C L O S E R

Protest tegen mogelijk verbod gezichtssluiers

Posted on September 27th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Activism, Gender, Kinship & Marriage Issues, ISIM/RU Research, Notes from the Field, Public Islam.

Over de recente plannen voor een verbod op gezichtssluier in het openbaar:

Op Facebook is een pagina geopend naar aanleiding van de recente plannen voor een verbod op gezichtssluiers dat in zou moeten gaan op 1 januari 2013. Op deze pagina wordt opgeroepen tot een protest actie tegen de plannen:
PROTEST ACTIE TEGEN NIQAAB VERBOD BIJ 2de KAMER!

Time
07 October · 16:00 – 18:30
Location
Den Haag

Met de wil en toestemming van Allaah zullen wij op vrijdag 7 oktober van 16.00 – 18.30 een actie houden. Daarin zullen wij onze ongenoegen uiten en dit verwerpen. Wij attenderen onze geliefde achterban dan ook om een gaatje vrij te houden op deze mooie vrijdag.

De protestactie zal plaatsvinden bij het Binnenhof.

Daarnaast is er een petitie opgesteld tegen de plannen:
Nee tegen boerkaverbod | petities.nl

Nee tegen boerkaverbod
4udta

Minister Donner wil het boerkaverbod gaan invoeren. Hij is van mening dat de boerka niet past in onze open samenleving en dat vrouwen met de gezichtssluier niet volwaardig mee kunnen doen.

Voor een papieren versie mail naar tegenboerkaverbod@hotmail.nl en wij sturen u zo snel mogelijk een pdf.

VERGEET UW ONDERTEKENING NIET TE BEVESTIGEN VIA EMAIL

PETITIE
Wij

willen dat moslima’s die hiervoor kiezen de vrijheid hebben de gezichtssluier te dragen.
constateren

Wij constateren dat moslima’s met dit verbod fundamenteel in hun vrijheid worden beperkt. Wij willen erop wijzen dat een groot deel van deze vrouwen Nederlandse bekeerlingen zijn (en dus niet gedwongen zijn door familie).
Wij denken dat een verbod deze vrouwen zal stigmatiseren en hen buiten de maatschappij zal plaatsen.
Wij willen wijzen op Groot Brittannië waar vrouwen met de gezichtssluier gewoon meedraaien in de samenleving.
en verzoeken

Wij wensen dat het boerkaverbod niet door de kamer wordt aangenomen.
Wij willen de religieuze vrijheid om de gezichtssluier in Nederland te dragen zonder hiervoor boetes te ontvangen.

 
Zie ook het KRO-programma De Wandeling waarin Shaista Khan aan het woord komt die een niqab draagt.:

In tegenstelling tot minister Donner volgens wie de gezichtssluier geen religieus gebruik is, stelt Shaista Khan in die uitzending het tegendeel. Op Wijblijvenhier.nl benadrukt Malika Mouhdi het belang van keuzevrijheid voor vrouwen:
De keuze is aan mij alleen | Wijblijvenhier.nl

Hoewel ik ‘verleidelijke’ kleding absoluut niet iets vind dat je buitenshuis zou moeten dragen, is het niet aan mannen of andere vrouwen zoals ik om besluiten te maken over wat iemand moet dragen. Of het nou gaat om een kort rokje of een niqaab, het is en blijft eenieders eigen keuze. Het is immers mijn lichaam en er is niemand die er iets over te zeggen heeft behalve ikzelf. Zeker niet een of andere gouverneur, een minister Donner of een groep zogenaamde feministen die zo verbitterd zijn dat ze niet kunnen inzien waarom iemand zichzelf wel wil bedekken. It’s my body and my choice, deal with it!

Ik zal de verschillende vormen van activisme blijven volgen. Reacties en tips zijn welkom natuurlijk.

3 comments.

'Burqa ban' in Europe

Posted on September 26th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Activism, Gender, Kinship & Marriage Issues, Public Islam.

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player
France’s Burqa Ban: Two Women Fined for Covering Faces – ABC News

“The problem is not the fine,” their lawyer told the German news agency DPA on Thursday. “The problem is that these women are effectively under house arrest. That’s the real punishment.”

The French proceedings were closely followed by governments around Europe. Italy and Belgium have passed similar legislation, while Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany have debated them. A number of nations already forbid face-covering garments for state employees while they’re on the job — including teachers — but a full ban has never been tested by modern European democracies.

“(The ban) simply violates my individual freedom, my freedom of thought, of religious expression and practice,” Ahmas told the Daily Telegraph, “and I have absolutely no intention of applying it.”

The French law has popular support, and some politicians claim they want to save Muslim women from the backward influence of religiously conservative men.

“There are extremist gurus out there and we must stop their influence and barbaric ideologies,” a Communist Party lawmaker named André Gerin told reporters last year, according to USA Today. “Covering one’s face undermines one’s identity, a woman’s femininity and gender equality.”

But the French law makes no reference to religion or gender. It forbids face coverings but makes a number of exceptions — for motorcycle helmets, for example, or fencing and ski masks.

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‘Burqa ban’ in Europe

Posted on September 26th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Activism, Gender, Kinship & Marriage Issues, Public Islam.

France’s Burqa Ban: Two Women Fined for Covering Faces – ABC News

“The problem is not the fine,” their lawyer told the German news agency DPA on Thursday. “The problem is that these women are effectively under house arrest. That’s the real punishment.”

The French proceedings were closely followed by governments around Europe. Italy and Belgium have passed similar legislation, while Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany have debated them. A number of nations already forbid face-covering garments for state employees while they’re on the job — including teachers — but a full ban has never been tested by modern European democracies.

“(The ban) simply violates my individual freedom, my freedom of thought, of religious expression and practice,” Ahmas told the Daily Telegraph, “and I have absolutely no intention of applying it.”

The French law has popular support, and some politicians claim they want to save Muslim women from the backward influence of religiously conservative men.

“There are extremist gurus out there and we must stop their influence and barbaric ideologies,” a Communist Party lawmaker named André Gerin told reporters last year, according to USA Today. “Covering one’s face undermines one’s identity, a woman’s femininity and gender equality.”

But the French law makes no reference to religion or gender. It forbids face coverings but makes a number of exceptions — for motorcycle helmets, for example, or fencing and ski masks.

0 comments.

Minister Donner as Mufti: New developments in the Dutch ‘burqa debates’

Posted on September 21st, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Gender, Kinship & Marriage Issues, Guest authors, Headline, Multiculti Issues, Public Islam.

Guest Author: Annelies Moors
Minister Donner as Mufti: New developments in the Dutch ‘burqa debates’

Following in the footsteps of France and Belgium, on Friday 16 September the Dutch Council of Ministers agreed to prohibit covering the face in public space. Although the headlines already consider it a run race, the draft Bill still needs to be sent to the Council of State, the government’s legal advisory body, before parliament will vote on it. One of the questions the Council of State needs to answer is its compatibility with the Constitution.

This is not the first time an attempt is made to implement a ban on face-veiling in the Netherlands. In December 2005, the Netherlands was the first country in Europe where a parliamentary majority voted in favour of a resolution to ban the burqa (and the niqab) from all public space. Geert Wilders, who tabled the resolution, specifically targeted Muslim women, by proposing a ban of ‘the burqa’ rather than of face-coverings more generally.* His main argument was that the burqa is a sign of Muslim women’s oppression and an obstacle to their emancipation. As it turned out, it was not easy to implement such a ban. A commission installed by the then Minister for Integration stated that a general ban of the burqa would be an infringement of the freedom of religion, whereas a general ban of face-coverings would only be possible for reasons of security. However, the police, public transport, and the security sector all stated that face-veiling was not a security issue. The next Center-Left coalition government no longer aimed for a general ban, but instead worked towards a number of functional bans (in education, health, public transport and for civil servants) using the argument of the need for open communication to maintain the rule of law. It only succeeded in implementing the ban for civil servants.

The recent attempts to ‘ban the burqa’ do not come as a surprise. The new Center-Right minority government has concluded an agreement of support with Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV). A general ban on face-coverings was not only included in the coalition agreement, but the issue was also taken up in the Memorandum on Integration presented by the Minister of the Interior, Piet Hein Donner, a few months ago. This document officially declared the end of Dutch multicultural society. It considers Dutch society as a community of citizens with a shared language, values and beliefs, that is grounded in a fundamental continuity of values, beliefs, institutions, and habits, which shape ‘the leading culture’, and to which those who settle in the Netherlands need to adapt. Government needs to ‘confront citizens with behaviour that is contrary to notions of cohesion and citizenship’, if necessary through legal obligations. The document then explicitly mentions face-veiling as a cause of discomfort and hence an issue where the legislature needs to act normatively. The intention is to prohibit covering the face in public from 1 January 2013 as a matter of public order.

Commenting on the decision of the Council of Ministers to move forward with the ban, Minister Donner underlined that face-veiling is contrary to the character and customs of public life in the Netherland where we should be able to recognize each others’ faces. This rather ambiguous formulation seems to hint both at the need to be identifiable and to participate in open communication. This raises the question on which legal grounds this can be demanded from citizens who simply step outside their door. Moreover, if one were to take this seriously, there is a far wider range of forms of public presence that could be taken into account, such as wearing sunglasses (especially reflecting ones that make it impossible to ‘look each other into the eye’) and the use of iPods, cellphones and similar ‘obstacles to open communication’. Perhaps Donner was referring to the sense of discomfort or intimidation people may experience when confronted with someone who wears a face-veil. However, the actual chance to find oneself in such a situation is rather slim, as, on average, less than 3 in 100.000 people wear a face-veil (100-400 persons in the whole country). And again, there is a host of other dressing styles and accompanying behaviour that may cause fear or discomfort. Men in army boots and bomber jackets as well as men in expensively tailored suits and other forms of power dressing can be quite intimidating to particular publics. Whereas legislating against such styles of dress, worn by far larger numbers, would be considered ridiculous (as well as an infringement of the freedom of expression), women wearing face-veils, an extremely small minority, are an easy target.

Donner also used two more specific arguments to legitimize a ban of face-veiling. First, he argues that face-veiling can be considered as contrary to the principle of equality between men and women as only women are required to don a face-veil. The intention here seems to be to protect women against gender discrimination. Resonating strongly with Wilders’ earlier 2005 resolution to ban ‘the burqa’ as a sign of women’s oppression and an obstacle to their emancipation, this reference to gender discrimination implies that wearing a face-veil is considered as a form of gender oppression. However, the women concerned – a considerable number of whom are Dutch converts – underline that they do so by choice, often to the dismay of their families. What then are the grounds to consider face-veiling as a form of gender discrimination the state needs to legislate against? And if it were the case that these women are pressured to wear a face-veil, on what ethical grounds should the state then exclude them – the victims – from education, health care, public transport and public space? It makes, in fact, more sense to consider the ban itself, which disproportionately affects women, as an infringement of the equality of men and women. Moreover, if we are to take Donner’s line of argumentation seriously, this also raises the more general issue of gender difference in dress. Amongst strictly orthodox Protestants some object to women wearing pants. Does this then mean that wearing skirts, as a sartorial practice only affecting women, is also an infringement of the equality of men and women? Should this then also be banned? And what about secular gendered styles of dress, such as wearing high heels, a potential health and safety risk, which also mainly women engage in?

But the most remarkable is Donner’s second argument. Whereas Geert Wilders considers the prohibition of ‘the burqa’ important to stop ‘the Islamization of Europe’, according to Donner face-veiling is a cultural or regional style of dress, rather than one related to Islam. Here he follows the French president Sarkozy who in his speech to parliament in 2009, stated that the burqa is ‘not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience’. Obviously, when face-veiling is only considered as a regional style, rather than an Islamic practice, banning face-veils can no longer be considered as an infringement of the constitutional right of the freedom of religion. Whereas it is true that some Muslims who oppose face-veiling follow a similar line of argumentation – it is not really an Islamic practice -, there are also Islamic scholars who support face-veiling. In any case, the face-veiling women themselves strongly underline that they do so for religious reasons. What matters here is that Donner – a practicing Protestant – does not simply express his personal opinion about what is Islamic and what is not, but that he does so in the function of Minister of the Interior. Such a form of direct state interference in the substance of a religion goes against the grain of Dutch secularism. It is ironic that a Minister who strongly underlines the importance of the continuity of Dutch values and institutions, produces such a fundamental break with Dutch ways of organizing the relation between the state and religion. In essence, he proposes that the state acts as theologian. A discussion whether face-veiling is or is not an Islamic practice is an internal Muslim affair and should not be a Dutch governmental concern. It is helpful here to go back to 1985 when the municipal council of Alphen aan de Rijn attempted to ban headscarves in public schools using the argument that wearing a headscarf is not a Quranic obligation. In response to parliamentary questions, the then Minister of Education, also a Christian Democrat, stated that it is not up to public authorities to decide about the correct interpretation of the Quran, and the ban was withdrawn. In a similar vein, it also is not the task of the Minister of the Interior to judge whether face-veiling is Islamic or not, unless he wants to claim the position of ‘state mufti’. In that case, it is, however, unlikely that his views will be considered authoritative in the circles of the women concerned.

* The term burqa is highly problematic. It refers to the Afghani style of full covering (with a grid in front of the eyes), which evokes the Taliban regime and women’s oppression. The women who face-veil in the Netherlands usually wear the Arab style niqab, a thin, mostly black piece of cloth that covers the face, but often leaves the eyes uncovered.

Annelies Moors studied Arabic at the University of Damascus and Arabic and anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She holds the chair for contemporary Muslim societies at the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She is co-director of the research programme group ‘Globalizing Culture and the Quest for Belonging: Ethnographies of the Everyday’, and director of the research programme Muslim Cultural Politics at the AiSSR (Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research). Annelies Moors is the primary investigator of a NWO Cultural Dynamics programme on ‘Islamic cultural practices and performances: New youth cultures in Europe’. She has published widely on gender, nation and religion in such fields as Muslim family law and Islamic marriages, wearing gold, the visual media (postcards of Palestine), migrant domestic labor, Islamic fashion, and wearing face-veils.

UPDATES BY Martijn
27 January 2011: Despite a negative advise the Dutch government persists in banning the face-veil.

7 comments.

Veilige religie of religieuze vrijheid

Posted on September 20th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Important Publications, ISIM/RU Research, Religion Other, Religious and Political Radicalization.

Het wetenschappelijke tijdschrift voorReligie, Recht en Beleid heeft een themanummer over de relatie tussen religie en (gevoelens van) veiligheid. In dit themanummer, onder redactie van Beatrice de Graaf en Sipco Vellenga.

Aflevering 2, juli 2011
Redactioneel
Veilige religie, of religieuze veiligheid?
Trefwoorden: Editorial, Religion, Safety
Auteurs Maurits Berger

Religie en Onveiligheid
Trefwoorden: Editorial, Religion, Safety
Auteurs Beatrice de Graaf en Sipco Vellenga

Religieuze orthodoxie als bedreiging – Verschuivingen in het publieke debat
Trefwoorden: public debate, religious orthodoxy, religion and violence
Auteurs Sipco Vellenga

Religie, criminaliteit en geweld: ambivalente bevindingen
Trefwoorden: religious commitment, fundamentalism, muslim-radicalism, crime, violence, prevention
Auteurs Bas van Stokkom

Wanneer religie niet aan onze kant staat – Een cultuurpsychologische analyse van angst voor religie
Trefwoorden: religion, fear, cultural psychology, agency
Auteurs Mark Dechesne

‘Moge Hij onze ogen openen’ – De radicale utopie van het ‘salafisme’
Trefwoorden: salafism, social movements, radicalisation, muslims
Auteurs Martijn de Koning

Religion bites: religieuze orthodoxie op de nationale veiligheidsagenda
Trefwoorden: securitization, terrorism, securitization-framework, salafism
Auteurs Beatrice de Graaf

Discussie: Drie visies op de relatie tussen religie en veiligheidsbeleid
Verslag van de expertmeeting ‘Angst voor religie?’ van de Commissie Religie in het Publieke Domein, 23 juni 2010, Den Haag
Trefwoorden government, safety policy, religious orthodoxy, counternarratives
Auteurs Ernst Hirsch Ballin, Peter Knoope en James Kennedy

Religie, veiligheid en de gedaanteverandering van religie
Trefwoorden: religious transformation, religion and safety, religion and lifestyle
Auteurs Erik Borgman

Jurisprudentie
Het afdwingen van een islamitische verstoting
Trefwoorden: case law, divorce, Pakistan
Auteurs Maurits Berger

Kruisbeelden op openbare scholen in Italië (II)
De uitspraak van de Grand Chamber van het Europese Hof voor de Rechten van de Mens
Trefwoorden: case law, religion, Italy
Auteurs Carla Zoethout

Dit themanummer is het resultaat van een expert-meeting over religie en (on-)veiligheid georganiseerd door Forum. In mijn bijdrage probeer ik een kader te bieden dat een alternatief is voor bestaande radicaliseringsperspectieven op islam en op ‘salafisme’ in het bijzonder. Ik richt me daarbij in het bijzonder op het proces van betekenisgeving en laat zien dat veel praktijken van de ‘salafi’ beweging niet per definitie problematisch hoeven te zijn, maar vooral gericht zijn op het bieden van een alternatieve visie op de wereld hen heen en op het reorganiseren van het dagelijks leven van de participanten. Dit gebeurt dan wel op zo’n manier dat ze op gespannen voet kunnen staan met de visie van de Nederlandse staat op goed burgerschap dat sinds 9/11 steeds meer in het teken is komen te staan van veiligheid, seculiere en sexuele vrijheden.

U vindt meer informatie hier: 2 2011 · Tijdschrift voor Religie, Recht en Beleid · BJu Tijdschriften

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Niet het laatste woord: debat de laatste fatwa in Argan

Posted on September 17th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Internal Debates, ISIM/RU Research, Multiculti Issues, Notes from the Field, Public Islam, Religious and Political Radicalization, Young Muslims.

Afgelopen vrijdag was er in jongerencentrum Argan in Amsterdam een debat over de ‘final fatwa’ van GroenLinks Tweede Kamerlid Tofik Dibi. Tijdens deze avond onder leiding van Nadia Bouras ging Tofik Dibi in debat met jongerenimam Yasin elForkani en met de zaal over de inhoud en vorm van Final Fatwa. Ik had de eer een inleiding te mogen geven. Hier de tekst van de inleiding en een korte impressie van de avond. (more…)

1 comment.

Spring in the Arab Spring

Posted on September 15th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Society & Politics in the Middle East.

Guest Author: Gert Borg
Spring

If, in Google, you type “Arab Spring” and hit the button, you get more than 14 million hits back. If you type the Arabic equivalent “al-rabî‘ al-‘arabî” you are bound to find 4 million hits, which gives it a decent second place.

The question that Google will not answer is: “Do these words really mean the same?” “Spring” evokes the idea of a new beginning, of rebirth and new fertility. But what does rabî ‘ mean? For this we go back to an Arabic saying: al-shi‘r dîwân al-‘Arab, which roughly means: poetry is the common memory of the Arabs.

What does rabî ‘ mean in Arabic poetry? First, of course, it is the season after winter; winter in the Arab desert is a dry and stormy season, that makes it difficult for nomadic tribes to survive. Draught, famine and need forces them into skirmishes, raids and battles, mainly for food.

In contrast rabî ‘ is the season of rainfall, flowing wâdî’s and a green desert, enough to feed the hungry cattle. Rabî ‘ is the season of lush abundance. Rabî ‘ can also indicate the cloud that brings plentiful amounts of rain. Therefore metaphorically the word can be used to signify a generous person or even generosity itself. You’ll see that there is a subtle difference from the meaning of spring in western languages.

Cynically the only ones who met generosity in the months of the Arab spring were those Arabs who did not rebel against their leaders: the governments of Saudi-Arabia and some Gulf states provided their subjects with large funds and allowances as a compensation for their willingness to oblige. And those who revolted will certainly not feel that, as a result of their rebellion, material wealth came their way. The population in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria will probably remember these months for shortage and destitution., often more so than in the days of dictatorship. What they can be proud of, though, is their newly won freedom, liberty of speech and hope for a better future.

In spite of all the setbacks at the moment, has the Arab world become a better one for the people who live there? It definitely could not become any worse than it was before. I would even say, that the developments of these last months will change the Arab world for a long time to come. The Arab world will probably never be the same.

But why was this revolution necessary in the first place? The population obviously freed itself from dictatorship and military rule, but these were not in place since the Beginning of Time. So how did they emerge in the Arab world after colonization by western powers? Did local dictators simply replace the former foreign powers? Some in the Arab world tend to believe that, but I think it’s a wrong assumption. Let’s not forget that the first generation of national leaders aroused an enormous enthusiasm and feeling of optimism among the local population.

If it is true, that a leader can only develop into a dictator, when he can be certain that he will not be easily replaced, then there must have been outside factors that kept him in this situation. And it is here that I believe that the two s-words should be mentioned. I strongly believe, that the ultimate responsibility for keeping the dictators in place lies with the western world for reasons of (1) stability and (2) a steady flow of oil. But it was certainly shortsighted to believe, that dictators could contribute to political stability as dictatorship is probably one of the most volatile and unstable forms of government as can be witnessed now.

Let’s not forget that in countries like Egypt, Iraq and Syria after the revolutions that freed these countries from colonialist powers there were actually parties and social organizations such as trade unions. The decades of dictatorship, supported and sponsored by the West, eliminated these necessary organizations that the Arab world so badly needs at the moment.

What went down with these organizations was social cohesion and social commitment and what remained was individual selfishness, materialism and a total lack of meaningful self-organization. The problem at the moment is: how can the Arab world regain values such as social commitment, mutual respect and dignity, transgressin local, tribal and religious interests.

Freedom can and should be conquered. Democracy, however, is an attitude that can only be slowly acquired.

Gert Borg is assistant professor Islam and Arab studies at Radboud University Nijmegen and former director of the Dutch-Flemish Institute in Cairo. This text was a spoken column at the Lux / Soeterbeeck debate with Tarek Osman on the Arab Spring

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'Tired of 9/11': Remembering as a dogma and creed

Posted on September 14th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: International Terrorism, Murder on theo Van Gogh and related issues, Some personal considerations.

Is it possible to have a commemoration that includes alternative meanings of 9/11 and that produces alternative forms of solidarity and public memory? (more…)

0 comments.

‘Tired of 9/11’: Remembering as a dogma and creed

Posted on September 14th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: International Terrorism, Murder on theo Van Gogh and related issues, Some personal considerations.

Is it possible to have a commemoration that includes alternative meanings of 9/11 and that produces alternative forms of solidarity and public memory? (more…)

0 comments.

Tarek Osman en het verhaal van Egypte

Posted on September 12th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Society & Politics in the Middle East.

Datum: 13 november 2011
Lokatie: Lux Nijmegen, Mariënburg 38-39

Tarek Osman is een Egyptische econoom en auteur van Egypte; een geschiedenis van Nasser tot aan Mubarak. In dit boek, dat verschijnt bij uitgeverij Bulaaq, beschrijft Osman de moderne ontwikkeling van het land Egypte.

In Egypte zijn twee van de belangrijkste moderne stromingen in de Arabisch- islamitische wereld ontstaan; het Arabisch nationalisme van de charismatische presidenten Nasser en Sadat en het radicaal islamitische gedachtegoed van de Moslimbroederschap. Osman’s boek biedt daarnaast inzicht in hoe het moderne Egypte, met mondaine steden als Caïro en Alexandrië, is verworden tot een autocratisch geregeerd land dat tot armoede is vervallen en waar de jeugd (70% van de bevolking is jonger dan 35) weinig tot geen perspectief heeft. Het boek biedt daarmee tevens een blik op het ontstaan van de Arabische Lente in Egypte. In deze lezing, in het kader van het Soeterbeeck Programma, Tarek Osman zal aan de hand van zijn boek vertellen over zijn ervaringen tijdens de volksopstand die uiteindelijk Mubarak verdreef en mogelijke toekomstscenario’s van zijn land schetsen.

Gert Borg, onderzoeker bij Islam en Arabisch aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen spreekt een column uit over de Arabische Lente. Zijn collega Martijn de Koning, schets een overzicht van de situatie in de Arabische wereld. Prof. dr. Evert van der Zweerde, hoogleraar Politieke filosofie aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, zit de avond voor.

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Closing the week 36 – The Remains of That Day 9/11

Posted on September 11th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Blogosphere, International Terrorism, Murder on theo Van Gogh and related issues, Religious and Political Radicalization.

Most popular on Closer this week

1. Radicalization Series VI – Muslims and Radicalization: What do we know?
2. Wikileaks: De VS, Nederlandse moslims en (anti-)radicalisering
3. Moskee Slotervaart Amsterdam in Koeweit

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You can follow me on Twitter: Martijn5155

Featuring The Remains of that Day: 9/11

Memory and relics
Daniel Silliman: 9/11 relics

Religion, Peter Berger once said, is the audacious proposal that human activities are cosmically meaningful.

In this sense, some of the remembrances and relics of 9/11 are deeply religious. Curiously so.

Memories of 9/11 tragedy preserved – Philly.com

“What you find at most archaeological sites, ancient and modern, are things that are mundane, a part of daily life, so that is our mission here,” said Kate Quinn, the Penn Museum’s director of exhibitions.

Quinn said the September 11 museum lent Penn things that fulfill that goal of everyday items transformed – eyeglasses, a computer keyboard, visitor badges – that were unearthed during the excavations at ground zero.

“Archaeology usually tells us something about ancient times, but this is history, too, even if it is only 10 years old,” Quinn said.

It took me ten years, but I finally wrote something about September 11th. And then I made a little movie. | The Gideonse Bible

I knew I had to do it eventually, and I had to do it by today. When I saw that the VAMP theme for August was “Alternate Endings,” I knew exactly what to do. I wrote it in two hours; it exploded out of me. I’m sure it could be honed here and there, but I like the raw weirdness of it. What follows are my remarks as prepared for delivery. In the video, the last word is “possibility,” and I swallowed it for some reason. Also, I apologize for the sound quality; I don’t really know what I’m doing. Anyway:

Through the fragments of 9/11 » Knoxville News Sentinel

After the collapse of the south tower of the World Trade Center in New York, the first of the wounded, including four members of the New York City Medical Examiners Office, with Amy Mundorff, second from left, are brought via boat across the Hudson River to a triage area in Jersey City, N.J., September 11, 2001. Mundorff now teaches forensic anthropology at the University of Tennessee. (Chip East / Special to the News Sentinel)

The September 11th Industry | homophilosophicus

In the face of such horror however, a great hope was born on the streets ofManhattanten years ago today. On the television and on the radio inAmericaand around the world, millions witnessed the beautiful transformation of apparently cold New Yorkers into heroes and martyrs. Women and men in workaday suits and uniforms walked, often to certain death, into grave danger to reach the hands of other human beings whom they had never before met. In the sudden depths of catastrophe ordinary people took it upon themselves to become extraordinary. For all of our perceptions of the Big Apple as a cruel and hard place, it was the everyday New Yorker who reminded us that we are human. For all of the loss and the fear and the despair, there was a flash of something truly brilliant from the rubble and dust that day.

Reflecting on 9/11: Humanizing war

When I chose to enlist, I didn’t feel any great patriotic call. Our integrity as a nation never depended on me killing people in other countries. I didn’t have any college prospects—my GPA was a 1.17—and I didn’t want to end up as another pothead or meth-head in the rust belt. I wanted to blow shit up and kill people. Nobody in specific, no ethnic prejudice or anything stupid like that, I just wanted to shoot endless bad guys wearing the same clothes as each other, like in Goldeneye. Maybe pick up their ammo when I ran low.

‘A deeper meaning’: How 9/11 changed one Vermonter – for good: Rutland Herald Online

Ten years later, Michael realizes the eyewitness details he remembers were only the start of a larger story.

Column: Forgetting 9/11 Would Be a Tragedy – Long Valley, NJ Patch

Every person in this nation has differing opinions on the course of action America took in years following the deadliest attack on U.S. soil, but Sept. 11, 2001, in my opinion, is a day that cannot be forgotten.

9/11: Are We All Moral Monsters?

9/11 reveals often-hidden facts in our own anthropology: that we are all 9/11-enabled human beings, and we are all scared of our own mortality.

Marking the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11 : The New Yorker

For those in the immediate vicinity, the horror was of course immediate and unmistakable; it occurred in what we have learned to call real time, and in real space. For those farther away—whether a few dozen blocks or halfway around the world—who were made witnesses by the long lens of television, the events were seen as through a glass, brightly. Their reality was visible but not palpable. It took hours to begin to comprehend their magnitude; it is taking days for the defensive numbness they induced to wear off; it will take months—or years—to measure their impact and meaning.

The meaning of 9/11’s most controversial photo | Jonathan Jones | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/9/2/1314964814888/Young-people-chat-as-the–005.jpg In the photograph Thomas Hoepker took on 11 September 2001, a group of New Yorkers sit chatting in the sun in a park in Brooklyn. Behind them, across brilliant blue water, in an azure sky, a terrible cloud of smoke and dust rises above lower Manhattan from the place where two towers were struck by hijacked airliners this same morning and have collapsed, killing, by fire, smoke, falling or jumping or crushing and tearing and fragmentation in the buildings’ final fall, nearly 3,000 people.

Museum Anthropology: 9/11 Museum Human Remains Controversy

The brewing controversy over the unidentified human remains at the new 9/11 Museum has hit the news. Full disclosure, Dr. Chip has been involved with some of the grass-roots advocacy groups. We believe this is an important issue for all museum anthropologists, as it creates an important dialogue that asks about how the profession treats all human remains in the museum context, the intersection of memorials and museums, the nature and process of consultation, and how we might respond should another attack of such a magnitude come.

An Anthropological Preview of the Post-9/11 World « ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Imagine this scenario for 2002 – science fiction a short while ago, exceedingly likely now. The world had entered the paranoid phase of globalisation. Countries were neither at war nor not at war. Detailed surveillance of citizens and quixotic imprisonment of individuals became commonplace. Politicians eagerly elaborated on the imminent threat of terrorist attacks, thereby justifying ever more draconian measures. Radical humanist networks and human rights groups were ostracised for their lack of loyalty and structural similarities to terrorist groups. Yet everybody, including the politicians, knew in their heart of hearts that turning the citizenry into potential enemies would only aggravate the problem.

Anthropology News

In the aftermath of a disaster, calls for the replacement, replication and reproduction of that which has been lost represent a yearning for a return to normal. Yet a full return to any pre-disaster “normal” is impossible as the physical and emotional rupture of tragedy transforms everything and everybody. That which has been lost is irreplaceable, even if what may appear to be the original form is rebuilt. There is no unadulterated replacement, only re/placement. To break down this word:

Watch Videos Online | Other 9/11s Remembered – DN! | Veoh.com

Watch Other 9/11s Remembered – DN! in News | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Social scientists on 9/11 and its aftermath
10 Years Later: Islam in the U.S. – YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELKoWgKeSQo
Robert Hefner, professor of anthropology and director of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA) at Boston University, discusses the state of Islam and Muslim society in the U.S. since the September 11th terrorist attacks.

Shaped by 9/11: UMBC Researchers Reflect – YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VsXOjXJ7Nk
The events of September 11, 2001 changed course of history. To some faculty at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), particularly those early in their careers, they also changed the course of their life’s work. The attacks and subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led them to study new issues and respond to new needs. This video includes reflections from Dr. Rebecca Adelman, who examines imagery of the War on Terror, and Dr. Seth Messinger, who works with veterans recovering from limb loss.

9/11 impact was less in Europe, says WUSTL anthropologist | Newsroom | Washington University in St. Louis

Because the Sept. 11 attacks happened on U.S. soil, it makes sense that they might have had a more profound impact in the United States than in Western Europe.
John Bowen

Bowen

But the location of the attacks isn’t the only reason for that, says John R. Bowen, PhD, an anthropology and religious studies professor, both in Arts & Sciences, at Washington University in St. Louis, who has spent the past 10 years studying Islam and civil law in France and England.

Key differences in how Muslims were perceived before 9/11 in the United States and Western Europe played a key role in how much — or how little — attitudes on Muslims changed after 9/11, Bowen says.

“After 9/11, many in the United States came to fear American Muslims for the first time; most knew nothing about Islam,” says Bowen, PhD, the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences. “But fear of Muslims already was present in parts of Europe.”

Al-Qaeda Is Winning – Daveed Gartenstein-Ross – International – The Atlantic

A decade after the attacks of September 11, 2001, national security opinion leaders are converging around the ideas that the threat of terrorism has been substantially reduced over the past 10 years, and that al-Qaeda is on its death bed. “Al-Qaeda is sort of on the ropes and taking a lot of shots to the body and the head,” White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan told the Associated Press on August 31. Defense secretary Leon Panetta said in July that the United States is “within reach” of “strategically defeating” the jihadi group, and the Washington Post has confirmed that his assessment is shared by many analysts. Commentators in the public sphere are increasingly adopting similar views. But my own research into the group has led me in a different direction: that this emerging consensus doesn’t just appear wrong, but obviously wrong. Al-Qaeda isn’t anywhere near defeated — for all our triumphalism, it appears to be winning.

10 Years Later: How We Won – William McCants & William Rosenau – International – The Atlantic

Ten years into our struggle against al-Qaeda, it’s time to acknowledge that the “war” is over and recognize that the United States and its international partners overreacted to the al-Qaeda threat. Terrorism, after all, is designed to elicit such overreactions. But the confluence of the recent death of bin Laden, harsh new economic realities, the democratic movements in the Middle East, and the ten-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks provide an ideal time to take stock of what it actually takes to deal with the al-Qaeda threat.

Well, Is Al Qaeda Winning Or Not? | INTELWIRE.com | Terrorism news and analysis, investigative reports and exclusive documents | By J.M. Berger, author of Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go To War In The Name Of Islam, Al Qaeda terrorism expert, documentary maker, author, special subjects include 9/11 Documents, Ali Mohamed, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Oklahoma City Bombing, and more

Some of my favorite thinkers have diametrically opposing pieces in The Atlantic today. Will McCants and William Rosenau write about How We Won the War on Terror, while Daveed Gartenstein-Ross writes that Al Qaeda is Winning.

Why Is The Middle East Still In Thrall To 9/11 Conspiracy Theories? | The New Republic

The 9/11 attacks catalyzed a tremendous shift in American foreign policy in the Middle East. Rather than prioritizing petrol, Washington targeted terrorist organizations, dethroned a dictator, and lobbied throughout the region for liberalization. Yet despite the billions of dollars spent policing Baghdad and protecting Benghazi, the unpopularity of the United States in the Arab world continues to be fueled by the belief that Islamist terrorists had nothing to do with 9/11, with many claiming the attacks were an American, Israeli, or joint American-Israeli conspiracy. In this sense, overcoming 9/11 revisionism is, perhaps, the greatest challenge facing American public diplomacy in the coming decade: So long as such conspiracy theories persist, Arabs will continue to view American policies aimed at preventing “another 9/11” as thoroughly illegitimate since, as they see it, 9/11 is just a big American lie.

Ten Years after 9/11, Do the Arabs value Democracy more than We do? | Informed Comment

The September 11 attacks have been revealed as a last gasp of a fading, cult-like twentieth-century vision, not as the wave of the future. They were the equivalent of the frenetic dashing to and fro of a chicken already beheaded. Al-Qaeda’s core assumptions have been refuted by subsequent events and above all in 2011 by the Arab Spring.

9/11: more security, less secure | openDemocracy

The world has been changed by the securitisation of everyday life and the Islamisation of security. The accompanying threat-complex has shifted American sensibilities, says Cas Mudde.

The roots of conflict | Education | The Guardian

Is western culture better than any other? Umberto Eco argues that what is important is not superiority but pluralism and toleration

Human Terrain Systems Dissenter Resigns, Tells Inside Story of Training’s Heart of Darkness » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

My initial inclination was to wonder if this was a gag, or, having written several critiques of the Human Terrain Systems program describing why it is an ethical and practical anthropological disaster, whether someone was setting me up. While I’ve had several other Human Terrain social scientists write me with complaints about the program, it didn’t seem likely that Human Terrain Systems (HTS) would hire someone with John’s politically progressive views. But the email address was the same one John had used for years, and John’s story checked out and made sense, so I approached our correspondence along the lines of his initial request to help him organize his focus and to understand critiques of HTS. As he undertook his HTS training, we corresponded and I passed along articles, and offered friendship and critiques of what he was learning in this training; not that John needed help with this critique, the flaws in the program were pretty obvious to him.

David H. Price: Anthropology’s Military Shadow | The New Significance

Just as it was becoming passe to remark on anthropology’s status as colonialism’s wanton stepchild, George Bush’s Terror War rediscovered old militarized uses for culture, and invigorated new modernist dreams of harnessing anthropology and culture for the domination of others. Because I began in the early 1990s using the Freedom of Information Act, interviews, and archival research to document American anthropologists’ interactions with military and intelligence agencies, by the time the post-9/11 push by the Pentagon and CIA to again use anthropological knowledge as tools for intelligence, warfare and counterinsurgency, I had a decent head start on documenting and thinking about some of this history. By the time America got its terror war on, I had already documented the details of how this worked in the past, and had thought about the core of the ethical, political and theoretical fundamentals of a critical approach to questions relating to the weaponization of anthropology.

Wiley: Anthropology, History & Sociology

In the 10 years since the events of September 2001 a vast amount of scholarly research has been written on the impact of 9/11. We are pleased to share with you this collection of free book and journal content from the Anthropology, History & Sociology books and journals published by Wiley-Blackwell.

Wiley: Religion & Theology

In the 10 years since the events of September 2001 a vast amount of scholarly research has been written on the impact of 9/11. We are pleased to share with you this collection of free book and journal content from the Religion & Theology books and journals published by Wiley-Blackwell.

The paradoxes of the re-Islamization of Muslim societies « The Immanent Frame

The 9/11 debate was centered on a single issue: Islam. Osama Bin Laden was taken at his own words by the West: Al-Qaeda, even if its methods were supposedly not approved by most Muslims, was seen as the vanguard or at least a symptom of “Muslim wrath” against the West, fueled by the fate of the Palestinians and by Western encroachments in the Middle East; and if this wrath, which has pervaded the contemporary history of the Middle East, has been cast in Islamic terms, it is because Islam is allegedly the main, if not the only, reference that has shaped Muslim minds and societies since the Prophet. This vertical genealogy obscured all the transversal connections (the fact, for instance, that Al-Qaeda systematized a concept of terrorism that was first developed by the Western European ultra-left of the seventies or the fact that most Al-Qaeda terrorists do not come from traditional Muslim societies but are recruited from among global, uprooted youth, with a huge proportion of converts).

10 Years after September 11

10 Years After September 11, a digital collection recently launched by the Social Science Research Council. In the days immediately following 9/11/01, the Council invited a wide range of leading social scientists to write short essays for an online forum. Ten years later, these same contributors have been asked to reflect on what has changed and what remains the same. The result is an extraordinary collection of new essays, with contributions from Rajeev Bhargava, Mary Kaldor, David Held, Olivier Roy, Saskia Sassen, Veena Das, Richard Falk, and many others.—ed.

9/11 chronomania « The Immanent Frame

This post sketches out some of the ways the events of 9/11 altered time-consciousness and temporal rhetoric in the public sphere and follows how the attacks continue to frame the subjective experience of temporality. Beginning with the lexicon of the war on terror—with its temporally overdertemined rhetoric of “the homeland,” “preemption,” “fundamentalism,” and, of course, the name-date “9/11” itself—I consider a few cases of what I call 9/11 chronomania—the obsession with time and temporal disruption that characterizes representations of 9/11 across a variety of media forms. In the case of the 9/11 Commission Report, by refashioning disaster as chronology, the narrative aims to replace victims with knowers—first, by establishing an authorial subject in command of its perceptual, technological, and temporal fields, and second, by attempting to shape personal and collective understandings of 9/11 by securing events unfolding in multiple locations and witnessed in myriad ways on a single, immanent timeline. The goals of such a narrative are clear: the chronometric novella that begins the 9/11 Commission Report is in part a hook designed to catch a national audience primed by thrillers like the television series 24, but it is also an attempt to incrementalize and disaggregate horrific events into an easily understood linear plot as part of a self-professed attempt to salve the wounds of collective trauma.

Accounts of everyday life and politics
Aftershock and awe – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News

Usama Hasan, a devout Muslim of Pakistani origin , who grew up in Britain and was known to be active in radical circles, was at work in his Oxfordshire office on the day of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
muslims.
Hicham Yezza, an Algerian Muslim who came to England on a scholarship to study computing and management, was at home in Nottingham, getting ready to go to class.

British Muslims tell the terrorists they ‘failed’ on the tenth anniversary of 9/11

More than 50 Muslim community groups the length and breadth of Britain have united on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 to express their solidarity with victims of terrorism and to tell the terrorists that a decade on ‘they failed’ in seeking to divide society on religious grounds.

How the fear of being criminalised has forced Muslims into silence | Mehdi Hasan | Comment is free | The Guardian

We have more Muslim MPs than ever. But there is a growing belief that dissent risks falling foul of terror laws

After 9/11: ‘You no longer have rights’ – extract | World news | The Guardian

What was it like for immigrant Muslims and Arab-Americans in the wake of 9/11? Ten years on, three people tell their stories

9/11 is No Excuse for Bashing Muslims – OtherWords

Violent jihadists don’t represent Islam any more than the Anders Breiviks of the world represent Christianity.

Book explores ‘Arab Detroit’ in decade since 9/11 | Detroit Free Press | freep.com

A book has been published that examines life in the Detroit area’s Arab-American community in the decade since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade” was released this past week and is published by Wayne State University Press. The book incorporates academic, artistic and everyday voices and viewpoints from one of the most well-known and largest communities of Arabs outside the Middle East.

The 9/11 Decade – How Interfaith Groups Built Bridges – NYTimes.com

Jews, Christians, Muslims come together, hoping to fight fear with familiarity. How it’s playing out in Syracuse.

Conversations with New Yorkers – The 9/11 Decade – Al Jazeera English

Al Jazeera speaks to people in New York about the 9/11 attack on their city and the events that followed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y155rP6iTYo

Living with 9/11: the Muslim American | World news | The Guardian

Linda Sarsour lives in Brooklyn and is from a Palestinian American family. She has become increasingly involved in community activism since the September 11 attacks

Three girls lead ‘normal’ lives after 9/11 attacks, but never forget | MyCentralJersey.com | MyCentralJersey.com

Sept. 11 was just the start of family always being around. Casey remembers getting off the bus that day and being so confused because there were so many cars in her driveway. She said her mom told her they were having a party because it was the first week of school and they wanted to celebrate because they have to get back into their daily routines.

Misc
The criminalization of speech since 9/11 – War Room – Salon.com

The expanded use of the material-support law is an important part of the legacy of 9/11 and the legal regime erected in response to the attacks. To learn more about the history and use of the material-support statute, I spoke with Hina Shamsi, the director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Mahmood Mamdani: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (Part 1) – YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w20DhY1O2j8

The HISTORY NEWS NETWORK (http://hnn.us) recorded this appearance of Mahmood Mamdani, Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology Columbia University, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association on January 6, 2007. He spoke as the guest of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. The speech took place over lunch at Atlanta’s famous Pittypat’s Porch.

A US Soldier’s Experience in Iraq on 9/11 | Savage Minds

Here is a second interview with my friend serving his second term in Baghdad. We talk about his ‘cultural training’ exercises, Bradley Manning, and his engagement with the local Iraqis.

What was Osama bin-Laden for Muslims? | Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist

Yet what was bin-Laden for Muslims? This question is more difficult to answer than the previous one. First, I think we have to look at how western commentators, politicians, and of course the general public imagined what bin-Laden was for Muslims. Indeed, this is even more important than the former question since such perceptions have shaped how many people living in western countries saw and see Muslims. You only need to ask around in any European or US city and you will find people whom are strongly convinced that Muslims adore bin-Laden.

The Missing Martyrs — By Charles Kurzman — Book Review – NYTimes.com

In “The Missing Martyrs,” Charles Kurzman suggests that even before Osama bin Laden was killed, his movement had failed utterly. Al Qaeda’s ideological trademark is to exhort ordinary Muslims to engage in individual acts of violence against those deemed enemies of Islam, specifically Americans, Jews and the infidel rulers of Muslim-­majority states. And yet very few such attacks have occurred in the United States since Sept. 11, and certainly none comparable to the devastating events of that day. To emphasize just how surprising this is, Kurzman cites a 2006 online manual for aspiring jihadists that lists 14 “simple tools” that “are easy to use and available for anyone who wants to fight the occupying enemy” — they include “running over someone with a car” and “setting fire to homes or rooms at sleep time.” Kurzman, a sociologist who has written widely about Islamic reform movements, asks: “If terrorist methods are as widely available as automobiles, why are there so few Islamist terrorists? In light of the death and devastation that terrorists have wrought, the question may seem absurd. But if there are more than a billion Muslims in the world, many of whom supposedly hate the West and desire martyrdom, why don’t we see terrorist attacks everywhere, every day?”

Al-Qaeda’s Past and Present « jihadica

The newest issue of Foreign Affairs on the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 includes an essay by me (free registration required) on the history of al-Qaeda and its prospects after the Arab Spring. The essay covers the reasons for al-Qaeda’s founding, its targeting of the United States, its strategic thinking under Zawahiri’s leadership, its concept of an Islamic state, and its enduring problem with Islamist parliamentary politics.

After the Massacre, Norway Reexamines Its Values and Fears – The Daily Beast

In the wake of a devastating massacre, Norway reexamines its values—and its fears.

Slow attempts at making sense: Oslo 22/7

This research diary has until now exclusively treated the various facets of my PhD research project in Paris. When the numbness began to lose its grip, I started to realise why I feel so terribly concerned. Of course, I think most Norwegians, many Europeans and even many, many fellow world citizens feel deep concern when an atrocity like this strikes, even when they or their closest aren’t struck personally. This concerns us as fellow humans (of both the victims and the perpetrator…), and it concerns us as political beings. But I also realised that this concerns me profoundly in terms of the career I’ve chosen: What good is it to devote my professional life to understanding nationalism, belonging, community cohesion, conceptions of difference and the like when I have done nothing to prevent the worst thinkable acts of violence to take place in my own country? Especially since I think – or I’m sure – that I’ve felt there was a need for worry (but of course, not to this unconceivable degree…). For several days now I’ve been thinking about how I can contribute. How can I contribute in the best way with my knowledge (of living with difference in Europe), my concern (for the future of us all) and my devotion (to work for a better world)? I know need to think much more about this in the coming days and weeks, and I know that I need to act.

Jihadi Suicide Bombers: The New Wave by Ahmed Rashid | The New York Review of Books

After September 11, 2001, readers around the world quickly learned about the basic tenets of jihad and its distortion by al-Qaeda. Now the shelves of Western bookshops are again filled with books on the subject, which gives no sign of going away. Jihad, which means struggle, is “recommended” rather than obligatory for all Muslims, but its interpretation is literally an open book—the lesser jihad to purify one’s soul and perform good deeds for the community, the greater jihad to defend Islam when it is under attack. Each major collection of Hadith, or the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad that were compiled by several Muslim scholars well after the Prophet’s death, contains its own descriptions of jihad, with the result that the discussion of jihad has always been a matter of differing interpretations rather than literal observance.

Report – A Call to Courage: Reclaiming Our Liberties Ten Years After 9/11 | American Civil Liberties Union

An ACLU report release to coincide with the 10th anniversary of 9/11 warns that a decade after the attacks, the United States is at risk of enshrining a permanent state of emergency in which core values must be subordinated to ever-expanding claims of national security. (More on Civil Liberties After 9/11 »)

Empire, Subalternity, and Ijtih?d: Two Muslim Women’s Leadership Models in the Post-9/11 US – Ahmed – 2011 – The Muslim World – Wiley Online Library

Binary stereotypes silence Muslim women in post 9/11 America, but little has been written about how Muslim women’s leadership can enable voice. This article presents two leadership models based on the philosophy of ijtih?d (independent reasoning), which facilitate self-worth and solidarity, key elements of voice. The less visible spiritual colleague model, which has a followership of practising Muslim women, facilitates self-worth through ijtih?d, allowing women to seek self-definition through their own interpretation of the Qur’?n. As strategy, the leader converts her home into a space which is simultaneously sacred and political where such informal discussions take place around religious rituals. The public bridge-builder model creates solidarity between and among its following of practising and nonpractising Muslims and non-Muslim men and women. The strategy focuses on effective dialogue between different groups. Ijtih?d as discourse in pursuit of knowledge (‘ilm) creates equality and respect, the basis of sustainable alliances.

Anwar Al-Awlaki’s Links to the September 11 Hijackers – J.M. Berger – International – The Atlantic

In the timeline of the hijackers’ movements in the months before the attacks, New Mexico-born Awlaki and his followers seem to turn up nearly every step of the way

Zakaria: Why America Overreacted to 9/11 – The Daily Beast

Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.

New books reflect what we’ve learned from September 11 and how we’ve learned to say it – The Boston Globe

Yet there is much to praise in these volumes. One captures the grief and loss of the period with uncommon intimacy. One captures the disillusion of the decade with unusual anger. And the third retells those events with unbridled drama. None of these three – or the scores of other commemoratives, perhaps the only growth industry in publishing right now – is in itself a one-volume work that captures this period of pathos and personal powerlessness.

Thoughts on 9-11: On the Importance of Intolerance | Reuters

She was a producer who lived in downtown Manhattan and upon hearing the first collision had run up the stairs of an apartment building across from the towers and banged on doors until someone fleeing the building let her in to watch from their windows.

Dutch
NOS Nieuws – Moslim-jongeren praten over gevolgen 9/11

Praten over de gevolgen van de aanslagen van 11 september in Amerika voor Nederland. Dat gebeurde gisteravond in Amsterdam door moslim-jongeren. Maar ze kwamen vooral voor de mening van een bijzondere gast, merkte verslaggever Rienk Kamer.

Fotozondag: Tien jaar geleden | DeJaap

Tien jaar geleden is het vandaag, dat twee vliegtuigen zich kort na elkaar in de Twin Towers van het World Trade Center in New York City boorden. Een derde vliegtuig raakte het Pentagon en een vierde stortte neer in Pennsylvania. Bij deze terroristische aanslagen kwamen 2974 mensen om het leven. Onder hen 328 brandweermannen en 62 politiemensen die direct na de eerste inslag op zoek gingen naar slachtoffers.

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Wikileaks: de VS, Nederlandse moslims en (anti-)radicalisering

Posted on September 10th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Activism, International Terrorism, ISIM/RU Research, Murder on theo Van Gogh and related issues, Notes from the Field, Public Islam, Religious and Political Radicalization, Young Muslims.

Na de aanslagen van 11 september stond terrorisme natuurlijk hoog op de politieke agenda. En dan met name terreuraanslagen (mogelijkerwijze) gepleegd door moslims. Na 9/11 werden moslims dan ook nauwgezet gemonitored door de Nederlandse staat zoals blijkt uit een recent vrijgegeven ‘secret cable‘ bij Wikileaks. Het beeld is ontluisterend. (more…)

2 comments.

Radicalization Series VI – Muslims and Radicalization – What do we know?

Posted on September 8th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: anthropology, Headline, International Terrorism, ISIM/RU Research, Murder on theo Van Gogh and related issues, Religious and Political Radicalization, Young Muslims.

Since 9/11 the issue of radicalization of Muslims is top priority on many policy and research agenda’s. A large industry of research, policy making and advising, counter-radicalization programs and so on has emerged. In this post I will focus on research and the very basic question of what we know by now about radicalization. (more…)

3 comments.

Achter Religieuze Grenzen – Hoe kunnen religieuze verschillen het verschil maken?

Posted on September 6th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues, Public Islam, Religion Other.

Achter Religieuze Grenzen
Hoe kunnen religieuze verschillen in Nederland het verschil maken?

Datum en tijdstip: donderdag 22 september van 15.00 tot 17.00 uur

Lokatie:  Auditorium van de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

De vrijheid van godsdienst is een in de Grondwet verankerd principe in Nederland, maar meer dan eens blijkt dat het in de praktijk brengen van deze vrijheid tot controverses leidt. Wanneer religies aanspraak willen maken op bepaalde rechten wordt hen te verstaan gegeven dat dit botst met andere grondwettelijke principes. Bovendien beschouwen veel mensen de religieuze diversiteit in de publieke ruimte als problematisch omdat het de Nederlandse identiteit en cohesie zou aantasten. Waar staan moderne religies voor? Hoe kunnen de verschillen tussen religies worden georganiseerd in de samenleving?

Donderdag 22 september praten rabbijn Raphael Evers, islamoloog Umar Ryad van de Universiteit Leiden en gereformeerd predikant Marten de Vries daarover aan de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Het gesprek wordt geleid door VU-filosoof Ad Verbrugge.

Veel christenen zijn bang voor de gevreesde islamisering van Nederland. Schijnbaar triviale zaken als handen schudden, eigen feestdagen of ritueel slachten worden principiële breekpunten. Moslims hebben op hun beurt vaak het gevoel dat zij door het negatieve klimaat over de islam steeds verder in de marge worden gedrukt. Joden maken zich niet alleen zorgen om het groeiend antisemitisme in de samenleving, maar zijn van mening dat ook aan hun religieuze praktijken wordt getornd.

Wat maakt elk van deze religies bijzonder en waarin verschillen ze van elkaar? En hoe kunnen die verschillen worden georganiseerd in de samenleving? Die vragen staan centraal tijdens het debat. Het debat is een ‘socratische’ discussie. Daarbij gaat het niet om de vraag wie er ‘gelijk’ heeft, maar is het de bedoeling elkaar uit te dagen en uit te spreken waar een ieder nu eigenlijk voor staat. Omdat de openbare ruimte niet neutraal is, zullen in het debat juist de geclaimde verschillen door religies zelf uitgangspunt zijn, in plaats van het aanpassen en wegstrijken van diversiteit. Het streven is om op die manier meer ruimte te creëren voor ‘samen leven’.

Het debat Achter religieuze grenzen. Hoe kunnen religieuze verschillen in Nederland het verschil maken? vindt plaats op donderdag 22 september van 15.00 tot 17.00 uur in het Auditorium van de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Het is de eerste van een drietal debatten waarin de spanning tussen godsdienstvrijheid als principe en als praktijk centraal staat. Het tweede debat vindt plaats op 3 november op zelfde tijd in de STOA zaal en zal gaan over het offer als belangrijk religieus principe. Het derde debat is op 22 december. Voor meer informatie kunt u contact opnemen met het bureau van VISOR.

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Moskee Slotervaart Amsterdam in Koeweit

Posted on September 5th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Public Islam, Ritual and Religious Experience.

Het eerste gebed op de dag van het suikerfeest is Salaat ul-eid. Dit jaar zond de Koeweitse televisie dit gebed live (?) uit vanuit Moskee Slotervaart in Amsterdam. Moskee Slotervaart is mede gefinancierd vanuit door giften van gelovigen en via steun vanuit Koeweit en is eveneens een soort thuis basis voor Ontdekislam. Over de Koeweitse steun was, zoals te verwachten, de nodige heisa over ook al omdat het een Moslimbroederschap moskee zou worden, maar naar later overigens bleek is dat toch zeer onwaarschijnlijk.

Filmpje: H/T JB

2 comments.

Closing the week 35 – Featuring the politics of food, fasting and feasting

Posted on September 4th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Blogosphere, Religious and Political Radicalization, Ritual and Religious Experience, Society & Politics in the Middle East.

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Featuring the politics of food, fasting and feasting
tabsir.net » The Politics of Ramadan

Religion and politics have always been intertwined, even though some rituals would seem to be above the fray. Consider the fasting month of Ramadan, which has just ended. The Islamic hijra calendar is lunar with arbitrary 30-day months for a lunation which is not exactly 30 days. So determining when a month begins is linked to the sight of the new moon. Before the age of mechanical clocks it was also necessary to fix dawn by observation of the sunrise and decide at what point it was possible to say the sun had risen. In the early days of Islam the timing of Ramadan and the prayer times was based on visible signs. Scholars devised scientific and folk scientific means of telling time, but the basic premise is that a pious individual must make the call.

Foreigners and Their Food : David M. Freidenreich – University of California Press

Foreigners and Their Food explores how Jews, Christians, and Muslims conceptualize “us” and “them” through rules about the preparation of food by adherents of other religions and the act of eating with such outsiders. David M. Freidenreich analyzes the significance of food to religious formation, elucidating the ways ancient and medieval scholars use food restrictions to think about the “other.” Freidenreich illuminates the subtly different ways Jews, Christians, and Muslims perceive themselves, and he demonstrates how these distinctive self-conceptions shape ideas about religious foreigners and communal boundaries. This work, the first to analyze change over time across the legal literatures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, makes pathbreaking contributions to the history of interreligious intolerance and to the comparative study of religion.

Is Eid Tuesday or Wednesday? – India Real Time – WSJ

The confusion about Eid-ul-Fitr, the day Muslims break their month-long Ramadan fast, is on again.

Ramadan 2011 – Alan Taylor – In Focus – The Atlantic

Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, began earlier this month with the sighting of the new moon. Throughout this ninth month on the Islamic calendar, devout Muslims must abstain from food, drink, and sex from dawn until sunset. The fast, one of the five pillars of Islam, is seen as a time for spiritual reflection, prayers, and charity. After sunset, Muslims traditionally break the fast by eating three dates, performing the Maghrib prayer, and sitting down to Iftar, the main evening meal, where communities and families gather together. Collected below are images of Muslims around the world observing Ramadan this year. [42 photos]

When Is Eid? Muslims Can’t Seem To Agree : The Two-Way : NPR

Today is Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting. Except that it isn’t.

Today, many Muslims in the United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan are celebrating Eid. Meanwhile, many Muslims in Indonesia, South Africa, India and Oman are not celebrating Eid until Wednesday.

Eid ul-Fitr marks end of violent Ramadan in Syria – CSMonitor.com

Eid ul-Fitr is normally a festive time, but Syrian citizens say seven were killed today by security forces. The regime faces EU oil sanctions by week’s end and weakening support at home.

Singapore’s Curry Solidarity · Global Voices

An Indian family in Singapore has agreed not to cook curry when their newly arrived neighbors from China are at home after the latter complained to authorities about the smell of curry. To show solidarity to all Singaporeans who love curry, which is after all a national dish, a “Cook A Pot of Curry Day” event was organized last Sunday, August 21. The Facebook page of the event had a confirmed attendance of more than 60,000. Below are some online reactions.

Video – Breaking News Videos from CNN.com

The duo that last year visited 30 U.S. mosques in 30 days is now visiting 20 mosques in 20 days during Ramadan.

Guestview: Ritual slaughter ban reflects fights over food and faith in the Netherlands | FaithWorld

In the recent Dutch debates about ritual slaughter, food has become a field where people battle over political, religious, economic, social and animal welfare issues. I do not think it is that speculative to say that the Animal Party has profitted from three major developments in Dutch society.

Guernica / Nicola Twilley: The Politics of Our Changing Foodscape

Nicola Twilley: Food is a political issue because politicians, and, indeed, our whole system of government, play such a large role in shaping what we do or don’t eat. For example, the government literally feeds a vast number of Americans (there were a record 45.75 million food stamp recipients last month) through its food assistance programs, and it feeds them with commodities it has purchased in bulk—purchases that are in themselves designed to support and stabilize prices for particular crops and industrial processes. Marion Nestle is a great person to read on how public health programs such as nutrition labeling or dietary guidance are shaped by our political system, including the undue influence of corporate lobbyists. It’s interesting to look at how dietary guidance, for example, shifts by country, for political as well as cultural reasons. The government plays a huge role in agricultural research (look at the influence of the extension programs at universities across America), environmental regulation, food safety (including guidelines around genetic modification and nanotechnology), and the economic landscape within which food production occurs. It is government policy on monopolies that allows four companies to dominate America’s meat supply, for example. Given that food is a health, environmental, infrastructural, economic, and technological issue, government investment, policy, and regulation ends up being one of the largest forces shaping the contemporary foodscape.

Religion and politics
Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith – NYTimes.com

Yet when it comes to the religious beliefs of our would-be presidents, we are a little squeamish about probing too aggressively. Michele Bachmann was asked during the Iowa G.O.P. debate what she meant when she said the Bible obliged her to “be submissive” to her husband, and there was an audible wave of boos — for the question, not the answer. There is a sense, encouraged by the candidates, that what goes on between a candidate and his or her God is a sensitive, even privileged domain, except when it is useful for mobilizing the religious base and prying open their wallets.

New York Times Editor Bill Keller’s Religious Test for Presidential Candidates – The Daily Beast

Do religious conservatives operate far outside the American mainstream and pose a serious threat to our pluralistic democracy?

USC Knight Chair in Media and Religion

The New York Times’ Executive Editor Bill Keller struck a nerve when his weekly column in the Times Magazine called for journalists to pay “closer attention” to what the GOP’s candidates for president “say about their faith and what they have said in the past that they may have decided to play down in the quest for mainstream respectability.”

Political theology and political existentialism « The Immanent Frame

Kahn’s book is fascinating, insightful, and a delight to read. But it is many things. Although its arguments are set forth in a largely holistic fashion, one can distinguish at least three distinct aims: 1) a more or less faithful and analytic reconstruction of Carl Schmitt’s 1922 work, Political Theology; 2) a meditation on the applicability of Schmitt’s political-theological insights to specific features of contemporary American political-legal practice; and 3) a bold proposal, only loosely grounded in Schmittian textual evidence, that argues for political theology as the indispensable framework for grasping the character of politics in the modern world. The first of these aims helps to explain why the book owes its title and its chapter-by-chapter architectonic to Schmitt’s original work. The second explains why Kahn not infrequently departs from the task of reconstruction by offering illustrations drawn from contemporary American law and politics. The third leads us to Kahn’s most provocative conclusion, that there is something distinctive about modern politics qua politics that can only be understood if we remain alive to the theological sources that animate this dimension of our experience. Unlike some of the other commentators, my training and interests do not lie in the sphere of contemporary politics, and most certainly not American politics. I will therefore refrain from offering any challenge to Kahn’s reconstructive or illustrative purposes and will focus my attention chiefly on the third and final strand of the book.

Oxford University Press: The Myth of Religious Violence:

The idea that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence is part of the conventional wisdom of Western societies, and it underlies many of our institutions and policies, from limits on the public role of religion to efforts to promote liberal democracy in the Middle East. William T. Cavanaugh challenges this conventional wisdom by examining how the twin categories of religion and the secular are constructed. A growing body of scholarly work explores how the category ‘religion’ has been constructed in the modern West and in colonial contexts according to specific configurations of political power. Cavanaugh draws on this scholarship to examine how timeless and transcultural categories of ‘religion and ‘the secular’ are used in arguments that religion causes violence. He argues three points: 1) There is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion. What counts as religious or secular in any given context is a function of political configurations of power; 2) Such a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion as non-rational and prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of Western society; 3) This myth can be and is used to legitimate neo-colonial violence against non-Western others, particularly the Muslim world.

A suspension of (dis)belief « The Immanent Frame

Most academic discussions in political science and international relations presuppose a fixed definition of the secular and the religious and proceed from there. Most realist, liberal, English school, feminist, and historical-materialist approaches treat religion as either private by prior assumption or a cultural relic to be handled by anthropologists. Even constructivists, known for their attention to historical contingency and social identity, have paid scant attention to the politics of secularism and religion, focusing instead on the interaction of preexisting state units to explain how international norms influence state interests and identity or looking at the social construction of states and the state system with religion left out of the picture.

Encounter – 12 June 2011 – Islam and the Arab Spring

As old regimes are torn down and new constitutions established in North Africa and the Middle East, how will these majority Muslim countries handle the challenges of liberal democracy and secularism?

Salafists boycott Egypt’s constitutional principles meetings – Politics – Egypt – Ahram Online

The Salafist Call (Al-Dawa Al-Salafya) and Nour Party release a statement explaining their boycott of yesterday’s constitution meeting called by Egypt’s Deputy Prime Minister Ali El-Selmi

Is there a crisis of secularism in Western Europe? « The Immanent Frame

Even quite sober academics speak of “a contemporary crisis of secularism,” claiming that “today, political secularisms are in crisis in almost every corner of the globe.” Olivier Roy, in an analysis focused on France, writes of “The Crisis of the Secular State,” and Rajeev Bhargava of the “crisis of secular states in Europe.” Yet this is quite a misleading view of what is happening in Western Europe.

Arab Uprisings
Ex-Jihadists in the New Libya – By Omar Ashour | The Middle East Channel

Abd al-Hakim Belhaj, the commander of Tripoli’s Military Council who spearheaded the attack on Muammar al-Qaddafi’s compound at Bab al-Aziziya, is raising red flags in the West. Belhaj, whom I met and interviewed in March 2010 in Tripoli along with Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi, is better known in the jihadi world as “Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq.” He is the former commander of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a jihad organization with historical links to al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Egyptian al-Jihad organization. Does his prominent role mean that jihadists are set to exploit the fall of Qaddafi’s regime?

Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring: The Myth of Authoritarian Stability « Kajian Internasional Strategis

For many Middle East specialists, this remarkable record of regime stability in the face of numerous challenges demanded their attention and an explanation. I am one of those specialists. In the pages of this magazine in 2005 (“Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?” September/ October 2005), I argued that the United States should not encourage democracy in the Arab world because Washington’s authoritarian Arab allies represented stable bets for the future. On that count, I was spectacularly wrong. I also predicted that democratic Arab governments would prove much less likely to cooperate with U.S. foreign policy goals in the region. This remains an open question. Although most of my colleagues expressed more support for U.S. efforts to encourage Arab political reform, I was hardly alone in my skepticism about the prospect of full-fledged democratic change in the face of these seemingly unshakable authoritarian regimes.

Libya’s spectacular revolution has been disgraced by racism | Richard Seymour | Comment is free | The Guardian

The murder of black men in the aftermath of the rebellion speaks of a society deeply divided for decades by Muammar Gaddafi

Egypt approves founding of Karama and Asala parties | Al-Masry Al-Youm: Today’s News from Egypt

The Asala Party is the second approved Salafi party, after the Nour Party. It was founded by Adel Abdel Maqsood Afify, Ihab Mohamed Ali Sheeha and Mohamed Ibrahim Abdel Fattah Sultan.

Egyptian Salafi says Mubarak trial un-Islamic Asharq Alawsat Newspaper (English)

The Egyptian Salafi preacher responsible for the sensational fatwa condoning the killing of potential presidential candidate Mohamed ElBaradei has surfaced again. This time however, Sheikh Mahmud Amir, has issues a fatwa rejecting the legal persecution of former President Hosni Mubarak, saying that Mubarak’s actions were authorized by Shariaa law.

The Politics of Royal Pluralism in Jordan

While the people have demanded the fall of their regimes in streets and squares across the Arab world this year, those regimes have offered a persistent, if predictable, reply: “the people just aren’t ready for us to go yet.” This accusation of unpreparedness has taken a few different forms in different contexts: “The people are too sectarian” (Bahrain and Syria); “too tribal” (Libya and Yemen); “too Islamist” (Egypt, Libya, Syria); “too underdeveloped,” “too radical” “too violent,” “too weak and defenseless,” et cetera. In every case, the people are portrayed as inept and a threat to themselves. Meanwhile, regimes clinging to power in the face of mass protests portend that the only solution to this unpreparedness is their steady hand ferrying their societies into the harbor of democratic governance (eventually).

Awe and history in the Arab revolts

In their ongoing revolts against police states and overly centralised autocratic governments, ordinary Arab men and women are compressing into a single moment their equivalent of perhaps the two most outstanding global historical movements of the past 300 years or so: the democratic revolutions that engulfed the world from their starting points in France and the United States in the late 18th Century; and the global decolonisation movement that swept much of the Third World in the mid-20th Century.

The Middle Ground between Technology and Revolutions – Technology Review

Social media didn’t cause the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, but it did achieve unique visibility.

In Egypt, the Lure of Leaving – NYTimes.com

The first time I met Ayman, he insisted on picking me up in his shiny black Chevrolet sedan outside the King of Shrimp, a popular fish restaurant in the Cairo neighborhood of Shobra. It was April, and he had just returned from Berlin, where he attended a conference on tourism (“the world’s biggest”) for his job. A brand new “I Love Berlin” key chain dangled from his rearview mirror. Also dangling was a small metallic cross, along with “I Love London” and, of course, “I Love New York.” As a procurement manager at a multinational company, he travels a great deal. “I have a busy passport,” he told me during that first meeting, handing me his overfull visa pages to inspect.

Human rights irony for the US and Arab world – Opinion – Al Jazeera English

Ten years after September 11th, human rights flounder in the United States but flourish in the Middle East.

Qaddafi’s Fall Rivets Yemen – By Tom Finn | Foreign Policy

But in Yemen, the poorest and youngest country in the Arab world, tens of thousands were also tuning in to soak up the drama unfolding in North Africa. It was the downfall of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in early February that first set Yemen’s protest movement ablaze, sending thousands of young men spilling into the capital’s dusty streets to face the rubber bullets and water cannons of President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime.

Yusra Tekbali: Libyan Women Active Force In Revolution

Many of the Libyan women we interviewed tried to change society from within, but were repeatedly bogged down by the lack of bureaucracy and corruption in the law, saying the regime’s tight restrictions and constant interference were a constant threat. As Salha, a former employee in the oil and gas sector put it, corrupt officials and unpredictable laws meant “your business, your life, everything you work for can be here one day and gone the next.” On the other end of the spectrum, I met with Gaddafi supporters, such as the head of Tripoli’s Women’s Council and the commander of the Women’s Military Academy.

Radicalization and counter-radicalization
Kosovan Albanian admits killing two US airmen in Frankfurt terror attack | World news | The Guardian

Arid Uka, 21, tells court he was influenced by online Islamist propaganda before shootings at airport in March

University staff asked to inform on ‘vulnerable’ Muslim students | Education | The Guardian

Lecturers and student unions express disquiet over new anti-terror guidance on depressed and isolated students

Abraham H. Foxman: The Day Hate Became Everyone’s Problem

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were a national and personal tragedy. It was one of the darkest days in the history of America. Many of us knew people who died that day at the World Trade Center.

But it was also a day of resolve.

US Muslims find selves target of monitoring, abuse – Boston.com

More than half of Muslim-Americans in a new poll say government antiterrorism policies single them out for increased surveillance and monitoring, and many report increased cases of name-calling, threats, and harassment by airport security, law enforcement officers and others.

Still, most Muslim-Americans say they are satisfied with life in the United States and rate their communities highly.

New York becomes the Occupied Territories – Opinion – Al Jazeera English

As the US security state grows and civil rights and liberties erode, Osama bin Laden gets the last laugh.

New report maps the roots of Islamophobia – Islam – Salon.com

In a 140-page report released Friday, researchers at the Center for American Progress have traced the origins of rising Islamophobia in the United States to what they call a “small, tightly networked group of misinformation experts guiding an effort that reaches millions of Americans through effective advocates, media partners, and grassroots organizing.”

The report features profiles of some figures — blogger and activist Pamela Geller and think tank denizen Frank Gaffney — who will be familiar to regular Salon readers. It names Gaffney and four others as the leading “misinformation experts” who generate anti-Muslim talking points that spread in the media: Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum; David Yerushalmi at the Society of Americans for National Existence (who is also the architect of the anti-Shariah movement); Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch; and Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

Guernica / Rania Khalek: How the Political Right Bullied the Department of Homeland Security Into Ignoring the Threat of Right-Wing Extremism

After right-wingers freaked out about a report detailing the rise in right-wing extremism, Homeland Security effectively dismantled a unit tasked with tracking it.

Guernica / Russ Baker: Who—And What—Are Behind The “Official History” Of The Bin Laden Raid?

When you look closely, nothing seems right about what will surely become the accepted account of the raid that nailed America’s enemy number one. And then things get even weirder…

tabsir.net » Muslims of Color

Here is propaganda so blatant and smiley gross that it deserves a place alongside the insidious emulation of Lenin by the Soviets and idolization of dictators the world over. The cover image is an interesting spin on the separation of church and state in our land of the free: here we see the tattered American flag flying above a cross illuminated by a beam of light from above, at the feet of which lie a firefighter’s helmet and police hat. To label the libel in this colorfully designed “Kid’s Book of Freedom” a “Graphic Coloring Novel” strikes me as a misspelling; is it not more aptly named a “Pornographic Coloring Novel,” to be rated so for the sensational violence mongering rather than any out-of-place showing of body parts?

Misc.
Immigration law: No offence | The Economist

THE American Immigration Lawyers Association just released a report detailing what happens when criminal-law enforcement agents—ie, the police—enforce civil-immigration law. It looked at 127 cases from 24 states and Washington, DC in which clients of immigration lawyers were stopped, questioned or arrested by police for minor offences that resulted in the commencement of deportation proceedings. So it is a small sample, and not necessarily a representative one: most of these cases involved immigrants represented by or able to speak to counsel; there are plenty of others who were unable to contact an attorney before removal, and so represent themselves pro se during the removal process. It makes for dispiriting reading.

A question on affect « The Immanent Frame

I have a question about affect, the current it-word for cultural studies and critical theory. Roughly, “affect” gets at a kind of interactive, embodied experience that functions outside of meaning, rationality and intention. It is a capacity, intensity, or resonance of the body that acts autonomously from the subject. Affect is at work in inexplicable fads, social buzz, or even the mundane act of blushing. We can translate blushing into an emotion in a linguistic and psychological system—shame, attraction, anxiety—but the translation necessarily loses the very interactive, embodied, asignifying thing that makes affect such a fruitful and provocative topic. So, then, what does it mean to write about affect?

enthusiasm | frequencies

In German, there are two words—three even. Enthusiasmus, like the English enthusiasm, is rooted in the Greek “en theos,” to have the god within, to be inspired by god or the gods. But Enthusiasmus was inadequate to contain the sixteenth-century German reformer Martin Luther’s rage against those who purported to receive direct divine inspiration. For them, he coined the term Schwärmer, from the verb schwärmen, to swarm, as in the swarming of bees. The Schwärmer were those, like the so-called Zwickau prophets, Nicholas Storch, Thomas Drechsel, and Marcus Thomas Stübner, who claimed to have direct revelations from the Holy Spirit, or Thomas Müntzer, who insisted that direct revelation and prophecy continued to occur in history. For Müntzer religious radicalism and political radicalism went hand in hand; the new prophecies and apocalyptic revelations he proclaimed called for the re-ordering of society, and not just of the church. In denouncing Müntzer, the Zwickau prophets, and others as Schwärmer, Luther rejected not only claims to continuing revelation, but also the forms of religious and political agitation to which he believed such claims gave rise. To be a Schwärmer, most often translated as enthusiast or fanatic, was to be ungovernable by either human or God.

Cultural Relativism 2011 – DSK, Guinea, Anthropology 101

When I first flagged the op-ed by anthropologist Mike McGovern, “Before You Judge, Stand in Her Shoes,” I also included comments from parenthropologist who wrote, “I fear that Mike McGovern’s point, in his op-ed, will be lost on too many Americans who feel that there are too many immigrants, legal and especially illegal, in ‘their’ country.” But it’s worse. In “Don’t walk a mile in her shoes” Robert Fulford uses McGovern’s article to attack anthropology and the idea of cultural relativism (thanks to anthropologyworks for the update).

James Mollison’s Photos of Children’s Bedrooms Are a Commentary on Class and Poverty – NYTimes.com

Mr. Mollison’s new book, “Where Children Sleep,” had its origins in a project undertaken for a children’s charity several years ago. As he considered how to represent needy children around the world, he wanted to avoid the common devices: pleading eyes, toothless smiles. When he visualized his own childhood, he realized that his bedroom said a lot about what sort of life he led. So he set out to find others.

Dutch
Kafirs en Zeloten: geschiedenisfantasieën met Martin Bosma – GeenCommentaar

Maar wie waren die piraten nou eigenlijk? Bosma heeft het over ‘drijfjachten van moslims’ – alsof het zou gaan om religieus gemotiveerde zeloten, maniakken die voor eigen zielenheil in het wilde weg random christelijke dorpen ontvolkten omdat Allah nou eenmaal groot is en God niet. Niets is minder waar. Het is zoals Bill Clinton zei: it’s the economy, stupid. Het was handel. Keiharde handel. Mensenhandel. Foute boel. Maar: handel. En waar handel is, daar is Dietschen bloed niet ver weg. Een bekend en berucht piratenleider was Symen Danzeker – Simon de Danser. En wat te denken van Suleyman Reis, ook wel bekend als Dirk de Veenboer, en Murat Reis, geboren Jan Janszoon. Britten waren er ook, overigens. John Ward is ‘n bekende. En Lipari werd veroverd door een Ottomaans-Franse alliantie. Dus dat hele ‘moslims-tegen-christenen’ verhaal van Bosma is vierkant geleuter. Veel van de ‘islamitische’ piraten waren uiteindelijk Europeanen – en ze waren lang niet allemaal bekeerd tot de islam. Het ligt veel pragmatischer: in Europa kon je christenen niet als slaven verkopen. In de Arabische wereld daarentegen wel. Daar lag de verkoop van Moslims weer ietsje lastiger. Zo ziet u maar, die Arabieren lijken meer op Europeanen dan we geneigd zijn te denken.

Antwerpen wil moslims uit garagemoskeeën – Religie – TROUW

De 42 kleine moskeeën van Antwerpen moeten plaatsmaken voor een paar grote. Wethouder Monica De Coninck (SP.A) ziet moslims graag vertrekken uit hun achterkamers en garages.

Hoogleraar Jean Tillie: etnische en religieuze organisaties goed voor democratie

Religieuze en etnische gemeenschappen bedreigen de democratie niet, maar bevorderen die juist. Etnische en religieuze organisaties dragen bij aan democratie. Binnen deze organisaties vindt zelfreflectie plaats en worden burgerlijke vaardigheden ontwikkeld. Cruciaal voor dit democratisch proces is wel dat gemeenschappen niet geïsoleerd raken en ‘zwakke verbanden’ hebben met andere gemeenschappen. Het kabinet morrelt echter aan deze verbanden door in wij-zij-tegenstellingen te spreken. Daarmee ondermijnt het de democratie.”
Dat verklaarde Jean Tillie, hoogleraar en adjunct-directeur van het Instituut voor Migratie en Etnische Studies van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, die als coreferent optrad tijdens de Anton de Kom-lezing in het Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam. De lezing werd dit jaar gegeven door voormalig minister Ab Klink en is een jaarlijks initiatief van Art.1 en het Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam. Met de lezing willen de organisatoren aandacht vragen voor de strijd tegen intolerantie en discriminatie in heden en verleden.

Arabische Lente? – GeenCommentaar

Hoe zit het nu met die zo bejubelde Arabische Lente, is een win-win situatie wel mogelijk? Die vraag van een van mijn trouwe reageerders laat zich goed beantwoorden door een gerenommeerd politiek commentator uit het Midden-Oosten: Rami Khouri. Over het belang van historische analogieën om de ontwikkelingen in het Midden-Oosten op waarde te kunnen schatten. En waarom de westerse term ‘Arabische Lente’ de lading niet dekt.

Boerkaverbod is het product van een paternalistische overheid

Boerka’s verbannen maakt de samenleving niet veiliger, bevordert het samen leven niet, en helpt ook niet tegen de onderdrukking van moslima’s. Emancipatie is beter.

4 september: Suikerfeest voor vrouwen en kinderen : Nieuwemoskee

Op 4 september organiseert Al Nisa een actieve, inspirerende en gezellige workshop voor de vrouwen en een feestje voor kinderen. De bijeenkomst start om 13.00 uur met een inloop vanaf 12.30 uur. Vervolgens zullen we met de Ramadan in ons achterhoofd in een interactieve workshop onder leiding van Al Nisa bestuurslid Sandra Doevendans op zoek gaan naar wie we echt zijn. Neem iets mee wat belangrijk voor u is.

Sociale Vraagstukken » Etnische diversiteit versterkt sociale banden

Autochtonen die in regio’s wonen met een hoge etnische diversiteit blijken wel degelijk goede informele contacten met andere autochtonen te onderhouden, anders dan de Amerikaanse socioloog Robert Putnam vond. Voorwaarde is dat men geen etnische dreiging ervaart.

X, Y, zzzz: een pleidooi tegen generaties | DeJaap

Het begrip ‘generatie’ wordt – zoals dat gaat met tot de verbeelding sprekende begrippen als ‘authenticiteit’, ‘interactiviteit’ en ‘duurzaamheid’ – alom misbruikt. Misschien komt deze ellende wel door Pepsi. In de jaren ’80 hield zij jongeren voor dat zij “the next generation” waren. Die jongeren gingen dat geloven. Mensen geboren in de jaren ’60 en ’70 wilden zich graag onderscheiden van die groep voor hen, de babyboom generatie. Ze kwamen bekend te staan als generatie X – de babybusters. Hiermee was het hek van de dam en wilde iedere generatie een eigen label.

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Schuld, crisis en macht – Waar hebben we het over?

Posted on September 3rd, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Misc. News.

David Graeber is docent sociale antropologie aan de Goldsmiths University in Londen en de auteur van het controversiële ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years‘. Het Engelstalige blog Naked Capitalism heeft een interview met hem waarin hij enkele interessante ideeën over de huidige schuldencrisis poneert. Dat begint al met het idee dat geld is uitgevonden om het ruilsysteem vervangen aangezien dat niet goed zou werken. Het idee van ik geef je 20 kippen voor die koe, maar kan nu even niet aan 20 kippen komen, maar wil toch die koe dus vind ik geld uit om de koe toch te kunnen betalen. Dat is historisch gezien onjuist volgens Graeber. Wat er wel gebeurt is dat zo’n boer zegt, wil je die koe? Neem hem. En dan ben je hem iets schuldig. Geld is daarbij noodzakelijk, niet als ruilmedium, maar als een manier om de waarde van wat je hem schuldig bent vast te stellen. De mythe dat er eerst ruilhandel was (barter) dan geld en dan schuld klopt dus niet. Geld was eerst een rekeneenheid en economische relaties waren gebaseerd op schulden en vervolgens kwam er geld als een soort van ‘handelsgoed’ voor goederen en diensten. Alleen samenlevingen die al geld kenden, zo laat Graeber zien, kenden het ruilsysteem zoals dat in veel economie boeken vernoemd wordt. Door geld als rekeneenheid te gebruiken voor schulden wordt schuld van een moreel begrip een financieel begrip en ontstaat er een samenleving die verdeeld is in schuldeisers en schuldenaars.

Met een dergelijk perspectief kijkt hij ook naar de huidige financiële en economische crisis. De relatie tussen schuldeisers en schuldenaars is inmiddels zo onevenwichtig geworden dat de laatsten nog als enige optie hebben zichzelf als slaven te verkopen. Iets wat nu gebeurt met de Grieken zeg maar en wellicht ook de inwoners van IJsland. En in plaats van de schuldenaars te beschermen zijn er machtige instituties gebouwd zoals IMF die schuldeisers beschermen en die in feite stellen (volgens Graeber tegen alle traditionele economische logica in) dat geen enkele schuldenaar zijn schulden kwijtgescholden mag krijgen (zie ook Bas Jacobs). Maar volgens hem kunnen de schulden simpelweg niet helemaal terug betaald worden. Het overnemen van schulden van en aan banken is voor hem onzinnig, maar politici en bankiers beschermen ook nu weer de schuldeisers (en in feite dus zichzelf want inmiddels zijn zij geld schuldig aan zichzelf door het nationaliseren van schulden door de overheid) door simpelweg te stellen, dit is nu eenmaal de situatie en we kunnen er ook niets aan doen.

Graeber wijst op een interessante vergelijking met de schuldencrisis van de ‘Derde Wereld’ van jaren terug. De zogenaamde anti-globaliseringsbeweging riep op tot echte democratie en zag zich gesteld tegenover een coalitie van financiële elites en bureaucraten (IMF, Wereldbank, WTO, EU, enz.). Dat is vergelijkbaar met wat er nu gebeurt in de straten van Griekenland en Spanje die in feite stellen:
What is Debt? – An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber « naked capitalism

Look, in 2008 you let the cat out of the bag. If money really is just a social construct now, a promise, a set of IOUs and even trillions of debts can be made to vanish if sufficiently powerful players demand it then, if democracy is to mean anything, it means that everyone gets to weigh in on the process of how these promises are made and renegotiated.

Graeber vindt dat erg hoopvol. En ik eigenlijk ook wel.

Meer interessante antropologische beschouwen over de financiële en schuldencrisis evenals besprekingen van Graeber’s boek:
The ascent of money: A financial history of the world | The Economist

THE typical career of a Wall Street banker lasts about a quarter of a century, enough to span just one big financial crisis. As Niall Ferguson explains in his new book, “The Ascent of Money”, which will be published next month, today’s senior financiers would have started out in 1983, fully ten years after oil and gold prices first began the surge that had ruined the previous generation of money men. That, he concludes, is a “powerful justification for the study of financial history.”

Can You Spare a Dime? by Robert Skidelsky | The New York Review of Books

The Ascent of Money is a superb book, which illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of history for understanding what is happening now. It is written with the narrative flair, eye for detail, range of reference, and playfulness of language that we have come to expect from this exceptionally versatile historian. Ferguson is clearly fascinated by the subject of finance, knows a huge amount about it, and communicates his enthusiasm to the reader. Many parts of the story will be familiar enough to specialists, but Ferguson has a special ability to color even the familiar with strange and unusual examples, and he weaves together the separate strands of the financial tapestry with great skill. Some of the financial material is quite technical, but there is no attempt to “dumb down.” The book is an all too rare example of good, even dense, scholarship finding a way to engage the larger public.

Financial crisis: Anthropologists lead mass demonstration against G20 summit

Under the slogan “Storm the Banks”, the two members of The Radical Anthropology Group are urging the public to vent its anger on the financiers and bank executives many blame for the global economic crisis. They think it is necessary to question or even overthrow capitalism – a taboo topic for the ruling elites.

Pay Dirt: Watching Wall Street | StarTribune.com

An anthropologist who studied the culture up close during a year as a business analyst has emerged with fascinating insights – and a book.

The Anthropology of Wall Street – NYTimes.com

Luckily for Mr. Gross (and perhaps Mr. Obama), Duke University Press has recently published an anthropologist’s inside view of banking, titled “Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street.” The author, Karen Ho, is currently an anthropology professor at the University of Minnesota, but previously worked at an investment bank.

Her central thesis is that Wall Streeters have internalized the way they treat the companies they buy, sell and restructure, thereby creating a corporate culture that similarly cultivates transience, constant turnover, uncertainty and risk-taking. These values helped precipitate the financial crisis, she argues.

An Anthropologist Goes Techno: Anthropological Explanation for the Financial Crisis

The “Innovation Guru” of BusinessWeek, Bruce Nussbaum discusses the cultural side of the financial crisis. His idea is that the conceptual leap from “gambling” to “gaming” in describing the phenomenon of risking money was essential. Check out the video (3 min 34 sec) here!

Can anthropology shed light on the financial crisis?

At the recent Quaker Business Conference 2010, senior Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett explained why she thought the answer to the above question is ‘yes’. Before becoming a journalist, Gillian worked as a social anthropologist in Soviet Tajikistan while studying for a PhD. One of the things anthropologists observe is what is discussed and, perhaps more important, what is not discussed. Applying this approach to the financial markets in late 2004, Gillian observed that most of the media coverage concerned stocks and shares while debt and derivatives were largely ignored. She found that there had been a revolution in capital markets finance with innovations such as the ‘slicing and dicing’ of debt to create composite debt packages known as collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) which were then sometimes ‘sliced and diced’ further to create CDOs squared! She drew her colleagues’ attention to the ‘social silences’ on these topics by means of what became known within the FT as ‘iceberg memos’ and was permitted to write about them in the FT, but unfortunately in the capital markets section which is a low-profile, inside-page section of the newspaper. Her recent book, Fool’s Gold, sets out her analysis of the events leading up to the financial crisis.

The Memory Bank » Blog Archive » Anthropology and the financial crisis

These posts to the ASA Globalog in November 2009 were part of a series about anthropologists’ contributions to understanding the financial crisis.

1. “In the long run we’re all dead” (Keynes)

2. “The great economic revolutions are monetary in nature” (Mauss)

3. The limits of naivety for the anthropology of money

4. Surfing the credit crunch with Abdul Aziz

5. Why don’t more people make their own money?

Laura Barton meets Gillian Tett, assistant editor at the Financial Times | Business | The Guardian

The banking world ignored Gillian Tett when she predicted the credit crisis two years ago. Laura Barton hears how her training in social anthropology alerted her to the danger

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The Asylum Game – Failed Asylum Seekers Compete on TV

Posted on September 2nd, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Arts & culture, Multiculti Issues.

During the summer period Dutch public broadcasters come up with all kinds of new formats for TV progams. Several of those ideas are tried in the so called TV Lab in order to test the public response. One of these shows is the ‘Weg van Holland’. In this show failed asylum seekers can win 4.000 euros which helps them to make a new start in their country of origin to which they will send back. The winner is the person who demonstrates he or she knows their adopted country the best. TV viewers can also join the competition and compare their knowledge with that of the candidates. The winner among the TV viewers gets a (return!) ticket to the Caribbean island of Curacao.


The title of the program has a double ring to it. ‘Weg van Holland’ means both leaving Holland and loving Holland (probably this double meaning is best translated as ‘Holland, You’ve got to love it’.Radio Netherlands talked to the producers and the Refugee support network that supports the program (as well as Defence for Children). TV quiz for asylum seekers courts controversy | Radio Netherlands Worldwide

“My first reaction was: terrible idea, we’re not doing that. Then I looked into the issue more deeply and decided: we have to do this! Weg van Nederland focuses attention on the fact that, these days, many asylum seekers who are being expelled have children who have lived in the Netherlands for eight years or more. They have had a good education, speak perfect Dutch and have only seen their country of birth on television. We believe it’s time to stop and think about this.”

Sensitive
He emphasizes that the programme is not a hoax like De Grote Donorshow:
“The candidates are not actors, they are genuine unsuccessful asylum seekers who have to leave this country within a month or two.”

It’s a frivolous show about a serious issue. The VPRO is giving failed asylum seekers a public face and demonstrating how important they could be to the ageing population of the Netherlands. It’s a sensitive subject, as was illustrated recently by the case of Sahar, an Afghan girl who had been living in the Netherlands for ten years. Her planned expulsion was cancelled after a storm of emotional protests.

Investment
Wouter van Zandwijk of the refugee support group Vluchtelingenwerk says he can understand that people might find Weg van Nederland tasteless:

“The programme is sick but, let’s face it, the reality is sick too. The reality in this country is that people run out of legal options. Meanwhile, their children are receiving a good education and are integrating well. It makes you think: first you invest in people then, as you are about to harvest that investment – just before they all become hardworking Dutch taxpayers – that’s when you send them away.”

Frank Wiering comments: “The candidates are highly intelligent, self-assured people quite capable of deciding for themselves whether to take part or not. In terms of taste, I find a programme like Idols far more objectionable. First people are led to believe they are going to be big stars, then after three performances they’re headed off for a life of disappointment and drink.”

Knowledge
Van Zandwijk: “We’re hoping Weg van Nederland makes more people think about how we treat asylum seekers, that they understand more about what asylum seekers go through. Sometimes it takes far too long before they know whether they can stay. Vluchtelingenwerk would like a fast but careful asylum procedure. Young people who have spent so many years in the Netherlands are often more Dutch than Afghan or Somali and more at home here than in their country of origin.”

RNW compares the program with the Big Donor Show a few years ago in which the winner could receive a donor organ. It proved to be fake but was meant to draw attention to the shortage of organ donors in the Netherlands. So, I’m not sure how serious this program actually is. I doubt it. Words are misspelled in the program and they let the people carve out the shape of the country in cheese for example. Nevertheless in a Dutch press statement the broadcaster VPRO states that they play this game because they want to show how Dutch these asylum seekers have become over time. According to them they are real asylum seekers who really will leave the country. Furthermore the program makes the asylum seeker visible as a real person instead of a number.

The whole idea therefore is to show not only how restrictive Dutch asylum policies are but also how they actually work against the benefit of society by deporting asylum seekers who are successful and have internalized Dutch culture; the contestants are well educated and eloquent and include an aeronautical engineer from Cameroon and a Slavic languages student from Chechnya. This all happens on a very stereotypical level of course contributing to my impression that the show is a spoof.

The show also reminds me of a German program, based upon the (Dutch) Big Brother format, Foreigners Out! (Ausländer Raus! – Schlingensief Container) in which Schlingensief staged an interactive concentration camp right at the heart of Vienna tourist centre.

The whole asylum game (not only referring to this show) is indeed badly in need of some thorough analysis and debunking. Read for example the very useful piece of Anthony Burke on Australia. I watched part of the ‘Weg van Holland’ game and think they very clearly put forward the issues they said they wanted to highlight. I also thought it was mildly funny. As long as those people don’t really have to leave.

2 comments.

Religion & Film: Of Gods and Men

Posted on September 1st, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Arts & culture, Religion Other, Ritual and Religious Experience, Society & Politics in the Middle East.

Psalm 82:6-7, “I have said, ye are gods and all of you are children of the Most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.”

In 1996, during the Algerian Civil War, seven monks of the Tibhrine monastery in Algeria (belonging to the Roman Catholic Trappist Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance) were kidnapped. They were held for two months and killed. It remains unclear who the perpetrators were: the Armed Islamic Group (GIA – who claimed responsibility) or the Algerian army who may have killed them during an attempt to rescue them.

The film of Gods and Men is based on that event and follows the lives of French Catholic monks in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria in the 1990s. As the country is caught into a terrible civil war between an oppressive secularist state and radical Islamists, the Trappist brothers face the question of how to ‘love thy neighbour’.
Monks in Algeria: loving thy neighbor at gunpoint

Caught between the brutal Algerian government and the ruthless Islamists, the monks struggle to know and share God’s love and peace. What they experience alongside the beauty of the love they live out on a day-to-day basis in their monastic community is unbounded hatred, unspeakable violence, and, ultimately, unstoppable death seeping into their world. They must decide whether to remain in their monastery or flee the violence and return to France.

In their vocations, they seek to love and serve God by being “brothers to all”—in their monastic community and with all the people they encounter. All this becomes exponentially more complicated when new neighbors—a group of radical Islamists—come to the region. The battles between the Algerian government and the Islamists for influence and control unleash persistent horror and tragedy.

Love thy neighbors, all of them

The monks face a new question: What does it mean to share brotherly love at gun point? Over the years, the lives of the monks and the neighboring villagers became intertwined. The monks realize that if they leave, the consequences will be immense not only for themselves but also for the Muslim villagers who work in the monastery and whom the monks serve through a free medical clinic.

This is not a film about Christians vs. Muslims. Rather, this is a film about Christians trying—imperfectly but still genuinely—to love Muslims. And the monks must sort out what love means amid competing interpretive claims on the Muslim faith. In the Islamists’ political fanaticism and obsession with political power, the monks encounter a “distorted” Islam that stands in sharp contrast to the religious faith the monks experience in the lives of the Muslim villagers who live alongside the monastery in peace, Muslims who love their families and their neighbors.

The film is magnificent in the sense that it brings out the struggles each of the monks has with living together with others with whom they share many things but whom they also fear. It is in their prayers before God that these struggles are most clear. Trying to remain steadfast Christians and to respect Muslims against the background of the Civil War and trying not to resort to a dead end us vs. them game. The solution they found was ‘to love thy neighbour’ even at gunpoint.Journal of Religion & Film: Of Gods and Men (2010) by Wendy M. Wright

Each of the monks reacts differently to the felt sense of impending peril. But viewers are not treated to a story of one individual against many but to a story about genuine community in which individual struggle is honored and at the same time the integrity and deep bonds of the whole are acknowledged. The oscillation between common and individual dynamics is captured through the filmmakers’ choices. When the army wants to thrust its machines and armed men upon the monastery, Fr. Christian peremptorily refuses: this is the antithesis of the life of peace and hospitality (another one of those other Benedictine themes) that he has chosen. But his confreres gently but firmly call him out: we did not elect you to make your own unilateral decisions they say, reminding him of his appropriately humble and un-autocratic role as outlined by St. Benedict’s Rule. Alternately, the solitariness of Fr. Christian’s burden of leadership is evident as he paces alone across the remote windswept acres of the monastic lands while wild fowl wing across a vast expanse of sky and dwarf his silhouette.

[10] Thus begins a remarkable series of scenes that reveal the process of spiritual discernment, genuine listening to the Spirit of God as it is refracted through individual conscience, through community members, through others, and through the tradition. This is where the centrality of the liturgical office and the prayer to which the men return again and again becomes clear. The words of the midnight liturgy of Christmas echo powerfully as the shaken community gathers after the terrorists disappear into the night. Allusions to the crucified one and to the sacrifice of love resonate in the music the men sing. As the danger looms, they listen in the refectory to a reading by Carlo Corretto (a French spiritual writer and member of the Little Brothers of Jesus, a community inspired by hermit Charles de Foucauld who lived and was assassinated in the Algerian desert). Carretto’s words about surrender sink in, helping to sharpen the discernment the men are making. What is stability? What does it mean to vow fidelity to a community? What does it mean to follow the crucified God of Love? What is martyrdom? What of the people in the neighborhood to whom they have pledged their presence? The filmmakers use some dialogue to explore these questions but much of the questioning, both individually and communally, is visually expressed through facial close ups and by careful attention to the nuances of posture, gesture, tone of voice, and unspoken interactions among community members as they gather to decide together what they should do.

I think when used with articles and books that shed some more light on Algerian politics of the second half of the 20th century this film is excellent for teaching purposes.

0 comments.

Religion & Film: Of Gods and Men

Posted on September 1st, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Arts & culture, Religion Other, Ritual and Religious Experience, Society & Politics in the Middle East.

Psalm 82:6-7, “I have said, ye are gods and all of you are children of the Most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.”

In 1996, during the Algerian Civil War, seven monks of the Tibhrine monastery in Algeria (belonging to the Roman Catholic Trappist Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance) were kidnapped. They were held for two months and killed. It remains unclear who the perpetrators were: the Armed Islamic Group (GIA – who claimed responsibility) or the Algerian army who may have killed them during an attempt to rescue them.

The film of Gods and Men is based on that event and follows the lives of French Catholic monks in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria in the 1990s. As the country is caught into a terrible civil war between an oppressive secularist state and radical Islamists, the Trappist brothers face the question of how to ‘love thy neighbour’.
Monks in Algeria: loving thy neighbor at gunpoint

Caught between the brutal Algerian government and the ruthless Islamists, the monks struggle to know and share God’s love and peace. What they experience alongside the beauty of the love they live out on a day-to-day basis in their monastic community is unbounded hatred, unspeakable violence, and, ultimately, unstoppable death seeping into their world. They must decide whether to remain in their monastery or flee the violence and return to France.

In their vocations, they seek to love and serve God by being “brothers to all”—in their monastic community and with all the people they encounter. All this becomes exponentially more complicated when new neighbors—a group of radical Islamists—come to the region. The battles between the Algerian government and the Islamists for influence and control unleash persistent horror and tragedy.

Love thy neighbors, all of them

The monks face a new question: What does it mean to share brotherly love at gun point? Over the years, the lives of the monks and the neighboring villagers became intertwined. The monks realize that if they leave, the consequences will be immense not only for themselves but also for the Muslim villagers who work in the monastery and whom the monks serve through a free medical clinic.

This is not a film about Christians vs. Muslims. Rather, this is a film about Christians trying—imperfectly but still genuinely—to love Muslims. And the monks must sort out what love means amid competing interpretive claims on the Muslim faith. In the Islamists’ political fanaticism and obsession with political power, the monks encounter a “distorted” Islam that stands in sharp contrast to the religious faith the monks experience in the lives of the Muslim villagers who live alongside the monastery in peace, Muslims who love their families and their neighbors.

The film is magnificent in the sense that it brings out the struggles each of the monks has with living together with others with whom they share many things but whom they also fear. It is in their prayers before God that these struggles are most clear. Trying to remain steadfast Christians and to respect Muslims against the background of the Civil War and trying not to resort to a dead end us vs. them game. The solution they found was ‘to love thy neighbour’ even at gunpoint.Journal of Religion & Film: Of Gods and Men (2010) by Wendy M. Wright

Each of the monks reacts differently to the felt sense of impending peril. But viewers are not treated to a story of one individual against many but to a story about genuine community in which individual struggle is honored and at the same time the integrity and deep bonds of the whole are acknowledged. The oscillation between common and individual dynamics is captured through the filmmakers’ choices. When the army wants to thrust its machines and armed men upon the monastery, Fr. Christian peremptorily refuses: this is the antithesis of the life of peace and hospitality (another one of those other Benedictine themes) that he has chosen. But his confreres gently but firmly call him out: we did not elect you to make your own unilateral decisions they say, reminding him of his appropriately humble and un-autocratic role as outlined by St. Benedict’s Rule. Alternately, the solitariness of Fr. Christian’s burden of leadership is evident as he paces alone across the remote windswept acres of the monastic lands while wild fowl wing across a vast expanse of sky and dwarf his silhouette.

[10] Thus begins a remarkable series of scenes that reveal the process of spiritual discernment, genuine listening to the Spirit of God as it is refracted through individual conscience, through community members, through others, and through the tradition. This is where the centrality of the liturgical office and the prayer to which the men return again and again becomes clear. The words of the midnight liturgy of Christmas echo powerfully as the shaken community gathers after the terrorists disappear into the night. Allusions to the crucified one and to the sacrifice of love resonate in the music the men sing. As the danger looms, they listen in the refectory to a reading by Carlo Corretto (a French spiritual writer and member of the Little Brothers of Jesus, a community inspired by hermit Charles de Foucauld who lived and was assassinated in the Algerian desert). Carretto’s words about surrender sink in, helping to sharpen the discernment the men are making. What is stability? What does it mean to vow fidelity to a community? What does it mean to follow the crucified God of Love? What is martyrdom? What of the people in the neighborhood to whom they have pledged their presence? The filmmakers use some dialogue to explore these questions but much of the questioning, both individually and communally, is visually expressed through facial close ups and by careful attention to the nuances of posture, gesture, tone of voice, and unspoken interactions among community members as they gather to decide together what they should do.

I think when used with articles and books that shed some more light on Algerian politics of the second half of the 20th century this film is excellent for teaching purposes.

0 comments.