OK, now I’m worried. We were talking about cilices last night at work. According to www.cilice.co.uk, motto How Luminous is Darkness, a cilice is a spiked metal belt or chain worn strapped tight around the upper thigh. It hardly needs saying that this is a Catholic thing, in particular they are worn by members of Opus Dei. The idea is, I think, that the discomfort caused is a penance for your sinfulness. The thing that’s worrying me, though, is that I find the idea of a woman wearing one so very intriguing! The concept of someone thinking she’s so sinful that she needs to atone for it by wearing a spiky metal garter-belt, it’s so weird, so revealing. That was what I always used to find so attractive about Catholic girls; they knew so much about sin it was always at the front of their minds. And let’s face it, the upper-thigh, strapped tightly, contrasting with the delicate metal-work wrought by Italian nuns, it’s a compelling image. Mama Mia, Agent Provocateur should be selling them!
Archive for the 'Religion' Category
According to the official Saudi Arabia information site:
To understand the history of the Kingdom and its political, economic and social development, it is necessary to realize that Islam, which permeates every aspect of a Muslim’s life, also permeates every aspect of the Saudi Arabian state.
and according to a story on the BBC News site today
An appeal court in Saudi Arabia has doubled the number of lashes and added a jail sentence as punishment for a woman who was gang-raped.
If I were a Muslim I would consider Saudi Arabia a very poor advertisement for my religion. Have a look at the official information site and click on the section entitled Saudi Art and Culture. It contains a poetry section containing two short poems, and a discussion of the Arabic language which is put to shame by the entry on the same subject in Wikipedia. 
Veiled Mum called over her five year old daughter and told her off for dancing about.
Afro-Caribbean Mum: Don’t you like her dancing?
VM: No, it’s not allowed in our religion.
AM: But she’s just playing around, she’s got lots of energy.
VM: I wouldn’t like her ever to become a dancer.
AM: Not even a ballet dancer?
VM: No, it’s not allowed in our religion.
The BBC has produced an excellent guide to the several degrees of headscarf that different Muslim women wear. I had a good search through the sites of the Muslim Council of Britain, the Islamic Human Rights Commission and the Protect Hijab site. There was plenty of material on them about fighting bans on the Hijab and some on why women choose to wear it, why it’s not sexist and so on but none of them even make an attempt to explain the different types of scarf. I suppose it would be unfair to suggest that it seems like Muslims are more interested in fighting for their rights than explaining their culture, but have a look around, see if you can find anything.
I did find one article about Islamic Clothing Definitions on a site called Central Mosque. They also had an article answering the question “How is it that Islam allows Slavery?” It starts off with a damming description of the practice of slavery by the ancient Egyptians, Romans and “Western European Nations” before going on to explain that “…under Islam regarded as fundamentally equal, the slaves in Muslim society could and did live in secure possession of their dignity as creatures of the same Creator…” It is a good example of the kind of dishonest sophistry that passes for theological discussion in many parts of Islam. You can find equally hilarious nonsense in Christian literature, of course, but not generally published these days. I think that’s because they know they couldn’t get away with it because they’d be rightly lampooned. Unfortunately satire is still a very dangerous activity in most of the Muslim world and so nonsense reigns supreme.
As far as veils go, I don’t think much of them, as I’ve said before, but I find them much less offensive than SUVs. In fact, if I had to put them on a scale I’d say I like them a bit more than shell suits and a bit less than platform shoes. On the other hand, a well-cut chador or shayla can be pretty damm sexy.
I had never been particularly interested in seeing the cartoons about the holocaust that Iran commissioned as a reaction to the Danish Muslim cartoons brouhaha. However, now that a Danish newspaper has published them and there’s no doubt going to be a fuss all over again I thought I’d have a look. A search with Google took me to a page produced by the Israel News Agency in which they publish the Iran cartoons in tacky juxtaposition with photos from the holocaust. The cartoons seem thoughtful, I didn’t find them offensive. The bullying and dishonest text pasted over the cartoons by the INA, however, is as revolting in its own way as their misappropriation of those tragic photographs.
Watching Michael Radford’s 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice a couple of days ago had made me feel a bit more sympathetic towards the Israeli government. It’s a heavy-handed film and I didn’t think much of it but Shylock’s dilemma at the end of the play highlighted for me the difficulty of Israel’s position in its current war with Lebanon. Portia tells him that he is legally entitled to take his pound of flesh but that if he takes more or less than a pound, even if he’s off by a fraction, or if he spills any blood in the process then he will be killed. I can see how Israel might feel that this is what is expected of them in their response to the aggression of Hezbollah. They are allowed to react but if they go too far, as indeed they did, or if they spill any innocent blood, as inevitably happened, then they are suddenly very unpopular.
There I was, looking for information about making drawers for a cupboard and instead I found a deposition by the data engineer of the International Necronautical Society.
We, the First Committee of the International Necronautical Society, declare the following:-
1. That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit.
2. That there is no beauty without death, its immanence. We shall sing death’s beauty - that is, beauty.
I’m not really sure what to make of it, but it is a great read, as are all the depositions on the site.
The Biblical story on which the Jewish festival of Passover is based says that Moses told Pharaoh Ramses II, the Egyptian leader, that he must free his Jewish slaves or his country would suffer terrible punishments. When the Pharaoh refused, Egypt was afflicted with 10 terrible plagues the last one of which was the killing of every first-born child and beast in Egypt. The Jews avoided having their own first-borns killed by marking their houses with lambs blood and so God ‘passed over’ their houses and didn’t murder their children.
I expect you can see where I’m going with this. Wasn’t Moses the Osama Bin Laden of his time, but even worse because Egypt wasn’t a democracy? The people who’s children were murdered had no role in choosing their leader and no say in his policies. They really were the ultimate innocent victims. Of course it’s great that the Jews were freed from slavery in Egypt, but look at the price! Maybe I’m over-sensitive because I am a first-born child and so is my oldest daughter. The Jews could have told their Egyptian neighbours what they needed to do in order to avoid having their first-born children killed. If they had done that it really would have merited an annual celebration. As it is I think the events are more worthy of a sad memorial, like a smaller version of Holocaust Memorial Day.
I was talking to my Dad about this and he asked me how else the Children of Israel could have free themselves from slavery. It’s a question some Palestinians have clearly been asking themselves.
The children of food Puritans like me are usually only allowed to eat sweets and chocolate on special occasions, and even then only in moderation. So today when we gave our daughters colossal chocolate eggs with the inevitable accompanying gigantic bars of Dairy Milk they may have been slightly unsure about what was going on. Once they’d started eating the chocolate though and nobody had told them to stop it was as if the walls of society had come crashing down. They responded in a way I never would have foreseen; they took all their clothes off. Then they ran round and round the garden shouting and waggling their bottoms. I was relieved that the bacchanalian orgy pretty much stopped there, probably because they are too young to be able to think of any other uninhibited things to do. Actually, Amelia did do a wee in a toy wheelbarrow but they’re too little to tie their parents up and barbecue us. I still haven’t found a reasonable way of reconciling this clearly pagan Easter with the other Easter I’d like them to know about, the Christian one with suffering, resurrection and hope. I tried to bring the subject up but I might as well have been talking about the relative merits of nicely indented html versus optimised text with no carriage returns or formatting. I favour the former, by the way, if you’re interested.
I find some parts of the old Testament very alarming; those descriptions of mass murder, ethnic cleansing and the cold hearted destruction of entire cities remind me of Nazi crimes during the second world war. One of the most horrifying stories is the description of the killing of every first born child in Egypt. I think that such a sad, awful event should be commemorated, like September the 11th. It surprises me that some people treat the occasion as a celebration. I suppose Easter is a similarly odd cause for celebration - Christians tend to focus on the resurrection rather than the death of Christ but they still use the symbol of the cross rather than a picture of the cave. Even so, it’s those murdered Egyptian children I’ll be thinking about during Passover.
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