Islamic Societies Review WEEKLY

Monday, August 13, 2012

Being Sikh in America

Monday, August 13, 2012 No comments

By HARTOSH SINGH BAL

DELHI — From 1988 to 1993 I was a graduate student at New York University. Like many nonobservant Sikhs, I did not wear a turban, but I did keep a beard. When I would travel to small-town America, my appearance sometimes gave rise to a barely concealed hostility, occasionally even a comment or two.

I am not claiming that such incidents were the norm, but they were not uncommon.

Once, as I was stepping out of my own apartment in Jersey City with a bag slung over my shoulders, the police pulled out a gun and searched me. On another occasion, camping in North Carolina, I was made to stand in a police car’s high-beams with my hands over my head, again with a gun pointed at me, until the cops saw my white companions.

The years I am talking about precede 9/11 by a decade. As far as I can see, post 9/11, it has become considerably easier to express and act on such prejudices. My point, though, is this: these prejudices have always existed in the United States, and they are not restricted to white supremacists.

Friday, August 10, 2012

Who will come out on top?: The rebels are a diverse bunch who are co-operating—for the time being

Friday, August 10, 2012 No comments

KINGS make war, but wars also make kings. A year ago, when Syrian government troops first tried to enter Jebel Zawiya, a region south-west of Aleppo where rugged hills enfold 33 villages, a handyman called Jamal Marouf gathered seven men and set off to fight the intruders. Now he claims to command 7,000 fighters, whose reach stretches over much of rural Idleb province, from Turkey’s border to Hama in the south. Perhaps to match their growing ambition, Mr Marouf’s “Martyrs of Jebel Zawiya” recently changed their brigade’s name to “Martyrs of Syria”.

The Sunni farmers who grow olives, figs and cherries have long resented the rule of the Assads and their Alawite co-religionists. Since the uprising took off a year ago, the Syrian army has wreaked havoc in Jebel Zawiya, as elsewhere in Sunni-populated regions. But the growing cost of fighting the tenacious rebels, combined with the need to reinforce strained government troops in Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city that is now locked in a furious battle, has pushed the army out of the area. Last month it quit, leaving just a few isolated outposts from which it lobs shells into rebellious villages.

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

God and the Ivory Tower: What we don't understand about religion just might kill us

Tuesday, August 07, 2012 No comments

The era of world struggle between the great secular ideological -isms that began with the French Revolution and lasted through the Cold War (republicanism, anarchism, socialism, fascism, communism, liberalism) is passing on to a religious stage. Across the Middle East and North Africa, religious movements are gaining social and political ground, with election victories by avowedly Islamic parties in Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. As Israel's National Security Council chief, Gen. Yaakov Amidror (a religious man himself), told me on the eve of Tunisia's elections last October, "We expect Islamist parties to soon dominate all governments in the region, from Afghanistan to Morocco, except for Israel."

On a global scale, Protestant evangelical churches (together with Pentacostalists) continue to proliferate, especially in Latin America, but also keep pace with the expansion of fundamentalist Islam in southern Africa and eastern and southern Asia. In Russia, a clear majority of the population remains religious despite decades of forcibly imposed atheism. Even in China, where the government's commission on atheism has the Sisyphean job of making that country religion-free, religious agitation is on the rise. And in the United States, a majority says it wants less religion in politics, but an equal majority still will not vote for an atheist as president.

But if reams of social scientific analysis have been produced on religion's less celestial cousins -- from the nature of perception and speech to how we rationalize and shop -- faith is not a matter that rigorous science has taken seriously. To be sure, social scientists have long studied how religious practices correlate with a wide range of economic, social, and political issues. Yet, for nearly a century after Harvard University psychologist William James's 1902 masterwork, The Varieties of Religious Experience, there was little serious investigation of the psychological structure or neurological and biological underpinnings of religious belief that determine how religion actually causes behavior. And that's a problem if science aims to produce knowledge that improves the human condition, including a lessening of cultural conflict and war.

Religion molds a nation in which it thrives, sometimes producing solidarity and sacred causes so powerful that citizens are willing to kill or die for a common good (as when Judea's Jews around the time of Christ persisted in rebellion unto political annihilation in the face of the Roman Empire's overwhelmingly military might). But religion can also hinder a society's ability to work out differences with others, especially if those others don't understand what religion is all about. That's the mess we find ourselves in today, not only among different groups of Americans in the so-called culture wars, but between secular and Judeo-Christian America and many Muslim countries.

Time and again, countries go to war without understanding the transcendent drives and dreams of adversaries who see a very different world. Yet we needn't fly blindly into the storm.

Friday, August 03, 2012

Karl Rove: He's Back, Big Time

Friday, August 03, 2012 No comments

On the evening of June 29, Amedeo Scognamiglio, a jewelry designer on the Isle of Capri, met friends for drinks at the elegant Grand Hotel Quisisana. Around midnight, Scognamiglio says, “I noticed some familiar American faces.” He took to Twitter. “What,” he wanted to know, “is Karl Rove doing at the Quisisana with Steve Wynn?!” The answer came zinging right back from @KarlRove: “Part of a group enjoying really good Bellinis on a beautiful Capri night!”

Rove is a tech-geek. On Sept. 11, 2001, he was the only White House staff member connected to BlackBerry e-mail on Air Force One as the plane ferried President George W. Bush back and forth across a panicked nation. When he made his Bellini tweet, Rove was on the Amalfi Coast honeymooning with his third wife, Karen Johnson, a Republican lobbyist. On Twitter, Rove did not refer by name to Wynn, though the two men are friends. Earlier in June, the casino mogul joined a select group of guests at the Rove-Johnson nuptials in Austin. All of this, be assured, has more than gossip-page significance: Wynn is just one of many mega-wealthy backers whose enthusiasm and checkbooks have fueled a Karl Rove Renaissance that’s redefining the business of political finance.

read more >>

Also Listen to the Author's interview on NPR Here.

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Sunday, July 29, 2012

Syrian war of lies and hypocrisy: The West's real target here is not Assad's brutal regime but his ally, Iran, and its nuclear weapons

Sunday, July 29, 2012 No comments

by Robert Fisk

Aftermath of terror attacks in Syria

Has there ever been a Middle Eastern war of such hypocrisy? A war of such cowardice and such mean morality, of such false rhetoric and such public humiliation? I'm not talking about the physical victims of the Syrian tragedy. I'm referring to the utter lies and mendacity of our masters and our own public opinion – eastern as well as western – in response to the slaughter, a vicious pantomime more worthy of Swiftian satire than Tolstoy or Shakespeare.

While Qatar and Saudi Arabia arm and fund the rebels of Syria to overthrow Bashar al-Assad's Alawite/Shia-Baathist dictatorship, Washington mutters not a word of criticism against them. President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, say they want a democracy in Syria. But Qatar is an autocracy and Saudi Arabia is among the most pernicious of caliphate-kingly-dictatorships in the Arab world. Rulers of both states inherit power from their families – just as Bashar has done – and Saudi Arabia is an ally of the Salafist-Wahabi rebels in Syria, just as it was the most fervent supporter of the medieval Taliban during Afghanistan's dark ages.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Why Does Turkey Want Regime Change in Syria?

Wednesday, July 25, 2012 No comments

by Halil Karaveli

The downing of a Turkish RF-4E reconnaissance aircraft in late June brought Turkey and Syria to the brink of war. Following the statement of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the rules of engagement of the Turkish military have been changed and expanded, Turkey has deployed two armored brigades and positioned antiaircraft batteries along its Syrian border. Turkish F-16 fighters scrambled to chase away Syrian assault helicopters, which were within four miles of the Turkish-Syrian border on several occasions during the first week of July.

Observing that a "new Middle East is about to be born," Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu recently stated before the Turkish parliament that "we will be the owner, pioneer and the servant of this new Middle East." The Turkish government must act in a way that matches such rhetoric, but that in turn risks inviting a dangerous escalation of the Syrian conflict. Turkey has committed itself, in concert with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, among others, to bring about regime change in Damascus. It has allowed the Syrian opposition to set up headquarters in Istanbul, and it is arming and training the Sunni rebels. Turkey's main weapon in its escalating confrontation with Syria consists of giving more support to the rebels, something that foreign minister Davutoglu hinted at when he assured that "we are determined to continue to support the Syrian people."

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Why the Syrian Rebels Should Put Down Their Guns

Saturday, July 21, 2012 No comments

by Daniel Serwer

Nonviolent organization has a better chance at unseating Assad's regime than an armed uprising.

A member of the Free Syrian Army gestures during a patrol
in the western border town of Zabadani / Reuters

It is remarkable how quickly we've forgotten about nonviolence in Syria. Only a few months ago, the White House was testifying unequivocally in favor of nonviolent protest, rather than armed opposition, against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his regime's awful crackdown. Even today, President Obama eschews military intervention. Yesterday, Yahoo News' Laura Rozen offered the views of four experts on moving forward in Syria. While one doubted the efficacy of arming the opposition, none advocated nonviolence. When blogger Jasmin Ramsey wrote up a rundown of the debate over intervention in Syria, nonviolence wasn't even mentioned.

There are reasons for this. No one is going to march around Homs singing kumbaya while the Syrian army shells the city. It is correct to believe that Syrians have the right to defend themselves from a state that is attacking them. Certainly international military intervention in Bosnia, Kosovo, and arguably Libya saved a lot of lives. Why should Syrians not be entitled to protection? Isn't it our responsibility to meet that expectation?

Thursday, July 05, 2012

A Quantum Leap: The discovery of the Higgs boson particle puts our understanding of nature on a new firm footing

Thursday, July 05, 2012 No comments

By Lawrence Krauss

Who would have believed it? Every now and then theoretical speculation anticipates experimental observation in physics. It doesn’t happen often, in spite of the romantic notion of theorists sitting in their rooms alone at night thinking great thoughts. Nature usually surprises us. But today, two separate experiments at the Large Hadron Collider of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva reported convincing evidence for the long sought-after “Higgs” particle, first proposed to exist almost 50 years ago and at the heart of the “standard model” of elementary particle physics—the theoretical formalism that describes three of the four known forces in nature, and which to date agrees with every experimental observation done to date.

Sunday, July 01, 2012

Here's a Map of the Countries That Provide Universal Health Care (America's Still Not on It)

Sunday, July 01, 2012 No comments

by Max Fisher

The U.S. stands almost entirely alone among developed nations that lack universal health care.

As excited as American liberals and proponents of expanding access to health care might be about the Supreme Court's decision to largely uphold the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. still stands out from much of the developed world in state efforts to make medical care available to the public. If universal health care in the U.S. is your goal, then today was a big step forward, but maybe also a reminder of how far behind America still lags.

The above map shows, in green, countries that administer some sort of universal health care plan. Most are through compulsory but government-subsidized public insurance plans, such as the UK's National Health Service. Some countries that have socialized and ostensibly universal health care systems but do not actually apply them universally, for example in poverty- and corruption-rife states in Africa or Latin America, are not counted.

4 Charts That Show Obama's Failure to Sell Health-Care Reform to the Public

Sunday, July 01, 2012 No comments

by David Graham

Earlier this week, Penn Schoen Berland released a wide-ranging poll on American values commissioned by The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute. In light of the Supreme Court's ruling on the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, it's worth revisiting a few of the poll's findings about health care.

First, let's look at how Americans feel about Obama's health-care law overall. Here's a chart from RealClearPolitics that aggregates multiple polls. As you can see, Americans have opposed the reform by a solid margin of at least 10 points for most of the last two and a half years: