Painful Truths

Burlesque vs charlatanesque: Islamism and the death of fun

The other day my wife and I treated ourselves to an evening of burlesque – a sort of sexy cabaret – at a theatre near us. It was fantastic: the girls were supremely, tastefully erotic and scrumptious. I could have made love to each and every one of them.

However, amid the beautiful breasts and the perfect, bare bottoms, I found my mind wondering and thinking about, believe it or not, Islamists – the Salafis and Wahhabis who nowadays are peeping out of every nook and cranny in the Arab world.

Beauty par excellence: a typical burlesque dance troupe

In case you suspect I’m losing my mind, I do have some mitigation. We – myself included – are all victims of religion – not just Muslims, but also Jews and Christians. Religion screws up our minds and leaves a permanent blot on our psyche. So, I suppose thinking about ugliness amid beauty is a symptom of the damage left on my sub-conscience by the contaminated environment in which I have been brought up.

I have never been religious and I cannot honestly say that I respect religious people. Live and let live is my motto but how can I respect someone who is irrational, an adult who believes in fairies and fairy tales?

That is not to say that I am antagonistic towards believers: they can believe in whatever they like as long as they don't try to impose their views and beliefs on me or anyone else. And vice-versa: while one should feel free to question believers about the "logic" of their beliefs, in the end it's their choice whether or not to be religious.

Although I have been living in the West for many years, my mind and my habitat are in the Arab world. So, it is not particularly surprising that I should be thinking – even for a few fleeting seconds here and there – about the ugliness afflicting my part of the world even while beautiful, exquisite angels are dancing semi-naked before my eyes.

In the interval during the burlesque show I looked around at the packed audience. They were decent people of various ages: young, middle aged and bordering on the old. Some were in burlesque-type attire while others wore formal or casual clothing. Most or all were couples: girlfriend-boyfried or husbands and wives. No hang-ups or complexes. Everyone seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. And after the show I suppose they will do what we did: go home, have a cup of tea and go to bed. The show’s over and tomorrow is another day.

Islamists typically go out of their way to look scruffy and ugly

I then thought about my folk back home. Once upon a time people in Egypt and other parts of the Arab world could enjoy a fun night out, going to an oriental dance, the theatre or the cinema. That is still possible in some Arab countries, but is in no longer seen as normal as it used to. Outlooks are shifting and, to a growing proportion of the population, going out to, say, a belly-dance is viewed less as a normal albeit niche activity, as was the case in the 1950s and 1960s, and more as something not that different to how some families in the UK view men who visit lap-dance clubs.

In other words, Muslims in the Arab world are stigmatizing fun. Fun and innocent entertainment are being confined to the margins of society and the drivers behind this are the Islamists, not just the Salafis, but also those such as the Muslim Brotherhood cult who are increasingly seen in the West as “moderates”. In truth, though, the difference between the two is superficial: both the Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood types are primitive, harking back to what they imagine life was like 1,500 years ago; bigoted; sexist; misogynist; incapable of relating to the opposite sex; and – hypocritically – prone to deviant sexual behaviour.

Instead of innocent, transparent entertainment such as oriental dance shows and music concerts, you will find many young Muslims flocking to mosques where they spend entire evenings listening to tales of the Prophet Muhammad and to preachers and other charlatans screwing up their minds with endless reminders of the billions of activities that would guarantee them a path to hell.

This is sad and, if you love your natural habitat – in my case the Arab world – it is depressing. But it would seem that we must all taste the bitter poison of the Islamist charlatans before we vomit it back in their ugly, bearded faces and see them off once and for all.

The writer Henry Louis Mencken wrote that a Puritan “is someone who is deathly afraid that someone, somewhere, is having fun”.

That is true not just of the dull Christian Puritans to whom he was referring, but also of the twisted, humourless, one-track-minded bigots, charlatans and perverts of the Islamist trend, be they Muslim Brotherhood, Salafis, Wahhabis or whatever other name they go by.

 

Egyptian Islamist advocates female genital mutilation

Female circumcision is part of the prophetic Sunnah, said MP Nasser al-Shaker of the Salafi-led Nour Party, who previously proposed a bill that would allow the practice.

On a morning show on Mehwar satellite TV station, Shaker said notable Egyptian scholars have said the practice is part of the Sunnah.

Imam Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, Abdel Halim Mahmoud, former Islamic Research Academy member Sheikh Attiya Saqr and former Egyptian Mufti Nasr Farid Wasel — all prominent Egyptian religious figures, the first three of whom have died — had all authorized the practice, also known as female genital mutilation, Shaker said.

via www.egyptindependent.com

Repulsive, misogynist creeps they may be, but there's something you've got to admire about Egypt's Islamists.

Without a care in the world, they're behaving as if there's no world out there. As with the Israelis and North Koreans, they're don't give a cahoot about what the world thinks about them (I won't even bother mentioning concepts such as equality and human rights, which are completely alien to them). As far as they're concerned, they're the centre of the world, they have a monopoly over the truth, they're all that matters and that's all that's to it.

So, less than a month after reports emerged that Egyptian Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood MPs proposed to legalise necrophilia and paedophilia – reports which the Salafi al-Nur party and the Muslim Brotherhood have still not denied – a Salafi MP is now proposing to reintroduce female genital mutiliation on the grounds that the Prophet Muhammad thought it was cool.

Why, you may ask, are the Islamists so preoccupied with matters sexual and genital when Egypt is teetering on the brink of collapse politically and economically?

The answer is quite simple and probably unpalatable to the average Western liberal. As I said in a previous blog post,

...as anyone who has met Islamists would know, your typical male Islamist, whether Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi/Wahhabi or Al-Qaeda-type jihadist, is driven largely by sexual frustration and a chronic social ineptitude that makes it difficult for him to form relationships with women (hence the prevalence of homosexual acts among Islamists, e.g. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) and leads to pathological misogyny.

But although your typical male Islamist may have difficulty relating to and sexually performing with women, he is expected to marry at least one wife and thereby meet one of the criteria for "respectability" (it's a bit like members of the British Conservative Party).

This expectation, however, creates its own problems: married but sexually inadequate, your typical Islamist is chronically insecure and haunted by the spectre of his wife (or wives) being unfaithful through dallying with more sexually capable "real men".

Preoccupied with matters sexual, the Islamist therefore sees female genital mutilation as the solution to his pathological insecurity, on the grounds that cutting off the female clitoris will remove her libido and make her less likely to go off with other men.

Is this primitive and disgusting or is this primitive and disgusting?

Egypt's Islamists seek to legalise necrophilia

In this age of 24-hour news, citizen journalism and ubiquitous means of disseminating and accessing news and information, it's hard to avoid matters that are shocking or upsetting.

However, now and again one stumbles upon news that is not just shocking or upsetting, but profoundly sickening – the kind of news that makes one want to vomit.

It comes as no surprise to me that the source of the latest vomit-inducing news is the Islamists – the half-witted, sexually-depraved, mentally-retarded Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis now in control of Egypt's parliament and sweeping across the political arenas of other Arab countries.

Today the website of Al-Arabiya TV channel reported that the Egyptian parliament is currently discussing two laws that would plunge the country to depths hitherto unknown to the human species. One law would permit a husband to have sex with his dead wife within the six hours following her death, and the other would lower the legal age of marriage for girls to 14 years.

According to Egyptian journalist Jabir al-Qarmuti, speaking on Egyptian ON TV on 24 April, the necrophilia draft law, dubbed the Farewell Intercourse Law, "is unbelievable. It is a catastrophe to give the husband such a right. Has the Islamic trend reached that far? ... Are there people thinking in this manner?”

The answer to both questions is yes. There is no limit to the depths to which Islamists will plunge. And yes, as anyone who has met Islamists would know, your typical male Islamist, whether Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi/Wahhabi or Al-Qaeda-type jihadist, is driven largely by sexual frustration and a chronic social ineptitude that makes it difficult for him to form relationships with women (hence the prevalence of homosexual acts among Islamists, e.g. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) and leads to pathological misogyny.

In May 2011 a demented Moroccan cleric, Zamzami Abd-al-Bari, issued a religious ruling – a fatwa – saying that, in his learned view, necrophilia is permissible in Islam because marriage remains valid even after death. To allay suspicions that he might be acting in a sexist manner by conferring privileges on males only, the perverted cleric added that a woman also can engage in sex with her dead husband.

However, while the legal significance of Abd-al-Bari's religious ruling is no greater than his IQ, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and their Salafi co-legislators have taken one giant leap further by seeking to enshrine their depravity in law.

And it doesn't stop there. Instead of devoting their attention to Egypt's considerable problems – over-population, homelessness, grinding poverty, corruption, to mention but a fraction – the sexually-depraved misogynist perverts of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafi al-Nur Party are launching an all-out onslaught on women's rights in Egypt. As Al-Arabiya put it, in addition to lowering to 14 years the legal age at which girls can marry,

They wish to cancel many, if not most, of the laws that promote women’s rights, most notably a law that allows a wife to obtain a divorce without obstructions from her partner. The implementation of the Islamic right to divorce law, also known as the khula, ended years of hardship and legal battles women would have to endure when trying to obtain a divorce.

Egyptian law grants men the right to terminate a marriage, but grants women the opportunity to end an unhappy or abusive marriages without the obstruction of their partner. Prior to the implementation of the khula over a decade ago, it could take 10 to 15 years for a woman to be granted a divorce by the courts.

While I feel sick at the mindless self-indulgence of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis, I am also happy that the Islamists have embarked on a course that will eventually result in their political annihilation. In Egypt as in the rest of the Arab world, those who voted for the Islamists will have to taste their bitter poison before turning against them. In this way, the Islamists will eventually achieve what Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi failed to do with their repressive apparatuses. They will self-destruct.

Postscript

In the interest of fairness, I would highly recommend reading this related article, "Egypt 'necrophilia law'? Hooey, utter hooey", published in the Christian Science Monitor (CSM). 

I agree with CSM about media that publish and regurgitate stories without bothering to check the facts. However, one reason for this - which is also the reason why I published my blog post - is that, despite this story being reported in the Egyptian and international media, neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor the Salafis of al-Nur Party have denied it. They must know the damage it is doing to them, to Egypt and, indeed, to Islam as a whole, yet not a murmour of denial. So, what are we left to conclude other than that it is true?

Egyptian hospital lets woman die because she can't afford admission

A woman died at the entrance of a private hospital in Alexandria after the hospital refused to admit her before paying a huge down payment that she could not afford, despite her poor condition.

Shaaban Morsi Saleh, 53, saw Sabah Mohamed Gad, 42, standing exhausted at the entrance of the Mabaret al-Asafra Hospital in Amreyya district that denied her entry.

via www.egyptindependent.com

Back in January 2008 I blogged about the lamentable absence of compassion in much of the world.

The subject of the blog post was a terminally ill Ghanaian woman deported from the UK but refused hospital treatment in her own country because she could not afford the exorbitant fees.

Commenting on this, I said:

In my own country ... we speak a lot about compassion, often citing the high value placed on it in the Koran. But at least in that spot of the Arab world, compassion is most conspicuous by its absence.

Sadly, nothing has changed. In a country that boasts about being the most pious in the Arab world and that has just voted in by a massive majority a bunch of charlatans from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafi Al-Nour Party, basic human compassion is still a rarity.

Is this what Islam is all about?

Quran burning, bigotry and hypocrisy

Another day and more Muslim protests, deaths and injuries over the burning of copies of the Quran.

According to Reuters news agency and other media, at least four people were killed and 26 wounded during protests in Afghanistan today ("Four killed, many wounded in Afghan Quran protests").  As I write, other reports put the number of dead at seven.

US sources say the Qurans were "inadvertently" put in an incinerator at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan after officials believed Taliban prisoners were using the books to pass messages to each other.

This is not the first time that Muslims have protested, killed and got killed over Quran burning. In April last year seven foreign UN workers were killed during protests that raged across Afghanistan for three days after an American cretin, pastor Terry Jones, burned a Quran in Florida. At the time, I wrote a blog post ("God, Muslims and a moronic pastor from Florida"), in which I said:

Sadly, the anger of Muslims at the prospect of a half-wit burning copies of the Quran is a manifestation of the intellectual depths to which they have sunk, thanks to their primitive educational systems and authoritarian regimes that discourage any form of debate or curiosity beyond that of the most basic type. To many Muslims, Islam now boils down to a set of rituals, which they perform without actually knowing why, and dress restrictions that have no basis in religion. As for fundamentals such as justice, equality and the quest for knowledge, forget it.

Consequently, it is perhaps not all that surprising that my Muslim brothers and sisters are expending so much hot air because a second-class twerp has threatened to burn copies of the Quran. For it seems to me that along with justice, equality and the quest for knowledge, Muslims have also forgotten who exactly they worship: God or paper? If it is God that they worship, then why get so exercised by an ignoramus burning paper on which the Quran happens to be written? After all, don't Muslims also burn – no, blow up – copies of the Quran, destroy God's holy places of worship and kill fellow Muslims when they attack Sunni and Shi'i mosques in Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere? Well, in case some of my readers have been on Mars for the past few years, the answer is yes, in the thousands.

If, on the other hand, my Muslim brothers and sisters have abandoned God and in fact worship the paper on which the Quran is written, then I fully understand their anger. But I won't be joining them.

In fact, I am now very tempted to fetch whatever copies of the Quran I still have and burn them myself, as an expression of disgust at the rank hypocrisy of Muslims all over the world. For in the time that has passed since the moron Jones's stunt, many hundreds of Muslims have been killed, thousands of Qurans burned and dozens of mosques blown to smithereens as Sunnis and Shi'is from Iraq to Pakistan and beyond set about deliberately slaughtering their Muslim brothers and sisters and desecrating Muslim holy places for no reason other than the fact that the victims were from a different branch of Islam.

Amid the blood and the hot air Muslims would do well to pause and think about what they are doing and what they hope to achieve. Those who can read should spend some time looking back over the past decade to see how many Muslims have been slaughtered by other Muslim bigots and hotheads and compare that with the number of Muslims that have been killed by non-Muslims.

Saudi journalist faces death penalty for tweeting about Prophet Muhammad

A Saudi newspaper columnist, Hamza Kashgari, 23, faces the death penalty after being deported from Malaysia to Saudi Arabia. (See "Malaysia deports Saudi journalist accused of insulting prophet".)

His "crime" was to tweet this on the Prophet Muhammad's birthday:

"I have loved things about you and I have hated things about you and there is a lot I don't understand about you. I will not pray for you."

I can't say that I have loved much about the dear old Prophet either but there's certainly a lot that I detest about him, not least his nine wives and the backward ideology he has bequeathed us Arabs.

Don't get me wrong: I equally detest Jesus, Moses, Abraham, Buddha, Confucius, Marx, Lenin and many other idols of old and new, including Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, Vladimir Putin, Dmitriy Medvedev, Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping, Muammar Gaddafi, Hafez and Bashar Assad, Binyamin Netanyahu, Tzipi Livni and Mark Thompson.

But why should anyone be deported or face the death penalty simply for speaking his own mind?

This sad and potentially tragic story serves only to underline the truth in Kashgari's tweet. The Prophet Muhammad's personal flaws aside, he has bequeathed an ideology of intolerance that is inimical to debate and has guaranteed that the critical-thinking faculties of at least a significant minority of Muslims have atrophied, perhaps even physically.

Goodness only knows what evolution will do to the brain of the average Muslim as a consequence of this.

If you believe that Mr Kashgari should be left free to say what he likes as long as he does no harm to others, then please sign this petition and  circulate this blog post far and wide and speak out as loud as possible before it's too late.

Is Islam the solution?

How long will it take until the Islamists that are now reaping the rewards of the Arab uprisings which they initially shunned – the Salafis, the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood – are exposed for what they are: backward, mentally retarded charlatans, hypocrites and misogynists?

Writing in the Arabist blog, (“Egypt’s Islamists and tourism”) the writer and analyst Issandr El Amrani says:

We are now at a point when the comfortable role of opposition no longer holds for Islamists; it's time to be serious about one's positions and their consequences.

A few years ago, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood MPs in [the Egyptian] parliament opposed a law that would tighten the ban on female genital mutilation (a practice that has absolutely no basis in Islam; it's largely a Nile Valley thing) and also opposed a law banning child beatings. If they are just traditionalists, let them say that. But if they want to invoke religion, they better make their case with full theological and scriptural backing.

Unfortunately, female genital mutilations and child beatings are not the Islamists’ only warts.

According to El Amrani, it would seem that the Islamists also believe that it is possible for tourism in Egypt to flourish without alcohol, with segregated beaches and with the manipulation of Pharaonic statues, such as those depicting fertility gods, to conceal nudity.

He quotes a veiled Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Azza al-Jarf, who told a cheering crowd of supporters at a campaign event dubbed "Let's encourage tourism" on 11 December: “Tourists don't need to drink alcohol when they come to Egypt; they have plenty at home… They come to see the ancient civilization, not to drink alcohol." The crowd chanted: "Tourism will be at its best under Freedom and Justice," the Brotherhood's party and the most influential political group to emerge after the fall of Hosni Mubarak.

In addition, prominent Salafi clerics, such as Yasser Bourhami, are advocating restrictions on tourism, the source of livelihood for millions of Egyptians. In an interview with the private Egyptian channel Dream TV, Bourhami described one of his grand ideas for boosting the tourism industry: "A five-star hotel with no alcohol, a beach for women –  sisters –  separated from men in a bay where the two sides can enjoy a holiday for a week without sins."

Another Islamist genius, Tarek Shalaan, who is a prominent member of the Salafi Al-Nur Party, “stumbled through a recent TV interview when asked about his views on the display of nude Pharaonic statues like those depicting fertility gods”, accordng to El Amrani. "The antiquities that we have will be put under a different light to focus on historical events," Shalaan said.

And there’s more.

However, now that they’re “in power”, at least in Tunisia and Egypt, it’s time to question some of the Islamists’ main planks.

One example is the slogan of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, ‑ “Islam is the solution”.  How, exactly will Islam solve Egypt’s economic problems – its grinding poverty and over population? What’s the Muslim Brotherhood’s answer to this, beyond abolishing usury, i.e. introducing “Islamic banking”, which will do absolutely nothing to address the country’s pressing needs?

The answer, alas, is nothing. The Islamists have no economic or foreign or any other policy beyond getting to power and putting women, minorities and others who are not exactly like them in their place. And if you ask yourself how a major party and its variants throughout the Arab world can survive without a policy, the answer is very simple. The answer is common knowledge among Islamists but they are somewhat reluctant to articulate it in public among non-members, for fear of being ridiculed. The Islamists’ answer to all of society’s problems, from unemployment, overpopulation and poor public services to ritual humiliations at the hands of Israel and its ilk, is simply this: if you please God he will solve all your problems. That’s it! You need do nothing further than indulge in activities which, in the Islamists’ eyes, will please God. And he will do the rest. Now you can see why they are shy of articulating this absurd view to the world at large and are comfortable in sharing it only among themselves.

But the big black cloud hovering over all Islamists remains the well-grounded suspicion that they remain anti-democrats and would, when the time is ripe, abolish democracy and institute a theocracy. In my opinion, the suspicion that, in essence, all Islamist parties believe in “One man, one vote, one time” is as true today as it ever was.

According to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Misri Al-Yawm, only a few days ago a member of Al-Nur Party’s Supreme Committee, Shaaban Darwish, told a party rally in Giza that democracy is heresy because it contradicts the principle of allegiance that was used after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, whereby people choose their caliph once and then remain loyal to him.

One must therefore beware of the Islamists’ pro-democracy "propaganda". As Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of Al-Arabiya TV, says ("The Islamists: between propaganda and the truth"):

Since the ouster of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, many people … claim that the image of the Islamists has been distorted by the Arabs and the West to prevent them from political participation. Following the revolutions, the Islamist party leaders rushed to improve their image in the eyes of the West, issuing statements stressing that they would not prohibit bikinis from their countries' beaches, or outlaw alcohol, and that they would accept a woman or Christian as leader.

Of course, these speeches are nothing more than public relations, and something that can only be believed by someone ignorant of the region or the logic of religious parties. If the claim of freedom of religion is true, it expresses the opinion of only a few [religious party] leaders, as the majority of leaders and members of such groups consider "purifying" society to be their first duty, and it would not be long before they turned against those political leaders urging tolerance.

Arab society is going through difficult developments that may lead to more dictatorships under the name of democracy, such as what happened in Iran. Therefore, we cannot settle for reading their intentions and believing their propaganda. If these societies … truly want a democratic approach and want to grant an opportunity for all political forces  ‑ including the Islamist and Arab nationalist forces ‑ to participate, they must build a state that is based on a constitution that protects rights, and an army that understands that its duty is not to rule, but to protect democratic institutions such as the judiciary and the parliament, and prevent the democratic system from being overthrown….

In other words, the solution to our countries’ problems is to build democratic, law-governed states that treat all of their citizens as equals, irrespective of gender, colour, ethnicity, faith or no faith.

The solution is not Islam.

Islam and modernity

The Afghan scholar Nushin Arbabzadah has written an excellent article on the adaptability of Islam to modern times ("Can traditional Islam adapt to the needs of western Muslims?").

In it she relates how the sermon given at her father's funeral in the German city of Hamburg was both incomprehensible and irrelevant.

I waited for the mercy and compassion that Muslims referred to every time they said "bismillah"...

Soon I gave up on listening altogether. The imam might as well have spoken Korean, a language as unfamiliar to me as the Arabic in which the sermon was conducted. I wondered why was I not allowed to hear the words of God in my own language?... For the first time in my life, I really needed religion to give me solace, but here I was, listening to an unfamiliar language where the word "devil" kept popping up, alarming rather than comforting me.

When the language finally switched to Persian, I hoped to get something out of the Hadith [the Prophet Muhammad's sayings]. But to my alarm, even though the Hadith and the imam's interpretation of them were in my language, I failed to understand how they related to the life and death of my father. We were in Hamburg, in the north of Europe, but the imam told a story that took us to the Arab lands of the eighth century, where a group of believers were hiding inside a cave. It was a tale of violence, an attempted mass murder, from which the believers were saved after God miraculously created a spider's net, covering the cave's front and misleading the prospective killers.

Nushin describes only her own, sad experience in Hamburg. But the problem isn't just confined to Muslim clerics failing to make Islam relevant to the needs of the diasporic communities of the West, Arabic speaking or not.

The problem is far wider than that: all the mainstream expressions of Islam, regardless of language, are largely irrelevant to Muslims wherever they are, be it in the Arab world, Asia or the diaspora. I am an Arabic speaker but whenever I hear Muslims – clerics or otherwise – talking about religion I end up feeling exactly the way Nushin felt at her father's funeral. In fact, I begin to wonder whether I am in the seventh or the 21st century.

As individuals, we are free to be as backward or as progressive as we like, provided we do no harm to others. But as societies, we in the Muslim world have a big problem on our hands. In the Arab component of that world, large sections of our societies appear to be gripped by backwardness, yearning not to catch up with the 21st century after years of stagnation under incompetent and corrupt dictatorships but to go back to the seventh century, as is clear from the election results in Tunisia and Egypt, and from the utterances of public figures in Libya.

There is no easy or quick answer to this problem. My feeling is that our societies must first taste the full experience of Islamist backwardness – the "Full Monty" of retards as represented by the Salafis, the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood – before turning against it and having their critical faculties collectively jump-started. Hopefully, people will then begin to look to more modern and forward-looking interpretations of Islam, ones that respect people as human beings and their right to say what they want to say, believe in what they want to believe and wear what they want to wear.

This will take time, perhaps as long as we have endured the dictatorships of Gaddafi, Mubarak and Ben Ali.

 

A seminal moment in British history?

Yesterday, we witnessed what I think is a seminal moment in British history.

Students who were in London to protest against the trebling of university fees by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat (ConDem) coalition attacked the limousine carrying the heir apparent, Charles Windsor, and his wife, Camilla Shand, as it was en route to a musical show. Nothing very serious happened: the students, chanting "Off with their heads", threw white paint on the black limousine and broke one of its windows. Nonetheless, Mr Windsor and Ms Shand were clearly shaken, as you can see from the photograph below.

I do not normally approve of violent protest, except in the most extreme of circumstances where repressive governments have left their subjects no choice but to resort to violence. In these instances, violence can be a catalyst for positive change. But in countries where other avenues for change exist, albeit ineffective ones such as in the UK, violent protest can be a slippery slope that incrementally corrupts the political culture and eventually supplant civil society institutions and actions.

Be that as it may, I think the attack on the Charles-Camilla limousine might be an indicator of a subtle, positive change that is unfolding in British society, almost imperceptibly.

Those of us foreigners who have lived in the UK for many years will know that one of the most debilitating, crippling blights in Britain is deference. It has its origins in socio-economic class divisions but in modern Britain it has a numbing, paralyzing effect on people, making them docile, inert and servile in the face of adversity and injustice. The native Britons are, by and large, deferential towards the rich, the powerful, the police and, above all, the royal family. They love the royal family in times of plenty and hardship, even though that family, which is filthy rich, is a virulent parasite on the public purse, even in these times of austerity, annually sucking up millions of pounds of taxpayers' money.

But it would seem that all this might be about to change, for how else are we to interpret the sight of white, middle class, educated native Britons attacking the limousine of one of society's demigods, Charles Windsor, the so-called "crown prince", and his second wife, Camilla Shand?

To paraphrase and slighty misquote that archytpical Briton, Winston Churchill, this may not be the beginning of the end of the British disease of deference but it is, perhaps, the beginning of the beginning of the end.

If that is so, then the native Britons should celebrate rather than reflect on, and apportion blame for, that white-paint-and-broken-glass moment.

Doomed to backwardness?

"Non-Muslim minorities and non-practising Muslims need to accept the fact that Islamic law is too rich and too important to be discarded." (Mohamed El-Moctar El-Shinqiti, writing in Al-Jazeera English website)

via english.aljazeera.net

Why? Why must we Arabs be doomed to live by the laws of 1,500 years ago?

The author talks about two types of secularism: (1) the "Anglo-Saxon 'soft' secularism which basically means positive neutrality of the state towards religion", and (2) "the French 'hard' laïcité that goes beyond neutrality to negative intervention against religion".

I would say that, given the central role of Islam in our most intractable social and political problems, from gender inequality to fatalism ("accept what God has predetermined for you and, if you're really hard done by, never mind, it'll be alright in the afterlife"), we Arabs must not only adopt the French model, but go beyond it.

In other words, you want to practise your faith (whatever your faith is)? Go and do it in your own house and don't even dream of imposing your will or way of life on me! You really believe everything is "written"? Fine by me, go and rot of poverty or disease on your own (or enjoy your fortunes), but don't come to society, i.e. the state, for help. You want to learn about religion in school? By all means, but not until you're 21. You want to spend lots of your time in a mosque, church or synagogue? No problem, provided you're an adult, i.e. over 21.

And one last thing. The author is keen on referring to the "Islamic world". What "Islamic world"? It doesn't exist any more than a "Christian world" exists. What do I, an Egyptian, have in common with a Pakistani, an Indonesian or a northern Nigerian, for example? Arab world, yes, at least we speak the same language, have similar temperaments and some common cultural traits. Islamic world? Only in your imagination.