After the mass shooting in Norway some news outlets enjoyed a certain level of navel-gazing over their own initial assumptions of Muslim perpetration, as though public self-reflection done for the sake of extending a dramatic headline has any possibility of being transformative. (It does not.) Much was made of the actual perpetrator’s blondness and Christianity, as though these facts alone were reliable evidence of demonstrated bias.
While in reality it would not have been, such superficial self-reflection was deemed irrelevant in the case of the Fort Hood shooting — the perpetrator was indeed Arab, indeed Muslim, and so the propensity for assumption was also deemed to have been validated.
In the case of the deliberate crashing of a plane into a Texan IRS building it took multiple days for there to be any mainstream media consideration given to the fuller implications of assumptive, lazy reporting, or of government statements declaring the act to have been non-terroristic. Even then there was only cursory attention given, as a kind of televised footnote. There was, in the meantime, some space given to consideration of whether the — white, American-born, ostensibly middle class — perpetrator had, in his brief manifesto, had a point, and considerable selection of, rather than “terrorist,” descriptors like “tax protester,” which in the American imagination draws upon such a patriotically iconic moment in history that it has likewise been employed as associative propaganda in the very name of the Tea Party.
In the case of the Virginia Tech shooting the mining for evidence of Muslim influence survived long enough to eliminate the possibility of news outlets making a show of self-reflection — the headline died before the suspicion did. It would not be realistic to underestimate the extent to which that the perpetrator was non-white and foreign-born was a factor.
The speculative reporting on the morning of September 11, 2001 could be argued to have been reasonable, not so much due to the scale of circumstance as to the fact that this was not the first attempt on the World Trade Center. I do not remember the reporting of the first time. I remember the reporting of the Oklahoma City bomb attack, but I do not remember if the media turned it around to reporting on their own reporting. It doesn’t really matter anyway. In all of these instances — though they are by no means comprehensive — we have seen an occasional awareness that self-awareness may make a story, but what we have not seen is self-awareness itself.
My maternal grandfather fought the Italians in Libya, but he did it for America, or perceptions of America, and not for Libya. His personal North African legacy as I know it is only in whatever of his blood and bone were left behind when his truck struck a landmine, shattering both of his legs to the hip and sending him home. And from before that, in the body of black and white photos of shirtless soldiers leaning on tanks in the sand in ways familiar to the war media of my own generation, and of graves, many graves, of a temporary kind, marked by crosses not of stone. I know nothing else of him there, of the rights or wrongs of a man at war in a place not his own. Knowing how foul that story often goes, I don’t really want to know.
A few nights ago I watched Salt of This Sea. It is a beautiful film which sets out to and succeeds at articulating a personal sense of the loss of place, the impact of occupation and of mechanized/militarized borders, and the ongoing erasure of a living, partially displaced culture. It is a sensitive film, at times delicate, at times funny, and always uncomfortable in a good sort of way.
In the below clip the lead characters — Soraya (Suheir Hammad) and Emad (Saleh Bakri) — are exploring Dawayima, Emad’s family’s original home prior to the Nakba, and to which he had never been prior.
Imagine my surprise when just a day later someone linked me to this Max Blumenthal post. It features a video clip of an actor talking about his role in Michael Lucas’s pornographic film, Men of Israel. The setting for this is the same ruin used to represent Dawayima in Salt of This Sea.
I do not know this place. I know it is not the site of the historic Dawayima — there is not even that much left standing — but I do not know exactly where it is. According to Blumenthal Lucas had stated that it was a ruin “deserted centuries ago,” but was of the opinion that it is likely Lifta. I see no major reason to doubt this, given the fuller appearance of it in Salt, and given Lucas’s statement that it is a place to the north of Jerusalem. If it is Lifta it was “deserted” — more like forcibly evacuated — only little more than fifty years ago.
I am not interested in policing what sites may be used as settings for which films. This is not my argument to make. But it struck me emotionally, seeing one place, one particular room in one place, being used back to back as the setting for so sensitive and insensitive portrayals of the site itself.
As I said above Salt of This Sea is, in part, about erasure. The place in which this scene is filmed is used as both an ancestral memory fragment, and a sort of an unattainable dream for the future. It is a place of wishes traveling in both directions from an unbearable present. It represents a resistance, however fragile, to being erased.
The relevant scene of Men of Israel, by contrast, and Lucas’s comments about it, are themselves a tool of erasure. Lucas cast the grounds as little more than a political prop in a sex movie. To put it bluntly, he was effectively saying, “Here. I will tell lies about the history here. Watch us fuck over your memories, and then watch us fuck on top of what’s left of them.” Salt of the sea, salt to your wound.
People mimic success to an irrational degree. How many attempted self-immolation after Bouazizi? Doing so would accomplish nothing, but the need to succeed at what succeeded him provided a kind of legitimacy, however scant, to it as a means. There was a hope in it for the desperate.
So there is a revolution. Two of them. There is success. It is complicated, but the simplified version of events calls it the power of protest. So what do people do afterward? Protest, of course. A means to success. Turn out about everything. Army abuses — protest. State media — protest. Minority rights — protest. Labor rights — protest.
I am not against protesting on behalf of any of these things, on principle. But there is a point at which protest in this context does become a kind of self-mimicry. There is a point at which its strength is expended, and every call for protest becomes just another match held aloft over a desperate man’s head.
Set up a so-called “sting operation” in which one, carrying a hidden camera, pretends to be a Muslim waving large sums of money under the noses of presumed bastions of liberal media. Attempt to entrap NPR executives into accepting said money, and therefore appearing to have Muslim donors. This, apparently, would be a Very Bad Thing.
When this fails, and when the target executives call the Tea Party movement out as being racist — which, for reference, see everything in this post leading up to this sentence — rather than a public tarring and feathering of the “sting” orchestrator for both methods and motives, we will see instead the resignation of the NPR executive in question. Meanwhile the media will engage in a brief debate over the rightfulness of referring to the Tea Party as racist, never once mentioning what exactly is displayed by using fake Muslims from fake Muslim organizations with fake money as a tool of political attack.
‘… The comments, apparently made by Ron Schiller, NPR’s exiting vice president for development, were recorded in a “sting” set up by conservative activist James O’Keefe, best known for mounting a similar prank on ACORN.
‘They came as part of a recent lunch in Washington Schiller had with two men posing as members of the “Muslim Action Education Center,” a fictitious organization the men claimed had ties to the “Muslim Brotherhood of America.”…’
Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave,
eats a bread it does not harvest,
and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years
and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation.
In August 2006 my then-husband and I were called into the State Security headquarters in Alexandria. It was my sister-in-law who received their call; we were out of town at the time. I am sure she informed them of this. Nevertheless they instructed her to tell us to come the following evening at around ten o’clock, or perhaps it was later … I only remember clearly that it was a strange hour, and felt as though the middle of the night. They declined to say where. Just come. We should know. And in truth we did — not exactly, but everyone knew the neighborhood, and within the neighborhood everyone would know the street. We cut our trip short and went home.
We got ourselves to a parallel street at the appointed time; a man we asked for directions from there said a prayer for us. Once inside it was very dim, but otherwise marked by normal higher governmental office procedures — sign in, collect cell phones, metal detectors, please wait. The building was near vacant. I have no idea what was on Mahmoud’s mind; on mine was what were not necessarily the most rational plans for what to do if they detained him, left me, and retained our phones. I had the phone numbers for select friends and an attorney on a paper in my pocket.
What followed was the most bizarre friendly tea of my life.
We were directed to an office containing two broad desks and a row of filing cabinets stacked high with paperwork overflow, one desk empty, the other manned by a rather satisfied looking man whose name I do not recall. We shook hands. He offered tea. He asked how Mahmoud and I had met. He asked how I was enjoying Egypt. He asked questions about my parents, my education, my job, and my religion. Midway through the conversation another man entered, did not offer his name, and sat behind the vacant desk to listen in. We spoke briefly about the Qur’an. We knew they could “disappear” my husband easily, or both of us if they were really so inclined. We knew they could hurt us. They knew we knew. And we were told we were free to go.
It has never been entirely clear what they wanted with us. But Mahmoud was a young man, an employee of the state with a low to the point of being unlivable salary, who nevertheless had afforded multiple trips to America, from a poor neighborhood with a very high Brotherhood presence, on the professorship track. I had also recently (because I am not always smart about these things) convinced him he might look nice with a beard. It is not unreasonable to think they wanted a look at him, and to know a little about me, to ascertain if they had on their hands a man moving up in position who, perhaps under the influence of neighbors, or perhaps under the influence of a foreign — yet already known to the state as religious — wife, should be reclassified as an “Islamist threat.”
Mahmoud liked skinny jeans and fitted tees. About a week prior he had given up entirely on the facial hair project, declaring it itchy, irritating to his mother, and the cause of far too many friends stopping him on the street to inform his that if it was for religion, ok, but for anything else he was a fool. And as for me, even at my most self-consciously religiously conservative, I have never managed to read as anything but a quiet and quite ordinary American — I am not really the character to be read as an Islamist accessory. To anyone from the state, no matter how paranoid, we doubtlessly appeared safe.
On the way to find a minibus home we bought sweet hibiscus from a street vendor. I remember not because it was special, but just because the stress was so high, and the relief so high, that the most ordinary details worked their way into being permanent memories.
Another (unfortunately) ordinary detail: I’ve a permanent memory, too, of the fear in everyone’s eyes, and the change in their voices, when we told them where we were going. You just can’t forget a thing like that.
There is no hyperbole in saying that the growing numbers of anti-Muslim “grassroots” protest organizations are to the Muslim American community what the Westboro Baptists are to the GLBT community. Imam Suhaib Webb posted a link to this same video on his Facebook page with a note to the effect that we need to develop a Sunni Fruit of Islam. While I would argue “pan-Islamic” in place of “Sunni,” I can’t disagree with the motivation behind the words.
The impetus for the protests was the scheduling of Imams Siraj Wahhaj and Amir Abdel Malik Ali as speakers at the event, both of whom have reportedly made statements in the past that it would be difficult to argue do not warrant some form of confrontation or community censure. Plainly, however, the turnout was not made up of people who were concerned exclusively with the objectionable statement of these two. I would be frankly surprised if most attending — on either side — were even aware of them.
•
From there I went on to read a refresher on Representative Peter King’s planned Congressional hearings on the”radicalization” of the American Muslim community, which one can only hope fizzle almost as quickly as they are called. King is apparently under the impression that drawing prominent Muslims and “experts” into public hearings will, in some unforeseeable way, uncover vast conspiratorial efforts of al-Qaeda to recruit ordinary Muslim Americans into violent action, and further expose the — demonstrably false (1, 2, 3) — reluctance of the broader American Muslim community to either cooperate with law enforcement or internally address “extremism.” As this goal being met seems more than a little unlikely, it appears more plausible that the effect of King’s hearings will not extend beyond generating sound bites with which to bolster both hysteria and rightful outrage at hysteria. Polarization at its best.
•
Continuing my perusal of the news further reminded me how sponsoring laws against sharia is apparently the new fad among certain politicians who, perhaps in anticipation of recent blows to the Defense of Marriage Act, have settled on making room on their legislative plates for demeaning multiple demographics. Diversification, or perhaps Bizarro World multiculturalism. Regardless, as usual, if you can’t accurately define a word you might not want to go proposing laws against it. Take, for example, the proposed Tennessee bill, which — despite its sponsors’ insistence that it deals only with violent “sharia jihad” and terrorism (are there not already laws against violence and terrorism?) –repeatedly and in various ways states within it that:
“‘Sharia’ means the set of rules, precepts, instructions, or edicts which are said to emanate directly or indirectly from the god of Allah or the prophet Mohammed and which include directly or indirectly the encouragement of any person to support the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the United States or Tennessee Constitutions, or the destruction of the national existence of the United States or the sovereignty of this state, and which includes among other methods to achieve these ends, the likely use of imminent violence. Any rule, precept, instruction, or edict arising directly from the extant rulings of any of the authoritative schools of Islamic jurisprudence of Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali, Ja’afariya, or Salafi, as those terms are used by sharia adherents, is prima facie sharia without any further evidentiary showing.”
“The knowing adherence to sharia and to foreign sharia authorities is prima facie evidence of an act in support of the overthrow of the United States government and the government of this state through the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the United States and Tennessee Constitutions by the likely use of imminent criminal violence and terrorism with the aim of imposing sharia on the people of this state.”
The sad reality is that many people, legislators included, are entirely possibly sincere in their belief that so long as the bill is not set up to prosecute broader Islamic religious practice in and of itself, enshrining wording such as the above in state law can not be considered discriminatory.
The sadder reality is that even more people believe that defining sharia as calling for the “destruction of the national existence of the United States” is unimpeachably accurate.
•
Finally, I learned this morning of a proposed mosque project quite near to my own home: Al-Falah Center in Bridgewater, NJ. By the looks of it quite an ambitious project, and one that — if it were to get off the ground — would be a tremendous boon to the local Muslim population who are present but in practice communally somewhat scattershot. It actually getting off the ground, however, at least at its current intended location, appears unlikely.
I learned of this project not through promotional material for the facility itself but rather through a news article on the town’s efforts, in the face of the proposal, to enact a zoning ordinance which would restrict new houses of worship to certain main roads — thereby eliminating the eligibility of the available site.
The claim is it’s about traffic. And it may be, to some extent. But I have never known several hundred people to turn out in a small town for a hearing on zoning-related traffic volume assessments. I have seen nothing regarding public complaints about the traffic volume generated by the location’s previous business, a hotel and banquet hall. And I have certainly never known people with concerns about traffic to argue their point with sentiments like, “Would we allow the KKK to build a headquarters at the Somerville Circle [a local highway intersection]?” or “When the Muslims denounce, loudly and clearly, the Islamic extremists among them, and turn them over to the authorities for prosecution and deportation, then maybe a mosque will be welcome here.”
I never realized that zeal for prosecuting “extremists” hinges on a yearning to get their cars off of the road and thus improve traffic flow.
A response to a specific question elsewhere, but since I don’t — and won’t — usually “talk hijab,” it’s probably as close as I’m going to get to summing up my thoughts here:
I dress “religiously modestly,” but I am not really fond of those kinds of terms, or terminology of “modesty” in general, really. I dress to my own comfort zone, which has to do with the body and privacy, adornment, and also to do with cultural values and group membership. Like almost all forms of dress. And so when terminology is set out that my clothes warrant a whole other level of discussion — where they stand in relationship to other cultures, what is their spiritual value, what is their symbolism in relation to broader gender roles, etc, etc, etc. — personally I am put off a bit. Clothes for me are not a lifestyle or a challenge or a means of putting myself in visible opposition to anything or anyone. When talk turns to feeling “called” to a “modest dress lifestyle,” or to the difficulty of this, I am, frankly, little more than confused by what this even means.
I’m trying to think what to do with this idea of clothing categories being something involving “personal fulfillment.” And all I am thinking about is how when someone asks me about the meaning or experience of covering my hair I just want to ask in return about the meaning and experience of their covering their ribs, or what have you. There is meaning there, sure, costume has meaning, but for most people there is very little in the way of conscious meaning, beyond perhaps the level of ordinary self-consciousness. And for me as well. I “stick with” this way of dress because, well, it is how I dress, and dressing as I do does not feel like fighting a tide. I am not up against anything; I’m comfy. Why do Americans stick with their jeans?
If I had to define it, I would say modest dress is dress that isn’t intentionally sexually ostentatious, but that really has very little to do with square inches of flesh showing. And I think questions about specific garment ideologies — “pants vs. skirts,” “scarf vs. no scarf,” that sort of thing — usually fall off of the modesty discussion and onto the topic of the meaning of and cultural markers for “femininity.” Which is not something I am, at this point in my life, interested in engaging with in any respect. I am not sure it is even possible to discuss femininity without speaking outside of one’s self towards women as a category, which is inherently a minefield, and should be.
For about the past five or six years, ever since I had come to know Egypt in any sort of intimate way, I have been saying that the country was going to erupt — but not until either the death of Hosni Mubarak or his making moves towards passing the presidency to Gamal, to whom corruption in the nation often appears connected as if by an umbilicus. (A possibility which was moving from being highly plausible to being borderline imminently certain as of at least last fall. The fact of which was lending an extra layer of farce to the assurances, and to the camps which accepted as a concession the assurances, that M.H. Mubarak would agree to not seek another term … for himself. The only major counter-argument to clear intentions of familial succession being a similarly timed presidential candidacy poster campaign for … Omar Suleiman. Yes, that Omar Suleiman. The man who, upon his appointment to the vice-presidency, CNN immediately declared to be a likely acceptable choice to the Egyptian people on the premise of his being a largley unknown, and therefore presumably uncontroversial, figure. Unknown to Wolf Blitzer, perhaps, but not so unknown to a great number of people simply walking on the street.)
At any rate, point being: I have never been more glad to have over-extended a timeline, and to have underestimated a people.
