There’s a depressing interview over at the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Two excerpts, from separate interviews with Islamist women, are below. Abd al-Lami: The demands raised by [secularist demonstrators]…are demands contradictory to Islam. RFI: Why? They demand the implementation of [international] agreements that arose from decades-long fight for the rights of women and from studying […]

I’ve just made brief post up on my blog regarding the rather virulent and violent strain of homophobia in the Muslim world, as a problem in itself and as a marker of deeper problems. Out of curiosity, how would GNXP readers go about trying to remedy these issues? What techniques of mimetic engineering would you […]

I’m on the record as stating that France’s Muslim community is no more likely to create an Islamic Republic of France than the United States’ Catholic community was likely to create a Papal States of America. If anything, it may well be less likely, given European-style rates of religious observance and levels of intermarriage comparable […]

Yahoo! News has reproduced Deborah Scoggins’ article from The Nation, “The Dutch-Muslim Culture War”. Starting from the person of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Scoggins goes on to examine the wider role of Islam on some of Europe’s more conservative communities. Moors and others don’t dispute the existence of the social problems Hirsi Ali identifies. Many Dutch […]

I was rather interested to come across Jonathan Edelstein’s post this afternoon asking his readers what apartheid was. While I certainly don’t deny that the empirical method has its advantages, trying to build a theoretical framework can be quite useful. And so, this evening as I ate my Bento boxed lunch at Natural Sushi on […]

In a September 2004 interview at Front Page Magazine, Bat Ye’or defines Eurabia as follows. Eurabia represents a geo-political reality envisaged in 1973 through a system of informal alliances between, on the one hand, the nine countries of the European Community (EC) which, enlarged, became the European Union (EU) in 1992 and on the other […]

Over at my blog, I’ve made two postings regarding interesting trends in the growth of religious minorities in two countries on the European Union’s doorstep. It seems certain that Ukraine’s Muslims are rapidly growing in number through migration; Algerian Christians, while still rarer, may also be growing sharply in number, not through immigration but through […]

My inital reaction to the virtual lesbian threeway depicted in the second edition of Masamune Shirow’s manga Ghost in the Shell, back when I first read it in January, was that it was just a throwaway scene aimed at a teenage male market. I’m not so sure now. To be sure, the teenage-male demographic does […]

I was fascinated to come across Deutsche Welle’s brief article on Jugendweihe, an interesting holiday in Germany (literal translation “youth consecration”) that aspires to be a secular equivalent to religious confirmation ceremonies for teenagers, marking the transition from childhood to adulthood. The German Humanist Association advertises for young Jugendweihe recruits with the promise that “there […]

A week ago, news.google.ca began turning up links to an interesting paper: Refik Erzan, Umut Kuzubas and Nilufer Yildiz’s “Growth and Immigration Scenarios for Turkey and the EU” (PDF format), written for the Centre for European Policy Studies. The authors make the compelling argument that even if Turkey’s bid for European Union membership is junked, […]

Back in July of 2003, Frank Laczko (of the International Organization for Migration) wrote the interesting article “Europe Attracts More Migrants from China”. Laczko’s article argues that the PRC-citizenship population of Europe is low, divided roughly as described in the below chart: Substantial evidence seems to suggest a significant undercount. The data for France is […]

I really don’t like it when sloppy and inaccurate terms–worse, terms which illegitimately polarize legitimate forms of debate and create new and dangerous possibilities–enter into the popular discourse. And yet, doing Google searches I find that “Eurabia” has taken a new prominent role. Created by Bat Ye’or, “Eurabia” has come into a new vogue among […]

Last month, I made a brief posting concerning my personal experiences with the relationship between non-heterosexual sexual orientation and non-typical gender norms. The relationship’s not hard and fast–I think that my own person is proof enough of that–but I would argue that some sort of positive correlation between the two does exist. I’m completely in […]

Sacred and Secular : Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge UP, 2004), co-authored by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, is one of those books that breaks new ground. Norris and Inglehart explore a seeming contradiction at the heart of sociology: The founding writers of this discipline–Marx, Weber, Durkheim–all predicted secularization as an inevitable outcome of modernization, […]

GNXP’s posters have covered the Netherlands’ recent events, starting with the assassination of van Gogh and continuing through to the current unsettled and open-ended situation. My contribution? I thought that I’d take a brief look at the situation in the Netherlands, all appropriate thanks owing to Afghan Voice. Back in April, the now-defunct blog Afghan […]

The comments to this guest post of mine over at the Head Heeb made me curious about ethnic succession. Can anyone think of a situation where a minority population (ethnic, linguistic, religious) in a fairly coherent social entity–a modern state, say, or a religious community–takes over entirely, purely through high fertility rates? Although there has […]

Today seems to be the sort of day when the recurrent debate here on GNXP about the importance of HIV/AIDS . Arcane did his post, I posted a reply on my own blog. The subtopic of HIV/AIDS in the former Soviet Union–particularly the prospects for a pandemic–has also received a lot of attention. In this […]

The subject of the assimilation of the most recent wave of immigrants to France–largely Muslim, these mostly drawn from former French colonies in North Africa–has been a subject frequently debated on GNXP, as a subject worthy of interest on its own terms and as a bellwether for events elsewhere. Reading the Toronto Globe and Mail […]

It’s a basic assumption among GNXP posters that the study of human biodiversity is an important contributing factor to the study of humanity in general. At the same time, though, it’s important to keep in mind that human biodiversity isn’t the only factor involved in the construction of early 21st century societies. Take South Africa, […]