Is Al Qa’ida in pieces?

It continues to mount brutally effective operations around the world, but from Saudi Arabia to the streets of east London, hardline Islamists are turning against Al-Qa’ida in unprecedented numbers. Is the global terror network self-destructing? A special report by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in The Independent:

Within a few minutes of Noman Benotman’s arrival at the Kandahar guest house, Osama bin Laden came to welcome him. The journey from Kabul had been hard - 17 hours in a Toyota pick-up truck, bumping along what passed as the main highway to southern Afghanistan. It was the summer of 2000, and Benotman, then a leader of a group trying to overthrow the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, had been invited by Bin Laden to a conference of jihadists from around the Arab world, the first of its kind since al-Qa’ida had moved to Afghanistan in 1996. Benotman, the scion of an aristocratic family marginalised by Qaddafi, had known Bin Laden from their days fighting the communist Afghan government in the early 1990s, a period when Benotman established himself as a leader of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

The night of Benotman’s arrival, Bin Laden threw a lavish banquet in the main hall of his compound, an unusual extravagance for the frugal al-Qa’ida leader. As Bin Laden circulated, making small talk, large dishes of rice and platters of whole roasted lamb were served to some 200 jihadists, many of whom had come from around the Middle East. “It was one big reunification,” Benotman recalls. “The leaders of most of the jihadist groups in the Arab world were there and almost everybody within al-Qa’ida.”

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For Indian scientists, no conflict with God

A nationwide survey of Indian scientists shows that they are as comfortable with seeking the blessings of the resident God as they are with embracing stem cell research. Seema Singh in Mint:

Science is all about empirical inquiry and objective results, but Indian scientists don’t appear to be divorced from their culture and ethos. The largest ever nationwide survey of Indian scientists shows that they are as comfortable with seeking the blessings of the resident God at Tirumala before a rocket launch as they are with embracing stem cell research.

The study, “Worldviews and Opinions of Scientists in India”, which was released at the United Nations in New York on Thursday, has been conducted by the Institute of the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture (ISSSC) of Trinity College in Connecticut, US, and assisted by the Centre for Inquiry India. It sampled 1,100 participants from 130 universities and research institutes in the country between July 2007 and January 2008.

Among other findings, the study shows that only 8% of Indian scientists express ethical reservations about genetic engineering and stem cell research, and 90% agree with the teaching of traditional Ayurvedic medicine in university courses. A large section, 56%, considers mixed economy as the preferred economic model, whereas 21% favour free market and 9% back socialism. Also, 6% think the village-based system is better while 8% are unsure.

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Towering silence

For millennia Zoroastrians have used vultures to dispose of their dead. What will happen when the birds disappear? Meera Subramanian in Science & Spirit [via 3quarksdaily]:

When Nargis Baria died at the age of eighty-five in Mumbai, India, her only child, a daughter named Dhun, initiated the death rituals of their Zoroastrian faith. Her mother’s body was dressed in white, prayers whispered in her ear, and after three days a summoned dog’s dismissal indicated that the spirit had moved on. It was time for the nassesalars, or pallbearers, to carry the body to the Towers of Silence, circular structures of stone located on fifty-seven, park-like acres in the heart of Mumbai, surrounded by the upscale high rises of Malabar Hill. They removed her clothing and placed her body in the middle of three concentric circles, one each for women, men and children. At the center was a well where the bones, the last of the last remains of a human body, would be swept in a few days time.

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Does going to Mecca make Muslims more moderate?

Ray Fisman in Slate:

Last December, more than 2 million Muslims from around the world converged on Saudi Arabia to participate in the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to the holy site of Mecca. The Hajjis spent a month performing religious rituals, mingling with Muslims from all walks of life, and, in some cases, taking part in communal chants of “Death to America” led by Islamic extremists. This was understandably unnerving to the 10,000 or so Americans who made the pilgrimage, not to mention those who didn’t. Such behavior raised concerns that the Hajj is a breeding ground for anti-Western sentiment-or worse.

Then again, the spirit of friendship and community that typically prevails during the Hajj has also been known to promote tolerance and understanding across peoples. Malcolm X famously softened his views on black-white relations during his pilgrimage to Mecca, where he witnessed a “spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white.”

[Ray Fisman is the Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise and research director of the Social Enterprise Program at the Columbia Business School. His book with Ted Miguel, Economic Gangsters, is forthcoming in October 2008.]

[via 3quarksdaily]
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In entertainment, mythology rules

In India, religious entertainment has evolved into an industry of its own, writes Priyanka P. Narain in Mint

Hanuman returns yet again—this time, in a video game. Meanwhile, Star TV and INX Network are working on the Mahabharat. Next month, actors from six countries will gather in Madhya Pradesh to perform the Ramayan in their own distinctive styles.

Mythology has not only endured, it is being given new life and new forms in India. An entire generation remembers the deserted roads of Sunday mornings in the late 1980s, when the conch blew on Doordarshan, back then the sole, state-run television channel, and the Mahabharat unfolded, suspending normal life.

Today, religious entertainment has evolved into an industry of its own. In the process, traditional stories are being retold from different perspectives, or even being modernized.

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Rushdie: I was deranged when I embraced Islam

From The Sunday Times, UK:

Sir Salman Rushdie has confessed that he pretended to “embrace Islam” in the hope that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him.

The author issued a statement in 1990 in order to defuse the row about his novel The Satanic Verses, which had provoked Muslims across the world. He claimed he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam in his novel and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world.

However, in an interview to be broadcast next month, Rushdie now claims his reversion to the religion of his birth was all a “pretence”.

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The Bookers’ favourite

Salman Rushdie reveals how writing The Enchantress of Florence helped him escape the painful break-up of his marriage to Padma Lakshmi. Andrew Anthony in The Observer, UK:

To be fair to Lakshmi, she seemed more at home at premieres than palaces, but then celebrity is the new royalty. From a distance, or more specifically through the prism of gossip columns, she looked like trouble from the very start, someone who was unlikely ever to provide a happy ending, at least in the conventional narrative sense.

According to Rushdie, the irony is that not only did she not inspire the book, she was very nearly the cause of its demise. ‘To put it bluntly,’ he says, ‘I had to write it in spite of her. Because what happened to me last year when I was writing this book was a colossal calamity.’ By this he means the end of his marriage. In January of 2007, Lakshmi asked for a divorce.

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Temple in UK sues RSPCA over cow

From The Guardian, UK:

Monks from the largest Hindu temple in Europe, angered by the RSPCA’s slaughter of its sacred cow, will serve the charity with legal papers today. Gangotri, a 13-year-old Belgian blue-jersey cross, was put down on welfare grounds on December 13 last year by RSPCA vets.

But campaigners from the Bhaktivedanta Manor Hindu temple in Hertfordshire claim that the “mercy killing” was illegal and took place while monks were at worship. Radha Mohandas, a spokesman for the temple, says the RSPCA entered the temple illegally with a false warrant.

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The new 7 deadly sins

Forget pride, envy, gluttony etc. The Vatican’s Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti spells out the new Bad 7 for modern times. Barney Zwartz digs up the dirt in The Age 

FIRST it was the seven wonders of the world. Now it’s the seven deadly sins’ turn for a fresh look.

Just as the ancient wonders of the world were matched by seven modern wonders, the deadly sins have a 21st-century version.

Polluting, genetic engineering, obscene riches, taking drugs, abortion, pedophilia and causing social injustice join the original seven deadly sins defined by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century: pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath and sloth.

Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti — head of the Apostolic Penitentiary — named the new “mortal”‘ sins in an interview with the Vatican newspaper yesterday.

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Subcontinental drift: Maha Shivratri festivities span countries

As Hindus in India gear up to celebrate Maha Shivratri, which falls on March 6, festivities seem to span countries from Pakistan to Nepal.

In Nepal, over 2,000 sadhus gather at Pashupati in Kathmandu to celebrate one of Hinduism’s biggest festivals, dedicated to Lord Shiva. Xinhua’s Bimal Gautam gets the big picture.

For more pictures, click here.

And in Pak Tea House, a Daily Times report on Maha Shivratri celebrations in Pakistan

Thousands of Hindu pilgrims are expected to attend this event in Katas, located in the Punjab province of Pakistan.

Maha Shivratri falls on the 13th (or 14th) day of the dark half of ‘Phalgun’ (February-March). The event marks the night when lord Shiva performed the Tandav dance (the dance of destruction).”

“Maha Shivratri means the night of Shiva, and ceremonies are pre-arranged chiefly at night time. Maha Shivratri is the night on which lord Shiva and Parvati got married.”

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For more on Maha Shivratri (the night of Shiva), Wikipedia has detail on the legends and rituals associated with this festival.

The life and times of Sister Alphonsa

When Pope Benedict XVI canonises her during holy mass at St Peter’s Basilica on October 12, Sister Alphonsa of Kerala will become India’s first woman saint. The date of her canonisation has been simultaneously announced by the Pope in Rome and Bishop Mar Kallarangattu at the Bharanaganum Church at Pala, Kerala.

It is said that a physically challenged boy was cured after praying at Sister Alphonsa’s tomb. The Vatican has accepted this as a miracle, on the basis of which the Sister will be declared a saint.

The Patron Saints Index has information on Alphonsa of India, also known as Anna Kutty, who died in 1946 and was declared Venerable in 1985 by Pope John Paul II.

For news on her impending sainthood, NDTV has a story here.

On being, and not being, a Buddhist

Dustin Eaton is a PhD student studying South Asian religion at the University of Iowa. Here he blogs in Newsweek/Washington Post’s Faithbook on his evangelical Protestant upbringing and his journey through Muhammad and Moses to a new belief

I am not a Buddhist. I’ve never told anyone that I am a Buddhist and have in fact denied the title on more than one occasion. Even though I have been circling around the stupa for the last ten years, I have never made any formal or official commitment to the Buddha sāsana. I’ve never sown a rakusu or received a “dharma name.” I am, as of this moment, a freelance wanderer through the six realms of samsara.

I was raised in West Michigan to a small family of born-again evangelical protestants. As early as a few weeks after my birth I was sitting on my mom’s lap in one of the world’s first mega-churches. (Although at the time I’m sure it wasn’t as mega as it is now). I loved felt-boards and summer bible camp. I memorized the books of the Old and New Testaments. I attended Awana and filled up my little plastic crown pin with little plastic jewels. This cheap trinket that I wore on a bright red vest represented the authentic crown that I would wear when I finally entered into the presence of God, my dead grandparents and all my recently expired turtles. I anticipated the rapture and feared the Devil. I sang “Jesus loves me this I know” and I did know it. I believed in the literal truth of the Bible before I knew what a metaphor was, and I can remember feeling guilty because I loved my heavenly father more than my earthly one. Over the years I was baptized and rebaptized, committed and recommitted. If there was an alter call, I was answering.

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An Archbishop of Canterbury Tale

Blogger Iowahawk’s witty, if somewhat right-wing, response to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s suggestion that some aspects of shariah law could perhaps be incorporated into the British legal system:

 

1  Whan in Februar, withe hise global warmynge

2  Midst unseasonabyl rain and stormynge

3  Gaia in hyr heat encourages

4  Englande folke to goon pilgrimages.

5  Frome everiches farme and shire

6  Frome London Towne and Lancanshire

7  The pilgryms toward Canterbury wended

8  Wyth fyve weke holiday leave extended

9  In hybryd Prius and Subaru

10  Off the Boughton Bypasse, east on M2.

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Remembering Bapu

On Gandhi’s death anniversary today: Rev Jesse Jackson visits India and there is quite a bit of introspection on the legacy of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and his relevance to the world today.

First, historian and author (India After Gandhi) Ramachandra Guha argues in the Hindustan Times that Gandhi cannot be understood without the context of his faith and religious belief but it was a faith that was of vital assistance in promoting peace and harmony between people who worship different Gods, or no God at all:

Many years ago, I had an argument with the philosopher Ramchandra (Ramu) Gandhi about his grandfather’s faith. I had always admired the Mahatma, but my secular-socialist self sought to rid him of the spiritual baggage which seemed unnecessary to his broader message. Could we not follow Gandhi in his empathy for the poor and his insistence on non-violence while rejecting the religious idiom in which these ideas were cloaked? Ramu Gandhi argued that the attempt to secularise Gandhi was both mistaken and misleading. If you take the Mahatma’s faith out of him, he told me, then Gandhi would not be the Mahatma. His religious beliefs were central to his political and social philosophy - in this respect, the man was the message.

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In the Times of India, political psychologist Ashis Nandy analyses the ‘fear of Gandhi’ and the middle-class antipathy towards him that has only become stronger in the global knowledge industry:

On the 60th year of the murder of Mohandas Gandhi, we must recognise the ambivalence towards him in India’s modernising middle classes. Gandhi was not killed by British imperialism or Muslim fanatics, but by middle-class Hindu nationalists committed to conventional concepts of statecraft, progress and diplomacy. He was not killed by a lunatic, as Nehru alleged, but by one who represented ‘normality’ and ’sanity’.

The middle-class antipathy to Gandhi cuts across ideologies. During one of her earlier tenures, Mayawati precipitated a first-class public controversy by attacking Gandhi. But she was only joining a long line of distinguished critics of Gandhi, stretching from Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the classical liberal turned Muslim nationalist, to Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena. New, aggressive critics of Gandhi are now being thrown up by the knights of globalisation in India.

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And, finally, political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express argues that Gandhi achieved more in death than in his life, which in the 1940s had become marginal to the new forms of Indian politics:

Gandhi’s gloriously original and inventive life continues to be extraordinarily fascinating. But his assassination remains shrouded in embarrassed silence. At the Indira Gandhi memorial, visitors are subjected to the details of her assassination. Gandhi, on the other hand is memorialised, but not primarily through Birla House, a monument that still does not have its rightful place in the historical itineraries of Delhi. There is a simple story we have told about the assassination: Gandhi was killed by a fanatic representing the fringes of society, and that is that. But for a life whose every gesture was overloaded with meaning, the interpretive silence over Gandhi’s assassination itself begs for interpretation. Was it the enormity of that crime that silences us? Or was it its marginality? Were the perpetrators distant from us? Or was there a wider complicity, if not with the assassination itself, with the sentiments that fuelled it? The question, ‘Why was Gandhi killed’, is an easy one to answer only if we deliberately shut ourselves to the complex political realities of the time.

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Gandhi’s grandson stirs a controversy

The grandson of Mahatma Gandhi has resigned as president of the board of a conflict resolution institute after writing an online essay on a Washington Post blog calling Jews and Israel “the biggest players” in a global culture of violence.

In his resignation letter to the board of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, founder Arun Gandhi wrote that his Jan. 7 essay “was couched in language that was hurtful and contrary to the principles of nonviolence. My intention was to generate a healthy discussion on the proliferation of violence. Clearly I did not achieve my goal. Instead, unintentionally, my words have resulted in pain, anger, confusion and embarrassment.”

Gandhi’s piece, titled “Jewish Identity Can’t Depend on Violence”, was part of a discussion about the future of Jewish identity on the religion blog On Faith at washingtonpost.com.

The Washington Post:

Arun Gandhi’s piece:

‘My successor can be a woman’: Dalai Lama

At the ongoing Tibetan festival in Ahmedabad, the Dalai Lama tells Harmony Siganporia of DNA that he is both a feminist and a humanist

The moment he holds your hand, you can’t help but believe that there is goodness in this world; goodness enough to make the staunchest cynics among us re-evaluate their stance. The Dalai Lama is an unassuming, modest man who goes out of his way to put people at ease.

And his laughter is contagious. Even while discoursing on serious topics, his legendary sense of humour is ever apparent, and he deploys it with frequency.

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Shah ast Hussain

In the Hindustan Times, Syed Salman Chisty, a servitor at Ajmer Sharief exlains why the martyrdom of Imam Hussain continues to hold universal appeal 

“Among the Belivers are men who delivered their promise to Allah”

– Ayah 23/Surah Al-Ahzab

ON THE 10th of Muharram, 680 CE, Hazrat Imam Hussain was martyred by the army of Yazid. This tragedy shook the Muslim world and continues to be remembered by those who love the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) and his family. Imam Hussain ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib was the grandson of the Prophet. He learned his knowledge and inherited his virtues and chivalrous character from his father, Hazrat Maula Ali.

Muharram: a martyr’s story retold

Taj Online on Muharram 

Muharram festival commemorates the martyrdom of Hazrat Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him). This festival starts at the 1st day of Muharram and lasts for 10 days until 10th of Muharram. Muharram is the first month of Islamic calendar.

During this month, while on a journey, Hazrat Imam Hussain, his family members and a number of his followers were surrounded by the forces of Yazid, the Muslim ruler of the time. During the siege, they were deprived of food and water and many of them were put to death. The incident happened at a place called Karbala in Iraq in 61st year after Hijra. This dispute was result of a disagreement among Muslims on the question of succession after the demise of Hazrat Ali, the fourth caliph.

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