By Zubair Ahmed
BBC News, Mumbai
A writer once said that more than one soul dies in a suicide.
It seems so in Neha Sawant's home. The atmosphere in the tiny flat in Mumbai has been lifeless since the 11-year-old was found hanging from her apartment window.
It has been weeks but her parents are still in deep shock. They look dazed and sleep-deprived.
Neha's distraught grandmother said in a broken voice: "Our brains are not working. We still cannot believe it."
Neha, at 11, must be one of the youngest in Mumbai to commit suicide. Figures suggest that more and more teenagers in India's financial hub are killing themselves.
Dizzying
Inexplicably, teenage suicides have become an almost daily occurrence in Maharashtra - one of India's most developed states - and its capital Mumbai (Bombay).
“ Something has gone amiss in [children's] lives quite early and suicides are a manifestation of that ”
Clinical psychologist Rhea Timbekar
The toll of teenage suicides from the beginning of the year until 26 January 2010 stood at 32, which is more than one a day.
While there are no comparative figures for the same period in 2009, there is a consensus among the concerned authorities in Mumbai that teenage suicides are spiralling out of control.
There is also a general agreement between psychologists and teachers that the main reason for the high number of teenagers taking their own lives is the increasing pressure on children to perform well in exams.
The scale of this largely preventable problem is dizzying - both in India with its billion-plus people and particularly in the state of in Maharashtra.
More than 100,000 people commit suicide in India every year and three people a day take their own lives in Mumbai.
Suicide is one of the top three causes of death among those aged between 15 and 35 years and has a devastating psychological, social and financial impact on families and friends.
'Needless toll'
World Health Organisation Assistant Director-General Catherine Le Gals-Camus points out more people die from suicide around the world than from all homicides and wars combined.
"There is an urgent need for co-ordinated and intensified global action to prevent this needless toll. For every suicide death there are scores of family and friends whose lives are devastated emotionally, socially and economically," she says.
“ The children don't realise they have more avenues than academic successes ”
School principal Mangala Kulkarni
In Mumbai the authorities are so alarmed by the scale of the problem that they have began a campaign, Life is Beautiful, which aims to help students cope with academic pressure.
Psychologists visit government schools in Mumbai once a week to train teachers dealing with students' problems.
Sharadashram Vidyamandir school boasts illustrious alumni such as cricketers Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli. It has been holding parent-teacher assemblies where parents can receive tips on tackling the pressures children face.
And yet such sessions could not prevent 12-year-old Shushant Patil's death. He was found hanging in the school toilet on 5 January.
Mangala Kulkarni is the principal of the girls' section of the school. She says that ultimately families need to be more proactive when it comes to stopping students from feeling stressed.
"The children don't realise they have more avenues than academic successes. They need to be made to realise this by their families from childhood," she said.
Blockbuster
A helpline in Mumbai, called Aasra, has been operating for several years to tackle the problem.
The director of the helpline, Johnson Thomas, says the problems today's children face are manifold: "They have peer pressure, they have communication problems with their parents, broken relationships, academic pressure and fear of failure," he says.
The home ministry estimates that for every teenage suicide in Mumbai there are 13 failed attempts.
One theory behind the recent rise is the influence of a recently released Bollywood blockbuster, Three Idiots, which has a scene where an engineering student is shown committing suicide after a mediocre exam result.
The film's impact has been debated and scrutinised in prime time television shows, with many directly blaming it for adding to the problem.
But Mumbai clinical psychologist Rhea Timbekar argues that it would be wrong to blame the film, which she says strives to explain that parents should not put too much pressure on their children.
Ms Timbekar says that she recently met a child who had not eaten for four days.
The child's parents said they were upset with him because he only got 89% in exams and stood third in the class, compared to coming first in previous years.
"Such parents need to be counselled," she asserts.
Ms Timbekar said that another explanation for the high teenage suicide rate was "copycat suicides" where children read about suicides in newspapers and decide to do the same thing themselves.
'Extreme steps'
Dilip Panicker, an eminent psychologist in Mumbai, says that pressure of exams is alone is too simplistic an explanation.
"At one level school pressures and expectations from parents are a valid reason," he says, "but that's always been there.
"In fact, parents used to beat up their kids in our time. What's changed is that today children are more aware, they have more exposure. They are more independent. So they blame themselves for failures and take extreme steps."
Psychologists also argue that the definition of a teenager needs to be revised in 2010.
"Today's 11-year-olds are the new teens. What we did at the ages of 14 and 15 children can do at 11 today," says Rhea Timbekar.
She demolishes the theory that children are more likely to be spontaneous in committing suicide, as opposed to adults who start with an idea, proceed with a plan and end with action.
"A child doesn't just wake up in the morning and says I will commit suicide today," she argues. "Something has gone amiss in their lives quite early on and suicides are a manifestation of that."
The breakdown of India's traditional family system is also being blamed for the problem. In a city like Mumbai - where it is common for both parents to work - children tend to become reclusive and watch too much television.
Dilip Panicker argues that there is a simple solution.
"If parents love their children unconditionally, with all their successes and failures, the problem would be greatly alleviated."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/8473515.stm
Published: 2010/02/01 11:32:11 GMT
© BBC MMX
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Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Yemen's greatest enemy is sitting across its border
Yemenis baulk at the idea that their neighbours should supply more aid
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Once upon a time in the early 1950s, the King of Yemen, Imam Ahmad, dispatched an adviser to Germany who returned with marvellous tales of what he had seen there. Describing the economic miracle which the US's Marshall Plan had wrought, he explained that although the Germans had started and then lost a war against the Americans, the streets of Cologne were now as clean as the Imam's table.
No fool, the Imam decided that Sanaa's streets would soon be a match for Cologne's; all he needed to do was declare war against America, lose it, and wait for the aid to pour in. The tale may be apocryphal but, as London readies itself for tomorrow's hastily convened conference on how to help Yemen root out an al-Qa'ida cell capable of equipping a Nigerian youth with enough explosives in his underpants to down a passenger plane, it is worth reviewing the highlights of Yemen's aid history.
The traditional attitude of all Yemen's leaders towards foreign aid, and the form which aid from neighbouring Saudi Arabia has taken since the 1970s, as well as the West's most recent effort to co-ordinate aid efforts in Yemen, should all be borne in mind.
Yemen's educated classes assume that Imam Ahmad's pragmatic "we'll take as much cash as we can get by whatever means and with as few strings attached as possible" policy is also the name of President Ali Abdullah Salih's game. It benefited Yemen during the Cold War; Maoist Chinese built the country's first paved road, Soviets modernised the Red Sea port of Hodeidah and ensured the country was armed to the hilt at almost no cost, while the Americans sorted out a water supply and a girls' school.
Video: Global summit on Yemen
Yemenis also assume that President Ali Abdullah Salih has deliberately refrained from cracking down hard on his jihadists in order to maintain the flow of anxious aid – money, surveillance equipment, weapons – from his Western allies and neighbouring Saudi Arabia. His mercenary short-sightedness is largely to blame, they say, for Yemen's shaming reputation as a jihadists' haven.
Saudi aid in the security field is already reckoned to be around double the $140m to be offered to Yemen by the US this year, and there is more – harder to quantify precisely – in the form of mosque-building, charity and religious education. But the hardest Saudi aid to quantify is the cash flowing straight out of a Saudi "Special Office" to the sheikhs of many Yemeni tribes, especially ones located anywhere near the Saudi border.
A Yemeni civil rights activist laments the Saudis' financial clout, portraying it as one of the chief banes of Yemen's existence: "Although Yemenis hate Saudis," he explains, "the Saudis know how to spread their influence by their wealth and they have corrupted everything in Yemen." He claims that two thirds – in other words, 6,000 of Yemen's approximately 9,000 tribal sheikhs – benefit from Saudi handouts, the most powerful of them to the tune of $3.5m a month.
The Saudis' apparent reluctance to invest in the long-term development and improvement of the country and help educate its people is what makes Yemenis baulk at the now frequently voiced Western opinion that Yemen's rich neighbours, rather than any Western countries, should be taking the lead in supplying aid to Yemen.
Pointing out the drawbacks inherent in Saudi Arabia's style of giving may be unwise, however, when the West has nothing much to boast about. A 2006 London conference devoted to aiding development in Yemen, involving both Western powers and Yemen's Gulf neighbours, resulted in pledges of almost $5bn, precious little of which has been received, let alone spent.
Yemen's Foreign Minister, Dr Al-Qirbi, in London for tomorrow's conference, has been complaining that if those projects had got off the ground and begun to bear fruit, "things would be very different now". The donors' reply to that would be that the human capital, the skills and standards needed to run the projects, were not available.
The scattering of brand new schools in Yemen's rural areas, standing empty and already decaying for lack of teachers, are a still more eloquent reminder of Yemen's true needs.
Victoria Clark's 'Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes' will be published by Yale in March
Comment:
9000 tribal leaders most of whom has direct contact with a foreign country. This is a modern era version of Zemene-Mesafint.
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Once upon a time in the early 1950s, the King of Yemen, Imam Ahmad, dispatched an adviser to Germany who returned with marvellous tales of what he had seen there. Describing the economic miracle which the US's Marshall Plan had wrought, he explained that although the Germans had started and then lost a war against the Americans, the streets of Cologne were now as clean as the Imam's table.
No fool, the Imam decided that Sanaa's streets would soon be a match for Cologne's; all he needed to do was declare war against America, lose it, and wait for the aid to pour in. The tale may be apocryphal but, as London readies itself for tomorrow's hastily convened conference on how to help Yemen root out an al-Qa'ida cell capable of equipping a Nigerian youth with enough explosives in his underpants to down a passenger plane, it is worth reviewing the highlights of Yemen's aid history.
The traditional attitude of all Yemen's leaders towards foreign aid, and the form which aid from neighbouring Saudi Arabia has taken since the 1970s, as well as the West's most recent effort to co-ordinate aid efforts in Yemen, should all be borne in mind.
Yemen's educated classes assume that Imam Ahmad's pragmatic "we'll take as much cash as we can get by whatever means and with as few strings attached as possible" policy is also the name of President Ali Abdullah Salih's game. It benefited Yemen during the Cold War; Maoist Chinese built the country's first paved road, Soviets modernised the Red Sea port of Hodeidah and ensured the country was armed to the hilt at almost no cost, while the Americans sorted out a water supply and a girls' school.
Video: Global summit on Yemen
Yemenis also assume that President Ali Abdullah Salih has deliberately refrained from cracking down hard on his jihadists in order to maintain the flow of anxious aid – money, surveillance equipment, weapons – from his Western allies and neighbouring Saudi Arabia. His mercenary short-sightedness is largely to blame, they say, for Yemen's shaming reputation as a jihadists' haven.
Saudi aid in the security field is already reckoned to be around double the $140m to be offered to Yemen by the US this year, and there is more – harder to quantify precisely – in the form of mosque-building, charity and religious education. But the hardest Saudi aid to quantify is the cash flowing straight out of a Saudi "Special Office" to the sheikhs of many Yemeni tribes, especially ones located anywhere near the Saudi border.
A Yemeni civil rights activist laments the Saudis' financial clout, portraying it as one of the chief banes of Yemen's existence: "Although Yemenis hate Saudis," he explains, "the Saudis know how to spread their influence by their wealth and they have corrupted everything in Yemen." He claims that two thirds – in other words, 6,000 of Yemen's approximately 9,000 tribal sheikhs – benefit from Saudi handouts, the most powerful of them to the tune of $3.5m a month.
The Saudis' apparent reluctance to invest in the long-term development and improvement of the country and help educate its people is what makes Yemenis baulk at the now frequently voiced Western opinion that Yemen's rich neighbours, rather than any Western countries, should be taking the lead in supplying aid to Yemen.
Pointing out the drawbacks inherent in Saudi Arabia's style of giving may be unwise, however, when the West has nothing much to boast about. A 2006 London conference devoted to aiding development in Yemen, involving both Western powers and Yemen's Gulf neighbours, resulted in pledges of almost $5bn, precious little of which has been received, let alone spent.
Yemen's Foreign Minister, Dr Al-Qirbi, in London for tomorrow's conference, has been complaining that if those projects had got off the ground and begun to bear fruit, "things would be very different now". The donors' reply to that would be that the human capital, the skills and standards needed to run the projects, were not available.
The scattering of brand new schools in Yemen's rural areas, standing empty and already decaying for lack of teachers, are a still more eloquent reminder of Yemen's true needs.
Victoria Clark's 'Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes' will be published by Yale in March
Comment:
9000 tribal leaders most of whom has direct contact with a foreign country. This is a modern era version of Zemene-Mesafint.
The Latino Crescent
by Lyndsey Matthews, from The Brooklyn Rail
A woman wearing a hijab rushes up the stairs of a mosque in Union City, New Jersey. She is frantically murmuring, “Empanadas, empanadas, empanadas!” as if to remind herself to pick up the savory Latino pastries for the crowd waiting inside. The sixth annual Hispanic Muslim Day event is about to begin.
More than 60 percent of Union City’s population is Latino, and the storefronts in this neighborhood proudly display flags from Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. This stately columned building used to house the city’s Cuban community center, once a popular venue for traditional Hispanic celebrations like quinceañeras. For 17 years, it’s been the Islamic Educational Center of North Hudson.
Unlike churches and synagogues, mosques do not keep rosters of their worshippers. Where one goes to pray is more fluid in the Islamic tradition. Shinoa Matos, one of the young women in attendance, estimates that of the thousands of people who pray at the Union City mosque in any given week, more than a hundred are Latino. “Just like how there are Albanian mosques in Albanian neighborhoods,” she explains, “we are a Latino mosque because we are in a Latino neighborhood.” Islam, however, discourages differentiation among ethnic groups, she says, so Muslims try not to do it.
Inside the mosque the aromatic scent of steaming empanadas, spiced beef stuffed inside shells of puffed pastry, inundates the first floor auditorium. About a hundred people of various ages mingle around a dozen round tables covered with white plastic cloths and topped with cream-colored ceramic vases holding bouquets of purple silk pansies. Grandmothers coo over infants while a group of young men plug a laptop into the sound system to play nasheed, a traditional form of Islamic music. There are more women than men, and only a few women are not veiled. By what seems like an act of natural separation, the men sit on the left of the auditorium, the women on the right, with a few scattered in between.
Eventually Ramon Omar Abduraheem Ocasio comes to the front of the auditorium to give the keynote speech. He is a family man who found Islam in Harlem in the 1970s and reared his six children as Muslims. He describes what it was like in those days to be ostracized in the neighborhood’s mosques, which members of the Nation of Islam dominated.
Ocasio is one of the 44 million Latinos living in the United States who constitute the nation’s largest minority population, according to 2007 U.S. Census estimates. This, plus the rapid growth in the number of adherents of Islam in the United States, has given rise to the relatively new demographic of American Latino Muslims. In 1997 the American Muslim Council identified some 40,000 Hispanic Muslims in the country, a number that had swelled nine years later to a reported 200,000. A 2008 study by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life put the number of Latino Muslim U.S. residents at 4 percent of all Muslim U.S. residents. The figure represents a tiny minority within a tiny minority—just over half of 1 percent of the U.S. population—and a somewhat surprising one. Latinos have long been associated with the Roman Catholic Church and, more recently, with the evangelical Christian traditions. All the same, it is not unusual for Americans to change faith for another denomination, an entirely new religion, or no religion at all. For example, of the nearly one in three Americans raised as Catholics, fewer than a quarter still consider themselves Catholic.
Although Islam has not permeated Latino culture to the extent that it has permeated black culture—24 percent of Muslim Americans are black—its influence is evident. Characters in the Spanish-language telenovela El Clon (The Clone) often discuss Islam and the prerequisites for becoming a Muslim. The appeal, Latinos who have converted say, comes from their search for a simpler and more intimate experience of God. They find the Muslim emphasis on family and conservative values familiar and, beyond that, Latinos often share neighborhoods with black and immigrant Muslims, and in turn develop strong ties as neighbors, friends, and coworkers.
The pale blue balloons floating on strings above the tables match Alex Robayo’s baby-blue collared shirt. As the Hispanic Muslim Day emcee, he speaks in both Spanish and English and directs his remarks primarily to the non--Muslims in the crowd.
“Are there any Catholics in the room?” he asks. A young dark-haired woman with a copy of El Coran, the Koran in Spanish, resting on the table in front of her quietly raises her hand and cringes slightly under the attention that turns in her direction.
Repeatedly, Robayo stresses the similarities between Christianity and Islam—the belief in one God and the many common prophets, including Jesus. Many converts say that they find the Christian idea of the Trinity complicated and that the monotheistic simplicity of the Islamic concept of tawheed—the “one true oneness of God”—has great appeal.
Robayo shares a story about his mother, a Roman Catholic, whom he picks up after Mass most weeks. He admires the beauty of the Catholic statues of Jesus and the saints but appreciates that in Islam there are no images. He likes the Islamic notion of a direct, unmediated conversation with God, a straightforward approach that appeals to many converts to Islam.
“You may say in Spanish dios, in English God, in Arabic Allah,” Robayo tells the crowd. “Are dios and God different?”
“Dios es grande,” he says.
Excerpted from The Brooklyn Rail (Sept. 2009), an incisive, eclectic, free journal of arts, politics, and culture.
www.brooklynrail.org
comment:
The simple reason they accept islam is because it's idea of God is simple-one and only one God no complicated idea of trinity.
A woman wearing a hijab rushes up the stairs of a mosque in Union City, New Jersey. She is frantically murmuring, “Empanadas, empanadas, empanadas!” as if to remind herself to pick up the savory Latino pastries for the crowd waiting inside. The sixth annual Hispanic Muslim Day event is about to begin.
More than 60 percent of Union City’s population is Latino, and the storefronts in this neighborhood proudly display flags from Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. This stately columned building used to house the city’s Cuban community center, once a popular venue for traditional Hispanic celebrations like quinceañeras. For 17 years, it’s been the Islamic Educational Center of North Hudson.
Unlike churches and synagogues, mosques do not keep rosters of their worshippers. Where one goes to pray is more fluid in the Islamic tradition. Shinoa Matos, one of the young women in attendance, estimates that of the thousands of people who pray at the Union City mosque in any given week, more than a hundred are Latino. “Just like how there are Albanian mosques in Albanian neighborhoods,” she explains, “we are a Latino mosque because we are in a Latino neighborhood.” Islam, however, discourages differentiation among ethnic groups, she says, so Muslims try not to do it.
Inside the mosque the aromatic scent of steaming empanadas, spiced beef stuffed inside shells of puffed pastry, inundates the first floor auditorium. About a hundred people of various ages mingle around a dozen round tables covered with white plastic cloths and topped with cream-colored ceramic vases holding bouquets of purple silk pansies. Grandmothers coo over infants while a group of young men plug a laptop into the sound system to play nasheed, a traditional form of Islamic music. There are more women than men, and only a few women are not veiled. By what seems like an act of natural separation, the men sit on the left of the auditorium, the women on the right, with a few scattered in between.
Eventually Ramon Omar Abduraheem Ocasio comes to the front of the auditorium to give the keynote speech. He is a family man who found Islam in Harlem in the 1970s and reared his six children as Muslims. He describes what it was like in those days to be ostracized in the neighborhood’s mosques, which members of the Nation of Islam dominated.
Ocasio is one of the 44 million Latinos living in the United States who constitute the nation’s largest minority population, according to 2007 U.S. Census estimates. This, plus the rapid growth in the number of adherents of Islam in the United States, has given rise to the relatively new demographic of American Latino Muslims. In 1997 the American Muslim Council identified some 40,000 Hispanic Muslims in the country, a number that had swelled nine years later to a reported 200,000. A 2008 study by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life put the number of Latino Muslim U.S. residents at 4 percent of all Muslim U.S. residents. The figure represents a tiny minority within a tiny minority—just over half of 1 percent of the U.S. population—and a somewhat surprising one. Latinos have long been associated with the Roman Catholic Church and, more recently, with the evangelical Christian traditions. All the same, it is not unusual for Americans to change faith for another denomination, an entirely new religion, or no religion at all. For example, of the nearly one in three Americans raised as Catholics, fewer than a quarter still consider themselves Catholic.
Although Islam has not permeated Latino culture to the extent that it has permeated black culture—24 percent of Muslim Americans are black—its influence is evident. Characters in the Spanish-language telenovela El Clon (The Clone) often discuss Islam and the prerequisites for becoming a Muslim. The appeal, Latinos who have converted say, comes from their search for a simpler and more intimate experience of God. They find the Muslim emphasis on family and conservative values familiar and, beyond that, Latinos often share neighborhoods with black and immigrant Muslims, and in turn develop strong ties as neighbors, friends, and coworkers.
The pale blue balloons floating on strings above the tables match Alex Robayo’s baby-blue collared shirt. As the Hispanic Muslim Day emcee, he speaks in both Spanish and English and directs his remarks primarily to the non--Muslims in the crowd.
“Are there any Catholics in the room?” he asks. A young dark-haired woman with a copy of El Coran, the Koran in Spanish, resting on the table in front of her quietly raises her hand and cringes slightly under the attention that turns in her direction.
Repeatedly, Robayo stresses the similarities between Christianity and Islam—the belief in one God and the many common prophets, including Jesus. Many converts say that they find the Christian idea of the Trinity complicated and that the monotheistic simplicity of the Islamic concept of tawheed—the “one true oneness of God”—has great appeal.
Robayo shares a story about his mother, a Roman Catholic, whom he picks up after Mass most weeks. He admires the beauty of the Catholic statues of Jesus and the saints but appreciates that in Islam there are no images. He likes the Islamic notion of a direct, unmediated conversation with God, a straightforward approach that appeals to many converts to Islam.
“You may say in Spanish dios, in English God, in Arabic Allah,” Robayo tells the crowd. “Are dios and God different?”
“Dios es grande,” he says.
Excerpted from The Brooklyn Rail (Sept. 2009), an incisive, eclectic, free journal of arts, politics, and culture.
www.brooklynrail.org
comment:
The simple reason they accept islam is because it's idea of God is simple-one and only one God no complicated idea of trinity.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Robert Fisk’s World: The stakes get higher as Arab princes try to outdo each other
Saturday, 16 January 2010
Do the Saudis not have the slightest idea of what is going on around them?
Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia is quite a man.
He says he doesn't want to be the prime minister of Lebanon – everyone who wants to be the prime minister of Lebanon says that – but he is immensely wealthy. True, his bank balance has sunk from $23.7bn to a mere $13.3bn since 2005 (thus sayeth Forbes magazine). But he's just announced that he wants to construct the world's tallest building – a 1km-high goliath which will dwarf his neighbour emir in Dubai who last month opened the paltry 25,000ft Burj Khalifa amid the sand dunes of his bankrupt creditors. The nephew of King Abdullah, al-Waleed understandably calls his company Kingdom Holdings. He also happens to be a major shareholder in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp – which is why you won't be reading these words in The Times. Long live Kingdom Holdings, I suppose.
Because yesterday morning, I was taking an al-Jazeera television crew around the repulsive, obscene, outrageous, filthy, stinking slums of the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps not far from my home in Beirut, a place of such squalor that the gorge rises that human beings even live there. Sabra and Chatila – yes, the site of that infamous massacre in 1982 when Lebanese Christian militiamen allied to Israel slaughtered up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians while the Israeli army surrounded the camps, watched the killings – and did nothing. They were the survivors of the great exodus or ethnic cleansing of 1948 – or their sons or grandsons – who fled Galilee for the "temporary" safety of Lebanon and, like the visa applicants of the movie Casablanca, wait and wait – and wait – to go home. Which they will never do. "I am very positive," Prince al-Waleed said when he announced his new priapic tower, to be constructed in the Red Sea port of Jeddah. "We are always looking for new investments."
Now I know that there are a lot of fine philanthropists in the Gulf, Prince al-Waleed among them, but what is one to make of all this? Afghanistan is collapsing in blood; Iraq remains a state of semi-civil war; the Israelis continue to thieve land for Jews and Jews only from the Arabs who hold the title deeds to that property – and Prince al-Waled wants to build a tower reaching a kilometre into the sky. Do the Saudis – who gave so much largesse to the Taliban (we have to forget this, of course, along with the fact that the Saudis provided most of the murderers of 9/11, which is why we bombed Kabul rather than Riyadh) – not have the slightest idea of what is going on around them?
For example, we all know that the Americans maintain stocks of weapons among their allies. They keep munitions in South Korea and, indeed, in the Arab Gulf (aka Saudi Arabia). But very quietly this week, they agreed to double their munitions supplies in Israel from $400m of weapons to $800m. Of course, Washington's gift of $9bn to Israel up to 2012 – never, of course, to be spent on those illegal colonies which are built against international law on Arab land but which Barack Obama now pusillanimously ignores – has nothing to do with this. But don't imagine that – in the event of a new "preventive" war – Israel cannot draw on these supplies for its own army and air force. After all, it was a missile taken to Saudi Arabia by the US marines for use against Iraq in 1991 that ended up in the hands of the Israeli air force as part of a quid pro quo for not joining in the war against Baghad - and which was subsequently used to kill civilians in a Lebanese ambulance in 1996.
But these days, Arab compliance reaches new heights every day. Now, for example, we have the Egyptian government – and its ever popular president (see the American-approved presidential election results which are way above 90 per cent) – building a wall around Rafah, part of the vast mass of poverty which constitutes Gaza, thus preventing food, gasoline (and, no doubt, weapons) from reaching the trapped Palestinians of this prison camp. A camp, one has to add, which meets with the full approval of Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, whose honourable involvement in the invasion of Iraq has now been outdone by is extraordinary success as peace envoy to the Middle East.
Egypt's intelligence boss (a certain Mr Sulieman who might be the next president of Egypt were it not for his pattern of heart attacks) approves of this wall, which is a very definite assistance to Israel and which will yet further impoverish the Palestinians of Gaza to the point at which the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila might actually feel themselves lucky they don't live in "Palestine".
In Israel itself, the deputy foreign minister humiliates the Turkish ambassador – while complaining about an anti-Semitic series on Turkish television – by forcing the diplomat to sit on a low sofa, refusing to shake hands and addressing him, with two colleagues, from higher chairs. The foreign minister himself, our dear friend Mr Lieberman, has now acquired the habit – every time poor old (and I mean old) US envoy George Mitchell raises the question of Jerusalem – of walking out of the room. That's what Obama's point man is worth. Israel's crazies – Netanyahu is a moderate chap by comparison – now prove that Israel can be just as much a banana Raj as the rest of the Middle East.
But fear not. The princes and the emirs and the caliphs and the presidents will be able to outbid each other in towers and hotels. I have a bigger painting set than yours. I have a sharper pencil, more crayons, a larger train set (Qatar, please note), a bigger bear than yours. And the world will watch this tragedy and marvel at the toy boxes now being opened in the Middle East. And, by the way, how many crayons do the children of Sabra and Chatila have?
Do the Saudis not have the slightest idea of what is going on around them?
Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia is quite a man.
He says he doesn't want to be the prime minister of Lebanon – everyone who wants to be the prime minister of Lebanon says that – but he is immensely wealthy. True, his bank balance has sunk from $23.7bn to a mere $13.3bn since 2005 (thus sayeth Forbes magazine). But he's just announced that he wants to construct the world's tallest building – a 1km-high goliath which will dwarf his neighbour emir in Dubai who last month opened the paltry 25,000ft Burj Khalifa amid the sand dunes of his bankrupt creditors. The nephew of King Abdullah, al-Waleed understandably calls his company Kingdom Holdings. He also happens to be a major shareholder in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp – which is why you won't be reading these words in The Times. Long live Kingdom Holdings, I suppose.
Because yesterday morning, I was taking an al-Jazeera television crew around the repulsive, obscene, outrageous, filthy, stinking slums of the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps not far from my home in Beirut, a place of such squalor that the gorge rises that human beings even live there. Sabra and Chatila – yes, the site of that infamous massacre in 1982 when Lebanese Christian militiamen allied to Israel slaughtered up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians while the Israeli army surrounded the camps, watched the killings – and did nothing. They were the survivors of the great exodus or ethnic cleansing of 1948 – or their sons or grandsons – who fled Galilee for the "temporary" safety of Lebanon and, like the visa applicants of the movie Casablanca, wait and wait – and wait – to go home. Which they will never do. "I am very positive," Prince al-Waleed said when he announced his new priapic tower, to be constructed in the Red Sea port of Jeddah. "We are always looking for new investments."
Now I know that there are a lot of fine philanthropists in the Gulf, Prince al-Waleed among them, but what is one to make of all this? Afghanistan is collapsing in blood; Iraq remains a state of semi-civil war; the Israelis continue to thieve land for Jews and Jews only from the Arabs who hold the title deeds to that property – and Prince al-Waled wants to build a tower reaching a kilometre into the sky. Do the Saudis – who gave so much largesse to the Taliban (we have to forget this, of course, along with the fact that the Saudis provided most of the murderers of 9/11, which is why we bombed Kabul rather than Riyadh) – not have the slightest idea of what is going on around them?
For example, we all know that the Americans maintain stocks of weapons among their allies. They keep munitions in South Korea and, indeed, in the Arab Gulf (aka Saudi Arabia). But very quietly this week, they agreed to double their munitions supplies in Israel from $400m of weapons to $800m. Of course, Washington's gift of $9bn to Israel up to 2012 – never, of course, to be spent on those illegal colonies which are built against international law on Arab land but which Barack Obama now pusillanimously ignores – has nothing to do with this. But don't imagine that – in the event of a new "preventive" war – Israel cannot draw on these supplies for its own army and air force. After all, it was a missile taken to Saudi Arabia by the US marines for use against Iraq in 1991 that ended up in the hands of the Israeli air force as part of a quid pro quo for not joining in the war against Baghad - and which was subsequently used to kill civilians in a Lebanese ambulance in 1996.
But these days, Arab compliance reaches new heights every day. Now, for example, we have the Egyptian government – and its ever popular president (see the American-approved presidential election results which are way above 90 per cent) – building a wall around Rafah, part of the vast mass of poverty which constitutes Gaza, thus preventing food, gasoline (and, no doubt, weapons) from reaching the trapped Palestinians of this prison camp. A camp, one has to add, which meets with the full approval of Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, whose honourable involvement in the invasion of Iraq has now been outdone by is extraordinary success as peace envoy to the Middle East.
Egypt's intelligence boss (a certain Mr Sulieman who might be the next president of Egypt were it not for his pattern of heart attacks) approves of this wall, which is a very definite assistance to Israel and which will yet further impoverish the Palestinians of Gaza to the point at which the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila might actually feel themselves lucky they don't live in "Palestine".
In Israel itself, the deputy foreign minister humiliates the Turkish ambassador – while complaining about an anti-Semitic series on Turkish television – by forcing the diplomat to sit on a low sofa, refusing to shake hands and addressing him, with two colleagues, from higher chairs. The foreign minister himself, our dear friend Mr Lieberman, has now acquired the habit – every time poor old (and I mean old) US envoy George Mitchell raises the question of Jerusalem – of walking out of the room. That's what Obama's point man is worth. Israel's crazies – Netanyahu is a moderate chap by comparison – now prove that Israel can be just as much a banana Raj as the rest of the Middle East.
But fear not. The princes and the emirs and the caliphs and the presidents will be able to outbid each other in towers and hotels. I have a bigger painting set than yours. I have a sharper pencil, more crayons, a larger train set (Qatar, please note), a bigger bear than yours. And the world will watch this tragedy and marvel at the toy boxes now being opened in the Middle East. And, by the way, how many crayons do the children of Sabra and Chatila have?
The perils of young Egyptians' secret marriages
By Yolande Knell
BBC News, Cairo
In the leafy grounds of Cairo University there are many dating couples among the crowds of students. Some sit close together in shady corners and hold hands.
Religious customs and ideas of social propriety in Egypt do not permit them to take their relationships much further.
However there is a way of bending the rules - urfi marriage.
Young Egyptians are said to be opting for these informal marriages in record numbers, often as a way of getting around religious strictures against premarital sex.
“ It's quite a conservative society. There's no premarital or extramarital sex, so they believe this gives a legitimate cover to the relationship ”
Madiha Safty Sociologist
"It's a secret marriage between a boy and girl which even their parents don't know about," explains a 20-year-old archaeology student. "They don't announce it publicly."
"From what I hear there are a lot of students in this university who have urfi marriages," adds his companion, Dina.
A urfi marriage is literally a "traditional" or "customary" marriage which does not need an official contract. Some students sign a hand-written document or come to a verbal agreement.
Others buy an unofficial marriage contract for about US $20 and sign it in front of two witnesses to try to meet Islamic requirements of a public declaration.
'Legitimate cover'
Usually they carry on living at home and stay quiet about their arrangement.
“ Some husbands who deny their marriages so the woman is forced to launch a lawsuit to prove paternity ”
Fawziya Abdullal Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights
"The young couple sees a urfi marriage as a pragmatic solution," says sociologist, Madiha Safty from the American University in Cairo.
"It's quite a conservative society. There's no premarital or extramarital sex, so they believe this gives a legitimate cover to the relationship."
The costs of a regular marriage and the obligations that go with it are one reason why experts believe more young Egyptians are making urfi arrangements.
"It's a cultural thing," Dr Safty observes.
"[With regular marriages] the groom is supposed to give a gift of jewellery upon engagement, he has to pay a sum for his fiancee to prepare for her life in marriage and find a place to live.
"At the same time she's supposed to provide the furniture. Of course people would also like to have a fancy wedding which can be quite expensive."
Pregnancies
Although they may be cheap, many urfi marriages do not end happily.
“ I was afraid so I called the guy I married and told him he needed to come over and ask for my hand officially ”
Female student who regretted her urfi marriage
A telephone hotline at the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights receives regular calls from young women confused about the legal and religious status of their marriages or seeking help when things have gone wrong.
Legal advisor, Fawziya Abdullal, says the most serious cases involve pregnancies.
"Maybe they have a baby, then [the woman] will become responsible for the child. There are some husbands who deny their marriages so the woman is forced to launch a lawsuit to prove paternity. A DNA test has to be done."
"She has a lot of hassles and difficulties," she says.
"It will also affect her reputation because as a woman in Middle Eastern culture she cannot marry another man."
' Excuses'
It is difficult to get young women who have had bad experiences of urfi marriages to speak about them but one told us her story through a lawyer.
She explained she had never had a boyfriend before she went to university but met a fellow student on campus and fell in love.
He gave her many reasons why they could not formally marry but persuaded her to sign a urfi marriage contract.
They consummated their union at her house when her parents were out at work.
However the woman became nervous after her mother confronted her about blood on her bed sheets.
"Really I was afraid so I called the guy I married and told him he needed to come over and ask for my hand officially," she recalls.
"Straight away he found a lot of excuses why he could not come and we had an argument.
"He broke up with me and tore up our urfi marriage contract."
Eventually the student revealed to her family what had happened and they tried reporting the case to the police.
However as she had consented to sex she had no comeback. She said she felt humiliated.
Politicians and religious officials have recently called for campaigns to warn women of the dangers of urfi marriages.
There have also been suggestions of new laws to make the practice illegal.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/8466188.stm
Published: 2010/01/19 07:56:56 GMT
© BBC MMX
Print Sponsor
BBC News, Cairo
In the leafy grounds of Cairo University there are many dating couples among the crowds of students. Some sit close together in shady corners and hold hands.
Religious customs and ideas of social propriety in Egypt do not permit them to take their relationships much further.
However there is a way of bending the rules - urfi marriage.
Young Egyptians are said to be opting for these informal marriages in record numbers, often as a way of getting around religious strictures against premarital sex.
“ It's quite a conservative society. There's no premarital or extramarital sex, so they believe this gives a legitimate cover to the relationship ”
Madiha Safty Sociologist
"It's a secret marriage between a boy and girl which even their parents don't know about," explains a 20-year-old archaeology student. "They don't announce it publicly."
"From what I hear there are a lot of students in this university who have urfi marriages," adds his companion, Dina.
A urfi marriage is literally a "traditional" or "customary" marriage which does not need an official contract. Some students sign a hand-written document or come to a verbal agreement.
Others buy an unofficial marriage contract for about US $20 and sign it in front of two witnesses to try to meet Islamic requirements of a public declaration.
'Legitimate cover'
Usually they carry on living at home and stay quiet about their arrangement.
“ Some husbands who deny their marriages so the woman is forced to launch a lawsuit to prove paternity ”
Fawziya Abdullal Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights
"The young couple sees a urfi marriage as a pragmatic solution," says sociologist, Madiha Safty from the American University in Cairo.
"It's quite a conservative society. There's no premarital or extramarital sex, so they believe this gives a legitimate cover to the relationship."
The costs of a regular marriage and the obligations that go with it are one reason why experts believe more young Egyptians are making urfi arrangements.
"It's a cultural thing," Dr Safty observes.
"[With regular marriages] the groom is supposed to give a gift of jewellery upon engagement, he has to pay a sum for his fiancee to prepare for her life in marriage and find a place to live.
"At the same time she's supposed to provide the furniture. Of course people would also like to have a fancy wedding which can be quite expensive."
Pregnancies
Although they may be cheap, many urfi marriages do not end happily.
“ I was afraid so I called the guy I married and told him he needed to come over and ask for my hand officially ”
Female student who regretted her urfi marriage
A telephone hotline at the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights receives regular calls from young women confused about the legal and religious status of their marriages or seeking help when things have gone wrong.
Legal advisor, Fawziya Abdullal, says the most serious cases involve pregnancies.
"Maybe they have a baby, then [the woman] will become responsible for the child. There are some husbands who deny their marriages so the woman is forced to launch a lawsuit to prove paternity. A DNA test has to be done."
"She has a lot of hassles and difficulties," she says.
"It will also affect her reputation because as a woman in Middle Eastern culture she cannot marry another man."
' Excuses'
It is difficult to get young women who have had bad experiences of urfi marriages to speak about them but one told us her story through a lawyer.
She explained she had never had a boyfriend before she went to university but met a fellow student on campus and fell in love.
He gave her many reasons why they could not formally marry but persuaded her to sign a urfi marriage contract.
They consummated their union at her house when her parents were out at work.
However the woman became nervous after her mother confronted her about blood on her bed sheets.
"Really I was afraid so I called the guy I married and told him he needed to come over and ask for my hand officially," she recalls.
"Straight away he found a lot of excuses why he could not come and we had an argument.
"He broke up with me and tore up our urfi marriage contract."
Eventually the student revealed to her family what had happened and they tried reporting the case to the police.
However as she had consented to sex she had no comeback. She said she felt humiliated.
Politicians and religious officials have recently called for campaigns to warn women of the dangers of urfi marriages.
There have also been suggestions of new laws to make the practice illegal.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/8466188.stm
Published: 2010/01/19 07:56:56 GMT
© BBC MMX
Print Sponsor
Monday, January 4, 2010
A Talking Drug
There is one visible difference between a Yemeni and most men in the world. Seven out of 10 men will have a protruding ball bulging out of their left cheek. It is not a physical abnormality, but a ball of qat, a mildly narcotic leaf that Yemenis have been chewing for centuries.
Taxi drivers will have bags of qat leaves next to their shift sticks. Vendors will have bags of qat next to the cash registers. Bureaucrats will keep qat next to their computers. Armed guards standing at attention outside public offices will break from holding their kalashnikov to pull more leaves out of the bag. By the time the sun comes down at six, the ball of qat will bulge so big that a Yemeni's speech becomes muddled and their smile turns bright green.
Qat is supposed to quicken the mind and liberate the tongue. A stimulant that induces banter and creativity. "It's like a talking drug," says Khaled, my translator. "Some people talk too much when they chew qat, but after a while it makes them sleepy and lazy." The crash after the high.
In Yemen, qat is not a luxury item, but an essential part of everyday life. Some Yemenis will spend a better part of their salary on these leaves and a better part of their day hoping for it to be 4 p.m. -- the time of day when and everybody retreats to attend a qat party.
It's a tradition that every Yemeni, no matter the social status or gender, relish. Women attend their own qat chews called tafritahs. Men attend maquils. Each chew is an opportunity to gossip, discuss politics, or simply catch up with ones neighbors.
Yemeni men chew qat.
Even though I am a woman, I have been invited to attend a maquil at the house of Jaruallah Omar, a prominent member of Yemen's Socialist Party. I arrive at 4 p.m. with Khaled, my translator to find that 50 pairs of sandals are already stacked outside the door.
I enter a smoky rectangular room 15 feet wide and as long as a tennis court to find over 60 men sitting on the floor, each separated by an armrest, compulsively stuffing their cheeks with qat. Each man has a large plastic bag full of qat, a silver spitoon, and a bottle of "Shamlan" brand mineral water at his feet.
They hold stems of qat branches and pluck the leaves fastidiously. The tender leaves from the top are preferred, but some men seem happy enough to put thick wide leaves into their mouths. I am told that tender qat can reach a price of up to $100 dollars a bag. But there are also bags that command the modest price of two bucks.
I am welcomed to this maquil as if I am one of the boys. I am asked to sit to the right of the host, Jaruallah, a charismatic man who is a leading figure in Yemen's Socialist Party. This is a great honor. The more important the person, the closer the get to sit next to the host.
Men gather at a daily "maquil" to chew qat and socialize.
Everybody wants me to try their qat. "Here, take mine, its of the finest quality," says one man with a red kafiyah draped over his head. Another man passes me an entire branch and adds, "You must try this one, it's more powerful."
I do as I'm told. First shake the leaves and massage them with my fingers to take away any pesticides. Then pluck, stacking the tender leaves on my lap and discarding the rest of the branch. Soon I am chewing on half a dozen leaves and pushing the mash with my tongue to the left, where the wad of sour paste is supposed to be lodged for a couple hours. It's not particularly unpleasant, a bit like chewing on blades of grass. But the damn qat activates the salivary glands, and I am soon swallowing thick gobs of green saliva.
While we chew, the conversation -- to my misfortune -- revolves around me. "Where were you born?" I tell them I was born in Colombia. "Why do you look like an American?" "Because my mother is American," I respond. I try to get in a few questions of my own, but the group, which consists of members of the Socialist Party and various professors and journalists, don't want to talk of Yemen. They want to hear about the Marxist guerrillas in my homeland. "What is their political program?" "Do you think they will get to power?" "Are they trying to form another Cuba?" I am amused that they are so interested in the plight of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, but I suppose its not surprising given that before unification, southern Yemen was a Communist state.
As we joke about how both Colombia and Yemen, have much in common -- Arabica coffee beans, coca and qat -- Faris Saddaq, a leading political analyst, rummages through a newspaper. Khaled my translator tells me that it is also a tradition to select a news item to discuss. Khaled explains that this only happens after the qat has had time to take hold, "so that the conversation will be more lively."
The article that has been chosen by Saddaq is one that was originally printed in a Jewish newspaper and has been translated and reprinted in an Arabic daily. The headline of the piece: "Why the Arab World Lags Behind Israel."
Once the piece has been read out loud, people take turns commenting. They discuss why Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, trails behind all their neighbors. One man comments that the problem is corruption. Another man says that Yemen is too insular. Another man spews a long and impassioned speech about the importance of education.
The talk goes on for hours. It happens ever day, day after day, just as it has for centuries. Work comes to a halt as Yemen stops to chew qat. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on these leaves. And half the productive workday is spent idly, stuffing cheeks.
I listen to the endless debate at the maquil, and think that Yemen's underdevelopment has a lot to do with all this qat chewing.
Taxi drivers will have bags of qat leaves next to their shift sticks. Vendors will have bags of qat next to the cash registers. Bureaucrats will keep qat next to their computers. Armed guards standing at attention outside public offices will break from holding their kalashnikov to pull more leaves out of the bag. By the time the sun comes down at six, the ball of qat will bulge so big that a Yemeni's speech becomes muddled and their smile turns bright green.
Qat is supposed to quicken the mind and liberate the tongue. A stimulant that induces banter and creativity. "It's like a talking drug," says Khaled, my translator. "Some people talk too much when they chew qat, but after a while it makes them sleepy and lazy." The crash after the high.
In Yemen, qat is not a luxury item, but an essential part of everyday life. Some Yemenis will spend a better part of their salary on these leaves and a better part of their day hoping for it to be 4 p.m. -- the time of day when and everybody retreats to attend a qat party.
It's a tradition that every Yemeni, no matter the social status or gender, relish. Women attend their own qat chews called tafritahs. Men attend maquils. Each chew is an opportunity to gossip, discuss politics, or simply catch up with ones neighbors.
Yemeni men chew qat.
Even though I am a woman, I have been invited to attend a maquil at the house of Jaruallah Omar, a prominent member of Yemen's Socialist Party. I arrive at 4 p.m. with Khaled, my translator to find that 50 pairs of sandals are already stacked outside the door.
I enter a smoky rectangular room 15 feet wide and as long as a tennis court to find over 60 men sitting on the floor, each separated by an armrest, compulsively stuffing their cheeks with qat. Each man has a large plastic bag full of qat, a silver spitoon, and a bottle of "Shamlan" brand mineral water at his feet.
They hold stems of qat branches and pluck the leaves fastidiously. The tender leaves from the top are preferred, but some men seem happy enough to put thick wide leaves into their mouths. I am told that tender qat can reach a price of up to $100 dollars a bag. But there are also bags that command the modest price of two bucks.
I am welcomed to this maquil as if I am one of the boys. I am asked to sit to the right of the host, Jaruallah, a charismatic man who is a leading figure in Yemen's Socialist Party. This is a great honor. The more important the person, the closer the get to sit next to the host.
Men gather at a daily "maquil" to chew qat and socialize.
Everybody wants me to try their qat. "Here, take mine, its of the finest quality," says one man with a red kafiyah draped over his head. Another man passes me an entire branch and adds, "You must try this one, it's more powerful."
I do as I'm told. First shake the leaves and massage them with my fingers to take away any pesticides. Then pluck, stacking the tender leaves on my lap and discarding the rest of the branch. Soon I am chewing on half a dozen leaves and pushing the mash with my tongue to the left, where the wad of sour paste is supposed to be lodged for a couple hours. It's not particularly unpleasant, a bit like chewing on blades of grass. But the damn qat activates the salivary glands, and I am soon swallowing thick gobs of green saliva.
While we chew, the conversation -- to my misfortune -- revolves around me. "Where were you born?" I tell them I was born in Colombia. "Why do you look like an American?" "Because my mother is American," I respond. I try to get in a few questions of my own, but the group, which consists of members of the Socialist Party and various professors and journalists, don't want to talk of Yemen. They want to hear about the Marxist guerrillas in my homeland. "What is their political program?" "Do you think they will get to power?" "Are they trying to form another Cuba?" I am amused that they are so interested in the plight of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, but I suppose its not surprising given that before unification, southern Yemen was a Communist state.
As we joke about how both Colombia and Yemen, have much in common -- Arabica coffee beans, coca and qat -- Faris Saddaq, a leading political analyst, rummages through a newspaper. Khaled my translator tells me that it is also a tradition to select a news item to discuss. Khaled explains that this only happens after the qat has had time to take hold, "so that the conversation will be more lively."
The article that has been chosen by Saddaq is one that was originally printed in a Jewish newspaper and has been translated and reprinted in an Arabic daily. The headline of the piece: "Why the Arab World Lags Behind Israel."
Once the piece has been read out loud, people take turns commenting. They discuss why Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, trails behind all their neighbors. One man comments that the problem is corruption. Another man says that Yemen is too insular. Another man spews a long and impassioned speech about the importance of education.
The talk goes on for hours. It happens ever day, day after day, just as it has for centuries. Work comes to a halt as Yemen stops to chew qat. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on these leaves. And half the productive workday is spent idly, stuffing cheeks.
I listen to the endless debate at the maquil, and think that Yemen's underdevelopment has a lot to do with all this qat chewing.
Jesus: the Muslim prophet
Jesus: the Muslim prophet
Mehdi Hasan
Published 10 December 2009
Christianity is rooted in the belief that Jesus is the Son of God, so is Islam’s version of Christ a source of tension, or a way of building bridges between the world’s two largest faiths?
Christians, perhaps because they call themselves Christians and believe in Christianity, like to claim ownership of Christ. But the veneration of Jesus by Muslims began during the lifetime of the Prophet of Islam. Perhaps most telling is the story in the classical biographies of Muhammad, who, entering the city of Mecca in triumph in 630AD, proceeded at once to the Kaaba to cleanse the holy shrine of its idols. As he walked around, ordering the destruction of the pictures and statues of the 360 or so pagan deities, he came across a fresco on the wall depicting the Virgin and Child. He is said to have covered it reverently with his cloak and decreed that all other paintings be washed away except that one.
Jesus, or Isa, as he is known in Arabic, is deemed by Islam to be a Muslim prophet rather than the Son of God, or God incarnate. He is referred to by name in as many as 25 different verses of the Quran and six times with the title of "Messiah" (or "Christ", depending on which Quranic translation is being used). He is also referred to as the "Messenger" and the "Prophet" but, perhaps above all else, as the "Word" and the "Spirit" of God. No other prophet in the Quran, not even Muhammad, is given this particular honour. In fact, among the 124,000 prophets said to be recognised by Islam - a figure that includes all of the Jewish prophets of the Old Testament - Jesus is considered second only to Muhammad, and is believed to be the precursor to the Prophet of Islam.
In his fascinating book The Muslim Jesus, the former Cambridge professor of Arabic and Islamic studies Tarif Khalidi brings together, from a vast range of sources, 303 stories, sayings and traditions of Jesus that can be found in Muslim literature, from the earliest centuries of Islamic history. These paint a picture of Christ not dissimilar to the Christ of the Gospels. The Muslim Jesus is the patron saint of asceticism, the lord of nature, a miracle worker, a healer, a moral, spiritual and social role model.
“Jesus used to eat the leaves of the trees," reads one saying, "dress in hairshirts, and sleep wherever night found him. He had no child who might die, no house which might fall into ruin; nor did he save his lunch for his dinner or his dinner for his lunch. He used to say, 'Each day brings with it its own sustenance.'"
According to Islamic theology, Christ did not bring a new revealed law, or reform an earlier law, but introduced a new path or way (tariqah) based on the love of God; it is perhaps for this reason that he has been adopted by the mystics, or Sufis, of Islam. The Sufi philosopher al-Ghazali described Jesus as "the prophet of the soul" and the Sufi master Ibn Arabi called him "the seal of saints". The Jesus of Islamic Sufism, as Khalidi notes, is a figure "not easily distinguished" from the Jesus of the Gospels.
What prompted Khalidi to write such a provocative book? "We need to be reminded of a history that told a very different story: how one religion, Islam, co-opted Jesus into its own spirituality yet still maintained him as an independent hero of the struggle between the spirit and the letter of the law," he told me. "It is in many ways a remarkable story of religious encounter, of one religion fortifying its own piety by adopting and cherishing the master spiritual narrative of another religion."
Islam reveres both Jesus and his mother, Mary (Joseph appears nowhere in the Islamic narrative of Christ's birth). "Unlike the canonical Gospels, the Quran tilts backward to his miraculous birth rather than forward to his Passion," writes Khalidi. "This is why he is often referred to as 'the son of Mary' and why he and his mother frequently appear together." In fact, the Virgin Mary, or Maryam, as she is known in the Quran, is considered by Muslims to hold the most exalted spiritual position among women. She is the only woman mentioned by name in Islam's holy book and a chapter of the Quran is named after her. In one oft-cited tradition, the Prophet Muhammad described her as one of the four perfect women in human history.
But the real significance of Mary is that Islam considers her a virgin and endorses the Christian concept of the Virgin Birth. "She was the chosen woman, chosen to give birth to Jesus, without a husband," says Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, an imam in Leicester and assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). This is the orthodox Islamic position and, paradoxically, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr notes in The Heart of Islam, "respect for such teachings is so strong among Muslims that today, in interreligious dialogues with Christians . . . Muslims are often left defending traditional . . . Christian doctrines such as the miraculous birth of Christ before modernist interpreters would reduce them to metaphors."
With Christianity and Islam so intricately linked, it might make sense for Muslim communities across Europe, harassed, harangued and often under siege, to do more to stress this common religious heritage, and especially the shared love for Jesus and Mary. There is a renowned historical precedent for this from the life of the Prophet. In 616AD, six years in to his mission in Mecca, Muhammad decided to find a safer refuge for those of his followers who had been exposed to the worst persecution from his opponents in the pagan tribes of the Quraysh. He asked the Negus, the Christian king of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia), to take them in. He agreed and more than 80 Muslims left Mecca with their families. The friendly reception that greeted them upon arrival in Abyssinia so alarmed the Quraysh that, worried about the prospects of Muhammad's Muslims winning more allies abroad, they sent two delegates to the court of the Negus to persuade him to extradite them back to Mecca. The Muslim refugees, claimed the Quraysh, were blasphemers and fugitives. The Negus invited Jafar, cousin of Muhammad and leader of the Muslim group, to answer the charges. Jafar explained that Muhammad was a prophet of the same God who had confirmed his revelation to Jesus, and recited aloud the Quranic account of the virginal conception of Christ in the womb of Mary:
And make mention of Mary in the Scripture, when she had withdrawn from her people to a chamber looking East,
And had chosen seclusion from them. Then We sent unto her Our Spirit and it assumed for her the likeness of a perfect man.
She said: Lo! I seek refuge in the Beneficent One from thee, if thou art God-fearing.
He said: I am only a messenger of thy Lord, that I may bestow on thee a faultless son.
She said: How can I have a son when no mortal hath touched me, neither have I been unchaste?
He said: So (it will be). Thy Lord saith: It is easy for Me. And (it will be) that We may make of him a revelation for mankind and a mercy from Us, and it is a thing ordained.
Quran, 19:16-21
Karen Armstrong writes, in her biography of Muhammad, that "when Jafar finished, the beauty of the Quran had done its work. The Negus was weeping so hard that his beard was wet, and the tears poured down the cheeks of his bishops and advisers so copiously that their scrolls were soaked." The Muslims remained in Abyssinia, under the protection of the Negus, and were able to practise their religion freely.
However, for Muslims, the Virgin Birth is not evidence of Jesus's divinity, only of his unique importance as a prophet and a messiah. The Trinity is rejected by Islam, as is Jesus's Crucifixion and Resurrection. The common theological ground seems to narrow at this point - as Jonathan Bartley, co-director of the Christian think tank Ekklesia, argues, the belief in the Resurrection is the "deal-breaker". He adds: "There is a fundamental tension at the heart of interfaith dialogue that neither side wants to face up to, and that is that the orthodox Christian view of Jesus is blasphemous to Muslims and the orthodox Muslim view of Jesus is blasphemous to Christians." He has a point. The Quran singles out Christianity for formulating the concept of the Trinity:
Do not say, "Three" - Cease! That is better for you. God is one God. Glory be to Him, [high exalted is He] above having a son.
Quran 4:171
It castigates Christianity for the widespread practice among its sects of worshipping Jesus and Mary, and casts the criticism in the form of an interrogation of Jesus by God:
And when God will say: "O Jesus, son of Mary, did you say to the people, 'Take me and my mother as gods besides God'?" he will
say, "Glory be to You, it was not for me to say what I had no right [to say]! If I had said it, You would have known it.
Quran 5:116
Jesus, as Khalidi points out, "is a controversial prophet. He is the only prophet in the Quran who is deliberately made to distance himself from the doctrines that his community is said to hold of him." For example, Muslims believe that Jesus was not crucified but was raised bodily to heaven by God.
Yet many Muslim scholars have maintained that the Islamic conception of Jesus - shorn of divinity; outside the Trinity; a prophet - is in line with the beliefs and teachings of some of the earliest Jewish-Christian sects, such as the Ebionites and the Nazarenes, who believed Jesus to be the Messiah, but not divine. Muslims claim the Muslim Jesus is the historical Jesus, stripped of a later, man-made "Christology": "Jesus as he might have been without St Paul or St Augustine or the Council of Nicaea", to quote the Cambridge academic John Casey.
Or, as A N Wilson wrote in the Daily Express a decade ago: "Islam is a moral and intellectual acknowledgement of the lordship of God without the encumbrance of Christian mythological baggage . . . That is why Christianity will decline in the next millennium, and the religious hunger of the human heart will be answered by the Crescent, not the Cross." Despite the major doctrinal differences, there remain areas of significant overlap, such as on the second coming of Christ. Both Muslims and Christians subscribe to the belief that before the world ends Jesus will return to defeat the Antichrist, whom Muslims refer to as Dajjal.
The idea of a Muslim Jesus, in whatever doctrinal form, may help fortify the resolve of those scholars who talk of the need to reformulate the exclusivist concept of a Judaeo-Christian civilisation and refer instead to a "Judaeo-Christian-Muslim civilisation". This might be anathema to evangelical Christians - especially in the US, where populist preachers such as Franklin Graham see Islam as a "very evil and wicked religion" - but, as Khalidi points out, "While the Jewish tradition by and large rejects Jesus, the Islamic tradition, especially Sufi or mystical Islam, constructs a place for him at the very centre of its devotions."
Nonetheless, Jesus remains an esoteric part of Islamic faith and practice. Where, for example, is the Islamic equivalent of Christmas? Why do Muslims celebrate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad but not that of the Prophet Jesus? "We, too, in our own way should celebrate the birth of Jesus . . . [because] he is so special to us," says Mogra. "But I think each religious community has distinct celebrations, so Muslims will celebrate their own and Christians their own."
In recent years, the right-wing press in Britain has railed against alleged attempts by "politically correct" local authorities to downplay or even suppress Christmas. Birmingham's attempt to name its seasonal celebrations "Winterval" and Luton's Harry Potter-themed lights, or "Luminos", are notorious examples. There is often a sense that such decisions are driven by the fear that outward displays of Christian faith might offend British Muslim sensibilities, but, given the importance of Jesus in Islam, such fears seem misplaced. Mogra, who leads the MCB's interfaith relations committee, concurs: "It's a ridiculous suggestion to change the name of Christmas." He adds: "Britain is great when it comes to celebrating diverse religious festivals of our various faith communities. They should remain named as they are, and we should celebrate them all."
Mogra is brave to urge Muslims to engage in an outward and public celebration of Jesus, in particular his birth, in order to match the private reverence that Muslims say they have for him. Is there a danger, however, that Muslim attempts to re-establish the importance of Jesus within Islam and as an integral part of their faith and tradition might be misinterpreted? Might they be misconstrued as part of a campaign by a supposedly resurgent and politicised Islam to try to take "ownership" of Jesus, in a western world in which organised Christianity is in seeming decline? Might it be counterproductive for interfaith relations? Church leaders, thankfully, seem to disagree.
“I have always enjoyed spending time with Muslim friends, with whom we as Christians have so much in common, along with Jewish people, as we all trace our faith back to Abraham," the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, tells me. "When I visit a mosque, having been welcomed in the name of 'Allah and His Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon Him', I respond with greetings 'in the name of Jesus Christ, whom you Muslims revere as a prophet, and whom I know as the Saviour of the World, the Prince of Peace'."
Amid tensions between the Christian west and the Islamic east, a common focus on Jesus - and what Khalidi calls a "salutary" reminder of when Christianity and Islam were more open to each other and willing to rely on each other's witness - could help close the growing divide between the world's two largest faiths. Mogra agrees: "We don't have to fight over Jesus. He is special for Christians and Muslims. He is bigger than life. We can share him."
Reverend David Marshall, one of the Church of England's specialists on Islam, cites the concluding comments from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, at a recent seminar for Christian and Muslim scholars. He said he had been encouraged by "the quality of our disagreement". "Christians and Muslims disagree on many points and will continue to do so - but how we disagree is not predetermined," says Marshall. "Muslims are called by the Quran to 'argue only in the best way with the People of the Book' [Quran 29:46], and Christians are encouraged to give reasons for the hope that is within them, 'with gentleness and reverence' [1 Peter 3:15]. If we can do this, we have no reason to be afraid."
“The Muslim Jesus" by Tarif Khalidi is published by Harvard University Press (£14.95)
Mehdi Hasan is the NS's senior editor (politics)
Follow the New Statesman team on Twitter
Mehdi Hasan
Published 10 December 2009
Christianity is rooted in the belief that Jesus is the Son of God, so is Islam’s version of Christ a source of tension, or a way of building bridges between the world’s two largest faiths?
Christians, perhaps because they call themselves Christians and believe in Christianity, like to claim ownership of Christ. But the veneration of Jesus by Muslims began during the lifetime of the Prophet of Islam. Perhaps most telling is the story in the classical biographies of Muhammad, who, entering the city of Mecca in triumph in 630AD, proceeded at once to the Kaaba to cleanse the holy shrine of its idols. As he walked around, ordering the destruction of the pictures and statues of the 360 or so pagan deities, he came across a fresco on the wall depicting the Virgin and Child. He is said to have covered it reverently with his cloak and decreed that all other paintings be washed away except that one.
Jesus, or Isa, as he is known in Arabic, is deemed by Islam to be a Muslim prophet rather than the Son of God, or God incarnate. He is referred to by name in as many as 25 different verses of the Quran and six times with the title of "Messiah" (or "Christ", depending on which Quranic translation is being used). He is also referred to as the "Messenger" and the "Prophet" but, perhaps above all else, as the "Word" and the "Spirit" of God. No other prophet in the Quran, not even Muhammad, is given this particular honour. In fact, among the 124,000 prophets said to be recognised by Islam - a figure that includes all of the Jewish prophets of the Old Testament - Jesus is considered second only to Muhammad, and is believed to be the precursor to the Prophet of Islam.
In his fascinating book The Muslim Jesus, the former Cambridge professor of Arabic and Islamic studies Tarif Khalidi brings together, from a vast range of sources, 303 stories, sayings and traditions of Jesus that can be found in Muslim literature, from the earliest centuries of Islamic history. These paint a picture of Christ not dissimilar to the Christ of the Gospels. The Muslim Jesus is the patron saint of asceticism, the lord of nature, a miracle worker, a healer, a moral, spiritual and social role model.
“Jesus used to eat the leaves of the trees," reads one saying, "dress in hairshirts, and sleep wherever night found him. He had no child who might die, no house which might fall into ruin; nor did he save his lunch for his dinner or his dinner for his lunch. He used to say, 'Each day brings with it its own sustenance.'"
According to Islamic theology, Christ did not bring a new revealed law, or reform an earlier law, but introduced a new path or way (tariqah) based on the love of God; it is perhaps for this reason that he has been adopted by the mystics, or Sufis, of Islam. The Sufi philosopher al-Ghazali described Jesus as "the prophet of the soul" and the Sufi master Ibn Arabi called him "the seal of saints". The Jesus of Islamic Sufism, as Khalidi notes, is a figure "not easily distinguished" from the Jesus of the Gospels.
What prompted Khalidi to write such a provocative book? "We need to be reminded of a history that told a very different story: how one religion, Islam, co-opted Jesus into its own spirituality yet still maintained him as an independent hero of the struggle between the spirit and the letter of the law," he told me. "It is in many ways a remarkable story of religious encounter, of one religion fortifying its own piety by adopting and cherishing the master spiritual narrative of another religion."
Islam reveres both Jesus and his mother, Mary (Joseph appears nowhere in the Islamic narrative of Christ's birth). "Unlike the canonical Gospels, the Quran tilts backward to his miraculous birth rather than forward to his Passion," writes Khalidi. "This is why he is often referred to as 'the son of Mary' and why he and his mother frequently appear together." In fact, the Virgin Mary, or Maryam, as she is known in the Quran, is considered by Muslims to hold the most exalted spiritual position among women. She is the only woman mentioned by name in Islam's holy book and a chapter of the Quran is named after her. In one oft-cited tradition, the Prophet Muhammad described her as one of the four perfect women in human history.
But the real significance of Mary is that Islam considers her a virgin and endorses the Christian concept of the Virgin Birth. "She was the chosen woman, chosen to give birth to Jesus, without a husband," says Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, an imam in Leicester and assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). This is the orthodox Islamic position and, paradoxically, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr notes in The Heart of Islam, "respect for such teachings is so strong among Muslims that today, in interreligious dialogues with Christians . . . Muslims are often left defending traditional . . . Christian doctrines such as the miraculous birth of Christ before modernist interpreters would reduce them to metaphors."
With Christianity and Islam so intricately linked, it might make sense for Muslim communities across Europe, harassed, harangued and often under siege, to do more to stress this common religious heritage, and especially the shared love for Jesus and Mary. There is a renowned historical precedent for this from the life of the Prophet. In 616AD, six years in to his mission in Mecca, Muhammad decided to find a safer refuge for those of his followers who had been exposed to the worst persecution from his opponents in the pagan tribes of the Quraysh. He asked the Negus, the Christian king of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia), to take them in. He agreed and more than 80 Muslims left Mecca with their families. The friendly reception that greeted them upon arrival in Abyssinia so alarmed the Quraysh that, worried about the prospects of Muhammad's Muslims winning more allies abroad, they sent two delegates to the court of the Negus to persuade him to extradite them back to Mecca. The Muslim refugees, claimed the Quraysh, were blasphemers and fugitives. The Negus invited Jafar, cousin of Muhammad and leader of the Muslim group, to answer the charges. Jafar explained that Muhammad was a prophet of the same God who had confirmed his revelation to Jesus, and recited aloud the Quranic account of the virginal conception of Christ in the womb of Mary:
And make mention of Mary in the Scripture, when she had withdrawn from her people to a chamber looking East,
And had chosen seclusion from them. Then We sent unto her Our Spirit and it assumed for her the likeness of a perfect man.
She said: Lo! I seek refuge in the Beneficent One from thee, if thou art God-fearing.
He said: I am only a messenger of thy Lord, that I may bestow on thee a faultless son.
She said: How can I have a son when no mortal hath touched me, neither have I been unchaste?
He said: So (it will be). Thy Lord saith: It is easy for Me. And (it will be) that We may make of him a revelation for mankind and a mercy from Us, and it is a thing ordained.
Quran, 19:16-21
Karen Armstrong writes, in her biography of Muhammad, that "when Jafar finished, the beauty of the Quran had done its work. The Negus was weeping so hard that his beard was wet, and the tears poured down the cheeks of his bishops and advisers so copiously that their scrolls were soaked." The Muslims remained in Abyssinia, under the protection of the Negus, and were able to practise their religion freely.
However, for Muslims, the Virgin Birth is not evidence of Jesus's divinity, only of his unique importance as a prophet and a messiah. The Trinity is rejected by Islam, as is Jesus's Crucifixion and Resurrection. The common theological ground seems to narrow at this point - as Jonathan Bartley, co-director of the Christian think tank Ekklesia, argues, the belief in the Resurrection is the "deal-breaker". He adds: "There is a fundamental tension at the heart of interfaith dialogue that neither side wants to face up to, and that is that the orthodox Christian view of Jesus is blasphemous to Muslims and the orthodox Muslim view of Jesus is blasphemous to Christians." He has a point. The Quran singles out Christianity for formulating the concept of the Trinity:
Do not say, "Three" - Cease! That is better for you. God is one God. Glory be to Him, [high exalted is He] above having a son.
Quran 4:171
It castigates Christianity for the widespread practice among its sects of worshipping Jesus and Mary, and casts the criticism in the form of an interrogation of Jesus by God:
And when God will say: "O Jesus, son of Mary, did you say to the people, 'Take me and my mother as gods besides God'?" he will
say, "Glory be to You, it was not for me to say what I had no right [to say]! If I had said it, You would have known it.
Quran 5:116
Jesus, as Khalidi points out, "is a controversial prophet. He is the only prophet in the Quran who is deliberately made to distance himself from the doctrines that his community is said to hold of him." For example, Muslims believe that Jesus was not crucified but was raised bodily to heaven by God.
Yet many Muslim scholars have maintained that the Islamic conception of Jesus - shorn of divinity; outside the Trinity; a prophet - is in line with the beliefs and teachings of some of the earliest Jewish-Christian sects, such as the Ebionites and the Nazarenes, who believed Jesus to be the Messiah, but not divine. Muslims claim the Muslim Jesus is the historical Jesus, stripped of a later, man-made "Christology": "Jesus as he might have been without St Paul or St Augustine or the Council of Nicaea", to quote the Cambridge academic John Casey.
Or, as A N Wilson wrote in the Daily Express a decade ago: "Islam is a moral and intellectual acknowledgement of the lordship of God without the encumbrance of Christian mythological baggage . . . That is why Christianity will decline in the next millennium, and the religious hunger of the human heart will be answered by the Crescent, not the Cross." Despite the major doctrinal differences, there remain areas of significant overlap, such as on the second coming of Christ. Both Muslims and Christians subscribe to the belief that before the world ends Jesus will return to defeat the Antichrist, whom Muslims refer to as Dajjal.
The idea of a Muslim Jesus, in whatever doctrinal form, may help fortify the resolve of those scholars who talk of the need to reformulate the exclusivist concept of a Judaeo-Christian civilisation and refer instead to a "Judaeo-Christian-Muslim civilisation". This might be anathema to evangelical Christians - especially in the US, where populist preachers such as Franklin Graham see Islam as a "very evil and wicked religion" - but, as Khalidi points out, "While the Jewish tradition by and large rejects Jesus, the Islamic tradition, especially Sufi or mystical Islam, constructs a place for him at the very centre of its devotions."
Nonetheless, Jesus remains an esoteric part of Islamic faith and practice. Where, for example, is the Islamic equivalent of Christmas? Why do Muslims celebrate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad but not that of the Prophet Jesus? "We, too, in our own way should celebrate the birth of Jesus . . . [because] he is so special to us," says Mogra. "But I think each religious community has distinct celebrations, so Muslims will celebrate their own and Christians their own."
In recent years, the right-wing press in Britain has railed against alleged attempts by "politically correct" local authorities to downplay or even suppress Christmas. Birmingham's attempt to name its seasonal celebrations "Winterval" and Luton's Harry Potter-themed lights, or "Luminos", are notorious examples. There is often a sense that such decisions are driven by the fear that outward displays of Christian faith might offend British Muslim sensibilities, but, given the importance of Jesus in Islam, such fears seem misplaced. Mogra, who leads the MCB's interfaith relations committee, concurs: "It's a ridiculous suggestion to change the name of Christmas." He adds: "Britain is great when it comes to celebrating diverse religious festivals of our various faith communities. They should remain named as they are, and we should celebrate them all."
Mogra is brave to urge Muslims to engage in an outward and public celebration of Jesus, in particular his birth, in order to match the private reverence that Muslims say they have for him. Is there a danger, however, that Muslim attempts to re-establish the importance of Jesus within Islam and as an integral part of their faith and tradition might be misinterpreted? Might they be misconstrued as part of a campaign by a supposedly resurgent and politicised Islam to try to take "ownership" of Jesus, in a western world in which organised Christianity is in seeming decline? Might it be counterproductive for interfaith relations? Church leaders, thankfully, seem to disagree.
“I have always enjoyed spending time with Muslim friends, with whom we as Christians have so much in common, along with Jewish people, as we all trace our faith back to Abraham," the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, tells me. "When I visit a mosque, having been welcomed in the name of 'Allah and His Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon Him', I respond with greetings 'in the name of Jesus Christ, whom you Muslims revere as a prophet, and whom I know as the Saviour of the World, the Prince of Peace'."
Amid tensions between the Christian west and the Islamic east, a common focus on Jesus - and what Khalidi calls a "salutary" reminder of when Christianity and Islam were more open to each other and willing to rely on each other's witness - could help close the growing divide between the world's two largest faiths. Mogra agrees: "We don't have to fight over Jesus. He is special for Christians and Muslims. He is bigger than life. We can share him."
Reverend David Marshall, one of the Church of England's specialists on Islam, cites the concluding comments from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, at a recent seminar for Christian and Muslim scholars. He said he had been encouraged by "the quality of our disagreement". "Christians and Muslims disagree on many points and will continue to do so - but how we disagree is not predetermined," says Marshall. "Muslims are called by the Quran to 'argue only in the best way with the People of the Book' [Quran 29:46], and Christians are encouraged to give reasons for the hope that is within them, 'with gentleness and reverence' [1 Peter 3:15]. If we can do this, we have no reason to be afraid."
“The Muslim Jesus" by Tarif Khalidi is published by Harvard University Press (£14.95)
Mehdi Hasan is the NS's senior editor (politics)
Follow the New Statesman team on Twitter
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