Relevant History

The impact of the Hajj

In David Lodge's great novel Changing Places, Euphoric State University professor Morris Zapp declared that "travel narrows." He was a world-renowned Jane Austen scholar, he said, precisely because he had never been to England: his lack of interest in the real England let him focus more sharply on the novels, and made him a better critic.

This attitude may hold true for literature (or not), but Slate reports on an interesting recent study (available here) suggesting that Muslims who make the pilgrimage to Mecca "came back with more moderate views on a range of issues, both religious and nonreligious, suggesting that the Hajj may be helpful in curbing the spread of extremism in the Islamic world."

The study looks at a group of 1,600 Pakistanis who applied for visas to go on the Hajj. As Slate explains, Pakistani visa policy creates a group that's a social scientist's dream:

In 2006, nearly 140,000 applicants vied for 80,000 visas through the Pakistan government's Hajj program. In order to decide who gets to go, the government holds a lottery. As a result, among the visa applicants, there's a group of people randomly selected to participate in the Hajj and a comparison group of would-be pilgrims who applied but didn't get to go. The two groups look very similar—the only systematic difference is that applicants in one group won the lottery and those in the other group didn't. If the Hajjis come back from Mecca more tolerant than those who didn't get to go, therefore, we know it's the result of the Hajj, not something else.

So what did the researchers find? As they report,

[P]articipation in the Hajj increases observance of global Islamic practices such as prayer and fasting while decreasing participation in localized practices and beliefs such as the use of amulets and dowry. It increases belief in equality and harmony among ethnic groups and Islamic sects and leads to more favorable attitudes toward women, including greater acceptance of female education and employment. Increased unity within the Islamic world is not accompanied by antipathy toward non-Muslims. Instead, Hajjis show increased belief in peace, and in equality and harmony among adherents of different religions. The evidence suggests that these changes are more a result of exposure to and interaction with Hajjis from around the world, rather than religious instruction or a changed social role of pilgrims upon return....

Our results tend to support the idea that the Hajj helps to integrate the Muslim world, leading to a strengthening of global Islamic beliefs, a weakened attachment to localized religious customs, and a sense of unity and equality with others who are ordinarily separated in everyday life by sect, ethnicity, nationality, or gender, but who are brought together during the Hajj. While the Hajj may help forge a common Islamic identity, there is no evidence that this is defined in opposition to non-Muslims. On the contrary, the notions of equality and harmony tend to extend to adherents of other religions as well.

Why is this?

While it is difficult to isolate what drives the impact of the Hajj, the evidence suggests that exposure to Muslims from around the world during the Hajj is important. While we find that Hajjis do not acquire greater formal religious knowledge, they do gain experiential knowledge of the diversity of Islamic practices and beliefs, gender roles within Islam, and, more broadly, the world beyond Pakistan. The Hajj’s impact on such knowledge and on some of the tolerant attitudes toward other groups tends to be larger for those traveling in smaller groups, who are more likely to have a broad range of social interactions with people from different backgrounds during the Hajj. Hajjis also show the largest positive gain in their views of other nationalities for Indonesians, the group they are most likely to observe during the Hajj other than Saudis. Hajjis’ changed views toward women also reflect the exposure channel since the Hajj offers Pakistani pilgrims a novel opportunity to interact with members of the opposite gender in a religious setting, and to observe interactions across the sexes among Muslims from nations which are more accepting of such interactions.

As with computers, so with religion: user experience and interaction is everything.

Technorati Tags: religion, sociology

Workplace this morning

All I'll say is, Tom Friedman got a more polite reception at Castilleja

Two protesters threw pies at Tom Friedman during a speech at Brown University:

The incredible thing is, the guys missed. So much for smashing global capitalism, dudes. (The girls at Castillja would have nailed it. They would have practiced. Of course, they also would have been expelled in a nanosecond, but at least they wouldn't have the shame of being tossed out of school for attempted pie-throwing.)

The other thing is that this gesture, while perhaps entertaining, and enough to earn you honors marks if you're a performance art major at Yale, isn't nearly as powerful, as, say, Matt Taibbi's takedown of The Earth is Flat, the best piece of snarky criticism this side of Adam Gopnik's review of Matrix Reoladed. A sample:

It's not for nothing that Thomas Friedman is called "the most important columnist in America today."... Friedman is an important American. He is the perfect symbol of our culture of emboldened stupidity. Like George Bush, he's in the reality-making business. In the new flat world, argument is no longer a two-way street for people like the president and the country's most important columnist. You no longer have to worry about actually convincing anyone; the process ends when you make the case.

Unlike the pie guys, Taibbi hits his target.

[via Gawker]

[To the tune of Willie Nelson, "Always On My Mind," from the album "Always On My Mind".]

The Bugle

I'm a big fan of John Oliver's work on The Daily Show. Recently I ran across a reference to a podcast he does for the Times of London, and I downloaded a couple to my iPod, and listened to one in the car this morning, as I was driving up to the city.

I put on an episode in which Oliver and Andy Zaltzman talk about a proposal for a pledge of allegiance in Britain, as a way to boost national pride. John Oliver's take on the idea:

John: There is no national pride in Britain any more, and with good reason. We've lost everything. We are the shell-shocked man walking away from the casino at five in the morning, rehearsing what he's going tell his wife. We collectively have lost our shirts; there's nothing left.

Andy: I'm sure this pledge of allegiance will achieve this far more effectively than such outdated and unproven methods as an all-around education, and specifically the proper teaching of history. Lord Goldsmith... said, "Yeah, I figure what this country's errant youth need is some half-assed ******** like this. That'll get them on the straight and narrow." So good work, everyone involved!

John suggested another idea: swearing at the Queen.

We'd be good at it; it would be fun; it would engender a sense of community; and it would be an energetic piece of punctuation to start the day. Besides, it's basically taking the Magna Carta to its natural conclusion. Turn to face the Queen, and say, "YOU %($*%^^) #*^!#@!!"

Apparently teachers have been among the most vocal critics of the proposal-- which only proves that it isn't necessary, because as John explains,

that is the last bastion of Britishness: sneering at things. That will be the last thing to go. The day that we can't scoff at other nations, we've arranged for France to put a pillow over our face, and hold it there until the twitching stops. If their wrists are strong enough, that is. It's like the fact that we mock Americans for whooping and cheering at things. We now ridicule the very concept of enthusiasm. That is how cynical we've become as a nation-- we find positivity laughable....

National pride in un-British. The only time we can collectively justify facing a flag and listening to the national anthem is when we've just won an Olympic bronze medal in the women's two-person dinghy....

Andy: I think the immigrants who are made to make these pledges might see the irony in pledging allegiance to a nation that was largely responsible for destabilizing the place they've just run away from.

After about ten minutes, I had to turn it off. I was laughing so hard, it was unsafe. I thought I was going to drive off the road.

[To the tune of Times Online, "The Bugle - Episode 21 - Swearing at the Queen," from the album "The Bugle - Audio Newspaper For A Visual World".]

Technorati Tags: humor, UK

Iconic photographs in Lego!

Check them out.

[To the tune of Bonobo, "Silver," from the album "Animal Magic".]

Technorati Tags: Lego

Obama and the "new dialogue on mixed race"

Good New York Times article on the impact Barack Obama's candidacy is raising issues about being multiracial, and how we describe racial categories:

Being accepted. Proving loyalty. Navigating the tight space between racial divides. Americans of mixed race say these are issues they have long confronted, and when Senator Barack Obama recently delivered a speech about race in Philadelphia, it rang with a special significance in their ears. They saw parallels between the path trod by Mr. Obama and their own....

Americans of mixed race say that questions about whether Mr. Obama, with a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, is “too black” or “not black enough,” as the candidate himself brought up in his speech on March 18, show the extent to which the nation is still fixated on old categories....

The old categories are weakening, however, as immigration and the advancing age of marriage in the United States fuel a steady rise in the number of interracial marriages. The 2000 Census counted 3.1 million interracial couples, or about 6 percent of married couples. For the first time, the Census that year allowed respondents to identify themselves as being two or more races, a category that now includes 7.3 million Americans, or about 3 percent of the population.

Of course, part of the appeal of California is that the Bay Area is ahead of this particular curve. The fact that everyone is from somewhere else-- and even many of us who are "natives" can tell how many generations it's been since their ancestors arrived here-- tends to make interracial relationships less notable than in some other places. Indeed, after years of having classmates who speak with Australian or Hong Kong accents, who have parents who graduated from IIT or Oxbridge, or whose parents are of different ethnicities, my kids assume that everyone is at least partly from somewhere else. And even though they're both native Californians (sixth or second generation, depending on whether you count from my wife's side or mine), growing up within a couple miles of the house their mother was raised in, they see themselves that way, too.

[To the tune of Dan Fogelberg, "Tell Me to My Face," from the album "Twin Sons of Different Mothers".]

Reconnect

I've gotten a slew of Facebook and LinkedIn requests these last few days, from people I've not been in touch with for a while. These come now and then, but what's unusual right now is how many of them are from people I haven't been in touch with for a long time.

This past weekend I got a friend request on Facebook from a high school classmate who I haven't seen since graduation, more than 25 years ago. He's now a pastor, and from what I hear a pretty good one.

I also reconnected with one of my high school music teachers. This is someone I haven't spoken to in a couple decades, but she was one of my favorite teachers. It turns out that she was also of the most influential. I've not sung in any organized venue since college, but I think singing gave me a valuable familiarity with public performance and an awareness (in a good way) of the craft and artifice of self-presentation.

This is not an impact either of us could have predicted, and it illustrates two things.

The first is that education is rarely wasted... but its doesn't always pay off where you expect. When my children were babies and waking up in the middle of the night, I was getting very little sustained sleep, and often thought to myself, this is like studying for my orals. I didn't read all that Joseph Ben-David, Margaret Rossiter and Andy Pickering in order to be more effective at baby-wrangling; but it turns out that the experience of having to plow through vast amounts of stuff, and not having enough hours to both read and sleep, paid off in unexpected ways. Nor did I study STS to become a futurist; but the value of STS as a conceptual toolkit and way of thinking is pretty self-evident to my colleagues.

The second is that if it's hard for us to predict how what we learn will pay off, it's almost impossible for our teachers to know. For me, one of the hardest things about teaching was the sense that I didn't know-- indeed, couldn't know-- what kind of impact I was having on my students, or would have on them. It might be that the enthusiastic ones would never find a use for anything I taught them, or that the smart but slightly jaded one would have a career-defining moment that turned on something she learned in class. All of that was unknowable to me, and I would have to take on faith that, after all was said and done, my impact would be more positive than negative (or maybe neutral was the worst you could reasonably expect-- a history teacher is going to have a hard time ruining anyone's life).

Of course, there are a few students you hear about, and if you're old enough you might merit some kind of formal recognition, which is an occasion for people to come and say nice things about you. But those kinds of events are pretty scripted, and come pretty late in one's professional life.

I wonder, though, if in the future teachers will find it a little easier to know how their former students are doing, and what kind of effect they might have had on them. My wife, who teaches eighth graders, is connected to some of her former students through Facebook; and while they may not talk regularly, those weak ties are easier to maintain than my connections to my teachers, and it's probably a little harder for them to decay to the point of being useless. (After a couple moves, I found that not only had I shed myself of things I wanted to get rid of, I'd also inadvertently thrown out things like address books, old letters, and the like. So much for going home again.) I suspect that in the future these links may make it easier for teachers to have a sense of how they've affected students. Which would be nice for everyone.

[To the tune of Perpetual Groove, "March of Gibbles Army," from the album "Live at The Music Farm, 31 December 2006".]

Technorati Tags: education, henrico, memory

Quote of the day

Via James Wolcott:

The cathedrals, with their distant domes, their long aisles and their high groinings, do add stature to human strivings; their chapels do give privacy for prayer. But the bathroom, too, shelters the spirit, it tranquilizes and reassures, in surroundings of a celestial whiteness, where the pipes and the faucets gleam and the mirror makes another liquid surface, which will render you, shaved, rubbed and brushed, a nobler and more winning appearance. (Edmund Wilson, A Piece of My Mind: Reflections at Sixty)

[To the tune of Radiohead, "Reckoner," from the album "In Rainbows".]

Technorati Tags: bathroom, place/space

The strangest thing I've ever seen in my entire life

This is truly astounding: a Japanese reenactment of "We Are the World."

via wonkette

Tags: music, humor, Japan

Why is the best dystopian fiction British?

My wife and I have Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on in the background as we work this evening. I'm really impressed by their rendering of the Ministry of Magic, which is an interesting mix of Gothic revival, 1920s Art Deco (particularly all the dark tile), and Brazil. It's wonderfully dark and dsytopian-- equal parts George Edmund Street and Terry Gilliam-- and it makes me wonder: why does the best dystopian fiction come out of Britain?

Of course, the Russians did some damn good stuff too, but it seems to me that the British work-- including Koestler, Orwell, Burgess, Huxley, et al-- is incomparable.