The New Republic’s big story this week is about Abou El Fadl, a scholar of Islamic law who teaches at the UCLA School of Law. Because El Fadl chooses a different branch of Islamic scholarship than the Wahabbists endorse, he is subjected to constant harassment by the intolerant majority of modern Islamic scholars. El Fadl explains that Wahabbism has come to dominate Islamic scholarship because the Saudi Arabians have spent many millions of dollars to make it that way. I could summarize how El Fadl’s views differ from those of the Wahabbists, but I’d do a poor job of it. Read the article instead (even though it requires registration).

El Fadl came to my attention last fall when I read an interview with him from The American Lawyer in which he explained how modern fundamentalist Islam is a radical departure from the Islamic legal tradition, which encouraged scholarship and critical interpretation of the Koran. When you read about El Fadl, you realize how radically Islam has to change in order to get away from its backward modern interpretation. With the Saudis spending bucketloads of money to shift the game in favor of the status quo, it’s not likely to start moving in a new direction anytime soon, either.

Al Jazeera is running a tape of someone purporting to be Osama bin Laden praising recent attacks (including the theater siege in Moscow). A couple of interesting notes: first, it’s not video. That could mean it’s faked, or that he’s too ill to show himself in front of a camera. The second is that bin Laden didn’t mention the recent sniper attacks in the Washington DC vicinity. That seems to confirm that there’s no al Qaeda/sniper connection, doesn’t it? (I never believed there was, but I know Ann Coulter, for one, disagrees.)

So, I was reading Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s blog entry the other day about ground level politics and it got me to thinking about something that’s been bugging me since election night. The thing that bugs me is that despite the fact that I cast my lot in the marketplace of ideas here every day, I really don’t do all that much to change this country or this world to be the place that I want it to be. For example, my next door neighbors are three guaranteed Democratic votes. They don’t know a whole lot about US politics, but they hate George W Bush with extreme passion. Unfortunately, they never registered to vote and so they didn’t get to cast their ballots on election night. Had I gotten off my duff back in October (the registration deadline was Oct 11) and gotten them voter registration cards, and then taken them to vote on election day, that would have been three more votes for our losing Democratic Senate candidate. The guy lost by about 200,000 votes — if 1/5 of the Democrats who voted could have found one other person to drag to the polls, he would have won. I could have picked up three without even trying very hard, and they have a lot of friends who probably didn’t vote either. It’s something to remember in 2004.

More on this here.

One thing I really like is when lessons from the world of sports can be applied to real life. Gary Huckabay, one of the smartest baseball analysts anywhere, wrote a great piece about decision making in Major League Baseball. In the piece he explains that the decision makers in MLB don’t make what are percieved as poor decisions due to lack of information, but due to different analysis of the information available than you or I might make.

The IHT ran a fascinating article today about the feud that wasn’t between the United States and France over the UN resolution regarding Iraq. The story reports that the feud was in fact a cleverly constructed gambit that enabled France to regain some international standing at the expense of Germany (which took itself out of the game when Gerhard Schroeder announced his total opposition to war in Iraq during the campaign there) and enabled the United States to pick up some multilateral clout in its dispute with Iraq. The more attention I pay to world events, the more I realize that my understanding of what’s really going on is established at a level several times too high to be of much use. The conventional wisdom thusfar has been that France was staunchly opposed to war in Iraq because French businesses stood to lose a lot of business if we invaded. Maybe that’s not so.

As we contemplate spending hundreds of billions of dollars on getting rid of Saddam Hussein, many countries in Africa are facing another extreme food crisis. As always, people are starving not just due to drought, but also because their so-called governments are too busy fighting wars, stealing from them, or generally screwing up to bother to feed them. Indeed, the pictures of starving Iraqis resulted not from Iraq’s inability to feed its people but rather because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to feed them. However, despite the fact that we know all too well that greed, incompetence, and arrogance are the responsible for famine, it seems like we ought to be doing as much as we can to ameliorate the suffering of these people, who certainly didn’t choose the governments that they’re stuck with.

There might be an argument other than simple charity in favor of helping out the starving masses as well. As we know, plenty of countries (including the United States) have been drought-stricken of late. There’s a reasonably good chance that global warming (whether you believe in it or not) is one of the causes of these droughts. Perhaps we can assume that the effect industrialization has had on the climate compels us to compensate those people who have been affected most negatively by climate change.

The folks at Spinsanity have been on lie patrol — keeping track of the evasions and untruths that have been a hallmark of the Bush administration. Probably the thing that I find most depressing about the current administration is that they want to disclose as little as possible, and that when they do make public pronouncements, there’s a good chance that they’re not true.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping track at home, XUL Planet has a list of 101 things you can do in Mozilla that you can’t do in Internet Explorer.

Alexandra Pelosi has a piece about the making of her documentary “Journeys with George” up at the official site. One thing to note: you may like George W Bush more after watching this than you did before, but any thoughts you might have had about Carl Rove being a creepy asshole will be confirmed.

It was reported this week that drinking a lot of coffee could reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Of course it’s just one study and all we have right now is correlation, not causation, but slurping down several cups of coffee a day sounds like more fun than starting that exercise regimen that I keep putting off.