“What’s important is that she’s a person made by God, loved by God and given gifts by God who feels that she’s called to be a priest, and that’s a call that’s been checked out by the church rigorously … Gender realignment surgery helps address that issue, and it’s about bringing mind and body into wholeness.  I see this as something restorative and healing.”
— Bishop of Hereford Right Reverend Anthony Priddis, speaking about the recent ordination of Sarah Jones, 44, as a priest in the Church of England.  

British law and the National Health Service recognizes gender dysphoria, in which an individual believes that his or her gender identity is incongruent with his or her anatomical sex. Sara Jones underwent sexual reassignment surgery at the age of 29 to become a woman.

Mimi Hanaoka

For those who have been vaguely enticed by Christianity but can’t be bothered to read the tome that is the Bible, there’s hope and a new gimmick on the market; Reverend Michael Hinton has, after years of toil and vicious editing, edited and published the new 100-Minute Bible. Miniature both in content and in style, 11,000 copies of the notebook sized Bible will be distributed to British churches and schools.

The Bishop of Jarrow, Rev John Pritchard, served as a consultant on the book and offered a rigorously non-theological take on the 100-Minute Bible, in which all 66 books of the Christian holy text have been condensed like a literary cheat sheet.  “This is an attempt to say, ‘Look, there’s a great story here – let’s get into it and let’s not get put off by the things that are going to be the sub-plot. Let’s give you the big plot’,” was the Reverend’s sunny outlook.

Indeed, it is precisely the “big plot,” of the Bible — its nuances, its theological distinctions, and its literary, historical, and sacred characteristics — that such an attempt at abridgement destroys.  And Mr. Pritchard should know better.  

Mimi Hanaoka

A bikinied Barbie doll might send shivers of loathing down a pious Muslim Damascene parent’s spine, but apparently Fulla, a doll that is curiously and impossibly proportioned like Barbie but imbued with “Muslim values,” is sending parents scurrying to the toy stores.

There have been other dolls garbed in traditional Islamic attire, including an Iranian Sara (who is veiled), an American Razanne, and an absurd Orientalist fantasy of a doll called Leila (who is Moroccan) that Mattel, Barbie’s creator, peddled as a slave girl flitting around an Ottoman court. But this new Fulla stands out because people are actually buying her in countries such as Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, and Syria (where she was spawned), even with her hefty price tag of 16 U.S. dollars, when the average Syrian per capita income is about 100 U.S. dollars a month.

Fawaz Abidin, Fulla’s brand manager for her creator, NewBoy Design Studio, explains Fulla’s popularity by insisting that “this isn’t just about putting the hijab on a Barbie doll…You have to create a character that parents and children will want to relate to. Our advertising is full of positive messages about Fulla’s character. She’s honest, loving, and caring, and she respects her father and mother.”

The emotional and spiritual qualifications of a plastic doll aside, the interesting aspect of Fulla is whether, how, and to what extent she will affect attitudes towards the hijab, the popularity of which she may popularize and work to solidify for a younger generation.

The hijab most recently drew international attention with the head scarf bans in France and regions of Germany and the attendant movements that formed to guard the rights of women to wear Islamic garb.

Mimi Hanaoka

Religious tribunals tend to slink around out of the spotlight of public interest, unless they are Islamic, in which case they tend to sound like a bit of a dirty word in the western world. And so it was in Canada; this week the government of Ontario, Canada’s largest province, decided to ban all religious arbitration and tribunals, which have been permitted since 1991 with the region’s Arbitration Act. Catholic and Jewish methods of arbitration drew little interest, and the religious courts arbitrated family law for those who opted for their affairs to be dealt before a religious committee, until proponents of Sharia law lobbied for the same privileges.

Dalton McGuinty, Ontario’s Premier, explained his about-face: “Ontarians will always have the right to seek advice from anyone in matters of family law, including religious advice… But no longer will religious arbitration be deciding matters of family law.” Most offensive to the Canadian government are likely the interpretations of Islamic law in which women are incapable of divorcing their husbands, in which polygamy is sanctioned, and in which girls are permitted to marry at younger ages than secular law permits.

Sharia opponents are gloating over their legal victory, while Christian and Jewish groups are adamant that they retain their privileges, and their Muslim counterparts insist that they will continue to lobby for Canada to sanction Sharia law on behalf of the nation’s approximately 600,000 Muslims. The UN tallied Canada’s total population at around 32 million in 2005.
  

Mimi Hanaoka

Knowing the end of the story makes sitting through it somewhat boring, and the Egyptian elections were no exception, even if the threats of violence, bullying, and outright fraud added a modicum of unpredictability to the inevitable outcome. In Egypt’s first contested presidential elections (previously the electorate could only vote for or against the candidate), Mubarak — who has already led Egypt for 24 years — won another six-year term with 88.6 percent of the votes. Ayman Nour of the Ghad (Tomorrow) Party trailed in with 7.6 percent of the vote and Numan Gumaa of the Wafd party crawled in with 2.9 percent.  Only 23 percent of the 32.5 million registered voters went to out the polls on Wednesday.

“This is a farce. I will appeal to get our rights back,” vowed Ayman Nour, amid allegations of fraud and intimidation on the part of the incumbent and his supporters. The electoral commission scoffed at Nour’s request.

Perhaps the only person to be surprised by the results was Ahmad al-Sabahi of the Umma Party who, at 90, forecast a landslide victory in which he seized 95 percent of the vote and had already requested that he be addressed as “Mr. President.” Included in al-Sabahi’s presidential platform was the promise that, if elected, he would force men to don the fez hat.    

Mimi Hanaoka

While virulent but nebulously directed anti-Muslim sentiment sullied the British consciousness in the wake of the recent London terrorist bombings, the country selected its first Muslim Miss England. Hammasa Kohistani — 18, Uzbekistan-born, and able to chatter prettily in a stunning six languages — was crowned as the first Muslim Miss England in Liverpool on Saturday.

Kohistani’s ascension was greeted by cheering crowds in Liverpool but grumblings at the Liverpool Islamic Institute. “There is no way a Muslim girl should be playing any part in this competition, because it is unlawful … The ladies in that contest are very scantily dressed, and the only part of the body that should be on display are the face, the hands, and the feet,” stated Hashim Sulaiman.

Undeterred by the criticism, Kohistani will be vying for the $US100,000 prize pot at the Miss World final competition in China in December.

Mimi Hanaoka

Before the mourning began — indeed, even before his death — the speculation about his successor began; Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist succumbed yesterday, at the age of 80, to his very private battle with thyroid cancer, and now the media is engaged in as respectful a feeding frenzy as possible about Justice Rehnquist’s legacy and the changing face of the US Supreme Court.  

Justice Rehnquist’s legacy is undoubtedly conservative — advocating states’ rights and the public role of religion in America while rallying against abortion and desiring to limit civil rights and the rights of criminal defendants — but his successor may even sit more staunchly on the far right of center. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement earlier this year on July 1st, which leaves two vacancies on the court.

President Bush nominated John Roberts — a stalwart conservative who, at 50, is preposterously young compared to his peers, should his nomination be confirmed by the Senate — as O’Connor’s successor, and Justice Rehnquist’s passing has cleared the canvas of American law to be repainted to President Bush’s liking. As Justice O’Connor was the nine-person panel’s less predictable swing voter, Roberts would, as a justice, considerably change the Supreme Court. The new session of the Supreme Court is fast approaching, and if there are only eight justices serving when the court reconvenes on October 3rd,  any ties will fail to set a legal precedent (although they will affirm lower court decisions). President Bush’s term in office now has a definite expiration date, but he now looks well positioned to engrave his ideological legacy on American law.  

Mimi Hanaoka

While gay marriages have been variously performed, overturned, and sanctioned — most recently in Spain — the question lingers: What makes you gay? And, more importantly, why does that matter?  

A recent article published in The Boston Globe summarizes the theories relating to homosexual behavior; it is entirely unresolved whether homosexuality is determined on the cellular or genetic level, in the social sphere, or in related hormonal developments and reactions, or a myriad of determining factors.  

Scientific breakthroughs aside, one reason to determine the source of homosexuality would be to further social acceptance. Should homosexuality be explained as an inborn characteristic, certain biases would lose their foundations. The ambiguously named Family Research Council, a conservative Christian organization, spawned the book Getting It Straight, in which the organization claims that should there be research that proves that homosexuality is an innate characteristic that precedes any nurture, such a discovery “would advance the idea that sexual orientation is an innate characteristic, like race; that homosexuals, like African-Americans, should be legally protected against ‘discrimination;’ and that disapproval of homosexuality should be as socially stigmatized as racism. However, it is not true.”

It was only in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association scrapped homosexuality from its list of mental disorders; in an ideal world, a scientific explanation of homosexuality would melt away the profoundly illogical prejudices that can accompany discussions related to homosexuality.

Mimi Hanaoka

“The Japanese people have stopped thinking about war … Even though our troops have been sent to Iraq, we don’t see ourselves as having any connection to war … the concept of building a nation through military power has disappeared and we just spend our days having fun,” is how Takashi Murakami, one of Japan’s pre-eminent pop artists, characterizes the lingering effects of the atomic bomb, 60 years after the days of infamy, on the Japanese mindset.  

What, then, is this Japanese mindset? According to Murakami, who was born in 1962, it is an attitude towards life, framed by the annihilation of the atomic bomb and the seven-year-long American occupation that followed, characterized by defeat, a desire for pleasure and entertainment, and a childlike inability to form a clear identity. Such a mindset may well be true, and given the counterproductive and curiously nasty trends that surface in Japanese culture — the tendency of many Japanese in their 20s and 30s who have forsaken or believe they have been forsaken by corporate culture to wander from temporary job to temporary job; the overwhelming lack of faith in the national pension scheme that is woefully under-funded and may become unable to sustain today’s youth; the bizarre phenomenon of “oyajigari,” whereby Lolita-esque schoolgirls meet older, typically married men, and then extort them for money while threatening to reveal their liaisons to their wives and children — but what is the solution to this event that occurred over half a century ago?

Murakami theorizes that this culture of diversion and defeat is “because we lost the war and because of the way we lost the war. We didn’t lose with courage, we just gave up and showed the white flag.”  What, then, should the Japanese have done or do now? According to Murakami’s characterization, a reversal would be a return to imperialist militarism. Regardless of whether the timbre of Japan’s current social identity was informed by an initial culture of military defeat, it has now become an identity, nonetheless, in the 60 intervening years; let military defeat be absorbed into the culture and be transformed so that the legacy of militarism, as well as the resultant defeat, can be left behind.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“The Islamic Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance that
all ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to altered realities. ”

—Novelist and Indian-born Muslim Salman Rushdie, expressing his belief in the need for Islamic reform.

Writing his way into public scrutiny again, Rushdie’s upcoming book, Shalimar the Clown, will imagine the story of a Muslim boy who, under the guidance of a radical Muslim cleric, becomes a terrorist.

Rushdie was condemned in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini, the previous supreme spiritual leader of Iran, for alleged blasphemy in his book
The Satanic Verses; Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the author’s execution, and Rushdie was forced into hiding in the subsequent years.
  

Mimi Hanaoka

What language is the language of God?  According to a BBC poll, the majority of British Muslims — 65 percent of them — would have Muslim clerics in Britain preach in English, despite the fact the Qur’an, the Muslim holy scripture and a recitation of the word of God, is written and transmitted in Arabic. Only 38 percent of the overall British population concurred that sermons should be delivered in English.  

The poll, conducted in August of this year and including 1,004 adults contacted by phone in addition to another 204 conversations with Muslims, could well be a reflection of the anxiety felt by Muslim communities in Britain about the alienation, marginalization, and failure to integrate and assimilate if preaching is conducted in Arabic, in addition to the fact that English may be the mother tongue of many British Muslims.

It’s unclear, however, it if is even feasible for the majority of imams to preach in English; Chair of the Muslim Council for Religious and Racial Harmony, imam Dr. Abduljalil Sajid, offered the BBC the vague estimate “that only 10 percent (of imams in Britain) are well versed in English and 90 percent probably speak in their own mother tongue — Turkish, Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic and so on.” According to Sajid, “Fifty-six percent of our young people are born British and the only country they know of is England, the United Kingdom,” which underscored the importance, in his opinion, of preaching in English to the younger generation of Muslim Britons whose primary language is English.  

Mimi Hanaoka

As terrorist bombs tore through London, Beirut, Sharm-al-Sheik, Cairo, and Istanbul this week, the Iraq Body Count and Oxford Research Group compiled the grim statistics of the ongoing carnage in Iraq; nearly 25,000 civilians killed, at least 42,500 injured, and over 1,700 American soldiers dead. According to the study, titled Dossier on Civilian Casualties in Iraq 2003-2005, American-led forces were responsible for 37 percent of all non-combatant deaths, with insurgents responsible for 9 percent, and another 36 percent falling under the vague but lethal umbrella of post-invasion criminal violence.  

Mimi Hanaoka