Category Archives: Islamophobia

“Today, I Am a Muslim Too” Rally

"Arab Spring", Islamophobia 101, Terrorism Issue


Congressman Peter King

“Today, I Am a Muslim Too” Rally
Time : Sunday, March 6 · 2:00pm – 5:30pm
Location : Times Square, New York, 7th Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, NY

Take the 1/2/3/7/A/C/E/N/R/Q/Shuttle trains to 42nd Street – Times Square. Check MTA for planned service changes: http://tripplanner.mta.info/_start.aspx

In response to the March 8th congressional hearings dubbed “The Radicalization of Muslim communities in America” led by Congressman Peter King (R-LI), members of diverse faith communities throughout New York City will join in unity and support of American Muslims.

Stand with us on March 6th to show Congress that we are all together, that we share friendship and trust and cannot be divided. Such hearings will send the wrong message, alienating American Muslims instead of partnering with them, and potentially put lives at risk by stirring up fear and hatred.

Thanks to all who are supporting the event, the list is below: Continue reading “Today, I Am a Muslim Too” Rally →

On Egypt and Islam

"Arab Spring", Egypt, Islamophobia 101

Uprising in Egypt: Islam and the compulsion of the political
by Jeremy F. Walton, The Immanent Frame (SSRC), February 23, 2011

Invariably, contemporary discussions of Islam seem to begin and end with the relationship between Islam and politics—both anti-Islamic pundits and critics of Islamophobia vigorously assert that the mechanics and kinetics of this relationship are central to the evaluation of Islam today. A nexus of paranoia, fear, ignorance, and old-fashioned bigotry typically animates arguments on one side, while those on the other tend toward the polemics and apologetics of subaltern critique. Both camps, however, assume that discussions of Islam necessarily traverse and trouble the domain of the political. This exclusive emphasis on the political marks the difference between Islamphobia à la mode and the older Orientalist discourses of Edward Said’s interrogation: unlike today’s Islamophobia, classical Orientalism constituted a total romance of the East that subsumed political, aesthetic, religious, and cultural forms. In contrast, contemporary Euro-American public debate about Islam evinces what I call the compulsion of the political. While this compulsion achieved hegemony rapidly in the wake of September 11, 2001, it stretches back at least to the seventies and eighties, with high water marks during the Iranian Revolution and the Rushdie Affair.

Much commentary on the recent events in Tahrir Square, throughout Egypt, and across the Middle East has inevitably recapitulated the compulsion of the political in relation to Islam. Despite the deeply ambiguous relationship between the Egyptian pro-democracy demonstrations and politically-oriented Islamic organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, pundits from across the political spectrum have seized on the relationship between Islam and politics as the crux of the matter. Arguments have crystallized around two poles, dystopian and utopian, respectively: either the dismantling of Hosni Mubarak’s autocracy will yield the nightmare of a theocracy led by the Muslim Brotherhood (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali fulminated in the New York Times on February 3), or the post-Mubarak era will witness the triumph of pluralist, liberal democracy, with the Muslim Brotherhood as one prominent voice among a multitude (as Tariq Ramadan asserted in a recent interview on al-Jazeera). Continue reading On Egypt and Islam →

Good Sufi, Bad Muslims

Islam in America, Islamophobia 101, Journalism and Media, Sufism


by Omid Safi, Sightings, January 27, 2011

One of the lower points in the Park51 Center controversy was the comment by New York Governor David Paterson: “This group who has put this mosque together, they are known as the Sufi Muslims. This is not like the Shiites…They’re almost like a hybrid, almost westernized. They are not really what I would classify in the sort of mainland Muslim practice.”

In a few short sentences, the governor managed to offend Sufis, Shi’i Muslims, as well as westernized Muslims, non-westernized Muslims, and “mainland Muslims” (whoever they are). Paterson overlooked the fact that some Shi’i Muslims are mystically inclined, and that six million American citizens are Muslims, thus there is no question of “westernizing” or “almost westernizing” for them. There is a more disturbing implication hiding in his assertion: the ongoing way in which the general demonization of Muslims, of the kind now routine on Fox News, is accompanied by an equally pernicious game of Good Muslim, Bad Muslims.

There are many versions of this game, but the basic contour stays the same: The assertion that the general masses of Muslims are evil, terrorist-supporters, anti-western, patriarchal, misogynist, undemocratic, and anti-Semitic; and that these masses are set off and defined against either the solitary, lone Muslim good woman or man. The “Good Muslim” is often an individual, or a small circle, because to admit that the larger group of Muslims could be on the right side of the human-rights divide is to have the house of cards of the Muslim demonization game collapse on itself. Continue reading Good Sufi, Bad Muslims →

Which Terry Jones is Banned in the UK?

Humor and Satire, Islam and Christianity, Islamophobia 101


Which of these is the real loonie?

So here is late breaking news from the BBC: Terry Jones is banned from entering the UK. As it happens, of course, there is more than one Terry Jones out there and it is obvious that one of them is a loonie worthy of Monty Python satire. So which one is it? The one on the left or the one on the right (so far right he is off the end of a flat earth)?

The BBC clears up the confusion:

Controversial US pastor Terry Jones has been barred from entering the UK for the public good, the Home Office says.

The pastor, who last year planned a Koran-burning protest in the US, had been invited to address right-wing group England Is Ours in Milton Keynes.

The Home Office said Mr Jones could not enter the UK as the government “opposes extremism in all its forms”.

Mr Jones told BBC Radio 5 live he would challenge the “unfair” decision and his visit could have been “beneficial”. Continue reading Which Terry Jones is Banned in the UK? →

Ablution Pollution

Afghanistan, Ethics, Islam and Christianity, Islamophobia 101, Taliban, Terrorism Issue


A report in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times is a chilling reminder of the utter absurdity of out-of-control sectarian violence in Afghanistan.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan —
A suicide bomber blew himself up Friday at a public bathhouse in southern Afghanistan that was filled with men washing themselves before the main prayers of the Muslim week. At least 17 were killed and 23 injured, provincial officials said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in Spin Boldak, in Kandahar province. The district, a main crossing point to and from Pakistan, is a longtime nexus of drug and weapons smuggling. Continue reading Ablution Pollution →

Grease-Monkeys and Bedouin Girls

Anthropology/Sociology, Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Islamic Rituals, Islamophobia, Literature, Orientalism


Grease-Monkeys and Bedouin Girls: The Rhetorical Fate of Arabs and Muslims in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup.
By Daniel Martin Varisco, Tingis Redux, December 11, 2010

Novels tell Stories, allowing readers to fantasize about reality but with no obligation to represent that reality as anything other than fantasy. Good novels, at least the kind that garner a Nobel prize for their author, capture the imagination through creative engagement and style. The South African author Nadine Gordimer has been writing about the shame of apartheid in her native land for more than half a century. Her focus on the moral and psychological tensions of racial inequality provides a welcome political stamp to her fiction. Yet, sometimes in telling one kind of story, especially teasing out the relationships of lovers across cultural boundaries, another story can be read between the lines. The Pickup, Gordimer’s acclaimed novel which pairs a privileged South African white girl named Julie with an Arab Muslim and illegal alien named Abdu, traces an unlikely love story but leaves the identity of Abdu literarily in the dust, the dust of a stereotyped Orientalist denigration of his homeland and his religion. One need not follow Edward Said’s controversial contrapuntal reading to find in this novel a generic image of Arab and Muslim that serves the plot only in its unrelenting negative portrayal. The Pickup, whatever its merits as a close study of personal dislocation, succeeds by picking on distorted images of Arab and Muslim.

For the rest of this essay, read it on Tingis Redux.

Heroic, Female and Muslim

Development, Gender and Sexuality, Islamophobia, Somalia, Terrorism Issue



Dr. Hawa Abdi runs a hospital in Somalia and stands up to extremists there; photograph by Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, The New York Times, December 15, 2010

What’s the ugliest side of Islam? Maybe it’s the Somali Muslim militias that engage in atrocities like the execution of a 13-year-old girl named Aisha Ibrahim. Three men raped Aisha, and when she reported the crime she was charged with illicit sex, half-buried in the ground before a crowd of 1,000 and then stoned to death.

That’s the extremist side of Islam that drives Islamophobia in the United States, including Congressional hearings on American Muslims that House Republicans are planning for next year.

But there’s another side of Islam as well, represented by an extraordinary Somali Muslim woman named Dr. Hawa Abdi who has confronted the armed militias. Amazingly, she forced them to back down — and even submit a written apology. Glamour magazine, which named Dr. Hawa a “woman of the year,” got it exactly right when it called her “equal parts Mother Teresa and Rambo.”

Dr. Hawa, a 63-year-old ob-gyn who earned a law degree on the side, is visiting the United States to raise money for her health work back home. A member of Somalia’s elite, she founded a one-room clinic in 1983, but then the Somalian government collapsed, famine struck, and aid groups fled. So today Dr. Hawa is running a 400-bed hospital. Continue reading Heroic, Female and Muslim →

Shariah at the Kumback Café

Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islamic Law, Islamophobia, Orientalism

By Roger Cohen, The New York Times, December 6, 2010

PERRY, OKLAHOMA — They call Oklahoma the buckle of the Bible Belt. It’s the state where all 77 counties voted Republican when Barack Obama was elected and where 70.8 percent of the electorate last month approved a “Save Our State Amendment” banning Islamic, or Shariah, law.

So I decided to check the pulse of a resurgent conservative America at the Kumback Café. The Kumback, established 1926, is a cozy, memorabilia-filled joint that sits opposite the courthouse in downtown Perry, population 5,230.

Things work like this at the Kumback: The guys, average age about 80, arrive around 8 a.m. and get talking on “the whole gamut of life”; the girls, average age too indelicate to print, gather later at a horse-shoe shaped table toward the back. Ken Sherman, 86 and spry, explained: “We’ve got to come here every day to find out what’s going on. And by the time we leave we forget.”

I asked Paul Morrow, a whippersnapper at 71, how things were going. “There’s just too much Muslim influence, all this Shariah law,” he said. “We’re conservative here, old and cantankerous.” Continue reading Shariah at the Kumback Café →