You all look alike (whites & Hispanics) asserts a candid black female congress-person. To some extent she’s correct (especially Cubans). But this is a no-no since everyone has to go around and pretend that the man in the middle is the future of political “black” America. Remember, this man is an icon of African-American political leadership. This man was for years the most prominent “black” in the NAACP (Walter F. White). This man calling this man a “gorilla” couldn’t be racism since both were “black.” Those in glass houses….

Posted by razib at 06:17 PM

About a week ago I posted The gentle jihadist & other tales. In it, the old conundrum about the reality of liberal Islam surfaced again. I repeat over and over that there is issue of quantification-there are certainly liberal Muslims, just as there are out homosexual Muslims (to push the analogy a few orders of magnitude).

But how many? Is it a non-trivial number?

Below are a few anecdotes that illustrate my viewpoint, and allow me to be more precise in what I’m getting at….

Setting: Bangladesh, visiting family in the early 1990s.

I’m at my father’s family’s place. They live in a high rise apartment complex-and there are a lot of people over visiting. The apartment is packed. Suddenly, a great cacophony of screaming and shouting. My aunt rushes toward the back-room, and I see people cleaning up and hiding pictures.

What’s going on?

My cousin tells me, “Your uncle is coming!” There is worry in his eyes. My “uncle” is my maternal uncle. I can see him in the distance, he is wearing a white cap (his “toupee”) that marks him as a religious individual, and striding in his white pajamas. My father’s side doesn’t know him well, but they are terrified of him. The half of a dozen females over the age of 12 in the apartment complex have sequestered themselves in the back room so as not to offend him.

My uncle shows up, and my cousins and uncle greet him. He sits and has tea, and lectures them mildly, because he’s noted that my 12 year old cousin is outside playing. He tells my father’s brother that he shouldn’t allow his daughters outside like that, unaccompanied. My uncle nods and smiles.

As my religious uncle leaves, the pictures come out, and the women emerge from their hiding. Life goes on….

Setting: Upstate New York, early 1990s.

We are visiting a close friend of my father’s, a physician. He’s preparing to move out of his small cramped apartment, he finally is finishing up his residency, and will soon be making bank. About 25 people are crammed together, chatting and gossiping, eating and drinking (water or juice).

Suddenly, a quiet passes over the room. I don’t know what’s going on, but next thing I know my mother is gone, she’s disappeared. All the women are gone. They’ve crushed themselves in my “auntie’s” bedroom (use of kinship terms with non-blood friends is common among Bengalis). My “uncle” (the host) ushers in a new guest. A man dressed in quasi-Islamic garb and his two sons rush into the living room. A woman covered in a burqua slinks into the bedroom. I vaguely remember him, he’s an engineer or something. Someone mentions that he’s had a religious conversion in the past year and has become very pious. I try to go talk to my mother, but they only let my younger brother in. I’m 12, too old to hang with the ladies.

My father is irritated, he finds such segregation ostentatious, but he doesn’t want to make a scene, so he keeps quiet. My “uncle” stops talking about Madonna (he’s a fan). The religious engineer starts talking about some inane Islamic point of ritual or dress.

Setting: Eastern Imbler, 1994.

I’m hanging with my best friend. He invites me to his Catholic youth group. His mother has bugged him about it, and there’s a hot chick there. Everyone looks bored, and his sister is there too. People start talking about God, and staying “pure.”

My friend’s sister starts talking about how “we” have to stay sanctified or something, because that’s what the Church teaches. Everyone agrees. My friend seems bored. Someone says that “of course we all believe in Christ,” I raise my hand and say, “No, count me out.” A little shock, but the conversation moves on.

I wonder, how exactly is lathering yourself up with whipping cream and having sex at your father’s house when he’s off fishing staying “pure,” because I know from my friend’s sister’s boyfriend that that’s what she did 2 weeks previous….

Setting: Western Imbler, college, 1996.

I’m at a party. A feminist friend of mine is telling me how science is another “superstition.” My roommates and I are laughing at her. Some hotties in togas (they just showed up from a frat party) walk by and I lear at them. My roommate starts giggling like a moron (he’s drunk).

A woman in a short hair-cut walks in. She’s wearing some shapeless shirt and loose baggy pants (kind of like a granola version of a burqa). People stop laughing as much. Something has changed in the air.

I smile toward my feminist friend’s toga-wearing friend. She gives me an annoyed look, but I’m enjoying myself. My roommate is also glancing her way.

The granola-burqa figure comes up toward me and stands next to my feminist friend. She looks me over as I try to ignore her. “Is she there for you to look at?”

I shrug, not really caring. The granola-burqa keeps staring at me, and a few people are looking my way, but I don’t care, as a half-Japanese girl that I know has just walked into the room, and is also wearing a toga. “Women aren’t there for you to look at, that’s not why they exist. I think perhaps you should be more respectful.”

Granola-burqa looks at my feminist friend. “I can’t believe you’d throw a party where the power dynamics are like this, we need a place where we can feel safe, not objectified.”

I’m annoyed, the corner of the room is tense, and everyone is worried. I pull out the proverbial race card, and granola-burqa backs off and life is good. I never do get to start on a conversation with the toga-wearers, my feminist friend starts ripping into me about science again and I think I lose it….

The moral: the stories illustrate on a personal level how minorities terrorize and dominate majorities. From the Bolsheviks, to the early Christians, to the fundamentalist Muslims of today, True Believers can conquer the apathy of the masses. I remember seeing polls before Roe vs. Wade where the majority of Americans didn’t want abortion legal. Today, the culture has changed, and people are OK with the status quo (if not with its exact execution).

My major point is that numbers alone do not matter, the weighting, the organization of the numbers, does matter. Those who mean well can name hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands and millions of liberal Muslims, but as long as they don’t organize and make their impact felt to the same extent as the retogrades, and the sheep will keep tumbling over the cliff at their urging. Tipping points happen. I won’t make any bets about the Muslim world 50 years from now, once gratification wins over “honor,” life will be good. But that’s not now, and we shouldn’t pretend that that time is forseeable. It’s possible, but it will probably slap us on the ass before we’ve reoriented ourselves. Life goes on….

Posted by razib at 01:25 PM

Aziz on The Passion. I don’t think I’m going to watch, sounds too bloody.

Update: Compare these two pictures: James Caviezel at the opening of High Crimes and a still from him in The Passion. Looks like he’s wearing brown colored contacts to play Jesus-so Caviezel is right when he states that they weren’t trying to portray the typical “Aryan Jesus.”

Update II: OK, it’s post-production….

Posted by razib at 12:57 PM

Fox’s show Family Guy had a bizarro run from 1999 to circa 2002 (it was on “hiatus” so often it was hard to predict when it would resurface between “Anchorage Cops: Eskimo Hell” and “When Housewives Attack IV”). Well, it seems huge DVD sales have resulted in its resurrection.

Posted by razib at 05:49 PM

My previous post had a few comments, and one thing I want to note to make clear to everyone, memorizing the Koran in its totality is intellectually sterile, but spiritually powerful (for the believer). To the vast majority of Muslims-the Koran is the Word of God, and to the vast majority of Sunni Muslims, the Eternal Word of God. To a believer, it is a book of power, and repeating those words is a deeply significant act. This idea does not map well to Christianity because even fundamentalists acknowledge that the Bible is a narrative collected by various human authors.

Also, I want to add one thing that came to mind, many eloquent rhetoricians in Christendom have traditionally used Biblical phraseology to add gravity and power to their speeches. Abraham Lincoln comes to mind. But since the Koran is written in archaic Arabic, and 80% of the world’s Muslims do not know Arabic, this same process does not occur. Additionally, the idea that the Koran could be considered canonical in a literary manner might be perceived to be blasphemous by some. I can not but help and wonder if this renders Muslims cultures poorer in spirit and speech-rendering the Koran a static idol, rather than a living, breathing document that is an expression of its civilization.

Posted by razib at 04:49 PM

In follow-up on godless’ post on the religious Right, a few quick thoughts….

As some readers have implied, he might have switched “Christianity” with a more qualified statement. I think a big point to note is that congregationally oriented Christianity (ie; the more “radical” Protestant sects) have played an outsized role in American history. The top Protestant sect in the United States, the Southern Baptists, are part of the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation, broadly speaking. Two of the major high status “liberal” churches, the Presbyterians & Congregationalists, are also from the radical tradition (the Methodists can also be argued as part of the radical tradition, though they are more complicated). And we all know about the Puritans (who were the direct ancestors of the Congregationalists and the uncles & aunts of the Presbyterians).

Some readers have pointed out that Russia was a Christian nation before the revolution. I think what must be noted is that the structure of its Christianity was very different than that of the United States, from what I can see the Church was subordinate to the state. When the state turned against it the Church had less of a populist base to fall back on, and in any case, Russia had been a top-down society in many ways throughout its whole history. Interestingly, China was also traditionally a top-down society, with the place of the Czar taken by the Emperor, and the nobles by the mandarinate. These are the two large nations where Communism was victorious from within (as opposed to the eastern European nations or North Korea, where the help of the larger powers aided Communism. Also, I believe that the Russian Communists had placed their bets on the Chinese Nationalists, not the Communists, initially).

In contrast, the United States, has at least the mythology of broad-based grass-roots politics. A coup by Communists that beheaded the national government in D.C. would likely have been faced with a far greater national resistance than the White Russians put up against the Bolsheviks. Whether congregational Christianity was the cause or a correlated variable I will not explore any further.

But, I would like to point out that secular/anti-religious/anti-clerical governing elites (the three are not identical) have had a long history in the modern West. You can see this beginning during the rise of Cromwell’s New Model Army when religious radicals like the Levellers were given shelter by his power-in a nation that was still predominantly Anglo-Catholic or moderate Calvinist. Later on, we all know the history of the French Revolution, turning against the Church, and eventually the faith of the Church with the “Cult of Reason.” A generation before Frederick the Great of Prussia was an openly irreligious and heathen autocrat (though he came from a Calvinist family who ruled a Lutheran land). Mexican readers will know of the anti-clericalism of the elite revolutionaries like Carranza which can still be found echoing in modern day politics south of the border (in contrast to the pious populism of Zapata). Similarly, many Latin American leaders, from Simone Bolivar, to the Emperor of Brazil, to the modern day president of Chile, did not share the religious faith of those who they ruled. In Europe the anti-clericalism of Garibaldi or the Spanish Republic is well known. In India, the founder of the modern nation, Nehru, was an agnostic who did not want a Hindu funeral (they gave him one anyhow).

I list all these to point out that in top-down societies anti-religious views can be espoused by the elite. My friend Zack Ajmal points out that atheism is popular among the Pakistani elite. But it is somehow different in the United States. I think it is important to note that the most anti-clerical public figures in the United States who rose to political prominence all seem to cluster early on in the history of the nation. Though evangelicals dispute it, men like Jefferson, Adams and Madison had views that would not be at variance with the skepticism or heterodoxy of their European counter-parts. Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine were two founding fathers who were even more explicit about their anti-Christianity. But after the period of Andrew Jackson, the rise of universal (male white that is) sufferage, this sort of attitude seems to disappear (Abe Lincoln was publically pious for all his personal heterodoxy). I can’t help but think that the participation of the masses in the political process caused the religion of the masses to percolate up.

Did congregational Christianity result in the populism that characterizes the American republic? Some would argue so. I am not so sure, though I think it might be possible. Some would argue that the high home-ownership rated mentioned by Vinod is just as plausible a cause (and that this also fostered congregational Christianity-or perhaps congergational Christianity fostered economic development which fostered home ownership which fostered populism which fostered anti-Communism, etc.). But I do think its genuine populism blocked any “take over” of a Communist elite. Instead, you had the quasi-socialism of the New Deal espoused by a leader who was popular in the religious south (which was opposed by atheist intellectuals like H.L. Mencken and initially blocked by the Supreme Court-the representatives of the elite).

Update: Please note Roosevelt’s consistent super-majorities in the deep South. New England, and to a lesser extent the Midwest and Mountain/West seem to be the major Republican strongholds (yes, I know there are historical reasons for this, nonetheless, after 1932 when Roosevelt had dealt his hand, the south remained Democratic, probably because of programs like the WPA and TVA).

Update II: Amusing historical anecdote: the Socialists were the second biggest vote getters in Texas from 1912-1914.

Addendum: New readers might find my old post, The Germanization of the liberal idea, interesting as it relates to this topic.

Posted by razib at 12:28 PM

The Hispanic Challenge by Sam Huntington.

Update: Matt Yglesias has linked to this article too, and he’s kind of harsh on it. Many of his readers are polarized, though they tend to agree with Matt from what I’ve seen. I don’t think there is a binary division here, as in:

A) that was then, this is now.
B) that was then, this is then.

The immigrant experience has both changed and remained the same. There are salient points on both sides.

Let me add something that I’ve noticed from my own personal perspective.

I have 3 siblings. One is 4 years younger than me and was also born in Bangladesh. The other two are elementary and early middle school age and were born in the United States. My younger siblings are more “culturally aware” and plugged into being South Asian and Muslim than either my somewhat younger brother or I (the Islam related forwards from my sister are starting to get on my nerves). Many factors account for this, but the combination of the growth of the Muslim South Asian community in the past generation, cheaper flights and telecommunications as well as a native culture that has nurtured and encouraged their differences (in the aim to foster diversity) are just a few of the changes in the past 20 years.

Posted by razib at 05:17 PM

With the public discourse soon to be overwhelmed with the release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ we should expect to be hearing and reading about the profound influence that Judaism and Christianity have had on modern society.

Let us not forget that we owe a greater debt to Solon than to the religious precepts passed down to us.

Posted by TangoMan at 08:57 PM

I just realized today that I don’t think I’ve spoken in detail of my 2-week experience when I was 11 in a madrassa.

Setting: Bangladesh. Visiting my mother’s family. My mean fundamentalist uncle told her she should give my brother & me an Islamic education. So my nice fundamentalist uncle (if you care to know, my mean fundamentalist uncle was rather Arab influenced, while my nice fundamentalist uncle is an imam in my family’s more traditional Hanafi orientation) takes me to a nearby mosque.

The Mosque: Two stories tall. Pretty normal. Doesn’t look new or old.

The teachers: Two dudes, one 35, another 30. Seem nice and pleasant. They agree to teach my brother & me how to read Arabic. We are going to be students for a few weeks. Proviso: we are not to be beaten and receive explicit special treatment.

The schedule:
4:30 AM wake up, “read” Koran.
5:30 AM perform dawn prayer.
5:45 AM keep reading.
6:00 AM eat breakfast.
6:30 AM keep reading.
11:00 AM lunch.
11:30 AM sleep for siesta.
2:00 PM keep reading.
7:00 PM dinner.
7:30 PM sunset prayer.
8:00 PM keep reading.
10:30 PM last prayer.
11:00 PM sleep.

…and repeat.

A few points. I left out two day prayers. They would puncuate the reading, though I forget the times we performed them. The food was OK if plain. I could never sleep during the siesta. It seemed kind of weird to me. I put “read” in quotes initially because I didn’t understand Arabic, and we were basically just learning the alphabet so we could recite the Koran.

As I said, we got special treatment. We saw our mother sometimes in the evenings during this two week period. Most of the students were from rural areas. They just read the Koran, though of course none of them understood it that I gathered, they simply would keep going to school until they memorized it front to the back. Their days were basically the same for 5-7 years, excepting the festivals when they prayed all day and ate some more food.

They had one 15 minute break once a week. They always looked forward to it. The madrassa was in a big hall on the second floor of the mosque, and during this break, they could go out on the terrace and look at people. To my knowledge the kids never really left the grounds of the mosque, though one or two might work as errand boys. This 15 minute period was their time of freedom, and they would stare at women walking by. No woman would come into the hall without covering herself up (usually sisters or mothers of students), but they still stared at them too-like hungry dogs. Sometimes uncovered women would stand outside, and kids would try and catch a glimpse. They seemed awfully horny, though they weren’t particular articulate in their ribald conversation since they had so little experience and information to create fantastic scenarios around.

The teachers were nice to us. They were modern, and seemed associated with a Southeast Asian Muslim order. They were excited to talk to us, because they never got to speak “English” with anyone. They had taught in Thailand for a few years, where they had used English with their pupils. So one day, they spoke to us in English. What my brother and I heard was a vaguely tonal language. We spoke to them in “English,” and they looked at us in frustration. They told us that because we spoke American English, and they spoke Thailand English, we couldn’t understand each other, since Thailand English was more like British English. Since these were men who beat kids on a regular basis, we didn’t say anything.

I never did learn the Arabic alphabet, I had just memorized it before we left the madrassa, and have forgotten the details, though I can still recite many of the letters (quite a few like “aleph” show the common Aramaic roots of the Latin alphabet through Etruscan through Greek). The madrassa was not like those you hear about in Pakistan that sent holy warriors to Afghanistan or Kashmir, it really was about learning (memorizing). It wasn’t a Saudi funded institution and had local ties to the Hanafi tradition of Bangladesh as well as Thailand and Malaysia (I think Southeast Asia is Shafi, though people can correct me). The teachers were liberal, and had pictures taken with us before we left. They were very ignorant about non-Muslim things, and the senior teacher admitted to my uncle that his Arabic was very weak in terms of comprehension, though unlike his students he did understand some of what was being said in the Koran.

The kids were sad. Many of them didn’t know what they were going to do with their lives, they were just very horny and fixated on memorizing the Koran so they could actually have free time. The kid who was my “minder,” (he showed us the best way to wash before prayer and what not) was beaten regularly because helping my brother and I meant that his Koranic studies went a bit lax.

My uncles told me that the madrassa would open my heart to Allah, to the message of the Prophet, but it just made me sad, and more confirmed in my atheism. There was a sterility in that hall that I can’t put into words. It was in some ways the most mentally bleak and desolate 2 weeks of my life. Allah seems to demand a monopoly on heart and mind-so that no room is left for anything else. And that, I could not abide….

Posted by razib at 02:22 PM

Comes the Thaw, the Gulag’s Bones Tell Their Dark Tale:

Yelizaveta I. Obst, whose father, an ethnic German, was sent to the gulag in 1943, said history in Russia remained ambivalent because so many were implicated in it.

Sound familar?

Posted by razib at 09:15 PM