Okay, pin this on Western imperialism if you can. According to Newsweek, a Saudi man shot a doctor in Riyadh for helping his wife deliver a baby:
Saudi authorities have arrested a man for shooting a male doctor who had helped his wife’s delivery, after arguing that a female doctor should have overseen the birth.
The doctor, Muhannad Al Zabn, delivered the baby in April at the King Fahad Medical City in Riyadh, Gulf News reported.
The father offered his thanks to the doctor and asked to meet him at the hospital to show him his appreciation in person for the delivery.
The pair proceeded to meet in the hospital garden to talk about the delivery when the father unveiled a firearm and shot at the doctor, seriously wounded him.
The father ran from the scene but Saudi police later arrested him. Health workers transferred Al Zabn to the hospital’s intensive care unit but he is now in a stable condition.
It’s not clear from the piece exactly what transgression the doctor committed: was it touching the women, or simply overseeing her delivery? Newsweek reports that while many people on social media take the doctor’s side, others don’t. Regardless, we see someone seriously injured because of a religious dictate separating men and women. Or was this really the fault of the West? Perhaps Robert Wright will tell us.
h/t: Russel
Perhaps even more shocking, further down that page (to be flippant) –
Saudi Cleric Says Posing for Photos With Cats Is Forbidden
http://europe.newsweek.com/saudi-cleric-coughs-hairballs-over-cat-pictures-gulf-kingdom-463356
In fairness the clerical genius is not specific in his dislike of felids, he says that t’s having your picture taken that is forbidden – the cats are incidental, having a picture with a d*g or a werewolf would apparently also be frowned upon.
Yep, that’s correct. Drawing pictures and taking photos without there being an emergent need of them is either discouraged/ frowned upon or it is forbidden, in that ridiculous religion.
So all those piccies ISIS posts on the Intertoobz of morons waving their guns just shows they’re bad Muslims, no?
cr
I shot a bullet into the air,
It came to earth I know not where (in a child?)
And I don’t care.
Firing bullets into the air to celebrate X remains utterly stupid, but I’m not sure it’s particularly dangerous.
Wikipedia give the terminal velocity for a falling bullet as 90 m/s, so guessing the weight (there’s probably a notation for this, but it’s not worth following up) at 20 grammes, that’s an energy of 0.5*0.02*90*90 joules, 81 joules. Hmm, that’s enough to hurt, but unlikely to be fatal unless you’re quite unlucky. Comparable to falling over and hitting your head on the ground. Not something to recommend, but most of our ancestors have survived multiple examples.
Stray bullets don’t just go up and fall nicely down. Sometimes they ricochet off random objects. Sometimes the gun happens to be pointed just a bit wrong.
It is utterly stupid but it can also be hazardous to children and other living things, as the old 1960’s poster used to say.
I wasn’t talking about stray bullets, but ones deliberately shot straight up. Though given the recent spate of shootings by sub-toddlers, I wouldn’t be too surprised if there were cases of people doing that indoors and killing someone in the room above.
“Act as if your IQ is greater than your shoe size” is a curse likely to be misunderstood by the people it is directed at with justification.
The sentiment and the meaning is fully taken, at least by me, Filippo. These comments makes me think liberal arts studies would benefit certain populations.
🙂
Anybody up to date on culture, evolution and dominance? There is certainly some portion of male dominance attributable to size and strength, but my impression is that most is attributable to culture, particularly the odious directives of many religions.
My guess is that the Arab shot the doctor for *looking at* his wife’s genitals. That’s reason enough, in an Arab-culture country. It’s true that Islam itself isn’t the problem; the culture shaped the religion, and then the religion became the enforcer for the culture. Destroy that culture, and Islam might become a decent religion. But that culture is definitely sh!t, and must be destroyed for the safety of the world.
This is confused. Religion is part> of culture. It isn’t some separate thing. It is a feature of culture, like music and cuisine.
Islam is a cultural artifact. Destroy Islam and you destroy a (bad) part of culture. “Culture” is not some kind of sacred entity, it is just the shared norms, belief, communication systems, and other ideas that humans use to organize themselves and interact with one another. Many cultural features are terrible things that should be abandoned. Religious belief is one of them.
I go part of the way with Leslie Fish. There are many versions of Islam, some of which are at war with each other.
We also know that Christianity, in some of its versions, has been transformed almost out of recognition to accommodate or incorporate local traditions or lifestyles. Culture and religion have influenced or even transformed each other.
I have no doubt the same thing is true of Islam. If someone wanted to make the argument that the Saudi culture of Islam is a particularly virulent and toxic strain, I’d agree.
cr
You’re just repeating the error. Culture is not some kind of alternate to religion. Religion is PART OF culture. It is an inner circle contained within an outer circle in a Venn diagram. Saying that religion is influenced by culture is like saying rock and roll is influenced by music. It isn’t a coherent representation of things.
Maybe not; I think this is an argument over form rather than substance. I agree that religion is part of culture, in a Venn diagram sense, but that doesn’t negate that one element of culture can influence others. Don’t art and other factors, for instance, influence fashion? There are many strains of a culture and some can have characteristics, e.g. persistence over time, that differ from others. So the group of beliefs and cultural characteristics that we call “religious” can be charted over time separately from others, e.g. pop music. And doubtless one can influence another, e.g. pop music has at times been absorbed into religious rituals. So considering the separate strands of a culture separately can be useful.
Of course. It is reasonable to talk about some elements of religion having been incorporated from a previously non-religious context. And vice versa. (Santa Claus in Japan is a great example.)
But when people talk about religion as something different from culture they are making a basic error and muddying the waters. Religion is simply a bunch of cultural concepts having to do with deities and how they expect us to behave. This set of ideas can change over time by exchanging tidbits with sets of secular ideas or with ideas from other religions.
I disagree. Unless you want to claim there are many different Islams, one for each culture? Because the culture of Morocco and Indonesia is very different, while the religion is the same. And how about Kerala (India) Catholicism vs. Boston Catholicism? Are they different religions because they’re different culture?
Religions are culture-like in that they comprise shared norms etc. But if I were to Venn diagram them out, they’d be separate circles with a large overlapping region; one would not fit inside the other, because its pretty clear that the behavioral and belief norms in a religion often cross cultural boundaries.
But that’s bog-standard cultural transmission, and not enough to support a religion-culture dichotomy. There are Americans and Brits who share more cultural similarities across the pond than they share with their compatriots – people of big business, for example. Political parties like conservative and socialist ones can transcend national and other “cultural” borders, but it’s fair to say they’re another layer of culture themselves rather than something distinct from it.
Cultures hybridize all the time, with strands of varying lengths and components wrapped across the globe in many guises: musical taste, economic beliefs, artistic judgement, philosophical inclination. Religion is one among many.
The only thing that is “the same” is the label we happen to use. If religion is characterized by anything it is the tendency to schism because there’s no good way for deciding whose ideas about imaginary beings are right. Hell, Islam isn’t “the same” within (say) Morocco or any other country.
Religions are just sets of ideas that get shared among people. The boundaries are somewhat arbitrary. This apples to all of culture and the labels we use to distinguish one “culture” from another “culture” are just tools we use to organize a fluid universe of ideas people share with one another.
I think Leslie has totally got it right – the Arab esp Quraish pastoral tribal culture shaped Islam then Islam became enforcer for that culture with a few modifications but still compatible with the most tribal aspects of ancient Judaism, a bit of stoning for apostasy and pray 5 times a day from Zoroastrianism not to mention bedouin culture
I need to clarify – Islam is part of the culture and Islam IS the problem because it has kept part of the culture at full strength that otherwise would be moderated. I think its attractive to pastoral tribal oriented cultures and they take it up and it helps preserve their cultural norms even for those groups whose own customary code (e.g. the Pashtunwalli code) is more severe than most schools of Islam. Accordingly they have readily moved from Hanifi Islam to Salafism. In some cultures which aren’t naturally oriented to Islamic sensibilities, (e.g. Indonesia)there is a lot of syncretism and there is a lot of tolerance of pre Islamic practises. However the modern spread of orthodoxy via literacy, globalisation and hardening of attitudes due to major economic shocks is encouraging a more conservative – perhaps more Orthodox Islam there.
It is now rather clear that Christianity was successful at getting large numbers of converts because of willingness to be syncretic, at least at first. I suspect we’ll find out that Islam was the same way.
(Needless to say another reason for both is the use of violence.)
GBJames and Improbability are not paying attention to the fact that Islam is relatively recently evolved as religions go, and it’s very clear that some of the cultural habits of, for example, the western Arabian culture have become … “sanctified” is a good word … by inclusion into the developing Islam, and then projected (at sword point) into remote parts of the world such as Indonesia.
Without remembering that historical context, it’s easy to get into a chicken and egg argument over the interactions of “culture” and “religion”. And of course, around here, we all know that eggs pre-date chickens by over 100 million years.
I won’t speak for Improbability, but I’m not ignoring history at all. I’m simply insisting that framing religion as something separate from culture is just plain wrong. Cultures are comprised of all sorts of interacting components and religious beliefs are some of them.
Chickens and eggs are not a useful analog for understanding culture and religion. It might work for some features of a culture in comparison to some other features but not when talking about culture vs. religion in general.
OTOH, both culture and religion do have history, and have changed at different times.
Does religion have much effect on … there’s a cultural artefact on the TV – a quern stone? Probably not. Did American culture have much effect on the religions of the Oceania – until the coming of the cargo cults. Religion and culture are undeniable inter-related, but are not completely indistinguishable.
I’m not sure why I’m not being clear. Speaking about religion and culture as “interrelated” is kind of meaningless. It is like saying words and language are interrelated. Words are part of language. Religion is part of culture. One is a subset of the other. The fact that some parts of some cultures have had no discernible effect on some parts of some other culture doesn’t clarify anything. Some words in some languages are not related to other words. But words remain parts of language and religion remains part of culture. This is all just basic anthropology.
Maybe the confusion occurs because people confuse “culture” in the scientific/anthropological sense with “culture” in the art museum, literature, and symphony hall sense.
And no Christian crazy ever violently assaulted an abortion worker due to Christian dictates, and no religious nut job Jew ever killed Yitzhak Rabin, to pick just two of a multitude of examples. There are batshit crazies all over – it’s part of the human condition. Religion – all kinds – is a facilitator, not a cause. Better to stop quibbling over quillets and show us some useful scholarly information on the interplay among religion and culture and economics.
Where are the Quaker batshit crazies? And so what if Christians have done crazy shit in the past? Who’s denying that? How is that relevant to the criticism in the article?
Good point. Quakers are a very small group (~75,000 in the entire US), and their doctrine and practice may select for more rational and peaceful types. Surely there are other small religions (Bahai?) in the same category.
As to relevancy, I think this site believes strongly that it is peculiarly the muslim religion that is responsible for such acts, and my response was directed to that point. I thought it was at least implied by the article.
If you think that this blog is unduly kind to Christianity, you must be a new reader.
As for the particular kind of violence described in the post, I do not know of any religion other than Islam inspiring it. I can supply another anecdote: My uncle was a doctor in a Muslim-majority Bulgarian village several decades ago. Sometimes, a Muslim man would bring his wife and would say, “Doctor, my wife is not feeling well.” My uncle would reply, “I need to examine her.” The husband would object: “No, doctor, just give her an injection so that she feels well again.” The injection had to be delivered through the clothes.
For the record, my uncle never gave such an injection. As for the sick Muslim women, they were left to the will of Allah the Almighty.
Yes, there are rules within Islam about treatment by doctors, especially male doctors and female patients. Even men are not allowed to expose their dangly bits to a male doctor unless absolutely necessary for a particular treatment. Technically this rules out things like medical check-ups and screening for things like prostate and testicular cancer.
You can find the rules at al-islam.org
Are there medical schools in Islamic countries? I wonder how they handle – with appropriate Islamic propriety, of course – the nekkid-ness of male and female cadavers.
There are because I used to know someone who was attending one in Egypt. I don’t know how that issue is handled.
I’ve just done a series of posts about the rules for covering for men and women in Islam. One of the things I haven’t covered so far is the rules related to medical treatment, but there are quite a few. I wasn’t going to write about them, but since this issue has come up, I feel like I should.
Richard Nixon was a Quaker. (You could quibble about whether he was batshit crazy or just plain vanilla crazy.)
As oppose to Chocolate Mousse Royale crazy? 😉
In KSA the entire system – political and social – facilitates it, because the entire system is religious. The “taboos” related to women are also far more widespread than among fundamentalist xians.
Yes but some religions produce more batshit crazy actions. In Islam, unlike Christianity, the leader of State is the leader of religion and the religion itself is the source of law (Patricia Crone: God’s Rule)
Hinduism may often be as misogynist but its not also evangelist, doesnt have coherent orthodox schools and isn’t aggressively expansionist. Hinduism can’t propagate its more oppressive aspects outside the local caste and race system of India itself. On the other hand over 50% of the Quran denigrates or threatens Jews, Christians, non muslims, unbelievers or apostates. The Quran says its fine for any Muslim man to have sex with his female slave and slaves can only be taken from amongst non muslims – unlike the Old Testament which is referring to extinct peoples. Several sahih hadith prescribe that apostates be put to death. As the seminal Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, who died in 1406, summarizing centuries of consensus from major schools of Islamic jurisprudence wrote:
“In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. …The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense …. Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.” Ibn Khaldun The Muqudimmah. An Introduction to History, Translated by Franz Rosenthal. (New York, NY.: Pantheon, 1958, vol. 1, p. 473)”
All religions
I had to use the ER (twice) in Iraq. Both times I insisted my female roommate be in the room, and SHE put the relevant equipment on my body. The male doctors *let her*, because even THEY know what the penalty can be for touching a woman. Even THEY understood it to be “dirty”, despite being medical.
I’m Iraqi-American, so I knew enough on how to treat the culture. So many times I had to stop my other American female colleagues from making massive mistakes with Iraqi men.
I suppose it would be too much that these cultural practices in Arabic countries lead to very substantial numbers of women being trained as doctors.
This is Easy.
I blame western imperialism.
Modern medicine originated in the West. Western imperialism is responsible for spreading modern medecine.
No Modern Medecine, no Obstetrician, no shooting.
Once more the west is guilty for spreading dangerous ideas in foreign countries.
I blame the Chinese. They invented gun powder.
I blame the Turks. They (probably) invented ironworking.
I think it was the Hittites, who lived in Anatolia before the Turks.
Oh, yes, I’d forgotten about them. Turkish is a (Doh!) Turkic language, and IIRC, most of those are centred on the other side of the Caspian. The Turks per se are immigrants.
(ok, One last post on this theme ;-p)
Well indeed.
If the doctors used Crystal energy to unlock the pregnant woman chackras, no physical contact would have been needed, thus avoiding the incident.
(Makes me think about the Excellent Mitchell and Webb “Homeopathic A&E” video. Google it if you haven’t seen it)
I haven’t seen it. It’s incredibly powerful. Don’t watch it – you’ll reduce its effect by exposure to it.
If you have seen it, then don’t watch it again. By letting it fade into the past, it becomes more diluted and therefore more effective at erasing belief in homeopathy.
+ 1
I blame the stability of the proton and the generally quiet neighborhood of stars near us. Clearly none of this would have happened otherwise.
How about asking the doctor who he blames?
The doctor will never say that he blames Islam, even if he thinks so.
Don’t be absurd. I don’t think anyone has been foolish enough to blame Wahhabism on the West (though I could be wrong!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism
This guy was a Wahhabi zealot. He probably would have shot a female doctor if she was Shia.
America has no reason to be “allies” with this benighted “kingdom”.
And it is the latter line that is the link. Sure any particular nutcase might have been such without influence from the outside, but the *numbers* of fanatics go up (statistically), particularly if the authoritarian state is also supported/an ally. Saudi Arabia is not the only example of the latter; other US client states have been brutally authoritarian: think Pinochet in Chile and others. (That the *enemies* of these client states are also authoritarian is connected, but also irrelevant.)
On the other side, many say that the US embargo makes the Cuban state more authoritarian than it would have been otherwise.
Yes, that illustrates another principle of creating authoritarians: provoke strong nationalisms.
Ive seen comments maintaining it was a defensive reaction from Saudi arabs to preserve Islam from the encroachment of western imperialism. The old Hanbali (fourth) school of Sunni Islam was ditched in the most of the Saudi peninsular in favour of salafism and wahabbism.
makes me want to barf up a furball
I say ‘Amen’ to that! Mehtinks the world has gone bonkers. Here we are in an age of all kinds of scientific, technological and medical marvels, as well as having the values of Enlightenment for the taking….. and huge groups of people choose *this*. It boggles the mind and the belly!
Many years ago I heard that Khomeini said that it was okay for a man to operate on a woman, but only if he used a mirror to look at her.
A Shia friend laughed at that. Who knows if the story was true.
Sorry, just remembering the appendectomy story.
Are muslim males not supposed to LOOK at the vaginas of their wives? Is that what the doctor, her husband, did that was so wrong? Is that proscribed by the great prophet Mohammed?
Ech. What a bunch of idiots. Wahhabis or the others, Sunnis, Shias, who cares, but them. I simply have no patience for them. These mostly male egos need to get outside of their ego-bubbles and realize that their perspective on reality is just not real. Bleh.
I guess cunnilingis sex (help me with that spelling)sexual practice is a frightening thing for Wahhabis and other weird Muslim ideologies? It’s okay for them to put their penis in a woman’s vagina, but oh my, what would happen if they LOOKED at a woman’s vagina? This is just so much nonsense.
A man can look at his wife’s genitals and vice versa, and oral sex is permissible. It quickly gets stupid once it becomes a man/woman you aren’t married to or immediately related to.
Wait. Why was he mad at the doctor? Wasn’t he supposed to shoot his wife? I thought it was always the woman’s fault, like when rape victims are executed for adultery and the rapist gets a slap on the wrist.
Sub
I don’t know the Koranic regulations about dom-sub games. It’s very likely asymmetric for men versus women.
At least (a) the doctor survived, and (b) the man was arrested.
But I wonder if there aren’t just as many crazies in e.g. New York City, just that they do their crazy stuff for other alleged reasons.
I hasten to add that IMO Saudian Islam and its laws are loathsome for all sorts of very good reasons. I’m just not sure whether this incident is evidence of the evility of Islam or just that they have their ration of crazies too. What the man is charged with may be more telling.
cr
If I could draw, I would illustrate a simple solution to this problem: behold, the hoohah hijab! Or is it the merkin burka?
I am an artist. Working on your project!
At age 61, had to look up “merkin.” *Sigh.* Who knew?
very shocking and horrible!