Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Oscillating Between Science and the Paranormal

    Scientists who indulge religious fantasies in the interest of popularisation are betraying their profession.

  • Shashi Tharoor on Indian Pluralism

    For now, the sectarian Hindu chauvinists have lost the battle over India’s identity.

  • Amartya Sen on India’s Democratic Success

    India became overnight the first poor country in the world to be a full-scale democracy.

  • NHS Staff Given Eating ‘Rules’ for Ramadan

    Staff have been told not to eat at their desks to avoid offending Muslim colleagues.

  • Scottish NHS Gives Ramadan Advice

    Doctors and nurses should not eat in front of Muslim patients and colleagues during Ramadan.

  • ‘Verifier’ Exposes Gaps in Logic

    That can result from expert biases and mistakes and invisibly skew research results.

  • Simon Callow on Michael White’s Galileo

    Italy produced no physical scientist of the slightest importance for two centuries after Galileo.

  • Taslima Nasreen Could Face Prison

    For being attacked. (Note Center for Inquiry banner behind her.)

  • Amartya Sen on Independent India at 60

    Now we make deals not with the Burmese people struggling for democracy, but with the military dictators of Myanmar.

  • David Baltimore Offers a Defense of Atheism

    Religion supplants evidence and logic with faith, so politicians can appeal to faith and let it go at that.

  • The Right to Write Insultingly

    Hurriyet expresses regret at Colason’s departure but says he had a tendency to write insultingly.

  • Hurriyet Fires Secularist Columnist

    Colasan is one of the leading columnists of the secularist front. News that he was fired sparked angry reaction.

  • Taner Edis

    So Steve Paulson asks Taner Edis how he would assess the state of scientific knowledge in the Islamic world.

    Dismal. Right now, if all Muslim scientists working in basic science vanished from the face of the earth, the rest of the scientific community would barely notice. There’s very little contribution coming from Muslim lands…Especially in military and commercial areas, they have put their emphasis on applied science rather than basic science. So there are lots of medical doctors and engineers in the Muslim world. But the contribution to scientific research is much lower.

    Does it matter? Can’t they just import basic science from the rest of the world?

    It permanently locks the Muslim world into a subordinate position in those aspects of modern life that depend on creativity in technology and science. And this is a huge swath of modern life…This is not a controversial statement in the Muslim world. Even the most conservative Muslim realizes that the Islamic world is at a severe disadvantage right now in science and technology. The West has done a much better job. And somehow, Muslims are going to have to do better.

    This bit is really interesting and suggestive.

    It was harder for science to achieve intellectual and institutional independence. This was not restricted just to science. In the Western world, the institution of law achieved a kind of autonomy from religion early on. Some historians argue that this was really a precursor to science achieving autonomy as well. In the Muslim world, law was never entirely disentangled from religion. Islamic culture has not been as supportive of intellectual independence for different areas of life.

    Intellectual independence…It’s probably hard to exaggerate the importance of that for both personal flourishing and for healthy public goods of all kinds.

    One of the features of medieval Islamic science that some modern Muslim thinkers want to revive is the way of perceiving the universe as a spiritual, God-centered place. This tends to work against the independence of science from religious institutions. It’s precisely this autonomy that helped science make the breakthrough in the Western world. In the Muslim world, this is still a relatively controversial concept.

    If you see the universe as a spiritual, God-centered place, then you can’t have real intellectual independence – not if you take that idea seriously. If the universe is a God-centered place, then God calls the shots.

    They talk about the ‘scientism’ charge – “There are a lot of people in the United States…who also complain about what they call “scientism” — the idea that science explains all there is in the world.”

    You can find Muslim thinkers making similar pronouncements. “Scientism” and “reductionism” have become stock accusations in religious circles. I don’t know if there’s much more content here than saying, “I don’t like naturalistic ideas.”

    Snicker. Yeah.

  • Why Another Look at the Zimbardo Experiment?

    Because the Stanford Prison Experiment may explain a vast range of disasters.

  • Bos Supports Making Leaving Islam ‘Discussable’

    But criticism of Islam is another matter.

  • Hirsi Ali Criticises Labour Over Jami

    Labour leader Wouter Bos has made it clear that his party will not support the ex-Muslim committee.

  • Ramachandra Guha on India’s Internal Partition

    Partition was meant to solve the Hindu-Muslim question, but it’s only made things worse.

  • The Worst Op-ed Ever Written?

    Stanley Fish shrewdly notices there are fancy new coffee shops out there. No, really.

  • Twelve Iranian ‘Thugs’ Executed

    A new series of executions has started in Iran. On 22 July 2007, in the notorious Evin Prison, the Islamic authorities hanged in one day twelve “thugs” accused of homosexuality, drug smuggling, theft, and violation of Islamic morality.

    Even if these executed twelve Iranians were thugs, they are the products of the 29- year policies of the Islamic regime.

    The word “thug” in Iranian socio-economic terms would refer to a group of people who are socially and economically marginalised. Such “thugs” are mostly derived from poor classes, and they confront all unfair aspects of the society.

    Because of the high rate of unemployment, poverty, widespread illiteracy, and a lack of welfare and a social protection system, they are direct victims of such a society and spontaneously revolt against the socio-economic pressures.

    Bully thugs with a religious identity can be recruited into IRI’s Security Forces or are systematically used in the organised pro-regime militias called plainclothes (lebas shakhsi) to intimidate the regime’s opponents, or beat anti-regime demonstrators. So, a number of IRI’s Security Forces, who now arrest “thugs”, are in fact the recruited ex-thugs. They now accuse the non-recruited thugs of violence, robbery, drugs, whereas these charges could be applied to them too, if they were not recruited by the regime.

    Some young Iranian men have been flogged for taking drugs, drinking alcohol or simply for listening to a personal walkman while walking down the street. They react in their manner to the lack of personal freedoms. The regime calls these people “thugs” too.

    Urban youth in particular call for social and political freedom. Youth is always the sector of the population which reacts most fiercely and most violently to their aspirations not being fulfilled.

    Young Iranians make up an estimated 70 percent of their country’s population. More than half of the country’s population is under the age of 20. The generation born under the IRI’s reign is increasingly showing frustration with Iran’s lack of social freedoms and ongoing troubled economy.

    Iran’s unemployment rate is now 15 percent (11.20 percent in 2006). Youth make up a large proportion of the unemployed. Official figures say youth aged 15 to 19 account for 39 percent of the country’s active work force and the unemployment rate stands at about 34 percent among the age groups of 15 to 19 years old and at about 16 percent among the 25 to 29 years age group.

    According to some statistics of 2003, about 20,000 teenagers live on the streets of Iran’s larger cities, but most of them reside in Tehran. The problem has been fuelled by poverty and aggravated by the economic crisis.

    A report by the United Nations has found that Iran has the highest drug addiction rate in the world. “According to the U.N. World Drug Report for 2005, Iran has the highest proportion of opiate addicts in the world — 2.8 percent of the population over age 15,” the report said. “With a population of about 70 million and some government agencies putting the number of regular users close to 4 million, Iran has no real competition as world leader in per capita addiction to opiates, including heroin.” The report added that a government poll had shown that almost 80 percent of Iranians believed that there was a direct link between unemployment and drug addiction.

    According to the Iranian National Centre for Addiction Studies, 20 percent of Iran’s adult population was “somehow involved in drug abuse”. Many Iranians describe high drug availability as evidence of a plot by the regime. “If they could create enough jobs, enough entertainment, why would people turn to drugs?” economists say.

    The IRI dreams of a total Islamic society, but people, especially young ones, do not bow to an Islamic way of life in any standard. Furthermore, social poverty, homeless tramps, high unemployment rates and the lack of social and individual freedom leads to the rise of unsolvable problems for the Iranian youth, described by an incompetent regime as “thugs”. With these current executions, continuous human rights violations in Iran seem to enter a new phase of repression against the whole Iranian society.

  • Why infidelity is essential

    I’m reading Infidel. I’m going to have to treat you to some samples.

    This one is on p. 94. She’s been taking classes at school with a very strict Muslim teacher (though one who urges the children to think, rather than merely shouting dogma at them). She has noted that ‘Something inside me always resisted the moral values behind Sister Aziza’s lectures: a small spark of independence.’ She was troubled by the gap between the demands of the Holy Writings and the reality of daily life; she had asked how a just God could want women to be treated so unfairly; she had noted that she continued to read novels.

    A Muslim woman must not feel wild, or free, or any of the other emotions and longings I felt when I read those books. A Muslim girl does not make her own decisions or seek control. She is trained to be docile. If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you. In Islam, becoming an indivuidual is not a necessary development; many people, especially women, never develop a clear individual will. You submit: that is the literal meaning of the word islam: submission. The goal is to become quiet inside, so that you never raise your eyes, not even inside your mind.

    Devastating final sentence, don’t you think?