Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

Akram's Razor has moved to Patheos

I'm pleased to announce that this blog is moving to Patheos.com. As its introduction puts it, Patheos is "the premier online destination to explore and experience the world's beliefs and to engage in the global dialogue about religion and spirituality."

I'm looking forward to joining the gang at Patheos, which lately has been gobbling up interesting bloggers like a cyberspace reincarnation of Galactus.

The blog's new home is http://www.patheos.com/blogs/akramsrazor/

The new site more or less mirrors the old one in content. The main difference is that it's mostly free of the maddening (and often pornographic) spam comments that TypePad has been letting through for a while now.  (I eventually gave up on exterminating the robo-vermin infesting my comments, as it was just too time-consuming.)

Please update your feeds, as I probably won't be updating this blog again. And, in any case, it'll presumably dissolve into into the ether once I stop paying the monthly subscription in a month or two.

 

Tikkun Daily: “Think the NYPD is infiltrating Pat Robertson’s church?”

After a very long hiatus, I finally posted something new on Tikkun Daily.

Teaching Kids the Holy Quran...with Legos!

I’ve blogged on occasion about Legos. You might remember me mentioning The Brick Testament,which retells a number of famous (and in some cases shocking) stories from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Well, I appear to be the last person in the Islamophere to notice the wonderful blog Teaching Kids the Holy Quran, which aims to do the same for the Quran, but with some innovative twists.

I love this glimpse of a Lego Jahannam (Hell) from Chapter 72/Surah Al-Jinn:

The emphasis is on lessons as opposed to stories, and these lessons drawn from the Quran are often embedded in a real world settings (e.g., an imam giving a sermon, a father and son discussing a doctrinal matter over a barbeque), an approach that sounds strange but actually works quite well for these purposes. It’s a great explanatory device and one that’s particularly well suited to the Quran, I think.

Due to its complex and often iterative narrative structure and interweaving of genres—a fact that leads some observers to mistakenly claim it to be random or incomprehensible a la Thomas Carlye; were these critics to read a scholarly treatment of the aesthetics of the Quran, like  Michael Sell’s very insightful Approaching the Qur’an, they’d realize that the Quran’s rich language and subtle deployment of themes operate simultaneously on multiple aesthetic and intellectual registers; to judge it simply by whether or not it is linear in narrative is to really utterly miss the point, however understandable that instinct may be for the uninitiated—to try to portray it in a single, seamless narrative would be confusing. Its structure lends itself well to shorter stories and lessons. And there are, of course, a number of “controversial” verses that are often misunderstood and/or misrepresented that these short takes are perfect for glossing in a highly accessible and unintimidating manner.

I wonder if this innovative use of both Legos, scriptural exposition and web technology has indeed succeeded in reaching children who otherwise might not learn about the Quran. On the one hand, Legos are presumably an appealing and unintimidating medium for instruction to children; on the other, I wonder how many kids young enough to be swayed by the choice of Legos for the medium would sit still and scroll down a web page to read these stories. Or is this perhaps really targeting adolescents? In any case, it’s an intriguing formula.

Skewering racism on public radio

For those who are French-enabled, I thought I'd share a great radio skit that's stirred up controversy in France. There's a new humorous skit on French public radio called A votre écoute coûte que coûte (which I'd translate as "Listening to you, whatever the cost [to me of doing so]") about radio call-in show on health issues hosted by two insufferably smug and superficial experts (a doctor and a psychiatrist who are married).

This particular episode involves a call from a young woman who's distraught over her parents' racist reaction to her Moroccan boyfriend. It's pretty biting satire of attitudes towards Arabs in France (which, I think it’s fair to say, has even greater problems than America in this department thanks to its often tortured colonial history, especially in North Africa).

I won't try to summarize it other than saying it skewers the hidden racism of this ostensibly cosmopolitan and enlightened couple mordantly (e.g., in response to the revelation that the girl's parents refer to her boyfriend as a bougnoule--a French analog to "nigger"--the learned doctor dives into the etymological nuances to establish there's no reason to assume parents racist from this turn of phrase, only to quickly be informed they resort to sale Arabe, dirty Arab, for her boyfriend, as well).

Sadly, I have succeeded in finding neither an English transcript nor discussion of this controversy and I don’t have time to write it up, myself. That's probably because it's a recent broadcast, from January 23 (among my podcasts for my commute are a few French programs, so I heard about the case almost immediately on the Canadian CBC's Euromag podcast).

Beyond the biting satire--I love humor that draws blood, a la Chris Rock--I love the utter contrast between this show and the intellectually unchallenging, timorously bland--and, for all the caterwauling of the Right about its supposedly rampant liberalism—and unmistakably uncritically-pro-government, militaristic and right-leaning programming we get on what passes for "public" radio in America.

 

All-American: 45 American Men on Being Muslim

The collection of essays by American-Muslim men that I mentioned before—and to which I myself contributed a piece—will be published in a few months and is now available for pre-order.

Its title is now All-American: 45 American Men on Being Muslim. It now boasts a foreword by the trailblazing US Congressman Keith Ellison.

Kudos to the book’s editors Wajahat Ali and Zahra Suratwala.

 

Here’s the current Amazon blurb on All-American: 45 American Men on Being Muslim:

Follow up work to White Cloud's successful and highly acclaimed May 2011 book I Speak For Myself: American Women on Being Muslim. With this second book in the I Speak For Myself series, American Muslim men speak out on their lives and how their Muslim beliefs play out in private and on the public stage. Contributors include high profile figures in the American Muslim community, representing a new generation that is making a profound impact inside and outside the Muslim world.

Can’t wait to see the final product (and who else contributed).

Insights into diversity within the Muslim Brotherhood

Came across a helpful if a bit sketchy overview of the schools of thought within the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement that’s on Western observers’ minds these days.

According to “The Muslim Brotherhood’s Trial of Pluralism” by Ibrahim El-Houdaiby in the Egyptian newspaper Midan Misr, there 4 streams:

1. Islamic Modernism in the mold of Muhammad Abduh (and later Mahmud Shaltut) that “rejects the authority of turath (accumulated heritage of Islamic sciences), and calls for the return to Quran and Sunnah and practicing ijtihad (innovation in Islamic jurisprudence) whilst being only guided by ideas in turath.”
2. Traditionalism “characterised by heavy reliance on turath and acceptance of the full authenticity of the four main Sunni schools of jurisprudence. The school also promotes the notion of “balanced identity”, arguing that each individual belongs to different circles of affiliation, including mazhab (school of jurisprudence), tariqa (Sufi order), theological school, hometown, profession, guild, family and others.”
3. Qutbism—after Sayyid Qutb—a worldview grounded in a “highly politicised and revolutionary interpretation of Quran that divides peoples into those who belong to/support Islam/Islamism, and those who oppose it. It relies on historical incidents from the prophet’s biography (mainly conflicts between Muslims and pagans) to construct a framework for managing the relation between Islamists and their societal counterparts, and between the Muslim world and other civilisations.”
4. Salafism/Wahhabism, “a modernist Islamist ideology that has minimal respect for turath, and is characterised by a conservative, rigid, and rather materialist understanding of Sharia law, low levels of tolerance and the focus on superficial/external components of religion.”

It would have been nice if the author had provided the names of the most prominent contemporary representatives of each tendency, but it’s a very useful overview for beginners. For one thing, it provides a much needed corrective to the reductionism of MSM coverage of the MB as a monolithic movement. It also shows that the only-marginally-better fall-back option of Western journalists, the old/young dichotomy—i.e., framing differences of opinion within the Brotherhood as simply the affects of generation gap—doesn’t help you understand the all that much, either.

One of my pet peeves is when Modernism is presented as a single school of thought, as there are many modernist that subscribe to varying approaches to the turath. For example, even if they may at time come to similar conclusions there is a huge methodological difference between Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan or Al-Afghani and Muhammad Abdu or Rashid Rida. Sir Sayyid was a great political leader who did much good for his fellow Indian Muslims during some low points of British colonial rule, but he wasn’t much of a religious thinker, in my opinion.  (I am guilty of some “modernist” leanings—Who isn’t today?—but to me Sir Sayyid comparisons are fighting words.) And one occasionally hears Yusuf al-Qaradawi referred to as a modernist.

There, a proper post for a change.

The Transformers face a truly eldritch horror!

This has no relevance to Islam, American politics or the price of fish, but as an ardent fan of H.P. Lovecraft, I have to give this delightfully obscure and unexpected mashup a nod.

 Octimus Prime and the Autobots are up against their fiercest, most spine-tingling foe yet: Cthulhu!

As if that's not entertaining enough, the Autobots are Steampunkified.

I haven't bought a comic book in ages, but the surreal novelty and unbridled geekery of this title may change that. 

A panel depicting Octimus Prime in battle from "Infestation: TRANSFORMERS", via i09:

 

Beware the peaceful decoy Muslims!

A very timely report from the trenches of the War on Terror. Al-Qaeda's most insidious plot yet: the peaceful decoy Muslims!

The Onion News: "Al Qaeda Populating U.S. With Peaceful 'Decoy Muslims'"

The sad thing is that this is barely satire, in some circles of American politics and media. The Orwellian notion that Muslims who are to all appearances and by all conventional standards  squeaky-clean, "normal" and "moderate"--but who do not enlist in the Islamophobes' cause--ultimately pose the greatest threat of all to American security is a constant refrain in the Muslim-baiting industry. Just lace up the hip boots and google "Taqiyya Muslims America" to see what I mean.

BTW, there's a small intertextual, presumably unintended, touch: The "reporter" in this clip bears a slight resemblance to a famous real-life Islamophobe kook--Wafa Sultan--known for comparably paranoid and bigoted rhetoric against Muslims.

Old folks "occupy" CA bank

This sight  surely scared the bank manager more than a sprinting horde of "Brains!"-chanting zombies would have.  [HT: SF Weekly]

‘Wild Old Women’ Close San Francisco Bank Of America Branch (CBS San Francisco, January 5, 2012):

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) – It was a slow-moving Occupy Wall Street protest, but it was an effective one. A dozen senior citizens calling themselves “the wild old women” succeeded in closing a Bank of America branch in Bernal Heights Thursday.

The women, aged 69 to 82, who live at the senior home up Mission street from the Bernal Heights Bank of America branch, decided to hold their own protest by doing what they called a “run on the bank.”

Tita Caldwell, 80, who led the charge of women with walkers and wheelchairs, said that they’re demanding the bank lower fees, pay higher taxes, and stop foreclosing on, and evicting, homeowners. [MORE]

Being caught on video arguing with--much less pepper spraying or ilegallydetaining--these protesters will make for rather bad PR. It's a PR disaster no matter how it gets handled. Which is appropriate given how scandalously cut-throat and neo-feudal  the American economy is today.  You can only put so much lipstick on this pig.

Cue the rightwing pundits with their slogans about clueless young people who don't understand how the real world works. Tell that to old peoplewho are eating cat food as the Right lectures them about "entitlement reform."

And cue the insincere declarations of support from centrist Democratic leaders whose economic policies are  consistently functionally indistinguishable from that of the Republicans. At least the latter are fairly consistent from a purely ideological standpoint as they promote policies that reduce America to a third world nation.

 

The Ta'leef Collective

Followed a link from someone's Facebook page to the Taleef Collective website and watched some of their videos. Judging by the brief interviews there, the Taleef Collective looks like an innovative community initiative that strives to create a social space that appeals to and meets the needs of American-born Muslims, and which doesn't reproduce all the religiously unnecessary and/or culturally out-of-place practices and hangups that make many immigrant-run mosques in American less hospitable than they could be to new and younger Muslims.

They're all very thoughtful, and it's fascinating to hear frustrations and concerns that you  assumed only you to be guilty of harboring voiced aloud, and by up and coming community leaders.

For example, I really cracked up at how the brother in the clip below points out how absurd it is that ungrounded young American Muslims--whether  converts not--engage in what one might call "moral hypochondria." He captures the absurdity of the dynamic wonderfully, describing it as not only a disease, but a disease we pretend to have. The example he gives is of an American-born person who presumably leads a normal, integrated life in American society that leads him or her to regularly interact with all manner of people but who suddenly becomes a prude about dress once they're in the masjid. This sort of almost comical cognitive dissonance arises at least partly, I think, out of the tendency of some converts and American-born Muslims to overcompensate for their lack of an Islamic cultural background  by neurotically aping the mores (often imagined mores) of people from Muslim-majority cultures.

Here's part of the description of the project from its website:

Ta’leef Collective began as Zaytuna Institute’s Outreach program in 2002 and was born into an independent organization in 2005.  Ta’leef Collective provides the space, content and companionship necessary for a healthy understanding, embrace and realization of Islam. We serve seekers actively interested in Islam and converts to the faith, assisting them in realizing a sustainable conversion to and practice of Islam, and a healthy, gradual integration into our greater Muslim community. Ta’leef Collective also strives to reengage the growing number of disenfranchised and often marginalized Muslim young adults.

It looks very exciting. I sure wish stuff like this had been happening when I was coming up.

 

REFLECTIONS with Amir Sulaiman from Mustafa Davis on Vimeo.

 

 

On the likelihood of mistaking a pile of kale for a chicken sandwich

A disturbing example of a small business getting sued by a corporate giant over ridiculous trademark infringement claims, and by a company that prides itself on being in touch with family town values.

They cease operations on the Sabbath--Chick-fil-A proudly advertizes its policy of closing on Sundays for religious reasons--but go for the jugular against, as Anderson Cooper cleverly sums it up, "a little guy with a squeegee."

So, I guess all the companies, organizations and church groups that spoof the iconic "Got Milk?" ad campaign are to be sued, too?

How many people even know what kale is, anyway? I think I've encountered it a half dozen times in my life.