the greycat blog

Yes, it’s called Bombay. That’s the established English name for the place, and no-one in India or anywhere else has the right to insist that it be dropped, particularly when their demand is rooted in chauvinistic religio-nationalism. Christopher Hitchens makes that point and many others in this excellent article in Slate: ‘Our friends in Bombay’.

… what’s at stake is the whole concept of a cosmopolitan city open to its own citizens and to the world—a city on the model of Sarajevo or London or Beirut or Manhattan. There is, of course, a reason they attract the ire and loathing of the religious fanatics. To the pure and godly, the very existence of such places is a profanity.

The importance of Bombay is more than symbolic, as is the importance of India. As Hitchens observes, ‘India is emerging in many ways as our most important ally. It is a strong regional counterweight to Russia and China. Not to romanticize it overmuch, it is a huge and officially secular federal democracy that is based, like the United States, on ethnic and confessional pluralism’.

India is indeed our natural ally in the fight against the jihadists, yet it has been sidelined by skewed Western geopolitics that rest on obsession with China, fear of Russia and faith in Pakistan. All three elements are disastrously misconceived: China is a mirage, Russia a paper tiger and Pakistan a terror cell masquerading, barely, as a state. India is a counterweight to all three and a firm foundation for a Western geostrategy that really is committed to the things the West says it cares about: democracy, freedom, economic and social progress. Hitchens is right, we must stand by our friends in Bombay.

Sad to see Wikipedia references in a serious piece of writing, though.

(Found via Alan Sullivan’s Fresh Bilge blog.)

Reporting on the arrest of the cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot in the Netherlands, the Wall Street Journal reveals that the Dutch Government certainly has its priorities right in the fight for free speech and liberty against obscurantism and religiously-inspired totalitarianism. Officials from the intelligence service, the interior ministry, the prosecutor’s office and other high-powered state bodies, under the leadership of a senior counter-terrorism officer, to create the top-secret …

Interdepartmental Working Group on Cartoons.

The title hardly sounds ominous, but the existence of this body is deeply troubling to anyone concerned about free speech (not to mention the priorities of government). The group is intended to alert Dutch officials to any cartoon-related dangers the Netherlands may face (unfunny Garfield strips? No, I don’t think that’s what they mean) and has no censorship role, we are assured. But then, no imposition of censorship is needed when an entire culture is bending over backwards to censor itself.

More at Greenspiece and Gates of Vienna.

In case you weren’t aware of the background to yesterday’s news that a group of Muslim scientists and clerics want a global time based on Mecca to replace GMT, two invaluable videos available at YouTube present the cutting-edge Islamic science underlying the Mecca Time movement. They both feature Dr ‘Abd Al-Baset Sayyid, a scientific luminary from the Egyptian National Research Centre.

The first video, ‘Science in Islam: Mecca is the centre of the world’, is from Al-Majd TV, Saudi Arabia, and dates from 16 January 2005. Highlights of this discussion include the claim that the Ka’ba emits short-wave radiation, that ‘this radiation is infinite’, and that this is why anyone living in Mecca or travelling there will live long, be healthier, and be ‘less affected by Earth’s gravity’. The existence of the ‘zero-magnetism zone’ halfway between the north and south poles ‘where the pull is equal from both sides’ is also considered: ‘the magnetic force has no effect there’.

The companion piece to this is ‘Science in Islam: Mecca Time must replace GMT’ from Mihwar TV, Egypt, recorded on 26 December 2006, in which Dr ‘Abd Al-Baset Sayyid expounds the benefits of Mecca Time. In Greenwich the magnetic field is 8.5 degrees, while in Mecca ‘the magnetic field is zero’. This means that when time is measured from Greenwich there is a discrepancy of 8.5 minutes ‘between the northern and southern hemispheres’. ‘Air traffic’, warns the doc darkly, ‘cannot be organized in this way’. There’s also a lot of fascinating information about blood, circulation, magnetic force, and why circling the Ka’ba will fill you with energy (clue: it’s all about going from right to left).

Such is the world of modern Islamic science, in which religious fundamentalism meets Time Cube. You infidels are educated stupid, not comprehend the zero-magnetism Mecca Time truth of Earth-centre infinite radiation wisdom.

Even the time must submit. ‘Muslim scientists and clerics’ want the world to adopt Mecca Time, reports the BBC:

Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth. … The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice.

One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca’s was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.

Some geologist. (1) Magnetic north is constantly on the move. (2) The line of longitude upon which Mecca is situated also passes through, for example, the Russian cities of Yaroslavl, Voronezh and Rostov-on-Don, so presumably those places (along with others in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Ethiopia, Kenya …) would have equal claim to whatever divinely-ordained distinction is claimed for Mecca. (3) There are also alignments of the earth’s magnetic field where magnetic north and true north are the same, but such lines are not equivalent to lines of longitude and anyway Mecca isn’t on one.

He said the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power, and it was about time that changed.

I find the notion of Royal Navy battleships circling the globe coercing people into setting their watches according to British diktat rather appealing, but it didn’t really work like that. GMT was adopted as a standard by consent, not imposed by force. Perhaps the distinction between the two is not well understood in Islam.

According to the Gulf Times’s report on this gathering of dunces, a man called Yasin a-Shouk has invented an Islamic watch that runs anti-clockwise. If the standard of scientific knowledge on display at this conference is any guide, the symbolism is appropriate: for Islam, intellectually at least, time does indeed run backwards.

[P.S. How long are pious Muslims going to permit this infidel organization to go on associating the name of the Holy City with commercialism, gambling, and garish decor?]

Anthony Burgess (1917-93) is a writer who’s rather neglected today, but who (in addition to being very readable) always has interesting things to say. Some of the most interesting, and often prescient, are about Islam and its relationship with the West. I’ve written a new essay exploring this theme which is available at greycat.org: ‘”The old enemy”: Anthony Burgess and Islam’.

‘Why the West is best’ by Ibn Warraq, City Journal, winter 2008:

A culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate.

(Found via Campus Watch.)

It seems Gillian Gibbons, the Sudan Teddy Bear Teacher, is to be freed. This something about which we should be very glad, but it is not something for which we should be grateful.

Apparently she has been ‘pardoned’ by the Sudanese president. That can hardly be the case; only someone who was guilty would need a pardon.

The interactivity of the web is all very well, but having comments facilities on news reports is a very dubious notion: just look at what happens over at CBS News. The BBC, so committed to fawning over user-generated content that one wonders why they need all those very expensive newsrooms and journalists at all, is, of course, in love with the idea. Those bulging ‘Have Your Say’ pages hang like monstrously distended parasitic growths from many BBC news stories, and the fact that the comments are moderated only makes the prevalent ignorance, offensiveness, smug stupidity (and illiteracy) of the contents all the more disturbing.

The Have Your Sayers have been Having Their Say about Gillian Gibbons and the Khartoum teddy bear crisis (see my earlier post), and the results are truly revolting. For the full grisly picture see ‘The self-loathing Brits who think teddy bear teacher deserves her fate’ at The Monkey Tennis Centre, but make sure you take a sick-bag.

(Some choice comments have been added since the Monkey Tennis Centre’s post. Steve from Derry declares that ‘She went to another country, broke the law, and insulted an entire religion’, that ‘calls for her to be executed are welcomed’ and he hopes that ‘even if she just gets the poor sentence of 15 days, there will be a strong revolt outside the prison upon her release’. What a nice chap. ‘I think we should take a step back and be thankfull that we are all luncky enough to live in a multi cultural society that welcomes any person of any race or religion’, says optimistic James Taggart of London. Glad you feel luncky, James. From sunny Southend, Ken reminds us all (twice, in identical posts - what’s that moderator doing?) that ‘You can’t look at this with western values, this is a different culture and it has to be respected’. Personally I find it hard to respect that kind of respect.)

Today hundreds of demonstrators have flooded Khartoum’s streets protesting about the leniency of Mrs Gibbons’s sentence and demanding that she go before a firing squad.

Above: Lord Kitchener of Khartoum (1850-1916), victor of Omdurman. He’d know what to do.

The quotation in the title of this post, ‘Astonishing backwardness, oh people!’, is from a posting, in Arabic, at The Sudanese Thinker, as quoted by the BBC in their review of blog responses to the Teddy Bear Crisis.

Gillian Gibbons, the British schoolteacher working in Sudan who called a teddy bear Muhammad after the name was chosen by her pupils, has been jailed for fifteen days for ‘insulting Islam’.

Rats in this affair include the Sudanese government, judiciary and religious authorities, and Sarah Khawad, secretary at the school where Gillian Gibbons taught, who made the original complaint. But also Robert Boulos, head of the school, who reacted to the verdict by saying ‘It’s a very fair verdict, she could have had six months and lashes and a fine, and she only got 15 days and deportation’.

Among the weasels, Catherine Wolthuizen of Fair Trials Abroad, who blames the victim: ‘I think she is not someone who has sought to cause offence, she’s not someone who’s acted foolishly, but she perhaps hasn’t necessarily understood the extent to which some of the parents might have been sensitive to the use of this name’; the Right Rev James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, who cringes and simpers like a true multiculturalist: ‘deep disappointment because this was clearly a mistake and I know that the Muslim community here in Liverpool will be as disappointed as anybody. I think, too, a real anxiety that something like this so badly handled in this way won’t do anything to build up good relations between the faith communities’; and the UK Foreign Office who have responded by quavering: ‘We are extremely disappointed with the sentence and Foreign Secretary David Miliband has summoned the Sudanese ambassador to explain what has happened’. Miliband himself has been mainly concerned to stress British respect for Islam, much good has it done him (or Gillian Gibbons).

Praise where due, however: both the Muslim Council of Britain and the American Islamic Congress have condemned Sudan in forthright terms.