Laila Lalami

Project Censored’s list of the top 10 most censored news stories of 2005 is available at Common Dreams. Among them: The continuing assault by the White House on the Freedom of Information Act, the Presidential Records Act and other public-information legislation, which, under normal circumstances, enable the public to find out just exactly what the government is doing behind closed doors; the invasion of Fallujah, and the U.S. military’s use of chemical weapons (otherwise known as “weapons of mass destruction” when they’re in the hands of dictators); increased powers of surveillance against U.S. citizens; and so on. Find out more at Project Censored‘s site, or buy the book.

Link via Metafilter.

Speaking of censorship: Reader Elizabeth Angell sends word that there is now “an organized campaign in Turkey” to remove article 301 from the penal code. Article 301, you’ll remember, was the little law that makes it illegal to “insult Turkishness,” and which made it possible for a zealous prosecutor to bring charges against novelist Orhan Pamuk last year. Pamuk’s only “crime” was to talk about the genocide of Armenians in 1916. While the charges against Pamuk have now been dropped, other writers still stand accused under the same law. A repeal of article 301 would be a major win for freedom of expression in the Turkish republic. Here is the website of the campaign: 301 Hayir (in Turkish only.)

Related: Orhan Pamuk Goes On Trial.

What do novelists and psychics have in common? In a brief essay for The Guardian, Hilary Mantel answers:

Which other self-employed persons stand up in public to talk about non-existent people? Novelists, of course. We listen to non-existent voices and write down what they say. Then we talk with passion and conviction about people no one can see. Our audiences are complicit, of course, whereas the audiences for professional psychics are ambivalent. They teeter on the edge of delusion and the edge of derision. For the psychic, it’s a no-win situation. If she gets it wrong, she’s rubbish. If she gets it right, she’s a cheat. One of the things I learned while writing the book is that scepticism can be held as firmly, devoutly, illogically as any religious position. Elaborate edifices of fraud are proposed – so elaborate, so unlikely, that it’s easier to believe that, after all, the dead are speaking

Mantel’s Beyond Black, which features a medium, has been praised by readers I trust, so I will have to add it to my TBR pile.

In an opinion piece for the Sunday Los Angeles Times, Reza Aslan argues that Osama Bin Laden should be viewed not just as a murderous criminal but also as a “principal figure” of the Islamic reformation, comparable to Martin Luther and other radicals of the Christian reformation.

Of course, there are those who reject the very idea of an Islamic reformation, let alone any attempt to draw parallels between the histories of Islam and Christianity. But while such parallels can be strained, there are certain similarities between the Christian and Islamic reformations that should not be dismissed, not least because they reflect universal conflicts found in nearly every religious tradition. Chief among these is the question of who has the authority to define faith: the individual or the institution?

In Islam, this question is somewhat complicated by the fact that it has never had a centralized authority — there is no “Muslim pope,” no “Muslim Vatican.” Religious authority in Islam is the province of a host of small, competing, though exceedingly powerful, clerical institutions that have maintained a virtual monopoly over the meaning and message of Islam for 1,400 years.

Yet, during the last century, as Muslims have increasingly been forced to regard themselves less as members of a worldwide community than as citizens of individual nation-states, a sense of individualism has begun to infuse this essentially communal faith.

Aslan’s No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam is now out in paperback.

Opium Magazine celebrates its fifth year with a series of events in New York this weekend. On Friday, February 3rd, our pal Jim Ruland will be reading alongside Sam Lipsyte at the Happy Ending Lounge. (Details here.) And then on Saturday, February 4th, an all-star gathering of humor writers will take place at the Slipper Room. Readers will include Jonathan Ames, Diane Williams, Jonathan Baumbach, Amanda Filipacchi, Dennis DiClaudio, Tao Lin, Shya Scanlon and Todd Zuniga himself. (Details here.)

Regular reader Mina J. sends in a link to this article about a tribe of goat herders in Saudi Arabia where men and women decorate their hair with flowers. But this being Paris-Match and not National Geographic, the author, Thierry Mauger, gets nearly apoplectic as he describes the “breathtaking beauty” of the men, compares them to “Christs of cathedrals,” and otherwise lets his imagination run wild at the encounter.

The photos appear in a book by Thierry Mauger titled Thierry au Pays de L’Or Noir. (God almighty. And you thought the Tintin-era orientalist crap was a thing of the past.)

Photo above: Thierry Mauger/Paris-Match.

The San Francisco Examiner asked several working writers about their favorite authors. Daniel Handler has a more…muscular approach:

I just saw Jim Shepard read from his novel Project X (Vintage) at the Make Out Room, and he killed. There were a bunch of writers there, all reading to raise money for a progressive candidate, and we were all excited to read with Jim Shepard but we could tell that most of the audience hadn’t heard of him, and the more we talked him up the more I could see people getting nervous that he was a “writer’s writer” –that is, some difficult, pretentious guy that only other writers like. But then he took the stage and in 20 seconds I saw several cynical hipsters laughing so hard they had to put their drinks down and hold their stomachs. And, I should add, it’s a novel about a high school massacre. As I told the crowd that night, I want you to buy a book by Jim Shepard and read it, and if you don’t like it come to me. I’ll give you your money back and then I’ll kick your ass.

Read others’ recommendations here.

The reactions to Hamas’s win in the Palestinian elections last week have been both depressing and amusing. Depressing because some people have acted as though the sky had fallen and the earth had stopped turning. How could it happen? they wondered. (Let me tell you how it could. When you have to live under a corrupt authority for ten years, when you watch your leaders build mansions and drive benzes while the humanitarian aid that was supposed to go to you goes to line their pockets, you’re going to hit back at them with the only weapon that voters have: votes. From where I sit, Hamas’s win is unsurprising.)

The reactions have also been amusing because, with Arafat gone and the Palestinians finally able to have elections, Bush was cornered into having to admit that “democracy” was on the move. Except that the result he got wasn’t the one he was hoping for, so he’ll look for a way to delegitimize it. Writing in Salon, Juan Cole makes this point rather clearly:

In a mystifying self-contradiction, Bush trumpeted that “the Palestinians had an election yesterday, the results of which remind me about the power of democracy.” If elections were really the same as democracy, and if Bush was so happy about the process, then we might expect him to pledge to work with the results, which by his lights would be intrinsically good. But then he suddenly swerved away from this line of thought, reverting to boilerplate and saying, “On the other hand, I don’t see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform. And I know you can’t be a partner in peace if you have a — if your party has got an armed wing.”

So Bush is saying that even though elections are democracy and democracy is good and powerful, it has produced unacceptable results in this case, and so the resulting Hamas government will lack the legitimacy necessary to allow the United States to deal with it or go forward in any peace process. Bush’s double standard is clear in his diction, since he was perfectly happy to deal with Israel’s Likud Party, which is dedicated to the destruction of the budding Palestinian state, and which used the Israeli military and security services for its party platform in destroying the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority throughout the early years of this century. As Orwell reminded us in “Animal Farm,” some are more equal than others.

Please also read Jonathan Edelstein’s thoughtful reaction to the elections, and the interesting discussion in the comments section.

Friends, I’m happy to report that Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits has gone into its second printing. (Time to get your hands on the signed first edition. Ha!)

Reza Aslan was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote the paperback release of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam earlier this week. You can watch the video on the show’s site. (Speaking of Aslan, I was surprised to find out a blurb from my Oregonian review had been used for the back cover. I liked the book quite a bit, and if you haven’t already read it, you really should.)