Map of the international community. Source: Terrible Maps
Have a look at this map. Is there anything missing from it? If you were Martin Wolf, the Chief Economics Commentator of the Financial Times, you would probably think that this is a map of “the world”—all of it. This is hardly a sarcastic remark, and I will prove it to you in this post.
Continue readingFor millennia, human beings have been making all kinds of arguments for the existence of God, deities, or any spiritual being/reality beyond the material world. One of the most unusual of these arguments is the one made by French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), which came to be known as Pascal’s Wager. It is not based on a logical, epistemological, scriptural, or experiential evidence but on probability: if you believe in God and live accordingly, and it turns out to be true, you win infinite rewards. If it turns out to be false, you lose relatively little—some restrictions on your daily life, but you can still live a happy fulfilling life. If you don’t believe, and it turns out that there is God, you risk losing too much, e.g. eternal damnation in Hell!
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What do Israel, Pakistan, and South Park have in common? Each has transformed a monotheistic religion into an ethnonationalist political identity that has little to do with that religion beyond its name. In this blog post, I will explore these three cases, pointing out the similarities (and few differences) between them. In the last section, I will discuss two possible counter responses to religion as ethnonationalism: one that I call the “Randy-ChatGPT principle” and another one that I would have called the “Jesus response” (I will explain later why I have crossed it out!).
Last month I wrote a blogpost in which I described how ChatGPT made up academic references after I asked it to suggest resources on Emir Abdelkader. The references seemed deceptively authentic, as if ChatGPT had been intent on misleading me.
Later on, I wanted to ‘confront’ ChatGPT with my accusations, so I asked it to analyze that post. Its answer was:
Continue readingHave a look at the above list of references, especially if you are an academic in Middle Eastern studies or any other related field. Do you notice anything suspicious about them? Unless you are a specialist on Emir Abdelkader (also written as Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri, a nineteenth-century Algerian anticolonial hero), they would all probably seem legit to you. Only they aren’t! These are all made-up references by ChatGPT, but admittedly, or perhaps annoyingly or even alarmingly, very well made-up.
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Iconoclasm is back! Angry mobs of puritan zealots are storming the streets of various cities, toppling statues and tearing images apart. No picture is too sacred for their axes, which are set to erase any blasphemy from the face of the earth.
Admittedly, this opening sentence is an overdramatization of recent attacks on statues and monuments in the aftermath of the gruesome killing of African American man George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States on May 25, 2020. It is, furthermore, inaccurate in its characterization of these acts as a form of iconoclasm, which is—in the strict meaning of the term—the destruction of statues and pictures set up as objects of religious veneration.
For some reason, I find religious leaflets interesting. Previously in this blog, I wrote a post comparing two brochures that I had picked up in a church in Stockholm, Sweden. Perhaps it is this overlap between religion and marketing, between what is supposed to be sacred and what is supposed to be profane, that fascinates me about them. In this post, I will revisit this topic, but instead of comparing two religious brochures, this time I am going to compare a religious flyer with an atheist/secularist brochure.
The religious flyer was handed to me last June by an old man in the Swiss city of Bern (fun fact that not many people know: it is the capital of Switzerland!). It says, in German, “God’s YES to you…”. The organization behind the flyer, Society for Biblical Propagation in Bern, states no confessional affiliation in its website. It claims it is neither recruiting converts nor seeking donations but merely spreading biblical message.
This is a conference report that I wrote for the website of The Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” at the University of Leipzig, where I currently work. Here is the link for the original post.
Between 10 and 12 March 2017, the Third Conference of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) took place in Beirut, Lebanon under the title: State, Sovereignty and Social Space in the Arab Region: Emerging Historical and Theoretical Approaches. The ACSS was established in 2008 to promote social scientific research and knowledge production in the Arab world, enhance the role of social science in Arab public life, and inform public policy in the region. The conference took place at the Crowne Plaza Hotel and consisted of 38 panels in addition to four roundtable discussions, a keynote, and a number of presentations. Lectures and discussions were conducted in three languages (Arabic, English, and French) with simultaneous interpretation available for every session. The papers presented by around 200 active participants covered a wide variety of themes in political science, anthropology, and sociology.
I wrote a draft of this post two years ago (March 2015) in my notebook, but only now that I have edited it and posted it online. I have avoided making any substantial changes, so that it remains true as much as possible to my thoughts back then.
Those who know me personally or have read some of my posts here (Oriental(ist) Metal Music or “Is God really Dead?”) know me as a dedicated heavy metal fan. For 15 years, almost half my life, I listened almost exclusively to heavy metal music (along with few hard and progressive rock bands). I have also been a dedicated concert-goer, sometimes travelling to other countries just to attend a metal band I like. Heavy metal was in fact more than just music for me. It was, for most of these 15 years, an identity and an influence on the way I think and behave. I even wrote my MA thesis, back in 2010, about heavy metal in Syria and for a while I was thinking about doing a PhD in this field. As a faithful metalhead I looked down at all other styles of music, especially hip hop, and bragged how heavy metal surpassed it in sophistication, authenticity, anti-commercialism, and fan-dedication. In fact, two months ago, I would not have been able to name 10 hip hop songs, and if you asked my what was your favorite hip hop song, I would have said Gay Fish.
So after all that to turn to hip hop within less than two months came as a surprise to me personally before anyone else. So I have spent the past two weeks reflecting on this “radical” change and trying to understand how come it ever happened and why hip hop and not any other style of music. What has changed in my life or my environment that helped make this transformation? I will try in this post to give some answers to these questions.
Continue readingEarlier this year, on a cold January morning, I was walking around in the snowy streets of Stockholm, not sure how to spend the few hours before the departure of my bus on an 18-hour journey to the far north of Sweden, when I came across a big brown church in a side street near the main train station. Being interested in religion, I decided to walk in and have a look in order to get an impression of Swedish churches.
Two different Christianities in two booklets
When I went in, which was few minutes after it had opened its doors to visitors, there were already 5 or 6 people inside. Some of them seemed to be homeless people who spent the night inside protected from the freezing cold. They wore rough clothes and had blankets and mats with them. There were also two people praying and another person sitting near the door, who, I assume, work for the church.
