Monday, October 24, 2005
greedy for attention
Ok, I just updated my blogroll, mainly adding the blogs I've been mentioning recently plus a couple of others where I've been commenting. I'm willing to add more but I don't have any really "on deck" at the moment. Also, conversely, if you like what you read here, feel free to add Planet Grenada to your blogroll. Leave a comment. Make criticisms or suggestions for improvement. Even leave a shameless plug for your blog. (So far, I've only deleted spam and I'm in the middle of deciding what to do with missionaries who leave comments which are equivalent to spam). In any case, feel free to use your voice.
international congress on islamic feminism
In a few days (October 27-29), in Barcelona, Spain the International Congress on Islamic Feminism is planned to take place. And in a related statement on "Gender Jihad", Abdennur Prado argues in favor of a "jihad" against patriarchy in Muslim communities.
Link thanks to Latino blogger, Ulises Ali Mejias at ideant
Link thanks to Latino blogger, Ulises Ali Mejias at ideant
so white they named white people after them
From Adisa Banjoko's blog, Holla at a Scholar: People always look at me crazy when I tell 'em "Theres' HELLA White Muslims on the planet".... on the situation of Muslims in the Caucasus region and their relations with the Russian government. For me, it is one of the remarkable features of Islam that it is able to become internalized by so many different ethnic groups and races. Each group relating to Islam in a way which makes it their own. And yet its the same religion.
really old story, new tribes
Following up on old story, new tribes here is more information about New Tribes, the American evangelical missionary organization which is being expelled from Venezuela by Chavez. According to Prensa Latina, New Tribes may have been conducting experients which infected the indigenous population with a virus and led to about 80 deaths. Missionaries' Experiments on Indigenous Denounced in Venezuela Can we say smallpox blanket?
democracy in the middle east
Writing for Al-jazeera, Soumaya Ghannoushi discusses some of the obstacles to Arab democracy in The great Middle East Power Games. Does the US really believe that the people of the Middle East should freely choose their own path or is it more interested in a Middle East which is configured to serve US objectives?
aminah mccloud activist/scholar
Middle East studies in the News
An Islamic Scholar With the Dual Role of Activist
by Felicia R. Lee
New York Times
January 17, 2004
CHICAGO — Aminah McCloud exchanged a hearty "Assalamu alaikum" ("Peace be upon you") with the two smiling young men guarding the entrance to Muhammad University, which, despite its name, is a private school for children on the South Side of Chicago run by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.
A heavyset woman in a black leather jacket and black wire-framed glasses, her graying hair squashed under a black wool hat, the 56-year-old Ms. McCloud has been a frequent visitor to the quiet, orderly school in the last eight years. She has volunteered as an academic consultant and has stopped by most recently as a researcher, gathering material for her forthcoming books on the Nation of Islam and black American Muslims.
As she walked the halls, the principal, a tiny woman swathed in an elegant head scarf and long skirt, as well as other teachers greeted her warmly, like a visiting dignitary.
Ms. McCloud, a professor of Islamic studies at De Paul University here who helped establish an archive for American Muslims there 10 years ago, has been gaining national prominence since 9/11 for talking about Islam in America. She has been quoted in newspapers from The Chicago Tribune to The Los Angeles Times, sparred with television talk hosts like Bill Maher and Bill O'Reilly and been featured on a PBS special on Islam in America.
Yet even more than her news media appearances, Ms. McCloud is known for being an energetic activist among American Muslims. She is a fixture at any number of community meetings and a board member of the American Muslim Council and of the Chicago branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. She is also proud of the legal work she has done as a consultant for cases of capital murder, divorce and wrongful death in which Islam is an issue.
Many Islamic scholars have been called upon by community groups and the news media to explain or even defend Islam, and Ms. McCloud's double role as activist and academic raises old questions about how to mix scholarship and social struggle. Scholars in disciplines like women's studies and black studies have argued about such dual allegiances and about whether it is possible to avoid scholarship that has what Henry Louis Gates Jr. once referred to as a "thumb on the scale."
"Scholars of Islam are in a special position, especially after 9/11 but even before 9/11," said Ali Asani, a professor of Indo-Muslim languages and culture at Harvard. On one hand there is such overwhelming "ignorance about Islam in the public sphere," he said, that scholars are often called upon for very basic public education. On the other hand, he said, their objectivity is sometimes challenged by those who fear they might be cultural cheerleaders.
"One of the contentions Muslim scholars have had for years is that it was taught largely by non-Muslim scholars," Mr. Asani said. "I was asked point-blank at a major university if, as a Muslim, I would be objective about Muslims. The irony is that I was asked by a Jewish man who taught Jewish studies."
As for Ms. McCloud, she has "done some remarkable work" in her studies unraveling the complexities of blacks and Islam, Mr. Asani said. She is very much in the tradition of scholar-activists, he said. But she really sticks out in the field, he said, because she is African-American and a woman.
Over breakfast at a South Side pancake house, Ms. McCloud complained that "the onus put on Muslims is not put on any other group." She acknowledged that "there is always the tendency to want to defend the religion, but we fight that tendency to report what is out there."
In Ms. McCloud's view, most Americans don't understand how politically and socially diverse American Muslims are. She said the government estimated that 46 percent of the country's six million Muslims are black. {pop} There is often tension between African-Americans and other ethnic groups that practice Islam, she said. And African-American Muslims often experience friction with non-Muslim African-Americans, most of whom are Christian. Ms. McCloud said pointedly: "After 9/11, white Protestant churches invited Muslims in to speak. African-American churches did not."
"The media has always largely determined who speaks for Islam, so they focus on immigrants," she said. "I set out to give an indigenous voice to Islam in America." With a book on Muslim immigrants due out soon and contracts to produce three more books this year, including one on Muslim women, that voice could get a much larger hearing.
"African-Americans always lament going to an immigrant mosque and being told how to pray or being ignored," Ms. McCloud said, which is why she works to improve relations among various Muslim communities who often get caught up in the old debate about whose version of the religion is most authentic.
Ali Mirkiani, a member of the Chicago-area Muslim-Catholic Dialogue Group, which meets monthly, said, "She is getting people to talk and to see similarities as well as differences, to talk about the image of Islam." He added that "she is overwhelmed by the immigrant Muslim community relying on her."
Besides the books and her community work, Ms. McCloud teaches seven courses each year and is busy with a proposal to create an Islamic world studies interdisciplinary major for undergraduates at De Paul, the largest Catholic university in the nation. She writes at night, she said, from about 9:30 to morning prayer, usually around 4 or 4:30 a.m., and then sleeps four hours.
One of her books will focus on the Nation of Islam. Ms. McCloud has spent a great deal of time with Mr. Farrakhan and finds him an intelligent, charismatic man. She believes the public view of him as a social and religious leader is distorted because of the focus on his incendiary statements.
"He has been talking abut inequities and injustices among black Americans for a long time," Ms. McCloud said. "To distill his views down to one sentence to what he utters about Jews is an utter negation of what he has done, in the same way that no one has written off Thomas Jefferson because he raped a slave woman."
One major question, she said, is in what direction the Nation will take its brand of Islam. The Nation has always been evolving, she noted, from its inception during the segregated 1930's to the prominent stage it occupied in the 60's, when Malcolm X dominated, to this new century.
Now, she argues, it has been moving toward traditional Islam while still focusing on using Islamic law to raise the status of blacks in society.
But most black Muslims are not members of Mr. Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, she stressed. She has found at least five groups that call themselves the Nation of Islam, with different leaders and different focuses. Most of the communities seem to be in big cities
like Chicago, New York, Detroit and Los Angeles. Some have descendants of original Nation members, others are young adults who joined in the last 10 to 15 years. Some were attracted by spiritual and philosophical concerns, others by the message of social uplift.
As for Ms. McCloud, she was a freshman at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1966 when she first met large numbers of African Muslims and was attracted to their spiritual and political vitality. She became a Muslim, too, coming from a family background of no particular religious affiliation.
"Muslims saw the issues of race in global terms, and they let me know that American racism and separatism were also a kind of apartheid," she recalled. "From my perspective as a young adult, the tactics used by the civil rights movement were wrong. You don't put women and children out to fight white men with dogs. The goal of being a citizen should not be to get people to let you eat in their restaurant."
She moved to Philadelphia and worked as a pharmacist, but after repeated holdups at gunpoint where she worked, her nerves were raw. She was reminded by a Muslim friend of the paucity of Muslim scholars. Although she was the divorced mother of three young children, she went back to school at Temple University and majored in Islamic studies, finishing her doctorate in 1993. "I did it as a commitment to the community," she said. She is now married to Frederick Thaufeer al-Deen, a former federal prison chaplain,
In her case, says Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, the combination of activism and scholarship complement each other: "She was one of the first people to designate Islamic studies in America as a discipline and to introduce it as a field of study in the academy."
Ms. McCloud said she hoped her work showed that "Islam in America is here to stay." She added, "They can assault the leaders, they can call everyone a terrorist, they can restrict people's movements, but Americans as a whole will not tolerate that."
An Islamic Scholar With the Dual Role of Activist
by Felicia R. Lee
New York Times
January 17, 2004
CHICAGO — Aminah McCloud exchanged a hearty "Assalamu alaikum" ("Peace be upon you") with the two smiling young men guarding the entrance to Muhammad University, which, despite its name, is a private school for children on the South Side of Chicago run by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.
A heavyset woman in a black leather jacket and black wire-framed glasses, her graying hair squashed under a black wool hat, the 56-year-old Ms. McCloud has been a frequent visitor to the quiet, orderly school in the last eight years. She has volunteered as an academic consultant and has stopped by most recently as a researcher, gathering material for her forthcoming books on the Nation of Islam and black American Muslims.
As she walked the halls, the principal, a tiny woman swathed in an elegant head scarf and long skirt, as well as other teachers greeted her warmly, like a visiting dignitary.
Ms. McCloud, a professor of Islamic studies at De Paul University here who helped establish an archive for American Muslims there 10 years ago, has been gaining national prominence since 9/11 for talking about Islam in America. She has been quoted in newspapers from The Chicago Tribune to The Los Angeles Times, sparred with television talk hosts like Bill Maher and Bill O'Reilly and been featured on a PBS special on Islam in America.
Yet even more than her news media appearances, Ms. McCloud is known for being an energetic activist among American Muslims. She is a fixture at any number of community meetings and a board member of the American Muslim Council and of the Chicago branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. She is also proud of the legal work she has done as a consultant for cases of capital murder, divorce and wrongful death in which Islam is an issue.
Many Islamic scholars have been called upon by community groups and the news media to explain or even defend Islam, and Ms. McCloud's double role as activist and academic raises old questions about how to mix scholarship and social struggle. Scholars in disciplines like women's studies and black studies have argued about such dual allegiances and about whether it is possible to avoid scholarship that has what Henry Louis Gates Jr. once referred to as a "thumb on the scale."
"Scholars of Islam are in a special position, especially after 9/11 but even before 9/11," said Ali Asani, a professor of Indo-Muslim languages and culture at Harvard. On one hand there is such overwhelming "ignorance about Islam in the public sphere," he said, that scholars are often called upon for very basic public education. On the other hand, he said, their objectivity is sometimes challenged by those who fear they might be cultural cheerleaders.
"One of the contentions Muslim scholars have had for years is that it was taught largely by non-Muslim scholars," Mr. Asani said. "I was asked point-blank at a major university if, as a Muslim, I would be objective about Muslims. The irony is that I was asked by a Jewish man who taught Jewish studies."
As for Ms. McCloud, she has "done some remarkable work" in her studies unraveling the complexities of blacks and Islam, Mr. Asani said. She is very much in the tradition of scholar-activists, he said. But she really sticks out in the field, he said, because she is African-American and a woman.
Over breakfast at a South Side pancake house, Ms. McCloud complained that "the onus put on Muslims is not put on any other group." She acknowledged that "there is always the tendency to want to defend the religion, but we fight that tendency to report what is out there."
In Ms. McCloud's view, most Americans don't understand how politically and socially diverse American Muslims are. She said the government estimated that 46 percent of the country's six million Muslims are black. {pop} There is often tension between African-Americans and other ethnic groups that practice Islam, she said. And African-American Muslims often experience friction with non-Muslim African-Americans, most of whom are Christian. Ms. McCloud said pointedly: "After 9/11, white Protestant churches invited Muslims in to speak. African-American churches did not."
"The media has always largely determined who speaks for Islam, so they focus on immigrants," she said. "I set out to give an indigenous voice to Islam in America." With a book on Muslim immigrants due out soon and contracts to produce three more books this year, including one on Muslim women, that voice could get a much larger hearing.
"African-Americans always lament going to an immigrant mosque and being told how to pray or being ignored," Ms. McCloud said, which is why she works to improve relations among various Muslim communities who often get caught up in the old debate about whose version of the religion is most authentic.
Ali Mirkiani, a member of the Chicago-area Muslim-Catholic Dialogue Group, which meets monthly, said, "She is getting people to talk and to see similarities as well as differences, to talk about the image of Islam." He added that "she is overwhelmed by the immigrant Muslim community relying on her."
Besides the books and her community work, Ms. McCloud teaches seven courses each year and is busy with a proposal to create an Islamic world studies interdisciplinary major for undergraduates at De Paul, the largest Catholic university in the nation. She writes at night, she said, from about 9:30 to morning prayer, usually around 4 or 4:30 a.m., and then sleeps four hours.
One of her books will focus on the Nation of Islam. Ms. McCloud has spent a great deal of time with Mr. Farrakhan and finds him an intelligent, charismatic man. She believes the public view of him as a social and religious leader is distorted because of the focus on his incendiary statements.
"He has been talking abut inequities and injustices among black Americans for a long time," Ms. McCloud said. "To distill his views down to one sentence to what he utters about Jews is an utter negation of what he has done, in the same way that no one has written off Thomas Jefferson because he raped a slave woman."
One major question, she said, is in what direction the Nation will take its brand of Islam. The Nation has always been evolving, she noted, from its inception during the segregated 1930's to the prominent stage it occupied in the 60's, when Malcolm X dominated, to this new century.
Now, she argues, it has been moving toward traditional Islam while still focusing on using Islamic law to raise the status of blacks in society.
But most black Muslims are not members of Mr. Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, she stressed. She has found at least five groups that call themselves the Nation of Islam, with different leaders and different focuses. Most of the communities seem to be in big cities
like Chicago, New York, Detroit and Los Angeles. Some have descendants of original Nation members, others are young adults who joined in the last 10 to 15 years. Some were attracted by spiritual and philosophical concerns, others by the message of social uplift.
As for Ms. McCloud, she was a freshman at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1966 when she first met large numbers of African Muslims and was attracted to their spiritual and political vitality. She became a Muslim, too, coming from a family background of no particular religious affiliation.
"Muslims saw the issues of race in global terms, and they let me know that American racism and separatism were also a kind of apartheid," she recalled. "From my perspective as a young adult, the tactics used by the civil rights movement were wrong. You don't put women and children out to fight white men with dogs. The goal of being a citizen should not be to get people to let you eat in their restaurant."
She moved to Philadelphia and worked as a pharmacist, but after repeated holdups at gunpoint where she worked, her nerves were raw. She was reminded by a Muslim friend of the paucity of Muslim scholars. Although she was the divorced mother of three young children, she went back to school at Temple University and majored in Islamic studies, finishing her doctorate in 1993. "I did it as a commitment to the community," she said. She is now married to Frederick Thaufeer al-Deen, a former federal prison chaplain,
In her case, says Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, the combination of activism and scholarship complement each other: "She was one of the first people to designate Islamic studies in America as a discipline and to introduce it as a field of study in the academy."
Ms. McCloud said she hoped her work showed that "Islam in America is here to stay." She added, "They can assault the leaders, they can call everyone a terrorist, they can restrict people's movements, but Americans as a whole will not tolerate that."
Sunday, October 23, 2005
africans in latin america
Check out the recent entry from the Black Looks blog on the situation of Africans (you know... Black folks) in Latin America
Saturday, October 22, 2005
allah is in da house
Bukhari Volume 8, Book 73, Number 47:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah's Apostle said, "Anybody who believes in Allah and the Last Day should not harm his neighbor, and anybody who believes in Allah and the Last Day should entertain his guest generously and anybody who believes in Allah and the Last Day should talk what is good or keep quiet.
On Soul Musings Alma, a Latina blogger writes about her visit to an open house at the Islamic Center of Iriving:
The controversial highlight of the Q&A session was when a middle-aged white man said, "I don't think a person can be a good American and also a good Muslim. You are either one or the other but not both." You could cut the tension with a knife! Personally, I thought the man was pretty obtuse for making such a blanket statement. The leaders addressed the man with poise and restraint. But then one of the audience members (he was white too but with a European accent) called the first man on his brazen comment. Everyone clapped in support of the European man's comments. I suppose the brazen man was making an effort to learn; after all he did make it to the open house. I do applaud his attendance tonight. Perhaps his mind was changed a bit after interacting with the friendly congregation of the mosque.
Occasionally I think about patriotism and Islam. In my house growing up my parents taught me to value God, Country, and Family (in that order). So where does that leave me when a good chunk of my country's foreign policy involves killing and torturing many of the people who believe in the same God that I do? If being a "good American" means uncritical support of U.S. government policy, I don't see how any person of conscience (Muslim or not) can be a "good American". But personally I find a different concept of patriotism much more relevant. Being a good neighbor.
Bukhari Volume 8, Book 73, Number 43:
Narrated 'Aisha:
The Prophet said "Gabriel continued to recommend me about treating the neighbors Kindly and politely so much so that I thought he would order me to make them as my heirs.
Being a good neighbor is emphasized so much that neighbors are almost like family. We should care for our neighbors. Take an interest in them and the community around us. But then extrapolate. From your block to your city to your county, state and beyond. In my book that's what real patriotism is based on. And in that sense, Islam not only permits Muslims to be "good Americans" but requires it.
Bukhari Volume 8, Book 73, Number 45:
Narrated Abu Shuraih:
The Prophet said, "By Allah, he does not believe! By Allah, he does not believe! By Allah, he does not believe!" It was said, "Who is that, O Allah's Apostle?" He said, "That person whose neighbor does not feel safe from his evil."
the other side of the coin
The Other Side of the Coin is a jarring set of images from Turkish artist Ekin Caglar about... well, you'll see.
prussian blue
Ok forget what I said in defense of white pride. I didn't mean people like the blonde-haired, blue-eyed twins Lynx and Lamb Gaede, also known as Prussian Blue. These people are crazy and dangerous. It is one thing for white people to get comfortable with their pre-Christian roots and study the Vikings, or get in touch with Celtic spirituality, etc. But these folks are the neo-Nazi version of the Olsen twins. And they are dangerous precisely because in many respects their image is so disarming.
For example, in an interview they were asked:
But then their message has another side. In the same interview:
Out of the mouths of babes.
The Gaede Bunch from the Southern Poverty Law Center
Young Singers Spread Racist Hate from ABC news
Rising Stars: Prussian Blue from National Vanguard
Prussian Blue's Official Website
For example, in an interview they were asked:
What are some of your favorite groups, either current or past?
We really like Avril Lavigne, Evanescence, Three Days Grace, Green Day, AC/DC, and Alison Krauss. [...] But our all-time favorite is Barney the purple dinosaur!
But then their message has another side. In the same interview:
Please tell me the significance of the name Prussian Blue.
Part of our heritage is Prussian German. Also our eyes are blue, and Prussian Blue is just a really pretty color. There is also the discussion of the lack of "Prussian Blue" coloring (Zyklon B residue) in the so-called gas chambers in the concentration camps. We think it might make people question some of the inaccuracies of the "Holocaust" myth.
Out of the mouths of babes.
The Gaede Bunch from the Southern Poverty Law Center
Young Singers Spread Racist Hate from ABC news
Rising Stars: Prussian Blue from National Vanguard
Prussian Blue's Official Website
"millions more" blogs out there
I still haven't been able to find the text of Erykah Badu's speech at the Millions More Movement march. But I have been finally finding blog entries from folks who actually went. One is Hassan Ntimbanjayo at Blogging While Black another is Blaq Speech at My Life in Peace, Politics, Poetry & Love
it's not what you know...
What may be "The Most Important Criminal Case in American History" hinges on what Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald can prove. Did someone create fake documents related to Niger and Iraq and use them as a false pretense to launch America into an invasion of Iraq? When a former diplomat made an honest effort to find out the facts was a plan was hatched to both discredit and punish him by revealing the identity of his undercover CIA agent wife?
progressiveislam.org
Another space for "progressive muslims" opened up online. This one is called Progressiveislam.org. It is still really young. There is a possibility I might get some space from them for a new incarnation of Planet Grenada. I still haven't thought it through yet.
another world is still possible
Macu Namia the author of a blog called Milfuegos is trying to get to the World Social Forum VI in Caracas, Venezuela. If you want to help him get there, check out his blog.
And from Grenada, back in May: another world is possible
And from Grenada, back in May: another world is possible
on the truth laid bear
Ok, when I first joined The Truth Laid Bear ecosystem I thought it would be kinda interesting just to see where I fit in. And then later on I was pleasantly surprised to find out I was a Large Mammal. Now recently I've been getting distinctively more traffic and comments on my site, but I'm currently a Marauding Marsupial (a demotion). What's even weirder is that yesterday and today I was actually at the very top of the Marauding Marsupial list but I had different rankings both times?!? And I actually have the same number of inbound links as the very last of the Large Mammals?!? Does anyone know how that line is drawn between Large Mammal and Marauding Marsupial?
Friday, October 21, 2005
the holiest parking lot in the world
A recurring issue which comes up in conversations between Muslims and non-Muslims is the challenge of explaining the difference between what Islam teaches in terms of its ideals, and the various practices which pass for Islam in various Muslim countries. "It's not part of the religion, it's the culture" (or economics, or politics, or colonialism) we say when it comes to explaining this or that abuse.
An especially difficult challenge is addressing the assumption that since Mecca and Medina are located in Saudi Arabia, that somehow the Saudi regime represents the purest, most mainstream and orthodox form of Islam. In fact there are many people in the Muslim world who are saddened and angry about several of the policies of the Saudi regime, and object to them on religious grounds.
Part of that criticism is based on the Saudi regime's attitudes towards Islamic historical sites and relics. Just look at:
The destruction of Mecca from Sf.indymedia.org
Makka's historic sites under threat from Al-Jazeera
Advice to our brothers of Najd by Sayyid Yusuf ibn al-Sayyid Hashim al-Rifa'i
The first two focus on how much of the religious architecture in Mecca and Medina is being destroyed by the Saudis. The last is a more comprehensive paper written from a traditional religious perspective and gives many examples (57 actually) of how the Saudi regime antagonizes orthodox Islam.
(links from mere islam)
An especially difficult challenge is addressing the assumption that since Mecca and Medina are located in Saudi Arabia, that somehow the Saudi regime represents the purest, most mainstream and orthodox form of Islam. In fact there are many people in the Muslim world who are saddened and angry about several of the policies of the Saudi regime, and object to them on religious grounds.
Part of that criticism is based on the Saudi regime's attitudes towards Islamic historical sites and relics. Just look at:
The destruction of Mecca from Sf.indymedia.org
Makka's historic sites under threat from Al-Jazeera
Advice to our brothers of Najd by Sayyid Yusuf ibn al-Sayyid Hashim al-Rifa'i
The first two focus on how much of the religious architecture in Mecca and Medina is being destroyed by the Saudis. The last is a more comprehensive paper written from a traditional religious perspective and gives many examples (57 actually) of how the Saudi regime antagonizes orthodox Islam.
(links from mere islam)
interview with samantha sanchez
From Sunni Sister's wonderful blog:
Samantha is a poet, writer, teacher, da’iyee, mother, and wife. She is one of the original co-founders of LADO: The Latino American Da’wah Organization, and wrote her master’s thesis about Latinos and Islam. She was one of MuslimPoet.com’s “Poets in Residence” from 2003 to 2004. In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, I decided to ask her a few q’s about da’wah, Islam, and Latinos.
UZ: Have you been writing any poetry / fiction lately? If so, what’s inspiring you, what are you “into” now? Any projects?
SS: I have written some pieces but none that I have shared. Poetry is always there…in me. I have been reviewing my old poetry to get back into it though. I can’t say I have been inspired as much lately.
UZ: We co-founded LADO in October of 1997. What’s going on with LADO now, esp. since LADO and Latino Muslims in general have been featured in several media outlets lately?
SS: LADO is in the capable hands of Juan Galvan. I will never completely walk away but I sure have taken a hiatus from directing LADO for the past 2 years. He is still on the speakers circuit and works with ISNA on conferences.
UZ: There are estimates that the number of Latino Muslims has doubled, or even tripled since LADO was founded. As far as da’wah to Latinos from the “major organization” goes, what do you see? Pros, cons? Do you think these organizations give enough attention to the Latino community? How do you think da’wah material in English (or Spanish) addresses cultural concerns that a potential convert from a Latino background might have (if at all)?
SS: I think that in years since the founding of LADO, more attention has been paid by the major organizations such as ISNA and Why Islam?. However, more can always be done. I see it being done more on a local level than nationally. Groups in Chicago, Texas and here in our own backyard in NJ have recently had Open Houses of a sort for Latinos to learn about Islam. I applaud these efforts.
MSAs have also recently become part of the local efforts, as NYU and Columbia Universities having iftars and events that included Islamic History in Spain or speakers of Latino descent. Some of the dawah material is written well but it is iften merely translations. I think it would come best from Latinos themselves.
UZ: When it comes to the general Muslim community, do you think that people are generally open minded about Latinos, or do they hold negative stereotypes about Latinos that may keep people away from Islam? What can community leaders and da’wah workers do to educate the community about the diversity of Latino cultures?
SS: I think that the majority of the Muslim community is open minded about Latinos and in fact intrigued that someone of Latino descent would choose to be Muslim. There are always those who look down on converts as not pure bred no matter what their stock, but thankfully, these are few and far between. I believe that community leaders should do more locally, having Latino converts speak at local mosques to explain a bit about Latino culture so that in turn this will help dawah efforts to the Latino community.
UZ: At the same time, do stereotypes of Arabs, Indians, Muslims, etc. among Latino people, esp. Spanish speakers, prevent those who have some interest in the Message of Islam from exploring it further (ie, have you run into this)?
SS: Stranegly enough, I personally have not run into many Latinos who think that badly of Arabs or Muslims. I am sure there are some. I would suppose that the only way to cure this malady is for Latino Muslims to be more vocal in the media particularly on TV. Perhaps if Latinos were made more aware of their own roots and they could hear from one of their own who is a Muslim, such stereotypes would dissappear or lessen at the very least.
UZ: You did a study some years ago on Latino converts. Are you still planning on making a book out of this material?
SS: I would love to have published that work. In fact, many studies that have been done since then have quoted from my work, which is rewarding. For many reasons it has been placed on the back burner, but the fire isn’t out just yet. There were problems with publishers that never got resolved and I never found another publisher that worked. Insha’allah it will happen someday soon.
obama and martinez
Florida Senator Mel Martinez, the first Cuban-American elected to the U.S. Senate, said Friday he was teaming up with Illinois Senator Barack Obama, the only black member of the chamber to introduce an immigration enforcement bill. It would create guest worker programs for immigrants, and provide incentives for undocumented workers to become documented, but tighten border enforcement. (full story)
Thursday, October 20, 2005
white muslims and moorish science
Laury Slivers, who wrote the piece Nourished by the Waters of Indigenous Islam also has another blog entry entitled Which Shade of White? about her experiences as a white Muslim.
In this latter piece she alludes back to the Moorish Orthodox Church of America which isprobably among the more ecclectic and unique movements in American religious history. They seem to have been the Sufi-tinged white hippie fellow travelers of the Moorish Science Temple.
If you want to learn more about the "Moorish" movement which formed around Noble Drew Ali, or want to delve more deeply into the "margins" of Islam, then one name you should definitely get to know is Hakim Bey (also known as Peter Lamborn Wilson). He has published books on Islamic heresies and mystical poetry. But he also has a HUGE amount of material (articles, interviews, a manifesto or two) available on the internet. I blogged about him in an earlier entry called hakim bey, ontological anarchy and cultural expression
In this latter piece she alludes back to the Moorish Orthodox Church of America which isprobably among the more ecclectic and unique movements in American religious history. They seem to have been the Sufi-tinged white hippie fellow travelers of the Moorish Science Temple.
If you want to learn more about the "Moorish" movement which formed around Noble Drew Ali, or want to delve more deeply into the "margins" of Islam, then one name you should definitely get to know is Hakim Bey (also known as Peter Lamborn Wilson). He has published books on Islamic heresies and mystical poetry. But he also has a HUGE amount of material (articles, interviews, a manifesto or two) available on the internet. I blogged about him in an earlier entry called hakim bey, ontological anarchy and cultural expression
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