A fun new hobby
And as for Lauren Booth…
Journalist and broadcaster Lauren Booth, 43 – Cherie Blair’s sister – now wears a hijab whenever she leaves her home, prays five times a day and visits her local mosque whenever she can.
In other words she agrees that she is an inferior and a subordinate who lets a religion tell her to conceal most of her head; she fritters away a large fraction of her time every day talking to someone who isn’t there; and she has made herself subject to the death penalty in certain places if she should change her mind about this conversion lark. She must be dumb as a stump.
Harsh but fair :-)
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Dumb, irresponsible, and apparently doesn’t give a damn for the rights or dignity of women who, unlike her, have little choice but to submit to this crap against their wishes. That makes her scum in my eyes.
A stump doesnt have a choice
That may well be true in this case, but sometimes it can be more complicated than that. Take the case of Lisa Bauer (a.k.a. Layla Nasreddin), for example.
I like the fact that she’s only got as far as “page 60” of the Qur’an. What if she finds something she disagrees with on page 61? I hope she kept the receipts for all those designer headscarves.
Hamilton Jacobi:
Yes, but I WAS pretty stupid, naive and unthinking at the time, looking back! It is worth noting that most Western converts eventually do just drift away, especially those that did so on the spur of the moment, something that isn’t usually mentioned in the statistics of Western converts to Islam proffered by Muslims. I know at least two Western (females) personally who did so, including one who married a Muslim and wore the hijab — she abandoned it after her Arab husband became a hardcore atheist (in the US), thank Allah! :-P The other converted kind of on the spur of the moment and just kind of lost interest, even though she still feels a kind of fellowship with hijab-wearing women she sees, even though she never wore it, though she’s basically an agnostic/atheist now. Then there’s me…
Perhaps Booth will reconsider when she realizes that conversion means she can only be married to a Muslim man per shari’ah. Since Wikipedia says she’s married to “actor Craig Darby” and he doesn’t seem to be a Muslim so far as I know, her marriage would be automatically considered dissolved and invalid. He’d have to convert to be “legally” married to her per Islamic — and Iranian — law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Booth
Lisa, you were certainly naive and unthinking at the time, but as subsequent events have shown, the root of the problem was not a congenital lack of brainpower.
On the other hand, for Lauren Booth to do this at the age of 43 in the midst of a successful career and (apparently) surrounded by loving family members does raise a few questions…
Lisa Bauer said: “Perhaps Booth will reconsider when she realizes that conversion means she can only be married to a Muslim man per shari’ah. Since Wikipedia says she’s married to “actor Craig Darby” and he doesn’t seem to be a Muslim so far as I know, her marriage would be automatically considered dissolved and invalid.”
A small amount of googling reveals that she started divorce proceedings against him in August. Skimming a couple of other articles about the couple doesn’t exactly reveal either in a particularly nice light. Apparently they used to live in France where she was able to work as a journalist writing articles for UK newspapers while he was a house-husband, looking after their children – an arrangement that neither of them seemed to enjoy. There was a couple of articles about them from a few years talking about the situation when the woman in a family relationship is the sole breadwinner. He seemed to hate the fact that they didn’t have a joint account and that he had to ask her for every bit of cash needed for the family shopping etc, while she complained about the fact that any gift he bought for her came from her own money. All in all it sounded like an impending divorce case even then.
On a related note I was actually married to a Muslim partner – my first wife. It wasn’t so much a problem since she was non practicing. Even her parents didn’t try to get me to convert. They were much more interested in keeping me a secret from their extended family (they were from Kuwait/Saudi and used to tell all their relations there that my wife was studying medicine – since that explained why she was abroad for so long!)
It is entirely up to her what religion she wants to convert to. Of course, if she were in an Islamic country, she wouldn’t have a choice, and would face the death penalty if she wanted to opt out of Islam. Clearly, there is a price to pay for liberty: freedoms are lovely but are so easily destroyed.
Which makes me think how utterly absurd we are in the west to pander and accommodate to its most dire opposite. Of course one set of bonkers politics bends over backwards to let Islamists full control of our political institutions (see Tower Hamlet’s latest mayor) while the far right uses the obvious truths of Islamism to breed hatred, so has to gain power.
What is perhaps so alarming is just how quickly the rot and absurdity is spreading, at least in Europe, because European secularism cannot withstand groupthink.
Truly stupid but not that different from converting to strict Catholic or fundy.
Wonder if she’ll soon be on Sunday morning debate programmes arguing that actually the Koran is very pro-woman if you just interpret it right…
Why oh why do these females with histrionic personality disorder almost always convert to ISLAM of all things?
Why don’t they try GREEK ORTHODOX for a change? I can help, since ekshelly there is only one degree of separation between me and the head bottle washer in Istanbul, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomaios (‘close friend of a close friend’ – honest cross my heart I’m not just name-dropping) and if Lisa or Lauren change their minds I reckon I could even rig an audience in the Fanar HQ with the cuddly head of 130 million faithful – and YES he’s JUST as cuddly as Pope ‘Benny’ Ratzinger or the loveable tousle-haired Archbishop R. Susan Williams. ‘Bart’ really has CHARISMA and what’s more he belongs to the apostolic succession so he can hear confessions, transubstantiate etc. just like an RC.
Besides members of the lite brigade may be happy to learn that Greek Orthodox teaching is far easier-going than the papists on artificial contraception, which gets the green light provided the contraceptive “is used with the blessing of one’s spiritual father” — which, chuckle chuckle, doesn’t mean the priest has to dunk the Dutch cap or condom or whatever in holy water each time, but that the (married) couple gets a kind of general “all clear” for several years. Though gays should note that as regards sodomy there is no light at the end of the tunnel and the Greek Orthodox church truly deserves to be put where the sun doesn’t shine.
Lisa, Lauren, wanna make the headlines again? Phone Cathal at the devil’s number 666 any time and I’ll do my level best.
Hamilton @5, true, but I would (and do) say I was dumb as a stump in my yoof, and after that too. (And would say I still am in some areas.)
Not any more it isn’t!
Does anyone have any idea what Brown is trying to say here :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/oct/25/lauren-booth-conversion-islam
Since when is Islam anything but an ideology?
Nope; he seems to be saying everything at once. What his point is is beyond me.
But claiming or implying that Islam is not an ideology is central to the pseudo-liberal “you must not criticize Islam” dogma.
Here’s something I think I should be saying something about. I thought it was pretty clear.
There’s almost nothing on which he doesn’t have to say something. And everything he says about anything almost means nothing.
I’d never underestimate Lauren Booth’s dumbness but nonetheless I don’t think this is fair. If any of us choose to, say, fornicate, sodomise, cuss a God, mock dictators or say, “Hey, this freedom thing – I’d go for it!” we’re making ourselves subject to the death penalty in certain places. That’s their problem.
Actually, this struck me as the most sensible and coherent piece I have ever read by Andrew Brown on the subject of religion. That’s not saying a lot, but it’s something.
He’s not saying Islam is not an ideology; he’s saying it’s not incompatible with (US) patriotism. I guess it depends on how seriously you take your Islam.
Hard to believe I’m defending Andrew Brown, however tepidly. But this is probably just a one-off deal; there’s unlikely to be an occasion for it to happen again.
BenSix – but with Islam the problem is inherent to Islam. It comes with the death penalty for apostasy attached. That makes it a bad thing to endorse by converting to it.
From Brown’s article :
“To become a Muslim in Britain is a very different thing to becoming one in Indonesia, and in Argentina it’s different again. This has absolutely nothing to do with doctrine.”
Really? So an Argentinian Muslim can choose not to pray five times a day? To eat pork?
Lauren Booth and that obnoxious Yvonne Ridley – shilling for Press TV and Hamas is a lapse of judgement that makes the conversion to Islam entirely unremarkable. Islam’s net loss, I think.
Well, again, I don’t think that’s entirely fair. If one joins a party that violently and regularly announces its intention to massacre puppies I can see that signing up would – even if indirectly – constitute endorsement for canine-killing. When someone converts to Islam, though, they might be signing up for entirely different pack of goods. Doesn’t mean some aren’t some right and some aren’t wrong, mind, but there’s clearly a scale between Reza Aslan and Fareed Zakaria, and King Fahd and Sheikh Abdul Rahman.
I think its safe to speculate that there may have been a rather strong emotional reason for her conversion at this time rather than a political, ideological or even a specific ‘religious’ reason (she has stated that she is only up to page 60 of the Koran!). She clearly comes from a religious family, predisposing her towards some sort of religious notion but she’s also going through a rather messy dissolution of her marriage – she is divorcing her husband who became disabled (brain damaged, I think) after getting into a road accident during an argument with her a couple of years ago. It is not unusual for people undergoing such a life crisis to be vulnerable towards feelings of inclusion that religions exploit (look at the number of divorcees in evangelical churches!).
“On the other hand, for Lauren Booth to do this at the age of 43 in the midst of a successful career and (apparently) surrounded by loving family members does raise a few questions…”
As her “career” depends entirely on being Tony Blair’s sister-in-law, this may be a blow foe independence in her view- also a wise career move: as Blair’s prime ministership becomes more remote, her attraction for Ieranian TV would decline.
Which is exactly why it’s worth pointing out what they are buying into and endorsing. Same with Tony’s conversion to Catholicism – I thought and think that was an appalling thing for him to do.
A member of an elite (well, sort of) is likely to be insulated from the worst demands of a religion. Just like celebrities praising Catholicism, Tibetan Buddhism, Scientology, etc., might not usually suffer overmuch from the repressive aspects of those belief systems. But doesn’t that give even more cause to criticize them for their endorsement?
I would like to talk to lisa. I am a former convert. I wrote a memoir