Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bomb suspects, reportedly wrote that “an attack against one Muslim is an attack against all” on the wall of the boat in which he was hiding from police last month. Variations of this refrain seem to be common among angry young Muslim men, especially those who are attracted to violence. However, such a view ignores history, religious thinking and contemporary reality. It should be seen as a crass advertising slogan rather than a declaration of belief.
But this time, there is a change in rhetoric of how potential suspects are identified, particularly if they are Muslim. It is because of this change we are learning to move past paralyzing fear and maturing in how we think of what it means to be American.
By the end of last February, after Patheos first covered the breakdown of trust between the NYPD and the area Muslim community, the trust deficit grew even deeper when a series of ongoing articles from the Associated Press exposed wide-reaching domestic surveillance programs set up for the NYPD by the CIA. The last straw came with the report that the NYPD had been conducting secret surveillance on Muslim Student Associations at 16 colleges across New York and northeastern United States. Click here to see how several NY-area academics, activists and students reacted to the news.
Pakistani-American, Houston-based artist Fahim Somani creates expressionistic, calligraphy-inflected compositions which are not only exquisite formal experiments full of delightful painterly flourishes, but aesthetic bridges between two cultures. While drawing on the text of the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, Somani incorporates elements that evoke Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, and other currents in post-war American art. The artist achieves this marriage of visual cues from Islamic and American art with innate talent, producing powerful and enigmatic images full of brilliant brushstrokes and vibrant textures.
Islamophobia is alive in America, and Hussein Rashid sees it playing out among Sikhs, often mistaken for Muslims. In the most recent example, a member of her own party mistook a Californian GOP candidate, who is Sikh, for being a Muslim. “The reality is that Islamophobia has very real consequences and more and more victims of Islamophobia and Islamophobic rhetoric tend to be non-Muslims,” Rashid said.
In a more popular context, we see the ways in which religious illiteracy, historical amnesia, and political expedience have combined to create Islamophobic narratives informed by knowledge produced in the academy.
The recent story of a gay mosque in Paris raises conflicted feelings in me. On one hand, I recognize the need for safe spaces of worship, where people are not constantly being threatened for who they are. However, I also fear that creating a separate mosque perpetuates stigma by allowing other Muslims to avoid having discussions about what a truly devotional space could look like.
In fact, one of the amazing elements of Islamophobia is the denial of its own existence—as Nathan Lean explains. In his article, Lean also offers several examples of the impact Islamophobia has had on the lives of Americans; Wajahat Ali has written about the fear and death that an Islamophobic environment sanctions; Erik Love gives us sociological background on the impact of Islamophobia. I want to offer a reflection of what a New York Muslim sees and hears as Islamophobia becomes so normalized that it becomes an institution.
Demanding Dignity: Young Voices from the Arab Revolutions brings together essays written by today’s generation of Arab youth who have directly inspired and sparked a revolutionary spirit that toppled governments, unearthing the corruption of decades of dictator dominated countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
Patrick J Ryan, S.J., the Lawrence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, will deliver the annual fall McGinley lecture, “Life After Death, Hopes and Fears for Jews, Christians and Muslims.”
Father Ryan, who has dedicated his work to facilitating a trialogue between the three Abrahamic religions, will deliver the lecture twice:
Tuesday, Nov. 13 6 p.m.
12th-floor Lounge
Lowenstein Center, Lincoln Center Campus
And again on
Wednesday, Nov. 14
6 p.m.
Flom Auditorium
William D. Walsh Family Library, Rose Hill Campus
Joining Father Ryan on both nights will be respondents Claudia Setzer, Ph.D., professor of religious studies at Manhattan College, and Hussein Rashid, Ph.D., adjunct assistant professor of religion at Hofstra University.
Balbir Singh Sodhi. I don’t know if that name has the resonance that it should. Amongst Asian-Americans, names like Vincent Chin or Navroze Mody are part of our collective conscious. But Balbir Singh Sodhi is a name that is so important for the telling of the tale of minorities in America, but also a story that sits at the base of a crushing horror of what’s happened in this country after 9/11. Sodhi was the first victim of post-9/11 acceptable racism in this country. It’s when we started realizing that we needed to stand together.
The new document, What is the Truth about American Muslims? Questions and Answers, is an attempt by the organizations to provide accurate information and delve into the law of religious freedom, the history of American Muslims in the United States, and misunderstood terms and practices, including Shariah.
Hussein Rashid, Hofstra University adjunct professor and Religion Dispatches associate editor, and Rev. Richard Cizik, president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, will join Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, president of Interfaith Alliance, and Charles C. Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Education Project, to discuss the guide and the state of religious freedom in the United States.
Muslim millennials are often depicted either as radicalized promoters of Islamic global dominion or champions of democracy. But what do these two competing images tell us about the roughly 450 million young Muslims in the world today? And what, if anything, about the future of Islam?
Reza Aslan, author, No God but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam and Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization
Musa Syeed, screenwriter and director, Valley of Saints and A Son’s Sacrifice
Khalid Latif, chaplain, New York University
Linda Sarsour, director, Arab American Association of New York
Nadia Roumani, director, American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute
Some defer to others: they are commenting on sacred texts. Some supplant others: sacred texts of one faith argue against those of another. But, as presented here, many also engage in unexpected dialogues, emulations, even dissections. Scripts imitate one another, even if they are in different languages; images and designs recur in manuscripts from different conceptual worlds. Some texts remain unflustered while everything changes around them. And all of this takes place among just 52 works, some of which are astonishingly ancient, many of which are beautifully illuminated, and most of which are written in Hebrew.
It would be a challenge just to give individual items the attention they demand, let alone attend to their interactions: a third-century fragment of papyrus with Philo of Alexandria’s interpretation of scripture; a fifth-century codex of the Four Gospels written in the ancient Aramaic dialect Syriac; a 12th-century autograph manuscript of legal commentary written in Arabic by the Jewish scholar Maimonides using Hebrew letters; a 16th-century Persian Koran with exquisite decoration; a 16th-century Hebrew poem written for Queen Elizabeth I, urging her to support Hebrew scholarship at the University of Oxford, as had her father, King Henry VIII.
"He needs to talk about Muslims in the U.S., to show that the U.S. is not at war with Islam," said Hussein Rashid, an Islamic studies lecturer at Fordham University.
Muslim and non-Muslims alike took to Twitter today to denounce the Islamophobic ad. Their responses were both humorous and thoughtful. Below are some of our favorite tweets:
Other Arab bronzes with inscriptions in Arabic and Latin conjure memories of places where East and West met.
A ewer from Arab Spain in the shape of a peacock carries an Arabic signature identifying it as “the work of the Christian King’s slave.” Underneath, an inscription in Roman capitals proclaims “Opus Salomonis Erat” naming the artist, probably called Sulayman, the Arabic form of the biblical name.
Now the museum is again risking the public’s wrath as it introduces the most radical architectural intervention since the pyramid in 1989. Designed to house new galleries for Islamic art, it consists of ground- and lower-ground-level interior spaces topped by a golden, undulating roof that seems to float within the neo-Classical Visconti Courtyard in the middle of the Louvre’s south wing, right below the museum’s most popular galleries, where the Mona Lisa and Veronese’s “Wedding Feast of Cana” are hung.
The combination of Yoon's voice and the electronic components helped create a bridge between the trappings of the modern and sense of spirituality as being ancient. The stories were inverted, and technology was ancient, with spirituality being modern. Perhaps that is the state of affairs we are entering. Twitter and the writing stick are both technology, and we are coming to grips with our own spiritualities now. And when I think about the prayer of the monks, with nothing but their voices, it makes me wonder if we can only understand a mediated spirituality.
"There's no longer a sense of Muslim and American, but Muslims as Americans," said Rashid, "and I think that's a really important part of that political engagement. And I think, looking at France, you still see this isolation, this difference. You're either French, or you're Muslim."
How to take the timeless language of classical Islamic mysticism, and express in it 21st century American English is something that takes heart and soul, intellect and craft, and Alexis York Lumbard’s beautiful Conference of the Birds is indeed rich with all these qualities. Lumbard's work is beautifully illustrated by the incomparable Demi. The result is a stunning work of art that speaks to all who are spiritually seeking, no matter what their age.
While the filmmakers behind the anti-Islam film, 'Innocence of Muslims,' may not have intended to cause protests and violence across the Muslim World, they did clearly intend to perpetuate Islamophobia. And while their film may not have succeeded in directly doing so, it seems as if the subsequent violent protests may be helping them achieve their aim.
So as protests in the Muslim world continue, more Americans may become disillusioned with our involvement in the region. But what does that mean for Muslim Americans, here in the United States?
Answering that question is Hussein Rashid, professor of religion at Hofstra University.
Professor Rashid says the moviemakers’ plan rested, in part, “on everyone being as full of hate as themselves. Fortunately, that's not the way the world actually is.”
In 2006, a new convert showed up at a mosque in Orange County, California, eager to study the Koran and make new friends. But when he started acting odd and saying strange things, those friends got suspicious. To them, he was Farouk al-Aziz. But his real name was Craig Monteilh, and he was working undercover for the FBI.
In her 2010 memoir, “The Butterfly Mosque,” G. Willow Wilson told the story of her conversion to Islam, charting her transformation from child of atheist parents to Boston University-educated undergraduate to faithful Muslim with an Egyptian husband and an apartment in Cairo. Wilson wrote of the contrast between East and West, and of feeling compelled to keep her religious beliefs secret. “In the West,” she observed, “anything that must be hidden is suspect; availability and honesty are interlinked. This clashes irreconcilably with Islam, . . . where the things that are most precious, most perfect and most holy are always hidden: the Kaaba, the faces of prophets and angels, a woman’s body, Heaven.”
It is thus unsurprising that secret identities form the axis of Wilson’s fast-paced, imaginative first novel, “Alif the Unseen” — a book that defies easy categorization. Is it literary fiction? A fantasy novel? A dystopian techno-thriller? An exemplar of Islamic mysticism, with ties to the work of the Sufi poets? Wilson seems to delight in establishing, then confounding, any expectations readers may have.
