text:
After my prepared speech in the India Ideas Conclave session on Tolerance & Terrorism (20 Dec. 2014, 17h25, with
Sultan Shahin and Norwegian bishop Gunnar Stalsett, moderated by Sadanand Dhume),
the other panelists gave their response, then the public spoke its mind, and
the following days some printed and digital media also ventilated their
opinions. Below are my responses to the more substantive responses. Articles I
will refer to include:
Shashi Shekhar: "Koenraad Elst's angst", Niti Central, 31 Dec. 2014 (http://www.niticentral.com/2014/12/31/koenraad-elsts-angst-musings-mark-end-2014-293984.html)
"Iranian General: Obama, EU Leaders
Should Convert to Islam For Peace," TheTower, 29 Dec. 2014, http://www.thetower.org/1453-iranian-general-obama-eu-leaders-should-convert-to-islam-for-peace/
Zeeshan Shaikh: "Row over Indologist's
anti-Islam remarks", Indian Express, 21 Dec. 2014, (http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/row-over-indologists-anti-islam-remarks/)
Tavleen Singh: "Fifth column: Either, or", Indian Express, 28 Dec. 2014, (http://indianexpress.com/profile/columnist/tavleen-singh/)
"Belgian Indologist sparks row after making 'disparaging'
comments about Islam", Daily Mail, 21
Dec. 2014 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2882121/Belgian-Indologist-sparks-row-making-disparaging-comments-Islam.html)
Koenraad Elst says '…make it uncool to be Muslims' at the Goa conclave of the
Hindutva Right, draws flak", Nasheman
News, December 23, 2014 (http://nasheman.in/indologist-koenraad-elst-says-make-it-uncool-to-be-muslims-at-the-goa-conclave-of-the-hindutva-right-draws-flak/)
Conclave participant Valery
Novoselsky, a self-described Christian, protested on his own website against my
talk, as well as with a letter in Pressenza:
An article that was sent to me but that I have
not been able to find back through the search engine, is Joseph Gathia: "Moving in Right Direction. A
Brief Report on India Ideas Conclave, Goa (19-21 December 2014)"
Media version of what
According to the UK paper Daily Mail, "Belgian Indologist Koenraad
Elst made disparaging references to Islam (…) There was tumult at the India
Ideas Conclave (…) after Belgian Indologist Koenraad Elst made disparaging
references to Islam. (…) The high-profile event (…) caused deep
embarrassment. Elst's blast on Islam left everyone rattled. Speaking on how 1.2
billion Muslims should be freed of their ideology, he left the organisers
red-faced." But what exactly I said that caused such embarrassment, the readers
are not allowed to know: "Elst (…) said many unacceptable things about Islam
which cannot be reproduced here."
A little spice is added by an
unimportant aside: "Incidentally, the nationalist conclave has replaced
rape-accused Tarun Tejpal's Thinkfest at the same venue." Hearty thanks to the
secularists who, in spite of themselves, made room for us.
According to Zeeshan Shaikh in Indian Express, "Belgian
Indologist Dr Koenraad Elst's anti-Islam remarks created a flutter at a Goa
conclave Saturday, prompting at least one foreign delegate to walk out while
another lodged a complaint with organiser India Foundation."
Here as well as in the Urdu paper Nasheman, my message is summed up thus:
"On the whole, you should make it uncool to be Muslims. That will help them.
You do not forcefully need to convert them. Through this, they will themselves
outgrow Islam." I must say that the media, while not rendering my exact
arguments, are rather fair and truthful in rendering my over-all position.
Thus, I would not have been surprised if they had given a foaming
misrepresentation of my position, pretending that I was giving ideological
support to Hindu communal rioters or Western armed intervention in Muslim
countries, quod non.
And on my position regarding the Ghar Wapasi (reconversion of Islamized or
Christianized Indians to Hinduism) campaign: "The Vishwa Hindu Parishad is
coming under criticism for the one thing that they are doing very well, which
is ghar wapsi. We need to liberate Muslims from Islam. Every Muslim is an
abductee and must be brought back." Exactly. Rama went to liberate his abducted
wife Sita, and we should emulate him by bringing back all Islam's abductees.
Shaikh and Nasheman also quote former Jordanian prime minister Abdelsalam
al-Majali: "I am appalled at what I heard from the platform about insulting
Islam and insulting the Prophet. One can criticize this, that and the other but
don't insult. To try to destroy the whole faith is wrong. We came here to
understand each other and try to be peaceful. It is very sad to be at such a
conference to hear insults on a religion which is followed by over one billion
people." Gunnar Stalsett, Bishop Emeritus of Oslo, and others are likewise
cited as questioning the "demonization" of an entire faith.
While the debate about my speech was raging, a general in Iran's Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), declared that US President Barack Obama and
the leaders of the European Union should convert to Islam in order to establish
peace between Iran and the West. It merely illustrates how normal calls for
conversion are. Hindus are so used to calls for conversion as well as to
demonizations of their religion, without anyone dramatizing this or apologizing
for it. Muslim-haters, however, assume that Muslims are inferior beings unable
to stand this strain and inclined to explode upon hearing any criticism of
their religion. Therefore, they profess indignation when they hear a candid
talk about some reasons for leaving Islam, such as my intervention in Goa.
Organizers create controversy
At the end of my session, on behalf of the
organizers, Swapan Dasgupta apologized because some things I had said were not
to the liking of a small section of the invitees. Yet, the organizers
themselves had included this session, and had assigned me the duty to be part
of it. And rightly so. The session's topic itself was hardly avoidable, for
this terrorism is a fact of life and has killed numerous Indians and others. It
hampers economic life and chases investors away, so even Indians interested
only in development will have to deal with it. Some Conclave participants would
clearly have preferred a cosy get-together where unpleasant realities such as
terrorism would be temporarily locked out, but the organizers chose otherwise.
After all, if you don't want to deal with terrorism, then terrorism may well
come to deal with you.
The other chosen participants would and did advocate
the common and trivial claim that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with
Islam, that it is all just part of the chaotic soup of human badness. With me,
at least, the organizers appealed to someone sure to explore a genuine and
specific explanation, with an identifiable cause for the frequently observed
phenomenon of terrorism. As appropriate at an "ideas conclave", I strictly
stuck to the logic of the facts discussed, without particularly trying to
please ("appease") or offend anyone. To be sure, people in the audience are
free to take offence to logical conclusions that go against their beliefs, but
that should not hamper the logic expounded on stage. Maybe at a diplomatic
summit meeting, but not at an ideas conference that means business, that seeks
not sweet-talk but an actual solution for a pressing problem.
The organizers then spoiled the Conclave by telling
me, an invited speaker, that according to their information, I had better go
for my own safety, while lying to some participants that my departure was
merely as per schedule, and lying to others and to some media that I had been
"sent away". Though having written repeatedly on the culture of duplicity and
mendacity in the Sangh Parivar since 1997, I had not really expected to be
targeted by it myself. I have demanded an explanation from the India
Foundation, Ram Madhav and Swapan Dasgupta, but three weeks after the incident
I haven't received any answer yet. They owe me a public apology without ifs,
buts or irony.
Defence of Islam
In my whole career as a critic of Islam, I've had to
deal with numerous responses defending Muslims, but rarely a real defence of
Islam. Thus, in 1992, the Belgian writer Lucas Catherine supposedly answered my critique of a number
of hate-mongering and violence-inciting verses from the Quran. It was not
longer than one sentence: "But the Quran is already an old book." Well, if he
dares, he can go and repeat that in a mosque.
If the Quran is merely a document of its age and
circumstances, I wouldn't mind it. If it only describes the delusions and
misbehaviour of some 7th-century Arab businessman, then it would
simply be a piece of history, not worth losing any sleep over. It is a pity
that he ordered the rape, enslavement or execution of people he did not like,
but he and his victims are long dead now. Mankind's chronicles and literature
are full of cruelty, so all this is not really exceptional. And yet, we are not
allowed to put it aside, because some people have decided that this is God's
own word, and that the example of this businessman-turned-Prophet should be
emulated. To different extents, Islamic institutions and individuals do indeed
emulate his words and deeds, from individual killers with the "sudden jihad
syndrome" to the Pakistani and many other states, culminating in terror outfits
like the Taliban, Boko Haram and the Islamic State. So, we are not confronted
with a private belief of a 7th-century Arab, but with a living
belief system acting worldwide through some of its more zealous adherents.
For this reason, we have to analyze this ideology
and the thralldom in which it holds more than a billion of our fellow human
beings. Some of these become veritable instruments of this ideology, many more
are only nominal Muslims, and a sizable number are something in between. All of
them, however, have been born simply as human beings, and Islam has been
imposed upon them from the outside. They are not identical to this imposed
ideology. Any observations or claims about them do not warrant conclusions
about the ideology, nor vice-versa. That is the difference between Islam and
Muslims. My talk was about Islam, but all the objectors only talk about
The other defence of Islam addressed to me was by Ayub
Khan (see my book The Problem with
Secularism, p.160-1), who said that the story of Mohammed's massacre of the
Jewish tribe Banu Quraiza has been "debunked", eventhough it is related in
detail in the orthodox biography of the Prophet by Ibn Ishaq. Alright, as a
historian I welcome the questioning of the text's genuineness. Moreover, it
would be good news if a massacre that we thought had happened, turns out not to
have happened. Hundreds of people saved, isn't that good news? But we won't
indulge in special pleading: if a critical principle applies to one passage, it
applies to the whole text corpus. Indeed, Islam calls itself a "seamless
garment": pull out one string and the whole fabric comes apart. If one passage
from Islam's source texts can be considered mistaken, everything in Islam's
basic documents becomes suspect. So Muslims can forget about Islam as all
commandments and prohibitions are uncertain anyway. The whole of Islam is on
shaky foundations, just imaginative literature. Does Khan dare to repeat that
in a mosque?
The nature of the Conclave
According to Shashi Shekhar, "Elst's comments that
made news in Goa were out of place given the active presence of Ministers of
the present government at the Conclave".
No, my comments were not out of place at all. The
topic was a pressing problem that this government, like so many others, just
has to deal with. In the relaxed atmosphere of a Goan holiday resort, many
people would have preferred to remain in their comfort zone and make it a
feel-good event. You can of course spend your money (and God knows the organizers
did) on a useless talking-shop, but some of us thought the situation is too
serious for that.
Maybe he means that the non-appeasing nature of my
conclusions would offend some of these Ministers? Well, the organizers know
better than me whom they invite. It is possible that some Ministers consider it
better for their field of operations if everyone is kept happy, and I have
nothing against that consideration. Politics has its laws, the intellectual
sphere has others. In caste terms: Brahmin and Kshatriya have their own
Swadharma. So, maybe the organizers were being duplicitous when they called
this an "ideas conclave" when in fact they had a diplomatic conference in mind,
or even just a publicitary exercise to show off their VIP contacts? That was at
any rate the impression I got when I arrived at the conference. And therefore,
I proposed to read a different paper about a less heady topic, viz. the Hindu
agenda and how it fares under Narendra Modi's regime. But the session moderator
insisted I talk about Islam, so that is what I did.
And why not? Maybe confronting the summer people
present with a piece of harsh reality was just what they needed? The organizers
in their infinite wisdom seem to have thought so.
Making room for a serious analysis of terrorism,
tracing its causes rather than feeding the audience the usual sop-story, was
especially useful for Ministers and other administrators who feel responsible
for their nation. After all, superficial answers lead to superficial policies
that leave the causes of the problem untouched and therefore perpetuate it. Gentle surgeons make stinking wounds. Decades of
Nehruvian superficiality have brought India and Hindu society endless problems,
now finally we can get serious about them. Responsible politicians don't want
to let them fester, leaving them for future generations to confront, at great
cost. Leaders "on Modi time" want to really solve it. This, in turn, takes a
proper understanding, and that is what I have tried to provide. If anything was
"misplaced", if anything was devoid of "ideas", it was the usual conformistic
pap, the fact-free litany of external causes for Islamic terrorism that leaves
Islam untouched.
The economy as a secular vote-catcher?
Some background: the Conclave was an attempt to unite
different tendencies within the ruling party. Principally these are the
cultural nationalists, with whom the party as a whole is traditionally
identified, and the so-called economic rightists. It is somewhat like the US
Republican Party, where economic libertarians and Christian conservatives form
the two poles.
To be sure, these economic rightists are not very
extreme. India hardly has any hard-core libertarians, just sensible people who
see what damage socialism has done, and therefore want to remove the endless
state controls. They want air to breathe while taking corporate initiatives, a freer
and more dynamic economy. But usually this economic liberalism is constrained
by other considerations, principally nationalism. Thus, libertarian hard-liners
in India and especially abroad had hoped that Narendra Modi would put all the
national economic assets up for sale, and then end up selling them for a song
to the best-placed bidder (like Boris Yeltsin did in Russia), but he refused.
Their emphasis on the economy does, however, give
them an orientation often at variance with the BJP's traditional backbone of
cultural nationalists. They tend to present "Hindutva" as obscurantist and
outdated. As mostly university graduates, they tend to talk down to the shabby
rustic Hindutvawadis. They look to the sky in desperation whenever a Cabinet
member or another leader so much as raises any Hindu issue. They also bank on
the long-standing Hindu tendency to hide Hindu concerns underneath secular
demands, particularly economic, in order to be on the safe side of hegemonic
secularism. Even now that they are in office, they keep on looking up to the
secularists for approval. Though the supposedly Hindu party is now supposedly in
power, this premium on secularism can still be felt, even at the Conclave.
Thus, in Joseph Gathia's list of things to do, we
find all the usual Congressite talking-points of development, fighting poverty
etc., which are the present ruling party's priorities as well. The only mention
of religion is the worn-out Gandhian slogan (which numerous Hindus wrongly
believe to be "Vedic") Sarva-Dharma-Samabhava,
more or less "equal respect for all religions", moreover usually misinterpreted
as "equal truth of all religions". However, while this wording obviously means
to avoid any specifically Hindu agenda, the slogan itself, analyzed beyond its
conspicuous superficiality, does reintroduce some Hindu desiderata. Thus,
whatever the slogan really means, it speaks of some kind of religious equality.
Nothing about it points to the anti-majority discrimination inherent in the
Nehruvian interpretation of Art. 30 (inviolabilty of minority schools) or in
Art. 370 (special status of Kashmir) of the Constitution, let alone the
existence separate of Civil Codes, one reformed by the secular Parliament (Hindu
Code) but the others the preserve of the respective religious establishments. That
is why Hindu activists have wanted to abolish or change the relevant laws.
These are perfectly sensible and genuinely secular demands, but the BJP
secularists avoid them because they are still in thrall to the ideological
hegemony of the Nehruvians.
These BJP secularists also overestimate their own
quantitative importance, furnishing only a minority of the landslide electoral
result of Narendra Modi in the spring of 2014. They are the ones who assert
that the BJP should betray the Hindu core of its programme as "people have
voted for development and therefore shouldn't be bothered with bygone religious
concerns". In their despotic mindset, they don't care if this means offending
the RSS workers and other Hindu activists who did all the legwork that put the
BJP in power. But the ground reality is that this was a very Hindu electoral
result. Modi as an economic miracle-worker surely helped, but Modi as the man
who has survived an unparallelled twelve-years-long onslaught by the
secularists, that is what made him the Emperor of the Hindu Heart (Hindu Hrdaya
The numerical factor that made all the difference
was that many more Hindus turned up to cast their votes than usual, and this
was because finally they had a really Hindu candidate for Prime Minister. Baba
Ramdev was only the most famous among the millions of Hindus who said that they
had voted for Modi, not for the BJP. Whatever Modi or his campaigners said, he
was stuck with a hard-line Hindu public image, and this is what reaped him
votes. Indeed, the secularist propaganda identifying Modi with militant
Hinduism has only earned him more grassroots support.
By contrast, the BJP's colourless image downplaying
any Hindu associations had shown its electoral potential in the defeats of 2004
(at the height of India's economic growth) and 2009. In 2004, AB Vajpayee's
Government treated Hindu activism as an outdated concern and focused on its
economic successes, expecting that the modern middle class would reward it, but
the BJP-led alliance unexpectedly lost. It spurned the deliberately Hindu vote
and so the Hindu voter stayed home. Yet, Swapan Dasgupta and Tavleen Singh
advocate a repeat of the folly that only earned AB Vajpayee's party a
resounding defeat.
The contempt in which the economywallahs hold the
Hindutva wing, is understandable though, and partly justified. The Hindutva
organizations have never invested anything at all in developing their ideology
and instilling it in their workers. The result is that now you have some
members of Parliament and even of Government who make inconsiderate statements
raising Hindu demands as if they are shooting cheap opinions on an internet discussion
forum. These statements are not necessarily stupid, they may raise legitimate
Hindu concerns. But instead of setting to work to realize them, they merely do
the Hindu routine and get vocally emotional about them. It is normal that among
serious politicians and mediacrats, this rustic behaviour is held in contempt.
This lack of understanding and sophistication also
translates into a glaring misstatement of even correct Hindu concerns. Thus,
RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat justifies Ghar Wapasi this way: "We have a right to
take back what is ours", meaning that we Hindus have a right to take back the
souls stolen from us by conversion through force or allurement. This bragging misconstructs
the issue, apart from being smug and repelling. No, Ghar Wapasi has a very
different rationale: when the delusions that constitute the basis of Islam or
Christianity are no longer backed up by power and fall away, what remains will
automatically revert to its general human condition and reintegrate into its
Hindu surroundings.
But it doesn't follow that these concerns deserve to
be swept under the carpet, as the economywallahs would prefer. Yes, these
ideological issues interfere with their more tangible money-making schemes, but
that is what is good about them: man does not live by bread alone.
Ghar Wapasi
The one topic that now has become the symbol of all
cultural concerns is Ghar Wapasi, the "homecoming" of non-Hindus to Hindu
society. Those who care about India's future identity know that this is the
only way to maintain a Hindu majority. On present trends of accelerating
Islamic demographic gains and large-scale conversions to Christianity, India
will turn Hindu-minority in just decades. The secular "development" wing takes
on airs of being enlightened but is very short-sighted: it pooh-poohs any look
into the distant future and doesn't even look across the border into Pakistan to
see what it is like to be a Hindu minority. Others, however, take the
well-being of Hindus as Hindus to heart and occasionally reconvert Muslim or
Christian individuals, families or communities.
The Ghar Wapasi movement pioneered by the VHP is
manned by the same people, or the same kind of people, on whom the
economywallahs look down, but to whom they owe their present power positions.
Some polite respect would be in order.
It is said that Ghar Wapasi is divisive, and that
India cannot have that now. Well, the missionary campaigns targeting Hindus for
conversion to other faiths are just as divisive; they have been with us for
centuries and are being condoned. Indeed, if any Hindu activist draws attention
to this phenomenon (e.g. to Pope John-Paul II's statement in favour of the
missionary project, Delhi 1999), he is only denounced or ridiculed. Those who
oppose Ghar Wapasi apply the same double standards that the secularists have
been notorious for since decades. Whereas during the Ayodhya agitation we had
an opposition between the BJP and the secularists, we now see this same
opposition reproduced as one between the pro-Hindu and the "development"-oriented
secular wing of the BJP.
My own intervention at the Ideas Conclave tied in
with the Ghar Wapasi movement. To be sure, I work at a different level. I
analyze the reasons why Muslims would do well to liberate themselves from
Islam, a concern for intellectuals only distantly of interest to Ghar Wapasi
workers on the ground. They themselves speak the proper language of the masses,
they know how to approach really existing communities, they have an
effectiveness that I in my ivory tower can only dream of. But on the rare occasions
where the elite tries to argue against Ghar Wapasi, my insights may make a
difference, and ultimately some of them may percolate to the mass level. At any
rate, though among Hindus it ought to have been a trivial thing to say, I need
to emphasize that my position is one of support to Ghar Wapasi.
Muslims in
our midst
Though a few secularists in the audience dissented
from my stated views, the controversy in my session was started in earnest by
two Muslims who accused me of "Islamophobia" and of "insulting the Prophet". Who were they?
Like Salman Rushdie and many others
earmarked for execution, or like the Charlie Hebdo editors and cartoonists
effectively killed, I was accused of "insulting the Prophet", this time by Dr. Abdelsalam
al-Majali. He was Jordanian Prime Minister in 1993-95 and 1997-98, and later
went on to chair the Islamic World Academy of Sciences. I frankly haven't
followed his work. I have been sent some troubling information about the
proceedings of the Jordanian Parliament, e.g. one that made it to the top 10 of attacks on Jews in 2014: "Next on the
list is the decision of the Jordanian parliament to hold a moment of silence
for the Palestinian murderers of four worshippers and a Druze policeman one day
after their November 19 attack on a synagogue in Jerusalem's Har Nof
neighborhood. 'I ask God to envelop them with mercy and to grant you with
patience, comfort and recovery from your grief…', wrote Jordanian Prime
Minister Abdullah Ensour to the families of the terrorists." (http://www.wiesenthal.com/atf/cf/%7B54d385e6-f1b9-4e9f-8e94-890c3e6dd277%7D/TOP-TEN-2014.PDF")
But I don't follow Jordanian politics and have no idea
what Dr. Majali's role was in these unmistakably pro-terrorist gestures, except
that during his own tenure as Prime Minister he even signed a peace treaty with
Israel. I am therefore ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. Any scornful
remarks I may have made privately about him stand annulled. However, that
doesn't mean he had a meaningful place at our Ideas Conclave. What has he ever
contributed to the system of thought informing the present Government? To put
it crudely: what was he doing there?
One thing his mere presence did achieve, was to make
the organizers walk on their toes not to offend Muslim sentiments and to
deplore the free flow of ideas wherever they could cause such offence. The
Muslim community is effectively given a veto power over what non-Hindus are
allowed to debate. Hindus are used to remaining silent whenever Islam (or
Christianity or secularism) imposes "respect". Theirs is an underground
society. That, incidentally, is also why I received such rousing applause: I
merely vocalized out loud what most Hindus think in silence or merely whisper to
those whom they trust.
The other Muslim was Dr. Ekmelleddin Ihsanoglu. He has
been President of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), comprising 57
states deemed Islamic, from 2004 to 2014. I know of nothing objectionable in
his personal career, and little in the talk he gave about the separation of
Religion and State in Turkey. However, he did obscure the fact that this laik (secular) separation was not
effected by or because of Islam, as a legitimate interpretation of Islamic
political doctrine, but by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as a way of curbing and combating the influence of Islam. Indeed, Atatürk was outspokenly
anti-Islamic, calling Islam "a rotting corpse that prevents our progress". Among
grown-ups it is normal to tolerate such language, though in my case even a more
sophisticated argument was reason for holy indignation. If Atatürk had spoken
at this conference, the organizers would have apologized for his utterances and
spirited him away.
The OIC he has represented until very recently,
however, and the reason for his importance and hence for his invitation, is
less palatable. The positions it has most prominently taken, were really very
out of place at an India Ideas Conclave. In its founding conference in 1969, this
pan-Islamic body rejected India's membership bid under Pakistani pressure,
pleading that India was not a Muslim-majority country (but sincerely hopes that
it will satisfy this criterion soon enough). The OIC's main claim to fame was the
1990 Cairo Declaration, passed unanimously (i.e. not a single Muslim-majority
country dissented), that the Shari'a
takes precedence over any human legislation including the UN Declaration of
Human Rights.
This flies in the face of the stated demand of the BJP
(and already of its predecessor, Bharatiya Jan Sangh, since 1952) that India
enact a Common Civil Code (CCC), eliminating the presently valid applicability
of the Shari'a for Indians classified
as Muslim. And this is not just a BJP demand, but a requirement of India's
Constitution: in its Directive Principles, it enjoins the Indian state to enact
a CCC. In 2005, the Supreme Court has consequently demanded from the Government
information on what steps it was taking to enact a CCC. India wants national
integration, including unity of all citizens regardless of religion, under a
uniform legislation. By contrast, the OIC stands for Shari'a and Muslim separateness.
So, the India Foundation owes us all an explanation.
Does it want national integration rather than communal separateness? If the
former, does it want a CCC, like the Constitution and the BJP? And if so, has
it cared to inform its OIC guest that the OIC position was radically rejected
by everything the India Ideas Conclave stood for, and by 99% of its
participants? Indeed, why was a retiring OIC President being invited, if not to
ask him to publicly repudiate the policies that he has represented for 10
years, until a few months ago? Or should these conflicts, a natural object of
scrutiny at an "Ideas Conclave", be swept under the carpet for the sake of
Hindu niceness?
Further, the OIC has popularized the concept
"Islamophobe", a term that can apparently be traced back to Ayatollah Khomeini.
It was a rousing success, being adopted overnight by the UN, the EU and every
trendy politician and media hack. But nonetheless, it was and is a nonsense
term, a pollution of language. Firstly, while literally pointing to a "fear" of
Islam, it is used as meaning "hate" of Islam. Secondly, the term is meant to
fit in the psychiatric jargon, like "claustrophobia" (exaggerated, irrational
fear of closed spaces) or "arachnophobia" (irrational fear of spiders),
implying that fear/hate of Islam is a disease, warranting a medical treatment
instead of a debate. It is meant to stifle scrutiny of Islam, an application in
new circumstances of the old Islamic prohibition on scrutiny of Islam by non-Muslims.
Ihsanoglu called me an "Islamophobe".
By contrast, my own term "Islamophile" is not borrowed
from psychiatric jargon. Just as "Francophile" simply means "outspoken lover of
everything French", an "Islamophile" is an outspoken lover of Islam. It is
simply a descriptive term of pro-Islamic behaviour, esp. in circumstances where
a more critical attitude of Islam would have been warranted. Thus, after the
three thousand deaths of 11 September 2001 (and on numerous other similar
occasions), loads of politicians showed their solidarity not with the victims
but with the community of the perpetrators, esp. by visiting mosques. (Strictly
speaking, they only aired their solidarity with Muslims while saying nothing
about Islam, but typically they don't make any distinction between the two.)
The event would have warranted scrutiny of whether Islam had anything to do
with it, but instead they made it a point to air their uninformed opinion that
this had nothing to do with Islam. They proved themselves Islamophiles.
Moderate Muslims
We all know self-described "moderate Muslims". Yes,
they exist. They plead that the Islamic terrorist attacks are not really
Islamic, or (more truthfully) that the religion which they themselves practise,
has nothing to do with terrorism.
Alright, they may well not practise terrorism. They
may even recoil in horror when they get to see the bloodied and maimed victims
of terrorism – as any normal human being would. These are the fruits of them
being born as human beings, not of them being raised as Muslims. It proves
nothing about Islam, it only proves that they have moral reflexes that are
outside Islam, either inborn as an inheritance of the acquired moral
sensitivity of the human species, or acquired as the gift from one of the many
influences to which human beings are subject apart from the religion imparted
to them.
All the same, I really feel for them. I realize that
with the present wave of terrorism exposing the true face of Islam, they are
facing a dilemma. Either they have to betray their inborn or acquired moral
sensitivity, or they have to betray the religion which they venerate as the
religion of their parents and teachers, viz. Islam. But I also know the way out
of their plight. They can follow their conscience, decide in favour of their
heartfelt revulsion at this Islamic terrorism, and choose to distance themselves
from the Prophet who inspired these crimes.
I make a strict distinction between Islam and Muslims.
This greatly irritates the Islam apologists, who persistently try to blur,
ignore, deny or (when used by Islam critics) blacken this distinction. Well, it
is strongly rooted in Islamic theology and much older than their usual modern
scapegoats supposed to have "triggered" the crimes of Islam: colonialism,
American imperialism, Zionism, Hindutva or the European discrimination of
immigrant Muslim minorities. Islam as a religion, as a set of divine messages
and commandments, counts as eternal and unchanging, above human flaws. By
contrast, the Muslim community consists of fallible human beings, very
divergent in their effective allegiance to Islam, part of the world of change
and decay, and subject to the Final Judgment. The distinction has also been
made by John Locke, one of the founding fathers of the Enlightenment, in his
speculations about religious tolerance: there is a radical logical difference
between a religion and its adherents. So, this distinction has very good
credentials, which the Islamophiles in their effort to blur the debate cannot
In this scheme, "moderate Muslims" clearly take a
middling position: they are true to Islam, but only partly. They can take heart
from the fact that in a few cases, they really have a point when they say that "radicals
violate true Islam". Or at least, they are not obviously lying when saying so. There
is a grey area in Islamic law where different opinions co-exist, and where it
can meaningfully be argued that one competing school misunderstands the Prophet
and hence real Islam. Thus, female genital mutilation is an obligation in some
Muslim countries and fiercely justified by the clerics and jurisconsults there,
yet unknown in other countries just as Islamic. Here, those who advocate a more
liberal view, viz. the non-legitimacy of female circumcision, might have a winnable
point. For another example, the murder of more than a hundred schoolchildren in
an army cantonment in Peshawar by the Taliban is justified by the perpetrators,
but its Islamic credentials are dubious: killing Muslim children entrusted to
the school by the soldiers of an Islamic republic might not accord with
Mohammed's precedent after all.
On the other hand, most Islamic commandments are not a
matter of doubt at all. The Islamic prescription about punishing an insult to
the Prophet is beyond discussion, all the relevant evidence from Mohammed's
life, supplemented by a very long list of legal authorities since, points to
the death penalty. Here, the position of moderate Muslims is more difficult.
Either they truthfully say that their religion supports the killing of the Arya
Samajis who criticized the Prophet, the irreverent Danish and French cartoonists,
Salmon Rushdie and his translators, Nobel winner Naguib Mahfouz and other
offenders (and then get attacked by other Muslims for breaking ranks); or they
mendaciously claim that Islam allows these "insults" to the Prophet (as those
who make headlines usually do).
Among those who violate the truth by denying the
purely Islamic reason of these Islamic crimes (or of slavery, robbery, rape,
iconoclasm etc.), we have to distinguish between two types. One is the common
Muslim who has an idealized picture of his religion and Prophet without exactly
knowing what they have historically stood for. They mean it when they say that "this
terrorism cannot be my religion". The other type is the educated Muslim who
knows he is lying through his teeth when he delinks Islam and Mohammed from the
murder of critics. They do so with a good conscience, for Islam allows them to
tell lies for the good of their religion. They deliberately exploit the
gullibility of the non-Muslims, and manage to pass as "moderate Muslims".
The situation of moderate Muslims can be compared to
that of people who have received a closed box with poison inside. They don't
open the box but pass it on to their children, who pass it on to theirs, etc.
This goes well, until one generation, some adventurous son opens the box and
tastes the poison. It is he who joins the Taliban, the Lashkar-i-Toiba or the
Islamic State. Indeed, most Muslim radicals descend from moderate Muslims. Given
the history of Islamic expansion, it could hardly be otherwise. Most
conversions to Islam took place under pressure, and while some people justify
this conversion to themselves by getting extra fanatical, most people merely go
through the rituals and settle for the status of "moderate Muslim".
I know from experience that this comparison makes Islam
apologists flare up in anger. Well, they should realize that it becomes less
dramatical when you shed your holy moralism and give up seeing everything
through the prism of good and evil. People often do things that are objectively
evil without meaning evil, through ignorance (as Socrates observed). Innocently
passing on something of which you don't realize all the consequences occurs
frequently, we should not make more of it than necessary. But of course, once
you realize it, you should get out of your habits, out of your comfort zone,
and do the needful to change this pattern. In this case, you should break the generational
chain of Islam.
But then there will be other problems? Sure enough,
Islam is by no means mankind's only problem. Islam apologists often say or
imply that "Islamophobes attribute all problems to Islam". This is a convenient
straw man, for such an "Islamophobe" has never been pointed out in reality. Some
Islamic activists may say that Islam is the solution
for all problems, but no one outside the Islamophile imagination thinks that it
is the cause of all problems.
Tavleen Singh makes herself the spokesperson of the
secular section of the BJP support base, the one that ridicules all Hindu
concerns, by dismissing my observations as "ugly". This is a word she
frequently uses, and at the same time a familiar word in secularspeak summing
up the secular distaste for anything to do with religion. She doesn't let her
readers know just what I have said that is ugly, nor what it is that makes my
positions ugly.
Well, I suppose columns are not a medium fit for going
into such trivial details. Alright then, let us confront our positions in a
more appropriate forum: a debate. She doesn't like it when I said that the
Prophet condoned rape? That the Prophet owned, took and sold slaves? That the
Prophet had critical writers murdered in the still of the night or, once he had
the power, formally executed? That the Prophet's own words and deeds count as
legally valid precedent in Islamic Courts? That the atrocities with which the
Islamic State has made headlines, are but an emulation of the Prophet's
precedent? She considers all these positions of mine "ugly"?
In that case, she can easily convince the public of
her position. Indeed, I myself, being very open-minded, am ready to be
persuaded by her. All she has to do, is to prove (not just assert, of course,
but prove from the source texts) that the Prophet forbade his men to rape their
hostages. That he abolished slavery (as some propagandists for Islam have
actually claimed). That he stopped his more zealous followers from killing Abu
Afak, Asmâ bint Marwan and other critical poets. That Islamic Courts have
surprised friend and foe by decreeing: "The Prophet was wrong. Don't follow the
Prophet!" If she can prove all this, the Islamic State's atrocities will indeed
start looking alien to the Prophet's precedent. But until then, she stands
exposed as Islam's failed PR agent.
Oh, and before she comes to trouble you or me with her
pontifications about "true Islam", she can go and convince the Taliban or other
experts in Islamic law. It doesn't require any skill to convince an ignorant
audience eager to be convinced that they don't have to get up from their seats
since Islam poses no problem at all. Reassurance about Islam is in great
demand. The public badly wants to believe, against its own impression to the
contrary, that Islam is nothing to be afraid of, so it will gulp down any
sop-story that serves this purpose. But it is more difficult to convince
seasoned practitioners of Islamic law like Caliph al-Baghdadi or the Taliban.
They know very well that the Islamic atrocities that make the news, are true to
Mohammed's precedent.
Thus, when Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death for
insulting the Prophet, everyone who mattered suddenly assumed expertise on
Islam and decided that this defence of the Prophet's reputation had nothing to
do with Islam. However, none of them dared to confront Maulana Mohsin Usmani Nadwi
who wrote an Urdu book, Ahânat-i-Rasûl kî
Sazâ ("The punishment for insulting the Prophet", Delhi 1989), in which he
summed up the legal position: of course the punishment for insulting the
Prophet, crystal-clear since the beginning of Islam, is the death penalty. I
agree with him, but in my case, Tavleen Singh calls this unassailable case
"ugly". Will she go and convince the Maulana that his position is "ugly"?
Or, when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas,
all the talking heads on TV decided that this could never be true Islam, but
the Taliban knew of the legally valid precedents of iconoclasm by the Prophet
himself (chiefly of the 360 icons in the Kaaba) and by other worthies in
Islamic history. Is Tavleen Singh ready to leave the comforts of her parlour to
go and talk the Taliban out of their "ugly" application of Mohammed's
precedent? If we see newspaper headlines: "Taliban sorry for Bamiyan
destruction", with the news: "Enlightened by an Indian secularist journalist,
moreover a woman, the Taliban admitted they had been wrong all along", we will
finally concede that Tavleen Singh is a real authority on Islam. In that event,
we might defer to her opinion. Until then, however, she is just another
ignorant secularist, expert only at willful superficiality in matters of
"India is different"
A secularist in the audience said that Indian Muslims
are different from their Arab counterparts. I don't know the man, and on second
thought he could just as well be an RSS activist, for RSS discourse is mostly
about "nationalism" and "Indianizing the minorities", rather than about
"Hinduism" and "Hinduizing the minorities". The European Heathens were mostly
baptized by Christian missionaries drawn from their own or adjoining nations,
ethnicity had little to do with the struggle between the true religion and the
false gods; by contrast, the RSS says it doesn't mind Christianity or Islam as
long as they are Indian. They don't mind beung converted, as long as it is by a
fellow-countryman. Anyway, let's consider the truth or otherwise of what he was
He named two examples. The first one was the former
President of India, physicist APJ Abdul Kalam. He was selected for office by
the Vajpayee Government and was the fulfilment of the Hindutva dream of a
"Mohammedi Hindu". Indeed, the BJP's soft-liners don't think of converting the
minorities anymore, only of redefining them. They should think of themselves as
"Christi Hindus" or "Mohammedi Hindus", and then they are welcome to their
Jihad and other anti-Hindu commandments of their religion. But no need to fear for
those in the case of Abdul Kalam: he really was a "Mohammedi Hindu", nominally
a Muslim but culturally very much a Hindu.
At that point I said something that was true in that
context, but when pulled out of context and put in isolated cold print, it
might be misinterpreted: that Abdul Kalam was the only "Mohammedi Hindu". This
could now be construed as a statement about every other Indian Muslim. It is
the only statement I made in Goa that I would slightly amend now. So let me
clarify that it referred to the Muslim VIPs always enumerated by Congress
people as exemplary "secular Muslims": among them, he was the only "cultural
Hindu", or what the RSS would call "Indian". A celibate vegetarian, his
lifestyle satisfied a Hindu ideal but was at variance with the Islamic
lifestyle. As for the millions of ordinary Muslims, however, there may well be more
"Mohammedi Hindus" among them, I have done no research in this matter but it is
most probable.
In Congress discourse, some other names are routinely
mentioned but don't fit the bill at all. In this case, the only one mentioned
was the Congressites' prime example, Jawaharlal Nehru's first Education
Minister, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad. He was called a "nationalist Muslim"
because he opposed the Partition of India, in contrast with the Muslim League
(the "separatist Muslims"). This much is true, but then consider the reason
why. In centuries past, Muslims were a far smaller minority then today, yet
they dominated India. A modern lawyer like Muslim League leader Mohammed Ali
Jinnah completely thought inside the modern democratic framework where numbers
are important. But to an obscurantist like Azad, this didn't matter: democracy
was only a temporary circumstance that need not stand in the way of turning a
united India into a Muslim empire. Moreover, Muslims could convert Hindus, and
through their superiority in demographic growth (from 19% to 24% in the sixty
years before Independence), they would eventually become the majority.
Moreover, Azad seized upon Mahatma Gandhi's proposal to form an all-Muslim
Cabinet as the ultimate "compromise" (i.e. surrender) to avert Partition. So,
he dreamed of Islamizing all of India rather than only the Pakistani part of
Moreover, now that the Caliphate has been declared, we
do well to remember the Caliphate (Khilafat) movement of 1920 in India. What
was Azad's position then? He gave out a fatwa, a juridical advice, declaring
India a Dar-al-Harb, a country under Pagan rule, and calling on all Muslims to
either take up arms and wage jihad against the British, or emigrate. Thousands
of Muslims went to Afghanistan, only to find that they were not welcome and had
no means of lielihood, so they came back in desperation. It seems Azad hated
Muslims so much that he ruined the lives of thousands along them. I would never
do so, but he did, the very man who was lionized by an Islam apologist in my
Bishop Stalsett emphasized that this debate should be
seen against the over-arching need for "diversity". India has always been
diverse, but in post-Christian Europe, ethnic and religious diversity is fairly
new. Those who favour Islam like to promote its demands under the guise of "diversity".
Well, long live diversity. However, one thing that
these do-gooders don't understand, is that Islam is by no means sympathetic to
diversity. It will use diversity as long as it is in a minority position, but
when it accedes to power, diversity will be whittled down. Look at the sorry position
of the Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, or even in Kashmir, and of the
minorities in other Muslim countries. They are not being terrorized in every
case, but they are always subject to some discrimination or other. Islam is not
comfortable with diversity.
Indeed, in this respect too, the Islamic behaviour pattern
was set by Mohammed, not always emulated yet still the recognized model for all
Muslims. His career and life's work can be summed up in one sentence: the Prophet
transformed an existing diverse and multicultural society into a monolithic
Islamic dictatorship.
from a Roma
A Roma speaker published this statement on
his website, the Roma Virtual Network:
response to blatant anti-Islamic rhetoric pronounced by one professor during
India Ideas Conclave in Goa on 20 December 2014
"Dr. Koenraad Elst from
Belgium happened to be a panelist on a session entitled "Religion -
Tolerance & Terror" and he shocked the audience with his blatant
anti-Islamic rhetoric. There were too many voices of protest against what he
said ... Moderator could not let everyone to voice the protest. I had to find
the way to tell my own opinion in defense of this Faith, even so I am not a
"So, I found the
solution in addressing blatant hate speech of that professor in the very
beginning of my presentation on Indian roots of Roma on a next session entitled
'Culture & Nation'. Here is what I said:
"Many of us this
evening were unpleasantly shocked by the blatant hate speech of someone against
Islam. We all know that there are different people in each religion and the
people with wrong motivations may interpret the same Holy Scriptures in the way
they want. But why the ones who criticize Islam are blind and do not see the
positive aspects of this religion.
"I myself am a
Christian, from Romani, Jewish and Chinese background, who lives in Israel for
20 years. And during this period three times in my life Muslim people with good
knowledge of Quran appeared in very critical moments and helped me a lot to
pass through the periods of depression, hopelessness and cry. They did not even
care about my ethno-religious background. Thanks to these good willing people I
am safe, sound and healthy now and stand in front of you to deliver the speech
on Indian roots of Roma.
"PLEASE think about many
positive features of Islam before you dare to criticize this religion!"
"My words had sensible
support of audience!
"Respectfully yours,
"Mr. Valery Novoselsky,
Executive Editor, Roma Virtual Network."
Executive Editor, Roma Virtual Network."
every single response to my talk, the letter contains no attempt whatsoever to
prove me wrong. It only makes its assertion, and the rest is the usual dirt and
emotional blackmail: "blatant", "shocked", "unpleasant", "hate speech".
thing totally untrue is his calculation of the audience's position. The "many
voices of protest" were only a few, though they made a lot of noise. Contrary
to what Mr. Novoselsky claims, those "critical" (meaning conformist) voices
were a small minority. On the other hand, my talk was only interrupted by
applause and encouragements, and I have never been greeted by so many
congratulations and embraces as after this performance. The audience consisted
mostly of Hindu activists (were the foreign invitees not informed of this?) who
shared my outlook, not Novoselsky's. Not that this has any importance, and I
realize that the roles would have been reversed before a different audience.
But those few voices of protest were indeed the more consequential ones: on the
one hand the organizers, who realized that my criticism of Islam had been
filmed and would be used to embarrass them and, through them, the Modi
government; and on the other the few Muslim VIPs present.
for the positive features of Islam: before he tries to convince me of those, I
suggest he tries his luck among the next of kin of the numerous Indian or
Israeli victims of Islamic terrorism. Those terrorists in their farewell
letters or videos say again and again that they did it for Islam's sake, so let
him please go and explain to their victims how positive Islam really is.
the topic of my talk was not the positive features of Islam (whose defenders
invariably blur the debate by changing the topic), but the explanatory factors
in Islam for the tangible and very large phenomenon of Islamic terrorism – which, after all, was the reason for
holding the session in the first place. But this is the usual rhetorical trick
of the Islamophiles: changing the subject while hoping that no one notices.
topic would be a refutation of the points I had made. Thus, he could have shown
that the Caliphate's conduct is contrary to the Prophet's precedent, e.g.
because the Prophet abolished slavery or at least refrained from its practice;
that he forbade his men to rape their hostages; that he invited his critics for
a frank debate rather than having them killed; or that Islamic Courts reject
and condemn the Prophet's conduct. That would at least show me the courtesy of
actually addressing the specifics of my speech, rather than being drowned in a
hazy common denominator of what "Islamophobes" are assumed to think.
Good Muslims
come to the main point: he accuses me of "blatant hate speech against Islam" and argues that my depiction of Islam
is way too negative because contradicted by his experience with a few helpful
Muslims. These are the usual objections by Islamophiles.
To start with the "good Muslims" point: of course
every single Islam critic knows that there exist good people who happen to be
Muslims. Mr. Novoselsky is not able to muster a single counter-example,
certainly not me. Every Islam critic knows perfectly well that many Muslims are
fine human beings. The Islam critic who does not know this (and against whom Novoselsky's
testimony was logically addressed) is merely a figment of the Islamophiles'
imagination, a part of the enemy-image constructed to mobilize their hatred. As
I said during the session, and as I had already written many times (but all to
no avail, for Islamophiles don't listen), the reason is that nominal Muslims
are simply human beings and have interiorized their Islamic indoctrination to
various extents. Experiences with Muslims (in this case even in statistically
insignificant numbers) imply nothing at all about the Islamic doctrine. The
question is what the people who do act on Islamic doctrine will do.
And we know what they will do, for they themselves
tell us. Not one terrorist has said: "What
I do has nothing to do with Islam." Instead, those who speak out, all
say they do it for Islam and in accordance with Islamic law. But the problem is
that the smug Islamophiles don't respect these Muslims, treat them all as
liars, overrule their testimony and replace it with their own explanation.
Islam critics, by contrast, respect these Muslims and take their self-testimony
seriously. When the newly founded Caliphate takes as its emblem the Islamic
creed, valid for all Muslims worldwide, we conclude that it has everything to
do with Islam.
From his own good experiences with a few Muslims,
Novoselsky deduces "many positive features" of Islam. OK, let's see what good
the votaries of another doctrine did. The young Wehrmacht soldier Karl-Heinz Rosch saved two Dutch children at the cost
of his own life in Goirle in 1944, and has now finally been honoured with a
statue. That is even more virtuous and heroic than spending some time to help a
troubled soul through depression. The "good Nazi"
John Rabe used his standing with the Japanese to save numerous Chinese during
the Rape of Nanjing in 1937; by the same logic, they could all testify in
favour of Nazism. So, for these good deeds by a
few Nazi individuals, Novoselsky is willing to conclude to "many positive
features" of Nazism. He is even prepared to speak out in defence of Nazism if a
previous speaker dares to criticize Nazism.
But the truth is that human beings cannot be reduced
to a doctrine which happens to be in a powerful position in their lives, and to
which they may swear allegiance. Nominal Muslims are not intrinsically Islamic.
Morality already germs among the higher mammals, and fully existed among
troglodytes. If human beings act morally, if they show helpfulness and
fellow-feeling, it simply proves that they are human beings, it doesn't prove
that their religious doctrine is the key to morality.
As for the allegation of "hate", this is an
absolute classic: when confronted with a fact-based and logical argument
against Islamic doctrine, Islamophiles will invariably change the subject and attack
ad hominem. They will impute to the
speaker a motive of seeking to spread hatred against the community of
According to Shaikh, former OIC president Ihsanoglu
protested with these words: "We are hearing a speech of hatred. You cannot use
your freedom of speech to hurt others. I was very happy being here until I
heard this speech of hatred." And I can testify that this is exactly what he
said. For now; we forego an in-depth discussion of his claim that freedom of
speech does not imply the right to hurt others, a claim also heard among
unimaginative Hindus who try to get anti-Hindu books or films banned. Only this: if free speech doesn't mean the
right to say unpalatable things, it doesn't mean much.
For another example, at the session, a Swiss
do-gooder in the audience spoke in the same vein: my critique of Islam amounted
to insulting a billion-something Muslims and spreading hate against them. (He
also objected to my smiling throughout the commotion; yes, I remained relaxed
because I allowed the evidence to speak for itself, whereas he with his cramped
face and rolling eyes had to mobilize all his indignation to somehow neutralize
the weight of the evidence. If there was a face of hate in that audience, it
was he.)
Generally, I observe that this allegation is always
uttered automatically, knee-jerk fashion, and that it always comes without any
attempt at proof. After all, why should the Islamophiles trouble themselves
with evidence? They have the opinion forum all to themselves, they are
supported by the powers that be and by the dominant media (who can't escape
reporting some unpleasant facts about Islam but always take care to minimize them
and put a whitewashing spin on them). Islam critics have nothing but the truth
in their favour, so they make sure to back up their claims with appropriate
references to the authoritative texts of Islam. Islamophiles, by contrast,
merely have to make assertions and then lean back to feel satisfied at how
capably they have silenced the evil Islamophobes.
For my specific case, I am entirely sure of my
position and speak with a clear conscience: no, I do not hate Muslim fellow
human beings. All those clairvoyants who
pretend to an ability to look inside my head and proclaim to the world what my
"real" intentions are, have it all wrong. Of course I do not hate Muslims. The
Islamophiles are unable to back up such an allegation, they haven't even tried
and I don't expect them to. On my part, I will go the extra mile and
demonstrate my innocence of this alleged "hate".
In pro-Islamic rhetoric among Muslims, it is commonly
assumed that the Western interventions in
Muslim countries are linked with and proof of "Islamophobia", a terrible force
that has all the might of the NATO armies at its disposal. Just the opposite is
the case. Each one of the interventionist Western war leaders, together responsible
for hundreds of thousands of Muslim deaths, has taken care to distance himself
from the "Islamophobes" and has spoken out in favour of Islam. Not one of them
has soiled his hands on criticism of Islam. On the contrary, John Kerry made
himself the champion of the armed defence of "true Islam" against the Islamic
State's "distortion" of Islam by announcing the intervention of NATO bombers,
whose job would be to target Muslims. David Cameron called the targeted Muslims
"monsters, not Muslims", but with his total incompetence on Islam, he is not
fooling anybody. Under whatever name, it is Muslims his Royal Air Force is
Against this bloodlust among explicit Islamophiles, I
have always opposed Western interventions in the greater Middle East,
particularly those in Iraq, Libya and the planned intervention in Syria. I
don't count this as special or heroic, indeed, my own government (Belgium) and
the neighbouring powers France and Germany boycotted the "allied" invasion of
Iraq in 2003. Saddam Hussein was not a nice man to know, but history since then
has proven that the Western intervention has unchained many other demons,
including the Islamic State. Likewise, the intervention in Libya, largely the
brainchild of French Islamophile philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, has chased and
murdered a flawed dictator who was a "lesser evil" appropriate for that part of
the world, but it created a far worse chaos and civil war. Its ideological
value and results are as yet unclear, but its tangible consequence is that
hundreds of thousands of Muslims are being killed. That is what I have opposed
all along.
For the umpteenth time, I repeat: what the Muslim
world needs is a thaw, not the mobilization and polarization which Western
interventions cause. People grow in circumstances of stability and a reasonable
degree of prosperity, not in endless wars. In my opinion, this thaw will allow
them to outgrow Islam; but I am aware that others have different perspectives
of what "progress" among Muslims would constitute. Alright, let the clash of ideas
decide that. But all our preferred scenarios of how the Muslim world should
evolve, presuppose propitious circumstances, not the useless wars and chaos
which Western Islamophiles have inflicted on that part of the world.
Hate and the jihad girls
Very recently, a debate has raged in my country about
how to deal with the Syria volunteers: young Muslims who go to join the
militias fighting in Syria, including the Islamic State. Islamophiles eager to
protect their rosy picture of "peaceful" Islam are thereby confronted with real
Islam rearing its jihadi head. So, in order to delink the actual jihads,
beheadings, rapes and slave-markets from Islam, they have to impute to these
young Muslims external motives. Bypassing their stated motive of Islam, the
Islamophiles call these Muslims "crazies", "misfits", "monsters". In order to
save a doctrine, they spread hate against real-life Muslims.
My answer to this is to defend these Muslims. As young
idealists, they are only acting out the religion they have been taught. They
are so committed that, whatever the wisdom of the ideology they have embraced,
they are staking their lives. That deserves respect. If they have committed war
crimes, I do not want to spare them the consequences, but these can be judged
under existing laws, there is no need to criminalize their involvement in a
radical form of their religion. If anyone is really at fault, it is this
religion itself.
Consider a special category among these volunteers:
the jihad girls. In a Dutch-language article (http://www.inflandersfields.eu/2014/11/wat-de-doen-met-de-nieuwe-oostfronters.html) of 5 November 2014, I delinked the misguided
idealism of the Syria volunteers from the religion that motivates them and that
is whitewashed and patronized by our politicians. About the jihad girls, I
"The jihad girls as well deserve a better press. They
are decent girls who make clear through their veils that they keep men at a
distance, not sluts as they call their Western sisters. Yet they go to the
military frontier in Syria to offer their sexual services to real men: those
who without any outside pressure have volunteered for frontline duty, and who
are prepared to die for the cause they believe in. Syria fighters who return
home can count on support from the Muslim community and receive lots of
applause. But applause is cheap: anyone could give it. These girls stake
themselves, their bodies and their futures. They don't offer miserable consolation
prizes, they give the main prize: themselves."
In the Islamic State, the jihad girls are the
honourable alternative to raping an Assyrian woman or buying a Yezidi
slave-girl. So, rather than slandering them as "crazy", "confused" and all the
hate vocabulary thrown at them by politicians seeking to keep Islam out of the
equation, I plead their case. I highlight their youthful idealism and insist on
the distinction between their generous involvement and the guilty doctrine that
has gripped them. Tell me if this is hatred.
So, in a number of cases, I have defended Muslims as
only a understanding friend would. But even and especially my deconstruction of
Islam is meant as a boon to our
fellow-men. The main point is that liberating them from Islam is the very
opposite of hate. Suppose you discover that a close friend of yours still
believes in Santa Claus. Would you not, because
you are his friend, feel obliged to inform him of the truth?
Islam and the truth
The problem with Islam is not just that it generates
an enormous self-righteousness in oppressing and even killing unbelievers. Even
if the religion could be cleansed from its intolerant and violent aspects, it
still remains untrue.
This need not be a problem, strictly speaking, because
in ancient times, the concept of "true religion" didn't even exist yet. Truth
is something that philosophers and scientists deal with, and even they only do
so when on the job. Most people are not seriously concerned with truth, and
their priests do not cater to a need that hardly exists. They may give their
time and money for beauty, for comfort, for reassurance, for altered states of
consciousness, but not for truth. Then, in comes Christianity claiming to bring
the truth and declaring all the rest to be "false religions". Next, Islam comes
with the claim that Christianity and other preceding religions have been found
wanting. Now that it has been revealed, Islam itself is the true religion.
Religion as such is not true or false, it is about
devotion, standing in awe before the divine, and temporarily achieving a higher
state of mind. It is only when religion takes itself so serious that it claims
to be the true religion, and the only true one at that, that we should
scrutinize it for truth or untruth. And so, scholars have held Islam against
the light and found it to be untrue.
The first claim of the Islamic creed, that there is no
deity except for Allah, could still be explained as somehow true. If we didn't
know the Quran or Mohammed's life, we could interpret it in a Vedic, inclusive
sense: Ishwar Allah tere naam, Raam Rahim ek hai ("Your name is both
Shiva and Allah", "Rama and Rahim [= merciful;Allah] are the same"); indeed,
Mahatma Gandhi and many other naïve Hindus have done so. However, its real
meaning in Islam is not so inclusive: Shiva is a false god, as well as Jupiter
and the rest of them, and only Allah deserves worship. But alright, let us for
a moment suspend our judgment here, the divine is way beyond us. The real
problem with Islam is not Allah, nor is the pilgrimage to Mecca, the five
prayers, or the month of fasting, equivalents to practices which equally exist
in Hinduism and other religions.
The real problem is the second part of the Islamic
creed: that Mohammed is Allah's messenger. To the unforewarned reader, nothing
about the Quran suggests a divine origin: the text is incoherent, contains
historical and scientific mistakes, is annoyingly repetitive, and mentions
nothing that could not be known to a 7th-century Arab businessman.
So, a different explanation than "divine revelation" is required. Ever more
medics and scholars of Islam see through Mohammed's claim of receiving divine
revelations. This was only a delusion, though many people (we call them
believing Muslims) still assert that they take this delusion seriously.
Mohammed had the typical features of a paranoia patient: a central delusion
concerning himself, viz. that he was chosen as the special and definitive
messenger of God, nurtured by frequent sensory hallucinations. Before anyone
flares up in indignation, let me point out that this is simply applied
secularism: understanding a claim of the supernatural as simply a human
Psychiatrists know of a phenomenon called folie à deux ("madness with two"),
where the partner or other dear one of a mental patient starts to act out or
even interiorize the latter's delusion. We could say that the Islamic world is
a billionfold folie à deux. Some
really believe Mohammed's claim; it is healthy and good for them if they shed
this delusion. Others are secretly skeptical but feel pressured to play along
with the Islamic game; it is beneficial for them if they can finally embrace
their skepticism freely and leave Islam behind.
Many people are very attached to the
religious life, and to the community life that goes with it. This they can
continue, there is just no issue of depriving them of that. Perhaps Communists
would want to oppress and abolish this religious dimension, but certainly not
Hindu activists. There is nothing wrong with a pilgrimage to the shapeless
stone (the linga) in the Kaaba, or with prayer, or with giving alms. Of course,
these practices will then evolve naturally rather then being frozen into the
patterns laid down by unchanging Islamic law. Thus, these ex-Muslims brought up
on the notion of pilgrimage to Mecca may discover the value of Kashi or
Ayodhya, or their month of fasting may be transformed by a modern medical
understanding of healthier and more effective forms of fasting than to cram
themselves after dark just before bedtime. But essentially they may continue
being religious: the problem is not Allah but Mohammed.
Mohammed (peace be upon him)
Even in Mohammed, we should distinguish
between different aspects. There is the idealized Mohammed of popular Islam,
the one they teach to children and that remains the centre of their religion
for the rest of their lives. When I first came to India, in 1988, the country
still had these Soviet bookshops, where you could buy textbooks for a song.
There they had really well-made children's books with stories and nice pictures
featuring Lenin. Mother would start telling her charming stories after being
asked by the children: "Mother, tell us about Lenin." And so, the historical
agitator and dictator, hard as nails, was transformed into a legendary benefactor.
Similarly, the Mohammed of ordinary Muslims' imagination is very different from
the historical Mohammed. That literary Mohammed is bound to linger for some
time as a literary character.
Then there is the historical Mohammed who
genuinely deserves our sympathy. Mohammed was an orphan who lost his father
before his birth, and his mother at six. The relatives who took him under their
wing deprived him of his inheritance. Since they were Pagans, resentment about
this experience later went into the argumentative armour of Islam against
Paganism: a single case of deceit is contrasted with a supposed honesty
intrinsic to Mohammed and thus to Islam. And we have to admit that the Arab
Pagans were not saints either. A society has a right to exist even if its
members are imperfect, but nevertheless it is good to realize their
imperfection. This imperfection was fortunate for Islam, for we see that when
Mohammed offered the bait of booty and other perks of being a Muslim, many
Arabs walked over to his camp. So, we have to discard the black-and-white
picture of "good Muslims vs. evil Pagans", according to Islam's apologists, and
of "evil Muslims vs. good, broad-minded, Shiva-worshipping Pagans" that you
find in some Hindu pamphlets. No, the historical fact is that Mohammed was just
a human being, as were his enemies, and of all of them, both positive and
negative things can be said.
Thirdly, there is Mohammed in his assumed
role of Prophet. That he practised robbery,
abduction, rape, enslavement, child marriage, targeted murder and mass
murder, is a fact, at least according to the Islamic source texts. (We forego
discussion of the theories pioneered by Christoph Luxenberg that Mohammed
didn't exist, assuming that our Muslim guests wouldn't like those either.) In
itself, this need not be important: Genghis Khan and numerous others committed
atrocities too, but these are only a footnote in history books without
importance for the present. We don't care if a 7th-century Arab
businessman was rather less than perfect.
A problem arises, however, when his words
and acts are glorified as the beautiful model today, and taken as legally valid
precedent, the basis of Islamic law sanctioned by association with God's own
revelation. Then we get the duty of properly scrutinizing this model behaviour
and of pointing out the many instances where this behaviour is contrary to
human morality. In those instances, Muslims are presented with a stark choice: either
choosing the humanly correct course, or following Mohammed. Will they have the
courage to do the right thing and implicitly to say: "Mohammed was wrong"? This
is indeed a problem for a Muslim's conscience, but only for as long as he
believes in Mohammed as the chosen messenger of Allah. Become an ex-Muslim and
free yourself of this burden.
The benefits of apostasy
Apart from the Islamic prescription that apostates be
killed (admittedly a serious hurdle) and its watered-down version of social
pressure, there is no real drawback to leaving Islam.
I can say this with some authority, as I know what I
am speaking about from experience. I am an apostate from another "true
religion" myself. As a child, I was a devout Catholic, even considering a life
in the priesthood. Like most friends and acquaintances, I outgrew the faith of
my youth, and have gone through all the phases of doubt and compromise. Finally
I had to face the certainty that Christianity was fundamentally mistaken and
unnecessary, eventhough its morality, arts and everyday worldview had a lot
that remains worth preserving. So, I am not asking anything from the Muslims
that I haven't been through myself. I know from experience that there is life
after apostasy.
One argument against leaving Islam is particularly
relevant to the present-day situation: belonging
to a religion is mostly a community affair, as Hindus will certainly
understand. Mahatma Gandhi opposed conversion because it would split families
and communities. So, does this not apply to Muslims? No matter if their distant
ancestors were converted under duress, but today they have an effective
community life among fellow Muslims. Hindus may well sympathize with this
objection, and indeed, integration into Hinduism has historically concerned
whole communities rather than individuals.
But this type of conversion today will not so much
concern lone individuals. Like in Europe recently, it could become a wave.
Those whom you used to meet in the mosque or in community activities as
youngsters, you will continue to meet later on, as they too are subject to the
same de-Islamizing developments. This is in tune with the present-day state of
information and communications technology. Most Muslims nowadays have, thanks
to the creativity of non-Muslims including Hindus, access to the internet, a
kind of Sesame Open Thee that gives entry to all available sources of
information. They can all read the data on Islam gathered by ex-Muslims and
other scholars.
And where formal Hinduization of communities is still
the norm, Ghar Wapasi follows this formula: according to my information from VHP
contacts, most reconversion ceremonies do affect extended families as a whole. So,
some adjustments will be needed in the community life of Muslims and ex-Muslims,
but nothing dramatic, especially in a modern society where changes are already
impressing themselves on everyone.
The start of our talk was an isight into who the
Muslims are: they are a congregation of (people descended from) converts from
other religions. Apologists of Islam, including the secularists, have a
racialized or essentialized conception of the Muslim community: they think that
Muslims have a God-given essence as Muslims, that they are fixed in their
Muslim identity the way Blacks are (at present) bound to remain Black. This
view is superstitious and unhistorical, it ignores or denies the historical
genesis and contingency of the Muslim identity. It happens to agree with the
Islamic view that Islam is eternal. But in reality, it has come about at a
point in time and is bound to disappear at another point in time.
While this disappearance is ultimately inevitable,
today it has also become urgently desirable. Religious terrorism, the topic of
my session at the India Ideas Conclave, is now a very intrusive problem which
should be remedied at the root. This is a pot we don't want to keep boiling. As for my opponents, I hope they
can face their children and grandchildren, and tell them: "Our generation
could have tackled the Islam problem. At the very least, we could have tried.
But instead, we have chosen to pass the problem on to you. Go ahead and bear
the brunt."
But this emergency reason for tackling Islam as a
problem should only be the negative reason that happens to impose itself. The
positive reason, far more important, is that we feel for the human beings who
have become Muslim. Hindus who don't have much experience with active
conversion sometimes ask me why Christian missionaries try to convert them. So
I tell them: "Because they love you." Indeed, in their ignorance, the
missionaries believe that all human beings have to be saved through
Christianity, and since they care about all fellow-men, they feel a pressing
need to bring them out of the camp of the doomed into the camp of the saved.
So, the thing to do vis-à-vis Islam is a slight improvement upon this same approach.
We have to shed the old ignorance, shed the mistaken notion of a "true religion"
to which all men have to be brought, but still show the same love. Let Muslims
come out of the prison-house of Islam into the freedom of the spirit, and then
let their religious nature take its course.
Read more!


text:
big data
The VizBox Experiments
This is the result of a project I have been working on for the past months. The video demonstrates the setup and use of the VizBox (previously known as TopoBox) – a physical platform for interactive data visualization on three-dimensional surfaces.
The project has been highly explorative, geared towards testing and demonstrating new potentials rather than producing a finished product ready for use. Hopefully, this can serve as a starting point for new discussions, projects and experiments.
I do not currently have any specific plans for developing the VizBox further. However, I would be happy to discuss ideas and possibilities for collaboration. What would YOU do if you had a box like this?
Update march 2015: I have made a new prototype and video, and won a prize for the work! See the new blogpost: "VizBox Bergen og Ã¥rets geogründer" (in Norwegian).
- Funding from Fulbright
- Elevation data and geographic data from The Norwegian Mapping authorities
- Norwegian municipalities in GeoJSON by Ove Daae Lampe
- Statistical data from Statistics Norway
- Survey data from Difi
- Music: All Night by Sliptide
- Made with Processing and the Unfolding Maps and LeapMotionP5 libraries.
Special thanks to colleagues and students in the Media Arts + Practice program within the School of Cinematic Arts – especially Virginia Kuhn, Andreas Kratky and Behnaz Farahi.
Using visualization for understanding survey data
One of the goals for my Fulbright project has been to work with real data, and use visualization as a means of exploring, understanding and analyzing data.
When doing research on data visualization it is obviously necessary to have some data to work with. Before going to the US I decided to cooperate with Difi (The Agency for Public Management and eGovernment) in Norway, since I had positive experiences from working with them before, and they were more than happy to see someone use their data.
More specifically, I have been working with survey data from The Norwegian Citizen Survey (Innbyggerundersøkelsen), which asked 30.000 Norwegians about their perceptions of public services in Norway, the welfare state and democracy, and living in different parts of Norway.
I have carried out a range of visualization experiments in order to get to know the data, but also for testing different visualization techniques as tools for discovery and analysis. Some of these visualization experiments will be presented in this blogpost, along with some of the lessons I have learned on the way.
Gigamapping the survey
One of the challenges when facing a large dataset is to understand the context in which it has been created. How was the data gathered? What can the data tell us, and more importantly, what can it not tell us? Are there any specific issues that are important to be aware of when analyzing and presenting the data?
Before leaving Norway, I had a meeting with the people in Difi that are responsible for the survey. While discussing the survey, I made notes on a large canvas laid out on the table, which served as a medium for documentation as well as a shared platform for discussion during the meeting. The resulting sketch was messy and kind of ugly (as expected!), but served its purpose well.
When I got to the US I digitized and cleaned up the map, and added some more relevant information. The result is a visual overview, or gigamap, that maps out different aspects of the survey and the data, and also serves as a medium for discussing the project with Difi and others. For me, the process of making the map was probably as important as the resulting map itself, as this forced me to clarify and reflect on the information, and look deeper into areas that I didn't know enough about (like relevant concept from statistics).
I have put the final map on the wall in my office to remind myself of all the aspects of the survey, as well as make my project visible to my colleagues. In addition, it has been useful to show the map in presentations, and literally zoom into specific areas of interest.
Lesson learned: Visualization and gigamapping can be useful for gathering, processing and communicating information about the context in which a specific dataset has been created. One of the main challenges is to find the balance between complexity and simplicity, between visualization as a tool for thinking and visualization as a tool for communication.
10,039,380 data points
After my initial meeting with Difi, it was time to get to know the data. When I have visualized data before I have mostly worked with aggregated data that has already been processed. In this case, however, I wanted to work with raw data in order to get more control and better understanding of the data.
The survey data comes in a large spreadsheet format in which each respondent's answers are located in a row, and each column represents an answer to a question (or data about the respondent). For just part 1 of the survey there are 23790 rows and 422 columns, which results in 10,039,380 cells! Where to begin?
Lessons learned: it can be quite overwhelming to approach a large dataset for the first time. Even though working with 'raw data' has its advantages in terms of pliability, it requires specific knowledge and skills to approach it efficiently.
First attempts: Tableau Public
My first attempts for working with the data were done with Tableau Public, the free version of Tableau Software.
Tableau Software is an application designed specifically for data visualization, and provides an (seemingly) easy-to-use interface. Unfortunately Tableau only runs on PCs, so I had to install Windows on my Mac to try it out. (A Mac version of Tableau Public is coming out in 2014).
I have the impression that many dataviz designers use the software for discovery, so I wanted to give it a try. However, I found that the type of data I work with (survey data that should be weighted) was hard to get into Tableau. Finally, I managed to get some of the data in, and I was able to gain some insight from the resulting visualizations. For example, I found that people in Norway are overall satisfied with their life situation – which of course is a good thing, but not so interesting to visualize!
Lesson learned: the good and bad thing with tools like Tableau is that the software presents you with a limited set of visualization types. This is useful if you need a standard graph, but Tableau is not the software package you would choose for exploring new kinds of data visualization. In addition, Tableau seems to live in its own little bubble; you have to work with the presets, interface styles and export formats presented to you. I needed something more flexible, and didn't want to spend a lot of time learning to use an application that could only take me so far.
Going behind the scenes with Python
While struggling to get my data into Tableu, I realized that I needed to learn some new tools to be able to sort and rearrange data. In addition, I wanted to combine several datasets into a new one, and for that purpose I needed to do some scripting.
Inspired by Nathan Yao, I decided to learn Python, which runs in the Terminal, and is powerful for working with large datasets. Python is also useful for scraping websites for data, which might come in handy later. If you want to learn Python, I highly recommend CodeAcademy. But be warned: you might get addicted to its game-like learning environment! I did.
Lesson learned: preparing, sorting, merging and rearranging data is a necessary but time consuming part of the data visualization process. Even though a couple of lines of code might be enough, the challenge is to find out exactly what those lines should contain. I am convinced that dataviz designers should learn at least some programming.
Categorical data overview with dbcounter
Since I started working with the survey data, I was looking for a way to get an overview of all the data. The solution was a Nodebox script written by Moritz Stefaner, that quickly makes a visual overview of large sets of categorical data (like survey data). I downloaded Nodebox and the script (which is written in Python), and tweaked it a bit. I saved the resulting illustration as a PDF, and changed the colors and fixed the text in Illustrator.
Each row shows the distribution of the responses for each question in the survey. Next to the graphic I put all the questions, so that I can zoom in and see the distribution and the corresponding question.
The nice thing with this visualization is that it is possible to see all the data at once. The responses that show a red to green gradient represent likert scale questions (disagree – agree, or very bad – very good). The pink-to-cyan gradients represent all other kinds of questions and variables, in which the categories are more arbitrary. Consequently, it is necessary to know the questions (and possible answers) in order to fully understand the visualization. This would not make much sense to present this for a general audience, but it works well for the purpose of discovery and exploration.
Lesson learned: dbcounter demonstrates how a simple script can be used to create a visualization that would take hours to produce manually. The resulting visualization allows us to see the distribution for all the questions at once, and makes it easier to discover interesting areas in the data, and start asking questions.
Explore interrelations with Parallel sets
While the dbcounter visualization gave a nice overview of the distribution of all the responses, it did not say anything about the interrelations across the questions/variables (also known as cross tabulation). One way of exploring such interrelations is to use an app called Parallel Sets, developed by Robert Kosara. The app makes it easy to interactively explore and analyze categorical data, and show relations between different categories.
The best way to explain this is through an example, using the survey data:
The horizontal line at the top shows the distribution of the size of the municipalities the respondents live in, from small municipalities (1) to large municipalities (4). The bottom line shows how satisfied people are with their access to cinema, concerts and theatre, from very unsatisfied (1) to very satisfied (7). Then, each respondent is tracked across the two variables, so that we can see what those who live in a small or large municipality feel about their access to cinema etc. As you might see, most people from large municipalities are very satisfied with the access, while the respondents from the small municipalities are not.
Lesson learned: even though it might be interesting enough to look at individual questions and responses, it becomes more interesting when we start to look for relations across variables. The Parallel Sets app provides one way of investigating such relations visually. However, it seems that this type of visualization works best when there are relatively few categories for each variable.
Searching for patterns in R
While dbcounter and Parallel Sets are great for visualizing data, they provide limited possibilities for analysis. At this point in the project, I was especially interested in correlation, and wanted to look for correlations between different variables in the dataset. For such statistical analysis, R is the place to go. R is a free, programming-based software environment for statistical computing. It can be used for visualizing data, even though the resulting graphs are a bit rough. However, by saving the graph as PDF and edit it in Illustrator, it is possible to make something decent out of it.
I have written some small and simple scripts in R in order to look for patterns in the data, reusing some code examples from Nathan Yau. The visualization type I found most useful was the Scatterplot matrix with LOESS curves. Here, the different variables are mapped against each other, plotting each respondent's answer according to the two variables. Then, a LOESS curves is drawn horizontally, based on the averages of the variable on the vertical axis.
In this example, you see the correlation between respondents' age (top row and left column) and 4 questions. For example, in the left column, satisfaction is plotted vertically against age (horizontally). As you may see, older people seem to be slightly more satisfied than young ones, and young and old people are the ones most satisfied with the quality of roads and streets. In addition, we see that there is a strong correlation between the 4 questions: people who are satisfied with one topic are likely to be satisfied with something else as well.
Lessons learned: data analysis and statistical computing is highly useful and necessary for finding interesting patterns in a data set. As a designer, however, it is important to find the balance between doing statistical analysis and doing data visualization. Even though infoviz designers should know a bit about statistics, it may be more important to know how far our knowledge goes, and when we should talk to a professional statistician. Obviously, this also points to the need for multidisciplinary teams in data visualization projects.
Next up: concept development
To sum up, all the visualization examples presented here have been carried out in order to get to know the survey data, and test different visualization techniques for discovery and analysis. Looking back at all these experiments, I think the most important lesson has been to experience how many different ways it is possible to approach a survey dataset through visualization. There simply is not one type of visualization that can show everything; different types of visualizations provide different types of insights. This also points to the importance of data visualization in general: by visualizing our data in different ways, we see it through different lenses, and thereby learn something new about the data itself.
In parallel to these experiments, I have been working on different ideas for creating a more comprehensive concept for interactive data visualization. This is still very much a work in progress, so stay tuned!
Story kicking big data
A couple of days ago I attended an event called That Time a Story Kicked Big Bad Data's Ass. The event was hosted by GameChangers in the pool (!) of gangster gardener Ron Finley . Lucky for us, there was no water in the pool!
GameChangers is a consultancy company that use improvisation techniques and narrative design to help their clients improve their communication and develop brand strategies. Consequently, the event itself was filled with stories and improvisation, which was refreshing.
Infobesity – The Tyranni of Data
The topic of the night was the relationship between big data and stories. Even though it was made clear that we should embrace big data, the take home message was that we need stories to understand and communicate data, and that stories can achieve much that data can't. The proliferation of big data and lack of stories results in 'infobesity'.
Mike Bonifer pointed out that stories can create a vision for the future, while data can only show us a snapshot of the past. Stories are experienced in the present, and speak to our unconsciousness. Relating this to my own project, this inspires me to look for ways of integrating data visualization and stories on multiple levels: from visualizing stories, to stories of visualization.
The Tyranny of Stories
However, stories also have a darker side, which Mike referred to as 'The tyranny of storiesâ€. People can be persuaded to buy into a story based on false premises, like signing up for a subprime mortgage, or to invade a country based on factual lies. Consequently, the power of stories makes them suitable for misuse, just like data and statistics can easily be misused.
Data visualization as a story space
Comparing big data with stories is, of course, somehow like comparing apples and oranges. I agree that data needs a story if you want to communicate something specific. However, in the context of data exploration and analysis, for example, you might want to visualize and present data without a tightly choreographed story. Such a visualization would allow the user to navigate and explore the data him/herself, and thereby create new, previously unknown stories. In that way, big data becomes a 'story space' in which a multiplicity of stories can reside.
Thanks to Mike and the rest of the GameChangers for an extraordinary event filled with stories to remember!
Recent posts
- SpotTrack: Award for Design Excellence
- VizBox Bergen og årets geogründer
- Fulbright report: six months at the School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles
- The VizBox Experiments
- TopoBox: exploring a tangible dataviz platform
- Norway in 3D part I: from DEM to 3D surface
- Using visualization for understanding survey data
- Story kicking big data
- Fulbright project: Dynamic Information Visualization
- Visiting Fulbright scholar at USC in Los Angeles
- (E)motional design paper at DANDE2012
- 3,5 års arbeid på 6 minutt og 40 sekund
- PhD thesis online
- New video: Kinetic Interface Design
- Presentasjon: Skisser utanfor boksen

subset: commoncrawl