Ibn Battuta was a Muslim Moroccan explorer, known for his extensive travels, accounts of which were published in the Rihla [lit. "Journey"]. Over a period of thirty years, he visited most of the known Islamic world as well as many non-Muslim lands; his journeys included trips to North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Africa, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe in the West, and to the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China in the East, a distance surpassing threefold his near-contemporary Marco Polo. Ibn Battuta is considered the greatest traveller of all time.
Tim Mackintosh Smith follows in the footsteps of 14th Century Moroccan scholar Ibn Battutah, who covered 75,000 miles, 40 countries and three continents in a 30-year odyssey. Beginning in north Africa, Tim visits Battutah's birthplace of Tangier in Morocco, and stumbles on a performance of medieval trance music. In Egypt, he goes to a remote village where Battutah had an astonishing prophetic dream and visits the world's oldest university in Cairo, then on to India and eventually to China [by way of Dubai and a visit to the 'Ibn Battuta Shopping Mall'].
"As the motorcade crept up Broadway, the shower of tickertape and confetti was so thick that one might have failed to notice Emperor Haile Selassie I, serene as a saint, buried in the pomp and protocol of his own welcoming. In 1954, the small yet dignified despot arrived in New York to partake in a liturgy of champagne toasts. Accompanied by the exotic Princess Semble and the thunder of a twenty-one-gun salute, the Ethiopian monarch impressed himself upon the Eisenhower White House, the deans of Harvard, the Boy Scouts of America, and the Redwoods of California. On this, his first state visit to America, Haile Selassie swapped Coptic crosses for autographed baseball bats, elephant tusks for honorary degrees, and confessed a taste for milkshakes. Wearing his field marshal uniform, as always, crested with ten rows of medallions, the Emperor flew to Hollywood, where he met Marlon Brando on set as Napoleon. Somewhat perplexingly, Brando exclaimed, “You’ve won more battles than I have.” (By most lights, Selassie’s signal military distinction was surrendering his country to Mussolini in 1936.)"
Thus begins a literary romp of a select few of the accidental gods and divinities of human history. Interesting reading, and almost too bizarre for comprehension. As humans we seem to want to believe in just about anyone [or anything].
But of course those mentioned are no more strange than the belief in the 'real divinities'.
"Three men have been jailed after becoming the first to be convicted of stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation for handing out a leaflet calling for gay people to be executed.
Ihjaz Ali, Kabir Ahmed and Razwan Javed gave out the pamphlet, entitled The Death Penalty?, that showed an image of a mannequin hanging from a noose and quoted Islamic texts that said capital punishment was the only way to rid society of homosexuality. Ali was jailed for two years and Ahmed and Javed for 15 months each.
Following a trial at Derby Crown Court last month, they were convicted by a jury of distributing threatening written material intending to stir up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation - the first prosecution of its kind since legislation came into force in March 2010.
The Death Penalty? leaflet stated that the Islamic verdict on anyone caught committing homosexuality is to apply capital punishment to both parties involved.
Sentencing the men, Judge John Burgess, Recorder of Derby, told them: "You have been convicted of intending to stir up hatred. It follows that your intention was to do great harm in a peaceful community."
He went on: "Much has been said during the course of this trial about freedom of expression, and the freedom to preach strongly held beliefs; beliefs, which may have some foundation in scripture. Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of democracy and a basic ingredient of any free society. . . . . "
"Gay people still live in fear in many countries around the world – prejudice, torture and execution are common. Can two new legal and diplomatic campaigns change attitudes?
Last Thursday, three men were hanged in Iran for the crime of lavat, sexual intercourse between two men. The case is considered extreme even by Iranian standards, because while the death penalty is in place for homosexuality, it is usually enforced only when there is a charge of assault or rape alongside it; the accusations in these three cases were of consensual sex.
For lesbian and gay people who live in one of the 82 countries where homosexuality is criminalised, the world is not getting better: it is getting significantly, demonstrably worse. The irony – it's actually not an irony, it's a source of great shame, but it is also an unhappy coincidence – is that 40 of these countries are members of the Commonwealth, and this is a British export. Homosexuality was criminalised here in the 1880s, and was therefore part of our legislative package in the age of empire. By the time it was decriminalised in England and Wales in the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 (Scotland followed in 1980 and Northern Ireland in 1982), we no longer had any control over Commonwealth jurisdictions. The repeal came after a report by Lord Wolfenden in 1957; if its findings had only been enacted more swiftly, today unnumbered people across the Commonwealth – at an estimate, more than a million – would be living entirely different lives. Jonathan Cooper, CEO of the Human Dignity Trust, says: "The human misery that criminalisation causes can never be overestimated. The impact on lesbian and gay people growing up, you cannot overestimate what it does to people living under those laws, even if they're not being prosecuted. Just the fact that the rest of society is denied to them, they have no access to it."
...the Human Dignity Trust, is not a campaigning organisation either. It is not there to raise awareness and is not even there to put pressure on governments. It is setting out to change the law, in the Commonwealth and beyond, on the basis that it is a breach of international human rights to criminalise someone's sexual identity.
With a few exceptions – Saudi Arabia being one – all the countries that criminalise homosexuality are signed up to either the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or they are bound by test case rulings in their respective courts. "This is a matter of law," Cooper says. "Once you're not following the law, you're undermining the rule of law." This is reflected in the list of the trust's patrons – the former attorney general of India; the former secretary general of the Commonwealth; Lord Woolf, former lord chief justice of England and Wales; and a former judge at the Intra-American court of human rights. "They are not pursuing this as part of a lesbian and gay agenda. It's an international rights law agenda," says Cooper..
,,,former attorney general of Belize, GodfreyPrice is quite cautious about the work he's taken on: he thinks the process will be slow, and its impact subtle. "If we can just begin to level the playing field a bit so that the other side is put, that will be progress. Because, at the moment, those who want to preach hate have pretty well got a free run.". . . "
"9-11: Was There an Alternative?" , published in November 2001 and arguably the single most influential post 9-11 book, internationally renowned thinker Noam Chomsky bridged the information gap around the World Trade Center attacks, cutting through the tangle of political opportunism, expedient patriotism, and general conformity that choked off American discourse in the months immediately following. Chomsky placed the attacks in context, marshaling his deep and nuanced knowledge of American foreign policy to trace the history of American political aggression--in the Middle East and throughout Latin America as well as in Indonesia, in Afghanistan, in India and Pakistan--at the same time warning against America’s increasing reliance on military rhetoric and violence in its response to the attacks, and making the critical point that the mainstream media and public intellectuals were failing to make: any escalation of violence as a response to violence will inevitably lead to further, and bloodier, attacks on innocents in America and around the world.
This new edition of 9-11, published on the tenth anniversary of the attacks and featuring a new preface by Chomsky, reminds us that today, just as much as ten years ago, information and clarity remain our most valuable tools in the struggle to prevent future violence against the innocent, both at home and abroad."
"Citizens are reeling after a blast ripped through Oslo's government headquarters and a gunman opened fire on a nearby youth camp, killing at least 91. Police in Norway have charged 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik, who they say is a Christian fundamentalist with right-wing affiliations. "Norway lost its innocence today," a grim-faced Ola Borten Moe, the minister of oil and energy, told The Daily Beast. "This will change Norway forever. This is something we have read about from other countries." Åsne Seierstad reports on the terror attack.
As rain poured down from a gray sky Friday afternoon, the heart of Oslo was struck by a powerful explosion outside the prime minister’s office, and on an island outside the city, a man dressed as a police officer began shooting at teenagers. The twin attacks left a total of 87 dead."
Politically conservative religious fundamentalists are bad news the world over, be they Christian, Moslem, Hindu, or any other group that espouses religious/political concepts as 'truth'. Many, if not most, are mentally unbalanced.
"This is a column condemning cowardice – including my own. It begins with the story of a novel you cannot read. The Jewel of Medina was written by a journalist called Sherry Jones. It recounts the life of Aisha, a girl who was married off at the age of six to a 50-year-old man called Mohamed ibn Abdallah. On her wedding day, Aisha was playing on a see-saw outside her home. Inside, she was being betrothed. The first she knew of it was when she was banned from playing out in the street with the other children. When she was nine, she was taken to live with her husband, now 53. He had sex with her. When she was 14, she was accused of adultery with a man closer to her own age. Not long after, Mohamed decreed that his wives must cover their faces and bodies, even though no other women in Arabia did.
You cannot read this story today – except in the Koran and the Hadith. The man Mohamed ibn Abdallah became known to Muslims as "the Prophet Mohamed", so our ability to explore this story is stunted. The Jewel of Medina was bought by Random House and primed to be a best-seller – before a University of Texas teacher saw proofs and declared it "a national security issue". Random House had visions of a re-run of the Rushdie or the Danish cartoons affairs. Sherry Jones's publisher has pulped the book. It's gone. .
In Europe, we are finally abolishing the lingering blasphemy laws that hinder criticism of Christianity. But they are being succeeded by a new blasphemy law preventing criticism of Islam – enforced not by the state, but by jihadis. I seriously considered not writing this column, but the right to criticise religion is as precious – and hard-won – as the right to criticise government. We have to use it or lose it.
Some people will instantly ask: why bother criticising religion if it causes so much hassle? The answer is: look back at our history. How did Christianity lose its ability to terrorise people with phantasms of sin and Hell? How did it stop spreading shame about natural urges – pre-marital sex, masturbation or homosexuality? Because critics pored over the religion's stories and found gaping holes of logic or morality in them. They asked questions. How could an angel inseminate a virgin? Why does the Old Testament God command his followers to commit genocide? How can a man survive inside a whale?
Reinterpretation and ridicule crow-barred Christianity open. Ask enough tough questions and faith is inevitably pushed farther and farther back into the misty realm of metaphor – where it is less likely to inspire people to kill and die for it. But doubtful Muslims, and the atheists who support them, are being prevented from following this path. They cannot ask: what does it reveal about Mohamed that he married a young girl, or that he massacred a village of Jews who refused to follow him? You don't have to murder many Theo Van Goghs or pulp many Sherry Joneses to intimidate the rest. The greatest censorship is internal: it is in all the books that will never be written and all the films that will never be shot, because we are afraid.
We need to acknowledge the double-standard – and that it will cost Muslims in the end. Insulating a religion from criticism – surrounding it with an electric fence called "respect" – keeps it stunted at its most infantile and fundamentalist stage. The smart, questioning and instinctively moral Muslims – the majority – learn to be silent, or are shunned (at best). What would Christianity be like today if George Eliot, Mark Twain and Bertrand Russell had all been pulped? Take the most revolting rural Alabama church, and metastasise it. . . . . . "
In the following video Mr. Hari speaks not only about Islam, but this intelligent and impassioned plea is extended to include and challage ALL of the world's religious fundamentalists. [Thanks to Unreasonable Faith for the heads up on this video.]
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit attrocities" - Voltaire
"Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb general held responsible for the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, was arrested on Thursday, signaling Serbia’s intention of finally escaping the isolation it brought on itself during the Balkan wars, the bloodiest in Europe since World War II.
.....Mr. Mladic had been at large for 15 years, and many European diplomats argued that Serbian officials could have arrested him long ago if they felt that the benefits of opening the door wider to the West outweighed appeals to virulent nationalism among some Serbs, who still regard Mr. Mladic as a hero.
Mr. Mladic was captured in the farming town of Lazarevo north of Belgrade after the authorities received a tip that a man resembling him was residing there. Serbia’s interior minister, Ivica Dacic, said that Mr. Mladic had been found with his own expired identification card and an old military book. Some Serbian news reports said he had been living under the name of Milorad Komadic and had labored as a construction worker. But the Interior Ministry said Thursday that it did not have evidence suggesting he had taken on a false identity.
The massacre at Srebrenica was the worst ethnically motivated mass murder on the European continent since World War II. Mr. Mladic was also accused of war crimes for the three-and-a-half-year siege of Sarajevo, in which 10,000 people died, including 3,500 children .....".
Yesterday, when Pres. Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had finally been eliminated, it was the 8th anniversary of George Bush's "Mission Accomplished" fiasco [and photo op].
Bad news for the Teabaggers who have, no doubt, already gone into shock or deep, deep, DEEP denial about this coincidence. They are really big on coincidence, as well as conspiracy, and usually try and drag God into everything they babble about. Personally I think this coincidental date did have an aspect of divine providence about it — it was probably God giving the Teabaggers a wave of his Divine Finger [you know, the middle one]. He/She/It may even have been heard to mumble, "Twirl on this, cretins".
I have never been one to take pleasure at the death of anyone, but I cannot but feel that justice has finally been done to one of the world's most evil human beings. A man who was personally responsible for deaths of countless men, women and children, many of his own professed faith; certainly evidence that religious fanaticism knows no bounds.
