On Sharia Law in the US

Shireen Qudosi

I don't normally include material relating to Islam and ISIS on here, but this series of sixteen tweets from Shireen Qudosi, a tweeter I follow, needs to be more accessible. (It's difficult following sixteen tweets in a row on Twitter: other tweets interrupt the flow!).

The series started as a result of this tweet from Isaac Cohen @IHWCo on the activist, Linda Sarsour.

Ms.@lsarsour claims having anti-Sharia bills or laws that forbid it from being made as US laws, prevents Muslims from practicing their faith

SHIREEN QUDOSI‏ @ShireenQudosi replied:

1. Anti-sharia bills look at sharia as it is practiced today, which isn't even original Islam. So anti-sharia bills are rightfully...

2. ...tackling an innovation in Islam. In original Islam, sharia was meant to be a pathway. It was never meant to be the Matrix.

3. Basically over course of 1400 years, bunch of Islamic philosophers sat around & talked about Islam. Their ideas got added onto the faith.

4. Since their ideas are codified into faith, sharia went from being, let's say, different currents in the ocean you could use to...

5. ...this rigid draconian anti-feminist legal system that is a thought-tentacle controlled by people who act like minions of God.

6. So if someone wants to propose an anti-Sharia bill, go for it. You're doing original Islam a favor.

7. Muslims will still be Muslims because being a Muslims is a simple thing. Sharia is not simple. Sharia today is in violation of Islam...

8. And sharia today is in violation of U.S. Constitution which should never be undermined, supplemented or run parallel to another system.

9. Truth is, no society can function with two separate codes of law. One law for all. American law based on American values. Because...

10. We don't compromise or negotiate the United States Constitution. Don't like it? There are 194 other countries to choose from.

11. Allowing Sharia to gain any ground in the U.S. is the day we give up on America. It's VITAL Americans understand how Islamism works.

12. Every single disgusting supremacist action allowed under Islam as it developed through scholarship and mutation of the faith....

13. ...is permissible in a nation that follows Muslim law. A Muslim nation. Sharia is a huge HUGE win in that fight. So ask yourself...

14. What comes next? Because all this Islamist talk of "America" is not about America as you and I see it. It's about....

15. ...whatever America looks like, today is one thing. Tomorrow through Islamism isn't another form of America. Their America.

16. And that is why we need to fight people like Linda Sarsour and every single thing she stands for. No negotiation. No compromise.

The same information could easily apply to the UK. 

Linda Sarsour

The Source

I can't say I'd come across the 2011 film The Source before, and there don't seem to be many English-language reviews of it online. It's directed by Radu Mihăileanu, a Jewish Romanian-born French director who also wrote the script in collaboration with two French writers. It has more than one title: as you can see from the poster, it's called La Source des Femmes, (The Source of/for Women) but the poster on IMDB names it La Sorgente dell'Amore, which translates as The Source of Love. All are equally valid: there is dialogue in the film in which the source of or for women is discussed, and also the source of love, that is, where does love come from - the answer in the film is pretty much, from women, although that's not the whole story. 
But there's a further aspect to the word, source: in the movie the starting point for the story is the spring up on the hillside to which the women must go each day with their buckets to collect water. This water is the source of life - especially in the drought-stricken time in which the movie takes place - and its place far up on the hill is another source: a source of contention. The women argue that their menfolk (who sit around most of the day doing nothing because the drought has destroyed their crops and livestock) should take the money gained from passing tourists and use it to put a tap from the spring right within the village. The men are loathe to - among many reasons is the one that women should know their place, and if they only had to go to the water in the village, what else would they do with their time? 
One of the women, an outsider, whose husband (a much more kindly and gentle man than most in the village) has taught her to read and write, begins a sex strike, and this has ramifications for all concerned. The story is an old one - the bawdy Greek comedy, Lysistrata, is one of the oldest known versions of it - but Mihăileanu and his team have set it in a remote North African village where Islam is the dominating force, and where men have license to beat their wives (just as one would beat children, gently, to discipline them, says the local Imam), and to demand sex nightly, if they're so inclined. And where teenage girls are frequently thrown into marriage without any instruction or care. 
Unlike Aristophanes' play, the comedy is minimal (though the film is billed as a drama/comedy) and there are some vicious beatings, fights, slappings and the like. People's passions run high here, and no some seems immune from a good slap across the face. 
But the story has more to say than just bringing harmony back between husbands and wives - harmony does return, as you'd expect, but at considerable cost. There is the much bigger issue of Islam itself, which pervades the lives of the people alongside elements of folk religion. Though these people are Arabs, they've been in this part of the world a very long time. 
The gentle husband talks at one point of the Islamic Enlightenment. If there's such a thing, it's got very stony ground in which to grow in in this village, and at the film's end it's debatable as to whether it's made much progress. Certainly there's an important scene in which the educated wife fronts up to the Imam with great respect, and counters his views of how husbands and wives should behave by quoting back the Koran to him with great confidence. He's shaken by having a woman stand up to him, but, to his credit, does listen, and reflect on it. 
In spite of the male domination aspect, this is a film where women have the focus. They sing at the beginning and at the end (the film is almost a musical at times - some of the story is told in song, and some of the interactions between men and women, or women and women, take place in musical terms), they have two other wonderful scenes in which what they're singing is exactly what the men don't want to hear, and which publicly embarrasses them. and they have a scene in their bathhouse (where there is some nudity on display) in which they discuss sex quite openly as well as the prospect of a sex-strike. Women's talk may embarrass men, but the women aren't embarrassed by it - the group song early in the piece is quite forthright in this regard. 
Love is a big theme throughout - it's seldom mentioned by the men, except in terms of disparagement - but for the women it's a thing to hold onto dearly; if it can be received and given it's priceless. The educated couple at the centre of the movie celebrate love, even when it also seems to make their lives more complicated (a man the girl had loved previously turns up to make things difficult), and several of the women long for love but have never received it, including one who gets the educated women to write letters for her to a man she loves, named, somewhat improbably, Slim. 
At times the wealth of subplots almost gets in the way of the focus of the story (one scene, in which one of the young husbands tells the educated man just how much he hurt him when he treated him as a lesser person, seems to be going somewhere and then doesn't) but Mihăileanu holds it all in place somehow, and makes the film all the more rich for all its different elements. It could have been a diatribe against Islam and its treatment of women; it could have been political (there are a few elements of this); it could have been primarily a love story. It's all these and more.
And what a cast: Algerian Leila Bekhti is wondrous as the educated wife; her husband is played by Palestinian actor, Saleh Bakri, who manages to overcome the occasional inconsistencies in his role. The older women have faces that never came from any Hollywood movie (some of them may be non-professionals). Israeli actress Hiam Abbass plays the vicious mother-in-law with an underlying fury - justified, we learn in due course, but terrifying all the same. Biyouna, who has a face of considerable ugliness (but happens to be a great star in her native Algeria) plays the aging widow who encourages, provokes, and generally manages to keep her finger in several pies at once. This international cast - it also includes several French-born actors - speak and sing in Arabic throughout, and it's more satisfying than having them dubbed (though the film was dubbed into French for the French!)
The Source is a revelation: for one, a look at an area of the Arab world in which terrorists have no obvious presence; a picture of Islam in which jihad is mentioned but in a totally different context; and much more. The Dunedin Public Library has a copy.

Control

Having trouble controlling how big the portions are in your evening meal?  You can get portion control dinnerware. This divides your plate up into three portions; you then put a certain amount of each food item in each section of the plate, and voila! instant self-control.  And if you're an eco-friendly person, these plates come in fully compostable versions, so you can dump 'em straight in the compost at the end of your picnic.  If there's a compost available.  The plates apparently provide 'portion control with a conscience.'  Right.

And talking of control, in Saudi Arabia, a Lebanese man was sentenced to 300 lashes with a whip and six years in prison for his role in helping a Saudi woman convert to Christianity and flee the kingdom in the latest example of the religious intolerance that grips the region.

I'm not sure how many people would survive 300 lashes.  His offsider, a Saudi man, received 200 lashes. I'm also not sure how you convince the Saudis that 'freedom of religion is an internationally recognised human right' as Joe Pitts, the representative for the Helsinki Commission and Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, claims. Islam is not fundamentally a religion of tolerance; expecting it to suddenly become one is probably like banging your head against a brick wall repeatedly. 

 

Control is something human beings have a leaning towards: North Korea is an example of a different kind of religious control (though of course we all know, don't we, that Communism isn't a religion?). Try to be anything but a Communist in that country and you're either executed or sent off to the North Korean equivalent of Siberia.  But I think there's more likely to be some change of stance in North Korea than in the world of Islam.  If Albania, the most Communist nation in the world, can revert to normality, then North Korea can.  It's a matter of time - perhaps waiting to see the old warlords die off. 

Catching up on Tunisia

Like many other New Zealanders, no doubt - and probably many other Westerners around the world - the recent unrest in Tunisia has come out of the blue. Where is Tunisia, for starters, and who are the people involved in the situation?

On my Google Reader I get a daily roundup of a lot of blog sites, but one that's been most helpful in getting some small grip on the Tunisian situation has been GetReligion.org, which not only sums a lot of things up very well, and quotes other sources more than adequately, but also gives helpful links for further reading, if you're of a mind. (GetReligion aims to clarify the religious aspects of journalism, but alongside that it's a very readable site in terms of the news.)

Their piece, Tunisia's Islamist-free revolution, is the article in question, and one of the most interesting things to come out of it is the way in which successive rulers in Tunisia have kept the Islamic opposition in its place; rather brutally, at times, but certainly they've avoided many of the problems that plague other Arab countries.

Blasphemy

A number of years ago I read a book on Blasphemy -I've still got it, but I'm not at home at the moment, so I can't remember the name or the proper title.

Even at that stage the writer was protesting the fact that Christian images, symbols and the like can be treated by artists as something they can use alongside sexual images, or other offensive material, and this is apparently okay. When Christians protest about these they immediately branded as non-art people who just don't get it. (The fact that the 'message' is almost always supposed to be a Christian protest in itself is often hard to see.)

But do anything in a similar fashion regarding Muhammad and the Muslim world goes crazy. He's not allowed to be blasphemed in any way, he's not allowed to be depicted in any humorous fashion, he's not allowed to be insulted in the teeniest weeniest degree.

Jesus Christ, on the other hand, is obviously a lot tougher. He can be insulted as much as people like and those who protest will always be demeaned in some way.

Terry Mattingly offers an alternate 'news report' on the topic over on Get Religion.org - the point he makes is perfectly valid, but check out what at least one of the commenters writes; he just can't get what Mattingly is trying to say.

There's one law for them and a different one for us....

John Gray - philosopher

I’ve just been reading an article in the NZ Listener from a couple of weeks ago about the philosopher, John Gray. I’m going to quote a few paragraphs and comment on them.

[John] Gray thinks we’re doomed. His latest book, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, argues that creeds that presume humankind can remake society are holdovers of Christian apocalyptic thinking – the illusion that a harmonious world will follow from an event of mass destruction that eliminates conflict. With the Enlightenment, the yearning to see human history as progressing towards a goal became secular rather than religious.

Gray isn’t anti-religion as a later quote will show. However, I think he’s mistaken in believing that Christians ever thought the world as it is would become harmonious. It will take God himself to recreate the world to bring about harmony.

Gray professes that secular ideologies – from Marxism and Nazism to extreme forms of liberalism and conservatism – contain this repressed religious inheritance. By believing that paradise on Earth can be created by force, the utopian mind justifies mass bloodshed.

Christian religion never believed that the a paradise on Earth could be created by force.

History doesn’t necessarily bear out Gray’s belief that utopianism is inevitably destructive. He argues that campaigns are not utopian if they potentially can be realised. But many historical strides, like abolishing slavery, would at one time have seemed as implausible as democratising Iraq.

Was the abolishing of slavery a Utopian idea? I think the writer of the article - Ben Naparstek - is mistaken in saying this.

The idea of using mass terror to refashion the world was absent in the medieval period, Gray says, and emerged only with the French Revolution. He sees al Qaeda as an inheritor of the same post-Enlightenment revolutionary tradition as communism, nazism and neoconservatism.
It’s interesting to see someone actually putting the blame for some of the worst atrocities of the last few centuries where it belongs; on the so-called Enlightenment.

He conjectures that the invasion of Iraq sounded the death knell for secular utopianism. “Iraq practically precludes another large-scale experiment along those lines.

And one final (long) quote:

Gray says his harshest detractors are “evangelical humanists”, hostile to his beliefs that secular movements renew Christian patterns of thought and that 20th-century tyrannies were by-products of Enlightenment ideology. “They’ve said things like, ‘Well, the Enlightenment can’t have any role in these episodes because the Enlightenment is pluralistic and tolerant’, which reminds me of those gormless Christians who say, ‘Christianity couldn’t have any role in the Inquisition because it’s a religion of love.’”

The role of atheism in Maoist and Stalinist totalitarianism is rarely acknowledged, says Gray. “Mao launched his attack on Tibet with the slogan ‘religion is poison’.”

Though not a believer, Gray excoriates the recent fad for books attacking religion by the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Michel Onfray. “The difference between religious believers and secular rationalists is that religious believers are used to questioning their myths, whereas secular rationalists think their myths are literally true. I advocate an attitude of scepticism and critical distance from all these powerful belief systems.”

This seems to me to be the wisest thing said about Hitchens, Dawkins and the like in quite some time.

Out goes music

I rarely see Islamic texts on the Net, because I don’t go looking for them, but it happened that while looking for something completely unrelated, namely Gitzo tripods, I came across a site which had the complete text of the Islamic prohibitions against music. I hadn’t ever heard of any such prohibitions before, and frankly, was quite amazed.
A few things are allowed: tapping on a particular drum is one. Some singing and chanting is allowed (if I’ve read it right), but beyond that music is pretty much out. Women can dance, but men never should. Women can clap (rhythmically, I presume) but not men. It’s not a sin to overhear music, but sitting listening to it is.
All the prohibitions are argued in the usual Islamic way from texts that quite frankly could be interpreted in a number of ways (and obviously have been). Some commentators claim that certain texts affirm the use of music and dancing; other commentators are sure that they prohibit them.
There are times when I’m glad that my book is the Bible; certainly it has its moments of obscurity, but in general it’s in plain language, certainly when it comes to allowing or prohibiting things.
This of course has nothing to do with Gitzo tripods, which don’t in any way relate to music, or the arts generally. I don’t suppose there’s any prohibition against the use of tripods, though in the light of what I’ve been reading it wouldn’t surprise me if there was!

Distracted by the Trivial

Once again the Islamic world is up in arms with a matter concerning Salman Rushdie. Some MP in Pakistan is threatening suicide bombers if the knighthood Rushdie has received isn’t taken away from him. The warped thinking that goes on in the Islamic world can scarcely be believed. Firstly, it’s none of their business who the Queen gives a knighthood too – and calling her an ‘old crone’ is hardly diplomatic.
But far more importantly, these same people who condemn a writer for writing something that offends them find no offence in the fact that 75 people were blown up in Baghdad today, and hundreds of others were injured. Do we hear anyone in the Muslim world condemning this act of terrorism? I certainly haven’t. And if we discuss such an omission in the Islamic world the Muslim speakers are likely to say it was all the fault of the Americans. If the Americans hadn’t been in Iraq it wouldn’t have happened. The plain nonsense of such a statement (which has been made before) is self-evident. The hypocrisy of the Islam is so blatant that the Western world can only stand by open-mouthed, wondering what piece of nonsense they’ll come up with next.
They have a great deal in common with Napoleon the Pig from Orwell’s book, Animal Farm. Whatever piece of nonsense he wanted to spout had to be believed, such as: All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
The Islamic world seems to say: Everything we say is wise, though much of it is nonsense.