Archives for June, 2009

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“If a woman has a child [and] she abandons that responsibility in pursuit of an empty career or the idea of making her mark on the world, she has completely misunderstood the great importance and the great responsibility that she has been given by God, in that the fruit of her womb is before her.”
“So if a woman brings children into this world and then dumps them in a daycare centre … and if she thinks somehow she is doing something more important by going out and working, I think there’s something very seriously wrong with her maternal instincts. Because abandonment in the animal kingdom, abandonment is alien to animals.”
“I am amazed that there’s children out there that are really struggling to find a purpose to their life in a world that is telling them constantly, including their parents by abandoning them, that that they are worthless.”
“If you don’t listen to your soul, you’ll end up on antidepressants.”
- Interview with Hamza Yusuf, undated.

My father is a very forceful man and he looks it. In high school, my male friends tended to melt away from around me whenever my father appeared. He’s also, in many ways, very conservative: he wears a thobe on a regular basis; is an ardent supporter of the Tabligh Jamaat, which he credits with restoring his faith when he was young; and has often talked favorably about the niqab. He is a strong believer in following the sunnah, though I sometimes think that in emulating the prophet, he’s got him confused with god.

My mother was one of — if not the — first Muslim women in Gampola to become a doctor, this despite the rampant sexism and racism of the time. She excelled in her studies and later in her work, even when dealing with the rampant sexism and racism of Saudi Arabia, where she spent a decade as an Obstetrician and Gynaecologist. When she married my father she didn’t wear a hijab. It was after she’d become a mother of two and moved to study in England for a while on her own that she decided to adopt it, because she felt that it helped her keep the faith in what was then not the multicultural UK we know now. When we migrated to Canada nine years ago, because she was an International Medical Graduate, my mother had to do a series of requalifying exams. My parents made the joint decision then that it would be her — and not my father’s — income that would sustain our household. To that end, while she spent most of the day studying in university carrels, and later being a medical student, my father put aside his own career ambitions in engineering so that he could stay at home more often. He took on jobs with flexible hours; invariably these were jobs that paid little: tutoring or low-level engineering positions, the kinds that are physically taxing for old men and disheartening for someone who was capable of much more. Continue reading this entry »

• I will engage with self-appointed “community” “representatives” only to note that they do not represent me. As such, their views are irrelevant to me, except to the extent that they wield hegemonic control over some segments of the community and disproportionate exposure within broader external media. I will not waste my time, energy, or resources attempting to rebut their every point, since this serves only to reassure them of their own importance.
• I reserve the right to protest all politics I find offensive, no matter who espouses them, be it the aforementioned self-appointed community spokespeople or elected officials. I will exercise this right no matter how well-established or how popular those people are, or however much I might agree with their politics in other regards. The focus is action, not noise; the need is work, not its spectacle.
• I will not apologise for my anger. There is a lot in the world to be angry about.
  Further, when the only alternative emotional response proffered as acceptable is passive grief, I will choose rage. After all, anger is its own practise of grief and of love. Focused, it can be proactive.
• I need to be focused. I will learn to articulate anger with composure and precision. I will learn to be coherent, however much of my heart is at stake in any given issue. I will practise discipline and patience. I will learn not to make a spectacle of my own anger. And I will accept that for some people, despite everything, I will still be dismissible.
• But I will allow myself moments of unbridled rage, too. There is a lot to be angry about.
• I will step away from the arguments I’ve had a million times before and know that I will have a million times again. There is other work that can be done, outside the cycle of noisemaking, and I need to reserve my energies for that. This isn’t an excuse for apathy or condescension; this is about being strategic.
• I will learn more: one date for every rumour, ten facts for every falsehood, an infinite supply of knowledge for the universe of ignorance.
  The learning is a process; I will never know enough.
• I will not dismiss the depths of my emotional investments in these struggles. The drive to social justice emerges out of and creates pain in my life; it always will. This will always hurt. How can it not? This isn’t about activism just of the rallying kind: this is about blood, how we tell stories to and of our families; this is about school, how we learned and unlearned histories; this is about love, why we fall into it and how we fell out; and this is about art, how we tell stories. This is life: there is nothing outside social justice; it is every system we navigate and every position we occupy. Everything is choice, a taking of sides, a choice of violences, a balancing of privileges. This is life; there is nothing outside it.
  This hurts, and I won’t pretend it doesn’t. The value is in its hurting. There is no such thing as objectivity, only varying levels of distance.
• I will love and I will hope. I will do both those things, while recognising that very little of the change I want to see will manifest itself in my lifetime, and that if it does, I will likely still not be satisfied with it. Life is a process. We die along the way. But that’s not an excuse, and neither is god/heaven, for surrender in the here and now.

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I wrote this last night, in a moment of fury, after a conversation that had frustrated me greatly. I read it a few hours later and was embarrassed by its lack of substance: I name no names here and identify no particular politics. This makes for an overly-pliant manifesto, one malleable to nearly all politics, including those I’d find offensive. Anyone could read this, any chauvinist and any racist, and nod along agreeably. But that said, I’m not offering this manifesto to other people. It’s meant for me: these are the points that I contend with often. I need to stop going through the same cycles of directionless rage and despair every single time I deal with oppressive politics about the issues I care most about, which in recent history have been the war in Sri Lanka and feminist practice in Muslim communities. These are both issues that engender so much pain that I can’t afford to be learning the same lessons over and over again. There isn’t enough time. When so much is at stake, I need to start being more efficient, which involves thinking about the very point of the conversations I have, when I talk about the issues that matter most to me.
But though it’s a personal list, I’m sharing it because I know that my experiences are not unique and part of my activist practice involves identifying and celebrating commonalities. Also, I’m always in need of feedback.