In this acclaimed Lannan foundation lecture from September 2002, Roy speaks poetically to power on the US' War on Terror, globalization, the misuses of nationalism, and the growing chasm between the rich and poor. With lyricism and passion, Roy combines her literary talents and encyclopedic knowledge to expose injustice and provide hope for a future world.
Explaining 9/11 to a Muslim Child By Moina Noor
Recently on the morning drive to school my 8-year-old son asked me a question I’ve been dreading since he was a baby, “Mom, what happened on 9/11?”
Mass murder is impossible to explain to yourself, let alone a child. But how do I, as a parent, explain the slaughter of innocent people in the name of a religion that I am trying to pass on to my boy?
Bilal was just 8 months old when September 11 happened. He was just starting to crawl and put everything in sight into his mouth, and I remember having to peel my gaze away from the television screen and remind myself to keep a watchful eye on where he lay nearby.
After Bilal was born I viewed everything — especially current events — through the lens of parenthood. I knew the world had changed irreparably on 9/11, and while I mourned the innocent and raged against my crazy coreligionists, my nagging anxiety was for my son.
Even in those early surreal hours after the attacks when images of towers falling and long-bearded men in caves flooded the television screen, I knew that Bilal’s childhood would not be like mine.
When I was growing up in suburban Connecticut few people knew much about Muslims, let alone cared. My parents and their friends would gather in community rooms or church basements for our version of Sunday school. They were devout but weren’t necessarily interested in teaching their neighbors about Islam. We were few in number and invisible.
After 9/11, the spotlight was aimed at Muslims everywhere, especially here in America. Like many Muslims, I felt the need to defend my religious identity. I threw myself into all things Muslim, and explained and explained: “We are like you. Islam is peaceful. Complex sociopolitical factors create lunatics who kill people. Please don’t judge a billion people by a few bad apples.”
I hung tightly to my spiritual rope. I could not let go of a faith has given me and my family comfort and solace for generations.
Since 9/11, I’ve worried how Bilal would feel about his identity as a Muslim living in America. A survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life appeared in 2007 stating that 35 percent of respondents had an unfavorable opinion about Islam. Could one of those 3 in 10 people be Bilal’s teacher or soccer coach?
Over the past eight years I’ve read about Muslims being deported and pulled off airplanes and mosques being vandalized. My sister, a former middle school teacher in Brooklyn, heard kids taunt a Muslim student on the playground, calling him a terrorist. And even though I fear the possibility of discrimination for Bilal, what I fear most of all is that the din of Islamophobia will rob my son of self-respect and confidence.
So just as I became an activist, I became a proactive Muslim mommy. When Bilal was a preschooler, I took him to Muslim playgroups, organized activities in Ramadan and bought him board books about the Prophet Muhammed. I pushed him in his stroller at peace walks and brought him to interfaith events. These days, I organize local Islamic school classes and give talks about the Hajj at his elementary school. My husband and I read him books about Islamic contributions to math and science.
Over the years, I’ve tried to protect my son from any negative associations made with Islam. I’ve developed lightening quick reflexes — the second I hear a story about suicide bombers or terrorists on the radio, I switch to a pop music station. I’ve made my husband limit his CNN time to after the kids go to sleep. I don’t want to have to answer the question, “Mom, what is the ‘threat of radical Islamic extremism?’ ”
For me, the thought of talking to Bilal about terrorism is a bit like talking about sex for the first time. It is awkward and difficult I’m just not sure how much a child his age is ready to hear.
This year 9/11 falls during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting. I made Bilal watch President Obama’s five minute long “Ramadan Message to Muslims” on the Internet. President Obama spoke with respect, knowledge and a sense optimism to Muslims around the world. He found the speech interesting but nothing out of the ordinary. For Bilal, who is just starting to become conscious of a world bigger than our front yard, there is no “clash of civilizations”.
Bilal is proud to tell others that he was named after “the Prophet’s best friend,” an African Muslim with a beautiful voice who gave the first call to prayer. He is also a Cub Scout who has learned how to fold the American flag.
I did try and answer Bilal’s question. I relayed the day’s events in broad cartoonish strokes: bad guys attack, buildings collapse. Don’t worry, I assured him, we’ll get the bad guys so they won’t do it again. As I looked at Bilal in the rearview mirror, I explained that good and bad exists in every group, even your own. I think he understands.
Indeed, all the programs the authors support — from improving girls' education to reducing sex trafficking to repairing obstetric fistulas — are good ones. But their central thesis — that we should help women because it will reduce poverty and violence — is flawed. It relies on the notion that women are deserving of economic and social power because they are good citizens, not simply because they are human. What happens if women decide to spend their newly earned money on alcohol instead of their children's education? What if they spend it on weapons? And what if, even though they spend it on all the "right" things, their countries still fail to develop economically? Treating women as agents of social change risks leaving them out in the cold if they don't effect the change we want.
Malcolm goes to Alabama, three weeks before he’s murdered and reaches out to Dr. King. King is in prison after leading demonstrations. Malcolm goes to Coretta Scott King and he says, “I want you to convey to your husband my deepest respect for him and that I am not trying to undermine Dr. King’s work. My goal is to be to the left of Dr. King, to challenge institutional racism so that those in power can negotiate with King. That’s my role.” So Malcolm understood what his role was.
A charismatic, handsome, articulate Black leader who had a controversial past as a hustler, a pimp, a drug addict, a numbers runner, “Detroit Red,” “Little Gangster,” “Little Bugsy Siegel,” who supposedly terrorized the Harlem community in the 1940s and went to jail and was given ten years in prison. He goes through a metamorphosis, he becomes a Black Muslim, he comes out, he explodes onto the scene. He creates seventy to eighty new mosques in less than ten years, turns a small sect of 400 people into fifty- to one hundred thousand by 1960–62. Then, he turns more overtly to politics, he breaks from the Nation of Islam (NOI), he builds two new organizations, the Muslim Mosque Incorporated in March 1964 and the Organization of Afro-American Unity in May 1964. He goes to Africa and the Mideast. He is treated as the head of state. He is welcomed at the Fateh by the Saudi royal household. He sits down with Gamal, eats breakfast with Anwar Sadat in Egypt. He caucuses and meets and gets to know Che Guevara while he’s in Africa, as he alludes to in a talk in 1964 at the Audubon Ballroom. So Malcolm is this extraordinary figure, dies at the age of thirty-nine. It’s a hell of a story.
When I asked one student about a decade ago, “What was the fundamental difference between Malcolm and Martin?” He said, “Dr. Marable, that’s easy. Martin Luther King, Jr., belongs to the entire world. Malcolm X belongs to us.”
That sentiment is echoed around the Muslim world. In many of the scores of countries that are predominantly Muslim, the latest generation of activists is redefining society in novel ways. This new soft revolution is distinct from three earlier waves of change--the Islamic revival of the 1970s, the rise of extremism in the 1980s and the growth of Muslim political parties in the 1990s.
Today's revolution is more vibrantly Islamic than ever. Yet it is also decidedly antijihadist and ambivalent about Islamist political parties. Culturally, it is deeply conservative, but its goal is to adapt to the 21st century. Politically, it rejects secularism and Westernization but craves changes compatible with modern global trends. The soft revolution is more about groping for identity and direction than expressing piety. The new revolutionaries are synthesizing Koranic values with the ways of life spawned by the Internet, satellite television and Facebook. For them, Islam, you might say, is the path to change rather than the goal itself.
Disillusioned with extremists who can destroy but who fail to construct alternatives that improve daily life, members of the post-9/11 generation are increasingly relying on Islamic values rather than on a religion-based ideology to advance their aims. And importantly, the soft revolution has generated a new self-confidence among Muslims and a sense that the answers to their problems lie within their own faith and community rather than in the outside world. The revolution is about reform in a conservative package.
Traditional clerics deride al-Shugairi, 35, and other televangelists for preaching "easy Islam," "yuppie Islam," even "Western Islam." But his message actually reflects a deepening conservatism in the Islamic world, even as activists use contemporary examples and modern technology to make their case. One of al-Shugairi's programs on happiness focused on Elvis Presley, a man with fame, talent and fortune but who died young. Life without deep spirituality, al-Shugairi preaches, is empty.
Politics is not the only focus of the soft revolution. Its most fundamental impact, indeed, may be on the faith itself.
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Later this year, the Turkish scholars are expected to publish six volumes that reject thousands of Islam's most controversial practices, from stoning adulterers to honor killings. Some hadith, the scholars contend, are unsubstantiated; others were just invented to manipulate society.
This is perhaps the most intellectually active period for the faith since the height of Islamic scholarship in the Middle Ages. "There is more self-confidence in the Islamic world about dealing with reason, constitutionalism, science and other big issues that define modern society," says Ibrahim Kalin of the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research in Ankara. "The West is no longer the only worldview to look up to. There are other ways of sharing the world and negotiating your place in it."
Many young Muslims are angry at the outside world's support of corrupt and autocratic regimes despite pledges to push for democracy after 9/11. "Most of the young feel the West betrayed its promises," says Dhillon, of the Brookings Institution. Muslims fume that a few perpetrators of violence have led the outside world to suspect a whole generation of supporting terrorism. "The only source of identity they have is being attacked," Dhillon says. The post-9/11 generation has been further shaped by wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza, all of which Washington played a direct or indirect role in.
The Muslim Ad Network, an online association that concentrates on the Muslim Market in North America, has partnered with advertising strategy firm, Desedo, to create a new advertising agency. Though we don't know what the agency will be called (Desedo is not giving up the goods to us) we are very excited about this new shop.
For starters, the Muslim American market has been valued at $170B according to The New York Times. The Economist also has said that "Two-thirds of Muslim households make more than $50,000 a year and a quarter earn over $100,000." Those are some attractive numbers. Still, it's basically an untouched marketplace. What American brands have seriously tried to engender their loyalty? And yes, in an age where advertising messages can be segmented, an online communities serve every need, a Muslim-American ad agency sounds like the right move to make. Plus, with our first minority President getting ready to be the new leader of the free world, the conversation about race is only going to get louder. Brands would be wise to listen up.
I'm curious to see if those who invest along the lines of Sharia (Islamic principles) better weather the recession. Having more disposable income in these times could accelerate this process.
In your research paper, you cite one person as saying: "part of the problem is that it is difficult for ad execs to create an advertising profile for Muslims as a whole, because [they] come from many diverse backgrounds and believe many different things." Question: isn't that true for Asians and Blacks living in America? Why do you think the ad industry still does not have a grasp on identifying and marketing to various ethnic identities?"Wow, there are many answers to that question, here is one thought:
Outside of humor, advertising is a generally risk-adverse platform. So if you're attempting to 'reach' a demo via broadcast, it's a massive investment and agencies/brands play it safe. So the same tropes get trotted out. Blacks get 'soul', Latinos gets 'family', Asians get 'sedulous', etc...
While agencies may intuitively understand that a black guy can love both Jay-Z and Modest Mouse, you're not (yet) gonna see that multiplicity reflected in traditional advertising. Luckily, the authorship space of new media and rise of transmedia planning is slowly changing this..."
Has peace in the Middle East become nothing more than a pipe dream? As Bob Simon reports, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians feel that a two-state solution is no longer possible.
"Every industrialized nation in the world except the United States has a national system that guarantees affordable health care for all its citizens. Nearly all have been popular and successful. But each has taken a drastically different form, and the reason has rarely been ideology. Rather, each country has built on its own history, however imperfect, unusual, and untidy."
"Social scientists have a name for this pattern of evolution based on past experience. They call it “path-dependence.” In the battles between Betamax and VHS video recorders, Mac and P.C. computers, the QWERTY typewriter keyboard and alternative designs, they found that small, early events played a far more critical role in the market outcome than did the question of which design was better."
"Yes, American health care is an appallingly patched-together ship, with rotting timbers, water leaking in, mercenaries on board, and fifteen per cent of the passengers thrown over the rails just to keep it afloat. But hundreds of millions of people depend on it. The system provides more than thirty-five million hospital stays a year, sixty-four million surgical procedures, nine hundred million office visits, three and a half billion prescriptions. It represents a sixth of our economy. There is no dry-docking health care for a few months, or even for an afternoon, while we rebuild it. Grand plans admit no possibility of mistakes or failures, or the chance to learn from them. If we get things wrong, people will die. This doesn’t mean that ambitious reform is beyond us. But we have to start with what we have."
"It will be no utopia. People will still face co-payments and premiums. There may still be agonizing disputes over coverage for non-standard treatments. Whatever the system’s contours, we will still find it exasperating, even disappointing. We’re not going to get perfection. But we can have transformation—which is to say, a health-care system that works. And there are ways to get there that start from where we are. "
“The point of the show is that American journalism and especially broadcast journalism right now seems to be spiraling downward,” said Gideon Yago, the host of the six half-hour installments.
Similarly, the second episode’s long examination of television military analysts, titled “How to Sell a War,” does not include the perspective of the networks that hired the analysts and allowed them to espouse the government’s talking points without any disclosures about their ties to the Pentagon or to defense contractors. The segment is based on an investigation by The New York Times in April and includes an interview with the Times reporter David Barstow.
Meghan O’Hara, the program’s creator and executive producer, said the omission was not for lack of trying. “None of them wanted to talk to us,” she said.
While the series is essentially an exercise in media literacy, it is far less academic than one might expect. Each episode includes an editorial cartoon, “News Junkie,” that pokes fun at media stereotypes and shortcomings. While the media criticism programs on cable news, “Fox News Watch” and CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” emphasize debates among guests, “The IFC Media Project” prefers taped segments and one-on-one interviews. The third episode applies neuroscience to so-called shout shows to see why pundit-driven talk is so entertaining to viewers.
Professor Sherman Jackson from University of Michigan expands on the debate surrounding sharia law in the west.
Ann Clurman: There has been a very well-known shift in power from marketers to consumers. Consumers have been really good at celebrating how smart they are, how empowered they are. We've been picking that up for at least a decade. What I think is really significant is what we're calling "personal authenticity." And what that was, that kind of reached a critical mass in 2004, it was a coming together of a number of values and trends that we described as consumers really working on internal clarity of their values. Not only were they kind of trying to understand what was really important to them, they began to develop the courage to act on [those things]. And part of that meant moving out of your comfort zone -- and I think that is very important to what's happening today. But also, this desire to get life right became a passion. What we're seeing today is a massive shift beginning to surface and that shift is not just being caused the last four or five weeks.
I just got one of those breaking news e-mails, and apparently Advertising Age has named Obama the marketer of the year.
And so I think that it's that power, but there's a second item too. Through the appointment of several high-level Cabinet members in the Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice for example, and Colin Powell, the ascendancy of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice has made Americans comfortable with black Americans in positions of high, high responsibility and of power. Seeing Condoleezza Rice negotiating around the world with world leaders has made many Americans comfortable with the idea of black people in leadership positions. None of that was possible eight years ago.
Russell: I really agree with what Peter is saying. This financial crisis and the feeling that things are going in the wrong direction have been a long, long time in coming. If you look at men's incomes, men's earnings, among men who work full time, their earnings peaked in 1986. That's more than 20 years ago. So for the past 20 years, why have household incomes been increasing? For one reason only: the working woman. And now, virtually every woman who is going to go to work is at work. That boost to household incomes is over. The only other remaining boost to household incomes is that we have the baby boom generation right now in peak earning years and that has kept the numbers from falling.
Clurman: It really does. I think one of the reasons people are not quite as hysterical about what is going on is that they realize a lot of other people are in the same boat. Everybody is getting hit hard here. It's very interesting. We call it the "new responsibility marketplace," but it's kind of not here yet. It's coming, and slowly but surely we're going to see this rolling out. People are realizing on some level that it's time to pay their proverbial piper.
Clurman: They understand on some level. Some people who are up there intellectually understand this problem, but I think on some gut level, people understand that we have got a lot of really serious problems and what's happening is the economy has acted as a lightning rod for some serious thought about where are we going. Global warming, I forgot to mention that one. What's happening to the planet, what's happening to our lives.
Salon: But I don't see people going to find scapegoats.
Clurman: That's why there's an accountability and responsibility happening. What we saw in '91, during that recessionary period, we saw the baby boomers looking at the world collapsing around them and pointing fingers and whining and saying, "This isn't my fault." And now what we're seeing, because the times are different and the demographics are different, what we're seeing is people looking around and saying, "We've got some serious issues here and we've all got to take some modicum of responsibility." It's not enough to just change your light bulbs [from incandescent to fluorescent]. We've got to do something more about what's fundamentally wrong here.
"Only 60 percent of the 18-to-29-year-olds are non-Hispanic white. "
Francese: There's a fourth item that I want to add to that. That is the vast number of young women who are going to college. The best-educated man in America is 55 years old. But the best-educated woman is only 35. So women are going to college at significantly higher rates than men, and there are many, many more young college-educated women than there ever were before in American history.
Salon: Is it that women were just going to college at a disproportionately low rate and that they've just caught up with men? Or is there something else going on with gender roles?
Francese: No. There are a couple of reasons, in my view. One, we've obviously over the last 30 years made the switch from a manufacturing, construction-based economy which favors men who are not college graduates to an office-based employment category in which most people now work in offices and that favors women. Women can work in offices equally as well as men. And they are actually a majority of the professional managerial workers according to the Census Bureau data. They're 51 or 52 percent. Women are just as capable of taking managerial and professional jobs and doing them just as well as men but those jobs usually require college degrees. So women, who mature earlier in life than men, do go to college in greater numbers, significantly greater numbers. That's a fairly recent development.
Russell: I totally agree with what you're saying, and actually the percentage of women who go to college out of high school has been significantly higher than men for the last 10 or 15 years as women poured onto college campuses. It's totally true that women are much more educated than men. And if you look at married couples today, in 2007 for the first time among married couples, the percentage in which the husband is more educated than the wife is lower than the percentage in which the wife is more educated than the husband. There's been a real change in family life.
Unfortunately, our political system is set up so that the rural areas have a great deal of political power, in the Senate. I think that trying to play up this rural vote can be effective because so many Americans relate to it. But ultimately, the suburban and urban voter should numerically take precedent.
Francese: Only 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas.
Salon: Is there anything else that strikes you, non-Sarah Palin related, as awry in terms of what the candidates are talking about? Cheryl, in your book, I saw based on poll analysis that 65 percent of the American people consider themselves moderates. That certainly isn't the tone in politics or on cable television.
Russell: Right, most Americans are in the middle of the road. But there's been such a partisan split in the media that's taken place, with the different cable channels focusing on different camps and talk radio, that it's driven a wedge between Americans when in fact there's very little difference between most of them.
Russell: Both factors are involved. The number of boomers, and that voting increases with age. Interestingly, the millennial generation we've been talking about is 19 percent of the vote this year. And that's up from 13 percent in 2004. Generation X is 20 percent, and the older generation, which is people older than boomers, 63-plus, is 23 percent. The millennial generation, in terms of the size of its vote, is almost as large as the older generation.
Francese: That's new. That's one of the reasons Barack Obama has a chance.
In recent days, nervous Obama supporters have traded worry about a survey — widely disputed by pollsters yet voraciously consumed by the politically obsessed — that concluded racial bias would cost Mr. Obama six percentage points in the final outcome. He is, of course, about six points ahead in current polls. See? He’s going to lose.
If he does, it wouldn’t be the first time that polls have overstated support for an African-American candidate. Since 1982, people have talked about the Bradley effect, where even last-minute polls predict a wide margin of victory, yet the black candidate goes on to lose, or win in a squeaker. (In the case that lent the phenomenon its name, Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, lost his race for governor, the assumption being that voters lied to pollsters about their support for an African-American.)
The way to that sentiment is through becoming a part of the American story, a story of powerful truths, lies and contradictions that have destined America to struggle, to her dying breath, to find that balance between enough remembering and enough forgetting to point her towards redemption. It is a story of America’s quest to rid herself of the vile habit of violating her own principles and creating “problem peoples” who fall outside the reach of her lofty ideals. From the founding of the republic and Thomas Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident …,” this quest -- more than anything else – has defined us as Americans. Indeed, this is the struggle that generates the “cohesive sentiment” that binds Americans as a people.
