Get our most popular stories once a week!
That is one of the most disgusting things I have ever heard of. The dress code seems far too..."
Posted by euterpe42 in Silence Broken: Making Inmates of Students
DemocratsWork posted in You Voted. Now What?
muthu22 posted in Interview with Education Chairman
bobqzzi posted in Raunch Culture
Equality Deferred
The candidacy-and now election-of Barack Obama has elicited an avalanche of commentary on race across the political and social spectrum.
Some pundits have posited that we now inhabit a "post-racial" society that has transcended racial differences with the victory of an African-American presidential candidate. That a nation which held blacks in bondage, and refused to grant them justice long after slavery was abolished, could elect a black man for the highest office in the land appears to most observers as a striking victory for the cause of racial unity and tolerance.
Lost in this celebration, however, has been any serious treatment of the Arab and Muslim question. Obama was ceaselessly and openly pilloried by conservatives as a foreign, exotic, unpredictable quantity, not only because he was of mixed racial heritage, but also because he was wrongly said to be Muslim and Arab. And while the Obama campaign fought firmly and intelligently to overcome voters' fears about electing an African-American, they rarely took the extra step of condemning the anti-Arab and anti-Islamic caterwaul of their opponents' campaign.
In this context, serious studies of how Arab and Muslim Americans are treated inside the United States should be welcomed to the discussion. One such study comes from Dianne Shammas, an American activist of Lebanese heritage pursuing her Ph.D in at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her thesis is the latest comprehensive study of racial discrimination against Arab Americans at community colleges in southern California and southeast Michigan.
She surveyed 753 Arab Christian, Arab Muslim, and non-Arab Muslim students from 21 community colleges using a 92-item survey and three focus groups to learn how this population viewed prejudice on campus and interacted with the larger campus community.
Previous studies have shown high levels of discrimination: a 2007 Arab-American Institute survey showed 76 percent of Arab-Americans ages18 to 29 experienced discrimination, and a 2004 Muslims in the American Public Square report showed 50 percent of American Muslims ages 18 to 24 experienced discrimination in the school and workplace.
However, Shammas said her findings did not bear out these previous reports. She found that Arab and Muslim students tend to cluster and form friendships on religious and ethnic lines, as do other minorities on college campuses. Examining 570 written responses, Shammas found that 38 percent of students formed friendships based on sameness of culture, heritage, and religious belief more than any other criteria.
Read the rest of the post »
Domestic Crusader
The presidential candidates don't argue over whether it is right to bomb Muslim countries, but rather over whether they’ve chosen the right Muslim country to bomb. A special interest group commanded by Israeli ex-officials unloaded 28 million copies of an anti-Muslim hate film in swing states to titillate idle exurban imaginations. The hammer of the “war on terror” is wielded against an ever-expanding pool of people who conveniently appear as wayward nails.
As these ominous realities unfold before their eyes, some American Muslims appear resigned and fatalistic.
Wajahat Ali is not among them. The 27-year-old California-born Muslim with Pakistani roots takes an aggressive but level-headed approach to politics and the arena of ideas. An attorney, activist, writer, journalist, and playwright, Wajahat aspires to the dynamism and versatility of Muslim scholars and poets of past ages.
“There’s no rule that say you only have to be one thing,” he says, emphasizing the need for American Muslims to become valuable leaders within their own communities—and to make their own communities leading examples of Muslim values: tolerance, justice, and scholarship.
“Prophet Muhammad said, ‘Seek knowledge, even if you have to go as far as China.’ You want to be part of a renaissance, you want to be part of a cultural, spiritual, intellectual revolution, where you revive Islamic scholarship,” Wajahat says.
Read the rest of the post »
Kabobfest Culture
Blogging isn’t easy.
Just ask May Alhassen, one of several contributors to the mostly Arab-American blog, KabobFest. She succinctly describes the website as “an Arab-themed Daily Show in blog format.” From tongue-in-cheek biographies where contributors describe themselves as attendees of “madrassas” (which simply means “school” in Arabic) to blog entries featuring Obama in Saudi-style headwear, the alternately acerbic and irreverent sense of humor is on full display.
But the issues KabobFest dissects are serious. “[The humor] is mostly meant to illustrate the absurdity of…attempts to politicize and demonize our people, language, culture and religion,” May said.
One striking example is a delightfully absurd five-minute video production on the Kuffiyah, a piece of cloth targeted by hyperventilating conservatives as an infectious symbol of Islamist terror.
For May, America's stereotyping of American Muslim women as draped in headscarves, veils, and burqas is particularly problematic, as she has noted in blog entries. A Muslim woman who chooses not to wear hijab, May says those who judge her are most often not other Muslims, but non-Muslims.
“I meet a lot of judgment and ignorance from the general public and my piety is constantly called into question,” she said.
May was born in America but raised with Arabic as her first language. Upon entering public school she was dumped into English as a Second Language (ESL) class. “They thought because I spoke Arab that I was a dunce,” she said. “That's how they perceive you if you speak any language other than or in addition to English.”
Read the rest of the post »
How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?
Rasha was 19, frightened, and upset. Woken up by government agents in the middle of the night, she and the rest of her family—except two younger brothers born in the U.S.—were hauled off to a holding cell and later to prison for almost three months. Grilled about terrorism and held on immigration charges, she and her mother were often reduced to tears, despondent and depressed.
And then she was released, without much fanfare, along with her father, mother, sister, and elder brother. As the family made its way out of prison, an immigration official handed them a court date and helpfully observed that they were, in fact, eligible to file a residency petition.
Moustafa Bayoumi’s book, How Does It Feel to be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America, depicts the struggles of Arabs who are growing up in the shadow of post-September 11th America and confronting the paradoxical mix of capricious and prejudicial attitudes evinced by its institutions.
An associate professor at Brooklyn College (CUNY), Bayoumi crafts his narratives, drawn from the lives of seven Arab American youth in the Brooklyn area, with careful, considered prose. Wisely, he often maintains a distance from his younger subjects, adding germane facts and historical context to illuminate the stories. Further, he chronicles not only their conflicts, but their successes and their ambivalence in the face of daily frustrations.
A less attuned academic might have taken the opposite route, relegating people’s voices to the periphery of a drawn-out polemic or perfunctory rundown of immigration patterns.
Instead, here we learn of the bonds formed between Rasha and her sister while in jail, the distant state her brother fell into after release, a school petition signed by 200 classmates on the family’s behalf, and a chance encounter with a smug prison official in Times Square.
Read the rest of the post »
War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims
Who are the Muslims in our midst? Terrorists? Existential threats to Western civilization? Sworn enemies of America?
These questions – rehearsed and scripted much like the answers – were rolled off the assembly line at a furious clip when America decided to wage war on two Muslim countries in the aftermath of September 11th.
Rarely have Muslims been invited to partake in this denunciation masquerading as discussion—except, of course, those polished ex-Muslims eager to denounce their former coreligionists carte blanche, accruing handsome benefits for themselves in the process.
War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims is a book which challenges the conventional and tiresome rhetoric aimed at Muslims—specifically, at the more than four million Americans who call Islam their faith.
Written by Melody Moezzi, a writer and lawyer who describes herself as “a thinking, feeling, educated and stubborn Muslim Iranian American woman,” the book does not address anti-Muslim prejudice through erudite exegesis. Rather, following the journalistic maxim of “show, don’t tell,” it engages the reader by presenting slices of 12 young Muslim American lives, including the author’s own, in accessible prose.
Moezzi presents us with a multiplicity of stories, including that of two Americans who convert to Islam despite ubiquitous domestic depictions of Muslims as fanatics; a young woman from Iran whose parents fled at the eve of the war with Iraq; a young man with an Egyptian father, Korean mother, and a penchant for rapping; a Bosnian war refugee turned legal advocate; a Wall Street Journal reporter close to the slain journalist Daniel Pearl; and a founder of a Muslim organization who braved death threats to serve the LGBTQ community.
Read the rest of the post »
MOGG Culture: Addiction or Cure?
Amid the media frenzy over the effect of violent games on kids or the sight of grandmothers smacking backhands on the Nintendo Wii, one crucial gaming phenomenon has been largely overlooked: millions of youth are immersed in massively-multiplayer online games (or MMOGs), sometimes to the point of addiction.
What separates MMOGs from conventional video games? Players pay a monthly subscription fee to take part in online environments crafted by developers. The game doesn't stop when you do. Instead, you choose attributes for an in-game character on the server, which never sleeps save for maintenance. One MMOG, World of Warcraft, caters to more than nine million players.
While addiction is a clinical diagnosis, MMOGs have rarely been analyzed through a social lens. What compels young people to play for hours on end? What does the trend reveal about their surroundings, their condition, and their desires? Could these games actually encourage youth cooperation and non-judgmental collaboration?
Read the rest of the post »
M. Junaid Levesque-Alam blogs about America and Islam at Crossing the Crescent. Co-founder of Left Hook. He's also a journalism graduate of Northeastern University and has worked for the daily press in suburban Massachusetts and weeklies in Queens, New York. He now works as a communications coordinator for an anti-domestic violence agency in the NYC area.