Kafr al-Hanadwa

Good piece in Slate on why many American Muslim women voluntary adopt and then dump the hijab.

[...] Suraya Ali, the daughter of unobservant Muslim immigrants from India, shocked her parents and her classmates by donning a Muslim head scarf. “It was my way of flipping the world off, saying, ‘I can be what I want,’ ” says Ali, now 31, who grew up in a Chicago suburb.

But a decade and a half later, Ali had a “strange feeling” of no longer fitting in with her Muslim community; she was constantly set up with potential suitors who assumed her scarf symbolized a certain submissive attitude toward marriage; and her elite education had prompted her to question the traditional roles for men and women laid out in classical Islamic law. “I realized [wearing hijab] is not who I am anymore.”

Ali’s decision was visible only to those who knew her (and because of her family’s sensitivities, she did not want her real name used). But her experience reveals how very modern American Muslim life can be. Hijab in America is not a social norm of ages past, unquestioningly handed down; rather, it has become a tool of self-expression….

When Yale anthropologist Carolyn Rouse studied African-American Muslim women for her 2004 book Engaged Surrender, she observed that the hijab (and, in some cases, niqab, or face-covering) was primarily about group identity. Many female converts, for example, started veiling themselves immediately—the two were seen as inseparable. Wearing hijab “signified belonging to the ummah,” or the broader, idealized Muslim community, she said. But this voluntary expression of citizenship doesn’t always last. By the time Rouse wrote her epilogue, several of the women she had followed no longer wore the scarf. One convert, Rouse wrote, “believes she used hijab to prove to herself the depth of her faith. Now that she feels more secure with her faith she does not feel she needs it.”

[...]

These theological arguments, while important in their own ways, sometimes seem little more than a patina atop more primal social urges, however. Wearing hijab or not wearing hijab—just like owning a gun or driving a Prius—says something fundamental about your beliefs and aspirations. And in America, at least, beliefs have a funny way of changing.

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No shit.

Several leading Iranian clerics criticized President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday for saying that the last imam of Shiite Islam, a messianic figure who Shiites believe was hidden by God 1,140 years ago, leads modern-day Iran.

“We see his hand directing all the affairs of the country,” Ahmadinejad told theological students in the city of Mashad during a speech that appears to have been given last month but was not broadcast until Tuesday. “A movement has started for us to occupy ourselves with our global responsibilities. God willing, Iran will be the axis of the leadership of this movement,” Ahmadinejad said.

Several clerics in the Iranian parliament accused Ahmadinejad of implying that Imam Mahdi or Imam Zaman (Imam of the Age), as the Shiite messiah is also called, supports his government….

“If, God forbid, Ahmadinejad means that Imam Zaman supports the government’s actions, this is wrong. Certainly Imam Zaman would not accept 20 percent inflation rates, nor would he support it or many other mistakes that exist in the country today,” wrote Gholam-reza Mesbahi Moghadam, a cleric belonging to a powerful faction close to Iranian businessmen and established religious figures….

The clerics also feared that the president’s remarks in Mashad could make it harder to criticize the government. “These kinds of statements might create an image of a holy relation between persons and religion, which will close the path for critics,” Mahmoud Madani Bajestani, another cleric and politician told Ettemaad-e Melli.

All that book learnin’ and it took them this long to figure it out.

(See a similar story about the US National Association of Evangelicals here).

First the kuffiyeh, now the sheesha. They’re coming to get your children!

More and more U.S. college students are smoking tobacco using waterpipes – or hookahs – and it’s becoming a growing public health issue, according to a new study led by a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher.

The findings offer important insight into the prevalence and perceptions related to waterpipe tobacco smokers and are reported in the May issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health. The article is also featured in an editorial in the same issue.

“These results should serve as an alarm bell to anyone interested in public health in the United States. Preventing tobacco-caused death and disease means remaining alert to new forms of tobacco smoking and then understanding the health risks of these new forms and communicating these risks to public health workers, policy makers, and to smokers themselves,” said principal investigator Thomas Eissenberg, Ph.D., associate professor in the VCU Department of Psychology.

In a hookah, tobacco is heated by charcoal, and the resulting smoke is passed through a water-filled chamber, cooling the smoke before it reaches the smoker. Some waterpipe users perceive this method of smoking tobacco as less harmful and addictive than cigarette smoking.

According to Eissenberg, current and prospective waterpipe tobacco smokers should be made aware that waterpipe tobacco smoking is not as benign as they might think. Waterpipe and cigarette smoke contains some of the same toxins — disease-causing tar and carbon monoxide, as well as dependence-producing nicotine. Additionally, the exposure to these toxins through waterpipe smoking may be greater due to longer periods of use.

Further, smokers take more and larger puffs with waterpipes, leading to inhalation of 100 times more smoke from a single waterpipe use episode relative to a single cigarette.

Through a cross-sectional study, approximately 744 students, mostly between the ages of 18 and 21, completed an Internet survey that included questions about demographics, tobacco use, risk perceptions and perceived social acceptability.

The research team found that approximately 43 percent of those surveyed had smoked tobacco using a waterpipe in the past year; and 20 percent of them had smoked tobacco using a waterpipe in the past month. Users were more likely to perceive waterpipes as less harmful than cigarettes compared to those who had never used a waterpipe before.

Slate has a thoughtful review of a book on Christian (evangelical) pop culture in the US, torn between the urge to mainstream its youth appeal and a desire to set itself apart as the ‘moral’ alternative, that raises questions very applicable to hijab-chic Islamic youth culture in the Middle East.

At this point in history, American evangelicals resemble the Israelites at various dangerous moments in the Old Testament: They are blending into the surrounding heathen culture, and having ever more trouble figuring out where it ends and they begin. In politics, and in business, they’ve mostly gone ahead and joined the existing networks. With pop culture, they’ve instead created their own enormous “parallel universe,” as Daniel Radosh calls it in his rich exploration of the realm, Rapture Ready! A Christian can now buy books, movies, music—and anything else lowbrow to middlebrow—tailor-made for his or her sensibilities. Worried that American popular culture leads people—and especially teenagers—astray, the Christian version is designed to satisfy all the same needs in a cleaner form.

The problem is that purity boundaries are hard to police in the Internet age. Show a kid a Christian comedian, and soon he’s likely to discover that the guy is a pale imitation of this much funnier guy—Jon Stewart—who’s not a Christian at all, and doesn’t even like Christians. Which might then lead to a whole new set of anxieties, such as: Why are Christians so constitutionally unfunny? And, what is the point of Christian culture, anyway?

In the ’80s, Christians were known as the boycotters, refusing to see movies or buy products that offended them. They felt about commercial culture much the way a Marxist might: that it was a decadent glorification of money and meaningless human relationships. Then, sometime during the ’90s, when conservative evangelicals started coming out of their shells, they took a different tack. The boycotters became coopters and embarked on the curious quest to enlist America’s crassest material culture in the service of spiritual growth….

At a Christian retail show Radosh attends, there are rip-off trinkets of every kind—a Christian version of My Little Pony and the mood ring and the boardwalk T-shirt (”Friends don’t let friends go to hell”). There is Christian Harlequin and Christian chick lit and Bibleman, hero of spiritual warfare. There are Christian raves and Christian rappers and Christian techno, which is somehow more Christian even though there are no words. There are Christian comedians who put on a Christian version of Punk’d, called Prank 3:16. There are Christian sex-advice sites where you can read the biblical case for a strap-on dildo or bondage (liberation through submission).

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The recent worldwide rise in grain prices and resultant ‘food crisis,’ felt most keenly by the poor, has touched a nationalist nerve in India. In the old days, Gandhians like Lal Bahadur Shastri sought to promote national self-sufficiency and social solidarity by encouraging the well-off to fast or at least not eat any cereals/grains one day a week, reasoning that this would allow the poor to eat (this fast is still kept, often on a Monday, by some older women I know, with a similar sense of religious duty as the more traditionally Hindu Tuesday fast).

In 2008, a fairly objective observation by Condi Rice that rising consumption standards in India and China have contributed to increasing food prices has been interpreted in news headlines as Americans “blaming” Indians for eating too much. Indignant commentators have asserted India’s right to eat its fill, suggesting that it is now taking back its rightful share from other greedy countries, or pointing to American hypocrisy in consuming corn for ethanol and generally making a big show of standing up to the hegemon. A ‘white Indian’ who has clearly been around long enough to have acquired a desi moralizing instinct about consumption only half-jokingly tells Americans they can solve the crisis by eating less meat. And a nationalist student-politician opinionator reinvents the fasting tradition for the new age by calling on people to give up eating American junk food.

Who will they be able to rant at once prices go down after the expected good harvest?

A thoughtful article in Slate looks at the perennial problem of lefty elitism and how overeducated, well-meaning political types who genuinely want to help the common man can actually connect with said common man. As the wise man said, “eat must be first.”

One key to the movement’s lack of popularity, Orwell argues, is its supporters. “As with the Christian religion,” he writes, “the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.” Then he wheels out the heavy rhetorical artillery. The typical socialist, according to Orwell, “is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism, or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler, and often with vegetarian leanings … with a social position he has no intention of forfeiting. … One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.” (Think “organic food lover,” “militant nonsmoker,” and “environmentalist with a private jet” for a more contemporary list.)

Orwell also rails against the condescension many on the left display toward those they profess to care most about. Describing a gathering of leftists in London, he says, “every person there, male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority. If a real working man, a miner dirty from the pit, for instance, had suddenly walked into their midst, they would have been embarrassed, angry and disgusted; some, I should think, would have fled holding their noses.”

Real working-class folks, he says, might be drawn toward a socialist future centered around family life, the pub, football, and local politics. But those who speak in its name, he says, have a snobbish condescension toward such quotidian pleasures—even condemning coffee and tea. “Reformers” urged the poor to eat healthier food—less sugar, more brown bread. And their audience balked. “Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like organs and wholemeal bread, or [raw carrots]?” Orwell asks. “Yes it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would rather starve than live on brown bread and more carrots … a millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits. An unemployed man doesn’t.”…

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Pankaj Mishra has a longish profile of Alaa al-Aswany in today’s NYT that goes over ground already covered by endless interviews and profiles but also offers some nicely observed glimpses of the life of the writer in Egypt, torn between the conviction that the corrupt society around him has to change, and an unvoiced attachment to old standards of the genteel, Westernized intellectual lifestyle. The descriptions of Aswany’s Cairene literary salon and of the Garden City Club are an entertaining slice-of-life (particularly when cell phones ring in the middle of tense discussions). But what the profile really brings out is the contrast between a writer who cannot but be political and be engaged in the social and cultural and political crises of the day (from a fairly self-conscious sense of his own role in that society and the disconnect between his sense of moral responsibility and real powerlessness in the face of the regime’s machine) when at home, and the writer as a wary celebrity overseas, expected to speak for his country and his religion in all matters, and who ends up, in spite of himself, having to speak for “the Arabs.” Do read the whole thing.

And on a similar topic, I highly recommend a new English translation of Richard Jacquemond’s book about the idea of the writer as the Egyptian nation’s conscience.

A fascinating historical study of the use of brands in commerce across urban centres in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt is reported in the New Scientist (via Bint Battuta’s blog).

[B]ottle stops stamped with symbols some 5000 years ago are evidence of the first branded goods.

Around 8000 years ago, village-dwelling Mesopotamians began making personalised stone seals, which they pressed into the caps and stoppers used to seal food and drink.

Originally these goods would have been traded directly with neighbours and travellers. But when urbanisation began - a little over 5000 years ago - city residents increasingly had to deal with products of uncertain origin.

Wengrow says the symbols in caps and stoppers came to play an important role in telling people about the quality and origins of products such as oils and wine. He has described how the seals might have been used to ensure quality control, to give provenance for goods or to show that they conformed to a standardised system. By looking at the symbol on a wine stopper, says Wengrow, consumers came to know whether or not to trust that bottle.

Many stoppers have been found in the ancient city of Uruk, now in Iraq, where some 20,000 people lived 5000 years ago. The symbol impressions are the first images produced mechanically in human history, says Wengrow. The images have long been regarded as works of art, but he believes that what we now consider art may actually have been promotional branding.

So those hieroglyphs may have symbolized something rather more shallow than we had imagined:

The object in figure 1, which measures about 8 cm across, was found in the subterranean part of a royal tomb at Abydos in southern Egypt and dates to around 3000 BC (Petrie 1900). Inscriptions on the lower left-hand section of its surface denote a specific quantity of “finest oil of Tjehenu,” a region in the vicinity of modern-day Libya and therefore exotic to the Nile Valley, where the label and its associated goods were deposited as part of a royal burial rite….

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An aunt and uncle who had lived in Egypt in the late sixties were reminiscing about the Merryland nightclub in Heliopolis and the star belly dancer, Nahed Sabry. There’s an elegant cabaret-like quality to the performers of the time, heightened by the clinking liquor glasses and Westernized clientele in the dancing scenes of the films in which they appeared - and perhaps that’s why this very Egyptian artistic form was disavowed for a while by the powers-that-be as decadent and therefore un-Egyptian, letting the Turks and “Phoenicians” claim it as their invention.

Normally, Arab women watching a belly dancer take on a resigned but faintly disapproving look while their menfolk nod their heads to the rhythm, clap their hands in time with the music or indulge in nights of fancy. The women at the “Merryland” were relaxed, responsive and in good humor. They smiled back at Miss Zaki as she shook her breasts, rolled her hips and gyrated her midriff, all with that sweet smile on her face. It was hard to realize this was the “belly dance” that in the West still has strong overtones of vulgarity and licentiousness….

The nature of their occupation makes belly dancers a particularly catty lot who disagree over everything, including the origins of their art. Indeed, no one really knows how and where the belly dance started. Some people maintain it began with the pharaohs, pointing as proof to tomb paintings showing dancers dressed in transparent veils. Most Egyptian dancers are tempted by this theory, but grudgingly admit the drawings in the pharaonic tombs depict movements and positions that are too stylized to have any relation to the fluid motions of the belly dance….

Egyptian officials at the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance prefer to emphasize folk dancing as being more in keeping with Egyptian tradition than belly dancing. Cairo newspapers regularly scold “the belly dancing cult” and one straitlaced columnist, railing against the undiminished popularity of the dance, recently wrote: “There are belly dancers everywhere. Why on earth is that? Are we introducing a new type of art which could be called the navel-shaking civilization? Let us get tough about all this nonsense and clean up our arts.”

Reflecting this opinion, belly dancing receives no government encouragement or assistance, is mentioned by officials with a frown, and is attributed to the Turks, who ruled Egypt for 400 years. Turkish officials, less inhibited in such matters, enthusiastically agree. “Of course it started with us,” said one emphatically. “Everyone knows that.”

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‘Masala’ would appear to be an honest-to-goodness, deep-rooted desi word, used to describe everything from a mixture of spices to the onion-ginger-garlic-tomatoey gravy that food is cooked in, to the ’stuff’ used in the filling of a samosa, to an adjective used to describe all ‘hot’ celebrity gossip or tabloid-y news, but wouldn’t you know it, it’s another one of those Persian-Arabic loan words. And it’s not just a food-related loan word either:

Urdu garm mali, garam masl, hot spices : garm, garam, hot, burning (from Persian garm, from Middle Persian, from Old Persian garma-, in garma-pada, entrance of the heat, month name; see in Appendix I) + mali, masl, ingredients, mixture of spices (from Persian masle, from Arabic mali, pl. of malaha, benefit, from alaa, to be good; see l in Appendix II).

Yep, the same maslaha (مصلحة) or concept of the common good/public interest, that we know and love in Islamic jurisprudence. Though it’s more likely that maslah/masala here is used in the other sense of the word, which is “matter” or “issue.”

If even a vice and virtue cop can get six of them, hookers can’t be so alien to Iran, thunder though A-jad may about foreign plots to destroy the moral and economic fabric of the country. Indeed, the Shi’a clergy’s relative comfort with the idea of muta3 marriage isn’t just limited to jurisprudence - centres of theological learning like Qom are veritable sausage-fests and even young Iraqi Shi’a men make the pilgrimage for both sacred and less sacred reasons. Slate’s Explainer offers some tips on how to spot a hooker among the chador-clad crowds, suggesting you either need a go-between or an eye for heavy makeup. But sources say that there’s a subtler trick in the Shia shrine cities in southern Iraq: hookers wear their chadors inside out.

Oh, how I love The Onion.

Calling it the most effective tool to date in the War on Terror, the Pentagon announced Monday that it had developed a new chemical weapon called “ennui gas,” a nerve agent that overwhelms its victims with sudden philosophical distress over the meaningless tedium of human life and a sinking sense that everything they have ever accomplished ultimately amounts to dust.

“When the enemy inhales the gas, he will immediately retreat to his bedroom, lock the door, stare at the ceiling, pick idly at his fingernails, and muse upon the similarities between fingernails and the fragility of life,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said. “While he broods over the futility of memory extinguished and the plaintive whisper of existence unhaunted by all but nothingness, that is when we strike.”
“Given the enemy’s state of mind, he will probably not even care,” Gates added.

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…but you clearly can’t take the Mugamma out of the Islamists.

Mohammed Atef was furious. The Al Qaeda leader had learned that a subordinate had broken the rules repeatedly. So he did his duty as the feared military chief of a global terror network: He fired off a nasty memo.

In two pages mixing flowery religious terms with itemized complaints, the Egyptian boss accused the militant of misappropriating cash, a car, sick leave, research papers and an air conditioner during “an austerity situation” for the network. He demanded a detailed letter of explanation.

“I was very upset by what you did,” Atef wrote. “I obtained 75,000 rupees for you and your family’s trip to Egypt. I learned that you did not submit the voucher to the accountant, and that you made reservations for 40,000 rupees and kept the remainder claiming you have a right to do so. . . . Also with respect to the air-conditioning unit, . . . furniture used by brothers in Al Qaeda is not considered private property. . . . I would like to remind you and myself of the punishment for any violation.”

The memo by Atef, who later died in the U.S.-led assault on Osama bin Laden’s Afghan refuge in 2001, is among recently declassified documents that reveal a little-known side of the network. Although Al Qaeda has endured thanks to a loose and flexible structure, its internal culture has nonetheless been surprisingly bureaucratic and persistently fractious, investigators and experts say….

In contrast to state-sponsored extremist groups, Al Qaeda was a decentralized alliance of networks. Recruits in Afghanistan had access to Bin Laden and other bosses. Operatives were often given great autonomy.

But the egalitarian veneer coexisted with the bureaucratic mentality of the chiefs, mostly Egyptians with experience in the military and highly structured extremist groups.

“They may have imposed the blindingly obdurate nature of Egyptian bureaucracy,” said a senior British anti-terrorism official who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. “You see that in the retirement packages they offered, the lists of members in Iraq, the insecure attitude about their membership, the rifts among leaders and factions.”

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A very giggle-worthy video from a pair of Iraqi comedians in Amrika, shamelessly stolen from the wonderful Tabsir. Enjoy.

An interesting juxtaposition on the pages of the Washington Post has an article by the Hamas foreign minister laying out the group’s position vis-a-vis Israel and the peace process, and an editorial responding to this position. The Hamas article, rather like previous articles that have appeared in the Western press, taps wider disapproval of Israel’s heavy-handed and illegal tactics against the Palestinians as a kind of apartheid, and liberal Jewish discomfort with Zionism, even going so far as to compare Palestinians in Gaza to Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.

Palestinians are fighting a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal — from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that “legalizes” the infrastructure of apartheid. Resistance remains our only option. Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world’s largest open-air prison, can do no less.

The focus is very much on Israeli violence, and the Palestinian response is presented, of course, as a defence of violated rights (never mind Hamas’ less savoury tactics against civilians, or the uncomfortable fit of its own ideology with the sort of high minded liberal human rights approach taken above). Then comes the hardline negotiating stance:

Our movement fights on because we cannot allow the foundational crime at the core of the Jewish state — the violent expulsion from our lands and villages that made us refugees — to slip out of world consciousness, forgotten or negotiated away. Judaism — which gave so much to human culture in the contributions of its ancient lawgivers and modern proponents of tikkun olam — has corrupted itself in the detour into Zionism, nationalism and apartheid.

A “peace process” with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.

Perhaps not the most productive or realistic negotiating position, but the point about the violence at the root of Israel’s foundation can’t be dismissed either - even if many Israeli liberals now like to see 1967 as the ‘loss of innocence’ and the Israeli state prior to that point as kumbayah-singing, egalitarian and committed to peaceful coexistence with the original inhabitants of the land. But let’s see what the Post editorial makes of it: first and foremost, it announces that the article “drips with hatred for Israel,” evoking emotional, irrational bigotry. Then it’s back to the old script, framing any challenge of a fait accompli produced by violence as the epitome of violence itself:

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