Sex Education For the Next Generation

This shouldn't be about individuals, bhrata beej, but I would submit that may be the goal itself is a bit new here - the goal of actually promoting as honest an understanding as possible - even if it does not conform to our personal and indiviual ideals and preferences, always.

Were one intent upon "hurting Muslims", the easiest option for a person of my background would be to promote the following in the name of Islam:

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/dmag9.htm

There is a huge market for this, in India and Pakistan, among Muslims and ignorant Hindus, for understandable reasons. One may even be able to draw upon Hamidm's formidable abilities. But that would not really be fair....

bjkumar: have you figured out a way to get past the noble muslim jinn defending the riches of the mosque from your ignoble bania hands? (just curious)

#219 thinkingstorm: Ranjit (the chowk version) was actually a villain too when he first came here and was (to use an overused word on chowk) gloating on the fate of the earthquake victims even as thousands of them were dying under debris. I must admit though that his subseuquent posts have been generally quite sensible, and so he I assume that was a temporary aberration of some kind...

#217, #218 Ranjit

Ranjit, you should have included this fair warning to the Kaal.

Kaal, I think you are in some real trouble now. Everyone, including this lowly, slinky character who calls himself Ranjit - thinks that they have you fully figured out! It is in your own interest to gracefully accept their verdict and ask for kshama-yaachna for making the chowk-venerated-roaspected Dr. Naqshbandi look like an absolute nincompoop in front of the whole assembly! You may need to also shed a few tears to convince your genuineness to the Pakistani lady folks who are noticeably absent from any discussions which have anything to do with actual sex acts and the tools of the same but does not involve simultaneous use of sharp metallic blades!

Ranjit #217 #218: While no doubt there are many individuals in India of the kind you describe, I dont think Kaalchakra is one of them.

I say this for the following reason: encouraging one or two or even a tiny handful of individuals on chowk to keep thinking along the lines they are thinking already(i.e. "mullahism" or "sufism") is hardly an effective way to reach the wonderful goal of encouraging muslims to remain backward!! Since I know Kaalchakra is in fact a intelligent man (as you also recognize), it stands to reason that he realizes this as well. But then, I could be mistaken... :-)

Of course, a smart person would not even set himself such an "admirable" goal - because if muslims in India (or Pakistanis) in fact do remain backward by following "mullahism" or "sufism", it is not just the muslims who suffer but the rest of the country and indeed the rest of the world. There is no room for lose-lose situations in any smart person's head, only in the heads of fanatics who are too stupid to understand that.

Long post, but I thought I should clarify this point - and also put off doing some real work...

LOL, Jesus, Ranjit, ts, that totally, totally, totally misconstrues my purpose. My dear friend zee is an armani jihadi, not an uneducated one, cliffs is a cardiologiest Islamist, and so on, and shah/studebaker bhai will tell you that appeasement isn't my deal at all :)

Now, to continue with vrv's interesting persective.:)
----------------------

ts, vrv

Oof the best 'insights' in the nature of Islamic knowledge I personally obtained was long ago on Chowk itself. Wonder if the three of us share the same understanding.

A chowkie was explaining how faith did not mean blind, irrational dogmatic superstition. Rather, it was the outcome of a very logical process, relying essentially on as much state-of-the-art knowledge as possible. He explained how back home, during the course of his studies, he was required to answer difficult questions that forced him to really learn and think much, like:

Use historical, social, political, scientific (etc) reasoning and knowledge to examine and authenticate the Quran as the word of God, and Islam as the desirable blueprint for humans to follow.

Is your understanding different?

Ranjit-

I watched an old old indian movie recently, and the dumb villan was named ranjit.

You, however, have redeemed this name.

Indeed, you have laid bare the game of chess that my mullah bretheren are too ignorant off.
with much respect,
thinking storm

Re:217 followup

The technical word for Kaal's strategy is "minority appeasement", something that the Congress party is an expert in. Give muslims their personal code so that they can marry 4 wives, procreate like crazy, go to madrassahs, remain uneducated and get haj subsidies. In other words, remain a permanent underclass in ghettos. Since it ostensibly appears to be based on religious sensitivities, the muslims cant be against it or protest against hindus. At the same time, they keep regressing into a dark hole of backwardness compared to hindus. This is brahmin brains at its best - a very clever use of the other party's weapon, which is their religious sentiments, into their main weakness.

Re:zeemax
[..... I mean if anyone asked me these questions ... e.g even a hindoo like Kaalchakra, or Sadna, or Swarrier whom I respect, I would answer. ]

Abey Zee, you bewakoof mullah, Kaalchakra is a typical brahmin along the lines of Chanakya. He is orders of magnitude smarter than you. While you have no control on your temper or hatred which betrays your puny intellect, Kaal is a consummate politician. He subtly eggs you on your hatred and encourages you to burn yourself up, since he knows quite well that anger and hatred diminishes people. Moreover, he would love to see muslims behave like you which makes it easier to brand them as primitive subhumans who should be treated like crap.

It was people like Kaal in the Indian Congress who were allied with the deobandis before partition and still are, with the objective of keeping muslims in their place by using their religious feelings as a weapon against them i.e. encourage them to be backward and regressive so that they pose no competition to hindus who outperform them in all aspects of life. This was one of things that pissed off Jinnah and the muslim burgeoise who saw through that strategy.

vrv-

re: ilm. Yes, the prophet did not consider the quranic revelations to be the only knowledge that muslims should seek. One of his sayings asks muslims to go and seek out knowledge even if they have to travel as far as china. So the importance of gaining knowledge is stressed, as is hijrat (travelling). For mingling with other cultures and observing the world at large would offer much learning. The early muslim explosive growth in mathematics, astronomy and chemistry were based on this very principle of traveling to seek out knowledge.
with much respect,
thinking storm

vrv, a great appraoch, but we might want to be careful of what we see or don't see because of who we ourselves are.

Pure knowledge, independent of the Quran and the hadiths and such? Even contradictory, if need is "seen" by the seeker?

vrv, this is NOT Hinduism. You might get some faithfuls in significant trouble...:(

naqsh's formula for sufism

take any old literalist fundamentalist, add sheikh in front of the imam, and presto! You have a sufi.

Thanks but no thanks.
with much respect,
thinking storm

Kaala Chakra, Getting into the shoes of others give us newer perspectives......sahaanubhuti!

Muhammed's emphasis on ILM (knowledge) gave me a new perspective of Islam. As I understand, it's not the word of Gabriel (Quran)...it's abt pure knowledge.....not Quranic.

naqsh,

thanks for the posts.

But you are quoting naqshis.

AND GHAZALI!!!! who was a learned JURIST...but not a sufi.

Naqsh, for your sake, please...you owe it to yourself to study a bit out fo your current circle.
with much respect,
thinking storm

"ilm', which prophet Muhammed recommended very strongly.

Btw, he never defined ilm as of Quranic source...it's an open-ended word."


Oh oh, vrv, we might be walking into uncertain arenas there, and uncertainty is to be avoided in matters of faith.

Sex and Religion: Joined at the Hip
Sex and religion are joined at the hip. The most interesting distinction is not between religions that do and or do not traffic in sex but between two aspects of a single religion, one of which regards sex as a blessing and the other as a curse.

Many religions drive with one foot heavy on the sexual accelerator and the other riding the sexual brakes. Judaism, Christianity and Hinduism celebrate, on the one hand, the power of sex within marriage and are keen to harness its power for their worshippers, while, on the other hand, they warn you that hair will grow on the palms of your hand if you masturbate. Even among the pro-sex sects, the concern for the control and legitimation of procreation often sprouts anti-sexual policies such as homophobia and an obsession with virginity and female chastity.
Pro-sex religion is not necessarily pro-marriage. Hierogamies (sacred marriages) are celebrated worldwide, but some Hindu sects also celebrate sacred adulteries. For them, the model for the love of god is not boring marital sex “got ‘tween asleep and wake,” as Shakespeare’s bastard Edmund mocks it, but the thrilling love of the married cow-herd women for the incarnate god Krishna, an erotic passion that risks all—honor, family, children, all--for the sake of a moment of intense emotion, sometimes just of longing, not even of consummation. Elsewhere in India, on one day each year, worshippers take the image of the god out of the temple (where he sits beside his wife) and carry him to his mistress in another temple; they leave him there all night, and in the morning, when he is in a much better mood, they address their prayers to him. In medieval Christianity, too, Guinevere and Isolde, the heroines of epic poems about the search for the holy Grail, are notorious adulteresses. These myths and rituals are not regarded as a license to sin; they are metaphors, not role models. No imitatio Krishni here; rather, as the old Latin maxim goes, “What Zeus can do is not for you” (quod licet Jovi non licet bovi).
Some Hindu texts argue that our sexuality is the very sign of our religiosity. Noting that the icons of the god Shiva and his wife Parvati are a lingam (a sculpture, usually in stone, of the male organ of generation) and a yoni (the female organ), they argue that the observed fact that all humans are born with not a Christian cross or a Jewish Star of David but a lingam or a yoni built into their bodies, clearly proves that we are all by our very nature worshippers of Shiva and his wife Parvati.
Victorian Protestants, ruling India during the British Raj, were of course scandalized by all of this. (They conveniently ignored the eroticism of Christianity in paintings of the tumescent Jesus [which Leo Steinberg helped us to see] or in the medieval nuns who fantasized that Jesus came to them in the night, not to mention the fact that their own branch of Christianity only existed because Henry VIII had a short sexual attention span). But the Hindus did not need the British to make them ashamed of the sexual aspects of their own religion; from at least the 5th century BCE to the present day there have been ascetic movements in India that loathed the body, loathed women, loathed sex—the part of the religion that rides the sexual brakes.
Sometimes the two approaches to sex in religion compromised, on the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” principle, or, in Paul’s words, “Better to marry than to burn.” Even the mystic movements that preached violent forms of celibacy often used the experience of sexual climax as the closest approximation to the ineffable mystic union with God (see Bernini’s statue of the orgasmic Saint Teresa). At such moments, the sects ceased to raise their ugly heads and agreed that sex was, even if a sin, a felix culpa.

Sex and Religion: Joined at the Hip
Sex and religion are joined at the hip. The most interesting distinction is not between religions that do and or do not traffic in sex but between two aspects of a single religion, one of which regards sex as a blessing and the other as a curse.

Many religions drive with one foot heavy on the sexual accelerator and the other riding the sexual brakes. Judaism, Christianity and Hinduism celebrate, on the one hand, the power of sex within marriage and are keen to harness its power for their worshippers, while, on the other hand, they warn you that hair will grow on the palms of your hand if you masturbate. Even among the pro-sex sects, the concern for the control and legitimation of procreation often sprouts anti-sexual policies such as homophobia and an obsession with virginity and female chastity.
Pro-sex religion is not necessarily pro-marriage. Hierogamies (sacred marriages) are celebrated worldwide, but some Hindu sects also celebrate sacred adulteries. For them, the model for the love of god is not boring marital sex “got ‘tween asleep and wake,” as Shakespeare’s bastard Edmund mocks it, but the thrilling love of the married cow-herd women for the incarnate god Krishna, an erotic passion that risks all—honor, family, children, all--for the sake of a moment of intense emotion, sometimes just of longing, not even of consummation. Elsewhere in India, on one day each year, worshippers take the image of the god out of the temple (where he sits beside his wife) and carry him to his mistress in another temple; they leave him there all night, and in the morning, when he is in a much better mood, they address their prayers to him. In medieval Christianity, too, Guinevere and Isolde, the heroines of epic poems about the search for the holy Grail, are notorious adulteresses. These myths and rituals are not regarded as a license to sin; they are metaphors, not role models. No imitatio Krishni here; rather, as the old Latin maxim goes, “What Zeus can do is not for you” (quod licet Jovi non licet bovi).
Some Hindu texts argue that our sexuality is the very sign of our religiosity. Noting that the icons of the god Shiva and his wife Parvati are a lingam (a sculpture, usually in stone, of the male organ of generation) and a yoni (the female organ), they argue that the observed fact that all humans are born with not a Christian cross or a Jewish Star of David but a lingam or a yoni built into their bodies, clearly proves that we are all by our very nature worshippers of Shiva and his wife Parvati.
Victorian Protestants, ruling India during the British Raj, were of course scandalized by all of this. (They conveniently ignored the eroticism of Christianity in paintings of the tumescent Jesus [which Leo Steinberg helped us to see] or in the medieval nuns who fantasized that Jesus came to them in the night, not to mention the fact that their own branch of Christianity only existed because Henry VIII had a short sexual attention span). But the Hindus did not need the British to make them ashamed of the sexual aspects of their own religion; from at least the 5th century BCE to the present day there have been ascetic movements in India that loathed the body, loathed women, loathed sex—the part of the religion that rides the sexual brakes.
Sometimes the two approaches to sex in religion compromised, on the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” principle, or, in Paul’s words, “Better to marry than to burn.” Even the mystic movements that preached violent forms of celibacy often used the experience of sexual climax as the closest approximation to the ineffable mystic union with God (see Bernini’s statue of the orgasmic Saint Teresa). At such moments, the sects ceased to raise their ugly heads and agreed that sex was, even if a sin, a felix culpa.

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/wendy_doniger/2007/02/sex_a nd_religion_joined_at_the.html