This weekend marks the time of
the Hajj, a core pillar of Islam in which
great tides of humanity venture to the ancient city of Mecca to honor God.
Predating Mohammed's birth by centuries, the pilgrimage comprises
several days of rites, from congregation like snow on
Mount Arafat and the ritual
stoning of Shaitan to the circling of the sacred
Kaaba (the
shrouded cubical monolith Muslims
pray toward daily) and kissing the
Black Stone (colored by the absorption of myriad sins, and believed by some to be a
fallen meteorite).
While the city has
modernized to handle this largest of annual gatherings -- building highway-scale ramps,
gaudy skyscrapers for the ultra-rich, and
tent cities the size of Seattle -- it remains mysterious, as unbelievers are
forbidden from entering its borders.
Richard Francis Burton became famous for
touring the city in disguise to write
a rare travelogue, but contemporary viewers have a more immediate guide:
Vice Magazine journalist Suroosh Alvi, who smuggled a minicam into the city to record
The Mecca Diaries [alt], a 14-minute documentary of his own Hajj journey.
Browse the manual to see what goes into a Hajj trip, or
watch the YouTube livestream to see the Grand Mosque crowds in real time.
posted by Rhaomi
on Nov 4, 2011 -
31 comments
In February of 2011, eleven students that attended
UC Irvine and
UC Riverside went to a fundraising speech featuring Israeli Ambassador to the U.S.,
Michael Oren, at the UC Irvine campus. During Oren's speech,
students would stand up, shout an objection to Oren's speech, and then would allow themselves to be escorted by security, essentially causing a "
heckler's veto." They were arrested, charged, and today
found guilty of
disrupting Oren's speech.
[more inside]
posted by jabberjaw
on Sep 23, 2011 -
59 comments
The Challenge of Teaching 9/11 "The events of September 11th are being discussed, taught, and commemorated in high school classrooms throughout the nation this week. And in many of those classrooms, the students are increasingly too young to have many actual memories of their own of that day’s events. I visited two high school classes in the San Francisco Bay Area to see how teachers are approaching the topic, what the students know and don’t know, and how they feel about the events surrounding that day."
‘Who’s Osama bin Laden?’: Teaching 9/11 to Muslim youth
"In the ten years since Sept. 11, many Muslim Americans feel they’ve had to deal with rising discrimination. Those who remember 9/11 at least understand how this started. But there’s a new generation of Muslim Americans who don’t. They were too young in 2001, or they weren’t yet born. But these children aren’t too young to perceive discrimination. At least one local Islamic school is still working through how, exactly, to teach its young students about 9/11."
posted by nooneyouknow
on Sep 9, 2011 -
84 comments
Orange County tea party members protest and hurl epithets at a local muslim organization's relief dinner to raise money for women's shelters and raise aid for homelessness and hunger in the US
Here is the video. Watch as members of congress show their support for this extreme show of xenophobia and racism.
posted by wooh
on Mar 3, 2011 -
364 comments
The Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA) is a resource to trace, share, and enable community enrichment of the modern art heritage of Iraq. Explore the works by artist, browse through related textual materials, or add your own images or stories to the archive.
posted by sciurus
on Mar 2, 2011 -
2 comments
A Danish court rules that truth is not a defense to its hate speech law and
fines Member of Parliament
Jesper Langballe $1,000 for commenting that "Of course Lars Hedegaard [President of the
Danish Free Press Society] should not have said that there are Muslim fathers who rape their daughters when the truth appears to be that they make do with killing their daughters (the so-called honour killings) and leave it to their uncles to rape them."
Hedegaard had tried to explain that he was speaking in the context of an epidemic of honor violence within Muslim families when he said "They rape their own children"; he faces his own set of charges. (via
Volokh Conspiracy)
[more inside]
posted by shivohum
on Jan 14, 2011 -
229 comments
A Muslim American soldier battles on friendly ground. 'In his 23 months in the Army, Klawonn has consistently earned among the highest physical training scores in his unit. He's at the top in weapons qualifications and is the only one in his battalion to be invited to try out for the Special Forces. But the thing that stands out most, says Capt. Christopher Arata, his commander, is Klawonn's impossibly clean record. Not one reprimand. Never even late to a morning formation.'
'You watch your words and actions, censoring anything that could be interpreted as anger. You do so even as you try to ignore the names piled on you. Sand monkey. Carpet jockey. Raghead. Zachari bin Laden. Nidal Klawonn. But the hardest to shake off -- the name that cuts deepest, especially for a man who defied his family and community to become a U.S. soldier -- is this one: Terrorist. "To be looked upon by the people you serve with, by people you've trusted your life with, as the enemy," Klawonn says, sitting in his barracks a month after receiving the note. His voice trails off as he struggles to describe the anger he feels. "It's not right."
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Mar 24, 2010 -
54 comments
Abdelrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian American businessman who spent the days after Katrina paddling around New Orleans in a canoe, saving elderly people and feeding stranded pets. His efforts were brought to a halt when he was detained by the Bush administration on suspicion of being a terrorist.
[more inside]
posted by reenum
on Aug 10, 2009 -
30 comments
Editor Marty Halpern looks back at the career of George Alec Effinger (
part 1,
part 2,
part 3), a prolific author best known for his work set in the
Budayeen, a walled city in a future Islamic state, teeming with gangsters, hustlers and transsexual prostitutes, many of them habitual users of plug in personality modules. The noirish tone and exotic technology of the
Marîd Audran books (When Gravity Fails, A Fire In The Sun, The Exile Kiss) made Effinger one of the leading lights in the cyberpunk movie, and spawned a
videogame - a rare attempt at a graphical adventure from Infocom - and
an RPG setting. Sadly Effinger
faded from prominence after that, and he suffered from a number of health and financial setbacks before
passing away in 2002. His work has had somewhat of a resurgence in popularity of late, with the Marîd Audran books coming back into print in 2007, a long with a
collection containing The Wolves of Memory, Effinger's personal favourite amongst his novels.
posted by Artw
on Jun 9, 2009 -
32 comments
A Quiet Revolution Grows in the Muslim World "In many of the scores of countries that are predominantly Muslim, the latest generation of activists is redefining society in novel ways. This new soft revolution is distinct from three earlier waves of change--the Islamic revival of the 1970s, the rise of extremism in the 1980s and the growth of Muslim political parties in the 1990s. Today's revolution is more vibrantly Islamic than ever. Yet it is also decidedly antijihadist and ambivalent about Islamist political parties. Culturally, it is deeply conservative, but its goal is to adapt to the 21st century. Politically, it rejects secularism and Westernization but craves changes compatible with modern global trends. The soft revolution is more about groping for identity and direction than expressing piety. The new revolutionaries are synthesizing Koranic values with the ways of life spawned by the Internet, satellite television and Facebook. For them, Islam, you might say, is the path to change rather than the goal itself."
posted by nooneyouknow
on Mar 24, 2009 -
26 comments
India, as she is today,
was carved out of
British India, in 1947 when the left and right hand sides of the country became the new nation of Pakistan (
East and
West) respectively. While the history of Islamic influence and
subsequent tolerance and intolerance goes back centuries to the first advent of the
Mughal invasion, it has been said that the
post Independence troubles of the modern nations of India and Pakistan
stem from this sundering. In
1971, war brought
forth Bangladesh from the former East Pakistan on India's eastern border.
The Partition, as this holocaust is known,
embedded in
current day Indian memory,
history, culture,
movies,
books,
TV serials and music, was an
unimaginable horror of
slaughter and bloodshed. This separation was
not in the plans of the Mahatma, and it is said he was assassinated by Hindu
fundamentalists for letting it happen.
What future awaits the Hindus and Muslims who have lived
side by side for hundreds of years?
posted by infini
on Nov 26, 2008 -
37 comments
An
article by
Johann Hari (a remarkable columnist) in today's Independent about the substantial Heavy Metal movement in the Muslim world inserted a flicker of hope into my normally gloomy outlook on the current situation.
I know that in my youth I used Heavy Metal (
old school) as a hammer to tell my parents, my teachers and the world in general that I was different from them and did not accept their rules, judgements and values.
If that is happening in Tehran, Morocco, Egypt and Pakistan then I'm with the kids.
Go Metalheads!
Rock the Mullahs!
Tarantist look and sound the part but the listing on their YouTube page of 'Home town - Tehran/Los Angeles' is a bit worrying. How the hell do they work that gig?
[more inside]
posted by surfdad
on Sep 8, 2008 -
18 comments
Fitna , a Koranic term translated as 'strife', shows footage of the attacks on the US in September 2001, and images of the bomb attacks on London and Madrid.
Geert Wilders, Dutch politician and leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV),
has called his just-released Fitna a ‘respectable film’. He admitted that Muslims may not be happy with it, but emphasised that he had always stuck to the facts. He said he believes that the film is also ‘one thousand kilometres within the framework of the law’.
[more inside]
posted by DreamerFi
on Mar 27, 2008 -
48 comments
We have lost on the way the lesson of living together,
We are now even scared of each other.
They are others whose faces are on your hands,
Your hurts are a deep sea -- our wounds are deep.
The stories that are being spread in our names are lies,
This is not us.
Words of a Pakistani pop song Yeh Hum Naheen [This is not us] hitting the charts, attempting to
spread the message that all muslims are not terrorists,
story via Salon.
"
Produced and written by a British Muslim, Waseem Mahmood, at the request of his two sons, "
Yeh Hum Naheen" offers a welcome counterpoint to the images of troops storming the Red Mosque, or fundamentalist mullahs preaching jihad. But the key to the song's success lies neither in its production values or deft depictions of average Pakistanis going about their daily lives, but in its heartfelt expression of pain. "
posted by infini
on Aug 25, 2007 -
26 comments
"Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values.
Because at their core, those values are sound. That is why, even in places where you'll find virulent anti-Americanism, you'll also find enormous affection for things American."
An
article by
Mohsin Hamid, author of
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
posted by A189Nut
on Jul 23, 2007 -
53 comments
Surprising findings in Pew study of US Muslims. The interweb is all atwitter over some of the findings of a Pew Research Center
study of the attitudes of Muslim-Americans (the most comprehensive one done yet). While most of the findings should be welcomed (US Muslims are well off, appreciate being here, have non-Muslim friends, shun extremism, etc.), there is one troubling statistic: 6% of US Muslims - and 15% of US Muslims under 30 - believe that "bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians" are "often or sometimes justified". Sounds bad, but what happens when you ask the same question of non-Muslim Americans? Turns out that
24% of all Americans agreed - four times the 6% of US Muslims who share that view. So are US Muslims more peaceful than their non-Muslim neighbors?
posted by laz-e-boy
on May 23, 2007 -
63 comments
Wake County, NC:
Solomon Kamil invited to speak at a public school in Raleigh
tells the students to shun Muslims "You may be excited that you found the 'tall, dark, and handsome man' you have been looking for. His sweet words and attention may blind you regarding the power, importance, and influence of his culture and Islamic faith."
posted by Secret Life of Gravy
on Feb 22, 2007 -
79 comments
