Heroes

Seyran Ateş

One of my heroes – I don’t have that many – is a woman named Seyran Ateş.  That’s Ateş with a cedilla under the s, meaning the s is pronounced like sh.  She was born in Istanbul to a Kurdish father and a Turkish mother but brought to Germany at the age of six, where she grew up with a sense of kinship to all three groups.

I’ll get into her personal story in a minute, but first let me look at her as a case study in the best of the modern world. Where animosity reigns between Kurds and Turks, and with more than enough cultural and political hostility between Germany and Turkey to contend with, Ateş rides across the top of it all, refusing all attempts to make her fit into one of the either/or boxes. Instead, she insists she is both/and. She also illustrates the beauty of modern Germany as a land of opportunity. She was a practicing lawyer, for a time, and remains a feminist and a social activist. If you want to be be an admirer, you have to get in at the end of a pretty long line.

So much for the positive side. The reason the word hero comes to mind is that she has had to contend with some pretty ugly opposition from conservative circles, starting with her birth family. At 17 she ran away from home and found her way to a shelter for battered women. Her feminist struggle is very personal. A few years later, now living at a women’s center, a Turkish thug broke in, shot and killed one of her colleagues and shot her in the throat. The bullet hit an artery and she nearly bled to death.

Undeterred, the attack only firmed up her resolve to fight for the rights of women. Germany named her woman of the year in 2005 for her work in Muslim communities.

Today she is a single mother with a daughter. In 2007 she was representing a woman in a divorce case when the woman’s husband attacked both his own wife and Seyran as well in a courtroom. It came as a shock to Seyran to realize that none of the onlookers came to their defense, and this led her, for the sake of her daughter, to give up her law practice. It had become, she decided, simply too risky.

Some of that energy has gone into her several books. They include:

·      Große Reise ins Feuer (The great trip into the fire) 2003 (Paperback 2006)

·      Der Islam braucht eine sexuelle Revolution: Eine Streitschrift (Islam needs a sexual revolution: a polemic (no date available)

·      Der Multi-kulti Irrtum (The Multicultural Error) 2011

·      Wahlheimat: Warum ich Deutschland lieben möchte (Chosen Home: Why I would like to love Germany) 2013

·      Selam, Frau Imamin: Wie ich in Berlin eine liberale Moschee gründete (Greetings, Madam Imam: How I founded a liberal mosque in Berlin) 2017

For whatever reason, probably because people don’t fear being left penniless in their old age and can put their energies into all manner of endeavors besides raising children, as a nation prospers its birthrate tends to go down, a phenomenon which Germany and Japan illustrate in spades. Germany realized this early on and started accepting workers from countries where they couldn't find work.

Turkey was one of the main suppliers, and thus began the influx of a religious cultural minority and the start of the radical Islam problem plaguing Germany today. Workers came far less from cities that shared a modern culture than from Anatolia, from less developed areas suffering from high unemployment and medieval patriarchal values. To exacerbate the disparity, German immigration policy makers early on assumed the workers would return to Turkey eventually, so in many cases they didn’t even bother to teach them German, much less integrate them in other ways into the mainstream culture. Well-intentioned educators decided the focus should be on teaching them not German, but Turkish, so that they would not be disadvantaged upon their return to the homeland.

But many Turks didn’t go home. Many became caught between their new country of residence, which they resented for not really letting them in, and their homeland, which they had left for good reason. And their kids born in Germany did what kids everywhere do. They played with other kids, learned the language and quickly began to see how restricted their home lives were. Some fathers even tried to keep their daughters from going to school at all. Girls were not allowed out of the house without a male escort, and the lifestyles they could see in their neighbors' homes and on television held a fascination too hard to resist. Culture clash was inevitable, and as conservative parents saw their home ways under threat many found themselves drawn more and more to radical Islam.

Fast forward to 2017.  In the recent Turkish election, only about half the voters living in Turkey were in favor of Erdogan's "reforms" granting him near dictatorial powers. But the 1.5 million Turkish residents of Germany voted 63% in favor.  Some are making the point that the Turks of Germany, where the death penalty is outlawed, helped impose it on their Turkish countrymen, who didn't want it.

Consider that from a democratic perspective. In the new Turkey, the president can override a judge, throw a journalist in jail at will, and impose the death penalty. German Turks live in a land where (as in the rest of Europe) these things are strictly outlawed. Nonetheless, they were a force for imposing those practices on the citizens of their land of origin.

I mention this only to illustrate that modern democracies operate in a larger ideological environment where modernity still struggles against old patriarchal ways. It's not just terrorists we have to contend with. At times, our biggest battles have to be fought with ordinary, otherwise sometimes decent, folk, with the power to make life miserable with their retrograde ways.

Seyran Ateş has said repeatedly that it’s not ISIS or Al-Qaeda who are making her life miserable; they have other fish to fry. It’s the conservative Muslim population of Germany that makes it impossible for her to move around without a bodyguard.

You frequently hear complaints that the Muslim community is too cowardly, that it doesn’t speak out enough against Islamism and terror in its religious community. Most people grant that the vast majority of Muslims are no more violent that the vast majority of Christians and Jews – but what is to be done about the violent strain of conservative ideas in the Muslim world?

In America we have the profoundly, cruelly, stupid policy proposed by the Trump administration to keep people out from Muslim countries, as if that were a solution to Islamic terror, keeping in mind that this policy keeps out some of the very Muslims who make up the majority of the victims of Islamic terror – other Muslims - all the while ignoring the major source of it, which is home-grown.

Responding to this charge – that Muslims aren’t doing enough – Ateş set about addressing the problem by opening her own mosque. And by actually becoming an imam herself to see it through.

In Alt-Moabit Street, just a seven-minute walk north of the presidential palace Bellevue, in Berlin, she and her supporters found a Protestant Church, St. Johannes, willing to provide them with space to get their mosque established. It opened for Friday prayers last June 16.  It carries the name the Ibn-Rushd-Goethe mosque – after the medieval Islamic scholar Ibn Rushd and the number one German cultural icon, Johann Wolfgang Goethe – two men known for their warm embrace of the culture of their counterparts. Welcome, Ateş declares, is extended to Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites and Sufis all. Men and women pray side by side. Gays and lesbians, come right in. Muslims who were not able to find a spiritual home in other mosques, she says, should find one here. Head coverings if you like, or come in without. Just don’t cover your face. We won’t have any of that.

Egypt issued a fatwa, of course. Islam is noted for not having any common agreement over oversight authority. Reminds you of the Southern Baptists, once noted for self-rule for each individual congregation, now becoming super authoritarian. They are even playing with the notion of excommunication.

Islamic self-rule notwithstanding, the Turkish religious affairs agency Diyanet was quick to issue a statement:

(The mosque's practices) do not align with Islam's fundamental resources, principles of worship, methodology or experience of more than 14 centuries, and are experiments aimed at nothing more than depraving and ruining religion. We are convinced that all fellow believers will keep their distance from such provocations…”

To which a German foreign ministry spokesman responded:

I want to be very clear in rejecting all comments that clearly intend to deprive people in Germany of their right to freely exercise their religion and to limit the right to free expression of opinion.  

Within Germany, which can’t help itself and insists religious groups have leaders the government can talk to, there is DITIB, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs. They “oversee” Germany’s 900 mosques (that's the figure as of 2016). They were out ahead of Ateş in getting Muslims to speak out against Islamic terrorists. They held a peace rally back in 2004 attended by some 20,000 people, including German politicians.  But Ateş is a bit much for DITIB. They’re keeping their distance and holding back, even refusing to answer questions posed by Die Zeit Online.

It’s not a one-woman show.  The Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque is being guided by a group of seven, three men and four women, including at least one self-described “secular Muslim.” That’s the point, says Ateş. She envisions the mosque as a broad tent.

And the problems are streaming in. Some like the kerfluffle over head scarfs are the usual small stuff. The main problem seems to be the theological issue of whether a woman has the right to give directions to a man. Whether LGBT people can be allowed, whether men and women can ever be allowed to pray together.

For my tastes, these very criticisms of Seyran Ateş's feminist efforts are what makes her so appealing. Also appealing is her skill in sharing a stage or a table in a coffee shop with folks who don't agree with her. She seems to have developed a personal friendship with Hamad Abdel-Samad and Henryk M. Broder, for example, two of Germany's most outspoken Islam critics. 

Check out this marvelous video of them showing up at the Ibn-Rushd-Goethe mosque to provide moral support to their friend Seyran. They come with cameras rolling. The irony of having a Jew (Broder) celebrating the opening of a mosque inside a church doesn't go unnoticed, by the way.

But then, just to keep things real, if your German is up to it - I cannot find an English translation - have a listen to the diatribe of Yasin al-Hanafi, who gives koranic chapter and verse to explain that men are superior to women and that women can "logically" never take leadership positions.

 the fascist woman Seyran Ateş, or as I intend to call her from now on "Satan Ateş"...  such a woman cannot logically be a leader..."

Frankly, I make it no secret that I'd just as soon throw organized religion out entirely. But there is something absolutely irresistible about watching believers and atheists having coffee and establishing lasting friendships. And about finding people who when faced with an either/or decision (Islam or enlightenment values, for example) find a way to insist on both/and.

Modern Germany is at the center of a struggle over how to define Islam in the modern world. If it's to be more than a retrograde medieval force, it cannot go on making every woman subject to the will of any man. What Ateş is demonstrating is that there is a place for mosques in Germany - and anywhere else in the modern world - and that if you want to build one, you can expect the support of Christians, Jews, atheists and others united by the values of the modern state as grounded in a federal constitution such as Germany's Grundgesetz.

What must not be missed is the fact that making this a reality still requires heroic efforts. Planners of this meeting between Ateş, Abdel-Samad and Henryk Broder decided they needed at least a dozen members of Berlin's finest to assure the security of its participants, for example.

It will be a while yet, apparently, before ordinary people can do this kind of thing without fear. In the meantime, we have heroes to help us get started.

a partial list of sources: 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17847605

https://www.thelocal.de/20170616/a-mosque-with-no-burqas-germanys-first-liberal-mosque-to-open-in-berlin

http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/imamin-seyran-ates-muslime-organisiert-euch.886.de.html?dram:article_id=388789

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Back hurts. Can't bend over anymore.

Picture 1

Big fuss going on at a Berlin-Reinickendorf day care center.  Seems they hired a man to take care of the kiddies.  A gay man.  And it seems the kids' parents are up in arms about it.  And bang, you’ve got a major news story because the parents are Muslims and don’t want a man changing their babies’ diapers and taking them to the bathroom.  Hell, they don’t even want him to hold their hands.

Picture 2 - How many differences can you find?

So many ways to take this story. The German right and the German left join forces here, the German right up in arms that these damn Muslims come into our country and try to take over, the German left because after all these years of working on gender equality we finally get men into child care and look what happens.  Can’t win for losing.

A third perspective is the homophobic one. It’s not just Muslim Germans who haven’t quite put their homophobia to rest. Lest they be turned into boogeymen too casually, consider a report on attitudes toward LGBT people issued this last January by the federal (German) anti-discrimination office. 24.1 percent of the general public stated they didn’t feel comfortable having gay men take care of their kids, and 19.6 didn’t even want lesbians for this job. So, if you wanted to, you could say this isn’t strictly a culture clash between Germans and outsiders over German values – which it is, of course. It’s more a clash between what some might call the values of the progressive modern class, which include fostering greater gender equality, and the values of traditional people where men work outside the house and you need a vagina to wash dishes properly. And take care of babies, obviously.

Interesting, (I'd say "sad" but we have to avoid that word these days), how we have sexualized the caretaking of children. Nobody thinks twice about a woman changing diapers.  Goes with being female. But when a man puts his hands on the body of a small baby, some people push the panic button. Why is that? Are we that primitive that we cannot see that people with healthy sexualities don’t make everything about sex. And most people have healthy sexualities. And if they don’t it has nothing to do with whether they are male or female. And that sorting the wheat from the chaff is a routine part of the job when you're hiring a caretaker of children.

That’s the perspective I take on all this, that the issue is not religion but social maturity. There are lots of places in this world where the working assumptions are a) that all people are heterosexual, and b) that they will have sex with each other at the slightest opportunity unless we scare the bejeezuz out of them with religion, or make the women live in bags, so as not to tempt the men, or otherwise chaperone them until they marry and then make sure they never get alone behind closed doors ever after that. [And yes, this applies to our Neanderthal vice president, too.]

We who lay claim to enlightened modern ways, from the bleeding heart liberals (what the German right calls Gutmenschen - see below) to the hardened cynics, have moved beyond such primitive notions. We have university dorms where the two sexes live together, sometimes even sharing bathrooms. We have women in the armed forces. And we measure social progress by the number of women in business and politics. The road to gender equality is filled with axle-busting potholes, to be sure. But we’re on it, and we don’t want to allow outsiders with retrograde values to join forces with home-growns with those retrograde values.

So what’s the strategy for addressing this challenge?

folks in the pot: "All cultures are equal"

Oh, no! Not those flavorless Gutmenschen again!

My first concern is that we don't pave the road to hell with more misguided good intentions. Remember when workers from Yugoslavia and Turkey and other places started pouring into Europe to help with the post-war rebuilding? The folks who today are referred to as “Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund” (People with a migration background) were then called “guest workers.” They were kept apart from regular German society because the bright-eyed idealists (Gutmenschen) of the day were thinking long term and wanted them not to lose their Turkish and be handicapped when they got home.  They were going back in a couple years and would need it. Gutmenschen is a word – literally “good people” - think “pinko leftie” – used by the right to describe the progressive left. That set the stage for the ghettos of today. Once separated, we came up with concepts such as “Leitkultur” (the dominant culture, the culture of the leading people, i.e., what the Germans would call their traditional German culture), thus loading it up with all the stuff modern German liberals wanted to bend over backwards to avoid – all this stuff from the Nazi era about racist cultural superiority.

That’s what’s going on here today. Bending over backwards is hard on the back and German liberals are beginning to straighten up. So no, you can’t ask us not to hire a gay male teacher to care for your kids while you earn a living. You need to get used to the idea that men make marvelous caretakers. And, by the way, if you want to congratulate us on being progressive about gender equality, feel free to jump in here anytime with a change of heart. In the meantime, you’re certainly free to seek out another day center.

Problem with that, of course, is that the person running this center in Reinickendorf can’t make much of a living if all the parents pull their kids out. I hope there’s some sort of back-up system to bail her out until things start looking up.

I don’t think the alternative – to let the homophobes call the shots – is the answer.

I mean, ask yourself how you’d react to the following:

• I’m sorry, but I need my baby to have a white person for a caretaker. I don’t want to see black hands changing my baby’s diaper.
•  I’m sorry, but where I come from we don’t like Jews.  I don’t want my kids to have a Jewish teacher.

Sorry folks. Welcome to Europe of the 21^st century. We’ve been where you are. We left it behind for good reason. And we’re not going back.

Photos:  Kita 1 https://philosophia-perennis.com/2017/03/27/berliner-kita-muslimische-eltern/

https://philosophia-perennis.com/2017/03/27/berliner-kita-muslimische-eltern/

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Kita 2: http://www.morgenpost.de/vermischtes/article210093507/Muslimische-Eltern-wehren-sich-gegen-schwulen-Kita-Erzieher.html

all cultures are equal: https://www.pi-news.net/2016/01/der-diffizile-begriff-gutmensch/

Modern-day Austrian man meets modern-day Swiss woman; they exchange views.

Efgani Dönmez

Just came across an example of the kind of thing Europeans are struggling with these days.  A video of an Austrian talk show where an Austrian man confronts a Swiss woman in language that might well be considered hate speech if the encounter took place in America.

The Austrian man is Efgani Dönmez.  He came to Austria with his parents when he was just a few months old, grew up not far from Salzburg, entered politics and was elected to the Austrian Bundesrat as a member of the Green Party, which he served from 2008 to 2015 when he left after the party rejected him for having suggested it might be a good idea to buy one-way tickets for protesting Erdogan supporters. He complained the Party had no room for “unconventional thinkers.”

Nora Illi on the Anne Will talk show

The Swiss woman is Nora Illi.  She grew up in Zurich and joined a punk group at some point. She met her husband, Patrick Jerome Illi, a promoter of techno-raves at a pro-Palestinian protest in Jordan, where they were married in 2003. Both became converts to Islam, and Patric took the name Qaasim. Both went to work for the Islamic Central Council. Qaasim ran into trouble with the law and was convicted of racial discrimination. On his web page he celebrated the “taking down” (erlegen) of what he described as 16 Israeli “Zionist Occupation Bastards” killed in a Palestinian suicide attack on the bus they were riding in. Charges of being in possession of explosives were eventually dropped, but he was again charged in 2016 for spreading jihadist propaganda.

Nora has been making the rounds on German language television wearing a niqab, i.e., fully covered except for her eyes, as a spokesperson for the Department of Women’s Affairs of the Islamic Council. She speaks out in favor of polygamy and after an appearance on the Anna Will show in November 2016, several of her public statements led to an indictment for aiding terrorism. Those charges were later dropped.

That’s the background for the video I came across today, where Efgani Dönmez confronts Nora Illi on that Austrian talk show, where the topic of the day was the debate over headscarves.

Normally this topic has been done to death, and if I'm looking for a good debate, I'll usually give this one a miss. But I remembered Nora from a couple earlier shows, the Anne Will Show and Menschen bei Maischberger, and wondered what she has been up to lately. Because of the tough spot Germany is in these days with Erdogan labeling as “Nazi tactics” their refusal to allow Turkish politicians to campaign in Germany, where a million and a half people with Turkish passports live, people are very careful about appearing anti-anything Muslim. I'm assuming this caution applies to Switzerland and Austria, as well.

But Dönmez is a Turk, originally, and he's fearless.  He really lets her have it.  

Here’s the video, if you can follow the German. At least have a look at the first couple of minutes. 

Right out of the starting gate, the moderator asks him why Frau Illi should not have the right to wear a head covering of her choosing.  He responds, addressing Illi and not the moderator:

We have the freedom in Europe to take up topics, including Islam itself, which in many Islamic countries would be unthinkable.  (But) instead of being a member of this society, you choose isolation.  Instead of bringing Islam forward you choose a Stone Age Islam, which has nothing to do with Islam. What you're doing here is provocation.  You get a stage to perform on.  You are supported by Salafist Wahhabi groups.  You're just a puppet.  You're just a piece of misery, to be honest. You've been brainwashed.  You're like hundreds of others...

What characterizes our society is that people engage with one another. We look each other in the eye, we offer to shake hands, so we can get to know each other. Even a dog gets to sniff somebody out. And you refuse to shake hands with somebody simply because he's a man. How sick is that?

I refuse to allow people like you to drag my religion into the dirt.  Your form of Islam is a very particular narrow version of the religion.  I'm not saying that all Salafists are terrorists, but up until now all terrorists have been Salafists. What we have to fight is not people like you - you can't help it - What we have to fight is this theology of contempt which is going around the world like a virus.

...cut...

Pinsdorf, Austria, where Efgani Dönmez grew up

You get the idea.  She fights back.  But he is like a dog with a bone.

Whatever happened to that picturesque land where the hills are alive with the Sound of Music?

Makes American television look like a steady stream of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.

picture credits: Efgani Dönmez; Anne Will with Nora Illi; Pinsdorf

Abu Nawas

Future travelers to the planet Mercury, especially hedonists and perhaps the occasional LGBT historian in search of milestones,  will no doubt want to locate the crater there named after the Arab/Persian poet Abu Nawas.  Those who don’t want to wait that long may wait till the current troubles are over in Iraq and Baghdad is returned to normal.  They will then be able to stroll along the banks of the River Tigris, on one of the city’s major boulevards, which also bears the name of Abu Nawas.

And not just bisexual readers, of course.  The Encyclopedia Britannica identifies Abu Nawas as an “important poet of the early ‘Abbāsid period (750–835).”  The Abbāsid caliphate is sometimes referred to as the beginning of the "Islamic Golden Age," when "the ink of a scholar (was) more holy than the blood of a martyr."  Arabic-speakers know him as one of the greatest of Arab poets.  He is said to have spent a year living with the Bedouins to acquire the original purity of the Arabic language.  That experience would seem, however, to have lasted him a lifetime, because when he was done, he returned to write of the joys of living in the city, chiefly for the access it provided to wine and pederasty, and apparently never looked back.

His was given the full name at birth of Abū Nuwās Al-hasan Ibn Hāni’ Al-hakamī .  At some point, his Persian mother sold him to a grocer.  He never knew his father.  The experience only made him stronger, apparently, and he shows up as a character in the Thousand and One Nights, and is known to have influenced the Persian poet Omar Khayyam.  He’s also known as the first Arab poet to write about masturbation.  And how women can be complete sluts.  Which, he says, is probably a good thing.  Especially when they are not fat.

A girl who is slender, not clumsy and flabby, will show you how to rub and grind.

I mention Abu Nuwas because I’ve come across his name repeatedly in recent weeks as I’ve been reading about Islam and trying to decide whether there is any substance to the claim that of the three Abrahamic religions it’s the most violent and restrictive and puritanical.  I’m leaning at present toward the view that religion is not what its scriptures tell you God wants for you to believe so much as it is about how it spreads out through the cultures which take it in and make it their own, filtering it and molding it over time, to suit local interests and fit local expectations of how the world should be run.

One of the most interesting claims made by Hamed Abdel-Samad, which I have now found repeated in a number of places, is that the great heyday of the Muslim world was a time of great creativity and intellectual imagination not because of Islam, but despite Islam.  That if you look at the places where Islam held sway – Mecca and Medina, chiefly – you find the most stifling lack of imagination and creativity.  Only in places characterized by a multitude of cultures do you find the gold in the label, The Golden Age of Islam.  And when people speak of this gold, the name Abu Nuwas often pops us.  Not sure everybody shares the view that Nuwas is a golden contribution to Islamic culture, but how does one reach these conclusions anyway?

O the joy of sodomy!  So now be sodomites, you Arabs.

Turn not away from it – therein is wondrous pleasure.

Take some coy lad with kiss-curls twisting on his

temple and ride him as he stands like some gazelle

standing to her mate

…

Make for smooth-faced boys and do your very best to

mount them, for women are the mounts of devils!

I cannot be sure how much has been lost in translation.  How much better it sounds in the Arabic of 1100 years ago, where I presume there is better rhyming and perhaps alliteration and perhaps other rhetorical delights.  I doubt he achieved his reputation for world’s best Arabic poet (or one of them) for his choice of topics.

The question is, “Is it golden?”

And, of course, “Is it Islamic?”

source of Abu Nawas’ poetry: Shaykh Nefzawi’s Perfumed Garden, p. 24 and 37-39, cited in Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim

picture credit: Collected works of Abu Nawas (in Indonesian)