The first is Arab women in Israel finally speaking out against their menfolk, after the 8th woman in the extended family was murdered:
The perpetrators of most honor killings in the Arab community are not apprehended. Hamda's murder, however, was one too many for the women in the Abu-Ghanem family. She was the eighth woman to be murdered in the extended family in the last six and a half years. All her predecessors also lost their lives in "honor killings."
This time, instead of keeping mum when the police questioned them, the Abu- Ghanem women gave detailed testimonies of everything they knew. One said she had seen Rashad enter the house where Hamda was. Shortly afterward she heard shots and seconds later saw Rashad, the key suspect, fleeing from the building.
The victim's mother told the police that Rashad had forbidden his sister to leave the house after some men had called her a "prostitute."
"It was a women's revolt against the men of the family. While the men refused to cooperate with the police and forbade the women to speak, the women revealed all. They decided to put an end to the bloody circle of silence," Chief Inspector Haim Shreibhand, who was in charge of the investigation, told Haaretz.
Next we have a Memri translation of an Arab show on the proper way of conducting wife beating:
The male keeps instructing the women in the show with him that to beat the wife lightly, in order to train her to obey him, so she won't be lazy, so she does his bidding immediately, is the proper way to go about family life, as the husband is the master of the home.
One of the women on the shows points out to the audience that, according to the research she has done, she has found men around the Muslim world beating their women with heavy electrical cords.
Finally, we have an historical view of Islam, that shows us that perhaps Islam was not always the way it is today, with regards to women. There was a time in the past when women, too, were noted scholars, who issued fatwas made legal rulings and prayed with men, and sat and conversed with them on Islam.
Mohammad Akram Nadwi, a 43-year-old Sunni alim, or religious scholar, has rediscovered a long-lost tradition of Muslim women teaching the Koran, transmitting hadith (deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) and even making Islamic law as jurists.
Akram embarked eight years ago on a single-volume biographical dictionary of female hadith scholars, a project that took him trawling through biographical dictionaries, classical texts, madrasa chronicles and letters for relevant citations. “I thought I’d find maybe 20 or 30 women,” he says. To date, he has found 8,000 of them, dating back 1,400 years, and his dictionary now fills 40 volumes. It’s so long that his usual publishers, in Damascus and Beirut, have balked at the project, though an English translation of his preface — itself almost 400 pages long — will come out in England this summer.
The dictionary’s diverse entries include a 10th-century Baghdad-born jurist who traveled through Syria and Egypt, teaching other women; a female scholar — or muhaddithat — in 12th-century Egypt whose male students marveled at her mastery of a “camel load” of texts; and a 15th-century woman who taught hadith at the Prophet’s grave in Medina, one of the most important spots in Islam. One seventh-century Medina woman who reached the academic rank of jurist issued key fatwas on hajj rituals and commerce; another female jurist living in medieval Aleppo not only issued fatwas but also advised her far more famous husband on how to issue his.
Mohammad Akram Nadwi notes that the repressive attitude towards women in current Islamic culture is based on its current insecurity. And failing to educate a woman is like the pagan religions burying women alive.
Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence - better known as "Lawrence of Arabia" - and renowned as a champion of Arab independence, actually had "a sort of contempt for the Arabs" and was an advocate of Jewish statehood from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, according to acclaimed British historian Sir Martin Gilbert...
T.E. Lawrence ... wore Arabian clothes and adopted many Arab customs. He is widely perceived, Gilbert told The Jerusalem Post this week, as "the great Arabist, right? ...
The "astonishing" truth, however, Gilbert went on, is that Lawrence was "a serious Zionist. He believed that the only hope for the Arabs of Palestine and the rest of the region was Jewish statehood - that if the Jews had a state here, they would provide the modernity, the 'leaven,' as he put it, with which to enable the Arabs to move into the 20th century."...
"He felt that only with a Jewish presence and state would the Arabs ever make anything of themselves. And, by a Jewish state, he meant a Jewish state from the Mediterranean shore to the River Jordan," said Gilbert, adding his own comment that this "will never come to pass."
Gilbert, in Israel for the International Book Fair, described his discovery of Lawrence's Zionist orientation as the most surprising archival revelation he had come across from an Israeli perspective...
And here is a comment in general from Gilbert about how the present understanding of history is often wrong:
"As a historian, I'm very cautious about anyone's claiming to know what any government is doing at the present time," he said. "I study archives as soon as they are open - normally 30 years after an event; sometimes a bit less. What you see when you do this is that the people you imagined had been strong were weak; the people you thought weak were strong; and things you thought couldn't possibly be taking place were taking place."
The distorting effect of "it bleeds, it leads," and journalists wanting to influence the outcome of events and writing their pieces in that way fortunately will have much less effect on the judgment of history 30 years on. Not to say that it will be nil, but it will be mitigated.
Thus, the change in Reagan's reputation in the intervening period, and thus, too, if Bush policies change the status quo in the ME in the long term, we'll see a very different historical judgement on him than the one he has at present.
A blog friend emailed me this story, in which the Rabbi of the 101st Airborne Division describes his inquries into the existence of the old Jewish section of Mosul/Nineveh:
As I entered light came through the half-open roof, and I could just make out writing engraved on the walls. It was Hebrew. It was then that I knew had stumbled into the ancient synagogue of the city of Mosul-Nineveh. My heart broke as I climbed over the garbage piles that filled the room where, for hundreds of years, the prayers of Jews had reached the heavens. I realized I was probably the first Jew to enter this holy place in over 50 years. Over three-and-a half meters of garbage filled the main sanctuary, and what appeared to be the women’s section. I could barely make it out because of the filth, but there was Hebrew writing on the walls.
A lovely story about discovering traces of the past community. Read the whole thing.
He asks this with reference to this data list compiled by J.R. Dunn that appeared in the American Thinker, Resisting Global Warming Panic.
Despite the insistence of Al Gore and friends, this is far from the first time the Earth has ever passed through a climatic warming period. In fact, one occurred relatively recently, the medieval warm period, more commonly known as the Little Climatic Optimum (LCO), a period stretching roughly from the 10th to the 13th centuries, in which the average temperature was anything from 1 to 3 degrees centigrade higher than it is today. Several years ago, I covered the LCO in an article detailing the climatic history of the last millennium. But it's worthwhile to cover the highlights once more, to help put the contemporary panic into perspective.
* How warm was it during the LCO? Areas in the Midlands and Scotland that cannot grow crops today were regularly farmed. England was known for its wine exports.
* The average height of Britons around A.D. 1000 was close to six feet, thanks to good nutrition. The small stature of the British lower classes (and the Irish) later in the millennium is an artifact of lower temperatures. People of the 20th century were the first Europeans in centuries to grow to their "true" stature - and most had to grow up in the USA to do it.
* In fact, famine - and its partner, plague -- appears to have taken a hike for several centuries. We have records of only a handful of famines during the LCO, and few mass outbreaks of disease. The bubonic plague itself appears to have retreated to its heartland of Central Asia.
* The LCO was the first age of transatlantic exploration. When not slaughtering their neighbors, the Vikings were charting new lands across the North Atlantic, one of the stormiest seas on earth (only the Southern Ocean - the Roaring 40s - is worse). If you tried the same thing today, traveling their routes in open boats of the size they used, you would drown. They discovered Iceland, and Greenland, and a new world even beyond, where they found grape vines, the same as in England.
* The Agricultural Revolution is not widely known except among historians. Mild temperatures eased land clearing and lengthened growing seasons. More certain harvests encouraged experimentation among farmers involving field rotation, novel implements, and new crops such as legumes. While the thought of peas and beans may not thrill the foodies among us, they expanded an almost unbelievably bland ancient diet as well as providing new sources of nutrition. The result was a near-tripling of European population from 27 million at the end of the 7th century to 70 million in 1300.
* The First Industrial Revolution is not widely known even among historians. Opening the northern German plains allowed access to easily mined iron deposits in the Ruhr and the Saarland. As a result smithies and mills became common sights throughout Europe. Then came the basic inventions without which nothing more complex can be made - the compound crank, the connecting rod, the flywheel, followed by the turbine, the compass, the mechanical clock, and eyeglasses. Our entire technical civilization, all the way down to Al Gore's hydrogenmobile, has its roots in the LCO.
But in the late 13th century, it all came to an end.
The climate closed down. Rains ruined crops and washed away entire seacoast towns. Far to the north, the great colonies of Iceland and Greenland faltered and began to fade away. Famine returned to Europe, and with it the plague, in one of the greatest mass deaths ever witnessed by humanity. The bright centuries were replaced by the dance of death and a dank and morbid religiosity. The focus of culture shifted to the warm Mediterranean. It remained cold, within certain broad limits, for six hundred years. The chill only lifted in the 1850s, when our current warming actually began.
On a truly random note, I'm wondering if the end of the little climatic optimum in roughly 1300 had anything to do with creating the colder social climate that led to the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.
In a sense, yes. Italian banking was one of the things created during the high middle ages - which occurred as a result of the warming period. And with the rise of the pope's bankers, the rationale for keeping Jews within England ceased to be important to the king, whose ancestors had used them for loans and to create revenue by exceedingly high taxation rates.
Moreover, note that the entire period of residence of Jews in England in this early period nearly exactly corresponds to this medieval warming period: Jews arrived sometime after 1066 and stayed until 1290. (Jews were not known in England before William the Conquerer.) One would have to do much more research to support the following hypothesis, but it is certainly possible that, with the warmer weather and agricutural abundance, English society became more open to outsiders; and the reciprocal closing of society occurred as resources became scarcer and conditions generally harder.
Also, note, that in our own country, 1100-1300 marked the height of Anasazi culture in the Southwest. I wonder if, to the extent that cannabalism existed in Anasazi culture (research suggests that it was introduced to Anasazi culture through trade with the Aztecs), it, too, occurred as a result of worsening weather conditions, with agricultural crops harder to produce in the severe drought years.
Drought, no doubt, would have adversely effected hunting conditions as well.
