Reza Aslan steals my arguments (as Franco Debono would say)
Well, actually, he can’t have done as this was back in September. A reader has just sent me the link (see video below). Since Reza Aslan is a man and a famous writer and academic at an important American university, Maltese readers will not dismiss him out of hand as they do me on these matters.
But while we are on the subject, allow me to express my irritation at the fact that so many Maltese people seem to think – largely because of their general experience in the Maltese press, for which I cannot blame them – that a newspaper commentator is somebody who can string a couple of sentences together in a readable manner and whose opinions are equal to those of people sitting about and gassing in coffee shops. No bank of knowledge about anything is necessary, because all you have to do is what others do in the street: look at something and say ‘In my opinion, that is pink and I don’t like pink because it is sugary.’
The reality is that a good columnist and commentator must have a broad range of knowledge about all kinds of things and be able to draw the various ends together rationally in a variety of debates and discussions without producing something turgid and minority-interest, but rather something that is entertaining, the information slipped in unnoticed like liquidised vegetables in a child’s fun food.
One of the most annoying aspects of debating the subject of terrorism and Islam with my readers and others is that it is immediately obvious how many of them come from a standpoint of ingrained cultural prejudice that has literally blocked their ability to assimilate information about the matter and has rendered them completely unwilling to find out.
I understand this cultural blocking because I grew up in the same society and know exactly how it was created, though my advantage is the ability to stand outside and observe. Yet in late adulthood it is particularly unattractive to say ‘no’ to large chunks of knowledge that make for a civilised and educated person.
It’s not small-island syndrome. The woman interviewer in this CNN video clip illustrates that. She is completely blocked in that typically American way. In the end, even Reza Aslan (who is himself American) tries to stop himself describing her arguments as stupid, and can’t.
I wonder how much of it is stupidity, though. Yes, a lot of it is stupidity – you need a certain level of intelligence to be able to seek out, absorb and process large amounts of complicated information about human society. But lots of intelligent people are doing much the same. So clearly, it is not just that. It’s an inability to understand because the cultural blocking doesn’t allow for it.
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Reza Aslan is one of my favourite authors and social commentators. “No God but God” is a terrific, informative read and I highly recommend it.
This may also be of interest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt1cOnNrY5s
[Daphne – Just uploaded it as a post. Fascinating, thank you.]
Smart man. Sound arguments.
When I saw this video, I was most impressed by the fact that CNN actually employed such rubbish journalists. It’s rare that on such prestigious news channels you see presenters getting so agitated. I had to look twice to see that it wasn’t Fox News.
Aslan’s answers are so perfectly logical. I think a large swathe of Maltese people need to see this over and over, merely to get an idea as to how to form an argument.
[Daphne – Maltese people also need the information. You have to start with that. Even at the top end of the social scale, many Maltese are as spectacularly uneducated as an American redneck. Some conversations are really quite awkward. They involve others having to zip their mouths out of sheer politeness.]
We are lucky that most informed commentary about most current topics happens in English, including new publications.
In the Emirates, Sheik al-Nahayan recognised that this weakness was a strong, consequential and huge danger and decided – with the help of several partners but notably that of a major German publisher, to augment their libraries and book offer in Arabic to include several hundred new translations on an annual basis.
When it comes to translation, there is first a selection process and then a delay to take into consideration.
At a moment in time when millions of views/opinions are circulating at any one moment, the quality and timing of incoming information is going to make a huge difference.
Poor English is a handicap to ease of assimilation of content and concepts.
Translators do not possess the full metacognitive range that the authors do and therefore the quality of translations is rarely as good as/ as pertinent as the original. Only rarely, does a translator produce a better oeuvre than the original.
Sometimes the translators need to fall back to use of terminology that is a near match, but not an exact match. When a concept is kept in the original language, the detraction happens when it is still understood in the environmental context of a language that hasn’t yet identified it. Sometimes translators are the people responsible for creating the terminology, and this “born” with its own conditioned or subjective perspective.
We in Malta need a full focus on the English language that is fast being lost, if we are halfway serious about wanting a population that is able to keep abreast of concepts, especially current and emerging ones, and their wider contexts.
Sorry Daphne. I’m Maltese and I dismiss him out of hand.
Aslan is respected only by the deeply religious.
I have followed this debate very closely since 9/11 and written a dissertation on the subject. I hated the conclusions that I had to draw.
However, these conclusions are unavoidable due to a crucial factor: the evidence.
Steven Weinberg says it best – “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” For the inconvenient evidence, check out the following polls.
http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Muslim_Statistics_-_Shariah
[Daphne – Steven Weinberg is wrong, fundamentally wrong. Good people do bad things out of self-interest and self-preservation. That happens independently of religion. In fact, it happens most times in religion or other dominant ideology because of self-preservation and self-interest. People do bad things in the name of religion or dominant political ideology because they want to conform and save themselves from the wrath of prejudice of their fellows or the ruling elite. When there are no consequences for themselves, they will use their own judgement as to what is good and what is bad, and behave accordingly. Good people do not do bad things purely because of religion. If they do, then the likelihood is that they are not good people at all but fundamentally bad.]
What should we make of the fact that the Maltese iman declares that robbers should be amputated. Is he a good person following his religion (like Abraham willing to kill his son putting God before humanity), or because he one of those who are ‘not good people at all but fundamentally bad’?
He spoke his own personal view, and at no time did he ever suggest that should be brought to Malta.
He followed that interview up with a piece in Times of Malta where he says again that he does not want that here.
Do we need to quote the Bible to show you passages calling for violence and forced marriage? Will that make you happy?
I try to explain to many people over and over again that most African inmigrants who come to Malta are Christian. Because we cannot contain within us the idea that we are against people of our own religion, we build a schema that depicts them differently.
Therefore all immigrants are Muslims to the Maltese, and all Muslims in Malta are illegal immigrants. We are so far from having basic knowledge.
Prosit. Well said.
Brilliant man.
Actually the Fox interview suggested by Feminist is even worse in terms of stupidity.
Give it a look, Ian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt1cOnNrY5s
Excellent arguments.
What most people who try to blame violence and repression on religion forget is that the most repressive country in the world is officially atheist, North Korea.
That interviewer is the perfect example of why a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. She was not making any effort to increase her knowledge even when figures about her premise regarding female genital mutilation and Islam clearly showed that she was wrong.
Having acknowledged that, however, I wonder whether Reza Aslan was saying the truth when he insisted more than once about women’s rights being upheld in Indonesia.
So I checked out Amnesty International’s and Human Rights watch’s site and I think he might be painting a rosier picture than it in fact really is.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/indonesia/report-2013#section-65-6
http://www.hrw.org/asia/indonesia
http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/11/17/indonesia-virginity-tests-female-police
I am not saying that Islam rather than the government is to blame, just that in my view, one cannot say that Indonesia is a place where women’s rights are upheld.
Sorry, I meant to include the Aljazeera link as well.
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/11/indonesia-women-srightsvirginitytestsfemalepoliceofficers.html
Saudi Arabia has beheaded 19 people and we go giving a Saudi prince the Gieh ir-Repubblika. Way to go, Joseph Muscat.
Reza Azlan, like most apologists for religion is a habitual liar (its the only way they can make an partially valid argument) who has turned religious apology into a money spinning machine.
There is a religious debating circuit of which he is a regular. If one requires a complete picture, one should look at how he fares in a debate with someone a little more sophisticated than Bill Maher, such as Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens, may of which are available on youtube.
[Daphne – You know, nighthawk, you are proof positive of the familiar accusation that obsessed atheists and anti-religion fanatics come out of the same mould as religious fanatics and extremists, and that their hostility to belief is in itself a belief and ideological fixation. Some people just need an ideology. It’s either a religious ideology or its flipside, an anti-religious ideology.]
Richard Dawkins is by all measures an obsessed atheist, but he does make some good arguments on the subject of penalties for apostasy in Islam. Christianity is rather benign in comparison.
Interesting how the response to statistics and requests to see the whole picture are classed as obsession and fanaticism. Maybe they are, but they are fuelled by the same spirit as the fight for democracy here and elsewhere.
But bald is not a hair colour, and not collecting stamps is not a hobby.
If redheads had persecuted and executed bald people as well as people with other hair colours for centuries, obstructed social, educational and scientific progress throughout history, and were still doing so now, bald people would be justified in being slightly annoyed. Somehow religion is expected to get a special pass and cannot be criticised. So the moderates are not that much different from the extremists after all.
One could argue that this is religion’s last hurrah by a vocal fringe, but I’m not so sure we should be complacent.
I am not hostile to belief but to belief driving policy, as so should we all be.
Throughout the Islamic world, in the US and now also in the UK and parts of the continent, religious people with funds are attempting to roll back scientific education with great success in the Islamic world, there not having been much to roll back in the first place, substantial progress in the US and some progress also in the UK. Religion has finally come to accept that more education means less religion and rather than look at itself as the problem in the equation it has decided to subvert scientific education instead.
This will have a huge impact on our economies when whole generations are taught to dump the scientific method. That is not a future to look forward to. Already many students in the UK and the USA are taught science subjects and told by their teachers that it is rubbish and that they should only study them in order to pass exams. The target is to drop all material contradicting literal interpretations of sacred texts.
In the US, while liberals occasionally score a victory, conservatives routinely ignore court judgements and limit the teaching of science they disapprove of. It is already bad enough that 60% think evolution is false and Noah’s Ark is a fact of history.
All this is further compounded by attacks on science text books and a recent development is the fact that publishers of science text books in Texas have succumbed to religious pressure in this respect. The sheer size of Texas’ education system means that other states simply adopt Texan text books without a murmur, and there you have it, a generation’s science education ruined.
I suppose the more I go on recounting the facts the more you will claim I am obsessed, always assuming that is a bad thing regardless of where it is directed. (Mintoff? Human rights?)
So I’ll just get back to the original topic. Reza Azlan is a habitual liar and a ‘clean face’ for an ugly subject.
Saying that whole generations will be taught to dump the scientific method is an unjustified extrapolation.
Rolling back scientific education is not sustainable in the long term, and religious leaders know this well.
You may be right about lack of scientific literacy in many schools, but at least at university level this is certainly not the case.
The greatest threats to science and scientific literacy come not from religion but from electing shockingly inept candidates such as Ted Cruz to head scientific committees in congress.
While Ted Cruz will have an effect on government policy (most importantly he is a climate change denier) he is not the cause of the drive to change text books. He is however also driven by religion in part, as are the vast majority of equally stupid and inept Republican and Tea Party legislators. (Oil funding also plays a part, as does coal)
One of his predecessors is arguably worse. Paul Broun, previously on the Science & Technology committee, a medical doctor with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, is on record stating that evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory are lies straight from the pit of hell. He is quite typical.
So I wouldn’t be so sure about US university education and even less going forwards. Beyond a restricted elite of Ivy League colleges there is a morass of community colleges and private (as are nearly all colleges) institutions often funded by or controlled by conservative religious organisations or state/city/county councils.
If a whole generation is taught to ignore scientific fact because it contradicts religious sacred texts then it is a justified extrapolation that they are also abandoning the scientific method. When they leave high school with this mentality it is too late for colleges to fix.
I hope I am wrong. America leads and the rest of the western world follows, for better and for worse.
Ted Cruz and other inept senators affect cutting-edge science directly. This is the same science that trickles down the publishing chain and eventually ends up in textbooks. So perhaps it’s more of an indirect effect.
I don’t know what your involvement in science is, but I suspect you haven’t been to a large European or international scientific conference. Great science is everywhere. Many European research centres and university departments are world-leading in their respective fields.
Finally, if you think that conservative religious nations cannot produce good science then you should Google Saudi Arabia’s university for science and technology (KAUST). It is truly impressive and unlike most European and US universities, extremely well funded.
Amanpour presented a good piece here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0tGbiFbF6w
And many of the comments below that video are just as polarized as we have seen everywhere.