Islamic Societies Review WEEKLY

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Poll of the Day: Americans' Attitudes About Sin

Thursday, May 24, 2012 No comments

Despite the recent controversy over contraception, Gallup finds Americans broadly approve of birth control -- but not porn, cloning, or infidelity.

Americans have few moral qualms about birth control or gambling. They think wearing fur, the death penalty, and abortion are more morally acceptable with porn. And they think suicide, polygamy, and human cloning are more moral than cheating on your spouse.

Inspired by the recent political debate over insurance coverage for contraception, Gallup this month included birth control in its regular survey of Americans' moral beliefs. Rick Santorum notwithstanding, the poll found that Americans overwhelmingly believe contraception is moral: 89 percent said it was morally acceptable, the highest rating of any of the morally questionable behaviors tested. Even among Catholics, 82 percent approved of birth control. No wonder Democrats were convinced they had a winning issue in the contraception debate -- even though the debate was about larger issues of religious freedom and government compulsion, there simply aren't a lot of people who sympathize with moral objections to birth control.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

On "Notes on a Century," The Tale of the Dragoman

Wednesday, May 16, 2012 No comments

by ERIC ORMSBY

It is all too tempting to describe Bernard Lewis, the distinguished historian of the Islamic world, as venerable. Mr. Lewis, who turns 96 on May 31, seems to possess the aura of the sage. Even his harshest critics have sometimes seen him in this light. After Mr. Lewis published a devastating critique of Edward Said's "Orientalism" in 1982 in the New York Review of Books, the injured author responded with a long, angry letter to the editor that mocked Mr. Lewis's "veneer of omniscient tranquil authority."

An attentive reader of Mr. Lewis's books would never come away thinking that omniscience or tranquillity was on conspicuous display. Whether writing about the early history of the Arabs or the development of the modern Turkish state, Mr. Lewis has always been unusually alert to nuance and ambiguity; he is wary of his sources and tests them against other evidence. In "Notes on a Century," his lively new memoir, he writes that his work in archives instilled in him "a profound mistrust of written documents."

As a historian, Mr. Lewis has evinced not only an unswerving commitment to historical truth and a hatred of what he calls "the falsification of history" but also a passionate, at times obsessive, curiosity about other peoples, other places. He is as interested in the history of foodstuffs as in the fall of dynasties. He is simply too inquisitive to settle for mere omniscience.

"Notes on a Century" is at once an autobiography and a statement of principle. Over the course of his long life, Mr. Lewis has met with everyone from Golda Meir to Moammar Gadhafi—and has bedded down in obscure Syrian villages and desert tents as well as sumptuous palaces. But his description of his beginnings is the most winning part of his account. Like the late man of letters John Gross, whose lovely 2002 memoir, "The Double Thread," describes growing up Jewish and English in London, Mr. Lewis evokes his Jewish-English childhood with great tenderness.

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Arab Spring has washed the region's appalling racism out of the news

Tuesday, May 08, 2012 No comments

by Robert Fisk

The Long View: Migrant workers from the subcontinent often live eight to a room in slums – even in oil-rich Kuwait

How many tracts, books, documentaries, speeches and doctoral theses have been written and produced about Islamophobia? How many denunciations have been made against the Sarkozys and the Le Pens and the Wilders for their anti-immigration (for which, read largely anti-Muslim) policies or – let us go down far darker paths – against the plague of Breivik-style racism?

The problem with all this is that Muslim societies – or shall we whittle this down to Middle Eastern societies? – are allowed to appear squeaky-clean in the face of such trash, and innocent of any racism themselves.

A health warning, therefore, to all Arab readers of this column: you may not like this week's rant from yours truly. Because I fear very much that the video of Alem Dechasa's recent torment in Beirut is all too typical of the treatment meted out to foreign domestic workers across the Arab world (there are 200,000 in Lebanon alone).

Many hundreds of thousands have now seen the footage of 33-year-old Ms Dechasa being abused and humiliated and pushed into a taxi by Ali Mahfouz, the Lebanese agent who brought her to Lebanon as a domestic worker. Ms Dechasa was transported to hospital where she was placed in the psychiatric wing and where, on 14 March, she hanged herself. She was a mother of two and could not stand the thought of being deported back to her native Ethiopia. That may not have been the only reason for her mental agony.

Brain Scans Reveal Dogs' Thoughts

Tuesday, May 08, 2012 No comments

New fMRI images of unsedated dogs represent a first peak into what dogs are thinking and open a door into canine cognition and social cognition in other species

Fido's expressive face, including those longing puppy-dog eyes, may lead owners to wonder what exactly is going on in that doggy's head. Scientists decided to find out, using brain scans to explore the minds of our canine friends.

The researchers, who detailed their findings May 2 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, were interested in understanding the human-dog relationship from the four-legged perspective.

"When we saw those first [brain] images, it was unlike anything else," said lead researcher Gregory Berns in a video interview posted online. "Nobody, as far as I know, had ever captured images of a dog's brain that wasn't sedated. This was [a] fully awake, unrestrained dog, here we have a picture for the first time ever of her brain," added Berns, who is director of the Emory University Center for Neuropolicy.

Saturday, May 05, 2012

Two Hundred Years of Surgery

Saturday, May 05, 2012 No comments

by Atul Gawande, M.D., M.P.H.

Surgery is a profession defined by its authority to cure by means of bodily invasion. The brutality and risks of opening a living person's body have long been apparent, the benefits only slowly and haltingly worked out. Nonetheless, over the past two centuries, surgery has become radically more effective, and its violence substantially reduced — changes that have proved central to the development of mankind's abilities to heal the sick.

SURGERY BEFORE THE ADVENT OF ANESTHESIA

The first volume of the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and the Collateral Branches of Science, published in 1812, gives a sense of the constraints faced by surgeons, and the mettle required of patients, in the era before anesthesia and antisepsis. In the April issue for that year, John Collins Warren, surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital and son of one of the founders of Harvard Medical School, published a case report describing a new approach to the treatment of cataracts.1 Until that time, the prevalent method of cataract treatment was “couching,” a procedure that involved inserting a curved needle into the orbit and using it to push the clouded lens back and out of the line of sight.2 Warren's patient had undergone six such attempts without lasting success and was now blind. Warren undertook a more radical and invasive procedure — actual removal of the left cataract. He described the operation, performed before the students of Harvard Medical School, as follows:

The eye-lids were separated by the thumb and finger of the left hand, and then, a broad cornea knife was pushed through the cornea at the outer angle of the eye, till its point approached the opposite side of the cornea. The knife was then withdrawn, and the aqueous humour being discharged, was immediately followed by a protrusion of the iris.

Into the collapsed orbit of this unanesthetized man, Warren inserted forceps he had made especially for the event. However, he encountered difficulties that necessitated improvisation:

The opaque body eluding the grasp of the forceps, a fine hook was passed through the pupil, and fixed in the thickened capsule, which was immediately drawn out entire. This substance was quite firm, about half a line in thickness, a line in diameter, and had a pearly whiteness.

A bandage was applied, instructions on cleansing the eye were given, and the gentleman was sent home. Two months later, Warren noted, inflammation required “two or three bleedings,” but “the patient is now well, and sees to distinguish every object with the left eye.”

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Africa’s next big war?

Sunday, April 29, 2012 No comments

BADLY drawn imperialist borders that cut across tribes or lumped too many diverse people unhappily together once fuelled much violence in Africa. Half a century after independence full-blown wars are much rarer, even if some borders still irritate. One of the last open wounds appeared to close on July 9th 2011, when the mainly Christian and animist south of Sudan seceded from the predominantly Muslim north. After decades of fighting that killed some 2m people, partition seemed to mark a success for both African and Western mediators.

Yet now that success is overshadowed by the threat of war. Over the past nine months the two Sudanese successor states were supposed to find a way to divide up such things as oil revenues, border posts and the rights of people living on one side of the border who wish to be citizens on the other. Both sides made outsized demands and engaged in extreme brinkmanship. New sparks flew when the south announced plans to build a pipeline to the Indian Ocean, through Kenya to the south-east, which would cut the north out of most of the oil trade. Militias, often proxies of the old rump state or the new southern one, attacked each other. International mediators, vital as brokers of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that paved the way for partition, stood aside, though Ethiopia and Egypt organised some talks and the UN proffered advice. Barack Obama last week made a stirring appeal for calm.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Human Rights in the UAE

Friday, April 27, 2012 No comments

by Rori Donaghy

Rights of foreign workers in UAE in focus

The UAE. A place famous for tax-free shopping, stunning feats of construction and beautiful beaches. So much so that one million Britons visit each year. Scratch beneath the aesthetics of opulent Dubai however, and a much darker story begins to emerge.

In the past, the rulers have distributed wealth amongst their citizens in exchange for political acquiescence. Following the advent of the Arab Spring, this has begun to unravel as the lack of democratic institutions has become clear. Of course, when the indigenous population makes up less than 10% of the population it is a little easier to ignore or suppress any whispers for democratic reform.

Last year, the case of the UAE 5 gained some traction in the West as five individuals were prosecuted for undermining state security after calling for increased democratic accountability in their country. After the international community's gaze fleetingly turned towards the UAE, the five were granted pardons and the focus swiftly moved onto other matters.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Lawrence Krauss: another physicist with an anti-philosophy complex

Thursday, April 26, 2012 No comments

by Massimo Pigliucci

I don’t know what’s the matter with physicists these days. It used to be that they were an intellectually sophisticated bunch, with the likes of Einstein and Bohr doing not only brilliant scientific research, but also interested, respectful of, and conversant in other branches of knowledge, particularly philosophy. These days it is much more likely to encounter physicists like Steven Weinberg or Stephen Hawking, who merrily go about dismissing philosophy for the wrong reasons, and quite obviously out of a combination of profound ignorance and hubris (the two often go together, as I’m sure Plato would happily point out). The latest such bore is Lawrence Krauss, of Arizona State University.

I have been ignoring Krauss’ nonsense about philosophy for a while, even though it had occasionally appeared on my Twitter or G+ radars. But the other day my friend Michael De Dora pointed me to this interview Krauss just did with The Atlantic, and now I feel obliged to comment, for the little good that it may do. And before I continue, kudos to Ross Andersen, who conducted the interview, for pressing Krauss on several of his non sequiturs. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Krauss is proud (if a bit coy) of the fact that Richard Dawkins referred to his latest book, entitled “A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing,” as comparable to Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” on the grounds that it upends the “last trump card of the theologian.” Well, leave it to Dawkins to engage in that sort of silly hyperbolic rhetoric. (Dawkins still appears to be convinced that religion will be defeated by rationality alone. Were that the case, David Hume would have sufficed.) The fact is, Krauss’s book is aimed at a general audience, popularizing other people’s (as well as his own) work, and is not the kind of revelation of novel scientific findings that Darwin put out in his opus, and that makes all the difference.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Tom Friedman’s War on Humanity

Tuesday, April 24, 2012 No comments

by BELÉN FERNÁNDEZ

Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, once offered the following insight into his modus operandi: “I often begin writing columns by interviewing myself.”

Some might see this as an unsurprising revelation in light of Edward Said’s appraisal: “It’s as if … what scholars, poets, historians, fighters, and statesmen have done is not as important or as central as what Friedman himself thinks.”

According to Friedman, the purpose of the auto-interviews is merely to analyze his feelings on certain issues. Given that his feelings tend to undergo drastic inter- and sometimes intra-columnar modifications, one potentially convenient byproduct of such an approach to journalism is the impression that Friedman interviews many more people than he actually does.

Wrong Formula: Bahrain races ahead with Formula One, but reverses on reform

Tuesday, April 24, 2012 No comments

THE Bahrain Grand Prix is back. Across the tiny island kingdom, posters trumpet joy at the return of the Formula One race: “UniF1ed: One Nation in Celebration”. But although cars, crews and cameras have indeed arrived for the event from April 20th to 22nd, the slogan rings hollow. A year on from an uprising against Bahrain’s ruling family that prompted a brutally efficient military crackdown, more than 50 deaths and the cancellation of last year’s race, the atmosphere in Bahrain remains poisonous.

Activists have gleefully torched posters for the race, and vow to disrupt it however they can. Government troops, tanks and armoured cars are enforcing a forbidding cordon around the desert circuit. Night after night, riot vans sweep into villages on the outskirts of the capital, Manama. Activist ringleaders are dragged from their homes, beaten in front of their families and carted off.