Fifteen Christians and 15 Turks bound at sea in one ship in a terrible storm, and the pilot declaring a necessity of casting one half of these persons into the sea, that the rest might be saved, they all agreed that the persons to be cast away should be set out by lot in this manner, viz., the 30 persons should be placed in a round form like a ring and then, beginning to count at one of the passengers and proceeding regularly every ninth person should be cast into the sea until of the 30 persons there remained only 15. The question is, how these 30 persons ought to be placed that the lot might fall infallibly upon the 15 Turks, and not upon any of the 15 Christians.

BBC News entitled their piece “Egypt mourns ‘headscarf martyr‘”. Additionally, they describe the murderer’s initial actions toward Sherbini as “insulting her religion” – an inaccurate statement, as W. insulted Sherbini herself, not her religion. Making such a statement skews the reality of the case and paints the story as the “Muslim angry over insult to Islam” trope. Stating this lie trivializes Sherbini’s very real experience of personal hate and Islamophobia. It diminishes W.’s hateful actions toward a Muslim woman. It ignores the fact that it was human being who was hurt, not a religion.

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond…

California: FBI investigating death of Muslim leader in High Desert

The FBI is investigating the death of a Muslim leader whose body was found inside a burned home in Yermo that had recently been spraypainted with racial epithets and Nazi symbols…

When firefighters doused the flames 40 minutes later, they found the body of 51-year-old Imam Ali Mohammed inside the East Yermo Road house he had moved his family out of last month.

"We don't know if it was simply an accident or if there is foul play involved," said sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Beavers. "We just don't know if a crime occurred yet."

(Why is this a mystery?)

Seattle: Man charged with hate crime for threatening Muslim woman

The woman, who was holding her six-month-old son, tried to reason with the 24-year-old Auburn man by saying that her "her clothing does not make her a bad person," court documents said. When the insults didn't stop, prosecutors said, the woman backed away from Garner and tried to shield her son from him.

Garner then cursed at the woman, got in her face and pulled out a large sheathed knife, court papers said. Garner told the woman he was going to "cut" the woman and her baby with the knife, charging documents said.

Minnesota: Minnesota withdraws "Run Hadji Run" fireworks from shelves

Miami: Miami-Dade police have charged two teens in the latest vandalism of a West Kendall mosque and school that has been targeted twice this year

Gonzalez-Vaca told police that the vandalism had been planned for months. He said "all Muslims are terrorists," according to the report….

Six months ago, the mosque was sprayed with 51 bullets that left broken windows and holes in the building's golden dome. In June 2005, unknown assailants used a large rock to shatter the door of the Islamic center, which draws 500 Muslims for Friday prayers and has a 250-student religious school.

The year before, the center's sign near Southwest 147th Avenue was defaced with a Nazi swastika and profanity. No arrests have been made in the prior vandalisms.

Thousands of people attended her funeral today in Alexandria, carrying signs calling her 'the martyr to the headscarf.' Egyptian bloggers have lashed out against the lack of international press coverage of her death. They have also criticized Germany for charging the attacker with manslaughter rather than murder, and for calling him a 'lone wolf,' ignoring widespread prejudice against Muslims in Germany.

Reports that Michael Jackson had converted to Islam created a minor buzz on Muslim blogs last fall, but I didn't hear much about it elsewhere. Part of me was okay with that: the guy had become so weird that I'm not sure he did Islam's image any favors. But most Muslim bloggers who talked about it reported it as a happy event and welcomed him into the fold, under his new name, Mikaeel Jibril. A few other articles came out a week or two later saying it was just a rumor: that Jermaine had converted in the '80s, but Michael never did. Both Yusuf Islam and Dawud Wharnsby Ali, who were supposedly present at said conversion, said it wasn't true. Michael himself neither confirmed nor denied the story, though he certainly must have been aware of it.

We'll never know. But I thought the silence outside of Muslim Blogistan was telling. There are more Black Muslims in the U.S. than there are Arab Muslims, their history here pre-dates immigrant Islam, and most of them are Sunni, not Nation of Islam. But in the media they are presented as exceptions, or at best as avid followers of Louis Farrakhan. The Islam of someone like Dave Chappelle is rarely mentioned, and Michael Jackson was probably likewise considered an outlier, as he was in so many other ways, so reports of his conversion were ignored, doubted, or dismissed as a stunt, despite the otherwise obsessive interest in his personal life. Thus the narrative of who counts as a "real" Muslim remains intact. A Pakistani man who kills his wife does so because the Qur'an told him to, but even during the height of the War On Terror the D.C. sniper — also Muslim — was slotted into the Violent Black Male category. Not a category that's any better, mind you, but evidence of the way both stereotypes are calcified. Black and Middle Eastern men are both dangerous, but for different reasons.

In contrast, there was the case of John Walker Lindh, a devout Muslim by about any standard you care to employ, but he was white, so the media treated him like a mixed-up boy-child from northern California who dabbled in terrorism because he was spoiled by his hippie parents. Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a Black Muslim convert who killed an army recruiter in Arkansas, was not treated as part of a larger conspiracy until it was discovered that he'd traveled to Yemen, although he was charged with terrorism — unlike Scott Roeder, a white man who engaged in a different politically-motivated murder one day earlier. Roeder was described as mentally ill.

Michael Jackson's funeral won't answer any questions about his relationship with Islam, if there even was one. The need for an autopsy means he couldn't have been buried within 24 hours, and at any rate it's common among American converts to have mixed ceremonies. But the conversation still interests me.

Al-Azhar mosque

So Obama is planning to speak in Egypt on June 4, a choice some are saying is a signal that America wants our "autocratic ally" to be a model for other Arab nations. He's rejected the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh in favor of Cairo, a move that is considered bold, since anything in Cairo will be harder to secure.

Now the question is finding a venue within Cairo, and there's talk that it may be Al-Azhar, one of the oldest universities in the world and Egypt's center of Islamic learning. Pro: Al-Azhar can hold 1,000 people. Con: What to do with all the shoes?

I doubt this will be the final choice, but I'll be interested how the media in both countries will respond if it is. In Egypt Al-Azhar is the center of state-sponsored Islam; Sheikh Tantawi is known as a mouthpiece of the government, always giving Muslim cover for Mubarak's policy decisions. Obama speaking there would be an endorsement of Mubarak, not the Islamists. But would that be understood in the U.S.? Or would it just be read as Barack HUSSEIN Obama speaking at a mosque?

Check out the trailer for New Muslim Cool, a documentary about a Puerto Rican Muslim community in Pittsburgh:

From the web site:

Puerto Rican American rapper Hamza Pérez ended his life as a drug dealer 12 years ago, and started down a new path as a young Muslim.

Now he’s moved to Pittsburgh’s tough North Side to start a new religious community, rebuild his shattered family, and take his message of faith to other young people through his uncompromising music as part of the hip-hop duo M-Team.

Raising his two kids as a single dad and longing for companionship, Hamza finds love on a Muslim networking website and seizes the chance for happiness in a second marriage.

But when the FBI raids his mosque, Hamza must confront the realities of the post-9/11 world, and challenge himself. He starts reaching for a deeper understanding of his faith, discovering new connections with people from Christian and Jewish communities.

NEW MUSLIM COOL takes viewers on Hamza’s ride through the streets, projects and jail cells of urban America, following his spiritual journey to some surprising places —where we can all see ourselves reflected in a world that never stops changing.

I need to go soak my feet in hot water just thinking about it.

photo courtesy of yasmine

[x-posted at HijabMan.com]

When HijabMan posted his entry on the murder of Aasiya Hassan yesterday, "On Giving Men a Free Pass," I was thankful. It was, I thought, another sign that the Muslim community is taking the issue of domestic violence seriously. In some cases the talk is coming from corners where the discussion is long overdue – there's no use pretending otherwise – but if there is any small good that can come out of this woman's brutal murder I hope that it will be in the form of more attention to violence against women, and the need for Muslim leaders, in particular, to address it.

Secular North American feminists have been at the forefront of this issue since the 1970s. In theory, they should be playing a leadership role as well. Instead, though, we get quotes like this from NOW-New York, attacking the use of the term "domestic violence" in Aasiya Hassan's case:

The ridiculous juxtaposition of "domestic" and "beheading" in the same journalistic breath points up the inherent weakness of the whole "domestic violence" lexicon… This was, apparently, a terroristic version of "honor killing," a murder rooted in cultural notions about women's subordination to men. Are we now so respectful of the Muslim's religion that we soft-peddle atrocities committed in it's
name?

I'm not sure what a "terroristic version" of an honor killing is, or how it's worse than the regular kind. But I do know that "cultural notions about women's subordination to men" are not limited to Muslim countries. And the thing is? Marcia Pappas, NOW-New York's president, should know that, too. I expect sensationalistic coverage from FOX News (who tell us divorce "is not permitted in their culture," and that such crimes will increase if left "unchecked by Western law"). But mainstream feminist groups like NOW keep doggedly insisting, year after year, that no, really, we speak for all women, not just white middle-class women. Really! We swear! And yet when something like this happens, they inevitably revert to the same tired script: When white men kill white women, they do it out of misogyny. But when brown men kill brown women, they do it because they're, well, brown.

Last year I attended a conference at UMass-Boston called "Engaging Islam," where Lila Abu-Lughod, a Palestinian-American feminist anthropologist who has done work in Egypt, gave a talk about honor killings. As she was researching this issue, she found that many cases of family-based violence in the Muslim world were labeled "honor crimes" but did not have the characteristics that would merit this label (i.e., a girl killed by male family members over real or imagined sexual indiscretions); for example, one case was that of a Palestinian father who likely killed his daughter because she was about to expose him as an informant. While family-based violence should be a serious issue in any circumstance, there was nothing uniquely Muslim about this case. This lack of distinction between forms of violence, she found, was typical of research on the subject; reported numbers of honor killings varied dramatically, from fourteen a year to four thousand a year, depending on how "honor killing" was defined.

She also asked how descriptions of these situations capture the flow of life-as-lived in areas where these acts are practiced. In her own fieldwork with the Awlad 'Ali Bedouin in Egypt, she said, the emphasis on honor and morality was true, but girls' lives could not be reduced to those factors – as in any community they were valued for their individual personalities, scolded for their mistakes, and so forth. And, as in all societies, there were violent husbands, brothers who committed incest, and other transgressions, but the perpetrators were considered as individuals, not men who were acting out their "culture." Finally, she said there is no evidence of honor crimes being on the increase (because the state of research on the subject is so inconsistent), but if this is true, it's more likely to be found in areas of rapidly changing social circumstances, rather than being an example of societies following an "ancient code of morality."

Was Aasiya Hassan's murder an honor killing? There's no evidence of that. We've only heard that she wanted a divorce. While that clearly infuriated her husband, there's nothing "Muslim" about such fury. It has been well-documented that one of the most dangerous times, for a woman who has been the victim of domestic violence, is when she finally decides to leave. The question, for feminists, is how to condemn honor crimes without playing into a wider discourse that depicts Muslim women as abject and "Other."

This is not the first time that a large, mainstream feminist organization that claims to speak for all women has made it clear that it only speaks for some. We should expect better.

The problem with articles on gay Muslims is that they often paint a distinct binary of the Muslim identity as constraining, conservative, and judgmental, and the gay identity as free, liberating, and natural. There’s a reality that developed this stereotype, but it’s not quite that simple. When a gay Muslim throws off her Muslim identity because it conflicts with her gayness (as some Muslims do), it’s not as though all the problems of being gay disappear and life is suddenly easy. And it’s certainly not as though families, if only they weren’t Muslim, would accept a gay child. It’s true that many Muslims and many immigrants don’t view homosexuality favorably, but it’s not a position that’s unique to these communities, even when it may be more prevalent in them.

Excellent (and succinct!) analysis of a popular media trope, from Muslimah Media Watch.

Tensions that had been boiling at Elmhurst College spilled over this week amid reports that a Muslim student had been physically assaulted by a masked gunman.

The 19-year-old sophomore said she was hit with a gun in a bathroom in the college's science center Thursday night, authorities said. Anti-Muslim graffiti was written on the wall, authorities said, similar to a threat written on the same student's locker the week before that said: "Die Muslims, Rid us of your filth."

Villa Park mosque vandalized for 4th time

The Islamic Foundation Mosque in west suburban Villa Park [Illinois --ed.] said today it was vandalized for the fourth time in less than two months when someone threw a 5-gallon tank of flammable liquid into the mosque's school on Tuesday, breaking two windows.

On Friday, September 26, the end of a week in which thousands of copies of Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West — the fear-mongering, anti-Muslim documentary being distributed by the millions in swing states via DVDs inserted in major newspapers and through the U.S. mail — were distributed by mail in Ohio, a "chemical irritant" was sprayed through a window of the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, where 300 people were gathered for a Ramadan prayer service. The room that the chemical was sprayed into was the room where babies and children were being kept while their mothers were engaged in prayers. This, apparently, is what the scare tactic political campaigning of John McCain's supporters has led to — Americans perpetrating a terrorist attack against innocent children on American soil.

unusualmusic has news & links.

All happy book publications are alike — the book finally comes out. All unhappy book publications are unhappy in their own ways — except when they involve Islam. Then the story follows a familiar plot.

Yay! I thought. Someone is finally talking about the shoddy research that goes into mass market paperbacks about Islam!

But then I read it, and no, it's chastising territorial academics and those who cower in the face of terrorist threats and Muslims who make such "a fuss" about Muhammad. That familiar plot.

On the way there we went past Cairo's aqueduct, built in the Middle Ages. We had a guide that day, and as we drove by he told us all about the lively textile district below. Inelegantly, I asked him if it wasn't also Cairo's slaughterhouse district. He seemed a bit embarrassed about this and said that technically that was true but the slaughterhouses were slowly being moved outside the city. A moment later we drove by a dead horse lying by the side of the road. He cleared his throat and said, "Of course, this hasn't happened completely yet."

Since he didn't seem interested in talking about that anymore and instead went on with telling my dad about Salah el-Din and the Mameluks, I took it upon myself to tell K. — who was sitting in the backseat with me — that this area was also famous as a place to buy drugs. Her father and I, I said, had a friend in college who was very wealthy and told people his family had made their money in the Gulf, but really he'd grown up in the slaughterhouse district and had his entire education financed by his uncle, a heroin dealer. He seemed like such a well-mannered boy that you would never guess he'd grown up in such a tough district, but one time he failed a course at AUC and in retaliation blew up his professor's car.

This isn't relevant to Coptic Cairo. I just think of that story whenever I drive through this area and needed to tell someone. K. seemed more interested in that than in Salah el-Din.

The area itself is a gated community. Like, there was an actual gate, with soldiers, that we had to pass through first. Directly inside there were a few gift shops and kiosks, and (once again!) I marveled at how much Eastern Christianity has in common with Islam, since at first glance I mistook these for glass Ramadan lamps.

We began by stopping at the remnants of the fortress of Babylon, a Roman fort that was built in this area before the city became Fustat, before Fustat became Cairo. This thing is old as hell.

From there we went to The Hanging Church, The Church of Saint Barbara, The Ben Ezra Synagogue, and The Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, where legend has it Jesus, Mary, and Joseph found shelter during their escape to Egypt. There is a crypt underneath it that runs all the way to the Nile. We saw the stairs going down to it, but couldn't go inside because they were clearing it of water. (Unfortunately I couldn't take pictures inside any of these places.)

As interesting as all this was (and it was), what I found most fascinating was the architecture around these churches. I'd assumed "Coptic Cairo" was just a district like any other, one that kind of bleeds into other areas. So I was surprised that you have to walk down INTO it, and that it's walled off from the neighborhoods around it. Next to all these historical buildings — like "Islamic Cairo" — you have regular apartments, with people hanging out their laundry and watching television. But the place feels like it's a thousand years old.

I've never been to Jerusalem, but it's what I imagine Jerusalem to look like.

This isn't true.

WHAT I WAS EXPECTING: People would be watching all the crap TV we export, including our crap news, including FOX. If someone spoke enough English, and cared enough, they could, in theory, watch all this crap American TV and come to the conclusion that the American people are either bombastic and stupid or decent and well-intentioned but either way they are separate from their government. Which is criminally insane.

WHAT I'VE FOUND INSTEAD: It's the other way around. The government looks smart, the people invisible (at best) or (at worst) in need of guidance from our overlords.

I was thrilled to get CNN International, since it's so much better than the regular CNN and in Boston we only get it for one hour a day. The problem is… it's too good. When Jesse Helms died there were no sappy and embarrassing obituaries, nor any glee from other corners. It was just reported. Here's who he is, he's dead now, moving on to unrest in Pakistan or child soldiers in West Africa. And the John Edwards affair? Only made the scroll on the bottom of the news. If I didn't have internet I would have missed it entirely. (I'm assuming they made more of it at home.) There's none of the joking about politicians, nothing about Bush's gaffes and failed policies. He does stuff and it's reported. Objectively and without context. Like he's a real politician, the kind other countries have.

I never thought I'd miss the underbelly of American media, but after being here for almost two months, watching only CNN and BBC and Al-Jazeera English, I've started seeing the U.S. in a different light. On television, our government looks scary-competent. It looks cold. And the American people — when they are featured at all, which is rare — look like cold and calculating minions of it. We look much more intentional than we really are. "Yes," we are saying to the world (unsmiling), "George Bush is our president. We like him, because he is powerful. We are more powerful than you."

One can, and I probably would, argue that this is closer to The Truth than the Jay Leno/Jon Stewart version of America, where George is a fuck-up who lies and bumbles, but not really Darth Vader, and the American people just kind of got stuck with him ha ha oh well.

Yet this cold version also misses the level and intensity of American opposition. I've gotten frustrated with German friends in the past who are critical of the U.S. government, particularly this administration, but obstinately refuse to acknowledge that I am too, probably way more than they are. But now I can kind of see it, because people who speak for me are not in power, and in this kind of news format, where it's Australia (60 seconds) –> France (30 seconds) –> South Africa (60 seconds) –> U.S. (30 seconds) –> Russia (60 seconds)….. there's no room at all for people like me. So why WOULD they think I exist? They watch the news, right, they're informed? And they don't see me. So my opposition looks like a defensive posture I'm adopting only because I'm under fire, in the moment, rather than the thing that drives me every day of my life.

It's making me re-think some of my reactions to Egyptian, and more broadly Middle Eastern, reactions to American policy. If you imagine an America with NO Left — not an ineffectual, underfunded, oppressed, or just generally embarrassing Left, the kind we complain about to each other, but literally NO Left, no anti-racist movement, no religions outside of God-told-me-to Crusader Christianity, no voices at all other than those of 5 or 6 politicians who are photographed disembarking from airplanes — I can see why it probably seems hopeless that anyone could ever deal with us. And maybe it really is! That's not my point. My point is that at home I feel American opposition and diversity. Here, I don't see it.

His movies aren't as hard to find as a lot of other Arab films are, but they're not easily accessible, either. The Alexandria series is on Netflix. I watched it, and I think I can say I liked it, but because it's meant to be a biography that mirrors Egypt's modern history you have to know a lot of modern Egyptian history to understand it as anything but a biography. I understood just enough of that to understand how much I must be missing. (I'm guessing it'd be like trying to watch a highbrow Wayne's World if you're not American. You'd think the story was the point, not the 9560949032845 inside references.) I'm hoping some of his other stuff eventually becomes available in the U.S. Or maybe it is and I'm not looking hard enough.

Here's a guide to his work, going back to 1950, just before the revolution.

And a biography.

My dad waited for me in the courtyard while I went into the women's area. The invited him in with me but he declined, which I thought was cool. When I came back outside a few guys had gathered around him and were reciting the Qur'an. Not to him, exactly, but within earshot (see above), which I thought was interesting because it's an older style of instruction and I'm glad he got to see that. I don't know how the university operates now, but historically Islamic universities didn't have "classes" in the sense that we think of them now. Back then the senior clerics would lean against the walls in the courtyard and give lectures, while the younger students milled about and listened to the ones they chose to hear. They progressed individually, on no fixed timetable, by proving their mastery of the religion to senior sheikhs. (Kind of like unschooling.)

Inside the women's area a few women were praying, and several more were sleeping. I've always liked that about mosques, that sleeping is allowed and common. You have to feel either very safe or very desperate to sleep in public. Mosques accommodate both.

This is the main prayer hall. We got there just in time to watch midday prayer (no pictures of that, though).

Part of the original madrassa:

A cat naps next to freshly baked bread off to the side of the madrassa:

The outer courtyard:

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Even after visiting it, I can't tell you exactly what it IS. A mausoleum, a school, a palace, a mosque, a cistern, a theater — and further down the street, a hotel — but I think what makes it notable isn't its architecture (although that's impressive) or the functions it served (although they were too) but that it's an early example of a _public_ building. It wasn't just built for the glory of a sultan, or even the glory of God, but for the people, ordinary Cairenes, to use.

Which is not to say Al-Ghouri himself was a great guy. By all accounts he seems like a bit of a dick. But he was a dick who apparently believed in giving people gardens.

View of the main courtyard from below and from above. This was a Sufi hostel. There is a stage because they still hold performances here, and during Ramadan people will sleep here:

..

On the left is the main hall, if you can call it that, of the mausoleum. Al-Ghouri himself isn't buried here, but his wife and children and concubine are. They died of the plague.

On the right is a fountain. After you're dead, it's said, there is little that can help you; your life as you've lived it is the only thing that matters on Judgment Day. One of the exceptions to this is if you've built a public good that will continue to serve people after you're gone. A fountain is the traditional example. Here you can see where the water was poured; passersby could come and drink from it without having to enter the building itself. There was one of these on each of three walls.

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They've turned one room into a theater and apparently still hold concerts here, too, every weekend:

The domed ceiling over the theater:

Below the mausoleum was a cistern I wanted to see. The guide was open to that, but he seemed kind of embarrassed and warned me that, um, the steps were small. Oh, that's no problem! I reassured him. Until I saw them. They weren't so much "stairs" as a choppy ramp. They were tiny and sloped sharply downwards. I tried 5 or 6 times but ultimately chickened out.

My dad was braver, though:

I took this one from the balcony of the old kuttab, a school traditionally attached to a mosque where poor children were taught to read and write from the Qur'an. Mosques and other religious institutions were the main vehicle of education right up until the late Ottoman period in the early 20th century — which is probably also why people (Westerners) misuse the word "madrasa," which on its own has no religious connotations; the word just means "school":

Here, by the way, is a 19th century painting of the same scene.

Street life below:

(Later I bought two tops down there, from a 14-year-old girl named Aisha. I was ten pounds short of her final asking price and was unsure whether to try to haggle harder or just give them back when she said, very shyly, "I like your bracelets." I took them off and we made a trade. Barter seemed appropriate to the setting.)

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The mashrabeya (latticework) over the windows allowed women to see out without letting others see in. Windows aren't made like that anymore, of course, but they're still a common sight in this area.

Finally we went to the roof, where there was a beautiful view of Islamic Cairo's skyline:

I love this part of the city so, so much.

+ her point about class and education is an important one
+ her dead serious demeanor interspersed with hilarious pics of Geert Wilders with a pen up his nose, Laura Bush, The Virgin Mary, and a woman covered in bubble wrap = love
+ I enjoy bashing the Dutch

People sometimes write off Khan el-Khalili, Egypt's grand bazaar, as a tourist trap, and it's easy to see why. All the vendors know some English (and some French, and Russian, and Italian, and German….) and they all but assault you trying to get you to come into their shops. Usually it's something as simple as "want silver?" or "best perfume!", but sometimes their pitches are more creative ("This is the best place to spend all your money!" "If you have any money left, I will take it for you, no broblem!"). A good portion of what's sold is kitschy souvenirs, and the prices for things like tea and soda can be double or triple what they are in normal parts of the city.

But to leave it at that misses the history, I think. The Khan goes back to the 1300s, and has been Egypt's major souq for hundreds of years. (It may have been indirectly responsible for the discovery of the Americas, since it was the site of Egypt's spice market, which Europe sought to bypass by finding a new route to India.) So as aggressive as the vendors are, I can't imagine they're much different than the vendors of the 1500s or the 1700s, who would have likewise been catering to international travelers. International trade is hardly a post-globalization development.

It's also just a popular shopping spot, for Cairenes, especially its western edge, Al-Muski Street, which is still the best place in Cairo to get bargain prices on linens, dishes, underwear, and other less romantic household items. There are also several still-functioning mosques in this district, as well as residences. So while the concentration of tourists is high, it's not an experience that's been manufactured for their benefit.

I was surprised, when I went to the bazaar in Istanbul, that it was all indoors and felt like a mall. The Khan is less a defined "space" than a city "district." Some of the streets are covered by a combination of plants, bamboo trellises, and balconies that they feel indoors-y, but most of the streets are open. How anyone could live here with all the noise I have no idea, but you can see there are apartments on the upper levels.

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The famous Fishawy's coffeeshop, reportedly open 24/7, uninterrupted, for the last 200 years:

The front of Al-Husayn Mosque, Egypt's holiest mosque (so much so that non-Muslims are not allowed to enter it):

The minaret of the Shaykh Mutahhar Mosque. See the loudspeaker? Most mosques now automate the call to prayer, rather than using a muezzin:

Randomly:

My dad finds a friend:

These two look much better big, so you should click on them!

Coming soon when I have time: Al-Azhar and the Al-Ghouri complex.

I had a map, but even so I walked down the main street twice without seeing the tiny side street I needed to turn into to get there. After asking around and being told, more than once, that I'd just passed it, one guy actually got up and led me into it.

We walked a few feet down that street and then he pointed down this alley and said, "Midaq Alley."

There was a boarded up cafe to the right, which they called the "Naguib Mahfouz cafe." This is confusing, though, because there's a cafe in a different part of Cairo called "The Naguib Mafouz Cafe" (as in: that's its official name) and another one, in a still different part of Cairo, that is referred to informally as "the Naguib Mahfouz cafe" because he used to go there every morning to write.

This isn't either one of those; I assume it's called that because it's one he described in his novels. That building on the left is also boarded up.

Back out on the side street, there was a man loading stuff into his shop. When he saw me with my camera he insisted I take his picture. "Egyptians!" he shouted. "Strong!" Everyone in the street cheered.

M

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(Although I've gotta say: I do find it amusing that the same Westerners who are critical of the headscarf on principle, who see it as a sign of oppression, come here and are suddenly reaching for any damn thing to put on their head to keep out the wind and the sand.)

(I'd say the same thing to Muslims not-from-Arabia who insist the hijab has always and only been about modesty; i.e. those who claim it's a complete coincidence that what's become known as "Islamic" headgear emerged in a desert climate.)

I Didn't Kill 'The Jewel of Medina'
August 9, 2008; Page A10

Asra Q. Nomani's "You Still Can't Write About Muhammad" (op-ed, Aug. 6) falsely asserts that I am the "instigator" of the Random House Press decision not to publish a novel about the Prophet's wife titled, "The Jewel of Medina." I never had this power, nor did I single-handedly stop the book's publication. Random House made its final decision based on the advice of other scholars, conveniently not named in the article, and based ultimately on its determination of corporate interests.

As a historian invited to "comment" on the book by its Random House editor at the author's express request, I objected strenuously to the claim that "The Jewel of Medina" was "extensively researched," as stated on the book jacket. As an expert on Aisha's life, I felt it was my professional responsibility to counter this novel's fallacious representation of a very real woman's life. The author and the press brought me into a process, and I used my scholarly expertise to assess the novel. It was in that same professional capacity that I felt it my duty to warn the press of the novel's potential to provoke anger among some Muslims.

There is a long history of anti-Islamic polemic that uses sex and violence to attack the Prophet and his faith. This novel follows in that oft-trodden path, one first pioneered in medieval Christian writings. The novel provides no new reading of Aisha's life, but actually expands upon provocative themes regarding Muhammad's wives first found in an earlier novel by Salman Rushdie, "The Satanic Verses," which I teach. I do not espouse censorship of any kind, but I do value my right to critique those who abuse the past without regard for its richness or resonance in the present.

The combination of sex and violence sells novels. When combined with falsification of the Islamic past, it exploits Americans who know nothing about Aisha or her seventh-century world and counts on stirring up controversy to increase sales. If Ms. Nomani and readers of the Journal wish to allow literature to "move civilization forward," then they should read a novel that gets history right.

===

shewhohashope alerted to me to this train wreck of a blog post [ETA: an update to it] about a book called The Jewel of Medina, a work of historical fiction about Muhammad's wife Aisha, written by Sherry Jones and set to be published by Random House. Publication was halted or delayed (reports vary) after Random House sent a review copy to Denise Spellberg, a professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas-Austin and herself the author of (an academic) biography of Aisha. Spellberg warned Random House the book might result in a backlash from Muslims so strong it would lead to riots and violence.

I think I've reported that accurately and fairly — meaning these are the facts that are not in dispute.

Here are some things that ARE in dispute:

1. The nature of the book, and what Muslims are supposed to be protesting in it. It has been described as a romance, a "bodice-ripper," and "soft porn." Asra Nomani, who was also sent a review copy and wrote about it in The Wall Street Journal, calls it "racy." The author, on her blog (which has all of 7 posts on it), takes issue with this characterization: All I did was try to portray A'isha, Muhammad's child bride (believed by most historians to have married Muhammad at age nine and consummated the marriage at age 11) in the context of her times.

Nomani quotes Spellberg as saying the novel describes Aisha's loss of virginity thusly: The pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I hardly felt the scorpion's sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life. The author says the book has no sex scenes, but she says this in the context of refuting the book's characterization as "pornographic." It's not clear if the above quote was fabricated by Spellberg, mis-reported by Nomani, has been edited out since Spellberg received her review copy, or if Jones felt that was too tame to be considered a "sex scene."

Jones — in an attempt to counter those who accuse her of writing soft porn — said her book has "a 29-page bibliography," which she said she posted on her blog. I went to her blog. She cites 26 _sources_ (not pages of sources). They include 1,001 Nights, Alev Lytle Croutier's Harem — a book about Ottoman harems that would have little relevance to Aisha's life in the Arabian desert a thousand years earlier — and popular mass market books like Geraldine Brooks' Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women and Karen Armstrong's Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet. Nomani claims Jones learned Arabic in order to write this book, but there are no Arabic sources in her bibliography. (I also question her ability to learn classical Arabic fluently enough to research medieval Islamic history in the five years she said it took her to write this book, and am guessing by "learned Arabic" she is referring to the Saudi encyclopedia of Arabic terms, written in English, that she cites among her 26 sources.)

But none of that matters! Remember: whenever Muslims critique something, they do it because they are personally offended and unable to deal with ambiguity about faith (or depictions of sex), never because pop culture's treatment of Islam is just so … bad. Sloppy, poorly researched, poorly written.

2. Spellberg's agenda. Jones said she read Spellberg's work on Aisha and asked Random House to send her a review copy. Spellberg, obviously, didn't think much of it. But are her concerns literary, political, or territorial? I'm voting #3.

If she simply didn't like the book's literary tone (and if the passage quoted above is accurate, I'm with her), a simple "this is dreck" would have sufficed. But I think characterizing her as a shrill alarmist with fucked-up politics is probably inaccurate, too. It was her editor, not Spellberg herself, who sent an e-mail to Random House saying that Spellberg thought the book was 'a declaration of war . . . explosive stuff . . . a national security issue.' Thinks it will be far more controversial than the satanic verses and the Danish cartoons. Spellberg may have in fact said things of that nature, but to me that sounds more like the language of an editor looking for buzz than that of an academic in Islamic history. UT-Austin has one of the best Middle Eastern Studies programs in the country. If she's on faculty there, she's not going to be someone who confuses "Muslims" with "terrorists," or someone who thinks any minor insult to Islam will lead immediately and inevitably to Defcon 1.

What I can see, however, is that she read the book, predicted — probably accurately — that it would be controversial and unpopular with Muslims, and said so. And dollars to donuts she was more than a little irritated that scholarly work like her own never puts a dent in the political landscape or finds its way into the mainstream media but authors like Jones get a $100,000 advance to write something called The Jewel of Medina, drivel one step above Harlequin's Bedded By The Sheikh series or whatever it's called, and this, THIS, is what becomes part of the popular conversation about Islam in the United States. But can she say that out loud? No, that would be tacky, and smack of self-interest. She has her own book coming out from Knopf, an imprint of Random House, that in the relatively small world of "books about Islam" would compete, however peripherally, with this one. So when Random House freaks the fuck out and decides not to publish The Jewel of Medina for fear of inciting Muslim terrorism, well, she's not exactly throwing herself in front of the train to stop them.

That paragraph is pure conjecture. But it makes more sense than anything else I've read.

3. How and why Actual Muslims got involved in this. Before going to Random House and her editors, Spellberg contacted Shahed Amanullah, the editor of altmuslim.com and a guest speaker at one of her courses. Altmuslim.com is known for being a moderate-to-progressive web site, though I haven't seen that reported anywhere in this mess. In the blogosphere at least, Amanullah's name seems to be shorthand for "real Muslim guy; has Bin Laden on speed dial" and the e-mail he wrote to a mailing list mentioning being contacted about the book = "sending word to Muslims everywhere that they should start preparing the poison gas." Another Muslim guy re-posted that e-mail his blog, calling the book "a new attempt to slander the Prophet of Islam," and a third one "proposed a seven-point strategy to ensure 'the writer withdraws this book from the stores and apologise all the muslims across the world.'" That post now seems to be locked, but it included such violent suggestions as "find a volunteer to read this book and alert others of its content."

Negative reaction from a handful of Muslims: check.
JIHAD IN AMERICA IMMINENT IF THIS BOOK GETS PUBLISHED: I'm not seeing it…?

[ETA: Shahed Amanullah responds.]

4. The difference between words like "review," "critique," "boycott," "censor," "protest," "riot," and "terrorism." And while I'm here, "fatwa." shewhohashope, demonstrating extraordinary patience in the blog post linked above, attempted to explain that it was possible to not like a book without calling for the author's death, and be a Muslim at the same time. Really!

This went nowhere. Or rather, I do think many people started to understand, but she was also repeatedly told that if she didn't like something she didn't have to read it — again, as if her discomfort was the only problem, rather than Muslims' right to review a book and give it a negative critique (or does that not count under "freedom of speech"?). Not that this was even possible with this book, since it hasn't been released. But whose fault is that?

This is such a pet peeve of mine: the belief that "negative review" = "banning." It comes up everywhere but is especially prevalent when people are arguing religious topics. The fact that evangelical Christians HAVE, in fact, wanted to ban certain works of art does not therefore make "critique" synonymous with "censorship." It just doesn't.

p.s. "Fatwa" does not mean death sentence.

5. Why anyone cares. As shewhohashope and a few other Muslim commenters pointed out, a fictional depiction of the Prophet is considered inherently offensive to Muslims, even if the portrayal is positive. Many of the other commenters just didn't get this, and many others did but didn't care. That's fine. I understand that.

But to me there are other issues at stake with this book, which is an account of the famous story of Aisha becoming separated from her caravan after she loses her necklace, and subsequently being accused of adultery when it's discovered that she's missing. Jones's book is told from 14-year-old Aisha's perspective. In it — and I've only read the prologue, but I think I'm being fair to the tone — she is portrayed as a timid teenager, and adultery as something she considered but did not act upon. She turns to Muhammad to defend her, and he does. From there on out it purports to be a love story describing their relationship.

I am guessing that the reason the author keeps insisting that she's being sensitive to Muslims is because she's written a positive, romantic portrayal of a marriage that has often been vilified by those who paint Muhammad as a pedophile. (Aisha's actual ages at her engagement, marriage, and consummation are not known, but she was certainly very young.) I understand that, but it's not enough for me.

This is a portion of the comment I added, which is buried deep enough in the comment thread that I'll re-post here:

In the last twenty years (well, really the last hundred, but I’m talking very modern history) Muslim feminists have made extraordinary strides in part by using the Qur’an and the hadith to answer back to misogynist cultural (i.e. not religious) trends in Muslim countries, particularly the Middle East and Central Asia. When, for example, men argue that women have no right to work or participate in public space, Muslim women have been able to point to the example of Khadija, Muhammad’s first wife, a successful businesswoman who employed him as her assistant. There are many examples of this.

This line of thought, or ‘tactic’ if you will, of using religion to make a *progressive* argument might seem counterintuitive to those raised in countries where religion (Christianity) is generally regarded as more conservative than (secular) culture, but in Middle Eastern countries it is culture, not Islam, that is more conservative and misogynist. Not all feminists who are Muslim would consider themselves “Muslim feminists” and there are certainly secular activists here, too, but really, the women who have been able to convince the clerics to re-read their own holy books have been the ones to make the most strides in fighting FGM and other institutional abuses of women that have no basis in Islam.

With that in mind…

The central point to the story of Aisha’s necklace is the ban on slander, and it’s often raised in context of the discussion around honor killings. No, Mr. Suspicious Husband/Father/Brother, you may not lash out at women based on gossip and hearsay. The Prophet himself, the best of men, was tested in this same manner, and look what choice he made: he defended Aisha against those who gossiped about her, even if it meant the risk of losing face among the powerful members of the community. This is a very important story to those of us committed to fighting abuses of women emanating from suspicion and slander and then ignorantly and retroactively justified as “Islamic.” All you have to do is say “Aisha’s necklace…” and people will know right where you’re going with this.

Yes, Ms. Jones portrays Muhammad as defending his wife (at least from what I’ve read in the prologue), but to cast doubt on Aisha’s actions and/or intentions—and this seems to be central to the plot of her entire book—essentially ruins the story. The point here is that it was Aisha’s (truthful) story against those of men who weren’t there. Not knowing who to believe, Muhammad went to God, and God told him to believe Aisha. The deciding factor was not, as Ms. Jones seems to be saying, his romantic love for Aisha, but rather her right, even as a young girl, to be believed. This wasn’t something she had to earn; it was inherent, literally God-given. Her word trumped their suspicions, even though she had less power than they did. From my own feminist perspective, this is an important distinction.

Do I think Muslim clerics are going to pick up this English romance novel and completely change their minds about Aisha? Obviously, no.

Do I think the book should be banned? No, of course not, and I have a whole separate rant about how Muslims, who were barely even aware of this book’s existence, are being blamed for that.

But I bring this up because I keep reading versions of “don’t like it? don’t read it!” and I want to say that this isn’t just a matter of being _personally_ offended, a la The DaVinci Code or Temptation. This story isn’t just some random tale out of the Qur’an, on par with something out of 1,001 Nights. Its interpretation has had real world consequences for women.

I would also, for reasons I hope should be obvious if you’ve read this far, take issue with the idea that this author’s interpretation is more feminist than the original. And that’s fine, I defend people’s right to write whatever regardless of where it lands on my feminist meter. But I also feel like there’s a lot of you-go-grrrl, publish away, screw the fundies! in this discussion, positing sex against religion as if that’s the issue, that’s based on an inaccurate understanding of the original story and its place in Islamic tradition. Aisha is not a “forgotten” woman of Islam; she is tremendously important. Every Muslim knows who she is, and knows that she was a strong female. Muhammad joked with his followers that they “should get half of their religion” from her. Jones' book doesn’t increase Aisha’s feminist appeal—that needs no assistance—and she most certainly didn’t _discover_ it. If anything, she undermines it.

Again, not a reason for censoring the book. But not really a reason for celebrating it, either.

I took this from the backseat of the car while we were driving to K's grandfather's grave in The City of the Dead. Those of you who follow my life in minute detail will remember that the last time I was in Egypt was 14 days after his absolutely unexpected death of a heart attack. We rushed to Cairo in a state of shock and stayed for several months. K was a year-and-a-half at the time.

The contrast between then and now has been quite stark. In my mind I left Egypt in one condition — a state of mourning — and so that's how I expected to find it. I know that's irrational since it's been over ten years now, but there are still small moments when I'm taken aback at how they've moved on. Before going to his grave we dropped off a friend of X's second sister and she joked, "Are you sure you don't want to come along and meet my father?" And we all laughed. Which was weird.

Since the grave itself is hard to find (they all look alike, and the back roads aren't marked) they navigate by asking around for the tomb of Abd el-Halim Hafez, a famous Egyptian singer, which is across the 'street' from their family's tomb. This is what we're doing in the video — driving around, asking strangers how to get to this famous dead guy's grave. It was actually kind of funny, like we were desperately searching for Jim Morrison's grave so we could pray for a random citizen buried next to him.

The City of the Dead itself is a sprawling necropolis on the outskirts of Cairo, and thoroughly un-Islamic. Above-ground tombs are a carryover from Pharaonic times (kind of like pyramids for the proletariat). Despite its (English) name, it's increasingly seen a lot of life as housing shortages have forced families to seek residence in the tombs. Typically a family will squat in a neglected tomb, or take over one of a wealthier family, who will pay them to look after it in their absence and to pray for those who are buried below. Sometimes the caretakers' families will be buried in the same tomb, leading to a sort of patron-client relationship that extends into infinity.

Once we managed to find the place, the woman here materialized out of I-don't-know-where, found the person who had the key, let us in, and sent for a boy to come and splash some water on the very throughly dead potted plants inside, which I think was intended as a gesture of respect for the space.

We said al-Fatiha and one of his sisters read from the Qur'an. (Sometimes the caretakers will do that, too.)

What amazes me every time I come here is how desolate it is. Cairo just doesn't do desolate. It's way too crowded.

But even with people living here the roads are usually empty and everything is quiet. Not a gentle-relaxed quiet, but an abandoned-after-the-apocalypse quiet. It's a bit eerie, and not just because it's a cemetery.

One funny thing: since the tombs weren't intended as housing, they don't have electricity. The tombs of the wealthy and famous, though, will sometimes have it because they're decorated with colored lights. Families living near those tombs might steal some of that electricity to power their own, smaller tombs, so they can have lights and a television.

I didn't take pictures or video inside their father's grave, but afterwards we went to Abd el-Halim Hafez's, which, while not exactly touristy, is "public" enough that I could. The caretaker opened it up for us.

The actual bodies are underground. The men are buried on the right and the women on the left. Or maybe it's the other way around? I can't remember. The space in the middle is an open courtyard.

The caretaker showed us how they pull up the floor to take the bodies down, then bolt it shut again. I'm kind of morbidly curious to know what it looks like down there, since they don't use caskets.

Outside again:

National Geographic did a short piece on the City of the Dead. Their video is better than mine.

Also BBC: "Tomb with a view"

I've never been much of a comics fan, but I was much impressed with Broken Mystic's two-part blog series, "Female, Muslim, and Mutant: A Critique of Muslim Women in Comic Books."

The first entry talks about the portrayal of the X-Men's "Dust" character, an Afghan heroine introduced to the series in 2002. The second contrasts this with the portrayal of Muslim women in two comics by Muslim writers, especially "The 99," a series based on a fascinating time period in Islamic history, the attack on Baghdad's Bait al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) in the mid-13th century. I haven't read either series, but it looks like "The 99″ has a compelling plot with a much more diverse cast of female characters.

(Incidentally, there is a wonderful children's book called House of Wisdom, by Florence Parry Heide and Judith Heide Gilliland and illustrated by Mary GrandPre, that also deals with this time period. It appears to be out of print, but it's worth hunting down if you are interested in the role Baghdad played in dragging Europe out of the Dark Ages and kick-starting the Renaissance.)

And the view was amazing:

This is the restaurant. If you look at pictures of Cairo proper, you can see why building something like this is such a feat: green spaces are so rare, and the city is already appropriating the desert to make room for housing. I remember I used to find it strange that the Cairo Zoo was such a popular picnic destination for families — people would be stretched out for the day on tiny little patches of space between the sidewalk and the zebra cages — but it makes sense if you consider it’s one of the few places with trees and grass. This is like that only way more so.

And the FOOD. Oh my GOD. Connor, you would have died. I am more indifferent to food than anyone I know — I’ve had this journal for seven years and have made, what, three posts about food? four, tops? — so believe me when I say that if *I* think it was incredible, it was incredible.

This was just the meat. Each of those tins contained a different dish: lamb, goat, beef, fish, chicken made five different ways, kofta, stuff I don’t even know the name of…

There was another room full of salads and vegetables, and a third full of pastries and desserts. On Fridays it was all-you-can-eat buffet. I felt like I was in one of those Middle Eastern medieval folktales where the humble servant comes to ask a request of the decadent sultan but has to interrupt him in the middle of his feast. (I, of course, playing the part of the decadent sultan.)

Actually I’m lying. THIS was the meat:

Seriously, it was a stupid amount of food. And then afterwards they bring you tea.

Later we went outside for a while.

At some point Laila decided to co-opt my scarf:

That’s X’s mom beside us. She was very mod in her younger years. It’s an ongoing joke that no one knows how old she is or what her real hair color is.

Laila and Omar go for a climb on the faux-latticework:

A waiter interrupts, offering to lift them over:

Omar goes for it, but Laila books for the stairs. When the waiter gives Omar a big kiss on the forehead her suspicions are confirmed, and she scolds her brother for being too trusting. (She explained to me that her baba told her that only mamas and babas are supposed to kiss you.)

As it got later the park started filling up. It was almost entirely Egyptians, not tourists, which surprised me. X’s sister pointed out that there were so many young (presumably unmarried) couples, much more so than you would have seen a few years ago.

Almost all of the women are wearing hijab now, a huge difference from when I was here in the past. Accordingly it’s become less meaningful as a religious symbol, and people are always complaining that it’s become just another fashion statement, something some women wear with tight jeans, sleeveless tops, or a lot of make-up.

On that note, here’s a funny tidbit: I went into the bathroom while I was at this restaurant and noticed a woman’s long black evening gloves abandoned by the side of the sink. I assumed they belonged to a niqabi woman, but the girl who came out of the stall was young, maybe seventeen, wearing jeans and a heavy metal T-shirt. I wanted to ask her if she thought we should take them to the reception (was there a reception?) or if there was some other way of dealing with lost items, but that was too many Arabic words for me so I just smiled instead and decided the woman, whoever she was, would eventually remember and come back for them. But then this heavy metal girl pulled a niqab out of her bag! And started putting it on! Ah! The gloves were hers! I like to think I’m immune from succumbing to hijab stereotyping, but I really hadn’t expected this girl, who looked less conservative than my own American teenage daughter does, to be the one so concerned with modesty she wouldn’t show her hands in public. That’ll learn me.

The movie was Hassan and Markus, with Omar Sharif and Adel Imam. Omar Sharif played a Muslim cleric who denounced Islamism, had his house firebomed, and was put into some kind of witness protection program where he was given a Christian identity. Adel Imam played a Christian who denounced pro-Christian violence, had his car blown up, and was put into the same program, posing as a Muslim. They unwittingly move into apartments across the hall from each other and their families become friends, each thinking they are "secretly" the same religion as the other. Wacky hijinks ensue.

Best line: After a building is blown up in a terrorist attack, some government PR guy trying to do damage control has a meeting with the press and says, "We are happy to report 75 were killed, all of them Egyptians! Not a single foreigner was harmed in this event!" The audience was rolling.

I really liked it and thought it was funny, but it was definitely a "message" film, with the Muslim (but really Christian) saving the lives of the wife and daughter of the Christian (but really Muslim) at the end, after their house is set on fire, and ending with both families bravely walking arm-in-arm through a riot scene between Muslims and Christians who are all screaming "Allahu akbar!" and "We will die for the cross!" and beating each other with sticks.

Not that I'm intolerant of "message" films. I was raised on afterschool specials, after all. But this one had a too-tight equation of the Muslim and Christian experience in Egypt, which I think is apples and oranges in a lot of ways. Coptic Christians are facing persecution for their religion, i.e. as minorities. Muslims' complaints against the government are broader, and more political than religious, though they take an Islamist form and use Islamist rhetoric. To go from one scene of the Muslim trying to muddle through a Christian prayer to another of the Christian trying to muddle through a Muslim prayer, and so on over and over, ignores the different social and economic position of both groups, in Egypt and internationally, reducing everything to a matter of faith and fanaticism, full stop. Maybe there was more I was missing because my Arabic is so bad and it wasn't subtitled, but I don't think so.

Although, as I said, I did like it. Especially because I like Adel Imam.

Lila Abu-Lughod has some good articles on the way Egypt, through its government-controlled media (which includes the censorship of film), has controlled the portrayal of Islam and Islamists. She's worth looking up if you have access to a university library.

It was sunset and you could hear the call to prayer all over the city.

This is a view of the old wall, built in 1087. Most of it’s gone, but you can see remnants of it here, in the lower part of the frame.

Cairo is the third-most crowded city the world, after Calcutta and Gaza City. I tried to take pictures capturing the scale of it, but without a wide-angle lens it’s impossible. Imagine putting six or seven of these photos next to each other side-by-side and you’ll get an idea.

This neighborhood is one of the oldest, though not one of the worst. Even here, though, you can see the near-total lack of vegetation. The unrelenting monotony of the brown and gray wears on you after a while.

But the sunset is always pretty. Everything blends together under the same light, and you know it’s about to become cooler. Al-hamdulillah.

2.
An hour-long NPR program about the differences between Muslims' experiences in Europe vs. the U.S. I was actually pretty impressed with this. You can't go into any depth in an hour, but they hit all the major points about why these are such different demographics — namely, why the U.S., despite its bootstraps attitude towards immigration and its greater participation in international imperialistic adventures, is nevertheless having fewer problems with integrating Islam.

It also has this great quote from Aminah McCloud:

Interviewer: But, isn’t it possible that this internal dynamic could turn into something more outwardly destructive? Could America’s young Muslims follow the path of some of their European counterparts?

McCloud: I want to say that they wouldn't, but I also know that there's always a chance for anything. I don't think they could ever emerge on the scale that they are in Europe. There are non-Muslims here who don't particularly care about Muslims, but they care about freedom of speech. They care about opportunities for everybody. There are also that indigenous groups of Muslims who say, no you're not going to bomb the street on which my mom lives, because then you won't have to worry about the US, you'll have to worry about me.

One on the presentation of the Iraq situation prior to the war, from the founder of FAIR:

In the fall of 2002, week after week, I argued vigorously against invading Iraq in debates televised on MSNBC. I used every possible argument that might sway mainstream viewers — no real threat, cost, instability. But as the war neared, my debates were terminated.

In my 2006 book Cable News Confidential, I explained why I lost my airtime:

There was no room for me after MSNBC launched Countdown: Iraq — a daily one-hour show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it. Countdown: Iraq featured retired colonels and generals, sometimes resembling boys with war toys as they used props, maps and glitzy graphics to spin invasion scenarios. They reminded me of pumped-up ex-football players doing pre-game analysis and diagramming plays. It was excruciating to be sidelined at MSNBC, watching so many non-debates in which myth and misinformation were served up unchallenged.

It was bad enough to be silenced. Much worse to see that these ex-generals — many working for military corporations — were never in debates, nor asked a tough question by an anchor. (I wasn’t allowed on MSNBC unless balanced by at least one truculent right-winger.)

Except for the brazenness and scope of the Pentagon spin program, I wasn’t shocked by the recent New York Times report exposing how the Pentagon junketed and coached the retired military brass into being “message-force multipliers” and “surrogates” for Donald Rumsfeld’s lethal propaganda.

The biggest villain here is not Rumsfeld or the Pentagon. It’s the TV networks. In the land of the First Amendment, it was their choice to shut down debate and journalism….

What makes me really angry? Is that this article is followed by comment after comment saying versions of "I don't watch TV," "who watches cable news?" "who believes this stuff in the first place?" "we all know Corporate Media lies," on and on.

Hurray, you don't watch television. HOW FANTASTIC FOR YOU. I appreciate non-participation as one strategy — will even call it the best strategy — against the way the Big Media^TM machine is currently constructed, but that yawn-and-dismiss tactic is INSUFFICIENT. Not when millions of other people DO watch television, DO get the majority of their international news from cable television, and DO use that information to vote and otherwise influence political events. I don't have any great answers here myself; it's not like I run something larger than the Pentagon and can combat this kind of thing in my spare time. But this guy is making some excellent points, if not strictly new ones, and I would appreciate having many more discussions about the issue without seeing them consistently bogged down in "you watch Hardball? what's wrong with you?" discussion-closers.

Sheesh.

Another one, this one about Debbie Almontaser, the Yemeni-American woman who was forced to resign as the principal of NYC's first Arabic bilingual high school. It's long-ish, but worth reading, especially pages 4 and 5, for another example of the oh-so-helpful role media (this time local media) play in defining political issues. Even I — who had been following this case, and wrote about it elsewhere last summer — was under the impression that she was fired because she was wearing an "intifada" t-shirt. While I personally don't have any problems with that, this article says she wasn't even doing that much: she was on the board of an organization that had an office that was sometimes used by a group of young women who were selling an "intifada" t-shirt:

Critics of the Madrassa Coalition say its tactics are typical of campaigns singling out Muslims: They lean heavily on guilt by association. The nuances of the claims against Ms. Almontaser were lost as the controversy lit up the blogosphere, said Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a liberal organization outside Boston that studies the political right. One Web site, MilitantIslamMonitor.org, displayed photographs of Ms. Almontaser wearing her hijab in different styles, suggesting that she had undergone a public relations makeover to “disguise” her “Islamist agenda.”

But no worries. "She's certainly not a terrorist" –Mayor Bloomberg.

With the huge, blinding, blinking-lights-in-neon caveat that I Am Not An Islamic Scholar, and that I welcome comments from those who are, I need to rant about this because the whole idea of "reinterpreting" the hadith from a modern standpoint just doesn't make a lot of sense if you know how the hadith works. This is NOT because everything in Islam is set in stone and there can be only one interpretation and Muslims are conservative fanatics who believe a seventh-century code is the only proper guide to life in the modern era and therefore cannot bear the idea of new readings on old problems — it's because the hadith is already considered potentially unstable. But there is an established way of dealing with this. All Muslims know that, hence the collective "huh?" at this becoming such a big story in the West over the last few days.

To make the first of what I'm sure will be a series of scandalous simplifications, a hadith can be compared to an ancient game of telephone. Unlike the Qur'an, which was considered divine and memorized word-for-word, hadiths were stories told about (not by) Muhammad and were intended to complement (not replace) the Qur'an. Some of these were told by multiple people, though wording and details vary from person to person. Taken collectively, the hadith describes the traditions and sayings of Muhammad (the sunnah), which is the second-highest source of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, after the Qur'an.

Of course, like any game of telephone, there is danger in a story becoming corrupted as it goes through a chain of narrators. Allowing for this, each hadith is verified individually according to several factors, such as the character of the original narrator and the reliability of his or her memory, whether or not the chain of narration is unbroken, the number of narrators telling the same story, and so on. What you get, in the end, is a collection of thousands of hadiths with varying degrees of reliability. It is perfectly possible to have a hadith told by one unstable guy whom no one liked who had an ulterior motive and no one to back up his story, a story which doesn't even make sense anyway because no one believes Muhammad would really have done that thing this guy claims he did. Right? So that hadith would still be part of the conversation around Islamic law, but it would be classified as a fabrication or otherwise unsupportable by a variety of methods used to validate individual hadiths. In casual conversation these are usually referred to as "weak" hadiths (although the word for weak, da'if, has a specific meaning in this context).

By the same token, you can have a very "strong" hadith, let's say one told by twenty different companions of the prophet who were all noble servants of God and had no motive to lie, telling a story that seems consistent with the Qur'an, followed up by an unbroken chain of narration — and still argue about the applicability of that hadith to modern circumstances. For cases like this there are a number of "lower" sources of Islamic interpretation,* such as reasoning by analogy, decision by consensus, and, at the lowest level, the acceptance of default cultural practice when it does not conflict with any of the above.

This process happens all the time. It is an assumed part of 'official' Islamic jurisprudence, as well as a common conversation that goes on informally among Muslims on a dead regular basis. This is a good example, or this debate about the hijab, or this post regarding Islam's association with misogyny.

So when the BBC article says that the Turkish Department of Religious Affairs claims "that a significant number of the [hadiths] were never uttered by Muhammad", that's a serious case of non-news. Yet the tone of the article, and the tone of discussion around it, implies that this is a shocking new development in Islam, one that only a secular state like Turkey would have the balls to initiate and the kind of thing we could only see in our present world climate, now that Islam has been called on the carpet and ordered to modernize.

Okay, you say, so acknowledging the (sometimes) problematic sourcing of (some) hadiths is old hat, but what about the "strong" hadiths perceived to be incompatible with modernity? Isn't Turkey so very brazen and forward-thinking to go there, too? From the article:

Prof Mehmet Gormez, a senior official in the Department of Religious Affairs and an expert on the Hadith, gives a telling example.

"There are some messages that ban women from travelling for three days or more without their husband's permission and they are genuine.

"But this isn't a religious ban. It came about because in the Prophet's time it simply wasn't safe for a woman to travel alone like that. But as time has passed, people have made permanent what was only supposed to be a temporary ban for safety reasons."

The project justifies such bold interference in the 1,400-year-old content of the Hadith by rigorous academic research.

Prof Gormez points out that in another speech, the Prophet said "he longed for the day when a woman might travel long distances alone".

So, he argues, it is clear what the Prophet's goal was.

Fine… but still not new. Feminists in Tunisia, for example, successfully achieved a ban on polygamy by arguing that it was permissible in the seventh century as a means of protection for widows and orphans during wartime, but that monogamy was clearly the Qur'anic ideal. This law, passed several decades ago, would have been even more controversial than what Turkey is doing now because these women were arguing about the Qur'an, not the hadith, and the Qur'an is considered the literal word of God.

Likewise, we hear of women trained in this "new" thinking going to rural parts of Turkey to explain that honor killings are not Islamic:

One of the women, Hulya Koc, looked out over a sea of headscarves at a town meeting in central Turkey and told the women of the equality, justice and human rights guaranteed by an accurate interpretation of the Koran – one guided and confirmed by the revised Hadith.

She says that, at the moment, Islam is being widely used to justify the violent suppression of women.

"There are honour killings," she explains.

"We hear that some women are being killed when they marry the wrong person or run away with someone they love.

"There's also violence against women within families, including sexual harassment by uncles and others. This does not exist in Islam… we have to explain that to them."

Yet another noble effort. Yet again, nothing new. There are so many examples of this I'm not going to list them here; suffice it to say that sending educated women into rural provinces to explain "true" Islam to illiterate peasant women is a well-established tradition in the Middle East and Central Asia, one that goes back at least 100 years, to the beginning of the feminist movement, and arguably much longer if we widen the discussion to include the historic role of Islamic schools in the teaching of literacy. My daughter's great-aunt, for example, born in 1920, got her first job as a teacher driving throughout Saudi Arabia, teaching girls in village schools. This was during a time of great upheaval, when the role of educating women was hotly contested. When this right was defended it was done so via the argument that women should learn "proper Islam" in place of "ignorant cultural practices." As evidenced by the Turkish case, elements of that debate continue today, on remarkably similar terms. Whether or not you find that position sufficiently radical to result in real change for women, at least situate it historically and acknowledge that this is not an example of bold new thinking.

Okay, you say, so it's not "new." Whatever. It's still good, right? This idea that Islam is subject to interpretation? Isn't it exciting to see people take up a project like this, in the face of certain fossilized versions of religion?

My problem here is that the perception of "newness" IS the story. It conforms to the view that Muslims occupy an earlier point on the progress timeline, and must be ripped, by force if necessary, into the modern era. (The Guardian article on this subject is called "Turkey strives for 21st century form of Islam" — in case we forgot that most OTHER Muslims are of the Dark Ages variety.) Sure, we may hate military intervention, but how else to foster change in a region where (we erroneously believe) people are still adhering to a form of religion unchanged and unquestioned for 1,400 years? That Muslims might — finally! for once! — be taking on this task through their own initiative is exciting only in the sense that we privately congratulate ourselves for having pushed them into it. When they stand up, we'll stand down. And so on.

The Guardian article makes this connection explicit:

The exercise in reforming Islamic jurisprudence, sponsored by the modernising and mildly Islamic government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, is being seen as an iconoclastic campaign to establish a 21st century form of Islam, fusing Muslim beliefs and tradition with European and western philosophical methods and principles.

The result, say experts following the ambitious experiment, could be to diminish Muslim discrimination against women, banish some of the brutal penalties associated with Islamic law, such as stoning and amputation, and redefine Islam as a modern, dynamic force in the large country that pivots between east and west, leaning into the Middle East while aspiring to join the European Union.

"Muslim beliefs and tradition" are balanced against "European and western philosophical methods and principles." They get to claim "stoning and amputation"; we get to claim "modern" and "dynamic." To drive this point even further into the ground, both articles rely on the tired trope of this leading to the possibility of "an Islamic reformation": an ahistorical idea rooted in the notion that Islam has remained stagnant.

In a related vein, the excitement here betrays a belief that extreme forms of Islamic conservatism begin with overly literal readings of Islamic texts. I've found this belief to be very popular with people who know a lot about, and are disgusted by, Christian fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism, they extrapolate, must be similar, only like using the Muslim Bible or whatever instead. I bet they hate science and abortion, too! In addition to ignoring some major theological reasons for this analogy not holding up, it's a framework that ignores the role of political circumstances, particularly colonialism, in shaping Islam-as-political-project. That's a separate and much longer discussion, but I'm noting it because I think, despite the fact that the word "terrorism" is never used, the read-between-the-lines hope being expressed here is that if Muslims only KNEW they had good, solid Islamic alternatives to Waging War On The Infidels, they would pack up and go home.

This is part of why the word "revised" is so problematic in this context. Read this sentence again:

One of the women, Hulya Koc, looked out over a sea of headscarves at a town meeting in central Turkey and told the women of the equality, justice and human rights guaranteed by an accurate interpretation of the Koran – one guided and confirmed by the revised Hadith.

There is no need to develop "revised Hadith" to make this point, since honor killings have never been an accepted part of Islamic practice. To note this is not to criticize the Turkish project itself, but to critique, again, its portrayal as daring innovation, because if anything such a portrayal lends credibility to the idea that actually honor killings ARE part of "real," "authentic" Islam. Not only is this false, but it is exactly the opposite of the project's intent. The implication is that, until last Tuesday, Muslims spent over a thousand years laboring under a medieval religious tradition; the only question now is whether or not they will accept "revisions" undertaken by a secular country like Turkey.

Which is an interesting subject itself. Had it not been for this rush of Western interest, I'd be optimistic. Turkey is secular, but its recent election was won by a (slightly) more conservative pro-Islamic party, and whatever the country's modern politics, it still retains an association with the Ottoman Empire, which would have been the proper site for a major Islamic project such as this one. More problematic is that it is being undertaken by a government agency, and government-sponsored mouthpieces of religion (an unfamiliar concept in the U.S., but popular abroad, not only in Muslim countries) are prone to issuing verdicts that are inevitably taken with a grain of salt. Still, the aim of this project sounds like something akin to Google — not the creation of new content, but the organization of old. Although this is being described as an attempt to overwrite all previous forms of Islam, I think, among Muslims, it would have been taken for what it was: an unusually ambitious but ultimately common and therefore familiar attempt to apply Islamic jurisprudence to modern circumstances. I have no particular problem with that, so long as it is understood to be part of a much larger discourse (and not, say, a state-sanctioned Wahhabist-style attempt to render all other readings moot).

Now, however, Turkey has been put on the defensive. This week, Mehmet Görmez, the director of the project, issued a statement decrying the BBC article, saying the Directorate of Religious Affairs is going so far as "to take the appropriate legal measures for redress" because the project was so inaccurately portrayed:

"Our project is not aimed at effecting a radical renewal of the religion, as is claimed by the BBC. Our objective is to help our citizens attain a better understanding of the hadith. Though I underlined several times during our interview with a BBC reporter that our project cannot be considered a reformation of Islam, he distorted the facts, saying Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam — and a controversial and radical modernization of the religion." …

A fresh look at the hadith collections — the gathering of which began some 200 years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed — and how they are utilized and interpreted within the framework of Islamic jurisprudence, while sure to generate a degree of criticism and controversy, is a far cry from attempting to change, in effect, some of Islam's most important historical records…

"I had an interview with BBC reporter Robert Pigott around two months ago about the project. I underscored during our interview that it cannot be termed a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam. But, his article read 'the very theology of Islam is being reinterpreted in order to effect a radical renewal of the religion.' This does not reflect the truth."

If this denunciation speaks louder than the original misreporting, the project may still find an audience. If not, I'm guessing it'll be tossed in the pot along with other ideas assumed to be Western-tainted pseudo-Islam, inciting not "revolution" or "reformation," but reactionary backlash and a further retreat into religious conservatism.

* This process is Sunni — Shi'a practices vary.

Thursday morning (the 27th) my sister and I were leaving a gas station when I glanced at the newspaper rack and saw The Waterloo Courier's headline that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated. I reacted the way you do when you hear something big, with what!'s and oh-my-god!'s, and then went searching through the rest of the rack to see if it was in any of the bigger papers, like The New York Times. It wasn't.

Now here is the thing. I honestly did not know if 1) it wasn't in any of the other papers because the news was so fresh that they hadn't gotten the story by the time they went to press, 2) if it was in the other papers but not considered enough of a story to make the front page, 3) if it had happened several days earlier and was old news by now, and I just hadn't heard it because I hadn't been following things, or 4) if it was even true.

Of course #1 did turn out to be right. The story broke, hard, within the hour, and then it was on every TV station, every radio station, my parents were talking about it, half my friends list posted about it, and my husband texted me the news on my phone.

But I thought about my reaction later, and realized what a crap shoot it's become, trying to predict what news will actually make it out of the apparent black hole that is the quote-unquote Muslim world. This goes for all international news, really, but I'm speaking about Muslim countries because so many Muslims complain about the way they're portrayed in the Western press, and I think this is often interpreted as a complaint, solely, about being portrayed negatively. Which is also a problem. But I think the larger issue is that, for all the news that we get in this country about Islam, the Middle East, and to a lesser extent South Asia, so much of it is the same five or six stories, re-hashed, continually, with American actors and American perspectives always, always, unrelentingly at the center. In retrospect it seems ludicrous that I could have thought Bhutto's assassination might be a page 16 blurb in the obits section, but then in so many other cases that's exactly how things have worked.

While I'm here and on the subject: HijabMan's sister and brother-in-law are in Pakistan right now and have been posting dispatches and analysis.

"When the French government invaded Algeria, in 1830, it started a vast campaign of military 'pacification,' which was quickly followed by the imposition of French laws deemed necessary for the civilizing mission to succeed. Women were crucial to that enterprise. In articles, stories and novels of the day, Algerian women were universally depicted as oppressed, and so in order for civilization truly to penetrate Algeria, the argument went, the women had to cast off their veils. General Bugeaud, who was charged with administering the territory in the 1840s, declared, 'The Arabs elude us because they conceal their women from our gaze.'"

- deep breath –

Just once, though, I would like to see a debate that goes something like this:

Person 1:
“The only country to use nuclear weapons is the United States.
Most Americans are Christian.
Therefore, using nuclear weapons is a Christian practice.
Therefore, if we want to calm the nuclear arms race, we must engage with these Christians by asking them to re-interpret the parts of the Bible that say ‘thou shalt bomb Japan.’ What is that, Leviticus? Whatever. Look it up. Anyway, I’m sure there are ways to do this that are sensitive to the other, less crazy parts of their religion.”

Person 2:
“But the fact that most Americans are Christians has nothing to do with Hiroshima and Nagasaki! There were political factors at play! Besides, Israel and Pakistan both have nukes, and they’re not Christian countries. And there are many Christian countries that don’t have them. It’s much more complex than that.”

Person 3:

“Are you saying the killing of thousands of people is ‘complex’? What’s complex about it? It’s mass murder! Wow, you’ve really gone off the deep end of moral relativism! Why are you always apologizing for these people?”

Person 2:

“No, I didn’t mean murder is complex, I meant the reasons for… ugh, never mind.”

- headdesk –

“I don’t want to see women on the street wearing burqas,” said Mr. Giordano, a nattily dressed man with the flowing white hair of an 18th-century German romantic. “I’m insulted by that — not by the women themselves, but by the people who turned them into human penguins.”

(more)

credit: Mark Wilson, EmpireWire.com

New York City has proposed building the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a public high school that will teach classes in both English and Arabic, and some folks are none too happy about it. Good ol' Daniel Pipes showed up, to warn us that "a madrassa grows in Brooklyn."

* cue screeching theme from Psycho *

First of all, I think it's funny that the word "madrassa" has been co-opted so thoroughly. Like the words fatwa and jihad, this one has been wrenched out of its original context and thrown around so carelessly that even I have trouble hearing it anymore without picturing rows of boys in the mountains of Pakistan rocking back and forth, thrashing their heads against their Qur'an racks in unison, training to become suicide bombers. (The word, of course, simply means "school" in Arabic. Where it has an Islamic connotation, it's because mosques were early promoters of literacy, and the "madrassa" was known as the section of the mosque devoted to education, as opposed to the sections devoted to prayers, ablutions, charity, and so forth. "Radical madrassas" do exist, but the term is not redundant.)

Secondly, I'd like to note that Khalil Gibran himself was a Christian. Just like the majority of native Arabic-speakers in the United States.

Call it what you will, however: this school is certainly pushing some buttons. The terrorists are coming for our children! And they are doing it by expecting them to learn Arabic morphology, verb tenses, and the triconsonantal root system! My, those jihadis are clever! Can't get nuthin' past them.

To be fair, many of the complaints against the school centered not around its subject matter, but its physical placement. It was originally to be housed in an existing public elementary school, and parents of students already attending that school legitimately worried that their own children's resources would be sapped to make room for new students, and that the match between an elementary school and a high school was a poor fit. Presumably due to parental pressure, the school has been moved to another location, where it will share space with the Brooklyn High School of the Arts, and the Math & Science Exploratory School.

So that should be the end of it, right? Yeah not so much.

I hate to call women shrill – I think it's sexist – but this woman? Shrill. A regular writer for the Sun, she calls the "madrassa" plan "insane," "a disastrous endeavor," and says that "[w]hen I first heard of this proposed school, I thought it was a joke." She's not concerned with kindergarteners sharing bathrooms with ninth-graders, or the prospect of fifth-graders losing their library: she says she's outraged because "we're bending over backwards to appease those sympathetic to individuals who would destroy us again," and invites her readers to "break out the torches and surround City Hall to stop this monstrosity."

If that's not enough to get your eyebrows muddled, she recounts the story of her daughter receiving an Arabic message on her cell phone's voice mail, from Michigan (p.s. Michigan is where the terrorists live), the result of a wrong number. Quickly realizing that she was the unintentional recipient of Al-Qaeda's launch codes, she did what any patriotic American would do upon hearing Arabic unexpectedly, and turned the message over to the FBI. To her dismay, the FBI was uninterested in her intelligence. (Quote: "Fools!")

But I don't want to pick on this particular woman, because there's nothing especially extraordinary about her worldview. Yet that's the point. I talk to folks, I read the news, I listen to the radio, I follow politics, and while I think we can agree her opinions aren't representative of all America, they do represent a large portion of it. (If that weren't the case, we'd have someone else in the White House by now.)

"During World War II," she asks, in a misguided attempt to be rhetorical, "did we open a German public school to explain the Third Reich?"

She calls the idea preposterous, but in a way that's exactly what we did. Not a single school to indoctrinate high school students into Nazi propaganda – there's a difference between the words explain and defend – but, following World War II, we made learning European languages, including Russian, a priority, an overdue recognition of the fact that students who'd grown up in immigrant households weren't the only ones in need of this particular form of expertise. In the 1980′s, as Japan's influence grew on the world stage, more and more high schools and colleges offered Japanese language classes. In this light there should be nothing unusual or surprising about the recent push for Arabic (and, while we're at it, Chinese). Currently there are 60 other dual-language schools in New York.

And as anyone who's taken even a single semester of foreign language knows, learning a language goes hand-in-hand with learning about the civilization that developed it. Hell, my 13-year-old daughter was up until 10:30 last night banging out a report about ancient Rome – not because she's taking history, but because she's taking first-year Latin. Do I fear that this newfound knowledge of hers will turn her into a Jupiter-worshiper? Not really, though I try to keep an open mind.

But we should also be careful. It's easy to look at the goofy, over-the-top hysteria of conservatives who believe an Arabic high school will produce a graduating class of wild-eyed Qur'an thumpers, and to respond by saying Arabic is important from a national security standpoint: after all, "we must learn the language of our enemy!" I've had plenty of friends whose parents pressured them into studying Russian for this reason, friends who wore baggy trousers and unconventional hair-dos and who were really more the Gaelic-by-correspondence type.

What we need to recognize is that teaching Arabic language and literature is important because Arabic language and literature are important. Imagine, for a moment, that – ha! – the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, the Palestine Question is settled to the universal satisfaction of everyone involved, all the corrupt dictators in the Middle East are replaced with democracies exquisitely attentive to human rights and international law, and mosques around the world announce that they will, from here on out, be giving their sermons in their native tongues. Does the need for Americans to learn about the Middle East magically disappear?

No. Because Mesopotamia is the cradle of civilization, because the Holy Lands figure prominently in European history, and because there is a thousand-year-plus history of interaction between Christian and Muslim countries, resulting in countless futile deaths, true enough, but also countless advances in the arts and sciences. Americans might have misinterpreted the word "madrassa," but there are other words imported from Muslim cultures that, historically, we've accepted without prejudice – "algebra," to name just one example. Learning this isn't important because we're at war with an Arab country, or because we want to make Arab American students feel included in the curriculum. It's important because it's important. Full stop.

Right?

Then again, we ALSO know that unveiled women are wanton sluts, women who require nothing more than hearing a man call “hey, baby” on a street corner and suddenly they’re in the backseat of his car, throwing their legs in the air while shrieking whee, I love Satan!

At least that’s what we’ve been told. I heard it on television and read it on the internet, so it must be true.

Or wait, did I get it wrong? Perhaps it goes like this:

Bare-headed women are liberated and free, sure of themselves, comfortable with their sexuality, a page straight out of Cosmo. They are women whose lives are filled with meaning and purpose; above all, they are modern — unlike backwards veiled women, who wouldn’t recognize their own oppression if it hit them on the head with a slipper.

Or no, wait, what I meant to say was that veiled women are the true feminists, women who are secure enough in their sexuality that they don’t need to engage in some base attempt to advertise it — unlike their sell-out sisters, who are so desperate for attention that they will abandon every iota of self-respect in a sad attempt to grovel for male approval. (“Tee-hee-hee, have you seen my belly ring?”)

Right?

Well. Maybe not. To all of the above.

+ + +

A Saudi friend of mine once said that "the only thing more cliché than talking about the veil is apologizing for talking about the veil." She’s right; the subject’s boring, long-exhausted. Yet, for Muslim women, it’s one subject that won’t go away. Here’s an insider tip for my male Muslim friends, even the so-called progressive ones who say they don’t care whether women veil or not: the difference between you and me is that you’ve never had to make this decision. And as much as we love you — plural — for claiming that you don’t care what conclusion we come to, the fact is you will never have to be in this position. And that, right there, makes your experience of Islam different from ours.

This is especially true in the United States. Which might seem odd, because we have no laws about veiling here, but that’s part of the reason the issue is so contentious.

In Iran, because veiling is mandated by law, a woman must be especially progressive to wear it in a lax and casual manner (in public) or forgo it altogether (in private). Veiling is the norm, so she’s well aware of the statement she’s making when she rejects it.

On the flip side, in France or Turkey — where there are laws against veiling inside various public institutions – a woman is, presumably, especially religious if she decides to take it up. Since not-veiling is the default, for Muslim and non-Muslim women alike, going against the grain of public opinion requires a commitment to Islam that most observers would understand to be something over and above the mere coincidence of being born into a Muslim family.

In the United States, however, it is precisely the freedom of choice I so cherish that makes this such a complicated decision for the Muslim women who live here. The cultural norm – the “average American” woman – is unveiled, but the predominant image of a Muslim woman, even among non-Muslims, is that of a muhajabah. Therefore a muslimah who decides not to veil is seen as transgressing against her community and will have her commitment to Islam doubted, while the woman who does decide to veil is seen as rejecting everything about American life save for her religious practice. We can’t win; there is no middle ground. Being 51% one way or the other is seen as a complete rejection of the other side.

In case you weren’t listening the first time around, let me be clear: I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m opposed to both the French ban on veiling and the Saudi mandate for it, and listening to the Dutch whine about the loss of their Pure Dutch Culture [sic] in the face of all these – gasp – immigrants is one of the few times I’m proud to be American, where multiculturalism is an established fact, however imperfectly it’s practiced.

But I also remember living in a country where the signifiers weren’t so strong. I’m told it’s different in Egypt now — that somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of Cairene women now veil — but when I was living there, in the early 1990s, it was closer to 50/50. I loved that. I loved, especially, that there was no great social divide between veiled and unveiled women; you’d see differences of opinion even within a single family. One of my sisters-in-law veiled, one did not, the third took it up for a few years and then changed her mind and took it off. None of this was a matter of any great controversy. It didn’t even merit much discussion.

This is not to downplay the choices Egyptian women had to make. One friend of mine at the university said her father never forced her to veil, but it was only after she decided to take it up that he allowed her study late at the library, walk home unattended, and otherwise participate in public space in ways he wouldn’t have permitted without her willingness to adopt the hijab and, accordingly, serve as walking symbolism for everything the hijab represented in the popular imagination. On the other side of that spectrum, there was another girl I knew, also Egyptian, who said she wanted to veil but worried it would interfere with her career as a journalist. She wanted to be a foreign correspondent, and she was afraid people would read so much into her scarf that they wouldn’t get around to reading her words.

Can the choice to veil or not veil in such a context truly be considered “free”? I don’t know. Then again, I know plenty of American women who will tell you no one forced them to diet, but they believed that being thin facilitated their right to speak with authority in a manner they’d have lost if they had to confront the bias against fat women in a country where being heavy is equated with a loss of self-control and a where a loss of self-control is considered shameful, if not downright sinful. My point here is not to excuse the former because of the existence of the latter: only to argue that there is nothing uniquely “Islamic” about a woman negotiating with the patriarchy, nothing specifically “Muslim” about a woman who trades in Her Personal Ideal in favor of getting what privileges she can with a minimal amount of compromise. We ladies, the world over and religion notwithstanding, have been doing that for thousands of years.

I wonder, though, if our notions of “Islamic dress” had evolved in such a way that the turban (for example) was considered as mandatory for men as the hijab is for women in some circles, would Muslim men in the West expound on the subject with the same confident manner they do now, one that is as flippant as it is self-assured? I’m sure 10% of men would wear it everywhere without a second thought, and another 10% would scoff at the mere idea of it. But for the majority, those in the middle, it would (I would hope) elicit a little more reflection. Do you risk community censure for being one of those “non-turban guys,” knowing that – before you even open your mouth – your bare head will be considered, by some, proof that you eat pork, drink alcohol, never pray, love capitalism, support colonialism and the war in Iraq, neglect your children, and cheat on your wife? Or do you take it up, knowing that, in different spheres, it will brand you as ignorant, ascetic, oppressed, and/or radical? Be careful! Remember, you don’t get to choose how you want to be seen at this event, or with that crowd of people: the choice you make has to be applicable for all times and circumstances. No fair picking one option for a family reunion or protest march, and another for your first nervous job interview at Chase Manhattan.

For a while, in Cairo, I lived across the street from a girls’ high school and would watch these young scholars stream out of class after the final bell. There would be the same roar of high-pitched laughter I recognize in teenage girls anywhere, in any country, as they coagulated in groups in the garden, or at the front gate: veiled girls interlinking their arms with girls who wore their hair uncovered, occasionally leaning over to whisper some secret that necessitated pushing back a girlfriend’s headscarf or ponytail, depending, in order to have access to her ear. The intimacy of girls that age is always charming to me, but it seems even more endearing in retrospect, knowing that they were doing something that, in so many parts of the world, would be considered a radical act: ignoring the politics of the veiled/unveiled split in favor of interacting with the human being inside.

Members of the right-wing Swiss People's Party, currently the largest party in the Swiss parliament, have launched a campaign to have the building of minarets banned…

In theory Switzerland is a secular state, whose constitution guarantees freedom of religious expression to all. In practice however mosques in Switzerland tend to be confined to disused warehouses and factories.

Across the country, there are only two small minarets, one in Zurich and one in Geneva, neither of which are permitted to make the call to prayer. In Switzerland's capital Berne, the largest mosque is in a former underground car park…

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Parliamentary candidate, 25, finds herself at centre of Europe-wide controversy

In the land that launched the cartoons war between Islam and the west, Asmaa Abdol-Hamid finds herself on the frontline, gearing up for a new battle.

The 25-year-old social worker, student and town councillor describes herself as a feminist, a democrat, and a socialist. She has gay friends, opposes the death penalty, supports abortion rights, and could not care less what goes on in other people's bedrooms. In short, a tolerant Scandinavian and European.

She is also a Palestinian and a devout Muslim who insists on wearing a headscarf, who refuses, on religious grounds, to shake hands with males, and who is bidding fair to be the first Muslim woman ever to enter the Folketing, the Danish parliament in Copenhagen.

For the extreme right, the young activist is a political provocateur, an agent of Islamic fundamentalism bent on infiltrating the seat of Danish democracy. To many on the left, Ms Abdol-Hamid is also problematic, personifying through her dress the reactionary repression of women and an illiberal religious agenda that should have no place in her leftwing "red-green" alliance of socialists and environmentalists.

As a result of announcing her parliamentary candidacy earlier this month, the young Muslim and Danish citizen has been thrust to the centre of a debate tormenting Denmark and the rest of western Europe – on the place and values of Islam in modern Europe and the treatment of large Muslim minorities.

Ms Abdol-Hamid is unfazed. "I see more Islam here in Denmark than in Iran or in other places in the Middle East," she says. "It's easier to be a Muslim in Denmark than in Saudi Arabia. I don't feel a stranger here. I'm interested in politics. I want to talk about this society, about political issues. But I'm not in politics because I'm a Muslim."

Her ambition, combined with her insistence on flaunting her religious affiliation, have outraged the Danish political establishment and triggered a new bout of soul-searching almost two years after the publication of cartoons of the Prophet ignited violence and protest across the Islamic world.

"This goes far beyond the extreme right," says Toger Seidenfaden, editor of the Politiken daily newspaper. "Asmaa is insisting on the right to be a religious Muslim and that's provoking broad debate among the public."

The key issue is the headscarf and whether it can be accommodated in parliament. This month Ms Abdol-Hamid gained the candidacy for a safe Copenhagen seat for the leftwing Unity List.

The Danish People's Party or DFP, the far-right movement that unofficially props up the weak centre-right government of the prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, is on the warpath. A couple of DFP politicians compared the headscarf to the Nazi swastika. One described the prospective MP as "brainwashed".

"We don't like the idea of her performing as an Islamist in the parliament," says DFP spokesman Kim Eskildsen. "We find it wrong that she'll use the parliament as a tool for Islamism … We don't consider this woman a Nazi. But the way the headscarf is used is comparable to other totalitarian symbols."

The happiest country in the world, according to one detailed survey of international living standards and public attitudes, Denmark is economically highly successful, with the lowest unemployment in the EU.

For the country's 200,000 Muslims and immigrants, however, that happiness is increasingly somewhere else. By virtue of the DFP's influence on the centre-right government, Denmark has enacted the tightest anti-immigration legislation in Europe in recent years.

Many Danes married to foreigners now commute into Copenhagen every day from the southern Swedish town of Malmo across the bridge linking the two cities because they cannot obtain residence for their spouses at home.

Ms Abdol-Hamid, who shares a one-room council flat with one of her six sisters in the "ghetto" of Vollsmose, in the town of Odense, says her political mission is to fight for this underclass.

"This is such a rich country. But we have people in Denmark in deep poverty and nobody helps them. For me the welfare system is very close to Islam. But we need to change the government."

But conservative Muslim leaders are also disapproving of her activism.

"Some Muslims don't think it's right for a female to act like this. They go to my father and tell him, get her married, get her married," she laughs. "Others think you can't be Muslim and Danish at the same time. Some of the Muslims and the extreme right are just the same.

"And there are women in my party who say that anyone who wears the headscarf is oppressed. It's like they think I'm dumb. They're taking away my individuality. We need the right to choose. It's up to us whether or not we wear headscarves.

"They think I'm a woman from the Middle East. No. I'm a Danish Muslim."

It's a shame her first book came to the world's attention around the same time as Irshad Manji's did, so they keep getting thrown in the same intellectual pile. (I know I ordered them both in the same Amazon order. "If you liked… then you'll love…!") A shame, because Ali is about 150 IQ points smarter than Manji is. I still disagree with her a lot of the time, but I give her credit for being consistent to the truth as she perceives it.

Here is a New Yorker video from last October with her, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im (who writes about human rights and Islamic jurisprudence), Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran), Mahmood Mamdani (Good Muslim, Bad Muslim), and others. It's long, but worth watching.

Whether or not you watch or like the show, it's an interesting look at the "but it's just television!" defense, used repeatedly and then interspersed with comments from soldier-fans in Iraq (who just happen to be *actual interrogators*), and meetings the writers have with the likes of Mary Cheney and Karl Rove.

He knows Asra; I'd met her at least once. We both knew she didn't wear hijab. In fact she's one of the few women who sometimes goes unveiled even in the mosque, which is almost unheard of, even among women who don't otherwise veil, even among non-Muslim tourists. In the fury over the woman-led prayer in New York City last year, much of the controversy centered around the fact that Asra Nomani was in attendance and she didn't veil. Gasp.

This isn't something you just forget to do. It's something you do to make a point. So why was she veiled on the cover of her own book, a book that deals with this very subject?

"I don't think she had much control over cover art," he said.

A lot of writers make that complaint. It still bugged me, though. This wasn't a matter of different aesthetics. Using the veil in this way is not only cliched as all hell, it's actively playing into the stereotypes the book itself is trying to undermine. Plus, she appears unveiled on the back cover, which made the whole thing seem silly and costume-y on top of everything else.

Last month she wrote about her war over cover art: Why do Western publishers have a veil fetish? ("this is my mea culpa"). Her publishers eventually relented, and she appears unveiled on the paperback edition.

Good, I guess. But why was there a need to put her picture, or that of any woman, on either of the covers in the first place? Is it really so hard to sell this kind of book unless a) it's got a pretty girl on the front, or b) it's promising a trip inside the harem? That's it, them's the choices?

I'm not opposed to veiling. I'm not opposed to not veiling. I am opposed to reducing everything a Muslim woman says or does or writes or thinks to what she does or doesn't wear on her head. Look at those two covers side-by-side, and it's hard to believe the same book is contained between them. Notably, when they let her take off her veil they also stripped off the word "Mecca," presumably because that word's connotations don't sit right next to a picture of a woman, sans hijab, looking confident, happy, and self-assured (even though neither of the photos were taken IN Mecca — one was a photo shoot; the second was on the street). She's right when she quotes Mohja Kahf, in the piece linked above, who says the image forces Muslim women into "a Victim or Escapee package." In the first picture she looks trapped — not only because of the scarf, but because of the lighting, her head tilted down, the word MECCA as large as her face beneath her. In the second picture her scarf's around her neck instead of her head (just like those French libertines!), the light's on her face (did someone allow her to go outside without a male chaperone?), her smile is broader, and she's no longer Standing Alone in Mecca (how lonely), she's simply Standing Alone (what independence, what strength!). It's like she earned political asylum in the time it took the paperback to come out.

But her book isn't about suffering within Islam, nor about joyfully leaving it behind. It's about embracing it and reclaiming it. Neither of those images convey that.