Category Archives: Ethics

“Honest to God” Burgers

Animals, Ethics, Food and Drink, Islam in America


Russell Khan, Sulman Afridi, and Khalid Latif (left to right) at New York City’s Honest Chops, the country’s first halal whole animal butchery.

by NEW YORK (CNNMoney), May 30

Thick T-bone steaks and richly marbled oxtails decorate the display case at Honest Chops, a new whole animal halal butchery in downtown Manhattan.

Not only is the shop committed to selling humanely raised meat, it’s all slaughtered in the Islamic tradition, which involves a prayer and quick death using a sharp knife.

Khalid Latif, who founded the butchery in March, spoke to Muslim students and working professionals in his community who wanted a higher quality of meat than their neighborhood markets offered.

Initially, he and his partners Anas Hassan and Bassam Tariq were just interested in opening a halal butchery. But after learning about the unnatural feed that commercial cattle and chickens are raised on, they opted to source their meat from small producers in upstate New York, Maryland and Massachusetts.

“When there’s not a certain kind of purity to the food that we’re consuming, that becomes problematic from the spiritual standpoint,” said Latif, who has rigorous standards for the meat he sources. Continue reading “Honest to God” Burgers →

Yemen from Janna to Jahannam

"Arab Spring", Ethics, Huthis, Obama Administration, Salafi, Terrorism Issue, Yemen, Zaydi

When I first arrived in Yemen, early in 1978, I found a virtual janna, a country building itself up by the sandalstraps, people who were welcoming, tribesmen who did more than wear their honor on their sleeves, a sense that the future would bring good things. It was not a land frozen in time, despite the lack of infrastructure and Western amenities, but a force for change as Yemenis took to entrepreneurship as second nature (which it, of course, always was). Development was in the air and on the ground, as bilateral and United Nations agencies poured money into Yemen, much of it ineffectual and wasted. In 1978 USAID was sponsoring a major sorghum improvement project in Yemen, a boondoggle that did little more than collect seeds for the University of Arizona’s seed bank. Given what I learned about Yemeni farmers’ knowledge, they should have been giving advice to the United States on how to grow sorghum. Much ado was made about building up the capacity of the central government, although the money flowing in through the various programs invited corruption rather than sustainable growth. Still, I have felt over the years that Yemenis, by and large, have the resolve and grit to persevere.

In the past three and a half decades Yemen has experienced ups and downs. A population estimated around 6 million or less back then has skyrocketed to some 24 million today. With the decline in subsistence agriculture, which at least filled stomachs, poverty and malnutrition are greater today than they were in 1978. The devastating loss of remittance wealth, which fueled Yemen’s grass-roots development in the 1980s, has led to chronic unemployment. The much touted unification in 1990, a kalashnikov wedding in hindsight, could not overcome the power politics and regional rivalry that have played out in the last two decades. The removal, or at least side-lining, of Ali Abdullah Salih has thus far not resulted in progress towards a peaceful solution to Yemen’s agonizing conflicts. The problem is not so much the inability of Yemen to renew itself, but the continual interference from outside forces. Continue reading Yemen from Janna to Jahannam →

Knowledge as Politics by Other Means

Ethics, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islam: Introduction, Islamic Law, Orientalism


The first part of an interview with Wael Hallaq by Hasan Azad has just been published on al-Jadaliyya. Below is the introduction and the first part of a much longer exchange which can be followed here.

Throughout the last three decades, Wael Hallaq has emerged as one of the leading scholars of Islamic law in Western academia. He has made major contributions not only to the study of the theory and practice of Islamic law, but to the development of a methodology through which Islamic scholars have been able to confront challenges facing the Islamic legal tradition. Hallaq is thus uniquely placed to address broader questions concerning the moral and intellectual foundations of competing modern projects. With his most recent work, The Impossible State, Hallaq lays bare the power dynamics and political processes at the root of phenomena that are otherwise often examined purely through the lens of the legal. In this interview, the first of a two-part series with him, Hallaq expands upon some of the implications of those arguments and the challenges they pose for the future of intellectual engagements across various traditions. In particular, he addresses the failure of Western intellectuals to engage with scholars in Islamic societies as well as the intellectual and structural challenges facing Muslim scholars. Hallaq also critiques the underlying hegemonic project of Western liberalism and the uncritical adoption of it by some Muslim thinkers.

Hasan Azad (HA): One of the debates raging nowadays has been about the inattention that Muslim intellectuals receive in the West. One can say that, with relatively minor exceptions, the modern Muslim presence in, or contribution to, the intellectual world of the West is near nil. In the closing pages of your Impossible State, you have pointed out that a robust intellectual engagement between Muslim thinkers and their Western counterparts is essential, not only for the sake of better Western understanding of Islam, but also for the sake of enlarging the scope of intellectual possibilities in the midst of Euro-American thought. Your argument, I believe, meant to convey the idea that there is much that the Islamic worldview and heritage can contribute toward enriching our reflections on the modern project, in the West no less than in the East. What is that contribution, and why is it not happening? What are the obstacles standing in the way?

Wael Hallaq (WA): To speak of the potential contributions of Islam to a critique and restructuring of the modern project is a tall order, one that should come subsequent to a diagnosis of the present modern condition and its causes. The obstacles you alluded to are numerous and multilayered, and originate in both sides of the divide. If there are any failings—and there are many indeed—they cannot be located on one side only. The first, and most obvious of course, is the linguistic obstacle, the only means to communicating ideas. The West (by which I here mean Europe, its Enlightenment, distinctively modern institutions and culture and the spread of all these mainly to North America), has seen it sufficient to consider its two or three major languages so universal as not to care to learn other languages well, if at all. Even Orientalism, as an academic discipline, has not been successful in producing sustained command of Islamic languages, despite the fact that it did produce individuals whose linguistic competence even in more than one Islamic language was no less than masterful. It remains the case however that those who can navigate an Islamic language or text are a miniscule—in fact insignificant—minority in Western societies.

But there is a larger sense to Orientalism involved here. In many ways, the field of Orientalism is surrounded by an outer, immensely extensive layer; that is, countless numbers of influential voices who really never bothered to do any of the hard intellectual and philological work on Islam; yet, they feel quite justified and confident to pronounce on the “Orient,” both within the classrooms of academia or as so-called “experts” in mass media. This “peripheral” Orientalism usually escapes our common definitions of that discipline, but it forms the bulk of common and popular Western knowledge about the rest of the world, especially Islam. In any case, this is roughly the linguistic obstacle.

The Haram of Boko Haram

Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Nigeria, Terrorism Issue

Here is a snap question: which does more harm to the image of Muslims, especially in the Western media: the political maneuvering of Egypt’s now outlawed “Muslim Brotherhood” or the savage acts committed by the self-styled Boko Haram in Nigeria? Boko Haram is well named, if you remove the Boko. I would have a hard time thinking of a more bloodthirsty and irrational group calling themselves Muslims, and there are far too many examples to choose from historically. Their kidnapping of some 276 Nigerian girls from a school to essentially enslave them is bad enough, but reports now surface of an indiscriminate killing spree in a crowded Nigerian market with over 300 said to be dead. The death toll from this group is measured in the thousands, both Christians and fellow Muslims becoming victims. Boko Haram espouses such a distorted view of Islam, that it is more accurate to label them a political terrorist group using the umbrella of Islam to carry out their barbaric acts.

Boko Haram is not alone. It is this kind of volatile mix of politics and religion that has plagued human history, probably from the start of recorded history. If one steps out of the Western preoccupation with the biblical tradition, the idea that any kind of just God would tell his ragged followers to kill every man, woman, child, ox, sheep and ass in a Canaanite city is a clear attempt to justify what most of us would rightly see today as a violation of human rights. The crusades and the bloody wars in Europe between Protestants and Catholics turned religion into yet another excuse to justify killing others. Hindus and Buddhists also have their blood-soaked moments, as do most known religions. The point is that “religion” is never separate from the real world except in some imaginary. It is myth that drives belief, whether from a sacred text written in a shroud of mystery or the quotidian alibi of personal experience. Those who take on the mantle of “God” show how little faith they really have. Continue reading The Haram of Boko Haram →

They died with their sandals on

Ethics, Film and Video, Iran, Iraq, Islam and Christianity, Islamic History, Shi'a, Sunni

When I was young and impressionable, one of my favorite movies was They Died with their Boots On, the Errol Flynn movie about Custer’s last stand. There was Flynn/Custer with his sword raised out in front of his troops heading for the savage Indians. Had it been a fair fight, of course he would have won, but he stood his ground and was the last man standing. Watching this film recently, apart from the totally ahistorical plot of the made-for-Hollywood battle scene, I wonder how many horses were maimed from the trip wires. In a sense Flynn represented a hero against impossible odds, but in another it perpetuated the notion of the white man’s manifest destiny at the expense of the savage “red man.” I doubt it inspired any sarsparilla party types to go out and shoot any Indians, but it certainly reinforced a cultural bias that remains to this day.

I recently came across a film about the death of Husayn, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, at Karbala. This comes in Arabic and Urdu versions and is entitled “The Caravan of Pride” (موكب الاباء). Like the Flynn film, the bias in the film is evident from the start. This is a film highlighting the conservative Shi’a view of an evil and crazed Yazid. Watching the film creates sympathy for the tragic death of Husayn and his followers at the same time that it denigrates the incoming Umayyad caliphs as heretics. It is easy to forget that the event taking place happened in 61 AH/680 CE, before there were any of the Sunni law schools and five years before Abd al-Malik became caliph and authorized a new edition of the Qur’an. Continue reading They died with their sandals on →

Milking the Marathon: Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Brandeis Speech

Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia, Somalia

by Setareh Sabety, Huffington Post, April 11, 2014

When my son, a senior at Brandeis University, forwarded me the news of the controversy surrounding the decision to grant an honorary degree to the controversial feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I took her side. I knew about her. She is a Somalian feminist, a champion of banning genital mutilation of girls, and later a member of the Dutch parliament. She reached fame when Theo Van Gogh, the director of Submission, a film that Hirsi had written criticizing women’s treatment in Islam, was killed by a fanatic.

She went too far when she picked on Islam as a particularly violent religion, but as a Muslim-born feminist, I understood her anger. I too have been accused of being Islamophobic when I criticized Islamic views of women. It is easy to become angry after a video clip of a stoning or yet another story of an honor killing. It is easy to hate Islam when your husband threatens to keep you from traveling, or when the waiter tells you to cover your hair better in a restaurant. In Iran, where Sharia, or Islamic, law is imposed by force, women like me “hate” Islam on a daily basis. For Hirsi Ali, coming from the especially violent Somalia, undergoing genital mutilation herself, and witnessing the death of a colleague even in the relative safety of Europe, it must have been horrendous. I can see how her experiences could make her take sides and lose patience.That is why, initially, I supported her receiving an honorary doctorate from Brandeis. When the Muslim Student Association gathered enough signatures from both students and faculty to force a cancellation, I was impressed by the passion of the students, and by their convincing arguments about condoning hate speech. But, still, I had mixed feelings about canceling someone I considered a sister-in-arms against radical Islam. Hirsi Ali is not an Islamophobe. She is not afraid of Islam. She is fed up with it. I am too. As a woman who fled Iran because she did not want to be forced into the hijab or banned from travel by her husband, I understand Hirsi Ali on a deep and visceral level. Continue reading Milking the Marathon: Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Brandeis Speech →

Against the Drones

"Arab Spring", Ethics, Obama Administration, Terrorism Issue, Yemen

YEMENIS AFFECTED BY U.S. DRONE STRIKES TO LAUNCH VICTIMS’ UNION

by Amel Ahmed, Al Jazeera, March 31, 2014

Friends and family members of victims of U.S. drone strikes in Yemen are launching a national drone victims’ organization Tuesday to support affected communities and lobby for a change in Yemeni government policy regarding the covert program.

The National Organization for Drone Victims (NODV), with the assistance of UK-based legal charity Reprieve, will conduct investigations of drone strikes and highlight the civilian impact of the U.S.’ controversial drone program in Yemen.

Baraa Shiban, the project coordinator for Reprieve, told Al Jazeera that the constant presence of drones in Yemen is devastating communities. “We are talking almost 50 percent of the country — ten provinces in total — who suffer from the constant hovering of drones.”

Shiban said that NODV will assist affected communities in the aftermath of drone strikes by focusing on the economic impact of the loss of families’ primary bread-winners, psychological trauma and physical injuries. Continue reading Against the Drones →

Yemen’s child brides and beggars fend for themselves

"Arab Spring", Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Yemen

by Abdullah Hamidaddin, Alarabiya.net, March 28, 2014

Maha is a 10 year old girl. She is the youngest of twelve and is now getting ready for her big day. She is to be married to a man who is thirty seven years old. Her mother is packing her bag. It’s a small bag. The family is so poor that Maha barely has ten pieces of clothes all together. Before she closes the bag, the mother puts in two plastic dolls. Maha found them while foraging for toys with her friends in the trash of an upscale neighborhood in Sanaa. I wonder what the mother is thinking now. She must be happy that Maha will have three meals a day. Before her engagement, Maha would only eat one meal daily and sometimes she had to sleep hungry. Now things seem brighter than before. The father spent part of her dowry on some food to fatten Maha up. Her fiancé remarked that she was getting too thin, and her parents were worried that he would call off the engagement started so they started feeding her more. Maha of course didn’t understand why she was eating alone. Why her mother wouldn’t share her oat meal and fresh cow’s milk. Meat was too expensive; but they would make soup from the fat which butchers usually throw away or feed the stray cats with.

I can’t imagine what Maha is thinking right now. I can’t imagine what she will be thinking when she is in a bedroom with her husband. Continue reading Yemen’s child brides and beggars fend for themselves →