Month: February 2008

A Reformation In Islam

Interesting news from Turkey: a team of scholars has been revising and re-interpreting the Hadith — collections of sayings of Mohammed that have quasi-sacred status in Islam — in light of the assumption that they were intended to interact with the culture of the day, and that they must be re-interpreted in light of today’s culture:

Some sayings accepted as being genuinely spoken by Muhammad have been altered and reinterpreted.

Prof Mehmet Gormez, a senior official in the Department of Religious Affairs and an expert on the Hadith, gives a telling example.

“There are some messages that ban women from travelling for three days or more without their husband’s permission and they are genuine.

“But this isn’t a religious ban. It came about because in the Prophet’s time it simply wasn’t safe for a woman to travel alone like that. But as time has passed, people have made permanent what was only supposed to be a temporary ban for safety reasons.”

The project justifies such bold interference in the 1,400-year-old content of the Hadith by rigorous academic research.

Prof Gormez points out that in another speech, the Prophet said “he longed for the day when a woman might travel long distances alone”.

So, he argues, it is clear what the Prophet’s goal was.

F-18s on the Brain

I watched the last episode of Jetstream last night. It’s a TV show following a class of Canadian CF-18 pilot trainees through their training course. It was a great trauma for me when I had to get eyeglasses in grade 3, meaning I could never be a fighter pilot.

Speaking of F-18s: India had a deal with Russia to buy a refurbished Admiral Gorshkov, a 40,000-ton “cruiser carrier”. Seems the Russian shipyard has been stalling and asking for more money, and threatening to hold back delivery of the ship for several years longer than agreed.

Meanwhile, the USS Kitty Hawk, an 80,000-ton conventional carrier, is slated to be decomissioned this year. So the US has offered to give it for free to India. I can only see this as a good thing. I’d far rather see democratic India holding the balance of power in the Indian Ocean, rather than, say, totalitarian China.

Anyway, if India accepts the offer, it makes it more likely that India will choose American F-18s in its next round of fighter purchases, since the US carrier is already set up to, er, carry them, which brings this post back around to a neat literary close.

Why Not?

The European Union faces an immense problem: that of language. Currently all its documents must be translated into ALL of its members’ official languages, and translation services provided between each. Since there are currently around 23 official languages, this results in over 500 language pairs to translate between. The EU spends over 15% of its budget on translation! And with several more countries waiting join, the problem is going to grow exponentially.

Various proposals have been made to simplify the situation: the use of national languages like English (the de facto working language at present), French, Spanish or German, all of which are politically fraught; the use of Latin, which is seen as favouring the Romance languages; or the use of an artificial language like Esperanto, which would be sensible in my opinion, but is evidently too wierd for people.

There is a humourous site devoted to the polyglot mix that tends to be used in social situations at EU headquarters; who knows, this may eventually take form as a new European language.

But some students in Spain have an interesting idea: since the majority of languages in Europe are in the “Indo-European” language family, they are all descended from a hypothetical common ancestor. Thus why don’t we resurrect that mother language? That way nobody can claim linguistic imperialism.

I find the idea delightful, actually, especially since their proposal — specifically, to develop a formal reconstruction of Late Proto-Indo-European — is full of the wonderfully complex phonology and grammar that students of ancient Latin, Greek or Sanskrit have a bit of a glimpse of: the full eight nominal cases, in four declensions; six verbal tenses & moods in twelve conjugations, and much, much more.

There is ample precedent for this kind of thing, actually. Modern Hebrew is a reconstruction of a language dead for 2500 years. Modern Indonesian is a modern formalization of several Malay dialects. One of the two Norwegian languages is an artificial reconstruction.

Of course, the scheme would still leave speakers of Basque, Finnish, Hungarian & Turkish, among others, out in the cold. So I guess if we can’t please absolutely everybody, we shouldn’t try to please anybody.