Quotulatiousness

March 16, 2010

Prepare for fireworks

Filed under: Books, Europe, Germany, Middle East, Religion — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:01

. . . or actual fire, as Qur’an researchers prepare what is carefully referred to as a “critical edition”:

A team of researchers at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences is preparing to bring out the first installment of Corpus Coranicum — which purports to be nothing less than the first critically evaluated text of the Qur’an ever to be produced.

What this means is that the research team is in the process of analysing and transcribing some 12,000 slides of Qur’an mansucripts from the first six centuries of the text’s existence. Once that is complete, the way is open to producing a text that annotates and, presumably, provides some sort of exegesis on the differences found in the early manuscripts.

The impact of such a project can hardly be underestimated.

Delicately put.

Update: It is an inherently dangerous act to discuss certain works, never mind to apply academic analysis tools and provide readers with context and interpretation. This project is intended to be complete by 2025 (they’re concentrating on small sections to start with). The debate — of which I suspect I really should say the uproar — will likely consume a lot of bandwidth. If the Berlin scholars are unlucky, it may consume significant chunks of their city.

On this news, Ghost of a Flea finds an interesting parallel.

February 24, 2010

Sex and the single warlord

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:50

Strategy Page discusses one of the less-well-publicized aspects of life in Afghanistan:

[. . .] in the Islamic world, sex is, well classified. Especially illicit sex. Thus some enterprising reporters have latched onto the ancient practice (in the entire region, from North Africa to India) of using young (well, teenage down to about ten) boys for sex and other entertainments (dancing, cross dressing, camel jockeys). This has been a thing with the rich and powerful in the area, for thousands of years. In some places it is sort of legal, but generally it is tolerated, even if officially forbidden. That’s because this sort of thing is most popular among the wealthy and powerful. Getting this story for Western audiences is dangerous, as those who indulge would rather make Western reporters disappear, than stop. These guys don’t consider themselves pederasts, just the custodians of ancient cultural traditions. Or something like that.

When the Taliban came to power in the mid 1990s, they outlawed the practice, but it continued anyway, just more discreetly. The Taliban tried to crack down on homosexuality in general, especially in the south, around Kandahar (the “capital” of the pro-Taliban Pushtun tribes.) Didn’t work. Casual homosexuality has long been the custom down there, and Afghans from other parts of the country (especially non-Pushtuns) have a large repertoire of humor and insults about the proclivities of those Kandaharis (one of the more printable ones is about how birds flying over Kandahar have to do so with one wing, as the other one must be used to cover the avian backside.)

January 12, 2010

Islam4UK to be banned?

Filed under: Britain, Law, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:25

The BBC reports that the group Islam4UK will be banned under the Terrorism Act:

A radical Islamist group that planned a march through Wootton Bassett will be banned under counter-terrorism laws, Home Secretary Alan Johnson has said.

Islam4UK had planned the protest at the Wiltshire town to honour Muslims killed in the Afghanistan conflict.

The government had been considering outlawing the group — Islam4UK is also known as al-Muhajiroun.

A spokesman for Islam4UK told the BBC it was an “ideological and political organisation”, and not a violent one.

Mr Johnson said: “I have today laid an order which will proscribe al-Muhajiroun, Islam4UK, and a number of the other names the organisation goes by.

The strength of the government’s move may be judged by the next statement in the report: “It is already proscribed under two other names — al-Ghurabaa and The Saved Sect.”

So, Islam4UK will be “banned” . . . in the sense that the organization has to come up with another alias, but the group itself will suffer no other hardship? Perhaps I’m missing the point of this little exercise.

January 6, 2010

I didn’t think that was what “tolerance” was supposed to mean

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Rondi Adamson posted an interesting Martin Amis quote:

I just transcribed and edited a speech Martin Amis gave in Toronto recently. The whole thing was wonderful, but this — about Islamic fascism — was the best line:

I have to take my hat off to the left in that they have found something to defend in a movement that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitorial, imperialist and genocidal. Perhaps it’s their view on usury that is attractive to the left — low interest rates or non-existent interest rates.

November 17, 2009

QotD: Characteristics of death-squads

Filed under: Military, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

This is not at all a matter of the usual stupid refusal of the FBI and other security services to understand an early warning even when they have detected one. It is a direct challenge to the unity and integrity of the armed services, which have been one of our society’s principal organs and engines of ethnic and religious integration. A U.S. soldier who wonders about the reliability of his, let alone her, Muslim colleague is not being “Islamophobic.” (A phobia is an irrational or uncontrollable fear.) If Maj. Hasan has made this understandable worry in the ranks more widespread, he has done his fanatical preacher friend the greatest possible service. But that’s his fault for doing what he did, and his superiors’ fault for letting him openly rehearse it for so long, not mine for pointing it out.

I wrote some years ago that the three most salient characteristics of the Muslim death-squad type were self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. Surrounded as he was by fellow shrinks who were often very distressed by his menacing manner, Maj. Hasan managed to personify all three traits — with the theocratic rhetoric openly thrown in for good measure — and yet be treated even now as if the real word for him was troubled. Prepare to keep on meeting those three symptoms again, along with official attempts to oppose them only with therapy, if that. At least the holy warriors know they are committing suicide.

Christopher Hitchens, “Hard Evidence: Seven salient facts about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan”, Slate, 2009-11-16

November 10, 2009

QotD: “It’s not that the FBI is merely incompetent”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:11

You know the scariest thing about this? It’s not that the FBI is merely incompetent. It is that, apparently, so many American Muslims in sensitive positions make contact with Al Qaeda that the FBI is forced to conduct investigatory triage and evaluate whether, in their minds, the emails are merely innocent-for-now banter or something demanding a more urgent response.

Otherwise, why the blow-off? I don’t understand how the FBI could possibly deem any chatter with Al Qaeda harmless and not worth investigating unless so much of this was going on that they had decide which illegal chatter with a hot-war enemy was worth their limited let’s-take-a-looksie-at-this resources.

Ace, “FBI: Hassan’s Al Qaeda Emails Were Probably Just Some Research and Social Chatter and Stuff”, Ace of Spades, 2009-11-10

October 26, 2009

QotD: Neither full veritas nor much lux

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:37

Notwithstanding all this, The Cartoons That Shook the World is an informative read. But you won’t find the actual cartoons in it. There’s a cartoon mocking George W. Bush; there’s a death threat against the cartoonists. But Yale University Press refused to publish Klausen’s book as she submitted it — with the 12 Danish cartoons. Yale ordered her to remove the cartoons, citing unnamed “experts” who claimed the book “ran a serious risk of instigating violence.” Several American newspapers, like The Philadelphia Inquirer, published the cartoons without incident. Yale has had no actual threats, but it pre-emptively surrendered. If Klausen wanted to live up to Yale’s motto — “light and truth” — she would have done what the entire editorial staff of the New York Press did in 2006 when their publisher vetoed their reprinting of the cartoons: They resigned en masse.

Given Klausen’s burning derision for Fogh Rasmussen’s decision to stand for freedom, it’s no surprise she collapsed immediately herself, academic integrity be damned. Her surrender — and Yale’s — is not a detail but a central part of the story, for it is exactly the outcome desired by the Danish imams, the Saudi diplomats and their chorus of rioters.

Ezra Levant, “Review: The Cartoons that Shook the World, by Jytte Klausen Cartoon logic”, The Globe and Mail, 2009-10-24

October 16, 2009

Friday links of possible interest

Filed under: Britain, Football, Health, Humour, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

August 11, 2009

Another way of unconsciously offending

Filed under: History, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

I’ve apparently been offending Muslims for years by referring to their places of worship as “mosques”. If Ibraheem Wilson is correct, the word mosque is a French term, invented by Spanish monarchs to associate Muslims with mosquitoes. Who knew?

We are supposed to use the term “masjid” instead of “mosque”. I have no idea of the preferrred pronunciation . . . MAS-dzhid? MAS-yid? mas-DZHEED? But I suspect that whichever one I try to use will be wrong.

Update: Whoops, forgot the H/T to Ghost of a Flea.

August 5, 2009

Maybe there isn’t a lot of ruin in a nation? Or a civilization?

Filed under: Books, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:47

Adam Smith remarked that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, but he perhaps was speaking just of economical ruin? In culture, things seem to have the ability to change remarkably quickly … usually in a ruinous direction. Ghost of a Flea looks at an interesting — but depressing — phenomenon:

In less than a generation, we have come to an extraordinary pass. Once right thinking progressives lined up to purchase copies of The Satanic Verses — my first edition sits untouched and unread — and death chanting rioters in Bradford and elsewhere were called out for the barbarians they so manifestly demonstrated themselves to be. It was the thin edge of the wedge. 9/11 worked as it was intended by its authors, sending every weakling into a panic, lashing out at the men on the walls lest they provoke another raid from the borderlands.

These days, Salman Rushdie would most likely be charged with something by a Commission for the Promotion of Human Rights and Prevention of Hatred. In Ireland they would cut to the chase and press criminal charges. Under the new regime, all demons may be mocked save the one pretending to be God.

These Weimar conditions are a hot house for growing hatred against the people they are ostensibly meant to protect.

July 16, 2009

QotD: Canadian Sharia courts

Filed under: Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:30

An Iranian artist has been sentenced to a five year prison term for setting the Koran to music. I would express outrage and alarm but I am writing from Canada and am in no position to point fingers. In Canada, we call our sharia courts “human rights commissions”.

Nick Packwood, “Provoking the faithful”, Ghost of a Flea, 2009-07-14

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