Ziauddin Sardar says Islam has a history full of freethinkers.

“This has nothing to do with Islam,” say the imams. “These callous and fanatic murders have nothing to do with us,” say the mullahs. “Islam means peace,” say the worshippers. These disclaimers, and variations on them, have been repeated countless times by Muslim commentators since the Charlie Hebdo killings. They are designed to distance people from guilt by association with those who kill and maim in the name of Islam.

But what about the sentence recently handed down to the (mildly) liberal blogger Raif Badawi in the Islamic state of Saudi Arabia? Ten years in jail, a massive fine, 1,000 lashes over 20 weeks (currently suspended because the first

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The king of Saudi Fascist Arabia has died and his half-brother has replaced him. The New York Times gives some background.

Abdullah’s reign was a constant effort to balance desert traditions with the demands of the modern world, making him appear at times to be shifting from one to the other.

When popular movements and insurgencies overthrew or threatened long-established Arab rulers from Tunisia to Yemen in 2011, he reacted swiftly.

On his return from three months of treatment for a herniated disk and a blood clot in New York and Morocco, his government spent $130 billion to build 500,000 units of low-income housing, to bolster the salaries of government employees and to ensure the loyalty of religious organizations.

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However, one piece of better news – though I can’t really call it good news, given the eight years wasted…

A pardon granted by El Salvador’s Parliamentary Assembly to a young woman imprisoned after suffering a miscarriage is a triumph of justice and gives hope to the other 15 women languishing in jail on similar charges, said Amnesty International.

In 2007 “Guadalupe” received a 30 year jail sentence after authorities wrongly suspected she had terminated her pregnancy. She was only 18 years old.

Now she’s 25 or 26. She lost eight years because she had a miscarriage.

El Salvador has one of the most draconian abortion laws in the world, criminalizing abortion on all grounds, even when a woman or

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Michael Shermer is on the book tour for his new book explaining morality.

Morality? Shermer?

Yes. Bemusing, isn’t it.

Known for his analytic approach to the complex plight of humanity, New York Times bestselling author Michael Shermer (Skeptic Magazine) brings his characteristic insight to the nuanced relationship between science and morality in his latest book, The Moral Arc. From paying ransom to Somali pirates and the dilemmas of being a Nazi, to an analysis of the Bible’s basic principles, Shermer unpacks the philosophies behind some of today’s greatest moral questions. He’ll explain how beginning with The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, scientific ways of thinking have made society more moral and in turn, created a freer,

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Now have some revolting kakk from the International Union for Islamic Scholars.

(That’s not “scholars” as normally understood, of course. It means not people who have read and understood many books, but people who have read and memorized one book.)

IUMS calls for the Islamic nation to continue in the legal peaceful demonstrating to defend the great messenger, and calls for the West to protect Muslim communities from attacks.

Defend him from what? He’s dead. It’s too late to defend him because he has no life to defend any more.

IUMS had received with deep sorr[ow], the insistence of some of the re-deployment of graphics or movies that offend the Prophet of mercy, the Great Prophet Muhammad – peace

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The doctors have again said Raif should not be whipped tomorrow, Amnesty reports.

The planned flogging of Raif Badawi is likely to be suspended this Friday after a medical committee assessed that he should not undergo a second round of lashes on health grounds. The committee, comprised of around eight doctors, carried out a series of tests on Raif Badawi at the King Fahd Hospital in Jeddah yesterday and recommended that the flogging should not be carried out.

Nothing surprising about the assessment – deep cuts caused by repeated blows of a stick would of course not heal completely in two weeks.

“Instead of continuing to torment Raif Badawi by dragging out his ordeal with repeated assessments the authorities

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CFI Canada is holding weekly protests at the Saudi embassy in Ottawa in conjunction with Amnesty International  Canada.

CFI Canada calls its volunteers and supporters to join or lend support to weekly 30-minute demonstrations at the Saudi embassy in Ottawa (201 Sussex Drive).  Amnesty International  Canada  is leading this initiative on Thursday January 15, 2015  at 4:00 pm.  Raif Badawi is expected to receive lashes every Friday for a total of twenty weeks.    For further information, contact the CFIC office at ned@cficanada.ca.

That’s from last week but theobromine tells us there is one today:

Note to anyone in or near Ottawa, Canada: Atheist and Humanist groups (CFI-Canada and Humanist Canada) are joining the weekly protests sponsored by Amnesty international –

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Watch Shazia Mirza speak up for the value of humor and Nabila Ramdani speak up for…other things.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuQZwZhFJaw… Read the rest

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Another item from Maajid on Twitter:

Maajid Nawaz @MaajidNawaz · 13 hours ago
Adam Lowisz on my Facebook page applied Kübler-Ross ‘5 stages of grief’ onto outdated Muslim “community leader” types

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More from that Washington Post article about the overlooking of female scholars of the Middle East when events are being organized. I ran out of time before.)

The problem isn’t going to fix itself, even though women are the majority at some graduate schools of international affairs now.

The paucity of women’s voices in public discussion comes not just from thoughtless conveners, but also from long-standing problems in the professional “pipeline” that carries individuals to the top levels of the field. Inequities in hiring and promotion often reflect, and help perpetuate, the unconscious bias of a male-dominated field.

Women are systematically cited less than their male peers, for example. Even when women are active scholars, as they are in

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Are.you.kidding.

Last year, six leading Washington think tanks presented more than 150 events on the Middle East that included not a single woman speaker. Fewer than one-quarter of all the speakers at the 232 events at those think tanks recorded in our newly compiled data-set were women. How is it possible that in 2014, not a single woman could be found to speak at 65 percent of these influential and high-profile D.C. events?

They all figure it’s more of a guy thing?

Pretty much.

Such questions are increasingly common in other fields, including the natural sciences. In our experience, organizers of all-male events reply to challenges with one of two answers: “I didn’t even notice there weren’t any women!”

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Now this is good – Maajid Nawaz on Twitter –

Maajid Nawaz ‏@MaajidNawaz 2h
I personally raised flogging @raif_badawi & @WaleedAbulkhair with UK Dep.Prime Minister @nick_clegg today #FreeRaif

Here’s hoping.… Read the rest

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Good – another ratchet in the protests to Saudi Arabia about its brutal torture and rights-abrogation of Raif Badawi.

The international outcry over  restrictions on freedom of speech in Saudi Arabia escalated last night as an array of Nobel prizewinners published an open letter calling on the country’s academics to condemn the public flogging of the blogger Raif Badawi.

In their letter, passed to The Independent, the 18 Nobel Laureates urge their Saudi peers to be “heard arguing for the freedom to dissent” by standing up for Mr Badawi, whose case they say has “sent a shock around the world”.

They also hint that if the country’s academics are unable to stand up for free speech they risk being

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Shocking but not really surprising – more than half of students in public schools in the US come from families in poverty.

This week, the Southern Education Foundation reported that 51 percent of students in grades K through 12 received a free or reduced-price school lunch in 2013, meaning that their families lived on less than 185 percent of the poverty line. According to the Washington Post, it is “the first time in at least 50 years” that more than half of the country’s public school kids have qualified as low income. In 1989, the figure was under 32 percent. In 2006, it hit 42 percent, and by 2011, it had ratcheted up to 48 percent.

Why … Read the rest

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