Category Archives: Islam in America

Another Debate (Debate?)

Iraq War, Islam in America, Luke R. E. Publican, Terrorism Issue

Watching the Fox News comedy-not-so-central Republican debate last night, it seemed to me that the gentlemen (and they were, of course, only men) behind the podiums were more intent on smiling through their election-year platitudes than engaging with the messy realities of the government each seeks to head. Apart from Ron Paul, the interloping libertarian, each candidate apparently (a word that John McCain stubbornly refuses to use in his vocabulary) hoped that supporting the troop surge would lead to a surge (even a blip for those hanging on only by their televised sound bites) in their respective pre-season ratings. There was a lot of puffing and fluffing about family values, with Hizzoner begging (the question) to have his private life left private (‘fat chance’, as they say in the Big Apple) and another don’t-remember-the-name tossed out the Pottery-Barnyard we-broke-it-so-we-gotta-fix-it mantra that treats premature evacuation (Iraqis Interruptus) as one of the seven deadly sins. Mercifully, there was no gay bashing and one candidate (does it really matter who said what at this stage?) insisted that Republicans or better than Democrats because they ‘come clean’ and resign after a scandal. I wonder if Larry Craig was taking notes. Fox News should have stationed an embedded reporter in a stall in the Minneapolis airport just to be on the safe side. Continue reading Another Debate (Debate?) →

Slam Drunk Fascism:Coming to a Campus Near You

Gender and Sexuality, Islam in America, Islamophobia, Terrorism Issue

Fascism, a thorn rather than a rose by any other name, has a long and sordid history. The modern term was resurrected from the gore-galore glorified history of ancient Rome by Benito Mussolini in the 1920s to signal the power of the state (his state, of course) über alles (as his ersatz Aryan co-fascist to the north put it). As an ideology it dispensed of a need for any other religion than the twisted Durkheimian notion that the dictatorial “state” was really at stake when talking about “God.” As a fashionable pejorative term to heap abuse on one’s enemies, “fascist” readily becomes the modern day equivalent of saying the hated other is a bloodthirsty cannibal.

Now there is the recent moniker “Islamofascism,” which appears to have been coined by the Marxist French scholar Maxime Rodinson to describe the overthrow of the Shah and unexpected rise of an Islamic Republic in Iran. If so, this demonstrate the malleability of a term in which one form of fascism seemingly replaces another. But then the rhetorical door opens at least a crack for renaming the Vatican a “Christofascist” city state — surely a word game that would make both Mussolini and the popes turn over in their graves.

Confused? Not to worry … because David Horowitz, an idiotologue out to save “Western civilization” along with Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer, has embarked on a cybercrusade campaign to make “you” aware of the apocalyptic dangers of Islamofascism. Forget about global warming (a liberal trick to discredit the Bush administration) and look out for bearded jihadis on the march. Mark your calendars for the week of October 22-26 for the coming of “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” Don’t expect any parades down Main Street (we need to keep up the barriers so the terrorists don’t get us at home), but man the campus barricades and stick it to the Women’s Studies Centers. Continue reading Slam Drunk Fascism:Coming to a Campus Near You →

NYPD.EDU

Islam in America, Islamophobia, Terrorism Issue

I write from the Syracuse International Airport, inside the security zone. Despite my guilty conscience, I passed the non-unionized TSA without a hitch. One guard even described my informal greeting as “the American way.” Would that other authorities so exercised their ethnographic faculties. But they do not, and recently two NYC cultural documents recalled our attention to this country’s addled take on religion, politics, and radicalism.

On Aug. 15, the NYPD published an “Intelligence Report,” which warns that Islamic radicalism is “permeating” (p. 66) New York City. Then on Aug. 19, Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla’s NY Times Magazine’s cover article ascribed the US-Islamic divide to the West’s advancement beyond, and Islam’s arrested adherence to, political theology. Continue reading NYPD.EDU →

Little Mosque on the Prairie

Film and Video, Humor and Satire, Islam in America, Islamophobia

It started with Little Joe on Bonanza; you’ve seen the reruns and you’ve hummed the theme song. Then Little Joe went family fare and moved into a Little House on the Prairie. This is the television icon of conservative, what-a-wonderful-life-we-all-had-in-the-good-old-days Americana, if ever there was. I have watched a seemingly infinite number of reruns of both programs, but to my knowledge the only Orientals in sight were Chinese; no Muslims crossed the prairie.

So it is certainly time for a Little Mosque on the Prairie, even if it debuts in Canada rather than Kansas. Yes, fellow Americans, Muslims can be funny and not just the butt of Islamophobic jokes. It may not be surprising that nearly 2 million viewers tuned into the premier of the new television series on CBC. Continue reading Little Mosque on the Prairie →

Apocalypse Watch: And It’s Gog Awful

Apocalypse Watch, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America

Thus says the Lord GOD: It shall happen in that day, that things shall come into your mind, and you shall devise an evil device: and you shall say, I will go up to the land of unwalled villages; I will go to those who are at rest, who dwell securely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having neither bars nor gates; to take the spoil and to take the prey; to turn your hand against the waste places that are now inhabited, and against the people who are gathered out of the nations, who have gotten cattle and goods, who dwell in the middle of the earth. Ezekiel 38:10-12

Application of biblical prophecy to contemporary events is no doubt as old as the prophets themselves. The extraordinary literary success of the near-sited Left Behind series should not be taken lightly. There are many fundamentally sounding Christian apocalypticists out there and more coming online all the time, thanks to the freedom of website development. One site I recently came across is by a man named Ken Power, who describes himself as follows: Continue reading Apocalypse Watch: And It’s Gog Awful →

Reading the Qur’an: Mohammed Arkoun

Anthropology/Sociology, Islam in America, Qur'an

By Jane Dammen McAuliffe
Dean of Arts and Sciences, Georgetown University
Professor, Department of Arabic and History

Mohammed Arkoun is the most honored French Islamicist alive today and continues to receive lecture invitations from around the world. His first language was Berber, and he learned Arabic and studied Islamic sources in French-speaking schools, first in Algeria and then in Paris (Gunther:127-131). Arkoun’s life-long project has been the sustained analysis of Islamic reason from the perspective of the contemporary epistemologies, both philosophical and social scientific. He is well-schooled in the successive forms of critical theory that have occupied humanistic scholarship for the last generation, particularly structural linguistics and semiotics. Continue reading Reading the Qur’an: Mohammed Arkoun →

Divide and Think You Conquer

Islam in America, Islamophobia, Shi'a, Sunni

The distinction between sunni and shi’a in Islam has both political and doctrinal issues at stake. In a political sense, the original causes are moot. There is no caliphate today, no unbroken record of temporal earthly dominion for successors of Muhammad in the Islamic ummah. In the older sense to identify on a macro-level as sunni or shi’a follows differences in interpretation of the Quran, statements of the Prophet Muhammad, and the continuing role of descendants in the Prophet’s family from ‘Ali. The actual divergences over mostly issues of Islamic law, apart from succession of the Prophet. These are as varied in the sunni schools as they are between sunni and the various shi’a views. Much of the disagreement can be explained on cultural terms as Muslim communities have evolved almost fromt he start outside of the Arabian heartland.

But for anyone interested in disrupting unity or political reconciliation, the embedded historical grievances between sunni and shi’a can be resurrected in a flash. Consider the power-scarred sectarian wedge in the current security chaos of Iraq, where Saddam’s secular Ba’th party had mitigated religious identity politics for several decades. Those in the West who hate Islam, who may even view it as a Satanic plot out to destroy Jews or Christians, must be smiling broadly every time Muslims kill each other, bomb each other’s mosques and treat each other as worse than the “other” infidels. Continue reading Divide and Think You Conquer →