The Month's Greetings + A Public Service Announcement

RAMADAN KAREEEEEEEEEMMMMMMMM!!!!!!

Ah, the blessed month has come, such a sweet time of friendship and caring, reflection, purification and contemplation, as everyone else looks on and wonders why those weird masochistic Muslims are so happy about starving themselves.......

Anyway, I just thought I would benefit mine readers with a little tip. If you are a Muslim, and, like me, live in a country as a minority, you would be aware of the relative difficulty of obtaining permissible food. When one eats out one would often have to head off to some prespecified Indian joint or kebab place, which tends to get rather tiresome in terms of variety. There ain't exactly many halal Mexican or Italian restaurants around, if you get my drift.

Which brings us to the wonder of Japanese food. Ahhhhh, so apparently one can finally eat well with a clear conscience! Dearest Nihon, with your clean and fresh flavors, and abundance of seafood and vegetables, surely a dream for any Muslim (or for that matter, Jew). Not like damn Chinese cuisine with seemingly always finds a way to get infiltrated with some form of animal product even when you order vegetarian.........

Who could possibly resist  a nice wholesome, refreshing bowl of soba noodles?

Or some delectable sushi?

So innocent eh? But the dark truth is:

MIRIN.

Aiiiieeee!!! Mirin, that sweet rice wine used to often in Japanese cuisine! Whether in sushi rice or the sauce of agedashi tofu, it is surprisingly common for alcohol to be used in the preparation of Japanese food.

So be warned, my brothers and sisters. We should always abtain from the haram, but this is especially important when breaking one's fast in this holy month. Always check with the staff that no grog has been used in the preparation of your Oriental iftar! Things are not always as they seem.........

That's my little bit of sanctimony for today. May your fasting be accepted!

Sayonara........

What's this? A halfway-sane article about the Afghan conflict!?

Source: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/simplistic-moralism-sells-afghans-short-20100806-11ofx.html

Simplistic moralism sells Afghans short
PRIYAMVADA GOPAL
August 7, 2010

Cartoon tales of good and evil are distorting our picture of Afghanistan.

Reprising a legendary 1985 National Geographic cover, this week's Time magazine features another beautiful young Afghan woman, but with a gaping hole where her nose used to be before it was cut off under Taliban direction. A stark caption reads: ''What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan.''

An editorial insists the image is not shown ''either in support of the US war effort or in opposition to it'', but to counterbalance damaging WikiLeaks revelations - more than 90,000 leaked documents that, Time believes, cannot provide ''emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land''.

Feminists have long argued that invoking the condition of women to justify occupation is a cynical ploy, and the Time cover already stands accused of it. Interestingly, the WikiLeaks documents reveal CIA advice to use the plight of Afghan women as ''pressure points'', an emotive way to rally flagging public support for the war.

Misogynist violence is unacceptable, but we must also be concerned by the insistence that the complexities of war and occupation can be reduced to bedtime stories. Time is not alone in condensing Afghan reality into simplistic morality tales. A deplorable number of recent works habituate us into thinking about Afghanistan as what British Defence Minister Liam Fox called a ''broken 13th-century country'', defined by pathologically violent men and brutalised women.

While Afghans have been further disempowered by being reduced to objects of Western chastisement, a recent judgment against Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul has raised the possibility of challenging distortions.

Based on her stay in the eponymous protagonist's home, Seierstad's memoir uses offensive commercial language to describe ordinary marital negotiations and refers to female characters as ''the burqa''. The tone implies that even the most anti-Taliban Afghan men are irredeemably vicious patriarchs. Predictably, some critical reaction deemed Afghanistan a ''horrible society''.

While there exists a colonial tradition of relegating the non-West to the past of the West - and some suggest leaving it to rot in hopelessness - the trendier option involves incorporating Afghans into modernity by teaching them to live in a globalised present.

In non-fiction bestsellers such as Deborah Rodriguez's Kabul Beauty School, an American woman teaches Afghan women the intricacies of hair colour, sexiness, and resisting oppression. ''To all appearances, there is no sex life in Afghanistan,'' writes Rodriguez, obsessed, as is Seierstad, with the nuptial habits of Afghans. Sex and the City 2, set in the Middle East, may have tanked as a movie, but as ideology it has displaced meaningful global feminism.

Acceptable Afghan-American voices such as Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner) and Awista Ayub (Kabul Girls Soccer Club) reiterate the notion that suburban America can ''infuse'' Afghans with freedom. Formulaic narratives are populated by tireless Western humanitarians, sex-crazed polygamous paedophiles (most Afghan men) and burqa-clad ''child-women'' who are broken in body and spirit, or have just enough doughtiness to be scripted into a triumphal Hollywood narrative. The real effects of the NATO occupation, including the worsening of many women's lives under the lethal combination of patriarchal feudalism and new corporate militarism, are rarely discussed.

The mutilated Afghan woman ultimately fills a symbolic void where there should be ideas for real change. The truth is that the US and allied regimes do not have anything substantial to offer Afghanistan beyond feeding the gargantuan war machine they have unleashed.

In the affluent West itself, modernity is now about dismantling welfare systems, increasing inequality (disenfranchising women in the process) and subsidising corporate profits.

Other ideas once associated with modernity - social justice, economic fairness and peace, all of which would enfranchise Afghan women - have been relegated to the past in the name of progress.

This bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators.

GUARDIAN

Priyamvada Gopal teaches post-colonial studies at Cambridge University.

Stop Blaming Ignorance for Islamophobia

In the popular discourse Muslims are the regular target of diatribe. It is also just as expected to answer such prejudicial behaviour with allegations of ‘ignorance’. So if someone is a bigot, it is because they are ‘ignorant’. If someone discriminates, it is because they are ‘ignorant’. Now, nobody is denying that this is true at least some of the time, but such a way of thinking possesses a serious flaw.

If we assume that a bigoted person is so due to the state of being ignorant, it becomes implicit that this person’s attitude is an irrational aberration, in contrast to rational, non-ignorant society at large. By extension, we go on to assume that this bigotry can be remedied by the removal of ignorance. Thus, ‘educating’ that person, in removing his/her ignorance, makes that person no longer a bigot, bringing him/her in line with ‘normal’ society.

Can anyone see the problem here? Bigotry is seen as the fault of the person. It is up to that person to change, because they are guilty and we are innocent. The onus for tackling religious prejudice is put solely on the shoulders of the individual. But no individual exists in a vacuum. Such an approach effectively whitewashes the responsibility of institutional, structural and ideological factors in contributing to this prejudice.

We keep harping for individuals to ‘stop being so ignorant’ whilst the media continually employs sensationalist, reductionist and value-laden language. Whilst minority communities continue to bear the brunt of socioeconomic disadvantage. Whilst anti-terror laws practically single out Muslims as THE threat. Whilst politicians continually use Muslim-related issues as a convenient vote-buying tool. Whilst the popular subconscious still holds as axiomatic a worldview grounded in Orientalist tropes which cannot help but view Islam and the ‘East’ as inherently inferior - culturally, morally, intellectually and spiritually.

Ignorance? More often than not the most vocal and influential Islamophobes are highly educated, charismatic and intelligent, and actively seek knowledge related to Islam which they use to further their agendas. Indeed, far from being irrational, Islamophobia is a product of a highly rational system of power relations which instigates and reinforces oppression and dominance at multiple levels.

Now if I may hearken back to my university days, in the field of public health, there is a very famous analogy which lecturers are forever paraphrasing to first-year students as a means of illustrating a key principle of the discipline. Basically, students are asked to picture being beside a flowing river, and seeing a struggling person in the water. Of course, one would jump in and rescue him/her. But then another unfortunate person comes floating into view. And so you rescue that person as well. But yet more and more people come floating by, crying for help. You want to rescue them too – but have you ever considered – just who the heck is upstream pushing all those people into the river?

It is precisely these ‘upstream’ factors which we need to deal with if we are to achieve any real progress in tackling Islamophobia.