The many Malcolms

I went to an open day at the local mosque yesterday afternoon,

There was a stall with various pamphlets about Islam, including one about Malcolm X which I picked up. It ends "So many people love and admire him, wanting to be like him, and aspiring to follow in his footsteps, yet they see what they want to see and ignore the rest. We must never forget it was Islam that made Malik El-Shabazz [the Muslim name he assumed in 1964] what he was."

The thought struck me that there not many people who so many claim as their own: black nationalists, Muslims, socialists. In large part, that's because Malcolm was all those things, albeit to varying degrees and at different times in his life.

Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, Malcolm X joined the Nation of Islam, a sect led by Elijah Muhammad, while in prison in Massachusetts in 1948. The NoI opposed integration with what it called "white devils" and ultimately advocated the return of black Americans to Africa, a position which led it into contact with the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party.

Malcolm X was drawn to socialism not just because of the racism and exploitation he witnessed in America's black ghettoes from a young age, but also because he saw it as the system by which Cuba and the newly independent former colonies in Africa he visited were advancing themselves economically and socially.

1964 was a turning point in Malcolm's life: he split from the NoI, converted to orthodox Sunni Islam and made the Hajj to Mecca, where he prayed alongside white pilgrims. He also formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity which, while still black nationalist, advocated some sort of alliance with poor whites.

After Malcolm's assassination in 1965, while giving a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in uptown Manhattan, the actor and civil rights activist Ossie Davis gave this eulogy at his funeral, which also forms the final scene of Spike Lee's 1992 film Malcolm X.

Lenten beer?

The start of Lent last week got me thinking about why, in England at least, there are no beers associated with this part of the liturgical calendar.

There are beers brewed for the seasons (golden summer ales and darker winter ones) and for other religious festivals, especially Christmas when most breweries bring out a seasonal beer. Maybe it's because Lent doesn't lend itself to Yule Love It/Good Elf-type puns. There's also probably the thought that, unlike at Christmas, people will be giving things up rather than enjoying them,

Strong, malty beers are drunk in Lent elsewhere in Europe. The Doppelbock known as Fastenbier in Bavaria and the high-gravity Trappist beers of Belgium were both supposedly first brewed by monks as sustenance, "liquid bread", when fasting in Lent. Whether that's true or not, it does show that at least some of our continental cousins see beer as an essential part of daily life, rather than an occasional luxury, which also reflects different attitudes to drinking in Catholic and Protestant areas.

Bayern Munich beer bust-up

I've only just seen this story about an incident at Bayern Munich's last home game in which French Muslim winger Franck Ribery was doused in beer by a team mate celebrating the club's twenty-third League title.

The story encapsulates a lot about how the press treats Muslims and doesn't bother to check the facts before printing a story. One question strikes me though: why is Paulaner supplying Bayern with alcohol free beer?

Gay marriage: a simple solution

The Archbishop of York has added his voice to that of the Catholic hierarchy in opposing gay marriage. In an article in The Guardian, John Sentamu argues - without really saying why - that allowing gay marriage would undermine marriages between men and women. The Catholic Church has been circulating petitions against gay marriage at Masses and in its secondary schools.

Unlike in America, Britain does not have a large body of religious people opposed to gay marriage - most Catholics are not whatever their Church says and circulating petitions against it in schools had led to protests by Catholic teenagers. What the resistance to gay marriage by the Catholic Church and Church of England really signifies is a "long, withdrawing roar" of people who know they no longer have the grip on society they once did.

The root of the issue in England is the intertwining of religious and civil marriage with Anglican vicars, Catholic priests and other ministers conducting ceremonies that combine the two. The answer is to separate them, as happens in many (religious) countries like France and Egypt so people can choose to have a civil marriage, a religious one or both. Everyone could have a civil marriage and it would be up to religious who could have a religious one, with the more enlightened Christians like the Quakers and Unitarians presumably marrying any couple, as they already do with civil parterships.

Separating civil and religious marriage would also probably also involve disestablishing the Church of England, a big step towards a secular society which would also allow Anglicans rather than politicians to control their church.

Language in our nature?

In the mid-90's, I did a part-time course in teaching English as a foreign language at Manchester College of Arts and Technology. One of things we studied was theories of language acquisition and it's something I've been fascinated by ever since.  The mainstream theory of language aqcquisition since the 1970's - developed by Noam Chomsky, Stephen Krashen, Stephen Pinker and others - is centred on the idea of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), a innate genetically transmitted ability unique to humans which allows children to instinctively learn their native language. This means that grammatical features (tenses, plurals etc.) appear in children at the same time whatever that language is.

I was interested therefore to read about a new book by one Daniel Everett which apparently seeks to overturn the LAD theory of language acquisition on the strength of a language called Pirahã spoken by around three hundred people in the Amzonian region of Brazil and which Everett claims doesn't include these grammatical features.

There are a number of holes that can be put in Everett's claims: he is the only non-native speaker of Pirahã and there is no way of knowing if what he says about the language is true (even if he thinks it is, there is no saying that the he has picked up all its nuances from the native speakers). He also seems to have oversimplified what Chomsky says about language acquisition in order to try to knock his theories down.  But the killer point to me - and one the Guardian review doesn't really deal with, possibly for reasons of undue politeness or liberal sensibilities - is that Everett is an evangelical Christian and former missionary who travelled to Amazonia to convert the native peoples and whose only reason for learning Pirahã was to translate the Bible into it.  Whatever Chomsky's political faults, I'd trust his rational judgements on language acquisition over Everett's any day of the week.

RIP Hitch

The journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens who has died of oesphagal cancer aged 63 moved a long way politically over his lifetime.

Hitchens was a member of the International Socialists from the mid 60's to early 70's when, as he later said, it was "a small but growing post-Trotskyist Luxemburgist sect". I don't know the circumstances in which Hitchens left IS but it coincided with the transformation of the group into a tightly controlled mono-tendency which banned internal factions and dissent. He subsequently moved to the right, but not as far as some of his detractors on the left claim. Hitchens towards the end of his life said he was no longer a socialist but denied he was a conservative. It would probably be accurate to call him a liberal, albeit a more consistent and principled one than the spineless, hand-wringing types who write for The Guardian. He certainly avoided the fate of his younger brother Peter, like him an ex-IS member, who is now a Daily Mail Tory Anglican caricature.

Even though he was wrong on the Iraq war in 2003, it was for the right reasons (wanting to liberate the Iraqi people from Ba'athist dictatorship) as opposed to much of the left who rightly opposed the invasion for the wrong reasons (anti-Americanism, pacifism or, in the case of George Galloway, friendly relations with Saddam and his henchmen). He was also clear in opposing Islamic clerical fascists like al-Qaeda, refusing to let them speak for a Muslims as a whole and standing up for those threatened by them like Salman Rushdie, in sharp contrast to the IS's successor the SWP who downplayed the threat and promoted organisations like the MAB inside the anti-war movement.

Hitchens' other role was as a debunker of religion. That he chose to do so in the United States where religion pollutes public life to a much greater extent than in most of Europe is to his credit and I think he did it more thoughtfully than others like Richard Dawkins. It was certainly always entertaining, as when he spoke about the death of the charlatan Jerry Falwell in 2007.

Goodbye Dr No

The news that the Rev Dr Ian Paisley is to stand down as a preacher in the Free Presbyterian Church he set up in 1951 is hardly surprising given that he's 85.  He has already stepped down as moderator of the church, a MP, Northern Ireland First Minister and leader of the Democratic Unionist Party in the last couple of years. It's certainly less surprising than him becoming First Minister in the first place, let alone one seemingly on friendly terms with his deputy, former Provisional IRA Chief of Staff Martin McGuinness.

Paisley always reminds me of what a Catholic priest I know used to joke: "In the beginning was the word, and the word was No."  Those who see his career as a question of showmanship are only partly right.  Beyond the political stunts - like heckling the Pope in the European Parliament in 1988 - and the Bible thumping preaching was a conviction politician who actually believed what he said he did.  In many ways, his unbending Ulster Protestantism was more suited to the seventeenth than the twentieth or twenty-first centuries.

This song by The Dubliners allegedly about Paisley sums him up.

Out of Africa

I'd been looking forward to Origins of Us, the BBC2 series on evolution presented by Dr Alice Roberts which started last night.

A number of things struck me, not least the extent to which humans' relationship with the environment has shaped evolution.  It is now thought that climate change and a thinning out of the forests of East Africa led to our hominid ancestors standing upright in order to reach food on higher tree branches about two million years ago.  The closeness of human and chimpanzee DNA, with a common ancestor about five million years ago, makes us near relatives and also underlines how ridiculous it is to divide humanity into separate races based on differences in skin colour, language or culture.

As the fossil evidence becomes ever more extensive, I look forward with amusement to how religious creationists will try to convince the rest of us that we appeared as we are now six thousand years ago.