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To conduct professional research is not easy; it’s difficult and in particular the most difficult thing is to plan the research and test these plans for accuracy. Another reason for which research is not easy is that it should be ethical; and I cannot emphasise this enough. For this reason, doctoral students are carefully trained. When research has a significant impact on human beings (or even animals) the ethical concerns should be paramount. Today writing and research about Muslims, because of the political situation and increasingly anti-Muslim sentiments, should be of the most professional level and ethically and methodologically correct.

Today the think tank Policy Exchange has presented a report entitled The Hijacking of British Islam.

The report is an investigation concerning the availability of ‘radical’ literature threatening non-Muslims and Muslim apostates within UK mosques and Islamic institutions. (more…)

[Webshaykh’s note: With so much discredited foreign policy decision-making, perhaps we should go back to the Nancy Reagan doctrine and look at the ouija board. Give political anti-realism a chance…what the heck, Mr. Hayek… See it for yourself on Youtube.]

‘Clairvoyant’ sees new Lebanese president, more assassinations, Hizbullah ’surprise’

Daily Star staff
Tuesday, October 30, 2007

BEIRUT: Reputed clairvoyant Michel Hayek predicted late on Sunday that “Lebanon will witness the election of a new president despite current problems.” He also ruled out the “imminent” threat of civil war. In an interview with George Salibi on New TV, Hayek foresaw “a few skirmishes and problems” in the country.

“There is no impending end to the string of assassinations,” he said, referring to the political murders that have plagued Lebanon since 2005.

Nicknamed “the Nostradamus of the Middle East,” Hayek is known for his yearly predictions for Lebanon, the Middle East and the world. (more…)

[Photograph taken in Afghanistan by Sergey Maximishin, 2001.]

[Webshaykh’s Note: It is a rare day when an anthropologist’s commentary is published in the New York Times. Here is yesterday’s op-ed by Richard Shweder of the University of Chicago, reproduced below. I invite readers to post their views here. I gave my own view of Anthropo covertus in an earlier post.]

by Richard Shweder, New York Times, October 28, 2007

IS the Pentagon truly going to deploy an army of cultural relativists to Muslim nations in an effort to make the world a safer place?

A few weeks ago this newspaper reported on an experimental Pentagon “human terrain” program to embed anthropologists in combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan. It featured two military anthropologists: Tracy (last name withheld), a cultural translator viewed by American paratroopers as “a crucial new weapon” in counterinsurgency; and Montgomery McFate, who has taken her Yale doctorate into active duty in a media blitz to convince skeptical colleagues that the occupying forces should know more about the local cultural scene.

How have members of the anthropological profession reacted to the Pentagon’s new inclusion agenda? (more…)

Of all the notable things on earth,
The queerest one is pride of birth
Among our “fierce democracy!”
A bridge across a hundred years,
Without a prop to save it from sneers,
Not even a couple of rotten peers–
A thing for laughter, fleers, and jeers,
Is American aristocracy!

English and Irish, French and Spanish,
Germans, Italians, Dutch and Danish,
Crossing their veins until they vanish
In one conglomeration!
So subtle a tangle of blood, indeed,
No Heraldry Harvey will ever succeed
In finding the circulation. (more…)

Coming across a cache of Civil War era copies of Harper’s Weekly some time ago, several of the old (almost a century and a half) jokes caught my attention. One of them was about Egypt; well, sort of. Here goes the latest joke from Harper’s Weekly for November 9, 1861, just before a war that was anything but a joke for American history.

Why ought not the people to starve in the deserts of Egypt?

On account of the sandwiches (sand which is) there.

But how came the sandwiches there?

Because Ham was there and his descendants mustered and bred (mustard and bread).

It helps to be a bible trivia expert for that one, but the next joke (from March 15, 1862) seems right up to date, given Haliburton’s infamous drilling oil pipelines to nowhere.

Why do our soldiers need no barbers?

Because they are regularly shaved by the Government contractors.

by Robin Bidwell

Philby’s grave in Beirut bears the inscription ‘Greatest of Arabian explorers’ and, in very many ways, this claim by his son is justified. None of the writers that we have discussed saw so much of the Peninsula, visited as he did practically every corner of it nor traversed it so many times in so many different ways. None of them spent more than twenty months in Arabia: Philby was there for most of forty years.

Harry St John Bridger Philby (generally called Jack or Shaikh Abdullah) was born in Ceylon in 1885 and used cheerfully to suggest that he was not really himself but a local baby mistakenly picked up by a careless nurse. After a very successful career at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge, he joined the Indian Civil Service and arrived in Bombay in December 1908. When, some two years later, he married, his best man was his cousin, the future Field-Marshal Montgomery. Philby acquired the reputation of being a difficult colleague—indeed he claimed to have been the first Socialist in the Service—but he made his mark as an exceptional linguist and a first-class administrator. (more…)

[The following is an editorial in the Centre Daily News, about a visit to Penn State by the Islamo-Fascist Awareness Weekers, brought to my attention by Jonathan Brockupp in the Department of History and Religious Studies.]

As the world, the country and even formerly placid Happy Valley desperately need unity and understanding, rock star Rick Santorum brought his Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week tour to Penn State this week, spreading his divisive “us vs. them,” “Christians vs. pagans” message.

“Thank youuuuuuuuuuu, State College. You’re a great audience. Here’s one you may have heard before. …” (more…)

By John Renard, for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Online, 10/23/2007

Something remarkable in Muslim-Christian relations happened this month, yet few Americans are aware of it.

More than 130 Muslim religious scholars from more than 20 countries in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Asia and North America sent an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI and to some two dozen other leaders of Orthodox and Protestant churches. Overwhelmingly conciliatory and non-polemical, the document (available at www.acommonword.com) lays out evidence from the Bible and Quran that all three Abrahamic faiths share a common focus on the “two great commandments”: love of God and love of one’s neighbor as oneself. (more…)

What better place for the Republican wolf-no-longer-in-sheepish-clothing pack to have a demolition derby debate than Orlando, home of Disney’s fantasy view of America and chosen site for a dodgeball game with reporters (not deciders, of course) from Fox News? Not since the missing chads of 2000 has so much heat been generated in Florida over such an important outcome. Whatever round this is in the GOP run-up to the election, this time they all came out itchin’ for a good-old-boy fight, apparently ready to shed their “family values” political correctness if only for a night. All of the candidates took pot shots at Hillary, playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey until the audience fell on their conservatively smart asses laughing. Fred laid a few low blows on Rudy, who kicked back with his own street smarts. Mitt and McCain were able to raise a little cain. Then there were the also-theres, including the recent third-place values man, Governor and former Baptist minister Mike Huckabee. Taking a page out of Rudy’s play book, he played the fear card. In one of his responses he noted that the greatest threat that has ever faced America (get ready for a history lesson) is Islamofascism. In a recent online interview he laid out his apocalyptic scenario:

“There’s almost an inevitability, not just a possibility. It will happen again. (more…)

 

[Note: Numerous excerpts of this popular Syrian Ramadan serial can be found on Youtube, starting with episode 1. The following is a commentary in Asharq Alawsat.]

by Mshari Al-Zaydi, Asharq Alawsat, Saturday 20 October 2007

I will admit to watching the Bab al Hara (Alley Gate) series with the same fervor normally reserved for football finals. Moving from one café to another on Jeddah’s al Tahlia Street, I watched this session’s last episode. The young crowd present, dressed in t-shirts and baggy jeans, burst into a warm round of applause at the end of the show - which is quite a rare reaction among Saudi viewers.

This second-part sequel to the Syrian television series is, in fact, an undeniable phenomenon; some in Saudi even exchanged Eid ul-Fitr felicitations that were inspired by stories in the series.

But this phenomenon has reached farther and wider than just Saudi alone, many viewers in various Arab states; even Arabs living abroad, regularly tuned in and set their alarm clocks to the show’s airing time.

Perhaps this huge success is what prompted the show’s producers to make a third series for next year. Such was its popularity that even some clerics were involved in this commotion; among them was Sheikh Salah Kuftaro, son of the former late Syrian Grand Mufti Ahmad Kuftaro and the Director-General of the Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro Academy, who publicly acclaimed the show and invited its cast to a Ramadan Iftar held in their honor. Likewise, Kuwaiti Islamist MP Walid al Tabtabai also praised the series. (more…)