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gnosticgnoob · 5 years

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Variations on a Theme: "The Weird vs The Quantifiable" -- Aggregated Commentary from within the Gutenberg Galaxy

The pursuit of examining the world through philosophy, mathematics, and science tends to be seen as expanding the borders of what is known and quantified, conquering the territory of what is not yet known. In this pursuit, the investigator encounters wonder or the "weird", and what ideologically separates some philosophers and scientists from others is whether the investigator sets aside the weird as a misunderstood quirk of what is not yet known but still knowable, or the investigator takes into account the weird as a fundamental, permanent attribute of the landscape of inquiry that may perhaps always represent factors which intrinsically and inescapably evade knowledge and literary explanation, not as a bug of our understanding but as a feature of the true ontological state of affairs. The former mindset supposes that with more time and rigor, our inquiry will finally arrive at a sort of epistemological/ontological "bedrock" that dispels any sense of the bizarre, the latter treats scientific inquiry itself as necessitating the injection of a sort of subjective poetry or play to adequately do justice to the full reality of what is observed and described for our purposes, without ever expecting that we will hit such bedrock. Materialism/scientism perhaps would posit that any inclusion of the mystical or poetic in the language we use to describe the world is inappropriate, pseudo-scientific, pseudo-intellectual, or maladaptive; the mystic posits conversely that to exclude the poetic and not make room for the weird is maladaptive.

I have here a collection of excerpts from other thinkers that I think work together to allude to the mystical as a permanent fixture of our endeavors for clarification through experimentation and language, or at least suggest that a more "mystical" mindset will always be more useful than one that is conversely more in the vein of materialism/scientism trying to arrive at a "final technical vocabulary":

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“We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.” --Gregory Bateson, English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). In Palo Alto, California, Bateson and colleagues developed the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. Bateson's interest in systems theory forms a thread running through his work. He was one of the original members of the core group of the Macy conferences in Cybernetics (1941- 1960), and the later set on Group Processes (1954 - 1960), where he represented the social and behavioral sciences; he was interested in the relationship of these fields to epistemology.

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“The mind is somehow a co-creator in the process of reality through acts of language. Language is very, very mysterious. It is true magic. People run all over the place looking for paranormal abilities, but notice that when I speak if your internal dictionary matches my internal dictionary, that my thoughts cross through the air as an acoustical pressure wave and are reconstructed inside your cerebral cortex as your thought. Your understanding of my words. Telepathy exists; it is just that the carrier wave is small mouth noises.” --Terence McKenna, "Eros And The Eschaton". McKenna was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s", an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. -------------------------------------

“If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet. Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” --Niels Bohr, Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus but can jump from one energy level (or orbit) to another. Although the Bohr model has been supplanted by other models, its underlying principles remain valid. He conceived the principle of complementarity: that items could be separately analysed in terms of contradictory properties, like behaving as a wave or a stream of particles. -------------------------------------

“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” --Werner Heisenberg, German theoretical physicist known for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which he published in 1927. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics. He also made important contributions to the theories of the hydrodynamics of turbulent flows, the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles, and he was instrumental in planning the first West German nuclear reactor at Karlsruhe. -------------------------------------

“We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.” --Max Planck, German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as the originator of quantum theory; the discovery of Planck's constant enabled him to define a new universal set of physical units (such as the Planck length and the Planck mass), all based on fundamental physical constants upon which much of quantum theory is based. -------------------------------------

“There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.” --Daniel Dennett, American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. A member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, he is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism", along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. -------------------------------------

“Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself; between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens. It is free for the dream.” --Michel Foucault, French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, and critical theory. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. -------------------------------------

“When the mind projects names and concepts on what is seen through direct perception, confusion and delusion result.” --Patanjali, sage in Hinduism, thought to be the author of a number of Sanskrit works. The greatest of these are the Yoga Sutras, a classical yoga text. -------------------------------------

“The man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one.” --Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911). Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Conrad wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of what he saw as an impassive, inscrutable universe. Heart of Darkness is among is most famous works. Conrad is considered an early modernist, though his works contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced numerous authors, and many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that Conrad's fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events. -------------------------------------

“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” --Richard P. Feynman, American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public as a member of the commission that investigated the Challenger shuttle disaster. Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. -------------------------------------

“The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.” --Michel Foucault -------------------------------------

“In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as ‘dazzling obscurity,’ 'whispering silence,’ 'teeming desert,’ are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions. “He who would hear the voice of Nada, 'the Soundless Sound,’ and comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dharana…. When to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams, when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE—the inner sound which kills the outer…. For then the soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear will speak THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE…. And now thy SELF is lost in SELF, THYSELF unto THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which thou first didst radiate.… Behold! thou hast become the Light, thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy God. Thou art THYSELF the object of thy search: the VOICE unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE OF THE SILENCE. Om tat Sat.” (H.P. Blavatsky, The Voice of the Silence). These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them, probably stir chords within you which music and language touch in common. Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.” --William James, Varieties of Religious Experience. American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James was a leading thinker of the late nineteenth century, one of the most influential U.S. philosophers, and has been labeled the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce, James established the philosophical school known as pragmatism. James also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James' work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty, as well as former US President Jimmy Carter. -------------------------------------

“Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological. … Whenever the Westerner hears the word ‘psychological’, it always sounds to him like ‘only psychological.’” --Carl Jung, “Psyche and Symbol”. Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work was influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies. Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital, during which time he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology. Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements, a process which Jung considered to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion. -------------------------------------

“God is a psychic fact of immediate experience, otherwise there would never have been any talk of God. The fact is valid in itself, requiring no non-psychological proof and inaccessible to any form of non-psychological criticism. It can be the most immediate and hence the most real of experiences, which can be neither ridiculed nor disproved.” --Carl Jung -------------------------------------

“Daniel C. Dennett defines religions at the beginning of his Breaking the Spell as ‘social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought,’ which as far as Christianity goes is rather like beginning a history of the potato by defining it as a rare species of rattlesnake…. He also commits the blunder of believing that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world, which is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” --Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution. British literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual, Eagleton has published over forty books, but remains best known for Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). The work elucidated the emerging literary theory of the period, as well as arguing that all literary theory is necessarily political.

#occult #scientism #mysticism #esoterica #philosophy

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mideastsoccer · 3 years

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Battle for the Soul of Islam

By James M. Dorsey

This story was first published in Horizons

TROUBLE is brewing in the backyard of Muslim-majority states competing for religious soft power and leadership of the Muslim world in what amounts to a battle for the soul of Islam. Shifting youth attitudes towards religion and religiosity threaten to undermine the rival efforts of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and, to a lesser degree, the United Arab Emirates, to cement their individual state-controlled interpretations of Islam as the Muslim world’s dominant religious narrative. Each of the rivals see their efforts as key to securing their autocratic or authoritarian rule as well as advancing their endeavors to carve out a place for themselves in a new world order in which power is being rebalanced.

Research and opinion polls consistently show that the gap between the religious aspirations of youth—and, in the case of Iran other age groups—and state-imposed interpretations of Islam is widening. The shifting attitudes amount to a rejection of Ash’arism, the fundament of centuries-long religiously legitimized authoritarian rule in the Sunni Muslim world that stresses the role of scriptural and clerical authority. Mustafa Akyol, a prominent Turkish Muslim intellectual, argues that Ash’arism has dominated Muslim politics for centuries at the expense of more liberal strands of the faith “not because of its merits, but because of the support of the states that ruled the medieval Muslim world.”

Similarly, Nadia Oweidat, a student of the history of Islamic thought, notes that “no topic has impacted the region more profoundly than religion. It has changed the geography of the region, it has changed its language, it has changed its culture. It has been shaping the region for thousands of years. [...] Religion controls every aspect of people who live in the Arab world.”

The polls and research suggest that youth are increasingly skeptical towards religious and worldly authority. They aspire to more individual, more spiritual experiences of religion. Their search leads them in multiple directions that range from changes in personal religious behavior that deviates from that proscribed by the state to conversions in secret to other religions even though apostasy is banned and punishable by death, to an abandonment of organized religion all together in favor of deism, agnosticism, or atheism.

“The youth are not interested in institutions or organizations. These do not attract them or give them any incentive; just the opposite, these institutions and organizations and their leadership take advantage of them only when they are needed for their attendance and for filling out the crowds,” said Palestinian scholar and former Hamas education minister Nasser al-Din al-Shaer.

Atheists and converts cite perceived discriminatory provisions in Islam’s legal code towards various Muslim sects, non-Muslims, and women as a reason for turning their back on the faith. “The primary thing that led me to atheism is Islam’s moral aspect. How can, for example, a merciful and compassionate God, said to be more merciful than a woman on her baby, permit slavery and the trade of slaves in slave markets? How come He permits rape of women simply because they are war prisoners? These acts would not be committed by a merciful human being much less by a merciful God,” said Hicham Nostic, a Moroccan atheist, writing under a pen name.

Revival, Reversal

The recent research and polls suggest a reversal of an Islamic revival that scholars like John Esposito in the 1990s and Jean-Paul Carvalho in 2009 observed that was bolstered by the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, the results of a 1996 World Values Survey that reported a strengthening of traditional religious values in the Muslim world, the rise of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the initial Muslim Brotherhood electoral victories in Egypt and Tunisia in the wake of the 2011 popular Arab revolts.

“The indices of Islamic reawakening in personal life are many: increased attention to religious observances (mosque attendance, prayer, fasting), proliferation of religious programming and publications, more emphasis on Islamic dress and values, the revitalization of Sufism (mysticism). This broader-based renewal has also been accompanied by Islam’s reassertion in public life: an increase in Islamically oriented governments, organizations, laws, banks, social welfare services, and educational institutions,” Esposito noted at the time.

Carvalho argued that an economic “growth reversal which raised aspirations and led subsequently to a decline in social mobility which left aspirations unfulfilled among the educated middle class (and) increasing income inequality and impoverishment of the lower-middle class” was driving the revival. The same factors currently fuel a shift away from traditional, Orthodox, and ultra-conservative values and norms of religiosity.

The shift in Muslim-majority countries also contrasts starkly with a trend towards greater religious Orthodoxy in some Muslim minority communities in Europe. A 2018 report by the Dutch government’s Social and Cultural Planning Bureau noted that the number of Muslims of Turkish and Moroccan descent who strictly observe traditional religious precepts had increased by approximately eight percent. Dutch citizens of Turkish and Moroccan descent account for two-thirds of the country’s Muslim community. The report suggested that in a pluralistic society in which Muslims are a minority, “the more personal, individualistic search for true Islam can lead to youth becoming more strict in observance than their parents or environment ever were.”

Changing attitudes towards religion and religiosity that mirror shifting attitudes in non-Muslim countries are particularly risky for leaders, irrespective of their politics, who cloak themselves in the mantle of religion as well as nationalism and seek to leverage that in their geopolitical pursuit of religious soft power. The 2011 popular Arab revolts as well as mass anti-government protests in various Middle Eastern countries in 2019 and 2020 spotlighted the subversiveness of the change. “The Arab Spring was the tipping point in the shift [...]. It was the epitome of how we see the change. The calls were for ‘dawla madiniya,’ a civic state. A civic state is as close as you can come to saying [...], we want a state where the laws are written by people so that we can challenge them, we can change them, we can adjust them. It’s not God’s law, it’s madiniya, it’s people’s law,” Oweidat, the Islamic thought scholar, said.

Akyol went further, noting in a journal article that “too many terrible things have recently happened in the Arab world in the name of Islam. These include the sectarian civil wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, where most of the belligerents have fought in the name of God, often with appalling brutality. The millions of victims and bystanders of these wars have experienced shock and disillusionment with religious politics, and more than a few began asking deeper questions.”

The 2011 popular Arab revolts reverberated across the Middle East, reshaping relations between states as well as domestic policies, even though initial achievements of the protesters were rolled back in Egypt and sparked wars in Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt imposed a 3.5 year-long diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar in part to cut their youth off from access to the Gulf state’s popular Al Jazeera television network that supported the revolts and Islamist groups that challenged the region’s autocratic rulers. Seeking to lead and tightly control a social and economic reform agenda driven by youth who were enamored by the uprisings, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “sought to recapture this mandate of change, wrap it in a national mantle, and sever it from its Arab Spring associations. The boycott and ensuing nationalist campaign against Qatar became central to achieving that,” said Gulf scholar Kristin Smith Diwan.

Referring to the revolts, Moroccan journalist Ahmed Benchemsi suggested that “the Arab Spring may have stalled, if not receded, but when it comes to religious beliefs and attitudes, a generational dynamic is at play. Large numbers of individuals are tilting away from the rote religiosity Westerners reflexively associate with the Arab world.”

Benchemsi went on to argue that “in today’s Arab world, it’s not religiosity that is mandatory; it’s the appearance of it. Nonreligious attitudes and beliefs are tolerated as long as they’re not conspicuous. As a system, social hypocrisy provides breathing room to secular lifestyles, while preserving the façade of religion. Atheism, per se, is not the problem. Claiming it out loud is. So those who publicize their atheism in the Arab world are fighting less for freedom of conscience than for freedom of speech.” The same could be said for the right to convert or opt for alternative practices of Islam.

Syrian journalist Sham al-Ali recounts the story of a female relative who escaped the civil war to Germany where she decided to remove her hijab. Her father, who lives in Turkey, accepted his daughter’s decision but threatened to disown her if she posted pictures of herself uncovered on Facebook. “His issue was not with his daughter’s abandonment of religious duty, but with her publicizing that before her family and society at large,” Al-Ali said.

Neo-patriarchism

Neo-patriarchism, a pillar of Arab autocratic rule, heightens concern about public appearance and perception. A phrase coined by American-Palestinian scholar Hisham Sharabi, neo-patriarchism involves projection of the autocratic leader as a father figure. Autocratic Arab society, according to Sharabi, was built on the dominance of the father, a patriarch around which the national as well as the nuclear family are organized. Relations between a ruler and the ruled are replicated in the relationship between a father and his children. In both settings, the paternal will is absolute, mediated in society as well as the family by a forced consensus based on ritual and coercion.

As a result, neo-patriarchism often reinforces pressure to abide by state-imposed religious behavior and at the same time fuels changes in attitudes towards religion and religiosity among youth who resent their inability to chart a path of their own. Primary and secondary schools have emerged as one frontline in the struggle to determine the boundaries of religious expression and behavior. Recent developments in Egypt, a brutal autocracy, and Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy, offer contrasting perspectives on how the tug of war between students and parents, schoolteachers and administrations, and the state plays out.

Mada Masr, Egypt’s foremost independent news outlet, documented how in 2020 Egyptian schoolgirls who refused to wear a hijab were being coerced and publicly shamed in the knowledge that the education ministry was reluctant to enforce its policy not to mandate the wearing of a headdress. “The model, decent girl is expected to dress modestly and wear a hijab to signal her pride in her religious identity, since hijab is what distinguishes her from a Christian girl,” said Lamia Lotfy, a gender consultant and rights activist. Teachers at public high schools said they were reluctant to take boys to task for violating dress codes because they were more likely to push back and create problems.

In sharp contrast, Indonesian Religious Affairs Minister Yaqut Cholil Qoumas issued in early 2021 a decree together with the ministers of home affairs and education threatening to sanction state schools that seek to impose religious garb in violation of government rules and regulations. The decree was issued amid a public row sparked by the refusal of a Christian student to obey her school principal’s instructions requiring all pupils to wear Islamic clothing. Qoumas is a leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim movement and foremost advocate of theological reform in line with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “Religions do not promote conflict, neither do they justify acting unfairly against those who are different,” Qoumas said.

A Muslim nation that replaced a decades long autocratic regime with a democracy in a popular revolt in 1998, Indonesia is Middle Eastern rulers’ worst nightmare. The shifting attitudes of Middle Eastern youth towards religion and religiosity suggest that experimentation with religion in post-revolt Indonesia is a path that it would embark on if given the opportunity. Indonesia is “where the removal of constraints imposed by an authoritarian regime has opened up the imaginative terrain, allowing particular types of religious beliefs and practices to emerge [...]. The Indonesian cases study [...] brings into sharper relief processes that are happening in ordinary Muslim life elsewhere,” said Indonesia scholar Nur Amali Ibrahim.

A 2019 poll of Arab youth showed that two-thirds of those surveyed felt that religion played too large a role in their lives, up from 50 percent four years earlier. Nearly 80 percent argued that religious institutions needed to be reformed while half said that religious values were holding the Arab world back. Surveys conducted over the last decade by Arab Barometer, a research network at Princeton University and the University of Michigan, showed a growing number of youths turning their backs on religion. “Personal piety has declined some 43 percent over the past decade, indicating less than a quarter of the population now define themselves as religious,” the survey concluded.

With the trend being the strongest among Libyans, many Libyan youth gravitate towards secretive atheist Facebook pages. They often are products of the UAE’s failed attempt to align the hard power of its military intervention in Libya with religious soft power. Said, a 25-year-old student from Benghazi, the stronghold of the UAE and Saudi-backed rebel forces led by self-appointed Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, turned his back on religion after his cousin was beheaded in 2016 for speaking out against militants. UAE backing of Haftar has involved the population of his army by Madkhalists, a branch of Salafism named after a Saudi scholar who preaches absolute obedience to the ruler and projects the kingdom as a model of Islamic governance. “My cousin’s death occurred during a period when I was deeply religious, praying five times a day and studying ten new pages of the Qur’an each evening,” Said said.

A majority of respondents in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, and Iran said in a 2017 poll conducted by Washington-based John Zogby Associates that they wanted religious movements to focus on personal faith and spiritual guidance and not involve themselves in politics. Iraq and Palestine were the outliers with a majority favoring a political role for religious groups.

The response to polls in the second half of the second decade of the twenty-first century contrasts starkly with attitudes expressed in a survey of the world’s Muslims by the Pew Research Center several years earlier. Pew’s polling suggested that ultra-conservative attitudes long promoted by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar that legitimized authoritarian and autocratic regimes remained popular. More than 70 percent of those surveyed at the time in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa favored making Sharia the law of the land and granting Sharia courts jurisdiction over family law and property disputes.

Those numbers varied broadly, however, when respondents were asked about specific issues like apostasy and corporal punishment. Three-quarters of South Asians favored the death sentence for apostasy as opposed to 56 percent in the Middle East and only 27 percent in Southeast Asia, while 81 percent in South Asia supported physical punishment compared to 57 percent in the Middle East and North Africa and 46 percent in Southeast Asia. South Asia emerged as the only part of the Muslim world in which respondents preferred a strong leader to democracy while a majority of the faithful in all three regions viewed religious freedom as positive. Between 65 and 79 percent in all regions wanted to see religious leaders have political influence.

Honor killings may be the one area where attitudes have not changed that much in recent years. Arab Barometer’s polling in 2018 and 2019 showed that more people thought honor killings were acceptable than homosexuality. In most countries polled, young Arabs appeared more likely than their parents to condone honor killings. Social media and occasional protests bear that out. Thousands rallied in early 2020 in Hebron, a conservative city on the West Bank, after the Palestinian Authority signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Nonetheless, the assertions by Saudi Arabia that projects itself as the leader of an unidentified form of moderate Islam that preaches absolute obedience to the ruler and by advocates of varying strands of political Islam such as Turkey and Iran ring hollow in light of the dramatic shift in attitudes towards religion and religiosity.

Acknowledging Change

Among the Middle Eastern rivals for religious soft power, the United Arab Emirates, populated in majority by non-nationals, may be the only one to emerge with a cleaner slate. The UAE is the only contender to have started acknowledging changing attitudes and demographic realities. Authorities in November 2020 lifted the ban on consumption of alcohol and cohabitation among unmarried couples. In a further effort to reach out to youth, the UAE organized in 2021 a virtual consultation with 3,000 students aimed at motivating them to think innovatively over the country’s path in the next 50 years.

Such moves do not fundamentally eliminate the risk that the changing attitudes may undercut the religious soft power efforts of the UAE and its Middle Eastern competitors. The problem for rulers like the UAE and Saudi crown princes, Mohammed bin Zayed and Mohammed bin Salman, respectively, is that the loosening of social restrictions in Saudi Arabia—including the emasculation of the kingdom’s religious police, the lifting of a ban on women’s driving, less strict implementation of gender segregation, the introduction of Western-style entertainment and greater professional opportunities for women, and a degree of genuine religious tolerance and pluralism in the UAE—are only first steps in responding to youth aspirations.

“People are sick and tired of organized religion and being told what to do. That is true for all Gulf states and the rest of the Arab world,” quipped a Saudi businessman. Social scientist Ellen van de Bovenkamp describes Moroccans she interviewed for her PhD thesis as living “a personalized, self-made religiosity, in which ethics and politics are more important than rituals.”

Nevertheless, religious authorities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, Qatar, Iran, and Morocco continue to project interpretations of the faith that serve the state and are often framed in the language of tolerance and inter-faith dialogue but preserve outmoded legal categories, traditions, and scripture that date back centuries. Outdated concepts of slavery, who is a believer and who is an infidel, apostasy, blasphemy, and physical punishment that need reconceptualization remain in terms of religious law frozen in time. Many of those concepts, with the exception of slavery that has been banned in national law yet remains part of Islamic law, have been embedded in national legislations.

While Turkey continues to, at least nominally, adhere to its secular republican origins, it is no different from its rivals when it comes to grooming state-aligned clergymen, whose ability to think out of the box and develop new interpretations of the faith is impeded by a religious education system that stymies critical thinking and creativity. Instead, it too emphasizes the study of Arabic and memorization of the Qur’an and other religious texts and creates a religious and political establishment that discourages, if not penalizes, innovation.

Widening the gap between state projections of religion and popular aspirations is the fact that governments’ subjugation of religious establishments turns clerics and scholars into regime parrots and fuels youth skepticism towards religious institutions and leaders.

“Youth have [...] witnessed how religious figures, who still remain influential in many Arab societies, can sometimes give in to change even if they have resisted it initially. This not only feeds into Arab youth’s skepticism towards religious institutions but also further highlights the inconsistency of the religious discourse and its inability to provide timely explanations or justifications to the changing reality of today,” said Gulf scholar Eman Alhussein in a commentary on the 2020 Arab Youth Survey.

Pooyan Tamimi Arab, the co-organizer of an online survey in 2020 of Iranian attitudes towards religion that revealed a stunning rejection of state-imposed adherence to conservative religious mores as well as the role of religion in public life noted the widening gap “becomes an existential question. The state wants you to be something that you don’t want to be [...]. “Political disappointment steadily turned into religious disappointment [...]. Iranians have turned away from institutional religion on an unprecedented scale.”

In a similar vein, Turkish art historian Nese Yildiran recently warned that a fatwa issued by President Erdogan’s Directorate of Religious Affairs or Diyanet declaring popular talismans to ward off “the evil eye” as forbidden by Islam fueled criticism of one of the best-funded branches of government. The fatwa followed the issuance of similar religious opinions banning the dying of men’s moustaches and beards, feeding dogs at home, tattoos, and playing the national lottery as well as statements that were perceived to condone or belittle child abuse and violence against women.

Although compatible with a trend across the Middle East, the Iranian survey’s results, which is based on 50,000 respondents who overwhelmingly said they resided in the Islamic republic, suggested that Iranians were in the frontlines of the region’s quest for religious change.

Funded by Washington-based Iranian human rights activist Ladan Boroumand, the Iranian survey, coupled with other research and opinion polls across the Middle East and North Africa, suggests that not only Muslim youth, but also other age groups, who are increasingly skeptical towards religious and worldly authority, aspire to more individual, more spiritual experiences of religion.

Their quest runs the gamut from changes in personal religious behavior to conversions in secret to other religions because apostasy is banned and, in some cases, punishable by death, to an abandonment of religion in favor of agnosticism or atheism. Responding to the survey, 80 percent of the participants said they believed in God but only 32.2 percent identified themselves as Shiite Muslims—a far lower percentage than asserted in official figures of predominantly Shiite Iran.

More than one third of the respondents said that they either did not belong to a religion or were atheists or agnostics. Between 43 and 53 percent, depending on age group, suggested that their religious views had changed over time with 6 percent of those saying that they had converted to another religious orientation.

In addition, 68 percent said they opposed the inclusion of religious precepts in national legislation. Moreover 70 percent rejected public funding of religious institutions while 56 percent opposed mandatory religious education in schools. Almost 60 percent admitted that they do not pray, and 72 percent disagreed with women being obliged to wear a hijab in public.

An unpublished slide of the survey shows the change in religiosity reflected in the fact that an increasing number of Iranians no longer name their children after religious figures.

A five-minute YouTube clip uploaded by an ultra-conservative channel allegedly related to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards attacked the survey despite having distributed the questionnaire once the pollsters disclosed in their report that the poll had been supported by an exile human rights group.

“Tehran may well be the least religious capital in the Middle East. Clerics dominate the news headlines and play the communal elders in soap operas, but I never saw them on the street, except on billboards. Unlike most Muslim countries, the call to prayer is almost inaudible [...]. Alcohol is banned but home delivery is faster for wine than for pizza [...]. Religion felt frustratingly hard to locate and the truly religious seemed sidelined, like a minority,” wrote journalist Nicholas Pelham based on a visit in 2019 during which he was detained for several weeks.

In yet another sign of rejection of state-imposed expressions of Islam, Iranians have sought to alleviate the social impact of COVID-19 related lockdowns and restrictions on face-to-face human contact by acquiring dogs, cats, birds, and even reptiles as pets. The Islamic Republic has long viewed pets as a fixture of Western culture. One of the main reasons for keeping pets in Iran is that people no longer believe in the old cultural, religious, or doctrinal taboos as the unalterable words of God. “This shift towards deconstructing old taboos signals a transformation of the Iranian identity—from the traditional to the new,” said psychologist Farnoush Khaledi.

Pets are one form of dissent; clandestine conversions are another. Exiled Iranian Shiite scholar Yaser Mirdamadi noted that “Iranians no longer have faith in state-imposed religion and are groping for religious alternatives.”

A former Israeli army intelligence chief, retired Lt. Col. Marco Moreno, puts the number of converts in Iran, a country of 83 million, at about one million. Moreno’s estimate may be an overestimate. Other studies in put the figure at between 100,000 and 500,000. Whatever the number is, the conversions fit a trend not only in Iran but across the Muslim world of changing attitudes towards religion, a rejection of state-imposed interpretations of Islam, and a search for more individual and varied religious experiences. Iranian press reports about the discovery of clandestine church gatherings in homes in the holy city of Qom suggest conversions to Christianity began more than a decade ago. “The fact that conversions had reached Qom was an indication that this was happening elsewhere in the country,” Mirdamadi, the Shiite cleric, said.

Seeing the converts as an Israeli asset, Moreno backed production of a two-hour documentary, Sheep Among Wolves Volume II, produced by two American Evangelists, one of which resettled on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, that asserts that Iran’s underground community of converts to Christianity is the world’s fastest growing church.

“What if I told you the mosques are empty inside Iran?” said a church leader in the film, his identity masked and his voice distorted to avoid identification. Based on interviews with Iranian converts while they were travelling abroad, the documentary opens with a scene on an Indonesian beach where they meet with the filmmakers for a religious training session.

“What if I told you that Islam is dead? What if I told you that the mosques are empty inside Iran? [...] What if I told you no one follows Islam inside of Iran? Would you believe me? This is exactly what is happening inside of Iran. God is moving powerfully inside of Iran?” the church leader added. Unsurprisingly, given the film’s Israeli backing and the filmmaker’s affinity with Israel, the documentary emphasizes the converts’ break with Iran’s staunch rejection of the Jewish State by emphasizing their empathy for Judaism and Israel.

Reduced Religiosity

The Iran survey’s results as well as observations by analysts and journalists like Pelham stroke with responses to various polls of Arab public opinion in recent years and fit a global pattern of reduced religiosity. A 2019 Pew Research Center study concluded that adherence to Christianity in the United States was declining at a rapid pace.

The Arab Youth Survey found that, despite 40 percent of those polled defining religion as the most important constituent element of their identity, 66 percent saw a need for religious institutions to be reformed. “The way some Arab countries consume religion in the political discourse, which is further amplified on social media, is no longer deceptive to the youth who can now see through it,” Alhussein, the Gulf scholar, said.

A 2018 Arab Opinion Index poll suggested that public opinion may support the reconceptualization of Muslim jurisprudence. Almost 70 percent of those polled agreed that “no religious authority is entitled to declare followers of other religions to be infidels.” Similarly, 70 percent of those surveyed rejected the notion that democracy was incompatible with Islam while 76 percent viewed it as the most appropriate system of governance.

What that means in practice is, however, less clear. Arab public opinion appears split down the middle when it comes to issues like separation of religion and politics or the right to protest.

Arab Barometer director Michael Robbins cautioned in a commentary in the Washington Post, co-authored with international affairs scholar Lawrence Rubin, that recent moves by the government of Sudan to separate religion and state may not enjoy public support.

The transitional government brought to office in 2020 by a popular revolt that topped decades of Islamist rule by ousted President Omar al-Bashir agreed in peace talks with Sudanese rebel groups to a “separation of religion and state.” The government also ended the ban on apostasy and consumption of alcohol by non-Muslims and prohibited corporal punishment, including public flogging.

Robbins and Rubin noted that 61 percent of those surveyed on the eve of the revolt believed that Sudanese law should be based on the Sharia or Islamic law defined by two-thirds of the respondents as ensuring the provision of basic services and lack of corruption. The researchers, nonetheless, also concluded that youth favored a reduced role of religious leaders in political life. They said youth had soured on the idea of religion-based governance because of widespread corruption during the region of Al-Bashir who professed his adherence to religious principles.

“If the transitional government can deliver on providing basic services to the country’s citizens and tackling corruption, the formal shift away from Sharia is likely to be acceptable in the eyes of the public. However, if these problems remain, a new set of religious leaders may be able to galvanize a movement aimed at reinstituting Sharia as a means to achieve these objectives,” Robbins and Rubin warned.

Writing at the outset of the popular revolt that toppled Al-Bashir, Islam scholar and former Sudanese diplomat Abdelwahab El-Affendi noted that “for most Sudanese, Islamism came to signify corruption, hypocrisy, cruelty, and bad faith. Sudan is perhaps the first genuinely anti-Islamist country in popular terms. But being anti-Islamist in Sudan does not mean being secular.”

It is a warning that is as valid for Sudan as it is for much of the Arab and Muslim world.

Saudi columnist Wafa al-Rashid sparked fiery debate on social media after calling in a local newspaper for a secular state in the kingdom. “How long will we continue to shy away from enlightenment and change? Religious enlightenment, which is in line with reality and the thinking of youth, who rebelled and withdrew from us because we are no longer like them. [...] We no longer speak their language or understand their dreams,” Al-Rashid wrote.

Asked in a poll conducted by The Washington Institute of Near East Policy whether “it’s a good thing we aren’t having big street demonstrations here now the way they do in some other countries”—a reference to the past decade of popular revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq and Sudan—Saudi public opinion was split down the middle. The numbers indicate that 48 percent of respondents agreed and 48 percent disagreed. Saudis, like most Gulf Arabs, are likely less inclined to take grievances to the streets. Nonetheless, the poll indicates that they may prove to be more empathetic to protests should they occur.

Tamimi Arab, the Iran pollster, argued that his Iran survey “shows that there is a social basis” for concern among authoritarian and autocratic governments that employ religion to further their geopolitical goals and seek to maintain their grip on potentially restive populations. His warning reverberates in the responses by governments in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Middle East to changing attitudes towards religion and religiosity. They demonstrate the degree to which they perceive the change as a threat, often expressed in existential terms.

Mohammad Mehdi Mirbaqeri, a prominent Shiite cleric and member of Iran’s powerful Assembly of Experts that appoints the country’s supreme leader, described COVID-19 in late 2020 as a “secular virus” and a declaration of war on “religious civilization” and “religious institutions.”

Saudi Arabia went further by defining the “calling for atheist thought in any form” as terrorism in its anti-terrorism law. Saudi dissident and activist Rafi Badawi was sentenced on charges of apostasy to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for questioning why Saudis should be obliged to adhere to Islam and asserting that the faith did not have answers to all questions.

Analysts, writers, journalists, and pollsters have traced changes in attitudes in the Middle East and North Africa as well as the wider Muslim world for much of the past decade, if not longer. A Western Bangladesh scholar resident in Dacca in 1989 recalled Bangladeshis looking for a copy of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses as soon as it was banned by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who condemned the British author to death. “It was the allure of forbidden fruit. Yet, I also found that many were looking for things to criticize, an excuse to think differently,” the scholar wrote.

Widely viewed as a bastion of ultra-conservatism. Malaysia’s top religious regulatory body, the Malaysian Islamic Development Department (Jakim), which responsible for training Islamic teachers and preparing weekly state-controlled Friday sermons, has long portrayed liberalism and pluralism as threats, pointing to a national fatwa that in 2006 condemned liberalism as heretical. “The pulpit would like to state today that many tactics are being undertaken by irresponsible people to weaken Muslim unity, among them through spreading new but inverse thinking like Pluralism, Liberalism, and such. The pulpit would like to state that the Liberal movement contains concepts that are found to have deviated from the Islamic faith and shariah,” read a 2014 Friday sermon drafted and distributed by Jakim.

The fatwa echoed a similar legal opinion issued a year earlier by Indonesia’s semi-governmental Council of Religious Scholars (MUI) labelled with SIPILIS as its acronym to equate secularism, pluralism, and liberalism with the venereal disease. The council was headed at the time by current Vice President Ma’ruf Amin, a prominent Nahdlatul Ulama figure.

Challenging attempts by governments and religious authorities to suppress changing attitudes rather than engage with groups groping for greater religious freedom, Kuwaiti writer Sajed al-Abdali noted in 2012 that “it is essential that we acknowledge today that atheism exists and is increasing in our society, especially among our youth, and evidence of this is in no short supply.”

Al-Abdali sounded his alarm three years prior to the publication of a Pew Research Center study that sought to predict the growth trajectories of the world’s religions by the year 2050. The study suggested that the number of people among the 300 million inhabitants of the Middle East and North Africa that were unaffiliated with any faith would remain stable at about 0.6 percent of the population.

Two years later, the Egyptian government’s religious advisory body, Dar al-Ifta Al-Missriya, published a scientifically disputed survey that sought to project the number of atheists in the region as negligible. The survey identified 2,293 atheists, including 866 Egyptians, 325 Moroccans, 320 Tunisians, 242 Iraqis, 178 Saudis, 170 Jordanians, 70 Sudanese, 56 Syrians, 34 Libyans, and 32 Yemenis. It defined atheists as not only those who did not believe in God but also as encompassing converts to other religions and advocates of a secular state. A poll conducted that same year by Al Azhar, Cairo’s ancient citadel of Islamic learning, concluded that Egypt counted 10.7 million atheists. Al Azhar’s Grand Imam, Ahmad al-Tayyeb, warned at the time on state television that the flight from religion constituted a social problem.

A 2012 survey by international polling firm WIN/Gallup International reported that 5 percent of Saudis—or more than one million people—identified themselves as “convinced atheists” on par with the percentage in the United States; while 19 percent described themselves as non-religious. By the same token, Benchemsi, the Moroccan journalist, found 250 Arab atheism-related pages or groups while searching the internet, with memberships ranging from a few individuals to more than 11,000. “And these numbers only pertain to Arab atheists (or Arabs concerned with the topic of atheism) who are committed enough to leave a trace online,” Benchemsi said, noting that many more were unlikely to publicly disclose their beliefs.

The picture is replicated across the Middle East. The number of atheists and agnostics in Iraq, for example, is growing. Iraqi writer and one-time Shiite cleric Gaith al-Tamimi argued that religious figures have come to represent all that’s inherently wrong in Iraqi politics society. Iraqis of all generations seek to escape religious dogma, he says, adding that “Iraqis are questioning the role religion serves today.” Fadhil, a 30-year-old from the southern port city of Basra complained that religious leaders “overuse and misuse God’s name, police human bodies, prohibit extramarital sex, and police the bodies of women.” Changing attitudes towards religion figured prominently in mass anti-government protests in Iraq in 2019 and 2020 that rejected sectarianism and called for a secular national Iraqi identity.

Even in Syria, a fulcrum of militant and ultra-conservative forms of Islam that fed on a decade of brutal civil war and foreign intervention, many concluded in the words of Al-Ali, the Syrian journalist, that “religious and political authorities are ‘protective friends one of the other,’ and that political despotism stems from religious absolutism. [...] In Syria, the prestige sheikhs had enjoyed was undermined alongside that of the regime.” Religion and religious figures’ inability to explain the horror that Syria was experiencing and that had uprooted the lives of millions drove many forced to flee to question long-held beliefs.

Multiple Turkish surveys suggested that Erdogan’s goal of raising a religious generation had backfired despite pouring billions of dollars into religious education. Students often rejected religion, described themselves as atheists, deists, or feminists, and challenged the interpretation of Islam taught in schools. A 2019 survey by polling and data company IPSOS reported that only 12 percent of Turks trusted religious officials and 44 percent distrusted clerics. “We have declined when religious sincerity and morality expressed by the people is taken into account,” said Ali Bardakoglu, who headed Erdogan’s Religious Affairs Department or Diyanet from 2003 to 2010.

Unaware that microphones had not been muted, Erdogan expressed concern a year earlier to his education minister about the spread of deism, a belief in a God that does not intervene in the universe and that is not defined by organized religion, among Turkish youth during a meeting of his party’s parliamentary group. “No, no such thing can happen,” Erdogan ordained against the backdrop of Turkish officials painting deism as a Western conspiracy designed to weaken Turkey. Erdogan’s comments came in response to the publication of an education ministry report that, in line with the subsequent survey, warned that popular rejection of religious knowledge acquired through revelation and religious teachings and a growing embrace of reason was on the rise.

The report noted that increased enrollment in a rising number of state-run religious Imam Hatip high schools had not stopped mounting questioning of orthodox Islamic precepts. Neither had increased study of religion in mainstream schools that deemphasized the teaching of evolution. The greater emphasis on religion failed to advance Erdogan’s dream of a pious generation that would have a Qur’an in one hand and a computer in the other. Instead, reflecting a discussion on faith and youth among some 50 religion teachers, the report suggested that lack of faith in educators had fueled the rise of deism. Teachers were unable to answer the often-posed question: why does God not intervene to halt evil and why does he remain silent? The report’s cautionary note was bolstered by a flurry of anonymous confessions and personal stories by deists as well as atheists recounted in newspaper interviews.

Acting on Erdogan’s instructions, Ali Erbas, the director of Diyanet, declared war on deism. The government’s top cleric, Erbas blamed Western missionaries seeking to convert Turkish youth to Christianity for deism’s increased popularity. Erbas’ declaration followed a three-day consultation with 70 religious scholars and bureaucrats convened by the Directorate that identified “Deism, Atheism, Nihilism, Agnosticism” as the enemy. Erdogan’s alarm and Erbas’ spinning of conspiracy theories constituted attempts to detract attention from the fact that youth in Tukey, like in Iran and the Arab world, were turning their back on orthodox and classical interpretations of Islam on the back of increasingly authoritarian and autocratic rule. Erdogan thundered that “there is no such thing” as LGBT and added that “this country is national and spiritual, and will continue to walk into the future as such” when protesting students displayed a poster depicting one of Islam’s holiest sites, the Kaaba shrine in Mecca, with LGBT flags.

“There is a dictatorship in Turkey. This drives people away from religion,” said Temel Karamollaoglu, the leader of the Islamist Felicity Party that opposes Erdogan’s AKP because of its authoritarianism. Turkey scholar Mucahit Bilici described Turkish youths’ rejection of Orthodox and politicized interpretations of Islam as “a flowering of post-Islamist sentiment” by a “younger generation (that) is choosing the path of individualized spirituality and a silent rejection of tradition.”

Saudi authorities view the high numbers in the WIN/Gallup International as a threat to the religious legitimacy that the kingdom’s ruling Al-Saud family has long cloaked itself in. The groundswell of aspirations that have guided youth away from the confines of ultra-conservatism highlight failed efforts of the government and the religious establishment going back to the 1980s. The culture and information ministry banned the word ‘modernity’ at the time in a bid to squash an emerging debate that challenged the narrow confines of ultra-conservatism as well as the authority of religion and the religious establishment to govern personal and public life.

False Equation

The threat perceived by Saudi and other Middle Eastern autocrats and authoritarians as well as conservative religious voices is fueled by an implicit equation of atheism and/or rejection of state-imposed conservative and ultra-conservative strands of the faith with anarchy.

“Any calls that challenge Islamic rule or Islamic ideology is considered subversive in Saudi Arabia and would be subversive and could lead to chaos,” said Saudi ambassador to the United Nations Abdallah al-Mouallimi. Echoing journalist Benchemsi, Muallimi argued that “if (a person) was disbelieving in God, and keeping that to himself, and conducting himself, nobody would do anything or say anything about it. If he is going out in the public, and saying, ‘I don’t believe in God,’ that’s subversive. He is inviting others to retaliate.”

Similarly, Sheikh Ahmad Turki, speaking as the coordinator of the anti-atheism campaign of the Egyptian Ministry of Endowments, asserted that atheism “is a national security issue. Atheists have no principles; it’s certain that they have dysfunctional concepts—in ethics, views of the society and even in their nationalistic affiliations. If [atheists] rebel against religion, they will rebel against everything.’’

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have sought to experiment with alternatives to orthodox and ultra-conservative strands of Islam without surrendering state control by encouraging Al Azhar to embrace legal reform that is influenced by Sufism, Islam’s mystical tradition. “There is a movement of renewal of Islamic jurisprudence. [...] It’s a movement that is funded by the wealthy Gulf countries. Don’t forget that one reason for the success of the Salafis is the financial power that backed them for decades. This financial power is now being directed to the Azharis, and they are taking advantage of it. [...] Don’t underestimate what is happening. It might be a true alternative to Salafism,” said Egyptian Islam scholar Wael Farouq.

By contrast, Pakistan, a country influenced by Saudi-inspired ultra-conservatism, has stepped up its efforts to ringfence religious minorities. In an act of overreach modelled on American insistence on extra-territorial abidance by some of its laws, Pakistan laid down a gauntlet in the struggle to define religious freedom by seeking to block and shut down a U.S.-based website associated with Ahmadis on charges of blasphemy.

Ahmadis are a minority sect viewed as heretics by many Muslims that have been targeted in Indonesia and elsewhere, but nowhere more so than in Pakistan where they have been constitutionally classified as non-Muslims. Blasphemy is potentially punishable in Pakistan with a death sentence.

The Pakistani effort was launched at a moment that anti-Ahmadi and anti-Shiite sentiment in Pakistan, home to the world’s largest Shia Muslim minority, was on the rise. Mass demonstrations denounced Shiites as “blasphemers” and “infidels” and called for their beheading as the number of blasphemy cases being filed against Shiites in the courts mushroomed.

Shifting attitudes towards religion and religiosity raise fundamental chicken and egg questions about the relationship between religious and political reform, including what comes first and whether one is possible without the other. Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama argues that religious reform requires recontextualization of the faith as well as a revision of legal codes and religious jurisprudence. The only Muslim institution to have initiated a process of eliminating legal concepts in Islamic law that are obsolete or discriminatory—such as the endorsement of slavery and notions of infidels and dhimmis or People of the Book with lesser rights—Nahdlatul Ulama, a movement created almost a century ago in opposition to Wahhabism, the puritan interpretation of Islam on which Saudi Arabia was founded, is in alignment with advocates of religious reform elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Said Mohammed Sharour, a Syrian Quranist who believed that the Qur’an was Islam’s only relevant text, dismissed the Hadith—the compilation of the Prophet’s sayings and the Sunnah, the traditions, and practices of the Prophet that serve as a model for Muslims: “The religious heritage must be critically read and interpreted anew. Cultural and religious reforms are more important than political ones, as they are the preconditions for any secular reforms.” Shahrour went on to say that the reforms, comparable to those of 16th century scholar and priest Martin Luther’s reformation of Christianity, “must include all those ideas on which the people who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks based their interpretations of sources. [...] We simply have to rethink the fundamental principles. It is [...] said that the fixed values of religion cannot be rethought. But I say that it is exactly these values that we must study and rethink.”

The thinking of Nahdlatul Ulama’s critical mass of Islamic scholars and men like Shahrour offers little solace to authoritarian and autocratic leaders and their religious allies in the Muslim world at a time that Muslims are clamoring not only for political and religious change. If anything, it puts them on the spot by offering a bottom-up alternative to state-controlled religion that seeks to ensure the survival of autocratic regimes and the protection of vested interests.

James M. Dorsey is Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies of Nanyang Technological University, Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute, and an Honorary Senior Non-Resident Fellow at Eye on ISIS. You may follow him on Twitter @mideastsoccer.

#saudi arabia #uae #iran #turkey #indone

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watchmanis216 · 5 years

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Germany’s Decline, Christianity’s Demise, America’s destiny’

Germany’s decline is occurring and is tied to Hitler’s rule and the Muslims. But we see Christianity declining in Europe, the UK, and in America. Thus the globalist America is headed for the destiny to which it must owe to its own doing. Whether you like it or not, America is catapulted headlong into a system of globalism that will implode into war and in the end we will find the Beast of Revelation 13 at the head!

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Table of Contents

America, Germany, and Politics: The abyss of bad policies. 1

World War Two Aftermath: Hitler, Himmler, and Al-Husseini 1

The influence of Al-Husseini and Islamic Jihad. 2

The Example of Merkel’s Germany and rise of Islamic influence there. 3

Innocent blood, Germany, and fall of Christianity. 4

World Cataclysm on the Brink. 5

American policies, Islamic jihad, and Christianity. 6

“But the safety of the people of America against dangers from foreign force depends not only on their forbearing to give just causes of war to other nations, but also on their placing and continuing themselves in such a situation as not to invite hostility or insult; for it need not be observed that there are pretended as well as just causes of war.” –John Jay, Federalist No. 4, 1787

America, Germany, and Politics: The abyss of bad policies

Germany has been on the international front for many decades and of late it has been led by Angela Merkel. It is this German leader whom Hillary Clinton would like to emulate. According to Hillary’s own words that heap high praise on Angela Merkel. Hillary has known Angela as far back as the 1990’s and even appeared on the same German TV show together. Hillary has gone so far as to say “She is, I think, a really effective strong leader and right now the major leader in Europe, not just Germany”. Donald Trump said Monday in a detailed policy speech on radical Islam that Hillary was in fact aiming to be “America’s Angela Merkel”.

Further; a Breitbart report pointed out that Clinton, if elected would push to ‘resettle close to one million Muslim migrants in her first term as President alone.’ This is according to the latest data from Homeland Security. While many democrats led by Barack Obama have no qualms about such a massive influx of Muslim immigrants, there is much to consider. Especially if we look at Angela Markel’s Germany we will find how unstable Germany is today. Does America want to mirror the E.U. or say Germany? I think not!

World War Two Aftermath: Hitler, Himmler, and Al-Husseini

Today we can look under the rug and see the political policies of Merkel and those who side with her over the allowance of Islamic tides of refugee’s into the German nation. We can see that Germany’s relation to and for Muslims goes back to Hitler. At the time it was expedient for Hitler to have help fighting not only the whole of Europe and the Americans. However Hitler’s new deal included the riddance of the world’s Jews! Hitler’s aim was to extinguish the light of world Jewry wherever the Nazis could find them. But in the Muslim, the German leader found an ally! This is further revealed in a November 2, 1943 telegram, which Himmler wrote to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem saying:

The National Socialist movement of Greater Germany has, since its inception, inscribed upon its flag the fight against the world Jewry. It has therefore followed with particular sympathy the struggle of freedom-loving Arabs, especially in Palestine, against Jewish interlopers. In the recognition of this enemy and of the common struggle against it lies the firm foundation of the natural alliance that exists between the National Socialist Greater Germany and the freedom-loving Muslims of the whole world. In this spirit I am sending you on the anniversary of the infamous Balfour declaration my hearty greetings and wishes for the successful pursuit of your struggle until the final victory. Reichsfuehrer S.S. Heinrich Himmler”

The Final victory according to Himmler who led Hitler’s policies was a world without Jews! It is Al Husseini who did much in the Middle East to push his plans for a greater and united Arab world. Al Husseini ‘recruited Bosnia Muslims’ so they could fight for the ‘German Waffen SS’. These Muslim Nazi warriors were Albania and Bosnia. But in Yugoslavia alone this brigade of Muslim Nazis ‘was responsible for the murder of over 90 percent of the Yugoslavian Jewish Population’. After the war the Mufti of Jerusalem by this time was fleeing the wrath of the allies who conquered Hitler. The Muslim leader of the Nazis wound up in Egypt. His role was not finished. He was the most important influence there was and his scheme was devious as his policies would challenge generations of Muslims to fight Jews.

The influence of Al-Husseini and Islamic Jihad

We find further evidence of this on the Middle East Forum. Husseini’s place in history is firm, as he is a heralded as a Palestinian hero. Today you can find references to him in textbooks and is viewed as one of the founding fathers of the nation. His plans are well documented.

The absurdities for which Husseini became famous in the 1940s have continued to play a far too prominent role in the Palestinian political culture ever since. He did incite others to murder Jews. He did spread ridiculous conspiracy theories comparable to those of the Nazis. He did all that he could to help the Nazis in a failing effort to spread the Holocaust to the Middle East and to win the war in Europe. He left behind a legacy of hatred, paranoia, religious fanaticism and celebration of terror so long as it was aimed at Jews and Israelis. The Palestinian authority and Hamas even more so has kept that legacy is alive and well and fills the heads of Palestinian teenagers with rubbish that has led to the terror wave of recent weeks. Middle East Forum Netanyahu, Husseini, and the Historians, 2015

It is this same branded Islamic fervor which we find in the Middle East today. Although the target for Husseini was Jews and Palestine, today the war has extended to America, Europe, and the world.

However today after the push by Angela Merkel of Germany to accept so many Muslim refugees, it is no wonder why Germany has the largest Muslim community in Europe. France was considered to have the largest Muslim community. Germany the second, times they say; have changed. It is in Germany because of Merkel’s policies, where the number of Muslims in Germany could reach Five million, thus making it the largest.

“We could suddenly have five million Muslims,” said Thomas Volk, an Islam expert at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a think tank associated with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party.

The Example of Merkel’s Germany and rise of Islamic influence there

As a result you can see Islam taking over Germany. The irony is that that Hitler accepted the Muslims and their radical hate for the Jews. It was Hitler who first used the combination of radical Islamic hate for Jews and Hitler’s desire to rid the world of Jewry that combined so long ago. But again we find irony in that today Germany and the German people are radical pacifists. While on the other hand the Muslims have an even greater hate and purpose to destroy the Jews. But to this add on the global aspirations of ISIS, Iran, and others who see a global Islamic caliphate or Mahdi taking over the nations of the world. The stepping stone for this is Europe and the main brick in that have been Germany and its former Reich ruler, Adolf Hitler and his henchmen.

Using the Husseini brigades of Muslim Nazis came in handy to help fight the war and in the process exterminate Jews. Yet as Hitler did accept the Muslim and his fomenting hatred into Germany it should come no surprise that Post Germany is seemingly overrun by Muslims. A fact led by Merkel’s own policies and also something Hillary Clinton would like to emulate. Certainly Barack Obama has followed the policy of Muslims first, and then only a few Christians allowed in the United States.

Is it fitting judgment for Germany to be facing a flood of Muslims, a rise of Atheism, and the fall of Christianity? After all, if we ask ourselves was this not the nation that lauded Hitler, and did nothing to stop his holocaust not only on the Jews but on Europe. Was it not Germany’s partner Japan who brazenly attacked America, forcing the nation into the Second World War? Although we are in a post-World War Two era and many have forgiven both Germany and the Germany people for their role in this chapter of world history, the facts are the facts.

Furthermore, is this not a modern Germany led by Angela Merkel who the German’s have sat by and allowed to flood their nation with foreigners? Today Germany sits as a major player in the E.U. and it is failing in many ways, not to mention that the very existence of the nation itself is threatened by German Islam or a related brand of Islamic teachings. Germany is going the way of many in the Middle East being taken over by social jihad and bad politics. The E.U. is in the same boat. Christianity is declining there and Islam today has done what their efforts during the crusades could not do, which is to infiltrate Europe and slowly take the whole place over and institute Islamic rule.

Again as I said before, it is this same political and social agenda led by Angela Merkel that Hillary Clinton wants to imitate! It is clear that if Hillary gets in, America will become more like Europe, Germany, and others who have become targets for Islamic social jihad. Make no mistake there are those in America that look forward to a United Muslim States of America.

Innocent blood, Germany, and fall of Christianity

In addition, all these years later the innocent blood spilled in Europe during World War Two, both of Jews and others at the hands of the Nazis and their Muslim counterparts is still on the land. The land is infected with this curse of innocent blood, although Germany was defeated; they today are reaping results of the Hitler regime and his connection to the Muslims.

What is more, we find that Christianity is being extinguished in Germany. This is a trend we find in Europe as well. Not to mention America where we do have Christian influence but it is waning and giving way to liberal policies that will destroy America.

The fall of German Christianity leaves an emptiness that seems likely to be filled by a more multicultural and Islamic society. That is why Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, just called for the creation of a “German Islam.” Merkel’s powerful ally linked the rise of a German Islam with the national demographic disaster. “Demographic change is one of our great challenges,” said Schäuble. Germany today houses Europe’s largest Muslim community. Gatestone Institute

Der Spiegel says that the ‘citizens of the former German Democratic Republic have by far the ‘world’s highest rate of Atheism.’ It is here that in Post Hitler Germany, the East German portion became communist East and it is documented that in this area a high portion of those living under such communist rule were atheists. This today has affected Germany who is now rejoined with both East and West under one nation.

A new study released by an American research organization found that just 13 percent of people in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) say they have always believed in God. Der Spiegel

The term used in Germany by one professor of religious sociology is coined as “the New Atheism” and the author of this phrase is *Detlef Pollack. In East Germany only 4% of Protestants attend a church regularly. But it is not just atheism that is changing as those watching the decline of Christianity in Germany have also said the Catholic Church is declining their as well.

Germans have been leaving the Catholic Church in droves. In 2015, 181,925 Germans formally chose apostasy. By comparison, only 2,685 people have converted to Catholicism. The number of baby baptisms has also decreased by one third, from 260,000 baptized in 1995 to 167,000 in 2015. The situation is even more dismal for weddings. Twenty years ago, 86,456 couples married in a church. Last year, the number dropped by almost half: in a nation of 80 million people, only 44,298 couples sworn eternal love in a church. The proportion of people who attend church has declined from 18.6% in 1995 to 10.4% in 2015. *Gatestone, Lights out in Germany

World Cataclysm on the Brink

It also bears repeating, that the problem Germany faces is one that Europe and also America faces. Solving the problems in the Middle East and also stopping the Islamic Jihad mentality for taking over the world is paramount. Nevertheless, the jihad mentality is one that has been stirred and planted, nurtured and watered since the time of Al-Husseini and his relationship with Hitler’s Nazi regime. Today the Jews in Israel know certainly well that this hatred continues and global war is around the corner. In fact the war in Syria and Iraq has been touted as the Third World War. Even Putin has been warning of a global nuclear war with the United States. Further we find NATO in the same respects speaking of a nuclear war with Russia. Things could never be more unstable today that it is right now!

Iran on War:

Our strategy now is that if we feel our enemies want to endanger Iran’s national interests, and want to decide to do that, we will act without waiting for their actions,”

Putin warning Foreign journalists of Nuclear warn with America and NATO:

We know year by year what’s going to happen, and they know that we know. It’s only you that they tell tall tales to, and you buy it, and spread it to the citizens of your countries. You people in turn do not feel a sense of the impending danger – this is what worries me. How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction? While they pretend that nothing is going on. I don’t know how to get through to you anymore.

Putin Ally Warns of Nuclear War:

“Relations between Russia and the United States can’t get any worse. The only way they can get worse is if a war starts,” said Zhirinovsky, speaking in his huge office on the 10th floor of Russia’s State Duma, or lower house of parliament. “Americans voting for a president on Nov. 8 must realize that they are voting for peace on Planet Earth if they vote for Trump. But if they vote for Hillary it’s war. It will be a short movie. There will be Hiroshimas and Nagasakis everywhere.”

Make no mistake Islamic Jihad works best when nations are in turmoil. Today the refugee influx worldwide has pushed this turmoil. When nations find themselves in such chaos, it makes it better for Islamic jihad to strike. Their purpose is to take over. They could not defeat many of these western nations and European nations outright. But if a war broke out, well just as Hitler used Muslims to back his agenda, so too Muslims will embark on their own branded form of war. They will take over the systems from within. The enemy therefore is among us! Neither Hillary, nor Merkel, and certainly not the E.U. recognizes the threat of all this.

American policies, Islamic jihad, and Christianity

Barack Obama has fostered his own brand of ill-conceived world affairs as is par for the course for America. It is because of Obama that a weak response to Syria, Iraq, and his feeling that ISIS is a Junior varsity team that has allowed such a flood of refugees to swarm the world. As they do enter into European and Western societies, they take over. Further the push of Islam, Islamic teachings, and social jihad are all part and parcel of this. Even more destructive policies was Obama’s Iran policies that have allowed the Shia state to push ahead with Nuclear ambitions and also secure its money, sell its oil, and be free to do as it pleases. Iran is a state sponsor of Islamic jihad and terrorism. While many fear ISIS’ Sunni Islam brand of a caliphate, Iran’s Shia policies are headed a threat as well. They look establish and help bring in their Mahdi, who they believe will take over the world and establish worldwide Shia Islam.

The problem with all this is that not only is the UK, E.U., and Germany blind to this. We find America surely blinded as they pursue globalist policies and ignore America’s foundation. Today in America while we have churches, seminaries, and many denominational aspects to our Christianity here, the fact is we have radical Islam here as well. Under Obama’s watch we have also seen more Islamic terror strikes in this nation while at the same time the administration does all it can to not say it is ‘Islamic terrorism’. As America falters and the foundational aspects of this nation are under attack, including traditional Christian beliefs, the threats to this nation cannot be any more perilous than with the current crops of political amoralists and globalists we have. These include both Republicans and Democrats.

As we see Europe go and with it those nations like Germany, we also see the free world, western Christianity, and our way of life as we know it. In America we have become our own worst enemy! We have that anything goes belief and with any moral proclivity has been trampled asunder especially any biblical Christian morals left in this nation. Thus this is damning our nation to judgment. Far worse will America be than that of Nazi Germany. We must awaken out of our abyss of tolerance and apathy. We must stop the globalist agendas and if it must, so let it come. Here let it reflect the parting of the ways between that which is good and that which is evil. Let the reader understand what this means!

“But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practicing iniquity and extravagance and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” –John Adams, To the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 1798

This paper is not meant to be an in-depth treatise on all aspects of Hitler, Himmler, Husseini, Germany, or the current geo-political setting.

Psa 24:6-10 (6) This is the generation of them that seek him, that seek thy face, O Jacob. Selah. (7) Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. (8) Who is this King of glory? The LORD strong and mighty, the LORD mighty in battle. (9) Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. (10) Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah.

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Germany’s Decline, Christianity’s Demise, America’s destiny Germany’s Decline, Christianity’s Demise, America’s destiny’ Germany’s decline is occurring and is tied to Hitler’s rule and the Muslims.

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djgblogger-blog · 7 years

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What's behind America's promotion of religious liberty abroad

http://bit.ly/2nyA6VP

Samuel Brownback appears before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

On Jan. 24, the Senate confirmed Sam Brownback, the governor of Kansas – a Methodist, who converted to Catholicism and today attends an evangelical church – for the position of ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. On Jan. 30, President Donald Trump touted in his State of the Union address the “historic actions to protect religious liberty” as a major achievement of his administration.

Brownback’s victory was a razor thin 50-49. Conservative leaders, who know Brownback as an ally in the fight against abortion and homosexuality, were quick to lavish praise with Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore calling him “an outstanding choice.” Democrats, on the other hand, criticized Brownback for rolling back LGBTQ protections in Kansas.

As a historian of religion and foreign policy in the United States, I know that this is not the first time Americans have disagreed about the meaning of religious freedom. The United States has, in fact, been promoting religious liberty abroad since its founding, but there has always been disagreement on what exactly it is.

Religion and American empire

In 1775, in the early days of the American Revolution, George Washington prepared the Continental Army to invade the Canadian colonies in order to convince the inhabitants to join the rebellion against the British. As Colonel Benedict Arnold prepared to lead the charge, Washington warned him to respect the religious liberty of Catholics in Quebec and avoid unnecessary conflict. He wrote:

“While we are Contending for our own Liberty, we should be very cautious of violating the Rights of Conscience in others.”

Portrait of George Washington. Rembrandt Peale, via Wikimedia Commons

Washington’s advice was followed in Canada but not in the newly founded United States, where Catholics found themselves facing discrimination.

Although Congress passed the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1791, religious liberty applied only to “respectable” Protestant denominations, like Baptists and Methodists, who grew rapidly in the first decades of the 19th century. As historian David Sehat explains Protestant denominations created a “moral establishment” that acted like official churches did in Europe. As in Europe, this moral establishment persecuted minority faiths, like Catholics, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

A way of projecting American power

America’s record of promoting religious liberty abroad was also spotty. Religious liberty largely meant the rights of missionaries to go out and convert “heathens” to Protestant Christianity.

For example, government agents and missionaries in the 19th century trampled on the religious rights of conquered Native American nations by taking away their children and placing them into faraway residential schools that forbade them from practicing their native faiths. The United States banned certain native religious ceremonies, like the Ghost Dance, because of fears that the ritual stirred up rebellion.

In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain and took possession of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, Spanish colonies that were both predominantly Catholic. As historian Tisa Wenger has pointed out, promoting religious freedom in the colonies was a way for the United States to expand its empire. The idea that the United States would spread religious freedom through its policies made Americans feel like liberators even when they acted like conquerors.

According to historian Anna Su, the United States attempted to remake these colonies in its image by separating church and state and divesting Catholic religious orders of their property. President William McKinley reasoned that the Filipinos could not be trusted to make that separation themselves.

Ironically, the American claim that promoting religious freedom in the world was its sacred mission was one of the reasons the country became an empire.

Two versions of religious freedom

Many Filipinos, Puerto Ricans and Native Americans demanded the right to worship freely and to organize their lives as they saw fit. Their appeals, however, fell on deaf ears until the early 20th century, when liberal Protestants and Jews began championing a vision of religious liberty aimed at protecting minority rights, not just the rights of the Christian majority.

These progressives wanted to disassociate religious liberty from empire and promote it through international law. Lutheran academic O. Frederick Nolde led a liberal Protestant effort to enshrine religious liberty in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

For Nolde, religious freedom was important among other human rights, including social and economic rights. He argued that people had the right to live free from discrimination and that religious freedom was one of the ways of protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority. Nolde was hired by Federal Council of Churches, one of the most powerful religious lobbies in the United States.

Nolde and his associates were in the vanguard. It was only over time that the liberal Protestant and Jewish communities came to be more accepting of same-sex relationships and more supportive of church-state separation and other causes to protect minorities.

Evangelical view

Meanwhile, evangelicals and conservative Catholics embraced a different version of religious freedom, one that had the promotion of Christianity at its heart.

Evangelist Billy Graham. AP Photo/Pierre Gleizes

Evangelist Billy Graham, for example, worried in the 1950s that the Soviet Union was promoting atheism across the world, so he highlighted the country’s oppression of religious people and called on the United States to do more to free them. At home Graham opposed many of the court decisions that removed Bible reading and prayer from public schools.

Ironically, many conservatives seemed to believe that religious liberty was largely for people abroad, not at home. They opposed court decisions that they saw as infringing on the rights of Christian communities to pass on their values to their children. Evangelicals were also skeptical about Catholics having a more prominent role in American society, especially following the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Religious freedom abroad?

More recently, the legislation that created the position of ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom – Brownback’s new job – was in essence, the result of evangelical concern over the persecution of Christians in China and the Middle East in the 1990s.

It was under pressure from evangelical groups, such as the Christian Coalition, the Southern Baptist Convention and the National Association of Evangelicals, that Congress, in 1998, passed the International Religious Freedom Act to do more to protect Christians abroad.

The bill gained support among more liberal Protestant, Catholic and Jewish communities as well, along with secular human rights groups. But disagreements about religious liberty remained. While evangelicals were fretting over the fate of Christian communities, progressive groups wanted to see religious freedom as part of a broader human rights agenda.

To the progressives, religious freedom was part of a larger canvas of human rights issues. It was no surprise that President Barack Obama, for example, appointed Suzan Johnson Cook, a religious leader with a passion for human rights and subsequently David Nathan Saperstein, Brownback’s predecessor. Saperstein was a rabbi who had advocated on a range of social justice issues.

These appointments were in keeping with progressive beliefs. As political theorist Elizabeth Shakman Hurd explains, religious freedom could not be isolated from many social, economic and political forces that lead to conflict. Elevating religious concerns above other human rights issues could, in fact, lead to more harm than good.

The question now is whether Brownback will treat religious freedom as a human rights issue or use the position to promote the interests of Christian abroad?

Gene Zubovich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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philosophers-en-blog · 7 years

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Michel Aflaq

"Aflak" redirects here. For the village, see Aflak, Yüreğir. Warning: Page using Template:Infobox officeholder with unknown parameter "main_interests" (this message is shown only in preview). Warning: Page using Template:Infobox officeholder with unknown parameter "school_tradition" (this message is shown only in preview). Warning: Page using Template:Infobox officeholder with unknown parameter "era" (this message is shown only in preview). Warning: Page using Template:Infobox officeholder with unknown parameter "region" (this message is shown only in preview). Michel Aflaq (Arabic: ميشيل عفلق‎‎‎, Arabic pronunciation: [miːʃeːl ʕaflaq], 1910 – 23 June 1989) was a Syrian philosopher, sociologist and Arab nationalist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athism and its political movement; he is considered by several Ba'athists to be the principal founder of Ba'athist thought. He published various books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Battle for One Destiny (1958) and The Struggle Against Distorting the Movement of Arab Revolution (1975). Born into a middle-class family in Damascus, Syria, Aflaq studied at the Sorbonne, where he met his future political companion Salah al-Din al-Bitar. He returned to Syria in 1932, and began his political career in communist politics. Aflaq became a communist activist, but broke his ties with the communist movement when the Syrian–Lebanese Communist Party supported France's colonial policies. Later in 1940 Aflaq and al-Bitar established the Arab Ihya Movement (later renaming itself the Arab Ba'ath Movement, taking the name from Zaki al-Arsuzi's group by the same name). The movement proved successful, and in 1947 the Arab Ba'ath Movement merged with al-Arsuzi's Arab Ba'ath organisation to establish the Arab Ba'ath Party. Aflaq was elected to the party's executive committee and was elected "'Amid" (meaning the party's leader). The Arab Ba'ath Party merged with Akram al-Hawrani's Arab Socialist Party to establish the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party in 1952; Aflaq was elected the party's leader in 1954. During the mid-to-late 1950s the party began developing relations with Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, which eventually led to the establishment of the United Arab Republic (UAR). Nasser forced Aflaq to dissolve the party, which he did, but without consulting with party members. Shortly after the UAR's dissolution, Aflaq was reelected as Secretary General of the National Command of the Ba'ath Party. Following the 8th of March Revolution, Aflaq's position within the party was weakened to such an extent that he was forced to resign as the party's leader in 1965. Aflaq was ousted during the 1966 Syrian coup d'état, which led to a schism within the Ba'ath Party. He escaped to Lebanon, but later went to Iraq. In 1968 Aflaq was elected Secretary General of the Iraqi-led Ba'ath Party; during his tenure he held no de facto power. He held the post until his death on 23 June 1989. Aflaq's theories about society, economics and politics, which are collectively known as Ba'athism, hold that the Arab world needs to be unified into one Arab Nation in order to achieve an advanced state of development. He was critical of both capitalism and communism, and critical of Karl Marx's view of dialectical materialism as the only truth. Ba'athist thought placed much emphasis on liberty and Arab socialism – a socialism with Arab characteristics, which was not part of the international socialist movement as defined by the West. Aflaq believed in the separation of state and religion, and was a strong believer in secularisation, but was against atheism. Although a Christian, he believed Islam to be proof of "Arab genius". In the aftermath of the 1966 Ba'ath Party split, the Syrian-led Ba'ath Party accused Aflaq of stealing al-Arsuzi's ideas, and called him a "thief". The Iraqi-led Ba'ath Party rejects this, and does not believe that al-Arsuzi contributed to Ba'athist thought. More details Android, Windows

#Philosophers

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atticusblog2016-blog · 7 years

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New Post has been published on Atticusblog

New Post has been published on https://atticusblog.com/comcast-charter-team-to-take-on-mobile-establishment/

Comcast, Charter team to take on mobile establishment

US cable giants Comcast and Constitution Communications announced a partnership to cooperate on their respective entries into u . S .’s competitive cellular market, in a move designed to reduce charges, accelerate time to the marketplace and collaborate on the era.

The partnership, announced today, will see the organizations “explore capacity opportunities for operational cooperation”, after they each activated separate reseller agreements with US operator Verizon to release MVNO services.

Comcast showed in April it would release an MVNO, Xfinity cellular, in mid-2017 the usage of a combination of its sixteen million c084d04ddacadd4b971ae3d98fecfb2a hotspots and Verizon’s cellular community.

Constitution, in the meantime,

Said it planned to enter the mobile segment in 2018, with both groups now set to do warfare with u. S . A .’s four mounted operators.

In a joint declaration, Comcast and Constitution said they’ll work together in a number of areas in the wireless area ahead of their respective launches, consisting of: “growing common operating systems, technical requirements development and harmonization, tool forward and opposite logistics and rising wireless era systems”.

The deal between Comcast and Constitution additionally includes a clause barring both agencies from moving into a cloth merger or acquisition without the other’s consent for one year. They also agreed to work simplest together with recognizing to other national cell community operators.

This, in effect, could save you both company from merging with a cell operator for the subsequent year.

At the beginning of 2017, reports connected Verizon with a deal to merge with Charter Communications, a circulate which might red meat up the operator’s content material play following current actions made by means of foremost rival AT&T inside the pay-Television area.

mobile aims

In a record issued beforehand of the partnership being confirmed, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) stated the new settlement could gasoline hypothesis Comcast and Charter may finally try to crew to collect an operator, possibly to be both T-mobile US or Dash.

each cellular operators have also been difficult to acquisition speculation in recent months, with Comcast linked to a deal for both participants.

Comcast Email Address – Easy Ways to Lookup Or Search For a Comcast Email Address

Have you ever been in a scenario in which you lose contact together with your friends and cherished ones? Have you ever the idea of a manner on how to get their electronic mail accounts? On-line chat and emailing are simply of the offerings provided via Comcast. It allows us to get lower back to our pals and to our enterprise associates. That allows you to do that, we need to be guided with the aid of some clean ways to look up or look for a Comcast electronic mail cope with.

We want to feel secure and secure while we observe for an email account, and those are just the motives why we want to get a Comcast account:

– To avoid scam and spam messages that intentionally receives into our debts.

– To be able to document abusive or suspicious messages which could ruin our accounts.

smooth methods to lookup or search for a Comcast e-mail deal with is only a simple process to follow If you want to get what you need when searching for a positive account Online.

Right here are the suggestions on how to retrieve misplaced or forgotten email accounts:

1. Seek at Comcast as it has e-mail finders that may undoubtedly assist inside the Seek.

2. Usually have the entire name of the person you’ll Seek – his first, middle and closing names. Type in the Search container the entire call of the man or woman within the specific order and then press ‘Input’. It’ll then give you a listing of possible email addresses that the name being searched can be the use of.

3. Ask your buddies or other individuals who may also have had touch with the person you’re searching out.

4. Another alternative might be to search for the individual in websites where many people are probably to enroll in or go to. The extra famous the site is, the more human beings are joining and the more probabilities of finding the character.

Mobile Phone Parts – How to Buy Them Online

A mobile phone is made up of many different sections of integrated circuitry (ICs) like the CPU, the Network IC, the Flash IC, the Power IC, the Charger IC, and the Logic IC. It is also made up of network related Antenna switch and P.F.O. Then there are the oscillators and crystals, filters, ROM, and RAM. These are the main internal parts of a mobile phone, which cover all its functions of display, networking, storage, etc. Then there are the external frames and accessories all of which are specific to their brands and model numbers. Like every manufactured product, there is a thriving online market for such parts and with mobile phones becoming the most important accessory in today’s scenario, this marketplace is absolutely booming!

China is the largest market for mobile phones in terms of subscribers. They are also the world’s largest manufacturers of branded phones for other countries as well as off-brand cell phones that they sell through various channels at very low cost. This is because they don’t spend much on research and design and manufacturers usually buy a casing molding and fill it with their own components. These case moldings are based on internationally famous brands and so their local off brands get to plug into the popularity of the international brand and enjoy it as well.

So, the market for the parts for mobile phones is quite an interesting cocktail!

Who are the customers for the cell phone parts market?

They could be users like you and me or retailers of cell phones and parts

What sort of parts do these online sites sell?

· Terminal product repair parts like LCD screens, battery, and flex cable

· Accessories like earphones, tempered glass, USB cable chargers

· Repair tools

· Other products which are customized

How do you make the right choice of vendors for cell phone parts in such a scenario?

· Replacement screens are the most widely sold part of a mobile phone. One must always look for a good quality screen which has no dead pixels or dead spots and can match any OEM screen. In short, the parts should be of the good grade. Many of them buy their parts in bulk, but such parts are of inferior quality and can’t be traced back to the manufacturer in case of defects.

· They should provide technical support as well. Some online retailers of cell phone parts have tie-ups with manufacturers with whose cooperation, they can raise their quality of technical expertise.

· They should be able to meet specific demands, whether it is an OEM product or a Chinese copy etc.

· Some of their customers like retailers would be happy with financial support like the assurance of credit.

Do the Words “In God, We Trust” Violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause?

The phrases “In God, we agree with” does no longer violate the primary modification’s status quo clause.

The clause reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an established order of religion, or prohibiting the loose exercise thereof; or abridging the liberty of speech, or of the clicking, or the proper of the people peaceably to collect, and to petition the Authorities for a redress of grievances.” The phrases “In God, we consider” does now not pertain to any individual faith or another, the word God is ambiguous relating to a supernatural being, applicable to a myriad of monotheist and polytheist religions alike. The not unusual announcement that the phrases “In God we consider” is at once analogous to a Judeo-Christian God is unsuitable.

Similarly, it is blind to the universality held throughout major cultures, beliefs, and values spanning almost all nations and time intervals. The important center idea of believing in a novel or important supernatural pressure or deity is found in almost every essential global faith, through polytheism and monotheism. For example, in the Hindu faith they consider in Brahman, in Islam they trust in Allah, the historical Egyptians trusted inside the solar god as an important deity that breathed life onto this earth. The phrases “In God, we accept as true with” signify America’ adherence to the establishment clause with the aid of promoting a non-precise widely wide-spread notion that encourages the unfastened exercise of faith not the absence of it.

The status quo clause shows that the united states can show no bias towards any person religion; it’s far to consequently promote freedom of faith, no longer freedom of religion. Most people of competition comes from atheists who declare that the phrases “In god, we believe” found on U.S. foreign money violate they’re proper to freedom of faith located inside the status quo clause.

However, atheism is not a faith, it is the lack thereof, Webster’s dictionary defines religion as a non-public set or institutionalized device of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices. The antonym of religion in which atheism falls under is religionless that’s described by way of the 1913 version of Webster’s dictionary as “Destitute of faith.” This appropriately describes atheism, because of the centric middle of this philosophy. Atheism being a philosophy deserves safety underneath freedom of speech but merits no protection as an established order of religion. Can you photo the chaos if we allowed people’s personal philosophy to keep the equal criminal advantage as faith? If this became law or courtroom precedent the effects could be catastrophic.

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cubaverdad · 7 years

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SO CLOSE AND YET SO FAR: THE JEWS OF CUBA

SO CLOSE AND YET SO FAR: THE JEWS OF CUBA BYDANIELLE ZIRI APRIL 16, 2017 07:20 Cuban Jews face challenges with hope. HAVANA, CUBA – On a quiet, tree-lined street of Havana's Vedado, a residential neighborhood just steps away from the sea, one may come across a simple yet striking construction. A dozen yellow-brownish marble steps lead to a large blue gate, symmetrically decorated with tarnished gold symbols including two menorahs. The building is topped with a high arch, in the center of which is a Star of David. The Beth Shalom Synagogue, the main one of three in Havana, was built in the early 1950s. While the exterior appears to have gotten little maintenance throughout the years, it is easy to recognize the grandeur it must have exuded back then. Next door, behind a white wrought-iron gate is the Jewish community center, where in a narrow office, a few people have made it their mission to sustain Jewish life for a community estimated at only 1,400 in the Communist-ruled Caribbean island. "It's a small but a vibrant community," center president Adela Dworin told The Jerusalem Post. Dworin, a short woman in her 80s with a big sense of humor and a distinct Yiddish accent, was born and raised in Havana. Her parents came to Cuba from Poland, like many Jews during the period between the world wars, as pogroms were taking place in eastern Europe. "They wanted to go to America, to the US," she explained, sitting behind her dark wooden desk, crammed with piles of paper and pictures. "But then, it was very difficult to get American citizenship and Cuba accepted immigrants, so they thought they would stay here a short time and then they would get to the US." However, what was supposed to have been a temporary home became a permanent one for Dworin's family, as was the case for many others, who eventually set up communal life on the island. They enjoyed freedom of religion and were welcomed as immigrants. By the 1950s, there were some 15,000 to 25,000 Jews in Cuba. After the revolution in 1959, atheism was declared the official religion of the state and 90% of the Jews simply left to neighboring countries. The new law caused many to stay away from synagogues, especially if they wished to become members of the Communist Party. Things changed again in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Cuban government rewrote its constitution and decided to define Cuba as a country without religion. This allowed the Jewish community to resume their practices freely. Adela Dworin and her colleagues at Beth Shalom all say they have never encountered antisemitism in Cuba. In fact, there is no sign of security outside or inside the synagogue – no metal detectors and no guards. Sitting by Dworin's desk, Jose Fernandez, who is not Jewish but describes himself as "a friend" of the community and seems to know much about it, told the Post he believes this is mostly due to basic ignorance about who Jews are. "We are respected," he said. "We are not supported, we are not encouraged or anything, but we have a great relationship [with the authorities]. It's a normal relationship." Fernandez, a smiley elderly man with very good English, grew up across the street from Beth Shalom. Back in the early 1950s, before the synagogue was built, he used to play baseball, Cuba's most popular sport, in the empty lot. As a child, when construction began on his field, he was furious. "I threw stones here!" he said with a smile. "I was going to play ball here and they said there was going to be a Jewish thing here. I didn't know these people!" Decades later, after getting to know the community, and spending much time at the synagogue, he admits having "fallen in love." WITH SUCH a small community and in a country still much isolated from developments in rest of the world, some challenges arise, starting with access to kosher food. There is only one kosher butcher shop in all of Cuba, located in Old Havana. Jews are able to go to the shop and claim their monthly ration of meat there, as the food distribution system in Cuba requires. "Well, it's a little difficult, but you don't starve," Dworin said with a smile, her eyes covered by lightly tinted glasses. "You have rice and beans and sometime you can get a live chicken from the farmer. I take it to the shohet, who performs the slaughter. "We have about two pounds of kosher meat a month," she explained. The size of the community has also brought about a high rate of intermarriages, Dworin pointed out, and such couples are welcomed at the synagogue. "We accept children from non-Jewish mothers but Jewish fathers and we give seminars to those who are linked to a Jew," Dworin said. But many of the struggles that the community faces are the struggles faced by Cubans in general and come down to money. Like the general population, Jews in Cuba live in poverty. Under Communist rule, there are two currencies in Cuba: the regular peso, used by locals, and the peso convertible, largely used by visitors, for which the exchange rate is one dollar per peso convertible. Much of the supplies the Jewish community needs, Dworin explained, cannot be bought in regular pesos. This includes powdered milk or adult diapers for the seniors, who make up 20% of the community. Unless they have enough funds from donations, or they are sent from abroad, Beth Shalom does not have access to these items. Recently, the synagogue was finally able to repair the hole in its roof, which had been leaking for a while, through a donation as well. But beyond these practical needs, the financial situation sometimes affects Jewish life itself in Cuba. "Because we are a very poor community, we cannot afford to maintain a rabbi," Dworin said. "A rabbi is not like a priest; he comes with his wife and children." Instead, the synagogue hosts a rabbi once every few months, who shows members of the community how to lead services, funerals and more. Fernandez said that donations come to Beth Shalom "a little bit by chance." Since sending money to Cuba is often either impossible or comes with an exorbitant wire-transfer fee, the contributions usually come from Jewish tourists visiting the synagogue. "If someone is coming and he has millions of dollars and [Dworin] is funny that day, he asks 'what do you need? Money?' and then he donates money," he said. "That's the way it is." This has happened several times at Beth Shalom. In 2013, thanks to a donation from a wealthy American Jew, they were even able to get uniforms for the group of Cuban Jewish athletes who Beth Shalom sends annually to the Maccabiah Games in Israel. This year, Dworin explained she is still not sure whether they will be able to afford sending a delegation to the games. SOME JEWISH federations and organizations from the US and Canada help sustain the community. One of them is the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which has been actively and continuously involved since the early 1990s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reintroduction of religious freedom, the JDC became the first American organization to be licensed to go to Cuba and work with the Jewish community there. To jump-start communal life on the island, the JDC set up a series of programs that are still running to this day. They include chicken dinners for Shabbat, holiday services, Jewish summer camps, family camps, organizing bar mitzvas and even providing transportation for members of the community to attend synagogues. The JDC has also helped establish a small pharmacy at Beth Shalom, distributing medicine shipped by the organization or brought by mission participants and tourists. "There are many challenges – everything from the reality of Cuba today, the economy of the country, to having lived under 50 years of communism," JDC assistant executive vice president Will Recant told the Post. "One of the main challenges was Jewish education: reeducating the community to what it means to be Jewish, what Jewish life is," he added, mentioning the Beth Shalom synagogue's Torah, which was not kosher and had to be reworked. He brought it back from the United States himself on one of his trips. "The JDC has to respond to whatever challenges are in the communities we work in, taking into account the physical and spiritual reality of what takes place in those countries," he said. Although they made clear they are grateful for the help they received from abroad, when asked whether they feel any sense of abandonment, the community expressed mixed feelings, especially when it comes to Cuban Jews who left the country. "I would say yes," Fernandez answered, while explaining that as a "friend" of the community, he may be more comfortable saying so. "That is something that is felt. Maybe not expressed or talked about or discussed, but it is felt. What we particularly need is actually what you are doing," he told the Post. "We need people to know that we exist, that we have these needs and that sometimes it's very easy to help." Recant said that as far as his organization is concerned, helping sustain and strengthen the Jewish community will always be a priority. The difficult financial and social situation in Cuba has driven a large number of Cubans to leave the country. For Jews, Israel was a welcome option. "If the economic situation in the country improves, people won't be thinking so much about making aliya, about immigrating to other countries," Dworin said. "It's a miracle that the Jewish community exists." The process of making aliya, however, may come with more difficulty for Cuban nationals than for others. Due to the lack of diplomatic relations, Israel does not have an embassy in Cuba. In order to start the aliya process, Cuban Jews use the Canadian embassy, which serves as an intermediary. David Prinstein, Dworin's right hand and vice president of the community, told the Post that Jews in Cuba would generally like to see the two countries interact. "I love Cuba because I am Cuban and because of the quality of life here, which deserves to be recognized, and I love Israel because it's my other half, the other land that we belong to," he explained in Spanish. "I feel like a son in a divorced family where the parents don't talk or understand each other enough and the son isn't sure where to look." Despite the challenges, neither Dworin, Prinstein nor Fernandez are worried about the continuity of Jewish life in Cuba. Children are key to the future, and Beth Shalom runs a Sunday Hebrew school program in which some 60 kids take part every week. "It's not just a religion: it's a story and an identity," Prinstein, whose children are themselves very involved with the synagogue, said. "We have been trusted with a great legacy that we have to keep passing from generation to generation with the tranquility that we have in Cuba. I really wish that you could do that around the world." Prinstein himself only begun learning about his Jewish roots in the 1990s, when the community underwent its revival. He had to learn about Judaism while trying to pass on the traditions to his children. "We are trying to make sure that the youth are very active in every important moment, project, and programs – that they see and feel a strong tie to our community, to the State of Israel, to our history in Cuba and the legacy that we are leaving to them," he explained."We feel that the future leadership will be better prepared than we were." "It's definitely a big family and a community worth betting on." Mike Gellis contributed to this report Source: So close and yet so far: The Jews of Cuba - Diaspora - Jerusalem Post - http://ift.tt/2pFp3cT via Blogger http://ift.tt/2pmz1Dr

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