19AR24-08

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AR 24:8 - The Muslim "republican" vs "monarchist" struggle

In this issue:

ISLAM - how "the conflict between monarchical and republican Islam" of the past reflects today's "decline of Islamism"

LONELINESS - "social media may actually be making the problem worse"

MEDITATION - "why meditation studies tend to be flawed"

Apologia Report 24:8 (1,416)

February 21, 2019

ISLAM

"Jamal Khashoggi and the Competing Visions of Islam" (New York Times, Oct 24 '18) -- by Faisal Devji, who teaches history <www.bit.ly/2tug3eI> at the University of Oxford. "The growing tensions between Turkey and Saudi Arabia after the murder of the Saudi journalist in Istanbul remind us of an older conflict between monarchical and republican Islam."

Devji explains that Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party are "widely believed to have subscribed to the Islamist ideal of power democratically achieved - an ideal represented by the Muslim Brotherhood."

In the "battle between monarchical and republican Islam ... both sides deployed the Islamists against one another." Devji traces Islamism from the Cold War to the present where "it appears to have lost its way, allowing social conservatives a place in the public life of [some] countries while mutating into something barely recognizable with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"As the remnant of a much larger struggle, the competition between Muslim republicans and monarchists represents a politics in terminal decline. Most of the region's royal houses are modern creations, encouraged if not implanted by colonial powers. They possess no worked-out political idea or theory to legitimize themselves, relying instead on a transactional mixture of privileges, payoffs and punishments to secure the allegiance of their subjects....

"Islamism, for its part, has become a red herring in accounts of Middle Eastern politics. The Muslim Brotherhood was not at the forefront of the Egyptian revolution but caught unawares by it. The party was furthermore brought down by a movement as popular as the one that had put it in power, thus allowing the army to intervene and impose its dictatorship on the country. The Brotherhood's opponents were as religiously observant as its supporters, which meant the dissolution of a narrative that pitted popular Islamists against secular elites. The democratization and fragmentation of Islam has shifted it beyond the grasp of any party or group.

"Having torn their religion from the grasp of its traditional authorities among both clerics and mystics, Islamists were themselves set aside by the rise of jihad movements in the 1990s, which reject their visions of electoral democracy or even revolutions to set up Islamic republics. And like the Islamists before them, these militant outfits are now used by the region's governments against one another even when they cannot be fully controlled.

"The decline of Islamism can be gauged by the way in which the Turkish government has crushed its former ally, the Gulen <www.bit.ly/2SdSbGb> movement, which it accuses of fomenting the attempted coup in 2016 with foreign help. Turkey retaliated like other Middle Eastern governments to eliminate an Islamist threat with international links and foreign sponsors. In doing so it demonstrated that Islam will be tolerated only if it is put in the exclusive service of the state, paradoxically setting more limits upon religion than either the most secular or theocratic of countries."

Devji observes that "The outrage in the West over Mr. Khashoggi's killing ... cannot conceal how bereft of ideological features the event is, indicating instead the brutal secularization of politics in a region marked by the desire for hegemony of its three remaining powers - Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia." <www.nyti.ms/2BxZkvs>

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LONELINESS

"An Epidemic of Loneliness" (no byline) -- "Is isolation more common? It appears to be. Between 1985 and 2009, the average American's social network shrank by more than one-third, defined by the number of close confidants. ...

"[D]espite seemingly infinite opportunities to connect online, social media may actually be making the problem worse. Scrolling through an endless stream of curated photos of parties, vacations, family gatherings, and weddings may increase feelings of being left out or dissatisfaction with one's own life. In one study of Americans ages 19-32, the top 25 percent of social media users were twice as likely to report feeling lonely as the people using it least. Some researchers say loneliness began becoming widespread long before the internet, when the Industrial Revolution broke up tightly knit agricultural communities."

The sidebar "Alone, angry - and intensely partisan" begins: "Some researchers believe that America's increasingly polarized politics - and the partisan viciousness on social media - may be at least partly the product of increasing loneliness." The Week, Jan 11 '19, p10.

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MEDITATION

"Bad Science? Many of the studies touting meditation and mindfulness benefits are not methodologically sound" by Matthew Abrahams (Tricycle, Wtr '18) -- "It seems as if every day a new article is published promoting the benefits of meditation. According to the litany of reports, meditation can help with stress, anxiety, depression, sleep, and can even make you a better, more compassionate person. But according to a 2018 meta-analysis of meditation studies, the science behind these claims is plagued by methodological flaws.

"The analysis - 'The limited prosocial effects of meditation: A systematic review and meta-analysis,' <www.go.nature.com/2S6bctX> written by Ute Kreplin, Miguel Farias, and Inti A. Brazil and presented in the open-access journal Scientific Reports [8:2403, (2018)] - looked at studies of the supposed prosocial effects of meditation, such as increasing compassion, connectedness, and empathy, or decreasing aggression and prejudice. They found that 'the methodological quality of the studies was generally weak (61%), while one third (33%) was graded as moderate, and none had a grading of strong.' Other investigations, including a 2015 analysis of lovingkindness meditation studies published in the journal Mindfulness <www.bit.ly/2V7BApg> and a 2014 lovingkindness study published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, found similar results. And a 2009 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine <www.bit.ly/2XcZj9f> found that results from studies purporting to show the benefits of mindfulness-based stress reduction techniques also suffered from methodological flaws.

"Tricycle spoke to Ute Kreplin, one of the authors of the meta-analysis. Kreplin received her PhD in Affective Neuroscience at Liverpool John Moores University, teaches psychology at Massey University in New Zealand, and has conducted research at Oxford and Coventry universities in the United Kingdom. Here she discusses why meditation studies tend to be flawed and what that means for meditators - if anything." <www.bit.ly/2BGBH3N>

The abstract of the Scientific Reports article cited above reads: "Many individuals believe that meditation has the capacity to not only alleviate mental-illness but to improve prosociality. This article systematically reviewed and meta-analysed the effects of meditation interventions on prosociality in randomized controlled trials of healthy adults. Five types of social behaviours were identified: compassion, empathy, aggression, connectedness and prejudice. Although we found a moderate increase in prosociality following meditation, further analysis indicated that this effect was qualified by two factors: type of prosociality and methodological quality. Meditation interventions had an effect on compassion and empathy, but not on aggression, connectedness or prejudice. We further found that compassion levels only increased under two conditions: when the teacher in the meditation intervention was a co-author in the published study; and when the study employed a passive (waiting list) control group but not an active one. Contrary to popular beliefs that meditation will lead to prosocial changes, the results of this meta-analysis showed that the effects of meditation on prosociality were qualified by the type of prosociality and methodological quality of the study. We conclude by highlighting a number of biases and theoretical problems that need addressing to improve quality of research in this area."

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