The continuing problem of Guantanamo Bay

The US prison facility at Guatanamo Bay continues to be a thorny problem. Almost two thirds of Americans surveyed recently opposed closing the prison there. That's despite allegations of torture, the facility continuing to provide fuel for jihadi nutcases and suicide bombers and Barak Obama's promise to close the facility.

Those being detained at Guantanamo Bay are not going to be charged with any crime. For many, there's no evidence other than hearsay reports. Others have been tortured and their trials would reveal just to what extent. There's also the small problem that some of those detained and subsequently release have gone on to become involved in terrorism.

People detained for five years, tortured, never charged let alone convicted of a crime, held in solitary confinement, subjected to routine humiliation, unable to see their families, etc. may go home, get a job, keep a low profile. Or they may write a book about what they've been through. Or they may find they actually have a reason to be pissed off with the United States military and a government that allowed (or, if you like, encouraged) it all to happen.

Guantanamo will cease to be a problem for the US when it's closed. If they've not got enough evidence to charge the people there, they should let them go. And expect law suits to follow.

We can't let the Taliban have the final say

It is always disturbing to be reminded of the atrocities and brutality of the Taliban (warning: contains images of horrific violence and brutality) in Afghanistan. With the ever-changing allegiances of the different factions and leaders and no discernible difference between the politics and religious views of the Taliban, Northern Alliance and Hamid Karzi's religious extremist bed-fellows, there is no solution to the dismal human rights situation and abject poverty (in material and spirit) in Afghanistan.

Karzi's acquiescence to religious extremism (seen most recently the "Family Code" which disinherits women, legalises spousal rape, child marriage, etc.) shows that groups like RAWA that are fighting for freedom, peace and human rights are firmly shut out of formal politics and still face life-threatening risks.

It is important that the innocent and defenseless victims of the Taliban and other religious fanatics in Afghanistan be remembered. Their stories should be told and kept from being blown away with the dust of history.

Who was this woman murdered by the Taliban on the dirt of a football pitch? How will she be remembered and by whom? What was she like? Was she funny and outgoing or shy? Did she tell jokes? What was her laugh like? What colour were her eyes? What was her favourite flavour of ice-cream? Was she kind to her sisters and brothers? Did she like reading and telling stories? Was she clumsy and apologetic when she knocked over a glass of tea? Did she like cooking or was she lazy but sly and quick to convince her sister that she was a terrible cook who would only ruin an evening meal?

How long did she have to wait, trembling and crying knowing her death was inevitable? Or was she calm and resigned? Did she hope someone would notice? Did she fear that nobody would ever know what happened to her? What "crime" had she committed before having her memories, dreams and fears shot out of the back of her head by a hate-fuelled fanatic? Did she know her killers? Her accuser? Did she have children or elderly parents she had to care for? Who betrayed her and let the Taliban take her? Was she loved? Is she missed?

What was her name?

Maybe her's is a story that can never be told but there must be others and they must be.

Americans and torture

58% of Americans are against torture and we're supposed to take comfort in that. The so-called Greatest Nation on Earth, a beacon of freedom, hope and democracy still has 40% of it's population in favour of torture. There are enough people there that think people don't matter. Their rights don't matter. Even though anyone with a clue says torture has no intelligence value. Too many nights spent watching 24 and not even flinching when someone... you know... has to be tortured to reveal where the ticking bomb is planted. Even Slumdog Millionaire makes light of torture. The main character is abducted by the police, held without charge, electrocuted and then, seemingly none-the-worse, set free to go and win 25 crore rupees.

In countries where torture is commonplace and seen as a valuable tool for breaking opposition movements, political dissidents and "enemies of the people", many people look to the United States as a place where these kinds of things can't happen. A place where a tried and true belief in liberty protects people from the state. Yet stories leek out about policemen beating people, shooting innocent citizens in cold blood and planting weapons, killing people held in cells, abusing their power, etc. These are the kinds of things people like to brush off as "rogue elements" or "cops stepping over the line", but maybe they aren't. And they're shielded from punishment by public complacency.

Maybe they aren't Lethal Weapon-style kill-all-the-bad-guys excesses, rugged individualists against the corrupt system crap, but are indicative of something far more corrosive in American society -- that the state knows what's best and people don't matter.

Let's hope Barack Obama and his new administration take a real stand against torture and send out a clear message -- the USA does not torture, will not torture, nor will freedom-loving Americans stand by and allow others to torture.

Religious lunatics try to keep women down in Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan is still going on, but the real war is a civil war between decent Afghan people and religious lunatics trying to keep women down who will stop at nothing to deny them basic rights such as the right to education. We can only hop that groups like the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan still have the stomach for the struggle they're involved in. I suspect they might still have it.

Saudi women make their mark in business

Despite all the crap women in Saudi Arabia have to put up with, many are making headways into the business world. You don't need to be able to vote or drive when you're making hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Women's emancipation has a long and turbulent history, full of contradictions. Whether it's those fighting for universal suffrage, but forgetting their darker skinned or colonial sisters, or those fighting for the right to get into universities and the workplace, there are always less visible struggles. The struggle against the hijab in Iran, for example, maybe gets headlines whereas the struggle to get into the boardroom doesn't.

BBC documentary series Science and Islam

The BBC in the UK has just shown a 3 part series Science and Islam. Parts of the series are available on YouTube (other blogs have all the links, and they're available on certain peer-to-peer filesharing websites. Here is a taster:

Not only was this a fascinating documentary series, well put together, great locations and a nice antidote to the "What did Islam ever give us?" rhetorical questions. That's all despite lots of shots of presenter Jim al-Khalil standing around holding his little brown notepad, staring at exotic looking piles of dirt.

In his exposition of Shi'ite Islam Muhammad Husayn Tabatabaei explains the Islamic sciences as being:

divided into the two categories of intellectual ('aqli) and transmitted (naqli). The intellectual sciences include such sciences as philosophy and mathematics. The transmitted sciences are those which depend upon transmission from some source, such as the sciences of language, hadith, or history. (Shi'ite Islam, trans. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, p. 104-105)

But al-Khalil never really establishes his scientists as Islamic scientists any more than they were Persian, Syrian, Palestinian or Spanish. Their religious identity, or that part of their identity that could be called Muslim, was never really discussed. The result was something less than an insight into Islamic science than an insightful history into scientific contributions from men who just happened to be Muslims/living within the great Muslim empire and seats of learning. Interestingly, the word 'scientist' is a relatively recent creation, whereas mathematics has a much richer history.

In what seemed like a rushed closing, al-Khalil lays much of the blame for the decline of Islamic science, more so than science in Islamic culture, at the door of those countries (Spain, France, Portugal, Great Britain, etc.) expanding into the New World after the discovery of America. He makes no effort to explain the cultural and religious shifts within Islamic countries themselves and brushes away the changes as a reaction to what was happening in the West.

Iraqi resistance recruits women to their cause... by raping and humiliating them

News that an Iraqi woman named Samira Jassam allegedly recruited 80 women to be suicide bombers as part of the "resistance" in Iraq comes as no surprise. One of her recruitment tactics however, shows how the fratricidal "resistance" is can offer nothing more to the Iraqi people than an example of the very lowest that humanity can sink to.

It's not like Koreans thinking electrics fans will kill them in their sleep or people in Tanzania, Botswana and other countries murdering albinos because they think drinking blood and eating albino body parts will give them magical powers. That is the result of religious mumbo jumbo, superstition and misinformation that is hard to stamp out.

But Samira Jassam's actions are the result of a culture and a movement eating itself and it's own people. What she has done is the cultural equivalent of waterboarding -- setting up a situation in which the body's own, life-saving reflex is used against it. Knowing the immense shame and destruction of a life that would follow she organised for women to be raped and then sent to her. There she would pressure them into becoming suicide bombers to redeem themselves and wash away the stain of their shame.

Shame is a public emotion, turned inwards. Shame is the result of culture, people's actions towards a victim, the turning away of family members. The embarrassment and humiliation of having to look people in the eye. People who know. The strong, powerful feelings of shame and guilt in conservative Iraqi society and other countries in the Middle East lead to such horrific crimes as the systematic rape of women to make them feel the only way they can redeem themselves is through suicide bombing, the murder to Leila Hassan and her daughter Rand for "dishonouring" their family, the victim of a gang rape being sentenced to 200 lashes. This whole notion of crime, justice and right is inverted.

The feelings of self-loathing victims feel and their sense of shame are common worldwide, but most countries don't have the combination of ultra-conservative public morality, fratricidal civil war and desperate old crones ready to exploit them.

There is no compulsion in religion. Except for women.

Being neither a Muslim, nor a scholar of Islam, I wonder how Muslims reconcile what appear to be cultural and social compulsions that receive a religious legitimacy from their faith?

Let there be no compulsion in religion. Truth has been made clear from error. Whoever rejects false worship and believes in Allah has grasped the most trustworthy handhold that never breaks. And Allah hears and knows all things. [Sûrah al-Baqarah: 256]

So what can we say when a father murders his daughter for not wearing a hijab? No tabloid paper is going to pick up this news story and run it under the headline "Muslims condemn sickening brutality in name of Islam", because that's not their line on anything to do with Islam and because there is no outcry.

Turkey and France ban the hijab in universities. German states ban the hijab for teachers. More young Muslim women are adopting the hijab as an expression of defiance and an assertion of Islamic identity. But compulsion, force and violence in the name of Islam, persist in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, etc.

I listened to a girl wearing a hijab working in Primark explaining to her work colleagues (another teenage girl) why she wore the hijab:

It's part of my religion. It's a religious symbol.

But isn't it a cultural symbol from part of the Middle East and now a religious fashion statement? Modesty doesn't mean a rejection of beauty. It is less about appearance and more about humility, the way your carry yourself and the way you treat others. There is no modesty in forcing your opinions or culture onto someone else. That's chauvinism.