i.

i know this girl who was raped when she was 8. she was 13 when i found out. i know this girl who’s known her father was a rapist since she was 11. she was 12 when i found out. i know this boy who’s had to spend time with a man who he knew sexually assaulted young boys. he was 17 when he told me. i know a girl whose friend was raped by her uncle. she was 12 when she told me.

muslim kids, you know. muslim rapists to match. Continue reading this entry »

We are deeply conscious of the lacunae in this volume caused by the absence of [...] a paper on Arabic-Tamil, a dialect which was mainly Tamil with a profusion of Arabic conceptual terms, which were indispensable to convey Islamic thoughts and feelings. And it was written in Arabic script. It was a dialectical synthesis of Semitic Arabic and Dravidian Tamil – an ingenuity of the Moors, which remained the tool of Moorish intellectual writing and discourse from the end of the thirteenth century right up to the end of the nineteenth century. And Arabic-Tamil had its parallel in the Swahili group of languages along the East African coast. A deeper research of Arabic-Tamil and the immense corpus of literature that came out of it is bound to reveal much about the origin and history of the Moors of this country, at least, such was the contentions of one of our foremost eudcationists and scholars – the late Mr. A. M. A. Azeez.
[...]
Some of the source material, I should say, a greater part of them – namely, the immense body of literature of the early Arab settlers in Arabic and the much later productions in Arabic-Tamil are irretrievably lost. The Moorish leaders in the past had expressed a desire that the younger generations of this community should delve into their past and continue the initial effort made by I. L. M. Abdul Azeez. It should be borne in mind that Mr Azeez’s contribution to this field is of a polemical nature as it arose in the course of a controversy to refute Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan’s thesis* on the origin of Moors.

The term ‘Muslim’ denotes a religious denomination and not an ethnic, and not necessarily an ethno-cultural one, but an ethico-religious one. This should be clearly grasped by the readers to avoid confusion. Conceptual clarity is vital to understand the problem we are dealing with, namely, Muslim Minorities. For instance, while all Moors are Muslim, all Muslims in this country are not Moors. Cultural varia[tion] within even a local or regional community such as the Sri Lankan Muslims is a fact, but it is glossed over even by serious-minded scholars. “Moor” is not a synonym for “Muslim,” at least as far as Sri Lanka is concerned. There is a sizeable number of Malays, Bhoras, and Memons; and in the recent past there were substantial numbers of Coast Moors, Khojas, Afghans, etc.

* Ethnology of the Moors of Ceylon. Vide Article on the Moors of Ceylon by Sir ir Ponnambalam Ramanathan. Proceedings f the R. A. S. (C. B.) Vol X No 36 of 1888.

– Skukri, M. A. M. “Preface.” Muslims of Sri Lanka. Avenues to Antiquity. Jamiah Naleemia Institute: 1986, Sri Lanka. iii-v.

Notes.

• What are “Islamic feelings”? I think he meant Islamic concepts or terms (masjid, mosque, palli; sawm, fasting, nombu). However, the rest of his writing indicates that he is in fact invested in the construction of a unifying Muslim spirituality, which is what finds expression here as “Islamic thoughts and feelings.”

• My mother’s maternal grandmother – who I think was from Gampola, and therefore not a coastal Muslim, i.e. without direct contact with Arab traders, who anyway stopped coming to the island some centuries ago, so can we please stop with the ridiculous “Sri Lankan Muslims have Arab connections” myths, unless you want to talk to me about how the Sri Lankan government benefits from its labour ties with Arab nations, in which case go ahead, because it’s not Al Qaeda I give a fuck about, it’s modern-day slave conditions in Middle-Eastern households, and this applies as much to Sri Lankan Tamil and Sinhalese housemaids and labourers as it does Muslim ones – could speak and read Arabic-Tamil (aka Arwi, aka Arabu-Thamizh). I don’t know if any of her offspring could. I should find out. In any case, my mother, who knows both Arabic and Tamil (and can read the first, but not the second), doesn’t know Arabic-Tamil.

Continue reading this entry »

I. Looking for Resistance

I posted a note on my Facebook profile of a list of Israel and Jewish voices opposing Israel’s attacks on Gaza (Word Doc). It begins, “Contrary to what popular media in North America claims, there are critical voices in Israel and among American Jews.” Though I put it up, I paused before writing that sentence, particularly the bit about American Jews, because of how uncomfortable I feel when people write carelessly about resistance movements among Muslims. I wondered if I was being just as condescending as others are when they take Muslim activists out of context in order to use their comments to bolster their own self-righteousness. In asking that American Jews denounce Israel’s indiscriminate violence, I was assuming that by and large American Jews do support Israel’s policies, while simultaneously attempting to dispel that same myth. In attempting to shatter the media’s misleading portrayal of a supposedly hegemonic Jewish/Israeli block that supports Ehud Barak’s war crimes, was I being paternalistic? I have no qualms demanding Israelis acknowledge the immorality of the violence, but can I demand the same from American Jews without coming across as reductive?

Ultimately, the links I put up are ones that need to be read, since the papers I read are doing a troublingly good job of not giving them publicity. I wish, though, that I could word it in a way that more carefully distanced American Jewry from Israeli policy, in the way that I demand people understand the distance between Muslims and Al Qaeda. I don’t do official “condemnations” of terror, because it infuriates me that anyone would expect to have supported the killings of civilians in the first place. Likewise, American Jews live existences independent of Israel; I can’t therefore expect them to forever be policing Israel.

On writing about America’s progressive Jewry, Steve Ackerman notes:

You don’t want to reduce yourself to the mere fact of your heritage and become a self-parody. You have other stuff to write about and pay attention to. You don’t want to hurt your mother’s feelings.

I can relate to that.

II. Looking

Though the war’s been going on for a few days now and though hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and many hundreds more injured, I’ve yet to watch a single video of the violence or look at any photographs. It’s not, of course, for a lack of first-person reports from Gaza (though Israel has forbidden journalists from entering Gaza), but it’s that I’m avoiding the images, as I tend to do. So though on a theoretical and rational level, I’m horrified at the violence, on a more private level, I’m untouched. This whole thing feels unreal, something like a story whose end I already know. Something artificial. And perhaps because I have no loved ones in or from Palestine, I’m afforded the luxury of this emotional distance. But it was like this after the tsunami, too, and still when the violence flares (and continues to worsen) in Sri Lanka.

There is a massacre happening right now in the Congo, which I’ve mostly not been paying attention to. The other day, I saw a photograph in the newspaper of a twelve-year-old boy carrying an toddler on his back. It was a technically beautiful shot, the colour of their skin and the colour of the sky in perfect contrast to each other. The caption noted that they were looking for their parents. Two black kids in Africa, crying. Stock photo material.

But something hurt just then, a visceral hurt, something that had nothing to do with the war, just the way they were crying — you could tell that they’d only recently gotten lost, that they thought their parents were still alive somewhere, that they were crying the way kids do the world over, like if you cry someone you love will fix this. It was something about the way he was holding his little brother, the way you protect the ones you love, something about all the different kinds of fear in the world, something about family and loneliness.

Maybe if that picture had been taken a few days later, when their pain had grown less acute, had given way to despair, I wouldn’t have flung the paper away. As it is, I stil haven’t read about the violence in the Congo — a selfish luxury I can enjoy that no one deserves.

I’m afraid of pictures.

For a core group among my friends, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was formative reading. We read it as teenagers and the book became foundational to the different ways we learned to live with the politics of race and culture. Malcolm and his life represented for us an education that we sensed only for its obvious absence in our regular schooling. Books and writers like these, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time being another example, made critical race theory important to us in profoundly pragmatic ways: it permeated our lives, our creative work, our activism. It continues to do so. This was not mere high theory; this is a practise of resistance that we live because this is the world we inhabit and the inequities we recognise.

I remember how thrilled I was when I first read the book. When I was younger, I badly wanted heroes. I wanted to read about people whose lives stretched further than my own. I wanted their energy, that surety of an early death preceded by a life that had been worth living, worth dying for. Malcolm possessed all the traits I wanted to find in myself: intelligence, charisma, force. And he was angry – a beautiful rage, sharp and disciplined.
We were all of us, this handful of people among my friends, angry adolescents, angry in specific ways. That anger stays with us still, making Malcolm X, or rather the memory of reading his life, integral to the ways we continue to relate to and function in a fundamentally fucked up world.

In a few weeks, I will be presenting on the book in class. I’m excited, but also nervous, because I’m not entirely prepared for the internal messiness that this subject threatens. Continue reading this entry »