the human province

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

I've been thinking a fair amount lately about the role that the western media has in breaking down or furthering the misunderstandings and stereotypes held by the "East" and the "West." It goes without saying that sites like MEMRI strengthen the Orientalist view of Arabs, but I've noticed another, perhaps smaller, thing in English language reporting on the Arab world. Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

It seems, however, that this will to linguistically sever the Muslim and Christian god isn't only limited to Westerners or Christians. In this bizarre article the BBC reports that Malaysian Christians are being forbidden to use the word "Allah," despite the fact that in the Malay language, as in Arabic, Allah means God (or the God):

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims.

In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.

Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.

[...]

The Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has also taken legal action after a government ministry moved to ban the import of religious children's books containing the word.

In a statement given to Reuters news agency, the church said the translation of the bible in which the word Allah appears has been used by Christians since the earliest days of the church.

There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".

"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.

This, of course, is ridiculous, and I wonder what Malay word the Malaysian government proposes Christians use instead of Allah.

Last week, Lebanese Shi'a cleric Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah issued a fatwa banning honor killings, or honor crimes as he is calling them:

Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric issued Thursday a fatwa, or religious edict, banning honor killings, calling the custom of murdering a female relative for sexual misconduct "a repulsive act."

The fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was a rare condemnation by a prominent cleric of the practice. Fadlallah's office said he issued the statement in alarm over reports on an increase in honor killings.

"I view an honor crime as a repulsive act condemned and prohibited by religion," Fadlallah, the most revered religious authority for Lebanon's 1.2 million Shiites, said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press.

"In so-called honor crimes, some men kill their daughters, sisters, wives or female relatives on the pretext that they committed acts that harm chastity and honor," said Fadlallah, warning that the practice was on the rise in region.

"These crimes are committed without any religious evidence, and mostly on the basis of suspicions," added Fadlallah.

This, and Egypt's recent hymen fatwa, are the kinds of religious edicts that I like to see.

This story in the Times shows what happens when an idiot judge in Germany mistakes cultural sensitivity with bigotry:

A German judge has stirred a storm of protest by citing the Koran in turning down a German Muslim woman's request for a speedy divorce on the ground that her husband beat her.

In a ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim customs and European laws, the judge, Christa Datz-Winter, noted that the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu, in which it is common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote in her decision, sanctions such physical abuse.

...The 26-year-old woman in this case was born in Germany to a Moroccan family and married in Morocco in 2001, according to her lawyer, Ms. Becker-Rojczyk. The couple settled in the Frankfurt area and had two children.

In May 2006, the police were summoned after a particularly violent incident. At that time, Judge Datz-Winter ordered the husband to move out and stay at least 55 yards away from the coupleis home. In the months that followed, her lawyer said, the man threatened to kill his wife.

Terrified, the woman filed for divorce in October and requested that it be granted without the usual year of separation because her husband's threats and beatings constituted an "unreasonable hardship."

"We worried that he might think he had the right to kill her because she is still his wife," Ms. Becker-Rojczyk said.

In January, the judge turned down the wife's request for a speedy divorce, saying her husband's behavior did not constitute unreasonable hardship because they are both Moroccan. "In this cultural background," she wrote, "it is not unusual that the husband uses physical punishment against the wife."

This is the kind of ruling that gives intercultural dialogue a bad name. All it takes is for some foolish judge to think that she's engaging Islam in a respectful way to make the whole enterprise look foolish.

It seems ridiculous to me that the Qu'ran would even come up in her ruling, but even more ridiculous that she would have the gall to say what is and isn't customary in Muslim culture or Islamic law or think that her opinion would have any weight at all. This, of course, is not because she's a foreigner, but because Islam is not her field, so just like she's unfit to make judgments on quantum physics, say, or Inuit literature, she should hold her tongue on issues that are not only not germane in a German civil court but of which she most likely knows next to nothing.

I've been really annoyed by the media's tendency to equate Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic terrorism. This is a point made in Olivier Roy's works on the subject, and it seems obvious that the fact that someone is a fundamentalist Muslim does not mean that that person would ever be willing to commit a violent act on behalf of those beliefs. Similarly, I know many fundamentalist Christians in America's Bible Belt, but none who have bombed abortion clinics or murdered abortion doctors.

This idea comes up in a Slate review of Daveed Gartenstein-Ross' book, My Year Inside Radical Islam:

While working at the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, Gartenstein-Ross adopts some conservative Muslim practices, including a few advocated by the puritanical Salafi school of thought. He grows a beard; wears a kufi, or skullcap; refrains from praying together with or shaking the hands of women; avoids contact with dogs; rolls his pants above his ankles when he prays; and throws away his music collection. But he also dates a Christian woman, to whom he proposes without asking her to convert. And I never caught mention of him requesting halal food in his parents' home, where he was living during his internship. His new religious behaviors were surely meaningful and important to him, but they hardly meet the prevailing American definition of a "radicalized Muslim" as someone who retreats from secular society, advocates a nation governed by Muslim law, and resorts to violence against those who would thwart such plans. And if that definition truly is wildly off-base, Gartenstein-Ross does nothing in the book to challenge it with an alternative.

He does undertake one genuinely "radical" religious action: Midway through his internship, he begins to pray daily for the mujahideen in Chechnya. Outside of his conscience, though, the closest he comes to doing anything radical, illegal, or related to terrorism is when he nearly meets at the airport a man he later learns was trying to procure money for al-Qaida. To repeat -- he almost met someone who he had no idea was in the country to do evil. If this is the experience of a young Westerner who's been drawn into the world of radical Islam, then perhaps we have less to worry about than we thought.

But Gartenstein-Ross isn't John Walker Lindh, interrupted. His is merely the tale of a confused, suggestible kid with what comes off as an unquenchable need for acceptance within whatever community he happens to find himself. For conservative commentators to suggest that this is a cautionary, inspirational tale is off the mark. Time and again, Gartenstein-Ross reports examples that we're supposed to react to with the horrified feeling that he's being brainwashed. Instead, though, they come across as confusing behavior by someone undergoing a spiritual crisis and who seems almost eager to back down from beliefs he once held dear.

To be fair, I haven't read his book, but it certainly sounds like Gartenstein-Ross fell in with a group of fundamentalist Muslims, then decided that their belief system wasn't for him. This is not to say that it's not an interesting subject, the experience of a convert, and his decision to go back on his conversion (a process that took two years from beginning to end). But what it is not, is a look at Islamic terrorism, which is really where the book market seems to be these days.

So while it might be interesting to read an account of someone who was "born again" into one of the churches that we see in Jesus Camp, it wouldn't necessarily help us to understand what makes a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist move from more or less extreme religious beliefs to religious violence.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

I've been thinking a fair amount lately about the role that the western media has in breaking down or furthering the misunderstandings and stereotypes held by the "East" and the "West." It goes without saying that sites like MEMRI strengthen the Orientalist view of Arabs, but I've noticed another, perhaps smaller, thing in English language reporting on the Arab world. Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

It seems, however, that this will to linguistically sever the Muslim and Christian god isn't only limited to Westerners or Christians. In this bizarre article the BBC reports that Malaysian Christians are being forbidden to use the word "Allah," despite the fact that in the Malay language, as in Arabic, Allah means God (or the God):

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims.

In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.

Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.

[...]

The Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has also taken legal action after a government ministry moved to ban the import of religious children's books containing the word.

In a statement given to Reuters news agency, the church said the translation of the bible in which the word Allah appears has been used by Christians since the earliest days of the church.

There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".

"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.

This, of course, is ridiculous, and I wonder what Malay word the Malaysian government proposes Christians use instead of Allah.

Last week, Lebanese Shi'a cleric Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah issued a fatwa banning honor killings, or honor crimes as he is calling them:

Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric issued Thursday a fatwa, or religious edict, banning honor killings, calling the custom of murdering a female relative for sexual misconduct "a repulsive act."

The fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was a rare condemnation by a prominent cleric of the practice. Fadlallah's office said he issued the statement in alarm over reports on an increase in honor killings.

"I view an honor crime as a repulsive act condemned and prohibited by religion," Fadlallah, the most revered religious authority for Lebanon's 1.2 million Shiites, said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press.

"In so-called honor crimes, some men kill their daughters, sisters, wives or female relatives on the pretext that they committed acts that harm chastity and honor," said Fadlallah, warning that the practice was on the rise in region.

"These crimes are committed without any religious evidence, and mostly on the basis of suspicions," added Fadlallah.

This, and Egypt's recent hymen fatwa, are the kinds of religious edicts that I like to see.

This story in the Times shows what happens when an idiot judge in Germany mistakes cultural sensitivity with bigotry:

A German judge has stirred a storm of protest by citing the Koran in turning down a German Muslim woman's request for a speedy divorce on the ground that her husband beat her.

In a ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim customs and European laws, the judge, Christa Datz-Winter, noted that the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu, in which it is common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote in her decision, sanctions such physical abuse.

...The 26-year-old woman in this case was born in Germany to a Moroccan family and married in Morocco in 2001, according to her lawyer, Ms. Becker-Rojczyk. The couple settled in the Frankfurt area and had two children.

In May 2006, the police were summoned after a particularly violent incident. At that time, Judge Datz-Winter ordered the husband to move out and stay at least 55 yards away from the coupleis home. In the months that followed, her lawyer said, the man threatened to kill his wife.

Terrified, the woman filed for divorce in October and requested that it be granted without the usual year of separation because her husband's threats and beatings constituted an "unreasonable hardship."

"We worried that he might think he had the right to kill her because she is still his wife," Ms. Becker-Rojczyk said.

In January, the judge turned down the wife's request for a speedy divorce, saying her husband's behavior did not constitute unreasonable hardship because they are both Moroccan. "In this cultural background," she wrote, "it is not unusual that the husband uses physical punishment against the wife."

This is the kind of ruling that gives intercultural dialogue a bad name. All it takes is for some foolish judge to think that she's engaging Islam in a respectful way to make the whole enterprise look foolish.

It seems ridiculous to me that the Qu'ran would even come up in her ruling, but even more ridiculous that she would have the gall to say what is and isn't customary in Muslim culture or Islamic law or think that her opinion would have any weight at all. This, of course, is not because she's a foreigner, but because Islam is not her field, so just like she's unfit to make judgments on quantum physics, say, or Inuit literature, she should hold her tongue on issues that are not only not germane in a German civil court but of which she most likely knows next to nothing.

I've been really annoyed by the media's tendency to equate Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic terrorism. This is a point made in Olivier Roy's works on the subject, and it seems obvious that the fact that someone is a fundamentalist Muslim does not mean that that person would ever be willing to commit a violent act on behalf of those beliefs. Similarly, I know many fundamentalist Christians in America's Bible Belt, but none who have bombed abortion clinics or murdered abortion doctors.

This idea comes up in a Slate review of Daveed Gartenstein-Ross' book, My Year Inside Radical Islam:

While working at the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, Gartenstein-Ross adopts some conservative Muslim practices, including a few advocated by the puritanical Salafi school of thought. He grows a beard; wears a kufi, or skullcap; refrains from praying together with or shaking the hands of women; avoids contact with dogs; rolls his pants above his ankles when he prays; and throws away his music collection. But he also dates a Christian woman, to whom he proposes without asking her to convert. And I never caught mention of him requesting halal food in his parents' home, where he was living during his internship. His new religious behaviors were surely meaningful and important to him, but they hardly meet the prevailing American definition of a "radicalized Muslim" as someone who retreats from secular society, advocates a nation governed by Muslim law, and resorts to violence against those who would thwart such plans. And if that definition truly is wildly off-base, Gartenstein-Ross does nothing in the book to challenge it with an alternative.

He does undertake one genuinely "radical" religious action: Midway through his internship, he begins to pray daily for the mujahideen in Chechnya. Outside of his conscience, though, the closest he comes to doing anything radical, illegal, or related to terrorism is when he nearly meets at the airport a man he later learns was trying to procure money for al-Qaida. To repeat -- he almost met someone who he had no idea was in the country to do evil. If this is the experience of a young Westerner who's been drawn into the world of radical Islam, then perhaps we have less to worry about than we thought.

But Gartenstein-Ross isn't John Walker Lindh, interrupted. His is merely the tale of a confused, suggestible kid with what comes off as an unquenchable need for acceptance within whatever community he happens to find himself. For conservative commentators to suggest that this is a cautionary, inspirational tale is off the mark. Time and again, Gartenstein-Ross reports examples that we're supposed to react to with the horrified feeling that he's being brainwashed. Instead, though, they come across as confusing behavior by someone undergoing a spiritual crisis and who seems almost eager to back down from beliefs he once held dear.

To be fair, I haven't read his book, but it certainly sounds like Gartenstein-Ross fell in with a group of fundamentalist Muslims, then decided that their belief system wasn't for him. This is not to say that it's not an interesting subject, the experience of a convert, and his decision to go back on his conversion (a process that took two years from beginning to end). But what it is not, is a look at Islamic terrorism, which is really where the book market seems to be these days.

So while it might be interesting to read an account of someone who was "born again" into one of the churches that we see in Jesus Camp, it wouldn't necessarily help us to understand what makes a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist move from more or less extreme religious beliefs to religious violence.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

I've been thinking a fair amount lately about the role that the western media has in breaking down or furthering the misunderstandings and stereotypes held by the "East" and the "West." It goes without saying that sites like MEMRI strengthen the Orientalist view of Arabs, but I've noticed another, perhaps smaller, thing in English language reporting on the Arab world. Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

It seems, however, that this will to linguistically sever the Muslim and Christian god isn't only limited to Westerners or Christians. In this bizarre article the BBC reports that Malaysian Christians are being forbidden to use the word "Allah," despite the fact that in the Malay language, as in Arabic, Allah means God (or the God):

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims.

In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.

Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.

[...]

The Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has also taken legal action after a government ministry moved to ban the import of religious children's books containing the word.

In a statement given to Reuters news agency, the church said the translation of the bible in which the word Allah appears has been used by Christians since the earliest days of the church.

There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".

"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.

This, of course, is ridiculous, and I wonder what Malay word the Malaysian government proposes Christians use instead of Allah.

Last week, Lebanese Shi'a cleric Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah issued a fatwa banning honor killings, or honor crimes as he is calling them:

Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric issued Thursday a fatwa, or religious edict, banning honor killings, calling the custom of murdering a female relative for sexual misconduct "a repulsive act."

The fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was a rare condemnation by a prominent cleric of the practice. Fadlallah's office said he issued the statement in alarm over reports on an increase in honor killings.

"I view an honor crime as a repulsive act condemned and prohibited by religion," Fadlallah, the most revered religious authority for Lebanon's 1.2 million Shiites, said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press.

"In so-called honor crimes, some men kill their daughters, sisters, wives or female relatives on the pretext that they committed acts that harm chastity and honor," said Fadlallah, warning that the practice was on the rise in region.

"These crimes are committed without any religious evidence, and mostly on the basis of suspicions," added Fadlallah.

This, and Egypt's recent hymen fatwa, are the kinds of religious edicts that I like to see.

This story in the Times shows what happens when an idiot judge in Germany mistakes cultural sensitivity with bigotry:

A German judge has stirred a storm of protest by citing the Koran in turning down a German Muslim woman's request for a speedy divorce on the ground that her husband beat her.

In a ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim customs and European laws, the judge, Christa Datz-Winter, noted that the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu, in which it is common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote in her decision, sanctions such physical abuse.

...The 26-year-old woman in this case was born in Germany to a Moroccan family and married in Morocco in 2001, according to her lawyer, Ms. Becker-Rojczyk. The couple settled in the Frankfurt area and had two children.

In May 2006, the police were summoned after a particularly violent incident. At that time, Judge Datz-Winter ordered the husband to move out and stay at least 55 yards away from the coupleis home. In the months that followed, her lawyer said, the man threatened to kill his wife.

Terrified, the woman filed for divorce in October and requested that it be granted without the usual year of separation because her husband's threats and beatings constituted an "unreasonable hardship."

"We worried that he might think he had the right to kill her because she is still his wife," Ms. Becker-Rojczyk said.

In January, the judge turned down the wife's request for a speedy divorce, saying her husband's behavior did not constitute unreasonable hardship because they are both Moroccan. "In this cultural background," she wrote, "it is not unusual that the husband uses physical punishment against the wife."

This is the kind of ruling that gives intercultural dialogue a bad name. All it takes is for some foolish judge to think that she's engaging Islam in a respectful way to make the whole enterprise look foolish.

It seems ridiculous to me that the Qu'ran would even come up in her ruling, but even more ridiculous that she would have the gall to say what is and isn't customary in Muslim culture or Islamic law or think that her opinion would have any weight at all. This, of course, is not because she's a foreigner, but because Islam is not her field, so just like she's unfit to make judgments on quantum physics, say, or Inuit literature, she should hold her tongue on issues that are not only not germane in a German civil court but of which she most likely knows next to nothing.

I've been really annoyed by the media's tendency to equate Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic terrorism. This is a point made in Olivier Roy's works on the subject, and it seems obvious that the fact that someone is a fundamentalist Muslim does not mean that that person would ever be willing to commit a violent act on behalf of those beliefs. Similarly, I know many fundamentalist Christians in America's Bible Belt, but none who have bombed abortion clinics or murdered abortion doctors.

This idea comes up in a Slate review of Daveed Gartenstein-Ross' book, My Year Inside Radical Islam:

While working at the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, Gartenstein-Ross adopts some conservative Muslim practices, including a few advocated by the puritanical Salafi school of thought. He grows a beard; wears a kufi, or skullcap; refrains from praying together with or shaking the hands of women; avoids contact with dogs; rolls his pants above his ankles when he prays; and throws away his music collection. But he also dates a Christian woman, to whom he proposes without asking her to convert. And I never caught mention of him requesting halal food in his parents' home, where he was living during his internship. His new religious behaviors were surely meaningful and important to him, but they hardly meet the prevailing American definition of a "radicalized Muslim" as someone who retreats from secular society, advocates a nation governed by Muslim law, and resorts to violence against those who would thwart such plans. And if that definition truly is wildly off-base, Gartenstein-Ross does nothing in the book to challenge it with an alternative.

He does undertake one genuinely "radical" religious action: Midway through his internship, he begins to pray daily for the mujahideen in Chechnya. Outside of his conscience, though, the closest he comes to doing anything radical, illegal, or related to terrorism is when he nearly meets at the airport a man he later learns was trying to procure money for al-Qaida. To repeat -- he almost met someone who he had no idea was in the country to do evil. If this is the experience of a young Westerner who's been drawn into the world of radical Islam, then perhaps we have less to worry about than we thought.

But Gartenstein-Ross isn't John Walker Lindh, interrupted. His is merely the tale of a confused, suggestible kid with what comes off as an unquenchable need for acceptance within whatever community he happens to find himself. For conservative commentators to suggest that this is a cautionary, inspirational tale is off the mark. Time and again, Gartenstein-Ross reports examples that we're supposed to react to with the horrified feeling that he's being brainwashed. Instead, though, they come across as confusing behavior by someone undergoing a spiritual crisis and who seems almost eager to back down from beliefs he once held dear.

To be fair, I haven't read his book, but it certainly sounds like Gartenstein-Ross fell in with a group of fundamentalist Muslims, then decided that their belief system wasn't for him. This is not to say that it's not an interesting subject, the experience of a convert, and his decision to go back on his conversion (a process that took two years from beginning to end). But what it is not, is a look at Islamic terrorism, which is really where the book market seems to be these days.

So while it might be interesting to read an account of someone who was "born again" into one of the churches that we see in Jesus Camp, it wouldn't necessarily help us to understand what makes a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist move from more or less extreme religious beliefs to religious violence.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

I've been thinking a fair amount lately about the role that the western media has in breaking down or furthering the misunderstandings and stereotypes held by the "East" and the "West." It goes without saying that sites like MEMRI strengthen the Orientalist view of Arabs, but I've noticed another, perhaps smaller, thing in English language reporting on the Arab world. Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

It seems, however, that this will to linguistically sever the Muslim and Christian god isn't only limited to Westerners or Christians. In this bizarre article the BBC reports that Malaysian Christians are being forbidden to use the word "Allah," despite the fact that in the Malay language, as in Arabic, Allah means God (or the God):

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims.

In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.

Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.

[...]

The Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has also taken legal action after a government ministry moved to ban the import of religious children's books containing the word.

In a statement given to Reuters news agency, the church said the translation of the bible in which the word Allah appears has been used by Christians since the earliest days of the church.

There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".

"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.

This, of course, is ridiculous, and I wonder what Malay word the Malaysian government proposes Christians use instead of Allah.

Last week, Lebanese Shi'a cleric Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah issued a fatwa banning honor killings, or honor crimes as he is calling them:

Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric issued Thursday a fatwa, or religious edict, banning honor killings, calling the custom of murdering a female relative for sexual misconduct "a repulsive act."

The fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was a rare condemnation by a prominent cleric of the practice. Fadlallah's office said he issued the statement in alarm over reports on an increase in honor killings.

"I view an honor crime as a repulsive act condemned and prohibited by religion," Fadlallah, the most revered religious authority for Lebanon's 1.2 million Shiites, said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press.

"In so-called honor crimes, some men kill their daughters, sisters, wives or female relatives on the pretext that they committed acts that harm chastity and honor," said Fadlallah, warning that the practice was on the rise in region.

"These crimes are committed without any religious evidence, and mostly on the basis of suspicions," added Fadlallah.

This, and Egypt's recent hymen fatwa, are the kinds of religious edicts that I like to see.

This story in the Times shows what happens when an idiot judge in Germany mistakes cultural sensitivity with bigotry:

A German judge has stirred a storm of protest by citing the Koran in turning down a German Muslim woman's request for a speedy divorce on the ground that her husband beat her.

In a ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim customs and European laws, the judge, Christa Datz-Winter, noted that the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu, in which it is common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote in her decision, sanctions such physical abuse.

...The 26-year-old woman in this case was born in Germany to a Moroccan family and married in Morocco in 2001, according to her lawyer, Ms. Becker-Rojczyk. The couple settled in the Frankfurt area and had two children.

In May 2006, the police were summoned after a particularly violent incident. At that time, Judge Datz-Winter ordered the husband to move out and stay at least 55 yards away from the coupleis home. In the months that followed, her lawyer said, the man threatened to kill his wife.

Terrified, the woman filed for divorce in October and requested that it be granted without the usual year of separation because her husband's threats and beatings constituted an "unreasonable hardship."

"We worried that he might think he had the right to kill her because she is still his wife," Ms. Becker-Rojczyk said.

In January, the judge turned down the wife's request for a speedy divorce, saying her husband's behavior did not constitute unreasonable hardship because they are both Moroccan. "In this cultural background," she wrote, "it is not unusual that the husband uses physical punishment against the wife."

This is the kind of ruling that gives intercultural dialogue a bad name. All it takes is for some foolish judge to think that she's engaging Islam in a respectful way to make the whole enterprise look foolish.

It seems ridiculous to me that the Qu'ran would even come up in her ruling, but even more ridiculous that she would have the gall to say what is and isn't customary in Muslim culture or Islamic law or think that her opinion would have any weight at all. This, of course, is not because she's a foreigner, but because Islam is not her field, so just like she's unfit to make judgments on quantum physics, say, or Inuit literature, she should hold her tongue on issues that are not only not germane in a German civil court but of which she most likely knows next to nothing.

I've been really annoyed by the media's tendency to equate Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic terrorism. This is a point made in Olivier Roy's works on the subject, and it seems obvious that the fact that someone is a fundamentalist Muslim does not mean that that person would ever be willing to commit a violent act on behalf of those beliefs. Similarly, I know many fundamentalist Christians in America's Bible Belt, but none who have bombed abortion clinics or murdered abortion doctors.

This idea comes up in a Slate review of Daveed Gartenstein-Ross' book, My Year Inside Radical Islam:

While working at the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, Gartenstein-Ross adopts some conservative Muslim practices, including a few advocated by the puritanical Salafi school of thought. He grows a beard; wears a kufi, or skullcap; refrains from praying together with or shaking the hands of women; avoids contact with dogs; rolls his pants above his ankles when he prays; and throws away his music collection. But he also dates a Christian woman, to whom he proposes without asking her to convert. And I never caught mention of him requesting halal food in his parents' home, where he was living during his internship. His new religious behaviors were surely meaningful and important to him, but they hardly meet the prevailing American definition of a "radicalized Muslim" as someone who retreats from secular society, advocates a nation governed by Muslim law, and resorts to violence against those who would thwart such plans. And if that definition truly is wildly off-base, Gartenstein-Ross does nothing in the book to challenge it with an alternative.

He does undertake one genuinely "radical" religious action: Midway through his internship, he begins to pray daily for the mujahideen in Chechnya. Outside of his conscience, though, the closest he comes to doing anything radical, illegal, or related to terrorism is when he nearly meets at the airport a man he later learns was trying to procure money for al-Qaida. To repeat -- he almost met someone who he had no idea was in the country to do evil. If this is the experience of a young Westerner who's been drawn into the world of radical Islam, then perhaps we have less to worry about than we thought.

But Gartenstein-Ross isn't John Walker Lindh, interrupted. His is merely the tale of a confused, suggestible kid with what comes off as an unquenchable need for acceptance within whatever community he happens to find himself. For conservative commentators to suggest that this is a cautionary, inspirational tale is off the mark. Time and again, Gartenstein-Ross reports examples that we're supposed to react to with the horrified feeling that he's being brainwashed. Instead, though, they come across as confusing behavior by someone undergoing a spiritual crisis and who seems almost eager to back down from beliefs he once held dear.

To be fair, I haven't read his book, but it certainly sounds like Gartenstein-Ross fell in with a group of fundamentalist Muslims, then decided that their belief system wasn't for him. This is not to say that it's not an interesting subject, the experience of a convert, and his decision to go back on his conversion (a process that took two years from beginning to end). But what it is not, is a look at Islamic terrorism, which is really where the book market seems to be these days.

So while it might be interesting to read an account of someone who was "born again" into one of the churches that we see in Jesus Camp, it wouldn't necessarily help us to understand what makes a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist move from more or less extreme religious beliefs to religious violence.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

I've been thinking a fair amount lately about the role that the western media has in breaking down or furthering the misunderstandings and stereotypes held by the "East" and the "West." It goes without saying that sites like MEMRI strengthen the Orientalist view of Arabs, but I've noticed another, perhaps smaller, thing in English language reporting on the Arab world. Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

It seems, however, that this will to linguistically sever the Muslim and Christian god isn't only limited to Westerners or Christians. In this bizarre article the BBC reports that Malaysian Christians are being forbidden to use the word "Allah," despite the fact that in the Malay language, as in Arabic, Allah means God (or the God):

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims.

In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.

Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.

[...]

The Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has also taken legal action after a government ministry moved to ban the import of religious children's books containing the word.

In a statement given to Reuters news agency, the church said the translation of the bible in which the word Allah appears has been used by Christians since the earliest days of the church.

There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".

"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.

This, of course, is ridiculous, and I wonder what Malay word the Malaysian government proposes Christians use instead of Allah.

Last week, Lebanese Shi'a cleric Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah issued a fatwa banning honor killings, or honor crimes as he is calling them:

Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric issued Thursday a fatwa, or religious edict, banning honor killings, calling the custom of murdering a female relative for sexual misconduct "a repulsive act."

The fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was a rare condemnation by a prominent cleric of the practice. Fadlallah's office said he issued the statement in alarm over reports on an increase in honor killings.

"I view an honor crime as a repulsive act condemned and prohibited by religion," Fadlallah, the most revered religious authority for Lebanon's 1.2 million Shiites, said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press.

"In so-called honor crimes, some men kill their daughters, sisters, wives or female relatives on the pretext that they committed acts that harm chastity and honor," said Fadlallah, warning that the practice was on the rise in region.

"These crimes are committed without any religious evidence, and mostly on the basis of suspicions," added Fadlallah.

This, and Egypt's recent hymen fatwa, are the kinds of religious edicts that I like to see.

This story in the Times shows what happens when an idiot judge in Germany mistakes cultural sensitivity with bigotry:

A German judge has stirred a storm of protest by citing the Koran in turning down a German Muslim woman's request for a speedy divorce on the ground that her husband beat her.

In a ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim customs and European laws, the judge, Christa Datz-Winter, noted that the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu, in which it is common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote in her decision, sanctions such physical abuse.

...The 26-year-old woman in this case was born in Germany to a Moroccan family and married in Morocco in 2001, according to her lawyer, Ms. Becker-Rojczyk. The couple settled in the Frankfurt area and had two children.

In May 2006, the police were summoned after a particularly violent incident. At that time, Judge Datz-Winter ordered the husband to move out and stay at least 55 yards away from the coupleis home. In the months that followed, her lawyer said, the man threatened to kill his wife.

Terrified, the woman filed for divorce in October and requested that it be granted without the usual year of separation because her husband's threats and beatings constituted an "unreasonable hardship."

"We worried that he might think he had the right to kill her because she is still his wife," Ms. Becker-Rojczyk said.

In January, the judge turned down the wife's request for a speedy divorce, saying her husband's behavior did not constitute unreasonable hardship because they are both Moroccan. "In this cultural background," she wrote, "it is not unusual that the husband uses physical punishment against the wife."

This is the kind of ruling that gives intercultural dialogue a bad name. All it takes is for some foolish judge to think that she's engaging Islam in a respectful way to make the whole enterprise look foolish.

It seems ridiculous to me that the Qu'ran would even come up in her ruling, but even more ridiculous that she would have the gall to say what is and isn't customary in Muslim culture or Islamic law or think that her opinion would have any weight at all. This, of course, is not because she's a foreigner, but because Islam is not her field, so just like she's unfit to make judgments on quantum physics, say, or Inuit literature, she should hold her tongue on issues that are not only not germane in a German civil court but of which she most likely knows next to nothing.

I've been really annoyed by the media's tendency to equate Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic terrorism. This is a point made in Olivier Roy's works on the subject, and it seems obvious that the fact that someone is a fundamentalist Muslim does not mean that that person would ever be willing to commit a violent act on behalf of those beliefs. Similarly, I know many fundamentalist Christians in America's Bible Belt, but none who have bombed abortion clinics or murdered abortion doctors.

This idea comes up in a Slate review of Daveed Gartenstein-Ross' book, My Year Inside Radical Islam:

While working at the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, Gartenstein-Ross adopts some conservative Muslim practices, including a few advocated by the puritanical Salafi school of thought. He grows a beard; wears a kufi, or skullcap; refrains from praying together with or shaking the hands of women; avoids contact with dogs; rolls his pants above his ankles when he prays; and throws away his music collection. But he also dates a Christian woman, to whom he proposes without asking her to convert. And I never caught mention of him requesting halal food in his parents' home, where he was living during his internship. His new religious behaviors were surely meaningful and important to him, but they hardly meet the prevailing American definition of a "radicalized Muslim" as someone who retreats from secular society, advocates a nation governed by Muslim law, and resorts to violence against those who would thwart such plans. And if that definition truly is wildly off-base, Gartenstein-Ross does nothing in the book to challenge it with an alternative.

He does undertake one genuinely "radical" religious action: Midway through his internship, he begins to pray daily for the mujahideen in Chechnya. Outside of his conscience, though, the closest he comes to doing anything radical, illegal, or related to terrorism is when he nearly meets at the airport a man he later learns was trying to procure money for al-Qaida. To repeat -- he almost met someone who he had no idea was in the country to do evil. If this is the experience of a young Westerner who's been drawn into the world of radical Islam, then perhaps we have less to worry about than we thought.

But Gartenstein-Ross isn't John Walker Lindh, interrupted. His is merely the tale of a confused, suggestible kid with what comes off as an unquenchable need for acceptance within whatever community he happens to find himself. For conservative commentators to suggest that this is a cautionary, inspirational tale is off the mark. Time and again, Gartenstein-Ross reports examples that we're supposed to react to with the horrified feeling that he's being brainwashed. Instead, though, they come across as confusing behavior by someone undergoing a spiritual crisis and who seems almost eager to back down from beliefs he once held dear.

To be fair, I haven't read his book, but it certainly sounds like Gartenstein-Ross fell in with a group of fundamentalist Muslims, then decided that their belief system wasn't for him. This is not to say that it's not an interesting subject, the experience of a convert, and his decision to go back on his conversion (a process that took two years from beginning to end). But what it is not, is a look at Islamic terrorism, which is really where the book market seems to be these days.

So while it might be interesting to read an account of someone who was "born again" into one of the churches that we see in Jesus Camp, it wouldn't necessarily help us to understand what makes a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist move from more or less extreme religious beliefs to religious violence.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

I've been thinking a fair amount lately about the role that the western media has in breaking down or furthering the misunderstandings and stereotypes held by the "East" and the "West." It goes without saying that sites like MEMRI strengthen the Orientalist view of Arabs, but I've noticed another, perhaps smaller, thing in English language reporting on the Arab world. Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

It seems, however, that this will to linguistically sever the Muslim and Christian god isn't only limited to Westerners or Christians. In this bizarre article the BBC reports that Malaysian Christians are being forbidden to use the word "Allah," despite the fact that in the Malay language, as in Arabic, Allah means God (or the God):

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims.

In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.

Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.

[...]

The Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has also taken legal action after a government ministry moved to ban the import of religious children's books containing the word.

In a statement given to Reuters news agency, the church said the translation of the bible in which the word Allah appears has been used by Christians since the earliest days of the church.

There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".

"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.

This, of course, is ridiculous, and I wonder what Malay word the Malaysian government proposes Christians use instead of Allah.

Last week, Lebanese Shi'a cleric Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah issued a fatwa banning honor killings, or honor crimes as he is calling them:

Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric issued Thursday a fatwa, or religious edict, banning honor killings, calling the custom of murdering a female relative for sexual misconduct "a repulsive act."

The fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was a rare condemnation by a prominent cleric of the practice. Fadlallah's office said he issued the statement in alarm over reports on an increase in honor killings.

"I view an honor crime as a repulsive act condemned and prohibited by religion," Fadlallah, the most revered religious authority for Lebanon's 1.2 million Shiites, said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press.

"In so-called honor crimes, some men kill their daughters, sisters, wives or female relatives on the pretext that they committed acts that harm chastity and honor," said Fadlallah, warning that the practice was on the rise in region.

"These crimes are committed without any religious evidence, and mostly on the basis of suspicions," added Fadlallah.

This, and Egypt's recent hymen fatwa, are the kinds of religious edicts that I like to see.

This story in the Times shows what happens when an idiot judge in Germany mistakes cultural sensitivity with bigotry:

A German judge has stirred a storm of protest by citing the Koran in turning down a German Muslim woman's request for a speedy divorce on the ground that her husband beat her.

In a ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim customs and European laws, the judge, Christa Datz-Winter, noted that the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu, in which it is common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote in her decision, sanctions such physical abuse.

...The 26-year-old woman in this case was born in Germany to a Moroccan family and married in Morocco in 2001, according to her lawyer, Ms. Becker-Rojczyk. The couple settled in the Frankfurt area and had two children.

In May 2006, the police were summoned after a particularly violent incident. At that time, Judge Datz-Winter ordered the husband to move out and stay at least 55 yards away from the coupleis home. In the months that followed, her lawyer said, the man threatened to kill his wife.

Terrified, the woman filed for divorce in October and requested that it be granted without the usual year of separation because her husband's threats and beatings constituted an "unreasonable hardship."

"We worried that he might think he had the right to kill her because she is still his wife," Ms. Becker-Rojczyk said.

In January, the judge turned down the wife's request for a speedy divorce, saying her husband's behavior did not constitute unreasonable hardship because they are both Moroccan. "In this cultural background," she wrote, "it is not unusual that the husband uses physical punishment against the wife."

This is the kind of ruling that gives intercultural dialogue a bad name. All it takes is for some foolish judge to think that she's engaging Islam in a respectful way to make the whole enterprise look foolish.

It seems ridiculous to me that the Qu'ran would even come up in her ruling, but even more ridiculous that she would have the gall to say what is and isn't customary in Muslim culture or Islamic law or think that her opinion would have any weight at all. This, of course, is not because she's a foreigner, but because Islam is not her field, so just like she's unfit to make judgments on quantum physics, say, or Inuit literature, she should hold her tongue on issues that are not only not germane in a German civil court but of which she most likely knows next to nothing.

I've been really annoyed by the media's tendency to equate Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic terrorism. This is a point made in Olivier Roy's works on the subject, and it seems obvious that the fact that someone is a fundamentalist Muslim does not mean that that person would ever be willing to commit a violent act on behalf of those beliefs. Similarly, I know many fundamentalist Christians in America's Bible Belt, but none who have bombed abortion clinics or murdered abortion doctors.

This idea comes up in a Slate review of Daveed Gartenstein-Ross' book, My Year Inside Radical Islam:

While working at the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, Gartenstein-Ross adopts some conservative Muslim practices, including a few advocated by the puritanical Salafi school of thought. He grows a beard; wears a kufi, or skullcap; refrains from praying together with or shaking the hands of women; avoids contact with dogs; rolls his pants above his ankles when he prays; and throws away his music collection. But he also dates a Christian woman, to whom he proposes without asking her to convert. And I never caught mention of him requesting halal food in his parents' home, where he was living during his internship. His new religious behaviors were surely meaningful and important to him, but they hardly meet the prevailing American definition of a "radicalized Muslim" as someone who retreats from secular society, advocates a nation governed by Muslim law, and resorts to violence against those who would thwart such plans. And if that definition truly is wildly off-base, Gartenstein-Ross does nothing in the book to challenge it with an alternative.

He does undertake one genuinely "radical" religious action: Midway through his internship, he begins to pray daily for the mujahideen in Chechnya. Outside of his conscience, though, the closest he comes to doing anything radical, illegal, or related to terrorism is when he nearly meets at the airport a man he later learns was trying to procure money for al-Qaida. To repeat -- he almost met someone who he had no idea was in the country to do evil. If this is the experience of a young Westerner who's been drawn into the world of radical Islam, then perhaps we have less to worry about than we thought.

But Gartenstein-Ross isn't John Walker Lindh, interrupted. His is merely the tale of a confused, suggestible kid with what comes off as an unquenchable need for acceptance within whatever community he happens to find himself. For conservative commentators to suggest that this is a cautionary, inspirational tale is off the mark. Time and again, Gartenstein-Ross reports examples that we're supposed to react to with the horrified feeling that he's being brainwashed. Instead, though, they come across as confusing behavior by someone undergoing a spiritual crisis and who seems almost eager to back down from beliefs he once held dear.

To be fair, I haven't read his book, but it certainly sounds like Gartenstein-Ross fell in with a group of fundamentalist Muslims, then decided that their belief system wasn't for him. This is not to say that it's not an interesting subject, the experience of a convert, and his decision to go back on his conversion (a process that took two years from beginning to end). But what it is not, is a look at Islamic terrorism, which is really where the book market seems to be these days.

So while it might be interesting to read an account of someone who was "born again" into one of the churches that we see in Jesus Camp, it wouldn't necessarily help us to understand what makes a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist move from more or less extreme religious beliefs to religious violence.