Again a Fictive Ezra Pound

Extra Pound

Pound gazed on his body one day,
Found himself in the family way!
Truly strange was that Ding,
Not a woman's Unding,
Bringing forth in an unnatural way.

Though truly fictive, this character sketch using the limerick form works pretty well. One can hear the limerick beat. And pity the poor, unmentioned female hyena! You might also check a German dictionary.

"Germany must be Islamized!"

Daniela Städter

Google Images

In an article posted in Catholic News (Katholische Nachrichten) on November 14, 2016 by Daniela Städter, "Hidden in the Refugee Centers: Everything Christians Experience" ("Unerkannt in Flüchtlingsheimen: Was Christen alles erleben"), we learn that Muslim refugees far outnumber Christian ones, which is not surprising, but what might surprise some readers is the intention of many Muslim refugees - and their Muslim translators - to Islamize Germany. Here is the German original of a passage in the report, which is based on the experience of a thirty-nine-year-old Eritrean Christian interpreter fluent in both German and Arabic, but who kept her Christian faith a secret, followed by my rough translation in English:

Sicherheitsdienstmitarbeiter und Übersetzer sind ihren Angaben zufolge fast immer Muslime. Sie machen, sagt die 39-Jährige, auf den ersten Blick einen sehr netten Eindruck: "Sie sind zumeist hier aufgewachsen, haben oft studiert, angesehene Berufe, und sie geben sich weltoffen." Doch das ändere sich, sobald sie "unter sich" seien: "Dann zeigen sie ihr wirkliches Gesicht und sagen Sätze wie 'Deutschland muss islamisiert werden'. Sie verachten unser Land und unsere Werte." Die junge Frau ist entsetzt und will es lange nicht wahrhaben. Sie verschweigt weiterhin, dass sie Christin ist, um mehr zu erfahren. Unter anderem besucht sie den Koranunterricht verschiedener Moscheen: "Dort wird purer Hass gegen Andersgläubige gepredigt. Die Kinder bekommen es hier in Deutschland von klein auf beigebracht." Ähnlich sei es in den Flüchtlingsheimen. Sie bekommt mit, wie sich muslimische Jungs weigern, mit Christen zu spielen. Die Übersetzerin versucht zu vermitteln: "Du bist Muslim, er ist Christ. Welchen Unterschied macht das denn?" Die Fünfjährigen antworten ihr: "Mit den Christen spiele ich nicht. Meine Eltern hassen die auch." Die Übersetzerin erschrickt: "Sie sind vor dem Krieg nach Deutschland geflohen und müssten doch froh sein, dass ein christliches Land sie aufnimmt."

Now for my rough translation, which is at times more of a paraphrase based on the context supplied in the original German article:

According to a 39-year-old Christian female interpreter who keeps her Christian faith secret and works with the refugees from Syria, security coworkers and interpreters are almost all Muslim. She says that they make a very nice first impression: "Most of them grew up here, often undertook higher education, work in respected occupations, and present themselves as open-minded." But all that changes as soon as they are "among themselves": "They then show their true face and say things like 'Germany must be Islamized'. They disrespect our country and our values." The young woman was shocked and for a long time couldn't accept it as true. She continues to hide the fact that she is a Christian in order to learn more. Among other things, she visits the Qur'an courses in various mosques: "In those mosques, pure hate is preached against people of other beliefs. Here in Germany, Muslim children get taught that from an early age." It's similar in the refugee shelters. She observes that Muslim boys refuse to play with Christians. She tries to mediate: "You are Muslim, he is Christian. What difference does that make?" The five-year-olds reply: "I don't play with Christians. My parents hate them, too." The interpreter is alarmed: "They fled to Germany from the war and ought to be happy that a Christian country accepts them."

So much for gratitude. I'd heard of this problem through other channels, but I was waiting for a more official report, which this one seems to be.

Five Theories of Korean Unification

Victor Cha
JoongAng Daily

Victor Cha finds "Five theories of unification" (JoongAng Daily, July 22,2014) in Korean history, and I'm posting them below for memory's sake:

The first theory of unification emerged after the division of Korea and throughout the Cold War. This was essentially the notion of "unification by force" . . . , or the idea that the only legitimate definition of unification was the crushing victory of one Korea over the other . . . . This "winner take all" view was held by Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee and Kim Il Sung . . . . [T]he second theory of unification[, formulated after German unification, was] . . . that it was too difficult and too dangerous. Unification became something that was not desired, but something to be avoided because of its staggering costs and the terrible uncertainties . . . . This second "hard landing" theory of unification predominated Korean thinking from the end of the cold war in Europe until the Asian financial crisis in 1997 . . . . [The third theory of unification came in] 1997[, when] Kim Dae-jung put forward the idea of the sunshine policy. A strategy of unconditional engagement designed to open the North to the forces of reform. This was a policy tied to DJ's more liberal political ideology, and then carried forth by his successor Roh Moo-hyun for an entire decade . . . . [and it] was motivated by hard economic realities. Korea's liquidity crisis in 1997-98 made unification impossible, so it was best to engage the North Korean regime over the long-term, and pave the way for a gradual transition or "soft landing." What was so distinct in retrospect about the Sunshine Policy was the notion that unification should be pushed generations into the distant future . . . . [The fourth theory of unification started] with the . . . election of conservative Lee Myung-bak. Lee was a businessman, not an ideologue. He was pragmatic and saw unification in pragmatic terms . . . . This fourth theory was a pragmatic one -- that is, unification may be expensive, it may be difficult and it may be dangerous. But . . . . as traumatic as unification may be, it could very well come tomorrow or next month or next year. Koreans must start to prepare now for it, not simply wish it would go away forever . . . . [The fifth theory of unification started with] President Park. In her Dresden speech, she laid out her own theory of unification as a bonanza or jackpot for Korea and her neighbors . . . . This fifth theory of unification does not see it as winner take all . . . , or something to be feared and delayed indefinitely (sunshine), or even something that we must reluctantly prepare for. . . . Rather she paints it as something bright. (bold font and underlining mine)

There are things to keep in mind, namely, "that the stability of the regime in the North is far from certain" and that "there is a direct correlation between the increased interest in unification and South Korea's outreach to China." But this rapprochement does not "mean that Seoul will be willing to cut a deal with China on North Korea that excludes the United States[, for] without the U.S. alliance, South Korea gets treated by China like a small province."

But might not the US be willing to cut such a deal? That is tempting for some American policy-makers, I suspect, the ones who argue that Korea doesn't need US forces anymore, especially since the US forces are generally unappreciated anyway. Make an offer to pull out of Korea in return for China's support on re-unification?

But wouldn't this contradict Obama's pivot to Asia . . .

Franklin Willis: Artist, Athlete, Fulbright Fellow

Franklin Willis
Challenges Changing Form

My wife was cleaning out our closet and found a packet with slides of artwork by an old Fulbrighter friend from 1989-90 -- the man in the photo above, Franklin Willis. The man has made his way to some degree of success, as his website shows.

When I knew him, he was just getting onto the fast track, and he's certainly outpaced me! We had some good talks about art and basketball and culture, our ABCs for living in Germany.

Here's a sample of his art:

A Bucket of Water

Franklin Willis

Good job, Franklin . . . I hope you remember me . . .

Idle Request . . .

Donald Duck
Wikipedia

Does anybody of a certain age recall this childhood ditty -- sung to the tune of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" (or for you Brits, "God Save the Queen") -- popular among kids in the early sixties:

I hate my country,
I'll go to Germany
To see the king.

His name is Donald Duck,
He drives a garbage truck
To every city dump,

And how it stinks!

I recall singing this when I was about five, but I had -- and still have -- no plausible idea what it's about.

Anyone out there know its origin and meaning?

Granieri on the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Power of Individuals, and the Unpredictability of History

Ronald J. Granieri

FPRI

Professor Ronald J. Granieri, a historian of modern Germany, has written a timely article for those of us living in South Korea during these unstable, unsettling times, "The Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Power of Individuals, and the Unpredictability of History" (E-Notes, FPRI, March 2013). Here's how he opens his paper:

German unification was one of the most dramatic developments in contemporary history, as well as one of the most unexpected. After decades during which the press and public measured political wisdom according to how well leaders managed the apparently permanent realities of German and European division, leaders in 1989 had to improvise responses to the literal collapse of the most concrete of those realities in Berlin. As much as German politicians had claimed for years to be hoping for this day, none had actual plans ready. Into this potentially dangerous vacuum stepped a most unlikely improviser. Helmut Kohl was a reasonably successful party leader of enormous bulk and moderate political gifts, generally underestimated even by his political allies and known neither for creativity nor dynamism. To the surprise of all, he proved remarkably adept at managing the international and domestic complications of 1989. Within thirteen months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he rode successful reunification negotiations to a landslide victory in the first all-German democratic elections since 1932. Even if many of his decisions during those months can be (and have been) questioned, his place in history is assured.

And here's Granieri's main point:

Kohl's story provides but one of many crucial insights into how the story of German reunification displays both the limits of realism and the unpredictability of history. That unpredictability reminds us of the role that individuals can still play in the modern world, even in the face of enormous complexity. For it was the combined actions of individuals, neither beginning nor ending with Kohl, who changed the world in 1989, and all students of international affairs can profit from reexamining that dramatic story.

The combined actions, yes, but Granieri makes clear in the paragraphs that follow these opening ones that a leader other than Kohl might have made a misstep. I remember those days, for I was living in Germany at the time. Kohl read the timepiece of history correctly, unlike many German politicians, and took bold steps that were possible for two reasons: 1) people trusted him because 2) they thought he wasn't smart enough to be crafty. But like Reagan, Kohl was smarter than people gave him credit for, though he was fairly honest for a politician, so people were half right, but for the wrong reason.

Why is this article timely? Because it chastens us from making bold predictions about what might happen up North, or about who might step into the breach of history here in the South during a time of crisis . . .

Our Globalized, Systemic Conflict

Egypt Protests
Photo by Asmaa Waguih/Reuters
Christian Science Monitor

Nathan Gardels, writing "In violence over anti-Muslim video, a new world disorder" for the Christian Science Monitor (September 14, 2012), says some things that fill in what I alluded to in a recent comment, as we see in the following quotes from his article:

Welcome to our new world, where no one is in control -- neither the West of its social media nor Arab rulers of their liberated subjects. This is a combustible mix that goes beyond the recent anti-Muslim video to the overall message of Western-shaped globalization.

Gardels reminds us that the scholar Akbar S. Ahmed, already in the decade before 9/11, foresaw the stakes in the increasing conflict between the West and Islam and realized this conflict's existential character:

Years before Osama bin Laden conceived of the assault on the Twin Towers in New York, Akbar Ahmed, a Pakistani scholar and former ambassador to Great Britain, grasped the mentality of siege gripping the Islamic world. After an extended trip through the remote villages of the Afghan-Pakistan border where the Taliban got its start, he reported that pious Muslims sense "there is no escape now, no retreat, no hiding place, from the demon" of the Western media, which he called "storm troopers" of the West. They feel, he wrote, "the more traditional a religious culture in our age of the media, the greater the pressure on it to yield" to the faithlessness and secularism of global civilization emanating from the West.

Mr. Akbar imagined that "it must have been something like this in 1258 when the Mongols were gathering outside Baghdad to shatter forever the greatest Arab empire in history. But, this time, the decision will be final. If Islam is conquered, there will be no coming back."

That may go quite a ways toward explaining the rigidity of the battle lines that have been drawn. Gardels himself -- perhaps channeling Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory -- considers the conflicts cultural and acted out on a global stage:

The conflicts of the future are thus going to be as much about the abundant cultural flows of the global information economy as about the scarcity of resources or the breach of territory. This is because contending values have been crowded into a common public square created by freer trade, the spread of technology, and the planetary reach of the media.

Only in such a world could a provocative Danish cartoon or a truly lame YouTube video on Muhammad inflame the pious and mobilize the militant across the vast and distant stretches of the Islamic world.

This is precisely what was on my mind in my recent comment noted above in my opening line. Gardels expects these cultural conflicts to be unavoidable because fundamental:

No military retaliation, or further violent attacks on diplomatic outposts, can erase the reality that what is sacred for America (freedom of expression, including sacrilege) and what is sacred for the Muslim world (their faith) are clashing values now contending on the same virtual terrain.

Not just America, of course, but the West more generally, which in its most secular heart believes sacrilege sacred -- an irony perhaps worthy of being reflected upon. Still, Gardels hopes for the best . . . sort of:

Managing some semblance of stability in this new, out-of-control world is going to take some deft statesmanship. The West is not about to give up its defense of freedom of expression -- whether Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" or the "Innocence of Muslims" YouTube video. Muslims, militant or mainstream, are not about to give up the defense of their faith and its messenger.

That's the best he can hope for, "deft statesmanship," and it isn't much hope, for he sees our reality clearly:

Along with the advent of democracy in the Arab world, this is a new reality we will all have to live with. Let's not pretend that this conflict isn't real.

I've been living almost entirely without that pretense since 9/11, and I had a strong inkling of it ten years before that attack when I was living in Germany and saw up close the increasing piety of Muslims studying and living in Europe.

Iranian Refugees' Interest in Christianity

Iranian Converts

Photo by Kairospress

Christianity Today

An extremely interesting article by Matthias Pankau and Uwe Siemon-Netto, "The Other Iranian Revolution," appeared in Christianity Today (7/17/2012), reporting on Christian converts among Iranian refugees living in Germany:

[Apparently, there are] countless reports of Muslims having visions of Jesus. According to . . . [those] interviewed for this article, most of these appearances follow a pattern reported by converts throughout the Islamic world: Muslims see a figure of light, sometimes bearing the features of Christ, sometimes not. But they instantly know who he is. He always makes it clear that he is Jesus of the Bible, not Isa of the Qur'an, and he directs them to specific pastors, priests, congregations, or house churches, where they later hear the gospel.

How did these conversions get started?

Twelve years ago, Trinity Parish in Leipzig, a tiny congregation of the Independent Lutheran Church, began teaching German as a second language to asylum seekers awaiting government approval of their refugee status.

Trinity used Luther's Bible translation as a textbook. Linguists credit that translation with having created the modern German language. Intrigued by what they read, several exiles asked to be baptized. They brought along friends who also wished to learn the basics of the Christian faith. "Today, one third of our 150 members are Persians," says Markus Fischer, Trinity's pastor.

That's the story in Germany, anyway, but there's a broader answer, for Iranians have been converting to Christianity since the 1980s, repelled by Iran's Shi'ite Islamist government, with its system of enforced Islamic law, and attracted by Christianity, with its emphasis upon grace rather than law. Or as one German pastor explains:

"Islam is like a rope ladder on which people try to reach God . . . . They manage to climb a few rungs, but with each sin, fall off the ladder and must start all over again. Christians, by contrast, need no ladder because Jesus comes down to earth for them. Christians have salvation. Muslims don't."

Also, Iranian refugees tend to be well-educated, and among educated Iranians, Islam has lost a lot of moral legitimacy due to Iran's theocratic system, or so the article says. But I would add two more things. Shi'ite Islam in some forms speaks of a divine spark or divine light within the early caliph they honor, Ali, so the Christian concept of Jesus as both human and divine is not so foreign, and Ali's suffering at his death -- betrayed and dying of thirst -- can recall the death of Jesus. But religious concepts aside, Iranians are very proud of their pre-Islamic civilization and don't accept the Islamic view that everything pre-Islamic was mere ignorance, what Muslims call jahiliyya, a very negative expression. Iranians tend to see Islam as an Arab ideology and Islamization as Arabization, and I think there's merit to their opinion.

Whatever the motivation, these conversions are certainly a phenomenon to keep one's eyes on in the shifting kaleidoscope of contemporary European multiculturalism.

Uncle Cran: Ozark Urbarmacher?

In the above photo taken by my wife of our daughter driving an all-terrain vehicle on Uncle Cran's Ozark farm a couple of summers ago, you see how green and lovely the land appears in this peaceful pastoral scene, but a lot of hard labor is required to arrive at this image of cultivation, and Uncle Cran is about to describe his early spring cultivation efforts in response to Cousin Bill's "Weekly Ramblings" report on his own 'cultivation' efforts at his Kansas homestead:

Today we got our exercise in, walking . . . three plus miles for Cheryl, two plus for me and the dog (I did less as I had a yard to mow . . . the dog had no excuse). Rainy weather is in the forecast this way . . . for the next several days. I'm ahead of the game…got the lawn mowed. That's it for today. Enjoy your week.

Such were Cousin Bill's modest words on his 'cultivating' activities, as reported on Uncle Cran's e-list, to which Uncle Cran responded with his own account of cultivation in the Ozarks:

Bill:

Sorry to wait so long in reading your WR's.

I know you have been working awfully hard in your huge lawn, feeding various critters, and walking your dog. Here on the farm I have been doing a few minor chores myself.

For instance, I spent 21 days during late January to early March digging hundreds of rocks out of my hay field with a rock rake and a pick and hauling them off with the front end loader bucket on my tractor. I loaded them all by hand, and they made two small piles, each one about 8 feet long, 3 feet wide, and 3 feet high. They ranged in size from my fist to some more than 100 pounds.

Also during this time I walked over every foot of the field with a hand-held limb cutter and cut off the stems of the bushes I had been brush hogging with the tractor. The limb cutter was to cut the stems at ground level so I could run my hay mowing machine later this spring.

Then I used my 6-foot-wide rock rake to scrape up all the bushes and stems and dump them in several large piles.

After this I took my trailor and hauled 5 tons (10,000 pounds) of fertilizer to the farm, [where I] loaded it onto my fertilizer/seed spreader with a scoop shovel. The spreader holds about 400 pounds each load. Then I spent about 8 hours spreading the fertilizer over my pasture and hay fields, pulling the spreader with my tractor.

Then I took some electric line poles that the electric company replaced with new ones, and dug 5 holes about 8 inches in diameter, and 3 feet deep. I cut the poles into 8 feet lengths, and used the tractor to set them into the ground. I cut 3 lengths of the poles into 9 feet lengths and set them at an angle to brace the upright posts. Then I re-stretched the 5 five strands of barbed wire back into place.

In my spare time, I used the weed eater to clear out some tall grass in my yard, dug several hundred thistle plants out of my fields with the pick, and dug a patch of prickly pear cactus out of my field. Later I dug a few of the cactus spines out of my hands and fingers.

I won't mention the various projects Gay wanted done, plus all the assorted chores, such as cattle feed and hay, and some minor jobs for neighbors.

But of course, none of this compares with your duties. I am almost ashamed to tell you what I've been doing.

Other than that, I have been using my leisure time to read some good books.

Have a good week,

Cran

There appears to be a streak of competitiveness in Uncle Cran, and I have to admit that he does seem to have worked quite hard. He is obviously what the Germans call an Urbarmacher, one who makes the land arable, i.e., suitable for agriculture. I encountered this word recently as used by the Catholic theologian Raimon Panikkar in a German text that my wife and I are translating into English. In looking further into the term's meaning, I discovered that the Western Marxist Walter Benjamin had portrayed himself in a similar manner to describe his own culture-critical efforts:

But every ground must at some point have been turned over by reason, must have been cleared of the undergrowth of delusion and myth. This is to be accomplished here for the terrain of the nineteenth century.

This passage occurs on page 935 of The Arcades Project (translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Belknap Press and Harvard University Press, 1999). For stating himself this way, Benjamin was criticized by Rolf J. Goebel in A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin (Camden House, 2009):

Faced with the "Urwald," [i.e., the primeval forest,] Benjamin sees himself in the role of an "urbar Macher" (bearer of reason, who "makes [the ground] arable"), "clearing the undergrowth of delusion and myth. Thus, he is the "cultivator" who transforms the wilderness into a place of "culture" (see the Latin colo = I cultivate, and its derivations cult, culture). This comes to be exactly the role that according to history the "civilized" Europeans have accomplished for the "savages" they colonized. In a strange manner, Benjamin falls back into the typical missionary attitude of the colonizers, who usually are the object of his critique. (page 229)

This might seem a bit harsh on poor Mr. Benjamin -- and by extension on Uncle Cran -- for Mr. Benjamin perhaps thought that he was implicitly, though never quite expressly, setting himself at odds here with the manner of Martin Heidegger, that German philosopher who eulogized the primeval forest wilderness and pursued a mythicizing mystification of nature that clothed his fascist tendencies with a shroud of essentialized legitimacy. But we see from Mr. Goebel extensive evidence of many words and terms -- in German, English, and Latin -- that this was not the case. Mr. Benjamin was instead adopting the role of missionizing colonizer!

Neither Walter Benjamin nor Uncle Cran can therefore be known as cultivators of reason and fields but rather as European-style missionary colonizers, whereas Cousin Bill is just a simple lawnmower man . . .

"Grey is all theory . . ."

Mephistopheles and Faust

Bewitching Students

(Image from Wikipedia)

On our hike a few days ago up Bulamsan, one of the many mountains in and around Seoul, Sun-Ae and I took a break on a ridge leading up to the mountain and sat under a roofed platform beside the path to rest, sip water, gaze down at Seoul, and talk about various things.

My wife has a doctorate in German literature, and we met in Germany, so we both know a bit of German literature, and when she made a reference to Goethe's Faust, the line about striving and satiation, I caught her point and exclaimed:

"Verweile doch, du bist so schön!"

We discussed what was meant by Faust saying to the moment:

Remain, you are so beautiful.

To say those words to a moment of satisfaction, in the desire that it remain, that one might no longer strive for change . . . that would have been Faust's undoing, his damnation to hell, based on the particular pact that he'd made with Mephistopheles.

I know Faust fairly well. In fact, I read all of Faust, in German, when I was 21, in Mr. Martin's class at Baylor University. He taught a two-semester, upper-level seminar on Faust and invited me to take the class even though my German wasn't very good because he knew that I liked literature. I didn't understand very much at the outset, but I learned a lot, and still remember a few lines. For example, as my wife and I discussed the contrast between our scholarly life in books and our outdoor life hiking up the mountain, I cited Mephistopheles:

"Grau . . . ist alle Theorie . . ."

That led to a fuller citation:

Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.

Suddenly, I was struck by the deeper meaning of the lines. Mephistopheles is contradicting Satan, ostensibly, anyway. Here's the translation:

Grey, dear friend, is all theory,
And green the golden tree of life.

The original promise in the Garden of Eden was that eating from the Tree of Knowledge would make one god-like, and perhaps it did, but that proved unsatisfactory for the scholar Faust, as the first scene of him in his study makes clear, for he decries the futility, the sterility, of all the scholarly knowledge that he has accumulated.

Mephistopheles therefore offers 'fruit' from the Tree of Life, presumably, the experience of living life to its fullest. He happens not to be speaking to Faust at the moment that he makes this offer in these particular words (for he's chatting with a student at the time), but that's also what he offers Faust in return for Faust's soul -- though Mephistopheles only wins if Faust utters those fateful words:

Verweile doch, du bist so schön!

Faust eventually utters the words, but he states them subjunctively -- if I correctly recall -- and they mean the opposite of their literal meaning, anyway, in the sense that he uses them, for he addresses a moment of striving, not satiation.

Or so we discussed, before continuing on our hike, and you can now see why I married the right woman for me . . .

European Islam?

Sehitlik Mosque in Berlin

Sean Gallup, Getty Images

(Image from The Chronicle of Higher Education)

One of my history students this past spring semester wrote a research paper that cited an article by Paul Hockenos, "Educating Imams in Germany: the Battle for a European Islam" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18, 2010) and even though nearly a year has passed since its publication, the article is still worth reading because the issue of how to integrate Islam into European civilization will likely be with us for a long time.

The background to the issue is the growing Muslim population -- and not only in Germany, but throughout much of Western Europe -- for the second and third generations are not assimilating well, nor is Islam integrating well. Most Muslims live in enclaves where Islam is the leading religion, and the religious leaders are foreign to Europe, often funded by conservative oil money, and preach a very conservative form of Islam. Moreover, these religious leaders often know no European languages and understand little about European cultures. But let's turn to Hockenos:

In a Germany struggling to come to grips with its burgeoning, four-million-strong Muslim population (about 5 percent of the populace), the use of imams sent from Turkey and other foreign countries, including Saudi Arabia, has come under sustained fire from integration-minded critics. After all, argue some intellectuals, politicos, and other citizens across Germany's political spectrum, including the more moderate currents in the Muslim community, how can the foreign clergy advise believers -- many of whom grapple with profound disadvantage in Germany -- without mastering the lingua franca and knowing the world they live in? The imams have, in part, been held responsible for Muslims' ghettoization, as well as fundamentalism in some pockets of the country.

Germany thinks that it has an answer to this problem: education with the aim of producing an Islamic education that will make critical thinking an integral part of the pedagogical approach and thereby assist in the integration of Islam and the assimilation of Muslims:

Fostering a generation of German-schooled imams, seen as central to breaking the vicious circle of Muslim exclusion, is the chief aim of an Islamic-theology initiative announced by the government in January [2010]. The effort is a vital front of the Islam Conference, started in 2006, an ambitious, wide-ranging process set in motion by the German government to consider the yawning gap between mainstream Germany and its Muslims. The conference, designed to map out a long-term integration strategy, painted a dismal picture of the reality faced by German Muslims. It is a reality marked by meager integration; growing alienation and even fundamentalism among the second and third-generations; the ossification of a Muslim underclass; and dysfunctional communication between Germany and its Muslims, nearly half of whom are German citizens. One of its key recommendations is to focus on the training of the Islamic community's personnel, including religion teachers, as well as the dearth of Islamic theology in German academe.

Bringing Islam into the classrooms at the very highest level, Germany hopes, will have an educational and cultural trickle-down effect. And so the country's foremost academic advisory body, the German Council of Science and Humanities, announced the creation of cutting-edge academic institutes -- hybrids of seminary and religious-studies programs -- to examine Islamic theology with a critical bent and teach it to Germany's Muslims in a university setting. "This," stated the council's 158-page report, "is the best way to insure the academic quality of research and instruction, to intensify the discourse with other disciplines with different worldviews, and to create a reliable theological foundation for interreligious dialogue."

Although the institutes will be anchored in state-financed colleges, the country's Muslim communities will have a substantial voice in their curricula and management, just as Christian churches do in theology departments across Germany. The council's recommendations are not blueprints for the two or three new planned institutes, estimated to open in 2012 and to cost about $4-million annually in government funds, but rather a visionary démarche, the specifics of which -- the study program, size, and composition of faculty and students -- will be hammered out by the vested parties over the next few years. Certain, however, is that these new academies will nurture not only German-speaking imams with European orientations, but also -- if everything goes according to plan -- new ranks of male and female Muslim religion teachers, public intellectuals, scholars, and faith-based social workers. The long-anticipated proposal explicitly mentions the training of qualified religion teachers for the estimated 700,000 Muslim pupils in Germany who do not enjoy faith-based religious instruction on a par with that of their peers who belong to the major Christian denominations.

This is a visionary undertaking that aims to ground Islam in the European Enlightenment and thereby create a rational, critically self-reflective European Islam. The goal is a worthy one, and I think that it has to be attempted, but I also foresee problems, partly due to Islam's decentralized state (partially resulting from the fall of the caliphate). I'm not alone in this. A man whom I knew when I lived in Tübingen and pursued doctoral research there at Eberhard Karls University, Christoph Markschies -- who did his doctoral and post-doctoral studies under Professor Martin Hengel and also took part in seminars led by Professor Alexander Böhlig -- holds similar views:

The establishment of faculties of Islamic theology "could change the very character of Islam in Germany and Europe," says Christoph Markschies, president of the prestigious Humboldt University of Berlin.

The issue of Islam in Germany's public sphere is explosive -- and certain to stir up pique before the faculties open their doors. "The execution of these plans will bring up a lot of difficulties," predicts Markschies, a Protestant theologian. He welcomes the consensus around the project but warns that when it comes to establishing the institutes, "there's going to be bitter conflicts, not least within the large number of different Islamic communities, that will pit conservatives against progressives, Sunnis against Shiites, and so forth." Before concrete steps to create the institutes can be taken, the German universities have to locate a single, authoritative institution in the Muslim community to act as an interlocutor; the inability to do so in the past has proved the major stumbling block in establishing Islamic theology courses on a much smaller scale.

There's also the matter of an intransigent Islam, due either to fundamentalism or lack of education:

Against the backdrop of international terrorism, including a foiled bomb plot in Germany in 2007, and studies documenting failed integration, Germany's foreign imams have come under intense public scrutiny. One study discovered a pronounced conservative, fundamentalist streak among up to 20 percent of Islamic preachers in the country. Many of the imams possess little higher education, and some come from extremist ranks.

I'm surprised that the number is only 20 percent, for I suspect that the percentage is higher. But the German state believes that the academic institutes called for by the German Council of Science and Humanities offers an answer, and Markschies agrees:

The kind of academically rigorous theology that will be offered at Germany's universities, says Humboldt University's Markschies, is something rare even in the Muslim world. "Islam lacks a Western-type theology, characterized by a critical, open-minded discourse about its texts, its assumptions, and its history," says Markschies, who'd like to see one of the institutes find a home in Berlin. "The Christian religions have engaged with the Enlightenment and issues like human rights and personal liberty for some 200 years, which still has to happen in Islam. Bringing Islam into the German universities will compel it to face discourses about democratic norms and will ultimately change it, the way Christianity changed when it confronted modernity."

I hope so, but success in attaining this goal will come only if Muslims themselves accept the aims and the institutes, and this acceptance would have to come not only through openness on the part of German Muslims but on the part of Muslims throughout the world, for Islam in Germany -- as in Europe generally -- cannot be isolated from religious currents within global Islam. There will be great resistance to an Enlightenment-based Islam in the worldwide Muslim community, for as Markschies has pointed out, "Islam lacks a Western-type theology, characterized by a critical, open-minded discourse about its texts, its assumptions, and its history," and that's a fact about the 1.5 billion Muslims of the Islamic world, not just about Germany's four million Muslims. And even German experts warn of unintended consequences:

Ulrike Freitag, a professor of Islamic studies at Berlin's liberal-minded Free University, warns that the introduction of Islam into academe is open-ended, with no guarantee that something progressive will emerge. "On the one hand, there's enormous potential for a new interpretation of Islam," she says. "There's the possibility of a new kind of discussion between Sunnis and Shiites or an alternative reading of the Koran." On the other hand, she is wary that German universities "could wind up with something very conservative. The orientation of the migrant communities and their descendants is overwhelmingly traditionalist," she says, referring to their interpretation of the Shariah on matters such as gender, family law, clothing, and moral codes in general. "They could unite around a minimum conservative consensus rather than dare to try something new."

Markschies himself acknowledges doubts:

Although the Islam Conference and the planned Islamic institutes are enormous steps forward, those involved admit that the road ahead is treacherous. Markschies, for example, wonders whether there are enough qualified Muslim academics to fill the new posts.

Even if qualified scholars from the Muslim community do step forward, who will protect them from the fundamentalists as these scholars begin to offer a more open Islam based on a "Western-type theology, characterized by a critical, open-minded discourse about its texts, its assumptions, and its history"? Such scholars will be subjecting the Qur'an to skeptical analysis and raising questions concerning the traditions about Muhammad, and such an approach will not be tolerated by radical Muslims, either worldwide or in Europe itself.

A bloody fight looms . . .

Niall Ferguson and David Marsh on the Uncertain Euro

European Central Bank

(Image from Wikipedia)

Niall Ferguson and David Marsh have topical articles in Newsweek ("The End of the Euro") and the New York Times ("The Euro's Lost Promise"), respectively, that are both worth reading on the current uncertainty about the euro and what it might portend for the European Union.

They both agree on the factor responsible for the euro's instability. According to Ferguson, the European Monetary Union (EMU) had a fatal flaw from the outset:

[T]he worst defect in the design of the EMU . . . was that it was uniting Europe's currencies but leaving its fiscal policies completely uncoordinated. There were, to be sure, "convergence criteria," which specified that a country could join only if its deficit was less than 3 percent of gross domestic product and its public debt was less than 60 percent. But even when these were turned into a permanent set of fiscal rules in the Stability and Growth Pact, there was no obvious way they could be enforced.

Why couldn't they be enforced? In referring to Europe's monetary union of December 1991 in Maastricht (southern Netherlands), Marsh explains:

[J]ust before the Maastricht meeting, Chancellor Kohl noted that a monetary union without a corresponding political union would be "a castle in the air." His remark echoed the concerns of the Bundesbank, his country's statutorily independent central bank, that unless it involved greater political and economic anti-inflationary discipline and solidarity among weaker and stronger states, a monetary union would be doomed.

Why, then, did the European nations seek monetary union? Ferguson tells us one crucial reason:

Monetary union had geopolitical appeal . . . . In the wake of German reunification, the French worried that Europe was heading for a new kind of domination by its biggest member state. Getting the Germans to pool monetary sovereignty would increase the power of the other members over a potential Fourth Reich.

Marsh again gives details:

In the vanguard of the effort [toward monetary union] was none other than Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the man who had driven German reunification with miraculous speed. He knew he had to enshrine the larger Germany in a new European order to ease its neighbors' fears. The euro would be the monetary equivalent of the ugly yet necessary military compact between NATO and the Warsaw Pact that supervised East and West Germany after World War II.

The analogy between a recently reunified Germany bound monetarily to the EU and a recently defeated German divided between Nato and the Warsaw Pact sounds rather strained now, but I lived in Germany from 1989 to 1995 and can vividly recall the fears expressed by various other European nations in 1990 to 1991 about a unified, powerful Germany.

In other words, fear drove the Europeans' monetary union, much as fear drove European unification itself, fear of Germany. In short, the EU was based on fear, not trust, and suspicion continues to pervade the union, only now more generalized and not solely fixed upon Germany. But if the euro is to work, then the EU's central political power must grow and assert itself over fiscal policy. According to Marsh, this is one side-effect of the recent financial intervention, which poured nearly one trillion dollars into the effort to rescue Greece's economy, stabilize the euro, and ultimately save the European Union:

The huge amount of money aside, the significance of the rescue package was that, for the first time, power over the European Central Bank started to move to the politicians. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, a longtime critic of the bank's sway, joined forces with another Frenchman, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, to impose political supremacy over the euro zone.

The next year or two will determine whether the EU grows more unified through more centralized political power that can set fiscal policy . . . or not.

But if political centralization does succeed, there's still -- and even more so -- the so-called "democratic deficit" to deal with.

Major Fallacy: Nazis Deceived by Nonexistent Man With Qualities

Major William Martin

(Image from New York Times)

Jennet Conant, in "The Man Who Never Was," written for the New York Times (May 6, 2010), reviews Ben Macintyre's true story of the fictional Major William Martin, a British military man who didn't exist but who fooled the German high command by a clever ruse. The invented "Major Martin" was a corpse disguised as a fake courier carrying on his body papers outlining the real plan of invasion by way of Sicily disguised as a false plan and a false plan of invasion by way of Greece diguised as the real plan. This corpse, "who would wash up on the Spanish coast, was a complete fraud, but the lies he would carry from Room 13 of the British Admiralty all the way to Hitler's desk would help win the war."

The story is stranger than fiction because it began as fiction but grew to reality, initiated by an idea listed in a now-famous "Trout Fisher" memo, a document attributed at the time to Director of Naval Intelligence John Henry Godfrey but now known to have been written by another fellow working for British intelligence. This memo appeared early on, in September 1939, merely three weeks into the war:

"The Trout Fisher," said the memo, in that peculiarly sporting style that only the English can pull off, "casts patiently all day. He frequently changes his venue and his lures." Although issued under Godfrey's name, it was most likely the work of Ian Fleming, whose gift for intelligence planning and elaborate plots, most of which were too far-fetched to ever implement, later served him so well in his James Bond series. The memo was "a masterpiece of corkscrew thinking," Mac­intyre writes, laying out 51 schemes for deceiving the Germans at sea, including one to drop soccer balls coated with phosphorus to attract submarines, and another to set adrift tins of booby-trapped treats. Far down on the list of suggestions, No. 28 -- "not a very nice one," the author(s) conceded -- proposed using a corpse, dressed as an airman, carrying spurious secret documents.

That this suggestion was in turn based on an idea used in a detective novel by Basil Thomson, an ex-policeman and former tutor to the King of Siam who made his name as a spy catcher in World War I, only adds to the fantastic quality of Macintyre's entertaining tale. First Fleming, an ardent bibliophile, dusted off this quaint literary ploy; then the trout-fishing admiral, who always appreciated a good yarn, had the cunning to know that "the best stories are also true," and dispatched his team to turn fiction into reality. In many ways it was a very old story at that, as indicated by the operation's first code name, "Trojan Horse." A bit of gallows humor led to the plan's name being changed to the rather tasteless Operation Mincemeat.

The double-bluff worked. The Germans fell for it. But the story is even more fascinating, incorporating one Ewen Montagu, and his younger brother, Ivor, brilliant scions of a Jewish banking dynasty who attended Cambridge and there not only invented the rules for table tennis but also founded the Cheese Eaters League . . . though Ivor also became a Communist and Soviet spy who kept a watchful eye on his older brother as the M15 kept their watchful eyes on him. Unaware of Ivor's scrutiny as Soviet spy, which perhaps posed little danger anyway, Ewen took the bones of the corpse idea laid out in Fleming's "Trout Fisher" and put 'mincemeat' upon those bones, for he gave the ruse its name, "Operation Mincemeat," and helped work out the realistic details of Major Martin's fictional life. Ewen later wrote a book in 1953 on the successful operation, The Man Who Never Was, which was dramatized as a movie in 1956.

Truly a story thus even stranger than stranger than fiction . . .

"What's so great about the iPad?"

Apple iPad

(Image from Newsweek)

With intense interest, I read Daniel Lyons's article "Think Really Different" in this week's issue of Newsweek (March 26, 2010). Lyons captures almost precisely how I feel about the iPad without my having even seen one:

[M]y first thought, as I watched Jobs run through his demo, was that it seemed like no big deal. It's a bigger version of the iPod Touch, right? Then I got a chance to use an iPad, and it hit me: I want one. Like the best Apple products, the user interface is so natural it disappears. The iPad runs on the iPhone operating system, so it's even easier to use than a Mac. Like the iPhone, the iPad is a sleek, slim device. It has a nice 9.7-inch screen, weighs only one and a half pounds, and can play movies for 10 hours on a single battery charge. Right away I could see how I would use it. I'd keep it in the living room to check e-mail and browse the Web. I'd take it to the kitchen and read The New York Times while I eat breakfast. I'd bring it with me on a plane to watch movies and read books.

As I said, almost precisely. I have to imagine my reaction to holding the iPad in my hands, but I already know how I'd use it -- read the New York Times, check my email, browse the internet, post a blog entry -- and I'd do it while sitting on a subway train or after exercise while sitting on my sofa enjoying a beer. It's the first technological device that I've felt some excitement about since the 80s, back when I first got a computer . . . which was a Mac, by the way.

I was always a Mac-Man after that -- even while living in Germany -- until I came to stay in Korea, a place that has made using a Mac difficult, but the popularity of the iPhone has begun to change things, and when prices for the iPad drop, I will consider asking my wife to get me one.

Most of all, I won't have to fold and re-fold the great big pages of the New York Times while I'm riding the rails . . .

Germane Shaggy Dog Joke?

Super Shaggy Dog

(Image from Funny Dog Site)

There was once a poor man named Vere who wanted to be a dog, for he thought that even a dog's life would be better than the one that he had. As he obsessed on this thought, he wished with such longing that his very wish came true. He was transformed into a dog. A shaggy dog. A very shaggy dog. A very, very shaggy dog. A very, very, very . . . well, you get the picture.

Although to be a dog had been Vere's fervent wish, his life was not truly better. He no longer needed to worry about paying taxes, but there was still death to feel anxious about. To stave off death, he had to eat, but as a dog without a home, he had to be scrounging around for his next meal.

Stray dogs being forbidden in the city, Vere was soon picked up by the authorities and caged. Because his coat was so dirty and matted, he was subjected to the indignity of having it shorn. Furless, he shivered in his cold cage, snarled at his keepers, and even bit at them whenever they came near.

A few days of this, he was weary of a dog's life and longing for his old life back. He longed with such fervor that his wish again came true. He was transformed back into a man.

Finally, Vere was satisfied with his life, and reflecting at that moment on his misery as a shorn, aggressive dog, he said to himself:

"Vere, while a dog, you bit so shorn!"

Daniele Dell'Agli on Criticism of Islam: Xenophobic?

NPD Poster

"We clean up"

Xenophobic Germans?

(Image from Wikipedia)

The National Democratic Party of Germany is certainly a profoundly xenophobic political organization -- as demonstrated by its ties to the old Nazis (sympathy for Rudolf Hess), links to international racialist thought (meetings with David Duke), disdain for anyone who is not white (remarks about Barack Obama), and imagery that plays on some Germans' racial fears (campaign posters such as the one above) -- but are all German critics of Islam to be lumped with the NPD as extreme xenophobes?

In "Criticism of Islam has only just begun" ("Die Islamkritik hat gerade erst begonnen," Die Welt, February 4, 2010), the philosopher and literary critic Daniele Dell'Agli whom I quoted yesterday continues his critique of Islam and disputes the accusation that any criticism of Islam is racist or xenophobic:

Doch der Islam ist keine Rasse, sein homogenes Erscheinungsbild verdankt sich zuallererst der Unterwerfung aller Lebensvollzüge unter dieselben religiösen Vorschriften. Der Rassismusvorwurf soll Islamkritik in die Nähe nationalsozialistischer Gesinnung rücken -- so etwas nennt man schlicht Demagogie. "Fremdenfeindlichkeit" hingegen -- ein Klassiker deutscher Selbstbezichtigung -- suggeriert eine bösartige einheimische Neigung, wo es tatsächlich um eine überall auf der Welt vorkommende Disposition geht, die als Xenophobie bekannt und gut erforscht ist. Ihr Gegenteil ist mitnichten die vielbeschworene Gastfreundschaft, sondern wären Übergangsriten zur Verwandlung von bedrohlichen Fremden in akzeptierten Fremden, also Akzeptanzriten als Vorstufen von Assimilation, allen voran die Exogamie. Gerade in dieser Frage besteht bei den meisten Zuwanderern aus dem islamischen Kulturkreis nicht die geringste Bereitschaft, irgendeine Form der Vermischung einzugehen. Das ist das deutlichste Signal in der beide Seiten verstrickenden Dialektik von Ausgrenzung und Verkapselung. Wenn unter allen Migranten, die seit mehreren Jahrzehnten in Deutschland leben bzw. hier geborenen und aufgewachsen sind, ausgerechnet Muslime (nicht alle, aber viele) immer noch als Fremde, nicht selten als verschlossen bis feindselig jeden Kontakt abwehrende Fremde auffallen, dürfte dies nur zum geringsten Teil den Deutschen anzulasten sein.

Here's my loose translation -- really more of a paraphrase -- assisted by Google Translate because I'm lazy this morning:

Islam, however, is not a race. Its homogeneous appearance is due first and foremost to the subjugation of all lifestyles under the same religious rules. The accusation of racism is used as a means of suggesting that any criticism of Islam stems from Nazi sentiments -- that it's nothing more than simple demagoguery. But the charge of "xenophobia" -- a classic German self-critique -- suggests a malignant native tendency among Germans even though a disposition to distrust strangers occurs everywhere in the world, as is in fact well known and widely studied. The much discussed practice of hospitality is by no means the opposite of a fear of strangers, but rather a system encompassing rites of passage for transforming a menacing stranger into an acceptable stranger, rites that served as precursors to assimilation, most notably through the practice of exogamy (i.e., marriage between groups). On this issue in particular, most immigrants from the Islamic world show not even the slightest willingness to enter into any form of mixing. This unwillingness is the clearest signal in the dialectic of exclusion and encapsulation that entangles both sides. Among all of the various migrant groups who have lived in Germany for several decades, or even their children who were born and grew up here, Muslims (not all, but notably many) are still like strangers, often defensive strangers who are closed or hostile to any contact with non-Muslims, so their lack of integration in German society can be attributed to the Germans only to a very limited extent.

Mr. Dell'Agli is not quite right on this point, or not quite precise enough. Muslims do allow mixing through conversion to Islam or through marriage between Muslim men and non-Muslim women who belong to a religion of the book (e.g., Christians or Jews). But this mixing, of course, is entirely on Islam's own terms, a point that Mr. Dell'Agli could note, for it implies that Muslims in Germany (and Europe) have no intention to become assimilated to the host society but to assimilate the host society to Islam.

But this assumes that 'European' Muslims in general follow the dictates of Islam and only practice exogamy in the two ways noted. Is this true? Or do Muslim women living in Europe also marry non-Muslim men who do not convert to Islam? What are the statisitics on this?

At any rate, Mr. Dell'Agli makes an interesting point, i.e., that properly understood, xenophobia and hospitality work together. A reasonable fear of strangers is appropriate, so long as a society also has rites of hospitality for integrating the strangers that it fears. An extremely nationalistic society would probably exaggerate xenophobia and therefore lack the requisite sort of hospitality.

But as Mr. Dell'Agli makes clear, responsibility for integrating lies not only with the host but also with the guest.

Islam: Europeans are talking . . .

Necla Kelek

(Image from Novartis Foundation)

I try to read broadly in the newspapers, both on- and off-line, so that I can keep up with developments around the world. I'm most interested in the North America, Europe, and Asia because I've lived on these continents longest (or maybe I'm just 'north-hemispherocentric'). Of these three, Europe has often been my focus as its recent, close encounters with Islam offer the most noteworthy items, for they portend even greater changes within Europe's not-so-distant future.

Europeans are also taking note -- and taking notes!

And talking, or beginning to, about whether Islam itself is the problem, rather than just the ideological extremism within Islam that we usually call "Islamism" and generally prefer to consider a phenomenon on Islam's margins.

Just this morning, I read the British columnist Ron Liddle's remarks in an article titled "We should not absolve Islam of the crimes committed in its name" (January 27, 2010), written for Britain's Tory paper, The Spectator:

[B]y and large you cannot escape the conclusion that the most repulsive invasions of human rights that we see in the world today take place in countries where the national ideology is devolved from Islam. And the more directly or purely it is so devolved, the more primitive and savage it is.

This should not be a shock to us, but we have got ourselves into a twist over Islam in the UK. We have absolved the ideology of all blame by enacting legislation which demands that the rest of us 'respect' it, and therefore resist ad hominem attacks upon it as if they were in some way racist. They are not, of course. And at the same time as doing this we have been forced, as a consequence, to distinguish between those whom we think of as being representative of 'Good Islam' and the increasing numbers of those whom we place in the box labelled 'Bad Islam'.

. . .

I asked a representative from the Muslim Council of Britain if he agreed with the sentence handed down in Bangladesh on that 16-year-old girl [who was to be punished with 101 lashes for the 'crime' of being raped]. He was pretty clear that it was a 'monstrous interpretation' of Islamic law regarding the strictures against sex outside of marriage. But it is hardly an uncommon monstrous interpretation, if it is a monstrous interpretation at all, rather than a perfectly rational interpretation. In any case, he accepted that it was an attempted interpretation of Islam -- in other words, that the inspiration for the lashing of that abused child was drawn from the ideology, even if it was an inspiration based on a misapprehension.

Mr. Liddle sounds rather suspicious that so-called 'monstrous' interpretations of Islam might actually be the most rational understanding of Islam, and that worries him -- as it should if he's right. Is he right?

Europeans are talking . . .

And one of them is the sociologist Necla Kelek, a German citizen of Turkish Circassian origins who speaks out in "Islam has a Problem" ("Der Islam hat ein Problem," Europe News, January 7, 2010) against what she refers to as conservative Islam:

Moscheen bauen die Konservativen, sie betreiben auch die Koranschulen, in denen sie nicht nur den Koran auswendig lernen. Das sind nicht mehr als zehn Prozent der Muslime, aber die sind gut organisiert und bekommen Geld und Anleitung aus dem Ausland. Diese Verbände vertreten den politischen Islam, sie sind meist konservativ, propagieren die Scharia, die islamische Lebensweise und wollen im Prinzip eine andere Gesellschaft. Nicht jeder Muslim ist ein Terrorist, aber die Täter, von denen wir sprechen, nennen sich Muslime. Und die meisten kommen aus dem Umfeld von Moscheen oder Islamvereinen. Das ist ein ernstes Problem der islamischen Gemeinschaft, das sich nicht mit "Wir haben damit nichts zu tun" abtun lässt, denn alle berufen sich auf die Scharia, den Weg der Rechtleitung.

. . .

Der Islam hat ein Problem. Er will Leitkultur sein und nicht nur das Leben der Muslime regeln, sondern auch bestimmen, wie sich die übrige Gesellschaft gegenüber den Muslimen zu verhalten hat. Der Islam trennt zudem nicht Religion und Politik, ist also nicht säkular. Gleichzeitig hat diese Weltanschauung aber keine einheitliche Lehre davon, was diesen Glauben überhaupt ausmacht. Er ist alles und gleichzeitig nichts. Ein Gespenst. Der Islam ist in diesem Sinne verantwortungslos, weil der Gläubige nur Allah gegenüber verpflichtet ist.

Here's my somewhat loose translation, along with some bracketed additions to clarify Kelek's meaning:

Conservative Muslims build mosques, and they also run Koranic schools in which they not only learn the Koran by heart [but are also indoctrinated in political Islam]. They are no more than ten percent of the Muslims, but they are well organized and receive money and guidance from abroad. These groups put forward political Islam -- they are mostly conservative, propagate sharia (the Muslim way of living), and in principle want a different society. Not every Muslim is a terrorist, but the perpetrators [of terror that] we are talking about call themselves Muslims. And most come from the environment of the mosques and Muslim societies. This is a serious problem within the Muslim community that cannot be excused [by repeating]: "We have nothing to do with that." [This serious problem cannot be excused,] for all [Muslims] appeal to sharia, the path of correct guidance.

. . .

Islam has a problem. It intends to be the leading culture and not only regulate the lives of Muslims but also dictate to the rest of society how it should behave toward Muslims. Moreover, Islam does not separate religion and politics, and thus is not secular. At the same time, despite having this [integralist] worldview, Islam has no unified teaching as to what Muslim belief comprises. It is simultaneously everything and nothing. A spector [haunting Europe]. In this sense, Islam is irresponsible [with respect to society], for the believer has a duty to Allah alone [not to society].

From these two recent articles -- by two rather different writers from two rather different countries (though both Liddle and Kelek, fairly or not, are considered controversial) -- I sense that the discussion in Europe about Islam is shifting from a focus on radical Muslims as extremists on the outer fringe of Islam to a focus on radical Muslims as extremists at the very core of Islam.

Looks like those among us who are non-Muslims will need to become experts on Islam to make our judgements on a sound basis.

As should anyone who is talking . . .

Regret Over Missing November 9, 1989: The Whinge of History?

Professor Niall Ferguson

(Image from Wikipedia)

Professor Niall Ferguson, a Harvard historian who knows a lot more about money than I do, also knows a lot more about history than I, for he knows that the fall of the Berlin Wall, celebrated for its twentieth anniversary this past week, was not the world-shaking event that it's commonly thought to be:

Was the fall of the Berlin Wall not really History with a capital H, but just news with a lower-case n -- a wonderful story for journalists but, 20 years on, actually not that big a deal? Could it be that what happened 10 years earlier, in the annus mirabilis 1979, was the real historical turning point?

Ferguson may sound as though he's merely raising the question here, but he's already persuaded himself, or he wouldn't be writing this article, "The Year the World Really Changed" (November 16, 2009), for Time Magazine.

So when did the world really change? Ten years earlier:

[T]he events of 10 years earlier -- in 1979 -- surely have a better claim to being truly historic. Just think what was happening in the world 30 years ago. The Soviets began their policy of self-destruction by invading Afghanistan. The British started the revival of free-market economics in the West by electing Margaret Thatcher. Deng Xiaoping set China on a new economic course by visiting the United States and seeing for himself what the free market can achieve. And, of course, the Iranians ushered in the new era of clashing civilizations by overthrowing the shah and proclaiming an Islamic Republic.

He has a point -- or, more precisely, four of them, which he emphatically expounds upon:

Today it is the Americans who now find themselves in Afghanistan, fighting the sons of the people they once armed. It is the free-market model of Thatcher and Reagan that seems to lie in ruins, in the wake of the biggest financial crisis since the Depression. Meanwhile, Deng's heirs are rapidly gaining on a sluggish American hyperpower, with Goldman Sachs forecasting that China's GDP could be the biggest in the world by 2027. Finally, the most terrifying legacy of 1979 remains the radical Islamism that inspires not only Iran's leaders, but also a complex and only partly visible network of terrorists and terrorist sympathizers around the world.

Ferguson is obviously a pessimist, intent on proving that the world is far worse off today than twenty years ago and that it is worse because of watershed events thirty years ago. But I'm willing to consider his position for we have something in common. Both of us missed the breaching of the Berlin Wall, a gap in our life experiences that I, for my part, have long regretted and that Ferguson, for his part, initially admits to having regretted:

What exactly was the historical significance of Nov. 9, 1989? Having spent much of the summer of that year in Berlin, I have long bitterly regretted that I was not there to join in the party the night the wall came down. I mean, what kind of an aspirant historian misses history being made?

But rather than wallow in the mire of bottomless regret, he constructs a ladder of interlocking counterfactual questions and climbs out. I should perhaps borrow his ladder and climb out as well.

I can then stop kicking myself for going to bed instead of to Berlin that Tuebingen night of November 9, 1989, for like Ferguson, I didn't miss history after all.

Jeffery Hodges: "How I met her" . . . thanks to Robert Musil

Robert Musil

(Image from Great Books Guide)

Matt Lamers, journalist and editor for the Korea Herald, is currently having a series of articles and columns examining international marriages in Korea published in the Herald's Expat Living section, and yesterday (July 1, 2009) was my turn to tell my story of how I met Sun-Ae . . . which was a bit different than the usual boy-meets-girl story. I've told this tale before here on Gypsy Scholar, but some readers might not have read it:

How I met her

By Jeffery Hodges

About four years ago, when my family and I were still living in Osan, a woman in our apartment complex encountered my wife and recognized her as "the person married to that foreigner."

What the woman particularly wanted to know was, "Why did he marry you? You're not beautiful."

I suppose that there's always a story to tell. I met my wife in Germany, on a train. I hadn't noticed her standing on the platform before boarding, but she had already observed me, perceived the danger, and kept her distance. Despite her effort to avoid me, I happened to sit down beside her. Pure chance - it was the only empty seat. (My wife says fate.)

"Hello," I said, noticing her for the first time, and liking what I saw.

"Hello," she responded, in a low, wary, but husky and thereby enticing voice.

"I'm Jeff Hodges," I told her.

"I'm Sun-ae," she told me.

"What does your name mean?" I asked.

"Good Love," she revealed.

I took it as a sign and decided to marry her. But I had to win her heart. I therefore asked her what she was studying.

"Robert Musil," she said, still wary.

Now, I don't know that "Musil" derives from "muse," and it may be just a variant of "mueseli," but I took him as my inspiration.

"Oh," I noted, "The Man Without Qualities."

By chance (or was it fate?), I had recently begun reading that novel. In German. Indeed, the entire conversation with this unexpected love of my life was taking place in German.

I am terrible at foreign languages, not particularly eloquent in even my own, and was having to woo in a tongue suited less to expressing passionate love than to explaining the mechanical workings of an internal combustion engine. Even the German title of Musil's book sounds mechanical: "Der Man ohne Eigenschaften."

Rather like a piston, isn't it: Ei-gen-shaft-en. Ei-gen-shaft-en. Ei-gen-shaft-en. Ei-gen-shaft-en. Ei-gen-shaft-en ...

She, however, was impressed that I knew the book. Especially when I related the opening story, which introduces the main character, Ulrich, who meets a beautiful, mysterious woman through a series of unfortunate events and accidentally wins her heart.

This introductory part of the novel ends with the dry observation that, "One week later, she was already seven days his beloved." Which I quoted aloud.

I may not have won her heart with that, but I caught her attention. And over poetry the following evening, I did capture her heart.

When I took her to my Ozark home to meet my family, everyone was impressed with her but also baffled. My youngest brother put it succinctly, "How did Jeff ever get such a beautiful girlfriend?"

How indeed? I owe it all to a man without qualities.

That man would be Ulrich, I suppose . . . though I in fact owe my marital bliss to the author Mr. Robert Musil, who merely intended to write about the Austro-Hungarian Empire and would be astonished to learn that his magnum opus led to something far greater than that.

July 13th will make 17 years since Sun-Ae and I met on that German train, and our love is still an adventure going places.

Vicarious Dining . . .

Shy Chef 'Maria'

(Image from Shy Chef)

I've not visited Berlin for about 15 years, I think, for I last went (perhaps) in the early 90s. Prior to that, I had visited the city shortly after the wall had come down, when the two Germanies were still separate. I liked noisy Berlin, but I preferred the quiet little town of Tuebingen and probably wouldn't have met my lovely Sun-Ae if I'd gone to live in what became the new capital of unified Germany because I would likely have missed that fateful train.

But if I could visit the city now, I would seek out the Shy Chef 'Restaurant', which I've just now read about in the International Herald Tribune offline but found online at the New York Times website in an article, "Berlin's Hidden Restaurants" (June 14, 2009), by Gisela Williams:

Situated on a quiet residential street in Berlin's bohemian neighborhood of Kreuzberg, the restaurant was actually in someone's living room, decorated with fresh flowers and colorful artwork.

The eight guests -- including a couple from Finland, two young women from Ireland and two radio journalists from Berlin -- had never met before. Nor had they met the host, Maria, who calls herself the Shy Chef. (Like other underground restaurateurs who operate without a license, she did not give her full name for fear of being shut down.)

Maria has been inviting strangers into her home for dinner since March, as a kind of guerrilla-style restaurant. Patrons that night enjoyed a six-course meal that included a vodka-marinated salmon, a fine selection of wines and the warm company of fellow guests.

It felt like a dinner party given by an eclectic and extroverted new friend, except that those present scored invitations online (at The Shy Chef) and chipped in 50 euros each ($72.50 at $1.45 to the euro).

Well, I can't go to shy Maria's restaurant, but I can make a vicarious visit by means of her blog's "Welcome":

If you've just found us via the New York Times, welcome -- pleasure to have you here! We're a small secret supper club in the heart of Berlin, serving up a five-course meal for absolute strangers every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. There's a little more information about us here, and you can read what other guests have to say about us here. And if you’d like to make a reservation, just go here!

Absolute strangers? I can't even take my wife? That is Bohemian! And a temptation. I learned a bit about tempation yesterday in the SIBC's Sunday morning sermon: "Tackling Temptation" (June 13, 2009), which I here summarize in Byronic fashion:

Albeit all human history attests
That happiness for man -- the hungry sinner --
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.

Lord Byron was right about dinner, as Margaret Visser has also shown. Ever since the Garden of Eden (whether taken as literal or metaphor), temptation has promised to satisfy the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the lust for this life's worldly abundance. That 'Big Apple', Berlin, appeals to all three of these, including by way of the Shy Chef 'Restaurant'. If only I could take my wife . . . rather like Adam, in a palindromic role reversal, inviting Eve: "Madam, I'm Adam." The world might turn out better then, since munch depends on diner.

But since I can't go, perhaps you can, my anonymous friend? The food must be good . . . to please the eye, satisfy hunger, and bring wish fulfillment.