USA Today discusses this issue in a recent article:
For years, Sunnis and Shiites in this country have worked together to build mosques, support charities, register voters and hold massive feasts for Eid al-Fitr (on Oct. 13 this year in the USA), the celebration at the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
Now there are small signs of tension emerging in America’s Muslim community that are raising concerns among many of its leaders. They worry that the bitter divisions that have caused so much bloodshed abroad are beginning to have an impact here. Such concerns are rising at a time when the USA’s Muslim community has grown from less than 1 million in 1990 to nearly 2.5 million today, with two of three Muslims born overseas, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.
“You have people who recently arrived from other places where things may have gotten out of hand,” says Sheik Hamza Yusuf, the U.S.-born co-founder of the nation’s first Muslim seminary, the Zaytuna Institute, in Berkeley, Calif. “It takes just one deranged person with a cousin back home who died in a suicide bombing to create trouble here.” (more)
I would make extensive commentary and some witty remarks like I usually do, but I’m really pressed for time, so I’m just gonna say this: why can’t we all just be Muslims? The fact that there are even sects among us is disturbing. I mean, didn’t Allah reveal Islam to humankind because people had distorted the messages of their previous prophets? There were no “sects” during the Prophet Muhammad’s time. These emerged after his death, in response to the question of who would lead the Muslim community. From that point on, we began to distort Allah’s message at an early stage in Islamic history. I really doubt Allah introduced Islam so that we may become more divided. Or maybe that’s part of the test.
On a lighter note, the article also talks about HijabMan, friend and fellow blogger that sells shirts that say things like “My name causes national security alerts. What does yours do?” and “Frisk me, I’m Muslim.” His products were recently mentioned on a segment of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. Good job!
Since the beginning of Ramadan, I’ve dedicated about ten to thirty minutes nearly every day to reading the Qur’an in English (specifically, The Meaning of The Holy Qur’an by Abdullah Yusuf Ali). Because I read every footnote (255 down, 6055 more to go), I’ve progressed very, very slowly. I’ve been on Al-Baqarah, where I started, for like a million years now.
“Che, boludo. ¡Estás loco! ¿Por qué vos hacés eso?” (”Hey, idiot. You’re crazy! Why do you do that?”)
To put the surahs into perspective and to learn the historical contexts in which they were revealed. I would be totally clueless about what I’m reading without them. Footnotes are my friends, my friends. Maybe that’s just the sociology major side of me speaking. Although the footnotes are subject to the author’s biases, they reveal many of the thoughts that ran through his head during the translation process.
As someone that speaks English (native: 158% fluent), Bengali (native: uh, I suck at it), and Spanish (non-native: 85% fluent), I am well-aware that translations can significantly alter the original meaning of texts, especially literary, highly complex works that make extensive use of figurative language. Given the highly poetic nature of the Qur’an, all translations of it are best seen as interpretations. However, unless one speaks and understands seventh-century classical Arabic, translations are the next best thing.
Plenty of non-Arabic speaking Muslims grow up reading the Qur’an in its original language, but few take the time to understand and analyze what they read. Am I right, or am I right? Simply reading and reciting something without understanding a word of it will not teach you anything about Islam.
As a child, I always wondered why my mosque Sunday school teachers hardly emphasized the meaning of the lessons taught in the Qur’an and how to implement them into our daily lives. Probably because they were just taught to memorize and not analyze. Memorization, analysis, and interpretation are all integral parts of Qur’anic study.
An avid reader, I learned far more about Islam on my own than in Sunday school, but then again, I dropped out at the age of nine or ten, mostly due to the humiliation I bore being stuck in the class with the kids that were just barely out of their diapers. Ugh, didn’t the adults realize that sticking a ten-year-old with kindergarteners could have a detrimental effect on his self-esteem? I was reading great classics like James and the Giant Peach while they were watching Barney and Sesame Street. Just because I was slow at learning Arabic doesn’t mean they had to put me in the class with the kids that couldn’t even read English. Because of their negligence, I often cried and begged my parents to stop making me go.
I bet many Muslim kids out there in the US have to bear the brunt of “teaching techniques” imported from the Pakistan, Bangladesh, and wherever else. Hopefully, Sunday school education has changed for the better since my elementary school days back in the early and mid-1990s. If they haven’t, I need to go out there and fix it.
After nearly two weeks of dark days and cold rain showers, the weather’s finally clearing up and getting warmer. I don’t have a thermometer built into my brain, but I’m guessing the high was 65 °F or so. Pretty flippin’ sweet.
Thousands of high school and college students and probably some junior high kids too were out and about for Día del Estudiante, or Student Day, which is held every twenty-first of September, the first day of spring. With no classes, they were swarming the sidewalks in large droves, walking towards the nearest parks to hang out with their friends and possibly get drunk and/or high. Some snack vendors were out, and I saw a reggae band performing. Interestingly, reggae seems fairly popular down here. What’s more interesting is that you see a lot of Rasta-looking white guys with dreadlocks.
Two of my friends and I took a quick stroll through Bosques de Palermo, a big park full of trees, bushes, lakes, and other goodies. Since we’re American, we spoke English to each other, which draws attention here, especially when it’s spoken by two Bangladeshis and a black girl–you know, all Americans have blond hair and blue eyes. My friends, both Muslims and hijabis, tend to draw a lot of attention since there are very few blacks, desis, and women that cover their hair in Argentina. A group of three or four guys in their late teens or early twenties was walking behind us, staring and grinning. One of them kept saying to his buddies “A ver” (”let’s take a look”). Then they started saying stuff like “I love you” and “welcome Argentina” in their very limited English to my friends. Then I turned around and said “Hablamos castellano también” (”We speak Spanish too”) just to show them that we understood everything they were saying when they spoke among themselves. And then one of them said “te quiero” (”I love you”) to the girls. Ha ha ha ha ha. And then they offered them beer since they were walking around with at least one bottle of Quilmes. Fortunately, they drifted away after following us for a few minutes.
Argentine guys are so bold. How did they know I wasn’t with either of the girls? You hardly find guys in the US that are brave enough to say stuff like that to random girls, especially when they’re with other guys. Yes, they were probably drunk, but many Argentine guys do stuff like that when they’re sober. They often give random girls piropos, or flirtatious comments, even when they’re with a dude. They range from sweet to really vulgar and everything in between. You know what they call really vulgar piropos back where I’m from? Sexual harassment.
Luckily, I’m a guy and don’t have to deal with creepy men. Ugh, creepy guys ruin everything for the non-creepy ones like me. Why are so many guys like that throughout the world? Creepiness among men transcends nationality, race, religion, ethnicity, politics, and economics. I hope it’s not genetic.
A little video I took:
It got a bit racier a few minutes afterwards. The guy that pulled his shirt over his head pulled down his shorts and boxers and almost showed his, uh, yeah…
What a wonderful way to celebrate the beginning of spring.
I keep getting stupid Trackback spam, so I’ve been deleting them like crazy. In the process, I accidentally marked all the comments from the last four posts as spam. Sigh.
You may repost them. My posts are naked without your comments. I need comments to feel loved. Really.
The spammers out there need to get a taste of their own medicine. We need to find out who they are and spam the heck out of their inboxes and blogs and MySpace accounts and whatever else that can be spammed. And then we willl spam their loved ones. Yes, even the old men, women, and children. No one will be spared. Not even Michael Jackson and Kashif Memon. Only then will justice be served.
There’s all this talk about the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, but what about the War on Spam? I’m pretty sure spam causes more misery in the daily lives of the American people than some ex-Taliban guy in some village outside of Kabul that can’t read.
We keep getting spam because out of the 1,000,000 people that receive the same message, some idiot will believe that he can enlarge his you-know-what with a pill marketed through a horribly misspelled ad.
I wonder if and when humanity will save itself from such stupidity. Sadly, we’ll keep getting spam until such stupidity is eliminated.
So somebody rang the doorbell to my host family’s apartment at 1 a.m. and left a gift for us: smeared poop all over the door. After my host mom told me about that this morning, she noticed that there was a bag of poo on my balcony. No wonder there were a bunch of flies out there. I saw a plastic bag filled with brown stuff, but I didn’t think it could be anything so nasty. Someone must have thrown it from the roof.
I’m curious to know whether the poo was of human or dog origin. I’m really hoping the latter.
Apparently, someone had also left a special goody bag in front of the door of another apartment on this floor. Hey, that rhymes!
My host mom can’t figure out who did it and why, especially since she has no enemies here. She suspects that it may be the druggie 20-year-old granddaughter of an old lady that lives here.
I say we find out who did it and retaliate with a larger poo attack, with ammo collected from the sidewalks of Buenos Aires. If we don’t, the terrorists will have already won.
The ninth month of the Islamic calendar, a.k.a. Ramadan, started Wednesday night in Buenos Aires. My first Ramadan outside of the US, and my first Ramadan without any family to enjoy it with. Nonetheless, I’m excited to see how Argentines celebrate this holy month.
But I’m even more excited to see how they celebrate Eid down here. Word on the street is that girls show up at mixed Eid parties wearing tank tops and miniskirts. How interesting. You don’t see that in the US!
Muslim life around the world fascinates me.
Plans for Ramadan:
Read the Qur’an for at least ten minutes a day.
Log into facebook for no more than once a day. Believe me, this is gonna take a lot of self-control. I would love to just deactivate my account, but it’s a good way to keep in touch with family and friends.
Not listen to music during the daylight hours.
Study hard.
Not use any chat programs (e.g. AIM, MSN, Gmail Chat, etc.).
Check my e-mail no more than twice a day.
Spend quality time with friends.
Take advantage of the fact that many more Muslims go the mosque to collect data for my research project about Argentine Muslims.
Not idle around.
Perhaps I should limit my blogging to twice a week or something… But I just have to let everybody know how life is in this part of the world for someone from such a unique background. I mean, how many other Bangladeshi American Muslims that were born in Salt Lake City and raised in Oklahoma, Florida, and Illinois and majoring in sociology and political science do you know that live in Argentina? Zero.
David Horowitz and Friends have cooked up a new way spread their hate-filled, politically-driven ideology to a college campus new you:
During the week of October 22-26, 2007, the nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever – Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a wake-up call for Americans on 200 university and college campuses.
The purpose of this protest is as simple as it is crucial: to confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat. Nothing could be more politically incorrect than to point this out. But nothing could be more important for American students to hear. In the face of the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted, the academic left has mobilized to create sympathy for the enemy and to fight anyone who rallies Americans to defend themselves. According to the academic left, anyone who links Islamic radicalism to the war on terror is an “Islamophobe.” According to the academic left, the Islamo-fascists hate us not because we are tolerant and free, but because we are “oppressors.” (more)
That’s right, folks. The Islamo-fascists are out there to eat you and your children (especially the gay female Jewish ones that love freedom), so you better listen and learn. What? You don’t know what an Islamo-fascist is? You’re an idiot. It’s so obvious. Just imagine a Muslim version of Benito Mussolini.
In all seriousness, what the heck is an Islamo-fascist? Most people don’t even have a clue what fascism is; they just know it sounds evil. And as we all know, Islam is the most evil religion in the galaxy (isn’t that obvious from my posts?), so Islam + Fascism = omg omg omg mommy the moslemz r out to kill us. Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist has an excellent post about this very topic.
It’s pretty scary that such anti-Muslim rhetoric hardly causes anyone to flinch these days. Just imagine the uproar with a Judeo-Fascism Awareness Week. Or a Hindu-Fascism Awareness Week. Muslim trashing is the norm these days rather than the exception. You have bigots like Glenn Beck that make a career out of demonizing Muslim minorities in the West on mainstream networks like CNN, yet hardly anyone raises a finger. What a world we live in.
The top hatemongers out there aren’t stupid. It may comes as a surprise, but they study Islam and know it very well. They just choose to hide the facts for their own political gain. Yep. That’s who you’re dealing with.
To all my Muslims out there: don’t sit back and let this stuff slide. Fight back and attack the ideology and flaws of such close-minded thinking. Speak to your congressman or senator. Protest. Write to the editor of a newspaper when you read something false and misleading about Islam and Muslims. Post a link to your blog about an act of bigotry. There’s no excuse for you not to do anything. Even the simplest acts can serve to improve the image of Islam and Muslims.
Just don’t do anything stupid like burning down an embassy. Please?
Last Friday had to have been one of the coolest and most random days I’ve had in my time abroad.
After jummah, I met a young Bangladeshi American couple from New Jersey that was vacationing in Buenos Aires. It’s random enough to meet Bangladeshis, much less Bangladeshi Americans, in this city, as I only know one other bangladeshí yanqui besides me.
My two Muslim American friends that are studying here and I took them out. I felt like I was in some weird Islamoamerican version of Argentina because I’m not exactly accustomed to being around four other Americans that practice my religion down here.
That night, all but one of us ate dinner at a cheap, shabby hotel filled with Bangladeshi men. The hotel, which is located just about ten blocks away from where I live, is probably not the type of hotel you’re thinking of. Basically, it’s a combination of an apartment building and a hotel, where each unit just has one room, and everyone shares a bathroom. A lot of people that can’t afford to live in real apartments live in places like that for extended amounts of time.
While I was there, I saw about five of the who-knows-how-many Bangladeshis that live there, but just two of them did most of the cooking. The food was delicious. They prepared fried rice, chicken, beef, and eggs, all mixed together. There was even achar, or pickled mango. You Bengalis know what I’m talking about! It was great to eat a full Bengali meal made by authentic Bengalis actually from Bangladesh after such a long time away from home. I can’t even begin to describe their hospitality.
The sheikh that gave the khutbah at the masjid that day was at the hotel as well. Because I had seen him dressed in a dishdasha and a kuffiyeh, I was taken aback to see him in “normal” clothes. Plus, he spoke calmly in Spanish and Urdu and didn’t speak Arabic in a loud voice like he had at jummah. He was actually a pretty down to earth guy. Originally from the city of Lucknow in northcentral India, he studied Islam in Saudi Arabia for fifteen years. At some point, the Saudi government, I think, sent him to Ciudad del Este, Paraguay ten years ago to serve the large Muslim community there. He speaks Urdu, Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese fluently and some English. We talked to each other en castellano because that was the only language we had in common. Yeah, I never thought I would be talking to an Indian sheikh in Spanish.
The view from my balcony is pretty ugly, but hey, at least I can see the outside world and feel the freshly polluted air from my room, unlike in my last host family’s apartment. To deprive someone of natural light is just cruel.
