The Atlantic: The Female Quran Experts Fighting Radical Islam in Morocco

Some 1,600 Moroccans are thought to have joined extremist groups, mainly ISIS, since 2012, with some 300 still fighting with ISIS, according to Moroccan Interior Ministry figures. Although these figures are low compared to, say, Tunisia’s—some 7,000 Tunisians joined the group over the same period—the death toll in Europe has brought into focus the need for prevention and Morocco has come to play an outsized role in the debate over how, exactly, young people can be stopped from embracing radical Islam. [...]

One particular initiative comes with a twist: It places a special emphasis on women. Eleven years ago, Rabat saw the opening of an elite new school called L’Institut Mohammed VI Pour La Formation Des Imams, Morchidines, et Morchidates. It turns young women into religious scholars and then sends them out into pockets of the country where radical Islamists are known to recruit disenfranchised youth—to provide spiritual guidance that contradicts the messages they might receive from violent extremists. Making school visits and home visits, each woman—called a morchidat, or spiritual guide—talks to young Muslims and contests interpretations of the Quran that terrorist groups use for recruitment. For women to be employed by the government to do this kind of work within Morocco’s Islamic communities, where spiritual leadership is generally the domain of men, is unusual. Men are also trained at the Rabat school, but it’s the hundreds of female graduates who are having the most impact, according to the program director, Abdeslam El-Azaar. [...]

Many of the young Moroccan men and women who turn to groups like ISIS feel isolated, come from violent homes, or have been involved with petty crime. Radical Islamists offer them community and tell them that a full-throated embrace of their religion—an embrace that includes violence against nonbelievers—is the solution. Morchidats like Hidra suggest the solution is less doctrinaire. They walk young people through Quranic passages that emphasize tolerance, and provide gentler interpretations of passages that could be taken to promote violence. The idea is that young people eventually learn that their faith is not at odds with their families or society more broadly, and that this provides a lasting bulwark against terrorist recruiters. [...]

For the women in the program, however, there’s a side benefit that they find indisputable: It has elevated their status as women in society. Faitha El-Phammouti, 25, is in the class of scholars graduating later this year. She says the whole experience hasn’t just changed the way other people look at her, it has changed the way she sees herself. “I used to think men were superior to women,” she told me. “Now I don’t just think we’re equals, I think women come out ahead. We aren’t forced to work; we have a lot of autonomy and as morchidats we can have a profound impact on society, even more than men can, because we can talk to the young people and explain to them about the true Islam and they are willing to learn from us.”

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Salon: Women in Iran are protesting the veil — and this time is different

In 1848, a distinguished female poet and religious scholar from the city of Qazvin is said to have removed her veil in an assembly of 81 men to call an end to the ruling political and religious structures of her time. Although everyone talked about the incident, very few of her contemporaries admit to seeing her unveiled.

In fact, only one eye-witness has anything much to say about it.  The act of seeing itself implicates men in some complicated ways, it would seem. Some men implied that the poet’s veil may have slipped off. Others just report that one of the men in her presence was so gravely shaken that he cut his throat with his own hands. Covered in blood and shrieking with excitement, he fled the scene. [...]

Men and women fought together in the Iranian Revolution to upend an outdated and oppressive system of government. Just as in other nationalist revolutions, though, women who fought and won alongside their men were later asked to give up their civil liberties to maintain national unity and prevent “unnecessary fractions in the national body.” Ultimately, that national body was to be led by a new patriarchy, whose legal systems would give Shiite men twice the rights that women enjoyed. Women hoped against all odds that various factions would agree on a system of government that, unlike the U.S.-installed former monarchy, would represent the Iranian people. Instead, women were left with a new government that marked its difference to the rest of the world by instituting compulsory veiling for all women, regardless of religion. [...]

Thirty-nine years later, I am once again watching the country of my birth from afar. And what I notice this time, as I look at the images of girls and women of Enghelab Avenue, is the presence of men. In every one of the images of a woman with her veil on a stick men are there, turning, looking, and watching — with a hint of awe in their eyes. Men recording and snapping pictures of women standing on boxes and park benches. Men, online and off, applauding, with great pride, women who willingly defy national laws to demand civil liberties as equals. This is striking, and a radical difference from times past.

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The Local: Is Italy's Five Star Movement still an 'anti-establishment' party?

There are other reasons for voter dissatisfaction with the status quo, from a stagnant economy to mafia infiltration in politics, to a younger generation left disproportionately affected by unemployment and unstable work, after successive governments courted the elderly. The M5S started out with one message to voters: this is not the only option. [...]

Part of the M5S's ideology is that politics should not be a career, so it imposes a two-term limit on its own representatives, after which they are expected to return to work in civil society. While the main parties are often accused of cronyism, the M5S excludes those who already hold public office from their list. [...]

Grillo was fiercely eurosceptic and had long supported a referendum on euro membership, something which rattled markets and Italian business-owners. But in the months leading up to the 2018 election this was downgraded to a "plan B" and Grillo's replacement Di Maio has been more positive about the EU in general, recently saying he "would not contemplate" a referendum on the euro even as a last resort. [...]

For now, it is clinging on to its anti-establishment label through a combination of vagueness around its policies and the fact it has not yet made it into government, but if this changes after March, it would likely lose this label once and for all.

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Wall Street Journal: Basic Income: The Free Money Experiments | Moving Upstream

Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and other tech titans are promoting the idea of universal basic income, as a way to help citizens weather job disruptions caused by emerging technologies. Canada is giving it a try, with a pilot program that gives participants up to $17,000 annually for three years — no strings attached. WSJ’s Jason Bellini checks in on this free money experiment. 

Reuters: Giving up control of Brussels mosque, Saudi Arabia sends a signal

Belgium leased the Grand Mosque to Riyadh in 1969, giving Saudi-backed imams access to a growing Muslim immigrant community in return for cheaper oil for its industry.

But it now wants to cut Riyadh's links with the mosque, near the European Union's headquarters in Brussels, over concerns that what it preaches breeds radicalism. [...]

Riyadh's quick acceptance indicates a new readiness by the kingdom to promote a more moderate form of Islam - one of the more ambitious promises made by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman under plans to transform Saudi Arabia and reduce its reliance on oil. [...]

Before Saudi Arabia took control in the late 1960s, the Grand Mosque was a disused relic of the Great Exhibition of 1880 - an Oriental Pavilion. [...]

Belgium has sent more foreign fighters to Syria per capita than any other European country. Belgian officials now suggest the Muslim Executive of Belgium, a group seen as close to Moroccan officialdom, should run the Grand Mosque.

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Deutsche Welle: Anti-fascist protesters rally against racism in Italy

Thousands of anti-fascist protesters on Saturday took to the streets to rally against racism in the eastern city of Macerata, where an Italian man earlier this month opened fire on African migrants, injuring six people.

Up to 30,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Macerata carrying placards and shouting slogans against rising right-wing extremism. Protesters also gathered in Milan and other cities across Italy. [...]

Italy has witnessed a resurgence of far-right activity, including growing support for the neo-fascist party New Force (Forza Nuova), in tandem with a wave of migrants reaching Italian shores from North Africa over the past four years.

The Northern League party, which forms part of a right-of-center alliance expected to perform well during the elections, has campaigned on an anti-migrant platform. The far-right party's leader Matteo Salvini said he was "ashamed as an Italian" for the anti-fascist march in Macerata.

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The Guardian view on childhood obesity: forget small steps, tackle big food

We are in a global health crisis, and it grows worse by the year. By 2030 almost half the world’s population will be overweight or obese if current trends continue, the World Health Organization has warned. There are already 124 million obese children: a more than tenfold increase in four decades. More than a million of these live in the UK, which has the worst obesity rates in western Europe. Four in five will grow up to be obese adults; and the leader of the UK’s paediatric body warns that this will cost them 10 to 20 years of healthy life.

This is a social problem, both in cause and consequence. The chief executive of NHS England, Simon Stevens, has warned that obesity could bankrupt the health service. Yet the government’s response has been as modest and inadequate as these figures are shocking. Medical experts describe its childhood obesity strategy as weak, embarrassing and even insulting. Though it inherited a tax on sugary drinks – which comes into force this year – from George Osborne, it rowed back from restrictions on price-cutting promotions and junk food marketing or advertising. Instead, the strategy relies heavily on measures such as school activity programmes. [...]

But one factor leaps out: greed. The problem is not gluttony by a generation of Augustus Gloops but the avarice of the Willy Wonkas who press junk food on consumers, then profess surprise at the results. The tactics of big food are, as the global health organisation Vital Strategies points out in its report Fool Me Twice, strikingly similar to those of big tobacco over the years. But big food has the advantage that everyone needs to eat, while no one needs to smoke, and that a biscuit does not damage health as a cigarette does. Thus, these companies tell us that we should not restrict individual freedom; that it is up to people to show self-discipline; and that their products are fine as occasional indulgences. Never mind that they present family-size packs as if they are suitable for individuals (nor that highly processed foods, packed with salt and sugar, tend to be cheaper to produce, store and deliver – as well as being habit-forming).

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The Calvert Journal: Power structure

The juxtapositions you find in Vyborg help you grasp the idea of multiple, simultaneous, politically defined modernities. Soviet modernism in this sense is a part of a larger architectural puzzle. Yet it is especially interesting because ideology, by twisting and fermenting itself within the architecture, has taken on some very curious forms. One of them in Russia is called the spetsobjekt, or “special object” — a factory, research institute, or any utilitarian facility vaguely related to military needs or to some shady branch of law enforcement. This was my main subject in BLOC. A spetsobjekt is a fenced-off compound that may have completely lost its practical or technological relevance, yet nobody is in a hurry to remove the security regime around it. These shells of secrecy with no content inside them are a very prominent feature of the post-Soviet city. [...]

There is a prevailing idea about the sinister and ominous qualities of Soviet architecture and its potential to restrict freedom of thought and movement. While not unfounded, this discourse suggests an interaction between only two actors — the state and the individual. In reality, there were other actors in play, namely the architect and the bureaucratic chain of approval. The initial drafts of Soviet city planners were often brilliant and sophisticated, infused with an optimistic outlook and a positive vision of humanity. There is a qualitative gap between what was planned and the reality of what was accomplished, and I'm curious as to whether the latter came out as it did precisely because it was conceived in an idealistic, purist, ostensibly egalitarian way. Perhaps there is a seed of oppression inherent in idealism itself? [...]

One of the great “successes” of Soviet architecture was bringing geometry to life. The visual vocabulary of the urban environment consisted of basic figures, tiled fragments, angular flows and regular sections. Paradoxically, the more pronounced the structure, the more vulnerable it is to overgrowth. Over time, grids get overlaid by new grids, casual elements proliferate, until it all becomes quite abstract.  

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Politico: Erdoğan hits the bottle

Between Erdoğan’s rise to power in 2003 and January this year, the price of beer has increased by 618 percent, according to data from the Turkish Statistics Institute TUIK.

The price of rakı, an aniseed-flavored spirit popular in Turkey, increased by 725 percent. (To compare, the price of fruit juice rose by 121 percent in the same period.)

Turkey is not a nation of boozers: More than 80 percent of citizens say they do not touch alcohol. But for those who do drink, the frequent tax hikes — the most recent came last month — have turned alcohol into a luxury product. [...]

On top of taxes, the AKP has introduced restrictions on alcohol sales. Since 2013, shops are banned from selling booze after 10 p.m. and no alcohol may be sold within 100 meters of a mosque. [...]

The Turkish government, however, is about to put a stop to this trend. New regulations coming into effect at the end of March stipulate that producers must add denatonium benzoate — the most bitter chemical substance in existance — to ethyl alcohol sold in Turkey.

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