Random Variable

As Global Voices Online reports:

Japundit links to a news story where visiting Japanese Miss Universe Riyo Mori was given a cold reception by protesters in West Java, Indonesia. The protesters are a part of a hardline Islamic group that opposes the exploitation of beauty.

There’s no mention in the news reports that are linked to as to whether or not the protestors are predominantly male or female (as in, should we understand the protests as a campaign to keep women inside a religious, patriarchal moralism, or should it be seen as a women’s piety movement for women?)
Besides, since when did opposing the exploitation of beauty become a hardline thing? Did I miss a meeting?

This second part of my report on the religion and politics conference is rather late. I was busy.

Specifically, I was busy madly dancing to this:

The first afternoon session was entitled “Europe’s Soul”. For some reason, this was heavily Italy-based with papers on spiritual conceptions of politics in the catholic church and the development of Secularism in the Italian legal system.

Carin Laudrup presented a paper on the battle of EU’s soul, focusing on the impact of religious education. She made a strong case for John M Hull’s three models of RE:

1. Learning religion
2. Learning about religion
3. Learning from religion

Laudrup claimed that RE is responsible for the entrenchment of nations and religions, which reduces the possibility of integration.

The final session was on Islam in the EU.

Benoit Challand did a temporal comparison of the question of Turkey over the last fifty years. What was interesting was that Turkey was seen as a vanguard of Europe in the fight against communism in original discussions over integration into the EU in 1959. Ultimately, they were rejected on the grounds of economics alone. Religious identity simply didn’t come into it. However, modern representations of Turkey in school textbooks looks like this:

Thus, Turkey is being dehumanized in textbook representation.

He claims that the question of religion and Europe is a very recent one.

On a similar theme, Luca Mavelli looked at the very core of European identity - “freedom”, “tolerance” etc… For him, these are very empty signifiers based on a selective memory of Europe’s world role - a memory which isn’t selective for Europe’s colonial victims. He ultimately believes that Europe doesn’t have an identity, and is in the process of forming one.

Katherine Brown looked at the impact of British policy towards mosques on female agency. Ultimately, British security policy is predicated on a orientalist myth of women as subservient wives and mothers, but are responsible for running the family. There is a belief that Muslim women are all Western liberals, if only they could be liberated, and that therefore they are the frontline of counter-terrorism operations. This ignores, for example, female piety movements which are highly orthodox. In addition, British policy around getting women into mosques is practically patriarchal chivalry. The end result is a securitization of mosques based on a lack of knowledge, and a denial of female agency.

Parveen Akhtar presented an ethnography of Unity FM, the successor to Ramadan FM which now has a 5 year license in Birmingham. She looked at non-classical forms of political participation, as expressed in radio discussions and local action. She explained how first generation migrants did not originally get involved due to the myth of return back to the homeland. As they gradually got more settled in Britain, they got involved, but bought over South Asian modes of politics to Britain. So votes for party candidates run along the lines of kinship networks and family patriarchy. Key to her argument was the claim that it is not apathy that reduces ethnic minority participation in British politics, but alienation.

[1] The Contribution of Religious Education to Religious Freedom

Due to an incident involving not being able to find my tickets for the Wireless Festival later today, and planned engineering works on the Underground which I completely forgot about, I arrived an hour late.

As a result, I only caught François Foret’s presentation on legitimation issues for the EU, and Max Fras and David Herbert’s presentation on European Enlargement and Secularizaton in Eastern Europe.

Foret’s take home message is that religious institutions may become banalised to private individual practise or play a larger role in the creation of a European polity. However, he doesn’t believe religion is a particularly special case for the EU, in the fact that the European identity still has yet to be established, and the EU’s current method of building functionalist institutions doesn’t lend itself too well to the creation of legitmacy and identity.

Fras and Herbert presented a few examples of Eastern Europe, namely Poland, Romania and Hungary within the context of secularisation and religion. They believe that what is currently taking place is a deprivitisation of religion in Eastern Europe, after experiencing decades of forced-secularisation by the Soviets, it is natural that religion reemerges. Their talk ties in with Sabah Mahmood’s claims that we need to challenge notions that greater affluence, open markets, education, healthcare etc… neccesarily results in secularisation.

Norman Doe presenting a paper on a possible common law for Europe, came in for a lot of flak, which he treated with very good humour. He’s the kind of person you’d like as a supervisor but you know would make a flippant remark when you need some crucial assistance.

Anyway, next session in ten minutes.

I’ll leave it to you to work out the context with which I repost this editorial put up on Facebook by a friend who travelled to Idaho and partook in the local culture by reading the local newspaper:

Last Sunday, while walking to work, an old friend pulled his mountain bike over and asked, “Have you noticed that the world is going crazy?” I let him know that I have been aware of some changes. So that is when he told me about a Web site that he had been visiting and that I would be greatly edified to check it out.

We’ve known each other for some time and tend to agree on most issues of which we speak, but I don’t know if he saw what I did during my visit to this site.

A couple of weeks back I had the occasion to go into Wal-Mart to make my monthly purchases (Quick note- Sam also made purchases at that Wal-Mart and left her credit card there, which led to a series of events that culminated with my being pulled over for speeding) and when it came time to pay, I pulled out my checkbook and was told that I did not need to write anything on my check because it would be done digitally. WHAT??

Well, it finally happened. The Federal Reserve Bank took the next step in making our society paperless without making a big deal out of the procedure. I guess I’m glad that I haven’t ordered any more checks.

Back to the Web site: Ron Paul was the choice for the next president and it was speaking about the Federal Reserve and how our government had begun the process of creating a new currency in America, which would replace the dollar. LOU DOBBS has been following the secret plans to make Canada, Mexico and the United States one country under one economy and one currency.

What the site presented was interesting, particularly when it spole of the RFID chip that could be used to monitor everything. When implanted in an individual it potentially could be used to keep tabs on anything relevant in our daily lives, where we went, what we purchased, even who we hung out with at the mall.

But the biggest thing was that if it were ever taken away, we would not be able to buy, sell or participate in life as we now enjoy it.

People called the chip Orwellian, big brother is watching.

But what I saw was the writing in the books of Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation and the prophecy of the second coming of Christ in the Holy Bible. The Iraq War is a distraction and we are in a pot of warm water that is about to boil. Can you feel the heat?

Photographer and friend Richard Miller sent this by email:

Been asking people at work about how they feel about Muslim girls not being allowed to wear their veils in school..
can you supply me with your opinions/info on this, as I’m getting mainly “this is our country, abide by our rules” reactions.

Richard’s brother, Jamie (who really ought to get a blog), justifiably quotes UN Human Rights Article 18:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

to which one of Rich’s colleagues replied:

I like what you said, but what about communication?

(he refers to the ‘fact’ that 80% of all communication is non-verbal)

What if a child has aspergers? Non verbal communication isn’t going to work in that case, so the teacher must find alternative approaches. In this case, the veil may be treated as an Special Educational Need.
Its the teachers problem if they can’t communicate, though I would try to find out why she is wearing the veil. I would also teach a unit of work on cultural and religious differences, making clear that the veil is a result of a specific cultural mode of religious expression - hinting that there isn’t a compulsion to wear it in most traditional Islamic or more liberal Islamic cultures.

So I would suggest to not restrict negative freedoms (i.e. Freedom from interference) by forbidding her from wearing it, but would try to improve effective freedom (with all the moral implications that entails).

William Davies seems rather peeved at a Guardian journalist, and is worth a read. I was drawn to the statement at the bottom of the Guardian article which said:

In Britain the controversy has focused on the niqab or face veil. Teaching assistant Aishah Azmi was fired for refusing to remove it in November, while earlier Shabina Begum, 17, lost a legal battle to wear the jilbab, a full-length garment including headscarf, to school. In the Netherlands, full-length burkas are banned in some schools and headscarves can be banned under certain circumstances. In France, “conspicuous” religious symbols are banned in schools. Several German states have banned hijabs among pupils.

They don’t make clear that hijab is not even the face covering, it’s the headscarf in its entirety.

A number of interesting posts this week.

Harry Brighouse reports on a new book discussing Basic Income Grants, a central tenet of Green policy. The book discusses BIGs against Stakeholder Grants, not entirely dissimilar to Labour’s baby bond:

I’ve been familiar with both proposals for a long time, and find both very appealing, I haven’t got a stake in the debate really. But I was surprised how much new and interesting stuff was in the book, so I thoroughly recommend it whether you are a newcomer to the debate or an old hand.

Tyler comments on carbon offsets:

…these carbon offsets shift back the demand curve for dirty power but they also shift out the supply curve for power as a whole. (The persnickety might argue the demand curve doesn’t even shift back, but if you have to buy all those offsets you will think twice about your next plane trip.) Competition from wind power forces down the price of the monopolistic dirty power company (electricity?), which means that other people buy more of it. The quantity of dirty power consumed might well go up rather than down.

Colin Farrelly comments on Dworkin’s recent Oxford lecture, in which he weighs in on the role religion should have in politics, a major gripe of mine with the “secular left”:

Dworkin then noted that the most powerful argument for establishing religion are not paternalistic. Rather it is the claim that the majority are entitled to a particular culture. So the important question is- Who gets to shape the culture with which we live? How do we decide to answer this question?
The 2 models give different answers. The culture could be shaped organically… millions of independent decisions about what to buy, what to make, who to talk to, etc. can shape the culture. Or the culture could be shaped through collective political/coercive decisions. Dworkin argued that it has OK to collectively shape the moral culture, but if we hope to take his second principle seriously- the principle of special responsibility- the culture must be shaped organically. And this then leads him to endorse model (2)- the tolerant secular state.

Larval Subjects discusses pedagogy from a Deleuzian standpoint:

A pedagogy of problems, a new dialectics, thus becomes the site of a politics– A site where false problems would be revealed and carefully criticized, and where the focus would consist in the articulation of genuine problems where new individuations might take place…

John Quiggin reports on the McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan for climate change:

It was a good presentation and Warwick made an effective analogy between the McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan for climate change which uses fixed prices in the short run and fixed quantities in the long run, and the bond market, where central banks set short-term interest rates but allow long-term rates to be set by the market.

One thing I hadn’t realised, though, is that the plan doesn’t allow for international trade in emissions permits, even in the long run. McKibbin sees this as an advantage, since there’s less of a reduction in sovereignty, but I see it as a big problem for two reasons. First, there’s an obvious efficiency loss in not allowing countries with low-cost offsets to trade with high-cost countries. Second, the biggest source of credits so far is China, the country that is going to need the most persuading to join an international agreement (contrary to Warwick, I’m confident the US will ratify Kyoto, perhaps extracting some concessions on timing and targets, as soon as Bush goes out, and that Australia will do so then, if not earlier). The possibility of gaining credits, combined with the threat of border taxes on exports from non-ratifying countries will be needed to overcome the obvious free-rider problems.

On Wednesday, I had the great privilege of getting a few moments of time to speak with the great man himself. I want to leave what we talked about for later though. On Monday, I saw Saba Mahmood give her Milliband lecture on Secularism, Hermeneutics, Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation. Her thesis is that the social sciences in general have avoided treating secularism as an object of study in itself. She asserts that are assumption up to now is that secularisation always follows the pattern experienced in Europe, but that this doesn’t necessarily hold true in all circumstances. In the Q&A that followed, she gave two examples. Egypt – authoritarian, secular, state replacing civil society services that were provided by religious institutions, but yet a deeply religious society. Lebanon – a state system founded upon religion, but one of the most secular cultures in the Middle East. This is exactly the kind of work expected in Beck’s call for methodological cosmopolitanism. However, as a side effect, this opens a critique in Beck’s work itself. Mahmood also claims that attempts by Western institutions to modernise Islam necessarily involves a certain amount of theological and hermeneutic (re)invention. So when Beck asserts the need for negative freedoms that everyone can agree upon (something that is problematic in other ways), does this not imply that Beck’s cosmopolitanism also involves a certain theological project? Read the rest of this entry »