Irtiqa

Off-topic: A nudge for "The Artist"

2012-02-02T22:54:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

I know some people are hesitant to go and see a black & white, silent film in the 21st century. But really you should go and see The Artist. It is not only an homage to early cinema, but it also has a wonderfully crafted story as well as a great soundtrack to go with it.

Here is our film autopsy (review) of The Artist:

And while we are on the subject of movies, here is our film autopsy of the spy thriller, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy:

Facebook users in the Muslim world

2012-02-02T21:54:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

So as of last month, Pakistan had roughly 6 million Facebook users (about 3% of population). Egypt - 9 million (11%). Malaysia - 12 million (42% of population!). Indonesia - 41 million (17% of population)!

This is just to give you a snapshot of the diversity of Facebook use in some of the more populated Muslim-majority countries. The correspondence of internet users and facebook users is almost 1 to 1 in Indonesia.

As for Pakistan, I found this graphic in today's Tribune. This pattern is most likely true at least for most of the developing world:

And here is a bit more info on users in Pakistan (I'm actually unsure as to how we lost a million people in the graphic below. I thought all stats were for 18 and above).

Indeed this is an elite educated group (3% of the population). I don't have similar stats for Indonesia or Malaysia, but it will be interesting to see if there are differences in gender fractions and/or education levels. In Malaysia, the distribution between different religious/ethnic groups will also be fascinating.

Fictional creation of the universe

2012-02-01T09:56:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Alan Lightman is a physicist (his thesis advisor was Kip Thorne) who is also an accomplished novelist. And vice versa. But now he is a full time writer. I read his earlier books, Einstein's Dreams (a set of fictional stories dreamed by Einstein around the theme of relativity) and Reunion (about a college professor reminiscing about his own college days). Both are good, but Einstein's Dreams is phenomenal. I should mention that his good writing extends to graduate textbooks also. He is the author of one of the best foundational textbooks in astronomy: Radiative Processes in Astrophysics. We used to joke about it that this was the only textbook that we could read in bed.

In any case, now he has a new novel out that again links his astronomy to fiction writing, Mr g: A Novel about the Creation. Here is an excerpt from the review in Nature:

In Mr g, Lightman has taken the core of what we know about the origins of the Universe from physics, chemistry and biology and wrapped a few characters around it. The protagonist is the narrator: god, dubbed Mr g. Mr g lives in a timeless Void with his Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva, playing out skits that could have been lifted from a Woody Allen film — but with the humour on mute. One day, Mr g wakes up from a nap, decides to create a Universe called “Aalam-104729”, and from then on marvels at his creation as it evolves and becomes more complex — from the beginning of space and time, to the emergence of fundamental laws, particles, forces, stars, galaxies, planets and, ultimately, life itself.

As sentient beings finally emerge out of the cosmic mess, Mr g is torn: should he intervene or let them go their own way? Throughout, he is taunted by the creepy Belhor, a devilish character (a fine role for Al Pacino if this were ever made into a film) and Belhor's annoying daemons, the Baphomet siblings. Belhor pushes Mr g to allow his creations to do their own thing, and watches with glee as evil and unhappiness begin to emerge — leaving Mr g to observe as, for instance, an impoverished young woman anguishes over stealing meat to feed her starving siblings. Lightman uses the exchanges between Mr g and Belhor to riff on good and evil, free will and relative morality.

Looks intriguing. Read the full review here (you may need subscription to access the full review).

What kind of spiritual person are you?

2012-01-30T09:18:00.002-05:00

This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

The French magazine Psychologies, not to be confused with its namesakes in the US and in the UK, while aiming for the general-public, tries to keep a reasonable standard of scientific accuracy. It also tries to remain “interesting”, that is to sell copies, so in its latest issue (February 2012), it has a cover story on why our (sexual) desire comes and goes and an interview with the captivating actress Juliette Binoche. But it also has a two-page article on the more than dubious “quantum therapies”.

But I was intrigued by the quiz it ran on the various types of spiritualities that people hold today, though they may or may not be fully aware of that aspect of their personalities/personhoods.

Now, before I give you an idea of the quiz, and even let you take a short version of it, I must point out that the concept of “spirituality” has been the object of various attempts to redefine it or at least expand its meanings. Indeed, “spirituality” comes from “spirit”, which in the “technical” sense refers to “the immaterial intelligent or sentient part of a person” (as the Webster dictionary puts it), or more simply that dimension of humans that religious people believe makes us able to connect to God and perhaps to others. But since “spirit” can also mean “temper or disposition of mind or outlook” (another definition given by Webster), and if you take this meaning and infer some “spirituality” from it, then it no longer needs to be related to religion. And that is why there is this increasing trend of people describing themselves as “spiritual, but not religious” (just Google up "spiritual, not religious").

The Psychologies quiz begins with an introduction titled “To each, their own spirituality”, where the different facets of the concept are first explained. The reader is told that spirituality can refer to: a) a state of “completeness”, when one has integrated various dualities (light and shadow, heaven and earth); b) a feeling of being in relation with something sacred, of being connected to a higher dimension of existence; c) a “life of the spirit”, representing a kind of “secular spirituality”, as has been defined by some thinkers (the magazine refers specifically to the popular French philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville). It goes on to explain that these different types of spirituality then result in different responses in the person: giving meaning to one’s life, giving comfort, developing an ethic of living together, or solving personal problems and inner conflicts.

On this basis, the magazine produced a quiz: 48 statements are offered, and the reader is asked to the select the ones that s/he agrees more with (or represent his/her personhood); each statement is given a symbol, and the reader then counts which symbol appears most in his/her selected statements; on the next page, a description of the spiritual type represented by each symbol is given, thus describing the reader’s spiritual nature.

Since I can’t reproduce the whole quiz for you (first there are copyright limitations, and second I don’t have time to translate 48 statements), I’ve selected 16 from the four categories and labeled them A, B, C, D. Select the letter that appears more in your answers and refer to the description of each category at the end.

Here’s the mini-quiz. Have fun:

I often feel a need for protection. (A)
We are here on Earth to learn and to improve ourselves. (B)
As I matured, spirituality became more important for me. (B)
I feel connected to all that lives. (C)
Solidarity and compassion are not a monopoly of spirituality. (D)
I cannot bear the idea of nothingness after death. (A)
I find meaning and values in humanistic philosophies. (D)
I believe in miraculous healings. (A)
I often get lightning and accurate intuitions. (C)
I meditate to calm my mind and to open up my heart. (B)
I ask heaven for help in difficult situations. (A)
Spirituality should never leave the personal sphere. (D)
To change the world, one must first change oneself. (B)
It’s in Man that I believe, first and foremost. (D)
Speaking to God is completely natural for me; I need no intermediary. (C)
I am fully convinced that hardships have a meaning, and we must accept that sometimes it escapes us. (C)

The categories:

A describes a spirituality which seeks “refuse” in something or some being, a “parent God” who protects and heals the person. Supposedly (according to the magazine), this is closer to the traditional concept of God and spirituality.

B describes the spirituality of an evolving person, one who, through practices like yoga or zen, seeks higher and more connected ways of living. Here belief in a higher being (God) is not essential, even though there is often the belief/feeling that there is some higher intelligence that we may be part of or may be able to become part of.

C refers to the mystical type of spirituality, to seek to live in communion with the Divine/Spirit or with the Universe (in a pantheistic/panentheistic worldview).

D denotes an “atheistic ethic” (the magazine’s description), one which tries to uphold truth, goodness, and beauty without any reference to or need for God.

So, there you have them: the four types of spirituality as Psychologies sees them. Perhaps there are other types or definitions or hybrid forms…

Do you recognize yourself in any of these? Do you have a different description for your own or your parents’ spirituality?

Bookseller on a Rickshaw

2012-01-29T20:40:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Booksellers are in trouble everywhere. But here is a fantastic solution in Pakistan (should we call these r-books to go with e-books?):

Saturday Video: Ehab Abouheif and Taner Edis on Evolution and Islam

2012-01-28T17:00:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

In October 2009, we had organized an international conference on Darwin and Evolution in the Muslim World at Hampshire College. One of the public sessions included presentations by evolutionary biologist, Ehab Abouheif and physicist Taner Edis (he is also the author of An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam). They have different takes on Islam and evolution. Ehab is a practicing evolutionary biologist and believes that the two are compatible, while Taner believes that evolution poses serious challenges, at least to the traditional forms of religion, including Islam. If you are looking for name calling and mud-slinging, you won't find it here. This is a perfect example of people having disagreements about religion and having an intelligent conversation about it. It may also answer some questions you might have on the topic, or raise more. The good thing is the spectrum of opinions from people who agree on the basic principles of science.

Here is the main session followed by Q & A:

Ehab Abouheif & Taner Edis on Evolution and Islam from evolutionandislam on Vimeo.

Hampshire College | Night QA Panel Darwin and Evolution in the Muslim World from Hampshire TV on Vimeo.

On creationists...

2012-01-26T23:55:00.001-05:00

Tip from Farid Alvie.

I have a whole collection of these 'ascent of man' cartoons. Of course, they also propagate the erroneous ladder view of evolution. But what can we do? They provide for some nice comic opportunities. Here is one of my favorites, from the New Yorker:

Gender issues in Pakistani schools

2012-01-26T12:02:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Kamila Shamsie, the author several novels set in Karachi (for example, In the City by the Sea, Kartography), had an interesting article in Guernica about schools in Pakistan. The challenges are immense. It is not just a matter of creating more schools - after all, the Taliban are also "students". It is about the quality of education and its accessibility to all Pakistanis.

Here she talks about the infiltration of religion in textbooks (for example, on the encouragement of raising cattle, since it is a Sunnah of the Prophet), and a bit on ghost schools - schools that exist only on paper. But most of the article is about efforts to reform the existing educational system by an NGO led by couple if young Pakistanis, including Sana mentioned below. The efforts seems promising and I hope it works out, but then there have been numerous efforts in the past that have fizzled out at the end.

But apart from a better curriculum, I was struck by the gender issues mentioned in the article - and it provides a glimpse of the challenges involved.

But problems didn’t just come from adults. Increasingly, the neighborhoods in Karachi are divided along ethnic lines with each group identifying with a political party. The relationships between some of these political parties are marked by violence and “target killing,” intimidation, and extortion to the perceived benefit of the party. By the time many boys are adolescents, they’ve already been pulled into some of the more thuggish aspects. “With the boys you have to get to them by the time they’re eleven or twelve. Any later is too late,” Sana said, recalling how a group of fourteen-year-olds told her, “What do we need education for? We’re in politics.” Even further, those boys were unwilling to listen to a female. Once, when Sana was trying to get them to be silent, one of the students said, “Get the bearded guy with a stick to come in if you want us to be quiet.” Not long after, she stopped teaching in the boys’ section of the school.

“What about the girls?” I asked.

The girls, she said, were an entirely different matter. “I can set any essay assignment, and without fail they’ll manage to work into it that their greatest wish is to just be allowed to stay in school and complete their education,” Sana told me. But all too often their parents pull them out of school by the time they’re twelve. Sometimes the parents want them to get married, other times they can’t afford the fees and feel it’s more important to pay for the education of their sons.

The girls are as affectionate as the boys are macho, I heard from both Sana and Adnan. It was hard not to think that at home their brothers received all the attention. Damaging for both the boys and the girls, as well as for their relationships with each other. For Sana, it was particularly disheartening to realize how low the girls’ expectations for their lives were, how little they felt they could ask from the world.

This is a serious issue and the society as a whole has to work to find a solution. This is after all half of the student population of Pakistan! [and yes, I thought it was funny/sad that some of the boys thought they don't need education now that they are in politics]

Read the full article here.

Also see these earlier post:
The Enigma of Educated Pakistanis
Muslim Women Scientists Today

Arabia IMAX/3D: a fancy documercial for Saudi Arabia

2012-01-23T11:25:00.000-05:00

Last February, when I visited the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC (recall my “What makes us human?” post), I noticed that there was a documentary titled ‘Arabia’ playing in the IMAX theater. I made a mental note of it and went to the ‘human origins’ exhibit. The “documentary” later opened in theaters across the US in 3D and lush cinematography, though it didn’t play in my part of the world.

When I got a chance to watch it, on my small laptop screen, without the benefit of 3D and immersive effects, I understood why it wasn’t released here: this was made purely for western audiences, indeed quite specifically for Americans.

This fancy and clearly expensive 45-minute feature, which I’m describing as a “documercial” (hybrid between documentary and commercial), aims at presenting Arabia (read: Saudi Arabia) as a land with at least 2000 years of rich history and one which is now progressing in a balanced way between tradition and modernity. It wants to dispel stereotypes about Saudis being US haters, backward-thinkers, oppressors of women, etc.

I don’t know what the budget of this project was (several million dollars, I would guess, considering the lavish production, the under-water filming, the animations, and the special effects), but the feature was narrated by Helen Mirren, directed by Greg MacGillivray, with music by Steve Wood and some contribution by Yusuf Islam, a.k.a. Cat Stevens, though I couldn’t find any references to two beautiful Arabic songs performed at various moments. On the other hand, the credits do tell us that the feature was produced in association with the Royal Geographical Society, the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies. Quite a stellar group for a 45-minute documentary.

The picture revolves around Hamzah, a young Saudi who studies film at De Paul University in Chicago and who decides to produce a documentary about his culture, aiming to show how it is “progressing so quickly… trying to balance between the old and the new, tradition and progress”, and trying to explain that the (Saudi) Arabian ways of life are a result of attempting “to maintain the old values…”

Our narrators spend about half of his documentary telling us that Arabia has gone through two “golden ages”, and in the last part of the feature, we are told that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is now attempting to usher in “a third golden age” through education, specifically presenting KAUST (the King Abdallah University of Science and Technology) as “a first step” in this “golden age” that’s about to dawn and promising four research centers coming up soon…

Which golden ages are they talking about? The first one is the Nabatean civilization which flourished in the Arabian Peninsula some 2000 years ago, the most famous and stunning example of which is the town of Petra in Jordan. Hamza tells us that another Nabatean town, Madain Saleh, which was only discovered in 1876 in the northern region of Saudi Arabia, was part of that first “golden age”. Then, the Nabateans harvested and sold frankincense to the Romans, who used it to perfume the gods in their temples, thereby achieving great wealth. Their contacts with the Romans and the Greeks, as attested to by the coins found in the ruins, allowed them to learn architecture and masonry and thus build stunning stone edifices (the Petra treasury building, the Madain Saleh tombs, etc.). But when Romans adopted Christianity, frankincense was no longer needed for any gods, and the Nabatean “empire” collapsed, or so we are told.

The second golden age is the more well-known Arab-Islamic civilization’s golden era, when great knowledge, science, arts, and sophisticated urban life were produced. But here, the writers of the documentary first exaggerate the Arabian connection by over-emphasizing the role that the Qur’an and the Sunna played in igniting the knowledge production, stating that “the first seed of this golden age was sown in Arabian soil, then the new thinking spread to Persia, Spain, India, Indonesia…” The writers then overplay their hand even more by amplifying the accomplishments of the Arab-Muslim scientists, for instance by claiming that “Ibn al-Haytham’s theories of gravity and momentum preceded those of Newton by 700 years”, that “his pioneering work in Optics led to telescopes and cameras”, and that Ibn al-Haytham “conducted experiments to know how things really worked… he has been called the father of the scientific method…”

In fact, I was surprised to hear such an erroneous statement as “Prophet Muhammad spent much of his life in Medina” (he spent the last 10 years of his 63-year-long life there).

Then the documentary jumps to the twentieth century and turns into a commercial for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, presenting a short history of its emergence (through the unification of a large part of the Arabian Peninsula by King Abdelaziz ibn Saud). It also strongly emphasizes the special relationship between the KSA and the USA, first through the agreements made by Ibn Saud with Roosevelt as soon as huge oil reserves were discovered (by Americans) and then the long strategic alliance between the two countries in the last half century.

Finally, the documercial turns to education and insists that it is the first priority of the Saudi government and that such a great transformation is taking place that one can expect a new golden age!

Women too are presented as playing an important role in the Saudi society, through their family and teaching roles and even in “higher positions within the government”. At no moment are the constraints placed on women in the KSA ever mentioned; never do we see a face-covered woman; in fact all women are nicely dressed, always smiling and talking confidently, and in all scenes women are seen with men, never segregated.

So, to sum up, this was a pretty picture, nice to look at but not very satisfactory if you scratched the surface and asked about a few things or exercised some critical thinking about what was being claimed. I wonder how the American audiences, who were the target of this work, will have reacted to it and to what extent it will influence their views of “Arabia”.

Saturday Video: Appreciating religious values within Atheism

2012-01-22T12:43:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Here is an excellent talk by Alain de Botton called Atheism 2.0. Instead of ridiculing religions, he looks at the positive virtues they have to offer and suggests ways in which they can be incorporates within atheism. He makes an interesting point that in the 19th century, with the decline of religion in Europe, many turned to literature to find lessons in life and morality.

By the way, I had to chance to give a TEDx talk at Amherst College yesterday as part of TEDx Pioneer Valley. It was a fantastic experience and the whole atmosphere was phenomenal. Plus all the talks were great I will post up the video when its available.

Here is Alain de Botton:

A novel about growing up Muslim in Wisconsin

2012-01-20T12:07:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

English writers of Pakistani descent are becoming more and more prominent. A recent issue of Granta, for example, was dedicated to these writers (see: Granta - and a flock of new Pakistani writers). Uzma Aslan Khan even mixed in the fossil riches of Pakistan with the debate over evolution in her novel The Geometry of God. Now we have another one about growing up Pakistani-Muslim in Wisconsin: American Dervish by Ayad Akhtar. It brings up issues of identity in a different way. Ayad's own parents are both from Pakistan and also secular humanists. Ayad grew up fascinated by religion and he searched for his own path. In many ways, this is more a quintessential American story - but with a Pakistani flavor (and some Wisconsin cheese). It is these variations of the expression of religion (or non-religion) that I find fascinating. This looks like an interesting read.

In any case, here is a Fresh Air interview with Ayad Akhtar. Terry Gross seems to be flummoxed by the fact that his parents are from Pakistan and yet they are not religious. Does not compute. But then she talks more about his own religious practices and how it merges with his theater training (he is also and actor).

Here is also a review of American Dervish from NYT:

What a pleasure to encounter a first novel as self-assured and effortlessly told as Ayad Akhtar’s “American Dervish.” Mr. Akhtar, a first-generation Pakistani-American, has written an immensely entertaining coming-of-age story set during the early 1980s among the Pakistanis in the author’s hometown, Milwaukee.

Hayat Shah, an impressionable adolescent and the only child of a well-to-do, secular family, finds his comfortable existence upended by the arrival of his mother’s childhood friend Mina Ali and her son Imran, who have fled a life of abuse and repression in Pakistan. Mina, a strikingly beautiful woman and a fan of Henry Miller and F. Scott Fitzgerald, captivates Hayat by schooling him in her liberal interpretations of the Koran; she inspires the boy’s spiritual awakening at a time that coincides uneasily with his sexual awakening, particularly after Hayat observes Mina fall in love with a well-meaning but deeply naïve Jewish radiologist named Nathan Wolfsohn, who works alongside Hayat’s father.

Mr. Akhtar’s astute observations of the clashes between old world and new, between secular and sacred, among immigrants might seem familiar to readers of both contemporary and classic literature. Strong thematic affinities and plot parallels exist between this work and more than a handful of others — “The Namesake,” by Jhumpa Lahiri; “Love Marriage,” by V. V. Ganeshananthan; and Pauls Toutonghi’s “Red Weather,” a 2006 comedy about Latvians in Milwaukee, spring to mind. At times Mr. Akhtar seems also to be putting a modern Muslim spin on earlier stories of Jewish assimilation; his yearning and conflicted young hero suggests a PG-13 version of a Philip Roth character or a more repressed version of Eugene Jerome, Neil Simon’s alter ego in “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”

But what distinguishes Mr. Akhtar’s novel is its generosity and its willingness to embrace the contradictions of its memorably idiosyncratic characters and the society they inhabit. The family patriarch, Naveed Shah, is an accomplished and street-smart doctor and a devoted father, despite his penchants for rage, alcohol and philandering. Hayat’s mother, Muneer, is a philo-Semitic Freudian psychologist who nevertheless warns her son against ever getting involved with a white woman. Mina, even though she loves Western literature and culture, particularly the TV show “Dallas” and its star Linda Gray, jettisons love in favor of faith. Like the “dervish” of Mr. Akhtar’s title — an ascetic who, according to Mina, “gives up everything for Allah” — she ultimately succumbs to an emotionally impoverished existence.

Read the full review here.

Tebow, football miracles, and Islam in America

2012-01-18T21:03:00.002-05:00

by Salman Hameed

I have to admit, up until recently I had no idea who Tim Tebow was and why he was so popular. And I do follow the NFL. But this season, the discussion of his Christian faith has become more and more prominent, and we've had to hear about miracles on the football field (though, I think God would most likely reserve the name football for the game that involves primarily kicking the ball). It seems that God was helping him win sometimes with a number fourth quarter victories, but then testing his faith with some humiliating losses (And Bill Maher summarized this as well). When (positive) miracles happened, Tebow - Tebowed, unleashing a nationwide Tebowing frenzy (even a cat Tebowed). Ultimately, God decided to let natural forces (and Tom Brady) decide the game and the Patriots won by 35 points.

On the heels of all this, an article in Salon asks the question: What if Tim Tebow were a Muslim? (tip from Leyla Keough). This is a fascinating question, especially in light of protests against various Islamic centers in the US, the pulling of advertisements from All American Muslim, etc. The article brings up some interesting points and ultimately uses the case of Muhammad Ali to run this experiment. But we have to realize that that the case of Muhammad Ali (who by the way just turned 70!!) is loaded with more variables than just religion and religious identity. For example, he was a prominent African American at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and had interactions with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. That was also the beginnings of anti-war protests in the US. Plus, and I don't think the author of the Salon article makes the distinction, but Muhammad Ali at the time was a follower of National of Islam, which is very different from Islam.

However, the other example of Denver Nuggets basketball player, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf is a better one. But then that too gets enmeshed with nationalism, since he refused to stand for the national anthem. For an apt comparison, we will have to ask Tebow to refuse to stand up for the national anthem. To be fair, when Hakim Olajuwon, in the mid-1990s, was fasting and playing for Houston Rockets during Ramadan, it was mentioned in a respectful/admiring manner by the television commentators. But then that was the 1990s. It will be interesting to see the reaction today.

In any case, here are some bits from the Salon article:

So I ask, what if Tim Tebow were Muslim? How would our society react if during every interview, Tebow said “Insha’Allah” or “Allāhu Akbar” rather than thank his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ? Or instead of falling to one knee and praying, Tebow pulled out a prayer rug and faced Mecca? A recent study by the Pew Research Center suggests it would not be well received. While American Muslims in general tend be satisfied with their lives and communities in the United States, 55 percent report that being Muslim in the U.S. has become more difficult since Sept. 11. Twenty-eight percent report that people have viewed them with suspicion and 22 percent report having been called offensive names. The TLC show “All-American Muslim” has lost advertisers who were pressured by groups claiming that the show was Islamic propaganda. Yet Pat Robertson claims that the United States is a breeding ground for anti-Christian bigotry.

I don’t have answers to these questions. We can’t know the answers until we are faced with a prominent Muslim athlete who is willing to be so visible with his faith. In a country that consistently prides itself on freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom of religion – we can hope that Muslim athletes who are visible with their faith would find themselves just as revered as Tebow is for his.
But professional Muslim athletes are hard to find. Ahmad Rashād. Rashaan Salaam. Kareem Abdul-Jabaar. Hakeem Olajuwon. Rasheed Wallace. Most of these athletes are retired and went about their religious lives quietly. But it is to that list of retired professionals that we must look to find someone as outspoken about their faith as Tim Tebow – Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and Muhammad Ali, for example.

And here is the bit about Abdul-Rauf:

In 1990, Chris Jackson was drafted by the Denver Nuggets out of Louisiana State University. In 1991, Jackson converted to Islam. In 1993, he changed his name to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. In 1996, Abdul-Rauf refused to stand for the national anthem at an NBA game. A religious storm followed.

Everyone had an opinion, from fans to sports writers to radio hosts. Sports Illustrated reported that some people suggested Abdul-Rauf be deported. Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was born in Mississippi, however, and deportation from Colorado to Mississippi is rare. Two Denver-area radio hosts even walked into a mosque with a stereo playing the Star Spangled Banner. One was wearing a turban. And a Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf T-shirt. While broadcasting live, on air.

Abdul-Rauf claimed in a 2010 interview with HoopsHype.com that “[a]fter the national anthem fiasco, nobody really wanted to touch me.” He played only three more seasons in the NBA before going overseas to play professionally. In that same interview, he discusses how his home in Mississippi was burned down just a few months prior to Sept. 11. He eventually left the state.

So Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf stood up (or in this case, sat down) for his religious beliefs. He made his religion a visible aspect of his life and a visible aspect of his professional basketball career. Just like Tim Tebow. The difference of course being that Tim Tebow was satirized on “Saturday Night Live.” Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf had his home burned down and felt blacklisted from the NBA.

Read the full article here.

New Yorker on God's schedule during the creation of the universe

2012-01-17T16:24:00.001-05:00

by Salman Hameed

It is really hard to create a universe. Here is a hilarious take on God's daily schedule while He was working on creating the universe. From Simon Rich in the New Yorker - The Center of the Universe:

On the first day, God created the heavens and the earth.
“Let there be light,” He said, and there was light. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening—the first night.
On the second day, God separated the oceans from the sky. “Let there be a horizon,” He said. And lo: a horizon appeared and God saw that it was good. And there was evening—the second night.
On the third day, God’s girlfriend came over and said that He’d been acting distant lately.
“I’m sorry,” God said. “Things have been crazy this week at work.”
He smiled at her, but she did not smile back. And God saw that it was not good.
“I never see you,” she said.
“That’s not true,” God said. “We went to the movies just last week.”
And she said, “Lo. That was last month.”
And there was evening—a tense night.
On the fourth day, God created stars, to divide the light from the darkness. He was almost finished when He looked at His cell phone and realized that it was almost nine-thirty.
“Fuck,” He said. “Kate’s going to kill me.”
He finished the star He was working on and cabbed it back to the apartment.
“Sorry I’m late!” He said.
And lo: she did not even respond.
“Are you hungry?” He asked. “Let there be yogurt!” And there was that weird lo-cal yogurt that she liked.
“That’s not going to work this time,” she said.
“Look,” God said, “I know we’re going through a hard time right now. But this job is only temporary. As soon as I pay off my student loans, I’m going to switch to something with better hours.”
And she said unto Him, “I work a full-time job and I still make time for you.”
And He said unto her, “Yeah, but your job’s different.”
And lo: He knew immediately that He had made a terrible mistake.
“You think my job’s less important than yours?” she said.
“No!” God said. “Of course not! I know how difficult it is to work in retail—I’m totally impressed by what you do!”
“Today I had to talk to fourteen buyers, because it’s Fashion Week. And I didn’t even have time to eat lunch.”
“That’s so hard,” God said. “You work so hard.”
“How would you know? You never even ask about my day! You just talk about your work, for hours and hours, like you’re the center of the universe!”
“Let there be a back rub,” God said.
And He started giving her a back rub.
And she said unto Him, “Can you please take the day off tomorrow?”
And He said unto her, “Don’t you have to work tomorrow? I thought it was Fashion Week.”
“I can call in sick.”
And God felt like saying to her, “If your job is so important, how come you can just take days off whenever you feel like it?” But He knew that was a bad idea. So He said unto her, “I’m off Sunday. We can hang out Sunday.”
On the fifth day, God created fish and fowl to swim in the sea and fly through the air, each according to its kind. Then, to score some points, He closed the door to His office and called up Kate.
“I’m so happy to hear your voice,” she said. “I’m having the hardest day.”
“Tell me all about it,” God said.
“Caitlin is throwing this party next week for Jenny, but Jenny is, like, being so weird about it that I’m not even sure that it’s going to happen.”
“That’s crazy,” God said.
And she continued to tell Him about her friends, who had all said hurtful things to one another, each according to her kind. And while she was repeating something that Jenny had said to Caitlin God came up with an idea for creatures that roam the earth. He couldn’t get off the phone, though, because Kate was still talking. So He covered the receiver and whispered, “Let there be elephants.” And there were elephants and God saw that they were good.
But lo: she had heard Him create the elephants.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “You’re not even listening to me.”
“Kate . . .”
“It’s so obvious!” she said. “You care more about your stupid planet thing than you do about me!”
God wanted to correct her. It wasn’t just a planet He was creating; it was an entire universe. He knew, though, that it would be a bad idea to say something like that right now.
He said, “Listen. I’m really sorry, O.K.?”
But lo: she had already hung up on Him.

So how does it all end up? You can find the full article here. And if you like this, also check out God's Blog, also from the New Yorker.

My 100th Irtiqa Post + my own top-10 favorites

2012-01-16T02:22:00.001-05:00

After almost two years of contributions to Irtiqa, I have hit the 100 milepost. Considering that numerous bloggers have reached the (for me) unimaginable 1,000 mark, my score is not too impressive. But since I never considered blogging, have never twitted, and have only been using Facebook for posting my articles (i.e. once every two weeks or so), this is something of an achievement…

I thus wanted to reflect, semi-seriously about this experience, and, as a fun exercise, list the 10 posts of mine that I think of as the “best” (under what criteria?); that may give a chance for some readers to discover or re-read those posts, as new readers join Irtiqa regularly. Likewise, Salman might sometime treat us to his own top-10 selection. That would be a much harder exercise, considering the fact that Salman has probably posted over 500 pieces by now…

My first remark concerns Salman (and other serious bloggers): I don’t know how you do it, coming up with interesting posts at least every other day! Really, for me just to come up with a topic and write it up once a week is a challenge that I have often struggled to overcome; I cannot imagine doing this more often than once a week.

My second remark concerns the interaction with Irtiqa readers: according to the stats, some 400 visitors check out the posts every day (on average), not counting the Facebook ‘friends’ and other ways of getting the posts (is Google Reader counted in the 400?); however, the average number of comments per post is less than 5! To be honest, that is frustrating, as one never knows whether silence is a sign of agreement, of boredom, of disinterest, or what… Frankly, this aspect of the experience, coupled with the periods when one struggles to find the time and a reasonably relevant topic to write about, has/have led me to contemplate giving it up. But on the other hand, I figure that there must be a number of readers, hopefully a large cohort, who silently appreciate these writings. But if you want to know why I do continue to write even when I get no feedback: it is because such writings force me to keep an eye on various issues, think about them, and sometimes research some topics further, something that is useful to me in general… So if someday I announce that I’m stopping, it will mainly be because I can no longer find the time.

Now, before the top-10 list, a few observations (for fun):

· with my one-hundredth post, I will have matched the number of posts in the “education in the Muslim world” category; since I tend to think of many of Salman’s posts as (at least partly) educational, does this mean that many of mine are not? J

· sometime ago, I “defeated” ‘Islamic creationism’ (in number of posts), and recently I “defeated” ‘creationism’ in all its forms; I’m that influential…

· I am catching up on “Pakistan” – quite surprising, considering the popularity of the topic (judging by the number of comments that come on those posts);

· I am also catching up on “Atheism”; we’ll see how that race goes, considering the various views on this among our audience J;

· But I think I stand no chance with “film, theater, and television” (with 186 posts and counting), considering Salman’s expertise and productivity in this field;

· And I don’t even think of catching up with “Evolution” (with 251 posts and counting – didn’t realize it was such a frequent topic!)…

Now for my (totally personal and subjective) top-10 list.

10. The world’s 500 “most influential” Muslims

9. The Evil Eye (Belief) Is Still Very Strong

8. Islam and Astronomy: the tug-of-war continues

7. Euthanasia and Islam - Part 2

6. ET’s and their impact on us

5. What Makes Us Human? (has the largest number of comments on any post of mine on Irtiqa)

4. Statistical Analyses to Predict the Next Revolution(s) (in which my analysis, performed just after the fall of the Tunisian and Egyptian autocratic regimes, pointed to Libya and Yemen as the next two Arab-Spring countries, before uprisings and protests started there…)

3. Plagiarism in Arab-Muslim Academia (still a very serious issue)

2. Critiquing I'jaz - the claim of "scientific miracles in the Qu'ran" (need I say anything?)

1. Muslim Inquisition Today: the plight of Usama Hasan (the post I most proud of, for having made a small but real impact with it).

And here’s a bonus one (I didn’t want to rank it among the others J): Muslim Women Scientists Today.

As you can see, it’s a rather large spectrum of topics. I am really not sure which ones readers actually have liked or prefer in general. Some of these generated many comments, others none…

Let’s see if I make it to the 200^th post. But before I go back to writing (and thinking), I have one question for Irtiqa readers: why do you read this stuff?

Best wishes to all!

Film Autopsy of the ambitious "The Tree of Life"

2012-01-14T03:23:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

There were a number of ambitious films this past year. But I think no one can beat Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life in this category. It aims to place the day-to-day details of a boy's summer in Texas in the 1950s in the context of the whole history of the universe - from the beginning to the end! Yes, yes. The beginning of the universe 13.7 billion years ago, the formation of the solar system, the beginning of life, the evolution of life, the extinction of dinosaurs etc. No - the movie is not a documentary, but it provides this context in a 20 minutes of spectacular interlude which includes astronomical simulations of first stars and images from the Hubble space telescope. It will definitely remind you of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Oh - but the story is so much more. In a broader sense, it is also about the Book of Jobs, the way to make sense of the world in the wake of pain and loss. While the movie has a number of religious overtones, ultimately, this is a spiritual journey of the director Terrence Malick himself. This is a deeply personal film for Malick and a labor of love. If you don't believe me, just check out this New Yorker article about how he used an art installation called "Lumia" to show a shifting flame that represented some sort of cosmic beginning, and plays a constant theme in the film.

Here is out Film Autopsy (review) of The Tree of Life (you can find other film autopsies here):

Scientists must speak up against assassinations of scientists

2012-01-12T21:46:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Actually everyone must speak up against assassinations. But the news that another Iranian physicist has been assassinated is deeply troubling. I'm not in favor of nuclear weapons and there should every effort to eliminate them. But targeted killings of scientists associated with a nuclear program? How should we think about it?

First of all, this is illegal. This is extrajudicial killing and should have no place in a civilized world. While Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon, the killing is most likely associated with a country that already has one (Israel or the US). So a moral argument to preserve world peace in this case is already out the window.

Second, should scientists speak up against it? Yes. When scientists are persecuted anywhere in the country, journals like Nature and Science write editorials about it. The same is true when scientists have been fired from their jobs or, in the recent case of Turkey, when the Turkish government decided to exert undue influence on its Academy of Science. Shouldn't there be an outrage when a physicist is assassinated because of his association with a uranium enrichment program (which by in itself is not illegal)? We haven't seen it so far. This is not the first assassination of an Iranian scientist either:

The scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was a department supervisor at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, a participant in what Western leaders believe is Iran’s halting but determined progress toward a nuclear weapon. He was at least the fifth scientist with nuclear connections to be killed since 2007; a sixth scientist, Fereydoon Abbasi, survived a 2010 attack and was put in charge of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.

We have to stand-up and condemn these assassinations. The world is becoming a tricky place. I have written about ethical and legal problems with the drone program and the fact that these issues are not getting as much attention as they should. This assassination precedence directly affects scientists. I hope we will all speak up against it!

Talk at The Tech Museum in San Jose on Jan 15th

2012-01-12T18:25:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

I 'm headed to the west coast (actually this post is from 30,000 feet above Salt Lake City). The Tech Museum in San Jose has an exhibition Ingenious Innovations: Islamic Science Rediscovered (the exhibition is there until Feb 26th). Along with the exhibition, the museum is also hosting a lecture series. I will be speaking this coming Sunday at 2pm (Jan 15th) and the title of the talk is How do Muslims view science and evolution? The format is actually quite interesting. I will speak for about 20 minutes and the rest will be a dialogue with the moderator, Angie Coiro, and with the audience. This should be fun and I'm looking forward to it.

If you are in the area and are interested in the topic, c'mon over.

Hoodbhoy on Neutrinos and Angels

2012-01-10T22:18:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

This was published in Pakistan Tribune. This is familiar territory for Pervez. He has been calling out on the pseudoscience of finding science in the Qur'an for over two decades. The real problem is that some of the proponents have scientific degrees - and that is a scary thought. This business of I'jaz, I think, is one of the most damaging pseudoscience prevalent in the Muslim world. It is not that other cultures and religions don't have their own versions (just see the popularity of The Bible Code books in the US). But at least there already exists a large base of scientists in the US - and 99% of those don't subscribe to this nonsense (you can always find occasional oddballs: for example, see Tipler and his Pseudoscience). I hope budding scientists in Pakistan (or anywhere for that matter) don't fall for the pseudoscience of I'jaz. Nidhal and I have also written about it: You can read Nidhal's post Critiquing I'jaz - The Claim of Scientific Miracles in the Qur'an, and my post On the futility of finding science in the Qur'an and Other Scriptures.

Here is Pervez on Neutrinos and Angels:

The news from CERN was stunning: the European nuclear science laboratory had just discovered (September 2011) that particles known as neutrinos — called so because they are neutral and carry no charge — habitually travel a little bit faster than light. This threatened to shake the very foundations of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which had laid the basis for the atomic bomb, nuclear energy, and most of modern day physics. Relativity theory starts from the postulate that the speed of light is the absolute maximum that anything can travel at.

Pakistanis are generally unmoved by developments in the world of science. But this time the excitement was palpable. A TV channel called me up, requesting an interview. Fine, I said, specifying the time when I would be available. The producer was profoundly apologetic: this was exactly when they would be interviewing Dr Zakir Naik, an Islamic scholar who frequently pontificates on issues of science and religion. Would I therefore please give another time? Since the good doctor’s claim to fame is his understanding of religious texts rather than of physics, I declined and do not know what transpired subsequently.
Speed of light issues have often moved sections of religious people in rather strange ways.

Way back in 1973, as a young physics lecturer at Quaid-i-Azam University, I had been fascinated by the calculation done by the head of our department. Seeking the grand synthesis of science and faith, this pious gentleman — who left on his final journey last month — had published calculations that proved Heaven (jannat) was running away from Earth at one centimeter per second less than the speed of light. His reasoning centred around a particular verse of the Holy Quran that states worship on the night of Lailat-ul-Qadr (Night of Revelation) is equivalent to a thousand nights of ordinary worship. Indeed, if you input the factor of 1,000 into Einstein’s famous formula for time dilatation, this yields a number: one centimeter per second less than the speed of light!

These days the internet groans under the weight of claims that the Holy Quran had specified the speed of light 1400 years ago. Dr Mansour Hassab El Naby, said to be a physicist from Egypt, announces that according to his Quranic calculations, this speed is 299,792.5 kilometres per second. He even gives error bars! Another video gives a still more precise figure of 299792.458 km/sec. Given the unrestrained leaps of logic made by the authors, it is not surprising that they all arrive at more or less the same numbers.

Interested readers may also wish to visit an intricately-designed website that has clocked up over 750,000 visitors so far. Chockful of mathematical formulae, diagrams, and pictures, it starts from the premise that “angels are low density creatures” taking orders from a “Preserved Tablet” and says “the speed at which they commute to and from this Tablet turned out to be the known speed of light”. To enhance the visual impact, the website has a Java applet showing a white Caucasian scientist who moves his eyes up, down, and around in wondrous rapture. While doing so he sonorously pronounces — in what sounds like an Australian accent to me — that the extra space-time dimensions demanded by the physics of string theory are exactly those predicted in the Quran. The final conclusion: “Einstein’s theory of General Relativity proves the Quran right”.

Well, there’s a huge problem here! No scientist is sure that General Relativity (GR) is absolutely correct. In fact, the phrase “absolutely correct” does not belong to the lexicon of any science, even one as well developed as physics. Excellent as GR is — with hundreds of careful tests — physicists are pretty sure that there are places, such as at the edge of a black hole, where GR simply has to fail. Placing the absolute correctness of Allah’s Word on the knife-edge of an imperfect theory is pretty dicey.

Certainly, no working scientist takes seriously any of stuff on Islamic science websites. In spite of their wonderful graphics and scientific appearance, they are wholly unscientific. Science comes from persistently and patiently checking hypotheses, building upon earlier discoveries and knowledge, and systematically sifting out all which cannot pass stringent tests of logic and observation. For example, experiments at CERN consume the working lives of some of the most brilliant people on earth, require billions of dollars of equipment, and stretch human capacities and ingenuity to the limit. When real scientists eventually publish a result, it comes from solid evidence and not from uncontrolled spurts of imagination and strident assertions of faith.

Returning to neutrinos: today we do not know if the results from CERN on faster-than-light neutrinos are actually correct. Like most other particle physicists, I am sceptical. Explanations will surely be forthcoming once similar experiments are done in other laboratories; time will tell. But right or wrong, this is just another interesting puzzle for physicists to mull over. With deep foundations, the edifice of science has survived bigger earthquakes.

On the other hand, if the CERN results are right, “Islamic scientists” like Dr Naby would need to do much explaining. High above in the heavens, neutrinos would easily out-chase angels — the messengers of Allah — because, if Islamic websites are to be believed, angels are limited by the speed of light. So does that mean these naughty neutrinos are outside of God’s control? Using a holy text as a physics book makes little sense. But, sadly, it is all too common.

Worried by the cancerous growth of claptrap masquerading as science, the late Carl Sagan, one of my heroes, spoke to Bible Belt Americans with matchless eloquence:
“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonise about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us — then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.”

Pakistanis need to listen again, and yet again to this. Sagan is also speaking to us.

-------------

The Daily Show segment on a Muslim Republican

2012-01-10T21:49:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

This is actually quite funny - not to mention that it gives a whole new meaning to "against". Interesting thing is that most Muslims in the US used to vote for Republicans. In the fact, in the infamous Gore-Bush 2000 elections, American-Muslims were relatively well organized and 75% of their vote went Republican (oops...). But of course, this all changed in the coming decade - and to the degree that we have this piece from the Daily Show:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The Elephant in the Room

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Does Islam Forbid Even Studying Evolution

2012-01-09T11:22:00.001-05:00

A few days ago, The Huffington Post published an article by me under the above title. It quickly caught fire, clearly hitting a raw nerve: within 12 hours there were more than 500 comments, and some three days later, more than 100 Facebook pages had picked it, and 25 tweets were sent about it. I’ll let you check out the number of comments it has now received… Things went so fast that I could not reply to any of the comments at all. (When I got the notification that the article had been posted, and due to the time-zone difference, it had been up for 5 hours and 200 comments had been posted, so I realized what was happening, and I just resigned myself not to comment or reply.)

I’ll excerpt a few paragraphs from it below, though I wish to note that in the posted version, the editing was less than perfect, and some sentences turned out a bit strange (including the reference to Salman Hameed’s project and results). Here below I quote from the version I submitted, which is 98 % similar to what was published.

What was interesting was that many of the reactions had nothing to do with Evolution or with Islam. Many of the comments had to do with Religion in general, whether it makes sense to have any faith, i.e. whether science leaves any room for belief. I have found the discussion on the Huff Po to be very tense, harsh, and polarized; the moderate voices are few and difficult to hear… Perhaps that’s why balanced articles (as I hope mine was) are so necessary and needed.

Here are a few paragraphs:

Evolution, while largely rejected as a paradigm by Muslims, including highly educated ones, is nonetheless studied in countries like Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, and the UAE. No case of students boycotting evolution classes in those countries has ever been reported. There have been occasional reports of students “resisting” the study of evolution in some western universities (in Holland, more specifically), but nothing widespread to make it a general trend. Perhaps Muslim students elsewhere are also rejecting evolution but pragmatically “compartmentalizing” its study as simply part of the curriculum, without turning it into a political issue.

…

Surveys have shown Muslims almost everywhere largely rejecting the main concepts and results of the theory of evolution, particularly when it applies to humans. Even educated Muslims – and this is where today’s Muslim culture stands out – consider evolution as “only a theory” and refuse to accept that we humans share common ancestors with apes, and that all living creatures (animals and plants) came from an original cell.

…

Indeed, there is no uniform Islamic position on the theory of evolution. Ever since its earliest formulation by Darwin (and subsequent improvements on it), Muslim scholars have reacted to it with a variety of viewpoints, including sometimes a full acceptance of its scenario on the origin and history of humanity. In such cases, religious scholars insist on a theistic interpretation: God planned that whole evolution, by writing it in the laws of nature, and perhaps even “guided” it.

But there are also strongly creationist positions in today’s Muslim culture, the clearest and strongest one being expressed by Harun Yahya and his group, who for the past decade or more have launched an aggressive campaign targeting Muslims throughout the world, including the UK and France, where lecture tours are organized and books (such as the infamous Atlas of Creation) are massively distributed either freely or in subsidized sales. A full review of the spectrum of Islamic positions can be found in my book, including a detailed critique of the claims made by Harun Yahya.

So if there is a large spectrum of Islamic position vis-a-vis evolution, why do those students claim that “it is against the teachings of the Qur’an”?

…

The openness of the Qur’an to (re-)interpretation was recently underlined by Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, perhaps the most influential Muslim scholar of the past few decades, who stated that: “If Darwin’s theory is proven, we can find Qur’anic verses that will fit with it…”

You can read the whole thing (and the flood of comments) here.

Let’s see how many comments we get here now… ;-)

Saturday Video: Attenborough on the gods of Easter Island

2012-01-08T14:53:00.001-05:00

Absolutely spactacular! It is definitely on my travel wish-list:

The Opening Sequence of "Melancholia"

2012-01-06T00:40:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

The opening sequence of Lars von Trier's Melancholia is spectacularly beautiful and it lays the foundations for the whole film, including the apocalyptic ending (see an earlier post here). The opening shots are like paintings - and have references to other works of art, including earlier films. It is this layering in von Trier's work that makes his movies so enjoyable despite the often depressing stories. So first, here is the opening sequence:

Manhola Dargis in the NYT has done a fantastic job of dissecting the opening shots to reveal some of these layers (though some of Manhola's later points are a bit of a stretch). Here are some snippets of his analysis:

There are 16 shots in Lars von Trier’s hauntingly beautiful overture to “Melancholia,” a movie about love, family and the apocalypse. The movie, among Mr. von Trier’s greatest, stars Kirsten Dunst as Justine, a young advertising copywriter who, shortly after she gets married endures two separate yet related catastrophes: A wedding party at an oceanside golf resort owned by her brother-in-law ends with her new husband leaving. This in turn brings on the depression that overtakes her and seems to inaugurate the end of the world or her dream of the same. Many of the movie’s themes are introduced in the first eight minutes, a masterpiece in miniature that is a palimpsest of literary, artistic and cinematic allusions.

1A. The movie opens with a fade from black to a close-up of Justine’s head, with a bit of her neck. Her eyes are closed, and her head is slightly to the left of the center of the frame, with the rest of the image taken up by a gray-white sky streaked with pink. She slowly opens her eyes, her gaze directed at the camera (and us), her face impassive. As soon as her eyes are opened, dead birds begin falling from the sky like stones, an intimation of the disaster(s) to come.

1B. On the soundtrack the exquisite prelude to Wagner’s opera, “Tristan and Isolde” (completed 1859), begins to play. Wagner described the opera as “one of endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love; world, power, fame, honor, chivalry, loyalty and friendship all blown away like an insubstantial dream,” for which there is “one sole redemption — death, finality, a sleep without awakening.”

1C. Ms. Dunst’s character shares her name with the title figure in the Marquis de Sade’s 1787 novel “Justine,” about a virtuous woman who endures a crucible of suffering and, after being reunited with her sister, Juliette, is fatally struck by lightning. Mr. von Trier has expressed interest in adapting the novel, and it was one of the inspirations for his 1996 feature, “Breaking the Waves,” in which Emily Watson plays a doomed, sexually exploited, saintlike figure. “In the end,” Mr. von Trier said in a 1996 interview, “Justine thanks God for his goodness in letting her survive all the calamities — after which she is struck by lightning and burns to death.”

2. A long, overhead shot of a green lawn flanked by two parallel rows of teardrop-shaped bushes, a stretch of water at the top of the shot and a large sundial centered at the bottom. The shot evokes the famous garden in Alain Resnais’s “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961) with its topiary, statues and human figures, which alone cast shadows. Of Mr. Resnais’s work the novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote “Marienbad,” said: “In it I recognized my own efforts toward a somewhat ritual deliberation, a certain slowness, a sense of the theatrical, even that occasional rigidity of attitude,” which, he added, “suggests both a statue and an opera.” This fits “Melancholia” too.

3. A shot of the painting “Hunters in the Snow” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which here burns and shows up again when Justine replaces a book of modern paintings on a shelf with a book that has a reproduction of the Bruegel. The painting also appears in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film “Solaris,” including in a scene in which the dead wife of the lead character — or rather his hallucination of her — looks at the painting before the two of them levitate in each other’s arms, as a Bach choral prelude plays. Later the husband will walk through a wintery landscape that resembles that in the painting. “There’s no doubt that Tarkovsky,” Mr. von Trier has said, “is the master of them all.”

4. This shot shows a blue planet, perhaps Earth, seen from outer space, with a red pinprick to its right. This red point turns out to be planet Melancholia, which gives the movie its title and is hurtling toward Earth on an apparent collision course. Within the frame the blue planet is situated in the same location as Justine’s head is in the first shot and both her head and the planet are roughly the same size, which suggests an affinity between the two. One possibility: the world of the movie is nothing other than a manifestation of Justine’s imagination (head). This planetary vision — along with three others in the prelude — encapsulates the movie’s in broad outline.

5. A woman we later learn is Justine’s sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg ), holds her son, Leo, in her arms. She’s walking or perhaps trying to run on a hilly golf course, a line of deep, black footsteps trailing behind her. The artificial quality of the light illuminating this night scene along with the enveloping sense of threat recalls the elaborately staged and spectral landscapes in the work of the contemporary photographer Gregory Crewdson, whose influences include the filmmakers David Lynch and Steven Spielberg. Mr. Crewdson has described his photographs as “about the moment of transition between before and after.” The images in Mr. von Trier’s prelude have a similar liminal quality in that each refers to an extracted narrative moment, and in-between feelings, sensations, gestures.

By the way, Gregory Crewdson's work is breathtaking and surreal. I had a chance to see some of his photographs at Mass-Moca and was blown away by them. Here is an example of his work from that exhibition (tip from Kevin Anderson):

Read the full article about the opening sequence of Melancholia here.

And of course, see our Film Autopsy of Melancholia below:

A flowchart for choosing religion

2012-01-05T21:53:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Ha! (via Martin Riexinger)

On religious tolerance and Karachi

2012-01-04T23:38:00.001-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Almost a year ago, the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer was assassinated for his efforts to repeal the problematic blasphemy law in Pakistan. The reaction to the killing was even worse (also see: Forget Science: Speak up for religious tolerance in Pakistan). At this anniversary, there are a number of articles in Pakistani newspapers: The Silent Majority by Sana Saleem, Taseer's Killing - a symbol of a withering state by Badar Alam, The real essence of Salman Taseer by Ayesha Tammy Haq, and Remembering Salman Taseer by Pervez Hoodbhoy.

I thought I will leave you here with an excerpt of an interview with Steve Inskeep, the author of The Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi - a new book about Karachi. In particular, I appreciated his comments about the promise of tolerance and the perils of immigrations to large metropolis. It is also fantastic to see the name of Ardeshir Cowasjee. I grew up reading his columns in Dawn and he just retired from writing at the age of 86! I cannot think of a better Karachiite than Cowasjee. Here is a piece from the interview:

Guernica: How would you say that the uncertainty—from political violence, from migration—affects conflict in Karachi?
Steve Inskeep: People don’t know where they stand and what they’re going to lose, and that makes things uncertain. The political parties try to meld people together, but then that becomes a problem. There are parallels here to American cities, which, in the ’80s, with massive rural to urban migration, saw incredible amounts of violence. This has quieted down a bit over the years, and part of that may just have been that they’ve been able to work out better governance. You do have this circumstance in Karachi that because people know things are changing, the stakes are higher. Everyone is thinking, “My home is threatened, my job is threatened, my identity is threatened, my world is threatened.” And that creates a very particular sort of climate, that is linked. I mean, some people respond like the men in the sweatshop, holding on desperately to their village. Others may become like Mohammad Nadir; they marry, set down roots, and have to face the question of, “How am I going to make it work for myself here in Karachi?”

Guernica: Do you think this also engenders the religious revivalism in the city, in response to the uncertainty?
Steve Inskeep: The initial migrants from various parts of India that came immediately after partition were attracted to religiously based parties like the Jamaat Islami, since they were trying to figure out questions about what their new political identity as Pakistanis really meant. Then you have the ’80s and the emergence of Altaf Hussain that united the migrants under the platform of the MQM and gave them another way to identify themselves based on their refugee status. So religion becomes a factor. It may well be that people who feel dislocated turn to religion as a substitute for whatever identity they had before. But there are also larger questions for Pakistan that are seminal. What is this country about, what are the values for which it stands?

Guernica: Karachiites often complain, as do Pakistanis, that they don’t control their country’s narrative in the world, that they’re misunderstood. What do you say to this?
Steve Inskeep: So much has been written about partition and that era, but not so much about what happened after. I really have tried, with this book, to continue the story of what happened after. I think it’s fair to say that the country is misunderstood. At the same time, it’s not like everything is going great in Pakistan and nothing is wrong. I hope that Americans reading this book will pause and consider that this is a complex place that cannot be understood in an instant, and it’s not that they’re all against America or against universal human rights. I thought it important to tell the story of a people who, in their own quiet, heroic way…I wanted to capture a picture of a country that is not necessarily at war with the United States, but is at war with itself.

To Pakistanis, I would emphasize the urgent and absolute need for them to take back their history. People who want a different Pakistan have to find a way to go back into their own past and revive the vision of their founders, that was clearly a tolerant and diverse one, so that they can distinguish it from the one that has been imposed upon it. If they can do that, they can take back this city and their country. Tradition has to be retaken by the liberal forces, so that they can show their values of tolerance and democracy not as novel western ideas but as ones indigenous to Pakistan, as a part of its very creation.

Guernica: Aren’t there Pakistanis already engaged in that project?
Steve Inskeep: Let me name three of the people who influenced me, although it’s definitely not a complete list. Ayesha Jalal, the formidable Pakistani-American historian, has rigorously re-evaluated Jinnah’s political strategies leading up to Partition. The result is revealing. Jinnah was not seeking an all-Muslim homeland but rather seeking a way to protect the political rights of people who were Muslim. Akbar Ahmed, a former diplomat and now a distinguished scholar, has documented Jinnah’s life as a man who welcomed, worked with, and even married people of other faiths. Ahmed has argued that Jinnah did not need to choose between a Muslim society or a pluralistic one—rather, that Muslims could welcome minorities in ways that were fully in accord with their faith and its traditions. Ahmed calls attention to Jinnah’s August 11, 1947 speech in which Jinnah called upon his people to set aside “color, caste, or creed.” And then there is Ardeshir Cowasjee, the great Parsi newspaper columnist, who in his mid-80s is a kind of living history of all of Pakistan, old enough to have known Jinnah himself. Cowasjee’s Parsi father, a shipping magnate, was asked for help in creating a national shipping line in 1947. I can imagine no clearer evidence of Jinnah’s intentions, or of his views on diversity, than sitting at Cowasjee’s table in Karachi and listening to this man from a religious minority who was a witness to what Jinnah did and to all that has happened since.

Read the full interview here.

God, Snowflakes, and Kepler

2012-01-03T22:15:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

In terms of science & religion, it is fascinating to see Kepler, Newton and their contemporaries struggle to balance their mechanistic ideas with the need for an active God. Kepler, of course, was also into all sorts of numerical mysticism (and Newton into alchemy and eschatology), and it is a small wonder that planetary laws, now known as Kepler's Laws, were rescued from his search for numbers in the heavens.

Last week's Nature has a fascinating article about Kepler's efforts to explain the reasons for the shape of a snowflake. It is a perfect illustration of this struggle in finding a mechanistic explanation, and yet an attraction to ascribe 'occult' forces, in light of failure. It almost mirrors Newton's early attitude towards gravity. Here is Phillip Ball talking Kepler and the shape of snowflakes:

Did anyone ever receive a more exquisite New Year's gift than was given to the German scholar Johannes Matthäus Wackher von Wackenfels, 400 years ago? A booklet of just 24 pages, it was written in 1611 by his friend Johannes Kepler, court mathematician to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. In De nive sexangula (On the Six-Cornered Snowflake), Kepler attempts to explain why snowflakes have their striking hexagonal symmetry.

In his introduction, Kepler writes that he had noticed a snowflake on the lapel of his coat as he crossed the Charles Bridge in Prague, and so came to ponder on its remarkable geometry. This charming, witty work seeded the notion from which all of crystallography blossomed: that the geometric shapes of crystals can be explained in terms of the packing of their constituent particles.

Kepler's analysis of the snowflake comes at an interesting juncture. It unites the older, Neoplatonic idea of a geometrically ordered Universe that reflects God's design with the newly emerging mechanistic philosophy, in which natural phenomena are explained by proximate causes that may be hidden, or 'occult' (like gravity), but are not mystical.

Here is the motivation for seeking a naturalistic explanation and it mirrors modern scientific attitude:

“There must be a cause why snow has the shape of a six-cornered starlet,” Kepler wrote in De nive sexangula. “It cannot be chance. Why always six? The cause is not to be looked for in the material, for vapour is formless and flows, but in an agent.” This 'agent', he suspected, might be mechanical: the orderly stacking of frozen 'globules' that represent “the smallest natural unit of a liquid like water” — not explicitly atoms, but as good as.
...
Kepler asserted that hexagonal packing “will be the tightest possible, so that in no other arrangement could more pellets be stuffed into the same container”. This assertion about maximal close-packing is known as Kepler's conjecture. It was proved using computational methods only in 1998, by US mathematician Thomas C. Hales, whose proof was published 7 years later (Ann. Math. 162, 1065–1185; 2005). Kepler's vision of crystals as stackings of particles also informed the eighteenth-century mineralogical theory of René-Just Haüy, which forms the basis of all crystallographic understanding today.

But when it didn't work, he appealed to the occult forces:

Yet in the end, Kepler is defeated by the snowflake's ornate form and plate-like shape. He realizes that although the packing of spheres creates regular patterns, they are not necessarily hexagonal or flat, let alone as ramified and ornamented as that of the snowflake. His failure to explain the regularity of the snowflake is no disgrace, for not until the 1980s was this seen to be a consequence of branching growth instabilities biased by the hexagonal crystal symmetry of ice.

Kepler instead fell back on Neoplatonic occult forces. God, he suggests, has imbued the water vapour with a “formative faculty” that guides its form. There is no apparent purpose to the flake's shape, he observes: the “formative reason” must be purely aesthetic or frivolous, nature being “in the habit of playing with the passing moment”. That delightful image, which touches on the late Renaissance debate about nature's autonomy, remains resonant today in questions about the adaptive value (or not) of some complex patterns and forms in biological growth.

I actually like his options of "aesthetic" or "frivolous".

But this reliance on some 'occult forces' reminded me about debates on some of the (as yet) unexplained 'origin' questions: Origin(s) of life and origin of the universe. Just because there is no definitive theory yet, for many, this has become the place to insert God or some other supernatural force in there. Kepler at least tried to find the answer himself, and his efforts benefited the later sciences. Unfortunately, most of the "God of the Gaps" enthusiasts today are non-scientists and they are only interested in showing that an explanation is not possible. I wonder how Kepler would approach today's "origins" questions. I bet he won't give up so easily.

Population, Birth Control, and Abortion in the Muslim World

2012-01-02T08:56:00.002-05:00

In January 2011, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life (PFRPL) released a report on ‘The Future of the Global Muslim Population’. In it, PFRPL looks at demographic trends in 44 Muslim-majority countries and considers the importance of various factors, such as: levels of education (of women), economic well-being (GDP per capita), contraception and family planning, etc.

In July 2010, I had written a post here at Irtiqa on the ‘Population Explosion in the Muslim World’ using World Bank statistics, from which I stressed the doubling of populations over the past 30 years in large and important countries like Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia, and the tripling of Saudi Arabia’s population in the past 30 years.

In that piece I also cited some interesting statistics provided by the World Bank regarding the usage of contraceptives in various countries. And I discussed the question of birth control and Islam.

This PFRPL report first puts the global Muslim population’s growth in perspective, noting that in 1990 it totaled 1.1 billion, thus representing 19.9 % of the world’s population), in 2010 it was 1.6 billion (23.4 %), and in 2030 it will be 2.2 billion (26.4 %).

It also notes that while today Indonesia (with about 205 million people) is the largest Muslim-majority country, followed by Pakistan with some 180 million, in 20 years Pakistan will have largely overtaken Indonesia with 256 million compared with 239 million, and Afghanistan and Iraq will have climbed to the top 10 list (of Muslim-majority countries) with 50 and 48 million people, respectively (a rather scary prospect, if you ask me).

An interesting section of the report presented the state of contraception and abortion in Muslim countries.

First, a comparison of birth-control usage rates is given between Muslim-majority countries and non-Muslim countries, the latter group being divided into “less developed” and “more developed”. Here’s the data table presenting the percentages of married women (ages 15 to 49) using some form of birth control:

Interestingly, the two Muslim countries where birth control is used most are Iran (73 %) and Turkey (71 %), much higher than the world average of 61.3 % and about the same as in the USA (73 %).

Even more interesting is the section dealing with abortion. The report notes that:

Many Muslim-majority countries do not collect or do not publish data on the frequency of abortions. The partial data that are available do not allow for reliable comparisons of abortion rates in Muslim-majority countries with abortion rates in other countries. However, many Muslim-majority countries either forbid abortions or allow them only under tight restrictions.

The report then gives a neat table summarizing the abortion laws in Muslim-majority countries:

The spectrum of attitudes, policies, and laws in the Muslim world is fascinating on this (contraception and abortion) issue as on many others.

A bit of Qawwali for the new year...

2012-01-01T21:45:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Courtesy of the fantastic Coke Studio series from Pakistan, here is a 16-minute Qawwali from Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad called Kangna. Absolutely spectacular!

More than the Separation of Church and State

2012-01-01T21:25:00.001-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Today's NYT has a review of a book about a 17th century Protestant theologian Roger Williams, who is credited with emphasizing on separation of Church and State in the US. The book is titled Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. I think the review itself is fascinating as it does a nice job of providing a broader context of Roger Williams' writings. Here are some snippets from the review"

Born in England, Williams was educated at the Charterhouse School, in London, and at Pembroke College, Cambridge, just in time to thrust his way into his nation’s post-Reformation religious controversies. Disagreement over England’s official faith was why radical Protestants, now known as Pilgrims and Puritans, departed to settle colonies at Plymouth (1620) and Massachusetts Bay (1630). When Williams expressed similarly radical beliefs, and faced arrest, he and his wife fled to New England in late 1630. Their need to leave was so urgent that they crossed the Atlantic in winter, ordinarily considered too dangerous a time for ocean traffic. The Williamses settled in Plymouth Colony, and then in Massachusetts, where Williams again annoyed the authorities. When officials arrived at his house to arrest him in the winter of 1636, he was gone.

Williams struck overland, through snow and bitter cold, “wch I feele yet,” he reminisced later in life. He survived because he had help. “The ravens fed me in the wilderness,” he said, comparing himself to the scriptural prophets sustained by bird-borne morsels, though his “ravens” were Indians. With their assistance, he reached the upper bend of a bay that would be named for its inhabitants, the Narragansett. There, Williams bought land from its native proprietors and established a settlement he called Providence, to honor the divine assistance given to him and other Christians on their flights from persecution.

Then here is the bit about the separation of Church and State:

And yet Williams seemed determined to offend. “I desire not to sleep in securitie,” he had warned the Massachusetts governor John Winthrop, in perfect self-knowledge of his capacity to be purer than the so-called Puritans. He stated that the colony’s civil authorities could not regulate “the First Table,” those among the Ten Commandments that governed religion; they could prosecute someone for adultery, but not for making (or worshiping) graven images. Next, Williams refused to take an oath of fidelity to Massachusetts, on the grounds that anything sworn in God’s name for worldly purposes was corrupt.

The authorities in Massachusetts were so outraged that having failed to arrest Williams, they tried to obliterate his new settlement. He went back to England to get a charter to protect his colony on his own terms: with a “hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wildernes of the world.” In several publications, he argued that the individual conscience should not — could not — be governed, let alone persecuted. If God was the ultimate punisher of sin, it was impious for humans to assume his authority. And it was “directly contrary to the nature of Christ Jesus . . . that throats of men should be torne out for his sake.”

Barry shows how controversial these beliefs were at the time, and in this way reinforces the standard image of Williams as an early proponent of liberty of conscience. But his emphasis on the English context for the controversy neglects Williams’s even bolder insistence that what was true for Christian Europeans was true for others, including Indians.

However, the most fascinating part of the review focuses on Williams' views on Native Americans:

In his “Key Into the Language of America” (1643), a dictionary and a cultural anthropology of New England Indians, Williams called his native hosts and neighbors “Barbarians,” yet argued that they had consciences and rights as worthy of respect as anyone’s. He preached to the Indians, but thought that any coerced conversion of them would represent a false faith, an abomination to God. Nor did he think Indians should be deprived of their land. Against the near-universal assumption that America had more land than its indigenes needed or even knew about, he pointed out that they were “very exact and punctuall in the bounds of their Lands, belonging to this or that Prince or People.”

That was even more controversial than the doctrine of religious liberty among Christians. In the mid-1500s, a Catholic theologian, Bartolomé de Las Casas, had made a similar point. While cataloging Spanish atrocities against Indians, Las Casas defended them as inhabitants of a land to which they had rights, and said their lack of Christian faith did not justify abuse of them. Few were convinced. Consider the 18th-century Catholic missionary, Father Junípero Serra. He assumed that Spaniards had the right to take up land in California and that the church had the duty to reorganize Indians into Christian settlements, by force if necessary. Three thousand miles from Providence, at a rest stop on Interstate 280 in Northern California, a larger-than-life image of Serra faces the Pacific. Its back is turned against Williams’s far-off statue, as if also against his radical example of what New World societies might represent.

The United States is part Serra, part Williams. A “hedge or wall of Separation” between church and state was affirmed by the Constitution; rights for Indians were not. Williams would have considered it a battle half-won. He did not think an “American soul” needed to be created — such souls already existed within Indians. By largely confining Williams’s story to the establishment of liberties for America’s adopted populations, without equal attention to the defense of its indigenous inhabitants, Barry has perhaps underestimated his remarkable subject.

Read the full review here.

Saturday Video: Spiderwebs and a flight over the Earth

2011-12-31T16:31:00.002-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Before we get to space, first here is a stunning picture of spiderwebs around trees in Sindh, Pakistan:

The picture was taken by Russell Watkins and here is his description for the Guardian:

Russell Watkins: 'I was in Pakistan a year ago for DFID, looking at the impact of British aid in helping people affected by the floods. In northern Sindh a vast area had been flooded, but the waters had finally receded enough for local communities to start to return. While we were there the local NGOs told us about this odd phenomenon: miles and miles of flooded land, where every piece of vegetation was shrouded in these spider webs, like candy floss. It was stunning – a surreal sight. The trees were the only things above the water, so it was a very strange landscape, definitely ghostly'

And in case you wanted to have an experience of flying over the Earth, here is a short video of a compilation of 600 pictures taken from the International Space Station (you can catch some lightening in the pictures as well):

Irtiqa off until Dec 31st. But here are some things to keep you busy...

2011-12-27T12:19:00.002-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Irtiqa and Billy the Kit are on the same page on this one...

For much needed self-rebooting, Irtiqa will be off until Dec 31st. In the mean time, here are couple of things to keep you busy: A book about Karachi, a hilarious Christmas song, a book about searching for God, and a film autopsy of the new Almodovar's film.

A NYT review of Eric Weiner's book, My Flirtations with the Divine:

Eric Weiner’s “Man Seeks God: My Flirtations With the Divine” nimbly and often hilariously straddles the fence between the two genres. A former war correspondent for National Public Radio, Weiner is also the author of “The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World.” In that best-selling romp, he ditched the hellhole beat for a year and wandered the globe, from Bhutan to Iceland to Switzerland, looking for countries with a high “happiness index.” His new ramble begins after doctors mistake a nasty bout of intestinal gas for something far more dire. Weiner gets the scare of his life, and after a nurse confronts him in his hospital room (“Have you found your God yet?”) this self-described “Confusionist” sets off on a journey through five countries and eight religions to figure out which faith fits him best.

As Weiner explains in his introduction, he was born into a family of “gastronomical Jews” whose sense of a divine presence began and ended in the kitchen: “If we could eat it then it was Jewish and, by extension, had something to do with God. As far as I was concerned, God resided not in Heaven or the Great Void but in the Frigidaire, somewhere between the cream cheese and the salad dressing. We believed in an edible deity, and that was about the extent of our spiritual life.”

But that period of apathy ends with Weiner’s fear-of-death experience. Each subsequent chapter begins with a Craigslist-style personal ad, a plea from a “CWM” (Confusionist White Male) looking for divine inspiration.

Here is an article about Karachi and the new book by Steve Inskeep, Instant City:

Rome dominated the ancient world. Paris starred as the cultural diva of the 1800s. And New York soared as the steel-and-glass incarnation of the American Century.
So what metropolis best defines our restless, rickety present age — Shanghai; Mumbai, India; São Paulo, Brazil?

In his first book, "Instant City," Steve Inskeep, co-host of NPR's "Morning Edition," constructs a compelling case for bestowing the title on Karachi, Pakistan, a destination that usually rates higher among battle-hardened news correspondents than pleasure-hunting tourists.

With an estimated population of 15 million, and a litany of urban ills including dodgy infrastructure and periodic outbreaks of ethno-religious mayhem, Karachi is among the planet's most chaotic mega-urban areas. In an odd way, Inskeep believes, it's also one of the most representative.
...
Yet, despite Pakistan's pivotal role in current geo-politics, Inkseep's book isn't really about the country's relations with the U.S. or its problematic assignment in the so-called war on terror. Rather, "Instant City" posits Karachi as a metaphor for the developing world, teetering between modernity and tradition, democracy and authoritarianism, East and West.
Karachi, the country's former capital until Islamabad was built practically from scratch in the 1960s, sits at the crossroads of those tensions. It is a place where no amount of U.S. military cajoling and political arm-twisting has been able to impose the American way of thinking, although some affluent neighborhoods wouldn't look out of place in Southern California.

It's a place where the best-laid plans of urban designers and social engineers tend to be overwhelmed by the city's anarchic vitality, including those of Constantino Doxiadis, the Robert Moses of Karachi, a Greek architect who was hired to oversee Karachi's modern face-lift after World War II. If the book has a secondary theme, its author suggests, it's the unforeseen consequences of those repeated attempts to refashion Kariachi into something it's not.

"I've chosen a deeply troubled place," Inskeep said. "But I think it's symptomatic, it's normal, in more ways than we realize."

For your entertainment purposes, here is perhaps one of the best (and hilarious) Christmas songs ever: Tim Minchin's Woody Allen Jesus [it was cut from the show as it was considered to be too controversial. Oh c'mon. This is really funny!]

And here is our film autopsy of Almodovar's The Skin I Live in:

And if interested, you can also watch the autopsy of the new Jason Reitman film, Young Adult.

Conference on Knowledge and Values in Indonesia

2011-12-26T12:49:00.000-05:00

This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

A ‘first conference on knowledge and values’ was recently organized by the Center for Religious and Cross-Cultural Studies (CRCS) and the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies (ICRS) at the University of Gadjah Mada (UGM) at Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The two-day conference (Dec. 16 and 17) was titled ‘Methodological explorations of the encounters of science, religion and local culture’. It gathered a dozen or so speakers with some 100 students, most of them graduate students in the humanities, with a predominance in religious studies.

The format of the conference was interesting in itself: the first day was a series of sessions where two speakers presented their views on “the encounters of science, religion and local culture” in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and various areas of methodological study; the second day was devoted to short presentations by students whose essays had been selected, followed by lengthy discussions with the speakers, in parallel sessions of about 30 participants.

On the first day, I was “paired” with Prof. Etty Indrati, a biologist at UGM. I spoke on the challenges posed by modern science to Islam (and theism more generally), particularly methodological naturalism, reviewing the spectrum of Muslim thinkers’ reactions to modern science, and presenting my own position (the Averroesian harmonizing approach that I presented in my recent book); I also pointed explicitly at the worrisome trends in today’s Muslim culture, namely the dominant creationism, the popularity of I`jaz (“miraculous” scientific content in the Qur’an), and the mediocre state of science education and research in this part of the world. Prof. Indrati, while alluding to it once or twice, preferred to avoid the topic of evolution and creationism and focused instead on how science affects living standards and life expectancy and how cultural/religious norms can and should allow people to harmonize their worldviews and lifestyles with the scientific knowledge. In the end, she made the audience happy by proclaiming that a scientist, if s/he excels in his/her pursuit of scientific research, will be led to God. (Prof. Indrati is of Christian background.)

The discussion period for this session saw a spirited and rather high-level series of exchanges, particularly on the topic of “islamization of knowledge”. I later was told that this proposition is still quite popular in that part of the world, particularly among Muslim social scientists. I was asked about the situation in the Middle East, and I replied that the concept and “research program” of the “islamization of knowledge”, which was so popular and strong in the eighties and early nineties, has clearly dwindled in the last decade. Not so in South Asia, I was told. We discussed the flaws (in my view) of that “program” and what valid responses can be brought up to counter that dead-end.

The afternoon sessions were even more interesting, with very diverse talks given by Prof. Adam Seligman (a specialist of religious studies at Boston University), Prof. Mark Woodward (an anthropologist from Arizona State Univ. currently visiting UGM-CRCS), Prof. Heddy Shri Ahimsa Putra (a specialist of cultural studies at UGM), and others.

Prof. Seligman is an orthodox Jew; he characterizes himself as a traditionalist. He tried to stress the importance of understanding rituals as a momentary shift from our corrupt world to an ideal one, and how performing rituals helps us strive toward that ideal life and state of being. He also stressed the importance of keeping to traditions and not allowing “modernity” to make us arrogantly dismiss the ways of our grandfathers and ancestors, just because “we know better”. Needless to say, another spirited discussion ensued.

Prof. Woodward addressed two topics somewhat briefly (talks were 20-30 minutes long): a) what is “post-modernism”, and what principles in it are methodologically productive; b) how does one keep to highest levels of objectivity when studying a social “phenomenon” to which one relates (being from that culture, believing in those dogmas or practices, etc.).

And last but not least, the most unorthodox talk (to a modern mindset) was given by Prof. Putra, a talk he titled “Prophetic Paradigm”. In it, he fused elements of the islamization of knowledge/science program, the Nasrian worldview of “unity” (of knowledge, cosmos, being, etc.), and some local (Javanese/mystic/Sufi, I was told) philosophy. He insisted that “intuition” and mystical inner capabilities, combined with the information that one can extract from scriptures, can lead to knowledge that “science” is incapable of reaching. He presented a proposal on how all that can be integrated in this new “paradigm”, though he admitted that these are merely ideas, and that more specific approaches and applications need to be produced by researchers. Another spirited discussion ensued.

I was quite impressed by the energetic participation of the students. It is true that most of them were graduate students, but the conference was conducted in English, a language they do not fully master, and they were dealing with professors from highly respectable foreign universities, most of whom have published numerous works. Yet the students were not passive at all; they were always polite and grateful for all the discussions, asking to take pictures with the speakers and whatnot, but they were not afraid to voice their opinions and ask pointed questions.

I was also happy to see how the format of the conference (with relatively few speakers) made ample space for discussion, which greatly benefited the students. Most importantly, the discussions focused strongly on methodological issues, which I believe is the crux of the matter in all those debates, and the students were made very fully aware of this aspect.

I wish the CRCS and the ICRS continued success in their programs, and I look forward to more such “encounters” and debates.

Iran's increase in science publications in 2011

2011-12-25T21:54:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

This week's Nature has a nice map of top 40 countries in terms of the number of scientific publications. Turkey, Iran, Egypt and Malaysia are on the list. Iran also shows a 20% increase compared to its 2010 publication record - the largest increase amongst the top 40 countries. These numbers are just for 2011, but Iran, Turkey and Egypt have been showing a consistent increase in their science papers over the past 10 years or so.

Here is the map:

Saturday Video: Damasio on The Quest to Understand Consciousness

2011-12-24T09:03:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Not the greatest of speakers, but it lays out ways on how to ask questions on some aspects of this topic scientifically. Enjoy!

Naturalizing Buddhism

2011-12-23T23:49:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Buddhism poses a challenge for the standard - or stereotypical - discussion of science and religion. The most prominent debates today are rooted in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic concept of God and are a result of a millennia of interactions over the way to understand the natural world. But the debates in Buddhism have been very different in nature. So here is a review of two books about Buddhism and science:

Buddhism is a distinctive world religion. It lacks an 'omnigod' — an omnipresent, omniscient, all-powerful creator — and a notion of humans as complexes of physical bodies and souls that ascend to heaven after death. Could it be mingled with the scientific culture of the twenty-first century to produce a new philosophical outlook on the world, the mind and our values? That idea lies at the heart of these two contrasting books on Buddhism and science.

In The Bodhisattva's Brain, philosopher of mind Owen Flanagan wants to change Buddhism to fit better with the scientific world view. In Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic, Buddhist scholar and monk B. Alan Wallace wants to alter the scientific world view so that it meshes better with Buddhism. Both tease out the contrasts between Buddhism and materialism — and both stumble when it comes to defining the latter.

From the review, it seems that Flanagan's book is the one to get (though in this case we should really not judge the books buy their covers. No seriously. Flanagan couldn't find any pictures or any other design for the cover? Kindle may be helpful in this case...)

For Flanagan, the world is fundamentally physical, and thus explicable by natural science, at least in principle. But Buddhism seems inconsistent with this materialistic world view. It may have no place for a creator god or ascending souls, but as Flanagan notes, it is “opulently polytheistic insofar as spirits, protector deities, ghosts, and evil spirits abound”. He points out, too, that in east and southeast Asia, a belief in rebirth among Buddhists is as common as a belief in heaven among North Americans. So Flanagan sets out to 'naturalize' Buddhism: to see what Buddhism would look like without the “hocus pocus” (as he cheerfully puts it).

The result is a wide-ranging discussion of the neural and cognitive basis of mental states such as meditation and the achievement of enlightenment or nirvana, which are central to Buddhism. Flanagan outlines a plausible moral philosophy based on an idea that he takes from Aristotle but reinterprets in the light of Buddhist teaching: eudaemonia, a sort of happiness that, in Flanagan's view, is the proper aim of a good life.

Oh - and if you are inclined to induce some "hocus pocus"from Buddhism into the sciences, then Wallace's book may be for you:

Wallace adopts a contrary view, even urging the many scientists and philosophers who embrace materialism to change their minds. His book is in part a compelling and clear statement of key Buddhist ideas, but its main point is to advocate a distinction between science and a materialist interpretation of it. Materialist science, Wallace thinks, cannot get to grips with the reality of consciousness, free will or values. Science inspired by Buddhist experience might.

In both books, however, the concept of materialism remains blurry. Wallace notes what materialism isn't: the ancient 'atoms and the void' notion of the Greek philosopher Democritus, which is inconsistent with modern physics. But rather than clarifying what it is, he uses materialism as a placeholder for his dislikes — variously, a nihilistic rejection of moral values, a desire for more possessions and the denial of consciousness and the mind altogether. A more explicit statement from Wallace about what he is rejecting would have given his manifesto more muscle.

Read the full review here (you may need subscription to access the article).

A Saudi Innovator to help Mideast Scientists

2011-12-21T23:44:00.001-05:00

by Salman Hameed

I have in the past lambasted Saudi Arabia for a number of things (for example, on mindless executions based on sorcery charges, or for their efforts to buy academic prestige) and will likely continue doing that until the women there have at least some modicum of equality. But here is a positive and inspiring story about a female Saudi innovator. Hayat Sindi, who has now launched her own Mideast foundation, The Institute for Imagination and Ingenuity, to help scientists from the area (tip from Darakhshan). She actually has an interesting story about how Hayat got educated:

Sindi, who dresses in a traditional headscarf but also in trendy heels, relishes the details of making her own way in science. It started with a fib to her family after her first year of college in Saudi Arabia.

Keen to continue her studies abroad, she told her father some good news: She had been accepted at a prestigious university in London. Her traditional Muslim father said it would tarnish the family name for a young woman to live overseas alone. “He told me, ‘Over my dead body,’” Sindi recalls. Still, she persuaded him, and off she went to England.

The truth is, she hadn’t been accepted at any university. When she landed in London as a teenager in 1991, she says, she spoke only Arabic, no English. “My first night there, I went to a youth hostel,” she says. “I was in an attic room. I panicked. I looked at my plane tickets—my father had bought a return ticket. I thought, I’ll go home tomorrow.” Instead she went to an Islamic cultural center and got a translator to help her meet with college officials. “They told me, ‘You’re crazy,’” she says. “I was naive. I thought they would just let me in.”

After a year spent cramming on English and studying to pass the “A-levels,” the U.K.’s college-admission courses, she got herself in to King’s College, where she graduated in 1995 with a degree in pharmacology. She went on to get a Ph.D. in biotechnology from Cambridge in 2001. She says her family didn’t learn about her lie until years later, when they were surprised to hear her mention it in a speech.

This story is quite amazing and she seems fantastically driven (though this is still not the advertisement for Saudi Arabia: You can get well-educated if you can get out of there by lying. Okay - I have to suppress my cynical side on this feel-good story). And now she is planning to provide help for scientists in the middle east:

Sindi recently wrapped up a stint as a visiting scholar at Harvard, where she co-founded Diagnostics for All, the organization developing the disease-diagnosing paper, which changes colors when dabbed with bodily fluids from a person who is ill. The idea is to make it simple even for someone who isn’t a doctor to quickly and cheaply diagnose disease in places where doctors or clinics might be nonexistent.

Sindi currently is a fellow at PopTech, a U.S.-based nonprofit that provides fellowships to scientists in an effort to foster global innovation. On October 21, at a PopTech conference in Camden, Maine, she will launch her own Mideast foundation, the Institute for Imagination and Ingenuity, which will help scientists write business plans, and find investors for their ideas. “I picture scientists finding new ways to purify water, or diagnose disease,” Sindi says.

A big obstacle for Mideast scientists, she says, is that they aren’t savvy about putting together a business plan; as a result, venture capitalists in the region are wary of investing in science. Sindi says she hopes to eventually expand her foundation to the U.S., and plans to split her time between both places.

It’s clear that she already dwells in both worlds, although Sindi has been living in the West for her adult life. Sitting in a coffee shop near the PopTech offices in Brooklyn, she wears a blue headscarf, suede heels and silvery eye shadow and jokes that scientists need not be geeks. And she describes her deep respect for her culture. “I’m very proud of where I came from,” she says. “Sometimes people think they need to completely discard their culture. But you have to hold on to your identity.”

In Saudi Arabia, the number of women in the workforce has nearly tripled since 1992, according to a study by consulting firm Booz & Company. But the number is still low for the region: The female participation rate in the Saudi workforce is 14 percent, compared with 59 percent in the United Arab Emirates. Saudi culture doesn’t make it easy for women to work. A male guardian must give permission if a woman wants to get a job. Sindi hopes she can help change that.

Read the full article here. Also, you can see a video of her presentation at PopTech 2009 here.

Foreign Policy’s 100 Top Global Thinkers of 2011

2011-12-19T10:12:00.000-05:00

This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

The respected and influential US monthly Foreign Policy (FP) published a long list of “top global thinkers of 2011” in its December issue. The list actually contains some 130 names, as many of the ranks included several people. For each person, FP gave a one-sentence justification/explanation, a short (or for the most important ones, somewhat long) description of their importance and influence, plus a small sidebar where the thinkers were asked to: name their muse; choose between America and China; give their current reading list; and name their choice of the best and worst idea of the moment.

In addition to the list, this special issue contains several interesting long articles on current trends and background analyses, including: “The big think about the Arab spring”; “Does Facebook have a foreign policy?”; and “16 global cities to watch” (Cairo is the only one from the Muslim world).

I thought it would be worthwhile to extract the names of the Muslim individuals who have made the list and to analyze that (sub-) list. (One must keep in mind, however, that this list comes from Foreign Policy.) But before that, there are some interesting statistics about the entire list that the magazine points out; for instance:

·   33 of the selected individuals are women (25 %);
·      21 % are economists;
·      31 published a book this year;
·      9 are heads of state;
·      8 are Nobel prize winners;
·      5 were arrested this year;
·      6 were released from prison;
·      5 are billionaires;

· the average age of these global thinkers is 56, the youngest being 27, and the oldest 94.

Now, while the 3 “most influential global leaders” were: Obama, Merkel, and Erdogan (FP reminds us that last year, it was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Lula da Silva, and Hu Jintao), this year’s top spot for “global thinkers” was given to “the Arab Revolutionaries”, which includes 12 Arabs, plus one Serbian activist and one US academic, whose previous writings have (according to FP) been influential in the strategies used by the Arab revolutionaries on the ground.

The list starts with a big surprise: Alaa Al Aswany. Many readers of Irtiqa (and most educated people in the west) will probably not have heard of him. He is an acclaimed novelist (and a dentist!), whose books (with big and bold stories) over the past decade have been very successful both in the Arab world and the west, one of them at least has been turned into a movie, The Yacoubian Building. Now, why would a novelist be listed as a top “global thinker” (in relation to the Arab spring revolutions)? “For channeling Arab malaise – and Arab renewal”, FP tells us.

The rest of the “Arab revolutionaries” are:

· Mohamed ElBaradei (FP reminds us that a year ago, just before the Arab spring started, ElBaradei said of the Mubarak regime that “it will fall sooner rather than later”, and at the time this sounded like wishful thinking, and that he moved back to Egypt to challenge the regime), and Wael Ghoneim, the young Google regional executive who played an important part in making social networking a crucial instrument in the Egyptian revolution.

· Ali Ferzat, the Syrian cartoonist who was badly beaten up to try to prevent him from making his eloquent drawings, and Razan Zaitouneh, the young Syrian activist/attorney who produced an important website to document the Syrian uprising and who has been in hiding for months – FP says “for speaking truth to a bloody power”.

· Rached Ghannouchi and Khairat El Shater (the Tunisian moderate Islamist leaders), “for working to reconcile Islamism and democracy (we hope)”.

· Tawakkul Karman (the Yemeni activist, one of this year’s Nobel Peace prize laureates), “for keeping the spirit of the Arab spring alive against impossible odds”.

· Wadah Khanfar (the former head of Al-Jazeerah), “for turning the Al-Jazeera revolution into an actual one”.

· Eman Al Najfan and Manal Al-Sharif, “for putting Saudi women in the driver’s seat”; Al Najfan (a Saudi blogger, graduate student, and mother of three) gets to pen a long article titled “What do Saudi women want?”.

· Fathi Terbil, a Libyan human rights lawyer, “for believing that no massacre should go unpunished”.

· Srdja Popovic and Gene Sharp, the Serbian activist and the US academic, “for writing the how-to manuals for this year’s revolutions”.

In the rest of the top-100 list, we find another 10 Muslim individuals (I use “Muslim” here in the cultural background/origin sense, not in the religious affiliation one):

· At the 16^th rank, Ahmet Davutoglu and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “for imagining a new role for Turkey in the world – and making it happen”.

· At the 24^th rank, Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian activist, “for shaping the new world of government transparency”.

· At #28, Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, “for forging a path between violence and surrender”.

· At #54, Mohamed El-Erian, the CEO of Pimco (the largest bond fund, based in California), “for delivering economic tough love to a world in denial”.

· At #70, Zaha Hadid, the famed Iraqi-born British architect, “for creating new forms for a new age”.

· At #75, Maria Bashir, the Afghani prosecutor, “for aspiring to an Afghanistan ruled by law, not men.”

· At #84, Mustafa Barghouti, the Palestinian politician in the West Bank (not Marwan Barghouti, the jailed Farah leader), “for believing in a different politics for Palestine”.

· At #85, Pervez Hoodbhoy, the Pakistani physicist (who needs no introduction to readers of Irtiqa), “for his bold secular defiance”. FP further explains that Hoodbhoy “has become a powerful voice in denouncing his country’s growing religious fundamentalism”, and highlights his statement that “Muslims need freedom from dogmatic beliefs and a culture that questions rather than obeys”.

Looking at the list (at least the one relating to the Arab-Muslim world), I think it is clear that there is a certain agenda or at least mindset here. We may very well find the agenda (of promoting political programs that are rather western-friendly and highlighting and publicizing secularism and anti-traditionalism) commendable, or at least agreeable to us and our standpoints, but it is an agenda nonetheless.

For example, Mahmoud Abbas, Salam Fayyad, and Mustafa Barghouti (the moderate Palestinian politicians) are considered “global thinkers/leaders”, but not the Emir of Qatar and his wife (the famous Sheikha Moza), who are incomparably more influential?!

And the only Muslim writers/thinkers that FP could come up with are Al Aswany, Hoodbhoy, and Al Najfan (the Saudi blogger)?!

Now, last week I presented a ranking of the “top 500 most influential Muslims” produced by a Jordanian institution that we found to be so strongly biased and boldly agenda-laden that it became ridiculous in the choices that were often made, especially when unqualified individuals were placed in categories (Science & Technology, in particular) where the criteria should have been much more rigorous.

The list produced by Foreign Policy is certainly better informed, and intelligently presented and argued. It also clearly has a certain mindset/prism, if not a specific agenda.

But such exercises are often, if not always, interesting and useful.

A reasonable NYT article on Pakistan

2011-12-18T20:38:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

If we want to solve a problem, we have to understand it. Unfortunately, Pakistan is now such a hot-button political issue in the US that we are seeing more and more jingoistic and simplistic narratives in political debates and in major newspapers (and the same is true for the image of US in Pakistan). I had collected some decent articles on Pakistan's political situation in a recent post, A Cornucopia of Articles about the Complexity of Pakistan. Today's NYT Magazine section has another good article: The Pakistanis Have a Point. In all of this, one thing is becoming quite clear: There is a significant split in the strategy of the State Department versus the Military and the CIA regarding Pakistan. You pile on top of it the coming 2012 Presidential election politics, and you have foreign policy mess that you see in Pakistan.

Here is the bit of the NYT article where it talks about Pakistan's grievances:

The Pakistani version of modern history is one of American betrayal, going back at least to the Kennedy administration’s arming of Pakistan’s archrival, India, in the wake of its 1962 border war with China.

The most consequential feat of American opportunism came when we enlisted Pakistan to bedevil the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Pakistan — with help from Saudi Arabia — created the perfect thorn in the Soviet underbelly: young Muslim “freedom fighters,” schooled in jihad at Pakistani madrassas, laden with American surface-to-air missiles and led by charismatic warriors who set aside tribal rivalries to war against foreign occupation.

After the Soviets admitted defeat in 1989, the U.S. — mission accomplished! — pulled out, leaving Pakistan holding the bag: several million refugees, an Afghanistan torn by civil war and a population of jihadists who would find new targets for their American-supplied arms. In the ensuing struggle for control of Afghanistan, Pakistan eventually sided with the Taliban, who were dominated by the Pashtun tribe that populates the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. The rival Northern Alliance was run by Tajiks and Uzbeks and backed by India; and the one thing you can never underestimate is Pakistan’s obsession with bigger, richer, better-armed India.

As long as Pakistan was our partner in tormenting the Soviet Union, the U.S. winked at Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program. After all, India was developing a nuclear arsenal, and it was inevitable that Pakistan would follow suit. But after the Soviets retreated, Pakistan was ostracized under a Congressional antiproliferation measure called the Pressler Amendment, stripped of military aid (some of it budgeted to bring Pakistani officers to the U.S. for exposure to American military values and discipline) and civilian assistance (most of it used to promote civil society and buy good will).

Our relationship with Pakistan sometimes seems like a case study in unintended consequences. The spawning of the mujahadeen is, of course, Exhibit A. The Pressler Amendment is Exhibit B. And Exhibit C might be America’s protectionist tariffs on Pakistan’s most important export, textiles. For years, experts, including a series of American ambassadors in Islamabad, have said that the single best thing the U.S. could do to pull Pakistan into the modern world is to ease trade barriers, as it has done with many other countries. Instead of sending foreign aid and hoping it trickles down, we could make it easier for Americans to buy Pakistani shirts, towels and denims, thus lifting an industry that is an incubator of the middle class and employs many women. Congress, answerable to domestic textile interests, has had none of it.

“Pakistan the afterthought” was the theme very late one night when I visited the home of Pakistan’s finance minister, Abdul Hafeez Shaikh. After showing me his impressive art collection, Shaikh flopped on a sofa and ran through the roll call of American infidelity. He worked his way, decade by decade, to the war on terror. Now, he said, Pakistan is tasked by the Americans with simultaneously helping to kill terrorists and — the newest twist — using its influence to bring them to the bargaining table. Congress, meanwhile, angry about terrorist sanctuaries, is squeezing off much of the financial aid that is supposed to be the lubricant in our alliance.

“Pakistan was the cold-war friend, the Soviet-Afghan-war friend, the terror-war friend,” the minister said. “As soon as the wars ended, so did the assistance. The sense of being discarded is so recent.”

And here is an example of the two different sides of the story:

The official American version of the current situation in Afghanistan goes like this: By applying the counterinsurgency strategy that worked in Iraq and relying on a surge of troops and the increasingly sophisticated use of drones, the United States has been beating the insurgency into submission, while at the same time standing up an indigenous Afghan Army that could take over the mission. If only Pakistan would police its side of the border — where the bad guys find safe haven, fresh recruits and financing — we’d be on track for an exit in 2014.

The Pakistanis have a different narrative. First, a central government has never successfully ruled Afghanistan. Second, Karzai is an unreliable neighbor — a reputation that has not been dispelled by his recent, manic declarations of brotherhood. And third, they believe that despite substantial investment by the United States, the Afghan Army and the police are a long way from being ready to hold the country. In other words, America is preparing to leave behind an Afghanistan that looks like incipient chaos to Pakistan.

In Peshawar, General Malik talked with polite disdain about his neighbor to the west. His biggest fear — one I’m told Kayani stresses in every meeting with his American counterparts — is the capability of the Afghan National Security Forces, an army of 170,000 and another 135,000 police, responsible for preventing Afghanistan from disintegrating back into failed-state status. If the U.S. succeeds in creating such a potent fighting force, that makes Pakistanis nervous, because they see it (rightly) as potentially unfriendly and (probably wrongly) as a potential agent of Indian influence. The more likely and equally unsettling outcome, Pakistanis believe, is that the Afghan military — immature, fractious and dependent on the U.S. Treasury — will disintegrate into heavily armed tribal claques and bandit syndicates. And America, as always, will be gone when hell breaks loose.

General Malik studied on an exchange at Fort McNair, in Washington, D.C., and has visited 23 American states. He likes to think he is not clueless about how things work in our country.

“Come 2015, which senator would be ready to vote $9 billion, or $7 billion, to be spent on this army?” he asked. “Even $5 billion a year. O.K., maybe one year, maybe two years. But with the economy going downhill, how does the future afford this? Very challenging.”
American officials will tell you, not for attribution, that Malik’s concerns are quite reasonable.

Read the full article here.

Saudi Universities buying Academic Prestige?

2011-12-17T20:04:00.001-05:00

by Salman Hameed

I have written multiple times about King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) before (for example, here, here, and here). KAUST has the second largest university endowment in the world and is supported by the Saudi government. I have written about the promise (it may open up genuine science opportunities) and also the perils of such an experiment (will it have any impact when it is isolated from the general Saudi society, etc.).

But now comes the news that two other Saudi universities, King Abdullah University (KAU) and King Saud University (KSU) have been buying academic prestige by offering money to high profile researchers so they can list one of these universities as affiliations. While there are couple of tricky issues here, ultimately, the central question ought to be: Is this the best investment of money for building the scientific infrastructure of Saudi Arabia?

So lets first look at what has been going on. From Science (tip from Gary Dargan):

At first glance, Robert Kirshner took the e-mail message for a scam. An astronomer at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was offering him a contract for an adjunct professorship that would pay $72,000 a year. Kirshner, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, would be expected to supervise a research group at KAU and spend a week or two a year on KAU's campus, but that requirement was flexible, the person making the offer wrote in the e-mail. What Kirshner would be required to do, however, was add King Abdulaziz University as a second affiliation to his name on the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI's) list of highly cited researchers.

“I thought it was a joke,” says Kirshner, who forwarded the e-mail to his department chair, noting in jest that the money was a lot more attractive than the 2% annual raise professors typically get. Then he discovered that a highly cited colleague at another U.S. institution had accepted KAU's offer, adding KAU as a second affiliation on ISIhighlycited.com.
Kirshner's colleague is not alone. Science has learned of more than 60 top-ranked researchers from different scientific disciplines—all on ISI's highly cited list—who have recently signed a part-time employment arrangement with the university that is structured along the lines of what Kirshner was offered. Meanwhile, a bigger, more prominent Saudi institution—King Saud University in Riyadh—has climbed several hundred places in international rankings in the past 4 years largely through initiatives specifically targeted toward attaching KSU's name to research publications, regardless of whether the work involved any meaningful collaboration with KSU researchers.

Oh - and apart from all other things, all 60 researchers are men. At least there is consistently in the Saudi approach: If women can't drive, they can't be given money even if they are a top-notch researcher :)

Academics who have accepted KAU's offer represent a wide variety of faculty from elite institutions in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. All are men. Some are emeritus professors who have recently retired from their home institutions. All have changed their affiliation on ISI's highly cited list—as required by KAU's contract—and some have added KAU as an affiliation on research papers. Other requirements in the contract include devoting “the whole of your time, attention, skill and abilities to the performance of your duties” and doing “work equivalent to a total of 4 months per contract period.”

Neil Robertson, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Ohio State University in Columbus who has signed on, says he has no concerns about the offer. “It's just capitalism,” he says. “They have the capital and they want to build something out of it.” Another KAU affiliate, astronomer Gerry Gilmore of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, notes that “universities buy people's reputations all the time. In principle, this is no different from Harvard hiring a prominent researcher.”

Officials at KAU did not respond to Science's request for an interview. But Surender Jain, a retired mathematics professor from Ohio University in Athens who is an adviser to KAU and has helped recruit several of the adjuncts, provided a list of 61 academics who have signed contracts similar to the one sent to Kirshner. The financial arrangements in the contracts vary, Jain says: For instance, some adjuncts will receive their compensation not as salary but as part of a research grant provided by KAU.

Jain acknowledges that a primary goal of the program—funded by Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Higher Education—is to “improve the visibility and ranking of King Abdulaziz University.” But he says KAU also hopes the foreign academics will help it kick-start indigenous research programs. “We're not just giving away money,” he says. Most recruits will be expected to visit for a total of 4 weeks in a year to “give crash courses”; they will also be expected to supervise dissertations and help KAU's full-time faculty members develop research proposals. Even the “shadows” of such eminent scholars would inspire local students and faculty members, he says.

Read the full article here (you may need subscription to access it). Okay now onto some tricky issues. I think it is absolutely true that having access to such researchers will not only improve the visibility of the universities but will also allow the ability to have fruitful collaborations that otherwise may be difficult to forge. It is also true that students will benefit - even if a top researcher visits there for only a few weeks a year. One can argue that this is better than no visit.

The problem, however, in all this is the return on each dollar spent. Is spending $72,000 for a 2-3 week visit is the best use of that money? Perhaps, most importantly,this may tell us more about the attitude towards building scientific institutions.

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. Money can only buy so much. Ultimately, scientific gains come from the human capital of the country, and that comes from developing strong educational institutions at all levels of educations and crucially for both sexes. Similarly, it is equally important to create an environment where students and faculty members can think freely (since Saudi government is behind these universities, we have to acknowledge that it is the same government that does allow women to drive or own a passport). Yes, money is also important - but the obsession to be included in a list of top universities is misguided at best. The goal should be to produce good thinkers and researchers, and the rankings should follow that. Is the best way to produce good thinkers and researchers depend on paying $72,000 for a 2-3 week visit per year? Probably not. Instead, may be, Saudi Arabia can look at places like Singapore. They also have an authoritarian regime, but their investments in education have been smart and have been producing interesting scientific results. It may take a decade or two, but the results may also be more permanent.

Do you think the Saudi strategy of affiliations will be successful in the long run?

Saturday Video: NOVA on Pluto Files

2011-12-17T16:13:00.003-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Here is a NOVA episode with, of course, more propaganda against Pluto :). [Update Dec 18: Also see Laurel's Pluto blog for reinstating Pluto's status as a planet]. Actually Tyson does a good job here of talking to everybody involved in the dispute over Pluto's status as a planet and also of laying out the issues involved. He also goes to Las Cruces, NM and meets Clyde Tombaugh's (the discoverer of Pluto) wife (she's got to be in her upper 90s) and family. Then around 28 minutes into the show, Tyson visits a Unitarian Church in Las Cruces, which has a stained window that celebrates the life of Clyde Tombaugh! How cool is that and it is one of those places (not always) where science and religion conflict narrative collapses (and yes, I know, we are talking about a Unitarian church, but still...). Here is a picture of the window:

By the full disclosure here: I have a soft spot for Pluto as a planet as did my doctorate work in the astronomy department at NMSU, which was founded by Clyde Tombaugh. I had a chance to attend his 90th birthday, and it was amazing to see the popularity of Clyde and Pluto amongst kids in the US and abroad.

Watch The Pluto Files on PBS. See more from NOVA.

The end of the world in "Melancholia"

2011-12-16T19:54:00.001-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Here is another stunningly beautiful film by Lars Von Trier: Melancholia. Yes, his films are challenging and sometimes (always?) difficult to watch, nevertheless, he is an amazing filmmaker and always has a lot of interesting things to say. I loved (and flinched watching) his last film Antichrist. The opening sequence of Antichrist is stunningly beautiful and unbelievably sad. The rest of the movie is full of religious references and can be considered as an alternative take on the Original Sin and the Garden of Eden.

Now comes Melancholia. The opening sequence is absolutely phenomenal - and that alone is worth the admission! It tells you the whole story - and yet we want to know how do these dots really connect. It is not a spoiler then to tell you that the world gets destroyed in this movie. Oh - but what a spectacular destruction it is! The world, in fact, is destroyed by a planet named Melancholia. It is interesting that we have two movies this year, this and Another Earth, that have used the discovery of a new planet very close to the Earth as a device to talk about human conditions (see our review of Another Earth here). But neither of the films is science fiction and lets not even begin to talk about the scientific accuracy of these films. Nevertheless, there is something going on where such planets are in the zeitgeist.

Here is our autopsy (review) of Melancholia, and this time we are joined by novelist and former producer of 60 minutes, John Marks. He also runs the fantastic blog, Purple State of Mind:

Film Autopsy of Melancholia from kevin taylor anderson on Vimeo.

Peering into Newton's notebooks

2011-12-15T23:52:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Here is your chance to take a peek into Newton's notebooks, and even an annotated copy of his Principia published in July 1687. Cambridge University has opened up digital archives of Newton's papers and have made 4000 scanned pages available for now. Check it out.

A graphic novel inspired by Islamic Calligraphy and Arabian nights

2011-12-14T14:12:00.001-05:00

by Salman Hameed

I have previously referred to an excellent website on Islam and Science Fiction maintained by M. Aurangzeb Ahmad. It has a recent interview with Craig Thompson, the author of a new graphic novel, Habibi. The novel is inspired by Islamic calligraphy and some of the fairy tale narratives from the Middle east. Here is a snippet of the interview:

M Aurangzeb Ahmad: What inspired you to write Habibi?Craig Thompson: After BLANKETS, I was sick of drawing high school renditions of myself and mundane midwestern landscapes. I wanted to craft something outside of myself, something bigger than myself, and was considering two trajectories — the classic fantasy epic with dragons and elves and whatnot — or a nonfiction piece of political/social relevance like the comics journalism of Joe Sacco (FOOTNOTES IN GAZA). HABIBI ended up meeting in the middle. On a personal level, I’d always wanted to do a book about sexual trauma, and the characters of Dodola and Zam - two escaped child slaves - were the perfect roles to unravel this story. They arrived in my sketchbook almost fully realized - a gift - but I didn’t know what sort of world they inhabited. I found a home for them in the fantastical landscapes of A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. I became excited for the latter as a fantasy genre (much like super heroes or crime noir, etc.) and savored the stories for their adventure and bawdiness and humor, but questioned whether these elements were intact from the original arabic folk tales or imposed by a British colonialist Richard Burton. At which point, I sought a deeper reading of these tales in the Islamic arts.

M Aurangzeb Ahmad: What kind of background research did you do in writing Habibi?Craig Thompson: The core of research around HABIBI was simply conversation. I must shamefully confess that before the book, I didn’t have any Muslim friends! Such is the limiting nature of social circles. But HABIBI motivated me to seek those connections/friendships and greatly enrich my life. These meditation on Islam and the arabic language was born directly out of my new friendships, especially exploring the vivid connections with my Christian upbringing. The visual fuel for HABIBI was from book reference - on calligraphy, ornamentation, geometric design, architecture - all these art forms that evolved so profoundly because of a supposed prohibition against representational imagery. Nothing in the book is specific to any geography or time period. Rather it borrows fast and loose from all over the world, Most of all with HABIBI, I trusted my imagination. The backdrop is a dreamscape. The story is a fairytale. The characters of Dodola and Zam are as I described, a gift, that arrived fully realized from outside of me, but that I felt a parental bond to - and a responsibility to explore their stories on paper.

M Aurangzeb Ahmad: Arabic Calligraphy also features prominently in Habibi, what was your inspiration behind that?Craig Thompson: Arabic calligraphy has been described as “music for the eyes” which sums it up perfectly. The cartoonist Chris Ware talks about comics as sheet music - because the reader needs to know how to interpret the symbols, like notation, to unlock the musicality of the page. Ware describes comics as “pictures you READ”. Whereas, calligraphy is words you LOOK at. You can savor arabic calligraphy for its surface aesthetics, as beautiful as any painting, and its fluidity. That fluidity is key. I have great envy of the arabic written language, because Romanized letters are so clunky and abstracted. The fluidity in a language must influence fluidity in culture and worldview. And this is the core thread in HABIBI - when the fluidity dries up or is blockaded - environmentally, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually - how to you restore that flow?

Read the full interview here. Here is a review of Habibi from the Guardian and another one from NPR (you can also read an excerpt here). And just for the taste, here are couple of graphics from the novel:

Execution based on Sorcery Charges

2011-12-13T22:02:00.001-05:00

by Salman Hameed

This is simply insane. It is sometimes really hard to maintain perspective on issues related to religion, politics, and science. Just this past Sunday I had a post about Islamophobia in the US and the utter idiocy of a conservative US group that is upset about the "normal" portrayal of Muslims in the reality show All-Ameircan Muslims. But then, just to provide fodder for the bigots, Saudi Arabia decides to execute a woman on sorcery charges. Again - a woman has been killed in Saudi Arabia in the 21st century because of charges of practicing sorcery!

Saudi authorities have executed a woman convicted of practising magic and sorcery.
The Saudi interior ministry said in a statement that the execution had taken place on Monday, but gave no details of the woman's crime.
The London-based al-Hayat daily, however, quoted Abdullah al-Mohsen, the chief of the religious police who arrested the woman, as saying she had tricked people into thinking she could treat illnesses, charging them $800 a session.
The paper said a female investigator followed up the case, and the woman was arrested in April 2009 and later convicted in a Saudi court.

Shame on Saudi Arabia! This is not just simple idiocy. This is dangerous lunacy and people are paying the price with their lives. The problem is that this is not the first time. Here are some earlier posts related to other sorcery charges:

Sibat's life may be spared...

"Sorcery" execution delayed

Beheading on "sorcery" charges expected on Friday

Still no sense from Saudi Arabia on sorcery death sentence

Sorcery Charges: Saudi Arabia boldly marches into the 15th century

The world’s 500 “most influential” Muslims

2011-12-12T09:04:00.001-05:00

This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

Last week I received a bulk email from the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center (based in Amman, Jordan) announcing the release of their third annual ranking of the 500 “most influential” Muslims. All three of their annual documents can be downloaded (here) for free, or ordered for $30 or so.

Last year, I had written here about their list in general, but paying closer attention to the Science and Technology category. Salman then noted the particularly conservative, anti-modern standpoint proclaimed in the document itself.

The essential problem with this list is that not only is the term “influential” difficult to define, one clearly realizes that the editors of the document(s) oscillate between at least three very different meanings of the term: a) having power to affect Muslims (through policies); b) being popular among the Muslim public and thus having some “influence” on attitudes and beliefs; c) making important contributions (of substance) in one field or another, contributions that sometimes few Muslims have even heard about and thus have no wide “influence”. This is why one finds in the list, in fact even in the Top 50, people as diverse as Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani (Emir of Qatar), Khaled Mashaal (political leader of Hamas), Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi (perhaps the top Muslim scholar/preacher), and Seyyed Hossein Nasr (the thinker). And among the “honorable mentions” (who missed the top 50 just by a bit), one finds Harun Yahya and Zakir Naik!

So what’s the point of this list and ranking? According to the email I received, “what you’ll learn” in this “must-own book” includes: “the actual movers and shakers in the Muslim communities”, “the scholars, teachers, and preachers who affect the widest number of Muslims”, “the main Muslim politicians who get things done in the domestic and international realms”, “the top business leaders”, “the Muslims who donate millions to or run large charities”, “the top Muslim scientists, artists, celebrities, sports stars”, etc.

Now, a brief look at the document will reveal that not only is the same kind of conservative/orthodox agenda being pushed, in some ways this year’s edition is even worse than last year’s.

First, in an introductory section titled “The House of Islam”, the doctrinal stands of the producers of this list and document shows up very clearly – as it did in the previous editions. After presenting the “Major Doctrinal Divisions in Islam”, which it divides into Sunni, Shii, and Ibadi, it devotes a sub-section to “ideological divisions”, which it categorizes as “Traditional Islam” (96% of the world's Muslims, it says), “Islamic Modernism” (1 %, it says), and “Islamic Fundamentalism” (3 % of the world’s Muslims, it says). Never mind the percentages and where they come from; it is the descriptions of these categories, particularly “Islamic Modernism” that is quite stunning: “Islamic modernism is a reform movement started by politically-minded urbanites with scant knowledge of traditional Islam. These people had witnessed and studied Western technology and socio-political ideas, and realized that the Islamic world was being left behind technologically by the West and had become too weak to stand up to it. They blamed this weakness on what they saw as 'traditional Islam,' which they thought held them back and was not 'progressive' enough. They thus called for a complete overhaul of Islam, including—or rather in particular—Islamic law (sharia) and doctrine (aqida). Islamic modernism remains popularly an object of derision and ridicule, and is scorned by traditional Muslims and fundamentalists alike” (emphases added).

With that kind of conservative mindset and agenda, one then understands the list, starting with the top 10:

1. King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, King of Saudi Arabia (as last year)

2. King Mohammed VI, King of Morocco (was Number 5 last year)

3. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey (was Number 3 last year)

4. King Abdullah II bin Al Hussein, King of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (same as last year)

5. Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran (was Number 3 last year)

6. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Emir of Qatar (was not in the Top 10 last year)

7. Professor Sheikh Ahmad Muhammad al-Tayeb, Grand Sheikh of the Al Azhar University, Grand Imam of the Al Azhar Mosque (same as last year)

8. Dr. Mohammed Badie, Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood (was not in the Top 10 last year)

9. Sultan Qaboos bin Sa’id, Sultan of Oman (was Number 6 last year)

10. Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hussein Sistani, Marja of the Hawza, Najaf, Iraq (was Number 8 last year)

Then among the 12 “Honorable Mentions”, one finds interesting figures like Dr. Zakir Abdul Karim Naik, who is presented simply as “Preacher” and Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya), labeled only as “Science & Technology”! That says quite a bit about the standards being upheld, not to mention what the Center and the editors of this document consider as “Science & Technology”…

But our (bad) surprises are not over. Further into the document, there is a section for “Science & Technology”, with the statement: “These are the main figures from the world of science and technology.” The list begins with Dr. Zaghloul El Naggar, the foremost proponent of I`jaz (miraculous scientific content of the Qur’an and the Sunna), and Harun Yahya is listed again, pointing the reader to the “Honorable Mentions” list. One must recall that these two writers and media-savvy people are indeed “influential”, in the sense that millions of people gobble up what they say, though there is no description or discussion in the document of the type of influence that these people exert on Muslims.

And to confuse readers even more, the list does consider other types of “influence” by listing more mainstream and prominent Muslim scientists such as Ahmed Zewail, A Q Khan, and Atta-ur-Rahman. The ‘S & T’ list is, for the most part, identical to last year’s, but the editors of this document have decided to take out people like Mehmet Oz (Dr. Oz of TV/Oprah fame) and Anousheh Ansari, whose “influence” was a mystery to begin with…

So it’s the mixed bag and subjective selection that one must decry, as it gives the wrong understanding to those who cannot quite discern the valid personalities from the badly influential ones.

How media sees Muslims: Scary or Stupid? (oh -and shame on Lowes)

2011-12-11T20:02:00.003-05:00

by Salman Hameed

First of all, shame on Lowes. It has pulled ads from the reality show All-American Muslims after receiving protest e-mails. Protest for what? Protests for the fact that Muslims are depicted as ordinary Muslims and not as a threat - as is perceived by Florida Family Association! Seriously.

Hardware store giant Lowe’s has yanked ads from the series after the Florida Family Association encouraged members to email the program’s advertisers.
“The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish,” the group said about the show, a docu-soap chronicling everyday Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan that debuted last month. “Clearly this program is attempting to manipulate Americans into ignoring the threat of jihad and to influence them to believe that being concerned about the jihad threat would somehow victimize these nice people in this show.”
The organization posted a letter allegedly from a Lowe’s representative agreeing to pull its ads: “While we continue to advertise on various cable networks, including TLC, there are certain programs that do not meet Lowe’s advertising guidelines, including the show you brought to our attention. Lowe’s will no longer be advertising on that program.”

Wow. It is hard to see this kind of bigotry against any other group at this moment in time (in the past, Catholics and Jews have faced similar reactions in the US). At the same time kudos to California senator, Ted Leiu (D), who is calling for the boycott of the home improvement store unless it apologizes to the Muslim community in the US (Good - that we have been going to Home Depot all along :))

On another issues, I had mentioned earlier about the news item of UK Muslim medics "boycotting evolution lectures". Well, that was based on one interview with a biologist. Now it may very well be true that many Muslim doctors or students may not agree with evolution and may indeed have been walking out of classes, but it needs to backed up some kind of study. However, such a news item fit such stereotypes that it ended up being covered by several British newspapers and appeared on numerous blogs on the web.

Now comes the news that an anonymous Egyptian cleric has issued a fatwa that women should not handle cucumbers in the kitchen. This is clearly idiotic, and most of us would chuckle and move along. But again, for some this defines Islam. Tabsir - a friend of this blog - has an excellent (and quite entertaining) commentary on this, High Heels, Cucumbers, and Fat-chance Fatwas:

Drowning out a semblance of nuance are the Islamophobes who are having a field day with the spate of silly fatwas coming out of Egypt (and elsewhere). Within the last couple of days it seems like The Onion has been scooped by sites like Jihad Watch. The wishy-watchers on that Watch quote al-Arabiya, so we learn:
Preacher Mustafa al-Adawi issued a fatwa prohibiting Muslim women from wearing high heels because they are a source of seduction for men.
“A woman can only wear high heels for her husband but she is not to do so outside her house,” he said.

If you have invested in the Egyptian stock market, you might want to pull out of the shoe businesses. Well, at least this preacher lets women wear high heels at home.

Then there is the anonymous Egyptian cleric who has apparently warned women not to touch cucumbers, zucchini or carrots because they resemble a penis and will thus arouse the women. So they should have a male cut these vegetables for them, as women obviously still need to do the cooking. I suppose it has not occurred to this fellow that if a man picks up a cucumber and thinks it looks like a penis, that this kind of homosexual thought should be even worse. Actually, this is not a new idea. The 13th century travel account by Ibn al-Mujawir relates a story that the ruler in Sanaa, Yemen at the time forbade women to sell or buy whole white radishes (the long white kind that look like carrots) in the market because they would use them for a certain purpose in that unmentionable part of their anatomy. And someone should tell this cleric that men should not eat figs unless they are at home with their wives in bed. Pity the poor vegetable hawker who gets a basket of oranges or mangos to sell and is asked for two at a time.

The fear mongering here is that, horror of horrors, Egyptian women will not be able to wear high heels in the street and men will have to help out in the kitchen for dinner. Of all the issues pressing Egyptian society, high heels and phallic cucumbers are newsworthy? Jihad Watch does not indicate that in fact these are not binding rules, but opinions that most Egyptian Muslims find utterly amusing. There are indeed all kinds of silly fatwas out there, which is the case for any religion I know. I remember growing up fundamentalist Baptist and reading a little booklet by “Sword of the Lord” John R. Rice that women should not bob their hair. Bob their hair! It is also well to remember that almost half of the people in the United States say that they believe in a literal Adam and Eve and do not accept the scientific theory of evolution.

But then here is the key point - there are people risking their lives for democratic ideals, and this is the kind of items that are garnering attention?

The popularity of such fat-chance fatwas is obvious; we all love to read silly things. But there is a double problem here. First, an anonymous bearded cleric does not define Islam any more than Terry Jones defines Christianity. If you think that the first new law passed in a democratically elected Egyptian parliament will be to ban wearing high heels, you probably need a brain transplant. Second, we trivialize Islam by focusing on such banal pronouncements. We just witnessed protests in several countries that took people’s lives; those who braved the tanks and tear gas did not do so to keep Egyptian women from handling cucumbers. Yes, the new political systems will have a far more religious flavor. No one knows what rights will be newly given and what rights will be eroded. I suspect, however, that economics will trump moral policing.

First of all, read the full article here. I suspect that these kind of issues are brought up as a distraction. The whole Terry Jones stuff as well as the hysteria over the Manhattan Islamic Center was part of the election cycle and Republicans stoked those fires. The same will be true for Egypt as well. Some of the crazier fatwas may help divert attention for a bit. But, as it is pointed out on Tabsir, ultimately economics will drown out claims for such moral policing.

Saturday Video: Frans de Waal on Morality without Religion

2011-12-10T11:54:00.001-05:00

by Salman Hameed

The issue of morality often gets entangled with religion. But the origins of certain behaviors that we term 'moral' can be traced in our evolutionary pasts. Of course, one can argue that those characteristics are part of the natural world because of the laws put in place by God. At the same time, the search for the origins of those laws (like any other scientific question) falls under the purview of science, and the following talk is about that. Here is primatologist Frans de Waal talking about Morality without Religion. By the way, if you haven't read his books, you should definitely check those out. He is an excellent writer. I was hooked on to his books after reading The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist.

Here is the Tedx talk by Frans de Waal. Also note the fascinating videos of chimps from the Yerkes Archive.

Playing with the Moon

2011-12-09T19:47:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Here are some creative pictures by photographer Laurent Laveder (tip from Bad Astronomy). He has some spectacular pictures on his website. For example, check out his panoramas. In any case, here he is with the Moon:

Jon Stewart escalates the 'war on Christmas'

2011-12-07T21:43:00.001-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Okay - this is hilarious - and even Muslims make a cameo in this one. Enjoy!

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

When can we go to Kepler 22b?

2011-12-07T21:18:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Yes. Astronomers have the first confirmed detection of an earth-like planet located in the star's habitable zone - the distance from the star where water can exist in liquid form. It is also called the Goldilocks zone (The Red Riding Zone is where the planet gets eaten by a wolf pretending to be the planet's grandmother). The discovery is amazing, if not really surprising. There are just too many planets out there, and we are bound to find planets in places that match conditions of the Earth. And life is also likely to be quite common. Life that can build telescopes? Don't know.

So what do we know about this planet? It is called Kepler 22b. This is the sexiest name that astronomers could come up with (actually, it is because it is discovered by Kepler telescope). It is located about 600 light years away - just far enough that we can't start thinking about packing our bags for a trip. At least, not yet. It is about 2.4 times the radius of the Earth. We don't know its composition for sure, but there is a good chance that it is a rocky planet. And perhaps most importantly, your birthdays would come every 290 days (woo hoo!).

Is there life there? We don't know. This planet was detected when it passed in front of its star, dimming the light of the parent star a bit. We do not have an image of the planet. When we do - and it may take years - then we can potentially analyze the composition of its atmosphere. The presence of oxygen in the atmosphere will be a good indicator for life, as oxygen in our own atmosphere is a by-product of life itself.

We are getting closer to finding life.

If you are interested, I had a chance to talk about Kepler 22b as well as the idea that we may all be Martians on the Bill Newman show yesterday morning. The segment is called Musings on our insanely huge universe and you can download it here (the segment about Kepler 22b is the last 15 minutes of the show). We also had a discussion of dark matter the month before, and you can find that episode here (again the last 15 minutes of the show).

Al Jazeera discussion on London Muslim medics and evolution

2011-12-06T22:23:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Last week, biologist Steve Jones gave an interview to the Sunday Times in which he said that some of his Muslim students (not a majority) have walked out of his biology classes when he addresses the topic of evolution. Now, this is an interesting observation based on his personal experience. However, the story took a life of its own and the blogosphere and even couple of other British newspapers were suggesting that Muslim medics are boycotting evolution classes in elite medical schools in London. Notice, how "some Muslim medics boycotting" turned into "Muslim medics boycotting". I will have a separate post on the media coverage of this and some suggestions on how to cover such evolution-related stories (in the mean time, you can read this article from earlier this year - also about another controversy involving London: Fallen Angels, Risen Apes: Covering Islam and Evolution).

Al Jazeera also weighed in today on its show The Stream. I was one of the guests along with philosopher Stephen Law from Oxford and Imam Joe Bradford from Jacksonville, Florida. We actually had a pretty good discussion and I appreciated the comments of both Stephen and Joe about what our attitude towards science and evolution should be (the only exception was in the post-show discussion, when Imam Joe was ambiguous about the possibility of human evolution). I also think that the host, Imran Garda, had done his homework and hence the level of questions was quite good. Even the selection of Twitter and Facebook comments was good, and the result, I think, was a fruitful and civil conversation.

Here is the video (by the way, the quality of Skype turned out to be quite good!):

How will Facebook and Twitter impact Islam?

2011-12-05T09:20:00.000-05:00

This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

I continue to be highly interested in the influence that digital technology nowadays has on religion in general and Islam in particular. I’ve recently written posts on “The Future of Islam in the Age of New Media” (reviewing an online conference on the subject), “Ramadan Apps, High-Tech Islam”, and “Hajj 2.0”, all here on Irtiqa, and “New Media and Islam” a month ago on The Huffington Post.

Last week, I wrote another piece on The Huffington Post, this time looking more specifically at the impact that Facebook and Twitter could have (or maybe are already having) on Islam. It seems to have resonated quite a bit with readers, judging by the numbers of Facebook “shares”, re-tweets, comments, and direct emails it generated.

Here are a few excerpts from it:

During a recent Friday sermon, a young Muslim sitting next to me took out his Blackberry and started to check his messages (while the Imam was giving his speech). I was quite stunned. The young man then put away his smartphone, but ten minutes later took it out again and typed a few things. That gave me a good indication of both his (short) attention span and the addiction to cyberspace that youngsters have fallen victim to these days.

I could not shake off this little scene from my mind, so I later googled “Twitter and religious services”, and lo and behold, I found pages titled “Tweeting during church services gets blessing of pastors” (an article in the Houston Chronicle two years ago) and “Does God Tweet?”, an online forum organized by the Washington Post two years ago, where 16 contributors presented their thoughts on whether a relationship with God can be established through Twitter. Can prayer be reduced to a 140-character statement? Can we no longer free our minds, quiet our inner selves, focus on our spiritual dimension, and establish a meaningful religious state of being?

I thus wondered how Twitter, Facebook, and current and future social networking and micro-blogging tools will affect religions in general and Islam in particular. My worries were heightened when I found an article titled “25 Reasons Why Twitter Is Spiritual”, but none of the reasons were remotely convincing.

Facebook poses another set of challenges and concerns for Muslims. First and foremost is the freedom of speech that either can be much greater than many Muslims are accustomed to (in their countries) or can be abused to the point of becoming hate speech. There have already been a number of instances where a page was set up to publicly and crudely “criticize” Islam, and last month an Egyptian was jailed for “insulting Islam” on Facebook.

In reaction to this, some Muslims have either waged Facebook-boycott campaigns or just went ahead and created Muslim social networks, e.g. Muslimsocial.com, Muxlim.com, or Naseeb.com.

Other concerns that many Muslims have with Facebook relate to the loss of “virtual modesty”, of “correct behavior”, and of privacy. The concern over “modesty” refers to images that can be deemed indecent. “Correct behavior” decries the loss of inhibition that people exhibit online, often in stark contrast to their everyday personalities, and the hypocrisy of voicing views online that are quite different from one’s beliefs and practices in “real life”. And the issue of privacy online is well known.

Finally, there is the huge problem of time waste in social-networking activity. Two years ago, a study was conducted among evangelical Christian college students; these were found to spend an average of 18.6 hours a week on social media, half of that on Facebook. Interestingly, 54 % of these religious students reported that “they were neglecting important areas in their life due to spending too much time [on that activity]”. On the other hand, 43 % of the students stated that this helped alleviate stress in their lives, and 35 % reported that their social relationships were improved by that. The authors of the study warned against the negative impact that this time waste will have on the religious activities (prayer, Bible study, attending services, serving others, etc.) of the users of social media.

And indeed, as I mentioned in my last column, an important Iranian cleric recently warned his students of the “dangers and temptations” of the Internet and advised them to “spend more time praying and less time clicking through cyberspace.”

…

Clearly, the new media and social networks have created a new dynamic within religious communities, including Muslims. Some effects are already being felt, both in the practice and in the formulation and understanding of the religion itself. This is one of the most important developments of our times.

You can read the whole piece at this link: “How Will Facebook and Twitter Impact Islam?”

For those highly interested in this whole topic, I would also like to recommend the website/blog “Virtually Islamic”, which is produced by Dr. Gary Bunt, the author of “iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam” (see Ziauddin Sardar's review here).

The disappointing gods of "Immortals"

2011-12-04T20:50:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

I had a chance to see Immortals, the recent film by director Tarsem Singh. I raved about his earlier film, The Fall (for example, see this earlier post: Unusual Darwin and Wallace in The Fall). The concept of Immortals is interesting as it envisions Greek Gods on Mount Olympus and their interaction with Titans and humans. When first finding out that Tarsem is directing the film, I had high hopes for the project. I wondered if he is going to take some of the phenomenal origin mythologies and present them on the screen. Alas - the movie is quite disappointing. However, the costumes are very good and there are some fascinating visuals associated with the fighting of the immortal gods. For more on this, check out this film autopsy of Immortals with Kevin Taylor Anderson and I:

Film Autopsy of Immortals from kevin taylor anderson on Vimeo.

And as a bonus, here is the film autopsy of an excellent film, The Descendants. It doesn't have much to do with science and religion, but it is a high quality film about family dynamics.

Film Autopsy of The Descendants from kevin taylor anderson on Vimeo.

Mars and Microbial ethics

2011-12-04T20:32:00.001-05:00

by Salman Hameed

This semester I have been co-teching a class on Astrobiology with microbiologist Jason Tor and planetary astronomer/geologist Darby Dyar. It has been a lot of fun, and tomorrow, in our last class, we are looking at the ethical implications of the discovery of microbes on Mars. If we have a sure sign of detection, do we continue to send landers on Mars and risk further contamination from Earth? Would humans retain the right to explore and colonize Mars? Can we - from Earth - ever claim even a piece of Mars, or does Mars belong to the Martians, and we have to follow the Prime Directive, and let it evolve on its own? These are indeed difficult questions but we have to address them soon as we are sending more and more sophisticated instruments to detect Martian life (For example, see the recent launch of Mars Science Laboratory). What do you think? If we detect life on Mars, should humans still colonize the planet in the future?

Coincidentally, there is a fascinating article by Carl Zimmer in today's New York Times that talks about bioethics related to microbes that make up our own bodies:

Welcome to the confusing new frontier of ethics: our inner ecosystem. In recent years, scientists have discovered remarkable complexity and power in the microbes that live inside us. We depend on this so-called microbiome for our well-being: it helps break down our food, synthesize vitamins and shield against disease-causing germs.

“We used to think of ourselves as separate from nature,” said Rosamond Rhodes, a bioethicist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “Now it’s not just us. It’s us and them.”
For bioethicists, one of the most important questions is what our microbes can reveal about ourselves. Studies have revealed, for example, that people who are sick with certain diseases tend to have distinctive collections of microbes. Someday we may get important clues to people’s health from a survey of their microbes. Professor Rhodes argues that this sort of information will deserve the same protection as information about our own genes. Your germs are your own business, in other words.

But that is only one side of the issue. As scientists get to know the microbiome better, they are also looking for new medical treatments: after all, most antibiotics were first discovered in bacteria and fungi. Michael Fischbach, a biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues have discovered a wealth of promising druglike molecules made by microbes in human bodies.

It may even be possible to use the bacteria themselves as living drugs. Doctors have treated hundreds of patients suffering from gut infections by giving them so-called fecal transplants: the bacteria from healthy people can create a stable ecosystem that drives disease-causing microbes to extinction. In their more speculative moments, scientists have proposed using microbes to treat obesity or autoimmune diseases. Some researchers are even genetically engineering microbes to make them more effective.
Manufacturers already add beneficial bacteria, called probiotics, to a range of foods. But regulating a microbe is trickier than regulating a molecule. Probiotics can multiply inside us, and can later escape to colonize new hosts. When a doctor prescribes engineered microbes for individual patients, the ethical questions will extend far beyond them, to their families and communities.

Microbes defy a simple notion of individuality. They are essential to our biology, and they travel with us from birth to death. Yet they also flow between us, and can be found in water, food and soil.

Read the full article here. It seems like we are here to provide a warm and safe environment for the microbes to thrive. May be we should respect our masters on Mars as well :)

Libyan archaeology after the revolution

2011-12-03T20:30:00.001-05:00

by Salman Hameed

Leptis Magna, 2nd century AD

Now that the things are settling a bit, there are hopes that archaeologists will not only be able to resume their work there, but may even have some further support from the Libyan government for research. Like its neighbors, Algeria and Egypt, Libyan terrain provides a fertile ground for archaeological remains. And much is still unexplored. From Science:

As for archaeology, Mattingly and colleagues tend to burst out in superlatives when they describe Libya's riches, which include five UNESCO-designated World Heritage Sites: the Greek city of Cyrene; Leptis Magna, the Roman city where emperor Septimius Severus was born; a Phoenician trading post called Sabratha; Ghadamès, an ancient oasis town; and a vast collection of rock paintings near the Algerian border.

On top of that, there are massive hidden treasures, says Mattingly, who runs a U.K. project in the Sahara called Desert Migrations, spanning everything from the northward movement of early hominins to ancient desert civilizations and 19th century trade routes. “The evidence is everywhere you look, and it's of extraordinary value,” he says. “It's the envy of the rest of the world.”

The museums and most of the sites fortunately escaped harm in the recent fighting. However, the future of the archaeology in Libya is far from certain:

Just how Libyan archaeology will evolve depends to a large degree on what happens to the country's Department of Antiquities. Its director, Salah Agab—whom Science was unable to contact—was suspended from his job, Michel says, like many other high-ranking officials, but he has since been reinstated. Mattingly hopes that Agab will keep his post, calling him a “wonderful guy and genuinely someone of vision.” But the department needs to be rebuilt and strengthened, Mattingly adds.

Scientists from other disciplines who have worked in Libya are eager to return as well. “If things settle down really quickly, I could be back next year,” says University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno, who visited Libya to finalize a study agreement 10 days before the uprising started. With Libyan partners, Sereno hopes to search for dinosaur fossils in a mountain ridge extending along the coast. “It's really terra incognita,” he says, “and as the Earth gets smaller, it's great to have a place that is that unknown.”

“Gaddafi cared a lot about security but not really about science and education,” says Salem Sharata, who teaches geology at the University of Az Zawiyah. Yet Sharata senses that Libya is finally moving in the right direction. But it will continue to need help, he says. “I hope you guys won't leave us alone.”

Read the full article here (you may need subscription to access the article).

Saturday Video: NOVA's "Universe or Multiverse"?

2011-12-03T09:22:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

This is part of Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos. We also had a discussion about religion and the issue of multiverse here on Irtiqa: Multiverse theory: Leave it to science. Enjoy!

Watch The Fabric of the Cosmos: Universe or Multiverse? on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Iran's Stem Cell Fatwa

2011-12-01T23:41:00.000-05:00

by Salman Hameed

This is from a couple of years ago, but it is still a fascinating piece that complicates the usual relation of science & religion, and also of our general impression of Iran. At a time when embryonic stem cells research is a hot-potatoe issue for US politics, it is interesting to see the reaction in Iran. Yes, part of this has to with the definition of the beginning of life in Islam (often considered at 4 months - instead of at the time of conception), but still, this provides an nice insight into the dealings with science in deeply religious societies. By the way, evolutionary biology is also included in biology textbooks and we found the same positive reaction when we interviewed a few Iranian medical doctors who recently arrived in the US.

In any case, here is the segment on Iran's Stem Cell Fatwa from Frontline (Tip from Abu'l-Rauhan Al-Biruni):

Watch Iran: The Stem Cell Fatwa on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE/WORLD.

The film autopsy of "50/50" and "Drive"

2011-11-30T00:20:00.002-05:00

by Salman Hameed

How does one deal with the threat of death? Most religions have major components that deal with the topic of death. The film, 50/50, addresses the topic of cancer and death in an intelligent manner. You must be thinking right now that you really don't want to see a movie about cancer. However, trust me - this is a smart and funny film that respects its characters. Give it a chance! Here is its film autopsy:

Film Autopsy of 50/50 from kevin taylor anderson on Vimeo.

And if you are truly looking for a fantastic film, check out Drive. It is one of the most interesting films I have seen this year. The best way to describe Drive is "cool". While it is a fantastic film, be warned, that it is also quite violent (see the trailer below). It is rare that one comes out of the theater and says "wow - I haven't seen any thing like this before". Do check out the film, and here is its film autopsy:

Film Autopsy of Drive from kevin taylor anderson on Vimeo.

To give you a taste, here is the trailer for Drive: