culture

Two terms that you'll almost never see juxtaposed: latex burqa. But I saw them in a blog by a woman who wears one on a regular basis. Assuming that this isn't a grand hoax, this is a woman who lives in Ireland, is in a sub/dom relationship with her husband, and wears restricting and enveloping garments made of latex 24/7. No mention is made of religious or cultural background, but the author is clearly educated, fluent in English, and has an active social life, although her world is filtered through a layer of latex and any restrictions that her husband (who she calls "Sir") may choose to impose.

I'm an iconoclast, a rebel, a square peg refusing to get stuffed in a round hole. Sometimes. In general, I like trends that go against the mainstream, if that makes any sense. I knit, I sew, I refuse to wear synthetics any more than I can get away from it. I whip up my own body products, and shun most conventional jobs. The day that my government-based health coverage accepts herbalists and direct-entry midwives for OB/GYN care into its networks will be a happy day for me, even though on that day, it will also snow in Hell.

Sorry I have been MIA for a bit. A couple or three things jump out from the New York Times, NPR and the 'Net this morning.

Firstly, there's an op-ed in the NYT this morning by the country director for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting providing his personal perspective about the bombing of the Serena Hotel in Kabul, a watering hole (and just a place to hole up) for expats, particularly. And there have been other stories about Afghanistan in The Times, on NPR, other places in the last few days. It seemed to hit me; is it a coincidence that the Western Media and Zeitgeist is sitting up and noticing--or should I say acknowledging, since some information has always been around--that Afghanistan is down the tubes because the Taliban, as Mr. McKenzie tells us, have now started a policy of targeting westerners?
The other thing that jumped out at me was from a series that NPR is doing on Muslim Women in Britain.

Recently, I was discussing the possibility of teaching a short summer course in ethics and culture at a university in Bangladesh. I proposed the following outline to them. It will be an elective for first year students with no previous exposure to religious studies or philosophy. As a result, it has to be a bit of an introduction to philosophy, history of religion and politics with an emphasis of what all these mean in a modern Muslim context. Thoughts and suggestions welcome.

"The 99" is now available in comic book stores!

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I am a cultural imperialist. Yes, I am. No, I won't get tangled in webs of deconstructionist doubt. Change needs to happen, but how? Such things as fearing women's voices, disregarding women's desires and so on are all deeply ingrained in the culture. So is a seeming disregard for cause and effect: refuse to work against extremism = being blamed for standing by. Yet how can we convince others to change?

We agree that such cultural attitudes are disfunctional at best and morally wrong and sinful at worst. But, lately I've been approaching the problem as one of cultural engineering and social change: what strategies and tactics can we devise and perform to effect cultural change? Female led prayer is one such tactic, but what is the overall strategy and what other tools do we have at our disposal? This web site and others which write sanely about our insanities is a good start, but writing and speaking (categories of communiticaing) only go so far. The Prophet preached but he also performed. Last week I learned about a concept in anthropology called performativity, which means that Muslim identity is what we do and what we agree to say it is. It took a while to wrap my head around that one because it sounds far too much like the Quranic quoting of how God creates, "Be! and it Is" (kun fa-yakun). But, apparently this is how human minds construct culture.

I was reading the Wahsington Post's article on Salafism which quoted a Salafi imam in Washington DC. Khan believes that Islamic schools are imperative because...he says, "a big mixture happens between mainstream America and mainstream Islam, and . . . in most cases . . . Islam loses." Khan is wrong, because he's mistaken his Islamism for Islam itself.

Islam and Islamism are distinct becuase Islam is monotheistic, while Islamism is mono-discursive. Thus, while Islam the religion has survived, Islamism is doomed to loose just as Khan says. The reasons go to the core of the differences between two approaches to life: Islamism and Americanism.

Sometimes I bump into other converts in real life or in the blogosphere who make me wonder about what they converted to. Did they convert to Islam or did they loose themselves in a new identity that is more a foreign ethnicity than it is Islam? Sometimes, it seems that converts loose themselves in the identity of thier Muslim-born spouse. Although this happens mostly to women, I've also seen it plenty among male converts who married Muslim-born foreign women. Ancedotally, interethnic marriages between two Muslims born or raised in the same country usually adopt the majority culture of the country as thier culture-in-common. What is it about the foriegn Muslim cultures that seduce many a convert away from good old Americana?

Negativity. Fear. It sells newspapers. It excites people to action and it sure as hell generates comments. For example, my entry reflecting on a certain resentment drew numerous comments, yet my hopefully constructive entry about some aspects on how to make a mosque a welcoming place to all ethnicities got hardly a peep? Negativity attracts like a light pulls in the moths. But, is negative reinforcement a viable way to build a blog, build or rebuild a community? While a few positive and/or constructive comments get by, it seems that most responses are by those who disagree which i think applies to many Muslim-ish blogs. While disagreements can become fertile grounds for learning, usually they devolve into agitprop festivals which can have no real solution: each participant is doomed by thier egotisitical urge to impose thier view. Don't worry because I know that you know that is takes one to know one... Thus, this is as much introspection as it is a request.