on religion — the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, may be valued at $30 billion annually according to a Gulf News report — the culture produced within the vaunted “religion of peace” has serious social issues with the rest of the world.

And it can’t stand to hear about them.

After so much delving into contributing cultures and history, Haider makes this general observation, which I feel should be taken to heart:

“In all these forms of contact — individual, tribal, and civilizational — supremacy of one over the other, i.e., ascendancy of one sex over the other, of one tribe over the other, or of one civilization over the other, is a bad arrangement.  It is less productive and cannot hold forever.  It has been observed that if clash is less frequent than kindness, in these forms of relationships, the resulting posterity is healthier and happier.  The concept of dominance seems to be the less developed form of behavior in human history.  That is perhaps why all doctrines and philosophies of wisdom preached against it.” (p. 174).

I would suggest our species more gregarious than not and altogether more inclined toward real goodness and good relationships than not.

However, be that as it may, a little farther on in a chapter titled, “Hate the Jew: And Do Not Ask”, Haider notes, “The tragedy does not lie in the inability of Muslims to learn or think” — here I interrupt to note my friends do learn and do think, wonderfully, but they may be neither representative of all nor few, a subject to be taken up at another time . . . but back to Haider’s telling sentence — “it lies in the absolute dominance of Islamic dogma that has been carefully defended, so that no critical approach could ever raise a finger . . . .  In Saudi Arabia, even now geocentric astronomy is taught as syllabus; Abdul Rahman bin Baaz, the head of Medina University received award of merit for his thesis that the Earth is static while the Sun and the Moon move.”

I believe the veracity of Haider’s anecdotal evidence.

Those who believe Abdul Rahman bin Baaz’s theory would seem capable of believing anything, not that anyone dare tell them that.

Reference

American Psychiatric Association. Personality disorders. In: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc; 2000:717-731.

Ali, Jasim.  “Sweeping economic impact of the Haj.”  Gulf News, November 7, 2011.

Altaf, Waseem.  “We need multiple measures to start a return: Mobarak Haider.”  Viewpoint, n.d.

Ambardar, Sheenie and David Bienenfeld.   “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”  Medscape Reference, updated May 24, 2011.  (References 2000 DSM-IV-TR).

Kreger, Randi.  “Don’t Diss the Narcissists!”  Psychology Today, May 24, 2010.