Krekar aloft

There's a vacant job position awaiting Ms. Rehman at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. :)

Uhm. Why is he Smiling in the first picture? Shouldn't the simple fact that she is Touching him, already have him in outrage?

Re Islam and the "Muslim Comic," a nearly-oxymoronic idea.

Last night CBS carried on 60 Minutes a segment on one Ms. Mirza, billed as a "Muslim comedian" of Pakistani descent, living in Britain. There were two problems with Ms. Mirza as a "Muslim comedian": 1) She wasn't funny and 2) She was really a sly apologist for Islam, passing herself off as a brave truth-teller from within Islam.

As to 1), her humor consisted entirely of "jokes" showing up the silly fears of non-Muslims on planes; in other words, not Islam, but the fearful --- and exaggerated -- reactions of non-Muslims to Muslims, was the subject of her soi-disant humor. It was all so predictable,so phony, and so hard -- one could see -- for the non-Muslim audience to wanly laugh, try as it did. Her humor was so anodyne that it made that it made Bob Hope seem like Mort Sahl.

Mirza turned out to be an apologist for Islam. She said, preposterously, that Islam is "full of humor." But those steeped in Islam tell us quite different things. Ayatollah Khomeini, a learned theologian, wrote that "there is no place in Islam for humor. Islam is serious." There is no tradition of making even the slightest fun of Muhammad, or the Companions. can one imagine Ms. Mirza daring to make what would be the most obvious of jokes -- say, something as mild as about her little brother starting a rock-group called "Muhammad and His Companions" which for some reason couldn't get a gig down at the mosque or the curry-palace. She wouldn't dare. She wouldn't dare refer to little Aisha skipping rope or playing hopscotch before, bye and bye, she caught Muhammad's eye. She wouldn't dare make jokes about the "isnad" or chain-of-transmission for the stories about Muhammad, the hadith -- a chain of transmission that is taken so seriously, pondered over by so many muhaditthin -- "as being sort of like your party game, you know, of 'Telephone,' where one person whispers a story in the ear of another, and then he in turn whispers what he remembers to another, and then...." Since all the humor in the game from the accretions and omisssions and distortions, as the story is retold, from one party to the next, Mirza could give an example of a hadith, in which Muhammad, according to the final teller of the tale, has him ordering a Big Mac and fries after the Battle of the Trench, or describes him attending a bar mitzvah in Yathrib ("Few Muslims know it, but Muhamamd just loved Bar Mitzvahs. He was the one who first came up with the line "My son, today you are a fountain-pen. Yes, it's true."). She could make great fun out of what is halal, and what haram -- "Now, let me get this straight: Qaradawi says I can't have a hairdo shaped like a camel's hump, but my brother can hump a camel, as long as he doesn't serve its meat to the family afterwards?" Or "let me get this straight. The boys get 72 virgins in Paradise, or some pearl-like boys, if they kill Infidels in the Jihad, but the girls get....bupkiss?" Good god, I think I'll go into this line of work myself.

Mirza turned out disappointingly to be an apologist, half-unwitting, half-deliberate, for Islam. She told an uncritical and admiring Ed Bradley that "Islam actually empowers women." What can she be thinking of? Whenever one hears this line from a Muslim woman, one knows that either the person, though born into Islam, knows little about it, and therefore not to be trusted, or is a deliberate apologist, and therefore not to be trusted.

Has Ms. Mirza never read those passages in the Qur'an and hadith about the proper ways to beat your wife, or those about about the natural inferiority of women? Does she know about the value placed on the testimony of women as compared to that of men? Does she think women can decide for themselves how they may dress, or otherwise behave? What of the burqa, the chador, the hijab -- all just voluntary? What of the Afghani girls burned to death two days ago for the crime of daring to go to school? The honor killings in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey? The fact that women cannot leave their houses in Saudi Arabia, fully orthodox Saudi Arabia, without their husbands or a close male relative? Her preposterous remark was allowed to stand, unrebutted -- what is it that makes the crusaders of 60 Minutes turn to jelly when such stories are offered? Would a little bit of reality change the heartwarming, uplifting nature of the story's implied moral -- see, they're on their way, the brave and funny and outspoken forces from within Islam, who will change it, for it can be changed with a nudge, and a wink, and a smile or two. How stupid and sentimental must we all be?

If Ms. Mirza thinks that the way she at least sometimes allows herself to act, with relative freedom, in Great Britain, would be tolerated for one minute back in Pakistan, she knows nothing aboutr Islam. Her freedom is entirely in violation of the spirit, and letter, of Islam, not in accord with it. She herself is one more of those walking passports to ignorance who, while born into Islam, does not really know what Islam is all about, and helps to perpetuate ignorance that causes such damage, as she must know, to many Muslim girls and women, even in the West, even in her own town of Bradford (does she know about the girls who are sent back to Pakistan to be married off to a villager, and who kill themselves? Or does she remain blissfully ignorant of all that? Is she aware of the mailgnant antisemitism so widespread in the Pakistani community of Britain? Or the less publicized inculcated hatred of Christians and especially of Hindus? Does she care?).

The same objection can be said, incidentally, for the strident, self-centered, publicity-prone, but at least much more honest Irshad Manji, who keeps prating about the various allowalb e "interpretations" of Islam that will be the key to "reforming it." Born as a Muslim, she nonetheless does not have any deep acquiantance with its tenets, with the doctrines that render it both immutable and, in its "interpretation," through the doctrine of abrogation, far harsher in its ultimate signficance even than the literal contents of the Qur'an would indicate. And of course she scants the hadith. Manji talks as if all those reformers in the past simply did not know what she knows; that Abduh and Al-Afghani and a host of others failed because they lacked the insights of Irshad Manji. No, they failed because textual reformation is simply not possible; only constraints on Islam by powerful and determined despots -- like Ataturk -- can create the conditions, by limiting Islam, in which a critical mass of nominally Muslim people can become true secularits -- as in Kemalist Turkey, a mass always in danger of being overwhelmed by the barely-suppressible totalitarian temptations of Islam, which so many continue to find as the answer to everything.

Mirza is not funny. And Manji is not going to find that the gates of ijtihad willl swing open for her; Muslim law professors, currently engaged in their phony "projects" of "reform" (very useful for getting invitations to conferences, grant money, and -- of course -- tenure from admiring and naive and ill-informed Infidel colleagues). The only way to "reform" Islam is not to attempt to "interpret" away, or fiddle with, the immutable texts, as understood for much more than a millenium, but to constrain how Islam is practiced, what Qur'anic excerpts and which hadith may be referred to -- this "reform" is one of governmental fiat. Ataturk did not claim that "Islam empowered women." But he went ahead and gave them legal equality, including the right to vote, and banned the hijab as well. He did not change the texts of the Qur'an, but he did put agents into the mosques to monitor the content of the khutbas, to make sure that all the dangerous texts were left carefully unmentioned (and this is a kind of endless, sweeping-back-the-tide undertaking -- as it is, incidentally, in France, where the same monitoring is now going on). If Islam were, in fact, naturallly a religion of "peace" and "tolerance," then Ataturk would have had no problem to begin with -- but he knew that there was a very big problem, and he dealt with it in the only feasible manner: the armed might of the Turkish state, headed by a determined, popular, and implacable leader.

What makes people like the unfunny "comedian" Ms. Mirza tell such obvious untruths? What is it that makes her, who bills herself as a "Muslim woman comedian" and is touted as such, really make no use of Islam for her material, but rather has her lame humor depend on making fun of non-Muslims for their faults, their sillinesses, their unfounded or exaggerated worries about Muslims sitting next to them on airplanes or in cafes?

It is fascinating to ponder why it is that the Ms. Mirzas of this world continue to pretend that Islam is not what it is, and what they surely must know that it is, that they continue to explain away, or minimize, the reality of Islam -- while there are others, such as the many ex-Muslim contributors to the websites of Ibn Warraq and Ali Sina and others -- who know perfectly well what Islam teaches, what the real limits on women are, and what arethe real attitudes toward non-Muslims within the cozy world of Islam itself. What makes for the hyper-defensiveness that allows for such dishonesty, such willingness to substitute filial piety for critical thought?

Is there humor in Islam? Not much. Mobs in Fallujah, Baghdad, Najaf, and Ramallah smile delightedly at the sight of Infidel corpses being further smashed or dismembered. Bin Laden had a spell of mirth, caught on that first famous tape, as he told his adoring companions further details about the 9/11 attack; those Companions, as at least Al-Zahawiri sees himself -- also found it hilarious.

It was pitiful to see the audience of non-Muslims trying desperately to laugh at Ms. Mirza's distinctly unfunny and obvious jokes, no doubt in a willed spirit of (false) solidarity with a "good" Muslim, a female comic Muslim, a thoroughly-modern female comic Muslim who turns out to be a dutiful Muslim girl, afraid of going near any of the real material for humor in Islam (see above), making inane jokes designed to convince us, the non-Muslims, that it is we who are comical, with our silly fears and baseless prejudices.

Enough of this nonsense, from her, from Sixty Minutes, from all of the sentimentalist Family-of-Man propagandists who have been brainwashing us for decdades.

If you want to have comic relief based on Islamic material, read some of the material at the websites, especially from a few of the Iranian women in exile, who are linked to Ali Sina's www.faithfreedom.org, or the scathingly humorous Ibn Rawandi, or the inimitable Ibn Warraq at www.secularislam.org.

yeah what hugh said

Priceless! lol

Bravo Hugh! I seriously think you have an untapped talent. I loved your examples of jokes that she could have said! They were great! The Jewish people have long had a tradition of wonderful humor willing to take the risks of poking fun at themselves and their faith, and I have caught a number of Christian stand ups willing to point up alot of things about themselves and their faith as well, but of course, neither of these groups have any "death threat" from the religion hanging over their heads if they say something unfavorable about it. That's the difference. She might have wanted to be cutting edge, but knew in her heart that it would be the end of her stage career, such as it was. I agree, that she was an apologist, and skirted the truth, especially when Bradley asked if she would want to marry a "white" boy (I assume just non-muslim), and she said sure, but he'd have to convert to Islam. It would have been nice if she'd said (or that 60 minutes would have said), that although it is okay for a muslim man to marry a non-muslim woman, whether she converts or not, it is against Islamic Law for a muslim female to marry a non-muslim (unless he maybe converts before marriage and so-called courtship). At the rate that she's being turned down as a possible marriage prospect by her own faith, she may have to do what Nonie Darwish did (here's her article about islamic family dynamics and her marriage to a christian and subsequent fleeing from the middle east to america to avoid persecution for having done so: http://www.noniedarwish.com/pages/745442/index.htm ). Still, I'm glad to see a few muslim women speak or act out in some way, however small, or unorthodox that goes against the grain of the typical muslim. In the philosophy of "compared to what", I'd also give huge bravos to Irshad Manji for her honesty and in-your-face slam of her faith, islam, in her book "The Trouble with Islam". It may not be enough for you, perhaps, but damn, it's a good start to a dialogue within the muslim community that is long overdue, and comopared to other muslim women out there, she's a loud, intelligent breath of fresh air.

The evening news on Norwegian TV tonight reported that the police will probably not charge Shabana Rehman with anything, as a result of Krekar's complaint, because as they put it: "He suffered no bodily harm". Instead they will suggest Shabana and Krekar settle the matter out of court. The reports are unconfirmed, the police have not said anything publicly yet.

Shabana has agreed to meet with Krekar, but says she will not apoloigize, and has offered to lift Krekar's lawyer as well. As for Krekar the rumors are he is considering to withdraw the complaint, since its giving Shabana so much PR, raising her market value as a comedian to ever new heights.