From the monthly archives:

November 2009

Why Britain’s Extreme Political Correctness Needs to Be Utterly Mercilessly Destroyed

by Drima on November 27, 2009

This is what happens when an Afro-Arab Sudanese, aka yours truly, and a white English chick, aka my friend Claire, get together to talk about the recent BBC show that invited our lovely friend, Nick Griffin of the BNP, for a fun entertaining episode.

Yours truly pretty much bugged the shit out of busy Claire to write a quick guest post sharing her honest opinion on the matter after we discussed it.

Brits in the house (you know who you are), please drop your thoughts below after reading. Here it is. The blog post’s title is mine. The rest is hers.

Enjoy. :)

So Drima and I got talking one day about “the rise of radical Islam” in my country, the UK. Prompted by Nick Griffin’s appearance on prime time television, this huge issue has been publicly ripped opened – at last. So now the conversation can really begin…

But you know what? It’s such a huge and complex conversation, I can’t even begin to do it justice.

The one thing I will say is one of the more significant points in our conversation.

Drima was railing about how British political correctness had gone crazy and why we let that happen.

We allow the East London Mosque and its bookshop to run freely despite knowing what it sells, whilst we send innocent people to court for wearing a Cross necklace at work?!

“Simple” I said. And I know the answer because I am white, British and middle class.

We let the PC go crazy because our ex-colonial past is not in the past.

We used to take over and destroy cultures, replacing them with our own. We now acknowledge that this is wrong. Very wrong. So today, if we tell someone of an ethnic minority, “you can’t do that”, for any reason, justified or not, the auto-response is “racist! You don’t understand or respect culture. White colonialist! Shame!”

And we do feel shame. And the next time we keep quiet.

What makes this more difficult? More often that not, this shouted response is not from the minority.

It is from our embarrassed white brother.

In recent years this attitude reached special highs and the average person got sick of it – which is probably why the BNP started doing so well.

Of course they went too far, but apparently, at least they were willing to “stand up and say no, enough is enough. This is our country too and we want Christmas! Change is coming.”

The BNP is an overreaction (thank you, BBC, for allowing Nick Griffin a public platform to hang himself and his “political party”) but now the shout of “too much PC” has at least been heard.

And perhaps more importantly there is the growing voice of the home-grown Islamist recanters, speaking out against violence and promoting “secular Islam.”

Could this be the shift we’ve been waiting for?

These two voices need to be heard and they need to work together to create an environment we all can live in together.

I’m hopeful. Because there is a middle ground filled with people just like me, who are neither fascists nor jihadists. Dare I say it, we’re the quiet majority?

We must be louder.

Islam will not leave our country but neither will it become an Islamic Republic – and the scared white folk and radical Islamists both need a re-education to understand that that is OK.

Welcome to 2010.

Special thanks to Drima for sending me this article, it reveals a lot of what needs revealing in a way I could never express.

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Taqwacore – The Birth of Punk Islam

by Drima on November 19, 2009

O

ur quote of the day comes from Michael Knight, author of the infamous book, The Taqwacores.

When he was 17, Michael Knight left his mother’s home in Rochester to study Islam at a Pakistani madrassa. It was his first act of rebellion – against his abusive, schizophrenic, white-supremacist father. Years later, burned out on the demands of religious dogma, Mike rebelled once more – by penning a Muslim Punk manifesto called The Taqwacores. His work of fiction struck a chord with young Muslims around the world and before long, real-life Taqwacore bands were creating a scene. This film follows Michael and his band of Muslim punks as they journey across the U.S. and Pakistan, transforming their worlds, their religion and themselves through the spirit of Taqwacore.

The quote? Well, it comes from this awesome interview he gave about his new film.

“I realized that I’d rather be inside the mosque urinating out than to be outside the mosque urinating in.” – Mike Knight

LOL, hilarious!

Watch the whole interview here:

And here’s the film’s trailer:

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The Universe Is In Us: Deep, Deep Down Where Religion and Science Profoundly Connect

by Drima on November 5, 2009

N

o, this isn’t some New Age pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo. No I haven’t been converted into a believer in The Law of Attraction after watching that hit film, The Secret. And no, I don’t buy into everything New Age guru, Deepak Chopra says, although he does have many cool and pretty valid ideas.

I’m talking about something very different here – how science and religion connect together at their deepest level.

Neil Tyson says it better in this video.

What Happened Before the Beginning?

Here’s something that pretty much sums up what was said in the video.

Read it all, every word of it.

“What happened before the beginning?”

Astrophysicists have no idea. Or, rather, our most creative ideas have little or no grounding in experimental science. Yet certain type of religious person tends to assert, with a tinge of smugness, that something must have started it all: a force greater than all others, a source from which everything issues. A prime-mover. In the mind of such a person, that something is, of course, God.

But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify–a multiverse, for instance? Or what if the universe, like its particles, just popped into existence from nothing?

Such replies usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist on the ever-shifting frontier. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. And therein lies a fascinating dichotomy. “The universe always was” goes unrecognized as a legitimate answer to “What was around before the beginning?” But for many religious people, the answer “God always was” is the obvious and pleasing answer to “What was around before God?”

No matter who you are, engaging in the quest to discover where and how things began tends to induce emotional fervor–as if knowing the beginning bestows upon you some form of fellowship with, or perhaps governance over, all that comes later. So what is true for life itself is no less true for the universe: knowing where you came from is no less important than knowing where you are going. ~ Neil Tyson

Right on Neil.

And that ladies and gentlemen, is where science and religion connect – at their deepest questions.

So, whether you’re an atheist, pantheist, theist, mystic or just plain agnostic, next time somebody starts going on a rant about how it all began, keep in mind that to a certain extent, the two of you are merely engaging in a game of semantics.

At the deepest level, “The universe always was” Vs “God always was” aren’t such different answers after all.

Unless of course, you take the discussion to a higher level and begin discussing the qualities and properties of those two entities.

Either way, it’s something I personally find pretty damn fascinating and I love Neil’s approach to the issue.

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