22 posts tagged “islam”
Tonight's movie was another in an anthology of movies about perceptions of Islam and Arabs in the U.S. It is difficult to know if I should recommend it to anyone or not. And apparently, I am not alone. In many ways, the movie serves as a container carrying a number of crucial issues that Muslim's in the United States (or maybe more specifically in some U.S. Cities). If it were to be regarded as a “slice” of what life is really like in the U.S. I suspect that it would fail. One might better regard it as a caricature and not a portrait.
In the course of the movie, a number of stereo-types are reinforced even as the movie seems to want to break them down. Each of the issues that it seeks to deal with I suspect are real issues but each has been somewhat over dramatized to make them impossible to ignore. The central character, Mustafa, is an Egyptian American who has brought his family to Los Angeles to start a new life. The decision leads to numerous difficulties for he and his family particularly in the heightened security situation post 911. Mustafa's teenage son evidences significant identity issues and makes it clear that he no longer wishes to be a Muslim and that his experiences in America cause him to lose respect for his family, his ethnicity, and his father in particular. Mustafa's sister has to deal with her dislike for family traditions of familial marriage (she does not wish to marry her first cousin from Egypt) but also must deal with the fact that she does not like the way American men treat women either (to be specific, one particular man who is also serving as a caricature of American men I might add). Mustafa's friends are also caricatures in many respects. One is an “Al-Jazeera head” who regards all American news as propaganda and all Jews as Zionists. Another is a young actor who simply wants to assimilate into American culture, much like the Irish did but keeps getting assigned roles as a Middle Eastern terrorist, thus further embossing the stereotypes that he himself is suffering from. Indeed, one realizes that in his particular case, stupid American television producers it seems will not hire him if he does not conform to the stereotype for them.
I will confess. I have an appreciation for what this movie was trying to do. But I felt like the exaggerations – of both Middle Eastern culture AND American culture went too far. I think anyone watching who had never lived here would simply get false impressions of what American society is like reinforced (i.e. we are not all dope smoking, religion doubting, scandal mongering, Islamaphobic, women groping, propaganda slurping, racists). I think anyone watching who had never actually lived in a Middle Eastern culture might get false impressions of what Middle Eastern or Islamic culture is like reinforced (i.e. the arranged marriages, the family honor uber alis, the solving an offense by taking hostages, the inability to make ethical decisions without reference to the Koran, the constant yelling at each other and the expression of emotion with violence, etc.)
In a
way, it is like seeing a beautiful Impressionist painting converted
to glow in the dark fluorescent paint. Sometimes, one prefers to have
to do a little work in constructing meaning from subtle clues.
Sometimes, too much intensity distorts reality to the extent that it
becomes hard to see what is real. Truth is often a more subtle thing.
My guess is that a family of Muslims living in America might watch
this movie and say “We too have problems like this, but they are
not this overt.” Similarly, Americans might watch this and say,
“These things probably do happen but certainly not to this degree”.
I should have probably been able to recommend it more highly had it
all been toned down somewhat (and a bit less swearing on the part of
one particular character. The pervasiveness of his obscenity laden
speech throughout the movie would make it exceptionally difficult to
show in American high schools where I suspect some scenes could be
beneficial in getting a conversation started about prejudice and how
it often functions to bring lies into reality.
On the whole, I think there needs to be more movies about the complications of families making transitions as a result of cultural assimilation. I would just like to see more that did not see culture in such binary ways (i.e. forcing people to decide EITHER/OR). Surely, people are rational enough to realize that there are ways to adapt without complete capitulation and surely there are people who realize that no culture is a great deal like its caricatures.
P.S. I cannot for the life of me figure out why they chose this cover for the movie. It really tells you nothing about it.
Question for comment: Caricatures often tell us more about a person than a photograph but this is only because the viewer knows that he is looking at a caricature. Is a movie that caricaturizes groups of people helpful or harmful in helping to dispel stereotypes?
I just got the opportunity to listen to Barak Obama's speech in Cairo June 4. I would highly recommend it as it sets a tone for a future based on possibilities rather than practicabilities, a future based on a chosen way of seeing the world rather than an inherited one. Naturally, the question will have to be settled: Can we really chose new ways of seeing the world, or must we endure the ones that we have earned by our past behaviors and mistakes? Obama's speech also asserts, without an argument, that the world can move forward without arguing about the validity of its episimological sources of cultural values because, and this is the lynchpin of the assumptions he makes, those sources (Bible, Talmud, Qur'an) are fundamentally, not in conflict about anything that "really" matters.
Though asserting that he was himself a Christian, in a number of places he made reference to "our Holy Quran". Rhetorically, it was extremely effective. But on a pure logical level, I can see it being fraught with difficulties. The question is, will people respond on a level of logic or a level of sentiment? I suspect the later. And maybe therein lies our salvation as we make our way forward. Can one argue for some things (peace, human values, non-violence) on the basis of an authority that - if read in entirety - ALSO rejects some of the same propositions that you are arguing for? i.e. the status of Jerusalem or the West Bank/Judea-Samaria?
“The Holy Koran tells us …”
“The Talmud tells us …”
“The Holy Bible tells us …”
President Obama makes a powerful argument that these sacred books all agree on certain things. But what of the differences? He advocates - by his silence - ignoring them. Regard them as authoritiative where the ends are consistent with a peaceful world. Neglect the aspects of their messages where those messages might lead to contrary ends. I think that is essentially the argument that he is making.
“Faith should bring us together” he says, " As the Holy Quran tells us, be conscious of God and speak always the truth. . . . Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad joined in prayer”
In several places, he made the argument that America and Islam are not based on competing assumptions and he said so with such authority that his tone of voice and assurance carried the argument. But I myself feel a need to think more on the matter.
"America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition," he said, "The freedom to live as you chose. These are not just American ideas. They are human rights and that is why we will support them everywhere.”
And it is at this point where the most interesting debate should occur. Are the Qur'an or the Bible or the Talmud really arguing that human beings should be given the freedom to live as they chose? Is a religion whose name MEANS submission, a religion of choice? Is the Talmud a record of a debate about what humans want to do? Or is it a record of people trying to discern in the minutest of detail what God wants them to do? When Jesus says in his Sermon on the Mount "Anyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them is like a man who builds his house upon sand and when the floods come ..." is He advocating autonomy from divine command? When the Apostle Paul says "Have this mind in you that was in Christ ..." is his goal the autonomous individual, free to live as they chose?
Barak Obama has taken the approach that all sources of certainty can be regarded as equally valid and authoritative as long as none are. No one thus wins. No one looses. No one must admit to having been misled for a few hundred or thousand years.
It remains to be seen if this argument, made forcefully and diplomatically, and frequently enough, can carry the day.
Question for Comment: If we assume for a moment that major Western Religions are a Ven Diagram of concentric circles - each advocating certain assertions that are common and certain assertions that are exclusive, is there any reason to retain the exclusive elements if the result is irreconcilable conflict?
To Die in Jerusalem is a story of two mothers. Two mothers that illustrate and exemplify two whole peoples. In the last half hour of the movie, a mother who’s daughter has been killed in a suicide attack speaks with the mother of the girl who committed it. I confess, it was almost like watching Sarah and Hagar reincarnated.
It was as if electricity was moving up out of the ground in one and meeting electricity coming down through a lightening bolt out of the other’s sky. And just as the very place where their hearts connected, the force of the energy exploded. As if to say, "Now that I know you are listening, I need to be able to tell my story of suffering so that it can neutralize and even negate yours.” I have a confession to make. I am no fan of suicide bombers in general and certainly not when they are children killing children. But I honestly felt like the Palestinian woman gave the better arguments and came across as less “stuck” even though it was her daughter who had committed the act that took the other’s life. She was simply saying, “understand the context in which young people like my daughter must make moral decisions” and the Israeli woman would respond “Why do you hate us?”
I think it is fair to say that throughout history, circumstances have created in people anger and leaders have directed it. Someone holding a hose will not be able to do anything with it if there is no water pressure. But water pressure undirected cannot be blamed for what someone holding a hose can do. A suicide bombing is an act of desperate inexpressible anger. It seems obvious that Israelis need to understand that they play a part in the creation of that reservoir of anger. By the same token, takig a young seventeen year old girl’s anger and using it to blow up another girl her age indiscriminately is a concern that Palestinian leaders need to examine themselves about.
People need to understand that whole societies are creating the anger that portions of societies are using to create more. Hatred is something some people profit by and they will invest the principle as long as they are allowed to do so.
This was a hard movie for me to watch. This was not like many of the documentaries I have seen where individual citizens are simply seen offstage as world leaders argue. This was a movie about the ground floor and grass roots of animosity. It seems like the positions are or have been almost set in concrete now. Israelis seem to have decided that the responsibility for the happiness of refugees lies in the hands of surrounding Arab countries. If those refugees are unhappy, they believe the animosity should now be directed at the surrounding countries that will not take them in. Either because of their historical education or their religion, they believe that the Palestinian right to return to their homes in 1948 is subsumed and nullified.
Palestinians have concluded that justice demands their
return to their lost homes and lost status as a people worthy of a dignified
place among the nations. Like Serbians who wanted to be members of a Serbian
State in 1914 or Kurds who want to be members of a Kurdish State in the modern
world, they see no reason to inflict an apartheid status on themselves and
agree to relocation. Armed with these positions, there is nowhere to go besides
conflict it seems. If only land could be stacked up like a bunk bed.
Justice and understanding of another person’s history: I have always regarded these things as the pre-requisites to peace. But in cases where there are two notions of justice and two notions of history, the conflict is made worse by them and I wonder if a region wide self-induced amnesia is what is required.
I hope to bring some measure of mutual understanding to my Middle East courses this summer. A task to which I now turn.
Question for comment: Have you ever been in a situation where justice for you would have entailed an injustice for someone else? Is one morally obligated in any way to fight for one’s own justice? For another’s or for a split of the difference?
Two movies to report on: Jihad
for Love and Call to Witness. In
both Christianity and Islam some people are saying that God is fine with people
being gay and some people say God forbids it. So a bunch of humans get together
for councils and they declare their positions on the questions and God forgets
to come to the meeting and the world is left wondering. The status quo appeals
to the Bible and the Koran and their laws and the insurgents appeal to their experience and logic and their love and
the band plays on.
Who can say where it will all wind up?
But on the whole, if someone were interested in knowing more about this conflict, this would be time well spent. "A small house can accommodate hundreds of friends," says one Dr. from Gaza, "but it cannot accommodate two enemies." And this is why I am about to commit employmenticide (a word I just coined). I think the only solution at this point may be to stop teaching anyone in the region history. There are too many bloody stories worthy of revenge to be found in any coverage of just about anything. Anyone taking a history class in this region will be traumatized by it?
So why do I keep watching documentaries on it? Because someone has to know enough of both stories to figure out what I have just figured out. Maybe I am being ridiculous. But maybe I am not. I am just saying, if you are living in a world where every moment, you face a moral dilemma. You have to believe that in every other moment, an offense against someone or someone's morality is being committed. And where these things are happening, there will be pain, and insult, and the sanctification of retaliation.
I will say this. The producers of this documentary found articulate people to speak from all sides. There are many things said in this documentary that would cause other people interviewed in it to stand up and walk right out of the room. These sorts of debates can only be found on film now. The ability to stay in the same room and speak war with each other maybe extinct.
God help you to keep the same from happening to the conflicts in your life.
Question for comment: Jewel sings a song with a line in it that says "No longer lend your strength to the to that which you wish to be free from". How might you be contributing to this conflict? How might you remove your participation in it?
Because I am who I am, and because I had many important things to do today (taxes, midterm evaluations, course prep, etc.) I spent an hour or two this afternoon just reading Arabic short stories. Sometimes, I wonder how I will ever get through this life being who I am. I have no sense of this worldly priorities. I am irresponsible to the point of shame. But there were some excellent short stories in this anthology and I thought I should rescue my decision to read them by taking a few more moments to write about them.
As with any anthology, there were several stories I did not care for and several that held me rivited, as though these authors were writing about me and my life.
Izz al-Din al-Madani's The Tale of the Lamp is something of a long joke as much as it is a short story in a way. Perhaps it is a story about how life is more like a slot machine than a gumball machine. It rewards us and punishes us in ways that we simply cannot predict ahead of time.
Ibrahim al-Faqih's The Book of the Dead is a delightful caracterization of a rather radical fundamentalist teacher's internal confusion when he is faced with his first female student. In some ways, I think intentionally humorous, it runs the gamut of fear, suspician, and confusion that someone experiences when confronted with change when they have no previous experience to moderate their wildest emotions. The main character, Mr Abd al-Hafiz is terrified by this woman in his class, then astounded, then smitten, then terrified. He is a ship without memories of normal relationships with women to serve as a rudder. He becomes simply an erratic expression of all his socialization's stereotypes of who women are and what they represent. I suspect that the author's intent is to say, this is what it is like to go through one's whole life without their own experiences and be left with nothing but stereotypes to regulate ones emotions. I really liked this story.
Najib Mahfuz's story, Quismati and Nasibi is a fascinating tale about a set of conjoined twins and how their predicament destroys their lives. One could easily see in this story a metaphor for many communities in the Middle East who are, as it were, "sown together at the hip, with polarized opposites. Shia and Sunni in Iraq, Modernists and Fundamentalists in Egypt. Turks and Armenians or Kurds in Turkey. Palestinains and Israelis. etc. etc. In so many cases, diametrically oppositional forces are tied together and this story explains their pain about as well as any explanation I have ever heard. Another excellent story.
Hanan al-Shaykh's story Jasmine's Picture is a wonderful look at the way that we can sometimes idealize someone we do not know. Indeed, we can fall in love with them and ignore the person or people in our actual lives entirely because we have so fallen under the hypnotic effect of the mysterious person we think we know. There may be, in this story, a somewhat vieled look at how we may also do the same with the countries we might wish we lived in ... living in love with fantasy until the reality actually shows up to shake our hand and in an instant we realize what we have done.
"He did not embrace her. Instead he found himself reaching for her hand, realizing that he did not know her."
Fu'ad al-Takarli's A Hidden Treasure just had me rivited. It is about a man who has spent years making himself content with who he is and what he as who coincidentally meets his childhood sweetheart - his first heartflame - while working on a furnace in his boss' house. It is a story about memories and contentment and how fragile the later can be in the face of a lost love. "Memories do not vanish from a person's mind for no reason. INdeed, they can be a source of misery if one is not careful."
Today, I had the opportunity to watch an excellent 55 minute documentary that was created simply for the sole task of giving Muslim women in America (and specifically in the American Northwest) a n opportunity to voice themselves and to dialog with each other in a public way. The director of this movie had never made a movie before but felt, in the aftermath of 911 that SOMEONE had to create a resource for ordinary people who simply wanted to meet the ordinary people on the other side of some perceived cultural divide. The women in this movie, in my opinion, do an excellent job. And as I will be starting an online conversation with students in Amman, Jordan about Sophocles' play Antigone. This movie would be ideal for an introduction.
Here in Vermont, these sorts of face to face conversations with people from different faiths and cultures can be a challenge. My compliments to the makers of this movie.
Question for Comment: If you could make a documentary about a group of people or a subgroup of people, who would you make it about?
Its interesting how many different ways the Romeo and Juliet story can be told. Essential ingredients can be found laying around in many culture. Take a young woman, just about any culture or sub-culture will do. Now find a young man who has grown up in the culture that her culture thinks of as the enemy. Make her a Montague and him a Capulet or visa versa. Make him a Jew and her a German. Make her a pastor's daughter and he a rebel (as in Footloose). Make her a Puerto Rican "Shark and he a white boy "Jet" (as in West Side Story). Make her a Japanese girl and he an American (as in Snow Falling on Cedars). Make her an aristocrat and him a common nobody (As in the movie Titanic). Make her a Palestinian Arab and he an Israeli soldier and you have the movie Torn Apart. Make her an American teenager and make him a "reformed" vampire (as in the movie Twilight). Or, as in the story this movie is based on, make her a Muslim woman during the era of Indian partition and he a Sikh. The formula has been working since Shakespeare and I see no reason for it to fail to work any time soon. People are always interested in watching to see if young love (one of the most powerful forces on the planet if you have ever felt it) can overcome hatred (one of the most powerful forces on the planet if you have ever felt it). The way it works out in Romeo and Juliet, love conquers over hatred but hatred conquers over the lovers. Alas, that seems to be the way most of these plot lines run their course. Each side has to win something or the movie or play does not seem to reflect life as we know it. And most playwrights and script writers appear to think that we are more satisfied if we know that love wins than we are if we know that the lovers survive.
I for one am not sure how much I like this formula and I would speak of its application to the movie in question if I did not fear that such a discussion would lead to a plot spoiler. But I will say this. The scenery and music in the movie Partition are beautiful and it does serve to remind you once again that what makes people different in this world is usually much less significant than what makes them the same. And when we set out to feel things about people we have not met because they belong to some group or another, we are generally making a big mistake. There are many people we could love deeply on the other side of those lines. There are many people worthy of some hatred on our own.
My compliments to the people who understood that this period and time in Indian history would make a great setting to reteach us all a lesson.
Question for comment: Do you have any friends on the "other side" of some cultural war that you find yourself involuntarily a part of?
What was interesting about the conversation about the documentary with my dad after is to find those many points of convergence between his own views (and perhaps mine) with much of Islam. In some respects, American Christians are closer to Islamic Wahabiism for example than they might suspect. And Pentecostals would be much closer to Sufi Muslim traditions than they might be to, say, Catholicism.
What fascinates me is at what point religions become frozen into forms that it becomes difficult to evolve out of. What are the factors that cause a religious tradition to stop pursuing a trajectory that its original inspiration heads out on. Why do different religions arrive at their perceptual golden ages - the religious culture that they come to regard as "sacred"?
One thing I did appreciate about this documentary is its willingness to travel around the Islamic world and make it clear that there are many expressions of the faith to be considered before any discussion of "Islam" as a unilithic culture can be had intelligently.
In the past week, I have been slowly and methodically making my way through a fairly lengthy documentary on the lives of religious minorities in the Balkans and Middle East. The creator of this movie invests a good deal of time introducing us to the people of Macedonia, Bosnia, Albania, Turkey, Lebanon, and Israel by selecting interviewees who come from religious minorities in each of these regions. I suspect that it would be a movie too long for many people who don't bring an interest in religion and Middle Eastern history to it but there are moments of it where the application of their human dilemmas can be regarded as universal. We all have people in our lives who have left wounds on us. Imagine what it is like for people who have centuries of historical conflict that they have inherited on TOP of their own personal baggage. How do they sort things out.
And how do they sort out their own identities when they belong to nationalities as minorities within those nationalities? Is an Armenian Christian a Christian, an Armenian, or a Turk? Is an Israeli former Palestinian Arab Christian a Palestinian, an Israeli, an Arab, or a Christian? Or should all regard themselves as humanists.
I confess, the most interesting of the interviews to me personally were the last two (In Lebanon and in Nazareth) though I really enjoyed getting a feel for the geography and topography and human demographics of each of these regions. The gentleman interviewed from Lebanon ran a Christian organization that sought to help marginalized people assimilate back into society. The gentleman from Nazareth ran a school for multi-ethnic and religious kids and spoke inspiring of his work with Jews in trying to create bridges by which they might enter into each other's narratives of suffering.
If a reader found the subject interesting, these last two would be worth the price of the movie. The director films almost ever interview in the presence of or through the prism of a broken mirror.
One last thing. I have been reading a lot lately about the basic accouterments of the sacramental system of Ancient Israel and this movie about the various sects of Orthodox, Eastern, Syriac, Armenian, and in some cases Islamic sacramental life is intriguing to watch. All of the vestments, the icons, the sacred dress, the sacred furniture, the incense, etc. It is all still there in some of these modern versions of ancient faith's and is well documented in this movie. I find myself mystified by why people still derive satisfaction from these things and this documentary feeds my curiosity even more.
Question for Comment: Have you ever attempted to enter into the suffering narrative of a person (or group of people) who has caused you pain? Does it help? Or does it simply make your suffering worse?
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