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I have been increasingly frustrated by the direction in which Phil, Sebastian and maybe one or two others are taking the comments in my post on the Dove World Outreach Center’s burn-a-Quran day. Instead of focusing on the obvious Islamophobia motivating the event, they want to interrogate Islam, Islamic values, the values Muslims hold, etc., and it seems to me that they want to do this in part in order to determine whether or not the Islamophobia my post was pointing out is at all justified. (I might be wrong about this; it is just the feeling I get.) For example, as I pointed out in a response to Phil, there is a big difference between asking, as he does:

Does that mean, then, that it is always wrong to wonder how many millions of Muslims hold extremist views?

and asking:

Does that mean, then, that it is always wrong to wonder what percentage of Muslims hold extremist views?

The former version of the question seems to me clearly Islamophobic, not because there might not be millions of Muslims who hold such views, but because the question proposes its own answer in a way that frames Muslims as “the enemy.” If we were talking about any other religious group, I don’t think this kind of rhetoric would be allowed to stand unchallenged, and I think people from those groups would, rightly, refuse to engage the conversation precisely because the rhetoric of the question is so biased and inflammatory.

To give a specific example, an awful lot of people have a problem with the idea within Judaism that the Jews are God’s “chosen people.” I can understand why someone who is not Jewish might not care that this phrase does not have a monolithic meaning within the Jewish community, that they might, in other words, find offensive any way in which the phrase can be understood. It is, however, one thing to say, simply, that this belief and therefore Judaism is offensive; while it is quite something else to demonize the Jewish people as, for example, Zionist conspirators who want to rule the world and feel it is their right to do so because they are God’s chosen people. (And I would like, please, to leave out of any discussion of this what Christians mean when they talk about the Jews as God’s chosen people.) Similarly, as I pointed out in another comment: It is one thing to point that there have been despotic Black political leaders in the world, demonstrating–as if it needed to be demonstrated–that Black people are just as capable of being evil and oppressive as everyone else, but it is quite something else to start talking about those leaders when the discussion at hand is about anti-Black racism in the United States.

There is nothing wrong with asking questions about Islamic values, beliefs and traditions, even for the purpose of critiquing them; there is nothing wrong with asking how many of which Muslims hold which kinds of beliefs, religious, political or otherwise; there is nothing wrong with pointing out that Sharia law has within it, as do Jewish and Christian law, elements that we today consider barbaric, and there is nothing wrong with pointing out that those regimes which put those elements into practice are, in fact, behaving barbarically.

I hope that statement is unambiguous enough. Because there is something wrong with using those questions to demonize Muslims and their religious tradition. And that is why I have given this post the title I have given it. I just wish I knew enough about Islam to write Islamophobia 101.

Or at least that’s what Frank Rich, citing Salon’s Justin Elliott, wrote in his August 22 op-ed column, “How Fox Betrayed Petraeus.” (You can find links if you click through to the whole column.)

We owe thanks to Justin Elliott of Salon for the single most revealing account of this controversy’s evolution. He reports that there was zero reaction to the “ground zero mosque” from the front-line right or anyone else except marginal bloggers when The Times first reported on the Park51 plans in a lengthy front-page article on Dec. 9, 2009. The sole exception came some two weeks later at Fox News, where Laura Ingraham, filling in on “The O’Reilly Factor,” interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of the project’s organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Ingraham gave the plans her blessing. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” she said. “I like what you’re trying to do.”

As well Ingraham might. Rauf is no terrorist. He has been repeatedly sent on speaking tours by the Bush and Obama State Departments alike to promote tolerance in Arab and Muslim nations. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic reported last week, Rauf gave a moving eulogy at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan, at the Manhattan synagogue B’nai Jeshurun. Pearl’s father was in attendance. The Park51 board is chock-full of Christians and Jews. Perhaps the most threatening thing about this fledgling multi-use community center, an unabashed imitator of the venerable (and Jewish) 92nd Street Y uptown, is its potential to spawn yet another coveted, impossible-to-get-into Manhattan private preschool.

In the five months after The Times’s initial account there were no newspaper articles on the project at all. It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Murdoch axis of demagoguery revved up, jettisoning Ingraham’s benign take for a New York Post jihad. The paper’s inspiration was a rabidly anti-Islam blogger best known for claiming that Obama was Malcolm X’s illegitimate son. Soon the rest of the Murdoch empire and its political allies piled on, promoting the incendiary libel that the “radical Islamists” behind the “ground zero mosque” were tantamount either to neo-Nazis in Skokie (according to a Wall Street Journal columnist) or actual Nazis (per Newt Gingrich).

I haven’t yet had a chance to read Elliot’s piece, but I will.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

The poet Kazim Ali posted this to his Facebook page, saying that he thought it “had to be a myth,” and that is what it sounds like at first, but the Dove World Outreach Center is indeed inviting people to burn a Quran on September 11, 2010. It’s easy to dismiss this as quackery, as not worth giving the attention that it got through CNN’s coverage, but the truth is that if we don’t pay attention to it, if we don’t call it out for what it is–and it’s gratifying to see that the Facebook page protesting the event has close to twice as many fans as the Facebook page announcing the event–it will spread. More than that, though, it will become–it already has become, actually, and this is kind of frightening–part of the way perceptions of Islam are framed by our national rhetoric. Here’s the video:

Rick Sanchez, I think, proves himself to be a particularly inept interviewer here–I don’t watch him, so I don’t know if he’s usually better than this–but one of the things that disturbs me about the way he tries to respond to Terry Jones, Dove World Outreach’s pastor, is his but-there-are-moderate-muslims-out-there tone, as if those “moderate Muslims”–and more about that phrase in a moment–are somehow the exception to the rule. Or as if they are, you know, out there, but really well hidden, and so you have to know the secret code or something to get them to reveal themselves. Equally troubling to me, though, is the way the phrase “moderate Muslims” has taken on the same descriptive weight and authority as, say, Orthodox Jew or Evangelical Christian, as if “moderate” were somehow actually a sect of Islam. Well-meaning as it may be, the phrase actually contributes to rather than deconstructs the way in which Islam is being defined as a profoundly hostile theologically-informed, we-want-to-rule-the-world political stance towards the West, broadly speaking, and the United States in particular, rather than as a religion. This is to me–and I’d be interested to hear what other people think of this–very similar to the way in which the antisemitic rhetoric of Europe framed Judaism from the 18th century, and certainly the 19th century on, and it is certainly one of the underlying assumptions–i.e., that the Jews want to rule the world–of the “World Zionist Conspiracy” theories.

It’s also worth noting that Jones and his group also declared August 2 “No Homo Mayor” day, a day to protest Gainesville’s openly gay mayor. Both groups–Muslims and homosexuals–are godless according to Jones, a logic similar to the one that created the association between being Jewish and homosexuality, to mention being communist, Jewish and homosexual, that was an important point of antisemitic rhetoric in this country during 50s, 60s and even 70s.

It’s easy to dismiss Terry Jones and his church as a bunch of nuts, especially when his arguments for why Islam is a devil’s religion, as quoted in the text accompanying the Rick Sanchez video, include doozies like this:

“I mean ask yourself, have you ever really seen a really happy Muslim? As they’re on the way to Mecca? As they gather together in the mosque on the floor? Does it look like a real religion of joy?” Jones asks in one of his YouTube posts.

“No, to me it looks like a religion of the devil.”

The problem is that Jones and company are only giving expression to the logical conclusion of what an awful lot of people in the United State., consciously or not, already believe. The term Islamophobia may be relatively new, but the (often racialized and racializing) hatred of Muslims has a long history in this country–and that is something I will perhaps write about in another post–a history that predates the September 11th attacks not by decades, but by centuries, and its assumptions, its images, its rhetoric is/has been as much a part of our culture as the assumptions, images, rhetoric of, say, racism.

I am not an alarmist, though I do think there is a comparison to be made between the way in which antisemitic rhetoric was deployed so as to make the Nazi’s campaign against the Jews and the way Islamophobic rhetoric has been more and more making its way into our public discourse. Indeed, I think this comparison would probably work with the rhetoric of any genocidal campaign, though I do not think and I am not implying that this is the beginning of some kind of anti-Muslim government action. Rather, I think, plain and simple, that those comparisons should make clear to us how imperative it is not to let the actions and the rhetoric of people like Terry Jones go unanswered.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

This is from the “Readings” section in the August 2010 issue of Harper’s, and I have been reading it over trying to decide what frightens me most about it.

The content of education is always, always, political and there will always be someone somewhere who thinks her or his perspective has been left out of what children are taught, to their detriment as individuals and to the detriment of society as a whole. Independently of that, thought, I am a big believer in trying to find as many ways as possible to include as many perspectives as possible in the classroom, not to make the point that they are all equally valid, but to make the point that the more informed we are about those perspectives, even the ones that have been shown to be invalid, the more responsible and accountable we are likely to be in our own perspectives. The proposed changes to history and social studies curriculum recorded here, made by Texas State Board of Education member Don McElroy–and if you have not read about the Texas text book controversy earlier this year, here’s a Washington Post article that gives a taste of it–are problematic on their face because they so clearly favor an overtly conservative political agenda, but three things stuck out to me in particular:

• Removing discussion of propaganda as one of the reasons that the United States entered World War I so falsifies what goes on when any nation decides to go to war–and I am obviously talking here about the government propaganda directed at that nation’s public to garner support for the war–that it transforms whatever lessons are taught in the context of this curriculum change from education into propaganda.
• The third paragraph down about “efforts by globalist organizations to usurp the U.S. Constitution transitioning from U.S. sovereignty to global governance” is frightening not only because it suggests that the U.S. has, and should have, an agenda to become, essentially, the governor of the world, but also because it is so badly written–unless I have read it wrong; and I have read it over more than a few times now–that it grammatically attributes “threats to individual freedom and liberty” not to the supposed “efforts by globalist organizations,” but to the Constitution itself.
• Curriculum guidelines that compare historical figures to fictional characters as if those fictional characters were real–and remember these are history and social studies, not literature guidelines–sound like something out of Orwell’s 1984 or some other dystopian novel. That Mr. McElroy and whoever advised him could not find an example of real life optimistic immigrants to compare with Upton Sinclair, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois seems to me say more about the canyon-wide gaps in their education than these proposed changes could ever say about the ostensible liberal bias in education that they are supposed to correct.

I don’t know if these proposed changes passed, but that they should have been put forward as serious and substantive, that they should have been taken seriously at all, really scares me.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

From an August 11th article by Jonathan D. Sarna published on The Jewish Daily Forward’s website:

When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood on Governors Island, in sight of the Statue of Liberty, and forcefully defended the right of Muslims to build a community center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, he expressly made a point of distancing himself from an earlier leader of the city: Peter Stuyvesant, who understood the relationship between religion and state altogether differently than Bloomberg does.

As governor of what was then called New Amsterdam, from 1647-1664, Stuyvesant worked to enforce Calvinist orthodoxy. He objected to public worship for Lutherans, fought Catholicism and threatened those who harbored Quakers with fines and imprisonment. One might easily imagine how he would have treated Muslims.

When Jewish refugees arrived in his city, in 1654, Stuyvesant was determined to bar them completely. Jews, he complained, were “deceitful,” “very repugnant” and “hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ.” He wanted them sent elsewhere.

Stuyvesant’s superiors in Holland overruled him, citing economic and political considerations. He continued, however, to restrict Jews to the practice of their religion “in all quietness” and “within their houses.” Being as suspicious of all Jews as some today are of all Muslims, he never allowed them to build a synagogue of their own.

It was not until the early 1700s that Jews won the right to worship in public in New York City. In Connecticut that right was not granted until 1843, and the reaction of The New Haven Register, which “viewed the synagogue as a public defeat for Christendom,” is instructive:

“The Jews…,” the paper thundered, “have outflanked us here, and effected a footing in the very centre of our own fortress. Strange as it may sound, it is nevertheless true that a Jewish synagogue has been established in this city — and their place of worship (in Grand Street, over the store of Heller and Mandelbaum) was dedicated on Friday afternoon. Yale College divinity deserves a Court-martial for bad generalship.”

It took an act of Congress, signed by President Franklin Pierce, for Jews to be able to worship in public in Washington, DC, where some contended that the Religious Corporation Act granted the right to purchase real estate only to Christian churches; and just in case you think that Jews no longer run into such problems in the United States, Sarna cites a case from 1999 in which “opponents of a new Orthodox synagogue seeking to build in New Rochelle, N.Y. [used] warnings [about] ‘rats,’ ‘traffic’ and ‘creeping commercialization’ [to hide their] real fear, [which was] that ‘the identity of the neighborhood would change.’”

Muslims have been worshiping in public near Ground Zero for three decades. The Cordoba House community center will not, in other words, be bringing something entirely new to the area. Rather, it will provide much needed space for a community that already exists there–not to mention the much needed space it will provide for Muslims and people of other faiths to interact. The similarities between much of the rhetoric being employed to argue against the building of Cordoba House and The New Haven Register’s The Jews have outflanked us ought to disturb us all.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

I should be planning my classes. School starts in a couple of weeks and I am in the middle of setting up a long and complex assignment for the technical writing class I will teach starting in September. On top of that, I need to write a new syllabus for my introductory creative writing course and for the three sections of freshman composition in front of which I will be standing starting on September 1st. Or I should be working on the introduction to my next book of translations, which I still have some hope of finishing this week, because that will allow me to get back to work on the Fragments of Evolving Manhood pieces I have been writing and on the poems waiting in the blue folder on my desk for me to revise so I can start submitting them to journals. Instead of working on either of those two projects, however, I am writing a blog post about something I have not been able to get out of my head since I read about it in The New York Times this past Friday: the story of Omar S. Thornton, who killed himself after killing eight people in Manchester, Connecticut.

Thornton drove a truck delivering beers for Hartford Distributors. He’d been called into a disciplinary hearing on the morning of the shooting, Tuesday, August 3rd, after having been accused by company officials of stealing beers; they offered him a choice between resigning or being fired. Instead, he opened fire. When he was done shooting, eight people were dead, two were wounded, and he placed a call to 911 because he wanted “to tell my story, so you can play it back.” He’d been, he said, racially harassed at his workplace to such an extent that he had no choice but “to take [things] into my own hands and handle the problem.” According to Thornton’s girlfriend and her mother, this harassment included things like someone drawing a hangman’s noose on the bathroom wall.

Company officials deny the charges of racism, which it is likely they would do even if the charges were true, and an official with the Teamsters union said that Thornton had never filed any complaint, which only mean no one officially knew about the problem, if there was one; but let’s assume for the moment that the report of the hangman’s noose is false, that racism on the job was not a problem that Thornton had. That doesn’t mean, of course, Thornton was not experiencing racism in his daily life. Indeed, it would have been remarkable, more than remarkable in fact–it would have been miraculous–if he had not been experiencing racism in his daily life since he was old enough to know what racism was; and so, while nothing justifies the murders he committed, and while it is true that if he had not killed himself, given the clear fact of his guilt, he would have deserved to be punished to the full extent of the law (though, for me, such punishment would stop short of the death penalty), there is no reason to doubt that Thornton was telling the truth when he said that the anger motivating his killing of those eight people was rooted in his experience of racism.

There is, however, a difficulty in acknowledging that truth; in its implication that Thornton might also have been a victim, it seems to place him and his victims on the same level, as if he were not responsible for his own actions. More, because racism is such a complex issue, to acknowledge that racism might have played had a role in shaping Thornton’s state of mind such that he was able to kill eight people in cold blood is to risk eclipsing the far more simple fact that he actually killed those eight people, that they no longer exist because of him; and since I do not want to lose sight of the fact that those eight people are gone, I would like everyone reading this post to pause here and go read “Remembering Lives Lost in a Warehouse Rampage,” an article in The New York Times by Patrick McGeehan that memorializes their lives.

I know many people who will think that what I have to say next is about making excuses for Thornton, but it’s not. No matter how much he might have suffered because of racism, nothing changes the fact that he was guilty of murder. When I first read about the deaths he caused, though, it was in the context of the 911 call he made so that he could explain himself, and my second thought, because my first thought was of the victims, survivors and their families, was of the first sentence from the title essay in bell hook’s collection Killing Rage: Ending Racism: “I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder” (8). The next three and a half pages of hooks’ essay recount a “sequence of racialized incidents involving black women.” These incidents so “intensified [hooks'] rage against the white man sitting next to [her] that [she] wanted to stab him softly, to shoot him with a gun [she] wished [she] had in [her] purse.” She continues:

And as I watched his pain, I would say to him tenderly “racism hurts.” With no outlet, my rage turned to overwhelming grief and I began to weep, covering my face with my hands. All around me everyone acted as though they could not see me, as though I were invisible, with one exception. The white man seated next to me watched suspiciously whenever I reached for my purse. As though I were the black nightmare that haunted his dreams, he seemed to be waiting for me to strike, to be the fulfillment of his racist imagination. I leaned towards him with my legal pad and made sure he saw the title written in bold print: “Killing Rage.” (11)

Take any one of the “racialized incidents” hooks refers to out of the context of the sequence she refers to, and I think even she would acknowledge that her “killing rage” was out of proportion to the nature of the incident, but that is why the word sequence is so crucial. A sequence implies an accumulation, an accretion, of significance, of weight, and so while the incident that triggers the rage hooks feels is relatively minor–an airline boarding pass mix-up involving her traveling companion, who is also black, during which the crew treats hooks’ companion in ways that are clearly racist–it is, on that particular day, the proverbial last straw, the one that, added to the many other racist straws hooks had been forced to carry that day, not to mention those she’d been forced to carry throughout her life till that point, left her unable to carry anymore.

Hooks, however, did what we can only wish Thornton had been able to do. She wrote about her rage, gave it a form and a content that turned it into something other than the destructive force Thornton’s rage became. The difference in how they responded to their rage does not mean that we are talking about two very different kinds of rage; and by we I mean here white people. I mean us. The fact of Thornton’s deadly destructiveness makes it easy to dismiss him as crazy, as a nut, as inhuman; it makes it easy to other him such that we feel we don’t need to understand him. We need only to punish him–though in this case the punishment can take place only in our imaginations–so that, in punishing him, in pushing him beyond the pale of reasonable humanity, we can reassure ourselves not only that the problem was his, not ours, but also that “reasonable” Black people, educated professionals like bell hooks, for example, don’t feel what he felt, could never do what he did.

Yet if we are unwilling even to try to understand a man like Omar S. Thornton, if we are unwilling to grant the possibility that he told the truth about himself when he said he had experienced such racism that he felt he had no choice but to kill, we only guarantee that there will be more like him. I do not mean by this that white people are somehow responsible for what Black people do with the rage they feel. I do mean that we need to start by really listening to Black people when they say they feel that rage, not because everything they say out of that rage will be accurate, but because we usually don’t listen–unless the rage is safely packaged in something like bell hooks’ book; and even then, how many of us read such books?

To listen at the level I am talking about is, first, to acknowledging the fact that, because we are white, we have no way of knowing what it’s like to live through, to borrow bell hooks’ phrase, sequence after sequence after sequence after sequence of “racialized incidents;” there is no way we can know what it’s like to feel the core of who we are eroding beneath those sequences, repeated day after day, year after year, the way rock erodes when water flows incessantly over it; there is no way we can know what it’s like to reach a point where we don’t feel anymore that there is a core to who we are and that the entirety of the society in which we live has arranged things for us that way simply because of the color of our skin; it is to acknowledge that because we are white, no matter how difficult our lives may have been in other ways, we will never have to know the particular desperation that emerges from that particular feeling of emptiness simply because we are white.

At the same time, however, to listen at the level I am talking about is not–as some people will no doubt suggest I am saying it is–about surrendering our own perspective on the world or suspending our own critical faculties; it is not about accepting as valid everything that people like bell hooks or Omar Thornton say out of their rage or allowing ourselves to be silenced by guilt. Rather, listening at the level I am talking about is about acknowledging that, precisely because we cannot know what it means to be Black in the United States, we need to understand what it means to be white and how what it means for us to be white contributes to the “killing rage” that hooks wrote about and that Thornton acted on. To do otherwise is to be complicit in the racism to which that rage is a perfectly reasonable response; it is to be like the white man that bell hooks was sitting next to, the one she wanted to murder, to whom she said, “[This] was an occasion for you to intervene in the harassment of a black woman and you chose your own comfort and tried to deflect away from your complicity in that choice by offering an insincere, face-saving apology” (9).

There have been times in my life when I have intervened, but I would be lying if I said there have not been times when, consciously or not, I chose my own comfort. Being able to choose between those two responses more or less without consequence is part of the privilege of being white in the United States and the degree to which we fail to own that privilege is one measure of the degree to which we fail to understand a man like Omar S. Thornton, and that, I think, is where I would like to end: not with the predictable platitudes about how, if only more white people had actively opposed the racism he encountered in his life, if only Thornton himself had had more and better opportunities, he might never have gotten so enraged and the eight people he killed might still be alive–because no matter how true that might be in the abstract, there is no way of knowing if it would have been true in reality and, moreover, that line of reasoning ultimately trivializes the murders Thornton committed; rather, I want to end with the simple assertion that, guilty as Thornton was, we still need to understand him, because I don’t think we really do.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

So this is kind of cool. I have been entering my books into Sente, a really fine bibliography software package if you’re on a Mac, and I came across these two books of poetry that I took from my grandmother’s library, Cups of Illusion and The Upward Pass, both by Henry Bellamann, best known for the novel King’s Row, which he published in 1940 and which was made into a movie in 1942. Anyway, what drew my attention was the fact that Bellamann inscribed the books of poetry to my grandmother, calling her his “dear little friend” in Cups of Illusion and “good friend” in The Upward Pass. My grandmother once hinted to me that there was a story from the time she was a girl about her and a writer–though she never actually told me the story; she tended to be very secretive about her past–and now, of course, I am wondering what that story might be. In 1928, the year Bellamann inscribed The Upward Pass, he also published Crescendo, about a man in love with two women. I somehow doubt that was the story my grandmother never told me, that she was one of the women in the novel, but it is fun to think about.

Not much else to say about this. Just that I think it’s kind of cool. Here is a poem from Cups of Illusion that I opened to at random:

August Gardens

Falling petals and dusty leaves
And drooping flower heads
Beneath unpitying skies
Unpromising of cloud or change–
Yet some faint life still moves
In your pale veins;
Some dumb, unknowing courage
Meets each day’s mocking sun.

How you keep faith with wind and rain!

I watch you in your silence,
Touch your curled tendrils,
While my eyes
Search Heaven for promise
Or for change.

Can you know in your dim nerves
The touch of one who waits like you
And still keeps faith with God
As you keep faith with wind and rain?

And here is one from The Upward Pass:

The Gulf Stream

They say a tropic river threads the seas
Bearing the strangest things to northern lands:
Vermilion fish, like flowers, with silver bands,
And bronze seaweed from scarlet coral keys.
Green birds that mock the moon from tall palm trees
Where ghost-gray monkeys hang by cunning hands,
Follow the thinning blue to northern sands,
And there among the black pines scream and freeze.

The while this ardent current chills and fades,
Splendors of ice drift slowly south, each one
A frozen torch of borealic fire,
Each one a spectral ship with rainbow sails,
Sinking and fading as it nears the sun
In this relentless river of desire.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

I am late publicizing the fact that three of my poems, “Like This,” “Free Radicals” and “Empty Rhetoric,” were published on Poets for Living Waters. Here is “Free Radicals:”

Rowboats on the pond:
random particles
dancing to laws
they couldn’t name
even if the god
that doesn’t exist
descended this moment
and himself commanded
them to speak

—and our son, sleeping,
nestles further back
in his stroller, animals,
no doubt, tracking with him
through his dreams
the mud of the day
we’ve just lived;
and when he wakes
he’ll read the story
back to us,
the narrative components
bouncing off each other
like these vessels
would do on the water
if all at once their pilots slept

—which, if we’re honest about it,
is how we got here,
bumped and bonded,
released from our rage
into this hope, this boy,
this: his own life.

Submission guidelines asked for, along with three poems and a bio, a statement if you wanted to make one. Here is mine, corrected for the spacing errors that appear on the site:

Tikkun olam, a concept that is central to Jewish spirituality, means, literally, the fixing of the world, and it refers to a religious duty Jews are supposed to consider our­selves obligated to perform. In one strand of Jewish mystical tradition, tikkun olam means the task of gathering the fragments of the shattered divine, the pieces of him­self [sic] that the god of the Hebrew Bible gave up in creating the world so that the world could live and grow, and then using them to reconstruct the original godhead. On a more mundane, though no less significant level, tikkun olam is represented by such things as the struggle for social justice. For me, writing poetry is also a form of tikkun olam. As Sam Hamill has written, “The first duty of the writer is the rectification of names,” and he quotes Kung-fu Tze [Confucius], “All wisdom is rooted in learning to call things by the right name.” Finding my way through language to a finished poem is the act of finding that name, whether it is the name of the way things were, the way things are or the way things might be. Poetry’s response to disasters like the BP oil spill, it seems to me, needs to encompass all three of those possibilities.

The Poets for Living Waters mission statement is also worth reading:

Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the BP Gulf oil disaster of April 20, 2010, one of the most profound man-made ecological catastrophes in history. Former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky describes the popularity of poetry after 9/11 as a turn away from the disaster’s overwhelming enormity to a more manageable individual scale. As we confront the magnitude of this recent tragedy, such a return may well aid us.

The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else. An appreciation of this systemic connectivity suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.

This online periodical is the first in a planned series of actions. Further actions will include a print anthology and a public reading in Washington DC.

This is the title of a PhD thesis written by Dr. Amanullah De Sondy, who has just accepted a position at Ithaca College. According to Joan McAlpine, who profiled Dr. De Sondy for The Sunday Times, several leading publishers are competing to buy the thesis and publish it as a book and, if they do, I think they should consider the title she suggested: Men, Sex and Islam. I, for one, am very interested to read it. In McAlpine’s words:

It challenges assumptions about what it means to be a Muslim man. The Koran does not, says De Sondy, demand a bearded patriarch with several wives and dozens of children. There are dysfunctional families in Islamic tradition, he says, prophets without father figures and revered holy men who led “effeminate” lifestyles. Most controversially, he challenges homophobia in Islam. “Homosexuality is not incompatible with Islam. The two can and have co-existed. The important thing is to link it with living a good life and creating a good society.”

Later in the article, De Sondy is quoted as saying:

“In the 16th-century Punjab, there lived a Sufi saint and poet called Shah Hussain who is greatly venerated. He fell in love with a Hindu boy. They lived together and are buried side by side in the same tomb. Pilgrims come to the tomb and shrine in Lahore district even today, but some people want to rewrite history, saying the boy was in fact a girl.”

He also points to the presence of “antinomian Sufis in the Indian subcontinent — men who have pierced ears and dance in women’s clothing”.

In response to the story that De Sondy says most of the conservatives who disagree with him use–that of God’s decision to destroy the city of Sodom because of the sins of its inhabitants–he says the story “is really about [God's] disapproval of the rape of young boys that was happening in the place,” which is very different from saying that God disapproves of homosexuality.

I am not a scholar of Islam, nor well-enough informed to know the complexities of what Islam has to say about homosexuality, but I do know that scholarship like this, which at the very least highlights the degree to which ideas about masculinity, manhood and male sexuality are contested ideological territory, showing that the traditional view is only one of the possibilities that exist, is very, very important.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

I first read about the ADL’s statement supporting those who would stop the building of Cordoba House, a Muslim community center modeled on the YM/YWHA’s and CA’s you can find all over New York City over at The Debate Link. In reading the statement, I was struck by these two paragraphs:

However, there are understandably strong passions and keen sensitivities surrounding the World Trade Center site. We are ever mindful of the tragedy which befell our nation there, the pain we all still feel – and especially the anguish of the families and friends of those who were killed on September 11, 2001.

The controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location is counterproductive to the healing process. Therefore, under these unique circumstances, we believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.

These words raise, of course, the obvious question: Suppose the building at stake were a Jewish community center and suppose the people opposed it were doing so out of “strong passions and keen sensitivities” that were analogous to what the people who oppose the Cordoba House feel, would the ADL argue that such a building in a such a place was “counterproductive to the healing process” and urge that the center be built elsewhere? More than that, though, I found myself wondering about whose feelings the ADL is being so considerate of here. As Michael Barbaro wrote on July 30th in an article on The New York Times website–the article was on the front page of the July 31st edition of the paper–attributing the point to Oz Sultan, Cordoba House’s programming director, “He said that Muslims had also died on Sept. 11, either because they worked in the twin towers, or responded to the scene.”

Sultan was responding to a statement made by Abraham Foxman, ADL’s national director, to the effect that the people whose feelings his organization feels ought not to be hurt by the building of center at its current location are the families of those who died in the September 11th attacks. Mr. Sultan’s response, of course, is precisely to the point, and I don’t think there isn’t much else to add to that. I do find Foxman’s reasoning, at least as it is quoted in Barbaro’s article, profoundly troubling, though:

Asked why the opposition of the [September 11th victims'] families was so pivotal in the decision, Mr. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, said they were entitled to their emotions.

“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” he said. Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”

It’s hard for me to know where to begin taking this apart. First, though, let me say that I do think Foxman is right about this: people who have been through trauma are entitled to their feelings about things that may force them to return to or relive that trauma, and even when those feelings are irrational, the validity of the feelings themselves should not be questioned, even when those feelings can reasonably be categorized as “bigoted.” The rest of us, however, should not be held hostage to the legitimacy of those feelings. More, precisely because those feelings can be reasonably categorized as bigoted, deferring to them in matters of public policy and discourse can end up perpetuating that bigotry in concrete ways. Witness the ADL’s statement which, even granting the most generous possible reading–and I am not sure what that would be–marginalizes Muslims simply for being Muslim.

Even more than that, though, I think it is cynical beyond belief for Foxman to enlist the moral authority that inevitably attaches to mention of Holocaust survivors, especially because he is himself a survivor, to justify the ADL’s position. It is insulting of my intelligence; trivializing of the Holocaust; it renders Muslims invisible on all kinds of levels by equating the September 11th victims’ families with the Jews; and it is, fundamentally, more about guilt-tripping the people who want to build the Cordoba House and their supporters than it is about a search for healing and that can be nothing but, to use Foxman’s own word, counterproductive.

I have not been following the Cordoba House issue very closely and so I have not read much about the questions that have been raised about some of the sources for its funding, but I would like to say this: even if it turned out that Cordoba House were being funded with money that could be tied back to the same people who perpetrated the September 11th attacks, [ETA in response to Robert's comment below: the fact of that funding would be the reason to prevent the building of the Cordoba House anywhere; the fact of that funding] would still not justify the ADL’s position. I hope that those questions about funding, if they have been legitimately raised, are resolved positively and that the Cordoba House gets built. The controversy surrounding it convinces me that we really, really need it.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.