Muslim Heretics Conference

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

‘Honor killings’ contort religion
By Melissa Robinson
For the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/10/08

As an American Muslim, I was horrified to read about the tragic death of Sandeela Kanwal in Clayton County, allegedly at the hands of her father, in a supposed “honor killing.” Police said Kanwal’s father killed her because she left her husband. According to the twisted logic of “honor killings,” Kanwal ruined the “honor” of the family by trying to get out of her arranged marriage.

It would be easy to point a finger at all Muslims and rail against such barbaric traditions. But this I can tell you: I am a Muslim, born and raised in Tennessee, and I do not subscribe to this brand of honor.

As a co-founder of the American Islamic Fellowship, an Atlanta-area organization of more than 200 Muslims, I can tell you that our organization does not subscribe to any interpretation of Islam that condones murder in the name of religion or honor. To me and our membership, this is an abhorrent expression of misogynistic thinking that targets women as the guardians of a community’s honor.

It has come from the mouths of Christian saints, Italian philosophers, American revolutionaries, French existentialists, Baptist preachers, modern historians, European scientists, English poets and Muslim imams, just to name a few:

“It is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in every woman.”

“It is said in the state of adultery, the responsibility falls 90 per cent of the time on the woman. Why? Because she possesses the weapon of enticement.”

“A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.”

Who said which comment? The first came from St. Augustine, the second from an imam in Australia and the third from a Baptist preacher.

While the problem of domestic violence is not unique to Muslims, we are still struggling to eliminate this kind of “honor killing” from our communities internationally. In Pakistan, a predominantly Muslim country, there were 107 honor crimes last year, according to the Pakistan Human Rights Commission. It is critical that we speak out.

The Qur’an states, “Show kindness to parents, and to family, and orphans, and the needy, and to the neighbor who is of your kin and the neighbor who is not of kin, and the fellow-traveler and the wayfarer.” Also, it states, “When you divorce wives, and they are about to reach their term [end of the waiting period for divorce], then hold them back honorably or set them free honorably; and hold them not back by injuring them so that you commit aggression, and whoever commits that, then indeed he does wrong.”

This means that we cannot, under any circumstances, allow physical abuse in families. To do so would be to violate these fundamental Qur’anic injunctions.

I call upon all area Muslim leaders to preach from the pulpit this Friday that this kind of violence is unacceptable. We need to help our communities heal and lead the way to a brighter, safer future. We need to stop allowing our religious texts to be used to justify cruel behavior. We have a humanitarian obligation to speak out against those who commit such atrocities. As a Muslim, I have a religious obligation to speak out against oppression and injustice and to protect the rights of the disenfranchised. As a woman and a Muslim, I am horrified by the tragedy of Sandeela’s death. I refuse to allow her death to be swept under the rug.

We must work together to bring an end to this malady that afflicts us all. In Atlanta, the organizations dedicated to fighting domestic violence are always in need of our support.

A few of these in the Atlanta area include the Muslim-run women’s shelter Baitul Salaam and the South Asian organization Raksha in addition to the Women’s Resource Center for Domestic Violence, the Partnership Against Domestic Violence and the International Women’s House.

Last March, the American Islamic Fellowship, in partnership with the Progressive Muslim Network in Washington, D.C., and I AM: American Muslim in Phoenix, launched “Not in Our Name: United Against Domestic Violence.” It was a campaign to unite all people of faith in an effort to bring an end to this problem that affects all our communities. Another Muslim initiative to fight domestic violence internationally is the Peaceful Families Project.

We need to support these efforts so that no life is ever taken in the name of religion.

> Melissa Robinson of Atlanta is director and co-founder of the American Islamic Fellowship.

‘Honor killings’ contort religion | ajc.com

Reuters / Yves Herman

Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe arrives for the world premiere of “Ocean’s 13″ at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007.

July 10, 2008 | “Rewish,” or “al Rawshana,” is a colloquial Arab term that means “hip” and also “distracted or confused,” according to Allegra Stratton’s “Muhajababes,” a lively (and rewish) exploration of youth culture in several Middle Eastern nations. One of the many people Stratton interviewed for her book — a bike-glove-wearing female member of a dance troupe that inexplicably describes itself as “an R&B band” — told Stratton that the region’s booming under-25 demographic is being made ever more rewish by their exposure to two seemingly opposed forces: racy pop music videos full of gyrating, pulchritudinous singers like Haifa Wehbe and what Stratton calls the “piety trend,” which has more and more young Muslims heeding the call of TV mullahs to abandon smoking, drinking, displays of flesh and premarital sex.

The result is a new breed of mermaid-like creatures, spotted by Stratton all over the streets of Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Dubai and Damascus. These are “muhajababes,” from “muhajabe,” a term for the veil. Zina, a girl Stratton met in a Cairo cafe, is a classic example. Her hair was covered with “a flower-patterned headscarf” but she was also wearing heavy makeup and jeans so tight she couldn’t fasten the top button. When Stratton asked Zina why she also smoked (widely considered “haram,” or forbidden, to observant Muslims), Zina grew “frosty.” Then she explained: “If I smoke and wear the headscarf you know that I’m not one of them [that is, the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest Islamist group]. You know that I’m Islamic. That I am devout. But I’m also different … If you know what you’re looking for then you’ll see being a Muslim these days is a different thing.”

Stratton, a British journalist, didn’t begin her research knowing quite what she was looking for, but she had a thesis, taken from Western scholars of the contemporary Middle East. These professors are predicting a major sociopolitical shakeup in the region, based on demographic patterns resembling those seen before in upheavals in Western history, such as the English Civil War and the French Revolution. “What creates unrest,” Stratton writes of this theory, “was not just an increase in the numbers of young people but also in the numbers of educated young people with no increase in jobs.” (Yes, that sentence is grammatically incorrect, as are many in “Muhajababes.” Chalk it up to a combination of Stratton’s attempt at an easy, casual style and the bad habits engendered by the low editing standards in British publishing. Be warned: Participles dangle as plentifully in these pages as vines in a jungle.)

Having spent her own post-collegiate years sharing a big, ramshackle East London house with a bunch of idealistic pals (they dreamed of setting up a printing press in the basement), Stratton decided to wander around a handful of Mideast cities, in search of the “Arab Haight-Ashbury,” where the coming revolution might be brewing. Mark LeVine, author of another new book, “Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam,” also went looking for glimmers of social change, but he took an approach at once more and less comprehensive than Stratton’s. LeVine, who is both a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of California, Irvine, and a profession rock musician, traveled to more countries (including Pakistan and Morocco) than Stratton, but he seems to have hobnobbed with a much narrower range of people.

 

There’s something irresistible about the idea that LeVine, who according to his author bio has played with such luminaries as Mick Jagger and Dr. John, not only interviewed rock and rap artists from all over the Middle East and North Africa (or MENA, as he calls it), but also put down the notepad and got up onstage to jam with them. The folio of photographs at the center of “Heavy Metal Islam” features a few shots of him rocking out with his subjects at festivals and in nightclubs. Yet LeVine’s account of Muslim rock culture is strangely colorless, mostly because he’s only interested in two things: the music itself and the degree to which a band’s lyrics explicitly criticize the political regimes in their home countries.

Most heavy metal lyrics are aggressive and doomy, and the lines LeVine quotes — “This land is barren, it does not feel/ Our self-made slaughte / by our own hands/ Here lies the orphaned land” from the Israeli band Orphaned Land, for example — can be interpreted as speaking of anything from, say, the conflict over Palestine to environmentalism to free-floating teenage social angst. The people LeVine interviews have ample cause for complaint; besides the general authoritarian, undemocratic nature of their governments, they often come in for extra harassment as a result of their appearance and musical taste. Metalheads in Morocco, Lebanon and Egypt have even been arrested for practicing “satanism.” But their counterparts in the democratic West are often just as disgusted with the adult world for entirely different reasons.

Complaining about their governments isn’t what makes Islam’s metalheads unusual — practically everyone in the Mideast does that (to the extent they can get away with it). What’s interesting is the fact that they’ve chosen heavy metal in spite of its Western roots, and the ways they reconcile this with their own regional and nation identities. Several of the musicians LeVine interviews are religious, even devout, and the author has hopes that rock fans will unite with young Islamists against their authoritarian rulers. To his great disappointment, a meeting he facilitates in a Cairo hotel bar between members of a band called Wyvern and the editor of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Web site turns out to be a dud, mostly because the metalheads don’t seem to believe the Brotherhood’s recent protestations that they are now interested only in political reform, not policing cultural virtue. “So many Egyptians — and Arabs more broadly,” LeVine laments, “prefer to continue dealing with the devil they know (corrupt and autocratic regimes) than to risk the even less appealing alternative

Laura Miller reviews “Muhajababes” and “Heavy Metal Islam” | Salon Books

Geneive Abdo, a foreign policy analyst at The Century Foundation, is the author of several books on contemporary Islam, most recently “Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America After 9/11.” She may be reached through www.tcf.org.

All too often, commentators on television and in newspapers say that Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis is truer today than when he wrote his famous essay in 1993. Conservative pundits point to scenes across the Middle East of suicide bombings and other violence being carried out in the name of Islam to support their argument that an insurmountable divide exists between the East and the West.

Recently, those on the other side of this debate began fighting back. Muslim American organizations, scholars who support their views and even international institutions have launched a campaign to emphasize the commonalities between Muslim and non-Muslim societies and the shared values of the three Abrahamic faiths. Adopting the tactics of their adversaries on the far right, they, too, oversimplify the picture: Violence has nothing to do with Islam, they say, because Islam is a religion of peace.

The result is that now this debate is dominated by these two sets of spin doctors, and neither side is presenting a cogent analysis for the public or the policy community. The long-term effects of this polarized debate will not be in the interest of either Muslims living in the United States or those abroad, nor will they advance a more intelligent foreign policy agenda for the next administration.

The time for a more nuanced and substantive discussion is overdue. Americans could become lulled into thinking that Muslims here speak for their co-religionists abroad. Most second-generation American Muslims, in fact, have spent scant time in their families’ countries of origins. After 9/11, many realized they knew little about the faith and now study the Islamic texts in their mosques, summer camps and universities.

Yet, this has not restrained some from casting themselves as knowledgeable about everything from Islamic theology to the views of Muslims abroad toward the United States, and foreign policy approaches the U.S. government should take in the Islamic world. Some activists even argue that interfaith dialogue can solve intractable global conflicts, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (I doubt the Israeli government and Hamas would agree.) Consider this example, which is typical of the kind of rhetoric coming from interfaith dialogue enthusiasts.

“My voice is hoarse from condemning terrorists who have perverted my beloved religion, and so are all the voices of all Muslim Americans,” wrote one Muslim activist who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through grants and donations for an interfaith youth group he heads in Chicago. “But it will take all of our voices, insisting on the American ideal of pluralism, to defeat our real enemy.” The comments were published in On Faith, a Washington Post blog.

There are several false and implicit messages behind such prose, which does nothing to explain the causes of extremism abroad. Chief among them: There is a universal interpretation of Islam, which is practiced by most Muslims; and, if Muslim Americans unite under the banner of American pluralism, they can defeat the so-called enemy, presumably the one that exits abroad among a minority of Muslims.

A few weeks ago during a trip to Cairo, I visited a religious scholar I have known for a decade to get his views on whether Muslim Americans should counsel the American public and the U.S. government about the Islamic world. “These people do not speak for us,” said the elderly scholar, who was a prominent sheikh at al Azhar, the theological center for the Sunni Muslim world. “Muslims here and across the world are becoming more anti-American. This is very clear.”

Geneive Abdo, a foreign policy analyst at The Century Foundation, is the author of several books on contemporary Islam, most recently “Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America After 9/11.” She may be reached through www.tcf.org.

Geneive Abdo: When American Muslims hurt their own cause | Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas, Texas | Opinion: Viewpoints