Dear friends, Here are three interesting responses to the epoch-making Cairo Speech of Obama by representatives of secular thought from different parts of the world .I like to apologize with Harsh for taking the liberty to make these texts slightly abridged in view of putting lesser demands on the readers' time here. Regards, Venu. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Harsh Kapoor <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 17:23:58 +0200 Subject: Obama the Preacher meets Oumma : Nice and Dangerous [Wonder when President Obama plans speaking to Hindusim, to Christianity and other such enterprises. Three comments on Obama's religion laced diplomacy. Given the nature of the widespread disease I am not surprised not to read any voices from the left so far to stop Obama and his advisors in their tracks and tell them not to peddle Huntington. Any one on the left for separation of Chruch and the State? Sadly, secularists are dying tribe and the left has its head burried in the sand. -Harsh] o o o #1. http://www.siawi.org/article792.html Reinforcing presumed religious identities: where are women and secularists of Muslim countries in Obama’s speech in Cairo? by Marieme Helie Lucas June 4, 2009 It is beyond doubt that many people around the world, of various political opinions and creeds, will feel relieved after the discourse the President of the USA delivered in Cairo today. It is apparently a new voice, a voice of peace, quite far from Bush’s clash of civilisations. But is it so? I presume that political commentators will point at the fact that Obama equates violence on the side of occupied Palestinians to violence on the side of Israeli colonizers, or that he has not abandonned the idea that the USA should tell the world how to behave and fight for their rights, or that the Israelo-Palestinian conflict is reduced to a religious conflict, or that he still justifies the war in Afghanistan, etc… All those are important issues that need to be challenged. However, what affects me most, as an Algerian secularist, is that Obama has not done away with the idea of homogeneous civilisations that was at the heart of the theory of the ’clash of civilisations’... He persistently opposes ’Islam and the West’ (as two entities- civilisations), ’America and Islam’( a country vs a religion); he claims that ’America is not at war with Islam’. In short ’the West’ is composed of countries, while ’Islam’ is not. Old Jomo Kenyatta used to say of British colonizers : ’when they came, we had the land, they had the Bible; now we have the Bible, they have the land’. Obama’s discourse confirms it: religion is still good enough for us to have, or to be defined by. His concluding compilation of monotheist religious wisdom sounds as if it were the only language that we, barbarians, can understand. These shortcomings have adverse effects on us, citizens of countries where Islam is the predominant and often the state religion. First of all, Obama’s discourse is addressed to ’Islam’, as if an idea, a concept, a belief, could hear him. As if those were not necessarily mediated by the people who hold these views, ideas, concepts or beliefs. As Soheib Bencheikh, former Great Mufti of Marseilles, now Director of the Institute of High Islamic Studies in Marseilles, used to say: ’I have never seen a Qur’an walking in the street’… Can we imagine for one minute that Obama would address himself to ’ Christianity’ or to ’Buddhism’? No, he would talk to Christians or Buddhists… to real people, keeping in mind all their differences. Obama is essentializing Islam, ignoring the large differences that exist among Muslim believers themselves, in terms of religious schools of thought and interpretations, cultural differences and political opinions. These differences indeed make it totally irrelevant to speak about ’Islam’ in such a totalizing way. Obama would not dare essentialize, for instance, Christianity in such a way, ignoring the huge gap between Opus Dei and liberation theology… Unfortunately, this essentializing Islam feeds into the plans of Muslim fundamentalists whose permanent claim is that there is one single Islam - their version of it -, one homogeneous Muslim world, and subsequently one single Islamic law that needs to be respected by all in the name of religious rights.....these supposedly Muslim laws reflect as well historical and political factors including colonial sources [*] - obviously not divine. This is the first adverse consequence of Obama’s essentializing Islam and homogeneizing Muslims: as much as he may criticize fundamentalists - which he calls ’a minority of extremists’-, he is using their language and their concepts. This is unlikely to help the cause of anti fundamentalists forces in Muslim countries.... He assumes that anyone has to have a religion, overlooking the fact that in many instances, people are forced into religious identities. In more and more ’Muslim’ countries, citizens are forced into religious practice [**], and pay dissent with their freedom and sometimes with their lives....Many citizens of ’Muslim’ countries want to leave religion in its place and delink it from politics.. they oppose unchangeable, a-historical, supposedly divine laws, as a process that is alien to democracy... Obama is claiming to defend democracy, democratic processes, and human rights? How can this fit with addressing whole nations through their supposed, hence imposed, religious identities?... They are made ’Muslims’ . Not just by our oppressive undemocratic governments - by Obama too… And when he talks of his own fellow citizens, these ’7 million American Muslims’, did he ask them what their faith was or is he assuming faith on geographical origin? In this religious straight jacket, women’s rights are limited to their right to education - and Obama distances himself from arrogant westerners by making it clear that women’s covering is not seen by him as an obstacle to their emancipation. Especially, if it is ’their choice’… Meanwhile, Iran is next door, with its morality police that jails women whose hair slips out of the said-covering, in the name of religious laws… And what about Afghanistan or Algeria where women were abducted, tortured, raped, mutilated, burnt alive, killed for not covering [***]? At no point does he raise the issue of who defines culture, who defines religion, who speaks for ’the Muslims’ - and why could not it be defined by individual women themselves - without clerics, without morality police, without self appointed, old, conservative, male, religious leaders - if their fundamental human rights were to be respected. Obviously, Obama trades women’s human rights for political and economic alliances with ’Islam’… ’Islam’ definitely owns oil, among other things. No, this discourse is not such a change for an American President: Obama remains within the boundaries of clashing civilisations- religions. How can this save us from the global rise of religious fundamentalism, which this discourse was supposed to counter? Footnotes [*] for instance, from 1962 to 1976, the source for Algerian laws on reproductive rights was the 1920 French law; or, in 1947, the source for Pakistani law on inheritance was the Victorian law that the UK itself had already done way with. [**] One Malaysian state made daily prayers compulsory; Algerian courts condemned to prison non fasting citizens in 2008; Iranian courts still jail women for ’unislamic behavior’. [***] *** Shadow Report on Algeria. wluml.org Creative Commons License Reinforcing presumed religious identities: where are women and secularists of Muslim countries in Obama’s speech in Cairo? by Marieme Helie Lucas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. You may republish it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. o o o #2. The Guardian, 5 June 2009 We wanted a world leader. We saw only a US president Obama’s long-awaited speech demonstrated little to suggest America will pursue any course beyond its own interests by Ahdaf Soueif This is hard. It’s hard because we so need to believe that Obama is about change, that he’s wise, that he’s good, that he has the interests of the world – rather than just the interests of the United States – at heart. ....In the great Festival Hall under the dome of Cairo University we are a good-humoured crowd....Obama did what many of us hoped he would not do: he accorded faith a central position in the relationship between our different parts of the world: rather than human beings with different histories and different political interests and ambitions – and despite a quick acknowledgment of colonialism – we were essentially people of different faiths who would now make nice with each other. And such is our beleaguered state of mind here in this part of the world that every time he quoted the Qur’an, he was applauded. But then again, it seemed that it was the same 200 or so people who were putting their hands together – to less effect each time. "Extremism" was top of the agenda, even though al-Qaida, once so modern and cutting edge, is now tired and irrelevant. But it was prodded out of its stall again as justification for American operations in Afghanistan. We were reminded of the 3,000 people killed in New York – people who had done no harm to anyone. And every person listening east of Rome and many west of it would have been thinking "and what about the million Iraqis, what about the Afghanis, what about …" And nothing about non-Muslim extremism, about the 40 million American Christian Zionists anticipating the Rapture with glee, or the Israeli settlers who in Hebron take your photo and upload it to God to fast-lane you to hell. Obama’s speech was a lawyerly speech, a clever speech. It certainly departed from the Bush discourse, but how far away from the policies of the last eight years are the sources it springs from? We still can only wait and see. The biggest applause he got was when he said that all US troops would be out of Iraq by 2012, and when he repeated his position on the Israeli settlements. He’s been brave on the settlements, and of course we’re all grateful for every step in the direction of halting the dispossession of the Palestinians. But it also needs to be remembered that stopping the settlements has been part of the official position of every American administration; what’s required is the implementation of that position by cutting off the funding for the settlements and closing the tax loophole that allows private American organisations to fund them. Around the pedestal carrying the Eternal Flame of Knowledge outside the university,the American activist group Code Pink carried banners that said "Obama: Stop funding Israeli war crimes". They came out of Gaza on Wednesday carrying a letter from Hamas to the American president, and they were at pains to point out that Hamas chose an American feminist group to carry their letter. I don’t know if they managed to deliver it. There is a difference between believing that ultimately the interests of the inhabitants of the planet are genuinely interconnected and believing that the interests of the world can be made to seem compatible with America’s. Obama has said that America should have not only the power but the moral standing to lead the world. Today we waited for him to demonstrate that moral standing and assume the leadership of the world. He did not; he remained the President of the United States. o o o #3. The Ottawa Citizen, June 4, 2009 Obama misses his ‘tear down this wall’ moment by Tarek Fatah "..But perhaps there was a method in Obama’s madness. Perhaps he would walk into the heart of dictatorship and racism to make his “tear down this wall” call as Ronald Reagan did in Berlin in 1987. I waited, but that moment never came. At one stage when Obama made reference to Bang-ladesh and Indonesia and Turkey, my heart fluttered in anticipation. Yes, I thought. He is now going to make the argument directly to the men who rule the Arab world with an iron fist. Talking about women’s rights, Obama said: “In Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia, we have seen Muslim-majority countries elect a woman to lead.” Bravo, I thought. I hoped his next sentence would say: Now is the time for Arab countries to take a lead from their non-Arab co-religionists and learn how to bring women to the forefront of politics and leadership. But he didn’t. Instead his next line was almost an apology for why the Arab world is so hostile to women’s equality. Obama said, “Meanwhile, the struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life, and in countries around the world." To me he sounded as if he was saying to the kings and generals: Do not despair, we Americans too are not without blame as far as women’s rights are concerned. Of course America has miles to go before it rests, but to even hint of a parallel between the challenges facing women in America and the appalling condition of women in the Arab world is downright dangerous and only feeds the mullahs who will say, “Look, even America discriminates against women — Obama said it.”... --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. 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