Interview with Founder of Black Lives Matter

Aug 05

Alicia Garza, founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, was recently interviewed by Bloomberg.  Too many people still understand racism from the narrow lens of morality, and accordingly, only recognize intentional, conscious racism as noxious. They are, however, blind to the structures that de jure racism has bequeathed us.  As she puts it, “[R]acism is a set of interlocking dynamics: One in three black men can expect to spend some time incarcerated; women are the fastest-growing population in prisons and jails—and 30 percent are black; black folks are on the low-earning end of the economy. Lots of people who are great people are implementing and ­protecting systems, practices, structures that fundamentally exclude, disenfranchise, marginalize black people.”  Undoing these structures is the great challenge facing the US today.  I am hoping that with a Hillary win in the fall, the necessary changes in the Supreme Court can be made to allow us to adopt the broad remedies necessary to undo the legacy of Jim Crow in the US.

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Bloomberg: “Trump is Cratering”

Aug 05

As I’ve repeatedly explained to my non-American friends, Americans are not uniformly crazy, and that I had a better chance of being elected president than Trump.  Bear in mind, I am most definitely not a natural-born US citizen.  These latest polls confirm my view.

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Washington Post’s profile of the son of an al-Qaeda Bombmaker and His Relationship to ISIS

Aug 05

The Washington Post today has an interesting article about the life of Mohammed al-Masri, the only person, the story claims, to have had spent significant time both with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and ISIS in Raqqa.  There is no way to avoid recognizing that our indifference to the coup in Egypt played an important role in catalyzing the rise of Daesh (ISIS/ISIL), both by vindicating Bashshar al-Asad’s bet that no amount of violence against “Islamists” would be likely to trigger international intervention against him, and by allowing Daesh to claim that it is the only genuine “champion” available for Sunni Arabs.  The sad reality is that US policy in the Middle East under Obama has only succeeded in making al-Qaeda the “reasonable” option. That doesn’t mean that Obama was not right to pursue the policies he chose: it’s hardly the duty of the US to save the Arabs from themselves, but it would have been nice had the US chosen to support the imperfect democratic regime in Egypt in 2013 rather than being indifferent to its fate, and it would have been nice had the US listened to Turkey and established a no-fly zone in Syria prior to Russian intervention.  At a minimum, that would have likely prevented the authoritarian turn in Turkey, and it might have prevented the refugee crisis, which could very well lead to the unravelling of the European project. The refugee crisis already helped produce Brexit.  From a narrow realist perspective of what constitutes US interests, Obama’s policies of benign neglect in the region are probably defensible, but the costs to the people of the region are incalculable, and on top of the active destruction wrought by the Bush administration, is creating a leval of anti-Americanism that is unprecedented. Worst of all, the entire region is slowly drifting into the orbit of Putin’s Russia: authoritarian crony capitalism is evolving from the de facto reality of the Arab world, into a norm that is openly embraced.

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Ken Burn’s The Civil War

Dec 26

Thanks to Netflix, I finally managed to watch Ken Burn’s epic documentary, The Civil War.  It brought me back to my days as a kid and teenager when I was an avid Civil War buff, devouring all the books I could find on that conflict.  William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses Grant were of course my favorite generals, there was no figure I found more contemptuous than George McClellan.  Nothing in this documentary has given me reason to doubt my childhood judgments on these men.  (Although I find it interesting that the people of New Jersey had it in them to elect McClellan governor in later years — I suppose the promise of America is that the possibility of redemption is always around the corner.).
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Strategic Voting in Monday’s Federal Election

Oct 16

Regarding the upcoming Federal election this Monday, it is crucial that Canadians opposed to Harper and his Federal Conservatives avoid vote splitting.  This means that they should look to which of the non-Conservative candidate in the voter’s riding has a better chance of defeating the Conservative candidate.  This link helps voters determine whether their riding is a swing riding, i.e., in a competitive race where, if the liberal and NDP voters coordinated, they could defeat the Conservative candidate.  This document also dispels much of the confusion that surrounds strategic voting in the GTA, and is directed specifically toward the concerns of Muslim voters in the GTA.

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Constructing Authority in Early Islamic Legal History

Aug 03

Anyone who is a student of early Islamic history is familiar with the numerous controversies surrounding the rise of Islam and whether Muslim accounts of early Islamic history can be deemed to be generally reliable or whether Muslim histories of the early community should be dismissed as little more than pious accounts of sacred history.  The recently deceased Patricia Crone was probably the most famous of the “revisionist” historians who adopted an extremely skeptical stance toward the early Muslim sources.

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The Lunacy of Lunar Sightings — A Brief Reply

Jul 20

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf has a short and valuable blog post entitled “The Lunacy of Lunar Sightings” in which he defends a middle position between naked-eye sightings and the use of astronomical calculations to determine the beginning and end of Islamic months.  He argues for the need to establish Islamic dates based  on a combination of the best-available scientific evidence along with naked-eye observation.  I still think, however, it does not make the case for continuing with naked-eye observation rather than simply using calculations to determine the beginning and end of Islamic lunar months.  Here, the decisive question is whether what is required is certainty or probability.  The very fact that in traditional fiqh, the beginning and end of months could be established by the testimony of individual witnesses, and not the kind of corroborated testimony that Shaykh Hamza seems to demand in this essay, shows that certainty is not required in this matter. And, when this is combined with the element of practicality — something Shaykh Hamza dismisses too easily, I believe — it seems that simply using astronomical calculations, regardless of the fact of the naked-eye observation, makes sense.  As far as an official public calendar, sure, that does require certainty, and perhaps there should be a specialized astronomical institute that can maintain an “official” Islamic calendar, but as Shaykh Hamza knows, one of the great disputes in fiqh on this matter is the debate between ikhtlilaf al-matali` and ittihad al-matali’, basically, whether the lunar calendar is the same in all places of the world, or differs according to one’s location on the planet.  I believe that, if the standard is naked-eye observation, we must adopt the principle of ikhtilaf al-matali’, which renders the possibility of a unified Islamic calendar impossible.  But in any case, at least for Muslims in the west, none of this is really relevant because we don’t use the hijri calendar for administrative purposes, only for religious ones, and from that perspective, having a sound basis to believe that the month has started or ended is sufficient.  (There is also another fundamental point of disagreement with respect to how to interpret the Prophetic hadith on this topic: did the Prophet (S) tell his companions either to observe the moon or to count the days because that was a ritual command, or because that was the means that was easily available to his people to calculate the month?  Shaykh Hamza’s position is that the means the Prophet (S) communicated to his companions were themselves a part of the ritual. There is certainly support for that position from the tradition, but why should we reject what seems to me an equally plausible view that it was simply the most convenient means available for them to calculate the month? After all, the Prophet (S) did not tell his companions to fast based upon the government’s declaration that the month has begun, nor did he tell them to cease fasting based upon the government’s declaration that the month has ended, but the jurists all concluded that a judge, based on competent testimony, can declare the beginning and ends of months.  It seems bizarre to then say that we can’t use astronomical calculations to determine the beginning and ends of months because they do not correspond perfectly with naked-eye observation.

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Quick Thoughts on Obergefell

Jul 07

I finally got a chance to read Obergefell.  The majority’s reliance on the due process clause and not equal protection is a bit of surprise to me (indeed, according to the Roberts’ dissent, even the Solicitor General disclaimed the due process argument), but perhaps is justified by what might be the sheer volume of litigation that would have resulted if the majority rested its decision on equal protection grounds rather than due process: had it held on equal protection without also finding a violation of due process, that would mean that each instance of a law according a benefit to an opposite-sex couple would have to be challenged from the perspective of the proper standard of constitutional review, i.e., rational basis — intermediate scrutiny — strict scrutiny.  By simply declaring that the right to marry another person, regardless of that person’s sex, is an inherent part of liberty, there is simply no need now to challenge the rationality of gender-based restrictions found throughout the law to determine whether they satisfy constitutional demands of rationality.  This clean solution to what might otherwise have been a rather large practical problem in implementing a commitment to marriage equality, however, raises problems of conceptual clarity insofar as it seems to recognize a fundamental positive liberty to marry.  I don’t know whether in the case of US constitutional law, there are any other commitments to positive liberty, but there now seems to be a conception of liberty that requires the states to recognize marriage, and since this is now an inalienable kind of liberty, states must organize laws of marriage on a basis that does not discriminate on the basis of gender.  I wonder, however, whether this positive liberty to marry also carries in its wake other positive liberties associated with families, like the right to pass on an estate to heirs?  I also doubt the majority that endorsed a positive liberty to marry is likely to find a positive liberty to economic rights, e.g., a living wage for example.  In  any case, the chance that states could exit the marriage business, as some liberals hope for, seems to be extremely implausible in light of the majority’s language describing marriage as a freedom that is a necessary condition for individuals to obtain a host of goods that are required to live a good life.  It does not seem to contemplate the possibility that a state could simply choose not to recognize the importance of these relationships — whatever called — because it is only by virtue of the public recognition of those relationships that it becomes possible to secure those other goods.  Private ordering, it seems, cannot do the same job in securing these ends, at least according to the majority’s reasoning.

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ISIS’ Appropriation of Classical Islamic International Law

May 08

Brookings’ 2015 US-Islamic World Forum invited me recently to contribute to Will McCants’ series of discussions regarding ISIS’s relationship to the Islamic tradition which he initiated in response to the now (in)famous Atlantic piece by Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants“. I wrote about ISIS’s appropriation of classical concepts such as dar al-islam and dar al-harb to justify their actions against their enemies, domestic and foreign, while ignoring over 1200 years of the concepts’ evolution, including, in the post-World War II era where leading Muslim jurists have concluded that the distinction is irrelevant in the modern world.

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The Fate of Non-Muslims in the Next Life According to 20th Century Azhari Reformist Theologians

Apr 08

I’m not quite sure who this Islam al-Buhayri fellow is, or why he has suddenly become controversial in Egypt.  His facebook page describes him modestly as a an “A Reforming [lit.: “correcting”, musahhih] Islamic Researcher.” One issue that seems to have stirred the pot is his claim that it is impossible to describe the People of the Book, i.e., Jews  and Christians, as kuffar, i.e., non-Muslims, from the perspective of the Quran.  Here is a link to a very interesting fatwa by Yusuf al-Qaradawi on this question.  Qaradawi’s basic position is that kafir — disbeliever or non-Muslim — has two meanings in Islam.  The first is a legal category, and applies to anyone who has not affirmatively embraced Islam.  The second is a theological category, and applies for purposes of reward and punishment in the next life.  In the second case, a person is only a kafir and subject to divine punishment if the person, despite subjectively recognizing the truth of Islam, refuses to become a Muslim out of obstinacy and spite. As for this life, Muslims and non-Muslims according to him are supposed to cooperate on the basis of justice, not whether they have the same belief.  This view itself grew out of a series of theological debates that took place in the Azhar in the second-half of the twentieth-century.  I have written on this debate in a paper titled, “No Salvation Outside Islam: Muslim Modernists, Democratic Politics, and Islamic Theological Exclusivism.”  That paper was one chapter in the larger book. “Between Heaven and Hell: Islam, Salvation and the Fate of Others,” edited by Mohammad Hassan Khalil.

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