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Ed Webb

Israel's Religiously Divided Society | Pew Research Center - 0 views

  • a major new survey by Pew Research Center also finds deep divisions in Israeli society – not only between Israeli Jews and the country’s Arab minority, but also among the religious subgroups that make up Israeli Jewry.
  • Nearly all Israeli Jews identify with one of four categories: Haredi (commonly translated as “ultra-Orthodox”), Dati (“religious”), Masorti (“traditional”) or Hiloni (“secular”)
  • secular Jews in Israel are more uncomfortable with the notion that a child of theirs might someday marry an ultra-Orthodox Jew than they are with the prospect of their child marrying a Christian
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  • The vast majority of secular Jews say democratic principles should take precedence over religious law, while a similarly large share of ultra-Orthodox Jews say religious law should take priority.
  • When asked, “What is your present religion, if any?” virtually all Israeli Jews say they are Jewish – and almost none say they have no religion – even though roughly half describe themselves as secular and one-in-five do not believe in God.
  • Sephardim/Mizrahim are generally more religiously observant than Ashkenazim, and men are somewhat more likely than women to say halakha should take precedence over democratic principles. But in many respects, these demographic differences are dwarfed by the major gulfs seen among the four religious subgroups that make up Israeli Jewry.
  • Most non-Jewish residents of Israel are ethnically Arab and identify, religiously, as Muslims, Christians or Druze
  • Israeli Arabs generally do not think Israel can be a Jewish state and a democracy at the same time. This view is expressed by majorities of Muslims, Christians and Druze. And overwhelmingly, all three of these groups say that if there is a conflict between Jewish law and democracy, democracy should take precedence
  • Fully 58% of Muslims favor enshrining sharia as official law for Muslims in Israel, and 55% of Christians favor making the Bible the law of the land for Christians
  • Roughly eight-in-ten Israeli Arabs (79%) say there is a lot of discrimination in Israeli society against Muslims, who are by far the biggest of the religious minorities. On this issue, Jews take the opposite view; the vast majority (74%) say they do not see much discrimination against Muslims in Israel
  • Nearly half of Israeli Jews say Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel, including roughly one-in-five Jewish adults who strongly agree with this position
  • About one-in-six Muslims say they have been questioned by security officials (17%), prevented from traveling (15%) or physically threatened or attacked (15%) because of their religion in the past 12 months, while 13% say they have suffered property damage. All told, 37% of Muslims say they have suffered at least one of these forms of discrimination because of their religious identity in the past year
  • The vast majority of Jews (98%), Muslims (85%), Christians (86%) and Druze (83%) say all or most of their close friends belong to their own religious community
  • Israeli Jews overall are more religiously observant than U.S. Jews. Politically, American Jews are more optimistic about the possibility of a peaceful two-state solution and more negative about Jewish settlements in the West Bank than are Israeli Jews
  • Israel is no longer a predominantly immigrant society; at present, roughly three-quarters of Israeli adults are natives, and just one-quarter were born abroad. Yet with virtual unanimity, Israeli Jews of every kind – native-born and immigrant, young and old, secular and highly religious – agree that all Jews everywhere should have the right to make “aliyah,” or move to Israel and receive immediate citizenship.2 This overwhelming support for Jewish immigration may be linked, in part, to perceptions about anti-Semitism. Fully three-quarters of Israeli Jews (76%) think that anti-Semitism is both common and increasing around the world, and roughly nine-in-ten (91%) say that a Jewish state is necessary for the long-term survival of the Jewish people.
  • A solid majority of Haredim (62%) favor gender segregation on public transportation, such as buses and trains, used by members of the Haredi community. Among Hilonim, meanwhile, just 5% favor this policy. The vast majority of Hilonim (93%) are opposed to enforcing gender segregation on any public transport, even when it is used by Haredim
  • The survey asked Jews whether they strongly agree, agree, disagree or strongly disagree with the statement that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.” Roughly half of Israeli Jews strongly agree (21%) or agree (27%), while a similar share disagree (29%) or strongly disagree (17%).3 Datiim are especially likely to favor the expulsion of Arabs. Roughly seven-in-ten (71%) say Arabs should be transferred. Hilonim lean in the other direction: Most (58%) disagree and say Arabs should not be expelled from Israel, including 25% who strongly disagree. But even among these self-described secular Israeli Jews, about one-third (36%) favor the expulsion of Arabs from the country
  • Seven-in-ten Haredim (70%) and roughly half of Datiim (52%) say being Jewish is mainly a matter of religion, while 3% of Haredim and 16% of Datiim say being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry and/or culture. Among Hilonim, by contrast, only 4% see being Jewish as primarily a matter of religion, while 83% say Jewish identity is mainly a matter of ancestry and/or culture. However, at least some members of all of these groups see their Jewish identity as bound up with both religion and ancestry/culture.
  • Arabs in Israel – especially Muslims – are more religiously observant than Jews as a whole. Fully two-thirds of Israeli Arabs say religion is very important in their lives, compared with just 30% of Jews. Israeli Muslims (68%), Christians (57%) and Druze (49%) all are more likely than Jews to say religion is very important to them, personally. In addition, more Arabs than Jews report that they pray daily and participate in weekly worship services.
  • Religious intermarriages cannot be performed in Israel (although civil marriages that take place in other countries are legally recognized in Israel).7 This is reflected in the rarity of marriages between members of different religious communities in the country. Nearly all Israelis in the survey who are married or living with a partner say their spouse or partner shares their religion. Relatively few married Muslim, Christian and Druze residents (1%) say their spouse has a different religion, and only 2% of married Jews say they have a spouse who belongs to a non-Jewish religion or is religiously unaffiliated.
  • Israeli Arabs are highly skeptical about the sincerity of the Israeli government in seeking a peace agreement, while Israeli Jews are equally skeptical about the sincerity of Palestinian leaders. But there is plenty of distrust to go around: Fully 40% of Israeli Jews say their own government is not making a sincere effort toward peace, and an equal share of Israeli Arabs say the same about Palestinian leaders.
  • While Muslims living in Israel, overall, are more religious than Israeli Jews, they are less religious than Muslims living in many other countries in the region. For example, about two-thirds of Muslims in Israel (68%) say religion is very important in their lives – higher than the comparable share of Lebanese Muslims (59%), but lower than the share of Muslims in Jordan (85%), the Palestinian territories (85%) and Iraq (82%) who say this.
Ed Webb

The Idea of the Muslim World and the global politics of religion - The Immanent Frame - 0 views

  • The stabilization and reification of Islam and other so-called world religions that I have remarked on in the theory and practice of international relations make The Idea of the Muslim World not only academically prescient but politically necessary. It allows us to reevaluate, and perhaps unlearn, some of the powerful yet nearly imperceptible assumptions about religion and politics that inhabit us as moderns.
  • The idea of the Muslim world enables narratives in which Islam “causes” people to do things. It allows for the depiction of Islam as the religion that is most recalcitrant and resistant to Western-style modernity, an agent that defines all aspects of life. Like other religions, only more so, the “Muslim world” requires management with white gloves, and sometimes the use of force, to prevent it from igniting into violence.
  • This narrative requires certain preconditions to take root and flourish. It needs stable entities called “religions” that are taken for granted as drivers of (peaceful or violent) forms of politics, (amenable or hostile) social relations, and (oppressive or emancipatory) legal and social systems. It is in this environment that something called “Islam” can be successfully portrayed as a “cause” of violence. It is in this environment that Ted Cruz’s preposterous assertion during the presidential campaign that “there is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror” could be a plausible statement to more than a few supporters
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  • political gestures whose cumulative effect is to create social and political worlds that are saturated with naturalized distinctions and suspicions between Muslims (and other religions/races) and others
  • The idea of the Muslim world enables the specific forms of politics and religion that structure contemporary international relations, many of which are premised on the protection of individuals and groups on the basis of religion. This is why his book is so important. If we were to take Aydın’s thesis to heart, programs to cultivate tolerant Muslims and suppress Islamic extremism that are premised on the notion of a stable “moderate” Muslim identity would be unimaginable. Instead policymakers would have to contemplate a much broader and more complex set of factors and forces
  • “Muslim” as a politically salient ethnic, religious, and/or racial identity is the product of political and religious discourse and history
  • n the 1990s, Bosnians who saw themselves as atheists before the war woke up to find themselves identified—and divided—by a newly salient religious identity
  • pan-Islamism—the idea that there is such a thing as a “Muslim world”—is a new and historically strange invention, a legacy of imperial racism
  • “the racialization of Islam was bound up with its transformation into a universal and uniform religious tradition, a force in international politics, and a distinct object in a discourse of civilizations. Political strategy and intellectual labor made this new reality, and both Muslims and European Christians took part.”
  • “Racialized Muslim subjects,” Aydın concludes in a key passage, “remained the real heart and animating force of pan-Islamism.” It is this perception of solidarity—a particular and historically contingent species of racialized colonial and postcolonial solidarity—that mattered, and that still does
Ed Webb

The perils of mixing religion and politics: the case of Turkey | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • Turkey was touted as a model of secularism in Muslim society, which could only be achieved, it was argued, top-down through state imposition. By the end of the century, however, when postmodern multiculturalism prevailed, Turkey began to be seen as an example of authoritarian secularism, intolerant of religious expression.
    • Ed Webb
       
      Not wrong, but the passives here hide who held these opinions.
  • Erdoğan’s rejection of the designation and his unconcealed intention to institute an Islamic regime throw in doubt the existence of a difference between the goals of the so-called “moderate” and “radical” Islamisms, except perhaps in terms of political method. On 28 November 2019, during the closing session of a meeting of the Religious Council of Turkey, Erdoğan clearly stated his priorities as President:“According to our faith, religion is not restricted to certain spaces and times. Islam is a set of rules and prohibitions that embrace all aspects of our lives. … We have been commanded to live as Muslims … No one can deny these tenets, because a Muslim is obligated to adapt his life to the essence of his religion and not the religion to his conditions of existence. … Even if it may be hard for us, we will place the rules of our religion at the center of our lives and not the requirements of our time.”
  • I want to question the wisdom of mixing religion and politics, as pursued by the AKP government.
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  • in foreign affairs, the government pursues a “neo-Ottomanist” policy, building on Muslim Brotherhood networks, losing allies and tending to resort to military hard power in the region instead of diplomatic soft power
  • Domestically, intervention in people’s life-styles, primarily in the form of restricting the consumption of alcohol through exorbitant taxation and a policy of limiting times and zones of alcohol sale and consumption, does not only violate citizens’ freedom of choice, but has also indirectly caused loss of lives owing to the illegal production and sale of fake drinks to evade the restrictions
  • discrimination on the basis of religious identity or degree of religiosity, including in public employment, has been rampant
  • Erdoğan’s repeated calls since 2012 to “raise pious generations” led to a radical overhaul of the entire educational infrastructure. Religious instruction began to occupy a greater part of the curriculum at all levels. More specifically, Imam-Hatip Schools, originally created in the early republican period to train preachers and prayer leaders employed by the Directorate of Religious Affairs (DRA), began to turn into a mainstream venue for secondary education for both boys and girls.
  • The total number of Imam-Hatip middle and high schools (the former had been previously closed but then reopened by the AKP government in 2012) went from 2215 (in 2013-2014) to 5017 (in 2018-2019), housing over one million pupils.
  • the success rate of Imam-Hatip graduates in university entrance exams is the lowest among all types of high schools
  • Nearly half of the 200+ (public and private) universities in Turkey have faculties of theology, the majority of which opened since 2010, and currently enroll more than 100,000 students, 60 percent of which are women. Moreover, the recent trend in the appointment of university rectors by President Erdoğan has been in favor of those with Islamic theology backgrounds.
  • A pamphlet prepared by the DRA and distributed free of charge in early 2019 expounds the inverse relationship between secular education and religiosity, and suggests that higher levels of education encourage “individualism and freedom” and discourage “belief and worship.”
  • The threat that “secular education” poses to the government is not illusory. There is indeed an inverse relationship between the level of education and the level of religiosity, and, likewise, the electoral support for the AKP is in an inverse relationship with the level of education, but in direct correlation with the level of religiosity.
  • Those youths from the secularist upper and middle classes, whose families could afford to send them abroad for better education, have begun to leave the country. Those youths from the conservative lower classes, whose families have been the power base of the AKP, may be unable to leave but they have begun to turn away from religion. Reports indicate a decline in religiosity and rise in deism and atheism, alarming the AKP government and its religious establishment. It appears that mixing religion with politics does not even serve religious purposes. Politics needs to be kept free of religion.
  • After 9/11, Turkey was flaunted again, this time as a model of “moderate Islam,” an alternative to the presumably dangerous “radical” version
Ed Webb

Recent insights on the role of religion in economic history | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal - 0 views

  • The study of religion in economic history covers two broad areas of investigation. The first area is which (economic) factors cause religious adoption, religiosity, and religious change. The second area is which consequences religion exerts on economic development, seeking the ‘deep roots’ of larger economic differences between regions and religious communities.
  • the monotheistic character of the main Abrahamic religions facilitated a close historical interconnection of religion with political power and conflict
  • human capital often played a leading role in the interconnection between religion and economic history
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  • the recent literature has produced ample evidence that socioeconomic factors matter in the historical development of religions
  • In addition to human capital, the Reformation has been shown to have affected secularisation, political change, technology diffusion, and social outcomes
  • recent works on missionaries show that early access to Christian missions still has educational, political, and economic consequences in present-day sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America
  • Various works have shown how the presence of Islam in law and politics has affected economic outcomes such as corporate development, usury restrictions, conflict, finance, and human capital development
  • Maybe the most challenging direction for future research is to dig deeper into the link between economics and religiosity rather than religious affiliation – what people think and feel and which specific beliefs they do and do not adhere to. Measuring religiosity and beliefs is demanding in contemporary work, and it is even harder in the historical context where the option of fielding a survey is no longer viable
  • While recent work has clearly shown that religion has played an important role in economic history, there remains ample room, not least for multidisciplinary approaches, to advance our understanding of how religious thoughts and activities changed people’s economic lives over the course of history.
Ed Webb

What is the 'proper' place of religion? | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • In its more insistently assertive form, the line drawn in the name of secularism is sharp and one which squeezes out religion from the public sphere, reducing and limiting it to a matter of private, individual conscience. An example of this is the assertive sense of laïcité found in France, where there are bans on religious clothing in public schools (especially focussed on the Islamic headscarf) and face covering in public spaces (targeting burqas and niqabs); ‘burkinis’ have also been banned in some areas, and a recent controversy has erupted in relation to Muslim women wearing headscarves when accompanying children on school trips.
  • Other secularisms, such as the forms of moderate secularism of most of the rest of Western Europe, draw a softer line and are more tolerant of religion’s public presence. In many ways religion is not only permitted but also encouraged in the public sphere. This is often through state-religion connections where religious organisations play a significant role in welfare provision in partnership with the state
  • We might say that the secular state in this sense is interested in religion as far as it can serve the state’s purposes, providing services for its citizens that it is unable or unwilling to provide itself. It is not, however, interested in the religious reasons and motivations orienting these groups, and a deeper engagement at this level is either not sought or perhaps deliberately avoided.
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  • at a time when multiculturalism has brought issues of religion and politics back to the foreground, religious literacy is lacking
  • such arrangements may serve to contain the critical voice and positive role religious faiths can play in the public sphere precisely because of their religious orientation, in challenging such things as the misuse of power or excesses of capitalism, for instance, and how this role might contribute towards developing a more equal society
  • a religiously literate secularity is a benefit to everyone
  • such literacy improves rather than detracts from the ability to engage with religion when its societal impact might be negative. A will to understand is surely more powerful here than a will to ignorance. The presence of religious reasons, language and motivations in the public sphere provides a deeper engagement with them, which both enables better understanding between co-citizens of different faiths, denominations and none, as well as a more literate way of challenging them where that is necessary and where it is part of a healthy democratic engagement.
Ed Webb

The 'Judeo-Christian Tradition' Is Over - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The “Judeo-Christian tradition” was one of 20th-century America’s greatest political inventions. An ecumenical marketing meme for combatting godless communism, the catchphrase long did the work of animating American conservatives in the Cold War battle. For a brief time, canny liberals also embraced the phrase as a rhetorical pathway of inclusion into postwar American democracy for Jews, Catholics, and Black Americans. In a world divided by totalitarianism abroad and racial segregation at home, the notion of a shared American religious heritage promised racial healing and national unity.
  • the “Judeo-Christian tradition” excluded not only Muslims, Native Americans, and other non-Western religious communities, but also atheists and secularists of all persuasions. American Jews themselves were reluctant adopters.
  • Although the Jewish and Christian traditions stretch back side by side to antiquity, the phrase Judeo-Christian is a remarkably recent creation. In Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy, the historian K. Healan Gaston marshals an impressive array of sources to provide us with an account of the modern genesis of Judeo-Christian and its growing status as a “linguistic battlefield” on which conservatives and liberals proffered competing notions of America and its place in the world from the 1930s to the present.
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  • Even as legal barriers for non-Christians slowly fell state by state in the 19th century, Christian Americans hardly viewed their country, much less Western civilization, as embodying a tradition shared equally by Jews and Christians. During the Civil War and early Reconstruction years, Congress repeatedly considered a constitutional amendment to declare the United States a “Christian nation” under the ultimate sovereignty of the “Lord Jesus Christ.”
  • much of the American Christian response to Nazism, which focused less on the concrete anti-Semitic threat to Europe’s Jews than the spiritual and political danger Nazism posed to Western religion as a whole.
  • King’s lofty invocation of “our Judeo-Christian tradition” in the name of civil rights marked the high point of the phrase for American liberals. Even at that time, King’s 1960s Jewish civil-rights allies pushed hard to separate Church and state through a series of landmark Supreme Court cases. Privileging religion would not end well for American Jews and other religious minorities, they argued. True religious freedom required separation of government from faith
  • Yet it was not quite true that America didn’t particularly care which religion its people chose. Conservatives interpreted the same idiom in narrower, exceptionalist terms to argue that only Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism could inoculate American society from the dangerous viruses of Marxist secularism and excessive pluralism
  • In 1954, for instance, the Protestant pastor George Docherty persuaded President Dwight Eisenhower to officially add the words under God to the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God we trust” to American currency as part of a “theological war”
  • Remarkably, Eisenhower was one of the first to flag the problematic nature of Judeo-Christian. Despite Eisenhower’s promotion of God language in American governance, including the inauguration of the National Prayer Breakfast, Gaston observes, he seldom used the specific phrase Judeo-Christian. Eisenhower seems to have been less concerned with its repercussions for America’s Jews or others than with the way it would be received by a global audience. In a fascinating letter written in 1954, Ike cautions his brother on his use of the phrase: You speak of the ‘Judaic-Christian heritage.’ I would suggest that you use a term on the order of ‘religious heritage’—this is for the reason that we should find some way of including the vast numbers of people who hold to the Islamic and Buddhist religions when we compare the religious world against the Communist world. I think you could still point out the debt we all owe to the ancients of Judea and Greece for the introduction of new ideas.
  • What mattered most in the Cold War, and in a rapidly changing America, was making a common commitment to faith. “America prescribes religion: but it does not care which one,” wrote the sociologist Nathan Glazer in 1955. Postwar America had developed its own “religion of religion,” marked by a striking ecumenical spirit.
  • As liberals retired the term, conservatives doubled down on it. The phrase appears with regularity in rhetorical attacks on Islam and the progressive left, in attempts to restrict immigration and LGBTQ rights, and in arguments in favor of religious freedom that would collapse the wall of separation between Church and state.
  • the catchphrase has failed to shed its Christian religious residue
  • An authentically American human-rights vision cannot rest upon a flawed historical reading of how our country first came to imagine rights
Ed Webb

Jordan's Baha'is struggle for basic civil rights - 0 views

  • in Irbid, Niaz Ruhani and his wife, Wissam al-Masjoun, pray at home, like all other Baha’is in Jordan. They have no temples or religious courts or education classes because Jordan does not officially recognize the Baha’i faith as a religion. The Baha'is arrived in Jordan in the late 19th century from Iran, where the religion originated. A few families, mostly agricultural workers, settled in the Adassiya region, in the Jordan Valley. Their descendants currently number an estimated 1,000 in the kingdom, according to Ruhani, a senior member of the community
  • Jordan's Baha’i community, like most Baha’is in the Middle East, lament that they do not enjoy full civil rights because authorities refuse to officially recognize their religion. Jordan only recognizes Islam, Christianity and Judaism. As a result, Baha’is face difficulties registering marriages and divorces, settling inheritances, establishing places of worship and receiving religious education through schools
  • “Since Baha'ism is not recognized as a religion, a Baha’i marriage is not fully registered by the Jordanian Civil Status and Passport Department,” said Wissam al-Masjoun, who is a lawyer. “The state gives us a family book, but it does not record the date of marriage.”
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  • Because there is no Baha’i court, Baha’is are sent to Islamic courts to sort inheritance issues, but Baha’i tradition on inheritance is different from Islam. For example, under Islamic law, a daughter is entitled to only half the inheritance a son is guaranteed, but in Baha’ism, the will of the deceased determines who gets what. Given all this, Baha’is try to settle issues of inheritance among themselves, or they approach a civil court to sort out matters.
  • she has never felt the need to hide that she is Baha'i, a tiny minority in a country that is 97% Sunni Muslim
  • Article 6 of the Jordanian Constitution states that Jordanians shall be equal before the law and that there should be no discrimination among them in regard to their rights and duties on the basis of race, language or religion,” she told Al-Monitor. “However, Baha'is face problems when it comes to the implementation of this article. Article 14 provides that the state shall safeguard the free exercise of all forms of worship and religious rites, but this article is limited only to the recognized religions in the kingdom.”
Ed Webb

Marxism and Islam in Africa - Africa is a Country - 0 views

  • reconstitution of the history of philosophy as a[n] exclusively European affair was really a fabrication of 19th century philosophy
  • There was quite a significant tradition of Maoists in Senegal. The events of 1968 were very important in Senegal, so my generation came after that. We were not veterans of 1968, we were too young to participate; but we sort of lived the consequences of 1968. So my heroes were the students who led the strikes, the movement
  • it is true that the Marxist left was not very keen on even African philosophy. The critique of ethno-philosophy was coming from the left and their idea was that this was not true philosophy, looking at African conceptions, religious conception, and so on; because the idea of philosophy was really about philosophy being class struggle in theory. Paulin Hountondji, who is a main philosopher against ethno-philosophy, says as much: “ok, what Tempels did and followers of Tempels wrote was not truly philosophy.” He was very Althusserian saying that. So, my interest in Senghor’s thought was already a break from that that position coming from orthodox Marxism about what philosophy is and what philosophy should be. The weapons of criticism would be what philosophy is about, and not this exploration of African philosophy let alone Islamic philosophy because that was idealism, was religion, spirituality and not philosophy at all. You can find that kind of very strong position in Cameroonian philosopher Marcien Towa, who is the ultimate orthodox Marxist; who thinks that anything having to do with religion cannot be philosophy. You had this very narrow understanding of philosophy as following Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. Philosophers have until now interpreted the world, the point is to transform it. So everything in philosophy that leads to that transformation is real, “true philosophy.” So, we all had that conception at one point and I, having started working in the field in which I was working, had departed from that. And when it comes to religion, even when I considered myself a Maoist, a Marxist, I have never actually been materialist in the sense of being atheist. Islam has always been somehow my interiority, coming from the background that I did. I’ve never departed from religion at all.
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  • Senghor thought that the early Marx was really a Marx that spoke to a Catholic like him, being a Socialist; and alienation having this precise meaning, about estrangement – where human feeling is estranged from his own humanity, from his fellow humans and from his own work. “Work” is sucking his blood instead of being the fullest expression of his humanity. That way of thinking in Marx was something that spoke to a spiritual man such as Senghor and it explains, why in the French tradition – and, I believe, in the European tradition in general of Christians, for leftist Christians – that Marx also was important. It is interesting to see how many priests on the left in France had written on Marxist humanism, following the rediscovery of those early writings of Marx that spoke to them more than Capital would speak to them. Senghor belonged to that tradition. He wrote a very important essay entitled “Marxism and Humanism” in 1948 after World War Two
  • he considered that this was a criticism that should be made against a kind of petrified religion that had forgotten the social message of religion. So that Marx could be used by people who felt that they were fighting for social justice, and at the same time were deeply religious. Something akin to Liberation Theology; Senghor might not have really used the expression, but he was very much in that movement of Liberation Theology.
Ed Webb

God and the Ivory Tower- By Scott Atran | Foreign Policy - 0 views

  • On a global scale, Protestant evangelical churches (together with Pentacostalists) continue to proliferate, especially in Latin America, but also keep pace with the expansion of fundamentalist Islam in southern Africa and eastern and southern Asia. In Russia, a clear majority of the population remains religious despite decades of forcibly imposed atheism. Even in China, where the government's commission on atheism has the Sisyphean job of making that country religion-free, religious agitation is on the rise. And in the United States, a majority says it wants less religion in politics, but an equal majority still will not vote for an atheist as president.
  • for nearly a century after Harvard University psychologist William James's 1902 masterwork, The Varieties of Religious Experience, there was little serious investigation of the psychological structure or neurological and biological underpinnings of religious belief that determine how religion actually causes behavior
  • the greater the investment in outlandishness, the better. This is because adherence to apparently absurd beliefs means incurring costs -- surviving without electricity, for example, if you are Amish -- which help identify members who are committed to the survival of a group and cannot be lured away. The ease of identifying true believers, in turn, builds trust and galvanizes group solidarity for common defense
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  • recent research echoes the findings of 14th-century historian Ibn Khaldun, who argued that long-term differences among North African Muslim dynasties with comparable military might "have their origin in religion … [and] group feeling [wherein] mutual cooperation and support flourish." The more religious societies, he argued, endured the longest
  • the same logic that makes religious and sacred beliefs more likely to endure can make them impervious to compromise. Based on interviews, experiments, and surveys with Palestinians, Israelis, Indonesians, Indians, Afghans, and Iranians, my research with psychologists Jeremy Ginges, Douglas Medin, and others demonstrates that offering people material incentives (large amounts of money, guarantees for a life free of political violence) to compromise sacred values can backfire, increasing stated willingness to use violence. Such backfire effects occur both for convictions with clear religious investment (Jerusalem, sharia law) and for those that are at least initially nonreligious (Iran's right to a nuclear capability, Palestinian refugees' right of return).
  • Although this sacralization of initially secular issues confounds standard "business-like" negotiation tactics, my work with political scientist Robert Axelrod interviewing political leaders in the Middle East and elsewhere indicates that strong symbolic gestures (sincere apologies, demonstrating respect for the other's values) generate surprising flexibility, even among militants, and may enable subsequent material negotiations. Thus, we find that Palestinian leaders and their supporting populations are generally willing to accept Israeli offers of economic improvement only after issues of recognition are addressed. Even purely symbolic statements accompanied by no material action, such as "we recognize your suffering" or "we respect your rights in Jerusalem," diminish support for violence, including suicide terrorism. This is particularly promising because symbolic gestures tied to religious notions that are open to interpretation might potentially be reframed without compromising their absolute "truth."
  • seemingly contrary evidence rarely undermines religious belief, especially among groups welded by ritualized sacrifice in the face of outside threats
  • Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history; only 123 (7 percent) were religious. A BBC-sponsored "God and War" audit, which evaluated major conflicts over 3,500 years and rated them on a 0-to-5 scale for religious motivation (Punic Wars = 0, Crusades = 5), found that more than 60 percent had no religious motivation. Less than 7 percent earned a rating greater than 3. There was little religious motivation for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts or the world wars responsible for history's most lethal century of international bloodshed.
  • studies by behavioral economist Joseph Henrich and colleagues on contemporary foragers, farmers, and herders show that professing a world religion is correlated with greater fairness toward passing strangers. This research helps explain what's going on in sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam is spreading rapidly. In Rwanda, for example, people began converting to Islam in droves after Muslims systematically risked their lives to protect Christians and animists from genocide when few others cared.
  • When competing interests are framed in terms of religious and sacred values, conflict may persist for decades, even centuries. Disputes over otherwise mundane phenomena then become existential struggles, as when land becomes "Holy Land." Secular issues become sacralized and nonnegotiable, regardless of material rewards or punishments. In a multiyear study, our research group found that Palestinian adolescents who perceived strong threats to their communities and were highly involved in religious ritual were most likely to see political issues, like the right of refugees to return to homes in Israel, as absolute moral imperatives. These individuals were thus opposed to compromise, regardless of the costs. It turns out there may be a neurological component to such behavior: Our work with Gregory Berns and his neuroeconomics team suggests that such values are processed in the brain as duties rather than utilitarian calculations; neuroimaging reveals that violations of sacred values trigger emotional responses consistent with sentiments of moral outrage.
  • research in India, Mexico, Britain, Russia, and Indonesia indicates that greater participation in religious ritual in large-scale societies is associated with greater parochial altruism -- that is, willingness to sacrifice for one's own group, such as Muslims or Christians, but not for outsiders -- and, in relevant contexts, support for suicide attacks. This dynamic is behind the paradoxical reality that the world finds itself in today: Modern global multiculturalism is increasingly challenged by fundamentalist movements aimed at reviving group loyalty through greater ritual commitments to ideological purity
Ed Webb

Turkey: An Ambivalent Religious Soft Power - 0 views

  • Albania is not the first country to realize that the mosques built with Turkey’s money and other services were also used for political purposes to promote Erdoğan's sociopolitical and religious desires. For instance, in June 2018, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz ordered the closing of seven mosques run by the Diyanet and deported more than 40 Turkish imams and their families in consequence of their political activities under the cover of religion
  • Germany launched an investigation into the Diyanet to explore the possibility that some Turkish imams have spied on members of the Gülen Movement among the diaspora
  • surveillance activities conducted by imams within the territory of foreign states cannot be defined within the concept of religious soft power, which fundamentally means the promotion of religion for a country’s foreign policy purposes. However, these investigations underline that the Diyanet imams are not alone; on the contrary, they have been working with Turkey’s other transnational apparatuses, which have been seen as soft power tools of Turkey in host countries
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  • Since coining the term in the late 1980s, Joseph S. Nye Jr. has modified the concept of soft power multiple times, but he has not explicitly theorized religion as a form of soft power
  • Jeffrey Haynes, as one of the first scholars to talk about the relation between religion and soft power, noted that religious soft power involves encouraging actors to change their political behaviors
  • Starting from the late 1940s, within the multi-party system, political parties have realized that religious rhetoric could be transformed into votes; therefore, both right-wing and centrist political parties tried to enlarge the real authority of the Diyanet to reach religiously sensitive masses of people. After the re-establishment of the democratic order annihilated by the 1960 coup d’état, the Diyanet gained prominence because the state employed it in its struggle against communism. 
  • After the 1980 coup d’état, the Diyanet’s mission included the promotion of Turkish Islam abroad, and it began to play a sociopolitical role in the international arena with the aim of promoting Turkey. Thus, Turkey’s Diyanet and Turkish moderate Islam have been actively instrumentalized in Turkish foreign policy as a soft power tool, providing an advantage over other potential actors since they have been seen as a preventive force against some of the radical Islamist movements and ideologies.
  • With its ascendant economy, domestic reforms aimed at the EU accession process, and a global climate proposing the compatibility of Islam and democracy, Turkey rose as a soft power with religious tools at its disposal. In this, Turkey has become publicly almost more visible than the other Islamic soft power actors in continental Europe, in the Balkans, and in some particular countries like Somalia.
  • opened branches in more than 40 countries, publishing and distributing Qur'ans and religious books in more than 25 languages. It also provides financial support to official Muslim representative institutions in the Balkans, continental Europe, and Africa. Furthermore, the state-run construction companies TOKİ and TİKA have been constructing mosques around the world
  • process of democratic backsliding has manifested through both domestic politics and significant changes in foreign policy, and the increasingly acrimonious rivalry between the Gülen Movement and the AKP has negatively affected Turkey’s capacity to wield effective soft power. In this transformation the AKP has started to instrumentalize Islam quite differently compared to the previous periods of Turkish attempts to exert influence in the Middle East and North Africa, the Balkans, and beyond. Notably, the Diyanet’s policies have been synchronized with the policies of the AKP, and its budget, administrative capacity, and activities have been gradually expanding throughout these years despite the shrinking economic environment within which the AKP operates. Over time, the Diyanet of the now increasingly repressive and less moderate AKP has started to be perceived differently by various countries and groups around the world
  • these religious soft power apparatuses have started to involve themselves in the host countries’ domestic politics, as in the case of Bulgaria, due to Erdoğan’s new foreign policy mentality
  • Turkey’s religious soft power is best characterized in terms of ambivalence—particularly given the increasingly competitive market of Islamic soft power
Ed Webb

Reinforcing Laïcité? Loi Confortant le Respect des Principes de la République - 0 views

  • The 1905 debates, rich in passion and reasoning, are replaced today by pragmatism and politicians substituting for public intellectuals. Jean Baubérot points out the factual errors and serious misinterpretations made by Minister Delegate for Citizenship Marlène Schiappa in her book, Laïcité, point! Shortened deliberation, substituting intellectuals with politicians, factual errors: it looks nothing short of the neoliberal age of France.
  • Ghettoization was undermining vivre ensemble, the expression that has become the key to laïcité and integration. The president explained, “we can have communities in the French Republic...these belongings should never be considered as subtractions from the Republic.” With separatism, he was referring to the abuse of religion for “building a project of separation from the Republic.” 
  • A focus on “public neutrality” as the principle of laïcité under challenge overshadows the fact that it is a process of privatization of state enterprises, which changes the boundaries of the public and gives rise to a “problem of neutrality.”
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  • Privatization is a bigger challenge to the French republican and laic traditions, since both are built upon a strong state. When Macron not only shrinks state infrastructure but also invests in the police forces, the neoliberal background to this particular reemergence of the question of laïcité becomes even more visible.
  • A republic of values and “civility” is empowered over a republic of rights, procedures, and socializations as the state shrinks its infrastructure, and expands with values and security into associational life
  • The Republic has every right to control international influence in religion in terms of finance and personnel; however, when it plays the age-old game of state-encouraged soft religion as a solution to hard religion, it relinquishes the thesis that religions are “the rocks of ages” and sticky
  • Macron carefully refused the option of concordat with Islam after having pronounced the term in 2018, but he insisted on “the structuration of French Islam.” Instead of only investing in the laic socialization mechanisms of the Republic and guarding their boundaries, he inserts the state into the process of community-building, which risks opening the paths to communitarianism by the very hands of the state
  • Another development casting unfavorable light on the Macron line is the discontinuation of the Observatory of Laïcité. The observatory was performing a slow pace strengthening, repairing, and reproducing laïcité at the public and social levels. The government’s intolerance in the face of its disagreements with the observatory over the law and its single-handed reaction to close the observatory sadly mark an anti-intellectualism, a disinclination for deliberation and a particular approach to institutions as governmental mouthpieces
  • Adding law to law for reinforcing values marks a use of law beyond its democratic capacity
Ed Webb

Muslim fundamentalism in Europe… So what? - 0 views

  • The most striking finding, going against decades of received wisdom, is that young Muslims are as fundamentalist as older Muslims. This is particularly surprising because, unlike the old Muslims, who are the original ‘guest workers’ who immigrated from Morocco and Turkey, the vast majority of young Muslims are born and raised in Western Europe. This finding goes against the received wisdom that ‘immigrants’ have assimilated by the third generation; a process that used to hold up for most of the 20th century, but seems to have changed in the current interconnected world. That said, recent research on French immigrants showed that the fourth generation (which they call ‘2.5 generation’) is much more integrated than the third.
  • The most problematic part of the report is the, undoubtedly unintentional but nevertheless unfortunate, distinction between “Muslim immigrants” and “Christian natives.” As said, today most Muslims are not ‘immigrants’ but ‘natives,’ who were born and raised in the particular West European country. Moreover, many (non-Muslim) natives are not Christians. In fact, this is the only questionable part of the data of the survey: 70 percent of the ‘native respondents’ indicated that they were Christians. That seems an incredibly high proportion for a largely secular region. While numbers differ widely, mostly according to how it is measured, a comparative Ipsos-MORI survey of 2011 found much lower percentages. Using the inclusive question “What, if any, is your faith or religion even if you are not currently practising?,” they found that 49 percent of Belgians, 45 percent of the French, 50 percent of the Germans and just 35 percent of the Swedes mentioned Christianity. In the Netherlands, which wasn’t included in the study, the percentage is 44. While a more accurate representation of Christian ‘natives’ would probably narrow the gap with the Muslim ‘immigrants,’ it wouldn’t change the (much more) widespread fundamentalism among Muslims.
  • Not surprisingly, the media focuses almost exclusively on the Muslim exceptionalism aspect, which is the dominant media frame in reports on Islam and Muslims. The main difference is how strong the findings are reported. For example, whereas the German version of The Huffington Post headlines “Are the Rules of Islam More Important Than the German Laws?”, the conservative German newspaper Die Welt titles “Muslims: Religion is More Important than Law.” Only a few media reports ask questions about the findings; most notably, the Dutch (Protestant) newspaper Trouw headlines “Survey Proves That Many Muslims Are Fundis. Or Not?,” interviewing Arabist Jan Jaap de Ruiter, who questions the equivalence of the statements across religions. For instance, he argues that religious laws are much more important for Muslims than for Christians, because they are very different (“The Sharia is really something completely different than, say, the Ten Commandments”).
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  • Most media only report Koopmans’s warning against the intolerance of Muslim fundamentalism. However, in a very nuanced conclusion, he also stresses that religious fundamentalism should not be equated with support for, or even engagement in, religiously motivated violence, and emphasizes that Muslims constitute only a small minority of West European societies. Hence, “the large majority of homophobes and anti-semites are still natives.”
Ed Webb

The Tangled Politics of America's Woke Liberals and Muslim Millennials | Newlines Magazine - 0 views

  • Across the Western world, it is liberal politicians and activists who back Muslim groups and support Muslim community issues.Indeed, Islamophobia, surveillance, and the securitization of Muslim communities has firmly become an issue of the political left, which sees parallels between the experience of ethnic minorities such as African Americans and Muslim communities. There’s an international aspect to it, of course, as evidenced by the “Muslim ban,” which is why liberals have taken a leading role opposing the Iraq War and supporting the Palestinian cause.
  • The left has historically been opposed to organized religion, believing its conservatism entrenches and justifies inequality and its communalism is a threat to individual liberty.On that basis, one could expect that liberals would oppose religious identity. And indeed, they seem to do so when the groups espousing faith are part of the dominant power structure, or, to say it starkly, when those talking about religion are white men. The faith of brown men and Black women is less of an issue.
  • a hierarchy of liberal values, which sees undoing structural inequality and injustice today as a more vital political task than creating a liberal society tomorrow
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  • For reformers, an ideal society would not necessarily be liberal in the sense Western liberals understand it — such as holding liberal social values, being accepting of abortion and homosexuality, for example — but would instead be politically liberal, meaning it would allow minority faiths to both practice and — and this is the crucial bit — express their religious faith in public. That’s a critical distinction that liberals have yet to grapple with.
  • Western European liberals have forgotten how to grapple with faith, so religion has been comprehensively pushed to the margins of public life
  • the idea of groups coming together, which may have differing views about how a future society should be organized, is the basis of politics itself
  • The broad coalition of ideologies that make up the left today have different conceptions of what an idealized society would look like. Yet they agree on the political task of removing structural inequality and injustice today.
  • While there are certainly questions about this alliance between liberals and faithful Muslims, and some on each side eye each other warily, I don’t share the belief that there is anything unusual or uniquely challenging about this political alliance. For one thing, the rising progressive wing of the liberal movement — the one so often derided as “woke,” as if that were a bad thing — has more in common with Muslim millennials than the previous political generation
  • A rising generation of liberals now looks at social institutions as the problem. They look at the way hierarchies are constructed — in society, at work, even in relationships — and believe the structures themselves are the problem. The same with schools, banks, the police, and so on. The value systems within these structures are the problem, not the people within them who are incentivized to uphold these values.That analysis chimes with a changing Muslim political community, too. For Muslim millennials, integration is not the overarching political ambition that it was for a previous political generation. The current political generation of Muslims in the West applies a structural analysis of what is wrong with the world. This is where the overlap occurs. The two groups look at the structures of power and see clear links between the historical crimes of slavery and colonialism, as well as the hierarchies of race, gender, and faith, and the situations in the West and the Muslim world today.
  • Progressive liberals are upending some of the distinctions long thought to be immovable. As that movement shifts from analyzing hierarchies in society, work, and relationships to hierarchies in politics, some of the questions that were taken for granted will be upended.One of those questions will be about the role of faith in public life, or, to say it more specifically, what exactly counts as the display of faith in public life. As religion shifts from being something about the afterlife to being something about culture in this earthly life, there will be a shift in what counts as the display of faith in public life.
Ed Webb

Liberman's secular campaign turns him into kingmaker - 0 views

  • A little over 173,000 people voted for Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party in April, giving it five Knesset seats. In September, the number of people who voted for the party shot up to 310,000. So, after just 3½ months of campaigning, it gained 137,000 new voters and grew to eight seats. These eight seats make it impossible for either bloc — right or left — to form a narrow majority government. That's why, on Oct. 3, the very day that the new Knesset was sworn in, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initiated a meeting with Liberman. He wanted to convince the Yisrael Beitenu leader to join the new government that he was trying to form
  • It seems like Liberman succeeded in selling voters on his formula for change, specifically in matters of religion and state. That is something that most people support, particularly in the political center. What Liberman also offered them was a realistic way to make it happen. He proposed bringing two main parties — the Likud and Blue and White — together, given that there are so few ideological differences between them. Doing this would seem to be the most natural thing in the world. The problem is that the Blue and White party rejects Netanyahu, because of his pending criminal cases, while the Likud insists on bringing its right-wing, ultra-Orthodox bloc along with it.
  • Liberman called for a change to the status quo on matters of religion and state and laid out a path to achieve this, i.e., a unity government without the ultra-Orthodox or the ultra-Orthodox nationalists.
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  • He wants to see a new government made up of the Likud, Blue and White, and his Yisrael Beitenu party only, thereby forcing Netanyahu to sever his sacred alliance with the ultra-Orthodox. In this way, Liberman could advance the changes that he promised. When, about two weeks before the election, the Blue and White party realized that Liberman is stealing many of their votes because of this position, they also started talking about a secular, liberal government. Liberman now claims that this was why he did not have an even bigger victory.
  • most of the party’s new voters supported it because it established itself in their minds as a kind of middle ground with a message of unity, and as a party capable of solving problems of religion and state, such as public transportation on the Sabbath, conversion, the Conscription Law,
  • the second generation of immigrants, who came here when they were very young or who were actually born in Israel, are now suffering because of the Chief Rabbinate, which is forcing them to prove that they are Jewish in order to get married. This is especially insulting to them, given that they fought so hard to preserve their Jewish identities under the Soviet regime.
  • One possible explanation for this movement of voters from the Likud to Yisrael Beitenu could be the characteristics of many such voters — people who immigrated to Israel from Russian-speaking countries, or people whose parents did. In the past, these people voted for the Likud, because their politics traditionally veer (nationalistic) right, but in this election, they internalized Yisrael Beitenu’s campaign message concerning religion and state. Liberman’s focus on these issues is particularly dear to them. The fact that they have to prove to the Rabbinate that they are really Jews before they can get married seems to have clinched the deal.
  • One other group where Liberman was successful was the Druze sector. According to the Globes analysis, Yisrael Beitenu received 10,000 votes from the Druze sector, compared to just 6,000 in April. What is remarkable is that Yisrael Beitenu won these votes even though it supported the Nationality Law, which infuriated Israel’s Druze community. Hamad Amar, a Druze Knesset member for Yisrael Beitenu, told Al-Monitor that these Druze voters were very impressed by the way Liberman stuck to his principles in last May’s coalition negotiations. “They recognized that Liberman sticks to his word and that he is reliable. That is the most important thing for us.”
Ed Webb

Nothing Sacred: These Apps Reserve The Right To Sell Your Prayers - 0 views

  • Pray.com collects data about its users in multiple ways. According to its privacy policy, the company records detailed information about users, including their physical location, the links they click on, and the text of the posts they make. Then, it supplements that information with data from “third-parties such as data analytics providers and data brokers,” which can include “your gender, age, religious affiliation, ethnicity, marital status, household size and income, political party affiliation and interests... geographic location, and Personal Information.” The policy also says Pray.com shares users’ personal information, including identifiers that link their activity to specific devices, with “third parties” for “commercial purposes.”
  • Prior to an inquiry from BuzzFeed News, the policy made no mention of the company purchasing files about its users from data brokers. Pray.com added the language on Dec. 22, 2021, following the inquiry.
  • an audit of Pray.com by privacy researcher Zach Edwards showed that the app shares granular data about the content its users consume with several other companies, including Facebook. According to Edwards, this means users could be targeted with ads on Facebook based on the content they engage with on Pray.com — including content modules with titles like “Better Marriage,” “Abundant Finance,” and “Releasing Anger.”
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  • As people have turned to religious apps as a replacement for in-person church services amid COVID-19, Silicon Valley investors have seized on them as an opportunity to commercialize a set of conversations that have historically been among the most private: those with God.
  • Venture capitalist Katherine Boyle put it bluntly in a 2020 Washington Post op-ed: “A holy trinity is in place: isolated people hungry for attachment, religions desperate for growth in an online world, and technology investors searching for the consumer niches yet to digitize.”
  • A new Catholic app called Hallow, which offers devotional content with titles like “Overcoming Hopelessness,” announced in November that it had closed a $40 million Series B fundraising round. In December, a similar app called Glorify also raised $40 million. These apps, which also collect extensive information about their users, are backed by some of Silicon Valley’s best-known prospectors: Greylock Partners (Pray.com), Andreessen Horowitz (Glorify), and Peter Thiel (Hallow). Greylock, Andreessen, and Thiel are also all known for their investments in Facebook, which recently ramped up its own prayer offerings by rolling out a new tool called “prayer posts.”
  • Adults aren't the only ones caught up in Pray.com's dragnet. Some of the profiles on Pray.com appear to represent underage users. The app features a “Kids Stories” section, and BuzzFeed News found numerous Pray.com profiles for younger teens. One profile that claimed to be a 12-year-old expressed suicidal thoughts in a prayer post that was visible to anyone in a nearly 100,000-user group. In response to questions about underage users on the app, including the 12-year-old user, Shortridge confirmed that Pray.com “does not knowingly allow anyone under 16 to sign-up” for the app, but wrote that “age gating would not be relevant for our site.” The account belonging to the 12-year-old was removed from the platform after BuzzFeed News provided screenshots of it to Pray.com.
  • In 2018, Pray.com founder Steve Gatena portrayed Pray.com in intimate terms: “While other social networks might serve as a public place for your professional identity or your social identity, prayer is more traditionally a deeply private experience.” But 10 million downloads after its launch, much of the app is public — Katie’s, Sarah’s, and Jenny’s prayers and interactions with other users are visible to anyone who joins their nearly 100,000-person public group.
  • users should anticipate that at any moment, online advertising could be easily integrated into these websites, and the data they currently are collecting could be used to optimize new advertising systems
  • Bible Gateway, one of the largest devotional apps on the market, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, has been making money by sharing its users’ information for years. It began, like Pray.com, as both a free and ad-free experience, but eventually introduced targeted ads to cover its costs. Since 2017, the app has fed data about the nearly 8 million people who have downloaded its app into an ad targeting system called NewsIQ, which infers interests about users based on their behavior across News Corporation apps and websites. NewsIQ claims it can “capture the preferences, opinions and emotions” of users for advertisers to exploit.
  • Founded without a business model, Instapray quickly found traction with users and investment from Peter Thiel. But it was then sold — along with its users’ data — to Salem Media Group, a conservative-aligned conglomerate of talk radio stations and political websites. After the acquisition, Salem shut Instapray down. It did not respond to questions from BuzzFeed News about how it uses Instapray users’ data.
  • Religion scholars noted that the most spiritually important conversations may not always be the most commercially viable ones, and that companies’ desire to capture users’ attention might narrow the themes explored in their devotional practice. Privacy experts worried the apps could be manipulated by interest groups like anti-vaccine activists and political parties. Instapray, which initially marketed itself to religious political constituencies, later faced criticism for hosting “political statements disguised as prayer.” At least one government has taken an interest in prayer app data, too — the US military bought extensive location data mined from Muslim prayer apps back in 2020 for use in special forces operations.
  • In 2020, researchers at the website VPNMentor.com discovered that Pray.com was storing millions of users’ personal information, including home addresses, where they attend church, and the contents of their contact lists, in publicly accessible cloud storage “buckets.” Among the records exposed were photos of underage users, which the researchers said were likely uploaded without parents’ permission.
Ed Webb

When Religious Freedom Means Freedom for Religious Violence | Religion Dispatches - 0 views

  • the ReAwaken America Tour, which has been kind of a rolling campaign for revolt since the failed coup. Led by former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, the 15 rallies held since April 2021 have each drawn thousands of attendees. Like “Stop the Steal” events, they tend to be foggy, distortion-infused affairs, full of dire warnings of hidden evil and worse to come
  • a disturbing religious dimension has received far less attention; that is, until November, when Flynn blurted out their broad intention at a San Antonio rally, “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.” 
  • Impresario and tour director Clay Clark introduced Lance Walnau as a prophet when he spoke at the event in Phoenix, Arizona in January 2022. Walnau is an important figure in the neo-Charismatic New Apostolic Reformation, best known for his advocacy of the idea of Seven Mountains Dominionism, which is a vision of Christians gaining control over the main sectors of societal influence—namely, religion, government, family, arts & entertainment, business, media, and education.
Ed Webb

The myth of the Islamist winter - www.newstatesman.com - Readability - 0 views

  • In Tunisia, as in Egypt, the Islamists who came to power through the ballot box are seeing their popularity erode and are tempted to hold on to power by recourse to authoritarian measures. But they have to deal with the legacy of the Arab spring. They face a new political culture: now, one where people who disagree with the government take to the streets; where there is no reverence for established power and the army and the police no longer inspire fear.
  • consider the precise nature of this authoritarian turn because it bears little resemblance to the “Islamic revolution” often associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and al-Nahda, the Renaissance Party, in Tunisia. It is, on the contrary, a conservative and paradoxically pro-western “counter-revolution”
  • The electoral and social base of the Egyptian regime is not revolutionary. Instead of trying to reach a compromise with the principal actors of the Arab spring, Morsi is attempting to get all the supporters of the new order on his side. The coalition he is building is based on business, the army, the Salafists and those elements of the “people” that are supposedly tired of anarchy
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  • economic model is neoliberal
  • State control of religion would in fact go beyond institutions and extend to religious orthodoxy, leading to limitations being placed on Sufi practices and theological discussions. Even if the Muslim Brothers succeed in the first part of the operation – nationalising faith institutions – the price they will have to pay for it will be high, because the imams won’t appreciate being turned into civil servants. They also run the risk of destroying the religious dynamic of their movement: if the state controls religion, what use is a religious “brotherhood”? And if religion is identified with the state, there is a grave risk that the unpopularity of the government will affect faith institutions in turn, as has happened in Iran
  • Time is against Morsi, because the economic measures that he wants to introduce will make the government increasingly unpopular. And, on the other hand, continued popular protest will require him to call on the army, which will support him, but at a price – the political and economic autonomy that the military is asking for runs counter to the Brotherhood’s programme of economic liberalisation
  • the other battleground for the Muslim Brotherhood is control of the religious sphere. Like al- Nahda in Tunisia, it has discovered that this is considerably more diverse than it had thought. Moreover, figures who had previously been relatively docile where the state was concerned, such as Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, have reasserted the autonomy that they were granted by the Arab spring. This means that the only way for the government to wrest back control of the religious sphere is to place it under the authority of the state (specifically, to submit the mosques to the diktat of the ministry of religious affairs)
  • Morsi has accepted the outlook of the IMF, not because he has been forced to do so, but because it is an approach he shares. This will bring further privatisation and competition. And because the price paid by swaths of the population will be severe, the government will need a functioning apparatus of repression and to break the trade unions. It will also have to gain the acquiescence of the army, in exchange for immunity and the right to regulate its own affairs, particularly in the economic sphere
  • a politics more redolent of Pinochet in Chile than of Khomeini in Iran
  • Religion is becoming just one instrument of control among others – rather than a social, economic and ideological alternative. This is, in short, the failure of political Islam
  • Al- Nahda is neither as strong nor as deeply rooted as the Muslim Brotherhood. The movement is more diverse, with a branch that is, if not more liberal, then at least more realistic. And because of their commitment to violence, the Tunisian Salafists are not credible allies
  • Al-Nahda is coming into conflict with the unions, either for the same reasons as in Egypt (a fascination with the free market) or for reasons more specific to Tunisia (it wants allies on its left but cannot bear to compete with a truly popular movement of grass-roots activists)
  • As in Egypt, al-Nahda proposes to use its own ministry of religious affairs to control the religious sphere, although this statism could rebound against the movement
  • if there were a credible and unified opposition, it could beat al-Nahda in the elections. Consequently, Tunisia’s chances of staying democratic are better than Egypt’s
  • The Islamists are succeeding neither in delivering the goods in economic and social terms nor in giving the impression that they are architects of an authentic social project that goes beyond the stamping of “Islamic markers” on a society over which they have increasingly little control
  • To get through the period of austerity and the economic difficulties that go with it, they should have done more to secure a “historic compromise” with the liberals. The alternative to such an alliance is not “Islamic revolution”, however. What is taking shape instead is a coalition that is con - servative in politics and morals but neoliberal in economics, and thus open to the west
Ed Webb

The hegemony of religious freedom - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

  • Is the world created by religious freedom a place in which we want to live? Are other options for living peacefully with social and religious differences being pushed aside by this laser-like focus on religious freedom? Is there an alternative?
  • state promotion of religious freedom may add fuel to the fire of the very sectarian conflict that religious freedom claims to be so uniquely equipped to transcend
  • When news media, government officials and public figures reinforce the regime’s framing of this revolt as a sectarian conflict pitting Sunnis against Alawites and their Shia allies, rather than as a popular uprising against a secular autocracy, it makes sectarian violence more likely. It energizes divides between Christians, Alawites and Sunnis. It brings these identities to the surface, accentuates and aggravates them. When religious difference is the primary lens through which social and political conflicts are framed, sectarian conflict is exacerbated.
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  • Religious freedom advocacy politicizes religious difference.
  • top-down promotion of religious freedom creates a world in which religious difference becomes more real and more politicized
  • It presses dissenters, doubters and families with multiple religious affiliations to choose a side
  • the religion defended by American bishops, the U.S. State Department and now, perhaps, the Canadian government, regulates, and may even eliminate, spaces in which unconventional and non-established religion has a chance to flourish
  • Religious freedom needs to be reimagined as a site of resistance against powerful authorities, rather than a form of discipline imposed by them, funneling people into predefined religious boxes and politicizing their differences
Ed Webb

The Islamic Monthly - Religion and the Arab Spring: Between opposition, equivocation an... - 0 views

  • 18 tumultuous days of nonstop media coverage
  • Reflecting on Bouazizi's death on his popular TV show, al-Shari'a wa-l-Hayat, Qaradawi affirmed that suicide was generally a major sin (kabira), but blamed the Tunisian state for Bouazizi's sin and prayed that God would absolve him of any blame for that sin. Qaradawi's sympathy for Bouazizi's otherwise sinful act was a reflection of Qaradawi's more general approach to the problem of religion and politics: that justice is a central demand of the Shari'a and that interpretations of the Shari'a that strengthen oppressors and tyrants cannot be deemed to be legitimate parts of the Shari'a.
  • Qaradawi's reputation for moral courage in the face of Arab dictators, however, suffered a significant blow as a result of his refusal to condemn the actions of the Bahraini and Saudi governments in violently suppressing the peaceful protests in Manama's Pearl Square. His attempts to distinguish the Bahraini protests on the ground that they were sectarian in character rather than national hardly seemed at the time plausible; in light of subsequent events, they are even less so.
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  • Gomaa's fatwas were consistent with historical Sunni views that regard revolution with scepticism, if not outright terror, at the prospect of public disorder. The mufti's stance of neutrality, meanwhile, alienated significant segments of the Egyptian population who expected him to take a much stronger stance against the unlawful conduct of the regime and its security forces
  • The various responses by religious leaders to the events of the Arab Spring suggest three distinct issues facing the role of religion and politics (particularly, the possibility of a more democratic politics) in the Arab World. First, the lack of institutional independence from strong regimes continues to undermine scholars' legitimacy. It is hard to believe, for example, that Qaradawi's stance regarding Bahrain was not influenced by the Gulf Cooperation Council's anti-Iran policies. This failure to be consistent, meanwhile, undermines his status as a moral voice in these times of uncertainty. Second, among traditional scholars, there remains a profound failure to understand the nature of the modern state and how it differs from the personal rule that characterized pre-modern states. Third, traditionalist scholars continue to view politics as something exogenous to the religious life, as if it were something that can safely be ignored without doing any damage to one's life as a Muslim.
  • the desire by virtually all political parties to use the religious establishment to further their political programs contradicts the desire to have an independent religious establishment that could be faithful to its own mission
  • To the extent that traditional scholars still cling to a conception of political rule that identifies legitimacy in the personal attributes of the ruler, they anachronistically promote the idea that good politics is the function of the virtuous ruler, rather than the modern notion that virtuous rule is the product of the right institutions.
  • the Arab Spring rejected the notion that one can live a virtuous private life untouched by an unjust and corrupt political sphere
  • If one accepts the proposition that the character of a regime profoundly affects everything produced within its domain, then it is no surprise that the authoritarianism of the last 50 years in the Arab World produced sterile and decadent religious as well as secular thought
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