veiled4allah

things are moving right along

I haven't worked (i.e., for paid employment) in the high tech field since 1999. But from 2002, I've been keeping my hand in, off and on, by helping out at the Movable Type support forums (do a search on username almuhajabah). And I followed that up with my Movable Type Tips blog. That's what led to my current engagement. Funny how that goes. I signed and faxed my contract yesterday so until August 17 I've got a source of income, and hopefully we'll sign a new contract after that to continue the arrangement; this is just a trial period to see how it works out. I'm still not sure if I should announce this on my blog, so I'll continue to remain mysterious. I am doing technical support work and get paid per successful completion of support requests. I'll be doing some training today, practicing responding to test requests but hopefully by next Monday I should be ready to jump in with some real paying work. Like I said before, this won't be a lot of money, but it'll help and my parents (who've been largely supporting me) are relieved at the lightening of their burden. Let's hope this this might lead to something more than just part-time contract work, or that I'll finally get a response to all those resumes I'm sending out, inshallah.

war crimes and human rights

By way of Atrios, I found the Crimes of War Project website. This has a wealth of materials on international humanitarian law as well as discussions of current and recent situations around the world that raise questions about war crimes. The archive section examines human rights issues in various regions of the world while their online book features essays on each of the major topics in the law of war. Three featured articles discuss current events and may be of particular interest: The Darfur Conflict: Crimes Against Humanity in Sudan, America's Interrogation Network: Rules on the Treatment of Prisoners in International Law, and The American Military Justice System and the Response to Prisoner Abuse. I highly recommend reading all three of these articles and other materials at the site.

quote of the day

Quote of the day:

If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription drugs, and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief, it is that fundamental belief, I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. - Barack Obama, speech to Democratic National Convention

a hopeful sign, inshallah

As some of my long-time readers may remember, I'm unemployed. I'm still sending out resumes every week but for the last month or two I just haven't been getting any response at all. There are hardly any paralegal jobs or even a lot of jobs at all in law offices. The administrative assistant and similar jobs that I've been applying for I guess they don't want me for. It's pretty depressing. The economy is supposed to be picking up, and we've actually seen some major employers hiring again in this area, but mostly in manufacturing jobs or hiring back people they had laid off previously. The "pink collar" job market doesn't seem to have picked up yet. I still don't have real employment, but I've picked up a temporary contract for the next three weeks with the hope that it can become a longer-term contract if the trial period works out well. I was doing some contracting of a very different type earlier this year but that fell through. This arrangement looks better and I know the company pretty well (I'm not sure yet if I can mention details about the job so for now I'll remain mysterious). This time I'll be self-employed rather than a contract employee like I was for the other company, which gives me more leverage. Got to do some reading, though, to learn about how I'll need to handle filing my tax returns, and other legal issues. This probably won't bring in more than a couple hundred bucks during the temporary contract period, but as my mom says, it pays for groceries and it's money I don't have to take out of savings or borrow from my family so it's a step in the right direction :) Inshallah khayr.

Muslims at the Democratic National Convention

A number of Muslims were elected as delegates to the Democratic convention (I believe one or two of the Kucinich delegates are Muslims). They've decided to get together and get organized, the MetroWest Daily reports:

Muslims expect to have their voices heard at the Democratic National Convention. Forty Muslim delegates from across America have come to Boston to have their say during the convention and express their support for Kerry's campaign. The majority, along with local Muslim leaders, plan to also take part in events outside the FleetCenter. Shahid Khan, national finance co-chairman of the John Kerry for President Committee, lives in Framingham and will attend a reception tomorrow hosting Muslim delegates at the Islamic Society of Boston. "We want to mobilize American Muslims in the community and show our support to the Democratic Party," said Khan. "We also hope to interact with local politicians, as a kind of networking opportunity for Muslim leaders." ... ..."We are fragmented as a community because we are all spread out. This is one of the few opportunities we have to communicate and form stronger alliances," said Parwez Wahid, secretary of the Democratic Town Committee in Framingham and one of the organizers of the event. "We will all be there to support the victory in 2004 for Kerry's ticket." Wahid said American Muslims face a serious lack of representation in different facets of American society. According to the Framingham resident, Democrat Muslims are "upset" with the current administration for going to war on Iraq with "no genuine reasons." Wahid mentioned the interest of the government in benefiting from the oil industry and showing no commitment for peace in Iraq. "We all want to be pro-active in our support to the Democratic Party," said Wahid. "I feel the Democratic Party has a commitment for achieving peace in Iraq and for a stronger middle class in America. That's why I support it."

more on the history of Darfur

The name Darfur is from dar fur which in Arabic means "the abode of the Fur". The Fur are the predominant ethnic group in the Darfur region. The Fur began to be converted to Islam in the 1300s or 1400s. In 1596, the Darfur Sultanate was established and Islam declared the state religion. The Darfur sultanate remained independent through various conflicts in Sudan including the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan in the late 1800s before finally being subjugated by the British in 1916 and made part of Sudan. You can read a brief history of the Darfur Sultanate. Fouad Ibrahim of the University of Bayreuth in Germany provides a brief outline (PDF) of his ideas on the Darfur conflict. He gives emphasis to Darfur's long history of independence and its resistance to various other groups seeking control of all of Sudan. I also found a paper by Mohamed Suliman of the Institute for African Alternatives written in 1997, which looks at the roots of two conflicts in Western Sudan, one of which is Darfur. He argues that although the indigenous peoples of Darfur (the Fur and several other tribes) and the Arabs have always had distinct identities, they generally got along well until resources became scarce, then they made ethnicity and race the focus of their conflict:

As to Darfur prior to the mid-1980s, conflicts in northern Darfur were infrequent, highly localised and of low intensity. Arab pastoralists were allowed into Jebel Marra after the harvest was collected and usually stayed there until the first rains in April or May. Indeed, some of their livestock belonged to rich Fur peasants. Ethnic barriers were low and easily surmountable. All people inhabiting the area were Sunni Muslims with Arabic as their lingua franca. The prolonged drought dealt a severe blow to the tradition and spirit of cooperation and tolerance between herders and peasants in the region. Fuelled by the neighbouring conflict between Chad and Libya and the influx of modern weapons, skirmishes turned into large-scale armed conflict. On both sides of the conflict divide, people fell back to their time honoured, traditional group solidarity and reciprocity. The barrier between the Fur and their erstwhile good neighbours began to grow. People found solace in entrenchment within their ethnic and cultural niche. The conflict was widely perceived as ethnic/tribal. Party political affiliations, which ran across ethnic and geographical borders, began to collapse. Ethnic brotherhood became paramount and the conflict was seen by all as an ethnic strife. Fourteen years later, the transformation of the perception of the conflict into an unshaken conviction about the true nature of the conflict is proceeding fast. The ethnic divide already constitutes, for good or for evil, a formidable social force in northern Darfur. Without a comprehensive solution to the protracted conflict, that also restores the economic and social fabric of the region, renews cooperation between the two factions and opens new vistas for economic and social development, the spreading malaise of ethnic hostility will continue to grow. In its wake, efforts at conflict resolution will be hampered and the palpable presence of ethnic hostility will indeed constitute a concrete and tangible cause of future violent confrontations. Most violent conflicts are over material resources, actual or perceived. With the passage of time, however, ethnic, cultural and religious affiliations seem to undergo transformation from abstract ideological categories into concrete social forces. In a wider sense, they themselves become contestable material social resources and hence possible objects of group strife and violent conflict. Usually by-products of fresh conflicts, ethnic, cultural and spiritual dichotomies, can invert with the progress of a conflict to become intrinsic causes of that conflict and in the process increase its complexity and reduce the possibility of managing and ultimately resolving and transforming it.

Arabs, Africans, Muslims, and Darfur

A few days ago, I posted about how to send aid money to Darfur, Sudan, and pointed you to a large number of posts at Prometheus 6 about Darfur. The horrific violence in Darfur and the terrible humanitarian tragedy that's unfolding there is a conflict between Arab militias supported by the central government in Khartoum and black Africans who live in the region. The Arabs one can guess are Muslim. But what about the victims?

The war in Darfur is in many respects a replay of the war in southern Sudan, waged with weapons that include ethnic militias, scorched-earth tactics and denial of humanitarian access. Both wars pit Sudan's Islamist, Arab-dominated government against African rebels demanding equal rights and an end to decades of neglect. In the south it is the SPLA that is doing the fighting; in Darfur it is the similarly named but quite separate Sudan Liberation Army (SLA). But there is one big difference between the 21-year war in the South and the 15-month war in Darfur. The ethnic Africans of Darfur, unlike those of the South, are Muslim. And not just Muslim: deeply, devoutly, unshakably Muslim. Theirs is not the shrill, extremist Islam of the fundamentalist generals who seized power in Sudan in 1989, but a quiet, tolerant Islam that has characterized Sudan for most of its recent history and that still characterizes most of its citizens - Arab or African.

Julie Flint, a researcher for Human Rights Watch writing for the Daily Star of Lebanon, has plenty more to say about the nature of the conflict:

The government's swift and bloody crackdown on the rebellion in Darfur reflects the unique importance of the SLA rebellion within Sudan. For the uprising is not only proof of Muslim opposition to the country's totalitarian rulers. It is, perhaps even more importantly, a war that cannot be depicted as a rebellion against Islam. The rebels cannot be condemned as "infidels" as they were in the South. And so they are vilified as "thieves and robbers" - thieves and robbers, however, who have proved capable of mounting a formidable military challenge to a government that has the advantage of air power and the added punch of the Janjaweed. The war in Darfur has laid bare the racial animus that has always underlain the war in Sudan. The killing there is not about religion. It is about race and ethnicity. In Darfur, the government's drive to "Arabize" a country that is made up of myriad ethnic groups has found a full and willing partner in Arab nomads whose search for new water and grazing land for their herds has led them into conflict with the majority population of settled African farmers. When the SLA took up arms in February 2004, protesting government inaction in the face of increasingly violent encroachment by Arab nomads, the government responded by increasing its support for the nomads - reincarnated as Janjaweed - and embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing designed to lay waste the countryside and starve the rebels of support. "The government wants to kill all African people, Muslim or not Muslim, in order to put Arabs in their places," says Izhaq Abdullah, unwittingly echoing the conclusion of many analysts. "We Africans are good Muslims. We pray all the time. We read the Koran all the time. It is they who are bad Muslims."

Flint describes some specific outrages of the Janjaweed against Islamic sites and symbols in Darfur:

The mosque in the village of Urum was packed with people mourning Yahya Abdul Karim, 80, when armed men on horseback rode in, firing indiscriminately. The village imam, Yahya Warshal, ran out of the mosque to try to protect his orphaned grandson. Some of the attackers rode into the mosque, where they killed 16 mourners. Others chased the imam into his grass hut and killed him there, along with the 3-year-old boy he was trying to protect. Before leaving the village, the attackers, driving over 3,000 stolen animals before them, tore up Korans found in the mosque and set the building on fire. Barely a week later, the horsemen returned with soldiers from the regular Sudanese Army and in a four-day rampage killed 80 more people, including women and children. "The soldiers stayed on the edge of the village," said a 37-year-old man. "But they saw everything." In the village of Sandikoro, soldiers and horsemen tore up Korans and defecated on them before burning the mosque, with its imam inside. In Kondoli, they killed another imam, Abrahim Durra, as well as a second imam and the muezzin. The story is the same across Darfur, Sudan's westernmost region. In 25 days of research there and among refugees on the border with Chad, Human Rights Watch documented 62 attacks on mosques in Dar Masalit, the homeland of one of Darfur's three main African tribes. Several of them were accompanied by murders inside mosques, often during prayer time. Korans, prayer mats and other symbols of Islam were routinely desecrated.

As far as I am aware, the Janjaweed are not claiming an Islamic justification for their actions - and it's hard to imagine how they could while pillaging and desecrating mosques! Flint calls her article "The Shameful Muslim Silence on Darfur". I wonder if many Muslims realize that the people of Darfur are themselves Muslims. I didn't until I started learning more about Darfur. We have a simplistic assumption that Arab=Muslim and therefore African=Non-Muslim. Many Muslims who are so eager to condemn the U.S. or Israel for actions taken against Muslim peoples are silent about what Muslims themselves may do in the name of Islam. Sometimes that the guilty people are Muslim, even if their actions are done in the name of nationalism or any other ideology and not Islam, is enough to "shield" them. I hope that will not be the case here. If Muslims can't be led to speak up against the genocide in Darfur because the victims are human beings, perhaps they will speak up when they realize that the victims are Muslims. And perhaps some day more of us will speak up just because they're human beings.

seen around the blogosphere

It appears that economist Max Sawicky is looking into Islamic economic theory¹. As usual when people post about Islam, the level of discourse in the comments doesn't seem overly high, though it could be a lot worse. ¹ The page Max is linking to is from a Twelver Shi'a website (the predominant branch in Iran) and the details may or may not represent the views of other Muslims

over and out? (no, not this blog)

As of yesterday, I became a "Muslim for Kerry" when Dennis Kucinich endorsed John Kerry for president and ended his own campaign. No surprises here, not for me at any rate. Kucinich had been saying since the beginning that's what he'd do and that's what his campaign was for and I supported him knowing that, because I thought that the best use of my time and energies was to support the progressive cause within the Democratic party. I don't regret it. A few more thoughts. Looking forward to kicking Bush's electoral arse and making him unemployed come November. ;)

flying while Arab

It seems that there was a bit of hysteria caused by a woman who mistook a group of Syrian musicians on a plane fight who found themselves being accused of being terrorists doing a "dry run". David Neiwert compares this to the anti-Japanese hysteria in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Unfortunately, we seem to be dooming ourselves to repeat what we did sixty years ago. Zack Ajmal looks at some other similar cases and reflects:

I am a political liberal and a secular Muslim. I detest the terrorists and thugs who kill in the name of my religion. I am dismayed at the lack of democracy and civil liberties in Pakistan. However, when I read about incidents like the ones described in this post, I remember that like Ansar, I am a Pakistani immigrant to the US; like the Syrians on the Northwestern flight, my native language is written in the Arabic scrript; and so on. For me, unfortunately, these things are not beyond imagination. I can easily think of myself in their shoes and the feeling I get is scary. At a rational level, I understand that the US is a better place in terms of liberty than most other countries and that the chances of anything bad happening to me or my family are quite minute. I just hope that we get over these "tribal" attitudes and get to the task at hand: getting rid of terorrism and spreading democracy and human rights around the world.

Aziz Poonawalla has more, including a list of "suspicious" things he's done on an airplane.