latin american council of churches elects first black president

Christianity Today: Latin American Council of Churches Elects First Black President

with apologies to jesse jackson

Here is the recent "Wheel of Fortune" episode of South Park, With Apologies to Jesse Jackson. The last couple of minutes really sums up some of the small-scale political issues in my life right now. When a white person is criticized for problematic behavior around race, they may sincerely feel bad, but they still have plenty of white privilege and other forms of power to wield which they are capable of ruthlessly exercising in order to feel okay. In this episode we see Randy Marsh (Stan's father) accidentally use the n-word and get taunted as "the nigger guy". But by the end, he (along with Michael Richards and Mark Fuhrman) is able to get legislation passed to ban this hateful language. As the reporter said: From now on, if a person uses the word "nigger," it must be at least seven words away from the word "guy."

Planet Grenada on Michael Richards

tego calderon: latin america needs its own civil rights movement

New York Post: Black Pride: Latin America needs its own Civil Rights Movement by Reggaeton rapper, Tego Calderon

pencak silat

I haven't worked on the Muslim Art of War series in a while so I thought I should share the following online video games.

Pencak Silat
Pencak Silat 2
Pencak Silat Defender

For those that don't know, Silat is a Southeast Asian martial art which is popular in Malaysia and Indonesia (and thus even though it seems to have pre-Islamic roots, a lot of Muslims practice it and bring an Islamic flavor to their understanding of the art.). Personally, I've learned whatever little I know about it from Naqshbandis I've met. I wouldn't claim that the movements in the video games are authentic but to me it is interesting that the games even exist.

upon the ashes of babylon

Here is an entire talk entitled Upon the Ashes of Babylon from a powerful Muslim spoken word artist, Amir Sulaiman. The event was part of Islam Awareness Week 2006 at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, AB, Canada. Amir's words manifest a quiet confidence which I find compelling. He has a way of framing issues which is really cathartic and healthy... it reminds me of how I felt when I read Malcolm's speeches for the first time.

Upon the Ashes of Babylon
Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Past Grenada posts on Amir

verily, there is only one hip-hop umma

Socialism and Democracy: In his article, "Verily, There Is Only One Hip-Hop Umma": Islam, Cultural Protest and Urban Marginality Hisham Aidi wrestles with the full gamut of Grenada- esque themes. Specifically, he looks at how politically conscious Black, Latino and Arab youths are coming together and participating in Islamic and Islamically-tinged forms of hip-hop culture.

dominican tango

On a lighter note, here is a clip of the song For the Last Time, I'm Dominican from the musical episode of Scrubs, performed as a duet between Carla and Turk. Carla Espinosa on Scrubs (played by Judy Reyes) is one of the few Afro-Latina characters currently on television.

y tu abuela donde esta?

You Tube: Here is a performance by Evelyn Brito of Y Tu Abuela Donde Esta?, the paradigmatic poem by Fortunato Vizcarrondo on invisibility and Afro-Latino identity. We've previously discussed the general theme of invisibility on multiple occasions (see "that's wells, not ellison, in case you feel like being cute again.") and I've also referenced Vizcarrondo's work specifically in my own writing (see slave ships south) But it is nice to actually hear and see the work acted out.

the departed

I recently saw The Departed. It wasn't bad, but like many such movies, the excessive hype led to me being disappointed by the film. The acting was good but the ending seemed more messy than necessary.

By the way, I'm starting to reach that age where I realize that pretty much every story has been told before. For example, The Departed was actually a remake of a Hong Kong thriller called Infernal Affairs. I'm actually looking forward to seeing the original film since, based on the little I've read about it so far, the plot is somewhat more elegant and less "messy" than The Departed.

Also, both Deep Cover (Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum) and No Way Out (Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman) were older films which dealt with similar themes (double-identity and divided loyalties) in ways which I found more compelling. I highly recommend them.

By the way, No Way Out was a remake of an even older film called The Big Clock (based on a novel of the same name). For me, this all connects to some of the issues raised in the dead white males post. If there are only so many stories, it makes sense to ask which is the best example of a given type and form the canon. The tragic love story. The heroic quest. The road trip. The buddy cop film. etc. There are only so many myths... so many archetypes.

Grenada's past:
deep cover

race and the human genome

Africana.com: Race and the Human Genome by Hisham Aidi is a brief overview (from 2001) of some of the racial implications of modern genetics research.

the party of lincoln

So I guess he was a white supremacist...

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

-Abraham Lincoln, (September 18, 1858)

black presidents (part six)

It is likely that with the possible exception of occasional updates on Obama's candidacy, this will be the last entry in this series on Black presidents. I'd meant to comment on the topic of the current post especially after I realized that some folks were finding their way to Planet Grenada by trying to learn more about this subject anyway...

but Sondjata over at Garvey's Ghost already beat me to the punch with his entry: On These So Called "Black" Presidents

I'd heard this claim before because some of the Afrocentric bookstores I would frequent carried J.A. Roger's book "The Five Negro Presidents". Basically, the claim is that several of the past U.S. Presidents (not counting Bill Clinton) had some amount of African descent and were therefore only "passing" as white. (The candidates are Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge).

Personally I would not want to dismiss these claims without really looking at the evidence but in some cases the racial identification seems more rooted in negative campaigning in a racist society than on solid genealogical information. Furthermore, as Sondjata's post underlines, the fact that anyone could consider any of the candidates "Black" just reveals some of the extremely bizarre implications of the one-drop rule and the American construction of race.

See also:
5 Black Presidents by Dr. Leroy Vaughn
DiversityInc: Obama Wouldn't Be First Black President by Aysha Hussain

black presidents (part four)
black presidents (part five)

al sharpton and strom thurmond

From an old Boondocks:

Huey to Ceasar: Y'know, love him or hate him... you can't deny that there is a powerful message for all of us to learn in the long life of Strom Thurmond.

Ceasar: And that is...?

Huey: That you can really, really, really, really, really hate Black people... And it's basicaly ok with everyone...

In related news: Al Sharpton recently learned that some of his ancestors were owned by Strom Thurmond's ancestors. Strom Thurmond's biracial daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams says: It's not that bad.

blacks and browns urged to unite for immigration

By James Wright, Contributing Writer
February 26, 2007
WASHINGTON - A coalition of Blacks and Latinos is necessary to effecting changes in immigration laws, a nationwide advocacy group has determined.

The Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM), which operates under the umbrella of the Center for Community Change, held a summit on the campus of Gallaudet University from Jan. 30-Feb. 1 to discuss strategies on how to bring together the two largest minority groups to create fair, comprehensive immigration reform policy. There were workshops, speakers and visits to members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.
(full story in the Louisiana Weekly)

dead white males (part one)

This was originally going to be a St. Valentine's Day post but time ran away from me...

I was in high school when I first heard about Allan Bloom's book "The Closing of the American Mind". This was my first introduction to the "cultural wars"... the epic struggle between the Canons of Dead White Male civilization and Political Multi-Post-Cultural-Relativistic Correctness. By default I tended to cheer for the second camp but as I grew older I tended to soften up on this a little.

I once saw Mortimer Adler (one of the pioneers of the University of Chicago's Great Books Program) on C-Span defending his curriculum against the standard criticism. Why aren't there more works by women? What about people of color? What about the works of the Buddha or Confucius? Aren't those "great books" too? Adler's basic response was that by excluding non-Western voices he wasn't really making a judgement call. The point isn't that Shakespeare and Plato are really greater than Rumi and Confucius. The point is that books of the Western canon don't just exist in isolation, instead they reflect and respond to one another and participate in what he called the Great Conversation.

As Adler puts it:

"What binds the authors together in an intellectual community is the great conversation in which they are engaged. In the works that come later in the sequence of years, we find authors listening to what their predecessors have had to say about this idea or that, this topic or that. They not only harken to the thought of their predecessors, they also respond to it by commenting on it in a variety of ways."

And rightly or wrongly, Adler argued, non-Western and non-dominant voices were historically excluded from participation in that Conversation.

The corollary, of course, is that there could be other "canons of Great Books" which serve as milestones for those other conversations. Latin America, Africa and her Diaspora, the "Orient", Confucian civilization, etc. Instead of being bothered by Adler's Dead White Male canon, I should just figure out which conversations are "mine" and then swim the depths of those particular oceans of ideas.

For example (and this is where the Valentine's Day connection comes in) if I'm going to be an educated member of the Muslim community, I should probably try to be more familiar with the canons of the Muslim conversation. And so on the fourteenth I was thinking to myself that I should get around to reading at least one version of the great "Oriental" love story of Layla and Majnun. I already read Romeo and Juliet in high school, but even that work is somewhat derrivative of the former. In some ways, Layla and Majnun is also reminiscent of the Song of Solomon in the sense that both texts can be read literally as being about physical romantic love, or metaphorically as beaing about spiritual divine love.

More on the canon(s) later...

our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure

It's just been on my mind. It poses an interesting challenge:

"'Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.' We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
-Marianne Williamson

obama's islamic past

Examiner: Can a past of Islam change the path to president for Obama? raises the question of whether Obama's connections to the Muslim community (through his father, stepfather and brother) will turn out to be political liabilities.

shakira and wycleff at the grammys

A friend recently put a YouTube clip of Shakira and Wycleff at the Grammys on her blog, which I thought was rather Grenada-esque and so I decided to "steal" it. (Actually I wonder how much consideration to give the fact that she was introduced as a "Latina superstar" as opposed to an "Arab superstar"?)

In any case, what follows is my own weak attempt to justify the sudden increase in the booty-shakin' quotient on this side of the blogosphere...

For a while now, I've been thinking about doing some kind of "deep" post about the cultural significance of Shakira, but honestly how deep I can make her. But in "Let Us Be Moors": Islam, Race And "Connected Histories" (the same paper which I use for the opening summary of Planet Grenada, Hisham Aidi makes a noble effort. He writes:

In the past two years, Islam and the Arab-Muslim world seem to have entered even more poignantly into the Latin American imagination, gaining a presence in political discourse and strongly influencing Hispanic popular culture. This Arab cultural invasion of Latin America, which has reverberated in mainstream American culture, is often attributed to the Brazilian telenovela El Clon and Lebanese-Colombian pop icon Shakira.

[...]

Through the Latino back channel, the impact of Shakira in bringing Arab culture to the MTV audience has also been considerable. The Lebanese-Colombian singer was bombarded with questions by the media about her views "as an Arab" on the September 11 attacks, and advised to drop the belly dancing and the Arabic riffs from her music because it could hurt her album sales, but she refused. "I would have to rip out my heart or my insides in order to be able to please them," said the songstress, and expressed horror at hate crimes against "everything that's Arab, or seems Arab." [18] During the run-up to the Iraq war, Shakira's performances took on an explicitly political tone, with her dancers wearing masks of Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Fidel Castro. Backdrop screens flashed images of Bush and Saddam Hussein as two puppets playing a sinister game of chess, with the Grim Reaper as the puppeteer. She also undertook a highly publicized tour of the Middle East (though her concerts in Casablanca, Tunis and Beirut were postponed), during which she visited her father's ancestral village in the Bekaa Valley.

Interesting... but honestly if I find more serious discussion of Shakira's significance online, I'll probably add some links. I promise this won't just turn into fan site.

happy singles awareness day

Happy Singles Awareness Day!

And from last year's post:
happy v.d. (I hope people realized this was Will Smith from the song "Just the Two of Us")

Looking back at old posts reminds me... Planet Grenada is almost 2 years old... wow.

compass for a sea of scholars

I have written about a similar topic before but it has been on my mind again recently...

Shortly after becoming Muslim, I realized how common it is for Muslims to speak in extremely confident and extremely vague terms about what "the ulema" or "the scholars" have to say about this or that topic. At the same time, it was also very clear that in reality "the ulema" display a diverse range of orthodox opinions on a great many questions. The situation can definitely be confusing to a beginning Muslim.

One of the more beneficial talks I attended as a new Muslim was one which stressed the importance of finding a regular methodology for resolving the various fiqh issues one is faced with from day-to-day. One of the presenters even went as far as saying that pretty much given ANY action, there was at least one scholar who would argue that any action was halal. So if you just look to what "the ulema" say indiscriminately it would be possible to be lead by your ego and follow no law at all just by following the "easy rulings" of every scholar.

For practical decisions, one solution to this problem is to follow one of the traditional schools of fiqh (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi, Hanbali). I would say that seeing this presentation was one of the significant moments which really got me thinking seriously about following a madhab.

I would suggest that there is a similar problem when it comes to broader spiritual questions. If you want good general advice about spiritual/religious/moral/ethical issues from an Islamic perspective, where do you go? In the sea of varied scholars with varied opinions, who are the reliable sources? This is the question which inspired the current post:

According to a well-known hadith:

"Allah shall raise for this Umma at the head of every century a man who shall renew (or revive) for it its religion" (Sunan Abu Dawud)

The Arabic term for this figure is the Mujaddid and through the years Muslims have expressed a wide variety of opinions about the identity of the Mujaddid or reformer for any given century.

At one point, I thought to myself that a good goal would be to go to
some traditional sources and with a list of mujaddids I felt comfortable with, and become more familiar with the ideas and biographies of the people identified as mujaddid for all 14 centuries. To be honest I didn't get very far. Part of it was due to motivation but to be fair, some of it was ultimately due to the fact that translation of Islamic works into English is an uneven process. And texts which are of interest to English-speaking Muslims are not necessarily going to the same as texts which are of interest to Western scholars.

In any case, the whole concept of mujaddid is what reminded me that in a lot of ways there are some healthy similarities between what I would call traditional or orthodox Islam and the best aspects of Roman Catholicism (and Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy). Just the idea that in century after century there were always saint-scholars who were reminding the community of basic truths about the religion, passing down, preserving and reforming a traditional orthodox faith. This sense of continuity is especially pronounced in the case of candidates such as Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti (founder of the Chisti order) or Abdul Qadir Jilani (founder of the Qadri order) or a prominent Naqshbandi like Ahmad Sirhindi because the Sufi orders themselves each have specific silsilahs or chains of master-disciple relationships which trace, in "apostolic" fashion, from the current head of a given branch of the order all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad (saaws). Even for Sunnis, most of these chains typically go through Ali ibn Abu Talib (ra) but occasionally (in the case of the Naqshbandis) through Abu Bakr Siddiq (ra).

In any case, I would just suggest that going to these major touchstones like the mujaddids or through shaykhs with a verifiable lineage seem like a reasonable way to navigate through the uneven sea of "the ulema".