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  johnpi 10:08 am on November 5, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: drug abuse, drug rehabilitation (2), drugs (5), Egypt (94), Muslim drug abuse (3), Muslim drug addicts, Muslim psychiatrists (2), Muslim psychologists, Muslims in therapy, psychiatry (3), psychology (11), social science (2), social sciences (2), social workers (2)

  Egypt has an estimated 6 million drug addicts, about 7 percent of the population. Al Jazeera reports.

  Psychiatrist quoted in the report: “You need to go to the people who have started to experiment with cigarette smoking by the age of 8, who are dropouts of school, who are not doing very well in school, who have violence in their family or in their personal history, who are experimenting with sex. So these are the sort of ‘naughty boys’ and the programs are not designed to reach out to them.”

  The psychiatrist is identified as a specialist in drug addiction, but his specialty has limited application in fighting addiction. He is a medical doctor who can write prescriptions that will treat the side effects of drug detox, but more psychologists and social workers are needed, an assertion that in both my experience and my reading is controversial.

  Here’s Khaled Abou El Fadl (book: ‘The Great Theft’) describing Islamic ‘puritans’ approach to the social sciences:

  To become truly modernized, according to the puritans, means to regress back in time and recreate the golden age of Islam. This, however, does not mean that they want to abolish technology and scientific advancements. Rather, their program is deceptively simple – Muslims should learn the science and technology invented by the West, but in order to resist Western culture, Muslims should not seek to study the social sciences or humanities.

  The puritanical strain’s influence on ‘orthodox’ or conservative Muslims in discouraging individuals from choosing these professions damages the larger community’s ability to engage drug addicts with talk therapy and other therapys derived from the social sciences that could greatly improve treatment. I take this as an answer to why there are not enough Muslim psychologists and social workers. This seems to be a trans-national problem in Muslim communities.

   

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  johnpi 9:24 pm on May 2, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: alcohol abuse (2), censorship (44), drug abuse, Faux Feminist Watch (8), Faux Journalist Watch (8), Hedayah Darwish (2), Internet vs print media (5), Kul Al-Watan (2), retaliation against bloggers (13), retaliation against journalists (9), saudi arabia (135), sexual harassment (8), women's rights (32)

  A Saudi Arabian blogger has published an expose about women reporters in that country suffering sexual harassment and having to sleep with their bosses to keep jobs and get promotions. The blogger, Hedayah Darwish, also reports that Saudi journalists sometimes resort to using drugs and alcohol. As most any reporter will tell you, use and abuse of substances is sadly far more common than it should be among those in that profession due to the stress and the sometimes inhuman demands that come with the job, so this is not a wild report.

  Now however, it seems the bosses and editors she exposed are utilizing the Saudi Journalists Association to destroy her, with 13 female journalists smearing Darwish and calling for a government crackdown and new round of censorship of bloggers and e-newspapers that publish “content that creates social harm and negative images.” (The gender of the accusers is important because they claim Darwish impugned female journalists only, but Darwish seems to deny that in the Arab News article linked above.) The attack on Darwish is a trojan horse that may allow the traditional print journalists of Saudi Arabia, who operate under more restrictive censorship rules than their online brothers, to cut out the competition by prompting a government over-reaction that squashes access to Internet information sources in that country.

  Aside from that larger issue, the most important journalistic question that arises out of the story is this: Is the report accurate? If the story is accurate then there is no issue, since the truth should be the highest value as a standard of personal, professional, societal and even religious integrity. “Social harm” and “negative images” should be secondary considerations to the truth in a country that claims the Quran for its constitution.

  If Darwish’s story contained inaccuracies, the Saudi journalists should have published reports that corrected the inaccuracies and set the record straight. Instead they acted like Stalinist toadies and called for a full-on government slam-down on Internet publishers. So I’m creating a new tag here at TalkIslam “Faux Journalist Watch” to go with the “Faux Feminist Watch”, both of which seem to apply to this story.