Painting Fakes

One of the mistakes we make as Westerners is that if we want to know what Muslims think, we go and read the Q'uran.  Not that I think we shouldn't read it - we really should - but we shouldn't assume that once we have read it we know how Muslims think.  What's to say they interpret it the same way we do?  What's to say they emphasise the bits that stand out to us? Of course the question "what do Muslims think?" is highly simplistic.  There are over 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, of all ages, a wide variety of nationalities, languages and cultures and widely differing levels of education.  Naturally they don't all think the same thing.  Still the obvious way to find out what Muslims think is to ask them. That's why I am surprised that in all the media I have been seeing on Islamic issues in the past few years, and the various bits of reading I've done, no-one has yet referred to Riaz Hassan's Inside Muslim Minds. Hassan is a South A

Cricket commentators around the world are asking, "can Test cricket survive?" They're particularly asking it here in Australia because we have just witnessed a soggy and depressing end to one of the least interesting Test series in history, played between Australia and a team of young men impersonating the West Indies.  Not many people turned up to watch, TV ratings were lukewarm and as one wit put it, by the third test even Mother Nature got bored and decided it was better to spend the time watering the grass. Meanwhile Australia's domestic cricketers, along with a fair number of actual West Indians and a smattering from other countries, have been playing T20 cricket in the Big Bash League in front of packed stadia and large TV audiences.  Even the women's version of the competition, in its very first year, is attracting enough interest for Channel 10 to increase its coverage. Of course threats to Test Cricket are not new.  In 1960, long before TV covera

When I was looking for Christmas songs for church earlier this month, I came across my words and chords for this little gospel music gem we used to sing way back in the early 1980s. It's got a pretty, catchy tune and simple words, and it's easy for a ham guitarist like me to play.  Plus back in the day we were heavily into trying to convert people (not very successfully) and this song really tried hard to do that. Here's the thing though.  It never struck me as odd that although it calls itself 'A Christmas Song for All Year Round' it's actually an Easter song.  Look at the words. I wonder if this Christmas they'll begin to understand The Jesus that they celebrate was much more than a man. Cos the way the world is I don't see how people can deny The only way to save us was for Jesus Christ to die. And I know that if St Nicholas was here he would agree That Jesus gave the greatest gift of all to you and me They led him to the slaughter on

As you know I like a good music memoir.  I don't even mind a bad one.  Being a music obsessive I like the insight a memoir can give me into the songs and the times, the way you can get a little way into the head of the person who wrote the songs or performed them and see the process of their creation.  Many of my favourite musicians are getting on in years and are not as prolific as they once were and are turning to writing as way to fill their time, boost their income or secure their legacy, so I have plenty to choose from. Of course the down side is that the skill of writing a book is very different to that of writing a song.  A song is pithy, allusive, with a compactness that disciplines the composer to say what they need to say in a few short verses.  A memoir stretches out over thousands of words and lots of years.  It needs good (or at least adequate) writing to keep the reader engaged, characters with depth and resonance and a story that keeps you reading. The most obvio

If you've been reading, you'll know that I'm on the hunt for simple diagrams that can explain the entire world at a glance. Here's another one A couple of years ago I did a piece of research for Shelter NSW on the redevelopment of public housing estates.  If you're a real nerd you can read it here , but unless you're especially interested in the literature on public housing renewal you'll find it very tedious. One of the many reports I read involved the researchers interviewing residents who had lived in the midst of a redevelopment project in Minto, Sydney.  They suggested that a large part of the reason for the disconnect between the plans made by the redevelopment authority and its contractors, and the preferences of the tenants, was that they view the neighbourhood very differently. Redevelopment professionals - architects, planners, project managers and so forth - see the suburb as a grid, as if viewed from the air, and for them all parts of the g

I haven't been blogging for a while because I've been too busy with other things - a couple of weeks holiday in Western Australia, lots of work before and after to clear two weeks for a holiday, a journey to a strange land to do a job I can't tell you about.... Anyway, I can tell you about a book I've just finished reading which provides a kind of counterpoint to our current moral panic about Islam .  It's called The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity,  and it was written back in 2001 by Philip Jenkins who at that point was Distinguished Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University although he has since moved on to other academic posts.  To some extent it may be a little aged, but because it deals with long term trends (both past and future) it remains largely relevant in 2015. We often think of Christianity as a Western European religion, centred on Italy, France and Spain if you are Catholic, and on Germany, Netherlands and Britain i

When I was a young man the World Government Conspiracy was quite popular (or should I say unpopular?) in the conservative church circles in which I moved for a while.  The basic idea was that various powerful forces were working in secret to create a single world government, perhaps with the United Nations as its initial vehicle.  This government would appear benign and desirable initially, but once firmly established would show its true Satanic character in fulfillment of various prophecies in the Book of Revelation. There were a number of usual suspects in this conspiracy - Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Club of Rome, Jewish bankers (or Jews in general) and Communists.  Many elements were imported from earlier conspiracy theories.  For instance, the Jewish aspect of the conspiracy was imported directly from Nazi propaganda.   The Protocols of the Elders of Zion -  a clumsy forgery created by the Russian secret service which purported to describe a Jewish plot for world dominatio

There are many different ways to bring on the Apocalypse.  One of them, apparently, is to be so careless as to lose all the honeybees. Bees make honey, which is very tasty, but they also cross-pollinate plants, including many of our food crops.  Apparently about one third of all the crops in the world rely on bees to pollinate them, including most fruits, nuts and seed crops.  If the honeybees were to disappear some of the slack might be taken up by other species including other bees, butterflies, dragonflies and birds.  However, none of these do such a good job, and at such volume, as our cultivated honeybees. Unfortunately, large-scale honeybee loss is not pure speculation, it is an actual, present risk.  I've just been reading a book on the subject by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum called A World Without Bees, first published in 2008 .   Benjamin is an environmental reporter for the UK Guardian  and McCallum is her partner and fellow hobby apiarist. A World Without Bee