Patience, patience

It's been a couple of weeks now at my new home for City of Brass at Beliefnet, and while I've largely settled into a new routine there, several things remain unfinished. First among these is my RSS feed, which still has not been activated. I ask your patience. In the meantime, why not take a look at the blog the old fashioned way? I really have been quite a lot more active these past two weeks.

City of Brass v2.0 now live at Beliefnet

It's official - City of Brass will henceforth be published at Beliefnet - the URL to the new blog is:

http://blog.beliefnet.com/cityofbrass/

Please join me over there, and update your bookmarks accordingly!

Announcement

I am pleased and honored to announce that I have been invited to move City of Brass to BeliefNet.com. Effective next week, I will be posting at my new URL (http://blog.beliefnet.com/cityofbrass/ - but don't go yet, there's not much there at present). If you are subscribed to my feed, you needn't change anything, you should be redirected automatically.

I am really excited about this opportunity and I think that it will be a lot of fun. See you over there!

Obama's muslim-outreach advisor resigns

Chalk up another victory for the scalp-hunting Islamophobe right: Mazen Asbahi, appointed as national coordinator for Muslim American affairs by the Obama campaign, has resigned from his volunteer position because of claims that he has "ties" to the Muslim Brotherhood, and served on the board of advisors for an Islamic fund at the same time (8 years ago) as another member, Jamal Said who is a fundamentalist imam. Asbahi actually resigned from that position after only a few weeks, once he learned of allegations against Said. In other words, Asbahi got the jihadi cooties, which are kind of like a mixture of anthrax and herpes.

Obama continues to disappoint on this score. He still remains unable to state publicly that "no, I am not a muslim but it would make no difference even if I were." It would have truly been a hope-inspiring change to see him defend Asbahi and take on the whisperers, because caving to them makes them all the stronger. That would be audacity I can believe in.

Yes, 12% of voters still think Obama is muslim (incidentally, 1% think he's Jewish). So whats the better strategy? Try to distance yourself from muslims at all costs to try and make that 12% think, "hmm. ok so he threw his volunteer outreach guy under the bus. I'm convinced!" ? Or to try and undermine the reasoning that says "if Obama is muslim, then I cannot vote for him, because muslims are not acceptable" ?

If any politician had the power or the pulpit to take on the ugly, dark side of American culture that Islamophobia represents, it's Obama. Given the confluence of events of war and energy and security, a sane outreach to Islam is in our collective best interest. Yet Obama runs away. Again.

I'm not sure whether I have any substantive analysis here other than snark, so I'll just stop here. Some excerpts from the story at WSJ:

why even have a muslim outreach advisor?

Until Mr. Asbahi joined the campaign, Sen. Obama did not have a Muslim-outreach coordinator and had relied on the Democratic National Committee's efforts. The campaign has long had its own outreach efforts to Catholic, evangelical Christian and Jewish voters. Some Muslim voters have complained about the disparity. An Obama aide says Mr. Asbahi was brought on in part to bridge that perceived gap and to reach out to Muslim communities in Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, states seen as among the most competitive this fall.

What exactly are these "ties" to extremism?

In 2000, Mr. Asbahi briefly served on the board of Allied Assets Advisors Fund, a Delaware-registered trust. Its other board members at the time included Jamal Said, the imam at a fundamentalist-controlled mosque in Illinois.
[faith and obama]

"I served on that board for only a few weeks before resigning as soon as I became aware of public allegations against another member of the board," Mr. Asbahi said in his resignation letter. "Since concerns have been raised about that brief time, I am stepping down...to avoid distracting from Barack Obama's message of change."

Who exactly is Jamal Said?

The Justice Department named Mr. Said an unindicted co-conspirator in the racketeering trial last year of several alleged Hamas fund-raisers, which ended in a mistrial. He has also been identified as a leading member of the group in news reports going back to 1993.

Mr. Said is the imam at the Bridgeview Mosque in Bridge-view, Ill., outside Chicago. He left the board of the Islamic fund in 2005, Securities and Exchange Commission filings state. A message left for Mr. Said at the mosque was not returned.

What jafi scum was responsible for this particular scalping?

The eight-year-old connection between Mr. Asbahi and Mr. Said was raised last week by the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report, which is published by a Washington think tank and chronicles the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood, a world-wide fundamentalist group based in Egypt. Other Web sites, some pro-Republican and others critical of fundamentalist Islam, also have reported on the background of Mr. Asbahi.

Is orientalism dead?

I admit to not having read Edward Said's Orientalism, but from what I gather, his thesis is that any study of eastern cultures by western historians is necessarily tainted by a racist, condescending, colonial perspective that portrays eastern culture in an inherently inferior light. I have always had trouble accepting this thesis (at least, as far as the modern era - examples of it abound from the colonial era, for example pretty much everything written about India during the British Raj).

Any analysis of a foreign culture is necessarily going to happen across a cultural chasm. As such, it is inevitable that elements of that culture under study will be filtered through the observer's own. The whole point of cultural analysis is to try and understand something alien; the human way to do this is to try and relate it to something more familiar. As a result, the culture under study will be bent and folded (and even mutilated, depending on the skill or lack thereof of the observer) to fit into predefined (and alien) categories.

There probably is always some element of condescension involved as well. Cultural superiority is ingrained deeply by force of habit and the comfort of the familiar. How many times have we seen statements about the West from Islamic sources that seek to portray the West as inherently sinful, hedonistic, without morals, etc. ? Perhaps Western analysts have learned to mask or even suppress their condescension better. But is that condescension the core of the analysis or a side effect? Is the value of the analysis totally negated by it?

A modern day westerner writing about the middle east (which, it should be noted, includes we western muslims as much as it does someone like Michael Totten) will not be immune to these foibles. In my opinion, the thesis of orientalism draws a false line between east and west. In that way Edward Said is as guilty of perpetuating the "Clash" as Samuel Huntington (personally, I favor the Gash of Civilizations theory instead). When i think of Oriental I think of the far east (the Chinese civilization and its offshoots). The middle east is the frontier between east and west, but I don't think you can argue (especially with the adoption of western leftist parliaments and political systems) that its wholly distinct. Neither are they distinct in the religious sphere - after all, there are three great Abrahamic faiths, and they are coterminus at Jerusalem.

I think that we cannot expect a non-muslim writing about the middle east to be too sympathetic to our muslim axioms. It's our task to explain why orthodoxy and faith are important, to rescue terms like hijab and jihad from the negative connotation, to take our own pride in our orthopraxy. A non-muslim writing about the middle east will look for what they know - bars, liberalism, hot chicks - whereas we might see something different. That's not orientalism, its simply culture shock.

Overall, orientalism is badly named. It describes a relationship between colonial powers and its colonies more than it does east vs west or Islam vs (anything). I can't help but speculate that Said's motivation was really to try and establish a distinction between east and west as proxies for the palestinians and the israelis. That conflict is all the more tragic when seen as a fraternal one rather than one at the very frontier between two civilizations, alien and opposed. There's no reason however that the rest of us, who are not embroiled in a life or death struggle over holy land, need to be bound by this formulation. I think we as western muslims especially need to reject the concept of orientalism out of hand.

UPDATE: great essay in The Guardian, "Orientalism is not racism". In my opinion the most important part of the argument is as follows:

Today the west is bleakly incurious about the history of Islam, its art, peoples and learning. There's a blank wall of terror. This wall has been strengthened by Said's book because it closes down a crucial way for cultures to encounter one another: it closes down romanticism.

NOTE: Comments closed here - to discuss this essay, please join the discussion at Talk Islam.

who says muslims don't laugh at themselves?

At Talk Islam, a joke and a photo.

What is an African-American?

Tariq has a very thorough post at his blog expanding on the question of what it means to be African American and whether Obama qualifies to claim that ethnic heritage or not. I think the post expands very well on the earlier discussion and i find myself in agreement now that the term African American does have a special meaning that is best left undiluted. I do still think that the self-identity of AA in the US needs to ultimately free itself of slavery’s shadow, much like the self-identity of Jews needs to free itself of the Holocaust, but in practice I don't know how practical that is.

It must be noted however that the term AA will continue to be used as a broad brush. So i think in one sense if ethnic AA's try to articulate their "ownership" of the term African-American, they do risk being tarred (unfairly) as making the “black enough” argument. It might be better to make the argument in the abstract for the term AA, but adopting a more specific label for pragmatisms’ sake. I personally think “Black American” is more descriptive since Africa, per se, is not really central to the identity in question.

(Note - comments closed here. Please discuss this post at Talk Islam).