Hirsi Ali: Alienating, Insulting Those She Claims to Help

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s visit to Australia has not prompted local Muslims to roll out the welcome mat. Haneefa Deen explains why.

A hatred of Islam will not aid reform

Hanifa Deen (The Age)

I have always admired disobedient women, especially dissenting women who speak their minds. I’d like to think that I, too, belong to the tribe of rebellious females, something that I remember my devout Muslim father complaining about to my mother as he rolled his eyes, waved his hands and looked up to the heavens for assistance. But there are times when a certain style of protest alienates the very people it supposedly represents….

… Long before Hirsi Ali came on the scene, Muslim women around the world were struggling to break free from customary laws. Many progressive Muslim men have joined them in their struggle, for not all Muslim men are “bastards” as some anti-Islamic campaigners would have us believe. Neither are they the one-dimensional villains lurking inside the covers of many “harem-horror” novels sold in our bookshops…

Pakistan: Taking Aim at Girls Education

Pakistani girls’ schools in radicals’ sights

David Montero (The Christian Science Monitor)

All throughout the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), Pakistan’s impoverished western border with Afghanistan, lie the ruins of barbershops and music and video stores – symbols of Western-oriented life that religious extremists have destroyed in a growing wave of violence.

Now Islamist militants have a new target, and if they are successful, observers say their campaign could be disastrous for Pakistan’s future.

In what appears to be an escalating spree over the last year, extremists have bombed at least four girls’ schools and circulated violent threats warning girls to stay at home. While no girls or school staff have been killed, girls in some areas have stopped attending classes – marking a direct blow to Pakistan’s national enterprise of “enlightened moderation,” which posits female education as a central pillar.

Iran: Academics Warned Not to Travel Abroad or Speak with Foreigners

Talk to foreigners and we will view you as a spy, Iran warns academics

· Lecturers told not to travel to conferences abroad
· Purge of liberals feared in atmosphere of suspicion

Robert Tait (The Guardian)

Morocco: You Tube Blocked

YouTube site ‘blocked’ in Morocco

(BBC News)

Internet users in Morocco who have been unable to access YouTube have voiced concern that it is being deliberately blocked by the authorities.
Many Moroccans have been unable to see the video-sharing site since 25 May.

Some people have linked the problem to videos critical of Morocco’s actions in Western Sahara, a disputed territory which Morocco took control of in 1975.

But state-controlled service provider Maroc Telecom said the problem was the result of a technical glitch…

A technical glitch. Sure…….

Guantanamo: A Fourth Prisoner Commits an Asymmetrical Act of Warfare…

… or, in English, a fourth prisoner has committed suicide at Gitmo.

Saudi prisoner kills self at Guantanamo, U.S. says

Jane Sutton (Reuters)

A Saudi Arabian prisoner died of an apparent suicide at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on Wednesday, the U.S. military said.

“The detainee was found unresponsive and not breathing in his cell by guards. The detainee was pronounced dead by a physician after all lifesaving measures had been exhausted,” the U.S. Southern Command in Miami said in a statement.

The military did not indicate how the prisoner died.

He is the fourth detainee to die of apparent suicide at the detention camp…

US: Muslim Informer in Hiding; Personal Life in Shambles

The Informer: Behind the Scenes, or Setting the Stage?

Robin Shulman (Washington Post)

… For 13 months, he was a paid informer for the New York Police Department. His work in 2003 and 2004 helped convict Shahawar Matin Siraj, a Pakistani immigrant, of conspiracy to bomb Manhattan’s 34th Street subway station. Siraj, 24, was sentenced in January to 30 years in prison, but for Eldawoody the case, now under appeal, still feels raw.

“It’s been hurting me. Everybody believes that I am a cheater,” he says.

“By Islam, by my feeling toward my country . . . it’s something that had to be done,” he says..

Al-Aqsa: Israeli Judge Bans Burials Adjacent to Mosque

Israel Bans Muslim Burials Next to the Al-Aqsa Mosque

Mohammed Mar’i (Arab News)

The Israeli High Court of Justice has upheld a decision by Public Security Minister Avi Dichter to ban Muslim burials southeast of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.

The area is one of the most sensitive in Jerusalem’s Old City and borders the eastern wall of the mosque running parallel to it.

Under pressure from prominent Israeli personalities, Dichter became convinced that the burial area at the southeast foot of the compound, outside the walls, had stretched into an area defined as a national park, which is of archaeological significance and which has apparently not previously been used for burial…

If being part of a 1400 years old cemetery qualifies as “not previously used for burial”, then I suppose Israeli Court Judge Dichter has a point…

Syria: Iraqi Refugees Forced to Sell Their Bodies to Survive

Desperate Iraqi Refugees Turn to Sex Trade in Syria

Katherine Zoeph (NY Times)

… For anyone living in Damascus these days, the fact that some Iraqi refugees are selling sex or working in sex clubs is difficult to ignore.

Even in central Damascus, men freely talk of being approached by pimps trawling for customers outside juice shops and shawarma sandwich stalls, and of women walking up to passing men, an act unthinkable in Arab culture, and asking in Iraqi-accented Arabic if the men would like to “have a cup of tea…”

… Many of these women and girls, including some barely in their teens, are recent refugees. Some are tricked or forced into prostitution, but most say they have no other means of supporting their families…

Eteraz: US Muslims and the Mutawwa Mentality

U.S. Muslims and Extreme Social Conservatism

Ali Eteraz (Huffington Post)

… The U.S. Muslim community, in a survey that is being widely hailed by American Muslim organizations as evidence that Muslims are mainstream, is actually revealed to favor more governmental morality policing, more ostracizing of homosexuals, and more patriarchy in U.S. mosques. I’m curious, what exactly is mainstream about these views? Simply opposing suicide bombings does not make one mainstream or well-integrated. It makes one sane, but being sane is a floor, not the ceiling.

The U.S. Muslim community’s willingness to be seduced by anyone calling for greater governmental intrusion in morality is one of its most damning qualities…

Vatican: Department for Inter-Religious Dialogue with Muslims Elevated to Former Status

Pope in about-face over Muslim dialogue office

Philip Pullella (Reuters)

In a surprising about-face, Pope Benedict has decided to restore power and prestige to the Vatican department that oversees dialogue with Islam a year after he controversially downgraded it.

The department’s return to its former status occurred as Catholic-Muslim dialogue is still suffering the negative effects of Benedict’s Regensburg speech last September in which he appeared to equate Islam with violence.

Catholic and Muslim officials on Monday hailed the decision as a positive step that could help improve relations.

Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said in Italy’s La Stampa newspaper at the weekend that the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue would again become “a separate department”.

Benedict downgraded the office in March 2006 by putting it under joint presidency with the Vatican’s culture ministry and removing its president, Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, a Briton.

“This would be a very positive thing for Muslims,” said a senior Muslim official active in inter-faith dialogue who asked not to be named. He said Muslims had seen the council’s downgrading as a sign Benedict was not very interested in Islam…

WaPo Book Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns

An Old, Familiar Face:
Writer Khaled Hosseini, Lifting the Veil on Afghanistan

Tamara Jones (Washington Post)

“I’m interested in writing about characters who suffer terrible things to survive,” Hosseini [author of "A Thousand Splendid Suns", his second novel.]

…”To my knowledge, everything I wrote was based on something I saw or heard,” Hosseini says. The dismal conditions at a Kabul hospital, for example, came straight from Hosseini’s own visit to a surgical ward, where he encountered a family whose small son was having an operation.

“The neurosurgeon came out, and he has this handful of prescriptions he’s trying to give the father. He’s telling him, ‘We don’t have serum’ — which is what you use for IVs — ‘we don’t have calcium, we don’t have antibiotics.’ ” Hosseini, who spent a few ambivalent years practicing medicine before writing his first novel, immediately understood what the illiterate villager did not: The only chance the child had of getting any of the medicines he needed was if his family found them for him. Hosseini took the prescriptions himself and embarked on a scavenger hunt across the city, from pharmacy to pharmacy, until all were filled….

Islam: Muslim Burial Rites; Preparing the Body for Burial

Muslim communities share burial duties

Andrea Useem (Religion News Service)

Deidre “Nusaybah” Ritchie knelt down and gently braided the brown hair of the woman’s body lying in a cocoon of white sheets.

After demonstrating to the women gathered around her how to wash the body with soap and sweet-smelling camphor, Ritchie finished wrapping the woman in several layers of seamless white cloth, which five minutes earlier were a set of store-bought queen-sized bed sheets.

“Performing this service for others is a reminder that death is a certainty for all of us,” said Ritchie, 39, as her audience of more than 20 Muslim women took notes and asked questions on how to prepare a body for burial in accordance with Islamic law.

The woman in the sheets was actually a volunteer. The women gathered in the cold conference room peppered Ritchie with questions, such as whether or not hair extensions should be removed before burial (answer: yes, if possible)…

US: Sociologists Propose De-Romanticizing Marriage, Emphasizing Community Ties

Two sociologists, Gerstel and Sarkisian, are proposing a return to a more traditional view of marriage as an institution integrating the couple into the community and creating new ties, rather than as a union that draws the couple away from family and community.

The Marriage Penalty

Shankar Vedantam (Washington Post)

… “Marriage and community are often at odds with one another,” the sociologists said in a recent article in the journal Contexts. “Instead of bolstering community involvement, marriage diminishes ties to relatives, neighbors and friends.”

Married people are less likely than the unmarried and the divorced to live with, visit, call or write relatives, according to data drawn from two national surveys: the 2004 General Social Survey and the 1992-94 National Survey of Families and Households…

…Gerstel, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Sarkisian, at Boston College, are not bashing marriage; they are not advocating that people should not marry. But they are all for de-romanticizing marriage; like any institution, they say, it comes with advantages and disadvantages. And they argue that society should rediscover the importance of community ties — the current societal expectation that a spouse can provide all the emotional sustenance a person needs is bad not just for people’s ties with community, but for marriage itself…

Saudi Arabia: In Jiddah, Colored Abayas Gain Popularity

For Cloaked Saudi Women, Color Is the New Black

Faiza Saleh Ambah (Washington Post)

… Abayas with patches of fluorescent color, floral patterns, animal prints, embroidery and even zodiac signs have started to show up in other cities as well, prompting clerics to criticize the trend and reiterate that abayas were meant to deflect attention, not attract it…

There’s a flash presentation accompanying the Post article that shows some very nice abayas. (Well, for $1000 and up, they should be nice!)

Saudi Arabia: Principal Flogs Student’s Brother in Front of Other Students, Teachers

Principal Carries Out Lashing in Schoolyard After Court Verdict

Hassna’a Mokhtar (Arab News)

A preliminarily court yesterday sentenced a 24-year-old man to 12 days in jail and 20 lashes, and handed him a SR23,000 fine for assaulting the principal of the school that his younger brother attends.

Judge Abdul Aziz Al-Shithry handed the sentence to A. Al-Subaei for assaulting school principal Hussain Al-Ansari earlier this year. Al-Subaei was subsequently lashed in the Yasir ibn Amir Elementary School playground in front of teachers and students.

According to Al-Ansari, Al-Subaei had gone to the school to complain that his second grade brother was being bullied. After that he tried going to his brother’s class, when Al-Ansari tried to stop him. Al-Subaei subsequently attacked him. The principal refused to provide Al-Subaei’s contact details to Arab News…

The principal sees himself as having “forgiven” Al-Subaei’s infraction. This forgiveness included the demand that he personally be the one to flog Al-Subaei in front of students and teachers. No action was taken on Al-Subaei’s charges that his brother had been bullied at the school. The whole situation escalated when Al-Subaei was physically prevented from speaking with a school counselor after being ignored by the “merciful” school principal.

A father of an elementary student attending a public school expressed his concern about the idea of his son witnessing a lashing. “The bullying wasn’t dealt with, a principal was punched and a student’s brother was whipped. What type of education are we giving our children? What sort of message was given to the students bullying Al-Subaei’s little brother?”