Indigo Jo Blogs

Linda Grant wrote this article in last Thursday's Guardian, on why small-town Americans vote Republican, even those who are well-educated like one she spoke to. Those she actually knows perceives "whitebread Republicans" as "like children - someone has to tell them what to do and what to think, they're incapable of independent ideas":

I asked a sophisticated and well-travelled Republican why he voted the way he did. He described growing up "dirt poor" in a small town in Northern California where joining the military was your sole ticket out; where the people in his family who depended on welfare stayed where they were and the ones who worked their fingers to the bone managed to make a better life for themselves. For him, joining the army led directly to an education. In fact, it led all the way to Princeton. But how, I asked him, baffled, could someone as intelligent as he is believe that George W Bush was anything but a cretin?

Because, he explained, people in small towns don't like or trust intellectuals, particularly ones who appear to be sneering at them for their supposed stupidity. They admire a plain-speaking man; it's what they know and what they are used to.

They always assumed Bush was a regular guy who could keep his thoughts concise.

The problem is that many of these "plain speaking" Republican politicians are not those who have worked themselves rich or to a good education, but actually people born into rich families and educated at many of the same places which produce the "sneering" liberal intellectuals. Thomas Frank's two most recent books, What's the Matter with Kansas? and The Wrecking Crew, provide examples of the type, wealthy pro-corporate conservatives who rely on the working-class vote to push policies which benefit only themselves and their friends, and never the working classes whose votes they rely on (also see Joe Bageant in Tuesday's edition).

Most of them did not have to "work their fingers to the bone" to get where they are, Bush himself being the classic example, and while some do and succeed, very many more do and stay poor. I wonder if Linda Grant bothered to put this point to him, since these politicians' backgrounds are no secret. I can see the virtue of not wanting to remain dependent on the state, but successful people often forget that their success might be down to good luck as well as hard work (hence we sometimes find that they refuse to leave much or anything to their children, because they want them to work as hard as they had to).

Zoe Williams, in today's Guardian, on the mawkish obsession with the horses and other pets which belonged to the family believed to have been murdered by its indebted father a couple of weeks ago in Shropshire, who shot not only his wife and daughter but also his horses and dogs, before setting fire to his house and killing himself:

We persist, though, in seeing a certain nobility in the man who destroys everything to avoid "shame". Sure, he must have been crazy, but in a nice way. He has his priorities the wrong way round, but that doesn't mean he didn't treasure these lives that he took possession of so freely. As the Sun (or rather, "a source") said of Foster: "In the end his state of mind must have been, 'If I can't have all this, nobody will'. He adored his wife and daughter so he must have been in a terrible mental state to do what he did."

It makes no sense, this stuff: to talk in one sentence of a dog-in-the-manger motivation so idiotic and immature you'd balk at it from a toddler; and then in the next breath to attribute an emotion as deep and encompassing as adoration to this petulant, wanton, arrogant man-child. Other newspapers have scented the act with an Egyptian grandeur, as Foster interred himself, pharaoh-like, with all his "belongings", his wife and pets and offspring, in the rustic tomb that was so soon to be repossessed.

With the fasting moving back to the very beginning of autumn and the first couple of days fasting being the most difficult they've been since, well, whenever they were last in April, I have noticed a strange phenomenon affecting when people are starting their fasts. People in places that are very close together are starting fasting nearly half an hour apart.

The Ramadan Timetable website has been posting timetables supplied by mosques up and down the country. My nearest mosque, at Kingston, has a timetable (PDF) which gives the end of suhoor at 0407 today (0409 tomorrow), with Peterborough, Leeds and Nottingham, all much further north, fasting from slightly earlier, while Aylesbury, High Wycombe and Hounslow all started around or after 0430, and yet finished at roughly the same time - about 1950. Bristol started at 0451, and while it's understandable that they started a bit later than London because Bristol is further west, they finished only about five minutes behind us, at 1956.

Surely some of these timings must be wrong, because the variations seem not to consistently match with the towns' locations, and in some cases wildly different suhoor timings are being given within the same city. Am I getting up at half three when I do not need to, or are some people having their breakfast when they should be fasting?

As someone who's been using Movable Type since 2005, I found that the biggest loss when upgrading to version 4 of that software was the lack of a blogroll manager, which had been available as a plug-in for version 3. This facility is standard on WordPress and Textpattern (and probably many other content management systems) and there is a plug-in called Web Links which provides the same functionality for Drupal. The developer of MT-Blogroll produced something called Link Roller, but it was inadequate for my needs as it did not support categories, using tags instead. Since upgrading to MT4, I have been using a static version of what MT Blogroll generated, although I had to change it significantly when changing my theme recently.

Well, I've produced a blogroll generator for Movable Type 4, which might even work with previous versions. Rather than a plug-in, it's a script which you can include as a widget or module, and can load by including it in any template. It then loads a blogroll file, which must be coded in XML. The plan is to develop a client which will produce these files, so unless you fancy hard-coding a blogroll in XML, this announcement is chiefly aimed at any developers who might be reading.

The PHP code can be downloaded from this address, while an example blogroll, demonstrating the format, can be found here. I intend to post more detailed instructions within a few days.

Yesterday, a new organisation was launched called the Accord Foundation, which claims to be "a new broad-based coalition calling for inclusive schools and an end to special arrangements for state funded religous schools". Its member organisations are listed as the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, the British Humanist Foundation, Ekklesia, the Hindu Academy, The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, the Socialist Education Association, a Labour affiliate which was once the party's main think-tank on education, and Women Against Fundamentalism. The supporters do include a few religious figures, but also includes Polly Toynbee (who wrote this in yesterday's Guardian) and AC Grayling, prominent secularist thinkers, as well as Professor Steve "I'll tell you about evolution and you can tell me when I'm lying" Jones.

The Channel 4 Dispatches programme last night returned to its theme of sending a reporter undercover to gather information on what's being taught in mosque study circles and being peddled in mosque bookshops. The programme focussed entirely on the Regent's Park mosque in London (or Islamic Cultural Centre, to give it its proper name), where it found that the bookshop, run by Darussalaam, which is known for publishing religious texts emanating from Saudi Arabia, was selling offensive DVDs including some from some Australian guy called "Shaikh Faiz", who talked of killing kaafirs with much enthusiasm, and that the women's study circle was telling women that they should not befriend non-Muslims or take British citizenship. This was, however, pretty much the head and front of the mosque's offending, as far as could be told in this programme.

Here is a transcript of the conversation I had with Anne Diamond, on the subject of the Daily Express complaining about Tower Hamlets council workers (in east London) will be asked not to eat at council meetings in front of fasting colleagues.

By the way, the same folks who made the Dispatches programme Undercover Mosque have made a follow-up, which is expected to air tomorrow, at 8pm. (I wonder if it's coincidence that it goes out when a lot of people will be breaking their fast, rather than a week earlier.)

I got through to speak to Anne Diamond (sitting in for Vanessa Feltz who's off having her gall bladder removed) today! The issue was a story picked out of the Daily Express (or Daily Spew as it's known in these parts) about Tower Hamlets council (Tower Hamlets is an area of east London with a heavy Muslim population) asking its councillors not to eat publically from next week onwards because a lot of their colleagues will be fasting (more at Islamophobia Watch). I think that this, in principle, is no big deal and quite a reasonable request, but obviously the Daily Spew thinks otherwise (how would they sell papers otherwise?). I said pretty much what I've said here, that the Spew has a history of stirring up hostility against Muslims with headlines like this one, and that as a driver I could not eat and drink while on the road or I could be fined for not driving with due care and attention. You can hear it here (about an hour and five minutes in; you need Real Player) until next Thursday; I intend to post a transcript of the conversation over the weekend insha Allah.

This morning, I was driving to work and was listening to the BBC London breakfast show, which features Jo Good and Paul Ross, who is every bit as irritating as his brother Jonathan (I had to turn him off in the end when he started practising the few bits of German he said he knew for a German caller who was telling us how they do things back home). Apparently there is some statistic that a fifth of accidents involve newly-qualified drivers, so there is some sort of consultation about whether restrictions ought to be placed on such drivers, such as having to attach a "P" (provisional) plate to the vehicle or not being allowed to drive on motorways or at night.

Recently three people I know visited Cairo. One of them, a Muslim of Somali origin who lives in Canada, spent two weeks there on the way to Dubai and Somalia; the other two, both relatives of mine, went on a day trip from Cyprus, where they had been enjoying a holiday. I have also been to Cairo; I spent two months and a bit there in 1999, learning Arabic (not much in the event). I think day trips to Cairo are a bad idea on many, many levels. Part of this is a bit of old-fashioned moralism mixed with new concerns about the environment; another is that a day trip to Cairo just does not do the place justice.

Radio 4's programme Sunday, its weekly religious affairs programme broadcast at 7am on Sunday mornings, today featured the "Islamic" marriage contract issue. You can listen to it here until next Sunday when the next programme is broadcast (it's a Flash application, no Real/Windows Media necessary); it starts at 30m 8s. Readers in London who listen to the BBC London station should listen out to see if Jumoke Fashola covers this issue on her late night show, which often deals with religious/spiritual matters; Vanessa Feltz (9am-noon weekdays) might cover it as well.

The Guardian today published a lengthy article about an MI5 report they had obtained (which was restricted), which stated that there was no real profile which could indicate what sort of young Muslim would get involved in terrorism. One important factor, though, was that a strong religious commitment meant one was less, rather than more, likely to get involved:

• The majority are British nationals and the remainder, with a few exceptions, are here legally. Around half were born in the UK, with others migrating here later in life. Some of these fled traumatic experiences and oppressive regimes and claimed UK asylum, but more came to Britain to study or for family or economic reasons and became radicalised many years after arriving.

• Far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could actually be regarded as religious novices. Very few have been brought up in strongly religious households, and there is a higher than average proportion of converts. Some are involved in drug-taking, drinking alcohol and visiting prostitutes. MI5 says there is evidence that a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation.

The report also found that many of those involved had criminal backgrounds, and that the groups they involved themselves did not mind recruiting criminals:

"We have noticed that terrorist groups are remarkably tolerant of individuals with serious criminal histories. This is the case even when those individuals continue to be involved in very serious non-terrorist crimes, including drug-trafficking, assault and even rape".

The so-called Islamic marriage contract recently proposed by the Muslim Institute has attracted a lot of attention in the Muslim blogosphere lately, much of it negative, for reasons anyone who has read it will understand. It contains brazenly anti-Islamic elements, much of the rest is useless boilerplate, and they have dishonestly claimed (by placing their logos on the front) support from Muslim organisations which do not, in fact, support the finished product even if they supported the idea of such a contract before. Haitham al-Haddad, one of the imams at al-Muntada al-Islami in London, explained this, along with a lot of the other Islamic legal issues, in this series of YouTubed lectures. (More: Traditional Islamism, Muslim Matters with a letter from Sh. Tawfique Chowdhury of AlKauthar Institute, IslamicPolitik.)

Haitham al-Haddad (a "salafi" imam based, if I remember rightly, at al-Muntada al-Islami in west London) has given a lengthy response to the recent "Islamic" marriage contract published by the Ghayasuddin Siddiqui front organisation, the Muslim Institute. It's a YouTube video in seven parts and starts here. This has attracted a lot of hostility from Muslims online, despite having claimed the support of the Muslim Council of Britain, which it doesn't have, and the Islamic Shari'ah Council, which it also doesn't have. Insha Allah, more from me on this later.

As you can see, I have changed the theme for this blog. I had not intended to do this when I upgraded my Movable Type installation last week, but the old templates did not support the new features in the new version of Movable Type, and having tried to copy the new features into my old templates and failed, the only thing left was to set up a new blog and copy all the old entries in. So here it is.

The main new feature is that you can now register to comment with OpenID, which means you can sign in with your WordPress.com or LiveJournal ID as well as with the old TypeKey. The old rules still apply: once you post a decent comment (i.e. one which doesn't contravene my site policies), I approve you and all your subsequent comments pass straight onto the site; others are moderated. I have not copied all the old articles (as opposed to blog entries) over yet, but there's still time insha Allah.

Recently I had an exchange with an old school acquaintance who accused me of defending an enemy of my country, namely Abu Hamza, on my blog. Abu Hamza is currently in jail, having served most of a sentence in the UK for inciting racial hatred, and awaiting extradition to the USA on suspicion of some sort of conspiracy to start a terrorist or jihadist training camp in Oregon. While I dithered over continuing the discussion with this individual, I was provoked into writing this by reading this article in last week's New Statesman, about others facing extradition to the USA under the same odious treaty being used to extradite Abu Hamza.

Yesterday, the Policy Exchange published a report which suggested that the government should stop trying to revive the north, and instead build lots of new houses around London, Oxford and Cambridge and encourage ambitious northerners to move down here. Despite the Policy Exchange's close links with the present Tory leadership, Cameron has dismissed the report, while the Guardian had a substantial G2 feature on the virtues of the north (lovely people, great scenery, and hey, it's a great place for the arts as well). David Cameron called it barmy, and stated that "Conservative policy is focused on the good work of continuing the resurgence of cities across the north of England", and also towards keeping regional development agencies where they are working.

As a southerner myself, I have my own concern about the suggestion about people clearing off down south in large numbers, which is that the cost of living in London is difficult enough as it is; has anybody seen the cost of buying or renting a property? Even if they build a whole load of new boxes in the Thames Valley or around Oxford and Cambridge, these will not be good enough for ambitious incomers, from the north or anywhere else, who will want either proper houses, or nice new flats or studios, in the cities or in desirable suburbs, not in some new estate orphaned on the Thames estuary. These places will become ghettoes.

The Policy Exchange mob have their own agenda, and their own prejudices. One suspects that state-sponsored regeneration is anathema to them anyway, but no doubt they just want to get "their people" out of the "God-forsaken" north with all its small towns divided into "white trash" and Asian ghettoes. Besides their total ignorance of the north itself, which has thriving and well-regarded universities, they seem to think that Oxford and Cambridge are the only places besides London where a self-respecting person might settle, when in fact they are hardly the most industrialised places in the south. Cameron noted that the report's main author was soon off to Australia; one wonders what country he was living in when he wrote this nonsense.

The Khalifites are, thankfully, a group one does not encounter often as a Muslim these days, but they seem to come in waves when they appear. In the mid-1990s, during the heyday of the old Usenet newsgroups (apologies to any old ARPAnet hands who think Usenet's real heyday was back in the 1980s or earlier), they briefly hijacked the group soc.religion.islam (see this article, originally posted there in 1995, and this, by a Salafi, posted in 1996). They are a group founded by Rashad Khalifa, an Egyptian (allegedly, originally Copic Christian) immigrant to the USA, which believes in some sort of mathematical miracle in the structure of the Qur'an, and when they found two verses which allegedly did not conform to it, they pronounced that they should be excluded. They also totally reject the Sunnah, claiming that it is nothing but a load of hearsay. The group has a week's residency at the New Statesman's Faith Column (last week, it was the turn of a representative of the Alevis of Turkey), which means they will get the benefit of a bit more publicity.

Ziauddin Sardar, in the current New Statesman, has a worthwhile argument about some recent government idea to "set up a board of Muslim theologians" in order to "steer the more radical elements of the Muslim community away from violent extremism and issue fatwas on controversial issues such as the position of women and loyalty to the UK". He thinks this is "bonkers", and suggests instead that any such committee should be elected by the Muslims themselves and consist of people other than "beards", rather including women, young people, Muslims other than Asians, and professionals other than "theologians".

I partly agree with this; a state-appointed consultative council only has so much legitimacy as a representative of popular opinion. When king Fahd of Saudi Arabia set up an appointed consultative council, it was generally dismissed and one local liberal said it had as much power as a flock of sheep. A council of "theologians" consisting mostly of Asian imams with one or two representatives from Central Mosque would be seen as just another talking shop, particularly by Muslims outside the communities represented.

On the other hand, fatwas, whether on loyalty to the UK or anything else, can only be issued by people qualified to give them, and this usually does mean "beards", i.e. religious scholars who studied in traditional religious schools or somewhere like al-Azhar. It is simply not permitted in Islam to take fatwa from someone who is unqualified, or even from a council of various experts where the religious scholars were outvoted. Of course, they do not have to be old, or Asian, but they are usually male. Even then, when a religious scholar starts saying things the government wants him to say, people switch off, and any such council will have no effect on the youth who are already radicalised. It will, if anything, damage the image of the imams in this country among young people who are at risk of such a transition.

The Guardian today had this feature on descendants of Nazis, including a shirt-tail relative of Adolf Hitler, who became Jews, and in one case a rabbi, supposedly to cleanse themselves of the sins of their fathers. Naturally, this aspect of their conversions is what was focussed on:

I walk through the Old City, pondering my encounter with this strange, kindly man. Something seems to be missing from his story. To stand in front of a rabbi whose father was in the SS and to hear he became a Jew because he doubted the Trinity is absurd. So I telephone Dan Bar-On, a professor of psychology at Ben Gurion University, and a world expert on the psychology of the children of perpetrators. He tells me, flatly, pitilessly: "The motive of the converts is to join the community of the victims. If you become part of the victim community, you get rid of the burden of being part of the perpetrator community." He interviewed Shear-Yashuv for his book Legacy of Silence. "For me," he says, "Shear-Yashuv [a rabbi whose father was in the Waffen-SS but has himself served in the Israeli army] represents a person who ran away from the past."