Travels

I'm happy to see that New Muslim Cool got a good review from the New York Times. I still haven't had the opportunity to watch it, as the city I'm in never seems to match up with cities where it's being screened.



I'm in Halifax, Nova Scotia, right now, couchsurfing in a cool old house with a bunch of young people, a student, a lawyer, and guy who builds decks. Couchsurfing has been in the news fairly frequently lately (here and here). It's a simple idea - building a social network of people who like to travel and are willing to host travelers in their homes, although there are forums where you can get to know travelers with similar interests, get questions answered, and post tips. The amount of trust is considerable; yesterday we showed up here and our host dipped out of work for a few minutes to let us into his home, then went back after less than five minutes of chatting. I think it works because it's self-sustaining, and the type of people who participate are generally on the same level of what they want to give and receive in return, plus tend to be open-minded and generous. I've heard that women have had some problems staying with men, and I don't think I'd stay with a guy if I were traveling on my own, but for the most part people are very respectful regarding boundaries.

This trip has been the first time for me to be hosted - I hosted a few people back in New Orleans - and overall it's been a great experience. I got to know a couple from Pennsylvania who more or less randomly decided to move to Portland, ME, for the summer, and the fellow of the two got a job working in a small seafood market with a bunch of salty sunburned tattooed sailors who bring in lobster and rock crabs at the end of the day. I stood out on the decks watching them haul up these teeming baskets of crustacean, and felt privelaged to be there - not many tourists get to meet the kind of people I've been meeting. In Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, after a long a nauseating trip through stormy waters, I stayed with an incredible woman and local journalist who took me and my boyfriend on a nighttime lantern-lit tour of a local graveyard. We ran into the gravedigger (who still does dig the graves himself, just him'n'a shovel), and as our host had interviewed him for an article on his hobby of building custom bikes, she suggested that we take a look at his works. He starts with a concept and then builds a bike - like the gravedigger bike, with a shovel for a seat and grass clippers for handles.

I'd really have to recommend couchsurfing; the fates sort of become your guide. It's been great so far, and I'm ready to test it out in Southeast Asia when I head there later this summer.

New Muslim Cool tonight in DC

From the Facebook Invite I received:

“While the film transcends race, ethnicity, class and religion, the setting, scenes and scope all reaffirm the universality of one humanity. New Muslim Cool, like hip-hop culture, is all about irrepressible social transformation and empowerment.”
-Dr. Ben Chavis, CEO and Co-Chairman, The Hip-Hop Summit Action Network

(FREE to all teach-in registrants $10 to general public)

Registrants of the 2nd Annual Remixing the Art of Social Change and members of the larger DC metro area community will come together for an exclusive sneak preview screening of the new documentary New Muslim Cool, thanks to Words Beats & Life which will host an evening screening at the St Stephens Church 1525 Newton St NW Washington DC 20010 on June 12th, at 9pm. This is one of several New Muslim Cool premiere screenings that are taking place in communities around the country.

Senior Advisor Zaheer Ali will be there in person for a post-screening discussion with the audience.

Musing on Leaving New Orleans for the Summer

On my last night in New Orleans I was sitting in the Columns Hotel with some friends, listening to them go over the various things that had happened to them during the day.  The context and content of the conversation was so epically New Orleans that in order to truly convey the absurdity of life there, I shall relate three stories that I heard.

First, a teacher at an all girls private school described how that morning, someone had hacked into his school's website and transformed it in ways both subtle and less-so into a hard-core porn site.  We all had a good chuckle to hear about how the school learned of it when a prospective student's parent had visited the site and, disturbed, called to complain.

Then another friend, a biker, bouncer at Miss Mae's (and if you're from New Orleans, you'll know that that means something), and filmmaker, told us that he had met a neurosurgeon in the bar where he works who had commissioned him to film his surgeries and edit them into a sort of surgery portfolio - though it was unclear whether this was for professional or personal use.  Particularly because he wanted it set to music, and not just any music, but classic rock. Naturally, we all laughed.

Finally, in the most New Orleanian of the three tales, a guy who works at a public school mentioned a story we had all heard in the news about a bus driver who had been stabbed by a passenger following an altercation over a stroller.  Reading about it in the news, he recognized the name and photo of the stabber as a student of his.  The next day in class he had confronted her about the incident and asked to hear what happened.  Now, let me just say that the busdriver claimed that the young woman had been noncompliant over a rule regarding the folding of strollers on the bus, and at some point fighting became so heated as to prompt a stabbing, the driver victimized.  The girl explained to my friend that she'd gotten on the bus, folded the stroller, and then while exiting the bus unfolded the stroller (inciting the ire of the driver) and descended the steps, all the while suffering verbal abuse from said driver.  After exiting the bus (and presumably in retaliation for this verbal abuse), the girl took a bottle of milk and squirted the driver.  In response, the driver got out and kicked the stroller, sending the infant contained therein FLYING THROUGH THE AIR (unconfirmed) and into a lamppost, bloodying its nose (again, unconfirmed).  At which point the girl noticed a knife on the ground and naturally, defending her child, stabbed the driver with it.  This stroller-kicking, nose-bloodying, milk-squirting, stabbing tale so undeniably smacks of home that I will hold it in my heart forever (along with the story of a guy biting off a chunk of a stranger's arm in Metairie - which, as my forensic anthropology professor once told me, is where the really weird stuff happens).

Ah me.  

As scholar Harry Levin once put it, "The most protean aspect of comedy is its potentiality for transcending itself, for responding to the conditions of tragedy by laughing in the darkness," or perhaps more aptly, Chris Rose described how "In New Orleans we dance even if there's no radio.  We drink at funerals.  We talk too much and laugh too loud and live too large, and, frankly, we're suspicious of others who don't."

dOvestar Takeover

DOVESTAR CHRONICLES-THE PAKISTANI STARFLEET

Yesterday I had the great, soul-enriching fortune of visiting my all-time favorite museum, The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, MD. Untrained artists, schizophrenics, geniuses...artists of great insight but frequently overlooked as mere madmen (and women) grace these walls, and always provide me with a welcome sense of enchantment.

I was particularly enchanted by Kenny Irwin, Jr. (not to be confused with the Nascar driver), who combines a fascination/obsession with Pakistan and its culture, particularly Sufi themes, with science fictional a la Starwars pseudo-post-apocalyptic visions of giant dove attacks and the heroic response of the Pakistani starfleet. What can I say? (Actually, I'm at a public library and have little time to say anything at all, so...) Here's some of his work.

The Perfectly Made Birds: dOvermasters Series One (Youtube)

Kenny on MySpace

Flickr discussion

Take That, Expectations!

Update to the Universe:

Not only did I pass the oral assessment, but I managed to do so with grace and a nice high score! Ah, dusty spice-scented alleyways of far-flung haunts that beckon, I await thee (hm, more like office desks and stacks of paper, but a girl can dream).

Lost in Space

Hello all out there in the Internet tubes. Sorry for being AWOL, it's been a long month(s?) and much has happened.

• First, I'm moving to sunny Doha! Imagine if the following said Qatar:

Sadly there is no equivalent out there for Qatar...and I suspect I know why. As I haven't gotten there yet, I'll keep snarky comments to a minimum.

• Second, I'm taking the State Department oral assessment next week, and with a passing rate of one out of five (or eight, so I've heard), I'm being optimistic but not pinning all my hopes on it. I'll be thrilled if I can manage to make it through the test without being so nervous that I spontaneously develop tourretes.

It doesn't have to be tourretes of course - I can imagine myself doing a hundred different embarrassing things that would immediately disqualify me for public service now and forever. Keep. It. Together. Kid.

• Third, I'm planning on changing the direction of this blog, seeing as I'm going to be traveling quite a bit this summer, followed by a pretty big move, and would like to post about my observations of place as well as of interests. So expect me to post pictures of mussels in Canada, mosques in Jakarta, and I don't know, dunes, in Qatar, as well as random bits and pieces of what I see and do.

Okay, wish me luck!

Islamic Sci-Fi

I've recently had the pleasure of reading A Mosque Among The Stars, the edited collection of "Islamic" science fiction that I posted about before. It's certainly made for good reading, and some of the stories have stayed with me for quite a while.

Like the genre, the stories are full of allusions to dystopian futures; genetic programming, novel means of communication, beings from other planets. What stood out though were the many references to globalization, motion and travel (whether on spacecrafts or pirate ships), then to war, torture, imprisonment, occupation, to a lesser extent terrorism, and then finally to the juxtaposition of truths, cultural values, and notions of authenticity and justice. Naturally, science-fiction is a way of stepping back from our own society and reexamining it through lenses of possibility, indicating as well just how dystopian our present can be, and I definitely found these stories engaged in that process. In one, a space-station prison, the bureaucracy it's chained to, the innocent prisoner set to be executed, and the man who frees him express not only what the dispossessed are up against, but our desire to break out of the web of bureaucracy and displaced responsibilities in favor of grounded morality, and justice.

What makes the stories Islamic varies. Sometimes the stories contain a peripheral, albeit critical, Muslim character, whose values contrast with those around them. Other times, and I thought not often enough, the main character was Muslim. In a few cases, non-Muslim characters found themselves in an entirely Islamic setting. For example, in the first, and I thought best story, a group of American soldiers follows a path leading to the Islamic hell, where the survivor is confronted by his own mix of desperation, survival, and belief.

My problems with the volume included a definite sense that readers are still encountering the "Islamic" aspects from the position of outsiders, Western, non-Muslim outsiders. The authors are primarily non-Muslim, and there was a tendency in some of the stories to exoticize the Muslim Other. Inclusion of non-Western, and certainly more Muslim authors, would have enhanced the collection, but this could be the direction that any future publications take, and hopefully this book will inspire others take up the pen.

----

In other news, Juan Cole is giving a presentation of his book Engaging the Muslim World in Second Life tomorrow, April 9th. Kind of neato.

New Orleans Human Rights Filmfest

March 26-April 5, 2009
List of Films

Every year I say that I'm going to attend this filmfest, and this year I mean it!

New Media and Identity-Making

I just finished The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, by Mohja Kahf, (a gift from my thesis advisor that I finally got around to reading once I realized that a soul cannot live on hyper-academic political science texts alone, which that soul reads in an effort to compensate for the feeling that her post-college brain is atrophying). It didn't strike me as an exceptional book, and in fact sounded like the same coming-of-age fiction that I used to read in middle school, except that instead of some werewolf caught between after-school-special American teenage normalcy and the unbounded metaphysics of occult possibility (or what have you), she's a Muslim teen living in the Midwest and forging an identity somewhere between Syria and America. By the middle of the book, however, I was pretty much hooked, and put off reading the last few chapters for a while because the thought of not having any more to read left me grasping, like a good book often does.
What's remarkable about the book, and is indicative of a larger project as a whole, is that its part of a process of identity making and remaking, and identity proclamation actively going on. Like other immigrant communities, and their children, and their children's children, Arab-American and/or Muslim-American (or really any -American group), there is for many an intentional and introspective process on what it means to be and have that "-American" added on. For others, it's not an introspective process, because the identity is real, and normal, and normalized, just that everyone else hasn't seemed to realize it yet. I know more than a few Muslim Americans who have complained that people don't seem to believe them when they explain that they're American. "No, but seriously, where are you really from?"

So, inspired by the book I've been checking out bloggers who have accepted the hyphenated identity, subsumed it, and come up as someone whole. What I like about introspective, personal diary type blogs (often maligned in favor of informational and more overtly masculine blogging styles) is that in them, authors are writing out the normalcy of their lives, exploring the corners of their own ordered universes, regardless of how sub their subculture might be. Muppie (Muslim+Yuppie) is one of my favorites; I love how she has taken components that this generic floating Western culture has told us are disparate, and has emerged a whole and interesting person. She's a college-educated-twenty-something dealing with post-college-life-and-its-seemingly-endless-professional-disappointments (ARGH...sigh) Muslim-convert rooted in the West but open to other traditions, and a great writer to boot. And what's lovely is that because she writes that identity, that identity is. Not that it isn't if it wasn't, but this online suggests represents the power of new media in identity-making (so does Baba Ali, for that matter).

Michael Hastings-Black wrote this in a an article on advertising, mass media, and Muslim identity in The Western Muslim:

It is new media that offers the greatest opportunity for expression of self, as the space serves to “multiply rather than reduce the number and range of message producers and [is] far more interactive, not only in the minimal sense of an increased range of choice, than mass media.” Fatemeh Fakhraie, Editor-in-Chief of Muslimah Media Watch, which is both an analysis of mass media and an access point to all other Muslimah bloggers, started the blog “because I didn’t see any representation of Muslim women in either mainstream or feminist publications. We weren’t given a voice; we are only talked about.”

What is the sound of one Muppie living her life if it's not blogged about?

Hastings-Black argues that young American Muslims, already acclimated to the various omnipresent dualities they're faced with, "can likely slide between the terrorist/non-citizen label, and be both American and Muslim – not ‘become’ American as mass-media may be waiting to see, or confer,– but be – as they already are." Blogging permits a window into authors' lives, so that the rest of their country can figure out what these what young American Muslims already have.

Mosque Among The Stars

I don't why this delights me quite so much, but it does...

Islam and Science Fiction chronicles the portrayal and activities of Muslims in science fiction from around the globe, and from comic books to cinema. "A Mosque Among the Stars" is a recent anthology of Islamic science fiction edited by one of the site's authors. Neat.

Israel/Palestine in Photography at Tulane

Deborah Bright and Linda Dittmar
8pm, March 5th, 2008
Stone Auditorium, Rm 210 Woldenberg Art Center

Since 2005, RISD Photo and HAVC Professor Deborah Bright and Linda Dittmar, writer and film scholar, have collaborated on a project titled "Destruction Layer," documenting sites in Israel where Palestinian Arab villages and urban neighborhoods existed prior to 1948. The project brings together Bright's long-standing interest as a photographer in how landscapes are continually rewritten to tell particular stories of heritage and nationhood, and Dittmar's
perspective as a third-generation Israeli who writes about issues of memory and identity in contemporary Israeli and Palestinian personal documentary films. Professors Dittmar and Bright will speak about their project and show images from their work on March 5th at 8pm in
the Stone Auditorium.

Gallup Poll on Muslim Americans

Gallup's Center for Muslim Studies released a report today documenting some of the ethnic, gendered, and emotional parameters of America's Muslim population, with interesting results. For one thing, they're the most diverse religious group in the US by a huge margin, with a majority of 35% being African-American. Second, at both ends of the economic spectrum Muslim men and women show the greatest gender parity in terms of monthly household incomes. Behind Jewish women, Muslim women are some of the most educated women in any American religious group, and tend to receive more advanced degrees than their male counterparts (for one case study on this, see Loukia Sarroub's All American Yemeni Girls: Being Muslim in a Public School). Muslim Americans are the most self-reportedly religious group in the US, behind Mormons.

However, Muslim Americans are among the least likely to be registered to vote (although the Arab American Institute-an ethnic and not a religious organization-does work to increase political awareness among Arab Americans), and are least likely to see themselves as "thriving."

Muslim Americans: A National Portrait (full report)

Paula Loyd in The Post

If you've seen the movie Grizzly Man, then you might recognize some of the same themes about Paula Loyd. Not that she was a recovering addict and oddball who found acceptance in the fringes of the world, far from it. It was that both she and Timothy Treadwell, with their combination of (misguided?) idealism, passion, and a belief that beyond everything else, that what they were doing was right and necessary, walked among are consistently characterized as dangerous beasts. They developed a personal relationship and binding love for the world that consumed them. Ultimately, both were victims of a failure to grasp that the circumstances of their participation had changed, or had never existed on the terms they assumed; both will be remembered more for their deaths than their lives.

As for Loyd, we know that the Human Terrain project is dangerous and that more will die, particularly as tensions rise with the continued strengthening of the Taliban and surge in U.S. troops. It's hard to measure its successes, and easy to see how it hurts the discipline. The article mentions how unfortunate it is that Ayala killed the attacker, leaving us with no clear understanding of his motives. I'm particularly interested in the gender component, and have been reading up on Pashtun masculinity and Pashtunwali, but that's for another day.

Swat Cont'd

This very sad article on the Taliban reach into immigrant's lives appeared today on the heels of disappointing news that the Pakistani government has made a deal with the Taliban in the Swat region to permit the imposition of severe Islamic law. The Taliban is using Pakistanis' links to family members in the United States to extract huge sums of money, for example, kidnapping immigrants' parents for ransom.

Malika El Aroud

Of all places, Marie Claire magazine has just featured an article on the female e-jihadist, Malika El Aroud, called "Love in the Time of Terror." I don't know if this is a twisted Valentine's Day thing or what, but somehow they managed to turn the story of a woman committed to death and destruction into a saccharine love story. I'm not sure if that intensifies the aspects of violence, or makes her seem more sympathetic.

Bizarre.