Monthly Archives: July 2008

Not your Daily Bread

Afghanistan, Food and Drink, Iran, Orientalism, Photography


Baking bread in Seyistan on the Afghan Border

[It is hard to find a society in the Middle East without a thriving history of bread preparation. Before the modern loaf and bleached flour assaulted our tastebuds, a variety of flat breads were baked, either in clay overs or other makeshift ovens. Here is a description of both Afghan and Turcoman bread making from a century ago, as reported by Ellsworth Huntington in the National Geographic Magazine in 1909. Webshaykh.]

The method of cooking it was very different from that employed in the oases, where ovens of mud shaped like beehives, with a hole in the top, are heated with a fire of weeds, and the dough is stuck against the inside of the hot oven, where it hangs until it is so far cooked that it falls down into the ashes. The bread of the Afghan caravan was cooked by heating small, round cobblestones in the fire and then poking them out and wrapping dough an inch thick about them. The balls thus formed were again thrown into the fire to be poked out again when cooked. The bread tasted well there in the desert, although in civilized communities the grit and ashes would have seemed unendurable. Continue reading Not your Daily Bread →

A Timely Lesson from Ibn Yaqzan

Ethics, Islam: Introduction, Sufism

[In a recent and provocatively stimulating book. Bill Chittick examines the relevance of centuries of intellectual pursuit of Islamic cosmology for Muslims in the modern world. This is a fascinating book that is worth reading by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. It is a welcome relief from the constant drumbeat of Islam and politics. Order a copy today… Webshaykh.]

by William C. Chittick

It is commonly imagined that if our ancestors could be brought from the past in a time machine, they would be amazed and dumbfounded by the feats of modern science and civilization. But how would a Muslim intellectual of the past react to the modern world, and in particular to its intellectual ambiance? What would an al-Farabi, or an Avicenna, or a Mulla Sadra think of contemporary science and scholarship?

For the purpose of this experiment, I will borrow the name of our time-traveler from the famous philosophical novel of Ibn Tufayl, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, “Alive, son of Awake.” The name refers to the soul that has been reborn by actualizing the intellect. I will simply call him Ibn Yaqzan.

No doubt Ibn Yaqzan would be astonished by the ready availability of an enormous amount of information. However, he would be much more astonished by the fact that people have no idea that all this information is irrelevant to the goals of human life. He would see that people’s understanding of their true situation has decreased roughly in proportion to the amount of information they have gathered. The more “facts” they know, the less they grasp the significance of the facts and the nature of their own selves and the world around them. Continue reading A Timely Lesson from Ibn Yaqzan →

Pox Britannica

Islam in Europe, Islamophobia, Journalism and Media

The Shameful Islamophobia at the Heart of Britain’s Press

When a tabloid newspaper reports that a ‘Muslim hate mob’ is daubing abuse, can we believe them?

By Peter Oborne
The Independent, Monday, 7 July 2008,

On the morning of 7 October 2006 The Sun newspaper splashed a dramatic story across its front page. The story – billed as exclusive – concerned a callous and cynical crime committed by Muslims. A team of Sun reporters described in graphic detail how what the paper labelled a “Muslim hate mob” had vandalised a house near Windsor. The Sun revealed that “vile yobs hurled bricks through windows and daubed obscenities. A message on the drive spelled out in 4ft-letters: ‘Fuck off ‘.”

One Tory MP, Philip Davies, was quoted venting outrage at this act of vandalism. “If there’s anybody who should fuck off,” Davies was quoted as saying, “it’sthe Muslims who are doing this kind of thing. Police should pull out the stops to track down these vile thugs”.

The Sun left its readers in no doubt as to why the outrage had been committed. Local Muslims were waging a vendetta against four British soldiers who hoped to rent the house on their return from serving their country in Afghanistan. The paper quoted an army source saying that: “these guys have done nothing but bravely serve their country – yet they can’t even live where they want in their own”. Continue reading Pox Britannica →

From Failed Resolution 1696 to Real Diplomacy

Anthropology/Sociology, Iran


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

by William O. Beeman

The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1696 calling for Iran to suspend nuclear enrichment was passed on July 31, 2006 — nearly two years ago. Every sanction and demand placed on Iran since that time has been based on this Resolution (and its strengthened re-iteration, Resolution 1737 on December 23 of the same year).

Clearly after two years the Resolution and its follow-ups have not worked. Iran has not suspended its uranium enrichment activities, and indications this week are that it is not likely to do so in the future. The United States and its reluctant European allies obviously can not put enough pressure on Iran to cause it to abandon what the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — to which Iran (but not Israel, Pakistan or India) is signatory – provides as is its “inalienable right”: peaceful nuclear development. As long as it does not violate Provision One of the NPT, namely the agreement not to develop nuclear weaponry. Continue reading From Failed Resolution 1696 to Real Diplomacy →

Muslim Metal

Books You Should Read, Immigration Issues, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Music and Dance

Muslim Metal
Bands crank up multiculturalism in the Islamic world

By MARK LEVINE, The Chronicle Review, July 4, 2008

The first time I heard the words “heavy metal” and “Islam” in the same sentence, I was confused, to say the least. It was around 5 p.m. on a hot July day in the city of Fez, Morocco. I was at the bar of a five-star hotel with a group of friends having a drink — at $25 a piece, only one — to celebrate a birthday. The person sitting across from me described a punk performance he had seen in Rabat not long before we had met.

The idea of a young Moroccan with a Mohawk and a Scottish kilt almost caused me to spill my drink. That the possibility of a Muslim heavy-metal scene came as a total surprise to me only underscored how much I still had to learn about Morocco, and the Muslim world more broadly, even after a dozen years studying it, and traveling and living across it. If there could be such a thing as a heavy-metal Islam, I thought, then perhaps the future was far brighter than most observers of the Muslim world imagined less than a year after September 11, 2001. Continue reading Muslim Metal →

A Secular State Must Deliver

Books You Should Read, Ethics, Islamic Law

by Mohammed Bamyeh, The Immanent Flame, SSRC Blogs, June 20, 2008

It is hard to disagree with the main arguments of Abdullahi an-Na’im’s impeccable book: a healthy religious life requires a secular state, even as political life may remain infused with the religious values of the population. And the historical examples provide added credence to the point. An Islamic state as such never existed historically, even though pre-modern states cannot be regarded as secular in the contemporary sense of the word. But there has never been a state in Islamic history that fused entirely religious and political authority after Muhammad, and it is far from obvious that Muhammad’s own Medina community constituted a state or was meant as a model for any state. All states in Islamic history had a more clearly defined political than religious character, even as they used religion for their purposes or were expected to fulfill some religious roles. In effect, they were political entities that survived to the extent that they accommodated themselves to the diversity (including legal diversity) of Islam and other local traditions. Colonial rule is to blame for rigidifying the sense of what Islam meant, namely by codifying diverse, flexible religious traditions into standard legal formats and ignoring the fluidity of communal boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims. However, this rigid colonial perspective on the meaning of religiosity and identity was inherited by contemporary Islamic political movements and states claiming to be Islamic. Continue reading A Secular State Must Deliver →