Indian Forces Face Broader Revolt in Kashmir

Protests in Kashmir have led India to one of its deepest crises and mark the failure of its efforts to win peace there.

http://nyti.ms/c2s8VR

Mayor’s Stance on Muslim Center Has Deep Roots

For reasons both civic and personal, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has defied public opinion on the project.

http://nyti.ms/dyJsid

Across Nation, Mosque Projects Meet Opposition

Heated conflicts have broken out in communities where mosques are proposed near far less hallowed locations than ground zero.

http://nyti.ms/b4GGxY

He is now world-famous, mainly for wanting the Koran to be banned in his country, “like Mein Kampf is banned,” and for making a crude short film that depicted Islam as a terrorist faith – or, as he puts it, “that sick ideology of Allah and Muhammad.”

Last year the Dutch government decided that such views, though coarse, were an acceptable contribution to political debate. Yet last week an Amsterdam court decided that Mr. Wilders should be prosecuted for “insulting” and “spreading hatred” against Muslims. Dutch criminal law can be invoked against anyone who “deliberately insults people on the grounds of their race, religion, beliefs or sexual orientation.”

Whether Mr. Wilders has deliberately insulted Muslim people is for the judges to decide. But for a man who calls for a ban on the Koran to act as the champion of free speech is a bit rich. When the British Parliament refused to screen Mr. Wilders’s film at Westminster this week, he cited this as “yet more proof that Europe is losing its freedom.” His defenders, by no means all right-wingers, also claim to be standing up for freedom. A Dutch law professor said he found it “strange” that a man should be prosecuted for “criticizing a book.”

This seems a trifle obtuse. Comparing a book that billions hold sacred to Hitler’s murderous tract is more than an exercise in literary criticism; it suggests that those who believe in the Koran are like Nazis, and an all-out war against them would be justified. This kind of thinking, presumably, is what the Dutch law court is seeking to check.

One of the misconceptions that muddle the West’s debate over Islam and free speech is the idea that people should be totally free to insult. Free speech is never that absolute. Even – or perhaps especially – in America, where citizens are protected by the First Amendment, there are certain words and opinions that no civilized person would utter, and others that open the speaker to civil charges.

This does not mean that religious beliefs should be above criticism. And sometimes criticism will be taken as an insult where none is intended. In that case the critic should get the benefit of the doubt. Likening the Koran to “Mein Kampf” would not seem to fall into that category.

If Mr. Wilders were to confine his remarks to those Muslims who do harm freedom of speech by using violence against critics and apostates, he would have a valid point. This is indeed a serious problem, not just in the West, but especially in countries where Muslims are in the majority. Mr. Wilders, however, refuses to make such fine distinctions. He believes that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim. His aim is to stop “the Islamic invasion of Holland.”

There are others who share this fear and speak of “Islamicization,” as though not just Holland but all Europe were in danger of being engulfed by fascism once again. Since Muslims still constitute a relatively small minority, and most are not extremists, this seems an exaggerated fear, even though the danger of Islamist violence must be taken seriously.

However, a closer look at the rhetoric of Mr. Wilders and his defenders shows that Muslims are not the only enemies in their sights. Equally dangerous are the people whom Mr. Wilders and others refer to obsessively as “the cultural elite.”

What they mean are liberals who are so concerned about Western racism that they find it hard to tolerate any criticism of non-Western people or non-Western faiths. There are such people, to be sure, but even among my fellow Dutch citizens political correctitude of this kind is becoming increasingly rare.

In the past, it is true, legitimate debates about cultural and religious tensions arising from the poor integration of ethnic minorities were often stifled by an excess of liberal zeal. Doubts about the official drive toward pan-European unity and over liberal policies over guest workers and refugees were too often dismissed as ultra-nationalism or worse.

Read at NYT…

David Brooks of the NYT has an interesting take on pseudo-intellectualism.

Dear Dr. Kierkegaard,

All my life I’ve been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it’s stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?

Existential in Exeter

Dear Existential,

It pains me to see so many people being pseudo-intellectual in the wrong way. It desecrates the memory of the great poseurs of the past. And it is all the more frustrating because your error is so simple and yet so fundamental.

You have failed to keep pace with the current code of intellectual one-upsmanship. You have failed to appreciate that over the past few years, there has been a tectonic shift in the basis of good taste.

You must remember that there have been three epochs of intellectual affectation. The first, lasting from approximately 1400 to 1965, was the great age of snobbery. Cultural artifacts existed in a hierarchy, with opera and fine art at the top, and stripping at the bottom. The social climbing pseud merely had to familiarize himself with the forms at the top of the hierarchy and febrile acolytes would perch at his feet.

In 1960, for example, he merely had to follow the code of high modernism. He would master some impenetrably difficult work of art from T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound and then brood contemplatively at parties about Lionel Trilling’s misinterpretation of it. A successful date might consist of going to a reading of “The Waste Land,” contemplating the hollowness of the human condition and then going home to drink Russian vodka and suck on the gas pipe.

This code died sometime in the late 1960s and was replaced by the code of the Higher Eclectica. The old hierarchy of the arts was dismissed as hopelessly reactionary. Instead, any cultural artifact produced by a member of a colonially oppressed out-group was deemed artistically and intellectually superior.

During this period, status rewards went to the ostentatious cultural omnivores – those who could publicly savor an infinite range of historically hegemonized cultural products. It was necessary to have a record collection that contained “a little bit of everything” (except heavy metal): bluegrass, rap, world music, salsa and Gregorian chant. It was useful to decorate one’s living room with African or Thai religious totems – any religion so long as it was one you could not conceivably believe in.

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

On that date, media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status.

Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)

Today, Kindle can change the world, but nobody expects much from a mere novel. The brain overshadows the mind. Design overshadows art.

This transition has produced some new status rules. In the first place, prestige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser. Inventors, artists and writers come and go, but buzz is forever. Maximum status goes to the Gladwellian heroes who occupy the convergence points of the Internet infosystem – Web sites like Pitchfork for music, Gizmodo for gadgets, Bookforum for ideas, etc.

Continue reading here…

“I would never have imagined that they would turn me down because of what I choose to wear,” Ms. Silmi said, her hazel eyes looking out of the narrow slit in her niqab, an Islamic facial veil that is among three flowing layers of turquoise, blue and black that cover her body from head to toe.

But last month, France’s highest administrative court upheld a decision to deny citizenship to Ms. Silmi, 32, on the ground that her “radical” practice of Islam was incompatible with French values like equality of the sexes.

It was the first time that a French court had judged someone’s capacity to be assimilated into France based on private religious practice, taking laïcité – the country’s strict concept of secularism – from the public sphere into the home.

The case has sharpened the focus on the delicate balance between the tradition of Republican secularism and the freedom of religion guaranteed under the French Constitution, and how that balance may be shifting. Four years ago, a law banned religious clothing in public schools. Earlier this year, a court in Lille annulled a marriage on request of a Muslim husband whose wife had lied about being a virgin. (The government later demanded a review of the court decision.)

So far, citizenship has been denied on religious grounds in France only when applicants were believed to be close to fundamentalist groups.

The ruling on Ms. Silmi has received almost unequivocal support across the political spectrum, including among many Muslims. Fadela Amara, the French minister for urban affairs, called Ms. Silmi’s niqab “a prison” and a “straitjacket.”

Read full article here…

An objective look at the facts, however, uncovers quite a different picture. Recent surveys indicate that the populations of many major Muslim-majority countries are almost evenly divided on such hot-button issues as whether Shari’a should serve as the primary foundation for laws and whether clerics should be involved in political questions. These new data challenge previously held assumptions about the values and attitudes of Muslim publics concerning mosque-state separation.

As important, history informs us that the current debate surrounding separation of religion and politics is not a historic anomaly; nor is it unique to Islam. In other parts of the world, including the West, it took great efforts to replace the “age-old assumption” that it is “right and justifiable to maintain religious uniformity by force.”2 The debate occurring in the Islamic world today should be viewed in the context of other countries’ transitions to separation of religion and politics, which offer valuable lessons that can help supporters of mosque-state separation become more effective.

Among the most interesting precedents for the Islamic world, and most surprising, is colonial America. To establish church-state separation and religious freedom in the United States, the Founders had to convince a devout and deeply skeptical populace that such a system posed no threat to religion. What today seems like a natural and obvious development was in fact a hard-won paradigm change with astonishing parallels to the issues dominating the debate in the Islamic world today. The Founders’ experience provides a template for those who seek to advance mosque-state separation in Muslim-majority countries.

Read full article at Policy Review

One day last fall, a young Israeli woman named Sharon went with her fiancé to the Tel Aviv Rabbinate to register to marry. They are not religious, but there is no civil marriage in Israel. The rabbinate, a government bureaucracy, has a monopoly on tying the knot between Jews. The last thing Sharon expected to be told that morning was that she would have to prove – before a rabbinic court, no less – that she was Jewish. It made as much sense as someone doubting she was Sharon, telling her that the name written in her blue government-issue ID card was irrelevant, asking her to prove that she was she.

Sharon is a small woman in her late 30s with shoulder-length brown hair. For privacy’s sake, she prefers to be identified by only her first name. She grew up on a kibbutz when kids were still raised in communal children’s houses. She has two brothers who served in Israeli combat units. She loved the green and quiet of the kibbutz but was bored, and after her own military service she moved to the big city, which is the standard kibbutz story. Now she is a Tel Aviv professional with a master’s degree, a job with a major H.M.O. and a partner – when this story starts, a fiancé – who is “in computers.”

This stereotypical biography did not help her any more at the rabbinate than the line on her birth certificate listing her nationality as Jewish. Proving you are Jewish to Israel’s state rabbinate can be difficult, it turns out, especially if you came to Israel from the United States – or, as in Sharon’s case, if your mother did.

In recent years, the state’s Chief Rabbinate and its branches in each Israeli city have adopted an institutional attitude of skepticism toward the Jewish identity of those who enter its doors. And the type of proof that the rabbinate prefers is peculiarly unsuited to Jewish life in the United States. The Israeli government seeks the political and financial support of American Jewry. It welcomes American Jewish immigrants. Yet the rabbinate, one arm of the state, increasingly treats American Jews as doubtful cases: not Jewish until proved so.

More than any other issue, the question of Who is a Jew? has repeatedly roiled relations between Israel and American Jewry. Psychologically, it is an argument over who belongs to the family. In the past, the casus belli was conversion: Would the Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew coming to Israel, apply to those converted to Judaism by non-Orthodox rabbis? Now, as Sharon’s experience indicates, the status of Jews by birth is in question. Equally important, the dividing line is no longer between Orthodox and non-Orthodox. The rabbinate’s handling of the issue has placed it on one side of an ideological fissure within Orthodox Judaism itself, between those concerned with making sure no stranger enters the gates and those who fear leaving sisters and brothers outside.

Seth Farber is an American-born Orthodox rabbi whose organization – Itim, the Jewish Life Information Center – helps Israelis navigate the rabbinic bureaucracy. He explained to me recently that the rabbinate’s standards of proof are now stricter than ever, and stricter than most American Jews realize. Referring to the Jewish federations, the central communal and philanthropic organizations of American Jewry, he said, “Eighty percent of federation leaders probably wouldn’t be able to reach the bar.” To assist people like Sharon, Farber has become a genealogical sleuth. He is the first to warn, though, that solving individual cases cannot solve a deeper crisis.

Read the full article at NYT

For Anthony Pagden, a professor of political science and history at the University of California, Los Angeles, the shah and Napoleon are archetypes, respectively, of East and West, each seeing himself as heir to a glorious civilization. But as Pagden points out, each man also had his own fascinating ambiguities. The Swiss-educated shah was a highly secular supporter of modernization (and the Champagne for his party came from Maxim’s of Paris). Napoleon proclaimed to the Egyptians that he revered the Prophet Muhammad and “the glorious Koran,” if only to win over the local clerics.

Pagden has a keen eye for the striking detail (a helpful attribute for someone plowing through 2,500 years of history in 12 chapters), and “Worlds at War,” like Pagden’s earlier work “Peoples and Empires,” is bold, panoramic and highly readable, at times a page turner.

Through a combination of legend, anecdote and evocative writing, Pagden brings alive the ancient Greco-Persian wars, the rise of Islam and the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman emperor Mehmed II. And he turns what might otherwise be dry history about the Investiture Controversy of the 11th century into almost a thriller, with an “outmaneuvered” Henry IV standing outside the castle of Canossa “in a hair shirt and robes of a penitent, barefoot on the ice for three days,” seeking an audience with Pope Gregory VII, who had excommunicated him. Having obtained Gregory’s forgiveness, Henry promptly “descended on Rome with an army.” Gregory called on the Normans to defend him, and they defeated Henry. But unfortunately they “sacked the city themselves,” causing the Pope “to flee south, where he died of fever in Salerno.”

But if “Worlds at War” is hard to put down, it’s also hard to pin down; almost to the end, its thesis is something of a moving target. For starters, Pagden casts his book as an exploration of the “perpetual enmity,” as Herodotus called it, between East and West. Yet he excludes from his account China, Japan and the rest of the Far East and, for the most part, India. So his “East” consists almost entirely of Islamic societies: Persia/Iran, the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, Egypt and today’s Arab world.

Continue reading at NYT

Ms. Haque and her friends may have helped initiate a new American ritual: the all-girl Muslim prom. It is a spirited response to religious and cultural beliefs that forbid dating, dancing with or touching boys or appearing without a hijab, the Islamic head scarf. While Ms. Haque and her Muslim friends do most things other teenagers do — shopping for shoes at Macy’s, watching ”The Matrix Reloaded” at the mall or ordering Jumbo Jack burgers and curly fries at Jack in the Box — an essential ingredient of the American prom, boys, is off limits. So they decided to do something about it.

”A lot of Muslim girls don’t go to prom,” said Ms. Haque, 18, who removed her hijab and shawl at the prom to reveal an ethereal silvery gown. ”So while the other girls are getting ready for their prom, the Muslim girls are getting ready for our prom, so we won’t feel left out.”

The rented room at a community center here was filled with the sounds of the rapper 50 Cent, Arabic pop music, Britney Spears and about two dozen girls, including some non-Muslim friends. But when the sun went down, the music stopped temporarily, the silken gowns disappeared beneath full-length robes, and the Muslims in the room faced toward Mecca to pray. Then it was time for spaghetti and lasagna.

It is perhaps a new version of having it all: embracing the American prom culture of high heels, mascara and adrenaline while being true to a Muslim identity.

Continue reading the full article at NYT