The Post-Modern Dialectics of Belief

I have been musing a little bit about belief, especially after a couple of outraged comments on the previous post about the absurdity of the moon-sighting charade that occurs ever few months. We get similar comments every time we post something about the irrationality that seems to pervade the thinking of literalist followers of religion. There really is no way to argue against belief. If someone actually believes with all their heart that white is actually black or that the placement of Venus relative to Mars will affect your chances of finding true love, how do you argue against it? A belief, by definition, resists interrogation. A good part of religion involves blind trust - that a beneficient god (or gods) exists, that everything that occurs has a hidden, deeper meaning, that there is a goal to strive towards, and that the path to that goal as defined by the religion is the best route to achieve it.

I should point out that I have no issues with people's personal spiritual beliefs (it's their own space after all and human history shows us that everyone requires some sort of belief system to survive) and I do think that on the whole all major religions (all the ones I know of in any case) share a desire to create a better, more just society (even if their followers' interpretations can tend to lead one to conclude differently). The desire to believe in a power greater than ourselves, to bring meaning to apparent anarchic chaos, is deeply ingrained in the human psyche, and I am not one of those whose mission in life is to go around attacking religion in toto.

But problems do arise when personal belief systems are either imposed on other people who wish to have a different belief system or, as in this case, when belief is substituted for an argument even in the face of tangible evidence to the contrary. If someone really believes that God intended for us to order our lives only by looking upon the moon with a naked eye (as the maulvis of Pakistan seem to believe), there is little that logic can do. They will throw hadees (or hadith to you Arabophiles) at you as if that in and of itself constitutes any rational argument (and I'm not even getting into the theological issues of which hadees is credible and which suspect, that different schools of jurisprudence have different opinions on). Such is the power of irrational dogma that even recalling the fact that the Quran itself encourages, at numerous points, people to use their minds (i.e. logic, rationality) is brushed aside as irreligious.

I am not advocating that science has all the answers to everything - it doesn't, and the realm of the spiritual is not the domain of science in any case. But yes, science is a process through which we have come to understand more and more about the physical world around us and it posits theories based on evidence, not on mere belief. These theories, which may be overturned by new evidence, are the most plausible explanations at the time of how or why things are the way they are. You can well argue against a theory using evidence that contradicts it. But you cannot, repeat cannot, argue against it just on the basis that you believe something is different.

And this is my problem with the bizarre new post-modern dialectic that seems to pervade the world these days and which is evidenced in some of the comments we get on this blog. Everything is not equally valid, especially if it originates from different planes of thought like religion and science. (Personally, I don't even see the contradiction between being a Muslim and accepting the principles of science, and it seems to me a selective reading in any case, since mullahs use all sorts of products based on scientific principles when it suits them.) This is the new cop-out: claiming you can base analyses on nothing more than your feelings. A sort of 'I feel it therefore it's true.' But you just cannot pit your cherished belief as a valid counter to empirical evidence or reasoned logic. Or rather, you can if you want, but we will make fun of it.

Just in case you thought the irrationality of religious belief  is limited only to places like Pakistan's Ruet-e-Hilal Committee, here's a handy reminder of how the whole world suffers from it. First see the following spoof video below and then follow it up with the real video that it satirizes...

Spoof:




Real:




Maybe somebody should enter Mufti Muneeb et al into the Miss USA pageant, based obviously merely on their rejection of logic.

The Mooning of Pakistan

Stung by intense criticism of the cretinism of Pakistan's maulvis and their perennial inability to reconcile even the basic concepts of natural science with their warped ideas of religion, the Ruet-e-Hilal (Moon-Sighting) Committee has this year attempted to allay some of the concerns by going out of their way to address them...

Here's Mufti "I Love Muftas" Muneebur Rehman, head of the central Ruet Committee attempting to sight the moon...

Meanwhile, here's Peshawar mosque Qasim Jan's Mufti Shahabuddin Popalzai, head of his own Ruet Committee attempting to do a moon landing in his own inimitable style...

First of Ramzan mubarak. Or Second of Ramzan. Or whatever. And don't miss the full moon on the 12th of Ramzan.

Lunar Lunacy, Once Again

I tell you, thank God for Aisam-ul-Haq! Because even though he lost the mixed doubles finals at the US Open today, there was far more grace in his losing than in anything else that has been going on in Pakistan.

Another Eid, another moon-sighting controversy and another bunch of lunatic maulvis. I refer you to my post last year on the same issue, aptly titled "The Rot That is the Ruet." But while that particular post was about the sheer idiocy of the whole moon-sighting exercise - which continues unabated - today we have sunk to even further depths.

In case you were rightly and fortunately more engrossed in the tennis, here is the situation so far:

The Central Ruet-e-Hilal (Moon Sighting) Committee, tasked with looking for the moon in the sky throughout Pakistan, announced that the new moon had not been sighted anywhere in the country. Therefore Eid would take place day after, i.e. Saturday (incidentally, on 9/11), in Pakistan. Fair enough, though Saudi Arabia and a bunch of other countries will of course be celebrating it tomorrow (Friday) 'cause their 30 rozas are already up. This was pretty much in line with what the Met Office had already predicted, that it would be almost impossible to see the very, very faint new moon anywhere in Pakistan with the naked eye, particularly with its transient 'rising' and 'setting' times, except perhaps in the far reaches of Balochistan. But since nobody sighted it in Balochistan either, it was decided that the new moon was not visible.

Popalzai Live: eagle-eyed

Enter Masjid Qasim Khan in Peshawar and its rebel mullah Shahabuddin Popalzai. Like last year, he announces two or three hours after any scientific possibility of anyone seeing the moon, that the moon has been sighted all over Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province and therefore Eid would take place tomorrow. Also like last year, the KP senior minister Batshit Bashir Bilour (supposedly representing the secular ANP), then jumps into the fray to give his support to Shahabuddin and to announce that the province would officially observe Eid tomorrow. He justifies this bizarre announcement, which basically once again means that KP will officially celebrate Eid a day before the rest of Pakistan, under the excuse of provincial autonomy and that the provincial government must respect its own clerics. You know the 18th Amendment has got sidetracked when you hear such logic. WTF?

Of course this is not the first time people in KP seem to be on their own timeline. For some odd reason, the moon is far more visible in KP and Peshawar than anywhere to the west or east of them. But it doesn't end here. Baba Haider Zaman, the septuagenarian head of the Sooba Hazara Tehrik, which has been demanding that the Hazara region be separated from KP and made into a separate province, then decides to add his two bits and announces that the entire Hazara region in KP will not follow the provincial announcement and observe Eid according to the Central Ruet diktat.

So you now have one date (1st Shawwal) in all of KP tomorrow except for the Hazara region, while the rest of Pakistan will be on a different date (30th Ramzan) along with the Hazara region which incidentally is still part of KP. I was getting infuriated with the sheer lunacy of all this until it struck me that, in fact, this is a brilliant, brilliant turn of events. After all if every area, nay every mosque, can decide the date for itself, the logical progression has to be that every individual can decide the date as well. I think next year I will declare Eid whenever I think I've had enough of fasters' bad manners. It's every man (and woman) for themselves and after this precedent, who can challenge me?

On a more serious note, however, doesn't this lunacy perfectly encapsulate the total breakdown of state power and governance in Pakistan? Here we ponder how the state can extract more taxes from an intransigent elite, ensure provincial harmony or clamp down on terrorists, but really, the state cannot even find a consensus on a date.

As I said, thank God for Aisam. Maybe he should just moon these mullahs.

The Rot that is the Ruet

I'm not going to beat about the bush. The maulvis are idiots of the highest order and we are even bigger idiots for letting them endlessly get away with their rubbish.

My ire is, of course, rekindled every time the charade of moon-sighting occurs, mostly every month, but particularly publicly at times such as the beginning of Ramzan (or Ramadan to you Arabophile slaves to the neo-Taliban herd) and Eid. In this day and age, where the Hubble telescope and its successors in space are seeing into the farthest corners of the universe and time, we have idiots with beards cloistered into a self-serving Ruet-e-Hilal (moon-sighting) committee on top of Habib Bank Plaza and the like, insisting that the moon must be sighted by the naked eye to confirm it is actually there.

The moon's iterations can be predicted, like that of other celestial bodies, thousands of years into the future. You can easily make a precise lunar calendar which would tell you exactly when the 'new moon' begins, when a full moon will occur (that is why we can predict eclipses by the way), and when it would be impossible to view. But no amount of scientific evidence is enough to convince these nincompoops. And why is that? Basically, because like the Taliban in Afghanistan argued about the wrongfulness of television, they argue this is how people in pre-medieval Arabia looked at the moon. Of course, nobody questions phones, or cell phones, or cars (Toyota Hilux Jeeps for the Taliban only), or guns or the internet or the millions of things these literalist cretins use every day which did not also exist in Arabia fifteen hundred years ago. Oh, but the moon... the moon MUST be seen by the naked eye.

But wait, that's not even the entirety of the cretinism on display. Recently, the Ruet-e-Hilal committee (I think it was a few years ago) allowed binoculars theodolites to be used. Here's cretin-in-chief Mufti Munibur Rahman pretending that he's not actually completely blind:

Which of course begs the question: if you can use binoculars theodolites, why the *@#$#%* can't you use telescopes? At the very least! I mean, it's the same principle of optics isn't it? But wait, there's more. Every once in a while, when the Ruet-e-Hilal committee cant find the moon in their navel, such as today, they will allow the month to finish up 30 days before the new month begins. But no month ever goes on for more than 30 days EVER since they accept the fact that the lunar cycle cannot extend beyond that and bang after 30 days at the max, they will begin the new month. Now, that means that they have, in fact, accepted a "theoretical" scientific principle derived from previous observation without recourse to necessarily seeing the moon. Why the *@#$#%* can't they apply the same principle to deciding the dates of the lunar calendar?!

Here's what the Met Office guy - who apparently just tags along for the sheer fun of being in the company of bearded monkeys - had to say on Geo about today's attempts by the Ruet-e-Hilal committee to view the Ramzan moon... According to him, the four factors influencing the visibility of the new moon are, 1) whether the new moon is present 2) the length of time it is visible after sunset 3) how high it is over the horizon and 4) how cloudy it is. With reference to the four factors today, he said, although the new moon was present (scientifically speaking obviously), the other three factors militated against its sighting today, i.e. it was there for a very short time, very low on the horizon and it was overcast. What he didn't say in so many words, fearing obviously the wrath of the spiritual keepers of the moon (read religious nutcases), is that while the new moon was technically there, the Ruet Rednecks could not see it.

Now, some of you may think I'm just getting het up for a silly little thing of no consequence. But actually, in my opinion, this whole charade is an indicator of the depths of irrationality and illogic we have sunk to. And it's not a small inconvenience. Every year we're never sure when certain holidays are going to fall, when offices will be shut, and like many a year, often we don't even know until late into the night whether the next day is a roza or Eid. On top of it all, we have to see and listen to the painfully slow Mufti Munibur Rehman and others of his ilk tell us self-evident truths in half-hour self-righteous drawls.

There is also a much larger issue here: that of the supposedly united Muslim Ummah and the lunar calendar. Every so often we'll hear someone or the other call for the adoption of the Muslim calendar. You know, as a calendar it's as good or as bad as any other calendar. But how the *@#$#%* is the Muslim Ummah supposed to follow a calendar when half of it is on a different day or two altogether? I mean, we've all seen the bizarre ritual whereby we can see Haj happening on television but according to "our" timeline, we won't have Eidul Azha until 2 effing days later. Forget between countries, we don't even have the same lunar calendar dates in all of Pakistan. The guys in Mardan seem always to be ahead of the rest by a day or two in terms of Islam. Can you imagine, following the Islamic calendar, setting up an office meeting for, say 13 Shaban, with some people turning up 2 days after the rest came and left? Or a wedding, scheduled to take place on 15 Rabiul Awwal, where the groom didn't turn up until a day after because, according to him, it was 14 Rabiul Awwal when the bride's family thought it was the 15th!

It's just patently absurd.

The Ruet-e-Hilal committee simply takes up a lot of money (they are funded by our money, remember), time and peace of mind. In these recessionary times, isn't it time somebody told them their services are no longer required?