Charity compels us to feel a genuine sympathy for Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle. He’s had a rough time of it recently. Last year his office was sent an anthrax-laden envelope that could have killed or seriously sickened members of his staff or the Senator himself. In early 2000, Daschle managed to gain control of the Senate for the Democrats by inducing Vermont Republican Senator Jim Jeffords to become an independent and vote with the Democrats for organizational purposes. Unfortunately for Daschle, Democratic Senate control lasted less than two years, as Republicans regained the majority in the Senate and extended their majority in House in the 2002 mid-term elections.
Daschle has long been criticized by Conservative pundits and commentators, but after the 2002 elections he was also roundly criticized by the Left for his failed leadership. Given a sluggish economy, Democrats had high hopes of maintaining and extending their hold on the Senate and re-taking the House. No wonder Daschle feels beleaguered. One receives the impression that Daschle feels like Senator Morris Udall who having lost in a primary to Jimmy Carter is reported to have said, “The people have spoken the bastards.” [1]
What else can explain Dachle’s pouting and whining performance last week when he complained that criticism from Conservative talk show hosts was inducing threats on him and his family? Daschle specifically lashed out at Rush Limbaugh for calling him now prepare your self an “obstructionist.” Daschle complained that when he was labeled an obstructionist, “There was a corresponding, a very significant increase in the number of issues that my family and I had to deal with. And I worry about that.” Surely Daschle does not believe that the use of this pejorative induces violence, or he would not have used the same precise term himself to label his Republican adversaries.
It was not like Alec Baldwin who on national television said “We should go to Washington and stone Henry Hyde to death… And then we should go to his house and kill his family.” Baldwin was surely jesting, but these remarks were far more irresponsible than characterizing someone has an “obstructionist.”
Politics has always been filled with lively and colorful invective. Perhaps the British are the most adept at the quick insulting witticism. Of one opponent, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once remarked, “The right honorable gentleman is reminiscent of a poker. The only difference is that a poker gives off the occasional signs of warmth.” Of another he said, “A crafty and lecherous old hypocrite whose very statue seems to gloat on the wenches as they walk the States House Yard.” It is too bad no one made a similarly clever observation during the Clinton perjury scandals.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was the recipient of many insults. She was labeled as the “Attila the Hen” by MP Clement Freud; the “Immaculate Misconception” by MP Norman St John-Stevas; and a “half-mad old bag lady” by MP Tony Banks. Reagan also had is poetically proficient detractors. Gore Vidal once described President Ronald Reagan as “a triumph of the embalmers art.” The Democratic Party used to have a cartoon at its web site showing George Bush pushing a elderly lady in a wheel chair down stairs. It was not particularly clever, but certainly not unexpected. [2]
Politics requires self-possession and a skin as thick as an elephant’s. Daschle seems to have forgotten how to laugh at himself and lost the ability to reconcile himself to both political victory and defeat. Perhaps Rush Limbaugh will mercifully ease up on Daschle. As Disraeli once said of another political opponent, “Debating against him is no fun, say something insulting and he looks at you like a whipped dog.”
[1] This quote is also attributed to Dick Tuck who lost a legislative race in California.
[2] Insult Monger.
Facing Mecca in the Modern World
Sunday, November 3rd, 2002In the fifteen century, Galileo Galilei was placed under house arrest by Catholic religious authorities for considering the Copernican proposition that the Earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around. Galileo was the unfortunate victim of being right at the wrong time.
At that time, the Catholic Church was particularly insecure about its authority in interpreting Scripture. The Protestant Reformation was challenging the Church’s exclusive franchise. The Church was in no mood to broker additional dissent. The punishment of Galileo was really not about cosmology or physics, it was about asserting control on the arbitration of Scripture. Insecurity was at the root of intolerance.
Even today, arguments against evolution by some are, at their root, less disagreements about science and more disputes about worldview and authority. In a tempestuous world of moral relativism, religious belief and ritual can serve as an important ethical anchor. Evolution and a very old universe appear on the surface to be at odds with the Book of Genesis. To some, questioning Biblical authority on what is essentially a scientific and empirical question undermines Biblical authority on moral and ethical strictures.
The same disposition seems to be undermining Islam’s collision with modernity. The Great Mosque in Mecca contains the Kaaba, the cube shaped and most sacred Muslim shrine to which adherents must turn to pray. This direction is called the qibla. The classical definition of the qibla is the “direction such that when a human observer faces it, it is as if he is looking at the diameter of the Earth passing through the Kaaba.” Traditionally, the entrances of mosques also face toward Mecca.
In Mecca, as long as the shrine is in sight, facing the Kaaba for prayer is straightforward. As Islam spread from the Arabian Peninsula, the qibla became more difficult to determine. Indeed, this geographic question challenged Islamic mathematicians and cartographers of the Middle Ages and helped give rise to algebra and spherical trigonometry.
On the surface of the Earth, Muslims have known for the past twelve centuries, the direction to Mecca lies along a great circle route. The computation of this direction in the modern world is now relatively easy. Somewhat counter to an intuition formed by looking at maps with parallel longitude lines, from North America, the qibla points to the northeast.
When the Islamic Center was built on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC in 1953, the Egyptian Ambassador was concerned because the center faced 56 degrees, substantially north of east. A quick check with a cartographer at the National Geographic Society confirmed the correctness of this direction.
However, the notion of using what some mistakenly believe is exclusive Western science is offensive to some modern Muslims. These Muslims refuse to believe the qibla from North America points toward the northeast. In 1993, Riad Nachef and Samir Kadi wrote a book arguing that the qibla from North American lies to the southeast. Nachef and Kadi believe that the notion that the qibla points toward the northeast “divides the word of the Muslims and perverts the Religion.”
There is no need here to argue geography. There is no question as to the qibla from North America. However, it is clear that some portion of Islam feels so threatened by modernity and so insecure in its position that it refuses to accept even geographic computations if they seem somehow tainted by Western influences. Insecurity is again at the root of intolerance.
The real irony is that conventional notions of direction that lead Nachef and Kadi to believe that the qibla from North America lies to the southeast is based on a particular map projection by the Flemish cartographer Gerhardus Mercator. Medieval Islamic mathematicians knew better.
Reference:
Abdali, S. Kamal, The Correct Qilba, 1997.
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