danielpipes.org*
Dec. 3 - 5, 2004
http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/
* Cross-posted with permission

Shari‘a Puzzles How does a Muslim keep the Ramadan fast on the solstice at the North Pole? What happens if a person dies and leaves sixteen heirs, all of them his great-great-grandparents? These are the sort of challenges that the Islamic jurisprudents (fuqaha') enjoy chewing over. But, sometimes, the improbable happens. Here are some examples:

Sex-change operation: What happens when a man inherits from his parents as a son and then becomes a woman? Does he properly inherit the full share of a son or the half share of a daughter? The siblings of a Saudi who underwent such a change argued for a half-share but the verdict was in favor a full share, for he was a male at the time of the inheritance. In the words of Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Misnad, a leading Saudi religious commentator: "The inheritors have no right, either religiously or legally, to ask that the money be re-divided. It was divided when the person in question was a male and was divided correctly at that time." (December 5, 2004) Permalink

Unexpected Syrian Connections to the Bush Administration First comes the news that Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner and now the president's nominee for secretary of homeland security, is married to a Syrian woman named Hala. Raymond Stock, the writer and translator from Arabic, speculates that "If she is Muslim, one wonders if Kerik converted (at the very least) to marry her – making him the first Muslim Cabinet member in history, if confirmed by the Senate."

Then comes the report by Tyler Golson, an American, a Democrat, and an English teacher in Damascus, who recounts how, since he began teaching in Damascus six months ago, he has been "continually surprised to find support and even admiration for Bush," then he gives first-hand examples of this phenomenon. (December 4, 2004) Permalink

Omid Safi's Closed Classroom One of the founders of the Progressive Muslim Union (an organization whose fake-moderation I recently exposed) is an academic named Omid Safi. He makes a great noise about being "progressive" and has even written a book titled Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism. (However, as Alyssa A. Lappen shows in an outstanding review at amazon.com focused on blinkered chapters by Khaled Abou El Fadl and Farid Esack, Safi's book is not at all progressive but "decidedly reactionary.")

I have belatedly noted the posting of the syllabus to Safi's course, "Religion 329: Islam and modernity," given in the spring semester of 2004. There is much that is pseudo-progressive in this document, but this assignment to students really caught my attention:

You are each required to turn in a report on a significant person who contributes to a negative public presentation of Islam and/or Muslims; whose political views and/or scholarship shape how Islam is presented today. This group is a broad coalition that includes folks from diverse backgrounds, such as unrepentant Orientalists, outright Islamophobes, Neo-conservatives, Western triumphalists, Christian Pentecostals, etc.:

Report: 3 pages. Include: a brief biography, intellectual history, and comments on Islam (and/or Middle East where relevant)

1) Bernard Lewis, 2)Samuel Huntington, 3)Fareed Zakaria, 4)David Frum, 5)Paul Wolfowitz, 6) Leo Strauss, 7) William Kristol, 8) William Bennett, 9) Daniel Pipes, 10) Charles Krauthammer, 11) Alan Bloom, 12) Robert Spencer, 13) David Pryce-Jones, 14) Stephen Schwartz, 15) Bat Yeor,16) Jerry Falwell, 17)Pat Robertson, 18) Francis Fukuyaman, [sic] 19)Patricia Crone 20) Niall Ferguson 21) Robert Kagan 22) Dore Gold 23) Ibn Warraq

[*Stephen Schwartz directs his critique at the Wahhabis, and is affiliated with Sufism, but he has fully identified himself with Neo-con think tanks and political ambitions.]

What is so particularly offensive about this assignment is not the topic itself – I am pleased for students at Colgate University to read my writings about Islam – but its prejudicial presentation. Robert Spencer noted this problem back in April 2004, when he criticized

the propagandistic basis of this list and the course in general. Labeling a group of people "Islamophobes" in a course about Islam is hardly conducive to freedom of thought. It is especially silly in light of the fact that one person on Safi's enemies list, Stephen Schwartz, is a Muslim himself

Call me old-fashioned, but I think a professor is supposed to inform and inspire his students, not tell them what to think. Safi's labeling the persons on his list symbolizes the insecurity and tyranny of Middle East studies. (December 3, 2004)

Dec. 4, 2004 update: Robert Spencer saw the above weblog and in response writes me:

In April, when I wrote the sentences you quote, the footnote explaining that Stephen Schwartz is a Sufi was not on Safi's syllabus. It was likely added as a result of my post, since several of Safi's students contacted me angrily when it was first posted.

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Arab Delight on 9/11 Sadik J. Al-Azm, emeritus professor of modern European philosophy at the University of Damascus and a patrician, is one of the most interesting of Arab thinkers. In an article in the Boston Review, "Time Out of Joint: Western dominance, Islamist terror, and the Arab imagination," he confesses his response on September 11, 2001:

There is a strong injunction in Arab Islamic culture against shamateh, an emotion—like schadenfreude—of taking pleasure in the suffering of others. It is forbidden when it comes to death, even the violent death of your mortal enemies. Yet it would be very hard these days to find an Arab, no matter how sober, cultured, and sophisticated, in whose heart there was not some room for shamateh at the suffering of Americans on September 11. I myself tried hard to contain, control, and hide it that day. And I knew intuitively that millions and millions of people throughout the Arab world and beyond experienced the same emotion. …

But I didn't understand my own shameful response to the slaughter of innocents. Was it the bad news from Palestine that week; the satisfaction of seeing the arrogance of power abruptly, if temporarily, humbled; the sight of the jihadi Frankenstein's monsters, so carefully nourished by the United States, turning suddenly on their masters; or the natural resentment of the weak and marginalized at the peripheries of empires against the center, or, in this case, against the center of the center? Does my response, and the silent shamateh of the Arab world, mean that Huntington's clash of civilizations has come true, and so quickly?

Comments: (1) This introspective account confirms the more blatant examples I documented in "A Middle East Party." (2) Al-Azm offers the same explanation that I would for his untoward response, noting how Arabs and Muslims

continue to imagine ourselves as conquerors, history-makers, pace-setters, pioneers, and leaders of world-historic proportions. In the marrow of our bones, we still perceive ourselves as the subjects of history, not its objects, as its agents and not its victims. We have never acknowledged, let alone reconciled ourselves to, the marginality and passivity of our position in modern times.

(Oct. 1, 2004) Permalink