Our YouTube feeds respond to our Internet habits — all that Google Chrome or other mammoth machinery may capture (about us), crunch with algorithms, and throw back to us with the logic that if we clicked on it, we must have been interested in it — but let me not get distracted with computer-human interactions, social engineering, and programmers.
Regarding the above clips: Farrokh Sekaleshfar had his name made the moment Omar Mateen operationalized at least an opinion similar to his own; Nouman Ali Khan, whose online presence I found connected with the Islamic Center of Irving (Texas) appears a countervailing speaker to Sekaleshfar; and then, in the way of YouTube’s relational “other video” options, comes a voice of reason about madness — Omar Mateen’s ex-wife.
What do they look like together, these three videos?
GREAT DAYS OF SERVICE IN IRVING, TEXAS, IS AN INTERFAITH ASSOCIATION OF FAITH COMMUNITIES AND COMMUNITY PARTNERS UNITED IN SERVING GOD AND COMMUNITY THROUGH RENEWING NEIGHBORHOODS AND AIDING HOMEOWNERS IN THE RESTORATION OF THEIR PROPERTIES.
Great Days of Service is a non-profit association of diverse Irving faith communities, businesses, and civic groups who are united in serving God and community by renewing neighborhoods and aiding homeowners in the restoration of their properties.
The GDS website supports pages displaying Church Partners (there are many — 14 churches listed and one mosque – the Islamic Center of Irving) and Community Partners, a melange of relevant government and the kinds of good-hearted private businesses that anchor the tapestry of small town America.
BackChannels has heard that in the past year– and for the next — one or two churches have dropped out of the ranks of the multi-faith “Great Days of Service” in the wake of a “dust up” with the mosque.
Those who keep tabs on voter rolls say the number of Muslim voters has jumped from about 150 two years ago to over 800 in the May 7 election. Of the city’s 92,000 registered voters, about 3,800 — slightly more than 4 percent — identify as Muslims.
But they made up nearly 18 percent of the ballots cast in an election where the turnout was low.
Possibly, this given the direction of those not-so-sacred numbers (indicating growth), it may not hurt the representatives of Irving’s Muslim community to share back into the Christian community the making and posting of participation-and-accomplishment videos having to do with those “Great Days of Service” –(added per the addendum at the top) nor would it hurt the churches to produce and post their own videos on the matter . . . or have a hand in the interfaith making of the next video.
Sigh.
In the medieval mode, religious succession — initially, the ascent or uptake of Christianity displacing (for most) Judaism (source of history and inspiration) and much else — accounts for bloodshed through many ages, but cue the angels (“Aaaaaaah”) and The Enlightenment arrives, the church divides and divides again — and fends off Islam’s incursions in what has become Europe– until within its many domains Northern Ireland quiets down and that seems the end of that part of the bloody story.
But wait: about here enters those “Red Brown Green” malignant narcissists — “Comrades, Nationalist, Islamists” but Kleptocrats (and subscription builders) most of all — and we’re once again on this potentially bloody — and still medieval — merry-go-round.
In the way of the web and YouTube, this video automatically followed the two cited and displayed above:
Apparently, the fishers of souls continue to count their success in subscriptions and may adjust their talk to compete.
Addendum and Mild Retraction – July 10, 2016
There have been other “Great Days of Service — Irving” videos recent within the past two years. However, the top search results appearing on YouTube come up absent of productions posted by the Christian churches.
Yet, for jihadists, the “past is not a tool of mere inspiration or for marking enemies,” Kazimi said, arguing that “history books are recipe books” giving instructions on how to “reclaim that greatness of Islam.” Since its origins in 2006 Iraq, the Islamic State in particular saw itself emulating Islam’s founding followers from seventh-century Arabia under the prophet Muhammad, a community that ultimately conquered empires. The 2014 caliphate declaration of ISIS, a group perhaps even stronger than the initial followers of Islam’s prophet, reflected how Muhammad’s “calling compelled him to strike out boldly, against incredible odds.”
I’ve never doubted Jasser’s sincerity but I have questioned the power of modern sensibility to “re-map” scripture. We’re beyond the age of miracles but not of religious sentiment, and to approach the updating of the legacy in scripture and related literature of Islam involves first overriding Muhammad’s warnings about tampering. On the part of modern and sophisticated people, I’ve seen two channels organizing effort to either interpret the Qur’an as a multilayered exercise in thought — and who is to say it’s not? — or, as Jasser and others have done, question the instructions and have the great conversation, and may both tracks lead away from the barbarism on display in Baghdadi’s emulation (so he believes) with ISIS in Syria-Iraq.
Related
ISIS – BackChannels supports the idea that ISIS was incubated by Damascus with the support of Moscow and Tehran, and that the method used we “de-selection” for combat and bombing early in the process that has become the “Syrian Tragedy”.
Qanta Ahmed – National Review — BackChannels considers conservative American and Muslim physician and writer Qanta Ahmed a force of nature sufficient for mention as a figure representing a modern pluralist stance in Islam without reform and opposite the Muslim Brotherhood as regards leveraging concession from the rest of the world.
I have not subjected the list to scrutiny beyond the declared penchant of each for moderation and good.
Those who obsess on fundamental core tenets and advisements and hadith and sunnah may be expected to continue to condemn an unreformed Islam by way of its reflection from the past — the Religion of Peace web site conveys the tough critic’s perspective. Whether the religion, which hundreds of millions of Muslims have assumed perfect from the start, has strength to weather genuine moderation and updating remains to be seen.
Political Psychology
“Cults of personality”, “dictatorship”, “fascism”, “feudal political absolutism”, “idolatry”, “malignant narcissism” — such terms revolve around the construction of feudal space and the will and rule of a single overwhelming and ruthless personality that through the carrot and stick of patronage and intimidation creates and manipulates a universe around itself. On BackChannels, the great struggle with the past has been presented this way:
Feudal Absolute Power vs Modern Democratic Distribution
For Islam and for Muslims to integrate with the cultural complexities of modern, pluralist, and secular democracies, which may then develop stronger capitalist economies with social welfare attachments, may require some reconsideration of Muhammad’s conflation with God, whether generated originally or by clerics or others promoting their own power in supposed emulation.
My kernel for how languages work would be metonymy with paired, primary, and secondary sound/other signal associations. N. may want to catch this because it’s one of the elements involved in conflict within Islam that make winnowing the issue down to the “God Mob” (such may not be restricted to Islam but may be archaic elsewhere) so difficult. If one asks, for example, what the term “homosexual” means in terms of its resonance — what else does it call to mind? — we have several approaches to analyzing that. The science community might want to know and then refer to the incidence in behavior in nature x species and fit that data and theorizing about it with similar data compiled for Homo Sapiens sapiens.
The bohemian-creative communities, long on hedonism, unconsciously selfish or deep down exploitive and willful, give it a glance, give it a go, paint, write, dance, sing (“Take a Walk on the Wild Side”) about it, include it, dismiss it as trivial, so many other things considered, and move right on to their next scene. Dig? 🙂
And the religious refer to holy scripture and the logic of edict that must follow, which mentality went hard on the witches of Salem, not too many hundreds of years ago, and has visited similar villainy to . . . gays in an Orlando nightclub.
Bored, confused, dead-ended, invisible, still energetic and searching for answers — and then comes imam or speaker Farrokh Sekaleshfar who explains that the Muslim response to homosexuality is death, and it would be merciful to get it over with.
Now we have an issue: how stable is that message in Islamic jurisprudence and scholarship?
That’s really asking a question about metonymy within Arabic and within Islamic thought.
Then: how authoritative and how deep goes the distribution of that thought through the Ummah?
The Dhimmi and infidel on the defensive before such a cultural and political program may approach the same thought with external ideas, and chief among alternatives authoritative secular governance founded on reason undergirded by science and research and wedded to compassion, humility, inclusion, and tolerance.
Counterterrorism is a complex field, but in the language part, many recognize aspects of the talk (e.g., invoking the term “crusader west”) that key into signature by way of talk x behavioral change x foreign travel / association with Muslim Brotherhood figures x media obsessions x planning x arming.
In the west, wild poets alter the meaning of elements in language on an experimental basis, at least, and the public picks up and sustains what it finds “cool” — and, for the most part, the culture, the whole shebang, recapitulates itself into the modern English world.
In the Ummah, one still meets Farrokh Sekaleshfar sincerely plying old and frankly monstrous thought with authority. He’s got his hands full today (as a person of interest to western authorities), but what he’s drawn from in language has “cultural metonymic stability” — i.e., he’s not the only one talking that talk and pushing it into everyone’s future.
While Judaism, Jewishness, and Zionism combine in the interest of Hebrew ethnolinguistic cultural and spiritual survival, the religion probably should not be confused with the practical motivation for related ethnic survival. For anti-Semites only, it’s all the same — Jews, Jewish faith, Israel, Zionism — but attacking Zionism in the age of tolerance becomes the more sustainable ploy.
In contemporary animus and conflicts targeting Jewish life, there are four themes:
1. Absolute Power — political power consolidated in one ruler; 2. Capricious Law — because the ruler is the law; 3. Idolatry – the ruler lays claim to divine right or historic inevitability for his legitimacy in power, and progressively conflates his image with God or the State, and expects followers to respond appropriately — or else! 4. Sadism — with confusion as to what is God and what is human, the permit to exercise a singular will to make others suffer with impunity comes into play.
However any may care to think about any number of political and religious figures in history, I feel the above describe the character of tyrants, small or large, or men or women on the way to becoming tyrants.
The Jewish program embedded in Christianity and Islam — attractive in Rome and useful in consolidating the Arab world — unfailingly promotes (from the git-go in Genesis) human consciousness, self-consciousness or self-awareness, and, most important of all, the possession of a human conscience. Moses later becomes the lawgiver who would oppose Pharaoh in the exercise of his contention that he himself was as if a god.
Game over.
The defense and transfer of concept over thousands of years has been apparently painful. The Jews, we Jews, are a mixed lot, including the atheist portion, but common to all has been mutual good regard, from Adam to Netanyahu, and the development of a conversation through time about divinity, ethics, and morality. We know discipline and order too, but Torah-derived or induced argument (regarding Isaac, should Abraham have talked back to God?) has led to a compendium of law sufficient for living, working, and trading in peace worldwide.
As an ethnolinguistic cohort, the Hebrews could grow only so much in numbers as Hebrews, but the uptake in Christianity and Islam fills in the story.
The “Abrahamic Faiths” should get off the bloody medieval and tribal merry-go-rounds and revisit their “operating instructions” line by line and in the context set by time — BCE, CE, feudal, medieval, mercantile, possibly “post-modern” — and eject the absurdity of global competition based on being born with a few labels in place.
As time is spacious and timeless, what other work than that of fostering ethnolinguistic cultural survival and co-evolution by producing a global political atmosphere in which mutual good regard matters.
While “The West” draws its shape also from Greek and Roman civilizations, the “Judeo-Christian” contributions in thought and in woefully bloody history serve to have produced so far deeply desired and survivable codes of conduct and of law. Whether we’ll be able to enlarge the familiar term to “Judeo-Christian-Muslim” contributions remains to be seen, for as implied by way of the awesome conversation, what Baghdadi has put on demonstration smacks of absolute power, capricious law, idolatry, and sadism, all of which greater portions of Islam seem to be rejecting as I type.
Sadiq Khan symbolically stands between the medieval world, specifically a world defined by the possession of political (and social) absolute power as bragged, defended, and exercise by singular leaders using whatever means necessary to place themselves and keep themselves positioned as rulers. Although a dozen European states today remain monarchies, the democratic forces evolved within the “western” character — such things are not so limited, but for the sake of conversation one may use the convention — have over centuries modified and exchanged “absolute power” distributed power with a chief administrator or two (where a president and prime minister may co-exist).
The gulf between between the medieval and modern worldviews is immense and, perhaps as demonstrated by Putin and the related axis defined by Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran tells that the matter is not strictly about religion, including. It is about the human grasp of power and power in the hands of the malign.
With Islam, and this apart from examinations of the content of the Qur’an and related wisdom and exegesis — all of which criticism has been well argued and displayed all over the “strident infidel” web — the mere rejection of the “Islamists” (now that we have that term) and the bent toward caliphate, and that by the proverbial sword as swung by such as Baghdadi and others like him, constitutes reform. Whatever Muhammad may have done that Baghdadi believes he’s emulating, the modern wish not to do over and over and over and over all the way to second comings.
Evolved with piety kept intact, which I think may be D______’s conservative election, or instantly updated per the wishes of the Muslim Reform Movement, Sadiq Khan and others, again of modern bent, have a pretty good palette within which to reside within the House of Islam.
Regarding the role of the Jews (apart from “No Moses — no Muhammad”), the Hebrew’s teleological ejection of unquestioned and unquestionable human authority, the rejection of Pharaoh, has had its revolutionary impact on the world, and the shape of it has been such as to repeatedly meet some of the challenges posed by dictators, but as history has jagged edges, the power of the despotic may shrink across time, but there are many despots and some live out their lives to die peacefully in their beds (at least it’s looking that way for Mugabe).
In short (wouldn’t that be nice?), it’s not the Jews that may stand in judgment of Sadiq Khan but rather those who have come across from the medieval world and left behind — ejected — its manners in the development and exercise of political power.
The gist of the assertion posed as a question: the Jews won’t accept London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s overtures until Islam has been definitively reformed.
Well, bunk.
As noted above, the Ummah’s rejection of the al-Qaeda-type organizations may constitute “reform” — at least Baghdadi, that stickler for authenticity who believes he’s conducting a state in Muhammad’s image, would reject such “reform”.
In the medieval mode, it would be natural to expect that “one true church” would conquer all the others; in the modern, democratic, secular, and tolerant mode, every true church may borrow, evolve, and shift by parts accommodation and parts compassionate discernment and idealism. The conquest by one of all becomes irrelevant.
As regards criticism and issues swirling around the figure of Muhammad and Islam, the blanket rejection of the same may call to mind Haider Mobarak’s term, “civilizational narcissism” as well as the many online sites devoted to the “anti-Jihad”.
Sadiq Khan is no Muslim extremist. And it is not only his track record voting for gay rights that proves this. Having known him when I was a Muslim extremist, I know that he did not subscribe to my then-theocratic views.
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