laura.fo

Muslimah Media Watch on the murder of Marwa el-Sherbini

BBC News entitled their piece “Egypt mourns ‘headscarf martyr‘”. Additionally, they describe the murderer’s initial actions toward Sherbini as “insulting her religion” – an inaccurate statement, as W. insulted Sherbini herself, not her religion. Making such a statement skews the reality of the case and paints the story as the “Muslim angry over insult to Islam” trope. Stating this lie trivializes Sherbini’s very real experience of personal hate and Islamophobia. It diminishes W.’s hateful actions toward a Muslim woman. It ignores the fact that it was human being who was hurt, not a religion.

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond…

California: FBI investigating death of Muslim leader in High Desert

The FBI is investigating the death of a Muslim leader whose body was found inside a burned home in Yermo that had recently been spraypainted with racial epithets and Nazi symbols…

When firefighters doused the flames 40 minutes later, they found the body of 51-year-old Imam Ali Mohammed inside the East Yermo Road house he had moved his family out of last month.

"We don't know if it was simply an accident or if there is foul play involved," said sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Beavers. "We just don't know if a crime occurred yet."

(Why is this a mystery?)

Seattle: Man charged with hate crime for threatening Muslim woman

The woman, who was holding her six-month-old son, tried to reason with the 24-year-old Auburn man by saying that her "her clothing does not make her a bad person," court documents said. When the insults didn't stop, prosecutors said, the woman backed away from Garner and tried to shield her son from him.

Garner then cursed at the woman, got in her face and pulled out a large sheathed knife, court papers said. Garner told the woman he was going to "cut" the woman and her baby with the knife, charging documents said.

Minnesota: Minnesota withdraws "Run Hadji Run" fireworks from shelves

Miami: Miami-Dade police have charged two teens in the latest vandalism of a West Kendall mosque and school that has been targeted twice this year

Gonzalez-Vaca told police that the vandalism had been planned for months. He said "all Muslims are terrorists," according to the report….

Six months ago, the mosque was sprayed with 51 bullets that left broken windows and holes in the building's golden dome. In June 2005, unknown assailants used a large rock to shatter the door of the Islamic center, which draws 500 Muslims for Friday prayers and has a 250-student religious school.

The year before, the center's sign near Southwest 147th Avenue was defaced with a Nazi swastika and profanity. No arrests have been made in the prior vandalisms.

Marwa Sherbini, a pregnant 32-year-old Egyptian woman, was stabbed 18 times in a Dresden courtroom by a man who had harassed her for wearing the hijab. Earlier she had won a judgment against him after he called her a "bitch," "slut," "Islamist," "terrorist," and other names. They were in court because he was appealing the decision. Her husband tried to intervene on her behalf and was stabbed as well, and then shot by security who mistook him for the attacker. He is now in critical condition. Her three-year-old son was in the room at the time and watched his mother die.

Thousands of people attended her funeral today in Alexandria, carrying signs calling her 'the martyr to the headscarf.' Egyptian bloggers have lashed out against the lack of international press coverage of her death. They have also criticized Germany for charging the attacker with manslaughter rather than murder, and for calling him a 'lone wolf,' ignoring widespread prejudice against Muslims in Germany.

I'd quibble with the monolithic use of the word "feminists" at the end here, but

+ her point about class and education is an important one
+ her dead serious demeanor interspersed with hilarious pics of Geert Wilders with a pen up his nose, Laura Bush, The Virgin Mary, and a woman covered in bubble wrap = love
+ I enjoy bashing the Dutch

1.
A Democracy Now! story about a teacher who was fired for "indoctrinating her students with Afrocentrism," and a legislative panel in Arizona that endorsed a proposal cutting funding to public schools whose courses "denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization" and denying funding to state-funded universities and community colleges that sponsor clubs based in whole or in part on race (fast forward to minute 49:30 if you want to skip Ralph Nader, or just read the transcript).

2.
An hour-long NPR program about the differences between Muslims' experiences in Europe vs. the U.S. I was actually pretty impressed with this. You can't go into any depth in an hour, but they hit all the major points about why these are such different demographics — namely, why the U.S., despite its bootstraps attitude towards immigration and its greater participation in international imperialistic adventures, is nevertheless having fewer problems with integrating Islam.

It also has this great quote from Aminah McCloud:

Interviewer: But, isn’t it possible that this internal dynamic could turn into something more outwardly destructive? Could America’s young Muslims follow the path of some of their European counterparts?

McCloud: I want to say that they wouldn't, but I also know that there's always a chance for anything. I don't think they could ever emerge on the scale that they are in Europe. There are non-Muslims here who don't particularly care about Muslims, but they care about freedom of speech. They care about opportunities for everybody. There are also that indigenous groups of Muslims who say, no you're not going to bomb the street on which my mom lives, because then you won't have to worry about the US, you'll have to worry about me.

What if you threw a big Islam-bashing hatefest and nobody came?

The case of Turkey's Department of Religious Affairs "reinterpreting" the hadith to make Islam more palatable to modern sensibilities has been the big story in Islamic circles this week. It was reported in the British press and received with fanfare across the blogosphere. I admit I am perplexed.

With the huge, blinding, blinking-lights-in-neon caveat that I Am Not An Islamic Scholar, and that I welcome comments from those who are, I need to rant about this because the whole idea of "reinterpreting" the hadith from a modern standpoint just doesn't make a lot of sense if you know how the hadith works. This is NOT because everything in Islam is set in stone and there can be only one interpretation and Muslims are conservative fanatics who believe a seventh-century code is the only proper guide to life in the modern era and therefore cannot bear the idea of new readings on old problems — it's because the hadith is already considered potentially unstable. But there is an established way of dealing with this. All Muslims know that, hence the collective "huh?" at this becoming such a big story in the West over the last few days.

To make the first of what I'm sure will be a series of scandalous simplifications, a hadith can be compared to an ancient game of telephone. Unlike the Qur'an, which was considered divine and memorized word-for-word, hadiths were stories told about (not by) Muhammad and were intended to complement (not replace) the Qur'an. Some of these were told by multiple people, though wording and details vary from person to person. Taken collectively, the hadith describes the traditions and sayings of Muhammad (the sunnah), which is the second-highest source of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, after the Qur'an.

Of course, like any game of telephone, there is danger in a story becoming corrupted as it goes through a chain of narrators. Allowing for this, each hadith is verified individually according to several factors, such as the character of the original narrator and the reliability of his or her memory, whether or not the chain of narration is unbroken, the number of narrators telling the same story, and so on. What you get, in the end, is a collection of thousands of hadiths with varying degrees of reliability. It is perfectly possible to have a hadith told by one unstable guy whom no one liked who had an ulterior motive and no one to back up his story, a story which doesn't even make sense anyway because no one believes Muhammad would really have done that thing this guy claims he did. Right? So that hadith would still be part of the conversation around Islamic law, but it would be classified as a fabrication or otherwise unsupportable by a variety of methods used to validate individual hadiths. In casual conversation these are usually referred to as "weak" hadiths (although the word for weak, da'if, has a specific meaning in this context).

By the same token, you can have a very "strong" hadith, let's say one told by twenty different companions of the prophet who were all noble servants of God and had no motive to lie, telling a story that seems consistent with the Qur'an, followed up by an unbroken chain of narration — and still argue about the applicability of that hadith to modern circumstances. For cases like this there are a number of "lower" sources of Islamic interpretation,* such as reasoning by analogy, decision by consensus, and, at the lowest level, the acceptance of default cultural practice when it does not conflict with any of the above.

This process happens all the time. It is an assumed part of 'official' Islamic jurisprudence, as well as a common conversation that goes on informally among Muslims on a dead regular basis. This is a good example, or this debate about the hijab, or this post regarding Islam's association with misogyny.

So when the BBC article says that the Turkish Department of Religious Affairs claims "that a significant number of the [hadiths] were never uttered by Muhammad", that's a serious case of non-news. Yet the tone of the article, and the tone of discussion around it, implies that this is a shocking new development in Islam, one that only a secular state like Turkey would have the balls to initiate and the kind of thing we could only see in our present world climate, now that Islam has been called on the carpet and ordered to modernize.

Okay, you say, so acknowledging the (sometimes) problematic sourcing of (some) hadiths is old hat, but what about the "strong" hadiths perceived to be incompatible with modernity? Isn't Turkey so very brazen and forward-thinking to go there, too? From the article:

Prof Mehmet Gormez, a senior official in the Department of Religious Affairs and an expert on the Hadith, gives a telling example.

"There are some messages that ban women from travelling for three days or more without their husband's permission and they are genuine.

"But this isn't a religious ban. It came about because in the Prophet's time it simply wasn't safe for a woman to travel alone like that. But as time has passed, people have made permanent what was only supposed to be a temporary ban for safety reasons."

The project justifies such bold interference in the 1,400-year-old content of the Hadith by rigorous academic research.

Prof Gormez points out that in another speech, the Prophet said "he longed for the day when a woman might travel long distances alone".

So, he argues, it is clear what the Prophet's goal was.

Fine… but still not new. Feminists in Tunisia, for example, successfully achieved a ban on polygamy by arguing that it was permissible in the seventh century as a means of protection for widows and orphans during wartime, but that monogamy was clearly the Qur'anic ideal. This law, passed several decades ago, would have been even more controversial than what Turkey is doing now because these women were arguing about the Qur'an, not the hadith, and the Qur'an is considered the literal word of God.

Likewise, we hear of women trained in this "new" thinking going to rural parts of Turkey to explain that honor killings are not Islamic:

One of the women, Hulya Koc, looked out over a sea of headscarves at a town meeting in central Turkey and told the women of the equality, justice and human rights guaranteed by an accurate interpretation of the Koran – one guided and confirmed by the revised Hadith.

She says that, at the moment, Islam is being widely used to justify the violent suppression of women.

"There are honour killings," she explains.

"We hear that some women are being killed when they marry the wrong person or run away with someone they love.

"There's also violence against women within families, including sexual harassment by uncles and others. This does not exist in Islam… we have to explain that to them."

Yet another noble effort. Yet again, nothing new. There are so many examples of this I'm not going to list them here; suffice it to say that sending educated women into rural provinces to explain "true" Islam to illiterate peasant women is a well-established tradition in the Middle East and Central Asia, one that goes back at least 100 years, to the beginning of the feminist movement, and arguably much longer if we widen the discussion to include the historic role of Islamic schools in the teaching of literacy. My daughter's great-aunt, for example, born in 1920, got her first job as a teacher driving throughout Saudi Arabia, teaching girls in village schools. This was during a time of great upheaval, when the role of educating women was hotly contested. When this right was defended it was done so via the argument that women should learn "proper Islam" in place of "ignorant cultural practices." As evidenced by the Turkish case, elements of that debate continue today, on remarkably similar terms. Whether or not you find that position sufficiently radical to result in real change for women, at least situate it historically and acknowledge that this is not an example of bold new thinking.

Okay, you say, so it's not "new." Whatever. It's still good, right? This idea that Islam is subject to interpretation? Isn't it exciting to see people take up a project like this, in the face of certain fossilized versions of religion?

My problem here is that the perception of "newness" IS the story. It conforms to the view that Muslims occupy an earlier point on the progress timeline, and must be ripped, by force if necessary, into the modern era. (The Guardian article on this subject is called "Turkey strives for 21st century form of Islam" — in case we forgot that most OTHER Muslims are of the Dark Ages variety.) Sure, we may hate military intervention, but how else to foster change in a region where (we erroneously believe) people are still adhering to a form of religion unchanged and unquestioned for 1,400 years? That Muslims might — finally! for once! — be taking on this task through their own initiative is exciting only in the sense that we privately congratulate ourselves for having pushed them into it. When they stand up, we'll stand down. And so on.

The Guardian article makes this connection explicit:

The exercise in reforming Islamic jurisprudence, sponsored by the modernising and mildly Islamic government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, is being seen as an iconoclastic campaign to establish a 21st century form of Islam, fusing Muslim beliefs and tradition with European and western philosophical methods and principles.

The result, say experts following the ambitious experiment, could be to diminish Muslim discrimination against women, banish some of the brutal penalties associated with Islamic law, such as stoning and amputation, and redefine Islam as a modern, dynamic force in the large country that pivots between east and west, leaning into the Middle East while aspiring to join the European Union.

"Muslim beliefs and tradition" are balanced against "European and western philosophical methods and principles." They get to claim "stoning and amputation"; we get to claim "modern" and "dynamic." To drive this point even further into the ground, both articles rely on the tired trope of this leading to the possibility of "an Islamic reformation": an ahistorical idea rooted in the notion that Islam has remained stagnant.

In a related vein, the excitement here betrays a belief that extreme forms of Islamic conservatism begin with overly literal readings of Islamic texts. I've found this belief to be very popular with people who know a lot about, and are disgusted by, Christian fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism, they extrapolate, must be similar, only like using the Muslim Bible or whatever instead. I bet they hate science and abortion, too! In addition to ignoring some major theological reasons for this analogy not holding up, it's a framework that ignores the role of political circumstances, particularly colonialism, in shaping Islam-as-political-project. That's a separate and much longer discussion, but I'm noting it because I think, despite the fact that the word "terrorism" is never used, the read-between-the-lines hope being expressed here is that if Muslims only KNEW they had good, solid Islamic alternatives to Waging War On The Infidels, they would pack up and go home.

This is part of why the word "revised" is so problematic in this context. Read this sentence again:

One of the women, Hulya Koc, looked out over a sea of headscarves at a town meeting in central Turkey and told the women of the equality, justice and human rights guaranteed by an accurate interpretation of the Koran – one guided and confirmed by the revised Hadith.

There is no need to develop "revised Hadith" to make this point, since honor killings have never been an accepted part of Islamic practice. To note this is not to criticize the Turkish project itself, but to critique, again, its portrayal as daring innovation, because if anything such a portrayal lends credibility to the idea that actually honor killings ARE part of "real," "authentic" Islam. Not only is this false, but it is exactly the opposite of the project's intent. The implication is that, until last Tuesday, Muslims spent over a thousand years laboring under a medieval religious tradition; the only question now is whether or not they will accept "revisions" undertaken by a secular country like Turkey.

Which is an interesting subject itself. Had it not been for this rush of Western interest, I'd be optimistic. Turkey is secular, but its recent election was won by a (slightly) more conservative pro-Islamic party, and whatever the country's modern politics, it still retains an association with the Ottoman Empire, which would have been the proper site for a major Islamic project such as this one. More problematic is that it is being undertaken by a government agency, and government-sponsored mouthpieces of religion (an unfamiliar concept in the U.S., but popular abroad, not only in Muslim countries) are prone to issuing verdicts that are inevitably taken with a grain of salt. Still, the aim of this project sounds like something akin to Google — not the creation of new content, but the organization of old. Although this is being described as an attempt to overwrite all previous forms of Islam, I think, among Muslims, it would have been taken for what it was: an unusually ambitious but ultimately common and therefore familiar attempt to apply Islamic jurisprudence to modern circumstances. I have no particular problem with that, so long as it is understood to be part of a much larger discourse (and not, say, a state-sanctioned Wahhabist-style attempt to render all other readings moot).

Now, however, Turkey has been put on the defensive. This week, Mehmet Görmez, the director of the project, issued a statement decrying the BBC article, saying the Directorate of Religious Affairs is going so far as "to take the appropriate legal measures for redress" because the project was so inaccurately portrayed:

"Our project is not aimed at effecting a radical renewal of the religion, as is claimed by the BBC. Our objective is to help our citizens attain a better understanding of the hadith. Though I underlined several times during our interview with a BBC reporter that our project cannot be considered a reformation of Islam, he distorted the facts, saying Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam — and a controversial and radical modernization of the religion." …

A fresh look at the hadith collections — the gathering of which began some 200 years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed — and how they are utilized and interpreted within the framework of Islamic jurisprudence, while sure to generate a degree of criticism and controversy, is a far cry from attempting to change, in effect, some of Islam's most important historical records…

"I had an interview with BBC reporter Robert Pigott around two months ago about the project. I underscored during our interview that it cannot be termed a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam. But, his article read 'the very theology of Islam is being reinterpreted in order to effect a radical renewal of the religion.' This does not reflect the truth."

If this denunciation speaks louder than the original misreporting, the project may still find an audience. If not, I'm guessing it'll be tossed in the pot along with other ideas assumed to be Western-tainted pseudo-Islam, inciting not "revolution" or "reformation," but reactionary backlash and a further retreat into religious conservatism.

* This process is Sunni — Shi'a practices vary.

Beyond the Veil

"When the French government invaded Algeria, in 1830, it started a vast campaign of military 'pacification,' which was quickly followed by the imposition of French laws deemed necessary for the civilizing mission to succeed. Women were crucial to that enterprise. In articles, stories and novels of the day, Algerian women were universally depicted as oppressed, and so in order for civilization truly to penetrate Algeria, the argument went, the women had to cast off their veils. General Bugeaud, who was charged with administering the territory in the 1840s, declared, 'The Arabs elude us because they conceal their women from our gaze.'"

“I don’t want to see women on the street wearing burqas,” said Mr. Giordano, a nattily dressed man with the flowing white hair of an 18th-century German romantic. “I’m insulted by that — not by the women themselves, but by the people who turned them into human penguins.”

(more)

Swiss move to ban minarets
A row is brewing over religious symbolism in Switzerland.

Members of the right-wing Swiss People's Party, currently the largest party in the Swiss parliament, have launched a campaign to have the building of minarets banned…

In theory Switzerland is a secular state, whose constitution guarantees freedom of religious expression to all. In practice however mosques in Switzerland tend to be confined to disused warehouses and factories.

Across the country, there are only two small minarets, one in Zurich and one in Geneva, neither of which are permitted to make the call to prayer. In Switzerland's capital Berne, the largest mosque is in a former underground car park…

(more)

Feminist, socialist, devout Muslim: woman who has thrown Denmark into turmoil

Parliamentary candidate, 25, finds herself at centre of Europe-wide controversy

In the land that launched the cartoons war between Islam and the west, Asmaa Abdol-Hamid finds herself on the frontline, gearing up for a new battle.

The 25-year-old social worker, student and town councillor describes herself as a feminist, a democrat, and a socialist. She has gay friends, opposes the death penalty, supports abortion rights, and could not care less what goes on in other people's bedrooms. In short, a tolerant Scandinavian and European.

She is also a Palestinian and a devout Muslim who insists on wearing a headscarf, who refuses, on religious grounds, to shake hands with males, and who is bidding fair to be the first Muslim woman ever to enter the Folketing, the Danish parliament in Copenhagen.

For the extreme right, the young activist is a political provocateur, an agent of Islamic fundamentalism bent on infiltrating the seat of Danish democracy. To many on the left, Ms Abdol-Hamid is also problematic, personifying through her dress the reactionary repression of women and an illiberal religious agenda that should have no place in her leftwing "red-green" alliance of socialists and environmentalists.

As a result of announcing her parliamentary candidacy earlier this month, the young Muslim and Danish citizen has been thrust to the centre of a debate tormenting Denmark and the rest of western Europe – on the place and values of Islam in modern Europe and the treatment of large Muslim minorities.

Ms Abdol-Hamid is unfazed. "I see more Islam here in Denmark than in Iran or in other places in the Middle East," she says. "It's easier to be a Muslim in Denmark than in Saudi Arabia. I don't feel a stranger here. I'm interested in politics. I want to talk about this society, about political issues. But I'm not in politics because I'm a Muslim."

Her ambition, combined with her insistence on flaunting her religious affiliation, have outraged the Danish political establishment and triggered a new bout of soul-searching almost two years after the publication of cartoons of the Prophet ignited violence and protest across the Islamic world.

"This goes far beyond the extreme right," says Toger Seidenfaden, editor of the Politiken daily newspaper. "Asmaa is insisting on the right to be a religious Muslim and that's provoking broad debate among the public."

The key issue is the headscarf and whether it can be accommodated in parliament. This month Ms Abdol-Hamid gained the candidacy for a safe Copenhagen seat for the leftwing Unity List.

The Danish People's Party or DFP, the far-right movement that unofficially props up the weak centre-right government of the prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, is on the warpath. A couple of DFP politicians compared the headscarf to the Nazi swastika. One described the prospective MP as "brainwashed".

"We don't like the idea of her performing as an Islamist in the parliament," says DFP spokesman Kim Eskildsen. "We find it wrong that she'll use the parliament as a tool for Islamism … We don't consider this woman a Nazi. But the way the headscarf is used is comparable to other totalitarian symbols."

The happiest country in the world, according to one detailed survey of international living standards and public attitudes, Denmark is economically highly successful, with the lowest unemployment in the EU.

For the country's 200,000 Muslims and immigrants, however, that happiness is increasingly somewhere else. By virtue of the DFP's influence on the centre-right government, Denmark has enacted the tightest anti-immigration legislation in Europe in recent years.

Many Danes married to foreigners now commute into Copenhagen every day from the southern Swedish town of Malmo across the bridge linking the two cities because they cannot obtain residence for their spouses at home.

Ms Abdol-Hamid, who shares a one-room council flat with one of her six sisters in the "ghetto" of Vollsmose, in the town of Odense, says her political mission is to fight for this underclass.

"This is such a rich country. But we have people in Denmark in deep poverty and nobody helps them. For me the welfare system is very close to Islam. But we need to change the government."

But conservative Muslim leaders are also disapproving of her activism.

"Some Muslims don't think it's right for a female to act like this. They go to my father and tell him, get her married, get her married," she laughs. "Others think you can't be Muslim and Danish at the same time. Some of the Muslims and the extreme right are just the same.

"And there are women in my party who say that anyone who wears the headscarf is oppressed. It's like they think I'm dumb. They're taking away my individuality. We need the right to choose. It's up to us whether or not we wear headscarves.

"They think I'm a woman from the Middle East. No. I'm a Danish Muslim."

Christopher Hitchens strawmans his way into the Ayaan Hirsi Ali debate.

This is a great review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's latest book. By "great" I mean the article is great. I haven't read the book yet. But the article does justice to her life and her work (page 1) and then points out the problem with her theory (page 2). Most reactions to her are either fawning or dismissive, no middle ground, so this is refreshing.

It's a shame her first book came to the world's attention around the same time as Irshad Manji's did, so they keep getting thrown in the same intellectual pile. (I know I ordered them both in the same Amazon order. "If you liked… then you'll love…!") A shame, because Ali is about 150 IQ points smarter than Manji is. I still disagree with her a lot of the time, but I give her credit for being consistent to the truth as she perceives it.

Here is a New Yorker video from last October with her, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im (who writes about human rights and Islamic jurisprudence), Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran), Mahmood Mamdani (Good Muslim, Bad Muslim), and others. It's long, but worth watching.

I. "They're too ignorant/oppressed to understand free press."

Barbara Boxer was on my television last Sunday telling a CNN interviewer that the Muslim cartoon riots are an unfortunate but necessary part of the inevitable learning curve for a society unaccustomed to democracy and freedom of speech. Her contention was that Muslims, like children, cannot be expected to understand political satire and the proper parameters of the free exchange of ideas, and the tragedy of burning embassies only points to the need for a benevolent lesson in Western-style education on this matter. I wanted to crawl into the TV and dope-slap her upside the head.

Like many people my age who came up during the Cold War, I was raised to believe "free speech" was sacred because it was what separated us from the Communists, not so much for its literal promise. By sixth grade I knew reputable American newspapers couldn't use the f word, that you wouldn't see penises on network programming, that you could sue a magazine for something called "libel," that I wasn't allowed to shout "fire" in a crowded theater or talk to my neighbor during reading time or call my mother a wanton whore or any number of things that contradicted the notion that all speech was always acceptable. It was fine, in other words, to have a discussion about the parameters of the acceptability of speech, but only so long as the argument was an internal one. Once the argument went global it became a matter of national pride to maintain that ours was a society of freedom-lovin' people who embraced all manner of open debate, without restriction. I see this happening again now, this distance between how we see ourselves, and how we see ourselves through others' eyes. It's interesting.

When I was in sixth grade I pictured the Soviet Union as a country with only one newspaper, which Yuri Andropov wrote himself each night over a cup of warm milk. I didn't give that bias much thought until I went to Egypt and saw how complex journalism really is in a country with a state-controlled press. Egypt has an official censorship board. (I think they actually call it that — at least, I've never heard it called anything else.) Mainstream magazines, newspapers, films, television shows, even recording studios must pass their content through this body, where their work is edited and refined. The larger press outlets receive federal funding in exchange for taking part in this process. As irritating and ridiculous as this may be, however, it's different from my original conceptualization of state-run press: I thought all the reporters who worked for government-controlled media were on Mubarak's payroll; thought they were the voluntary mouthpieces, if not eager cheerleaders, of the administration. It was only after working with some of them that I realized they found the process as exasperating as I did. Write a piece, wait for editing, sigh, eyeroll, change a sentence or two, send it back, get it okayed, print or record. It's technically illegal for any work to be published without going through this process, but it happens all the time regardless, since banned political parties all have their own newspapers and musicians and imams can release their work on bootlegged tapes and there are overseas publishers that cater to presses that would be banned domestically (Cyprus, as I recall, was popular for this).

Really the situation isn't all that different from the U.S., where the largest media outlets are corporate-owned and the journalists who work for them don't want to risk that golden thing called "access" by reporting scathing criticism of the elite. For that we have a large and diverse alternative press, who trade advertising dollars and a seat in the White House press room for the freedom to write what they please.

From the perspective of a reporter there's obviously a difference between writing for a paper that's banned and one that's merely marginalized and underfunded, but from the perspective of the reader the difference isn't all that stark. Banned papers are still distributed on street corners, discussed in coffeeshops, and referred to in university classes and by the state-run press. It's simply ignorant to say that Muslims – you know, all of them – are rioting because they're unfamiliar with discussion and dissent in the media. If anything the Arab world has a press even more robust and diverse than ours, because journalists are expected to write with a distinct viewpoint. Our papers have one page of columns and op-eds. Theirs are more likely to have a page or two of news feeds and then lots and lots of commentary. This is doubly true now with the internet, and triply true if we're talking about political cartoons, which in countries with high illiteracy rates are a particularly popular form of protest speech.

I still think there's value in framing this as a debate around freedom of expression, but not if it comes with liberal soft-pedaling about just what "we" can and can't expect "them" to handle. They're not burning down embassies because they befuddled at the idea of a newspaper printing something offensive. They're burning down embassies because they're pissed.

II. "Middle Eastern governments should take responsibility for fueling this fire."

Of course they're fueling the fire. They know where their bread is buttered. Even dictators need to maintain some semblance of support with their population, and this issue is a freebie. Every government in the Middle East dependent on Western aid fears internal Islamist resistance more than any other domestic threat; the recent election in Palestine is a good example of why. A dictator's first line of defense will be to arrest and kill the Islamists, but his second will be to claim and define Islam in a way that doesn't threaten the internal order. By criticizing "the West" for insulting Islam and standing in mock solidarity with those who riot against DENMARK of all places, Middle Eastern governments can channel local outrage that would otherwise be leveled against them and point it toward a foreign source that has no real political or economic power in the region.

III. "This is no different than mocking Jesus."

Religion has never existed in a political vacuum. This is a map of the riots, demonstrations, and deaths that have occurred on three continents over this issue. You'll note that North America, so far, is not represented, despite the fact that the United States is the biggest bully in Middle East affairs at the moment and has a sizeable Muslim population. You'll also note that North America rarely if ever sees violent home-grown clashes between immigrant Muslims and the government. (9/11 was the work of outsiders who came here to live with the specific intent of committing a terrorist attack.) Why? Because (so far!) assimilation in the United States has been possible within the space of one generation. If you've read this journal for more than five minutes you know I don't gloss over the very real problems immigrants have in adapting to this country, but the difference between us and Europe is that we don't imagine that there is anything like a "pure" American with ties to this land going back a thousand years or more and that immigrants are therefore "guests." First-generation Middle Eastern immigrants in the U.S. have higher incomes and higher educational levels than the American average. A quarter of them have household incomes above $100,00 a year. It is a pain in the ass for an immigrant to get an American passport, but it's not impossible, and their children will be granted citizenship automatically just by virtue of being born here. Consequently American Muslims may feel an affinity with majority-Muslim countries but they are not forced to look abroad for their primary sense of national identity.

This is not, overall, the case in Europe, where Muslims are both figuratively and literally ghettoized. And I shouldn't need to mention the array of abuses and humiliations, from Guantanamo Bay to Palestine to Abu Ghraib, that Muslims abroad endure at the hands of so-called Western powers. The Jyllands-Posten has been portrayed as a paper that unwittingly published some cartoons deemed offensive to Islam. Oopsie! Oh no! Now what! In fact they put out a call for such cartoons as a specific challenge to what they knew to be a sensitive issue with Muslims, and they did so two years after rejecting similar cartoons that pilloried Jesus. This is their right. However, in making a decision specifically designed to stir shit up within a population that has been habitually oppressed, harassed, and discriminated against, they look less like martyrs and more like someone who shoves his fingers into a burn victim's scabs — "does it hurt here? how 'bout HERE?" — and then shouts out in surprise when the victim finally slaps him. Again, I defend the right of the paper to say and publish whatever it pleases. But the frenzied discussion around this issue has (once again) portrayed Muslims as so inherently violent as to be almost random in their choice of targets. The problem isn't that those protesting don't understand the spirit in which the cartoons were published: it's that they understand it all too well. And in that case it doesn't matter if the newspaper were private or an official mouthpiece of the Danish government; doesn't matter if those who drew the cartoons weren't Muslim themselves and therefore not covered under the no-mocking-Mohammed clause. This was intended as a slam against Islam, and it was interpreted as such.

IV. "This is no different than mocking Jesus," take two.

Two words bear exploring: "offensive" and "taboo." I'm not sure the word "taboo" is really appropriate here. If it is, it's certainly not universal, since there have been paintings of Mohammed throughout Islamic history and, though rare, they haven't been particularly controversial when they appeared, usually because they were painted by Muslims and with affection.

I think it's better described as a "tradition" that has emerged as something of a creative challenge, respected by most Muslims for over 1,400 years. The first thing you learn in Islamic Art 101 is that the prohibition against depicting the human form has led to the flourishing of other types of art, including mosaics, calligraphy, and architecture. This practice even survived the invention of film. The Message, a biographical film about Mohammed (its director, tragically, ironically, was killed in the Jordanian hotel bombings) managed to create an entire narrative about the prophet's call to Islam without ever depicting him directly.

In one particularly memorable scene, the flight to Medina, the camera switches to what we are to presume is Mohammed's perspective. His followers line the highway from Mecca, folding into view solely through their greetings. They welcome [the cameraman] and invite him into their city, but we never see or hear anything from the object of their invitation. I know some viewers have said this feels awkward, or that Anthony Quinn would have made a wonderful Mohammed and should have been cast to play the role outright, but I always liked it. Putting aside from any overblown worry about idol worship, it allowed me to keep my own private version of Mohammed untainted (something I'm no longer able to do with the characters in The Joy Luck Club or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, never mind the 6093850439 million movies I've seen based on the Bible) and was an interesting bit of filmmaking to boot, one that gave a nod to the cultural and artistic legacy of the Middle East.

More than that, though, it's a testament to the lengths Muslim artists have been willing to go in order to preserve this particular tradition while still creating art that deals directly with Islam. Is that fear? Of God, of other Muslims? Maybe, sometimes, and that's a topic worth exploring. Then again, no one says Shakespeare was less talented because he wrote in iambic pentameter rather than free verse. If you can't see the difference between the creative possibilities that come from making art within selected parameters and "self-censorship," I suggest you go back to reading the tax code or whatever it is you do all day.

Saying someone is offended by the cartoons implies a blind attachment to a certain religious view, almost as a matter of taste, i.e. "Christ was our Lord and Savior! Don't you dare dunk a statue of him in urine!" That take, in my opinion, doesn't really capture the response we're seeing now. I'm not about to speak for the world's billion or so Muslims, but I know I was bothered by the cartoons mainly because I saw them as yet another clumsy attempt to claim art, expression, and the "correct" response to religious debate as the intellectual domain of the West. I'm not going to go burn down an embassy or anything over this view, but then again neither are most people who are bothered by it. Most people have been demonstrating, putting together boycotts, and writing letters to the editor. For this they were, right on cue, told they didn't understand politics and free speech. That's when the rioting started.

I plan to buy this book, though I'm a little disturbed that anyone would consider this analysis radical or new. By some people must, right? or, well, the world would be different.

Fundamentalism begins at home
A French author argues that new forms of Islam owe more to Western identity politics than to the Koran.
by Josie Appleton

After 9/11 the Koran became a bestseller in the West, as readers scoured the text for phrases that might explain the hijackers' actions. Some argued that violence is inherent in Islam; others said that Islam means peace. The 'understanding Islam' industry boomed, with debates, books and pamphlets professing to unearth the mysterious depths of Islamic culture, politics and history.

In Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, the French sociologist Olivier Roy criticises this 'confused' and 'sterile' debate. 'It is based on an essentialist view', he tells me, 'the idea that Islam is this or that. But you can find anything in Islam. The problem is not what is in the Koran, but what people think is in the Koran'. His concern is to look at the lived reality of Islam, rather than its canonical or historical background. For example, in the book he argues that the idea that Islamic suicide attacks are an attempt to win virgins in paradise is 'not very helpful. Why should Muslims have discovered only in 1983 that suicide attacks are a good way to enter paradise?'.

In a decade of research for the book, Roy travelled throughout the Middle East, searched Islamic websites on the internet, and studied Muslim immigrants in France. Far from having roots in the seventh century, he found that new religious forms are a response to Westernisation – to the modernisation of Muslim societies, and the migration of increasing numbers of Muslims to the West.

Roy deals with everything from the nihilism of al-Qaeda to the French schoolgirls determined to wear veils; from personal Islamic webpages to Pakistan's madrasas (religious schools). What new breeds of Islam have in common is their focus on the fulfilment of the self, rather than on community obligations. In these terms, re-Islamicisation is the recourse of isolated, Westernised individuals seeking to find a spiritual pattern and meaning for their lives.

In traditional Islamic societies, religion is tied up with culture: with the food people eat, the mosques at which they pray, their social and political networks. Modernisation has led to a weakening of family and community ties and the undermining of religious authorities. Increasingly Islam is becoming detached from Middle Eastern culture, and the Koran is being seen through the spectrum of individual needs and desires – in his book, Roy notes that cyberspace is full of people that could be 'Mr Anybody' pronouncing on what 'Islam means…'.

These more individualised forms of Islam are linked to fundamentalist violence. 'Dutch public opinion is blaming foreign culture for the murder of Theo van Gogh', Roy tells me, 'but if you look at the background of the guy who did that, he is fluent in Dutch, he is a Dutch citizen, and you even have two converts from an American father and a Dutch mother who played a big role in the plot. Clearly the more radical violence is linked to the deterritorialisation and globalisation of Islam'.

Most of the 9/11 ringleaders were 'born again' Muslims, who went to secular schools, had spent time in the West, and had cut themselves off from their families and communities. Judging by the documents they left behind, they had invented a bizarre set of religious prescriptions for themselves – instructions for the attacks included to 'wear tight socks' and 'blow your breath on yourself and on your belongings' (1). Such nihilistic violence cannot be understood in conventional religious or political terms – instead, it seems to be an individual's demonstration of the strength of their faith.

Roy cuts through the mystical veil of religion

Neofundamentalists act in the name of a global ummah (community), but this is entirely an invention of their imagination. Roy writes that: 'Neofundamentalism provides an alternative group identity that does not impinge upon the individual life of the believer, precisely because such a community is imagined and has no real social basis.' Islamic militants tend to see both politics and community ties as a bit grubby, a distraction from the pure religious project of developing the self. The fact that radicals have made no attempt to win adherents at Mecca, Roy argues in his book, shows that they have 'no interest in the real ummah'.

At the other pole we've seen the rise of Islam as a consumerist lifestyle choice. One American Muslim quoted in Globalised Islam says that 'Muslim preachers are salespeople, smiling and sweet-talking salespersons. If salespersons fight and argue with the customer, do you think people will buy the product'[?]. And there seems to be little to distinguish the customers of Islam from other customers. On internet chatrooms, Western Muslims ask whether 'body piercing is permissible in Islam' or whether they should marry their lover, a variation on advice columns in lifestyle magazines. As with crystals or yoga, Islam is presented as the cure for the ills of modern life: there are publications on 'Modern stress and its cure from Qur'an', 'Health and fitness in Islam', even on prayers as a breathing technique for better health.

While the French press sees headscarves as the symbol of a foreign and patriarchal culture, the girls themselves put it in terms of personal choice: 'this is my right', or 'nobody can tell me what to wear'. If young Western Muslims use traditional greetings, wear traditional clothes or eat Halal food this is more the result of identity politics than a pristine cultural survival.

When I recently attended a November meeting held by the Dialogue with Islam Forum in Whitechapel, London, many of the young Muslims in the audience – even recent converts – prefaced their comments with the greeting 'assalamu alaikum' (peace be upon you). Speaking from the panel, David Goodhart, editor of the British political monthly Prospect, argued that enduring Muslim identities showed the difficulty of social integration, which he put down in part to the 'low social class' of many Muslim immigrants. Yet the audience – educated, integrated and religious – refuted his theory. Roy gives a different view. 'To say assalamu alaikum in Afghan Persian is vernacular', he writes, 'but to use it when speaking French [or English] is to display an ostentatious, quite exotic and even provocative religious belonging'. This is about the projection of a confrontational identity against mainstream society, little different from gay/black/anti-globalisationist identities chosen by other young people.

Changes in Islam parallel changes in other religions. 'We are in an age of fundamentalism', Roy tells me. 'In Christian religious revival we find the same basic tenants as in Islam – individualisation, the generational gap, "born again", bypassing religious authority.' Evangelicals also emphasise personal religious experience rather than community ties, and promise to mitigate people's dissatisfaction with modern life.

New-style Islam can be seen everywhere from Turkish cities to Pakistani madrasas, but it is strongest among Muslim immigrants living in Western cities. In fact, far from fundamentalist Islam being a Middle Eastern import into the West, it is increasingly the other way around. Most of the jihadi websites, Roy reports, are based in the West. Omar Saeed Sheikh (of Wanstead, London) and Raed Hijazi (who studied business at Sacramento University, California) were arrested for fundamentalist attacks in Pakistan and Jordan respectively. The Islamic fundamentalist organisation Hizb-ut-Tahrir spread to Central Asia, Pakistan and the Middle East from its London hub. In April 2002, three Britons were arrested in Egypt accused of propagandising for Hizb-ut-Tahrir – none had any connection with Egypt, and two were converts.

Roy cuts through the mystical veil of religion, and shows how new forms of religion relate to social changes. In this, he is heir to the classical sociologists of religion – Emile Durkheim's studies of primitive religion, and Max Weber and RH Tawney's work on Protestantism. But the task, Roy tells me, is more tricky today. 'We have a problem with using traditional sociological categories. We are in societies that are less socially integrated, so the social categories are not so strong.' While Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism showed Puritanism to be the religion of the rising bourgeoisie, things aren't so clear-cut with contemporary Islam. 'In today's societies people can build identities outside of socio-economic milieu', says Roy. 'There are more spaces to build imaginary and virtual communities. The problem is what to do with the traditional requirements of sociology, to assign a place in society for the people we are speaking about?'

The West tends to see Islam as exotic and foreign

Fundamentalist networks are often composed of a ragbag of individuals. For example, one included an Algerian married to a Frenchwoman, a football player and petty drug dealer, a computing student, and four converts. Contemporary Islam doesn't seem to be concentrated in a specific social class, or have a particular functional role. In fact, it seems that rather than representing a social group or interest, religion expresses the breakdown of social ties. It is prompted by individuals' experience of dislocation – their search for a community and rules by which to live their life – which is something that seems to exist across society.

So why is modern Islam viewed as an exotic, historical throwback? 'It is a way to defend an imaginary Western identity', Roy tells me. 'We are using Islam as the Other to avoid discussing the present crisis of identity in the West. Specifically in Europe, there is a crisis of the nation state, because of globalisation and European integration. What does it mean now to be Dutch, French or British? We are confronted with the crisis of national identity, and we tend to blame Islam.'

These are points that could have been developed more in his book. By focusing almost exclusively on Islam, Globalised Islam neglects to analyse the important changes in the nature of Westernisation. At times, Roy risks implying that modernisation is always alienating and disorienting, and that it is natural for Muslims to want to hang on to their religion, to 'express [Islam] in a Western context'. But new forms of Islam were only really seen in the late twentieth century. Prior to that, the modernisation of Muslim societies had gone hand-in-hand with the adoption of Western ideologies, such as Marxism or nationalism, while Muslim immigrants to the West often joined left-wing movements or identified with national institutions.

The new breeds of Islam are really just the shadows cast by the changing shapes of the West. Today, with the old political frameworks gone, the West is unable to furnish the ideologies to go along with the process of Westernisation. Islam is reached for as an age-old gel, to hold things together in a dislocated world. Iran is modernising in reality – the age of marriage is on the rise, as are female literacy rates – but in ideology it is going backwards, with the lowering of the legal marriage age to nine. Educated, well-off young men, with degrees and laptops, imagine that their box-cutters are the equivalent of seventh-century swords.

The West tends to see Islam as exotic and foreign to assuage itself from blame, to avoid asking hard questions. Globalised Islam gets under the skin of today's quintessentially modern forms of Islam, and points the debate in a new direction.

Globalised Islam, by Olivier Roy, is published by C Hurst and Co, 2004 (first published, Paris 2002).

• Muslims' plea for a list of approved charities is rejected. So you can be detained for donating to various organizations, whether or not you know where they might be funneling their money. And no, we won't tell you which ones.

• An excellent piece on how immigration law in France — and I'd extend this to most of Europe — victimizes women.
  

  • A woman of Algerian parentage: "I desperately needed to establish my legal position," she said. "At that point, I was stunned to discover that, although I was born in France and my parents still live there, and although I could prove that I’d been forced to marry and I had had a child on French soil, I was seen as a first-generation immigrant. I had no papers. I was an illegal alien."

  • She cites the case of a young Senegalese woman who came to France to be with her husband (they had had two children), only to discover that he was already married: "She is his second wife and, as such, has no legal right to papers."
  • Poor women, whether they have French passports or no papers at all, often live in social spaces where such work as is available to them is mainly informal and unrecognised. Unemployment rates among those with foreign names are three times higher than among other women (10). The urban structure and the inadequate, or non-existent, public transport don’t help: there are no local shops or services, either, and few cultural activities or sports.

One thing I hadn't considered is that, in Europe, first- and second-generation immigrants seem more likely to live in what this article calls "rough, working-class" neighborhoods. This probably holds true for many American converts (especially considering the role of Islam in the prison system), but for immigrants? One statistic I read today said 26% of American Muslim households have an annual income of more than $100,000 a year. That's in keeping with my own anecdotal experience. I live in a "rough, working-class" neighborhood myself, but any time I seek out a Muslim event I usually end up facing a lot of BMWs and Mercedes. (What's the plural of Mercedes? Mercedii?)

I've read (and said myself) that racial and ethnic discrimination is much higher in Europe than it is in the U.S., but I'm wondering how much of that is class-based. Or, to take the other tack, how much American Muslims are protected from discrimination by their class standing, in contrast with their European counterparts.