VOICE OF GLOBAL UMMAH
Volume 239, August 4, 2013
Editors: Mohamed & Rashida Ziauddin
In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent and the Most Merciful
(www.xeniagreekmuslimah.wordpress.com)
EDITORIAL:
In this issue, we have highlighted ROLE MODELS in terms of an Islamic Center in Jacksonville, Florida, a Muslim leader by the name of Rami Nashashibi who is actively involved in social services (IMAN - Inner City Muslim Action Network) and a City in France named Roubaix, which we hope would be a model city not just in France but across the entire spectrum of the western world. It is high time that we human beings come out of our "literally speaking" individual boxes and have an open mind, increased tolerance, understanding and work together for WORLD PEACE.
PART I:
Islamic Center shares religion, culture with community
July 21, 2013
www.jacksonville.com
(condensed version)
BOB SELF/The Times-Union
Sabeen Mansoor leads visitors through the Islamic Center on a tour of Islamic religious and cultural artifacts during Sunday's open house. About 250 guests attended the event at the St. Johns Bluff Road mosque.
Aimed at offering the community a chance to understand the month of daily fasting that breaks at sundown each day, the open house at Islamic Center in Jacksonville hit the limit early, said Fawad Mansoori, a member of the board of directors.
Interest has grown over the years, and about 250 guests and an equal number of Muslims spent the evening together, finally sharing a meal after sundown.
The Islamic community's outreach is intended to dispel what Mansoori said is a lingering lack of understanding.
“There's still a lot of people that have no information or misinformation about Islam,” he said. “We are trying to build those bridges.”
BOB SELF/The Times-Union
Visitors sit under the ornately decorated dome of the sanctuary.
Invited to give the keynote speech,
Duval County schools Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said Jacksonville
should celebrate diversity and not mistrust differences.
“Often
we talk about tolerance, and we link that to diversity,” he said. “In
my mind, diversity means we accept difference.” There has been a loss in
pride and value of diversity, he said. “I think that is one thing we
have lost in public education is the development of the whole child,”
Vitti said.
New
City Council President Bill Gulliford (left) talks with Rabbi Joshua
Lief from Congregation Ahavath Chesed at the Islamic Center's Sharing
Ramadan event Sunday.
The celebration also showcased newly rendered calligraphy along the halls and in worship areas of the center. An artist from Turkey spent about three weeks at the center recently painting the inspirational depictions.
Alex Sivar called the scripts that attest God's attributes “music to the eyes.”
Stephanie
Slaymaker receives a hijab from Fati Mah before she enters the main
sanctuary of the mosque. The Sharing Ramadan event at the St. Johns
Bluff Road mosque offers the community a chance to experience the
rituals and culture surrounding Ramadan.
“We just wanted to see the event,” she said as she and two young companions went into the main hall. She and others were welcomed in an address by Mohammed Mona, chairman of the center's board, and separate discussions of Ramadan, calligraphy and the dinner. “I do think we have a lot more in common than most of us think,” Mona said.
dana.treen@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4092
PART II:
Iftar at the White House- Navigating Power, Privilege & Justice in Ramadan
Rami Nashashibi
Executive Director, Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN)
Last week, I was among several dozen Muslims who attended an iftar at the White House with President Obama. This has now become an annual tradition where the President extends greetings to the Muslim community and occasionally chooses to speak to other relevant issues. Two years ago, for example, President Obama selected this occasion as a platform to weigh in on the sensational anti-Muslim hysteria taking place in the debate around the proposed Cordoba House project in Lower Manhattan, otherwise known as the Ground Zero Mosque. At the time, the critique was mainly from extreme edges of the right wing who managed to make some noise about the President’s alleged “pro-Muslim” leanings.
This time around, most of the push back regarding the iftar I heard was coming from voices within the Muslim community. It wasn’t until two days before the event that I became aware of a handful of these folks on social media using White House Iftar to express their critiques. At one point I tweeted that I was indeed among those who were invited and would be attending. Among those who responded were some who urged me to boycott the iftar and said that by attending I was providing “political cover” for some of the administration’s most intensely contested foreign and domestic policies: mainly drone attacks, surveillance and forced feeding on Gitmo.
In spite of my brief exchange on Twitter in which I admitted sharing some of the substantive critiques of this administration and policies in question, I did not rescind my acceptance of the invitation for the following reasons:
1- I Reject the Notion That Showing Up is Giving Up
Showing up to an iftar at the White House, State Department, Governor’s Mansion, Police Department or anywhere else for that matter, is not giving up the ability to passionately dissent with and even protest the policies of the host. While some had an opportunity to debate things like the drone attacks with the President and his staff directly, I don’t think any of us were under any naive impression that such conversation was going to affect change on any of the issues in question. I have worked alongside some very good old-school Chicago organizers in the field long enough to know that “power concedes nothing without a demand” and from my experience that demand is best built through coalitions, alliances and relationships with leaders who are ready to put it on the line for one issue or a platform of issues, which leads me to the next reason that I didn’t participate in an impromptu call for a boycott.
2-Organizing a Grassroots Boycott
The closest I saw to something resembling a planned boycott was what well-respected Dr. Omid Safi provided in terms of a platform. Dr Safi’s list is a fair starting point for national mobilization around such an idea that I would be ready to participate in, although, I would agitate to make certain that our “Muslim” list of policy gripes doesn’t get conflated with a set of issues that leave out criminal justice reform, housing polices, mass incarceration, the farm bill and real investment infrastructure issues that affect millions of people on the ground every day.
I would also make certain that our platform is one that has the support and leadership of some important political allies and alliances in the field. For example, for the last ten years, IMAN has been involved in building an alliance of communities of color that stresses the critical importance of pushing inclusive platforms so that we fight off the notion that any one issue is a “black”, “Latino” or “Muslim” issue. While it is definitely easier to get a small group of people to intellectually coalesce around such an idea, it is much more difficult to build a broad base of community leaders that are ready to sacrifice politically for issues directly affecting the community. The idea of rallying alone with the same group of people for 15 years or organizing in silos to me is ineffective and a chronically flawed aspect of many of our movements.
Yet, once all those things are in place and we have explored all of our creative modes of nonviolent protest and decide that among those tactics a boycott of all White House and State Department invitations is among the things we agree upon, I will be the first to publicly consider supporting such an initiative.
3- “More Revolutionary Than Thou” Declarations
Some of the opinions on Twitter cast people who selected to attend this iftar or the State Department iftar as a bunch of sell-out Muslims crossing some virtual picket-line and trading in principle for an illusory moment to ingratiate themselves with the President or Secretary of State. Again, I do appreciate genuine healthy agitation and felt like some of the comments were truly coming from that spirit but there is certainly a thin line between that and the “more-revolutionary-than-thou” rhetorical posturing that attempts to bully people into acquiescence. I’ve been around long enough to respect the former and instinctively resist the latter.
-So why did I attend?
I am the executive director of a nonprofit organization that organizes around a number of key issues impacting low-income communities of color while providing direct services to those same community members. We build deep relationships and alliances so we can push through on a number of fronts and in that process we forge various strategic relationships with a diverse group of political actors. I am often called into meetings or accept invitations to sit down or have lunch with the same people we were protesting against six months ago or will be protesting and challenging a year from now: that’s what living in a robust democracy is all about. There are voices that may assert that talking or engaging with any high-level representation of authority is a wholesale endorsement of that entity’s agenda and tactics. These folks have their right to maintain that opinion and, in fact, some go further to make the argument that any form of political participation is a form a collaboration with “the Empire.” Such stances do little in the way of offering community groups on the ground with the means of navigating the world as it is with a clear, consistent and sustainable trajectory to build long-term institutional capacity with integrity and conviction around enduring principles and values.
I went to the White House Iftar not because I don’t have issues with some of the administration’s foreign and domestic policies. As previously stated, I certainly do. Yet, I also appreciate this administration’s commitment to fight back against the further demonization of Muslims and Islam domestically, something worth highlighting particularly considering how things could’ve gone after several high-profile attempts to carry out sensational acts of violence in this country by Muslims with deep grievances against America.
I went because I believe in the process of critical engagement which I define as a long-term commitment to shape, deeply inform and/or passionately contest the often disparate policies and conditions that govern our lives or sustain profound inequalities in the world. Such a process carries with it an admission that we certainly will make mistakes along the way and perhaps even fail to insert ourselves more forcefully around an issue or two.
Ramadan is an ideal time to interrogate how far our private and public actions are from the loftier ideals that our faith traditions call us to. It is a perfect time to scrutinize the privilege that some of us disproportionately benefit from and to honestly consider all the types of unjust power structures and policies we contribute to through our tacit support or deafening silence.
Follow Rami Nashashibi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RamiNashashibi
PART III:
A French Town Bridges the Gap Between Muslims and Non-Muslims
www.nytimes.com
(condensed version)
Butcher
shops line the streets of one of the main Muslim neighborhoods in
Roubaix, France. Unlike many French cities, Roubaix has made a point of
embracing its Muslim population.
Non-Muslims By ALISSA J. RUBIN via NewYorkTimes
ROUBAIX, France — Wearing head scarves and long skirts, the women glide along the faded back streets of this poor French town as they make their way to the mosque to hear the last prayer of the evening.
Like their husbands and brothers, fathers and sons, they feel at home here. That is in large part because Roubaix, a small city in northeastern France, has made a point of embracing its Muslim population, proportionately one of the largest in the country.
“I am comfortable in these clothes here in Roubaix,” said Farid Gacem, the bearded president of the Abu Bakr mosque, who was wearing a nearly ankle-length loose brown tunic on a recent afternoon.
In a country where Islamic head coverings are regulated by law and many Muslims say they have been made to feel like outsiders, Roubaix is one of just a handful of cities that have broken with a rigid interpretation of the country’s state secularism. The city stands out for its effort to take discreet but pointed steps to promote an active Muslim community, and in doing so it has diminished the ethnic and sectarian tensions that have afflicted other parts of France, evident again during the holy month of Ramadan this summer.
In Trappes, a heavily Muslim suburb of Paris, an altercation between the police and a woman wearing a niqab, a veil that is illegal to wear in public, turned violent two weeks ago. In another suburb of Paris, the mayor refused a request by Muslims for a prayer room to use during Ramadan. The Interior Ministry says crimes targeting Muslims have increased 28 percent this year.
Yet here in Roubaix, the mood is different. That is despite one of the worst unemployment rates in the country, 22 percent, with the figure far higher among young people, according to the mayor’s office. Nearly half of households have incomes below the poverty line, and many areas are troubled by petty crime and drug trafficking.
The question is whether Roubaix’s approach to multiculturalism will become a model for other French cities, or if, in a country in which the Muslim population finds itself at the center of a debate over racism, religious tolerance and national identity, it will remain an exception.
“Roubaix is a cradle, a symbol of immigration,” said Muhammed Henniche, secretary general of the Union of Muslim Associations of Seine-Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb, who has looked at the approaches taken by different municipalities.
“Roubaix is representative of living in harmony in terms of immigration,” he said.
The reasons for that approach are hard to pinpoint, in part because of a reluctance by French officials to talk about religion. But among Roubaix’s special circumstances is its long history of immigration, which has included not just Muslims but also Buddhists from Southeast Asia and other groups.
The mayor’s office has taken steps to offer assistance to Muslims here, including finding places to worship. That contrasts with the approach of many French cities that strictly follow the national ethic of laïcité, or state secularism. The city has six mosques, including one under construction, a large number for a city of fewer than 100,000 people. The local government has also allowed the appointment of a Muslim cleric at the city hospital, and three areas of the city’s cemetery are designated for Muslims, a rarity in France.
“When you look at the demographics, in two or three generations, all of France will be like Roubaix,” said Bertrand Moreau, the chief spokesman for the mayor’s office. “There will be a melting pot everywhere, and Roubaix is a laboratory” for how things could work, he said.
The mayor’s office has established a consortium that includes a representative from each of the city’s religious groups, as well as a representative of a group that supports state secularism, so there is a discussion about how to respond to the needs of different groups.
Demographers put the number of Muslims in France at five million to six million, or at least 8 percent of the population. In Roubaix, the mayor’s office estimates that the Muslim population is as much as 20,000, or about 20 percent of the population.
“Our leitmotif is to live together, and in this living together there’s an image that we wish to give of the Muslim community: that we are French citizens before anything, before the religious aspect,” said Sliman Taleb-Ahmed, president of the association of Muslim institutions in Roubaix.
One of the main Muslim neighborhoods here, L’Epeule, is just a few blocks from the central plaza, making it an integrated part of the city’s life. The street is lined with halal butchers, and the Safir bookstore does a brisk business in offerings about the Koran.
Ahmed El-Hadi, a 15-year-old who runs the store when his parents are out, wore a T-shirt that said in English: “I’m Muslim, Don’t Panic.”
A version of this article appeared in print on August 6, 2013, on page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: A French Town Bridges the Gap Between Muslims and Non-Muslims.
(www.hdwallpapersart.com)
THE END
