Thursday, July 28, 2005

Fodor 1985, Guide to Mental Representations




I instantly reconsidered my position when, however, it became clear to me that whatever danger threatened an occupant of the room could not come either from the window or the door. My attention was speedily drawn, as I have already remarked to you, to this ventilator, and to the bell-rope which hung down to the bed. The discovery that this was a dummy, and that the bed was clamped to the floor, instantly gave rise to the suspicion that the rope was there as a bridge for something passing through the hole and coming to the bed. The idea of a snake instantly occurred to me, and when I coupled it with my knowledge that the doctor was furnished with a supply of creatures from India, I felt that I was probably on the right track. The idea of using a form of poison which could not possibly be discovered by any chemical test was just such a one as would occur to a clever and ruthless man who had had an Eastern training. The rapidity with which such a poison would take effect would also, from his point of view, be an advantage.


Arthur Conan Doyle : The Adventure of the Speckled Band



Molly Bloom:


if they only knew him as well as I do yes because the day before yesterday he was scribbling something a letter when I came into the front room for the matches to show him Dignams death in the paper as if something told me and he covered it up with the blottingpaper pretending to be thinking about business so very probably that was it to somebody who thinks she has a softy in him because all men get a bit like that at his age especially getting on to forty he is now so as to wheedle any money she can out of him no fool like an old fool and then the usual kissing my bottom was to hide it not that I care two straws who he does it with or knew before that way though Id like to find out so long as I dont have the two of them under my nose all the time like that slut that Mary we had in Ontario terrace padding out her false bottom to excite him bad enough to get the smell of those painted women off him once or twice I had a suspicion by getting him to come near me when I found the long hair on his coat without that one when I went into the kitchen pretending he was drinking water I woman is not enough for them it was all his fault of course ruining servants then proposing that she could eat at our table on Christmas if you please O no thank you not in my house stealing my potatoes and the oysters 2/6 per doz going out to see her aunt if you please common robbery so it was but I was sure he had something on with that one it takes me to find out a thing like that he said you have no proof it was her proof O yes her aunt was very fond of oysters but I told her what I thought of her suggesting me to go out to be alone with her I wouldnt lower myself to spy on them the garters I found in her room the Friday she was out that was enough for me a little bit too much I saw too that her face swelled up on her with temper when I gave her her weeks notice better do without them altogether do out the rooms myself quicker only for the damn cooking and throwing out the dirt I gave it to him anyhow either she or me leaves the house I couldnt even touch him if I thought he was with a dirty barefaced


James Joyce: Ullysses



Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Pundit Towers - Jean Charles Menezes



Straight rip from Blood & Treasure


the origins of tragic errors

The victim was Brazilian, we now know:

It is believed that Mr de Menezes, who is thought to have spoken good English, may have been working illegally in Britain for up to four years. He is thought to have panicked when confronted by armed men as he was about to buy a Tube ticket at about 10am. Witnesses said that he hurdled the ticket barrier, ran down the escalator and stumbled into a carriage.

Three armed officers who pounced on him, might have thought his padded jacket contained explosives. One of them shot five bullets from a handgun into his head in front of horrified passengers.

Now the odd thing is that the Brazilian cops have been known to carry out extra judicial executions of people they believe to be socially marginal, and this may have informed de Menezes’ impulse to run for it.

It’s a tale of globalization. A terrorist technique is pioneered in the Lebanon, mass produced in Sri Lanka and refined in Afghanistan and Iraq before coming to London. In response, the British police take counter-terrorist techniques from Israel which fail – in part and perhaps - because of the victim’s experiences of life in Brazil.





Saturday, July 23, 2005

Serependipity

Going back for some more gorging on the glories of the Iberian peninsula through

Iberianature

catch word epistemology (which knew meaning of), then...

epistemology in Don Quixote

which must be one of the most serependipitously suprising small, but perefectly formed, small finds one could wish for.

Think Nick Lloyd who produces this compendious site is a English lecturer.

Featuring : linguablogs



Visited Language Hat before but didn't realise till checking the blogroll how many others there were. A friend who has quite a few European languages under his belt was mentioning a desire for a bit of Latin: there are three or four Latblogs, e.g. scripio scripsit, who appears to live in the western reaches of the Roman empire in Washington D.C.

Two other lingua tips :

(1) Swearing in Spanish

might not sound like something you direct the children to {1}, except in that they might need some background for Hemingway set books. Took my fancy because I had thought before going there it was partly to do with religion - proved true.
Spain is supposed to be a very religious country. Its history, at least, has showed a high respect to God and Friends in Heaven. However, spanish language is full of expressions that most foreigners would consider rather offensive. Religion is the center of spanish swearing, but quite different from Swedish, where the religious icon to be attacked is The Devil. The Devil, Satan and/or all Hellish creatures are seldom used in spanish swearing. On the contrary, the targets of a Spanyard's anger are God, The Virgin, Jesus and the rest of The Catholic Olympus. Centuries of Inquisition and forty years of National-Catholic Dictatorship haven't been enough to teach spanyards to show respect to their own deitys. We will take a look of some of the expressions that will condemn most spanyards to Hell.

(2) Eunoia {2}

Lipograms

This , reminding us of
George Perec’s, A Void, { 2 } { 3 } did come via language hat but, going back, can't find the link. Googling gave a review of Christian Bök's book (sorry) at:

The Danforth Review

extract of Gilbert Adair's translation of Void.

There is also :
Gadsby [1939] by Ernest Vincent Wright

What gives? Well, it seemed on reading the quote

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink
this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism,
disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks—impish
hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn’t it glib?
Isn’t it chic? I fit childish insights within rigid limits,
writing shtick which might instill priggish misgiv-
ings in critics blind with hindsight. I dismiss nit-
picking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I
bitch; I kibitz—griping whilst criticizing dimwits,
sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplis-
tic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit.

from “Chapter I” Eunoia

individual writing, necessarily limited by intelligence, creativitity and education, would in a sense fall into the same sort of restrictions as eunoia. More directly: my writing will never be like, say, Blanchot's essays. Though, damn it, in my time I have written some pretty convoluted stuff.

I read (say) Blanchot: don't quite get it all, just bits. That's partly through the limits of my intelligence, partly because I am not trained in the language he uses nor have the classical education to understand where he is coming from. Though I wonder, sometimes, if Blanchot (our example) actually understood all of what he wrote in his (say) philosophy of literature. After all, sometimes when ideas are stretching the limits of what one can understand and say, things do get confused. People make whole careers out of explaining what they think other writers were saying: who themselves might not have been absolutely sure what they were trying to say. Indeed, it may be true, in some cases, the interpretation feeds back to the originator explaining the writing fully for the first time.

Though great praise is put on the clarity of a writer like Orwell, and his insistence on a set of simple rules to prevent one's writing becoming a cliché ridden, metaphorical mess, perhaps he could only write like that and made the rules to fit what he could do....and maybe I like Orwell so much because that's all I can do!

Academic writing of course is a different category from novels. Whereas novelists try this to see what they can come up with, academics by the use of terminology and jargon are being forced to do it, in a what they would consider an unlimited and limiting fashion: that's part of the academic game. In reality it puts the limits on the readers comprehension.

The ideal of this type of experimental writing is to show how the limitations still produce comprehensible language and to demonstrate when this breaks down. Wonder if they do this in schools? There are probably poems with only one vowel in them on school walls throughout the world.








Friday, July 22, 2005

Tassili N'Ajjer



Another film from the Roland Collection which came from LawPundit on a trawl for other online movie sources.

Tassili N'Ajjer is 16 minutes long. You can't help but think of "The English Patient" with its Libyan cave paintings of the swimmers. Don't forget to view in 'theatre' mode, else too blurry.

Pre-writing. And yet, and yet. The flickering images reviewed time and a gain by fire-light like a much loved movie, but needing a little bit more imagination and audience participation. No organist, but the elders giving a running commentary and children scuttling about in the dark edges of the cave.



Wednesday, July 20, 2005

J Mark Bertrand



J Mark Bertrand on 'moral fiction'




Paranoia in literature



Decided to put up a side link under this category. Looking for ideas, came across The "scanty plot": Orwell, Pynchon, and the poetics of paranoia by Aron S Rosenfeld, which is pretty comprehensive, though there are a great variety of articles such as:

You lookin’ at me? Paranoia runs deep in Philip K. Dick’s tales and the movies made from them.

Emanuel Swedenborg, Prophet or Paranoid : a long introduction to his life and works and related matters: an education in itself if not exactly on fiction.

Dostoevesky and Psychology though slightly off-beam, in deleving into psycho-analysis and epilepsy, is nontheless useful, a reminder of another reading phase, when I read every book on Dostoevsky including one which went on at length about how he used the device of triangles to concoct his array of characters. True or not, who knows.

Transcript of Waugh's 1960 Face to Face interview with John Freeman at the point where Pinfold is discussed, which is part of
An Evelyn Waugh Website
including a page Evelyn Waugh in his own Words
A few sound bites of this and other programmes including Monitor



Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Paranoia in literature and life



I just had a nasty dose of paranoia which thankfully was mild and short-lived. But it drew me inexorably to a topic which might otherwise have passed me by. So it goes.

My last post 's links seemed to be re-directing to a Microsoft help page, rather than to a selection of my recent reading. After a cry of help to other Blogger.com users, there was a measured and helpful reply from a fellow blitteur, no name no pack drill, which put all to rights with the deletion of an extra http:// or two and the addition of a few missing colons.

Paranoia successfully epochéd what suddenly came to mind was the theme of paranoia in literature (and of course life). The only book I can distinctly remember the details of the main character's paranoia was Pinfold's in Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, which my parents had on their bookshelves in Libya when I was teenager - together with Amis's Lucky Jim - both of which I read later in my early twenties Waugh et al phase.

Pinfold, of course, goes crazy on a mixture of drink and drugs (if my memory serves, the latter supplied in copious quantity and variety by the ships doctor), as had happened to Waugh himself on a similar cruise which had been designed to help him recover from some mental problem or other.

These two novels involve drinking to oblivion and a third, which also now comes to mind, is Willy Russell's Educating Rita, where (in the film remember), lecturer Michael Cane's drinking is connected in part with his despair at the idea of teaching the literary canon to a working class girl with no previous education.

This looks as if it might be an opportunity for a collaborative effort, so I would ask any readers to come up with novels and ideas (not necessarily novel) to develop this theme. We could deal with Dostoevsky's drinking (and his epilepsy). Was it brought on by heavy drinking? If he hadn't drunk so much he might not have had the religious themes he put into so many of his novels. { N.B. epileptics are often or become obsessed with religion in some way or another, suggested to be through stimulation of the God Spot in the temporal lobe.}

It looks like I have got stuck on drinking and paranoia....however, this is a rich seam.






Monday, July 18, 2005

Never discuss politics with religion

Let other people do the thinking for you !

Thought for the Day Today Programme BBC Radio 4,
19 July 2005 by Dr. Mona Siddiqui


Is Islam Secularizable? which came from Institute for the Secularisation of Islam

  • A distinction between Islamism and neo-fundamentalism :

The failure of Political Islam by Oliver Roy

Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity

  • Reviewed by Ed Mooney, University of Syracuse
i.e. which emotions are the indignant Muslims exhibiting ?

The vexed question of, "When is a religion a cult ?" came up in several main-media articles: thought it might be a good idea to run through it one more time.

The Decline and Fall of Islam
Look for the mention of cult bits. Reminds me of the visits by the ever-so-nice Jehovah's Witnesses, who also like the Muslims believe in a paradise (but theirs will be here, right now on earth) which as he mentions here are considered by Christians to be a cult, though the JWs think they are interpreting the Bible more correcting than orthodoc christianity. As an atheistic/agnostic cycler: fondness for the JWs insistence on the Cross being a T and other details. Doesn't matter to me because I'm not a Christian or a Muslim. Quite like some aspects of Buddhism and must be Jainist because of drowning spider and fly retrieving syndrome [DSFRS] operating under all circumstances bar imminent threat of nuclear holocaust.
debating points:
  • apostasy
  • treatment of women
  • all pervading know-alls who presume to be experts on religions which are not their own (hope you don't think I fall into that category)
from :

Alan Caruba is the author of "Warning Signs", a new book published by Merril Press. His weekly column is posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center (www.anxietycenter.com). The Center offers "A Pocket Guide to Militant Islam."

  • Love the idea of a National Anxiety Centre. Must be American: we could probably do with one in the UK, whatever it is.

Another kind of fundamentalism

  • from Axis of Logic : The Evolutionary "Why" of Religious Capitalism: Imperialism, Colonialism and Capitalism in Christ's Name By Dr. Gerry Lower, Eugene, Oregon, 14 July 2005.
  • Getting the notion of fundamentalism straight from another perspective and, hey, evolution vs. creation is almost as fascinating as Islam and terrorism.







Monday, July 11, 2005

Blöggentherapie

This post is in flux

The Roland Collection is a wonderful resource. R. Mark Wood of Ca. seems to be a genius at finding this stuff: his use of the visual a master stroke. Don't always have much a clue about the quotes, but you don't have to go there just once. The paintings and photograph are always a rich source.

Looking for the best to link to in the movie category, found this 1990 Dutch production, Drawn from Experience : art therapist [subtitled] explaining her work with the aid of her patients' (if anyone says 'clients'....) work. It may be my capacity, a talent even, to take longeurs: this is a wonderfully deep little film, ostensibly on rehabilitation about the the human spirit and creativity. It is also about the way the creative impulse rises up, originates, and develops.

Film has always been my first love. Not a Cahiers type - though reading the big nobs of film on film can be instructive once the crap has been cut through - I prefer to build up knowledge and understanding from watching, thinking and writing. Most of these writings, including one called "Why I am a film-maker" - when patently I haven't actually made one - were written in the last five years and remain private so far, through lack of confidence and fear of ridicule of the as "A very good sixth form essay" variety. Anyway, this stuff hasn't stewed long enough to know if it is a learning experience or something to share.

When I have overcome the fear of my thinking and writing never having risen beyond a fairly basic level, I will publish some of it. Though there is no need to ask someone else to judge it before doing so: we are all Randolph Hearsts now, as the saying ought to go.

You may have to work through the extent and limits of your intelligence - early or late in life. Publishing writing or displaying one's art doesn't help having a fine sensibility. One of the useful functions of a weblog: to practice public writing. There is personal disclosure in MM but hopefuly minimal in the showy off sense and as objective as it is possible to be when writing about yourself.

A few real film projects started about 20 years ago. For many years I have wanted to buy a good amateur cinematograph (the dream: a Canon) and just go out there to make a film, object trouvé
fashion, but it just didn't happen. There have been many still that take the place of movie sequences, which could in effect be stitched together to make films. Now, with the digital technology all seems possible, with a little time and application. Many film ideas would work quite well using animation software.

One thing that is going to help a great deal is a source of film scripts online, e.g. The Manchurian Candidate, which, again, probably came through RMW. Anyone who has tried to write a script without bothering to buy a book on how to do it, knows you get it all wrong to start with. The BBC Radio and TV guidance is excellent : it gives sample scripting for the different formats. Of course, if your name is George Bernard Shaw, you have the hutzpah to write long stage directions - a study of the history of script writing probably shows they have progressively tightened and shortened.


Drawn fom Experience {conveniently linked to in its own category => } made me think back to my first year in teaching, with the good fortune to find in the same school a fellow new-ish teacher who had the same jaundiced view of the profession and was able to articulate its idiocies and inanities with great humour! She soon left teaching, to her credit, and became an art therapist. Gwen are you out there? Although not much of an artist - "the heart of the artist; the brain's of the booking clerk?" - that is the sort of job that might have covered my skills, aptitudes, temperament and interests.

It struck me forcibly again while watching the film - not novel but worth saying - how much reading and writing and here, drawing and painting, are principally therapeutic (only a handful are and even wish to be published) : how often humans have to depend on them to keep sane. Let's hope the diary and commonplace book continue to get written by hand as well in the weblog. Do remember inkjet ink runs like a school bottling paper chromatography experiment. Pecil is known to have lasted longest. If all writing is solely digital there is the risk of the whole lot going up in smoke on day leaving only the handwritten stuff....

It's not so much if you are a good writer or painter, then, but what it does for you. Creativity, yours or someone else's, is, must, begin with making you feel good, uplifting you in some way, though we know of so many writers who hate the process of getting it down on paper. Something drives them to overcome this hurdle. Even the simplest acts such as someone drawing while you watch give a frisson of pleasure, don't they?

Living film ideas, creating, running through, changing scene structure, in your head is greatly pleasurable too and, well, therapeutic: it takes you out of yourself in a way that work and much of life doesn't. It helps if you are hooked on - 'get' the essence of film in its techniques and its magical illusions : 100fps and {2}. Pehaps there are more people out there who actually make films in their heads than we know. Whatever, they have only been doing it for a 100 odd years, whereas idle dreaming and writing in the head have been going on for millenia.

You can sink into a good book - or daydream - but to preface ones' imaginings with "I'm making a film" makes it different in a special way (remember not to tell anyone you are doing it - eyes skyward, mostly, if you do): more engrossing (much more than drawing or painting or watching someone draw or paint partly because of the rules you have to obey) if you do have the sort of mind that can make films in your head. You need to be able film the scenes - eyes shut or open - to be really good at it, to 'sit' in the darkened editing room cutting and splicing, noticing as you do so that there seem to be more cuts than you filmed, going out to re-shoot scens. Sometimes there seems to be so much celluloid coiling on the dusty floor you begin to wonder is some of this stuff from a film someone else made?

Is 'making films' what humans do anyway? No:yes. Only since we learnt the rules of film. Technology and technique : lenses, depth of field, focal length, film type, shutter speeds, storyboarding, tracking, panning, fades, the eveyday tricks that make a film possible. Unless you are doing all this creating within the limits of film then it some other type of imagining. Film is the creation of realities or fantasies by a set of rules which you can't break: to break them too seriously means it is not film. There is plenty of scope for how you make one, thankfully.

The defining moment about film for me when I heard it said, "Show it, don't say it." Who said that?

Vision is the predominant sense and we didn't always have print. The cosy neolithic fire-side stories passing surpringly intact from generation to generation, or the Prophet Mohammed's words, were - had to be - pictured though almost-but-not-quite movies sans pellicule. You couldn't remember all in words - it has to be held together by interlinked images. Memory only works effectively if each object on the tray is associated with some sort of story. My favourite way of learning a list is placing everything in a virtual picture gallery..maybe 'film-makers' tend to do this rather than use raw cognitive power to memorise.


Some have to "raise the plane of regard" in life or weblogs : they would prefer to die than be be bereft of what is 'best' and not be allowed to let their creative impulses to flow. When the blitteur starts up, he or she may have done so because it seems like a neat way to form a reading group, but I suspect it is the desire to commune with others spiritually that is behind them. A few like to be seen, perhaps, to be able to judge what is good or newly cool in literature. Mine seems to be about going through what I have already read or done and trying to write good English! If you come back to some of my posts they may have radically changed their wording if not meaning...

Others have more mundane and complicated agendas, including professional self-promotion - where better to do so that in a weblog? The Americans are awfully good at all that, aren't they?

Weblogs have been a blessing and a curse, including amongst blitteurs, with so many starting off bright sparks, then slowly fading, some descending into unexplained silence, others with the need to sign off even if with the hope-filled promise of, "I will return". Although the weblog was seen by educated/cultured/creative types as "a good thing", the pressures of holding down a job (they are usually symbol manipulators) and doing the life maintenance necessities made it impossible to do all three well. Blogging takes time. I don't like three sentance posts with 8 links. The self-appointed bloggenphilosophes claim these are best. Why not sometimes be discursive within the bounds of sense and logic. As someone says after a while you lose your self consciousness about the process and use it as if a private diary or a telephone call to a friend. Letting go withing the bounds of personal safety (Don't say my neighbour Mr. Smith at No. 18 Google St. by mistake...) is part of the deal. The only rules that need apply are the constraints of the software. So many webloggers seem to be overtly or covertly laying down rules as to how weblogs should be used: this and commenting on how useless other weblogs are in terms of design and facilities such as RSS, seems to be taking up more of their time than actually getting on with expressing thought about something important or funny.

Many blitteurs who have maintained quality and quantity over a long period are probably using it to enhance their academic work. Some show a disconnect between their academic work and the paucity of their ideas and language used in their weblogs: when they have to talk in ordinary language, as if to a friend, they don't have quite so much to say as they thought. Some of the most interesting are those who off-load some of their professional work or thinking into their blogs: vid. John Wilkins' Evolving Thoughts. Sometimes it a case of being able to think and discus,s without the formal constraint, which has proved so, well, er, therapeutic. A philosophy student such as Richard Chappell can educate us while he is running through his course, blogwise.

Those weblogs - blitteur or otherwise - which just stop just stop and remain dormant are quite fascinating and mysterious in a way. There is a slight disappointment when you pick them up in a new, brighter, sharper format, under a new, cool name. Has the no-more-blogger has decided after many hundreds of hours of posting and flaming that it isn't worth the candle ? Doing the rounds a bit more than usual came across mention that England's Sword was packing up. But you see he is posting on other sites when and if. Its quicker and easier for a busy professional academic, writer, or whatever to do it this way. You can email the submission to the group site or whatever to make it even quicker.

Often, a weblog visit is simply to get access to a compendious set of handily categorised links. Someone's been putting in time and effort to do this and you get it for free, saving the bother of creating your own compendium. A massive blogroll can be a way of describing/defining who you are without having to post about it: it can also be a boring show off. Creativity can be stiffled in the effort of maintaining a weblog and constantly re-designing it to keep up with the crowd. Checking links go main page and not to some old post months ago, is another time waster. Scanning through the posts in 'link heavy' sites even after a week or two, with that expert eye one develops for a keyword, using the automatic mouse roll on its slowest speed while topping up wine glass or making roll-up, can be done relatively quickly and painlessly.

I don't want to be too annoying with that humorists old device about, "There are two types of people..." but in the interweb, as some wag recently called it, this is patently true. The weblog asks the eternal question "Hey, who am I?". " I'm a definite entity and I'm going to demonstrate my integrity by words and pictures.".....or ...."I'm a part of cyberpace so can change identity, opinions, employ the art of Ketman, employ multiple personalities..I'm freeeeeeeeee." This even in older age groups.

Looking for whether we can call workers as well as computers symbol manipulators and coming across nothing but Turing and Searle discussions, bumped in Daniel Drezner waxing about the therapeutics of weblogging. There's divergent thinking and there's convergent thinking and you'd be surprised how convergent we can be from the evidence of weblogworld.




Sunday, July 10, 2005

Movies



Didn't realise how many great little movies there were on the web till broadband...
Shall put a side link to built up a collection starting with this one
by Director
Herbert Apel of the life of artist Kathe Kollwitz, that came from a long, lingering look at Wood's Lot today.

If you come across any - I am looking for one that someone did on Rilke - send the links.




Working back to Art : politically confused





Overdue: to get the sun in my face once more and put aside the woes of the world, closing down pages one by one come back to Antigonish Review for a final check, find:


Shark or Submarine: How to Tell a Romantic from a Modern

and know the spiritual quest does not have to be through religion: the outsider can't take religion.



From Art to Life : politics for a change

From The Antigonish Review (no never heard of it) via Wood's Lot (tend to let the posts accumulate, then gorge on the pictures..)

Between Rock and Stone: a geopoetic alphabet

appealed to me, particularly limestone.

Politics in the light of 7/7

From Antigonish # 140 :

Jihadis R Us by David Rothberg.
Omar Sheikh was the westernised, educated Pakistan who killed Daniel Pearl. A personal story asking the question why more Arabs or Pakistanis don't turn into Omar Sheikhs, which mentions the 'Wahabbis financed many of the fundamentalist religious organisations in Pakistan in the '70s'.


Back to a post in Baghdadskies which linked to to an article in Spike Magazine : a review by Ben Granger of Al Quaeda by Jason Burke, covering similar ground - returning to one of my oft repeated themes in baghdadskies - the roots of disaffection and loss of hope based in the failure of Arab Nationalism exemplified by the life and works of Syeed Qutb.

The New Yorker from way back does Dr. Al Zawahiri and Qutb in interesting and illuminating detail.

Wikipedia covers both, giving details of Qutb's writing.

Although, as we are all reading in our newspapers, the bombings might be linked to someone such as Mustapha Setmariam Nasar {2} who is suggested to have been behind the Madrid bombings. {3} suggests otherwise. Now shown to homegrown bombers, but not who, if anyone, organised the attack from outside Britain.

It is vital to understand where this all really started - the failure of Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism. Though a more common view is it starts with the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. Thomas Friedman, New York Times 8 July 2005
If it's a muslim problem, It needs a muslim solution
argues acccording to M. Shahid Alam, Professor professor of economics at Northeastern University, in Did Thomas Friedman Flunk History? this is running through Norman Lewis' argument that the muslims have only themselves to blame.

the grievances which ave inflammed the Islammist and neo-fundamentalist Muslims could stem from

...the Crusades or the forced conversion of the Spanish Muslims and their eventual expulsion from Spain. That is not the history behind the "jihadist death cult." I could begin with the creation of a Jewish state in 1948 in lands inhabited by Palestinians; the 1956 invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel; Israel's pre-emptive war of 1967 against three Arab states; the meticulously planned destruction of Palestinian society in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967; the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, stretching from 1982 to 2000; the massacre of 200,000 Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s; the devastation of Chechnya in 1996 and since 1999; the brutalities against Kashmiris since the 1990s; the deadly sanctions against Iraq from 1990 to 1993 which killed one and a half million Iraqis; the pogrom against Gujarati Muslims in 2002; the US invasion of Iraq in April 2003 which has already killed more than 200,000 Iraqis. Clearly, there is a lot that Mr. Friedman has to forget, to erase from his history books.

When I was a small boy in the Baghdad a few years before the 1958 revolution in Iraq, there was no talk of Islam in the wider world. The man who filled everyone's screen was Gamal Abdul Nasser. His inflammatory speeches (often against other Arabs - they slug it out trading insults) filled the airwaves in the mid to late 50s. In Baghdad university students were his devotees. My teenage Iraqi friend, Selim, who had, when our familes were neighbours, taken me to the cinema to see Jailhouse Rock and had invited us to his house for meals, came to our front door one shocking day just before or after July 14 1958 to rant about Nasser, with a large framed photograph tied to the front of his chest. I was 9. We had moved, about 6 months before, from the Mushtamal in Khaddadah to a new house in the Armenian disctrict in the same road as the U.S. Consulate. We has lost contact but he had found where we lived. I can still feel the goose-bumps of fear as well all stood on the verandah lstening to his Arab nationalist diatribe.

Now, with Arab nationalist dreams in the dustbin of history, Muslim youth turns to Islam for political recourse
- direction - and emotional and psychological succour, rather than to the cut and thrust of Middle East politics of the nationalist and socialist type that existed before. Now: the tedious agitprop heard so often on TV - hardly a detailed, informed, reasonable political debate - about America's impartiality over Israel-Palestine, Britain's culpability in helping with the invasion of Iraq and the west's past colonial crimes form the new under-current, the backdrop, to any debate however feeble its intellectual level. Few Muslims of any nationality are willing to admit or accept or even talk about the failures of their own governments since 'red pencilled' after the First World War, as Lewis and others suggest. Its obviously both the West's domination of and interference in the Middle East and the failure of most of the countries in the area to democratise. In the Cold War Egypt, Syria and Iraq were client states of the USSR, not the U.S. or Britain.

Inevitably, acts which with some justification can be judged simply criminal and probably insane have to be examined through the filter of the failed societies the perpetrators come from. Now we have to pay attention to Islam, Muslims in the West, the Arabs and their history and colonial past together with current difficulties and grievances in the Middle East a whole (the rise and fall of nationalism) and the origin of the fundamentalist Islamist "Jihad" against the West. We tend not to ram home to Muslims in debate the truth about countries such as Egypt, Syria and Iran. Perhaps this should be the tack.

Personally - in the sense that I lived in Arab countries as a child, in particular Iraq, where my father worked helping to train the Iraqi Air Force, though not that this fact makes me a middle east or islamic expert - I think we British ought, for our own protection, and in defence of liberal democracy, put pressure firmly on the Islamic community in Britain as if we were dealing with a political party not a religion. We should not let leader such as Sir Iqbal Sacranie repeat facile mantras - which are no more than a willful refusal to deal with the real issues - about how Islam is a religion of peace, the bombers were not muslims and that we are all in it together. Allowing Muslim leaders and muslim vox pop - through our misguided adherence to political correctness - to repeat endlessly that Islam is a religion of peace, while allowing a hint through the the form of words or the lack of words - in the spaces between the words - at our moral degeneracy and the superiority of Islam, is not the way to come to terms with this.

We have to defend our political system and common values and not be weighed down by guilt about how we treated others in our colonial past. True the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq with the deaths of many thousands of innocents has not helped the debate. The refusal of the Coalition to acknowledge or even record the number of innocent civilians who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, was a folly of bathic proportions. Fait accomplie - there is no going back from Iraq, no matter how many are killed there - does not mean we cannot atone for our governments acts by getting them to acknowledge their mistakes.

Muslims generally insist Islam means peace.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam have been religions of war in their times. Unamuno {2} reminds us:

Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin. "It is only on the march and in time of war," says Robertson Smith in The prophets of Israel, "that a nomad people feels any need of a central authority, so it came about that in the first beginnings of national organisation, centred in the santuray of the ark, Israel was thought mainly as the host of Jehovah. The very name of Israel is martial, and means 'God (El) fighteth, and Jehovah in the Old Testament is Iahwè Çebãôth - the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly recognised; but in primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in time of peace.


The next paragraph in The tragic Sense of Life :

God, the only God, issued, therefore, from man's sense of divinity as a warlike, monarchical and social God. He revealed himself to the people as a whole, not to the individual. He was the God of a people and he jelously exacted that worship sholud be rendered to him alone. The transition from this moncultism to montheism was effected largely by the individual action, more philosophical perhaps than theological, of the prophets. It was, in fact, the individual activity of the prophets that individualised divinity. And above all by making the divinity ethical.

Unlike Unamuno, I don't believe God reveals himself to peoples as a whole, but to individuals who see solutions to human problems. Good and bad ideas spread equally through populations like molecules of gas expanding to fill the available space. Jesus's claim that he was the Son of God - an expression the meaning of which is open to interpretation - is the classic example of the personal. His solution was effective: the very personalisation of love, of turning the other cheek (as many times as required) and Good Samaritanism was what made his claim Love could conquer all so important in a time when an eye for an eye was the norm and led to escalations of violence and the attendant hatred and instability.

Though Islam was instigated by the prophet Mohammed through divine inspiration, it too was founded on the personal.
Muslims believe the Koran to be the direct Word of God delivered through Mohammed. This is a necessary fiction, in the same way that the mythology surrounding the Ten Commandments (and the rest) was fiction: no one is going to to accept a set of social rules that I offer up one morning on the Today Programme starting with 1. Always compost all your organic waste, down to the last tea leaf no matter what the circumstances, 2. Do not kill anything unless absolutely necessary to prevent a nasty bite on the back of your leg, unless I offer some sort of provenance or authority for them, such as that I am a your leadeer, am instructed to do so by God, am a priest or a theologian or a quantum mechanics physicist. Using such rules personally, such that I do not involve anyone else - except in that I am different from what I was before I adopted the rules, and am inextricably connected to other people - is not the same as making a set of rules up, then forcing or persuading everyone else to adopt them.

Most great ideas spead through personal involvement and committment. Many then are forced down everyone else's throats whether they believe them, want them, or not. Most religions are socio-political in orgin, though their orginators usually claim otherwise. Each of the great religions has a tendancy to forget its murky past.

A cursory reading of the Bible and its exegesies and the Koran, Sunnah and Hadith and subsequent commentaries, shows how all religions' Holy Books are very human documents: they show the gap between God and man. For example, it is well established and accepted the order of the verses of the Koran is something that has been imposed subsequently, just as the Bible was edited to become what it is today. So wherever the words actually came from, in the Koran they are now out of chonological order and in the Bible there are bits left out.

The words of the Koran and the Bible place the books in their times. For example the Torah injunctions about diet have a relation to necessity. Squeezing the blood out of meat is no longer strictly necessary. But kosher is still an integral part of being a Jew. Pork is now safe to eat therefore, rationally, prohitions on pork eating could have been quietly dropped from ereryday observance once this way established. The same applies to halal. The mystery is why such man-made rules which are so obviously of their time, persist through millenia, whereas many of the fundamental precepts such as the Trinity become modified according to circumstance. Actually, this is where the Muslim claims superiority over the Christian: muslims say Christianity has been overlain with theology and mysticism, whereas Islam has remained pure.

An example of how the Koran is of its time - the 7th century - is shown by keywording "unbeliever" in the Koran: the quotes clearly show this is a predominant concern about unbelievers was at the time the Koran was spoken by Mohammed and recorded by his followers. Christianity had its well-documentered share of suppressing heresy or other religions.

The bigger problem for Muslims
is retaining Sharia Law as it now stands when it was only really suitable for life in Arabia in the 7 century A.D. To take quotes either from the Koran, Sunnah or Hadith to use as a reason to live separately {1 } - even if only in your head and heart - from those you live amongst is a species of insanity and an argument, as was suggested by a muslim on Newsnight BBC2 on 13 July, who pleaded for more education in Islam for British muslims in Britain rather than in Madrasas and other Islamic educational establishments overseas. In other words he, a muslim, is saying many muslims are ignorant of their own religion. Of course, most Christians are pretty hazy about their too, so nothing new.

Unamuno continues in the next paragraph from the above quote:


Subsequently reason - that is, philosophy - took possession of this God who had arisen in human consciousness as a consequence of the sense of divinity in man, and tended to define him and convert him into an idea. For to define a thing is to idealise it, a process which necessitates the abstraction from it of its incommensurable or irrational element, its vital essence. Thus the God of feeling, the divinty felt as a unique person and consciousness external to us, although at the same time enveloping and sustaining us, was converted into the idea of God.

We in Britain - with its roots in Christianity if now secular - have no moral high ground, historically. But we do have values: they are not the values which are written about by journalists very often, in all the blather about what it is to British. What is happening? We are being put on the defensive, when there is no reason for this, allowing the agenda to be determined for us by the bench-mark of one religion of many, just because the Muslim world is in turmoil.

We are being forced, - we must feel it our duty to do so as "Sons of the Enlightment" - to learn Islam (which is not a bad thing) to be able to think and debate the problem of Islamic fundamentalism, understanding, as we do so, the distinction between Islamism and neo-fundamentalism. We should be concentrating our energies as well on arguing for the values, such as free speech, and freedom of worship, which we hold dear within a liberal democracy.

An article
in the New Statesman by Ziauddin Sardar, The struggle for Islam's soul, is worth reading by muslims and no-muslims.

Islam has a conformist tendancy: all religions are conformist by tendancy. Though, paradoxically, they are also inevitably schismatic: a primary argument of the non-believer that religions are human creations. The British as a people tend to non-conformism. We can and have for hundred of years let people from other cultures into our society, in large numbers, and coexisted with them, but there is often sticky problem of the Berlinian incommensurability of values which works across sociological entities as well as within them. it behoves all incomer to learn the roots of Britishness in order to be able to understand our attitude to a religion such as Islam.

If young British muslims are still going in their thousands to learn in Madrasas in Pakistan and doing military training in Afghanistan, and possibly in Iraq since 2003 as is claimed, then we ought to go straight to the parents of young British Muslims [ the talk in the media is now of how Muslims are doing this anyway] to say: "Look, you are living and working here quite happily, but if we find your children, who are British subjects, are preparing to wage war against Britain, your life too will be transformed in ways you did not want or expect. We know you will probably not be to blame for what your children think or do, but your are their parents and should be monitoring their activities. Don't send them to Pakistan unless they are accompanied by an adult. Check what your sons are doing in Britain. Ask yourself what you want out of living and working and bringing up your children here."

Because Islam is a politico-religion, we have to present British Muslims with a stark choice: "It is Islam or Britain: you must choose and say overtly which comes first in your priorities: state law or
Sharia law." In practice most mulsims in Britain are happy to observe both with national law primary. Though if they insist on "Islam first", because God comes first, quite naturally, then we non-muslims have to ask, "Can we trust you to be loyal to Britain?" For those to whom Sharia is paramount, Sharia is in effect law within law. If Muslims are not fully informed about their religion, it is easy for Islamists or neo-fundamentalist to persuade them that Sharia is the only law worth observing and statute law is a necessary inconvenience which they may refuse to accept in certain circumstances because it conflicts with Sharia. Most British Muslims do not think like this, but by taking their religion seriously they are in effect psychologically and emotionally cut off from non-muslims.

No sooner have we discussed someone else's religion, especially when do not observe one, we feel guilt. We believe in freedom of speech and the rule of law. But we ought to be plagued by our knowledge that the Islamic communities in the west shame us by their sense of community, self-disipline, hard work and good conduct. Can we be surprised they distain us, when we let the underclass do and say what they like where they like, with mass drunkeness in our city centres, very young children running riot in schools, burnt out-cars littering the countryside, and no-go areas in the vast urban council estates? This and the failures of history are the simple ideas Islamists use to turn young susceptible British born Muslims.

There are obvious benefits to being a member of the muslim community in Britain. But we might ask ourselves whether we have made a mistake in trying to understand and promulgate, through endless recyclings in the mainstream media of, for example, why a man like Bin Laden might think, in the 21 century, (if indeed he does) that the Madrid bombing were pay back for the destruction of the glories of Al Andalus, and what sort of effect his mad, misplaced, irrelevant, and pointlessly nihilistic ideology is having on the sons of respectable Muslims living in Britain. Our best thinkers might be better serve all by writing about the pros and cons of the two cultures.

Coming to mind are the young adventurers, thugs and psychopaths (many the idle sons of the nobility) who went on the successive waves of the Crusades, full of the notions of kicking the boot into someone or other, collecting booty and coming home heroes all in the name of God.

I put up a few references to the basics but they kept on linking to in explicably Microsoft, so took them down.

Try Wipedia on Koran and Sharia

Catholic Encyclopedia : Koran. Instructive and presumably objective.

How to confront a cult of terror ReligionNews.com

- Cult psychology may help explain why young men become suicide murderers

Muhammed, Islam, and terrorism

A warning from the past that the BBC does not want us to hear By Charles Moore
(16/07/2005)
" ..muddle of language is not confined to the extremists, and therefore is not easy to isolate."

An Open Letter to moderate British Muslims
By Charlie, an Anglian clergyman 13 July 2005

Becoming a British Muslim by Zahrah Awaleh
A British born Somali published on 12 July 2005 but 'last paragraph was written as the news of the explosions started seeping into the London community center where Zahrah works'.

he two faces of Islam : Why all Muslims benefit from Terrorism
By David Wood {post London bombing}

Poll on Muslim attitudes in Middle East
Indicate that growing numbers of Muslims differentiate between what they consider the peaceful influence of Islamic values in politics and the use of religion to justify attacks.

This may have been taken from

Pew Centre data 14 July 2005 > 9 tables from specific questions

A supreme radio debate on OpenSource, July 19th, 2005 : Integration and Extremism: Muslims in Europe

Understood from this debate is the ease of slip-back to religious default mode easily effected by brain-washing by zealots. The answer must be to deeply instil the lived in culture within mainstream education and general social debate. This would not be through RE but through history, sociology, philosophy and civics courses and through new courses, morals and ethics based ones, designed to deal directly with cultural values and questions such as the distinction between civilisation and civilisations. But also within genuinely unbiased broadcast media.



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