It is said that behind every great man there is a great woman. The Prophet Muhammad was married many times; but for 25 formative years, he remained faithful to one woman, Khadijah. She is widely recognised as the First Muslim and her story may be surprising to many non-Muslims. She was a successful business woman. She was considerably older than Muhammad, and it was she who proposed to him. She must have been a formidable presence. There are many debates about the place of women in the Muslim world; could Khadijah be an appropriate role model for Muslim women today? Joining Ernie Rea to discuss Khadijah, are Fatima Barkatulla an Islamic scholar who has recently written a children's book about Khadijah; Rania Hafaz, Senior Lecturer in Education at Greenwich College and Fellow of the Muslim Institute; Asad Zaman, a Manchester based Imam; and Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Inter Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
18 September 2017
The New York Review of Books: India: Assassinating Dissent
From the moment she died, the press reported her death not as an individual event but as the fourth in a sequence of assassinations; to the names Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, and M.M. Kalburgi, journalists now added Gauri Lankesh. Politically they were all left-leaning, strongly rationalist, hostile to Hindu orthodoxy, and convinced that right-wing majoritarianism was the mortal enemy of republican democracy. They were also public intellectuals who chose to write in their mother tongues: Dabholkar and Pansare wrote in Marathi, Kalburgi and Lankesh in Kannada. They spoke to a vernacular readership beyond the reach of the country’s English media, with its pan-Indian but paper-thin Anglophone audience. Each of them was shot dead by men on motorcycles with homemade pistols who got away. [...]
These incidents are classic examples of violent censorship, of concealment by murder. But the killings of Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi, and Lankesh don’t seem to be instrumental violence designed to silence inconvenient revelations. While it’s reasonable to be concerned about the impact of these killings on free speech and journalism, to see them primarily as an extreme form of censorship is to underestimate the enormity of the crime. Their murders look more like ideological assassinations designed to punish intellectual dissent. [...[
The intimidation or murder of inconvenient journalists is part of a much wider violent tendency. Since Narendra Modi became prime minister, India has seen a spate of targeted assaults on poor Muslims and Dalits, plebeian groups who deal in hides and skins and cattle and meat. Dalits dealing in cow hides have been systematically thrashed by vigilantes, encouraged by the present regime’s commitment to cow protection. Muslims have been dragged from their homes and beaten to death on the suspicion of having eaten beef. Muslims involved in the cattle trade have been bludgeoned to death on public highways as they begged for their lives, or strung up on trees and lynched. [...]
The function of political violence is to let bigotry slip sideways into public conversations. Every lynching, no matter how horrifying, becomes, in time, a matter of debate. Gauri Lankesh’s killing was a case in point. Hours after her death, a television journalist tweeted that she got what was coming to her. A businessman from the prime minister’s home state, Gujarat, achieved viral notoriety by tweeting that a “bitch died a dog’s death and set all the puppies yelping in tune.” This was especially notable because Prime Minister Modi followed him on Twitter. And despite the chorused outrage this tweet provoked, Modi continued to do so. What began as a general condemnation of Lankesh’s murder turned into a whispering campaign about her sympathy for insurgent Maoists, her conviction for defamation, her falling out with her brother, and under this sustained, posthumous inquisition, Gauri Lankesh became fair game: a martyred heroine to some, a treacherous virago to others.
The Atlantic: How Just Six Words Can Spark Conversation About Race in America
“We clearly are not post-racial,” Michele Norris, the celebrated former host of NPR’s All Things Considered, claims in this interview filmed at the 2017 Aspen Ideas Festival. That’s why she created the Race Card Project: to “examine and interrogate America’s racial DNA.” Participants are tasked with condensing their experiences, questions, or observations about race and identity into just six words, which Norris then publishes and archives for posterity. So far, she’s received over 50,000 submissions, including: “Why do I do that when I see a black man?” and “I’m only Asian when it’s convenient.”
The Atlantic: The Muslim Feminist Group Scrambling France’s Left-Right Divide
And while one might have expected a feminist leftist organization like France’s Planned Parenthood to oppose a group that includes members accused of being anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion, it actually issued a statement of support for Lallab. When asked about its rationale, Planned Parenthood’s national coordinator Victoria Noseda stressed that the statement was not an endorsement of Lallab or its members, but rather a show of solidarity for a feminist organization. (Lallab later issued a statement declaring itself pro-choice as an organization, notwithstanding the positions of some of its members on the issue.) [...]
Today, the right has defined itself largely with regard to economic and security issues—like labor reform and strong defense. But it has been torn apart from the inside between those who have argued for a strict interpretation of French secularism and those who approach the debate more flexibly. Its mainstream party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), went through an internal crisis in 2015 and was renamed The Republicans, in what was widely seen as a PR move. It’s no longer clear what the right stands for, and it has suffered as a result: During the legislative elections of 2017, the right-wing coalition got its worst score in the history of the Fifth Republic.
The left is also struggling to define what it stands for. Characterized by radical social-justice activism in the 1960s and 70s, the left—except at the fringes—now loosely stands for the ideals of liberalism, that is, emphasizing individual responsibility over government intervention. (With the important caveat that in Europe, in contrast to the United States, a base level of government intervention that might be considered radical in America—including universal health care and strong labor protections—is taken for granted.) But even this modest program doesn’t enjoy the support of all its members. Republican leftists—those who identify with the rigidly secular history of the Fifth Republic—feel at odds with more “radical” leftists, who adhere to a more American approach toward religion and multiculturalism, with its emphasis on freedom of religion. One part of the French left believes that the state should offer protection from religion, and the other, protection of religion. [...]
In fact, the issue of Islam in France is “breaking” the left, according to Benjamin Haddad, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute. This is not just for ideological reasons, but for practical ones as well, he says: Local elected officials have long leveraged identity politics to win elections, but now the strategy is backfiring. Christophe Barbier, a journalist and author of The Final Days of the Left, put it this way: “If the left continues on this path, it will provoke a major ideological confrontation that will precipitate its defeat, because there will always be more people in this country that will react vindictively and aggressively toward immigrants, and especially Muslims, rather than risking a bet on community-building.”
BBC: The mystery of the lost Roman herb
Indeed, the Romans loved it so much, they referenced their darling herb in poems and songs, and wrote it into great works of literature. For centuries, local kings held a monopoly on the plant, which made the city of Cyrene, at modern Shahhat, Libya, the richest in Africa. Before they gave it away to the Romans, the Greek inhabitants even put it on their money. Julius Caesar went so far as to store a cache (1,500lbs or 680kg) in the official treasury.
But today, silphium has vanished – possibly just from the region, possibly from our planet altogether. Pliny wrote that within his lifetime, only a single stalk was discovered. It was plucked and sent to the emperor Nero as a curiosity sometime around 54-68AD. [...]
The herb stumped even the most enthusiastic plant geek of the day, Theophrastus. Widely known as the father of botany, this Greek author was best friends with another giant – Aristotle, the father of biology – and wrote extensively about the characteristics of plants. Though he didn’t understand why it couldn’t be cultivated either, he observed that they tended to grow best on land which had been dug up the previous year. [...]
Every year, hundreds of thousands of people descend on America’s National Parks, from the Pacific Northwest to the mountains of Montana and Idaho. Instead of hiking gear, they’re armed with baskets, pots and pans, ready to brave grizzly bears and territorial gunfights in pursuit of one of the most coveted fruits on the planet: the huckleberry. The tart red berries are added to jams, sauces, pies, ice creams, snow cones, daiquiris, and even curries – and every year, demand exceeds supply. But there isn’t a single commercial huckleberry farm on the continent. [...]
So could silphium make a comeback? According to Rowan, even if the herb isn’t extinct, it probably wouldn’t be to modern tastes – in the Western world at least. “There’s a whole bunch of seasonings that the Romans used to use, like lovage, that today most people haven’t even heard of,” says Rowan. Back in the day, lovage was a staple of the Roman dinner table. Today it’s virtually impossible to buy, consigned to niche online shops and obscure corners of garden centres.
Geoawesomeness: Top 30 maps and charts that explain the European Union
Tomorrow European Union celebrates the 60th birthday. On March 25, 1957, leaders of six countries – Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands – met in Rome and signed two treaties that established the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community, later transformed into the European Union.
Although Europe is experiencing growing turbulence related to migration crisis, terrorist attacks, and Brexit, among others, the EU project is still the best thing that happened to the continent after The World War II. It allowed keeping peace and wealth for long years and we hope that it will stay that way for the next generations.
These maps and charts try to explain the sense of European Union.
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