Learning to love the Irish: a lesson in optimism for muslim Americans.
But, adopting a variant of “the fightin’ Irish” probably won’t work. No football teams are ever going to be named the Jihad, for a long time.
Tagged: catholics Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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aziz
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thabet
Revelations that the involvement of a Catholic priest in a 1972 IRA bombing in Northern Ireland was covered up by the government, police and the Catholic Church, has produced one of the most deranged things I’ve ever read by Terry Sanderson, the head of the National Secular Society:
Maybe Sanderson would like to bring back the Test Acts?
More from Splintered Sunrise.
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thabet
Thousands ‘join Italian self-punishment rite’:
As temperatures soared on a very hot Sunday in August, there were a number of people who had to be medically assisted or taken away after suffering heat stroke.
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Lawrence of Arabia
Penitenziagite!
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Yakoub
Just a thought – but Southern Italy was occupied by the Fatimids for several centuries, wasn’t it? Might this ceremony have an origin that predates the Madonna siting, I wonder? Mind you, if these folks parading through the Italian streets were Shi’a, there’d be outraged calls to ban it.
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Lawrence of Arabia
“Hundreds of years” is a rather vague description of the origins of this particular ritual. But, parades of flagellants were not uncommon in the Middle Ages, so the practice was not limited to this town nor tied to the discovery of the statue. I don’t know about Muslim influences, if any.
I didn’t think the Fatimids progressed beyond Sicily, though?
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thabet
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Lawrence of Arabia
that clearly caused Damian’s blood pressure to spike
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thabet
Despite having very different political and religious views to Thompson, I quite like his blog. He’s open and honest about his views actually has a good sense of humour. He even left a comment on my old blog once.
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Lawrence of Arabia
I don’t think anyone questions the power of his wit.
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Shams al-Nahar
Here we go….more data.
via AllahP.
Protestant 61% Catholic 22% Jewish 1% Other 5% None 7% dk/na 3%
Do you see a problem?
Where are the mormons who represent 2% of the electorate? Not in the democratic party.
Here is my first revision…christian including mormons and other non-catholic non-protestant christians.
Christian 88% non-christian 12%.
Wish i had access to the cross-tabs….i think % christian is actually much higher.
The survey question should been binary, christian or non-christian.
My hypothesis is for full sample response (no dk/na, which means refusal to answer)…..that 1% jewish and 7% none would hold….the Paulites prolly do have an atheist cohort.
92% christian and 8% non-christian.-
Shams al-Nahar
+or- 4%.
lawl…..not very representative of “real” America, unless you live in the New Confederacy, America south of the mason-dixon line..
This is national data of tea party supporters …..I believe tea party attendees would poll nearly homogeneously christian.
The TPM is a religious grievance movement……not a politcal party. -
Abu Noor
Sen. Jim Demint seems to agree with your assessment Shams,
Senator Jim DeMint: No actually just the opposite because I really think a lot of the motivation behind these Tea Party crowds is a spiritual component. I think it’s very akin to the Great Awakening before the American Revolution. A lot of our founders believed the American Revolution was won before we ever got into a fight with the British. It was a spiritual renewal.
Senator Jim DeMint: I’m ‘praying for you’ comes up more than anything else in these crowds so I know there’s a spiritual component out there.
Senator Jim DeMint: I think as this thing (the Tea Party movement) continues to roll you’re going to see a parallel spiritual revival that goes along with it.
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Abu Noor
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Abu Noor
Oh, I see that your link was referring to DeMInt as well, sorry I hadn’t read it when I came across the other one. I can’t find good recent numbers on the percentage of the Republican party that are Christians, but it’s gotta be quite high.
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shams
Abu Noor, if everyone in a movement professes the same religious belief, doesn’t that become a religious movement, and not a political movement?
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Lawrence of Arabia
Without denying the usefulness of each term, I am not sure how clear a distinction one can maintain, at the end of the end of the day, between the ‘political’ and ‘religious’ for those with a deep belief in God (at least if that God is the Infinite horizon of all existence). Both politics and religion deal with fundamental questions of how we relate to the Good and cannot ultimately be pried apart from one another.
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shams
The problem with Tea Party Jesus is that he seems to be advocating for the establishment of an american theocracy though His servants Sarah Palin and Jim DeMint.
Do you know, Lawrence, I think I could I could write a satire of Liberal Fascism just by doing global changes on some words?
…just globalchange liberal to conservative and fascist to islamofacist and christofascist and Nazi to al-Qaeda and Hitler to Osama bin Ladin….Mussolini and Stalin to Mullah Omar and Khamenei….and/or Sarah Palin and Jim Demint…swap the Taliban and the Basheej in for various fascist sects…..change all mentions of fascism to religious fascism…..change Tea Party rally to Weimar rally, etc, etc…….you get the picture.
Instant blockbuster non?
lawl.
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Pretty Pink Unicorns
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/21/words-of-wisdom-from.html is all I have to say on the subject. There’s no content; what kind of political movement has no content?
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shams
lawl, the TPM has content……the Unified Force Theory of Tea Party Jesus.
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thabet
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John Duckham
They are all there on that thread. Been blogging on the Telegraph a bit recently (johnpitcher….. full name John Duckham Pitcher). There are some choice examples. 1Bonnie is my Islamaphobic of the week on my website.
Not Thompson nor any of the others can come up with anything other than rabble rousing; none look at: How you break it to the British workforce, of all colours, creeds and religious persuasion that they will soon be picking fruit and being paid by the bushel? How do you put it to them that there is nothing wrong with being a white British teenager and cleaning cars and being paid by the car? And how do you get those who don’t want to do these things into technical colleges to train as electricians; carpenters; brickies and machine tool operators? How do you get companies to offer apprenticeships that have real value and raise the British skill levels again? How do you rebuild industries that can offer everyone jobs?
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thabet
Thompson’s actually a little smarter than he lets on. But I still can’t get over the fact he lives in Notting Hill. Very amusing.
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thabet
Creationism amongst higher education students in Brussels:
This according to a study by a research at ULB from several years ago.
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thabet
The Catholic Church in Malaysia has lost the latest round of a legal battle with Malaysian authorities over the use of the word ‘Allah’ as a translation for ‘God’ in Catholic publications.
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thabet
Catholics follow Hindus and Sikhs in complaining of being unloved by the British media and Channel 4 in particular.
Again, the general response from Muslims would probably be: you’re welcome to our media attention.
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thabet
Hopefully.
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shams, 
Mc Kiernan, 
thabet are discussing. 
Pretty Pink Unicorns, and 1 other are discussing. 
Arwi 1:28 pm on September 17, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Stranger things have happened. There is a Shriners group called Wahabi Shriners, in Mississippi of all places, and obviously not named for theological motivations.
Whenever I see Dirty Girl beauty products, I imagine a line of Dirty Kuffar products.
thabet 1:45 am on September 18, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Bagehot notes the same about Muslims in the UK:
Arwi 8:05 am on September 18, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
You omitted his assertion that prejudice decreased as Catholics became more “mainstream” in belief: One big change came when the Catholic church in England became less hardline towards its own flock, says Eamon Duffy of Cambridge University. Before the mid-1960s, bishops would still tell devout youngsters where they could safely study, and denounced marriage to non-Catholics as a threat to the faith. For Diarmaid MacCulloch of Oxford University, English tolerance of Catholicism moved in lockstep with the emergence of a mainstream middle class among Irish immigrant communities.
aziz 8:15 am on September 18, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
this is an important point, I think.
Perhaps teh mainstreaming is necessary to create protected space for the more orthodox. But if so it does suggest a fundamental limit to the very ideal of religious tolerance – religion can only be tolerated if it compromises.
Lawrence of Arabia 10:26 pm on September 18, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
this is always the limit of political liberalism that one ought to keep in mind. one sees it stated openly in liberals with perspectives ranging from Rorty to Rawls: the faithful can only be committed to god/the good within the bounds of order provided by the State, i.e., religion is, by definition, private.
thabet 10:43 pm on September 18, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Has it been any other way (even if we replace the modern nation-state with pre-modern polities)?
I guess the harder question to answer is: can it be any other way?
Lawrence of Arabia 11:03 pm on September 18, 2010 Permalink
the key conclusion, with regards to the liberal state is the end of the sentence: “religion is…by definition private”. What I was interested in there was the constriction of religion to a sub-political phenomenon and its inability to organize the totality of people’s lives.
i believe the key issue here is whether or not the State is in the business of promoting the Good, or whether the state is neutral with respect to the Good and allows people to muck it out on their own in the free market of goods, if you will.
Since we were discussing liberal states, the state is not, generally, understood to be concerned with questions of the Good and these are left for the private sphere (at least this is the liberal state’s own self-understanding; i don’t think one can or ought to accept this. states are always promoting some vision of the good which acts as a new “religion”). Religion thereby is consigned to the private sphere.
Even with states/societies that do believe that the political/social must be motivated by questions of the Good, one still probably ought to ask whether they take the state/society itself as the Good to be attained or whether the Good is beyond the political/social and that toward which the political/social directs its members.
shams 8:47 pm on September 19, 2010 Permalink
LoA you posted this originally.
America is a protestant nation.
Separation of church and state comes from Martin Luther prying the reins out of the religious hierarchy’s hands, not from the Enlightenment.
Lawrence of Arabia 11:22 pm on September 19, 2010 Permalink
I tend to interpret America as a kind of post-Christian Protestantism, which is why I said…
But you are right: the public/private split that is so central to political liberalism is a post-Christian version of the works/faith split.
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There are many different strands to the Enlightenment. But, Luther is spoken of very favorably by any number of Enlightenment figures, who often read him in the anti-clerical, anti-authoritarian way that you just did, and for whom the Reformation is simply the first wave of Enlightenment.
That said, by the 1650s and on through the early 1800s (even later if you were Catholic), the more orthodox your Christianity, the more likely you were to be opposed to the emergent liberalism. The more radical wing of the Enlightenment (which often included heterodox Christians like the Socinians) and the Radical Reformation (which included minority groups like the Mennonites and Quakers) were more strident activists for what we think of as political liberalism.
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By the way, for Hauerwas, who is Protestant, the effect of the American experiment on Protestantism has been to make that Protestantism thorough-goingly pagan…
shams 8:31 am on September 20, 2010 Permalink
Yes! But the most relevent part of Hauerwas for me was the idea of political protestantism. That is what larges swaths of America selfdescribe as– judeochristianity…the religion of the nation-state America. That is why it is accurate to describe Our Epic Fail in Iraq and Afghanistan as an attempt to proselytize judeochristianity, America’s Religion.
it also occurs to me that the faith/works dichotomy is another reason interfaith dialog is pretty much impossible between al-Islam and christianity. The heart of al-Islam is justice. I cannot see justice in deathrow murders being saved by faith. My bornagain friend i ride with told me she was just as sinful as Jeffrey Dahmer.
To muslims that cannot be….it is unjust.
Arwi 10:48 am on September 20, 2010 Permalink
The more radical wing of the Enlightenment (which often included heterodox Christians like the Socinians) and the Radical Reformation (which included minority groups like the Mennonites and Quakers) were more strident activists for what we think of as political liberalism.
Are there comparable Muslim sects? The followers of comparable thinkers like Soroush or Mohd Taha haven’t quite coalesced as sects afaik.
shams 11:09 am on September 20, 2010 Permalink
i don’t think so, Arwi. The shakers and snakehandlers and the Church of the Living Word are examples of christian sects based on a single phrase out of the bible. The sunnah and hadith enforce a sort of memetic hygiene on quranic exegesis that prevents that. Also, quranic exegesis can only be done by experts (islamic scholars)– thus the injunction against translating the Qur’an.
thabet 8:28 am on September 18, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I didn’t “omit” anything (!?), and I think his conclusion captures this anyway by linking affluence with ‘integration’.
Arwi 10:50 am on September 20, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Omitter! Just kidding, it was not intended as an accusation.
Muslims in the US are plenty affluent, has that helped “mainstream” them? I don’t know.
Dean Esmay 5:34 pm on September 19, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I’m a little surprised at your reaction there, Aziz, only because you seem somehow not to have noticed that it took the Irish Catholics about a century to reach that mainstream status. If I were inclined to be negative, I would say “so the Muslims only need to work really hard for a hundred years or so.” Although I don’t think that was the point either; it took Mormons only a few decades once they decided to work on it, although lingering Mormon prejudice is still around.
(If I posted this on my own blog someone would accuse me of being pro-Mormonism. LOL.)
shams 8:56 pm on September 19, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
try living in Colorado.
everyone in my cohort here hates the polygs with the fire of a thousand suns.
thabet 2:01 am on September 20, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
This is too funny.
shams 8:40 am on September 20, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
why? teh polygs are very discriminated against in university culture here. In the 70s the western college conference teams refused to play BYU teams and history informs the present.
In the four corners region the polygs have colonized the local governments so they can have their plural marriage and chattel slavery of women and chidren in peace.
Mormons are pretty discriminated against in colorado.
aziz 12:25 pm on September 20, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
if youre dating that century from the first major immmigration of Irish to America, then muslims are already 3/4 of teh way through that century, Dean.
Mc Kiernan 7:02 pm on September 19, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Dean,
Actually, neither YOU nor Aziz nor Hamza Yusuf GET it. Trying to imply a political quid pro quo is nonsense, much less a 100 years before you’ll get accepted. Totally bogus self-serving blather.
The only thing Irish Catholics wanted, was to work and do their own thing.
Hamza Yusuf Hanson ( the greek) was born like in 1960. What would he know of irish catholics in Philadelphia or Scranton or in Carbondale or the coal country or slate pickers?
Ask me, I’ll tell you who these people were.
shams 8:53 pm on September 19, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
that is all amerimuslims want. oh, and not spending a trillion dollars killing our brothers and sisters on some crackhead missionary proselytizing would be good too.
im four generations out of county cork.
my horse came from the galway blazers hunt capper string.
if you don’t have a horse, you are insufficiently irish.
sry, but that is just how it is.
shams 8:46 am on September 20, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
i wonder what thabet thinks about the Hunt, since he’s a limey prole.
Mc Kiernan 4:12 pm on September 20, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
You predicate yer life on an orse.
I’ve an ancester what won the Irish Derby ,
with his orse.
do I get any points ?
shams 4:57 pm on September 20, 2010 Permalink
+10
it is my favorite part of the Qur’an.
Mc Kiernan 9:41 pm on September 19, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Right…next thing yer gonna tell us yer a fenian what reverted…ha ha.
Get a clue. You can’t unbaptize yerself…Katie…
shams 6:04 am on September 20, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
but all humans are born muslim.
my parents had me baptized as a choiceless infant.
Islam is the superset, McKiernan.
Mc Kiernan 4:16 pm on September 20, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
That’s right. And Martin Luthers dna gobsmacked the Signers of the Declaration of Independence plus the Constitution.
shams 4:54 pm on September 20, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
no…..the founders and framers were highly educated Enlightenment deists for the most part. the yeoman farmers are the carriers of Luthers memetic DNA.
That is why the conservative base is so schizophrenic in America….they have to pretend to believe in the separation of church and state to claim the constitution and the founders and framers– but they really only want everyone else’s church separated from American govenment……not theirs.
Mc Kiernan 8:04 pm on September 20, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
How did you ever dream up that one ?
Like you went from 1770 something to the conservative base is schizo in America.
Shams al-Nahar 6:23 am on September 21, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
its the truth.
that is why we are not Enlightenment liberators in Iraq and Afghanistan…..and we are not armed social workers either.
We are missionaries with guns, proselytizing judeochristian democracy.
And that is why Iraq is an Epic Fail, and we are gettin’ an asswhupping in the Graveyard of Empires.