Table/Chart Of The Day
What better way to mark my return to blogging than with this chart (via Rafay Alam)? It synopsizes this post, which in turn argues that quitting Facebook is like the Hijrat-e-Medina. I've heard some great analogies in my time and some terrible analogies in my time, but I think this is the first that fits in both categories: it's so idiotic that I actually enjoyed it.
| Similarities between Hijrat-e-Madina, Migration to Pakistan and Quitting Facebook | Hijrat-e-Madina | Migration to Pakistan | Quit Facebook |
| |  |  |  |
| Why Required | |||
| Injustice based on religious discrimination towards the masses |  | | |
| Humiliating attitude of people in power towards Islam and Muslims | | | |
| Popular Hesitations for Hijrat | |||
| We have so much of property / resources here (Makkah / India / Facebook) | | | |
| What will the new land be like? We do not know anything about it. | | | |
| We will have to start over from scratch. | | | |
| We will have to leave our loved ones here | | | |
Labels:
Item of the day,
Pakistan
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Whenever a kneejerk reactionary panIslamist friend of mine talks about Khilafat, I remind him of what the last time a major pan-Islamist movement produced - the disastrous "Hijrat to Afghanistan" in 1920.
A very well written and well rehearsed post.
Am i missing something? It seems perfectly reasonable to me.
hahahah brilliantt :)
Excellente!
Of course, this also implies that eventually we will go back to conquer India and Facebook as well.
On a completely different note, Ahsan, you have to tell me how to post tables!
as fucktarded as AKS' posts.
Thanks for wasting my 2 minutes of my life.
Hilarious!! I wish I'd had this table when I was trying to explain the situation to people at work!
Question: for those of you who recieved your entire education in Pakistan, at any level of said education, were your required to take compulsory courses in logic and critical thinking? Were you ever offered any electives in these subjects?
I'm not saying it to be a jackass. Cuz the simple fact is that these things aren't even taught in the US until you reach college, and even then as electives.
But the point still stands.
Do readers and commentators in Pakistan not know what a false analogy is? Or the basic difference between inductive and deductive reasoning? Or how to detect the clever use of syllogisms?
Nowhere in these comments thus far, nor should I say the comments on the link Ahsan provided, has anyone systematically pointed out the fallacious reasoning in the chart. And I know the wiseacres among you are probably thinking "it's so stupid that I'm not going to waste my time refuting it." But when that attitude takes hold, people start thinking you're just an opinionated liberal who is more concerned with imitating 'western' opinions, than actually having principled, truely rational beliefs.
So for starters, while the Madani, Partition, and Facebook episodes may have in common the insulting of Muslims, they don't share causal links. Namely that in the first two, a reasonable argument could be made that Muslims were being harmed in their bodies and possessions. Facebook, despite some of the Jew bashing theories floating around out there, is not committed to maligning Muslims. They simultaneously play host to a number of pro-Muslim groups and local Muslim study circles [halaqas] in the US. They host Salafi pages, Deobandi pages, Sufi group pages, as well as pages for Islamic conferences and Milads in honor of the Prophet (s). So 'injustice towards the masses' is not a common sub-function of the three systems being compared and therefore that line of reasoning is debunked as a faulty anaolgy.
The same is true of the second proposition in the 'why required' category. I'm assuming by "people in power" they're ultimately referring to Mark Zuckerberg, the 26 year old co-founder and CEO of Facebook Inc. If that's the case, then this man has never made any insulting or otherwise anti-Islamic statement on any citable record. On the other hand, he, being himself a Jew, has defended the right of Holocaust deniers to have their own pages on his site, something that is deeply insulting to the majority of Jews in this world. So it seems that the "people in power" aren't interested in insulting Muslims. What they ARE interested in is preserving their customers' right to free speech. The issue here isn't a simple binary "you're either with the Muslims and take down the page, or your against the Muslims because you want to insult them." His fidelity is to his corporate earnings and preserving the freedom of expression on his site. What the authors of this chart are assuming is that his motive is to deliberately insult Muslims, which is an argument from ignorance, because they have no evidence to cite which says he respects Muslims, therefore he must hate and want to insult Muslims. This could easily be classified under a number of fallacies.
And none of the above goes to point out that the 'making Hijra' the authors are suggesting symbolically is begging the question that either banning or boycotting Facebook are the only ways to deal with this issue. It discounts the 'do nothing and disregard it' argument which wouldn't have brought nearly as much attention to the group as it subsequently gained. It discards the possibility of taking this as an opportunity to raise positive awareness using social networking sites. It neglects the possibility of even launcing defamation suits against the people who started the contest. And it leaves the highly plausible conclusion that if the 'offending of Muslim sensabilities' is the compass by which we judge what should be banned, then damn-near teh entire internet could fit into that loosely defined category.
As far as I know, there are not a single compulsory course till college level (I am still in college). However, there is one subject namely 'Critically Thinking'; optional in A'levels. But only a handful students ever take that. I know the basics.
XYZ: My admittedly low-tech solution is to simply highlight, copy and paste. But that always leaves the right end of the table out, as it is here.
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