veiled4allah

50th anniversary of Hiroshima

Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki Hiroshima: Who disagreed with the atomic bombing? (you might be surprised at some of the names) Not Just a Last Resort? - Just one of the reasons why the U.S. seems to be the biggest nuclear proliferator. Is our policy that nobody else should have them, but we can use as many as we want as often as we want?

the perils of bad history

Juan Cole debunks some misrepresentations of Islamic history. His conclusion makes a good point:

You can't treat Muhammad as a historical figure in a vacuum or by reading the sources naively. And you can't write knowledgably on modern Islamic reform if you don't know what Muslim authorities have written on issues in the medieval and early modern period.

The Islamic intellectual tradition is a lot more robust than many people are aware of.

Saladin

Amir Butler tells about Saladin (properly, Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub) and why he is a good model for Muslims - and non-Muslims - today:

Muslims revere Saladin because he was an embodiment of Islamic principles; and non-Muslims revered him for what they saw of his chivalry. He became a window through which the medieval world came to see something of Islam; and he now represents a window through which Muslims see something of their past. A past filled with acts of kindness that seem out of place in today's dystopian world of made-for-TV decapitations, kidnapping of engineers, and the torture of prisoners of war. Although he lived as a military leader at a time characterised by its violence, Saladin could teach our contemporary leaders -- both Muslim and non-Muslim -- something about chivalry and respect for humanity. Whilst besieging the Castle of Kerak, on his march to Jerusalem, Saladin learnt that a wedding ceremony was underway in a part of the castle. He didn't make some utilitarian judgement about 'collateral damage' and continue the attack. Rather, he ordered his soldiers to refrain from bombarding that wing. Whilst Crusaders had, according to reports of the time, massacred Jews, Christians and Muslims to the point that, "our men waded in blood up to their ankles", Saladin did not extract revenge or conduct any of his own massacres on recapturing the city 88 years later. Instead, he granted the Crusaders protected passage to the coast. When Richard the Lion Heart attempted to then recapture Jerusalem, he was confronted both by Saladin's military might and his clemency. Despite having violated a treaty by slaughtering 3,000 men at Acre, when Richard's horse was killed at Jaffa, Saladin sent two of his own horses to replace it. "It is not right," he wrote. "That so brave a warrior should have to fight on foot." When Richard fell sick during the siege, Saladin sent his personal physician to care for him. After his death in 1193, they did not find Swiss bank accounts of money pilfered from his people, but an empty personal treasury; emptied by his charity to those in need. For Muslims, Saladin represents a moment in their history of strong and honorable leadership in the face of tremendous opposition. Tyrants and dictators have since misappropriated his name and legacy; but Saladin was everything that the secular and politically emaciated dictators of the Muslim lands are not: a leader who was powerful yet just; victorious yet clement; and who was inspired not by a love of power or a thirst for wealth, but by faith alone. In the end, Saladin was victorious over the crusading armies of Europe, but perhaps his greatest victory was not militarily, but morally. For real victory, Saladin said, "is changing the hearts of your opponents by gentleness and kindness."

Some biographies here and here, plus some commentary on the meaning of Saladin in modern Egypt. Incidentally, Saladin was Kurdish.

lessons of 1942 still relevant today

Remembering:

Feb. 19, 1942, was a day that changed the lives of Japanese Americans forever. I was a teenager growing up in Hawaii when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which set into motion the removal and incarceration of more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry in inland concentration camps. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, a tense atmosphere of suspicion and hysteria engulfed the West Coast and Hawaii. Decades of anti-Japanese and anti-Asian legislation and racism had already laid the foundation for the events that soon took place. We were rounded up without due process even though we had nothing to do with the attack. Our family was shipped to California, then to Arkansas and finally to Wyoming, where we spent the duration of the war. Upon our release from the camps, Japanese Americans began to pick up the pieces of wrecked lives, in the face of continuing racism and hostility. For years, we suppressed our anger, bitterness and shame about the unfair treatment we got. Today, many in the Japanese American community will attend the annual Day of Remembrance events in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities, with the goal of teaching new generations the lessons from that painful time. Some of my fellow Americans are now being targeted because they are Muslim, Arab or Middle Eastern. When the attacks of Sept. 11 happened, I mourned for the innocent lives that were lost. But I also began to identify and sympathize with the innocent Muslim Americans who immediately became victims of the same kind of stereotyping and scapegoating we faced 63 years ago. They too have become targets of suspicion, hate crimes, vandalism and violence, all in the name of patriotism and national security. Feb. 19 is a day I do not wish upon anyone else. Now, the lessons are not just about events in a distant past, but events as they are occurring on a daily basis.

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learning from the past, or not doing so

As a follow-up to the previous post about the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, here are two headlines I saw today, one inspiring and one depressing: Rwanda remembers the Holocaust 100 killed in Darfur air raid

the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and doing something about genocide

January 27 is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz during World War Two. I had decided to do a search with Google to look for anything worthwhile that Muslims had written on the issue of the Holocaust. However, the results of my search were not edifying, consisting as they did mostly of news reports about a couple of Muslim groups doing stupid things like saying they wouldn't take part in a memorial service because it only focused on the Holocaust and not on other genocides, and more right-wing commentary than you could ever want about the wretchedness of Muslim anti-Semitism. Muslim anti-semitism is a topic that I've written on a number of times here: Muslims and anti-Semitism We should not let opposition to Israel's policies become bigotry against Jews Excellent article on Arab anti-Semitism Muslims, wake up!! Stop screwing around! A damaging obsession Have Arabs or Muslims always hated Jews? Here is what I wrote in my main post on the topic:

O you, those who have faith, stand up for God, witnesses in equality. And do not let hatred of a folk swerve you so that you do not do justice. Be just, that is the closest to God-fearingness. And fear God. Surely He knows what you are working - Quran Surah al-Ma'ida verse 8 Anti-Semitism is a real problem among Muslims today. Some Muslims cheered when the Israeli astronaut Col. Ilan Ramon died and said "one less Israeli in the world". Some Muslims talk about how "the Jews" are liars or enemies or evil. They talk about "Zionist pigs" and how they "hate the Jews". Jewishness is an ethnic and a religious identity. If you believe that all Jews are some way or other, you have to believe either that they were born that way or that their religion commands them to be that way. The first idea is the worst sort of racism and the second is no better because it assumes that all Jews are mindless robots who are incapable of dissenting from their religion. And this is assuming that Judaism teaches such a thing, which it doesn't. This kind of thinking is totally contrary to Islam. Islam teaches us that every human being is born with a fundamentally good nature and an innate faith in God. This is called fitra. Islam also teaches us that God made us into different races and nationalities so that we can learn from each other, and it teaches us that no race or nationality is inherently superior to any other. The only thing that makes a person better than another is his piety. There are several verses in the Quran and a number of hadiths that state this clearly. What's even worse about racism among Muslims is that people often treat us the same way. Not only do they call Islam evil, but they seem to assume that all Muslims are mindless robots who are incapable of dissenting from their religion. In today's climate we see a lot of this bigotry and we know how much it hurts. So how can we turn around and do the same thing to somebody else? Shouldn't we know better than that? Some people argue that they're just retaliating in kind, treating others the way that the others treat them. What kind of morality is that? We don't follow the rule of "do what's done to us". We follow the rule of God. Yes, an eye for an eye is mentioned in the Quran, but the Quran also tells us not to exceed the limits that God has set. We don't mutilate people because they mutilated us. God has forbidden mutilation. We don't kill the civilians of another people because they killed our civilians. God has forbidden the killing of civilians. We don't hold racist attitudes about a people because they hold racist attitudes about us. God has forbidden racism. When you think that way, you follow your caprices, not God's command. That is not Islam. This hatred of Jews is a cancer that will eat us up from inside and may ultimately destroy us. It takes us away from what God has commanded and it leads us to do what God has forbidden. Yes, some people who are Jews have hurt and oppressed Muslims. And some people who are Jews have helped Muslims. Remember what the Quran says: They are not all alike. Among the People of the Scripture (Jews and Christians) is an upstanding community. They recite the signs of God and spend the night prostrate (in prayer). They have faith in God and the Last Day and they command what is right and forbid what is wrong. And they strive with each other to do good works. Such are of the righteous. What they do of good will not be rejected. And God knows those who fear Him - Surah Ali Imran verses 113-115 This is the same as any other people. The same as us. We need to judge all people by their own deeds and beliefs, not by what we think they must be like because of their race or religion. That is how God judges us and that is how we need to judge others.

Refusing to take part in a Holocaust memorial service on a day that is singularly an anniversary for the Holocaust is crashingly stupid, insensitive, short-sighted, wrong-headed, and a whole bunch more adjectives besides. It's the thinking of people who put their nationalism first, rather than truly standing up for justice. It should be noted that the Muslim Council of Britain did say the following laudable things amongst the rest:

The best living memorial for the victims of the Nazi Holocaust is trying to ensure that we make the cry 'Never Again' real for all people who suffer, everywhere. We honor the dead most sincerely by working to end suffering and bring peace with justice to those who live without hope today... ...We stand together with our fellow British Jews in their sense of pain and anguish. None of us must ever forget how the Holocaust began... ...We must remember it began with a hatred that dehumanized an entire people, that fostered state brutality, made second class citizens of honest, innocent people because of their religion and ethnic identity...

It would make more sense to attend and take part to speak these messages than to "boycott". Because there is a valid point hidden away there: the Holocaust should not only be remembered for its own sake, but as a call to each of us not to let it happen again. Remembering the Holocaust, we should also remember Germany's genocide against the Herero of Namibia to start the 20th century, the crimes of Stalin, Rwanda (1, 2), or any of the many other horrific genocides of the 20th century (the preceding are just the few that I've posted about here so far). And, remembering the Holocaust, we must speak up about the ongoing mass murders and genocides right here and now in the 21st century like Darfur (1, 2, 3) and Uganda (1, 2). Because it would be a very great and tragic wrong if all we ever did was take part in memorial services while standing by and letting evil happen again. P.S. On a more positive note from last year, Holocaust remembrance day service brings faiths together Added: alt.muslim also comments on this issue. Added 2: To the tragic catalog above add the Congo past and present.

have Arabs or Muslims always hated Jews?

Juan Cole looks at the question Have Arabs or Muslims always hated Jews?:

These are the Orientalist premises of the Zionist Right and its American fellow travelers. The reason my comment was so challenging is that it didn't partake of these premises. The premise is that there is an "eternal Arab" or "eternal Muslim" that is defined as essentially fanatical and intolerant and full of hatred toward Jews. These are universal characteristics of this race, and unvarying over time. Of course, if it were true that "Arabs" or "Muslims" partook of this eternal character, then it just wouldn't matter what Israeli hawks do to them. Kill civilian Arab children with helicopter gunship fire? So what if that upsets the Arabs? They are already fanatical and hate-filled, so it just doesn't matter. You can't throw a glass of water into the ocean and thereby cause the tides to rise. But what if Arabs and Muslims were human beings like everybody else? Wouldn't it be the case that if you punched one in the nose, he would try to punch you back? And if you didn't punch him out, he'd be more likely to greet you politely? And if you tossed his distant cousin out of his house, wouldn't he mind that? Actions have consequences. What are the facts? Living as a minority in any society is seldom a picnic, but in fact Jews before the Napoleonic emancipation were substantially better off living in Muslim societies than in Europe. Medieval Christianity had no category for non-Christians in society. They completely kept Muslims out of Christian-ruled domains for the most part. Whereas perhaps a third of Egyptians in Egypt in 1400 were Christians, no British, French, Germans, etc. were Muslims. The Muslim trading diaspora threw up communities in Hindu Indonesia and Confucian China, and they were perfectly capable of pursuing opportunities in Europe had they been allowed to. They were not allowed to, in some important part because of the Inquisition. (Valencia in medieval Spain; Russia from Catherine the Great; and some post-Ottoman Balkan principalities are exceptions here, in allowing more tolerance for, or at least having to put up with the presence of, Muslims.) Likewise, for entire centuries in the late medieval period, Jews were completely excluded from Britain, France, Spain, etc. In contrast, Jews had thriving mercantile communities in places like Cairo in the same period. To paraphrase our SecDef: Was it paradise? No. Was it better than being kicked out altogether or forcibly converted to Catholicism? You bet. So it just isn't true that all Muslims have always hated Jews. In Islam, Jews were considered a "protected minority." They were not equal citizens with Muslims, but then there was no idea of citizenship or of equality in the modern political sense in any medieval society. Jews were in normal times assured of life and property. There were episodes of intolerance and even persecution, but they were not the norm. There was no blood libel in the Muslim Middle East (some Christian episodes of the libel started occurring under European influence in the 19th century). References in Arabic by Muslims to the blood libel as anything but a Western curiosity are as far as I can tell a very recent phenomenon. The protocols of the elders of Zion, a Tsarist forgery that posited a Jewish political conspiracy to rule the world, had no particular resonances in the Muslim world (outside a few radical Muslim cliques) until the past couple of decades.

For information about the history of Jews under Islamic rule, from Jewish sources, see The History of the Jews Under Islamic Rule. Further reading: My main post Muslims and anti-Semitism and links to other articles, We should not let opposition to Israel's policies become bigotry against Jews, Excellent article on Arab anti-Semitism, Muslims, wake up!! Stop screwing around!, and A damaging obsession.

Ukraine's Muslims, the Crimean Tatars, and the forgotten crimes of Stalin

Ukraine is very much in the news lately because of its disputed election. Much of the commentary on Ukraine's ethnic divisions concentrates on the Uniate Catholic ethnic Ukrainians of the western regions and the Orthodox Christian ethnic Russians of the eastern regions. But that doesn't tell the whole story. Ukraine has a Muslim population of about two million. Most of these are Crimean Tatars. Historically, Crimea was predominately Muslim. During the 1850s, Russia began its conquest of this region, leading to the Crimean War. But the most tragic chapter of Crimea's history would come in 1944, when Stalin deported 200,000 Tatars from Crimea, accusing the entire population of being Nazi collaborators. This was part of a much larger campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide by Stalin. Besides the Crimean Tatars, he also ordered mass deportations of Volga Germans and seven (predominately Muslim) nationalities of the Caucusus - including the Chechens; there's a reason they don't want Russia ruling over them anymore. Historians estimate that at least 1.5 million people were deported by Stalin during and after World War Two. See commentary such as Counting Stalin's victims 50 years on, The 20th century's worst crime goes unpunished, and Stalin's legacy. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Crimean Tatars who were living elsewhere in the former Soviet lands were allowed to return, and about 250,000 have done so to Crimea itself, where they face many difficulties and tense relations with the ethnic Russians who now predominate in Crimea. They continue to remember their history.

Muslim roots of the blues

Sylviane Diouf is the author of the book "Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas", which I reviewed last November. Currently, she's lecturing on Arab-Islamic influences on the African musical styles that, when brought to America by slaves, eventually gave rise to the blues. It's a long article, so I'll just quote the opener here:

Sylviane Diouf knows her audience might be skeptical, so to demonstrate the connection between Islam and American blues music, she'll play two recordings: The Muslim call to prayer (the religious recitation that's heard from mosques around the world), and "Levee Camp Holler" an early type of blues song that first sprang up in the Mississippi Delta more than 100 years ago. "Levee Camp Holler" is no ordinary song. It's the product of ex-slaves who worked moving earth all day in post-Civil War America. The version that Diouf uses in presentations has lyrics that, like the call to prayer, speak about a glorious God. ("Well, Lord, I woke up this mornin', man, I feelin' bad . . . Well, I was thinkin' 'bout the good times, Lord, I once have had.") But it's the song's melody and note changes that closely parallel one of Islam's best-known refrains. As in the call to prayer, "Levee Camp Holler" emphasizes words that seem to quiver and shake in the reciter's vocal chords. Dramatic changes in musical scales punctuate both "Levee Camp Holler" and the call to prayer. A nasal intonation is evident in both. "I did a talk a few years ago at Harvard where I played those two things, and the room absolutely exploded in clapping, because (the connection) was obvious," says Diouf, an author and scholar who is also a researcher at New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. "People were saying, 'Wow. That's really audible. It's really there.' " It's really there because of all the Muslim slaves from West Africa who were taken by force to the United States for three centuries, from the 1600s to the mid-1800s. Upward of 30 percent of the African slaves in the United States were Muslim, and an untold number of them spoke and wrote Arabic, historians say now. Despite being pressured by slave owners to adopt Christianity and give up their old ways, many of these slaves continued to practice their religion and customs, or otherwise melded traditions from Africa into their new environment in the antebellum South. Forced to do menial, back-breaking work on plantations, for example, they still managed, throughout their days, to voice a belief in the God of the Quran. These slaves' practices eventually evolved -- decades and decades later, parallel with different singing traditions from Africa -- into the shouts and hollers that begat blues music, historians believe. Another way that Muslim slaves had an indirect influence on blues music: the instruments they played. Drumming (which was common among slaves from the Congo and other non-Muslim regions of Africa) was banned by white slave owners, who felt threatened by its ability to let slaves communicate with each other and by the way it inspired large gatherings of slaves. Stringed instruments (which were favored by slaves from Muslim regions of Africa, where there's a long tradition of musical storytelling) were generally allowed because slave owners considered them akin to European instruments like the violin. So slaves who managed to cobble together a banjo or other instrument (the American banjo originated with African slaves) could play more widely in public. This solo- oriented slave music featured elements of an Arabic-Islamic song style that had been imprinted by centuries of Islam's presence in West Africa, says Gerhard Kubik, an ethnomusicology professor at the University of Mainz in Germany who has written the most comprehensive book on Africa's connection to blues music ("Africa and the Blues").

Read the whole thing

remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki

On August 6, 1945, America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima; on August 9, on Nagasaki. I haven't seen much commentary about this, but here are some good articles from different perspectives: Hiroshima Story Targeting of Civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembering Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Dark Cloud over Civilization In the Shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Also interesting is a collection of quotes from various prominent Americans at the time arguing that the atomic bombings weren't necessary; those quoted include General Dwight Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, and Admiral William Leahy, among others. Update 8/9/04: OK, here's another: Summer Days, Presidential Campaigns, and Hiroshima