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An inter-ethnic brawl which doesn’t seem to have received much attention…
Large groups of rivals had been meeting regularly to fight and had been seen with weapons including machetes and hand guns.
This, rather than religious fanaticism, is the bigger, far more real, problem for young boys of Muslim origin in the UK.
Sunny notes that a Sikh group is upset at a BBC Asian Network presenter (who happens to be Muslim) for his ‘denigration’ of a Sikh symbol (the kirpan). Razib picks up on this news story and notes:
There is a third, more local, dimension in the UK: there is (or was in the 1990s) a lot of friction between Pakistani (i.e. Muslim) and Sikh gangs in certain hotspots across the UK, the most notorious of which is Chalvey Estate in Slough (just outside of west London). I didn’t grow up anywhere near Slough (I’m from the other side of town), but like most British Pakistanis have lots of family there. There were always punch ups (actual and rumoured) between gangs, and tales of boys from each side ‘targetting’ girls from the other community for sex or religious conversion as a way of humiliating their ‘enemies’.
Umar wants to address the problems with masculinity that he believes white converts from secular, educated backgrounds bring into the Muslim community with them, such as interest in sado-masochism and the inability to be a strong male leaders to their families. Reports that desi women are rejecting men of their ethnicity for lack of masculinity too.
Umar’s assertions about Islamically mandated masculinity have heightened my awareness to the topic and I’ve been following the various comments around the Islamsphere with interest (though unfortunately it’s all devolving into a snipe-fest on Sh. Hamza Yusuf). I’ve always thought of masculinity and femininity as innate. I’ve never seen the word “masculinity” appear in any translation of the Quran or hadiths.
Anyway, I’m always interested in what other “people of the book” are doing when it seems to align somehow with a conversation I’m following, so here’s a report on a movement among evangelicals that has been going on for awhile, but that is evolving to a new level of organization. It’s called the “patriarchy movement.” They’ve issued a manifesto that you can read here.
Women’s liberation through submission: The new countercultural feminism
The “countercultural” [counter to feminist culture] attitudes that signers support include the idea that women are called to affirm and encourage godly masculinity, and honor the God-ordained male headship of their husbands and pastors; that wifely submission to male leadership in the home and church reflects Christ’s submission to God, His Father; that “selfish insistence on personal rights is contrary to the spirit of Christ”; and, in a pronatalist turn of phrase that recalls the rhetoric of the Quiverfull conviction, their willingness to “receive children as a blessing from the Lord.”
“Wimpy theology makes wimpy women. Wimpy theology does not give a woman a God big enough, strong enough, wise enough, good enough to handle the realities of life in a way that enables her to magnify Him and His Son all the time… Wimpy theology doesn’t have a granite foundation of God’s sovereignty underneath.” Non-wimpy theology gives women both a God strong enough to see them through the worst of life, Piper continued, and also a set of non-negotiable mandates for life. Namely that submission is a wife’s divine calling, and truest form of power.
We present a helpful template for Muslim Men: The Only Letter You Will Ever Need