260 "Gay International" an Orientalist project - Joseph Massad

"Gay International" an Orientalist project - Joseph Massad

(1) Marijuana, Prostitution, Sodomy - the case for Limbo (between legal & illegal)
(2) Limbo cf Legalism in the islamic world
(3) "Gay International" an Orientalist project: Joseph Massad
(4) Multicultural Xenophilia bespeaks social fragmentation - Eric Walberg
(5) 4 wives is just fine
(6) Vice squads, mixed male and female patrols, in Banda Aceh, Indonesia
(7) French minister tells Muslims to speak properly
(8) Turkey's Sephardic Jews who converted to Islam in the 1600s

(1) Marijuana, Prostitution, Sodomy - the case for Limbo (between legal & illegal)

From: Eric Walberg <efgh1951@yahoo.com> Date: 26.03.2010 04:25 AM

hi peter,

> it's best if it's in a sort of limbo between legal
> and illegal: not prosecuatable, but not fully legal.

this comment is excellent. cutting through the gordian knot. it is the tradition in the islamic world. the west is obseesed with legalism. it is like a fetish. the real world is too complicated for 'the rule of law'.
eric

(2) Limbo cf Legalism in the islamic world

From: Eric Walberg <efgh1951@yahoo.com> Date: 27.03.2010 04:21 AM

>> it is the tradition in the islamic world.

> Can you tell me about that?
> The image that sticks is the punishment of adultery in Saudi Arabia.

You need 4 WITNESSES to prosecute adultery. i don't buy the medieval punishments any more than you. but they are few, taken out of context by western media ... you fill in the blanks.

(3) "Gay International" an Orientalist project - Joseph Massad
Fathers of men: essay-review of Massad's Desiring Arabs

Eric Walberg

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/950/cu1.htm
http://ericwalberg.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=184:fathers-of-men-essay-review-of-massads-desiring-arabs&catid=41

4/6/9

Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs, University of Chicago Press, 2007

The Western "civilising" project in its many guises has given rise to strange bedfellows. Not only do Christian and Islamic fundamentalists -- officially enemies of each other -- find common cause in demanding more public displays of religiosity and less liberal social policies regarding sex. In fact, as Joseph Massad shows in his new book, Desiring Arabs, both parties -- again, paradoxically, as enemies of the international gay movement -- actually work in tandem with that very movement, aiding in the process of defining people according to the Western paradigm of heterohomo sexual categories, which, prior to the 19th century, did not even exist.

This is the central thesis in Massad's controversial study, which surveys Arab social history as constructed by Arab scholars and writers themselves from the 19th century on, heavily influenced by Western thought and research methods. ...

Whatever their intent, international gay activists have ended up replicating and even strengthening in other cultures the very situation of repression they set out to challenge in their own countries. Massad writes, "The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalised by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating."

The advocates of this paradigm advocate what looks like a scientific, essentialist programme that the entire world should adopt. What it is, however, is a kind of Western secular nativism seeking to replace what it sees as backward nativisms everywhere, forcing one and all to choose their slot. Woe to those who reject their paradigm, for the comprador elites and religious establishment have already been forced to fight the battle on the West's terms, implicitly accepting the Western paradigm as their own. Practitioners of msm (men having sexual relations with men) who reject the gay slot created for them by Western activists are catalogued as "self-hating" and guilty of "homosexual homophobia". ***

But could it be that the entire Orientalist framework, now including gay and lesbian "human rights", is a complete scam? While there are indeed sexual acts between men or between women, these acts must always be considered in their social setting. ...

Traditional Islamic society operated on the principle of social order, tolerating sins such as fornication and msm so long as they are sufficiently discrete. It defined man as a social being with social obligations, not an isolated ego pursuing his individual desires. Though communism is in other respects the logical conclusion of the civilising mission, in practice communist regimes tolerated discrete msm much like traditional Muslim societies, not attempting to colonise desire to the same extent that capitalism does.

Today the civilising mission of the "Gay International" (as Massad provocatively puts it) is to pluck individuals out of their social setting, forcing them to define their very essence according to certain acts, and then endow them with universal personal rights to perform these acts and encourage others to perform these acts wherever they like, be it in Teheran, Mecca or New York. In pursuing this invasive policy, it continues the work of Christian missionaries, paving the way for the economic system that imperialism seeks to spread across the world, giving Western forces more room to incorporate other societies into its domain, and in the process, rewriting history.

This vital and obvious point escapes even the venerated iconoclast Michel Foucault, author of the monumental History of Sexuality, who omits the cultural effects of colonial systems on conceptions and constructions of sexuality, implicitly endorsing the universalist agenda. Foucault lists the objects of discourse on sexuality from the 19th century as "the masturbating child, the 'hysterical woman', the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult", but critic Ann Stoler argues that Foucault ignores that all four imply "a racially erotic counterpoint", "the libidinal energies of the savage, the primitive, the colonised".

Not all Westerners are caught up in this Orientalist subterfuge. Some Western novelists have shown an appreciation of the value of social mores that the civilising mission is intent on destroying, much as Western ecologists struggle to save endangered species such as whales or apes. Edward Said argues that André Gide, Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, E M Forster, Paul Bowles and others saw in the colonial setting "a different type of sexuality, perhaps more libertine and less guilt- ridden", and cherished it in the face of Victorian repression and objectification. But this anti-modern trend in thinking still has no articulate spokesman other than Said -- or Massad.

Massad's frontal assault on the gay lib crusade aimed at the Muslim world is a defiant call to resist the Orientalist project. Massad in effect describes a litmus test for anyone, Western or Eastern, as to whether they understand the Arab world: whether or not s/he resists the slick campaign to divide people according to their sexual acts, a false duality. The fact that the battleground is the Middle East is no coincidence. The litmus test for the other Western "civilising" project here is of course whether s/he resists the project to divide people according to a false concept of race. Ironically, it is Muslims who stand in the way of both.

Massad hints that overcoming the capitalist and colonial mindset in both centre and periphery will require bringing the sacred back into sexuality; in fact, it is in rediscovering the sacred, which Western secularised society has lost. It is the West that must learn from the East, not vice versa. This was recognised long ago by Muslims visiting Europe. The imam Rifaah Al-Tahtawi visited Paris in 1834 and noted "the dearth of chastity among many of their women, and the lack of jealousy among their men... how... adultery for them is a vice and a shame but not a primary sin... [Paris] is charged with abominations, innovations, and perdition, although the city of Paris is the wisest city of the entire world and the home of world-based science." The contradiction between this admiration for the secular achievements of the West and disgust with the social mores would remain the dominant theme for East-West relations over subsequent centuries.

One generalisation of the Orientalists that rings true is that Western societies suffer from guilt (they argue this is because only Westerners have a conscience), while Arab societies suffer mainly from shame. Rather than a more elevated conscience in Westerners, in fact, evidence points towards a less destructive and freer conscience in non-Western societies. Errant or questionable behaviour from society's point of view is tolerated as long as it is discrete, governed by the individual's sense of obligation to the community, which is also that individual's conscience.

Why is guilt "better" than shame, or more conscionable? A society less addicted to guilt is by no means less developed, and in fact most likely provides greater positive emotional orientation than one steeped in guilt, as indeed Christian society has been. The Western secular aim to do away with guilt, to embrace acts which were formerly considered antisocial, such as fornication and msm, has hardly created a social paradise, considering the malaise of Western society, not to mention its wars. Where is the accounting for the sins of US leaders who condoned widespread torture, including sexual torture? Where is the guilt in such figures as Bush or Cheney?

The rise of gay lib in the West resulted from a complexity of factors, including the relatively repressive nature of Christianity/Judaism, the rise of capitalism, and urbanisation. The imposition of this paradigm on the Muslim world is more than an affront. It has produced both greater official repression of any social deviance and, at the same time, a proliferation of sexual tourism, with Western gays finding the less rigid sexuality of the Muslim world liberating despite official opprobrium. This is a dilemma for Western-oriented Arab regimes, which want to benefit financially from tourism but are ultimately the protectors of their societies, undermining their legitimacy. *** ...

(4) Multicultural Xenophilia bespeaks social fragmentation - Eric Walberg

Against culture: review-essay of Aziz Al-Azmeh's "Islam and Modernities" (2009)

Written by Eric Walberg Tuesday, 23 March 2010 09:53

http://ericwalberg.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=243:against-culture-review-essay-of-aziz-al-azmehs-qislam-and-modernitiesq-2009&catid=41

Islam and Modernities

by Aziz Al-Azmeh, 3rd edition, London:Verso, 2009

In this collection of essays by the Syrian historian Aziz Al-Azmeh, based at the Central European University in Budapest, the author provides a searing critique of both postmodernism and (multi)culturalism and of the radical Islamism that has arisen over the past 30 years in response to the Western onslaught on the Muslim world. In the preface to the third edition, Al-Azmeh attacks "culturalism and its correlative postmodernist and postcolonialist cant that betokens the ideological and conceptual hegemony of the Right over the Left, and the domestication of the latter by the former, most especially in Europe and North America since 1989." Not that he has any use for the "right-wing, fascist and hyper-nationalist ideology" of the Islamic reaction. On the contrary, he defends the Western Enlightenment – the chicken to the postmodern egg – against critics who trace today's intellectual and politic quagmire to that same Enlightenment, insisting that any progress must derive from it.

This is no surprise, as Al-Azmeh is a secularist and Marxist, both trends solidly rooted in the Enlightenment. But this contradiction ultimately weakens the thrust of his nonetheless devastating critique of the dominant currents in our thinking about things Islamic and their relationship with the Western tradition. His pessimism about how to extract ourselves from the dead end of the Enlightenment saps the reader's will to fight the good fight. "The tropes and notions of political and social thought available today form a universal repertoire that is inescapable, a repertoire which, though of Western origin, has in the last century and a half become a universal patrimony beyond which political and social thought is inconceivable," having "filtered through modern state structures, forms of discourse and communication, educational and legal systems, terms of political life and much more, which have become globalised, native not only to their points of origin, but worldwide."

Communism once provided an alternative reality to the Western project but is no more. For Al-Azmeh, the quixotic Islamist project as epitomised by the bin Ladens is doomed. It is hard to see any light at the end of his tunnel. But there is still much of value here. Al-Azmeh dismisses the hypstatisation or fetishism of Reason "construed as life, which is at once subject and object of knowledge we see in Western scholarship” and the equal if opposite process of fetishism among militant Islamists, who rightly identify the West's plans as inimical to Islam, but indulge in a "politics of nostalgia", pining for an "unsullied reality prior to the corruption of the present." The "civilising project" of the past two centuries is proof enough of the sterility or rather inhumanity of the former; and a sober look at the history of the Muslim world reveals the many periods of tyranny, intolerance and stagnation that have punctuated periods of peace, prosperity and intellectual ferment. Alas, there is no Golden Age that can be recaptured for all eternity. Cutting off appendages in search of justice is just not on.

There is only the past, complex and contradictory, that can serve as a fund, a common heritage, subsequently to be mined and built upon. The underlying problem in both scholarship and politics is with the thoughtless use of the term "culture", intended to paper over the economic and social reality of society, ignoring the class dynamics that are its bedrock. With the mass migrations of the past century, which have now reversed from colonisation of empires to a mass migration from former colonies to the imperial centres, the mix of "cultures" (read: colonial and class refugees) has brought us to a new "multiculturalism", where the exotic differences of language, skin colour and habits – and, yes, religions – must be incorporated into a confusing and often tense social fabric in both centre and periphery in a nonlethal way. But this runs up against intractable problems: apart from ingrained racism, there are the problems of accumulated injustices which colonial peoples suffered. There is also the problem of the age-old animosity between Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the cause of so much prejudice, so many wars. With large immigrant populations in Europe and North America (we will focus here on Muslims), the old prejudices are poured into new wineskins.

Given the tragic history of the 20th century, which culminated in the last of the traditional invade-kill-pillage-evict colonial projects – Israel – the results have been disastrous for all except the Western elites, who need not worry about declining living standards, being killed in random violence, or being dispossessed, tortured, etc. Al-Azmeh, tongue in cheek, traces Orientalism, the ideological garb of the colonial project in the Muslim world, to the publication of A True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mohammedans by Joseph Pitts, a sailor who was captured by Algerian corsairs in 1678 and converted to Islam, finally escaping and returning to Exeter. A compendium of fantasy and bigotry obviously written to order, it set the stage for thousands of other self-serving Western analyses, endowing the object of study with "changeless, 'oriental' properties, some repellent and others charming, that go beyond history, that violate the changing nature of things." Despite Pitts's many years reciting the Quran, he denounced it in this first Orientalist treatise as "a Legend of Falsities, and abominable Follies and Absurdities." Orientalism posits unreason, despotism/servitude, and backwardness/anachronism as the fundamentals of the Orient, which included the Ottoman Caliphate and the Arab world, as well as India and China. But this slick tradition, informing both pro and anti Western scholars is no laughing matter. It is used today to justify invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq and who-knows-what country next.

Today's multiculturalism is really anti-culturalism, an obliteration of the pre-capitalist societies, which were/are dismissed as un-cultures, an understanding that conveniently allowed British colonial administrators to dispossess local rulers of their gold, introduce monetary and market mechanisms and Western-style “land reforms”; and when it all went terribly wrong, as in the case of the Bengal famine of 1943, to wash their hands of it and not lose any sleep. It led to the horrors of partition in India and Palestine. In today's world, it helps the administrators' heirs rationalise ghettoisation in the imperial centre without any feeling of guilt for past injustices that just may be the cause of the current flood of immigrants from their failed post-colonial states. Not to mention "structural adjustment" policies through the IMF to the neocolonial administrations which further impoverish the already poor masses. The upside of multiculturalism is xenophilia, though Al-Azmeh turns his nose up at this outgrowth of the Enlightenment. "Race became ethnicity, then culture; normative hierarchy and inequality gave way to representation in terms of difference; and xenophobia was in many circles replaced by xenophilia." Here as elsewhere the author’s sympathy for Enlightenment gets in the way.

Multiculturalism finds support in social theory in the form of postmodernism, "the most recent form of the ideological production which had previously been termed 'the end of ideology'." The individual is "projected on to a metaphysical screen describing universal conditions." The supposed "celebration of difference" (read: xenophilia) of multiculturalism really "bespeaks conditions of post-Keynesian social fragmentation", as best exemplified in identity politics such as feminism and gay liberation, movements that isolated and alienated more than they gave succor, and which were easily incorporated into the now solidly pro-capitalist establishment, replacing the real threat that socialism once posed. In the latest dizzying development, "cultures become natures, and the history of human masses becomes a natural history," with the extremist writings of the likes of socio-biologist Richard Dawkins, famous for his fetishising of evolution and militant atheism. We are doomed by our savage, selfish genes.

The whole "civilising project" aims to convince the new immigrants to forget the past, and in the case of Muslims, the central importance of their religion to their lives, as embodied in the Western disestablishment of the church and its relegation to the privacy of ecumenical chapels and honorary secularised festivals a few times a year. These immigrants must blend into this shallow, multicultural "culture" (a culture in name only), which, say, in the case of Britain, means supporting Chelsea or United while tossing back pints of ale, absorbing imperial history and acknowledging the civilising mission of the British empire, and, if the immigrants still want to play at being Pakistani or Indian, becoming emissaries in the neo-imperial project of reincorporating the old colonies into a now global world order. ...

Al-Azmeh condemns attempts to find inspiration in Islam to counter the "universal project" – though now only Islamists are left holding the bag – as "primitivist withdrawal to concentrate on the specific as opposed to the universal, or to cling to the idea that we might be a nation different from other nations, our essence defined wholly or partially by religion". He argues this leaves no alternative but to submit, albeit grumbling, to the now very universal diktat of Western discourse, bankrupt though he admits it is. Just as bad are "former militants of the Arab left, nationalists who are disenchanted, sincere or naive, or who think they are being wily" for "giving credence to the Islamist discourse."

But stepping back for a moment, we must marvel at the resilience of Islam, that in the face of the obvious decline of Western "civilisation", it is alive and well, inspiring, comforting, unlike the tattered threadbare socialist secular ideology or the literally bankrupt capitalist one, not to mention the impotent remains of Christianity and the lethal racialist doctrine that Judaism in its Zionist phase has morphed into. Surely to anyone concerned with scholarship based on historical analysis, this "eternal" recurring spiritual force must be granted grudging approval, even admiration. After the last bank closes, after the last rainforest is chopped down, after the last Israeli drone crashes and the Jews flee their "eternal" city for the safety of their true spiritual home (secular Europe), people will be spreading their prayer mats in response to the plangent call of the muezzin and worshipping five times a day, together celebrating the oneness of the Almighty.

The very fact that capitalism, having destroyed the socialist alternative, is now demonising Islam in Western discourse should alert Al-Azmeh to its vital role as the last great protagonist of capitalism, which he realises is at the heart of our current crisis of reason, faith, economics, politics, what-have-you. But he has put all his eggs in his secular basket as the only way out. "The alternative choice would be a theocratic state... a temporary marriage of the pre-Galilean and the postmodern." He can't conceive of a developmental alternative that is not rooted in the West and seen through the prism of the Enlightenment, unable to rout for the last "cultural" symbol standing in the way of capitalism.

It is true that political Islam is the product of the last 30 years, "the offspring of modernity". But that is not to condemn it. Rather, it is to recognise, as Al-Azmeh demands we do, the importance of history, of fixing our eyes on its sweep and the social and economic forces shaping it. Islam has assumed the anti-imperialist burden which the Soviet Union once carried and collapsed under. There is a future other than Al- Azmeh's (unrealistic) one of pushing aside Islam and once again working towards a secular world socialism. It is not one where Muslims come hat in hand to their socialist secular brothers, but one where Western anti-imperialists come to the support of their Muslim brothers and sisters, as we are in fact witnessing today with the outpouring of sympathy for the Palestinians, unfortunately less so for the Afghans and Iraqis, as they valiantly resist the colonial steamroller.

(5) 4 wives is just fine

From: Max <Max@mailstar.net> Date: 25.03.2010 06:44 PM Subject: 4 wives is just fine

Malaysian Mirror, Feb. 12, 2010

He has four wives and life's just dandy

http://www.malaysianmirror.com/lifestyledetail/30-life-a-style/29972

KUALA LUMPUR - Rohaya Mohamad, a 44-year-old Malaysian doctor, chats happily about her plans for the evening, a romantic dinner for five with her husband -- and his three other wives.

Rohaya and her family, which has produced 17 children aged between seven and 21, are among growing numbers of Malaysians entering into polygamous marriages, a phenomenon that observers say is linked to rising "Islamisation".

Critics say that the practice, legal for Muslims who make up 60 percent of the multi-ethnic population, is out of step with modern times and that it degrades the lives of women and children.

But Rohaya and her fellow wives say the arrangement works just fine for them, allowing them to easily juggle childcare, domestic duties and careers in their busy households.

A wife every five years

The undisputed head of the family, 43-year-old husband Mohamad Ikram Ashaari, shuttles between the women's separate homes, spending a night with each in rotation before they join up on the weekends for family time.

He has taken a new wife every five years, starting with Juhaidah Yusof, a softly spoken 41-year-old who takes care of all the youngsters, and concluding with pretty 30-year-old Rubaizah Rejab, an Arabic language teacher.

His second wife, divorce lawyer Kartini Maarof, introduced him to number-three Rohaya -- who had sought the lawyer's services while divorcing her first husband, with whom she had seven children.

"She could see how busy I was so she offered me her husband. Initially I said no as I didn't want to hurt her... and my dad was really against it because polygamy has never been seen in a positive light," she says.

The family, part of the controversial Ikhwan Polygamy Club which says its mission is to improve the reputation of multiple marriage, believes it is a cure for social ills like adultery and pornography.

"Men by nature are polygamous, they have girlfriends and mistresses, they visit prostitutes -- it is normal," says Rohaya. "God has made men like that. "

"But in Islam there is a way out which means you must be responsible for the women you want to be involved with."

Roots in Al-Arqam?

They shrug off criticism that the club has its roots in Al-Arqam, a group banned by the Malaysian government which called it an illegal Islamic sect.

There has been particular controversy over plans to spread the club abroad, with branches in Indonesia to add to its network of 1,000 members across Southeast Asia, Australia, the Middle East and Europe.

Mohamad Ikram is a director with Global Ikhwan, a company whose diverse activities include restaurants and noodle manufacturing and which also manages the club.

"We want to say that polygamy works if you follow the rules of God. We don't expect people to follow but we want to change the mindset," says Rohaya.

The women say that in such a big household, friction is inevitable but they have learned to resolve their problems.

"It's a big family so it's normal that sometimes we argue, sometimes we get on, sometimes we get jealous," says Kartini.

The four wives seem to have an easy rapport with each other and their offspring, who troop in from school dressed in traditional flowing outfits before touching their foreheads to the hand of a visitor in a polite greeting.

But sociologist Norani Othman from pressure group Sisters in Islam says that these educated women and thriving children are not the typical polygamous family.

She says the practice's original purpose has been warped, and that the strict conditions to ensure women are fairly treated are routinely ignored.

"The Koran speaks of polygamy under certain circumstances -- for example, a war where you have lots of war widows and orphans. Historically a kind of emergency or welfare measure," she says.

These days, men can rarely afford to properly care for multiple wives and hordes of children, particularly in Malaysia's urban areas where the practice is becoming increasingly popular.

Her research has found that first wives, who often refuse to sanction the new marriage, are cut off financially and emotionally -- plunging them into poverty and depression.

Think of repercusions

Noraini says that up to five percent of marriages in Malaysia are polygamous, a figure that has risen as rules limiting multiple marriage have been watered down over the years.

"Over the past 15 years you can see a gradual increase... coinciding with the rise of Islamic revivalism, of Islamic fundamentalism," she said, adding it was likely there had been a further steep rise in the past few years.

"The impact of conservative Islam is that it gives an impression to ordinary faithful Muslims to just practice polygamy without seriously thinking of its repercussions."

But Mohamad Ikram and his family insist that polygamy can work well if those involved adhere to the rules laid out in the Muslim holy book, the Koran.

"I consider myself lucky that I have four wives, it reduces the temptation to commit sin," he says.

"Even though it's already enough, there's always the desire to have more -- one isn't satisfied with just four," he adds with a smile. - AFP

(6) Vice squads, mixed male and female patrols, in Banda Aceh, Indonesia

From: leo schmit <leoschmit@yahoo.com> To: shamireaders@yahoogroups.com
Date: 27.03.2010 04:13 AM Subject: [shamireaders] aceh

http://www.canopyindonesia.com/aceh.htm

In Banda Aceh, capital of the autonomous province of Aceh in Indonesia, it is still possible to get some ‘bintang’ beer cans if you know your way around in the city. Chickens are imported alive from Medan, North Sumatera, and butchered in the morning. Eggs too are transported through the night on the 12 hour ride. So why not bring some cans? Police and special squads are too busy anyway chasing a new generation of ‘terrorists’ who reputedly have come from Java. These terrorists are said to be attracted by the religious zeal of Aceh lawmakers who make the most of the hard-won Special Autonomy Law of 2006 by imposing a ban on jeans for ladies and imposing strict ‘jilbab’ head scarf standards.

Currently the vice police is becoming more active in chasing jeans-wearing ladies. Henceforth Aceh ladies must wear long drawn ankle skirts, something like the robes the Amish wear, but more tight around their hips. The vice squads are made up of mixed male and female patrols who drive around in non-armored open vehicles, back to back on the benches, males in the leading vehicle, females in the following one, ready to jump off and grab offending ladies with jeans or untidy ‘jilbabs’. A stern shoe code is not yet promulgated so that still leaves some room for adornment. I have seen the same thing in Afghanistan, where the ‘burka’ clad ladies sometimes adorn some quite enticing pieces of foot ware for the true connoisseurs.

Obviously, in order to chase offenders, the female vice squad members wear trousers themselves, albeit less tight than the jeans of their targeted culprits. The threat of public humiliation by cutting up jeans with scissors is the way to enforce the by-laws and it seems to work. Out in the region the spouse of one of my friends no longer dares to go to the market after the squad announced a jeans patrol through loud speakers. What will the poor fellow get for dinner these days, one wonders, or will his wife give in and go around robed as required? Anyway in the city of Banda Aceh it still is an uphill struggle to arrest all ladies with jeans. I still see them passing left and right on speedy motorcycles, with pretty but poorly protected sandal feet hovering over the tarmac. They wear their helmets over their ‘jilbab’, but soon there will come an order of the vice police to wear ‘jilbab’ over helmets.

Nevertheless, so far the sha’ria law is firmly in the hands of the Aceh lawmakers and they will not let it slip through again. In September 2009 they voted unanimously for the ‘Qanun Jinayah’ allowing for the ‘whipping, lashing and stoning’ of moral offenders. In a comment Gelling says it is all not as bad as it looks: “One must only walk through the streets of Aceh’s capital city, Banda Aceh, to find out. These days women walk freely without their headscarves, girls and boys mingle at coffee shops and the so-called “Sharia Police” make up only a tiny fraction of the city’s police force — and even then they are reluctant to enforce the province’s smattering of religious-based by-laws.” http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/090924/getting-stoned-aceh.

This is not true. The effect of these regulations is evident, whether it is by fear of the regulators or fear of social control and humiliation (‘malu’) which is still a powerful control device, not only in Aceh but all over the Indonesian islands.

Gelling quotes the famous Indonesia crisis watcher Sidney Jones who says: ‘There is a sense, in fact, among some Acehnese analysts, that the passing of the law was not meant to enforce Islamic morals at all, but instead was meant as a political move to destabilize the incoming parliament.’ Gelling further says: ‘If the new parliament doesn’t rescind the law, however, Jakarta will. Andi Mallarangeng, an advicer to the president, said the central government would likely review the law’s legality. Such an action could have interesting repercussions for the country as a whole’.

So if we want to believe Gelling and Jones, it is all folly. I wonder whether they are right. Who are Gelling and Sidney Jones? What is the purpose of these analysts, first making sha’ria law an issue, then saying it is not an issue, while the real issues are not being discussed?

Meanwhile, all this energy is spent at the expense of gaining some true economic benefits which the Special Autonomy Law could bring for Aceh. What is going to happen with Sabang Freeport, so strategically located at the tip of the Malacca Straits that it is impossible not to assume that there is some keen US attention for the place? After all, according to Chalmers, the US only have 700 bases around the world, so why not add one in this tiny island? Even the Dutch appreciated its location in their colonial heydays, using it as a bunker port. This begs the question what the USAID office is doing on the third floor of the provincial office, where even Aceh government staff is not allowed inside; reputedly the office is protected by steel doors, bullet-proof glass windows and an escape window to the roof for staff to be picked up by a helicopter. How many quiet Americans are working there? What is the future of the Arun gas exploitation in Lokhsameuwe? How are new mining licenses for gold, coal, ores and precious stones going to be handled by provincial and district authorities? The same question applies to fishery rights, forest exploitation and conservation, the protection of indigenous and cultural property rights.

In the end, one starts to wonder why chickens and eggs still are being imported three years after the bird flu that caused the elimination of the entire stock in Aceh? Why was it eliminated anyway? Is there a connection between dependency and sha’ria law?

(7) French minister tells Muslims to speak properly

PARIS

Tue Dec 15, 2009 12:15pm EST

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BE3KC20091215

PARIS (Reuters) - A junior French minister has told young Muslims living in France they should dress properly, find a job and stop speaking slang.

Opposition politicians from the left denounced the comments by the minister for families, Nadine Morano, as racist.

The highly outspoken Morano, who is a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy's inner circle, made the remarks on Monday evening in a small town in eastern France during a government-inspired debate on national identity.

"We are not putting young Muslims on trial. I respect their situation. What I want is for them to feel French because they are French," she said in a recording played on French radio.

"I want them to love France when they live here, to find work and not to speak in slang," she said, adding: "They shouldn't put their caps on back to front."

The comments tapped into stereotypical perceptions of youths from tough suburbs on the fringes of France's big cities, many of whom are from an immigrant background.

However, back-to-front caps, baggy trousers and a distinctive form of slang known as "verlan," once associated with those suburbs, have long since spread to high schools around the country and to youths of all backgrounds.

Anti-racism groups and Socialist politicians accused Morano of stoking racial tensions and said the government should abandon its series of highly controversial national identity debates before they provoked a violent backlash.

"This is a political operation designed to pit French people against each another and to create a war of culture and identity," said Socialist parliamentarian Arnaud Montebourg.

The human rights group SOS Racisme urged Prime Minister Francois Fillon to intervene and bring his cabinet to order.

Morano's office said the minister's words had been taken out of context.

Some five million Muslims live in France, the largest such community in Europe. Many of them are immigrants from former French colonies in North and West Africa.

Sarkozy's government has tightly linked the issues of immigration and integration and launched the national identity debate last month, playing on a theme that had served Sarkozy well during his successful 2007 election campaign.

Critics say the countrywide discussions will simply open a Pandora's box of prejudice and extremism.

(8) Turkey's Sephardic Jews who converted to Islam in the 1600s

From: Josef Schwanzer <donauschwob@optusnet.com.au> Date: 26.01.2010 05:10 AM

http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/23393/the-other-secret-jews/

The Other Secret Jews

A new book explores the rich history of Turkey’s Dönme, Sephardic Jews who converted to Islam in the 1600s

By Adam Kirsch | 7:00 am Jan 12, 2010 | Print | Email / Share

Jews of Salonika repent for following Sabbatai Zevi

CREDIT: Jewish Encyclopedia via Wikipedia

Most readers interested in Jewish history know something about the conversos, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews forced to convert to Christianity in the 14th and 15th centuries. ...

Much less is known, however, about a later, smaller, but perhaps even more intriguing group of Jewish converts, who emerged in the Ottoman Empire in the late 17th century. They were followers of the arch-heretic Sabbatai Zevi, who proclaimed himself the Messiah and set about abolishing major Jewish laws and customs. Despite, or because of, the blasphemous nature of his innovations—for instance, he declared that Tisha B’Av, the greatest day of mourning in the Jewish calendar, would henceforth be a day of celebration—Zevi attracted a large following across the Jewish world. But in 1666, Zevi was arrested by the Ottoman authorities and given the choice of converting to Islam or being executed. When he chose to convert, he left thousands of disillusioned believers behind him. Glückel of Hameln, the author of a famous autobiography, compared the experience to being pregnant for nine months, and then, instead of giving birth, only breaking wind.

But a small group of Sephardic Jews, many of them descended from conversos, did not think that Zevi’s apostasy invalidated his mission. On the contrary, they decided to follow him by converting to Islam themselves, while continuing to believe in their messiah and follow his commandments. This group, totaling about 300 families, became known in Turkish as Dönme, “converts,” though they referred to themselves in Hebrew as Ma’aminim, “believers.” By the 1680s, the Dönme had congregated in Salonika, the cosmopolitan and majority-Jewish city in Ottoman Greece. For the next 250 years, they would lead an independent communal life—intermarrying, doing business together, maintaining their own shrines, and handing down their secret traditions.

In The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks, Marc David Baer has produced the first scholarly study of this group. That it is a scholarly work, limited in its scope and sticking closely to written archives, is something that Baer insists on, and with good reason. For while the Spanish conversos are now seen as an interesting historical phenomenon, and it is even rather fashionable to claim converso ancestry, Turkey is still a part of the world where the anti-Semitic imagination runs wild.

And because the Dönme played an outsize role at key moments in modern Turkish history, the myth of their secret Jewish power has itself become powerful. As Baer writes in his introduction, there have recently been bestselling books in Turkey claiming that everyone from the current prime minister, the religious Muslim Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the revered founder of modern secular Turkey, are secretly Jewish. “Ghost Jews haunt the Turkish popular imagination,” as Baer puts it.

This makes it a delicate matter to write about the Dönme. In fact, Baer says, most of the descendants of Dönme whom he interviewed for the book asked him not to use their names. “Although many believe conspiracy theories about the Dönme,” Baer writes, “very few know the real character and history of the group.” His book, perhaps deliberately, will not raise the profile of the Dönme very much. Not only is it an academic book, published by Stanford University Press, but Baer says very little about the origin of the Dönme, or about their religious beliefs and practices—matters that many Jewish readers would be curious about.

In fact, he emphasizes that the Dönme, unlike the conversos, do not really merit the title “crypto-Jews.” They were not Jews who pretended to be Muslims, but a sect of their own, whose beliefs and practices were actually further from Judaism than from Islam. Because they were originally followers of Sabbatai Zevi, mainstream Sephardic Jews wanted nothing to do with them. Baer quotes one rabbinical opinion from 1765, declaring that “there is no difference between them and the Gentiles at all, transgressing against all that is written in the Torah, certainly taken for Gentiles in every matter.” The Dönme followed the Muslim calendar and prayed in mosques, though they dissented privately in some ways. For instance, while they fasted during the daytime on Ramadan, like all Muslims, they deliberately broke the fast a few minutes early, thus signaling their independence.

For the most part, however, Baer has little to say about Dönme origins and religious beliefs. He focuses instead on the Dönme in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and on institutions like schools and businesses that are officially documented. When some exotic feature of Dönme practice does come into view—for instance, the allegation that they celebrated a certain holiday with orgies—Baer is quick to note that such sexual sins are always imputed to religious schismatics, in the Muslim world as in the Christian world. (The word “buggery,” for instance, derives from the medieval Christian heretics known as Cathars, who were from Bulgaria.)

In Baer’s hands, the story of the Dönme becomes, instead, a rather familiar modern morality play—a story of strangeness annihilated by the pressure of sameness. For centuries, the Dönme lived their communal life in Salonika without interference from the Ottoman Empire, which accepted them as Muslims and did not inquire too closely into their private convictions. That began to change in the late 19th century, as the corrupt and cosmopolitan empire started to turn into a modern national state. The Dönme, who were prominent in the tobacco and textile industries, were initially strong supporters of political reform. Baer discusses the pro-reform articles in Dönme newspapers and literary magazines and notes that Dönme schools in Salonika were some of the most progressive in the Empire. (Ataturk attended one of those schools, though the evidence seems to prove that he was not a Dönme himself.)

Most important, several Dönme were leading members of the Committee for Union and Progress, the revolutionary party known as the Young Turks, who in 1908 forced the Sultan to grant a constitution. The Dönme, like Jews and Freemasons, sympathized with the CUP’s scientific, reformist program, though Baer emphasizes that the CUP was not a Dönme party—any more than the Russian Bolsheviks, though they included many Jews, were a Jewish party. Even so, some prominent Young Turks were Dönme, including the editor of the Party’s newspaper and the finance minister in the new CUP government.

This newfound prominence came just as the old Dönme community in Salonika was uprooted. In 1912, the city was conquered by Greece, which changed the name to Thessaloniki and set about expelling the Muslim population. The Dönme were forced to abandon their shrines and homes, and most of them resettled in Istanbul. Now in the public eye as never before, they were the subject of a number of muckraking newspaper articles and books, which Baer examines. In 1919, one anonymous publication accused them of being inbred to the point of biological degeneracy: “Muslims who give their daughters in marriage to those among whom tuberculosis and neuralgia/neural disorders are widespread are committing murder,” the writer warned. At the same time, the Dönme were said to be “always occupied with commerce. Because they do not consider others to be human, they consider it among the laws and praiseworthy qualities of their religion to cheat other nations with various intrigues and schemes.”

It is impossible to miss how closely such anti-Dönme rhetoric resembles anti-Semitic rhetoric, both the modern biological type and the traditional economic type. The Dönme may not have been Jews, but they functioned in the Turkish imagination as Jews—they were clannish, untrustworthy outsiders, who were actually more threatening than the actual Jews because they had so long pretended to be Muslims. In the 1920s, then, as the modern Turkish state was founded on a racial and nationalist basis, the Dönme came in for severe discrimination. Even one prominent Dönme journalist wrote that “this problem must be decisively liquidated,” so that those Dönme “who are truly Turkish and Muslim [can be] distinguished in public opinion … and saved from the necessity of carrying on their back the social stain.”

Soon enough the “problem” was liquidated, through intermarriage and assimilation. By mid-century, the Dönme had begun to disappear as a separate community, and today, Baer writes, the old Dönme cemetery in Istanbul is “the only place where the existence of the Dönme is really manifested as a distinct group.” Still, he notes, they were spared an even worse fate. As Muslims, the Dönme were expelled from Salonika in the 1910s, despite their protests. If they had been allowed to remain, they would have come under Nazi occupation during World War II, and given the Nazi racial definition of Jewishness, they would certainly have been sent to Auschwitz. In the terrible 20th century, The Dönme shows, there was no safe place for those on the margins.