Soccer Diplomacy

Iraq War, Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue

Forget the World Cup head butt, football (soccer for those who think “football” is a foreign word for the world’s most popular sport) may now be one of the only bright spots in war-torn Iraq’s immediate future. In case you have not heard, the Iraqi National Team won the Asia Cup. They did it with Shi’a, Sunni and Kurd and without the threat of torture for a missed goal. Their star, Younis Mahmoud, scored the winning goal against Saudi Arabia. Soon after ordinary Iraqis took the streets with guns, but shot into the air in celebration rather than at each other. At least for one day. Simon Apter has a nice article about this in The Nation.

Iraq’s success in soccer is, perhaps, one of the few concrete triumphs to have come out of the quagmire. Call it a beneficent side effect. The WMDs were, indeed, not there, but the bastinado was, awaiting whomever Uday capriciously felt had embarrassed the country with a sub-par performance. Running possibly the only Ministry of Sport complete with a torture chamber and jail, Uday made Bob Knight look like Francis of Assisi. Continue reading Soccer Diplomacy →

Islam Obscured

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Islam and Christianity, Islam: Introduction


“Interior of the Amron Mosque,” Henry Bechard, ca. 1870

[Note: the following excerpt is from the introduction to my recent book on the ways in which anthropologists study and represent Islam.]

What the world does not need is yet another book which assumes Islam can be abstracted out of evolving cultural contexts and neatly essentialized into print without repeating the obvious or glossing over the obtuse. This is–I believe and I hope–not such a book. I have no interest in telling you what Islam is, what it really must be, or even what it should be. In what follows I am more attuned to what Islam hopefully is not, at least not for someone who approaches it seriously as an anthropologist and historian. I bare no obvious axe to grind as either a determined detractor against the religion or an over-anxious advocate for it. Personally, as well as academically, I consider Islam a fascinatingly diverse faith, a force in history that must be reckoned with in the present. The offensive tool I do choose to wield, if my figurative pen can stand a militant symbol, is that of a critical hammer, an iconoclastic smashing of the rhetoric that represents, over-represents and misrepresents Islam from all sides. By avoiding judgment on the sacred truth of this vibrant faith, I shift intention towards an I-view that takes no summary representation of Islam as sacred. Continue reading Islam Obscured →

Springtime for Osama

Islam in Europe, Music and Dance, Terrorism Issue

If you had taken a poll of Holocaust survivors after their liberation from death camps in World War II, chances are few would have imagined that a future comedian (and a Jewish one at that) would produce a box-office smash that included a chorus line of goose-stepping rockettes prancing to “Hitler in springtime.” For the record, Mel Brooks spares no one, including a Busby Berkeley romp with Torquemada through the Spanish Inquisition. Nor does Monty Python, who satirized Nazis and, spam-spam-spam, The Spanish Inquisition, on the other side of the Atlantic. Of course, neither Brooks nor Python would have kept their heads (or the body parts they make the most jokes about) in 15th century Spain. So if even the cruelest atrocities of history can be lampooned with hindsight humor, when is a good time to rip into Osama Bin Laden and the distorted political mantra of jihad?

Jihad: The Musical already hit New York, and now it is taking Britain at the fringes (if Edinburgh can be deemed a fringe venue) according to the latest news reports on the BBC and The Guardian. Continue reading Springtime for Osama →

Letter to a Country with No Frontier

Ethics, Lebanon, Poetry

by George El-Hage

[Note: This is a translation from the Arabic, which is available in pdf by clicking here.]

Stand up! Get up!

Carry your bed and follow me.

Let’s leave this ungrateful land

This land…

That savors the decaying cadavers of its sons

A land satiated by the blood of its children.

Let’s leave these poor people

Defeated, fragmented

Knowing nothing but selfishness,

Servicing foreigners,

And worshipping the hollow love of prestige. Continue reading Letter to a Country with No Frontier →

The Contribution of Overseas Doctors to Britain’s NHS

Immigration Issues, Terrorism Issue


By Omar Dewachi

The recent failed terrorist plots that targeted the heart of London and Glasgow airport came as a shock for many as the identity and background of the suspects were revealed. Most of the detained were medical doctors who worked in Britain and who had Indian, Iraqi and Jordanian backgrounds. The fact that they were doctors was seen as a betrayal of the medical profession with its aim to save lives. However, the bigger shock in the UK was that these were overseas doctors who were working in Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), the main provider of health care to the country. As the new Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, promised in his first press conference to review the NHS recruitment, more background checks and surveillance of overseas doctors is going to take place. However, one wonders how this surveillance is going to take place and who is going to pay its heavy price and consequences? Britain has always imported its medical staff from abroad using them as an expandable labor pool. In this wave of hysteria about background checks and surveillance, the contribution of the overseas medical population in building Britain’s NHS must not be forgotten. Continue reading The Contribution of Overseas Doctors to Britain’s NHS →

Exposing Extremism—No Matter Where It Is Found

Islamophobia, Journalism and Media

By Bruce B. Lawrence

Robert Benchley, the American humorist, once quipped that “there are two categories of people in the world, those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.” Less funny, but persistent is the reflex to divide all approaches to Islam into two categories. The first are those who seek the truth in Islam. They ask: What are the various forms of Islam? How can we determine which is the true form of Islamic belief, and how do we know what are authentic norms for Islamic conduct? In opposition, there are those who have already decided there is no truth in Islam. Instead, they regard Islam itself as the true enemy—the enemy of global peace, the enemy of civil society and, above all, the enemy of Western civilization. Continue reading Exposing Extremism—No Matter Where It Is Found →

Mahdi as Hell: Look out Darwin

CyberOrient, Islam and Christianity, Islamic Sciences, Turkey

Has your atlas arrived yet? The New York Times reported yesterday that prominent American scientists and politicians are receiving what purports to be an “Atlas of Creation” from a Turkish media guru self-named Harun Yahya. No, it is not revenge for the “War on Terror.” Nor is a glossy book of patent nonsense, no matter how intelligently designed and styled as “probably the largest and most beautiful creationist challenge yet to Darwin’s theory” much of a challenge. Scientists will recognize it for a “load of crap,” as Kevin Padian, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, impolitely phrased it.

The “War on Terror” has manufactured a whole host of new enemies. But what a strange bedfellow is Charles Darwin, who liberated science from the dogmatic demands of religious apologists like Mahdi Yahya a century and a half ago. Darwin’s approach now summarizes all of modern science, a steady advance in knowledge because no specific idea is ever held sacred. This does not mean that scientists must abandon religion and faith, but it does offer a view of the world in which human reason is not abandoned under the cloak and rhetorical dagger of a supposedly spiritual quest for moral behavior. Continue reading Mahdi as Hell: Look out Darwin →

Eden is Lost

Ethics, Iraq War, Poetry

Today’s BBC has a report about the daily toll of mutilated bodies dumped into the Tigris River in Iraq and found in nets down river. Once a symbol of a river of paradise, the Tigris might as well be fed these days by a burning lake of fire. There are times when perhaps the best way to respond is in poetry.

A river rises in Eden to water the garden; beyond there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is the Pishon; it is the one that winds through the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. The gold of that land is excellent; bdellium and lapis lazuli are also there. The name of the second river is the Gihon; it is the one that winds all through the land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it is the one that flows east of Asshur. The fourth river is the Euphrates. The LORD God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it. (Genesis 2:10-15)

Eden is lost
yet again.
The weeds of war have choked the marshes
where the water god once spoke of life.
Nothing rises in Eden today
but the dust of a hate I can not measure.
God’s good well is dry
and the fields lie parched,
savaged by unwanted salt and more lies. Continue reading Eden is Lost →