Douglas Murray has an article in the latest edition of the Spectator (which at least had an edition last week, unlike the New Statesman which insisted that we make do with one edition for three weeks) in which he claimed that studying Islam made him reject his former Anglicanism in favour of atheism ([1], [2], [3], [4]):

Charles Darwin didn't do for God. German biblical criticism did -- the scholarship on lost texts, discoveries of added-to texts and edited texts. All pointed away from the initial starting-block of faith -- that the texts transmitted immutable truths. Realising that 'holy' texts are, like most other things in life, the result of an accretion of human effort and human error is one of the most troubling discoveries any believer can make. I remember trying to read some of this scholarship when I was younger, and finding it so terrifying, so ground-shaking, that I put it off for another day. ...

But it found me via another route. Some years ago I started studying Islam. It didn't take long to recognise the problems of that religion's texts -- the repetitions, contradictions and absurdities. Unlike Christianity, scholarship on these problems in Islam has barely begun. But they are manifest for anyone to see. For a holy book which in its opening lines boasts 'that is the book, wherein is no doubt', plenty of doubt emerges. Not least in recognising demonstrable plagiarisms from the Torah and the Christian Bible. If God spoke through an archangel to one illiterate tradesman in 7th-century Arabia, then -- just for starters -- why was he stealing material? Or was he just repeating himself?

Gradually, scepticism of the claims made by one religion was joined by scepticism of all such claims. Incredulity that anybody thought an archangel dictated a book to Mohammed produced a strange contradiction. I found myself still clinging to belief in Christianity. I was trying to believe -- though rarely arguing -- 'Well, your guy didn't hear voices: but I know a man who did.' This last, shortest and sharpest, phase pulled down the whole thing. In the end Mohammed made me an atheist.

Reading Mas'ud Khan's account of his recent exchange with Melanie Phillips ([1], [2], [3]), I noticed that he had mentioned Neturei Karta to her, asking her whether she regarded them as "self-hating Jews". NK, for anyone who's never heard of them, are the men in black coats and top hats who you might find at pro-Palestinian demonstrations: they are strictly orthodox Jews who oppose Zionism. They are not the only group of Jews who oppose Israel or Zionism, but most others are secular leftists and not religious. I am sure some Muslims think that their presence demonstrates that we are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semites; in fact, we do not need them there to prove that.

Today an experimental scheme comes into operation in London, allowing motorcyclists to use bus lanes on "red routes" (main roads with stopping restrictions for all or part of the day). They have been allowed to use them in Bristol for some time, but such a measure has been delayed in London for want of a "feasibility study", which is now happening. Naturally, cyclists' groups have complained, because they don't want to share their "special lane" with motorbikers.

Now that it's the evening of New Year's Day, and the holiday season will be over in a few hours (even if it's still the school holidays and a few people will be taking tomorrow off work as well, perhaps to sleep off any remaining hangover), I thought I might post my New Year reflection post, particularly as it's Islamic New Year as well as the new year in the West. The biggest story of 2008 without doubt was the so-called Credit Crunch, caused by various retail and merchant banks going bust, largely as a result of lending to too many people whom they really knew couldn't possibly pay the debt back. The upshot was that the supply of money dried up, which led to most businesses, and therefore people, having much less money than they did this time last year. Still, one has to be conscious that not everybody got much of a share of the "long party" which has been in progress since the end of the recession of the early 1990s.

Some sense from a columnist at the Times, no less: it was the USA who rounded up men too casually in their "war on terror", and it is they who should take in the victims, not expect other countries to pay for their mistakes:

The United States should provide a home for those Guantánamo prisoners whom it cannot charge for lack of evidence or is unable to deport. That is the only way to bring an honourable end to one of the worst legacies of the Bush Administration.

That will not happen, however. US officials have put out feelers to dozens of countries, asking them to take in the now-unwanted prisoners who were scooped up with too little thought in the War on Terror. Even though it is the Bush Administration asking, other governments are, understandably, treating the request as a tender to bid for the favours of Barack Obama's team. The President-elect has declared that one of his first acts will be to shut down the camp, a blight on the US's reputation around the world. How better to help him to start with a clean moral slate than to give a good home to a few Guantánamo inmates?

This is ridiculous. The US rounded up these men too casually, failing in the heat of battle to distinguish fighters from bystanders, including those turned in for bounty by their compatriots. The tribunals it held after the men had been taken to Guantánamo Bay were merely a nod to the Geneva Conventions, which require a country to check that the PoWs it holds really are enemy fighters. Now that the US has acknowledged - seven years after the first men men arrived at Guantánamo - that it lacks evidence to try all but a handful, it should take them to the US mainland. After all, if it is safe to repatriate them, then it is safe to let them live in the US.

I've been either ill or busy the past week. Before and after last week I had a job which required 12 and a half hour average days, then I went down with flu and couldn't write much over the course of last week. Then there was Christmas. I've been running a few posts around in my head, and one of the gifts I got was a camcorder, so I'm thinking of doing some video commentary posts insha Allah. Among my first topics is the perverse sympathy we have for people in authority in this country (like the police), even when they don't do their jobs properly and people die. That was half written by the time I went down with the flu, although not very satisfactorily. Insha Allah, within a couple of days.

I'd just like to say a huge thank you and jazakum Allah khair to all those who voted for me in the recent Brass Crescent awards. This blog won in the Best European blog category; Tim Bowes got Honourable Mention and Tariq won best blog overall.

On Thursday, there were reports about a woman who had taken her former employer, a bar in Mayfair, London, to court for supposedly sacking her for refusing to wear their staff uniform, a short red dress which she claimed left her open to unwanted sexual advances from male customers. (The bar allege that she resigned.) What made this headline news was, of course, that this woman is a Muslim and is claiming that the uniform offends against her religious values. They discussed this on the Vanessa Feltz phone-in, and there were at least two Muslim callers that I heard, one of them a woman, who were unsympathetic. The woman said that she should not even be working in a bar and touching, let alone serving, alcohol. You can see the woman, and another wearing the dress here. The bar management claim that the red dress matches that of the furniture, but people aren't furniture, really, are they?

Criticism of the Ottoman Sultans | Global Intifada

Jinnzaman has an interesting feature on scholarly criticism of the Ottoman empire, which was not as simplistic as some Muslims portray it, by calling all of the sultans awliyaa' (saints); rather, there were some good and some bad, as one of the major scholars who witnessed the conquest of Egypt testified.

One of my main criticisms of Muslim political activism is that some assume that if we only turned back the clock to, say, the mid-Ottoman period, or even the 18th century, everything in the Muslim world would be fine again. I have even read a suggestion that the imperial family still exists, and that the Muslims should find the pretender an office to move into. Quite apart from the fact that turning back the clock just does not happen, they overlook the negative aspects of their rule, notably the boy tribute system in Europe, which I have heard some Muslims offer as an example of Ottoman statesmanship even though it produced a lasting legacy of bitterness. Perhaps the people left behind were more embittered than those taken, who became part of an elite regiment in the Ottoman army, but it was an oppressive innovation all the same.

While I do not wish to excuse local hostility to Muslims, given that none of them actually experienced this particular form of oppression (it was ended long before the Ottoman empire fell, because the Janissary corps it produced came to be seen as a threat to the Ottoman state), and because it probably has much to do with the attitude of Serbian clergy towards people of other religions (including Catholics, let alone Muslims), the fact remains that the Balkans, which did not experience any other form of Muslim rule besides the Ottmans', have not become a predominantly Muslim region unlike many other places just as far from the traditional centres of Islam which were exposed to Islam just as late (e.g. Indonesia and parts of Africa), and the nature of Ottoman rule cannot be excluded when we consider the reasons for this, given the length of Ottoman rule there.

Marcel Berlins: Rights and responsibilities bill is all wrong (from the Guardian)

Marcel Berlins in today's Guardian on one big flaw in the proposed "charter of rights and responsibilities":

Adding responsibilities to rights will not create a "balance" as he claims; it will create a nonsense. The basic flaw is that rights and responsibilities do not logically belong to the same family. They are different animals. They cannot be set off against, or complement, one another. It makes no sense to say: "Here is a right, let's have a responsibility to balance it." If you have a legal right to something and you are denied it, you can go to court and demand it be restored, or that you are compensated.

But most responsibilities or duties are not of that ilk: they are more akin to statements of desirable behaviour by good citizens. That is not something the courts can, or should, be asked to rule upon.

To some extent, I do think responsibilities do complement rights, simply because a right necessarily implies a responsibility elsewhere: someone else's rights equal your responsibilities, such as a parent or other carer having a responsibility to feed a child effectively imply the child's right to be fed. However, that is not the main objection to this ridiculous concept of a "charter of rights and responsibilities".

Now that the boom years are over and thousands of people are losing their jobs, the government announces more restrictions on people claiming unemployment benefits, with accompanying cheerleading in the popular press which print stories crowing about the screw being tightened on the "work-shy". At least John Major waited until the recession of the early 1990s was over before introducing the "Jobseeker's Allowance", a time-limited unemployment benefit, justified by media stories about people living high on the hog for indefinite periods on the old Dole. The other day, while shopping in Kingston, I noticed such a story on the front page of the Evening Standard (notorious for egging on Thatcher back in the 1980s), alleging that the "workshy" face compulsory interviews and possible "workfare" type schemes. I've also heard that people will not be able to "use the recession as an excuse".

Technorati Tags: ben goldacre, bad science

Ben Goldacre is a doctor who writes a column called Bad Science in the Guardian every Saturday, and has also got a blog by the same title as the book, whose content consists largely of debunking health scares, press reporting of science, and quacks and quackery of various types, including homeopathy and "nutritionists". The book is essentially a distillation of his blogs and columns over the years into a book with a beginning, a middle and an end, from a few examples of products being sold based on spurious science, homeopathy, the placebo effect, the claims of self-styled nutritionists, the shoddy press reporting of science stories, concluding with the two most notorious recent British health scares: the "MRSA on hospital door-knobs" affair and MMR.

Harry’s Place » A Single Step

The above post at Harry's Place is by the infamous Shiraz Maher (this is the guy who says he got involved in Islamism after 9/11 and changed his mind after the London bombings in 2005, which should raise a few eyebrows in my opinion), claiming that there is "encouraging news" coming from India in the wake of the Bombay massacres, namely that Indian Muslim leaders are refusing to allow Muslims killed while perpetrating the attacks to be given funerals, or buried in Muslim cemeteries in India (see BBC report). The report quotes Ibrahim Tai, president of the Indian Muslim Council, as saying:

"They are not Muslims as they have not followed our religion which teaches us to live in peace.

"If the government does not respect our demands we will take up extreme steps. We do not want the bodies of people who have committed an act of terrorism to be buried in our cemeteries.

"These terrorists are a black spot on our religion, we will very sternly protest the burial of these terrorists in our cemetery," he said.

Misha Glenny, a noted author of books on the underworld, suggests that the Bombay-Karachi mafia known as "D-Company" may have been involved in last week's attacks, as they were in earlier bombings. The "kingpin" is a guy called Dawood Ibrahim, who controls a syndicate based out of Karachi, who organised the 1993 bombings in response to communal riots the year before, which killed 900 people, two thirds of them Muslims, and a number of his associates were killed or had property damaged. Then, he bribed Indian port officials; the same looks to be the case here:

Can the person from Leicester who wrote to me the other day, asking me to contact them, please can they leave another message with the correct email address, as I got a "message returned" message when I tried emailing the one that was left here, or else email me (you can find the address here).

So, it seems a lot of Muslims disagree with me and Umar over the perceived need to condemn the recent terrorist attacks in Bombay. Amad at Muslim matters was one of the first Muslims to actually publish a notice of condemnation; others have stated that we should condemn attacks like it because it is wrong according to Islam, not because we are afraid of censure from non-Muslims. On the latter point, I partly agree, and I do not criticise anyone who actually does condemn it as a Muslim. My point was not that we should condone it or make excuses for it. My point was that we should hold our heads up high as Muslims, and refuse any demand to condemn which appears to contain an assumption of collective guilt, or which appears to be an attempt to put words in our mouths. More to the point, we should not issue condemnations simply to prove our innocence when we had no role in the incident nor any connection to it.

American-Muslims Should Not Condemn the Mumbai Attacks « Umar Lee

A list of reasons why American Muslims should not fall over themselves to condemn the terrorist attacks in Bombay (I refuse to use the name Mumbai; although it is correct in two of the three local languages, this blog is in English, not Marathi or Gujarati, and I refuse to honour a Hindu nationalist renaming), and I think much the same applies to other western Muslims:

As Muslims in America we are not exactly relevant to the situation. Not only are we geographically and culturally distant we are also not a part of any conflict raging in India and we are not in a position to influence any party. Does anyone believe Indian mujahedeen, the Congress Party or the BJP is waiting to see what American-Muslims think before they make their next move? This makes our condemnation little more than rhetorical nonsense that is made only to please the ears of the media and Muslim-haters.

As of now, there are very few facts available as to what happened. Any condemnation made today is one that is made with minimal information.

Condemning these acts plays into the trap set by those hostile to Islam in that it reinforces the notion that all Muslims become guilty if a few do something bad and therefore the entire community has to apologize for the actions of the few.

Remember that Muslim leaders have condemned every major terrorists attack for years, and still Muslims face accusations that we do not condemn it enough, or loud enough, otherwise they would have stopped. The reality is that we do not have the power to stop terrorists attacking and that we are innocent of what they do, and so we should treat the demands of haters with the contempt they, and their demands, deserve.

Edward Stourton (of BBC Radio 4) in the Catholic Herald, on myths about "political correctness" commonly parroted in the British media, such as the "Winterval" event which supposedly replaced Christmas in Birmingham (the full story on which is here), and similar claims that Christmas is played down to avoid offending Muslims. You can buy the book from the link on the right (recommended if you're in the UK or Europe; it might be cheaper in the USA to buy from amazon.com). (Hat tip: Engage.)

The other day a British tabloid, the Sun, reported that Michael Jackson (you know, the guy that had a few hits in the 1970s and early 1980s but is now best known for his scandals, bizarre behaviour and plastic surgery) has converted to Islam. This might not surprise some people, given that his brother Jermaine really has done (and appeared at the recent Global Peace & Unity event in London), but as ever, people have picked up a dubious tabloid story and ran with it despite its tenuous sourcing.

In the Evening Standard yesterday, we were told that tens of thousands of jobs were likely to be lost in the UK in the very near future, the biggest single number of which were in retail. What with Woolworths on the rocks (the place having had no niche of its own for years, everyone else being better at them in clothes, stationery, sweets, records, pretty much everything in fact) and a number of other retail chains having gone into liquidation recently (notably the Dolcis shoe shop chain). Apparently, chains of cafés selling expensive fancy coffee are apparently in the front line as well. We have heard that Starbucks have closed 600 stores in the USA and have pulled out of Australia altogether. I suspect, however, that Starbucks may be on the way down anyway, for two reasons.