Unobserved irony about that Swiss minaret ban

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at 3:39 PM - 80 Comments

No doubt the Swiss voters thought of themselves as striking a blow against “fundamentalist” or “radical” Islam—but the funny thing is that it’s the most radical versions of Islam that are skeptical of objets d’art like minarets, which didn’t become a feature of the Islamic world until nearly a century after the death of the Prophet. Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, the 18th-century iconoclast who gave his name to the “Wahhabist” variety of Sunni Islam, hated the things. To the point of ordering rather a lot of them knocked down.

It goes without saying that when you scratch the surface of the Swiss minaret controversy, you pretty much find the Charlottetown accord—that is, a generic popular revolt against supercilious elites acting in perceived concert. I’m not sympathetic to religious discrimination in anybody’s law, but I am somewhat sympathetic to the Swiss idea of grassroots democracy, and very sympathetic to the Swiss passion for self-determination. My half-informed guess is that if the liberals in Switzerland had been intelligent enough to resist saying “European human-rights law requires us…” over and over, then a local dispute over minarets might not have exploded into a constitutional struggle. And Switzerland would not now find itself resisting Islam as manifested in, of all things, its architecture—i.e., the one artistic aspect of that faith which has surely contributed the most to the mainstream of European civilization.

Malaysian model caned for drinking

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 5:00 PM - 15 Comments

Six lashes—that’s Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno’s sentence for quaffing a beer with a few friends in a Malaysian bar. Kartika, a part-time model, will be the first woman caned there, and her case has divided the Southeast Asian country. Drinking isn’t technically illegal in Malaysia, but since Kartika is Muslim she is subject to Islamic sharia law, under which the consumption of alcohol is a punishable offence.

Moderates and non-Muslims say the ruling establishes a dangerous precedent by disregarding human rights and undercutting the mainstream Malaysian legal process. According to Hamidah Marican, executive director of Sisters in Islam, which works to strengthen women’s rights in Malaysia, “Kartika’s case has . . . caused damage to Malaysia’s reputation as a model Muslim country.” Continue…

We can’t talk about immigration

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 180 Comments

Christopher Caldwell’s new book is called Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. And, if you don’t quite get the Burkean allusion, his subtitle spells out his real concerns: “Immigration, Islam and the West.” Given my own obsessions in recent years, you’d expect me to be favourably disposed to it. And I am, my enthusiasm only slightly tempered by the instant conventional wisdom that, if you’re only going to buy one Islamophobic Euro-doom-mongering diatribe this summer, Caldwell’s is the sober and respectable one, in striking contrast to certain others we could mention. “Unlike [Oriana] Fallaci and Mark Steyn, Caldwell does not rant or sneer,” writes Matt Carr of Britain’s Institute of Race Relations. Caldwell, says The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, is not a “Steynian hysteric.” Oh, dear. I think I prefer the droll Irish commentator “P O’Neill”: “Someone has to say it,” he smirked. “Caldwell is the thinking man’s Mark Steyn.”

But enough about me. On to the book . . . actually, hold on a minute. One more thing about me. Let us put Islam aside for the moment, as my views have been well aired in these pages, and consider the author’s other theme. As it happens, for all his non-ranting, non-hysterical sobriety, Mr. Caldwell is somewhat more “extreme” than I am on immigration. For a notorious blowhard, I can go a bit cryptic or (according to taste) wimpy when invited to confront that particular subject head on. On the CBC last year, I was tap dancing around various socio-cultural generalities when the host, George Stroumboulopoulos, leaned in in that way he has and cut to the chase: “You mean [pause and knowing glance to camera] immigration?” Continue…

Radicals vs. Buddha

By Adnan R. Khan - Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 9:40 AM - 1 Comment

The irony is as thick as the dust clouds sweeping over the ramshackle Pakistani market town of Takht-i-Bahi. At the hilltop ruins of a first-century Buddhist monastery, Ikram Ali, a local university student, is in the middle of explaining what it is that attracts him to the UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site’s grassy knolls and quiet quadrangles when automatic gunfire rips through the serene vales and gullies. “It’s peaceful up here,” he’d been saying just a few seconds earlier, scanning the horizon in the direction of the Swat Valley. “You can escape all of the noise and stress that goes on down there.” The volley of bullets erupts just as he points down toward the town. A group of villagers can be seen scrambling for cover under a grove of trees. The exchange is brief, lasting five minutes or so, after which the villagers resume their routines. Ali watches the scene with mild amusement. “That kind of thing happens every day around here,” he says with a Buddha-like calm.

Across a wide, fertile plain to the north, the black mountains of Malakand Division, including Swat, stretch across the horizon. There, ruins of another sort are a dominant feature—the products of weeks of war that have gripped the Swat Valley and its environs. But up in the hilltop monastery in Takht-i-Bahi, none of that seems particularly relevant. Here, young couples, otherwise forbidden from even speaking to one another, huddle conspiratorially in the shadows of meditation halls, or walk casually through what were once monks’ residences. None of them can tell you much about the prolific history of Buddhism in Pakistan and the role Buddhism once played in bringing peace to a region perennially beset by violence. They can tell you little about Ashoka, the third-century BCE emperor of the Mauryan dynasty of India, who, after witnessing first hand the killing fields of his army’s expansionist campaigns, converted to Buddhism, banned war, and spent the rest of his life actively promoting a Buddhist-inspired program of peace and brotherhood. His story reads like a life lesson in pacifism. The prosperity his empire enjoyed after his conversion is legendary. Some of that legacy remains in Takht-i-Bahi, in the quiet, contemplative moods of people like Ali who come there to clear their minds.

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Reading, writing, and radicalism?

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

In a country where public education has long been low on the state’s list of priorities, madrasas, or Islamic schools, provide a way for Pakistan’s poorest families to educate, feed and even house their children. Though they have traditionally been open only to males, there has recently been a dramatic rise in the number of all-female religious schools: of the roughly 12,000 madrasas registered with the state, around 1,900 are attended by young women only. The female students, who have limited educational opportunities in Pakistan, are excelling in the schools and writing graduate exams at a higher rate than their male counterparts.

The illiteracy rate for women in Pakistan is nearly 80 per cent, and any opportunity for young girls to learn to read and write is worthwhile. There is concern, however, over what the madrasas’ real lessons are: some believe the schools are exposing students to radical Islamic teachings, and fostering sympathy for militant groups.

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Winning over Pakistan

By Adnan R. Khan - Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 4 Comments

Two months ago, Bashir Hussein was hoping that a peace deal between the Taliban and the provincial government in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) would finally bring an end to the violence that has plagued the Swat Valley for the past two years. The 75-year-old principal at the al-Mannar public high school in Mingora, Swat’s main city, says he’s seen so much violence in that time that the preceding decades of peace feel like a distant memory. After the accord was signed, some measure of normalcy returned to the school, one of the few co-ed institutions that remained open throughout the Taliban takeover of Pakistan’s mountainous north. But not without changes: Hussein renovated the school building to comply with the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law that bars any interaction between males and females, religious studies were given more attention, and the female staff were ordered to wear burkas, the all-encompassing shroud commonly worn by women in the ethnic Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Hussein says he did what was necessary to keep his boys and girls learning. “There was a time, before the deal came into place,” he recalls, “when I told my staff that if they wanted, they could go back to their villages and I would close the school. But one of the teachers stood up and said, ‘No. If you are going to die here, we will die with you.’ ” The accord signed in February, giving the Taliban de facto control over a large swath of territory northwest of the Pakistani capital Islamabad, was a kind of blessing. Hussein and his staff could go on with the task of educating Swat’s youth, as long as they followed the Taliban’s anachronistic code of conduct.

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Iranian porn actors could face death

By Michael Petrou - Friday, March 20, 2009 at 3:46 PM - 6 Comments

Police in Iran have arrested a group of “beautiful young women” and charged them with making pornographic films—a crime that carries the death penalty in that country—according to the pro-reform Iranian website Fararu.

The website cited a source in the office of an Iranian law enforcement agency who said the arrested actors have already produced several amateur films for sale on the black market. The directors of the films were also reportedly arrested. It is not known how many actors and directors have been jailed.

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French birthrate soaring; immigrants not responsible

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 9, 2008 at 10:51 AM - 0 Comments

This is so embarrassing.

“INED, France’s National Institute of Demographic Studies, has done some detailed research and concluded that France’s immigrant population is responsible for only 5 percent of the rise in the birthrate and that France’s population would be rising anyway even without the immigrant population.

“That is important in a country where the number of immigrants from traditionally Muslim countries and their French-born children and grandchildren is now reckoned to be more than 6 million from a total population of 60.7 million. The anti-immigration Front National Party has claimed the rise in births came from Muslims, who were thus on track to become an eventual majority, and this appears not to be the case.”