Laury Silvers's blog

Salams and Ramadan Mubarak Everyone!

Last night was the Salaam Iftar here in Toronto. More than 300 people showed up to share love, faith, and community spirit in support of Salaam, Canada's Queer Muslim Fellowship (founded by El-Farouk Khaki). Here is their website if you want to check it out http://www.salaamcanada.org/intro.html. El-Tawhid Juma Circle (founded by El-Farouk Khaki, Troy Jackson, and I) organized a woman-led prayer for the event. I brought the rest of the left-over Prog Islam t-shirts and gave them out. I wonder if folks will be visiting the website who came last night! If so, welcome! We hope all of you will make accounts and take advantage of the community blogging feature. You make a blog and we all read it. Blog entries that strike a nerve or inspire are promoted to the front page. Bloggers who get committed are promoted to authors who can post on the front page whenever they like. A new author and content editor is joining the Fashion Mujahid in running this show: Fatima Thompson! For those of you who do not know her, she is the organizer behind the "pray-ins" in which women go and pray in the main section of the mosque which men have taken as their own. Women refusing to pray in the closet or the back room or behind a wall. They don't make a fuss. They just pray in the main hall, all the way in the back. Such a simple thing has been causing a lot of distress among some men. And good. They'll get used to sharing huge spaces with women, little by little. Women will get used to knowing that the space belongs to them, little by little. Its a slow and powerful movement, the trickling stream that carves out whole valleys. Peace and Ramadan Mubarak!.

Life's been moving on. I finished training for pro-wrestling. I had my debut. I managed, did an in ring interview, took some serious bumps, and got forced into the royal rumble. I'll put the video up when I get it. That pic is JP Black lifting me up for body slam. The wrestler I managed, Jihad, is lying on the ground. I am the blur in JP's arms. (pic will be up as soon as I remember how to load pics, where did the little edit buttons go?)

My spam blocker consistently blocks any mail from Tarek Fatah or MCC.  I have whitelisted his addresses again and again.  I have gone into the settings of the spamblocker to make sure his addresses are not considered spam.  I have talked to the computer help desk about it.  No matter.  Spammed.  Every single time.  Spammed.

We've been hit by a huge snowstorm here in the North East.  The Valentine's Day Blizzard!  When I was married, whenever there was huge snowstorm I had to get out of the house.  I had to get into the car or walk outside or something.  My ex and I thought it was funny.  Seriously, no sooner would we get snowed in then I had to make tracks out.  I've been snowed in since I left him nearly 3 years ago now.  I'm snowed in today.  There looks to be nearly three feet of snow out there.  Still has to settle, could be less.  But I don't need to make tracks.  I haven't needed to make sure I had a way out of being snowed in since I left my husband.

James Brown died today on Christmas Day, Allah yarhamhu. 

I saw James Brown perform a handful of times when I was still living in Los Angeles.  I saw him right up next to the stage at these awful little clubs with hardly any attendance [Come to think of it that was around the same time I saw Tina Turner perform at Magic Mountain (an amusement park)].  Even without a full audience, in a small club, he was tremendous.  He was "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business." The whole entourage was on stage.  He walked in and bended one knee, lowered his head before all of us, and a member of his band came and removed his cloak with great reverance.  The Godfather of Soul was before us.  He was an extraordinarly generous performer.  God bless his soul and give him ease. 

I have nothing to say.  I find myself reflecting on these verses from Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching:

31:

Weapons of war are omens of doom,
To be loathed by every living thing
And shunned by those who keep the Way.
Presiding at court, the leader honors the right to conduct war,
But weapons are never the leader's choice.

Weapons of war are omens of doom,
Not to be used unless compelled.
And then used only with a quiet mind and heart.
Do not glorify arms.
If one glorifies arms,
One sings and rejoices over the slaughter of people.
Those who sing, praising such slaughter
Get nothing from this world.

Thus the left is for deeds that bring ease,
The right is for deeds that bring death.
The commander of the left is less important.
The commander of the right is most important,
The commander of the right conducts war with mortal gravity
by mourning for all those slaughtered,
and observing victory like a funeral.

Is it appropriate behavior for a Muslim woman, a feminist Muslim woman, to go to professional wrestling events and scream a lot? Scream things that maybe no one should ever scream, except for maybe at a professional wrestling event? This week I went with my buddies Kathleen, Hassan, and Mike to see Smackdown taping (showing tonight 6-23 on UPN) and a live taping for ECW on Sci-Fi. I love wrestling. It is a living comic book series of superheros and villians building stories by battling each other over years. Each match is an issue that hooks me for the next one. Better than a comic book, the audience gets to take part in it. Audience reactions to the wrestlers can push the way a wrestler's story will be told. The wrestlers are performers and have to work with us to hate or love their gimmick. They have to improvise when we do not cheer for the guys the company thought we would. The audience has turned gimmicks around in the past. The audience is also interacting with each other. We all have our favorites, our allegiances, our "issues" that come out in the posters and in the chants we yell for each other's benefit not just at the wrestlers.

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Wafa Sultan has now weighed in as Islam's newest "voice in the wilderness," daring to speak out where no one else will. No need to go into specifics here. This has already been covered a million times with respect to Irshad Manji. The whole scheme is an intellectual three-card monty. They hawk the promise of 'the truth about Islam' but never produce the goods. Those who listen to them and promote their intellectually impoverished and historically inaccurate positions are either in on the con or marks who keep falling for it no matter how many times they've lost. But there is another level to the con of moderate Islam. This is the con we run on ourselves by rushing to speak moderately whenever non-Muslims demand it.

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