C L O S E R

Een wekelijks portie burgerschap 30 – Festivals en politieke polonaises

Posted on July 28th, 2010 by martijn.
Categories: Burgerschapserie 2010.

Uit de burgerschapskalender:

Ieder viert feest op zijn eigen manier. De één met een kopje koffie en een gebakje, de ander met veel muziek en uitbundige dans. Zoals op het Zomercarnaval in Rotterdam. Alle kleuren vinden elkaar daar in muziek en dans. 30 en 31 juli Zomercarnaval Rotterdam
www.zomercarnaval.nl

We kunnen aardig feesten in dit land. Twee weken geleden de verloren finale van het WK voetbal. Vorige week de Vierdaagsefeesten in Nijmegen. Komende week het zomercarnaval in Rotterdam (en vergeet ook niet over een paar weken Rio aan de Rijn in Arnhem). Ik schat zo in dat het Zomercarnaval met de Tong Tong Fair (voorheen Pasar Malam) in Den Haag tot de belangrijkste publieke multiculti feesten van Nederland behoort. Dergelijke festivals vertellen ons wat over de feestcultuur in Nederland en zeker wanneer deze verbonden worden met burgerschap. De festivals worden gezien als de mogelijkheden bij uitstek om mensen van allerlei kleuren en achtergronden met elkaar te verbinden. Moslims hebben ook festivals natuurlijk: mawlids.  Maar dat staat nog een beetje in de kinderschoenen hoewel het zeker potentie heeft om uit te groeien tot iets groters. Wat er dichter bij komt zijn de nationale en lokale iftars ten tijde van de maand van Ramadan. Thijl Sunier schreef in zijn inaugurele rede hier het volgende over:

The whole scene bears a striking resemblance to the average New Year’s reception. This is actually how it has been organized. This is the ‘National Iftar’, a novelty meeting set up as a reception at the end of the holy month of Ramadan. It is organized as part of the yearly ‘Ramadan festival’ and one of the final events of the four weeks of activities that revolve around the Islamic fasting period. There are cooking competitions, public lectures, music, Islamic fashion events, film, commodity fairs for halal products, all very much designed to provide this Islamic obligation with a flavour of modern spirituality fitting to the social environment in which young Muslims in Europe function. It is also organized as a message to Dutch society at large that Muslims constitute an integral part of that society.

[…]

The organizers and participants of the National Iftar during the Ramadan festival on the other hand, are well on the way to turning their ‘problematic’ religion into a cultural relic comparable to Christmas or Easter. […] [It is an example of] of the contemporary making of religious selves among Muslim youth in Western Europe, […] of new modes of Islamic visibility, style and performative acting [and is a pursuit] of truthfulness.

De festivals zijn op deze manier bij het uitstek het product van een multiculturele samenleving waarin velen zoeken naar iets herkenbaars, gezamenlijks en een manier om het idee van hun eigen identiteit vorm te geven, te uiten en te beleven.  In de publieke ruimte gebeurt dat dan vaak zodanig dat het nog wel herkenbaar is als iets dat afwijkt van wat autochtone Nederlanders gewend zijn, maar dat tegelijkertijd toch ook weer zo verwaterd is dat ook autochtone Nederlanders er makkelijk bij kunnen aanhaken als deelnemer of toeschouwer.

Op zich niet zo’n slecht idee om het serieuze karakter van het integratie en islam debat in Nederland eens te doorbreken met vreugde, uitbundigheid en gezamenlijke voorstellingen (bijwonen). Tegelijkertijd staat deze festivals natuurlijk niet los van de harde realiteit van alledag. Zo kreeg enkele jaren terug de koningin van het Zomercarnaval, de Marokkaans-Nederlandse Lamya M’Haidra, klaarblijkelijk de nodige bedreigingen over zich heen hetgeen ondermeer leidde tot kamervragen van de LPF.

In een daaropvolgende editie bleek het problematisch dat de organisatie een caribisch feesttintje wilde hebben en bijvoorbeeld de Brabantse boerenkiel wilde weigeren.NWS / Hollandse feestkleding mag niet

,,In een boerenkiel meelopen, dat kan gewoon niet. Daarvoor moet je toch echt op het gewone carnaval zijn. Het verwijt dat dit discriminatie is, wijst zij van de hand: ,,Inschrijving staat open voor iedereen, dus ook voor Nederlandse carnavalsvierders. Ze moeten zich dan alleen wel een beetje aanpassen.

Tot de traditionele carnavalsverenigingen die graag zouden deelnemen aan het Zomercarnaval behoort De Keilebijters uit Rotterdam. De Hobbelende Bierviltjes uit Zwartewaal en de Boergoenzers uit Rotterdam zien samenwerking ook wel zitten. Pogingen daartoe zijn tot op heden echter op niets uitgelopen. ,,En dat is jammer, heel jammer, aldus secretaris Jo Heuvelman van de De Keilebijters. ,,Buitenlandse en Nederlandse carnavalsverenigingen samen in een optocht, dat zou pas echt multicultureel zijn geweest.

De traditionele carnavalsverenigingen begrijpen niet waarom DUCOS Productions Nederlandse invloeden buiten de deur houdt. Omgekeerd zeggen de verenigingen geen moeite te hebben met buitenlandse invloeden in het gewone carnaval. ,,We hebben vorig jaar nog via de organisatie van het Zomercarnaval geprobeerd een Antilliaanse brassband te strikken voor ons carnavalsfeest, zegt Heuvelman van De Keilebijters. ,,Maar ook dat liep op niets uit. Kennelijk willen ze niet.

Alsof die autochtone Rotterdammers uberhaupt carnaval kunnen vieren, hoor ik een Brabander achter mij zeggen. Dit jaar was er discussie toen het Radio 538 strandfestival niet doorging. Op internet waren diverse varianten op het volgende commentaar te lezen:
Streep door Radio 538 strandfestival – Binnenland – Telegraaf.nl [24 uur actueel, ook mobiel] [binnenland]

Hier in Rotterdam is het ook kommer en kwel, het ene na het andere festival komt te vervallen omdat het te gevaarlijk zou zijn. Het allochtone Zomercarnaval gaat echter wel door, terwijl daar vorig jaar iemand is doodgeschoten. Rara, hoe kan dat?
Mariken, Rotterdam | 13:18 | 15.07.10

Op deze manier gaat het om meer dan alleen feesten en vieren; een oordeel over een dergelijk festival betekent ook positie innemen in het grotere debat over religie, cultuur en etniciteit in Nederland en in de strijd om hoe ‘onze’ publieke ruimte eruit dient te zien en wie dat mag bepalen. Het is vaak snel bedacht zo’n groot feest door goedbedoelende zelforganisaties en bestuurders om zo mensen op een ongedwongen manier met elkaar kennis te laten maken. Mooi bedacht en vooral doen zou ik zeggen en daar mag best wat subsidie tegenaan. Vergeet echter niet die hele politieke polonaise die er vaak (ogenschijnlijk spontaan) achteraan komt hossen.

0 comments.

Dutch Ground Zero Mosque

Posted on July 26th, 2010 by martijn.
Categories: Misc. News.

UPDATED 27-08-2010, see below

This can be a very short entry. There isn’t going to come a Dutch mosque at Ground Zero. Or another mosque for that matter. In fact, it is not even about a mosque. So done, next topic. But there is more to it, of course. Just to give a few facts:

1. July 2009 the real estate company Soho Properties bought a five-story building that was severely damaged during the 9/11 attacks
2. The project is called Cordoba House, set up by the Cordoba Initiative and American Society for Muslim Advancement in order to improve relations between Islam and the West.
3. It is a proposed 13-story Islamic cultural center and mosque, approved of in May 2010
4. Located near (but not at) Ground Zero.
5. The current building is used as a makeshift Muslim prayer space
6. Prayer services are led by imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

The controversy is obviously over the fact that the building is located near Ground Zero. For some apparently a ‘not just a sign that live goes on but a ‘sacred site’:

The message mixes Christian symbolic references with American nationalism. Some people find the idea of the Islamic center, framed as the Ground Zero Mosque, an insult and again others point to the alleged controversial background of Feisal Abdul Rauf being a wolf in sheep’s clothing with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood and still holding on to radical dreams. Sarah Palin has stepped into the debate as well and severely criticized for it too.

Of course such allegations lead to counter-accusations of xenophobia, racism and islamophobia as well. And certainly we should not be blind about the many difficulties Muslims face when they want to establish new initiatives, even when they are not located near Ground Zero and although Islam and Muslims have a long history in the US (at near Ground Zero as well). One of the main problems of many current debates about Islam and Muslims could be that the debate is so fierce, harsh and sometimes false towards Muslims and Islam in a way that resembles a smear campaign, that many Muslims close ranks when another organization is under siege, thereby blocking any debate that might considered to be necessary. Whether one agrees or not for many 9/11 is linked to Islam and Muslims and although the whole issue has been wrongfully framed, it is necessary to acknowledge that in order to understand people’s feelings.

So now what is the Dutch connection here, besides the fact that Manhattan is part of Dutch history of course? In May 2010 the Dutch section of the International Civil Liberties Alliance revealed in an article (Een moskee te ver / A mosque too far) that Feisal Abdul Rauf’s wife, Daisy Kahn, leads the organisation Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality. This organisation appears to have received 1.000.000 euro from the Dutch state:
American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA) – MinBuza.nl

Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA)

Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity (WISE) Compact Program.

WISE Compact will work with local and national women leaders and the organizations they work in. The programme aims to provide: a) a global infrastructure for shared work among Muslim women’s groups, organisations, institutions, and networks, b) religious context for Muslim women’s dialogue about, and advocacy for, their rights, c) an institutional voice for gender equality, and d) accessible knowledge about effective ways to promote the equitable ethic of Islam. The activities planned for each of the results include development of WISE Compact design, develop partnerships with Muslim women’s organisations to develop learning and training resources, implement training with marginalised women and girls and create a comprehensive WISE Compact sustainability plan. The programme will focus on Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestinian Administrative Areas, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Turkey.
Amount granted

€ 1.000.000

Daisy Khan has received some criticism for her stance on polygamy: Some Muslims in U.S. Quietly Engage in Polygamy : NPR

According to Daisy Khan, who heads the American Society for Muslim Advancement and is married to an imam, polygamy is more common among conservative, less educated immigrants from Africa and Asia. It is rarer among middle-class Muslims from the Middle East. She adds that nowadays, imams do background checks on the grooms to make sure they’re not already married in their home countries.

Some clerics in the U.S. perform second marriage ceremonies in secret.

Khan, who does pre-marriage counseling, says she always raises the issue of polygamy with engaged couples.

“I also explain to them that as a woman, you have certain rights, and as a man, he may one day exercise his right to have a second wife,” Khan says. “And usually the man says, ‘No, no, no. I’m never going to do that.’ And I say, ‘Well, in case you ever get tempted, how about we put that in the contract?'”

Apparently she should have rejected it, full stop. The WISE project is aimed at furthering network building and exchanges and at improving the position and rights of women in conservative Islamic countries. Support for national and international religious organisations is certainly not new in the Netherlands and not only Islamic organisations receive such funding. Nevertheless since the whole secular-religious balance is under debate (not only with regard to Islam) such support at least raises eyebrows. In this case the support led to questions asked in Dutch Parliament by Dutch anti-Islam agitator Geert Wilders:
Weblog Geertwilders – Geert Wilders’ PVV discloses Dutch government support for ‘ground zero’ Mosque

Questions of the members Wilders and Fritsma (both PVV) to the Minister for WWI and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands about the co-funding of a mosque on Ground Zero.

Is it true that Dutch taxpayers’ money is used for the support of ASMA, the organization of Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, who wants to build a mosque on Ground Zero?* If yes,

Do you acknowledge that it is absurd to build a mosque right at Ground Zero and that this is also an insult to (the families of) the victims of 9-11? If not, why not? If so,

Are you, given the offensive plan to build said mosque, willing to immediately withdraw the subsidy to ASMA? If not, why not?

Interestingly Feisal Abdul Rauf last year received the Peace Builders Award on behalf of the Alliance for International Conflict Prevention and Resolution together with a Dutch Liberal Jewish rabbi Soetendorp. Together they wrote an article in the journal Justitia et Pax (Act Now)

God speaks in the Quran of the righteous and unrighteous of the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] as well as of the Prophet Muhammad’s own followers. Spirituality is about learning to see with God’s eyes, and as we learn to do so, to recognize in this life Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others who emit the fragrance of Paradise, in whom God’s pleasure is evident, as well as people across the religious spectrum in whom we detect the odor of God’s displeasure. This simple insight brings us to the conclusion that challenges many believers: that among those who confess to be of other faiths are those who in God’s eyes
share the same ultimate destiny.
[…]
The same God created us all. And when, as human beings, we learn to recognize, identify with, and speak from the core human and spiritual values that we hold in common, we may transcend our superficial divisions and learn to embrace the cultural and theological diversity that only enriches the human family. Over time, interfaith dialogue can dissolve the concept of the ‘other’, replacing it with a deeper realization that we are all – in fact – brothers and sisters.
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf
Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp

Wilders and, following him, much of the Dutch media has taken up the clearly false frame of ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ leading up to one Dutch columnist stating that the Ground Zero mosque crowns it all for Muslims after 9/11 and Dutch newspaper falsely stating that the Netherlands is funding the Ground Zero Mosque. It is in fact a racist frame: because Muslims did a violent thing, it is correct to criticize other Muslims for doing another (non-violent) thing. Until now Muslims in the Netherlands have remained silent on the topic although a few sites (in particular one related to my salafism research) have responded to the news and, while following the Ground Zero Mosque frame, stated (my translation):

We can see this as a true miracle because who would have ever thought that next to such a sensitive place a mosque would be build? Only one can give an answer to that, and that is Allah, the almighty, the allknowing. In the end Islam will prevail. No one, nowhere, can terminate the building of mosques.

Other Dutch Muslims, at the website Wij Blijven Hier (We are here to stay) have a more modest approach. They state (my translation):

And there you see how a center with the best of intentions, called Cordoba Initiative, will heavily invest in dialogue, community, culture, knowledge and meeting eachother, is labelled Ground Zero Mosque.

As mentioned above, it is necessary not to stop at this observation of racism. What kind of symbol is the sacred Ground Zero Mosque?

Although other atrocities in other parts of the world have caused much more in terms of human lives, such as the genocide in Rwanda (937,000 deaths ), the war and chaos in Congo (about 4 million deaths ) and the war Darfur (estimates vary between 70,0000 and 400,000 deaths ), ‘9/11’ is often considered as the event that changed the world as we knew it. The events of ‘9/11’ challenged not only the US but are seen as an attack on the Western world and all it stands for. For example in the Netherlands the Dutch government first asked for thoughtfulness but then also stated that 9-11 was tantamount to a declaration of war. Sylvain Ephimenco (a Dutch writer) pointed to Islam as the fertile ground which produces terrorists; Leon de Winter (a Dutch writer) claimed that the West was in a state of war with Islam; and Frentrop (a Dutch journalist) pleaded for a ban on Islam. The Dutch filmmaker and columnist Van Gogh would declare later that 9-11 was an eye opener for him. One of the main questions raised in many of these reactions was how ‘ordinary’ Muslims related to these extremist Muslims. Several reactions (some intended, some unintended, some distorted) added fuel to the fire: Is Islam compatible with a democracy based on the separation of church and state as well as equal rights for men and women? Though several Muslim opinion leaders tried to contribute to the debate but the scope of their contributions remained limited because they were much divided and none could be considered as truly representative of the Muslim community. Moreover, their hesitation to combine a condemnation of the attacks in support of democracy, together with solidarity with the US, worsened the situation according to many people.

In all the groups of the Ethnobarometer research ‘9/11’ stands out as the first landmark in the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, though certainly not the last landmark and not in all cases the most important one. With regard to the latter there was some disagreement about the importance of 9/11, although most of the participants saw 9/11 as an event of major implications. Certainly in the UK but to a lesser extent also in other European countries the ‘Islamic Revolution’ of 1979 in Iran or the Rushdie Affair in 1989 (Werbner 2002) had already put the spotlight on Islam and Muslims. Criticizing Muslims was still considered taboo in for example the Netherlands – chances were you would be labelled a racist –this taboo started to erode in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair. ‘Muslims’ became increasingly distinguished from the ‘Dutch’ people (whereas previously discourse was about allochthonous or ethnic minorities) and their loyalty towards the Netherlands was called into question. Also in the Netherlands in 1996 Pim Fortuyn released his book Against the islamization of our culture in which he elaborated on the issues other politicians such as Bolkestein had addressed earlier. Muslims, including liberal Muslims, were against the separation of church and state, against equality of men and women, and the main threat for world peace from which he concluded that Islam was a backward culture. Two weeks before ‘9-11’ and the day after ‘9-11’ he pleaded for a ‘Cold War’ against Islam. Although Fortuyn’s discourse was not exclusively ‘Islam-topic’ – he had strong anti-establishment rhetoric as well – his message concerning Islam became the most visible.

These are not unrelated incidents but they same part of an important, but largely invisible, undercurrent in contemporary societies. An important issue in this regard is that in the 1980s and 1990s there was no political party in the Netherlands with a clear anti-multiculturalist stand, making it difficult if not impossible for voters to voice their opposition to multiculturalism. Much of this changed after 9/11. It is clear that for Muslims and non-Muslims ‘9-11’ is important in the social construction of a conflict. ‘9-11’ is an important part of the answer to the question how do people know that there is a conflict. Before ‘9-11’ there may have been a latent conflict, surfacing occasionally after incidents such as the Rushdie-affair. An event like that is probably seen as an incident. In the case of ‘9-11’ all participants remember very vividly the attacks, seeing the planes flying into the WTC and the collapse of the Twin Towers. ‘9-11’ serves as the exemplary event for either explaining what is wrong with Islam or explaining what is wrong with the host societies of Muslim migrants. Muslims and non-Muslims recognize that since ‘9-11’ criticizing Islam and Muslims is no longer taboo and in some cases almost custom to this in the strongest way possible. The experience of ‘9-11’ and its aftermath can be seen as one of the underlying grammars in the construction of the Self and the Other. Writings such as those of Fortuyn and Sartori, perhaps already apprarent in popular thinking, have gained, in Gramsci’s words, plausibility because of ‘9/11 and after 9/11 such national discourses have merged with global discourses of the war against terror and Islam as a threat. These powerful discourses have merged with anti-islamic ideologies from people like Wilders thereby further complicating the national and transnational mixtures of politics and religion.

Update 27-08-2010
Recently conference in Singapore organised by the official Islamic Council of Singapore and the Majlis Ugama Islam Singapore (MUIS). The conference brought together academics and activists from all over the world to discuss the issue of Islam, Muslims and multiculturalism in a globalised world. Besides people like Tariq Ramadan, Reuven Firestone and Abdullah Saeed, also Feisal Abdul Rauf participated. Below you find the link to a report about the conference by Yoginder Sikand (who also attended) with an excerpt (H/T one of my regular readers: MvB):

The American Muslim (TAM)

For me, the highlight of the conference was hearing the arrestingly charismatic Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, head of the New York-based Cordoba Initiative, speak. The soft-spoken but extremely articulate Egyptian-born and Britain-educated Imam has been in the forefront of efforts to promote dialogue between people of different faiths, inspired by a truly universalistic—and, so, to me, powerfully attractive—understanding of religion. He began by pointing out that Muslims are today perceived as a ‘problem’ the world over. Owing to the actions of self-styled Islamists, Islam is now regarded by many as a security threat. This perception, he said, cannot be denied or wished away simply through apologetic exercises. Across the world, Muslim groups, using the vocabulary of Islam, have spearheaded violent political movements in the name of Islam. This is why, he said, many non-Muslims perceive Islam to be synonymous with violence and even terror. This undeniable fact, he went on, is a challenge to Muslims concerned about their faith, who must act to rescue it from terrorists who use it to give it a bad name.

The Imam debunked certain key myths that many Muslims, wedded to a narrow, communal understanding of Islam, zealously uphold. He pointed out that the Quran addresses itself not to Muslims as a communal group, but, rather to what it calls ‘believers’ or muminun. And this, he argued, is what the companions of the Prophet Muhammad saw themselves as. Based on his interpretation of certain key Quranic verses, the Imam pointed out that the category of muminun was not limited to those who call themselves by the Arabic term ‘Muslim’, and who generally construe the term as referring to a particular community. Rather, he persuasively argued, the muminun that the Quran talks about, for which any other suitable term could be used in other languages, included everyone, no matter what rituals he followed, what language he worshipped in, or whatever name he called himself by, who believed in the one God and in divine accountability after death and practiced good. This, he said, was the basic religion taught by all the prophets of God. Various prophets might have had their own methods of prayer and rituals, but these should be seen not as separate religions or as the bases of separate communities. Rather, they were more like different schools of thought or, in Arabic, mazhabs, of the same religion, or different sunnahs or paths. ‘The various prophets had different signatures, but they shared the same message’, he explained. All the prophets, the Quran says, were of the same status, and, critiquing Muslim claims to supremacy, he argued that nowhere does the Quran declare the Prophet Muhammad to have been the best among them or the most superior—contrary to what many Muslims contend. In actual fact, he pointed out, the Quran warns people not to make any distinction between the prophets. To imagine that the ‘believers’, in the Quranic sense, referred to a particular community that practiced a particular set of rituals in a particular language, as most Muslims do, was, the Imam argued, not at all in accordance with what the Quran says.

The universalistic understanding of religion and the notion of ‘believer’ that he argued the Quran actually preached (which is in marked contrast to how many of those who call themselves ‘Muslims’ understand them), the Imam suggested, was a powerful counter to the communalistic interpretations of Islam that have been, and still are, powerfully dominant and that inherently conduce to conflict. It was, he contended, also a firm basis to bring together the muminun in different communities, no matter what communal label they defined themselves with, to work together for a better world.

6 comments.

Closing the Week 29 – Featuring Khaled Said

Posted on July 24th, 2010 by martijn.
Categories: Blogosphere.

The official website of ISIM is closed and the repository of Leiden University works like…well it doesn’t work so well. Which is a problem if you want to read the ISIM Review articles. Therefore I’m happy to present to you: ISIM Review via Closer

Most popular on Closer this week:

1. Orange Fever: Notes on the World Cup, football, nationalism and Deep Play in the Netherlands
2. Europe and Islam: Dutch elections – Have the Dutch become intolerant?
3. Autumn School AISSR – Secular sounds, Islamic sounds: Politics of listening in secular-liberal nation-states

I’m honoured that my post on Orange Fever appears in the Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Carnival, this time compiled by Judith Weingarten.

• If you want to stay updated and did not subscribe yet, you can do so HERE

• If you want to stay updated about the ISIM Review pages I suggest you do subscribe
  

• You can follow me on Twitter: Martijn5155

Featuring Khaled Said
Global Voices in English » Egypt: Khaled Said – An Emergency Murder by An Emergency Law

Khaled Said, a 28-year-old Egyptian from the coastal city of Alexandria, was allegedly tortured to death at the hands of two officers who wanted to search him under the emergency law. He asked for a reason or a warrant – they killed him.

Egypt: Amnesty International Urges Egypt Government to Investigate Brutal Killing of Young Man

Amnesty International is calling for an immediate, full and independent investigation into the brutal killing of a 28-year-old Egyptian man, Khaled Mohammed Said, while in the hands of Egyptian security forces in the city of Alexandria on Sunday, June 6.

Facebook | My name was khaled , and i was not a terrorist

The story began on 7th June 2010 when Khaled Saeed went to his usual Internet cafe in Sidigaber

Shadowy’s Abyss: Beat to Death.. And the Reason “Why”!

It all started when Khaled Mohamed Saeed, 28 went in a cyber café based in Bobast st, in the district of Cleopatra, Alexandria where, all of the sudden, two policemen rushed in, ordered all the clients to evince their IDs, and started frisking them in a humiliating manner.

The Traveller Within: Khaled Said’s murder: Egyptians outraged over the killing of a young man at the hands of the police – again

Egyptians are intensely outraged, after the murder of a 28-year old man by the police – for refusing to show his ID, in an event that forewarns large repercussions within the Egyptian society, with social media playing a central role in the affair.

Egyptian Chronicles: Follow Up : Khalid’s Protest

The protest in front of the ministry of interior went as expected : Crack downs , arrests and journalists were harassed and their cameras were taken. The best photo I found for the protest was this photo from Assad.
Also here is another photo from Affet
The protest included the activists we always see in the protest , unfortunately it was too small despite the fact that the MOI thought it was going to be massive and that why they had nearly occupied down town !!
I do not know how the regime dares and opens its mouth in front of the photos showing the brutality of the police against peaceful protesters.Just see the videos and slide shows below to understand what I mean.

2,500 protest against police torture in Alexandria | Al-Masry Al-Youm: Today’s News from Egypt

Approximately 2,500 people gathered along Alexandria’s Corniche to protest the alleged torture and killing of Alexandrian Khaled Saeed. The protesters then marched to Saeed’s home.

Police maintained a remarkably limited presence during the protest.

Egypt: Prosecute Police in Beating Death | Human Rights Watch

Egyptian authorities should speedily investigate and bring charges against two plainclothes police officers who numerous witnesses say beat to death 28-year-old Khaled Said in Alexandria on June 6, 2010, Human Rights Watch said today.

Women, fashion and politics
tabsir.net » Born Free, unless you are female

I opened my email this morning and back-to-back there was instant conflict: a posting about a new Indian Deoband fatwa ruling that veiled Muslim women should not ride bicycles and another about a female French lawyer who ripped the face covering off a young Muslim girl in a shopping mall near Nantes, the latter a pre-emptive strike for the pending anti-niqab law in the French parliament. Both rulings strike me as silly, both as overtly political. So now instead of the standard “Death to America” vs. “Muhammad is a child molester” chant wars we have entered the era of dueling over social mores through Fatwa Wars. Although not as erotic as the recent tit-illating fatwa controversy, also involving women’s bodies, the battle lines are still drawn over the same resource: what males do to control women’s bodies and minds.

New Statesman – Europe’s problem with the burqa

Is there an anthropological explanation for the high level of disapproval for a garment worn by so few?

Muslim schoolgirls show that faith and fashion are not incompatible | World news | The Guardian

Muslim schoolgirls show that faith and fashion are not incompatible

Students gave traditional dress a makeover after winning places on an Islamic fashion course

Global Voices: Fashion designers bust burqa stereotypes – thestar.com

It’s meant to be modest – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be luxurious.

French labels by John Galliano of Dior as well as Nina Ricci and Jean Claude Jitrois appear on abayas adorned by Swarovski crystals and elaborate embroidery. They range in price for $2,000 to $2,500 for ready-to-wear, while a couture abaya with a coordinating veil could go for as much as $11,500.

The Associated Press: Spain parliament rejects burqa ban _ for now

Spain’s Parliament on Tuesday rejected a proposal to ban women from wearing in public places Islamic veils that reveal only the eyes.

However, the Socialist government has said it favors including a ban on people wearing burqas in government buildings in an upcoming bill on religious issues to be debated after parliament’s summer vacation break.

In Syria, Ban On Veil Raises Few Eyebrows : NPR

As a loud and controversial debate continues over wearing the Muslim face veil in Europe, Syria quietly imposed curbs Sunday on the niqab, the veil that exposes only the eyes.

The secular-minded Syrian government has rejected extreme religious dress in the classroom, the first Arab government to weigh in so heavily on the face veil.

While many Syrian Muslim women wear a head scarf, the Syrian government sees the face veil as a growing sign of radical Islam. The latest crackdown is in the education system. However, over the past year dozens of Islamic institutes have also been shuttered.

Sumbul Ali-Karamali: Burqa Bans From an American Muslim’s Perspective

Yesterday, Syria banned women wearing a full face veil from university campuses, both public and private. France, of course, voted last week to ban the full face veil (the niqab) from all public areas. The reason cited by both countries is that the face veil as a threat to their secular identity.

Syrian Education Minister Bans Full Face Veils in Universities | Middle East | English

Syria’s education minister has issued a decree banning women on university campuses from wearing veils that cover their faces. The decision appears to be drawing fire from some quarters and praise from others.

Female Afghan Governor Fears Taliban Deal – The Lede Blog – NYTimes.com

On the eve of an international conference in Afghanistan, the country’s only female governor told Britain’s Channel 4 News that Afghan women should not have to sacrifice their rights as part of any peace agreement with the Taliban.

British MP says he won’t meet veiled Muslim women – UK – World – The Times of India

A Conservative MP has drawn flak from Muslims in Britain for saying he will refuse to meet women wearing the full Islamic dress in his constituency unless they lift their veil.

Muslim groups have condemned Philip Hollobone, the MP from Kettering, saying he is being pedantic.

Mona Eltahawy – From liberals and feminists, unsettling silence on rending the Muslim veil

The French parliament’s vote this week to ban full-length veils in public was the right move by the wrong group.

Some have tried to present the ban as a matter of Islam vs. the West. It is not. First, Islam is not monolithic. It, like other major religions, has strains and sects. Many Muslim women — despite their distaste for the European political right wing — support the ban precisely because it is a strike against the Muslim right wing.

Covered and classy

Beautiful and striking designs were seen at the fourth Islamic Fashion Festival 2010 Kuala Lumpur-Jakarta.

ISLAMIC fashion is sometimes seen as quite unwearable. If you look at some designs, you find that most of them don’t quite make sense for the average women.

Where on earth would you wear trailing yards of fabric, layers of material and strange-looking headgear? But just like other types of fashion, where some of the things we see on the runway don’t quite look like what women can wear every day, it’s all a matter of interpretation.

gulfnews : Muslim preacher threatened with death in veil row

A female Muslim preacher has been threatened with death for declaring that the niqab (a veil which covers the whole face except for the eyes) is not obligatory.

Two Muslim women thrown out of pool for wearing ‘burkinis’ – Telegraph

Two Muslim women were ordered to leave a swimming pool in a French holiday village on the southwest coast for wearing body-covering “burkinis”.

Noorain Khan’s piece on bad burqa puns, which MMW reposted yesterday, came as I have been coincidentally trying to pull together an explanation of exactly what is wrong with headlines that use these puns. (For those unfamiliar with the structure, here’s an easy formula: “behind/beneath/under/beyond” +”the” + “veil/hijab/burqa/niqab.) Read her piece first for a great list of all the ways that this language plays out; what I want to do in this post is to expand on exactly what is wrong with using titles along these lines.

Life, rules and spirituality
Let women judges do their job

We do need to look at justice with a gender perspective. It is always women who suffer, both from injustice and society’s blindness towards it.

IT SEEMS to be the unchanging lot of women in Malaysia. First we are elevated, and then we are brought down to earth with a thud.

When the first women syariah judges were appointed this month, Muslim women were elated. At last, not only are women recognised for their ability to sit on the syariah bench but also perhaps now we can expect better justice for women in the syariah courts.

The first uneasy twinge came, for me, when one of the new judges said that she wanted to show that just because she was female it didn’t mean she would be biased towards women.

Being Na’ima B. Robert: An Interview with Award Winning Muslim Woman Author | MuslimMatters.org

Na’ima B. Robert is “Muslim, Black, mixed-race, South African, Western, revert and woman all in one”. Descended from Scottish Highlanders on her father’s side and the Zulu people on her mother’s side, she was born in Leeds and grew up in Zimbabwe. She went on to gain a first-class degree from the University of London. Having worked in marketing, the performing arts, and teaching, she is now an award-winning author and Editor-in-Chief of SISTERS, a magazine for Muslim women.

In Yemen, spirituality is in the air | Al-Masry Al-Youm: Today’s News from Egypt

In her book Forty Days and Forty Nights in Yemen: A Journey to Tarim, the City of Light, Ethar el-Katatney beautifully describes her experience in south Yemen, where she attended a course in traditional Islamic sciences. With its in-depth discussion of Islam, stunning photographs, personal ruminations, and daily anecdotes, Forty Days and Forty Nights in Yemencaptures a momentous time in the 23-year-old’s life, and is a meditative, thought-provoking experience for the reader.

Middle East Online

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, impoverished by his loss, enriched by his inspiration.

By Reuven Firestone

Los Angeles, California – A bright light of critical scholarship of Islam was just extinguished this month in Cairo with the death of Professor Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd on 5 July. I saw him only last spring at the international conference, The Qur’an in its Historical Context, held at the University of Notre Dame, where he and Professor Abdolkarim Soroush, the great contemporary Iranian philosopher and intellectual, together gave one of the most intellectually rigorous and emotionally moving keynote presentations I have ever experienced at an academic conference.

These two Muslims represent the zenith of intellectual and ethical expression among any people of faith I know.

Qantara.de – A Negation of Women or Religious Freedom?

Until recently, the black, full-body veil was unknown in the Maghreb, where it is now the subject of ongoing controversy. The niqab debate in Europe has put the topic back in the spotlight, as Beat Stauffer reports from Fes

Morocco’s madrassas try to shun stereotype – The National Newspaper

The sun was setting over this southern Moroccan village and in his room above the local mosque, Abderrahim Oulgoum’s thoughts turned to a subject far removed from his Quranic law studies: football.

Female Imams Blaze Trail Amid China’s Muslims : NPR

In an alleyway called Wangjia hutong, women go to their own mosque, where Yao Baoxia leads prayers. For 14 years, Yao has been a female imam, or ahong as they are called here, a word derived from Persian.

As she leads the service, Yao stands alongside the other women, not in front of them as a male imam would. But she says her role is the same as a male imam.

Counter-radicalization and Islamophobia in the West
World Security Network interview:Terror Threat from young Muslims born in Europe ? – International Analyst Network

There is a heated discussion in most European countries about the impact of a growing proportion of Muslims. Is there a direct relationship between Islam and terrorism? Is home-grown terrorism more dangerous than imported terrorism? Does the threat come from Islam, or from misused political Islamism? Has a period of multiculturalism come to a disappointing end?

Ioannis Michaletos, WSN Editor for South East Europe and South-eastern Office Co-ordinator took the opportunity to exclusively interview Lorenzo Vidino, the renowned Italian expert on Islam, international terrorism and European counter-strategies.

Anti-mosque protests on the rise, say Muslim advocates – Yahoo! News

Opposition to the construction of mosques has skyrocketed in cities and towns across the country, scholars and advocates of Muslim culture tell The Upshot.

Public protests against three planned mosques have made news in the past week: Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin joined others in opposing the building of a mosque a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. Hundreds demonstrated against a proposed mosque in a small town in Tennessee (pictured above). And some residents of Temecula, California, are opposing the local Muslim community’s plan to build a bigger mosque, saying it could become a hotbed of radical Islam.

Writers and academics protest over ‘racist’ LRB blogpost | Books | guardian.co.uk

Writers and academics protest over ‘racist’ LRB blogpost

Seventy-three leading cultural figures have written to the London Review of Books alleging that an article by RW Johnson contained ‘highly offensive, age-old racist stereotypes’

Muslims Debate asks Geert Wilders why he become anti Islam and what is his message to the Muslims | Muslims Debate

Muslims Debate asked Mr. Geert Wilders why he became anti-Islam and what is his message to the Muslims?

Response to Geert Wilders Message to Muslims | Mike Ghouse | Muslims Debate

Geert Wilders is becoming a European icon of intolerance, as a peace activist and a pluralist Muslim; I have an interest in understanding the man. What turned him away from becoming a peace maker?

France24 – ‘Ground Zero mosque’ raises questions of tolerance and grief

A controversy surrounding plans for an Islamic centre with a mosque near Ground Zero has highlighted tension between America’s cherished freedom of religion and its struggle to recover from the traumas of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Palin and the ground zero mosque – chicagotribune.com

Suppose there were a heavily Muslim neighborhood in New York, with mosques, religious schools and shops with meat prepared according to Islamic dietary rules. Suppose an evangelical church wanted to build a chapel there. And suppose local Muslims tried to block it as a flagrant insult to them.

Would Sarah Palin urge the church to retract this “unnecessary provocation” in the “interest of healing”? Would her followers? Or would they scorn this disparagement of Christianity and champion the religious freedom on which America was built?

You know the answer. But Palin is not a slave to intellectual consistency. Change the church to a mosque, and put it a couple of blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, and she suddenly loses all patience with the rights of religious believers.

Misc.
Guest Post: “The Potawatomis Didn’t Have a Word for Global Business Center”? » Sociological Images

This is an example of the use of Indigenous language and imagery that many people wouldn’t think twice about, or find any inherent issues with. But let’s look at this a little deeper

Five myths about the death penalty

The death penalty: the punishment we reserve for the worst criminal offenders. Last week, law enforcement officials said it was on the table for four men charged in the shooting deaths of unarmed civilians in New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina. It’s a signal that the crimes were truly reprehensible. Much of what we think we know about American capital punishment comes from the longstanding debate that surrounds the institution. But in making their opposing claims, death-penalty proponents and their abolitionist adversaries perpetrate myths and half-truths that distort the facts. The United States’ death penalty is not what its supporters — or its opponents — would have us believe.

Between Astroturf and Grass: Movements in the Middle » Sociological Images

We recently introduced the idea of “astroturfing.” Coined to contrast with the idea of a “grassroots” movement (led and supported by “regular” people), an astroturf movement is one that looks like it’s grassroots, but is actually driven and funded by a corporation. But is it always easy to distinguish between astroturf and grass? F.T. Garcia sent in this confounding example.

globeandmail.com: Anthropologist’s research ranged from Newfoundland speech to West Bank Jews

Robert Paine’s career was so multifaceted, his intellect so deft, his management practices so influential and inclusive, his research standards so high and thorough, and his impact as an anthropologist, author, teacher and administrator so far-reaching, it is difficult to pick a single example to demonstrate his prowess.

Anthropologist and pioneer in ethnic studies George De Vos dies at 87

George Alphonse De Vos, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a pioneer in cultural psychology, ethnic identity and migration studies, died on July 9, of congestive heart disease. He was 87.

De Vos’s ground-breaking research generated international recognition for then-emerging fields of culture and personality studies and psychological anthropology. His research ranged from psycho-cultural adaptations of Koreans in Japan and Native American cultural psychology to arranged marriage in Japan to Francophone Caribbean and African immigrants in Paris. He is believed to have introduced a multi-cultural perspective to anthropology before the term was invented.

Material World: The Art of Theft: Creativity and Property on deviantART

Specifically, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser write that, “Creativity is the upside of this brave new world of digital media (2008). The downside is law-breaking.”

Over the past two and half years, I have been studying this phenomenon, as it plays out online and offline. My commitment to an ethnographic approach to research has limited most of my attention to one website–albeit a rather large one–and also to comic and anime conventions, both of which feature the new generations of creators that have been taken up in the discourse of copyright law. In particular, I focus upon the real and not historically new concerns of many young artists and media producers as they post their work to the internet.

Generation without future, a future without generations: the endless suffering of Afghan children « Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist

I would love to ask the politicians who suggest that this war is fought for our ‘western’ security–often based on the insecurity of the non-western others–what we might expect, in ten or fifteen years from now, from a generation which not only has faced 600 children under the age of 5 dying every day, and has suffered the level of trauma described above, but also is increasingly addicted from early childhood to opium? Never before has opium and drugs flourished at such level in Afghanistan, since the Taliban succeed in fighting the cultivation.

Dutch
Religiesubsidie: hier en daar een bui | Artikel 7

Subsidieverlening aan levensbeschouwelijke organisaties is, vanwege de scheiding van kerk en staat, een gevoelig politiek thema. Toch wordt er in gemeenteraden nauwelijks over gedebatteerd en ontbreken veelal gedragsregels. Uit een onderzoek van het Instituut voor multiculturele vraagstukken Forum en het Verwey-Jonker Instituut blijkt dat slechts een kwart van de gemeenten een specifiek beleid heeft op dit terrein en slechts 13 procent hanteert een gedragscode.

’De Koran is gewoon gif’ – Trouw

Ben Kok is een spreekbuis van orthodoxe christenen die huiveren voor moskeeën en minaretten. Vrijwel dagelijks plaatst de Amersfoortse voorganger op internet waarschuwende berichten over het ’gevaar’ van de islam. Nu heeft hij een film gemaakt: ’Islam en waarheid’. „Een godswonder.”

• Begin your day with IslaamTV • » Blog Archive » Joods-Christelijke Pastor op de pijnbank.

Joods-Christelijke Pastor op de pijnbank.

hoeiboei: Kritisch onderzoek nodig naar subsidie Amerikaanse islamclub

Natuurlijk gaat de 1 miljoen euro, die ex-minister Bert Koenders (PvdA) schonk aan de American Society for the Advancement of Muslims (ASMA), niet rechtstreeks naar Cordoba House, het geplande islamitische centrum inclusief moskee in de buurt van Ground Zero. Het geld voor ASMA is toegekend aan het Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity (WISE), een van de programma’s van ASMA Society.

Ook SP wil boycot Israëlische dadels – Risala Community

De SP in Rotterdam roept samen met Nederlandse moslimorganisaties op om tijdens de ramadan geen dadels uit Israël te kopen. De boycot is volgens de socialisten bedoeld als verzet „tegen de bezetting van de Palestijnse gebieden door Israël en de voortdurende uitbreiding van illegale nederzettingen”.

Mustafa Kus doet aangifte tegen Wilders – Leiden en Regio – Leidsch Dagblad

Mustafa Kus (42) heeft het helemaal gehad met de PVV en in het bijzonder met Geert Wilders. Zozeer zelfs, dat hij deze week bij de politie aangifte heeft gedaan wegens belediging en discriminatie. ,,Ernstige belediging”, zegt de Leidenaar. ,,Het doet mij heel veel pijn.”

Bekering tot de islam: Dennis is nu Abdelkrim | Netwerk

De 19-jarige Dennis uit Haarlem gaat sinds een aantal jaar als Abdelkrim door het leven. Hij heeft zich bekeerd tot de islam. Ondanks de vele vooroordelen schaamt hij zich nergens voor en beleeft hij zijn ‘nieuwe’ geloof op z’n eigen manier.

‘Extra geld voor gebedsruimte’ – DePers.nl

De gemeente Amsterdam stelt 150.000 euro extra beschikbaar voor de bouw van een islamitische gebeds- en wasruimte op begraafplaats De Nieuwe Ooster. Het college van burgemeester en wethouders heeft dat besloten, zo maakte een woordvoerster woensdag bekend. Enkele jaren geleden trok de hoofdstad al eens 416.000 euro uit.

Wereldjournalisten Bekeerlingen tot islam krijgen met geweld te maken

Nederlanders die zich tot de islam bekeren krijgen met vooroordelen en zelfs geweld te maken, zegt Waleed Duisters van het Landelijk Platform Nieuwe Moslims. ‘Men denkt snel dat iemand zich wil aansluiten bij de Taliban.’

Vieze varkens en de karikaturale islam – GeenCommentaar.nl

Een paar jaar geleden werd er in Engeland een campagne van de politie waarin een puppy figureerde vroegtijdig gestopt. Men was bang dat dit onreine dier verontwaardiging zou oproepen bij moslims. Helaas zijn bijna alleen nog maar artikelen op het net terug te vinden over het incident, niet over de daarop volgende verwondering onder moslims.

Lucaswashier » Blog Archive » Het groot Islamitisch varkens topic

En het zijn dit keer eens niet de Islamieten die klagen. Dat deed een Nederlander, want die vond het zielig voor die arme Moslims. Dat ze zomaar een varken te zien krijgen. Want kunst in de vorm van een varken dat kan helemaal niet. Vandaar dat de Lingepolikliniek in Leerdam de kunst meteen verwijderde. Die zijn natuurlijk als de dood voor een man met baard in een jurk en een bommengordel. Hoeveel gekker moet het nog worden? Meteen maar alle uitingen van vrije expressie afschaffen? Want als we het criterium gebruiken dat er iemand mogelijk gekwetst kan worden is niks meer mogelijk. Vanwege al die mensen met tere zieltjes.

Ook DeJaap censureert kunst | DeJaap

Het idee! Beseft zij dan niet dat varkens, koeien, schapen, pauwen, katten, honden en zeker vlinders zeer gemeen kunnen schelden en voor eeuwig op het netvlies worden gebrand van mensen die gewoon heel leuk gek lief exotisch zijn en niet voor zichzelf klachten kunnen indienen, de arme onderdrukte slachtoffers dat het zijn, dus ontzettend blij zijn als een of ander extreem-links Rene Danen-type pro-actief een klacht indient?

Amsterdamse subsidie voor islamitische ‘weekendschool’ – Maroc.NL

Opnieuw kritiek op een Amsterdamse subsidie voor een islamitische voorziening. Stadsdeel centrum gaf een islamitische weekendschool ruim zevenduizend euro in het kader van integratie. Maar de VVD ziet niet in wat de Marokkaanse en religieuze lessen met integratie te maken hebben.

Op Nieuwemoskee.nl is Wilders ook welkom – hetkanWel.nl

Moslims wordt vaak verweten dat zij niet kritisch kijken naar hun eigen geloof. De website Nieuwemoskee.nl, een platform voor hedendaagse denkers, wil hierin verandering brengen. Zij willen denkbeelden over de islam doorbreken.

Polygamie, barbaars en ouderwets of juist met de tijd mee? – Wij Blijven Hier!: Het schrijversplatform van moslims

Nederland, een land waarover velen claimen dat het bekend staat om de moderne beschaving, de normen en waarden. Prachtig, of toch niet?

Een tijdje terug las ik een oud nieuwsartikel over polygaam huwelijken die in Amsterdam toegestaan zouden zijn. Mijn ogen vielen op het volgende stukje tekst: “Deze huwelijken zijn een uiting van onderdrukking van de vrouw…” Ik stond hierbij even stil en las het artikel weer verder door. Aan het eind gekomen, dacht ik weer even na over die zin. Namelijk, er wordt hier een bewering gedaan die de werkelijkheid tegen gaat.

1 comment.

Closer Holiday Service – Most cited AAA Anthropology Articles Available

Posted on July 23rd, 2010 by martijn.
Categories: anthropology, Important Publications.

It’s almost holiday here and what is better than to read a good article from an anthropological journal (except swimming, riding and/or walking in the mountains or doing nothing at all)? Current Anthropology is ranked as the second most-cited journal in anthropology. I cannot find #1, what is that? Why not show who the ‘winner’ is as well? Anyway, because the AAA journals do so well, they decided to give people free access to the most cited articles of their different journals, for one one month. Here’s the overview with the links you need:
Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time. JANE I. GUYER. 2008; American Ethnologist – Wiley InterScience

Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time
JANE I. GUYER 1
1 Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, Macaulay Hall 111, Baltimore, MD 21218 jiguyer@jhu.edu
Copyright 2007 American Anthropological Association.
KEYWORDS
time • macroeconomics • evangelism • events • future
ABSTRACT

A view from 1950s and 1960s Britain suggests that the public culture of temporality in the United States has shifted from a consequential focus on reasoning toward the near future to a combination of response to immediate situations and orientation to a very long-term horizon. This temporal perspective is most marked in the public rhetoric of macroeconomics, but it also corresponds in remarkable ways to evangelicals’ views of time. In this article, I trace the optionality and consonance of this shift toward the relative evacuation of the near future in religion and economics by examining different theoretical positions within each domain. In conclusion, I suggest that the near future is being reinhabited by forms of punctuated time, such as the dated schedules of debt and other specific event-driven temporal frames.

Race, Ethnicity, and Racism in Medical Anthropology, 1977–2002. Clarence C. Gravlee. 2008; Medical Anthropology Quarterly – Wiley InterScience

Race, Ethnicity, and Racism in Medical Anthropology, 1977–2002
Clarence C. Gravlee 1 Elizabeth Sweet 2
1 Department of Anthropology University of Florida
2 Department of Anthropology Northwestern University
Copyright © 2008 American Anthropological Association
KEYWORDS
Race • ethnicity • racism • health disparities • systematic review
ABSTRACT

Researchers across the health sciences are engaged in a vigorous debate over the role that the concepts of “race” and “ethnicity” play in health research and clinical practice. Here we contribute to that debate by examining how the concepts of race, ethnicity, and racism are used in medical–anthropological research. We present a content analysis of Medical Anthropology and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, based on a systematic random sample of empirical research articles (n =283) published in these journals from 1977 to 2002. We identify both differences and similarities in the use of race, ethnicity, and racism concepts in medical anthropology and neighboring disciplines, and we offer recommendations for ways that medical anthropologists can contribute to the broader debate over racial and ethnic inequalities in health.

Culture and Mind: Their Fruitful Incommensurability. Jerome Bruner. 2008; Ethos – Wiley InterScience

Culture and Mind: Their Fruitful Incommensurability
Jerome Bruner 1
1 School of Law, New York University
Copyright © 2008 American Anthropological Association
ABSTRACT

Abstract I reflect here on the historical junctures where anthropology and psychology cross paths, creating foundations for a general cultural psychology in the present.1 I am particularly attuned to those points of intersection that inform understanding of mind in culture and culture in mind. I focus on institutions as means for canonizing the ordinary, on narrative as a mode of positioning the extraordinary vis-à-vis mundane expectations, and on agency, each of which entails intersections of mind and culture. Recent encounters with U.S. legal culture provide a ground for illustrating these intertwining relations of subjects and their cultural milieux. [culture, mind, law, institutions, selectivity]

Navigating Contradictory Communities of Practice in Learning to Teach for Social Justice. Maria Timmons Flores. 2008; Anthropology & Education Quarterly – Wiley InterScience

Navigating Contradictory Communities of Practice in Learning to Teach for Social Justice
Maria Timmons Flores 1
1 Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling
Copyright 2007 American Anthropological Association.
KEYWORDS
social justice • practice theory • new teachers • teacher socialization • teacher education
ABSTRACT

In this article, I explore the contradictions that four new teachers experienced as their commitments to social justice collide with urban school culture. Framed within Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s (1999) theory of situated learning and development concepts of identity, practice, and relationships illustrate how teachers’ ideals are challenged as socializing features of two communities of practice—the universities and schools—intersect in new teachers’ development. This research contributes empirical evidence of the application of critical multicultural teacher preparation into practice, a cultural representation of how educational inequities are reproduced or disrupted in the situated contexts of urban schools, an application of Lave and Wenger’s theory of Legitimate Peripheral Participation that incorporates formal and informal education across multiple activity settings, and a call for collaborative communities of practice that support teachers’ situated learning in creating transformative practices.

Critical Social Learning: A Solution to Rogers’s Paradox of Nonadaptive Culture. MAGNUS ENQUIST. 2008; American Anthropologist – Wiley InterScience

Critical Social Learning: A Solution to Rogers’s Paradox of Nonadaptive Culture
MAGNUS ENQUIST 1 KIMMO ERIKSSON 2 STEFANO GHIRLANDA 3
1 Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden 11691, and Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden 11691 2 Department of Mathematics and Physics, Mälardalen University, 721 23 Västerås, Sweden, and Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden 11691 3 Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, 40127 Bologna, Italy, and Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden 11691
Copyright 2007 American Anthropological Association.
KEYWORDS
social learning • origin of culture • culture • biology • mathematical modeling
ABSTRACT

Alan Rogers (1988) presented a game theory model of the evolution of social learning, yielding the paradoxical conclusion that social learning does not increase the fitness of a population. We expand on this model, allowing for imperfections in individual and social learning as well as incorporating a “critical social learning” strategy that tries to solve an adaptive problem first by social learning, and then by individual learning if socially acquired behavior proves unsatisfactory. This strategy always proves superior to pure social learning and typically has higher fitness than pure individual learning, providing a solution to Rogers’s paradox of nonadaptive culture. Critical social learning is an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) unless cultural transmission is highly unfaithful, the environment is highly variable, or social learning is much more costly than individual learning. We compare the model to empirical data on social learning and on spatial variation in primate cultures and list three requirements for adaptive culture.

ROSE-COLORED GLASSES? Color Revolutions and Cartoon Chaos in Postsocialist Georgia. PAUL MANNING. 2008; Cultural Anthropology – Wiley InterScience

ROSE-COLORED GLASSES? Color Revolutions and Cartoon Chaos in Postsocialist Georgia
PAUL MANNING 1
1 Trent University, Peterborough, Canada
Copyright 2007 by the American Anthropological Association
KEYWORDS
political oratory • images • postsocialism • revolution
ABSTRACT

The Georgian “Rose Revolution” of 2003 was preceded by events in November 2001, in which students protested against a government raid on a popular TV station, Rustavi 2, and forced then-President Shevardnadze to request the resignation of the Georgian cabinet as the students demanded. This article describes these events in detail to show how political transition in Georgia has been carried out and exemplified by new political rhetorics and metarhetoric that expressly confronted entrenched logics of reception. The article illustrates how shifts in state formation, in postsocialist contexts in particular, are tied to shifts in representational modes.

0 comments.

Autumn School AISSR – Secular sounds, Islamic sounds: Politics of listening in secular-liberal nation-states

Posted on July 22nd, 2010 by martijn.
Categories: anthropology.

Autumn school at University of Amsterdam, AISSR

Secular sounds, Islamic sounds: Politics of listening in secular-liberal nation-states

Convenors: Jeanette Jouili and Annelies Moors

Much research has been done in the last decade or so on the new visible presence of Muslims in the Diaspora in the West, in Europe and in North-America. Literature has focused on issues such as veiling and other visible bodily practices or on the changing outlook of multicultural cities through mosques, halal shops, etc. While the aspect of the visible presence is crucial to understand the developments of the Islamic revival in the West as well as the ensuing (often affective, visceral) debates regarding Muslim’s access to the public sphere within the context of regimes of secularity, a crucial aspect seems to have been overlooked. It concerns the audible presence of Muslims in these contexts. Muslims have not only impacted on the visible landscape, but they also have transformed the soundscape. This autumn school aims to address this gap and focus on the audible or sonic aspects of the Muslim presence. The emphasis on the audible should, however, not be perceived as diminishing the aspect of the visual or as denying its inherent entanglement with the former. It is understood here that the perception through one sense register never occurs alone, but always co-functions with other senses.

Islamic (inspired) soundscapes have been flourishing notably within Islamic counter-publics in the recent ten years. Listening practices closely related to traditional modes of piety such as Quran recitation or khutbas have been proliferating through new media technologies. But also music practices have been flourishing, notwithstanding the contested character of music within strands of Islamic theology. From a revival of the nasheed tradition have followed the emergence of a diversified Islamic music culture, including forms of pop, country, rock and rap music. However, Islamic sounds can also potentially leave the circumscribed and somehow protected spheres of the Islamic milieu. Islamic sounds become audible in a larger public sphere when, for example, Muslim musicians perform Islamic music at multicultural festivals or mixed cultural events, they become audible on the street when cell phones resonate the call for prayer or nasheed melodies, or if a mosque has the permission to use loudspeakers for the call for prayer.

Yet, the audibility and sonic presence of Muslims raises issues similar to their visual presence in the secular public sphere (in particular in Europe) which has been subjected to stigmatizing (media) representations and governmental policies seeking to regulate and circumscribe them. Most European countries today forbid, for instance, the diffusion of the call to prayer outside mosques. ‘Screaming’ Muslims during street demonstrations, notably shouting religious slogans, are frequently shown in the media to underscore the danger of political Islam. Islamic music practices, on the other side, seem at times to be worthy of government funding, in the desire to shape particular Muslim subjectivities.

This event then wants to think through the conundrums posed not only by the visible but also by the sonic presence of Muslims in the West. It aims at understanding the issues at stake of the sensing, and more particular listening body, in connection to secular-liberal governance by post-Christian nation-states. Starting from the insights that sound and listening invoke a particular sensory register that simultaneously acts at the corporeal level and shapes subjectivites (Nancy) and that sound is “inscribed from the start within the panoply of power” (Attali), we want to tackle several questions: What does the emerging and quickly evolving Islamic soundscape and their interlinked listening practices in the West tell us about new (ethical) Muslim subjectivities? How does this relate to the ways in which sonic experiences affect the body? What kind of transformation occurs when these new practices leave the protected space of the counter-public sphere? How can these Islamic sound practices be submitted to governmental regimes? To what extent are sound policies implemented in order to securize the Western (European) secular (post-Christian) hegemonic project?

Program:

The program of summer school consists of both extensive lectures on the themes of the summer school and master-classes. These will be, organized by the senior scholars, with the latter allowing fora more thorough and interactive discussion of the themes. This will provide the participants with a context to discuss their own research linked to the theoretical and conceptual approaches mentioned above. A list of literature will be available to the participants in advance. We also intend to organize an Islamic music and poetry event which participants can attend.

The three days summer school is followed by a one-day workshop on the same topic to which a few additional researchers will be invited. All participants will be able to attend the workshop; some will also be invited to present their work there. At some of the events guests may be present.

Confirmed Lecturers to date:

Martin Stokes, Oxford; Deborah Kapchan, NYU; Veit Erlman, University of Austin, TX, Brian Larkin, Barnard/Columbia

Application and Fees:

Participation in the autumn school is limited to 20. Our target is (advanced) MA students, PhD candidates and post-doctoral fellows. Applicants commit themselves to actively participate in the full program. In order to apply, please provide a cover letter with motivation for applying, a CV and a one page abstract of your current research project.

Participants are required to pay a fee of 150 Euros, after receiving notice that they have been selected. This covers the lectures, master classes and the seminar, as well as coffee, tee and lunch meals. In exceptional cases, those without financial support can ask for a waiver. Participants need to organize their own accommodation. A list of (cheap) hotels will be provided.

Dead-line for applications is August 20, 2010.

For further questions, please contact Jeanette Jouili:  mcpamsterdam@gmail.com

0 comments.

Een wekelijks portie burgerschap 29 – Loop naar de Waal

Posted on July 21st, 2010 by martijn.
Categories: Burgerschapserie 2010.

Uit de burgerschapskalender:

“Wij lopen de Vierdaagse mee vol levenslust en moed. Als goede lopers blijven wij, altijd op goede voet. Want wij zijn één voor allen en allen zijn wij één. Zo willen wij door Neêrland en door het leven heen.” Uit het officiële Vierdaagselied dat in 1932 gecomponeerd werd door de Nijmeegse musicus H.A. van Mechelen. De tekst is van J.P.J.H. Clinge Doorenbos.
20-23 juli Vierdaagse in Nijmegen
www.4daagse.nl

Yep, ook ik heb meegedaan aan de Nijmeegse vierdaagse. Eenmaal, jaren geleden. Ook uitgelopen? Ja, ook uitgelopen. Doe je nog vaker mee? Denk het niet, misschien als ik 100 ben en me kan laten voortduwen. Het heeft wel iets die vierdaagse. En dan bedoel ik voor de verandering niet eens de saamhorigheid, de gemoedelijkheid, de prestatie, de aanmoedigingen van het publiek en het multiculturele karakter. Nee, ik bedoel simpelweg het lopen op zich. Zo’n 4 miljoen jaar geleden was het lichaam van de mens zodanig veranderd dat we rechtop konden lopen zonder ons evenwicht te verliezen. Lopen is daarmee zo basaal voor de mens dat we de complexiteit en de gevolgen ervan vaak voor lief nemen. Lopen is ook voor een antropoloog heel basaal en ook antropologen lijken dat nog wel eens te vergeten. Michel de Certeau heeft daar de aandacht op gevestigd in zijn boek The Practice of Everyday Life:Notes on

The story begins with looking down on the city of New York from the top of the World Trade Centre, and enjoying the pleasures of seeing the city laid out below. The pleasures are voyeuristic ones, of course, and this leads de Certeau to speculate that any such holistic perspective trying to look down on life and to map it neatly as a whole is equally voyeuristic. Obviously, this includes using some abstract general theory in social science to understand every day life. You need to get down onto the street itself, to get a perspective of the city as most people see it

The pedestrians on the streets down below read the city as a text, but, crucially they also write it. They do not have a single map or picture of the city but a series of ‘migrational metaphors’ for it, which change as they actually walk. As with the city, so with the State, which likewise is not seen in some simple holistic terms but as a conglomeration of properties.

De Certeau begint in zijn hoofdstuk over ‘Spatial Practices’ met een beschrijving van Manhattan vanaf de 110e verdieping van het World Trade Center. Hij beschrijft daarin de vlucht van Icarus als een terugkeer op de grond alwaar:

Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible”, Michel de Certeau, ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’, 1984, p.93

Om het alledaagse navigeren van mensen in de samenleving te kunnen begrijpen dient een antropoloog ook af te dalen naar dat alledaagse. In mijn geval betekent dit van de 17e verdieping van het Erasmusgebouw afdalen naar de begane grond. De alledaagse leefwereld van de stad is een andere dan die van planologen, bestuurders en politici die steden en wijken indelen in termen van nieuwbouwwijken, kansenwijken, achterstandsgebieden, veiligheidsconcentratiegbieden en noem maar op. Op het moment dat je door de stad heen loopt of zeg op het moment dat je een route volgt van de Nijmeegse Vierdaagse, dan weef in het voorbijgaan je de ruimtes waardoor je loopt aan elkaar op een subjectieve manier; je geeft betekenis aan je omgeving zodanig dat verschillende gebieden bij elkaar gaan horen. Zo is de tweede dag van de Vierdaagse de route van Wijchen en de dijken (mijn betekenis: gruwelijk langdradig) en de derde dag de dag van Groesbeek en de Zevenheuvelenweg: vaak aangeduid als de zwaarste route. Mijn mijn betekenis is een andere: een herkenning van het verleden toen ik nog wielrende. Tegelijkertijd ook een bevestiging van het idee dat ook de snelheid waarmee je je voortbeweegt gevolgen heeft voor de betekenis die je eraan geeft; met fietsen let je op andere zaken dan met lopen. Deze betekenis gaan voor de wandelaars boven de officiële aanduidingen. Wandelen is zo een manier om je eigen verhaal te scheppen op basis van je fysieke omgeving, snelheid, geheugen en fantasie. En een uitstekende manier om te ontsnappen aan het keurslijf van alledag waarin de staat ons een bepaalde sociale orde oplegt. En een uitstekende gelegenheid voor antropologen iets van deze alledaagse ontsnappingen op te pikken.

0 comments.

Een wekelijks portie burgerschap 28 – Onverantwoordelijk burgerschap

Posted on July 16th, 2010 by martijn.
Categories: Burgerschapserie 2010.

Uit de burgerschapskalender:

Laten we eerlijk zijn, we kunnen niet 365 dagen per jaar verantwoordelijk burger zijn…

We zouden het bijna vergeten. De overheid legt niet zomaar een burgerschapsidee op. Nu de overheid aangeeft wat we een dagje niet hoeven te doen, blijkt wat men eigenlijk wil: verantwoordelijk burgerschap. EZPress® – “Verantwoordelijk burgerschap. Een kwestie van geven en nemen”

Vandaag heeft minister Ter Horst met de publicatie “Verantwoordelijk burgerschap. Een kwestie van geven en nemen”, de aftrap gegeven voor een brede discussie over verantwoordelijk burgerschap. Respect, betrokkenheid bij elkaar, gerichtheid op de toekomst en inzet voor de samenleving zijn volgens het kabinet de vier belangrijkste elementen van burgerschap.

Het gaat best goed hoor:
Toespraak minister Ter Horst bij ontvangst Rob-advies ‘Vertrouwen op Democratie’ | Rijksoverheid.nl

Er zijn zoveel mensen die in de praktijk actief zijn en initiatieven nemen om er voor te zorgen dat mensen elkaar kennen en samen problemen in de buurt oplossen.

Dat bleek alleen al bij het discussietraject over verantwoordelijk burgerschap dat eind vorig jaar is afgerond.

De mensen zijn het eens over de belangrijkste waarden en gedragsregels voor goed burgerschap, zoals prettig samenleven, zorgen voor elkaar en je inzetten voor je buurt. Veel mensen zijn betrokken bij het veilig en op orde houden van hun directe leefomgeving. Dat is ook horizontalisering. Het zijn geen zaken om één keer in de vier jaar bij stil te staan; nee, dit gaat de mensen elke dag aan.

Maar uiteindelijk is het in de praktijk toch allemaal wat minder eenduidig dan op het eerste gezicht wellicht lijkt. Ik geef twee voorbeelden. Stel u bent een buschauffeur. U rijdt uw dagelijkse route van A naar B en weer terug. Op een gegeven moment stapt in A. een persoon in die u niet vertrouwt. De persoon ziet er onheilspellend uit en maakt dat u en andere reizigers zich ongemakkelijk voelen. Wat zou die persoon van plan zijn? U als buschauffeur neemt u verantwoordelijkheid als zorgzaam burger, betrokken op anderen en bij het veilig en op orde houden van directe leefomgeving; de bus in dit geval. U besluit de reiziger te weigeren.

Tweede voorbeeld. Stel u bent een persoon die zich erg druk maakt om de eigen toekomst en die van de medemens en zich daardoor mede ernstige zorgen maakt over de verloedering van de omgeving waarin u verkeert. Het gaat u, als vrouw, onder meer om de bejegening van mannen die u uitkleden met hun blikken en soms zelfs hun handen niet kunnen thuishouden. U kunt echter niet de hele samenleving veranderen, laat staan de hele wereld. Maar u heeft natuurlijk wel een eigen verantwoordelijkheid, op z’n minst voor uzelf. Om uzelf te beschermen van de chaos en wanorde in uw omgeving en omdat u als verantwoordelijk persoon betrokken bent bij uw eigen toekomst en die van uw naasten, geeft u gehoor aan een oproep van het belangrijkste in uw leven. U gooit uw leven radicaal om en besluit een leven te leiden dat voor u eervol en deugdzaam is en dat betekent ondermeer dat u uw kleding aanpast. U voelt zich er fantastisch bij; eindelijk leeft u uw leven authentiek en kunt u uzelf zijn. Maar met de bus mee gaan, dat is wat lastig.

De goede verstaander weet natuurlijk al lang waar het over gaat. Het gaat over de busschauffeur die de 19-jarige Ambaro in Uden weigerde voor een ritje naar Volkel omdat zij een niqab draagt. De buschauffeur nam waarschijnlijk in zijn ogen zijn verantwoordelijkheid voor de veiligheid van zijn passagiers. Alleen je mag echter niet iemand weigeren op basis van zijn/haar kleding. Weliswaar is er in het hele niqab/boerka debat een plan geweest om deze sluiering in onderwijs en openbaar vervoer te verbieden. In het onderwijs geldt dit ook evenals voor rijksambtenaren, maar openbaar vervoer is in handen van marktpartijen en de overheid kan alleen met hen overleggen volgens mij om hen aan te sporen die verbod in de vervoersvoorwaarden op te nemen. Uiteindelijk hebben de vervoersbedrijven dat klaarblijkelijk niet gedaan (in ieder geval in het geval van Connexxion niet, zo lijkt me). Hij is dus gewoon in overtreding. Als we echter naar de reacties op websites kijken dan ondersteunt een meerderheid op de nieuwssites toch de actie van de chauffeur; ook al handelt hij in strijd met de wet. Onder meer om de reden die de chauffeur ook aangegeven zou hebben én omdat men vindt dat een niqab hier in Nederland niet thuishoort. Maar mag je dus in het kader van verantwoordelijk burgerschap ook de wet overtreden?

De 19-jarige Somalisch-Nederlandse vrouw staat dus in haar recht. En gaat dus niet tegen het verantwoordelijk burgerschap in. Sterker nog je zou kunnen beargumenteren dat zij een zeer verantwoordelijk burger is die (als ik vrijelijk een mogelijke gedachtegang van haar mag interpreteren) zij gehoor geeft aan een verzoek van haar God en zo bijdraagt een een betere ordening van de samenleving. Eveneens zou je met recht kunnen beargumenteren dat hier juist haar veiligheid in het geding is, een aspect dat in de discussies over niqab nauwelijks aan de orde komt zoals Annelies Moors op basis van haar onderzoek onder niqab-draagsters ook duidelijk maakte. Tegelijkertijd echter is de politiek bijna zonder uitzondering fel gekant tegen niqab en stelt de regering dat de niqab voor velen symbool staat voor een fundamentalistische islam die niet in Nederland thuishoort. Tevens zijn er dus plannen in de maak om het op plekken te verbieden en in half Europa woeden hier debatten over. Het dragen van een burqa of niqab lijkt dus evenmin te passen bij het idee van verantwoordelijk burgerschap en de actie van de buschauffeur dan juist wel weer. Connexxion heeft inmiddels wel excuses aangeboden, om de een of andere reden aan haar man. Is dat verantwoordelijk burgerschap of komt er nu ook iemand met de kreet: islamisering?

Tegelijkertijd treden beiden ook op als zelfbewuste sterke burgers. Immers, de buschauffeur voelde zich bedreigd en ongemakkelijk maar neemt toch te stap haar te weigeren. De vrouw weerstaat alle negatieve reacties op de niqab terwijl zij toch echt een blikvanger is, wordt in haar persoonlijke veiligheid en vrijheid aangetast, maar laat het er niet op zitten en dient een klacht in (tenminste ik neem aan dat zij dat gedaan heeft). Hulde voor beiden dan maar? Ingewikkeld hoor dat verantwoordelijk burgerschap. Vandaag toch maar eens lekker onverantwoordelijk doen dan.

0 comments.

Orange Fever: Notes on the Worldcup, football, nationalism and Deep Play in the Netherlands

Posted on July 11th, 2010 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

Imagine this. You are a nine year old boy or girl from a happy middle class or lower class family. The one thing you love the most is to play football on the streets with your friends, day in, day out:

This may appear as football in its most authentic form. Of course as an anthropologist you know that this idea of authenticity is shaped throughout the years and has many cultural influences. What matters here is that it is experienced as the most authentic form of football. And very understandable of course. You can play football all day long with the peers you like the most or envy the most for their skills. You may get interrupted by parents who want you to be home at six for dinner or a dental appointment which is a nuisance so you try to skip that. Of course that doesn’t work, but you know you can always return to the same part of the street and play without having to worry to much about anything. Now imagine that same boy (sorry girls) 15-18 years later. You have to play not just a friendly game with your peers. No this match is about much more than that. It is about making billions of money for the organizing committee. About making millions for your own football association and for yourself. It is about giving the nation you feel you belong to, hope and optimism for the future. It even appears that a good result will give the men in that same nation more sex. The game earlier 12,5 out of 16 million people belonging to the same nation watched your performance. This game will get even higher ratings; more then 25 million eyes watching you (and that is your nation alone). And your opponent is not just an opponent. It could have been the one who occupied your country during the last major war but it turned out to be the nation that plays a fundamental role in the founding myth of your nation centuries ago during one of the longest wars ever: the 80 year long war. You are playing for a nation in distress. That has recently suffered major blows to its reputation as a friendly, funny, tolerant and permissive country. By some it is now seen as a country of intolerance, homophobia, islamophobia and anti-semitism. A victory of you could change that.

That my dear friends is a completely different game than the one you played when you were nine. The football World Cup can be seen as a ‘deep play’. Jeremy Bentham’s coined the concept of “deep play” in his The Theory of Legislation. By ‘deep play’ he means a play in which the stakes are so high that it appears to be irrational for men to engage in it at all. The famous anthropologist Clifford Geertz used the notion in his essay Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.Clifford Geertz; Altered Foundation of Anthropology – washingtonpost.com

More than a description of a cockfight and the betting that accompanied it, “Deep Play” was a wide-ranging metaphorical interpretation of how the people of Bali saw themselves in relation to violence, social status, morality and belief.

“Every people, the proverb has it, loves its own form of violence,” Dr. Geertz wrote. “The cockfight is the Balinese reflection on theirs: on its look, its uses, its force, its fascination.”

The actual betting is not (just) the cocks fighting but the bets that are placed with men “com(ing) together in search of pleasure, [entering] into a relationship which will bring the participants, considered collectively, net pain rather than net pleasure”. With football it is therefore (at least) as much about the football as it is about the fans. In the Dutch case all those people dressed in orange. Orange is the color of the Dutch monarchy and used mostly on Queensday and during games of the national football team (but also for other national teams in the Netherlands).

The color Orange is much more the national color than for example the tricolor (red-white-blue) and represents a rather inclusive national identity that transcends regional but also ethnic minority identities. You just wear something orange and your part of the community. This appears to be different compared to Spain the opponent in the final. One of my students did research in Barcelona asking herself what the latest victory of Spain in the European football championship has meant for Spanish nationalism and Catalonian nationalism. While it appears that in most countries football has the capability to transcend regional identities in favor of a national identity, this is not the case in Catalonia (based upon her material and the other studies she has used). What did happen and does happen now is that people in Barcelona point to the fact that the success of the Spanish team is based upon players from Barcelona; they make from a Catalonian identity and encompassing identity that includes the Spanish national team. Although it is clear that regions in Spain are very important, this does not mean that the Spanish team is not supported at all of course. It is my impression however (mainly based upon reports in the media and my student’s research) that the situation is different in the Netherlands.

The orange carnival appeared to have emerged in the 1970s, in particular after the Dutch lost the Worldcup final in 1974 from the Germans, which still serves as a national trauma. In 1988 during the European cup it reaches next level when everything that can be made orange was turned into orange and in the last years a new hype of making the street where you live or even whole areas orange. It is in particular here that neo-capitalism plays an important role. Companies make all kinds of items from hats, to dresses and from wigs to magazines in orange; ready made for shops before the championships begin. Media play an important role here increasingly focussing on emotions of fans and players that appeal to the audience. And probably without the introduction of color tv in many families in 1974 (companies like Sony and Phillips often launch new models of tv’s right before the football championships) the color orange would not even have made it as a national color. The combination with football seems ideal: one can identity with a whole team, the game is easy to understand and played all over the world. According to David Winner football has become part of Dutch identity and people have found in football an easy and powerful way to express their national feelings and belonging during times of globalization and europeanization. The role of media, the orange campaign of companies and national identity brings us to the issue of cultural commodification and identity incorporation as explored by John and Jean Comaroff in their book Ethnicity, Inc. A recent post at Savage Minds on the Worldcup made me aware of this:Parallels of Ethnicity Inc. at the World Cup | Savage Minds

They have termed this process “Ethnicity, Inc.” at once referencing both the idea of membership in a culturally constituted “people” and the fact that this cultural identity is more frequently being objectified and marketed to a larger global economic community. Through their fieldwork and research as well as the research of others, the Comaroffs develop several key dimensions that make up the larger process including ideas inclusion and exclusion through privileged genetics, that commerce and consumption produce ethnic groups, and struggles over intellectual property for indigenous groups.

[…]

In the conclusion to the book the Comaroffs present a dynamic that is both promising and terrifying, “…we recognize, and have sought to make sense of, its appeal: of the promise of Ethnicity, Inc. to unlock new forms of self-realization, sentiment, entitlement, enrichment. This notwithstanding the fact that it carries within it a host of costs and contradictions: that it has both insurgent possibility and a tendency to deepen prevailing lines of inequality, the capacity both to enable and to disable, the power both to animate and to annihilate.” (Italics theirs) I applaud them for sticking their necks out on this one and speaking to an inherent contradiction in anthropology. But, it is the last dynamic that gives me shivers and one that some of the marketing around the World Cup has promoted in some capacity.

Football is serious business and the Orange Index (yes this does exist, it measures the commercial success of the worldcup in the Netherlands) shows a rise in sales of ‘orange products’, commercials, news and so on. That the national evening news uses almost half of its program for news on the Dutch national team (much more for example than news about the talks for a new Dutch government let alone international affaiars) is also a sign of how important it is or being made by media. And although it appears that one can find the orange houses and streets mostly in white lower class areas when the Dutch team is succesfull the orange fieber easily spreads to other etnic groups and classes. Nevertheless it also creates new fault lines in society for example between black and white (in particular after the European championship of 96 when black players had to take a lot of criticism and the entire team failed). The current is appears not to be so multicultural as in the nineties although two Moroccan-Dutch and one Moloccuan-Dutch player are part of the whole team. There are less black players compared to the nineties; Elia is the notable exception. And of course not everyone in the Netherlands loves football and some groups are very much opposed to what they call Orange Hysteria. In particular some orthodox protestant Christian groups have warned against corrupting influences on people’s morals but even those circles where many people have no television at all, a large part of the population will watch anyway as I have been told. Nevertheless on a different level football and the worldcup do have some cosmpolitian qualities as well, although they are not explored very often by research as Lorenz notes at antropologi.info (see also the interesting links there).

Orange Fever qualifies as a particular form of deep play in which the players are not just involved in a match stand stands for all those things mentioned above, but it is the game that gives people the capacity to give meaning to developments in current Dutch society. It makes the game larger than life, nurturing the already apparent Orange Fever to reach an exceptional level. Where Dutch people in times of an economic crisis, grievances about multiculturalism, racism and polarization have a strong sense of discomfort, they can lose themselves now in what appears to be a simpel game. Orange Fever is a proces that feeds itself by the success of the Dutch team, commodification of the majority ethnic color and the intense involvement of large parts of the population both in public and private. It leads to fantastic feasts but sometimes also to riots; it can unite people but it may also divide people. This makes it beautiful and scary at the same time. And we may even forget that it is about men who play with a ball.

2 comments.

Een wekelijks portie burgerschap 27 – Hanengevechten, Diep Spel en Oranjekoorts

Posted on July 8th, 2010 by martijn.
Categories: Burgerschapserie 2010.

Uit de burgerschapskalender:

Stel je voor: naast je wijk wordt een woonwagenkamp gepland. Prima. Je kan je niet herinneren dat je ooit moeilijkheden hebt gehad met woonwagenbewoners en Frans Bauer is ook een heel aardige man. Maar een aantal buren begint een hetze. Je kunt je mond houden. Maar je kunt ook laten weten wat je vindt en op het beslissende moment je mond opendoen.
11 juli finale WK voetbal

Op de één of andere manier heeft bovenstaand citaat schijnbaar met het WK voetbal te maken. En een beetje klopt dat ook wel. Tijdens het WK is, hoe verder het Nederlands elftal komt, Nederland steeds meer oranje en de feestvierende meute groeit per wedstrijd. In plaats van een aantal buren die in een hetze is begonnen, zien we eerder een heel groot aantal buren die opgaan in en mee liften met het succes van het nationaal elftal. De enorme oranjegekte, de enorme bedragen die gepaard gaan met dit WK, bespiegelingen over hoe Nederland er anders uit zou kunnen zien als het WK voor de verkiezingen had plaats gevonden en over hoe Nederland aan hoop, optimisme en vertrouwen zou kunnen winnen door het succes van het voetbalteam, maken van voetbal een ‘deep play’. ‘Deep play’ is een begrip van de antropoloog Jeremy Bentham die het omschrijft als een spel waarvan de inzet zo hoog is, dat geen enkel rationeel persoon er aan zou deelnemen. Het is toegepast door de antropoloog Clifford Geertz in zijn essay over hanengevechten op Bali Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. Geertz stelt dat we door deze hanengevechten veel kunnen leren over de samenleving als geheel; het gaat niet alleen om hanen die met elkaar vechten, maar om mannen die met elkaar vechten (en ja, de term ‘cock’ heeft dezelfde dubbelzinnige lading in het Engels als in de Balinese taal) en om een commentaar op de Balinese hiërarchische verhoudingen en daarmee ook op de Balinese samenleving zelf. De hanengevechten en de weddenschappen daarover verbeelden het netwerk van sociale relaties tussen verwanten en dorpsgenoten en worden min of meer omgekeerd zonder echter de bestaande status quo aan te tasten: “iedere wedstrijd is een wereld op zich”.

We kunnen inderdaad stellen dat iets soortgelijks ook opgaat voor het WK voetbal. Kijken naar voetbal hoort daar ook bij; het betrekt miljoenen mensen in een gemedialiseerd sport evenement en juist dat zorgt ervoor dat de belangen ver uit stijgen boven het spelletje van 11 tegen 11 mannen: miljarden euro’s, eer, aanzien, vertrouwen voor een heel land. De kleur Oranje is daarbij van wezenlijk belang: het is de kleur van de koninklijke familie, het nationaal elftal, maar gezien de grote betrokkenheid van de bevolking is de kleur oranje ook de kleur van de grootste etnische groep van Nederland: de autochtone Nederlander zonder daarbij minderheidsetniciteiten uit te sluiten. Je trekt gewoon iets oranjes aan en klaar is Ahmed. De commercie speelt daarbij een cruciale rol. Een punt overigens waar Geertz weinig aandacht voor had (en evenmin voor de rol van vrouwen en kolonialisme). In hun boek Ethnicity Inc. maken John en Jean Comaroff een interessante analyse van de vermarkting van bepaalde groepen in een neo-liberale wereld. Zij richten zich daarbij op het marketen van cultuur en etniciteit bijvoorbeeld door middel van toerisme en op het ontstaan van ondernemingen die gebaseerd zijn op het commercieel uitbaten van cultuur en etnische identiteit. Dit proces noemen zij ‘de Etnicity BV’ wat verwijst naar het idee van lidmaatschap van een volk en naar het idee dat deze culturele identiteit steeds vaker zou worden geobjectiveerd en omgezet in handelswaar voor een mondiale economie. De enorme hausse aan oranje-prullaria is daar een voorbeeld van, maar denk in het geval van Zuid Afrika ook aan de vele safari’s en trips naar de zwarte wijken die schijnbaar iedere gast in het NOS programma van Jack van Gelder moet maken. Volgens de Comaroffs heeft de etniciteit BV de tendens om bestaande ongelijkheden te vergroten (denk aan de achterstelling van de informele economie bij dit WK), maar het kan ook mensen mobiliseren (denk aan de in china gemaakte vuvuzela, maar ook de enorme menigte op het Museumplein waar Radio 538 een rol speelde) en animeren (denk aan die beesies) maar ook tot vernietiging leiden (wacht maar tot na het WK in de zwarte wijken). De commercie draagt zo in niet geringe mate bij aan deze deep play.

De onmogelijkheid om je aan het oranje te onttrekken juist door de commercie gecombineerd met de euforie over de overwinningen en de sociale commentaren over hoop en optimisme scheppen een situatie waarin de term oranjekoorts misschien nog wel beter is dan deep play. Waar velen zich in tijden van economische crisis, onvrede over de maatschappij en de staat en de polarisatie onder bevolking een sterk onbehagen voelen is er nu een situatie waarin Nederland zich collectief lijkt te verliezen in een ogenschijnlijk simpel spel. Het is een zichzelf versterkend en aanstekelijk proces dat leidt tot gigantische volksfeesten, maar ook tot rellen. Dat ertoe leidt dat mensen verenigd kunnen worden, maar dat mensen ook weer tegen over elkaar gezet kunnen worden (de Duitsers), dat voorspelbaar is maar ook ongeregeld. Dat maakt het mooi, maar ook eng. En nu maar hopen dat Oranje ook op het beslissende moment haar punt maakt.

0 comments.

In Memoriam: Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid (1943-2010)

Posted on July 5th, 2010 by martijn.
Categories: Misc. News.

Vandaag is in een ziekenhuis in Cairo professor Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid overleden aan een hersenvliesontsteking. Hij is 66 jaar geworden. Abu Zeid kwam naar Nederland nadat in 1995 een groep van islamistische advocaten een rechtzaak tegen hem had aangespannen met de eis dat hij van zijn vrouw zou scheiden. Met zijn kritiek op hedendaagse interpretaties van islam en sharia was zou hij een afvallige geworden zijn en als gevolg daarvan zou hij niet langer getrouwd kunnen zijn met zijn vrouw die nog wel moslim werd geacht. De Hof nam de eis over en eiste dat Abu Zeid zou scheiden. Hij en zijn vrouw weigerden echter en ontvluchten Egypte naar Nederland. Veel moslim en seculiere intellectuelen in de Arabische wereld waren verontwaardigd over zijn veroordeling die ze beschouwden als een schending van de vrijheid van meningsuiting en vrijheid van godsdienst.

Nasr Abu Zeid werd in 1943 vlakbij Cairo geboren. Hij streefde naar een hermeutische interpretatie van de Koran, in plaats van een traditionele en/of schriftuurlijke interpretatie die ervan uitgaat dat de teksten van de Koran helder en eenduidig zijn. In een hermeneutische interpretatie vraagt de analyticus zich af wat de schrijver ermee bedoeld heeft en gaat daarbij niet alleen uit van de geschreven tekst zelf. Hij was daarmee zeker niet de eerste, binnen de islamitische wereld bestaan dergelijke tradities al eeuwen en Abu Zeid verbond zijn hermeneutische benadering met die van Al-Arabi, een middeleeuwse mysticus. Abu Zeid stelt daarmee de idee dat de Koran een goddelijke openbaring is ter discussie en gaan ervan uit dat de Koran een literaire menselijke tekst is die ook menselijke interpretatie met zich meebrengt. Hij ontwikkelde een methodiek om de context van het ontstaan van de Koran te kunnen onderzoeken en zo de literaire en taalkundige kwaliteiten van de Koran in de historisch te interpreteren. Abu Zeid’s ideeën hebben misschien wel mede door de affaire in Egypte tot een grotere verspreiding geleid dan voorheen mogelijk zou zijn geweest, maar zijn werk trok toch al de nodige controverse. Dit geschiedde bijvoorbeeld na publicatie van zijn boek A Critique of Religious Discourse (Naqd al-khitab al-dini). Hoewel hij van de Egyptische regering wel weer mocht terugkeren naar Egypte (en daar ook vrienden bezocht), werd hij bijvoorbeeld dit jaar nog de toegang geweigerd in Koeweit.

Nadat hij en zijn vrouw via Spanje naar Nederland kwamen, kreeg hij een gastdocentschap aan de Universiteit Leiden (zie HIER zijn oratie) en later ook aan de Universiteit voor Humanistiek in Utrecht waar hij de Ibn Rushd Humanisme en Islam leerstoel bekleedde. In en vanuit Nederland hield hij zich ook bezig met werk voor de WRR en het islamdebat en toonde zich daarbij kritisch ten opzichte van moslims en niet-moslims in dat debat en hekelde bijvoorbeeld de zijns inziens negatieve interpretaties van islam door het Westen. Daartegenover stelt hij dat islam heel goed kan samengaan met democratie en vrijheid omdat beide begrippen intrinsiek deel uit maken van de islam. Dat leverde hem niet alleen de nodige kritiek op van moslims, maar (in Nederland) ook van mensen als Hans Jansen en Paul Scheffer, Ellian en Cliteur die beide in feite het oordeel van de Egyptische rechtbank dat Abu Zeid een ongelovige zou zijn, ondersteunen.

Abu Zeid heeft in zijn carrière de controverse niet geschuwd door zijn weliswaar genuanceerde en voorzichtige standpunten over zeer gevoelige onderwerpen voor moslims en niet-moslims. Zijn kritiek op het anti-islam gevoel en zijn pleidooi voor een alternatieve lezing van de Koran leverde veel zere tenen op, maar ook waardering voor iemand die het waagde geen partij te kiezen in de wereld die soms beheerst lijkt te worden tussen wij-zij indelingen van moslims en niet-moslims.

Zie voor een kort artikel van Nasr Abu Zeid in ISIM Review: (Inter)textuality: interactive cultural practices.
Een special van NIO: Islam in de spiegel van…
Brief aan God (NMO)
IKON LUX Magazine Nasr Abu Zeid
Interview met Abu Zeid door Anja Meulenbelt.

3 comments.

Anti-semitism, Homophobia and Islamophobia in the Netherlands

Posted on July 2nd, 2010 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

Recently there are reports, again, about rising anti-semitism among Moroccan-Dutch youth. There has been talk about using ‘decoy-jews‘ (lokjoden in Dutch) as to expose and arrest violent youth who according to some seem to think that anti-semitism has become socially acceptable. The police is also talking about using ‘decoy-gays’ in response to, apparently, also rising homophobia in Dutch society. A recent report shows that although homosexuality is much accepted than several years ago there are still concerns for homogenativity and homophobia. It appears that in particular migrant youth often have negative attitudes towards homosexuality.

On Thursday Dutch Parliament had a special meeting in which he denied the rise of anti-semitism but rather that the number goes up and down, mainly determined by tensions in the Middle East. The anti-semitic and homophobic events and the ensuing debates were welcomed by many Muslim organisations and individuals but als triggered the response that the same amount of attention should be given to Islamophobia which according to several reports is indeed (also?) on the rise. According to the recent Racism Monitor anti-semitic violence is decreasing while islamophobic violence is increasing (Report in Dutch). This looks somewhat in contradiction with the general image of the Netherlands as a tolerant, quiet country. A recent study (in Dutch) by Rob de Witte shows however that racist violence in the Netherlands is a structural trend since the 1950s (the point of departure for that study). There were severe reactions against racist violence in the past but only after the rise of extreme right their involvement in the events; the structural character of these events was usually denied. Nevertheless there are also obvious differences between past and present violence. A recent article in Ethnos makes sheds some light I think on these issues:
Bangstad, Sindre and Bunzl, Matti(2010) ”Anthropologists Are Talking’ About Islamophobia and Anti-
Semitism in the New Europe’, Ethnos, 75: 2, 213 — 228

The terms anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are common in the media, but what do they actually refer to? Has traditional anti-Semitism run its historical course while Islamophobia threatens to become the defining condition of the new unified Europe? Both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are phenomena of exclusion of minorities, but does that make them comparable? And if yes, in what way can such an attempt at comparison escape the pitfall of analogizing the historical situation of the Jew and the contemporary situation of Muslims?

Matti Bunzl is a Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna (2004) and Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe (2007). In his latter book Bunzl argues that are significant distinctions between ‘traditional’ – ‘modern’ anti-Semitism and the ‘new’ anti-semitism that is still part of Europe. In his talk he points to several similarities between contempory Muslims and the Jews but he also argues against the ‘alarmist’ trend of equating both groups in shouting ‘Muslims are the new Jews’. In the interview Bunzl clarifies his stance:

The key difference from anti-Judaism was that in anti-Semitism, Jews had no escape. If you are racially, biologically different, there is nothing you can do. In anti-Judaism Jews could convert. From racial anti-Semitism, there was no way to convert. Now why do I call it ‘modern’? I call it modern because it happens in the late nineteenth century, at the pinnacle of modernity. It is linked to key processes of modernity; first and foremost the creation of the nation-state. Which really has its heyday, its great nationalist movements, in the nineteenth century. Think of the Habsburg Monarchy and all the nationalist movements that break it apart for instance, or think of Norway. This is exactly the moment when Norway wants to be its own nation-state. This is the height of when this happens, so it is a modern term.
The reason I call it ‘traditional’ is because I want to set it against what some people including myself, reluctantly, call the ‘new anti-Semitism’. So it is modern because its origin is in the moment of modernity; traditional because it is opposed to the new anti-Semitism. So what do I mean by new anti-Semitism? There it gets tricky. I try to be very anthropological and use as much as I can what we in anthropology call ‘emic’ categories as opposed to ‘etic’ categories. Emic categories are the categories a population itself uses. Etic categories are categories from the outside that you would impose as an analyst.

The new anti-Semitism as an emic category of European discourse by-andlarge refers to the wave of hostility against Jews, quite violent, of the 2000s. It is a wave of hostility against Jews that has been widely linked – and I think, broadly speaking, correctly – to the political situation in the Middle East. The most important time period we are talking about here is 2002–2004, the political contextwas the second intifada, and there was a whole string of violent attacks on Jews centred first and foremost in France and Belgium, but not exclusively. That has been labelled and debated widely under the term the ‘new anti-Semitism’. I do differentiate the new anti-Semitism from the traditional/modern anti-Semitism because of a component that separates it from the anti-Semitism of the early twentieth century, and that is a Muslim component. Now, I do not argue that the new anti-Semitism is an exclusively Muslim phenomenon, but there is a part that disenfranchised Muslim youth have played as perpetrators of these waves of anti-Semitic attacks, especially in France and Belgium. To me, that is a shift from what I call traditional anti-Semitism and therefore could be seen as something new.
[…]
So, traditional/modern anti-Semitism was all about creating an ethnic purity; a pure nation marking the Jews as Other so that you have a pure German space, pure France, etc. When the new anti-Semitism is perpetrated by, for example, Muslims in some relation to the politics of the Middle East, the project is altogether different. If a young Muslim attacks a synagogue or a man who wears a yarmulke, they are not doing so to create an ethnically pure France; that is just not the project. It is a different project. It is a project of resistance against what I think most of them see as a European colonization of the Middle East, namely Israel.

Bunzl defines Islamophobia as

as a rejection of a population on the grounds of their Muslimness

whereby he doesn’t imply that Islamophobia doesn’t have roots that are much older than the current decades. He states both anti-semitism and Islamophobia are sometimes used to block debates about issues that should be debated such as (my examples) the politics of Israel and the unequal position of women and men in Islam.The idea prevalent among some Muslim youth that Muslims are new Jews (as mentioned above rejected by Bunzl, and I think rightly so) should also be seen in the context of their perspective that violence against Jews and gays receives much more attention in media and politics than Islamophobia. They are not completely wrong I think. Looking for example at the last elections and the programs of the political parties it is clear that although all parties state ‘it’s the economy stupid!’, no party recognizes the difficult socio-economic circumstances of migrants (except as a reason not to let people enter the country anymore), the differences between generations that causes problems, modernity’s emphasis on individuality and authenticity that partly stimulates religiosity and only lip-service is paid to the issue of discrimination. That is however in general and not only pertaining to Muslims.

I agree with Bunzl that no matter how dangerous anti-semitism and homophobia are, Islamophobia is a greater political danger than anti-semitism. Whereas in the past Jews were a target for political parties (even some contemporary right wing movements) to mobilize people, this has vanished in the these days and several parties have emerged that primarily agitate against Muslims while being pro-Jewish/pro-Israel. What is clear of course based upon the Dutch case, and in other countries as well, is that accusations of Islamophobia and Anti-semitism are not only used to block debates about particular issues but also has performative aspects to it in which such accusations serve as rhetorical devices in the construction of us vs them. Pronouncing something as anti-semitic or islamophobic can be seen an attempt by groups to mobilize their own constituency, create unity and immunize themselves from attacks from the outside, but can also be seen as a radical political contestation attempting to change the status quo and making the ‘other’ into an immoral category. The same can be said for homosexuality that as Paul Mepschen shows in his piece Erotics of Persuasion:

In the debate about Islam in Dutch society, the politics of homosexuality have increasingly been instrumentalized as a marker of Dutchness, and simultaneously of (Islamic) alterity. While Muslims were increasingly criticized for not embracing sexual tolerance, and represented as homophobic, traditional, and backward, homosexuality was mobilized as the hallmark of what it means to be Dutch and modern today. This functioned as a grounding for the reinvention of Dutch national identity as post-religious (secular), ‘tolerant’, modern, and (neo)liberal.

This can turn ugly when anti gay violence activists turn racist. Judith Butler pointed to this recently when she refused the Civil Courage Award from Berlin Pride:
Judith Buter turns down civil courage award from Berlin Pride | Alana lentin.net

In the past years, racism has indeed been the red thread of international Pride events, from Toronto to Berlin, as well as of the wider gay landscape (see queer of colour theorists’ Jasbir Puar’s and Amit Rai’s early critique of this in their 2002 article ‘Monster Terrorist Fag’). In 2008, the Berlin Pride motto was ‘Hass du was dagegen?’, which might translate as ‘You go’ a problem or wha’?’. Homophobia and Transphobia are redefined as the problems of youth of colour who apparently don’t speak proper German, whose Germanness is always questioned, and who simply don’t belong. 2008 is also the year that the hate crimes discourse enters more significantly into German sexual politics. Its rapid assimilation was aided by the fact that the hatefully criminal homophobe was already known: migrants, who are already criminalised, and are incarcerated and even deported with ever growing ease. This moral panic is made respectable by dubious media practices and so-called scientific studies: Where every case of violence that can be connected to a gay, bi or trans person (no matter if the apparent perpetrator is white or of Colour, and no matter if the basis is homophobia, transphobia or a traffic altercation) is circulated as the latest proof of what we all know already – that queers, especially white men it seems, are worst off of all, and that ‘the homophobic migrants’ are the main cause for this. This increasingly accepted truth is by no small measure the fruit of the work of homonationalist organizations like the Lesbian and Gay Federation Germany and the gay helpline Maneo, whose close collaboration with Pride ultimately caused Butler to reject the award. This work largely consists in media campaigns that repeatedly represent migrants as ‘archaic’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘homophobic’, violent, and unassimilable. Nevertheless, one of these organizations now ironically receives public funding in order to ‘protect’ people of colour from racism. The ‘Rainbow Protection Circle against Racism and Homophobia’ in the gaybourhood Schöneberg was spontaneously greeted by the district mayor with an increase in police patrols. As anti-racists, we sadly know what more police (LGBT or not) mean in an area where many people of colour also live – especially at times of ‘war on terror’ and ‘security, order and cleanliness.’

And in her own words:
Judith Butler – I must distance myself

he host organizations refuse to understand antiracist politics as an essential part of their work. Having said this, I must distance myself from this complicity with racism, including anti-Muslim racism.

We all have noticed that gay, bisexual, lesbian, trans and queer people can be instrumentalized by those who want to wage wars, i.e. cultural wars against migrants by means of forced islamophobia and military wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. In these times and by these means, we are recruited for nationalism and militarism. Currently, many European governments claim that our gay, lesbian, queer rights must be protected and we are made to believe that the new hatred of immigrants is necessary to protect us. Therefore we must say no to such a deal. To be able to say no under these circumstances is what I call courage. But who says no? And who experiences this racism? Who are the queers who really fight against such politics?

And perhaps it her sharp analysis that also might explain why we lack any thorough long term measures against racism, anti-semitism, islamophobia, homophobia or any other intolerant attitude and behaviour. By not acknowledging the structural part of this violence and by focusing on the violence perpretrated by migrant (Muslim) youth our own image of tolerance and openness remains intact. Moreover, the whole debate is not about the victims and merely in very stereotypical terms about the perpetrators. In the end it is mostly about the self-image of the Dutch moral community. Measures taken are therefore aimed at symbolically protecting the image of the tolerant Dutch by announcing counter measures that make good headlines but do nothing to improve the situation of the groups that are attacked.

1 comment.