Middle East Madness

Two things struck me in today's Gulf News

1) The Grand Mufti of Egypt (and I'm sorry I cannot find the link in the online GN) says that women cannot be Judges. Oh yeah, why's that? Apparently it's because the source of law in Egypt is Shari'a (I thought Egypt was more or less secular). And Shari'a says that a woman cannot be alone in a room with unrelated men. Since Judges frequently work on a panel of three, and need to consult each other in private, it is not possible for women to be Judges. Well, listen Mr Mufti. A Judge can sit alone, yes? So no problem. Or there may be two lady Judges and one bloke. Who's wrong now? I find this whole thing incredibly demeaning, and I know I will get into trouble for this, but...why does Islam presume that a civilized man and a civilized woman cannot be alone together for whatever reason without instantly leaping on one another to have hot sex? It's even more insulting for this Mufti guy to suggest that highly-educated Judges of whatever sex cannot control themselves.

He then goes on to say that the propensity of women to get pregnant and have children is also a problem, although he does not specify why. Can somebody please tell me why Islam always places the blame (or at least the punishment) on women?

Those damned Jezebels, temptresses, I'm only a bloke, my willy does the thinking, how can anything be my fault!???!@!

2) The UAE Ministry of Education has announced that from the beginning of the next academic year, public and private schools will all follow the same holiday and examination schedule. With the greatest respect to the honourable Ministry, this is complete and utter bollocks. How can a private school following Indian board courses hold their exams on the dates/times specified by MinEd? Or British, European or American schools? The exams are set by external bodies, and are run worldwide at the specified times.

Sadly, this is yet another case of MinEd announcing first, consulting later, rescinding thereafter.

You would think they would learn, given the business they are in, but no. Every two or three years, they have a go at enforcing segregated schooling. Schools are given something like two or three weeks' notice, when really they need two years. But in any case, parents of kids in private schools pay a shitload of money in fees so that their kids get the education they need, not what MinEd thinks they should have. And if I wanted my child to grow up as some kind of dysfunctional weirdo in a single-sex school, I'd have sent him to Eton!

If it was up to me, the Ministry of Education would have no role whatsoever in private education: they don't understand the concept, hell they don't even seem to know that international exam boards cannot change their exam dates to suit the whims of a local in the UAE MinEd. Why they are involved in trying to regulate private education at all is a complete mystery to me.

Popegate

Gulf News has today published a very interesting article from the UK Daily Telegraph about the Pope's recent speech and the ensuing insanity. The Pope will be making a public statement later today. I might keep you posted.

A bit later...

El Papa has said he is 'regretful' of the actions that followed his lecture and clarified that the quote in no reflected his own personal thoughts. Most gracious.

I hope it satisfies the mullahs. Apology? Forget it.

The Pope Thing

I did a post about this last night, and woke up this morning and pulled it. This one is better.

I get the sense that not one of the protesting Muslims has any idea of the context in which the Pope uttered those words (indeed there were questions on the UAE Community blog as to where and when these words had come from).

Well, he was not standing on his balcony or at a pulpit. The offending words were said as part of a private lecture at a University - they were quoted from an historical source and were not intended to represent the thoughts of the Pontiff himself. The lecture is densely theological, and I've included the full text of it below. If you can understand it, good on yer!

As I understand it, El Papa is arguing for rationality and reason in religion, as opposed to blind faith and authoritarianism. He also spends quite a lot of time slagging off the Ancient Greeks, but I'm not hearing any protests from them. I will admit that his first example was a very bad choice (he would, perhaps, have been better off citing the Spanish Inquisition - the Catholic Church has not exactly been squeaky-clean throughout the centuries).

But here's the point. If an academic cannot be free to expound, explore and explain controversial ideas in the context of an institute of learning, where can he do it? Every day, throughout the world, words are written and spoken in the name of learning that will undoubtedly cause great offence to someone, somewhere. It's that old freedom of speech thing again.

Here beginneth the lecture...

APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI TO MÜNCHEN, ALTÖTTING AND REGENSBURG (SEPTEMBER 9-14, 2006)
MEETING WITH THE REPRESENTATIVES OF SCIENCE
LECTURE OF THE HOLY FATHER
Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg Tuesday, 12 September 2006

Faith, Reason and the University Memories and Reflections

Your Eminences, Your Magnificences, Your Excellencies, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium. I think back to those years when, after a pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the University of Bonn. That was in 1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with students and in particular among the professors themselves. We would meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas - something that you too, Magnificent Rector, just mentioned - the experience, in other words, of the fact that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason - this reality became a lived experience. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between - as they were called - three "Laws" or "rules of life": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation (*4V8,>4H - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably.

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the [word?] ". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.

In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for some time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and simply declares "I am", already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: "I am". This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's nature.

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - "8@(46¬ 8"JD,\"", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history - it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.

The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity - a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.

Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.

The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a student, and in the early years of my teaching, this programme was highly influential in Catholic theology too. It took as its point of departure Pascal's distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In my inaugural lecture at Bonn in 1959, I tried to address the issue, and I do not intend to repeat here what I said on that occasion, but I would like to describe at least briefly what was new about this second stage of dehellenization. Harnack's central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. Fundamentally, Harnack's goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ's divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament, as he saw it, restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university. Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant's "Critiques", but in the meantime further radicalized by the impact of the natural sciences. This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature's capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield ultimate certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.

This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.

I will return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology's claim to be "scientific" would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science", so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.

And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is - as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector - the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought - to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: "It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss". The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

*** NOTE: The Holy Father intends to supply a subsequent version of this text, complete with footnotes. The present text must therefore be considered provisional.
© Copyright 2006 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

So now you know.

The Return Of The Danes

So, it's official, the idiotic and completely bloody pointless 'boycott' of all things Danish is over. A conference of Islamic 'scholars' in Bahrain (according to Big Pharoah) has

issued a statement calling for the Muslim world to end their boycott of products made by the Danish company Arla Foods, the manufacturer of Lurpak butter.

I don't know why none of the local papers have reported this, but I did see a freezer at my local Choithram's today, packed to bursting with Lurpak. And the price is now Dhs 8.25, as against Dhs 7.50 before the boycott. I didn't check any sell-by dates.

I'm Offended. But Not Easily.

More fuel has been added to the fire of the 'Clash of Civilizations'. 80s rockers Saxon were due to play in Dubai this coming weekend, but permission has been withdrawn by the Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing. Why? Because one of their songs, 'Crusader', is considered offensive to Muslims. The lyrics are written from the viewpoint of a brave English chap going off to the Holy Land to fight the 'heathen Saracen', any time between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. You might consider it akin to an historical document. Or a work of fiction. You certainly cannot consider it a literal threat to Muslims, but this is apparently what some of the local Arab press has been whipping up.

...what will Saxon do in Dubai’s land and on Arabian sands? Are they going to make us, the Saracen heathens, taste their music just as if their guitars were swords made of steel?

When this started becoming a problem, the band said they would not play that particular song at this gig. End of story you might think. But noooo.

This is like family feuds over 'what you said to Sharon at Our Jason's wedding', only much much worse.

I just hope no-one mentions the Muslims and Christians Festivals that happen every year in Spain. Oops, too late.

I Got Lurpak!

Only a little bit. BetterArf and I went to the local food and bev establishment this evening for dinner. Beside the bread were some individually-wrapped portions of Lurpak. I immediately stuffed them into my pocket, and we asked a waitress to bring more. This establishment is also selling a lot more Carlsberg than it used to. Good on 'em.

By the time I got home, of course, I had forgotten all about my pocket full of molten Danish butter. Yeukkh!

Lurpak Again

I can't believe the Danish cartoons controversy is not only still going on, it is being used as an excuse for a lot of wanton violence, rioting and needless deaths. 11 in Pakistan, 16 in Libya, etc. For what? To make a point - 'we are upset'. Possibly more accurately, 'our Imam told us to be upset'.

Abu Ardvaark did an interesting post on the topic a few days ago. He described a report he had seen on Al Arabiya TV about "a new petition issued by 41 leading Islamist personalities on February 13 calling for a resolution of the cartoons controversy through the passage of an international law criminalizing insults against Prophets (Mohammed, Jesus, and Moses are the ones named)".

I posted this comment in reply to that:

"No, no, no!

You cannot bind secular countries into observance of the sensibilities of the gazillion religions and sects that exist on earth. So why would you single out one for special treatment?

I appreciate that many people were whipped up into a frenzy of 'I am offended'. But the solution now demanded is just utterly unworkable. It seems to me, and I say this with the greatest of respect to all true Muslims, that many extremists in the Islamic world are trying to use this issue to inflame conflict. And if the ridiculous notion of criminalising blasphemy against all religions were to come to pass, I would be looking for another planet to live on.

The 'offended' are now demanding apologies from the Danish government AND people. Come on! Regret has been been expressed, but you will absolutely not get a full apology from a Government whose laws unequivocally state that it cannot be held responsible for any offence committed by its subjects.

How hard is that to understand? I believe that both the cartoonists and the newspaper have apologised: these are the people responsible, so why not just accept that and get back to normality?

Islamists may mock 'freedom of speech', but it is a right that has been fought for over centuries in the West and it will not be compromised by a bunch of religious fanatics."

Also, I note with regret that our supermarket chains here in the Emirates are still boycotting Danish products. It would be interesting to see what would happen if one of these chains was brave enough to put these products back out on display. I for one would be filling my freezer with Lurpak. I already have a lifetime's supply of Lego (the greatest thing ever invented for kids of all ages).

What gets me about this is that foreign media are saying 'people of the Emirates are fully supporting the boycott of Danish goods' when what they actually should be saying is that 'people of the Emirates are being denied the chance to buy Danish goods'. Bit of a difference. Boycotts don't work the way you want them to. Arla Foods, the innocent victim in all this, are losing $1.5 million every day in the Gulf. Quite soon they will have to decide whether to tough it out, or close down their Middle East operations, resulting in the loss of 800 jobs in Saudi Arabia and 200 in the UAE. Did Arla Foods draw or publish the cartoons? Did they have anything to do with them at all? No they did not.

Does any right-thinking Muslim think this company should be penalised in this way for something they had nothing to do with? Or, for that matter, the government and people of Denmark? Somebody tell me...

(Oh, and I just found this - please read it).

Where's My Lurpak?

OK, I was trying to keep my head down on the Danish cartoon fiasco. But I cannot ignore it any more, it's too important. This issue will probably go down in history as the week when the West and the Islamic world finally realise that they simply will never understand each other. I don't care to speculate about what might happen hereafter.

I do know this: if a similar act had been perpetrated against a Western target (Christ with a bomb on his head, for example) the response in the West would be a chuckle, a shrug of the shoulders. Doesn't matter. Not much bothered.

One of the basic issues here is that the West is largely secular. Religion is important to some people, but it is nothing like as demanding as being a devout Muslim. Western countries are no longer governed by ancient religious tracts, they are governed by humanism and rationality. To quote Voltaire:

I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

And for every single European, this is something we know in our bones. Going against this, for a European, seems to be the exact equivalent of somebody making a joke about the prophet Mohammed. Don't go there. OK?

Nothing much happened back in September when these cartoons were first published, but the leader of the Danish Muslims wanted to whip up a bit of global attention. He printed a booklet containing reproductions of the published cartoons plus a few others that were far more offensive. One of them showed Mohammed (pbuh) with the face of a pig. You'll agree, even if you live on Mars, that that is pretty fucking offensive, but it was nothing to do with the Nyllens-Posten series. Anyhoo, our mullah goes to see the top boys in Egypt and Saudi and wherever else, and shows 'em the booklet. They're a bit upset, but nothing happens...

...until the Hajj tragedy in Makkah, when suddenly the Saudi Government press machine needed to deflect world attention from their never-ending incompetence, and so they turned their attention on the cartoons.

Now we have a boycott of Danish goods throughout the Arabian Gulf. Not as in individual customers not buying Danish goods, but supermarket chains pulling the stuff off the shelves. 'Excuse me, I want to buy a lot of Lurpak'. 'Sorry sir, it's in the cold store, we are supporting the pointless boycott of Danish products'. Hmmm.

So we now have the ridiculous situation where the Prime Minister of Denmark has offered an apology to the Muslim World. He was totally wrong to do so. Correction: apparently he has not apologised. He would be totally wrong to do so. It is not his responsibility. In a free country, the press can say what the hell they like. If that libels anyone then the libelled party has a proper legal path to seek redress. The Prime Minister is in no way responsible for the actions of individuals in his country.

Back to the Muslims. One of the issues is the so-called prohibition on any kind of image of the Prophet. Shi'a and Sufis don't even believe in that. It's not in the Quran, only a suspect Hadith:
http://www.crankyprofessor.com/archives/000492.html. Westerners just don't get it, really, is it the end of the world to draw a picture of anybody? Is it?

Of the twelve cartoons, (setting aside the idea that any kind of representation of the Prophet is supposed to be haram) only two of them can really be considered offensive. If you have not seen the cartoons, go here.

I'm really sorry that this has happened. But here's the thing. Westerners can and will say and publish what they want in their own countries. They have full, sovereign, legal authority to do so. They are not required to observe the sensitivities of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists or even Christians. They are not even beholden to the sensitivities of their own government (who, after all, are only elected short-term representatives) or of any other government. Unfamiliar with the concept? See this...

Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, when the rule prescribes not [if not illegal], and not to be subject to the inconstant, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.
- John Locke (1632 - 1704) Political Philosopher and Genius

As long as you are not directly inciting violence against members of a particular religion or slandering any individual then it's OK. I, as a Westerner, I know this in my bones.

And so I am deeply disappointed by the local reaction to this controversy. It is unreasonable, it is directed at the wrong people (not just an apology is demanded locally, but an OATH from the Danish PM that this would never happen again - as if he could even think of doing such a thing). It just highlights two utterly different ways of looking at the world that can probably not be reconciled.
The west: we can say what we like.
The east: no you can't.

Dammit, it was all going so well. My bones are aching.