Fieldnotes on Humanity

This is not a joke! This is real. It happened a couple of weeks ago. Some highly qualified and top Afghan  ulema (religious Muslim scholars), representing top Islamic seminaries like al-Azhar in Egypt, congregated in Kabul for several days to find out whether it is justifiable to declare suicide bombing haram (forbidden). After several days of arduous studies, miraculously, these ulama  found out that God in his Qur'an does not mention anything about suicide. Therefore, still unsure, but they took courage to announce that though they wanted to see where the Qur'an adjudicates suicide bombing, unfortunately they could not find it. The news was published on several news websites including  Deutsche Welle , also here . It is bewildering and to some degree it illustrates a comedy of stupidity of human nature. Who is to blame? It is unfathomable how Islam has mutated humans into one the most evil and cruel creatures imaginable on earth.

There is an uproar on social media, particularly on Twitter over a video about showing how Muslims are the coolest creatures. The video was published here . Muslims activists and non-activists called out for lack of racial diversity. I, on the other hand (not as a Muslim), looked at it from a different angle and that is the issue of Muslim identity. Why sometimes people take what a short video or article shows or says at face value is beyond understanding, albeit, this could be a way of struggle for recognition of certain groups of Muslims. Despite diverse backgrounds, Muslims, by outward appearance, try to be identified as Muslims in the West. However, coming from a particular region or belonging to a particular culture is neither necessarily representing a religious identity nor amounts to religiosity of a particular. A video like this one does not show the real Muslims at all, it rather shows how some Muslims (from various backgrounds) have not been able to assimilate and i...

We often hear of “honor killing” in the mass media, a practice that exists in some Muslim countries including Afghanistan. An honor killing is the murder of a family or clan member in which the perpetrators are motivated by a belief that the victim has brought dishonor upon the family, clan or community. A comparable, yet less widely publicized form of honour punishment, is gang rape. While honor gang rapes are usually carried out against women, an incident that took place two weeks in Northern Afghanistan involved the gang rape of two young men. According to a local report , a dozen farmers and shepherds raped two young men as a punishment for engaging in sexual relations with two young women. The incident occured in the Dasht-e Laili (Laili desert) of Jawzjan province, an area famed for being the site of a Taliban massacre in the aftermath of September 11. Both young men are related to high-ranking government officials, one being the son of the provincial governor and the other the s...