Talk Islam

Updates from razib RSS

  • 12:21:43 pm on June 23, 2008 | 2 | # |
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    from the survey below ….

    importance of religion in one’s life - very important
    national : 59%
    muslims : 72%

    frequency of attendance at religious services - more than once a week
    national: 15%
    muslims: 17%

    frequency of prayer - day
    national: 58%
    muslims: 71%

    frequency of receiving answers to prayers - at least once a week
    national: 19%
    muslims: 31%

    literal interp. of scriptures - word of god, literally true word for word
    national - 33%
    muslims - 50%

    interp. religious teachings - there is ONE true way to interpret teachings of my religion
    national - 27%
    muslims - 33%

    views of one’s religion as one true faith -my religion is the one, true faith leading to eternal life
    national - 25%
    muslims - 33%

     

  • 11:29:49 am on June 23, 2008 | 0 | # |
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    religion in america survey:

    Belief in God or Universal Spirit - Do not believe in god

    evangelical xtian - 0%
    mainline xtian - 1%
    historically black denom - 0%
    catholics - 1%
    mormons - 0%
    orthodox - 4%
    jews - 10%
    muslims - 5%
    buddhists - 19%
    hindus -5%

    what’s going on here? i was a bit surprised by the fact that 5% of muslims said they didn’t believe in god…but, i believe like judaism and hinduism islam in the united states is a minority religion which has ethno-cultural saliences for people raised in that tradition. therefore, the tendency to continue to identify as muslims in some way despite an open admission of atheism.

     

  • 05:57:49 pm on June 10, 2008 | 7 | # |

    Operation Lets Muslim Women Reclaim Virginity :

    Like an increasing number of Muslim women in Europe, she had a hymenoplasty, a restoration of her hymen, the thin vaginal membrane that normally breaks during the first act of intercourse.

    “In my culture, not to be a virgin is to be dirt,” said the student, perched on a hospital bed as she awaited surgery on Thursday. “Right now, virginity is more important to me than life.”

    As Europe’s Muslim population grows, many young Muslim women find themselves caught between the freedoms that European society affords and the deep-rooted traditions of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

    for me the creepiest part is the presentation of the blood as proof of virginity. what’s up with that? am i being narrow-minded?

     

  • 03:55:41 pm on June 7, 2008 | 2 | # |
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    listening to stuff on international salafists on the radio and reading via book. one notable thing about the terrorist salafist international which focused on the “far enemy” was its high educational levels, social status and technical (engineering) orientation. recent data suggests that this is changing, and more lower class and less eduated muslims (some from the diaspora in western europe) with clearly nihilistic inclinations are filling the holes generated by the war of attrition. this is good from an american perspective because uneducated nihilists usually lack coordination and execution skills.

     

  • 01:00:12 pm on May 30, 2008 | 0 | # |
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    here is some data on the proportion of evangelical xtians & muslims in europe including the russia (which is around 10% muslim and rather populous remember) over the years….

    1900 1970 2000 2025
    Muslims, 2.3%, 2.7%, 4.3%, 5.1%
    Evangelicals, 8%, 4.6%, 8.2%, 9.8%

    there are several issues with the worry of the islamicization of the native white stock of the continent

    1) it’s ahistorical, europe has had repeated swings between secularization and re-confessionalization since the enlightenment. the current swing to secularization may not be the “end of history”

    2) 40,000 converts to islam per year is a hard number, but what about those who shift from mainline toward evangelical flavors of christianity? (which in england might be under the umbrella of anglicanism)

    3) times change. the presumed moribund church of ireland (protestant) is now growing faster than the roman catholic church (mostly through conversion). see the irish census. straight line projections are really problematic, especially because of #1

    4) the data thabet points to suggests that mainstream islam is similar in many ways to conservative christianity (see responses to moral issues by “religious americans”). i think it is plausible if europeans need something to feed their soul they would choose evangelical forms of christianity more often than islam since the latter is associated with insular ethnic communities.

     

  • 10:37:17 am on May 27, 2008 | 3 | # |
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    i’m reading the post-american world. i will amend my earlier complaint about fareed talking about how chinese and indians don’t believe in god; he cites a 2007 pew survey which shows that the majority of chinese & japanese don’t believe that one needs to believe in god to be moral, and that the majority of americans do. that’s his one quantitative point. he has some later qualitiative arguments and points which i think are more subtle than come across in his exposition in interviews, even if they need further teasing apart than is possible in a book of this nature….

     

  • 11:44:57 pm on May 26, 2008 | 0 | # |
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    The Unraveling: The jihadist revolt against bin Laden. contrary to our fevered imaginings after 9/11 it seems plausible that that event will the “high water mark” of the al qaeda movement. most interesting is the anger from those who are waging the war against the “near enemy” (arab autocracies) as opposed the “far enemey” (non-muslim western regimes). even with al qaeda the shift from the near to the far enemy was somewhat controversial in the late ’90s.

     

  • 08:18:25 pm on May 26, 2008 | 1 | # |
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    As Toronto mother describes her ordeal, imam admits he has `blessed’ over 30 unions:

    Muslims have thought that if such a challenge on the basis of religion is launched, they would also benefit. But Nik Bala, a family law professor at Queen’s University, believes the case for Muslims is much weaker than that of the Mormons.

    “In Bountiful, the argument of freedom of religion applies, since polygamy is a requirement necessary to get to heaven. Islam permits polygamy, but doesn’t require it to be a practising Muslim,” said Bala. “The freedom of religion argument doesn’t hold up as strongly.”

    of course, non-fundamentalist mormons would disagree with the idea that mormonism requires polygamy for salvation. but i guess it’s an interpretation….

     

  • 05:06:02 pm on May 25, 2008 | 9 | # |
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    most people who know me that i am generally skeptical of any particular religious “essence.” e.g., i doubt most people could infer the nature of a given religion simply by its scripture. that being said, the creationist slant of muslims seems to be noticeable, and dovetails with perceptions of ‘literalism.’ here’s some data, turkey is more creationist than the USA, but arguably one of the less anti-modernist of muslim nations. and a survey of american medical doctors by religion, here the proportion who believe that “God created humans exactly as they appear now”:
    all - 18%
    jewish - 3%
    protestant - 35%
    catholic - 11%
    orthodox christian - 37%
    hindu - 11%
    buddhist - 0%
    muslim - 43%
    atheist - 0%
    spiritual - 4%
    other - 29%

    small N’s for some, so be careful about comparing on a fine grained level…but for me the comparison between hindus & muslims is the most interesting. i assume that most of the muslims are south asian immigrants, as are most of the hindu, so you’re eliminating a lot of confounding noise here….

     

  • 03:29:01 am on May 21, 2008 | 2 | # |

    fareed zakaria is kind of irritating me. he keeps saying that china & india don’t believe in god because they don’t believe in the abrahamic god. he also keeps saying that chinese don’t have universal-ethical principles (not that they’re amoral, just that they’re really pragmatic is his implication). lee kuan yew, former PM of singapore, once said that in the west everyone has a soul, while in the east everyone is just an ant. i think these glib generalizations totally ignore the reality that chinese society for 2,000 years was notionally undergirded by a religion of ethics; i.e., confucianism. there was always a strong line of confucian thought that one must uphold justice and the right no matter the pragmatic consideration. this was to encourage scholar-officials to be honest and truthful to the ruler, even if that might entail their own downfall or execution.

    there is obviously something to what fareed is saying. i just don’t think that these grand generalizations which attempt to adduce the state of present conditions really model reality as it is. one might have stated during the soviet period that eastern orthodoxy predisposed the russians to amoral materialism. after all, amoral materialism took over russia; QED.

    i don’t deny the reality of cultural generalizations.  but too often those making arguments know some cultures far better than others, so that the density of their priors is extremely skewed (i have labeled this “ethno-autism,” but autistic people got real mad).

     

  • 12:00:14 am on May 21, 2008 | 2 | # |
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    …reading a fair amount of material on hindutva. problem: bimodal distribution between those who support or oppose. most scholars have a hard time preventing their distaste for the ideology from seeping into the text. in any case, struck by similarities between Jamāl-al-dīn al-Afghānī and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. both were relatively liberal modernists who became intellectual ancestors for anti-modernist “fundamentalist” movements (salafiya and hindutva).

     

  • 02:18:10 am on May 20, 2008 | 0 | # |
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    reading nussbaum’s The Clash Within. she’s a philosopher, not a specialist. since i’m a dilettante i’m not going to cast stones, but her lack of social science rigor can get annoying. e.g., she states that india has the third largest muslim population in the world. on the margins there might be quibbles with this depending on how the indian census undercounts or not. but later on the chapter she states that some people are of the opinion that india has the largest muslim population out of the blue. this is unlikely, though if the undercount is big enough it is possible that there are more muslims in india than indonesia. when you go into a highly charged topic like communalism in india you need to be really precise and on the up & up, and nussbaum seems to slip into verbal shell games as philosophers are want to do for a specific argument.  she makes sociological generalizations without footnote so you can check up any quantitative data….

     

  • 08:33:45 pm on May 19, 2008 | 1 | # |
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    ali mentions debates about whether al-biruni was shia or sunni. one thing i’ve gotten the impression from my reading is that the “sunni” party as we understand it today is a relatively late-forming identity. a sort of catchall for all the groups before the fall of the abbassids to the mongols who weren’t shia or kharijite. al-biruni lived at a time when the lines were hardening, but the boundaries might not have been totally demarcated.

     

  • 08:07:57 pm on May 19, 2008 | 2 | # |
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    when i was a kid i was taught in the masjid that muslims believed in predestination. a quick survey of the literature suggests that this is much stronger a consensus among sunnis. talking to actually muslims suggests that the consensus isn’t really a consensus. thoughts?

     

  • 06:32:01 pm on May 12, 2008 | 4 | # |
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    20% of albanian muslims are historically of the bektashi sect. they drink wine, and even owned vineyards. they were popular among the janissaries, though ataturk banned the order so that it relocated to albania in the 1920s.

     

  • 01:48:24 pm on May 12, 2008 | 7 | # |
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    president apostate? the column reflects accurately i think the rather primitive attitude toward compulsion in religion (or lack of) in most muslim nations. but like many of these sorts of analyses it neglects psychological and social sophistication; the only other apostate (from islam) head of state who visited the arab world was carlos menem, and i don’t think there were major issues with assassination here. additionally, it tends to be a fact that apostasy and blasphemy laws in the muslim world generally end up enforced for two reasons: 1) the non-muslim is too vocal in proclaiming their faith or even has the temerity to attempt to convert muslims, 2) or, they are marginalized in some way so that these laws are used to screw them over (e.g., they’re insane, they have property you want, etc.).

     

  • 08:57:34 pm on May 11, 2008 | 13 | # |
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    skimming Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850. mentions a self-avowed “half-muslim” urdu poet from the early 19th century who drinks wine but does not consume pork. so what’s up with muslims and alcohol? my reading of history shows that elite muslims drink alcohol quite often; to the point of making a note when a particular caliph did not drink. jehangir and a recent king of saudi arabia were alcoholics. i believe there are references to wine in babur’s poetry. has alcohol consumption actually decreased in frequency as islam has become more populist???

     

  • 08:35:59 pm on May 11, 2008 | 1 | # |
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    europe vs. USA re: muslims. what’s the difference? specifically, UK vs. USA? is it the difference in ethnic diversity? (american muslims are fragmented between asians, blacks, whites, immigrants, arabs, natives, converts, etc. in a very balanced manner) the economic success of american muslims? the post-colonial legacy of the british? different racial attitudes? if i had to rank order these factors i think i would put the ethnic diversity first, and economics second. i believe that the fact that british muslims are divided into a few large ethnic blocks results in a identity politics synergy which generates a feedback loop which you would never see in this country….

     

  • 12:49:55 pm on May 8, 2008 | 4 | # |
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    aprosos of the apostasy post below, God’s Rule - Government and Islam: Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought :
    The Prophet was remembered as havinggiven them the choice between conversion and death. But it was only Arab pagans that he had eradicated: did non-Arab peers have to be similarly treated? After some debate, the jurists decided that the Zoroastrians…were an exception, they had once possessed a book…and/or that the Prophet had accepted jizya from Zoroastrians (in eastern Arabia)…But the jurists could not agree on other pagans. Some took the Prophet’s eradication of Arab idolaters to mean that all pagans had to be given the choice between Islam or death, whatever their ethnicity. This was the position of the Shafi’ites…Others argued that the Arabs were a special case and that it was the Prophet’s treatment of Zoroastrians which had universal significance: all non-Arab pagans should be treated as Zoroastrains. That was the position of the Malikis and Hanafis…aruging that all unbelievers were eligible for dhimmi status, full stop.

    the hanafi position is one reason adduced as to why this school is popular in the turkic and south asian world; it was more practical since non-muslims were thick on the ground. but it is interesting to note that shafis are dominant in southeast asia, where there are large non-muslim pagan minorities (buddhists and hindus).

     

  • 09:37:48 am on May 7, 2008 | 5 | # |
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    aziz & i have disagreed, if mildly, about the shia:sunni::catholic:protestant analogy. as i have noted, all analogies have their weaknesses. but reading God’s Rule - Government and Islam: Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought i am struck by a shia & protestant similarity in schismastic tendencies and eruptions of antimonianism. interestingly, the most “catholic” of the shia, the ismaili, exhibit both of these tendencies to the greatest degee of the shia themselves….

     
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