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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Barbara Boxer was on my television last Sunday telling a CNN interviewer that the Muslim cartoon riots are an unfortunate but necessary part of the inevitable learning curve for a society unaccustomed to democracy and freedom of speech. Her contention was that Muslims, like children, cannot be expected to understand political satire and the proper parameters of the free exchange of ideas, and the tragedy of burning embassies only points to the need for a benevolent lesson in Western-style education on this matter. I wanted to crawl into the TV and dope-slap her upside the head.

Like many people my age who came up during the Cold War, I was raised to believe "free speech" was sacred because it was what separated us from the Communists, not so much for its literal promise. By sixth grade I knew reputable American newspapers couldn't use the f word, that you wouldn't see penises on network programming, that you could sue a magazine for something called "libel," that I wasn't allowed to shout "fire" in a crowded theater or talk to my neighbor during reading time or call my mother a wanton whore or any number of things that contradicted the notion that all speech was always acceptable. It was fine, in other words, to have a discussion about the parameters of the acceptability of speech, but only so long as the argument was an internal one. Once the argument went global it became a matter of national pride to maintain that ours was a society of freedom-lovin' people who embraced all manner of open debate, without restriction. I see this happening again now, this distance between how we see ourselves, and how we see ourselves through others' eyes. It's interesting.

When I was in sixth grade I pictured the Soviet Union as a country with only one newspaper, which Yuri Andropov wrote himself each night over a cup of warm milk. I didn't give that bias much thought until I went to Egypt and saw how complex journalism really is in a country with a state-controlled press. Egypt has an official censorship board. (I think they actually call it that — at least, I've never heard it called anything else.) Mainstream magazines, newspapers, films, television shows, even recording studios must pass their content through this body, where their work is edited and refined. The larger press outlets receive federal funding in exchange for taking part in this process. As irritating and ridiculous as this may be, however, it's different from my original conceptualization of state-run press: I thought all the reporters who worked for government-controlled media were on Mubarak's payroll; thought they were the voluntary mouthpieces, if not eager cheerleaders, of the administration. It was only after working with some of them that I realized they found the process as exasperating as I did. Write a piece, wait for editing, sigh, eyeroll, change a sentence or two, send it back, get it okayed, print or record. It's technically illegal for any work to be published without going through this process, but it happens all the time regardless, since banned political parties all have their own newspapers and musicians and imams can release their work on bootlegged tapes and there are overseas publishers that cater to presses that would be banned domestically (Cyprus, as I recall, was popular for this).

Really the situation isn't all that different from the U.S., where the largest media outlets are corporate-owned and the journalists who work for them don't want to risk that golden thing called "access" by reporting scathing criticism of the elite. For that we have a large and diverse alternative press, who trade advertising dollars and a seat in the White House press room for the freedom to write what they please.

From the perspective of a reporter there's obviously a difference between writing for a paper that's banned and one that's merely marginalized and underfunded, but from the perspective of the reader the difference isn't all that stark. Banned papers are still distributed on street corners, discussed in coffeeshops, and referred to in university classes and by the state-run press. It's simply ignorant to say that Muslims – you know, all of them – are rioting because they're unfamiliar with discussion and dissent in the media. If anything the Arab world has a press even more robust and diverse than ours, because journalists are expected to write with a distinct viewpoint. Our papers have one page of columns and op-eds. Theirs are more likely to have a page or two of news feeds and then lots and lots of commentary. This is doubly true now with the internet, and triply true if we're talking about political cartoons, which in countries with high illiteracy rates are a particularly popular form of protest speech.

I still think there's value in framing this as a debate around freedom of expression, but not if it comes with liberal soft-pedaling about just what "we" can and can't expect "them" to handle. They're not burning down embassies because they befuddled at the idea of a newspaper printing something offensive. They're burning down embassies because they're pissed.

II. "Middle Eastern governments should take responsibility for fueling this fire."

Of course they're fueling the fire. They know where their bread is buttered. Even dictators need to maintain some semblance of support with their population, and this issue is a freebie. Every government in the Middle East dependent on Western aid fears internal Islamist resistance more than any other domestic threat; the recent election in Palestine is a good example of why. A dictator's first line of defense will be to arrest and kill the Islamists, but his second will be to claim and define Islam in a way that doesn't threaten the internal order. By criticizing "the West" for insulting Islam and standing in mock solidarity with those who riot against DENMARK of all places, Middle Eastern governments can channel local outrage that would otherwise be leveled against them and point it toward a foreign source that has no real political or economic power in the region.

III. "This is no different than mocking Jesus."

Religion has never existed in a political vacuum. This is a map of the riots, demonstrations, and deaths that have occurred on three continents over this issue. You'll note that North America, so far, is not represented, despite the fact that the United States is the biggest bully in Middle East affairs at the moment and has a sizeable Muslim population. You'll also note that North America rarely if ever sees violent home-grown clashes between immigrant Muslims and the government. (9/11 was the work of outsiders who came here to live with the specific intent of committing a terrorist attack.) Why? Because (so far!) assimilation in the United States has been possible within the space of one generation. If you've read this journal for more than five minutes you know I don't gloss over the very real problems immigrants have in adapting to this country, but the difference between us and Europe is that we don't imagine that there is anything like a "pure" American with ties to this land going back a thousand years or more and that immigrants are therefore "guests." First-generation Middle Eastern immigrants in the U.S. have higher incomes and higher educational levels than the American average. A quarter of them have household incomes above $100,00 a year. It is a pain in the ass for an immigrant to get an American passport, but it's not impossible, and their children will be granted citizenship automatically just by virtue of being born here. Consequently American Muslims may feel an affinity with majority-Muslim countries but they are not forced to look abroad for their primary sense of national identity.

This is not, overall, the case in Europe, where Muslims are both figuratively and literally ghettoized. And I shouldn't need to mention the array of abuses and humiliations, from Guantanamo Bay to Palestine to Abu Ghraib, that Muslims abroad endure at the hands of so-called Western powers. The Jyllands-Posten has been portrayed as a paper that unwittingly published some cartoons deemed offensive to Islam. Oopsie! Oh no! Now what! In fact they put out a call for such cartoons as a specific challenge to what they knew to be a sensitive issue with Muslims, and they did so two years after rejecting similar cartoons that pilloried Jesus. This is their right. However, in making a decision specifically designed to stir shit up within a population that has been habitually oppressed, harassed, and discriminated against, they look less like martyrs and more like someone who shoves his fingers into a burn victim's scabs — "does it hurt here? how 'bout HERE?" — and then shouts out in surprise when the victim finally slaps him. Again, I defend the right of the paper to say and publish whatever it pleases. But the frenzied discussion around this issue has (once again) portrayed Muslims as so inherently violent as to be almost random in their choice of targets. The problem isn't that those protesting don't understand the spirit in which the cartoons were published: it's that they understand it all too well. And in that case it doesn't matter if the newspaper were private or an official mouthpiece of the Danish government; doesn't matter if those who drew the cartoons weren't Muslim themselves and therefore not covered under the no-mocking-Mohammed clause. This was intended as a slam against Islam, and it was interpreted as such.

IV. "This is no different than mocking Jesus," take two.

Two words bear exploring: "offensive" and "taboo." I'm not sure the word "taboo" is really appropriate here. If it is, it's certainly not universal, since there have been paintings of Mohammed throughout Islamic history and, though rare, they haven't been particularly controversial when they appeared, usually because they were painted by Muslims and with affection.

I think it's better described as a "tradition" that has emerged as something of a creative challenge, respected by most Muslims for over 1,400 years. The first thing you learn in Islamic Art 101 is that the prohibition against depicting the human form has led to the flourishing of other types of art, including mosaics, calligraphy, and architecture. This practice even survived the invention of film. The Message, a biographical film about Mohammed (its director, tragically, ironically, was killed in the Jordanian hotel bombings) managed to create an entire narrative about the prophet's call to Islam without ever depicting him directly.

In one particularly memorable scene, the flight to Medina, the camera switches to what we are to presume is Mohammed's perspective. His followers line the highway from Mecca, folding into view solely through their greetings. They welcome [the cameraman] and invite him into their city, but we never see or hear anything from the object of their invitation. I know some viewers have said this feels awkward, or that Anthony Quinn would have made a wonderful Mohammed and should have been cast to play the role outright, but I always liked it. Putting aside from any overblown worry about idol worship, it allowed me to keep my own private version of Mohammed untainted (something I'm no longer able to do with the characters in The Joy Luck Club or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, never mind the 6093850439 million movies I've seen based on the Bible) and was an interesting bit of filmmaking to boot, one that gave a nod to the cultural and artistic legacy of the Middle East.

More than that, though, it's a testament to the lengths Muslim artists have been willing to go in order to preserve this particular tradition while still creating art that deals directly with Islam. Is that fear? Of God, of other Muslims? Maybe, sometimes, and that's a topic worth exploring. Then again, no one says Shakespeare was less talented because he wrote in iambic pentameter rather than free verse. If you can't see the difference between the creative possibilities that come from making art within selected parameters and "self-censorship," I suggest you go back to reading the tax code or whatever it is you do all day.

Saying someone is offended by the cartoons implies a blind attachment to a certain religious view, almost as a matter of taste, i.e. "Christ was our Lord and Savior! Don't you dare dunk a statue of him in urine!" That take, in my opinion, doesn't really capture the response we're seeing now. I'm not about to speak for the world's billion or so Muslims, but I know I was bothered by the cartoons mainly because I saw them as yet another clumsy attempt to claim art, expression, and the "correct" response to religious debate as the intellectual domain of the West. I'm not going to go burn down an embassy or anything over this view, but then again neither are most people who are bothered by it. Most people have been demonstrating, putting together boycotts, and writing letters to the editor. For this they were, right on cue, told they didn't understand politics and free speech. That's when the rioting started.

I wasn't privy to any of the early discussions that took place when they were getting off the ground last year; I'm an outsider, just a lurker and observer (and I, like other mere members, am reliably reminded of that fact by the leadership whenever I raise questions, which I find irritating since the questions were asked in good faith, but I can also appreciate their corresponding annoyance with having their motives second-guessed by people who weren't in the room when Issue 34543.b(ii) was being discussed originally).

However, what is the internet if not a vehicle for spewing uninformed positions? and so, here is mine: I believe the PMU made the same mistake some friends and I made when we started a nonprofit organization a few years ago, namely, that we thought because we had the same basic position on politics and world affairs we would naturally share the same views about strategy and tactics, group dynamics, the division of labor, finances, hierarchy in the workplace, "careerism," and all the other mundane details that go into running an effective organization. We turned out to be very, very wrong, and spent a lot of time blaming each other and defending our competing positions on minutiae like job titles and workflow, issues we should have hammered out before we went into business in the first place. These are problems in any company or organization, but since we were a progressive activist group our differences took on a higher level of indignation. I'm still upset that my assumption we would not organize in a hierarchical fashion wasn't respected; on the other hand I did nothing to promote that view or educate myself or others on how that model works in practice. I simply labeled people who disagreed with me reactionary, capitalist, status quo, opportunistic, etc. Some of those friendships have been irreparably broken; either way it took time out from doing our real work.

I should say, emphatically, that this is not a generic whiny plea, i.e. "Why can't we just get along?" I know it's not that easy. But that's the point. Because it's not that easy, you have to give the structure of your organization (not just its mission) a lot of thought, and figure out how divergent views will be addressed within it. Right now what I'm seeing is that the dog who barks the loudest keeps getting the bone. Members railroad each other on the listserv, those who moderate it have the power to deny the most argumentative members posting access and utilize that power liberally, those shut out go on to denounce the moderators elsewhere on the internet, and the cycle of in-fighting and ad hominem attacks continues. I realize ideology is at the bottom of so many of these arguments, but you'd never know it from the conversations I'm seeing. It's all names, names, names. He did this, then she did that. Meanwhile bombs in Iraq continue to fall.

I don't blame those who've resigned their positions on the Board (see here and here) — to sign on for that kind of headache is masochistic — but I'm also deeply disappointed that this movement is not turning out to be the utopian garden of acceptance I naively hoped it would be back in 2002 when I first discovered it. I'll say again that I'm here because of the PMU and its earlier incarnations, so any criticisms I have come from my own sadness at recent events. I've seen several blogs that are overflowing with glee and Schadenfreude at this situation, even from other progressives; this bothers me even more. I feel invested in this movement, and I want it to succeed.

For that to happen, though, they need to decide what they are, not just who they are. I was shocked when one Board member defended the PMU's decision to adopt unified position papers rather than open dialogue (in other words to have zero transparency, even within the membership, much less the general public) by saying GE doesn't discuss its internal affairs on a public web site, so why should they? It's not that I think a corporate model is inherently unsuitable. The ACLU has that kind of model; you can reliably expect there to be "an ACLU position" [singular] on all kinds of issues. But to get there I'm sure they have a rigid and elaborate internal mechanism for consensus-building, since it's unlikely that every single ACLU member agrees with every single ACLU position, down to the letter. Even the editorial board of my college newspaper would vote on their various editorial stances and someone from the "winning" side would be assigned to write the piece. It was simple and imperfect, but it worked. Or we all knew what we'd signed on to, at any rate.

It would be my hope, however (as contrasted with my expectation), that an activist organization would take a different approach. Last March, Mona Eltahawy wrote an article for MWU! criticizing the British decision to allow a student to wear jilbab rather than hijab, which she followed up with another piece about the student's background and relationship with Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Mohja Kahf followed this with a piece of her own in which she calls Mona "a dear friend" but defends the student and the court's decision. Together the three articles generated over 450 comments.

I found the exchange fascinating, and a perfect example of the dialogue that can take within an organization or group of people who share common goals. Both of these women are Muslims, feminists, opposed to extremism, and both, like the student in question, wore the hijab in their teens. Yet they took these shared experiences to arrive at different conclusions, and were generous enough to share those conclusions with the world. As someone who had originally framed the issue in the most basic terms (feminism, or multiculturalism?) I found the back-and-forth instructive and eye-opening, far more so than I would have found a generic position paper.

But the PMU is not a web site or a newspaper, and I understand it wants to be something more than a forum for discussion. But what is it, then? Even the ACLU does more than adopt positions; it raises funds, lobbies politicians, and defends people in the courts. So does ADC. AMIDEAST offers educational services. MERIP has its own publishing company.

My sense is that the PMU wants to situate itself as an alternative to CAIR and related organizations, but that might be my own cynicism. "Cynicism" not because I think that's an unworthy goal, but because it would explain what I feel is an extreme and distracting focus on recruiting big names and attracting press attention at the expense of real work and thoughtful discussion. The other day someone on the list asked for members' input on Fareed Zakaria. That was fine, and led to a nice chat. Several messages into the discussion, however, one of the other Board members mentioned in passing that this was a good example of the leadership asking for members' opinions before adopting a position on something.

Wait, I thought — why is anyone developing "a position" about Fareed Zakaria? Perhaps I misunderstood and they only wanted member input on this subject in order to frame their positions generally. Okay. But I also know there was some talk of asking him to be on the Board, which I do not understand at all, and that makes me skeptical. As far as I know he has never aligned himself with this movement, doesn't identify as a Muslim (progressive, cultural, secular, or otherwise) except via the accident of his birth, and is plenty busy with his own projects as it is. The only advantage he would bring is name recognition, and even that's a little sad. Other groups have Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Martin Sheen, Susan Sarandon. The PMU would have… Fareed Zakaria. Does no one else find this kind of depressing? Alienating hundreds of potentially enthusiastic members in exchange for getting to use the name of a guy who has a show on PBS? And if he did indeed rebuff the Board, what happens now? They come up with a position paper criticizing him for his politics, which are exactly the same as they were back when he was being recruited? I really hope that's not what's going on. I really hope I'm being cynical.

What I would like to see is a progressive Muslim organization that – yes – could be a public relations voice that mainstream news organizations could approach for soundbites and background information, but one that also serves as a one-stop networking space for:

• those who want to become active in their local communities,
• those who want to do MoveOn-style lobbying and internet slacktivism,
• a place for Muslim writers and artists to meet and possibly develop collaborative projects,
• identifying progressive mosques throughout the country (or the world),
• links to interesting and controversial articles elsewhere on the net, whether or not they've been stamped with anyone's official approval,
• shopping (books, clothing, software, toys, language resources),
• point/counterpoint editorial pieces of the Mona/Mohja variety described above (Brain, Child does something like this in every issue)
• links to charitable organizations in need of funding or volunteers.

The MWU! site has succeeded because politics aside its execution works: it's dynamic, diverse, and updated regularly. Not because its positions are uniform and perfectly articulated, and certainly not because it attracts famous names. People become well-known because their work resonates with others, not the other way around. The PMU approach reminds me of the Bush administration walking into Iraq and thinking it can sprinkle American Fairy Dust around the desert and suddenly, wow, there will be democracy.

As if.

"I am a nigger, and you will just have to put up with my blackness"

I met Amina Wadud two years ago and one thing she said, which will always stick with me, was, "Sometimes you read things" [in Islam] "and you say to yourself, this can't be right. And you have to go from there." This article talks about her disagreement with hudud punishments like the cutting of thieves' hands, or the permission to beat one's wife. Note that she's not saying that's not really what the Qur'an said, or "at the time the Qur'an was written this was appropriate but now we have to interpret things in light of modern circumstances," yadda yadda. She's saying yes, it's in there, and she finds it amoral anyway.

Breaking the ultimate taboo in the Muslim narrative, she stated that despite the fact the Qur'an explicitly asks for cutting off the hands of thieves, she did not agree with the Qur'an. She said she understood that this was a very difficult subject to talk about, but she would be dishonest to herself if she did not express her views.

She maintained that as a Muslim with Allah close to her heart, in all honesty she could not continue with the hypocrisy of lying about how she felt about some verses of the Qur'an.

The audience all but stoned her.

Her book, Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective, is also well worth reading.

So now I'm trying to remember just what we did all that time in church. I know we sang, a lot, the same children's songs over and over again. We said the Lord's prayer. We put on a play about Noah's Ark once in third grade, and did nativity scenes every Christmas. We visited the nursing home every couple months, and wrote letters to members of the church who were in the hospital. We decorated the church for holidays. We colored pictures of Jesus. We gave out Christmas trees to "poor" families ("poor" in quotes, because it was a small working-class town without much wealth disparity, so the "privilege" we're talking about was there by a pretty slim margin). We collected canned goods. We took turns handing out communion wine and lighting the candles on the altar. We learned little stories — Noah's ark, Moses, Adam and Eve, Jesus's birth — but never discussed them except in the most obvious terms: love is better than hate, being good is better than being bad, freedom is better than slavery. We said prayers for sick people. We made crafty items for our parents out of glue and yarn.

In short, it was a service agency. Not a religious education. I'm not sure I have a problem with this — I'm just calling it what it is.

By junior high it became a sort of extended guidance counseling session. We talked about our friends and the tyranny of popularity and our relationship with our parents, what we wanted to be when we grew up, and all the Big Issues of '80s like suicide and AIDS. That sounds nice, doesn't it? I remember it as excruciating. Being forced to discuss matters this private with a community I had not chosen was hell on earth.

And again, not a religious education.

The mosques in this area have an entirely different view toward children. There's no singing, period; a lot less art and a lot more rote memorization of Qur'anic verses and the Arabic alphabet. I don't like this approach, either. The Arabic I like in theory, but in practice it favors the kids who speak it at home and ends up alienating those for whom it's a second or third language. And memorizing the Qur'an in Arabic without learning the translation and without discussing the meaning is something I've never understood. What's the point? I know it's beautiful to listen to a child say a surah, but to them it's just the babbling of nonsense words until they sort out the meaning and the context.

I don't have any better ideas. Just something I'm thinking about today.

I'm not inherently opposed to competing or co-existing legal systems sharing the same jurisdiction. Not even sure if that's the right way to phrase it, but I'm thinking of Nigeria, where apparently you first take your case to a tribal council and if the solution isn't satisfactory to either party you can appeal and have it decided by the state. In theory, this seems like a nice way to reconcile cultural differences, though obviously it only works if everyone knows about it; one of the fears with the Canadian law is that recent immigrants (mainly women) will be told they have no choice but to get divorced within the religious courts.

What I don't understand about this, though, is how they can possibly define Muslim family law with such precision. I realize there are a few principles that are almost universally understood to be part-and-parcel of a "Muslim divorce," like the notion that the woman retains property in her own name. She's also entitled to "some" support after divorce, but what does "some" mean, and how long does it last? Child custody is particularly nebulous: after the Iranian revolution men were awarded custody of their boy children immediately following a divorce and of their girl children after age two (later, I believe, this was changed to boys at two and girls at seven); in Egypt after Sadat boys went to live with their fathers at age fifteen and girls stayed with their mothers until they were married or otherwise left the home. That's a lot of leeway in the interpretation of Islamic law, and either way the fitness of the parent doesn't enter the discussion. Is Canada claiming to have the definitive answer to this question?

My other question is why this only applies to family law. Here I feel like quoting myself, from a piece I wrote recently: "Herbert Liebesny has described the colonial displacement of Muslim law in majority-Muslim countries as five concentric circles, with commercial law on the outside, followed by penal law, real estate, contracts and torts, and finally family law at the center of the circle, the segment least affected by European influence. Since marriage, divorce, and other 'private' matters had scant influence on Europeans' ability to turn a profit in the colonies, these matters were among the only indigenous institutions left largely intact in the wake of imperialism. Over time this innermost circle came to represent 'authentic Muslim identity' both inside and outside the Middle East, and those who challenged laws related to women's rights — even laws dating back to the nineteenth century — were suspected of working in consort with the colonizers."

Which isn't to say I'd like to see sharia in its most draconian Saudi-style form instituted in Canada, wouldn't even like to see an Egyptian-style system that prohibits Muslims alone from gambling, or drinking alcohol during Ramadan. But I find it interesting that family law and other areas that affect women are considered "safe" territory for tinkering with the system, that these are the areas where we all agree to nod our heads and "respect multiculturalism," but in areas that involve the movement of capital, for example, or the treatment of prisoners, Islamic thought is still subservient to secular law. I suspect a lot of people who wouldn't dream of denying credit cards or a home mortgage to Muslim men (prohibition of usury), people who would rightly call that discriminatory, are still willing to consider taking a Muslim woman's children away from her in the name of Islamic law.

I'm sure there are good intentions behind this somewhere and in a way I'm impressed with Canada for even considering it, since the "How can we accommodate you, good Muslim citizens?" is an attitude in short supply right now. But there's potential for abuse all over the place.

ITHACA, N.Y. — In a study to determine how much the public fears terrorism, almost half of respondents polled nationally said they believe the U.S. government should — in some way — curtail civil liberties for Muslim Americans, according to a new survey released today (Dec. 17) by Cornell University.

About 27 percent of respondents said that all Muslim Americans should be required to register their location with the federal government, and 26 percent said they think that mosques should be closely monitored by U.S. law enforcement agencies. Twenty-nine percent agreed that undercover law enforcement agents should infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations, in order to keep tabs on their activities and fund raising. About 22 percent said the federal government should profile citizens as potential threats based on the fact that they are Muslim or have Middle Eastern heritage. In all, about 44 percent said they believe that some curtailment of civil liberties is necessary for Muslim Americans.

Conversely, 48 percent of respondents nationally said they do not believe that civil liberties for Muslim Americans should be restricted.

The Media and Society Research Group, in Cornell's Department of Communication, commissioned the poll, which was supervised by the Survey Research Institute, in Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. The results were based on 715 completed telephone interviews of respondents across the United States, and the poll has a margin of error of 3.6 percent.

The survey also examined the relation of religiosity to perceptions of Islam and Islamic countries among Christian respondents. Sixty-five percent of self-described highly religious people queried said they view Islam as encouraging violence more than other religions do; in comparison, 42 percent of the respondents who said they were not highly religious saw Islam as encouraging violence. In addition, highly religious respondents also were more likely to describe Islamic countries as violent (64 percent), fanatical (61 percent) and dangerous (64 percent). Fewer of the respondents who said they were not highly religious described Islamic countries as violent (49 percent), fanatical (46 percent) and dangerous (44 percent). But 80 percent of all respondents said they see Islamic countries as being oppressive toward women.

"Our results highlight the need for continued dialogue about issues of civil liberties in time of war," says James Shanahan, Cornell associate professor of communication and a principal investigator in the study. Shanahan and Erik Nisbet, senior research associate with the ILR Survey Research Institute, commissioned the study, and Ron Ostman, professor of communication, and his students administered it.

Shanahan notes: "Most Americans understand that balancing political freedoms with security can sometimes be difficult. Nevertheless, while a majority of Americans support civil liberties even in these difficult times, and while more discussion about civil liberties is always warranted, our findings highlight that personal religiosity as well as exposure to news media are two important correlates of support for restrictions. We need to explore why these two very important channels of discourse may nurture fear rather than understanding."

Researchers found that opinions on restricting civil liberties for Muslim Americans vary by political self-identification. About 40 percent of Republican respondents agreed that Muslim Americans should be required to register their whereabouts, compared with 24 percent of Democratic respondents and 17 percent of independents. Forty-one percent of Republican respondents said that Muslim American civic groups should be infiltrated, compared with 21 percent of Democrats and 27 percent of independents.

On whether mosques should be monitored, about 34 percent of the Republicans polled agreed they should be, compared with 22 percent of Democrats. Thirty-four percent of Republicans said that profiling of Muslim Americans is necessary, compared with 17 percent of Democrats.

The survey also showed a correlation between television news-viewing habits, a respondent's fear level and attitudes toward restrictions on civil liberties for all Americans. Respondents who paid a lot of attention to television news were more likely to favor restrictions on civil liberties, such as greater power for the government to monitor the Internet. Respondents who paid less attention to television news were less likely to support such measures. "The more attention paid to television news, the more you fear terrorism, and you are more likely to favor restrictions on civil liberties," says Nisbet.