Brain Drain

Immigration Issues, Islamic Sciences

by Michael Woods

The United Nations Development Program, in a report published last year, described in often painful detail some of the factors that have contributed to the decline of science and the rise of extremism in Arab societies. Among them are:

Increases in average income have been lower in the Arab world than anywhere else for 20 years, except for the poorest African countries. “If such trends continue…it will take the average Arab citizen 140 years to double his or her income, whole other regions are set to achieve that level in a matter of less than 10 years,” the report noted. One in 5 Arabs lives on less than $2 a day.

Arab unemployment is the highest in the developing world.

Surveys show more than half of young Arabs want to leave their countries and live in the United States or other industrialized countries where opportunities are better. Continue reading Brain Drain →

Move Over, You Tube

Film and Video, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Islam: Introduction, Qur'an, YouTube Watch

You Tube boasts one of the largest audiences on the web. There are plenty of videos put up by Muslims and many of these are in languages other than English. On July 11 there were 643,000 hits for the search “Islam” on You Tube. But move over, You Tube, and make room for Islamic tube, which has carefully selected videos on Islamic themes. You can find Quranic recitation, debates, numerous sermons and lectures and some rather raw anti-Zionist (and decidedly anti-Semitic) diatribes. This is a significant resource, but like all websites, should be consulted with caution.

Divided We Stand

Gender and Sexuality, Iran, Literature

Divided We Stand: A Woman’s Word about the Iranian-American Experience

by Dagmar Riedel

Gertrude Stein is alleged to have advised young Ernest Hemingway that he’d better stick to writing postcards if he had messages for his readers. It is understandable that Iranian-Americans want to reach American-American audiences with their stories about men and women with legs astride in two different cultures. But who is authorized to question a novel with a message, if its content is certified by the author’s traditional upbringing in Iran before the Islamic Revolution?

The fourth novel of Nahid Rachlin, Jumping over Fire (City Lights Books, 2005; cf. www nahidrachlin.com), has an intriguing black cover. Above the title a pair of blue eyes are staring intently at the viewer through the eye slit of a head scarf, while the bottom half merges a floral Arabesque with the yellow-red flames of a Nowruz bonfire. The title’s reference to the Nowruz purification ritual of jumping over fire is explained in the course of the novel. But on the cover the Zoroastrian tradition is presented as a variant of Western stereotypes of both the Oriental harem and Shia fanaticism because the collage promises a peek in the otherwise hidden world of a secluded Iranian woman and her burning desires. The reader has just to turn to the back cover to receive from Andre Dubus III, the son of the famous short-story author Andre Dubus, the confirmation that this is indeed a novel about a forbidden desire. The interpretation is further reinforced by the one-page biographical sketch in the back, written in the third person singular and designed to highlight in an objective language the author’s lifelong personal experience with displacement and gender-based social restrictions. Continue reading Divided We Stand →

Gender Takes a Licking

Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Luke R. E. Publican, Pakistan, YouTube Watch

One thing that ethical reflection by most Muslims, Christians and feminists can agree upon is that female sexuality in advertising is degrading to women, turning them into objects for the male gaze. There is no question that sex sells and not just on Madison Avenue. A recent video commercial for Wall’s Magnum chocolate bar, starring Pakistani model Neha Ahmed, is as suggestive as any MTV video. Indeed Bollywood rivals Hollywood in depicting the female body as a focus of attraction. But exploitation is not only from companies out to make a buck by subliminally changing the letter “b” to the letter “f.” Sometimes those sincere individuals who think they are defending women’s honor end up reinforcing the stereotype. Such is the case for the image pictured above and posted on an Islamic website. There are many reasons why a woman would choose to wear hijab, but in this metaphor their gender takes a licking. The issue is not the wrapping, whether hijab or sticky paper, but the fact that flies will go for the candy no matter what you try to do. Does it occur to the creator of this image that the problem is not with candy, which is tasteful in the right context, but the nuisance of unzipped flies. Someone go find the fly swatter, please.

Luke R. E. Publican

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 →