contexploration

For more on one central character in Freedland’s piece, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, see The Observer’s revelation on the British Foreign Office’s black propaganda program. The IslamOnline website, which Qaradawi supervises as chief scholar, endorses the “burning” and “stoning” of gays: “The jurists of Islam have held differing opinions concerning the punishment for this abominable practice [homosexuality]. Should it be the same as the punishment for fornication, or should both the active and passive participants be put to death? While such punishments may seem cruel, they have been suggested to maintain the purity of the Islamic society and to keep it clean of perverted elements.” Step into the bizarre and read Qaradawi’s teachings here.

Salman Rushdie wrote this piece in the Toronto Star in May 2005. A truce between religious and irreligious world views would have a chance of working only if it were reciprocal and the world's religions “agreed to value the atheist position and to concede its ethical basis, respect the discoveries and achievements of modern science, even when these discoveries challenge religious sanctities, and if they agreed that art at its best reveals life's multiple meanings at least as clearly as so-called ‘revealed’ texts.”

Bernard-Henri Lévy writes an open letter to the American Left in The Nation: “I found a curious lifelessness, a peculiar streak of timidity or irritability, when confronted with so many seething issues that in principle ought to keep them as firmly mobilized as the Iraq War or the so-called 'American Empire'." This echoes the conclusions from Joan Didion’s Political Fictions [highly recommendable]. When populism is at the wheel, is there any hope for visionary politics? Has the satisfaction of the self-centredness middle class been put higher than the hopes of achieving social justice in America?

In Norwegian: Only 29 percent of Norwegians believe in God, according to a recent opinion poll by Norsk Respons. (The statistics from Psykologisk Institutt (NTNU, May 2005) showed that only 20 percent of Norwegians consider religion "important in their life”.) To a certain extent, this torpedoes one of the central arguments put forth by “Gjønnes-utvalget” that “85% of Norwegians” are members of the State Church. The Governments commission concluded that the Church ought to be separated from the State, but wanted to keep a privileged “Folkekirke” (“People’s Church”) regulated by a new, specially designed law. The Norwegian State Church receives over 3 billion Norwegian kroner [450 million dollars, 400 million euros] each year from the state and municipalities. The property of the Church is worth over 4 billion kroner, according to the state entity set up to administer it, Opplysningsvesenets Fond [PDF]. How long should Norwegian politicians keep on speculating when the time it right to separate State and Church? The suitable point in time was 1814.

Finally an editorial in Morgenbladet that makes sense! Lena Lindgren provides an excellent deconstruction of the Norwegian right wing populist party “Fremskrittspartiet”. Not only does the party’s strategy of popularity-at-any-cost draw up a division between “our people” and “the others”, but it also scorns “the elite”, “the intellectuals” and ”the politicians”. (I might add that the party has previously directed this “Reaganomic” scorn “downwards” as well, towards single mothers and welfare recipients.) Lindgren writes: “This explains the populist parties’ attraction to nationalism and religion.”

(I have this letter to the editor on print in Morgenbladet. Another entry is in this week’s issue of Ny Tid.)