Islamism - 7

[Guest]

I think Caliph will be BHO, already he is hero in middle east.
Yesterday, Jesse Jackosn Jr, want to add one chapter in Bible on BHO.
Clash of civilization.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Turkey in turmoil </b>
The Pioneer Edit Desk
Erdogan pushes his Islamist agenda
Turkey is in a state of crisis. <b>The recent decision of Turkey's top constitutional court to strike down a bitterly contested law pushed through by the ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party, which would have allowed women to wear Islamic headscarves, or hijab, in universities, has sparked a political war of sorts</b>. But to suggest that the current situation could have been avoided would be naïve. For, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his fellow Islamists in the AKP were fully aware of what they were getting into when they cussedly insisted on using their parliamentary majority to end the ban on hijab in universities. To that extent, Mr <b>Erdogan and his party were, and remain, eager to show off their political might by riding roughshod over secular sentiments. </b>Mr Erdogan has been preparing for this battle for years. Although he did not force the headscarf issue in his first term, after last year's showdown with the secular Army over the presidential election and his subsequent victory in a general election, he is now sufficiently confident of achieving his party's goal of ridding Turkey of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's legacy and thus paving the way for another Islamic state to emerge. Being the world's only Muslim majority secular democracy, Turkey has a unique position in global geopolitics. Since the days of Ataturk, it has been the only country in a region dominated by various shades of Islamism that has actively separated religion and state, shunning political Islam. In that respect, it is the only Muslim majority country in the world that bears testimony to the idea that Islam can coexist with a modern democracy. It is this that has made generations of Turks look towards Europe rather than West Asia.

But now a reverse trend is in motion that threatens to drag Turkey back to the days of the Ottoman Empire. The Islamist forces that had been so far kept under check by the country's secular establishment have finally gathered enough clout, through subterfuge and disingenuous means, to reintroduce those very things that Ataturk stood up against. Although Mr Erdogan and his cronies insist that their attempt to legitimise the hijab is aimed at "protecting human rights", it is really the thin end of the edge. The implications of the headscarf issue go well beyond Turkey's borders: <b>They are intrinsically linked to pan-Islamism and not entirely devoid of a larger message to Muslims living in other secular societies</b>. There are two ways of dealing with the unfolding crisis. The West, which views Turkey as a strategic ally, could let Mr Erdogan know that his party is going back on its pledge to give up radical Islam and thus crossing into dangerous territory. Second, the Turkish judiciary could step in and put a halt to Mr Erdogan's revanchist politics. For the moment, the judiciary has acted well and must remain firm.
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[Guest]

<b>Indonesia minority sect fears hardline backlash</b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->JAKARTA - LIFE for Indonesia's Ahmadis has taken a frightening turn.
<b>Their mosques and sympathisers have been attacked by violent militant groups such as the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), and they are under pressure to say they are not Muslim</b>.

Near one of their onion-domed mosques in Jakarta, a lone police patrol car provides protection for the sect, even though at a Jakarta rally earlier this month, FPI supporters beat up and injured participants as they called for tolerance for Ahmadiyya.

'Of course, we are afraid and worried,' said Mr Deden Sudjana, who handles Ahmadiyya security.

'It is very human if everybody is traumatised, especially children and women because they saw blood, how they trampled on the elderly, beat them and kicked them.
...................Indonesia's top Muslim religious council has declared Ahmadiyya a deviant sect, and hardline groups want them banned.

Earlier this week, vice-president Jusuf Kalla said the government would not ban Ahmadiyya as long as its members do not preach or try to convert others.

A ministerial decree issued this week stopped short of banning the sect but warned followers could face five years in jail for tarnishing religion.
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[Shambhu]

Recently NPR had news about the Saudi-supported islamic schools in Northern Virginia (N. Va, you will remember, is the place a bunch of 72-worshippers were caught playing paintball to hone their skills against the infidel for a planned event to glorify the Most Merciful --ie terrorist act, as the evil infidels put it . N. Va also has these islami restaurants and "halal" meat stores. The restaurants have waiters who cannot hide their disdain for non-muslims).

The schools ostensibly "promote cultural harmony and filter text to remove offensive material" or some crap like that, but in spite of all that, a recent investigation has found verses advocating the killing of apostates by muslims and (some other killng which I forget).

900 children have been forced by their homicidal deluded parents to attend these schools.

The Peace emanating from this Religion of Peace brings tears to your eyes...

[Bodhi]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I have shown that Allah is not circumcised. According to the Hadith (Muslim-2872), Allah created Adam in His own image and hence simple commonsense says that, had Allah been circumcised he would have created Adam circumcised. And as a consequence all the believers would have born with natural circumcision and they would not need to undergo artificial circumcision after birth. The argument proves that Islamic God Allah is not circumcised. But the question remains – Was Prophet circumcised?

In fact, circumcision was a Jewish practice and Sir W Muir, in this regard says, “The practice is incumbent on Muslims as a part of the Sunna (custom or example of the Prophet), but it is curious that we have no authentic account of Mohammad’s own circumcision.” (The Life of Mahomet, Voice of India, New Delhi 1992, p- 191). When the Prophet died, attendants were prevented from making the body naked or looking at his naked dead body either, during the ritual bath before burial. To narrate the incident, Sir W Muir writes, “A heavenly voice was heard ordering not to bare the Prophet’s body, for the eyes of any one that looked upon his nakedness would forthwith be destroyed.” (ibid, p-191).

So my humble question to Zakir Naik is – Was the Prophet circumcised? Did any one of his wives, who only had the opportunity to see or feel Prophet’s private part, narrated any hadith in this regard?

http://www.news.faithfreedom.org/index.php...rticle&sid=1948<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[ramana]

Is Nazism a new Islam for Europe? IOW is it a way to bring a new normative process for Germanic people just as Islam did for Arabic people? If it was only for the Germans between the wars, how come it appeals to people elsewhere? There were Nazi party branches all over Europe.

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->An Open Letter to Indian-Americans 
Monday, May 26, 2008

Dear Friends,

I am Vijay Kumar, a native of Hyderabad, India, and an American Citizen. I have been in the United States for nearly 29 years and a resident of the great Volunteer State of Tennessee for the past 22 years. Now, I am running for United States Congress from the 5th Congressional District, Tennessee, as a Republican candidate.

Let me tell you why I am running and what I am fighting for. I believe you will see that it is a matter of the gravest importance to both our adopted homeland, the United States, and our native land, the Republic of India. I dare say it is the Number One matter confronting all humanity.

I refer to the threat of Universal Jihad, which you might know as “Radical Islamist terrorism.” The Universal Jihadists’ bombings are not limited to New York or London or Madrid. In fact, India has been the greatest victim of radical terrorism for the past 25 years. The recent bombing of Jaipur, Rajasthan, and previous bombings of Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi and others bear witness to this fact.

Who are these bombers? They are Universal Jihadists, and they go by different names in different countries. They advocate reestablishment of the Caliphate. They want “Talibanization” of the entire world.

Universal Jihadists demand theological, racial, political, and cultural supremacy over the rest of the world. They are products of a militant ideology and the ideology is what shapes them. This ideology—the Doctrine of Universal Jihad—is what we must confront and defeat. Our war is for intellectual and religious freedom. The alternative is unconditional surrender of the mind.

Take the Example of Kashmir. “Demographic Conquest” is the most permanent form of conquest. Kashmir was a Hindu majority state for thousands of years. Through invasion, forcible evacuation, and conversion lasting centuries, Muslims became the majority in Kashmir. Now the Universal Jihadists are waging a guerilla war to secede from India. They seek to impose Sharia law replacing the secular Indian Constitution. The jihadi struggle in Kashmir is a grand theological rehearsal; the ultimate goal of Universal Jihadists is total conquest and Islamization of India.

The task of defeating so pernicious an ideology is greatly hampered by a pervasive and willful ignorance on the part of the cultural Left in the United States, and in Europe and India. The liberals have been so cowered by “political correctness” that they actually serve as apologists for Universal Jihad. The Left and Muslim intellectuals say that terrorist attacks are the consequence of America’s foreign policy in the Middle East and its support for Israel.

This argument is patently false. Very few Americans or Jews live in places like India, Thailand, the Philippines, Bali, Nigeria, Sudan, Russia, and a host of other countries where jihad has been relentless.

The current global terrorist attacks are simply a continuation of 1,400 years of Universal Jihad. Western and Indian liberals have become lackeys of Universal Jihadists in their words and deeds. It is completely disingenuous to decry the genocide of Darfur and ignore the root cause of that genocide, Universal Jihad.

We must develop a comprehensive and lasting solution to the perennial problem of Universal Jihad, and we cannot achieve this goal using current strategies. The Bush Administration’s foreign policy of concentrating on Afghanistan and Iraq is not sufficient. The Bush Doctrine lacks coherence. Our goal should be absolute and unconditional surrender of Universal Jihadists.

This war must be waged on multiple fronts: ideological, economic, and military.

Ideologically, we must uphold that the American view of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is infinitely superior to the jihadist worldview of terror, death, and destruction.On the economic front, we must stop all forms of aid to terrorist-supporting nations and groups, regardless of any short-term gain we derive from supporting them.

On the military front, we must create a coalition of democracies that have historically been victims of global terror with the aim of jointly fighting the problem of terrorism. The coalition would include the United States, Britain, Western Europe, India, South Africa, Israel, Russia, Nigeria, Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan.

If I am elected, I will endeavor to attack the problem of Universal Jihad in the ways necessary to defeat it:


I will support the cause of Kashmiri Hindus, who have been victims of Islamist fundamentalist groups for nearly half a century and whose suffering is relatively unknown to the rest of humanity.


I will work hard to cut American military and economic aid to the States that have sponsored terrorism.


I will support the people and Government of India’s fight against terrorism.


I will work hard to build a coalition of democracies who are willing to confront the menace of Universal Jihad in defense of liberty. 

This letter is a direct call to you to give me that chance through your financial and campaign support. I greatly appreciate your attention to the information that I have provided here. For more information about my conservative positions, please visit my Web Site:  www.kumarforcongress.com, or please email me at kumarforcongress@aol.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

  I need your prayers and your immediate financial help, both of which are critical to my victory in Republican primary  on August 7, 2008.
  Please send your most generous contribution today to the following address:

Kumar for Congress,
P.O. Box 210348,
Nashville, TN 37221.

Respectfully,
Vijay Kumar   
 
http://kumarforcongress.com/An-Open-Letter...-Americans.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[G.Subramaniam]

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Secur...=1.0.2344863234

Pakistan: Tension grips town over Koran burning



Hyderabad, 17 July (AKI/DAWN) - Tension gripped a small town in Pakistan, after rumours that a Hindu child had burnt a copy of the Muslim holy book, the Koran.

The incident took place in a remote mountainous area between Hyderabad and Karachi.

Following the incident, people reportedly gathered in the town of Thano Ahmed Khan to pressure police to take action against the child.

Later it was revealed that the child, who works in a grocery store, had mistakenly given a buyer some goods wrapped in a page from a textbook which had a Koranic verse on it.

According to reports, the child was taken to a guesthouse, stripped and beaten up. Another report, denied by police, said that the boy was paraded naked in the area.

The boy's father, Maharaj Jaman Das, who holds an important religious position in the community, offered an unconditional apology to the protesters and said his son did not know what was written on the paper.

Police tried to verify the incident but no one in Thano Ahmed Khan could produce the paper which contained the Koranic verse.

Police in Thano Bula Khan told the Pakistani daily, Dawn, that no charges had been laid as no one had given any evidence that an act of blasphemy had occurred.

[Guest]

Guys im not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but this guy at school claims that the '71 genocide committed in bdesh was actually carried out by pro pak bengalis on bengalis.

Can you point me to some good links to to shut this guys case down?

TIA

[Shambhu]

Google gendercide

[Shambhu]

Who does every muslim adore as the best among men?

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2268731/WWMD-50-...ant-You-To-Know

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-thayilv+Jul 17 2008, 06:41 PM-->QUOTE(thayilv @ Jul 17 2008, 06:41 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Guys im not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but this guy at school claims that  the '71 genocide committed in bdesh was actually carried out by pro pak bengalis on bengalis.

Can you point me to some good links to to shut this guys case down?

TIA
[right][snapback]84372[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
http://www.genocidebangladesh.org/

[Bodhi]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Aisha wasn’t the only young girl Muhammad had eyes for.

Muhammad saw Um Habiba the daughter of Abbas while she was fatim (age of
nursing) and he said, "If she grows up while I am still alive, I will
marry her." (Musnad Ahmad, Number 25636)

Suhayli, ii. 79, In the riwaya of Yunus I.I, recorded that the apostle
saw her (Ummu'lFadl) when she was a baby crawling before him and said,
'If she grows up and I am still alive I will marry her.'  But he died
before she grew up and Sufyan b. al-Aswad b. 'Abdu'l-Asad al-Makhzumi
married her and she bore him Rizq and Lubab… (Ibn Ishaq, The Life of
Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah, translated by A.
Guillaume [Oxford University Press, Karachi], p. 311)<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Shambhu]

http://pseudosecularism.blogspot.com/2008/...-and-their.html
<b>The separatists in Kashmir and their "secular" supporters are trying to spread the myth that the Amaranth Yatra is of a recent origin</b> <!--emo&:furious--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/furious.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='furious.gif' /><!--endemo-->

Brainless ones indulging, once more, in that time-honoured tradition of lying for Allah (Taqqiyah).

[Shambhu]

RSS SAVED INDIA FROM MUSLIM LEAGUE'S INTENDED COUP

After partition, Delhi was in the throes of violence and intrigues by the Muslim Leaguers. When later on Dr. Bhagwan Das, the great savant and a recipient of the Bharat Ratna award, came to know the details of the role of RSS in those crucial days, he wrote on 16th October 1948:

"I have been reliably informed that a number of youths of RSS were able to inform Sardar Patel and Nehruji in the very nick of time of the Leaguer's intended coup on September 10, 1947, whereby they had planned to assassinate all members of Government and all Hindu officials and thousands of Hindu citizens on that day and plant the flag of Pakistan on the Red Fort and then seize all Hindusthan."

He added:

"Why have I said all this? Because if those high-spirited and self-sacrificing boys had not given the very timely information to Nehruji and Patelji, there would have been no Government of India today, the whole country would have changed its name into 'Pakistan', tens of millions of Hindus would have been slaughtered and all the rest converted to Islam or reduced to stark slavery. Well, what is the net result of all this long story? Simply this - that our Government should utilise, and not sterlise, the patriotic energies of the lakhs of RSS youths."

http://indpride.com/believeitornot.html

[Guest]

<b>Saudi arrested for having six wives: Report</b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Riyadh, July 31: Police in Saudi Arabia have arrested <b>a man working for the country’s vice squad who is accused of having six wives, two more than allowed under Islamic law,</b>  <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->  a newspaper reported on Thursday.
The 56-year-old Saudi, detained in the southwestern province of Jazan near the border with Yemen, is being questioned over charges that he is married to three Saudi and three Yemeni women, Al-Watan said.

The man is an employee with the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, or religious police commonly known as the Muttawa, which is in charge of enforcing a strict Islamic moral code in ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia He has denied the charge, claiming he has divorced two of his spouses, the newspaper said.
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just 2 more. <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->

[acharya]

http://www.hoover.org/publications/polic...60936.html

an excerpt...pls read the entire link above:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Muslim society, classically, is tribal society. Muhammad’s achievement was to meld the desert tribes of Arabia into an irresistible force for the spread of Islam. To this day, in fact, tribal identity remains politically relevant, not only in the arid territories of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, but even in settled Muslim states like Iraq. This is a distinctive characteristic of social life in the Middle East. Historically, it is unusual for states and tribes to coexist for long within a single territory, and rare as well for tribal peoples to found dynasties (as they have throughout Muslim history). In Europe, for example, the German, Celtic, and Gothic tribes that overran a collapsing Roman Empire quickly lost their tribal identities. The same fate awaited the great tribal dynasties that conquered ancient China. But in the Middle East, tribal identity persists.

Middle Eastern tribes are organized into what anthropologists call “segmentary lineage systems.” Simply put, segmentary lineages allow a society to operate strictly on the basis of kinship ties, without the need for a central government. If a man is attacked, for example, he’ll be defended not by police, but by members of his lineage, who will be pitted against the lineage-mates of his foe. And what if a man is attacked by one of his own lineage mates? In that case, his lineage will simply break apart (segment), and those most closely related to him will be opposed to those most closely related to his attacker. The system works through an almost infinite capacity for either segmentation or unity. Tribes can easily be split by internal disputes, yet can just as easily combine in the face of an alien enemy.

Muhammad’s achievement was to unify the tribes of Arabia under the banner of Islam, in the process replicating and extending to Islam itself the tribal ethos of militance and pride. By creating a kind of tribal feud between all of Islam and the outside world of infidels, Muhammad was able to launch a successful military campaign that unified and deployed the existing tribal structure against the enemy. In later battles against the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, tribal regiments united by bonds of kinship maintained a cohesion that state-employed mercenary armies could not. The Muslims swept the field.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
--------
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWYyM...DY0MTA0MGM0YmY=

<b>Marriage and the Terror War</b>
Better learn up on your anthropology if you want to understand the war.

By Stanley Kurtz
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Why is the United States engaged in a war against Islamic terrorists? The Left blames the war on American foreign policy, while the Right holds that America is being scapegoated for the Muslim Middle East’s own failure to modernize. In his controversial new book, The Enemy at Home, conservative social critic Dinesh D’Souza rejects both of these explanations. Islam is perfectly compatible with modernity, argues D’Souza. The real root of the terror war, says D’Souza, is that, like many other traditional peoples throughout the world, Muslims are being shocked into anti-Western radicalism by the decadent post-Sixties culture nowadays aggressively spread across the globe by the secular Left.


In “War of Cultures,” I take issue with D’Souza, arguing that the contemporary cultural Left merely aggravates a profound and already-existing conflict between Islamic society and modernity — a clash between tradition and modernity more thorough-going and prone to violence than in any other part of the globe. D’Souza’s theme of cultural incitement, rightly understood, I argue, points toward a deeper incompatibility between Islamic society and the demands of modern life — an incompatibility that has a great deal to do with the widespread Middle Eastern practice of cousin marriage. If this is so, then we are led to take up the fundamental question of the causes of the terror war in a new light.

The distinguished historian Bernard Lewis and political scientist Samuel Huntington have together popularized the notion that Muslims are scapegoating the West because of an underlying incompatibility between Islamic society and modernity. Lewis roots this incompatibility in the Muslim seclusion of women and also in the failure of Islam to separate church and state. Yet, in “Root Causes,” I show that the Muslim seclusion of women, and even characteristically Muslim church-state relations, are part and parcel of a distinctive kinship structure built around a preference for the marriage of cousins. Huntington highlights the significance of these “traditional clan ties,” while saying relatively little about their actual content.

In this first in a series of essays on Muslim cousin-marriage, <b>I want to begin to make the case that Muslim kinship structure is an unexamined key to the war on terror. </b>While the character of Islam itself is unquestionably one of the critical forces driving our global conflict, the nature of Islamic kinship and social structure is at least as important a factor — although this latter cluster of issues has received relatively little attention in public debate. Understanding the role of Middle Eastern kinship and social structure in driving the war not only throws light on the weaknesses of arguments like D’Souza’s, it may also help us devise a new long-term strategy for victory in the war on terror.

Self-Sealing Society
<b>
Think of the culture of the Muslim Middle East as “self-sealing.” Muslim society has a deep-lying bias toward in-group solidarity, the negative face of which manifests itself in a series of powerful mechanisms for preventing, coercing, or punishing those who would break with or undermine the in-group and its customs. This bias toward in-group solidarity serves to shelter Muslim society from interaction with the forces of modernity, and also explains why Muslim immigrants so often fail to assimilate. Of course, no society can function without some sort of “in-group solidarity.” Yet the Muslim world is truly distinctive on this score. When it comes to the core principles of kinship, Muslim practices strengthen and protect the integrity and continuity of the in-group in a way that sets the Middle East apart from every other society in the world. To appreciate this fact, we’ve first got to understand some fundamental things about the nature of kinship.</b>

For the greater part of human history, nearly every society has been organized into units based on kin ties. Modern life greatly reduces the significance of these ties, since capitalism tends to allocate jobs based on ability (instead of who your father is), while democracies apply laws, and assign benefits, on the principle of equal citizenship (not birth). By contrast, in most traditional societies, a man’s security, health, prosperity, and religious standing all depend, first and foremost, on his relatives. So to understand the kinship structure of a traditional society is to make sense of a good deal of life there. Unfortunately, our contemporary thinned-out notion of kinship has made it tough to recognize just how profoundly societies are shaped by variations in marriage practices. That’s why we’re far more comfortable making sense of the war on terror through the lens of a familiar phenomenon like religion, than in the light of something alien, like cousin marriage.

The anthropological study of kinship is famously abstruse, even for many anthropologists. The terminology can be eye-glazing, and as I’ve been arguing, it’s tough for modern Americans to believe that the problem of who-marries-whom can actually make much social difference. Suffice it to say that generations of anthropologists who actually travel to non-Western societies keep coming back impressed by how important the question of kinship is. As I’ll detail in a future piece, British scholars have lately discovered just how critical cousin marriage is for understanding the problem of Muslim assimilation in Europe. If the study of kinship can be exotic, difficult, and puzzling, so is the problem of modern Muslim rage. These problems, I argue, are related. So fasten your seatbelts. For the sake of making sense of America’s number one challenge, we’re about to take a plunge into the famously abstruse topic of kinship.

Short Course in Kinship

In the late nineteenth century, British anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor developed the founding insight of the modern study of kinship. <b>Tylor cited exogamy, or “marrying out,” as the key to human social progress. In Tylor’s scenario, early human groups, in danger of killing each other off through inveterate competition, discovered intermarriage as the path to social peace. Women who were related to one clan as sisters and to another clan as wives tended to discourage feuds between otherwise competing groups. As Tylor famously put it: “Again and again in the world’s history, savage tribes must have had plainly before their minds the simple practical alternative between marrying-out and being killed out.” And for Tylor, “cross cousin marriage,” a particular form of cousin marriage favored by many “primitive” societies, was the earliest and most fundamental form of clan exogamy — or “marrying out.”</b>

So what exactly is “cross cousin marriage”? Well, <b>in anthropological parlance, descendants of same-sex siblings are “parallel cousins,” while descendants of opposite-sex siblings are “cross cousins.” That is, if a man marries his mother’s brother’s daughter, he is marrying a cross cousin. If, on the other hand, a man marries his father’s brother’s daughter, he is marrying his parallel cousin.</b>

Yes, this sort of terminological arcana has been the bane of generations of anthropology students. But let me put my larger point in the form of a threat: Sit still for this brief basic account of anthropological kinship theory...or lose the war on terror.

All right, let’s say we have a society made up of clans organized by descent through the father. (Imagine a grander version of your own father’s family line, or something like the Hatfields and McCoys.) In any given clan, the men all trace their descent from a common male ancestor. In such a society, a rule or preference for cross-cousin marriage would create a systematic form of exogamy. In other words, if every man in a patrilineal, clan-based society were to marry his mother’s brother’s daughter, every man would be marrying someone from a different clan. (For example, if you were to marry your own mother’s brother’s child, you would be marrying someone from outside of your father’s family line.) Since every man’s mother in our imaginary society is born into a different patriclan than his own, when a man marries the daughter of his mother’s brother (i.e., his cross cousin) he is renewing an alliance with another patriclan (i.e. his mother’s birth clan) by bringing a woman from his mother’s birth clan into his own clan as a wife, just as his father did before him.
<b>
On the other hand, in a society made up of competing patriclans, a rule or preference for parallel-cousin marriage would have exactly the opposite effect. Parallel-cousin marriage would seal each and every clan off from all of the others. If, say, every man in a society made up of patrilineal clans was to marry his father’s brother’s daughter, every man would be married to a descendent of his own birth clan. (For example, if you were to marry your own father’s brother’s child, you would be marrying someone from within your father’s family line.) That would be a very strong form of endogamy, or “marrying in,” which, according to Tylor, would encourage social isolation, cultural stasis, rivalry, and high levels of conflict between clans.</b>

Although modern social anthropologists largely jettisoned the speculative historical reconstructions favored by nineteenth-century scholars like Tylor, they held onto Tylor’s central insights into the political significance of exogamy and cousin marriage. For example, building on Tylor, the great modern anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss argued that the incest taboo was the foundation of human social life. By prohibiting sexual ties among close relatives, Levi-Strauss claimed, the incest taboo effectively forces human beings to create alliances with strangers, through marriage. The prevalence of cousin marriage in many traditional cultures seemed to contradict this claim for the significance and function of the incest taboo. Yet Levi-Strauss’s brilliant, Tylor-inspired, analysis of the many political alliance systems created by cross-cousin marriage proved that even societies that encouraged the marriage of close cousins were in fact practicing a form of exogamous alliance-building. In the wake of Levi-Strauss’s achievement, some anthropologists even returned, in a more sophisticated mode, to Tylor’s original historical thesis, suggesting that the early discovery of exogamous marriage may have played a critical role in the evolution of modern human beings. (See Robin Fox’s Kinship and Marriage and The Red Lamp of Incest.)

Well, maybe exogamy played a central role in human evolution, or maybe it didn’t. However theoretically sophisticated, those sorts of historical reconstructions are nearly as speculative today as they were in the nineteenth century. In any case, early history aside, there is a critical flaw in Levi-Strauss’s theory of contemporary human kinship. Levi-Strauss did indeed show that the widespread practice of cross-cousin marriage confirms, rather than contradicts, the leading role of exogamy in human social life. Unfortunately, Levi-Strauss almost entirely failed to deal with the single great exception to his rule. Although the vast majority of societies with a preference for close-cousin marriage favor the marriage of cross cousins, a significant minority of such societies favor the marriage of parallel cousins.
<b>
And as we’ve already seen, parallel-cousin marriage has an effect precisely the opposite of the alliance-building interchange encouraged by cross-cousin marriage — and praised by Tylor and Levi-Strauss.</b> Instead of encouraging cultural exchange, forging alliances, and mitigating tensions among competing groups, parallel-cousin marriage tends to wall off groups from one another and to encourage conflict between and among them. However strong the urge among anthropologists to identify the cooperative advantages of exogamy as a core characteristic of human nature itself, the hard fact of the matter is that a significant minority of human societies have chosen to organize themselves according to principles quite the opposite of alliance-based exogamy. Care to hazard guess as to exactly where in the world those societies might be?

While the vast majority of societies that practice cousin marriage favor the marriage of cross cousins, <b>the relatively small number of societies that encourage parallel-cousin marriage can be found in the Islamic cultures of North Africa and west and central Asia</b>.<b> Russian anthropologist Andrey Korotayev has shown that, while the region that practices parallel-cousin marriage does not map perfectly onto the Islamic world as a whole, it does (with some exceptions) closely resemble the territory of the eighth-century Islamic Caliphate — the original Islamic empire</b>. So there is one great exception to the claim that human society — and even human nature itself — are built around the principle of extra-familial marriage. Almost every known contemporary case of preferential parallel-cousin marriage is the result of diffusion from a single source: the original Islamic Caliphate. And while parallel-cousin marriage may not be Islamic in any strict or formal sense (in fact, the practice apparently predates Islam in the region), as Korotayev puts it, “there seems to be no serious doubt that there is some functional connection between Islam and FBD [father’s brother’s daughter — i.e., parallel cousin] marriage.” Sounds like we’d best find out what that “functional connection” is.

...Proves the Rule
Once you give up the idea that every human society depends in some fundamental way on the practice of marrying out, it’s fairly easy to see the other side of the coin. If in-marriage stifles cultural development and change by walling society off from outside influences, then <b>strong endogamy also has the corresponding benefits of heightening social cohesion and preserving cultural continuity. That is precisely the argument of Kansas State University anthropologist Martin Ottenheimer, who notes that parallel-cousin marriage among Pakistanis in Great Britain tends to reinforce cultural continuity in Muslim immigrant communities. </b>Ottenheimer’s study, Forbidden Relatives: The American Myth of Cousin Marriage, was published in 1996, several years before it became apparent that reinforcing the “cultural continuity” of immigrant Muslim communities in Britain might have a down side. (See especially chapter 7.)

Determined to puncture the American “myth” that cousin marriage poses any sort of problem, Ottenheimer explains that the bans on cousin marriage adopted by many American states between the 1840s and the 1920s were the product of a biased and decidedly non-multicultural nation. As Ottenheimer sees it, given the foolish determination of our forbears to assimilate immigrants, Americans used intermarriage (a modern form of exogamy) as a tool to help break up ethnic communities and encourage a sense of national unity. Laws against cousin marriage fit right into that strategy, helping to break down in-grown traditional cultures and encouraging a shared sense of American identity (even if America never faced anything quite as in-grown as Muslim parallel-cousin marriage). Multiculturalist that he is, Ottenheimer prefers the “cultural continuity” fostered by parallel-cousin marriage among British Pakistani Muslims — a continuity facilitated by Europe’s permissive marriage laws — to America’s tradition of immigrant assimilation.

Ottenheimer has a point. Tylor and Levi-Strauss were mistaken to identify the functional gains of exogamy with human nature itself. The pattern of social adaptation, developmental flexibility, and relative peace achieved through intermarriage isn’t the only social game in town. Although a strongly in-marrying society may sacrifice these advantages, functionally speaking, <b>intense social solidarity and unbreakable cultural continuity are the powerful payoffs received in return for the rejection of exogamy.</b> Of course, the fly in this ointment (invisible to Ottenheimer in 1996) is painfully obvious today: Intense social solidarity and unbreakable cultural continuity in immigrant Muslim communities (and in the Middle East itself) are exactly what have been getting us into trouble.<b> This means that any a long-term strategy for winning the war on terror will have to undercut, counter-balance, or reverse the functional “advantages” (cultural stasis and isolation) accruing to Muslim society through the ongoing practice of parallel-cousin marriage.</b>

So the one great exception to the anthropological maxim that human advancement and peace require a certain minimal level of exogamy turns out to prove the rule. Islamic society has found a way to turn a uniquely intense form of in-marriage to its advantage (if advantage is defined strictly in terms of cultural survival, rather than adaptive change). Unfortunately, from the perspective of the rest of the world, the cultural stasis and isolation promoted by Muslim parallel-cousin marriage is now a serious problem.

We still need to discover the “functional connection” between Middle Eastern parallel cousin marriage and Islam. Find that link, I argue, and you will see what stands between the Muslim world and modernization. Grasp the connection between Islam and Middle Eastern kinship, and you’ll have a far better chance of devising a long-term strategy for winning the war on terror. These are the questions we’ll pursue in Part II of “Marriage and the Terror War.”
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[acharya]

<b>Indian Union Muslim League condemns serial blasts</b>
Staff Correspondent
Registering protest: Members of the Indian Union Muslim League taking out a protest march in Hubli on Thursday.

HUBLI: Members of the Indian Union Muslim League took out a protest march in Hubli on Thursday to condemn the recent serial bomb blasts in the country.

The members, led by president of the district unit of the party Dadapeer M. Koppal, held placards with messages condemning the blasts and those responsible for them, during the march.

Mr. Koppal addressed the protesters on the Hubli tahsildar’s office premises. Condemning the bomb blasts, he said that the BJP governments (in Karnataka and Gujarat) had failed to take steps to prevent the blasts.

Mr. Koppal said that it was wrong to target Muslim organisations whenever there were blasts or any terrorist activities in the country.
Wrong policies
<b>
Wrong policies were responsible for the growth of Muslim and Hindu fundamentalist organisations, he said and added that governments should stop indulging in politics at the cost of people. Rafiq Maniyar, Jalalsab Bijapuri and Chamansab Ansari were among those who participated in the protest.</b>

The protesters submitted a memorandum, addressed to the President, to the Hubli tahsildar. In the memorandum they stressed the need for better coordination between the Union and State governments in combating terrorism.

[dhu]

Hindu beheaded for mayying Muslim (WB)

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->KOLKATA, AUG 1 (PTI)

A Hindu man who married a Muslim girl was beheaded after a kangaroo court ordered his 'execution' at a village in Murshidabad district of West Bengal.

The villagers did not allow the man's hapless wife to approach the police for a fortnight.

The police said today that the girl Munera Bibi from Lakshanpur village met and fell in love with Shailendra Prasad from Bihar while she was working as a maid servant in Mumbai. They got married two and half years ago and the girl is now the mother of a 10-month-old child.

Religion was never a problem for the couple until she came to her own village in the district on July 1 with her husband who concealed his religious identity under the name Munna Sheikh.

But soon the girl's father Ansaria Sheikh became suspicious of his son-in-law's religion on July 14 and reported this to village elders. A 'salishi' (kangaroo court) comprising 22 members summoned Prasad and discovered his true religious identity. He was awarded 'death sentence', sources said.

On July 17 the man's beheaded body was found in a gunny bag in a jute field but as there was no complaint, the police failed to identify the person, the sources said.

Ten days later, the girl, her mother and brother went to Behrampore police station and lodged a formal complaint after which the incident came to light.

The police said three perons have been arrested in this connection.

"We tried to go to the police but the villagers forced us to stay indoors and threatened us with the same fate if we go to the police." the girl said.

The father of the girl and many other villagers are absconding.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[G.Subramaniam]

Remember the secular hullabulloo over Rizwanur ?