Author: Ophelia Benson

  • To say religious schools exclude is nonsense

    Because they exclude only the non-religious, and who cares about that?

  • Nick Cohen notes: they missed the story

    The Arab uprising is annihilating the assumptions of foreign ministries, academia and human rights groups with true revolutionary élan.

  • The Godly are always there in the wings

    Howard Jacobson is cautious about revolutionary elation.

    Let’s not get too carried away by the secular nature of the revolutionary zeal engulfing the Middle East right now: the Godly are always there in the wings, waiting for the hour in which they can claim the victory as theirs and restore tyranny, only in their image. Maybe it won’t happen this time – I doubt it, listening to protesters saying they don’t mind what comes next, so long as the process is democratic, as though a democratically elected theocracy is somehow better than any other kind.

    Really. I do wish people would get that straight.

    Much has been made over the last weeks of the youthful passion of the demonstrators, tweeting for liberty. Here, two of the most terrible illusions of our time are yoked together. To the fallacy that the opinions of the young are worth attending to because they are not the opinions of the old is joined the fallacy that the the internet, because it is ungovernable, is bound to be a positive instrument for good.

     Or to put it another way, theocrats also know how to tweet.

  • Gingrich predicts an atheist US dominated by Islamists

    He said so at Pastor John Hagee’s Texas megachurch. Srsly.

  • Howard Jacobson on the revolutions

    The Godly are always there in the wings, waiting for the hour in which they can claim the victory as theirs and restore tyranny, only in their image.

  • Howard Jacobson at Index on Censorship

    “It’s not just writers who are the enemy now; it’s language itself.”

  • Louis Theroux revisits Westboro Baptist church

    The family regard it as their duty to “rejoice in all of God’s judgements” – murders, natural disasters, the loss of loved-ones to carnality and fornication.

  • Spain investigates the stolen babies problem

    Franco set the precedent, and then it became a racket.

  • Whither higher education?

    And what is it, anyway? An expensive but meaningless credential, a ticket to debt, vocational training, or education?

  • British mum finds Allah in her potato

    See? Those brown lines where it’s starting to rot? That’s Allah.

  • Mona Eltahawy on Eman Al Obeidi

    And revolutionary women in Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia…

  • Susan Jacoby on that absurd heaven book

    What is truly disturbing about this book’s huge commercial success is that it attests to the prevalence of unreason among vast numbers of Americans.

  • The uses of leisure

    As Lauryn Oates points out, it’s good that Afghanistan is so happy and prosperous that its President can afford to pay attention to the elegant details of life.

    The deputy governor of Helmand province has been sacked for organising a concert that featured female performers without headscarves.

    Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai took the action against Abdul Satar Mirzakwal after tribal elders complained that it was inappropriate.

    Karzai himself was sufficiently at leisure to fire a deputy governor for allowing two women to sing at a concert without bags over their heads.

    And while we’re on the subject, notice the typical craven way the BBC puts it – “without headscarves.” Notice what an official says a few paragraphs down –

    “Women do not appear in public without wearing a burka and niqab in an Islamic country like Afghanistan,” one official, who wished to remain unnamed, said.

    Burka and niqab is not the same as a headscarf! Burka and niqab is a full-body fabric sack with a thick lattice in front of the eyes. A scarf covers the hair; hijab covers the hair and neck; burka and niqab covers everything. Let’s not be euphemistic.

  • Here come the resonant bodies

    The University of British Columbia has a Theory Workshop. No really; it does.

    This month’s was a Derrida one. Coming up in April there will be a Deleuze one. It looks way good.

    Most of us who draw from, and aim to produce, critical theory set out to make analytical interventions in the making of political transformations. This is, after all, what sets critical theory apart from mainstream theory. The ongoing wave of revolutionary unrest in North Africa and the Middle-East provides us with an opportunity and a challenge, both of which are theoretical as well as political: to put the tool kits of our conceptual assemblages to the test and re-invent and expand our intellectual horizons in response to novel political-historical configurations. In this workshop, we will explore and debate the political dimensions of the so-called “affective turn” in the humanities in the past decade. In particular, we will examine Spinoza’s concept of “affect” together with that of “resonance,” which a number of authors (including myself) are beginning to explore to understand the bodily, spatial, temporal, and affective forces that are currently transforming a central geopolitical node of global imperial power. My overall aim, in short, will be to debate the triad “affect, resonance, revolution” both conceptually and in connection with actual political terrains.

    Isn’t that just a great way to make analytical interventions in the making of political transformations? Don’t you think the people of Egypt will be thrilled and grateful to see the interventions appear over the brow of the hill?

    There’s a blog about it too. It’s a big intervention.

    Resonance is an intensely bodily, spatial, political affair, materialized in the masses of bodies coming together in the streets of Egyptian cities in the past thirteen days, clashing with the police, temporarily dispersed by teargas and bullets, and regrouping again like an relentless swarm to reclaim the streets, push the police back, and saturate space with a collective effervescence. Resonance is what gives life to this human rhizome and the source of its power.

    I think the idea is that when a lot of people get together, you have a crowd, and then sometimes things happen.

    Everybody feels the resonance reverberating from Egypt and is trying to make sense of it, to name it. But the words seem inadequate, partial, incomplete: enthusiasm, energy, passion, anger, contagion, electrifying, domino effect. These terms name features of resonance but miss its salience as a physical, affective, political force made up of living bodies. Those who know it best, if intuitively, are the bodies that produce it in the streets.

    Words are inadequate, so you need a Theorist to come up with better ones, like “bodies” for “people,” because that’s so…empowering. Do I have it right?

  • Official fired because two women did not wear niqab

    “Women do not appear in public without wearing a burka and niqab in an Islamic country like Afghanistan,” one official said.

  • Top priority for Afghanistan

    The war? Poverty? Schools, roads, hospitals? Ravening Islamists? Corruption? Incompetence? Of course not. It’s naked female heads.

  • Documentation in McGuire case

    “The more the Jesuits learned about McGuire’s problems, the harder they worked to cover them up.”

  • Suit says Jesuits ignored warnings about priest

    Lots of warnings, over a period of four decades.

  • It’s not just “neocons” who criticize arrests at Oda TV

    The police raid of the news website, a fierce critic of the ruling Justice and Development Party further fueled debate on freedom of the press in Turkey.

  • Turkish journalist defends Turkish press freedom

    Last year, the same journalist faced jail for criticising the courts.