More (I know, but there are a lot of good items today, and I want to quote from them). From the always-rewarding Ishtiaq Ahmed – who teaches political science in Stockholm.

Are human beings united or estranged in their essence? Tragedies such as the October 8 earthquake in Pakistan bring out the best and the worst in human beings. We have heard how people volunteered to help, sometimes risking their own lives, when involved in rescue operations…Everyday we see foreigners engaged in providing medical aid, food, blankets and other help. They too represent the best qualities in human beings. We should never forget their sense of duty to fellow human beings.

That’s exactly what I meant the other day when … Read the rest

Slavoj Zizek says something interesting in the Voice.

“I am a mastodon,” he says. “I still believe in the big theories popular back in the ’70s. This distrust in big universal theory is the most dangerous ideology today. Look at all totalitarians, the really bad guys, Hitler, Stalin. Sorry, but none of them believed in big theory. Hitler was a historicist-relativist and so was Stalin! Often a reference to some absolute truth is necessary to resist totalitarian political power, so you can not lose hope.”

Right on. Good mastodon. Pat pat pat.… Read the rest

This is good. Not least because it cites a philosopher of science who has written several articles for B&W. A ‘holy man’ shows up in a village in India and performs some conjuring tricks – then unmasks himself. Score one for rationalism.

“We are rationalists” declares the intruder, Sanal Edamaruku, secretary general of the Indian Rationalist Association. “We have come here to show you how sadhus and god-men are using simple tricks to cheat you.” The sadhu himself is divested of wig and beard and revealed as a completely ungodly rationalist volunteer. He’s no guru – just very skilled at conjuring…The miracle is that the spell has been broken. Once the crowd have absorbed the shock, and broken into

I read something this morning in Frank Cioffi’s essay* ‘Was Freud a Liar?’ that grabbed my attention. It reminded me of something. I knew what, too.

Freud did not fall into the seduction error through believing his patients’ stories; he did not fall into it through ignorance of the fact that persons sexually molested in infancy may, nevertheless, not succumb to neurosis; he did not fall into it through underestimating the frequency of seduction in the general population. Freud fell into the seduction error through the use of a procedure which to this day remains the basis of the psychoanalytic reconstruction of infantile life: the attribution to patients of certain infantile experiences because they appear to the analyst to be

I wanted to make more easily available the useful work Allen Esterson has done on the changes Hizb ut-Tahrir has made on its website, which he posted in comments on the previous N&C.

It is significant that some of the language the organization has had on its website has been removed, or toned down, presumably to make it more amenable for Western consumption. For instance, the statement that “There is no middle position or compromise solution in Islam” used to appear on the website, along with the statement: “The terminology of compromise did not appear amongst Muslims until the modern age. It is a foreign terminology and its source is the West and the Capitalist ideology. This is the ideology … Read the rest

It’s funny about this piece by Ziauddin Sardar – it gave me quite a turn when I read it a few days ago, because I’ve been writing an article that talks about exactly, but exactly, an issue he discusses. It’s a rather important one, too, and one in need of as much clarity of thought as possible. Getting it wrong causes suffering all over the place.

The bearded and elegantly attired supporters of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), the fundamentalist Muslim group, like to emphasise the non-violent nature of their party. As a recent press release put it, they “have never resorted to armed struggle or violence”. This is correct as far as it goes. While HT has openly engaged in the