Madihah Akhter in The Feminist Wire:

One Friday afternoon, as I was settling down to listen to a sermon in my local mosque in Orange County, California, a woman leaned over to me and whispered that I needed to take my toenail polish off to properly complete ablutions. Many people believe that since water can’t touch nails because of the impermeable polish barrier, one can’t perform ablutions. Without successfully performed ablutions, my prayers would not be accepted. My toenails have been a source of contention in mosques spanning the globe. I’ve been lectured on the moral ills of nail polish in languages I don’t understand. While I interpret lectures on ‘correct’ practices as policing, many women feel these corrections are religious and generational duties that contribute to community construction. While being scolded for nail polish may seem trivial, it is actually an entry point into a set of debates regarding how to accommodate the inherent diversity of beliefs and practices within religious spaces, especially among young American Muslims, many of whom find these comments intrusive. This experience is also the basis for a new initiative, the Women’s Mosque of America.

…The first question the board faced in creating the Mosque was how to reflect an inclusive mindset in policy. The organizers tackled this issue by having a diverse set of khateebahs. Ideal khateebahs reflect the diversity the Mosque embraces, including diversity in ethnicity, background, and sectarian affiliation. This diversity is also reflected on the advisory board itself, which is composed of men and women, Shias and Sunnis, and members from the various schools of Islamic jurisprudence who maintain varying degrees of practice. Finally, diversity is reflected in the Mosque’s “come as you are” policy, which recognizes that there is no one definition of female modesty, and pluralism in religious practice should be respected and encouraged. The goal is to avoid policing among congregation members. On one hand, this view of diversity is beautiful. It is a much-needed reminder that the American Muslim community is not a monolith. We define ourselves according to a wide ranging set of beliefs and practices informed by family background, upbringing, and experiences, in addition to varying interpretations of religious texts. On the other hand, this idealism begs the question: how can the Mosque practically implement and maintain these policies? The first step, according to Sana Muttalib, a co-founder, is to make the Mosque’s policies clear to the entire congregation. The khateebah announces this policy before her sermon and board members to keep an eye out for women policing other women within the congregation during prayer.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

As the Inuit people spread across the Arctic, they developed one of the most extreme diets on Earth. They didn’t farm fruits, vegetables or grains. There weren’t many wild plants to forage, aside from the occasional patch of berries on the tundra. For the most part, the Inuit ate what they could hunt, and they mostly hunted at sea, catching whales, seals and fish. Western scientists have long been fascinated by their distinctly un-Western diet. Despite eating so much fatty meat and fish, the Inuit didn’t have a lot of heart attacks. In the 1970s, Danish researchers studying Inuit metabolism proposed that omega-3 fatty acids found in fish were protective. Those conclusions eventually led to the recommendation that Westerners eat more fish to help prevent heart disease and sent tens of millions scrambling for fish oil pills. Today, at least 10 percent of Americans regularly take fish oil supplements. But recent trials have failed to confirm that the pills prevent heart attacks or stroke. And now the story has an intriguing new twist.

A study published last week in the journal Science reported that the ancestors of the Inuit evolved unique genetic adaptations for metabolizing omega-3s and other fatty acids. Those gene variants had drastic effects on Inuit bodies, reducing their heights and weights. Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the new study, said that the discovery raised questions about whether omega-3 fats really were protective for everyone, despite decades of health advice. “The same diet may have different effects on different people,” he said. Food is a powerful force in evolution. The more nutrients an animal can get, the more likely it is to survive and reproduce. Humans are no exception. When we encounter a new kind of food, natural selection may well favor those of us with genetic mutations that help us thrive on it. Some people, for example, are able to digest milk throughout their lives. This genetic adaptation arose in societies that domesticated cattle thousands of years ago, in such places as Northern Europe and East Africa. People who trace their ancestry to other regions, by contrast, tend to more often be lactose-intolerant.

More here.

At One-ment
… —Yom Kippur, 9/22/15

To find the means to a mend

To try a new take to forsake a mistake

To unfold the past and straighten its bend

To un-muddy a pool and make it clear

To lift the flat rock of our self and let the sun do its work

To yank the inside out and give it some air

To make a whole man of the stuff of a jerk

To morph a long fall into a hairpin turn

To lance a boil and do what’s best for us

To kindle the badly done and watch it burn

To unbury the past and make its corpse a Lazarus

To sew a split in one cloth now two

To impossibly do what the humble do

To end a grudge and make us whole again,

atonement then
.

by Jim Culleny
9/13/13

Yom Kippur

Ana Teresa Fernandez. Video still from Borrando La Frontera. 2011.

More here and here.

Over at the Boston Review, a forum on Ira Katznelson's piece on democracy, with responses from Larry Kramer, David M. Kennedy, Mark Schmitt, Rick Perlstein, Mohammad Fadel, Michael C. Dawson, Hélène Landemore, Michael Gecan, Martin O’Neill, Nadia Urbinati, Melissa S. Williams, Alex Gourevitch, and Richard Trumka:

Since the late eighteenth century, liberal constitutional regimes have recurrently collided with forms of autocratic rule—including fascism and communism—that claim moral superiority and greater efficacy. Today, there is no formal autocratic alternative competing with democracy for public allegiance. Instead, two other concerns characterize current debates. First, there is a sense that constitutional democratic forms, procedures, and practices are softening in the face of allegedly more authentic and more efficacious types of political participation—those that take place outside representative institutions and seem closer to the people. There is also widespread anxiety that national borders no longer define a zone of security, a place more or less safe from violent threats and insulated from rules and conditions established by transnational institutions and seemingly inexorable global processes.

These are recent anxieties. One rarely heard them voiced in liberal democracies when, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama designated the triumph of free regimes and free markets “the end of history.” Fukuyama described “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,“ a “victory of liberalism” in “the realm of ideas and consciousness,” even if “as yet incomplete in the real or material world.” Tellingly, the disruption of this seemingly irresistible trend has recently prompted him to ruminate on the brittleness of democratic institutions across the globe.

Perhaps today’s representative democracies—the ones that do not appear to be candidates for collapse or supersession—are merely confronting ephemeral worries. But the challenge seems starker: a profound crisis of moral legitimacy, practical capacity, and institutional sustainability.

More here.

The author, most recently, of “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights” says that more or less everything by Christopher Hitchens makes him laugh: “The laughter is what I miss most about the Hitch.”

From the New York Times:

What books are currently on your night stand?

“Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which I just finished and which impressed me; “Genghis Khan,” by Jack Weatherford, which is next up; “The White Album,” by Joan Didion, which is great to rediscover, and as good as I remembered it being; “The Heart of a Goof,” by P. G. Wodehouse, which can actually make me care about the game of golf, at least while reading it; and “Humboldt’s Gift,” by Saul Bellow, which seems to be on the night stand more or less permanently.

Who is your favorite novelist of all time?

“Of all time” is a long time. There are days when it’s Kafka, in whose world we all live; others when it’s Dickens, for the sheer fecundity of his imagination and the beauty of his prose. But it’s probably Joyce on more days than anyone else.

More here.

Nathan Halverson at PRI:

The springs fed the lush oases depicted in the Bible and Quran, and as the water disappeared, these verdant gardens of life were returning to sand.

“I remember flowing springs when I was a boy in the Eastern Province. Now all of these have dried up,” the head of the country’s Ministry of Water told The New York Times in 2003.

The springs had bubbled for thousands of years from a massive aquifer that lay underneath Saudi Arabia. Hydrologists calculated it was one of the world’s largest underground systems, holding as much groundwater as Lake Erie.

So farmers were puzzled as their wells dried, forcing them to drill ever deeper. They soon were drilling a mile down to continue tapping the water reserves that had transformed barren desert into rich irrigated fields, making Saudi Arabia the world’s sixth-largest exporter of wheat.

But the bounty didn’t last. Today, Saudi Arabia’s agriculture is collapsing. It’s almost out of water. And the underlying cause doesn’t bode well for farmers in places like California’s Central Valley, where desert lands also are irrigated with groundwater that is increasingly in short supply.

So what what happened? And what can the United States, China and the rest of the world learn from Saudi Arabia?

More here. [Thanks to Azeem Azhar.]

Sam Thielman in The Guardian:

As robotics advances, scientists continue to take cues from the natural world, whether it’s by building robots out of material from animals, like cloned rat muscle or jellyfish matter, or building them in imitation of dogs or cats. And now, those scientists are learning to simulate intelligence by imitating a swarm.

“Swarm robotics”, beyond being one of the scariest terms outside of a Terminator film, is the name roboticists give to robots that can coordinate behavior between multiple bodies, acting as a group. Thomas Schmickl of the Artificial Life Laboratory at the University of Graz in Austria, points out that robots as complex as humans or even dogs are a long way off, but the possibility in the insect world for simple animals to behave in ingenious ways as a group can provide some insight into how to simulate intelligence.

Schmickl’s current crop of robots work mostly underwater – his swarm of as many as 20 swimming robots, all named Jeff, imitates a shoal of fish. With the EU-supported Collective Cognitive Robots project, he hopes to develop not just hardware but algorithms and other software to make group behavior smarter.

“[M]onolithic, non-scaling technology is currently hitting the wall everywhere,” Schmickl said. He points out that computers now often have multiple central processing units, and says that swarms are not necessarily armies of robot bugs. “[W]e talk about the ‘internet of things’ – that might also be perceived as another kind of swarm.”

More here.

Iason Athanasiadis in Al Jazeera:

Two articles that appeared on the same day last month illuminated wildly differing aspects of daily life in contemporary Istanbul. The first appeared in the Turkish newspaper Milliyet titled Beaten, exploited and locked in a room, and described how the police discovered a man, referred to as TM, one of the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees flooding the city, locked up in a textile factory by his Turkish employers in between shifts. When he dared to request a pay-raise, he was beaten.

On the same day, the Wall Street Journal ran a beautifully-photographed feature titled The Discreet Charm of Istanbul, about a Turkish businesswoman, Asli Tunca, and her Belgian husband, Carl Vercauteren, who purchased a 19th century, five-story, 7,000sqr ft building with a garden in Istanbul's posh Beyoglu district and renovated it. The lady of the house called the house Hazz, Ottoman for “Enchantment”. The article concluded with Vercauteren saying that, “If there's a place on earth where God lives, it's Istanbul. The whole city has an energy and rich contrasts.”

After his cruel ordeal, TM would struggle to agree with the first part of Vercauteren's quote, but he might sympathise with his conclusion. TM and the Vercauterens inhabit the same city, yet they live in different worlds. Already an urban behemoth of 14 million, Istanbul continues its vertiginous ascent towards reclaiming its former cosmopolitan status.

More here.