Monthly Archives: August 2010

Imams as schoolboys

Educating Imams in Germany: the Battle for a European Islam

By Paul Hockenos, The Chronicle Review, July 18, 2010

Berlin

In the snow-swept courtyard of the white-marble Sehitlik Mosque, Berlin’s largest Islamic prayer house, the resident imam greets the faithful with handshakes and embraces. A slightly built, cordial man wearing an open parka, Mustafa Aydin is a Turkish civil servant on a four-year posting abroad, as are many of the Islamic preachers in Germany, where the Muslim community is overwhelmingly of Turkish heritage. Aydin understands basic German, which he’s been learning, but he communicates with me through a Turkish-to-German interpreter. The services’ prayers are in Arabic, he says, but his sermons and chats with congregants—including those born and schooled in Germany—are in the language of their parents’ Turkish homeland, and that, he assures me, is perfectly adequate for his parish’s needs. “We don’t have any problems with Turkish,” he says.

In a Germany struggling to come to grips with its burgeoning, four-million-strong Muslim population (about 5 percent of the populace), the use of imams sent from Turkey and other foreign countries, including Saudi Arabia, has come under sustained fire from integration-minded critics. After all, argue some intellectuals, politicos, and other citizens across Germany’s political spectrum, including the more moderate currents in the Muslim community, how can the foreign clergy advise believers—many of whom grapple with profound disadvantage in Germany—without mastering the lingua franca and knowing the world they live in? The imams have, in part, been held responsible for Muslims’ ghettoization, as well as fundamentalism in some pockets of the country. Continue reading Imams as schoolboys

Tariq Aziz: ‘Britain and the US killed Iraq. I wish I was martyred’


Tariq Aziz with Saddam Hussein before the fall

by Martin Chulov in Baghdad , The Guardian, August 5, 2010

Tariq Aziz is slumped on a tattered brown sofa seat cradling his walking stick and cigarettes, his gaunt face topped, incongruously for a practising Christian, by a Muslim prayer cap. It is perhaps only the familiar black-ringed spectacles that signal to the visitor that this was Iraq’s former face to the world – Saddam Hussein’s right-hand man, his most powerful deputy.

Apart from his captors and lawyers, Aziz, says he has not seen or spoken to a foreigner since the fall of Baghdad. But after years rotating between solitary confinement and a witness box in court, he is now more than ready to speak.

“It’s been seven years and four months that I have been in prison,” he told the Guardian. “But did I commit a crime against any civilian, military or religious man? The answer is no.”

Iraq has been through hell since Aziz was last seen in public, days before Baghdad fell in April 2003, toppling Hussein and the totalitarian Ba’athist regime that Aziz had helped lead for 30 years. Continue reading Tariq Aziz: ‘Britain and the US killed Iraq. I wish I was martyred’

Milking the mosque cow


Residents in Temecula, Calif., protested against a mosque’s proposed worship center; photo by Mike Blake for Reuters

As I child I have vivid memories of attending an avowedly fundamentalist revival meeting on the then hot Cold War theme of “The Impending Holocaust,” the theme being that the Russian communists were poised to invade America, knock down all our electricity networks and raze every church to the ground (imagine what they would do to God-fearing virgins). It was those commie atheists who could not stand seeing any house of worship. Now it is clear that the fearmongers among us have switched Satanic enemies. Islam has replaced Communism as the Devil’s international workshop (of course Islam long held that status before any German freethinker or British social theorist thought up the idea of communism). A church on every corner, a synagogue here and there and even an occasional Masonic temple, but “our” God preserve us from any mosques.

The current torrent of media hype about building a “mosque” near Ground Zero is part of a deeper Islamophobic fervor in direct lineage with the same unfriendly folks who have self-righteously hated Injuns, Negroes and Jews and found verses in the King James Version of the Bible to back up their hatred. Today’s New York Times carries a story by Laurie Goodstein about efforts across the country to stop construction of Islamic places of worship. If this is yet another tempest brewed in Tea Party forums, it looks more like a lynch mob than a ladies aid society brunch. Continue reading Milking the mosque cow

Hammering home Oriental Studies


One of the fundamental early attempts to establish Oriental Studies on sound academic footing was Josef von Hammer-Purgstall’s Fundgraben des Orients, established in 1809. It is a pity that in his Orientalism (1978) Edward Said ignored early texts like this, since this was far more influential than many of the prejudicial books he rightly critiques. Rather than dismissing all Western writing about an “Orient” for which accurate information was just coming together, it is relevant to look at the intention of this particular effort. Here is how von Hammer-Purgstall explains the project:

We feel that it is our task to show the true path for the improvement of Oriental Studies, thereby applying the meaning behind our motto: “Say, unto God belongeth the east and the west: He directeth whom He pleaseth into the right way.” Thus all of those in the West who gaze at the East, and vice versa, will meet here, helping each other to extract from the raw mine treasures of knowledge and learning.

Quote from Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (Oxford: Oneworld), 2009, pp. 170

By Air-Cooled Bus from Baghdad


The photograph above, taken by W. Robert Moore, appeared in the National Geographic Magazine December, 1938 issue (p. 732). The caption reads:

THE DESERT-GOING BAGHDAD-DAMASCUS BUS IS AIR-COOLED AND WAS “MADE IN U.S.A.”
Temperature was 111 degrees Fahrenheit when the picture ws taken at Baghdad’s airport, but inside the stainless-steel bus, operated by Nairn Transport Company, it was only 76 degrees. Now, in a few hours, these huge high-speed cars make the trip that once took camels many days.

Voltaire on Islam


For many Muslims the name Voltaire is one held in anathema. His rationalism is not the issue, but he is forever scarred as the author of a play in which Mahomet is the icon of fanaticism. While it is obvious that the real target of the play was Catholicism and not Islam, the mere fact that Muhammad becomes the scapegoat is a difficult trope to accept for quite a few Muslims. But Voltaire often praised Islam in contrast to the blood-crazed Christianity of his day. Consider the following comment:

The legislator of the Muslims, a powerful and terrible man, established his dogmas with his arms and courage; however his religion became indulgent and tolerant. The divine institutor of Christianity, living in peace and humility, preached pardon, and his holy, sweet religion became, through our fury, the most intolerant and barbaric of all.

Continue reading Voltaire on Islam