veiled4allah

in the footsteps of the Prophet

I just finished reading In the Footsteps of the Prophet: Lessons from the Life of Muhammad by Tariq Ramadan. This is an excellent book that tells the story of the Prophet's (sAas) life, with a focus on the moral and spiritual lessons to be learned from episodes within it. I highly recommend it both to Muslims, to deepen your understanding of the model that the Prophet (sAas) is for all of us, and to non-Muslims to learn more about Islam. There are many misconceptions spread about the life and teachings of the Prophet (sAas) and this book is an excellent rebuttal to those misconceptions. It also conveys the beauty of Islam and why Muslims find spiritual sustenance through this religion. Mashallah.

sisters of a different path

It's those other women that wear the veil - Time magazine has an interesting look at young women becoming nuns. My mom, who is Catholic, has said more than once that she sometimes thinks of me as having become a nun, just in a different religion.

dying to win

I recently finished reading Robert Pape's book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Pape is a professor at the University of Chicago and the director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, which compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack between 1983 and 2003. An earlier and shorter presentation of his findings can be found in his article, Dying to Kill Us. He describes the database:

This database is the first complete universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide. I have amassed and independently verified all the relevant information that could be found in English and other languages (for example, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and Tamil) in print and on-line. The information is drawn from suicide terrorist groups themselves, from the main organizations that collect such data in target countries, and from news media around the world. More than a "list of lists", this database probably represents the most comprehensive and reliable survey of suicide terrorist attacks that is now available.

Some of his findings:

• the leading instigators of suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion
• of the 315 separate attacks in the database, 301 (95%) could have their roots traced to large, coherent political or military campaigns
• of the 384 (out of 462 total) attackers whose religious or ideological affiliation could be determined, 218 (57%) were secular and 166 (43%) were religious
• of the 381 attackers whose sex could be determined, 59 (15%) were women

The book is divided into three major sections: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, The Social Logic of Suicide Terrorism, and The Individual Logic of Suicide Terrorism. In each section he presents a thesis, which he then analyzes and presents evidence for. He argues that suicide terrorism is an effective strategy for a militarily weak group to compel a democracy to withdraw military forces from territory the terrorists consider as their homeland, that it is most common when there is a religious difference between the occupiers and the occupied, which sharpens differences between the communities, and that suicide terrorists see themselves like soldiers, giving their lives to further the goals of their community. In each section he brings up alternate theories then uses the data from his database to refute or disprove them. His conclusion:

Understanding that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than the product of Islamic fundamentalism has important implications for how the United States and its allies should conduct the war on terrorism. Since the root cause of suicide terrorism does not lie in an ideology, even among Muslims, spreading democracy across the Persian Gulf is not likely to be a panacea so long as foreign combat troops remain on the Arabian Peninsula.

As BostonJoe at Daily Kos noted, Pape's work is a reality-based criticism of every word that Bush says about terrorism. See also Pape's discussion of the July 7 bombings in London, Al Qaeda's Smart Bombs.

good reading

Juan Cole does an excellent job fisking Bush's speech on Thursday. One of my favorite parts:

Yes, al-Qaeda does want these things. But then the Christian Identity Movement in the United States wants to establish a massive fortified refuge for persecuted white people to escape oppression at the hands of what they in their looney tunes way consider the evil, minority-dominated Federal Government. That crackpot fringe groups have big plans and ideas is not surprising, and we only have to worry about them if it looks like they might actually succeed. But who thinks this particular crackpot plan is in any way feasible? Look at America's friends in the Middle East-- Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Yemen, Oman, Pakistan, etc., etc. Which one of them is on the verge of being taken over by al-Qaeda? Why, al-Qaeda had to plan out 9/11 from Europe because it could not operate in the Middle East! An al-Qaeda meeting in Cairo would have had more Egyptian government spies in attendance than radical fundamentalists!

Another favorite bit:

Bush's attempt to conflate the regimes he doesn't like with al-Qaeda makes nonsense of his whole vision. It would be as though someone who disliked the United States and France should posit Southern Baptist American support for the Catholic Irish Republican Army because France is a US ally and is Catholic. To anyone who knows anything at all about the Middle East, Bush has made a mishmash of unrelated things and attempted to construct a bogeyman out of them.

Eh, just go read the whole thing ;)

world on fire

I've recently finished reading World on Fire by Amy Chua. The book is subtitled, "How exporting free market democracy breeds ethnic hatred and global instability". The book is fascinating and provocative. The key to Chua's thesis is the presence of "market-dominant minorities" in many societies. Examples include ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, whites and immigrants in Latin America and Africa, and Jewish oligarchs in Russia, among others. Chua argues that when a market-dominant group already exists in the society, globalization and capitalism greatly enrich this group while the poor majority see only minor improvements in their condition. When the market-dominant group is also an ethnic minority in the society, the stage is set for racial conflict. Chua further argues that when democracy is introduced into such volatile societies, it gives power and legitimacy to the resentment of the majority towards the minority. This leads to a backlash against free markets such as with ethnically-targeted property seizures and nationalizations. In order to bring stability, many countries end up with a backlash against democracy in the form of crony capitalism and minority rule. In the most extreme cases, there is a backlash against the minorities themselves, leading to expulsions and even genocide. Chua provides example after example of these three types of backlash. Chua also brings up examples of this process within the West, including Jim Crow and even the Holocaust. She suggests that the same analysis on the regional scale could explain a lot about Israel in the Arab world; and on the global scale, about America and the rest of the world. One of the key points that Chua makes is that Western countries long ago renounced pure free markets in favor of social welfare systems and the redistribution of wealth, but what developing countries are getting is pure free markets. Also, most Western countries developed slowly towards democracy and only adopted universal suffrage relatively recently, but developing countries are expected to implement universal suffrage immediately from whatever system they previosly had. The "free market democracy" we are exporting is not the same as what we've developed here at home and therefore, there's no reason to expect that the final result will be the same as here at home. When you add in the problem of existing market-dominant minorities, the result may indeed be a world on fire with conflict, hatred, and war.

Muslims on the Americanization path?

I've been reading Muslims on the Americanization Path?, a collection of essays from 1998. The essays are grouped into four broad themes, "The American Path Option: Between Tradition and Reality", "North American Pluralism and the Challenge of the Veil", "Americans on the Islamization Path? The African-American Experience", and "Americanization and the Preservation of Cultural Identity". The first section provides an overview of the experiences and challenges of Muslims in American society. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad provides a good discussion while M.A. Muqtedar Khan looks more deeply at the question of identity formation. Khaled Abou El Fadl approaches the question from a juristic angle, and examines what various schools of thought and legal scholars have said about Muslims living as religious minorities in non-Muslim lands. Yusuf Talal DeLorenzo describes the work of the Fiqh Council of North America to provide religious guidance for Muslims based on a close knowledge of the American context (as opposed to Muslims relying on foreign scholars). The second section looks at hijab. Kathleen Moore analyzes some court cases about the right of Muslim women to wear hijab, while Esmail Shakeri looks at how the issue is discussed in Canada. I would particularly recommend this essay for those who are interested in the hijab issue. Also, Carol Amway reports on the experiences of convert women, including their views on hijab. This seems to be based on her book "Daughter of Another Path", which provides an in-depth look at American women who convert to Islam. The third section looks at African-American Muslims. Ernest Allen, Jr., and Yusuf Nuruddin offer different perspectives on the history of movements such as the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, and other groups. Nuruddin also looks at the controversy in African-American studies between Islam and Afrocentricity. Additionally, Robert Dannin (author of "Black Pilgrimage to Islam", review here previously) looks at the current situation of African-American Muslims. I recommend all three of these essays to people who are seeking to increase their knowledge in this area; they provide an excellent complement to the other works I've discussed. The last section returns to the larger question of Muslim identity in America. Greg Noakes looks at the portrayal of Islam and Muslim in the media and the effect this has on the lives of American Muslims. Elise Goldwasser profiles the Muslim community of Durham, North Carolina, and compares the attitudes towards Americanization of immigrants of different social classes. Finally, Omar Khalidi looks at trends in mosque design in North America and what he feels that different types of design say about the Muslim presence. This is an excellent book and I recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about the Muslim experience in America. It would be interesting to see a follow-up volume looking at the post-9/11 experience; perhaps someone is at work on such a book now.

Islam on the inside

As I've mentioned before, a significant aspect of Islam in America is the phenomenon of African-American converts in the prisons. It's estimated that there are up to 300,000 Muslims in the prison system, most of them African-American converts. This is about 5% of the total Muslim population in America. The Baton Rouge Advocate has an interesting and informative article about Muslim inmates and how the prison system accommodates their observance of Ramadan.

At least 575 Muslim inmates in the state prison system are participating in Ramadan this year, according to figures provided by Melissa Callahan, a state Office of Corrections spokeswoman. Representatives from nine of the state's 11 adult, men's prisons responded to a request for information regarding their Muslim inmate populations. The largest Muslim population is found at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, which has 500 Muslim inmates, but only 150 are participating in Ramadan. Callahan said the prison officials indicated they plan to prepare early meals for inmates observing the fast, as well as allow inmates to break their fast together in the evenings during the month. The prisons also plan to allow Islamic inmates to celebrate the feast of Eid al Fitr at the end of Ramadan on Nov. 25, Callahan said. Hunt spokeswoman Angela Whittaker said the number of Muslim prisoners participating in Ramadan at Hunt has grown from 44 in 1999 to 74 in 2003. The prison first allowed Muslim inmates to organize a "Students of Islam" club in 1998, she said.

servants of Allah

I've just finished reading Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas by Sylviane Diouf. The book is the result of extensive research in primary sources about slavery and builds a profile of the African Muslims who were brought to the Americas as slaves. Diouf believes that about 15-20% of all slaves were Muslims. She analyzes the historical record in Africa as well as in the Americas to reconstruct the story of these slaves. Many of the Muslims taken as slaves were highly educated, in the religious sciences and in general. They were marabouts (holy men), warriors, traveling scholars, merchants, or members of the upper class. They had often dedicated their lives to Islam and established a respected place for themselves in their societies. They were often used to being leaders. (Diouf's analysis of the African historical record explains why the Muslims taken as slaves tended to fit this profile). In the Americas, they strove to practice Islam as much as possible and to form networks and communities with other Muslims. They made use of their education and training to seek ways to advance through the slave society. And when this failed, they more than once organized wide-scale revolts. What they didn't succeed in doing was transmitting Islam to more than a generation or two of their descendants. They were able to preserve it because they had learned it before being enslaved. But inculcating it in children from the beginning in the oppressive conditions of slavery proved to be almost impossible. Many traces of Islamic practice and culture remain in the broader culture of Africans in the New World, but anything recognizable as orthodox Islam had largely disappeared within three or four generations. As long as the slave trade continued and new Muslims were being brought from Africa, Islam survived in the Americas, but once the slave trade ended, Islam died out. Often, discussion of slavery tends to focus on the United States, but slavery was widespread throughout the Americas and much of the story of Muslim slaves comes from Latin America and the Caribbean. This book is absolutely fascinating and important for the look it gives not only at the experience of Muslim slaves but at what the world of slavery was like. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Whether you're interested in the history of slavery, or wish to learn about the struggle of Muslims to preserve their deen in brutal conditions, you will learn much from this book.

black Zion

In my earlier entry on Islam in the African-American Experience, I commented that a comparison of the black Muslim experience to the black Jewish experience would be instructive. Following my own advice, I checked out Black Zion from the library. The book is about more than just black Jews, it's really about African-American encounters with Judaism. The first section deals with black Jews. There are two basic trends here. The first is African-Americans who are born Jewish (for instance, as the child of a marriage between a Jewish mother and an African-American father) or who convert to mainstream Judaism. African-American Jews have usually found it difficult to be accepted by the Jewish congregations they join, while some African-Americans may regard them negatively for their association with white Jews. They find that very few people realize that it is possible to be both African-American and Jewish at the same time. It was interesting to compare this with the experience of African-American converts to orthodox Islam. Although African-American and immigrant Muslim groups often seem to work in parallel rather than in concert, African-American converts to Islam have found much more acceptance from Muslim communities than African-American Jews have found from Jewish communities. The second trend is black Jewish groups who have their own interpretation of Judaism and declare themselves to be Jewish according to that. These latter groups bear much the same relationship to Judaism as the Nation of Islam does to Islam. They tend to call themselves "Black Hebrews" or "Black Israelites" to distinguish themselves from contemporary Jews. They believe that black people are the true Children of Israel by descent and that white Jews are either the products of intermarriage or (in some interpretations) are imposters who are "not really Jews"; some interpretations also consider whites (including white Jews) to be a separate and inferior creation. This is similar to the NOI's interpretation that black people are the true Muslims and that whites are a separate and inferior creation. Some Black Hebrew groups adhere fairly closely to mainstream Jewish rituals and practice, others follow their own interpretations of the Torah along with the teachings of their founder. Again, this is similar to the NOI and offshoot groups in terms of how much to how little they adhere to orthodox Islamic rituals and practice. This first section of the book also provides an historical overview of African-American identification with the Jewish people and with Judaism. The stories of the Children of Israel in slavery in Egypt have long had deep resonance for African-American slaves and their descendants. In the last decades of the 1800s, African-American groups developed that mixed Jewish elements into Christian prcatice. The Black Hebrew movement seems to date largely from the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s as do its parallel Black Muslim movements. The second section of the book looks at the encounters of African-American Muslims with Judaism. Specifically, there is a chapter about the Nation of Islam and its views of Jews and Judaism, and one on a group called the Nubian Islamic Hebrews, who mix Islamic, Jewish, Christian, and New Age doctrines, practices, and symbolism. The chapter on the NOI is very thoughtful and worth reading for those who are interested in this question. The third section of the book then looks at the encounters of African-American Christians with Judaism. This section is the most eclectic. It includes an essay on African-American Christian interpretations of the Book of Nehemiah in the Bible, an essay on the friendship of Martin Luther King, Jr., with Jewish leaders, a study of African-American congregations who have moved into buildings that formerly served as synagogues but which were deserted as the ethnic and racial make-up of the neighborhoods changed, and a look at Haitian blacks and the role of Jewish characters in Catholic passion plays and Voudoun re-interpretations of these plays. I highly recommend this book. It is fascinating in itself as well as providing a larger context for understanding such groups as the Nation of Islam in comparison.

black pilgrimage to Islam

In an earlier entry, I reviewed the first part of Black Pilgrimage to Islam, by Robert Dannin. The second part of the book tells the stories of a number of African-American individuals or groups and how they came to orthodox Islam. The stories are selected to give an overview of the wide range of experiences and motivations. The first story profiles Hajji Wali Akram, who came to Islam by way of Ahmadiyya, a heterodox Muslim group. In the 1930s he converted to orthodox Islam. In part, his studies of the Quran had convinced him that Ahmadi doctrines were not correct. But he also felt that the Ahmadi movement (which was very active in the African American community in the 1920s) was more interested in gaining money for itself and in increasing its numbers than in the spritual well-being of the new converts or of the problems that they faced. The story follows Akram's struggles to lead himself and his congregation through difficult times and with limited access to orthodox Muslim teachers and texts. The second story follows a different community, called Jabul Arabiyya (mountain of the Arabs). This was a rural community founded by African-American Muslims in the 1930s where they hoped to live according to the Shari'a. The community has not been as successful as hoped for, but still exists today. The third story is of a young man who started out in the Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths, an extremely divergent offshoot of the Nation of Islam, how he became politicized during his time in the military, how he came to orthodox Islam, and how a conflict with Nation of Islam members in his area ultimately ended up as a shootout with the police that landed him in prison. The fourth story looks at the larger phenomenon of Islam in the prisons, a topic I have discussed previously. The fifth and sixth stories look at the issue of women and Islam. The fifth story is about a woman who converted to Islam and her difficulties finding a stable marriage within the African-American Muslim community, including her experiences with polygamy. The sixth story looks at the broader phenomenon of polygamy among African-American Muslims and the problems common in such marriages. The seventh and final story focuses on The Islamic School of the Oasis in Cleveland, Ohio, and its struggles to survive. I found this to be an excellent book. The inclusion of personal stories helps give a better feeling for how and why African-Americans convert to Islam.