September 19, 2014--Best of Behind: Off With Their Heads!

This one is from March 27, 2006. Unfortunately, it could have written today--

As a secular liberal I am trying very hard to get comfortable with the idea that there is great diversity within Islam—that not every Muslim is an Islamist radical. That though the Mullahs have control of the government of Iran and run most of the Madrasses in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, over the long course of Islam there have been moderate and tolerant voices, traditions, and practices. I spend a lot of time in Spain, and although I know the period during which much of Spain was under Islamic domination was not exactly a Jeffersonian democracy, Christians and even Jews were tolerated and played open and significant roles in the government, places of study, and the economy.

But the situation in Afghanistan right now, where there is the likelihood that the courts will sentence to beheading Abdul Rahman because he 15 years ago converted from Islam to Christianity, is nudging me toward my own shrinking limits of tolerance.

Like you I know that this is now a hot political issue in the U.S., with President Bush being pushed by the hard Christian Right to intervene. After all didn’t we invade and occupy Afghanistan in retaliation for their harboring and supporting bin Laden as well as to bring democracy to that part of the world? Didn’t we help them write a constitution that attempts to straddle our notion of democracy and their version of conservative Islam? And perhaps, just maybe, didn’t some of us see this as an opportunity to do a little proselytizing on the side?

I know that the Sharia laws about apostasy were shaped as early as the eighth century and when that occurred it was viewed as equivalent to treason—after all Islam at the time was fighting for its very existence and for someone to abandon the religion was literally going over to the enemy.

But that was then and this is now. Some contemporary Muslim jurists who read Islamic history this way also point out that the Prophet never called for the execution of apostates and taught that there should be no compulsion in religion.

Islam is in no way today so equally imperiled, in spite of how many in the Islamic world view our preemptive wars, and so shouldn’t it be possible for Afghanistan to have a constitution that might serve as a model for the moderate diversity within Islam? We’ll see.

I have a further question—putting aside this history, why should conversion from Islam (or any other religion) be such a burning issue? If yours is The True Religion and your coreligionists are the only ones who will go to your version of heaven, isn’t the very fact of leaving your religion and thereby losing the eternal rewards it offers punishment enough? Why not just let apostates live on and suffer throughout the remaining years of their natural lives and after that be condemned for all of eternity to the punishment they so deserve?

Yet once again, I don’t get it.

August 2, 2013--Croissants

Just my luck. At a breakfast place called Chrissy's in downtown Damariscotta, Maine of all places, after decades of searching, I finally found the best croissants in America.

They are bulky yet light and airy. Thick, dark caramel bands wrap them with blisters of tan revealing just how delicate each outer layer is. Tear off a piece and an internal view shows that the croissant is composed of seemingly hundreds of paper-thin layers and emanating from them is the sweet scent of toasted butter.

So wouldn't you know it, just as I was getting used to enjoying my good fortune—ordering two a day to consume with Chrissy’s homemade peach and cherry jams—according to the Washington Post, in rebel-held Aleppo, Syria, a sharia committee has just declared them--via a fatwa--symbols of "colonial oppression" and forbade their consumption. 

Nearly 100,000 Syrians have thus far been killed in the civil war between the government of Bashar al-Assad and various rebel groups and they have time to think about banning the baking and eating of croissants?

People are literally scavenging for scraps of food but there are Syrian religious leaders who are worried about the corrupting influence of these crescent-shaped delights?

I don’t mean to make light of this, but really.

But I do get it. It is because of their suspicious crescent shape. Could it be that croissants are made like that, these Syrian wise men ask, to mock the Islamic Ottoman invaders who in the early 1880s, attempted to capture Budapest? 

When they were repelled by the European infidels, what did the Hungarians do to celebrate their victory? According to the Syrian sharia committee, rather than organize a parade or a fireworks display like normal Western imperialists, life-loving Austrio-Hungarians that they were instead asked local bakers to come up with a new and special treat to commemorate their military victory.

The result, it is alleged, the buttery, flaky viennoiseria bread-roll with its signature crescent-shape, supposedly derisively derived from the crescent part of the crescent-and-star flag of the Ottoman’s.

The fact that this version of the croissant’s origins is apocryphal hardly matters—in reality, the croissant originated much earlier in the 19^th century and was concocted for the first time in Vienna, not Budapest, in what is now Austria. 

But what matters are two things—

First, this reveals that the Syrian rebels are becoming more and more doctrinaire and fundamentalist, recently having banned makeup and women’s tight clothing. If they manage to overthrow the Assad regime (seemingly less and less likely as time goes by), it may be that Syria will wind up more resembling Iran than Turkey.

And then there is my croissant problem: breakfasting on something that is the subject of a fatwa doesn’t sound like much fun. especially before I've had my second cup of coffee.
Note--

On the other hand, coffee is likely never to be fatwaed--it appears, thankfully, to have been first cultivated in the 14th century by Arabs.