Suffering from Biryani Overdose

So I haven’t updated in uh, a few weeks. But fear not, dear readers, I will be posting my blogs…when I get back! Why? Well, accessig the internet here requires me to sit in a ghetto little internet cafe in the indian boondocks (as i am right now) and pay for the privilege. So I’ve been writing my blog entries the old fashioned way, with this thing called a pen on a material called paper. Revolutionary, I know.

Anyhow, India’ s been wicked awesome so far.  Just to throw a few things out there:

Hyderabadi Biryani is BOSS.

Delhi is “*()(&ing hot. But the architecture is out of this world.

Most “hangout” places in India are total sausage fests.

I love sari shopping. I hate jewelry shopping.

My urdu’s becoming hella damn good if I do say myself. Meri Urdu kafii saaf hogi India ke aane baad.

It’s OK to be gay in India now! Gay Ho!!
Three words: Butter Chicken Masala. yummmmmm.

that’s it for now.  Hindustaan Zindabaad, ladies and gents!

Passage to India

Greetings dear readers in cyberspace,

So over the next few weeks, this blog is going to acquire a theme (yes, gasp!). See, I’m flying out to India tomorrow as part of a medical volunteer mission. Our goal: to travel to New Delhi and Hyderabad, India to observe, learn, and inshallah (God willing) to do some good.

I’m going with a group called the IMRC (Indian Muslim Relief Charity). We’re a group of students from a diverse array of backgrounds, from all over the United States. Some are South Asian, others aren’t.

So the point is: I’m going to be blogging about my experiences in India. This trip means a lot to me on  personal, political, and academic levels. Personally, I’m going back to my family’s homeland–literally.  We’re from Hyderabad,  and that city is the center of my ancestral heritage. Politically, I’m going because I feel that Indian Muslims are disproportionately poor, uneducated, and have suffered grave injustice at the hands of Hindutva extremists. I am hoping that I will in some way be able to help. And academically: I just finished the first year of med school. I couldn’t wait to a)get out of the country, and b)use my skills to do some good and c)did I mention get out of the country?

I fly out to Singapore, and to New Delhi tomorrow. It’s gonna be a wild ride, ladies and gents. Stay tuned!

PS: the pic below is from San Francisco, where I’m leaving from. I thought it was too beautiful not to post.

gateway to the east

gateway to the east

Idiocracy

I just finished studying for a hellish week of final exams. Thank God that’s over, and I can get back to writing stuff I care about, aka this blog.

Ah, the Iranian elections. Ahmadinejad goes into the election with polls indicating a 30 point lead for his opponent, Mousavi. The result? The complete opposite outcome, with Ahmadinejad winning by a 30 point margin. Iiiiinteresting, no?

There is no doubt there was a great deal of hanky-panky around this particular election, and it seems all the more brazen on the international stage. More interesting to me at this point, however, is the media coverage surrounding the election, its aftermath and the protests. The Western media is usually loath to give a damn about internal mideast politics, unless it directly concerns its bosom buddy, Israel–or at a stretch, Saudi Arabia. Iran is rarely spoken about in multifaceted terms, Ahmadinejad’s persona is allowed to predominate, and usually under the umbrella of the opportunistic label of anti-Semitism.

So it is interesting to me that it takes something like massive voting fraud to finally get the NYTimes and the like to give a shit about the voice of the Iranian people. Pictures like the one below are being widely circulated in the media. But I wonder: why?

There are many countries that gain by toppling Ahmadinejad. The United States and Israel are perhaps the two most obvious ones. Both nations are not above using any means necessary to preserve their “national security”. What better way to delegitimize the President of Iran than to have him accused of electoral fraud, thus fanning the flames of revolution? I just find it hard to believe that given the attention the Iranian government (and its supposed nuclear capability) receives on the international political stage, that the entire situation in Iran doesn’t smack of interference from multiple external actors.

And on a last, somewhat unrelated note, I had interesting thought re. electoral fraud, protests, and reporting by the American media. When Bush stole the 2000 (and 2004) election by committing blatant, massive electoral fraud in Florida and Ohio, the media was all but pussy-whipped. Not to mention the majority of the American public, who sat on the asses at home and bemoaned the outcome. At least the Iranian people are out the streets demanding a change. We Americans couldn’t even get our butts off the couch!

But I digress.

As the situation in Iran develops, I will most surely update.

Badass iranian protestor.

White Privilege and the Muslim Ummah

I just discovered a series of blogs written on Rolling Ruminations re. White Muslims and the interactions of religion, nationality and race. This ain’t my own writing, but damn this is fascinating!

http://sheerfluency.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/the-carnival-is-here-white-privilege-and-the-ummah/

On Privilege

Privilege. A funny thing, one hell of a loaded word.

Interestingly enough, it’s one of those things that you don’t realize you have till you’ve lost it. Like much in life, to invoke that cliche.

My family was privileged in pre-Independence India. They were members of the Muslim aristocracy. The aristocrats of Hyderabad, my family’s hometown, had land, money, and power.  The Nawabi class (as they were called)  were not unlike the lords and ladies of the British nobility.

Well, that was until a little thing called Partition came along in 1947.

Almost overnight, our ancestral lands were seized by the new Indian government, bank accounts frozen, and a complete reversal of power had taken place. In the years that came after, my grandparents’ generation had to rebuild from what they had lost. But the memories and bearing of privilege remained–as well as the damning realization that privilege is a flimsy and fleeting thing. As easily as it is bestowed, it is taken away.

That bitter knowledge was transmitted to the next generation–my parents, and eventually on to me. And now it comes full circle, as I attend school replete with the children of wealthy American aristocracy, “legacies” and the like who have lived so fully and blindly within their inherited money and privilege that they hardly even realize that its there.

It’s all sardonically entertaining to me, as I grew up on the opposite end of the stick–public school, state college, and little money–inherited or otherwise. But I did grow up knowing full well that my family HAD been uniquely privileged once.

But having seen two sides of the coin, I find myself in a unique place: To view aristocracy, privilege, power remotely and see it for what it truly is. That elitism is as much pageantry as it is actual power, that it is fully constructed and ultimately transitory, and how social status is an tool of economic and political advantage like no other.

Privilege is power, power is privilege. And unless you’ve had it taken away, little do you know how key it is to your success.

“Same Shit, Different Country”

DAM performing

Straight from the mouth of Tamer, one of the founding members of the Palestinian hip hop trio DAM.

I had the incredible opportunity of hanging with the aforementioned Tamer, one of the most famous hip hop artists in the Arab world. We got to talking about the significance of this music outside Palestine. I told him about my background, as an Indian Muslim and about the violent oppression and subjugation of my people. The second largest Muslim population the world, the largest Muslim minority by far, treated like shit.

“Same shit, different country, man….Oppressed people are oppressed everywhere.”

No joke. But it brings home an interesting point. When we look at the up-and coming hip hop artists with a decidedly political bent: MIA, K’Naan, Blue Scholars, Sons of Hagar, Narcicyst, Brother Ali, DAM to name a few–we see what is shared: the conception of art as a form of explicit political resistance. Art as a conceptualization of defiance in the face of unchecked, brutal domination. I’d like to see any of the lame-as-shit, sell out Fitty Cent imitators in this country measure to that standard.

I might not be Palestinian or Sri Lankan, but when I hear DAM’s “Born Here” or MIA’s “Paper Planes” (which, by the way, is actually a political song with a sly subtext) I feel camaraderie and inspiration, that we are all brothers and sisters of the same cause. To stand up and put into words and music what is unspeakable: genocide, oppression, violence, and every now and then: hope.

It’s entertaining, yeah–but art is pretty damn powerful when you see the message behind those beats and rhymes.

The Spiritual Feminine

This weekend, I attended a regional conference of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) National–a gathering of about a thousand or so young Muslim students from schools around the east coast.

For about three years during my undergrad I was an officer in the MSA. For uninitiated: the MSA is a collegiate socio-political organization for young American Muslims. It’s existed since 1947, which makes it North America’s oldest Muslim organization. The importance of the MSA in the lives of Muslim youth can’t be overstated: in many ways, it is a vehicle–or an experimental flask–for the the future of Islam in America.

When I heard that the MSA would be holding its regional conference close to where I was going to grad school, I decided to show up. It was ironic–I’ve likened being an MSA officer akin to doing military service. You sign up because you want to serve your community. The service itself is often hell-a ton of responsbilities, pressure, and getting shit from all sides. You do your 2-3 years, and even though you’re glad to be a “civilian” again, you don’t regret having been a part of the MSA. And like the military, it keeps pulling you back!

But I digress.

I was attending one of the conference lectures yesterday afternoon. The introduction was given by the current President of MSA National, Asma Mirza. She introduced the rest of the MSA National Board, which included three other sisters and a brother. Much like many females in the audience, I was proud to see a Muslimah up at the podium as our leader.

What I didn’t expect (or maybe I did on some subconscious level)) was that that would be the last time I’d be seeing a woman speaking on stage for the rest of the day. We heard a number of well-known scholars and teachers speak eloquently about the linguistic beauty of the Qur’an and the Black Muslim history in America. All had received some education in the middle east under the tutelage of known Islamic scholars. All were men.

I had a thought. Why?

OK,  the obvious answer is that patriarchy exists, and leaders in our still-patriarchial age tend to be men. More interesting to me though is a kind of organizational specificity to the inequality. Like I mentioned earlier, there were plenty of women on the MSA National Board–including the President. But when it came to the segments addressing spirituality and theology, the lack of women was pretty glaring. And this isn’t isolated by any means–I speak from years of being involved in MSA, ISNA and the like. I see the same pattern: there are gains for Muslim women in gaining leadership in Islamic organizations. But very few have gained the credentials of Islamic scholarship to lecture at events, and even so are not in huge demand at events like the MSA’s.

In a larger context: look at the three Abrahamic faiths–How prominent are female preachers, ministers, nuns, ministers, monks and the like? Forget Abrahamic faiths, what about eastern faiths like Buddhism? All are dominated by men. And it makes me wonder, what has happened in the last 2,000 or so years that has made legitimate spirituality, organized religion the province of men?

What is also interesting to me is that it wasn’t always this way. In the Islamic faith, A’isha, perhaps the most well known of all of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)’s wives, was the most significant preacher of her husband’s message after his death. Muslim women were prominent as teachers in the early days of Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam. In Christianity, the orthodox Celtic Church allowed women to lead mass and be priests on equal par with men. So this change is relatively recent.

Maybe this is yet another layer of the patriarchial phenomenon. If we view religion in a political sense, the leaders of a faith are imbued with immense power over those that follow. Organized religion has historically been a unbelivably powerful vehicle for social, political, and economic interests and change. So what what better way to keep marginalize women than to forbid them from holy places and deny them theological scholarship?

Kashmiri Muslim women pray outside the shrine of Sufi Saint Syed Abdul Qadir Jilani

Ground Zero

I went to New York City for the first time yesterday. While walking around Manhattan, I made a very important stop: Ground Zero.

The former site of the World Trade Center is a place that can be summed up in the following sentence:
It wasn’t the presence of something…it is a loss made conspicuous by absence.

I never saw the twin towers in person. I did, however, watch them fall to the ground live on TV on September 11th , 2001, a heap of rubble and nearly 3,000 lives lost.

9/11 was probably the first and only tragedy in living memory that was shared live by millions of people in the US and abroad. Its memory is something that we all share in common. Our reactions to the event, however, diverged greatly.

I began college in 2003. I studied political science, and did so because of the effect that the 9/11 tragedy had on my life.  I wanted to know why, and how something like the attacks could have happened. Most of all, I wanted to know how I, an American Muslim, became an enemy in my own country overnight. I thirsted for answers, and quickly realized that unless I spoke on behalf of the Muslim community, no one else around me would.

I never believed that something like September 11 was about “good” and “evil”. No doubt the act was horrific and murderous  beyond belief. But it was an inherently political act. As I would learn, it was the confluence of factors, decades of geopolitics, the consequences of the action of men within our own government and those abroad.

History runs along a continuum. Unremarkable events and decisions, economic cycles, periodic natural disasters, the predictable rise and fall of power. But every now and then, history turns upon a moment—a day—a single event. And, as if another fork was taken in a diverging road, everything afterwards is forever changed. September 11th was one of those days. The World Trade Center attack was that event.

The emptiness at Ground Zero was unnerving. I stood at the historic 18th century cemetery across from the site, where a sycamore tree had miraculously fallen and shielded the church and attached graveyard, and wondered how life might’ve been had the towers not fallen.

But, as always, life goes on. Past is prologue, and the future lies ahead unwritten. Only time will tell.

This Genocide Will Not be Televised

“Muslims…they don’t deserve to live.”
-Senior Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) Official

FROM: “The Truth: Gujarat 2002: Tehelka Magazine Expose”: http://www.tehelka.com/home/20071117/

The legal definition of Genocide, according to the United Nations Charter, is as follows:

“[Genocide is] any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Seven years ago, on February 28, 2002, Gujarat State in Northeast India became the proving ground for what would be one of the audacious, brutal, and wide-ranging state-sponsored genocides in recent memory. Meticulously planned and executed by right-wing Hindu extremists in collaboration with  government officials, over the space of three days 2,500 Muslim men, women, and children were systematically murdered–hacked to death by machetes, burned alive in their own homes, and beaten to death. Muslim-owned businesses, mosques, and homes were burned to the ground. Thousands of women were raped and mutilated. Those who survived were rendered homeless, destitute, and without food or water. To this day- the community has not quite recovered.

An analogy for those not as well-versed in communal Indian politics:

Indian Muslims make up 15-17% of India’s population.  In numbers and social status, we are akin to African Americans in the United States: According to the government-commissioned Sachar Report, India’s Muslims are disproportionately poor, uneducated, oppressed and underrepresented in all academic, social, and governmental institutions. We live shorter lives, adverse health outcomes, and are subject to persecution by right-wing extremist groups– such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad/ Bharatiya Janata Party. The former is analogous to the Ku Klux Klan, the second to the American Republican Party.

I’ve written every year about Gujarat, hoping that by my writing about what happened will prevent people from forgetting the unimaginable atrocities committed in the name of religion–so that it may never happen again.

This year, however, is a bit different.

This due in large part  to the Oscar-winning film SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, which brought the plight of the Indian Muslim community to Western worlds’ film screens. Jamal Malik, a young Indian Muslim boy, is the central protagonist in the story, and very early on in the movie his mother is murdered in an mass-murder rampage by right-wing Hindu extremists. For the first time, my friends were asking me just what was going on.

My jaded response: “This happens all the time”.  A more accurate answer would be that the massacre depicted actually happened in 1994, in the aftermath of the attack and demolition of the Babri Masjid, one of India’s oldest mosques. And this happened again, only seven years ago as noted above. Has any one of those responsible been prosecuted for war crimes? No. Have Muslims received reparations for the loss of their homes, family members, and property? No.

In short: Justice is a bygone dream for India’s Muslims.

Help from the international community? None whatsoever. Does anyone from the global Muslim community give a damn? Not particularly. Will any country (US?) pressure India to stop its homegrown terrorism being perpetrated against its own citizens. Hell no.

Being an Indian-American Muslim is a uniquely frustrating experience in a lot of ways. The greater Indian community is deaf–purposefully ignorant–of the shit-shameful way minorities are treated.  If anything, because Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims barely interact in the United States, ignorance grows stronger. The Muslim community is preoccupied with the Occupation of Palestine (which, don’t get me wrong, is ridiculously racist and inhumane) and does not give a moments’ thought to other occurrences of injustices–especially with regards to the the largest Muslim minority in the world–rather, the second largest Muslim community of any country, period.  In India, you’re hated. In America, you’re feared. There’s just no break.

But I digress.

I implore all of you to look at this from a larger perspective. Regardless of where you are from, what national, religious, or cultural allegiance you hold, the crime of genocide–wherever it is committed, requires our interest and moral outrage. We must demand justice–and remain vigilant, for that is price of peace. I only hope that one day, justice will prevail for the victims of Gujarat.

Edmund Burke said it best:

“All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

the good times?

It all started with Chris Brown and Rihanna.

I used to like Chris Brown’s music. Hell, I even helped choreograph a dance to the “Kiss Kiss” song. He seemed like a innocent, baby-faced teenager in all his videos and interviews. With her unique style and uber-popular club records, Rihanna seemed poised for pop stardom.

Well, that was until all of America got word that prior to the Grammys, the squeaky-clean Mr. Brown beat the living shit out of his (hopefully by now- ex) girlfriend Rihanna, who called the cops for help. Apparently, she had “grotesque” cuts and bruises all over her face and neck, and has disappeared into seclusion. Meanwhile, Chris B. posted bail and is looking at the possibility of jail time.

Superstar coupledom…ends in some good-old fashioned beating.

Rihanna’s gained a country-wide following of sympathizers, for good reason. In a perverse way, domestic violence couldn’t have asked for a better posterchild: a beautiful, young celebrity with everything she could ask for, no shortage of confidence and success- made to suffer at the hands of an equally famous and well-liked boyfriend. Message to the masses: anyone–ANYONE–can be victim of domestic violence.

These headlines are sensational to be sure. By treating this as a celebrity-centered story, we lose sight of one important truth: 1 in 3 women in the United States will be the victim of violence inflicted by a partner or family member. These women are your friends, your teachers, your aunts, sisters, and cousins. They are white, black, Asian and everything in between–rich, middle class and poor. And trust me, at one point in all of your lives, it will hit close to home.

I remember the story of Rebecca Griego , pictured here, in particular. Rebecca worked at Gould Hall, University of Washington’s School of Architecture, down the street from where I went to school. I walked in front of that building every day on the way to class. I had lecture a floor below where she worked.

On the morning of April 2 2o07, Griego’s ex-boyfriend Jonathan Rowan entered Gould Hall. He rode up to the fourth floor where she worked. There, around 9 AM, Rowan shot Rebecca in the head once. Then he shot himself. Both died before police came on the scene. I remember seeing that yellow crime scene tape draping the stairwell that I used to walk through every morning.

In the wake of tragedies like this, people often rally and organize. I wonder though, what are we doing for those who are living day in and day out with the threat of personal harm from a partner or family member? I wonder what drives men to beat and batter the women who are closest to them? And WHY is this the rule rather than the exception?

It is a known fact that boys who grow up in families plauged by domestic violence grow up to be batterers. It’s also known that in certain cultures, men consider it their right to exercise violent forms of punishment against their female family members. But it is easy to find exceptions to all of these as well, as noted above.

Rather, I think the answer lies in the use of violence and its portrayal in society, and how that is connected to ideas of masculinity. I think all too often, we try to dismiss partner violence as some kind of psychological problem. It isn’t. It is a societal issue, and one that transcends racial and economic boundaries. We focus on women as survivors/victims, which is all well and good, but I think it’s high time we looked real closely at the idealization of masculinity in our society. What does it mean to be a man? Better yet, what does it mean to be a man in a relationship, and what how does that connect to ideas of power, violence, and control?

In a nutshell, men need to start taking some responsiblity for the problem of domestic violence as much as women. Women should not be the only ones organizing to combat this problem. In order to educate the next generation (if Chris B. and Rihanna are any indication, very few young’ns have gotten the message that that shit is WRONG), a united front of men and women is needed.  Only then can we begin to address their issue in a truly constructive way.

some stats:

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, between 1998 and 2002:

• Of the almost 3.5 million violent crimes committed against family members, 49% of these were crimes against spouses.
• 84% of spouse abuse victims were females, and 86% of victims of dating partner abuse at were female.
• Males were 83% of spouse murderers and 75% of dating partner murderer.