[NON BLOG] It's a fine day

Pity I'm inside working.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Muslims of Ukraine

Last month, I was interested to come across the article "Eastern Europe Muslims Crave for Attention: Activist", which gave specific figures for Muslim populations in eastern Europe: "Russia comes first with 21 million Muslims, followed by Bulgaria with 2.6 million, Albania with 2.4 million, Bosnia with 2.2 million and Ukraine with 2 million Muslims." A related online chat gave more detail to the region.

Islam Online, like other religious advocacy sites, has a tendency to maximize the numbers of the faithful, out of an understandable desire to maximize the numbers of the faithful that, alas, doesn't exactly conform to accepted statistics. For instance, as I noted tangentially in a previous posting, only one-tenth of Bulgaria's nearly eight million people are Muslims, while the figure of a quarter-million Slovenian Muslims quoted in the chat is a five-fold overstatement.

Even so, there is abundant evidence that suggests that Ukraine's Muslim population is quite large, if not perhaps up to the quoted figure of two million. The Religious Information Service of Ukraine's website suggests that Ukraine's Muslim population is quite large, and not limited only to the quarter-million Crimean Tatars. This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense, since Ukraine was and remains relatively more prosperous than the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union. While the bulk of the massive emigration from the South Caucasus has been directed towards Russia, and while Ukraine is still poorer than Russia, it makes some sense to assume that at least some of these migrants have made it to Ukraine.

How many Ukrainian Muslims are there? I don't know; I can't find any reliable data sources on the Internet or elsewhere. Even if you estimate a moderate figure of one million Muslims, though, that's still a relatively high proportion: Compare the half-million Muslims living in a Spain of 43 million, or the one million or so Muslims in an Italy of 58 million. If anyone has any firm data, please share it with me; I'm really quite curious to find out more details.

[LINK] The Head Heeb on Lebanese Politics

Part 5 of Jonathan Edelstein's occasional series is up at the Head Heeb.

[NON BLOG] LJ Meetup

It looks like the boyfriend was right when he told me that I was underestimating how sick I was Tuesday evening, since I gave serod and runyon bad directions for our meetup today. Fortunately, they were able to redirect, and mea maxima culpa.

It was nice to spend a couple of hours with the two. I'd met serod before, of course, but not runyon. It was a pleasure to spend time with both, and my best wishes to them.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Christianization of Kabylia?

Several weeks after I read that provocative article on Ukrainian Muslims, I read, at Christianity Today, Agnieszka Tennant's article "The French Reconnection: Europe's most secular country rediscovers its Christian roots". One passage in particular caught my attention.

Just look at the members of the Christian and Missionary Alliance church Eglise Protestante Evangélique, located in a storefront in La Défense, a progressive business suburb of Paris. Last October, wearing a tie with international flags, pastor Jean-Christophe Bieselaar began the service by reading a passage in Revelation that describes all nations worshiping the Lord. This heavenly diversity marks the congregation.

When Bieselaar asked how many among those attending are indigenous, Caucasian French, only ten people raised their hands. Forty are African immigrants—some naturalized, some legal, and some illegal. When he asked them to say the names of their motherlands aloud, they mentioned Gabon, Ivory Coast, Congo, South Africa, Togo, Nigeria. Several are from Asia: Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Japan. Several are from Iran. Two are from Canada; a couple from the States. Some are from Colombia, Brazil, England, Spain.

[. . .]

Ali Arhab is an Algerian émigré who converted from Islam and who now heads Channel North Africa, a TV station that broadcasts Christian programming by North Africans for French immigrants from North Africa in Algerian Arabic. There are no statistics available on the number of converts from Islam to Christianity in France, but he speculates the number may be close to 5,000, adding that "it's growing rapidly."

One reason for the uncertain number may be that some converts keep their Christianity a secret. A lot of them live in the "Communist-belt" suburbs around Paris and Lyon, which have become centers of radical Islam, says Siemon-Netto. "They attend prayer services on Fridays at the mosque and call themselves names like Mohammad. But on Sundays they attend services at churches where they are known as Jack or John." All this because "you have cases in France where Muslims obviously have been harmed or killed for apostasy."

A veteran missionary to French Muslims who I'll call Steve Adams, speaking on condition of anonymity, says he knows of about 17 support groups for Muslim converts to Christianity in France; all have formed in the last 10 years. "We're on the threshold of major breakthroughs with Muslims," Adams says. "God is saving religious leaders from Islam, like the two former Islamic terrorists I met." He and other sources say the revival going on in Kabylia in northern Algeria—the area that gave us Tertullian and Augustine—is likely to spill over into France.

Is there a growth of evangelical Christianity in Kabylia? There certainly is a strong Kabyle particularism reflected in the Algerian region's Berber language and substantial European diaspora. It seems within the realm of possibility that Christianity could be making converts, given the general brutality and Arabization favoured by Islamic militants in Kabylia in the 1990s and--perhaps--a nationalist response that tried to reconnect with a pre-Arab/Muslim past. Certainly, evangelical Christians are interested in making conversions.

Is this actually going on? Again, I can't come to any conclusions owing to a paucity of data (thanks to the human rights situation, in Algeria's case). It's worth pointing out that there exists (identified by Patricia Lorcin) a "Kabyle myth", "a body of beliefs, beginning almost as soon as General Louis Auguste Victor Bourmont's expeditionary army had captured Algiers [holding that] the mountain-dwelling Berber-speaking sedentary peoples, particularly those of the Kabylie region of north-central Algeria, were somehow "superior" to the Arabic-speaking "nomadic" peoples of the plains; the former were more like the French themselves than were the latter; and they could therefore be more easily assimilated to French culture than the Arabs." Wishes reveal more about their makers than their subjects.

[GNXP] New Post Up

Here, a post linking to today's posts on Ukrainian Muslims and Algerian Christians. It strikes me that the Ukrainian and Algerian situations are somewhat similar: two poor if promising countries on the fringes of a unifying Europe, both currently in the position of supplying raw materials and human labour to their former colonizers, both with enough space and.or impetus to prompt radical cultural shifts. The ideas of a re-Christianized Kabylia, or a Ukraine proportionally as Muslim as France or Germany, are just provocative enough to be potentially realizable.

[BRIEF NOTE] Absolutely My Last Note on the Schiavo Affair

My only point of agreement with John Derbyshire, and why I sent my parents that E-mail.

---[Reader] For all you know about what's going on inside Terri’s skull, she might be dreaming the most beautiful dreams in there.

---[JD] I suppose she might. She might also be in her 16th year of agonized uncontrollable screaming. I should think the latter, if she has any self-awareness at all, is far more probable.

[NON BLOG] Two Realizations

• While chatting with serod and runyon, I surprised myself by saying that I was happy with my situation in life. Which is true: I don't need or want material success or prosperity, really, so long as either would interfere with my perceived lifestyle of enjoying Toronto. I want to change since I clearly can't achieve anything of lasting global import in my current socioeconomic situation. Finding motivation, though, is an issue. This is changing, I suspect.


• While considering whether or not to pick up Cyril Collard's Savage Nights at Definitely Not the Rosedale Library, I again surprised myself by thinking that this protagonist too wouldn't be much of a positive role model for he dies. I tend to look to literature--social-scientific, literary--for role models, for ideas on how to behave myself. Much of the GLBT literature I've read--Guibert notably, also Holleran and White, also others--features the slow and agonizing and terribly sad and premature deaths of people my age via HIV/AIDS. I'm inclined to morbidity as is. Recommendations for more uplifting GLBT reading material?