Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

Give a man enough rope...

Is that roasted elephant I'm smelling?

GOP cancer: Party could lose 20 more seats - John F. Harris and Josh Kraushaar - Politico.com

For the past 18 months, ever since the 2006 elections, congressional Republicans have been like a hospital patient trying to convince visitors that he is not really all that sick: a bit under the weather; actually feel better than I sound; should be up and about any day; thanks for asking.

Suddenly — belatedly — all pretense is gone.

The Republican defeat in Tuesday’s special election in Mississippi, in a deeply conservative district where, in an average year, Democrats cannot even compete, was a clear sign that the GOP has the political equivalent of cancer that has spread throughout the body. Many House GOP operatives are privately predicting that the party could easily lose up to 20 seats this fall.

Yoginder Sikand on "unveiling the hidden history of women ulema"

Yoginder Sikand has an informative book review of a pioneering book written in Urdu (yes, Urdu; for a change, something enlightening on gender relations will be translated in the other direction) on women scholars.

Sikand is a treasure, btw. He's being churning out illuminating studies of Sufism and Islam in India based on hard to find primary sources for many years.

Book review: unveiling the hidden history of women ulema | TwoCircles.net

Books in English and Urdu on Muslim history rarely, if ever, mention the role and contribution of numerous remarkable Muslim women scholars. Yet, as the author of this fascinating monograph, the late Qazi Athar Mubarakpuri (1916-1996), points out, early Muslim history records many such women, several of whose names are mentioned in contemporary Arab chronicles. Indeed, he asserts, many of these texts had separate chapters devoted to such women. Some early Arab Muslim writers even penned separate books dealing with women scholars.

There's a lot more. Read it if you want to live.

Johann Hari: The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics

Examples like this is why I get such a kick out of the complaints about the supposedly inordinate influence of CAIR and Muslims in general in American politics. As if Muslims can generate a fraction of the heat constantly unleashed by all these pro-Israeli pressure groups.

But frank discussions of the predations against open debate by the imaginary yet curiously powerful and visible Israeli Lobby is to traffic in conspiracy theories, so I'll shut up. Conspiracy theories about pro Israeli pressure groups whose influence is legendary in Washington and who've even been demonstrated to be extremely conspiratorial (Does plotting to infiltrate Wikipedia count?) are offensive, you see. The only conspiracy theories permitted today are those concerning American Muslims and organizations like CAIR.

HT: Omer Subhani

Johann Hari: The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn't especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me "a Jew-lover", "a Zionist-homo pig" and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile "pro-Israel" writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Lou's passing

Louis Cantori has returned to his Maker. Lou was a friend, a brilliant scholar of international affairs, and a courageous and outspoken voice of dialogue between America and the Muslim world. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon. May Allah bless him and his family. Lou was a truly unique individual and an inspiration. And he had a wonderful sense of humor and an infectious, booming laugh that I will miss.

Here's a tribute on his university website, though it doesn't capture what a courageous critic he, a proud US Marine, was of jingoism and injustice in American foreign policy. Insights: Passing of Louis Cantori, Professor Emeritus of Political Science

A blog has also been set up in his memory. It has information on the funeral to be held in early June in Maryland. Love, Laughter and Lou.

US Court blocks long distance triple talaq

A Muslim tries to pull a long-distance triple talaq and rightly gets shot down by a US Court.

Assuming philosophical reforms are made to make the traditional institutions responsive to the needs of a radically different--and in some respects almost unrecognizably so--world from that of the early Muslims, I believe shariah continues to have an important role to play for Western Muslims.

The un-Quranic and far too easily abused triple talaq, however, has no place as a universal practice in that new order, as far as I'm concerned.

Glad to see the quote from ISNA showing how Muslim leaders respect America's legal tradition and are committed to rule of law and due process. Sharia does not absolve a Muslim of the obligation to obey local laws. (And in my book the principles cited by the judge is as "Islamic" as they come.)

Interesting to see how this underhanded move was resorted to by an elite, wealthy, highly educated and presumably otherwise extremely cosmopolitan man (i.e., a senior official at the World Bank, as opposed to rickshaw walla), seemingly to avoid giving his wife her fair share of "his" wealth. So much for class and breeding as a protection against male abuse of power.

Court denies Islamic divorce -- -- baltimoresun.com

Saying "I divorce thee" three times, as men in Muslim countries have been able to do for centuries when leaving their wives, is not enough if you're a resident of Maryland, the state's highest court ruled yesterday.

Yesterday, the Court of Appeals rejected a Pakistani man's argument that his invocation of the Islamic talaq, under which a marriage is dissolved simply by the husband's say-so, allowed him to part with his wife of more than 20 years and deny her a share of his $2 million estate.

A church in the works in KSA?

Baby steps towards some semblance of religious freedom in in KSA.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Vatican-Saudi talks on churches

The Vatican is holding talks with Saudi Arabia on building the first church in the kingdom, where some 1.5m Christians are not allowed to worship publicly.

This comes after the opening of a church in Qatar, which leads the cynic in me to wonder this is the latest a new example of the scourge of intra-Khaleeji competition. If so, I'm glad to see phenomenon inspiring something positive and meaningful as opposed to shallow and materialistic for a change.

The disclosure of talks between the Vatican and Saudi Arabia, which do not have diplomatic ties, came soon after the first Roman Catholic church in the Qatari capital, Doha, was opened in a service attended by 15,000 people.

In an unrelated note, I was told when I lived there that in Qatari slang "going to church" means to pay a visit to one's mistress. I guess there's now a touch of ambiguity to that expression.

Who needs the gym? Just move often.

14 hours to pack a still fairly unpacked house before the movers arrive at 7 AM on Saturday.

Had been hobbled by a nasty toothache, but it lifted today alhamdulillah just in time for Heimdal to blow his horn signaling Ragnarok.

To mix religio-cultural metaphors, I felt like Samson, praying for my old strength for one last mighty feat, and lo and behold it was granted (at least the strength--we'll see about the victory over all these Philistine boxes).

Have gotten some help from friends--for which I'm certainly grateful--but it's turned into the usual, miserable one-man show.

I've helped a lot of people move over the years, but I don't usually volunteer without being asked (at least in the case of men--I do make an effort to help women, considering it a form of zakat on my health and relative strength).

Obviously, life's complicated and all sorts of things come up that are beyond one's control, and the pace and pressures of American life aren't exactly conducive to thinking about others to begin with, but speaking generally if your friends and acquaintances have to seek you out for help when you know they really need it, something might be wrong. That's something I need to remember.

But back to my battle to the death to the death with the hydra.

9:30 PM. 9 1/2 hours till the truck arrives and the men begin loading.

On the bright side, looks like fajr salat will be snap for a change.

Our trail of tears begins

We're off to parts western in connection with the Missus' job (she's starting a tenure track position this fall). 

Had been worried we wouldn't find a subletter for the summer. The good news is that one has popped up. The bad is that because of my uni's early summer school schedule, we have a week to vacate the premises so that the next crop can settle in. A freakin' week. We were expecting June.

Speaking of Passover, in hastiness this almost rises to the level the Israelite exodus (and, in messiness,  the Aegean Stables). Hyberbole? Only slightly. If you knew how many books there are to be packed, mounds of papers to be sorted and filed, errands to be run, misc loose ends to be tied, and layers of (increasingly self-aware) grime and sludge to be blasted off surfaces around the house (especially my bathroom, which has the affect of R'Iyeh on errant visitors who make the tragic one-time mistake of intruding into my forbidden lair), you'd agree. 

The worst thing is that this is coming just as the weather's become gorgeous. This is the best time to be in the South, and we were hoping to be doing long overdue sightseeing now as opposed to frantic packing.

Then there's the agony of prematurely returning all these scrumptious books that I should've read a decade ago  to the library barely opened.  The unkindest cut of all!

A whole lot of packing and scraping to do.  This looks like a job for loud, nostalgic music and a lot of it. Paging U2, Men at Work, NWA (at least til beti gets back from daycare), Duran Duran, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and the other odd bedfellows on my jogging mix.

When all else fails, there's always  "Numa", which is so irresistibly infectious it could make Lincoln get up off his throne and do the "Wop".

Merry Pesach

A belated Happy Pesach to fellow Abrahamic dissidents on that whole Crucifixion & Resurrection thing.

We attended a Seder last weekend, which was nice.

I can almost hear the millions of Jews around the world piously and miserably chomping away at their Matza wafers. Which is, of course, the point, given what it's commemorating.

I can relate. I got pretty tired of Matzoh as a kid. Odd, you say, given that I'm not Jewish.  Well, the goyim eat it, too. At least the really shnorrer ones like my dad do once the stuff goes, to my annual regret, on clearance afterwards.

Blech. As a kid, I must've eaten more of the stuff during the weeks following Passover than my Jewish friends  did during the holiday.

Though, it must be admitted that they weren't exactly frum; in fact, I seem to remember one scarfing down, to my outrage and his entertainment, a cheeseburger with bacon during Passover.  Guess my friends were more "Tel Aviv" than "Jerusalem".

Came across an amusing observation on this on a Jewish blog:

I don’t understand the boxes of matza that say “not kosher for passover”? WHO’S EATING THIS??? That’s like going to the pharmacy and seeing insulin that says “not suitable for diabetics.”

This talk of unleavened bread reminds me of something utterly unrelated:  I haven't had knækbrød  in, my God, over a decade.

People pray in the darnedest places

From an email circulating.

At least wudu is a snap. (Or is it? Do you end up doing a paradoxical version of tayammum?)