Week 31 2014

Tendring Topics

Pots and Kettles

            Nowadays, of course, both cooking pots and kettles gleam on the kitchen shelf and their contents are cooked or heated by gas or electricity.  This wasn’t always the case.  I can remember a time, in the 1920s and ‘30s, when much cooking and water heating was carried out over a coal fire or on a coal fired cooking range.  It didn’t take long for both saucepans and kettles to acquire a black, sooty coating.  Hence came the expression ‘the pot calling the kettle black’ when a critic of someone else’s behaviour showed the same defect as the subject of his (or her) criticism.

            It was a thought that must have recently been in the minds of a great many people with memories as long as mine. Our Prime Minister, Mr David Cameron, has been revealed as the head of a government that has approved the export of arms and military equipment to the Russians, shortly after he had publicly criticised the French for honouring a contract for providing the Russians with battleships.  The embargo had been imposed because of Russian support, and alleged supply of arms, to the pro-Russian separatist rebels in Eastern Ukraine.

            It could, in fact, be argued that ‘our offence’ was rather more serious than that of the French.  I don’t think any one seriously imagines that the pro-Russian rebels have any ambition to acquire a navy, whereas they most certainly can use rifles, missile parts and other military equipment that we have been sending to Russia.  I don’t find the excuse that rifles can be used for hunting and that some of the other equipment was to be sold on to the Brazilian Navy, very convincing. Is it, I wonder, quite OK to supply arms to the Kiev government?   I reckon that those tanks that we see the rebels using don’t come from Russia but have either been captured, or acquired as a result of the defection to the rebels of some of the government’s forces.

           

The fact is that no-one can be certain of the actual use to which exported arms may be put.   I don’t suppose that when the French sold exocet missiles to the Argentines, they imagined for one moment that the Argentines would use them to sink British warships engaged in the liberation of the Falklands.  I have little doubt that Colonel Gaddafi used weapons and ammunition that we had sold to him against us, when we helped Libyan rebels to overthrow his government.  Some of the weapons used by the Taliban to kill ‘our boys’ in Afghanistan were undoubtedly provided clandestinely by ‘the west’ to help their grandfathers kill Russians!  We have also sold weaponry to such autocracies as Saudi Arabia and Qatar some of which, I have little doubt, have  found their way into the hands of ISIS and Al Qaeda. I hope too, that the governments of both the USA and the UK have recently felt  just a little uneasy about the use of weaponry that we have sold to Israel.

 The manufacture and sale of weapons of war is an evil comparable with the slave trade.  It thrives on international discord and those who hold shares in the companies involved grow wealthy on the death and maiming of their fellow men and women; on violent death, the destruction of homes, and the creation of innocent and helpless refugees.

A world-wide ban on the manufacture and sale of weapons of war would be a positive answer to our prayer, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’.

 Two young heroines!

At a time when the news seemed to be going from bad to even worse, with three air liners downed in a week, an Israeli armed incursion into Gaza with the shelling of a United Nations school used as a shelter for refugees, and a total of some 1,000, mostly civilian, Palestinian dead, on 24^th July there came some really good news on a BBC news bulletin.. Meriem Ibrahim had been allowed to leave North Sudan and, with her husband and two children and accompanied by an Italian government minister, had flown to Rome where she had met the Pope who had commended her faithfulness and courage.

Sadly there was no confirmation of this the next day and I very much fear that it may be yet another example of the  truth of the cynical comment that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is!

Blog readers will recall that Meriem Ibrahim was the young Sudanese mother who was sentenced to being flogged followed by hanging for allegedly converting from Islam to Christianity and for marrying a Christian - which, since a Muslim woman is forbidden by Sharia law from making such a marriage, was regarded as adultery!  She could have escaped those penalties had she abandoned her Christian faith for Islam – but that she resolutely refused to do.  She gave birth to a daughter while shackled to the floor of her prison cell.

World-wide protests resulted in her being freed but then at Khartoum airport where she, her husband and her two children were about to depart for her husband’s home in the USA, they were prevented from departing on the pretext that her passport was invalid – and in North Sudan, so it seems, she remains.

No less deserving, but more fortunate, is Malala Yousafazai the teenage Muslim girl from Pakistan who was shot and left for dead by the Taliban for the crime of attending school and promoting education for other girls.  At death’s door, she was flown to Britain for urgent surgery and, almost miraculously, has been restored to health.  However Malala isn’t one to seek safety from further Taliban activity in obscurity..  She has inspired others to campaign, and is campaigning herself, for education for girls throughout the world and has recently been to Nigeria where she urged the President to redouble his government’s efforts to find and liberate the teenage girls who have been abducted by jihadist extremists and threatened with slavery or a forced marriage.

A sad, bad world has reason to be thankful that there are young women of the calibre of Meriem and Malala!    I wish I could claim to have, or ever to have had, their faith and their courage.  The thousands of us, and the governments, who rescued Meriem from a cruel and totally unjust punishment must  again urge the North Sudan government to allow her to return home.

Late News

I have just read in the ‘Church Times’ that Meriem and her family have taken refuge in the United States Embassy in Khartoum.  Well, at least they’ll be safe there until the North Sudan government can be persuaded, or coerced, into allowing them all to travel to the USA.

Assisted Suicide

          One of my most horrifying nightmares is of being trapped in a totally paralysed body, praying for death, but being incapable of doing anything about it; incapable in fact of doing anything at all.

            It might have been thought that that recurring bad dream would make me a keen supporter of the ‘assisted suicide’ bill that was recently debated in the House of Lords.  It wouldn’t have helped 'the me' of my nightmare in the least!. No doctor would have been able to declare that I had six months or less to live, or that I had a necessarily terminal illness.  Nor, I think, would it have been possible for me to give the informed consent required by the bill.

            I don’t think it possible to solve this problem by means of legislation.  The present situation is, I believe, that it remains a criminal act to assist a suicide – but that the Public Prosecutor does not press charges if he or she is persuaded that the person giving the assistance was acting out of love and did not have some ulterior motive. That is probably the best that we shall get.  If the Public Prosecutor can’t make up his mind then a jury can decide.

           After sixty years of marriage  my wife’s life came to an end eight years ago, in her sleep  in her own bed at home, and after several days of unconsciousness.  I do not believe that she suffered any pain.  I can’t say with absolute certainty what I would have done had she been suffering unbearable pain that our doctor was unable to alleviate, and had begged me to help her end her life.  I hope that I would have agreed and tried to do so.  One thing I do know. The possibility of my being prosecuted for manslaughter or even murder would not have had the very least influence on my decision!  I doubt if I would have given it a moment's thought.

week 25, 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

A Modern Martyr

          Folk of my generation were brought up in the belief that in our wonderful 20^th Century, the age of Christian martyrs, like the ‘age of miracles’ was over.  Martyrs were those who were ‘butchered to make a Roman holiday – thrown to the lions in the arena in the reign of the Emperor Nero or slaughtered in some other agonising way for their refusal to renounce their Christian faith. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the protestant half of Christendom honoured as saints and martyrs their co-religionists who were tortured and burned alive by zealous Catholic monarchs like Queen Mary Tudor (‘bloody Mary’),.  The Catholic half gave similar honour (observed in the Church of Rome to this day) to recusant priests hung, drawn and quartered by her half-sister Queen Elizabeth I.

            There have, of course, been martyrs since those days – in the wake of the French and Russian revolutions for instance, though much of the anti-clericalism of those times resulted from the perceived support of the established churches for the tyrannical former regimes in those countries, and the contrast between the splendour and riches of the ‘princes’ of the Church and the abject poverty and squalor of the people.  The fate of the Jews in the Nazi regime was different (and worse) than martyrdom. Martyrs could often save themselves by repudiating their faith. In the holocaust the victims were condemned not by their faith but by their ethnicity.  None of us can change or repudiate that.

Suicide bombers, unlike their victims, are not martyrs.  They are cold-blooded murderers who compound their crime by killing themselves as well, thereby evading human retribution for their crime.

Meriem Ibrahim (an attractive 21^st century young woman threatened with a medieval punishment. She could be ‘that friendly and helpful young woman next door’ to you – or me)

A modern martyr (who may yet be saved from martyrdom) is Meriam Ibrahim of North Sudan.  She had a Muslim father, who deserted the family, and a Christian mother who brought her up as a Christian.  She married an American Christian man and has a young son and a daughter, the latter born in prison while she was shackled to the floor of her cell.  She has been condemned to death for having converted from Islam to Christianity and, before being hanged, is to be flogged with one hundred lashes for her ‘adultery’.

She is deemed to have been a Muslim because her father was Muslim. Sharia Law as interpreted in Sudan declares that death is the punishment for conversion from Islam to atheism or any other faith.  Since that same law also forbids a Muslim woman to marry a Christian man, her relationship with her Christian husband is ‘adulteus’; hence the flogging before the hanging!

‘Humanely’ (well, Islam does claim to be compassionate and merciful) they won’t hang her for two years (presumably to allow the new baby to become less dependent on her mother) and they won’t hang her at all, if only she’ll repudiate her Christian faith and return to Islam.  This she refuses to do.  She can’t in any case ‘return’ to a faith that she has never embraced.

Baby Maya, Meriam’s daughter born in prison to a mother condemned to death.  Her name is the same (though spelt differently) as that of my little German ‘adopted niece’ who was featured in this blog two weeks ago.

Meriam’s case is so outrageous to western minds that it has attracted world-wide condemnation.  Barak Obama (Meriam is married to a US citizen and that baby, born to a mother in shackles, and her brother, are half Americans) has expressed his outrage, as have David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband.  A petition, of which I am one of the 800,000 (so far) signatories, is to be presented to the Sudanese authorities.

Sadly, I have heard nothing of British Muslims making their voices heard, yet apart from Meriam and her family, it is they who are likely to suffer most from Meriam’s martyrdom.  Incidents such as these, and the wholesale murder and abduction of Christians by militant Islamists in Nigeria, lend fuel to the intolerance and prejudice of such neo-fascist and anti-Islamic  groups as the English Defence League, the BNP and at least a minority of the Ukippers.

            I very much hope that the Sudanese government will bend to world-wide anger and release Meriam and her children unscathed to join her husband, the children’s father, in the USA.  Already one Sudanese government spokesman has said that she would be released within a few days – but that was quickly denied.  Sadly, those who are convinced that Meriam was convicted in accordance with a law laid down directly by God to his prophet nearly a millennium and a half ago, are unlikely to be impressed by an appeal to ‘Universal Human Rights’ in 2014.

Better or Worse? – or just Different?

          Writing about Islam and Sharia law has brought to my mind the fuss that there has been about the accusation that the governing bodies of a number of Birmingham Schools had been infiltrated by Muslim extremists who were changing the schools’ characters and possibly using them to ‘radicalise’ the younger generation and possibly make them recruits for terrorism.   I think that we’ll probably hear a lot more about this in the days to come. 

My knowledge of the situation has been gained entirely from tv news bulletins and broadcast interviews with parents, governors and – of course - national politicians.   It must be said that Muslim parents seemed for the most part to be thoroughly approving of the very schools that have been causing most concern. Some of the practices of these schools reminded me of my own schooldays – now some eighty years ago!

Our school day began with an assembly and an act of worship; Christian worship of course.  Throughout my eleven years (5 to 16) of full-time education I never even met anyone with any other religious faith.  There was a hymn, a prayer and a reading from the New Testament. The handful of Roman Catholic pupils were excused this part of the assembly.  They joined us to hear the Head Master give out any notices and dismiss us to our classes.

In the 1930s.  Boys’ School on the right, Girls’ School on the left.  Utility block, shared but at different times, in the middle.  Note the fence between the two playing fields.

There was a Boys’ School and Girls’ School.  Ours were adjacent but quite separate.  There were separate playing fields with a high wooden fence separating them.  There was even a ‘trip wire’ a few feet from the fence over which we were forbidden to tread - to stop our watching the girls play hockey through the occasional ‘knot hole’!

There were no ‘sex education classes’ and certainly no contraceptive advice!  There were a few co-educational secondary schools.  As a schoolgirl my wife went to one, but they were the same in that respect. The very thought of mixed classes in such subjects would have provoked embarrassed shock and horror among even the most ‘progressive’ parents!   I am sorry that my school wasn’t co-educational.   It would probably have made me less agonisingly shy and ill-at-ease with the opposite sex than I was during my late teenage years.  I’m not so sure about the sex and contraceptive classes though – I really don’t believe that teaching these things to ever younger children is the best way to reduce premature sexual activity and teenage pregnancies.

            I am sure that there are lots of things about educating children and fitting them for the world of the 21 century that Muslims can and should learn from the ‘western world’ – but we shouldn’t be so reluctant to admit that there are one or two things that we can learn from them.