She’s apparently “cut off from social life” and “deprived of identity,” he said. With all due respect, Monsieur President, there’s a better way to critique a cultural practice than totally discounting the agency of its practitioners. At the very least, please don’t talk shit about people you don’t know.
I sometimes wonder if it might be a good idea to institute a rating system for khutbahs, basically as a guidance for those preparing their sermons. I can’t remember the last time I felt so awkward at jum’a that I stopped looking up at the khateeb just to avoid eye contact. Actually, I do sort of remember, but I was sorry to have to do this again today. Honestly, the last thing I ever want to hear in a khutbah is how people should remove hair from the armpits and “shave the pubic area.” And this applies to both men and women, it was promptly clarified. (more…)
Filed under: Política
Sometimes I think Tom Friedman is so ridiculous that I can’t even believe they pay him to write crap for the NYT. Take, for instance, this line from his latest op-ed: “Is Facebook to Iran’s Moderate Revolution what the mosque was to Iran’s Islamic Revolution?” Like, seriously: WTF? Firstly, 1979 was not an “Islamic” revolution: it was an Iranian revolution that got co-opted by the Islamists. Secondly, it was organized on the streets, not in the mosques. I hate when journalists can’t write without resorting to such pigeonholing platitudes.
Do the halal butchers have any reason to be thankful to the New York Times? Indeed, they do. For apparently goat meat is the new fad, and of course our Muslim brothers have more goat than your average grocery in America. I remember reading Henry Alford’s funny article (“How I Learned to Love Goat Meat“) in the NYT a couple of months ago, but did not realize it’s actually affected the New York eating scene, as evident from this writer’s confession to his new “culinary obsession.” But for my desi friends, I’ve just got to quote the following from Alford:
When New York magazine proclaimed eating goat a “trendlet” last summer, one reader wrote on the magazine’s Web site, “Here are white people again!!!! Acting like they invented goat meat.”
LOL. To be honest, I have a love-hate relationship with goat meat. There’s no denying that Bengalis consider it a bit of a delicacy. Whenever I go home, my mom likes to plan out all my few days there just so she can make sure I get to eat all the things I “need to” (according to her), and that includes a fine khashi’r gosht dish at least once during the trip. But there’s an art to the whole thing, from the quality of meat you manage to buy to the way you cook, and so just like bad art, it may turn out to be rather unappealing if there’s a glitch at any stage of the process. You have to, for instance, bring the right balance to your eclectic mix of spices, achieve the right tenderness, and get rid of the notorious smell (Apparently, even “Chaucer said they ’stinken,’” like six centuries ago). Suffice it to say, I trust my mom to handle it much better than my relatively inexperienced cooking hands.
crhad Goat Meat
Today at the bookstore, I came across a copy of André Aciman’s memoir, Out of Egypt, which reminded me that I should write up my critique of Aciman’s much-circulated recent op-ed in the New York Times: “The Exodus Obama Forgot to Mention.” When I first read the piece, I was quite surprised that a scholar of his standing would write something so unhistorical. But before I go on to explain my reaction, let me note that I do agree with his main message. It is indeed a shame that few of us know this history, that most young Egyptians today have no idea about the vibrant Jewish community that lived among them less than a century ago.
What Aciman forgot to mention is why or how, and under what historical circumstances most of the Middle East’s Jews fled their homelands or were (unjustly) expelled from there by the governments. Aciman writes: “Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.” This is a downright dishonest and inaccurate picture, if only because of the glaring absence of the one big word you would expect to see here: “Israel.” (more…)
Dan Mathewson, a scholar of religion, has published an incisive analysis on disparities between the media coverage of Dr. George Tiller’s murderer and that of the man who killed an army recuiter in Arkansas. Whereas in the case of the latter, the media has paid a lot of attention to his religious background as a convert to Islam, in the case of the former, the fact of the man’s zealous attachment to Christianity has been basically set aside as unimportant. Junaid Afeef makes the same point in his piece at altmuslim, and further asks: why has Dr. Tiller’s murderer not been charged with terrorism, even though his act seems to meet the legal definition. (more…)
The NY Times had an interesting article about two Muslim artists based in New York: Asma Ahmed Shikoh and Negar Ahkami. You can see more of their work on their respective websites. I hope to be able to check out the exhibition on my next trip to the City.
I was really struck by Ahkami’s remarkably unique stylistic achievements. “The Fall” is a fascinating example. Among Shikoh’s works, I thought “Self-Portraits 1, 2 & 3” (or, the Statue of Liberty as a desi bride, a pregnant woman, and a mother with child) are quite interesting. Her “Beehive” is also an interesting project that involved collecting nearly a 100 actual hijabs mailed to her by women who wore them. As I examined a close-up photo of the ‘cells,’ I was thinking the piece could raise interesting questions about the currency of the headscarf as a ‘fetish’ in contemporary material culture.
Obama’s Cairo speech has obviously been the most talked about thing this past week. While I have been surveying the many varied praises and critiques out there, I was drawn to a set of responses on one particular aspect of the speech: the section on women’s rights. Fatemeh Fakhraie has shared her thoughtful observations here, mainly in response to other feminists who have found more to diss than to like in the speech.
A complaint by a certain Anne Applebaum caught my attention. She writes, in an otherwise positive take on the speech: “he could have spared us the comment about the ’struggle for womens’ equality in America,’ as if we were all in this together, us and the regimes who stone women for adultery.” This is a very interesting remark, because it objects to precisely one of the reasons why many of us might actually appreciate Obama’s speech, for his intelligent acknowledgment of nuance and complexity when it comes to such an issue. As Fatemeh notes, “Obama took care not to merely point fingers.” By recognizing problems within America while discussing those of “the Muslim world,” he made a very basic ethical gesture, one that I think is often crucial to resolving problems.
Applebaum’s perspective, however, is quite different. For her, the logic of differences between us and them reigns supreme. (more…)
Filed under: Islamica
In the comments section of a recent post by Yasir Qadhi at Muslim Matters, there’s a brief debate about “Asra Nomani, Irshad Manji etc.” and the “reason for why they behave the way they do.” One commenter said: “I wonder if it doesn’t simply have to do with arrogance, deliberate ignorance, and a liking for the spotlight.” This is, no doubt, a familiar argument (and I have myself alluded to the spotlight effect in a previous post on Irshad Manji here). But what struck me now is the realization that we never quite ask the same question about, say, the Sheikh. What are the reasons for why he behaves the way he does? In fact, to the extent that I know (of) them, I am more interested in the similarities between the three above-mentioned figures, whose respective worldviews reflect the decisive influence of their subjective personal experiences. In some ways, I am echoing here Mona Eltahawy’s musings on the remarkable fact that even with respect to their immense differences, both she and the Sheikh are the way they are because of their Saudi-influenced background. My point is not to suggest that regardless of their actual stances (‘liberal,’ ‘conservative,’ etc), the concerns of all of these people must therefore be illegitimate, but rather that a person(ality) is far too complex to merely explain away using arrogance or desire for fame. In other words, there’s got to be a better way to critique somebody than just arguing that s/he is not sincere.
As I procrastinate writing a paper on Abbasid history, I thought the following may be a source of some amusement:
Al-Fadl ibn al-Rabi’ said, “When Muhammad al-Amin succeeded his father Harun al-Rashid as Caliph in the year 193 [809], he ordered me to count the clothing, furnishings, vessels, and equipment in the stores. I summoned the secretaries and storekeepers and continued counting for four months, during which I inspected treasures which I did not dream the caliphal stores contained. Then I ordered them to set down a total for each kind. The list of contents was as follows:
- 4,000 embroidered robes,
- 4,000 silk cloak lined with sable, mink, and other furs
- 10,000 shirts and shifts
- 10,000 caftans
- 2,000 drawers of various kinds
- 4,000 turbans (more…)
