avari | by haroon moghul

More Resources on the Violence in Xinjiang, or East Turkestan

Good resources on the ongoing violence in East Turkestan.  Christian Science Monitor, Democracy Now, and Mona El-Tahawy on Huffington Post.

Security forces block the entrance to a mosque before Friday prayers in Urumqi

After your Jumu'ah prayer today, remember this one.

From the Times:

Job Opening and Uighur Discontent (Related, But Only Sort of)

EurasiaNet has a position open for web manager in New York City, and that same site also features a decent commentary on the sources of Uighur discontent.  Thanks to Faraz for linking to a Boston.com photo feature on the ethnic clashes in Urumqi.  The Times reports that China is banning mosque meetings.  In other words, public spaces are being closed off; the clampdown on mosques is brutal, but I am sure it will succeed.  The Uighur simply do not have the numbers to create a no-win situation for China.  Keep them, at least, in your prayers; add something this Friday to your sermons.  Your prayers will reach them -- trust me.  They will give them strength and solace and comfort.  It's the least we can do (and the most powerful thing we can do, if we are sincere).

This is what Urumqi has become (from Boston.com: Uighur woman carries a metal rod as she walks down a main road in Urumqi on July 8, 2009. Urumqui's Uighur and Han residents have taken to carrying metal rods and sticks for protection against attacks. (REUTERS/David Gray)):

Iran protests continue, with thousands on the street.  Insh'allah they are able to find a peaceful means of establishing a more democratic and accountable Islamic Republic, which is guided by the principles and ideals of the religion and respects all citizens as human beings, creations of God; as 'Ali ibn Abi Talib (r) said, and I paraphrase for fear of misquote, our souls are worth paradise, so they should not be sold for less than that.  Every government should respect that value and honor that destiny.

al-Qaeda is stepping up operations in the Maghrib.  Great.  They're always looking for new Muslim-killing markets.  Can't they all just blow up alone, in the desert?  That way everyone's happy.

Ongoing clashes in Kashmir, over an alleged incident of molestation.

Follow me on Twitter.  I post even more links so Avari doesn't make me look crazy.

The Most Moving Obituary I've Found of Michael Jackson ... was in The Economist

I kid you not.  For major media, this was one very powerful essay.

Look Over There -->

I'm on Twitter, but I can still make wack graphics.

Sympathy for the Uighurs: Why Iran Isn't Paying Attention

I'd already linked to this article, but felt it would be nice to draw attention to this paragraph, in light of some great recent comments:

“…if someone politically savvy planned this action, then they may have actually called on female participants to wear headscarves. The image of a crowd of apparently traditional Muslims facing down what looks like a faceless army of Chinese can draw on over a billion sympathizers.”

The story behind the picture has indeed become front page material on the websites of Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, Al-Quds, Hürriyet, Milliyet, Sabah, Today’s Zaman, Yeni Safak etc. etc. On Pakistan Daily, one headline read ‘China to further ties with Pakistan’ and next to it, ‘Muslim Unrest in China’. Some of them carry extremely gory pictures of dead people. Xinjiang is clearly important stuff in the Muslim world. But not in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The issue of Iranian media responses to the Xinjiang unrest carries some interesting points.

That Iran's Revolution long since went from revolutionary to conservative is well-known; that the recent elections and subsequent protests pitted the masses, resorting to religious slogans, against the head of a Shi'i Islamic state invoking the impermissibility of protest in the name of religion, only shows how damaging the institutional politicization of religion can be.

This happens all the time.  In claiming to oppose the un-Islamic West, Muslim states cozy up to Russia and China, as if the latter two are "more Islamic" -- never mind Chechnya or East Turkestan.  I applaud the Uighurs for pointing out this hypocrisy, which is especially severe when the political interests of a religious class trump the ideals and goals of the religion itself.  In other words, when power for Muslims trumps the ideals of Islam.

Iranians are noticing; reformists have picked up on the deep hypocrisies at work.  The comment below berates Ahmadinejad for being unable or unwilling to stand up to China, as if Palestinians were the only Muslims:

ا.ن فقط فلسطيني ها مسلمان مسلمان نيستنداگر مردي به چين اعتراض كن به سبب كشتار مسلمانان سين كيانگ.چين مسلمانانش را قتل عام كردو ا.ن خفه بود

Ottoman Hints and Shadows: Off the Beaten Path in Greece

Ottoman vestiges in Greece, a Times article and slideshow. I really want to see Greece, and much of Eastern Europe, preferably by train.  (I'm fascinated by that huge chunk of Europe between Prague and Kazan, Tallinn and Athens; had I not made South Asia my regional focus, it would have been somewhere within that part of the world in its place.)  This article explores a little corner of Greece, Hellenic Thrace, and makes it out to be fascinating and, as the pictures prove, beautiful.  Check out this wonderful picture, of Greek Muslim girls playing volleyball (I love the supposed contradiction -- they're muhajjiba (headscarved), and the Greek flag, with its big cross, stands just above them):

A little corner of a Greco-Muslim world long since erased in the violent population exchanges and wars of the 19th and 20th centuries.  For a great read on that period and its disappearance, check out Columbia's own Dr. Mark Mazower, author of Salonica, City of Ghosts.  For anyone traveling to the region, I recommend it is a must-read.  It provides a context, color and history that modern-day nationalisms have brutally erased.  (The loss of Turks in Greece, as well as ethnically Greek Muslim populations in modern Greece, Crete, Rhodes and the like, is paralleled by Egypt's explusion of Greeks and Italians.  Everybody lost, even the "winners").

Elsewhere, a post on the Uyghurs as losers.  This blog, just discovered via Talk Islam, contains a number of excellent articles on Iran, Central Asia and the like.  Readers have asked for other sources on the ongoing suppression of democracy in Iran; I would suggest iPouya (the former Rebel Radio) as one powerful source.

Otherwise, Avari is coming down with a cold.  This blog feels it, too.  We are both under blankets (it's okay, we're mahram.)

Better Understanding the Uyghurs, and Islam in China

The Times has a profile of the businesswoman at the center of China's accusations of "foreign interference", while Avari uncovered (in the manner of a Spanish explorer claiming to have discovered half the planet) Islam in China, a blog which contains among other excellent resources a new post on the diversity of Chinese Islam and the political considerations behind the recent violence.  City of Brass has put up a short comment, via Talk Islam, on the Uyghurs and the Ummah: I do agree with the author's points, all very valid, I do think the author underplays simple panic. 

Appealing to the Ummah might seem unrealistic, even absurd.  But somebody, practically speaking, needs to be appealed to, for the sake of some hope.  In desperation, many sufferers cry out to the West to end their miseries, to rescue them.  Unlikely, yes, but deeply moving.  What else are the Uyghur to do?  It is one thing to seek accommodation, another to accept the apparent "solution": gradual cultural annihilation or marginalization so severe as to do the same.  Effect a people's erasure.  Besides, while the concept of a political Ummah is certainly deeply unlikely and pragmatically unpromising, the cultural connections the Ummah creates do produce huge outpourings of relief, aid and sacrifice; not always to the right places or in the right proportions, but effect people it does.  Her strategy is a long-shot, but might shame people into a response.

Whether that response changes anything on the ground, I do not know.  I don't suspect it ever could.  But it is part of the tragedy of a people who are facing a power too big, too populated and too strong to be meaningfully resisted, and it unfolds before us in its ugliness and our ugliness, for our powerlessness.

City of Brass has also kindly reposted an earlier essay I'd written, The Myth of Secular Inevitability.  Do check it out.

Rushda Majeed writes on Sarkozy's move to ban the burqa, a decision that fits into a larger headdress anxiety; just blame the French.  It's what we Americans love to do, and now American Muslims have a raison to do so as well.  Another step in the mighty project of cultural assimilation.  (From France to Germany.)

Next up: Hussein Rashid, activist, brilliant academic, writer and panelist from the blow-your-mind Blogistan panel, argues that Bloomberg was right to threaten to veto the Muslim holidays proposal.  Avari disagrees: I think Bloomberg's decision is just part of a larger pattern of indifference to the city's huge Muslim population (witness his partisanship during the Gaza Crisis).  He can claim that approving Muslim holidays will open the floodgates to other religions, but that assumes there are that many other faiths waiting at the gate.  Since Bloomberg will never cancel Jewish or Christian holidays, as a public servant fairness -- indeed, the principle of secularity -- demand accommodation.  While, yes, this demands the state deciding which Islam to support, the state does the same for all religions: Why Christmas on December 25th, and not the Orthodox celebration?

That two school days are lost, at most, is a weak argument, considering that there are other ways to accommodate the loss of two school days. 

What do you think?

Just Execute Them, or Welcoming a Chinese Superpower

Responding to ongoing protests against authoritarian dictatorship, the Chinese government has threatened to execute protestors who are being denied their human rights -- twice over.  First because they are denied freedom of speech, assembly, religion and residence, and second because their inalienable right to protest the denial of these core rights is met with the promise of a death penalty.  It's nice to see how many Muslim countries, especially Pakistan, are so eager to cozy up to China for whatever advantages it brings, and how the same Pakistanis who protest the unfair treatment of Afghanis, and attacks on Afghani civilians (through a discourse that is, too often, extreme in its assumptions and conclusions), are silent when it comes to their great ally's actual attitude to one of its most substantial Muslim populations. 

There are legitimate reasons for disagreeing with and protesting many American policies and actions in many parts of the world; why, then, is that sometimes fierce displeasure not shared for other places where Muslims are crushed underfoot, such as Arakan or East Turkestan?

Avari, still angry. 

It's funny, and sad, that whereas the Chinese government warned America away from internal interference in Iran, there is no assumption that America might have a hand in this.  Because even that would be too absurd to believe.  Just as the hardline establishment in Iran claims to believe the West has a hand in ongoing protests -- I do think they know this to be a falsehood, but find it politically beneficial -- they cannot ascertain if their own population really is fed up.  Because dictatorships do not understand, in the absence of a free media, how to gauge how their populations feel -- and any place where media becomes less free becomes itself less free.  I should like it if the Muslim world paid more attention to such incidences when choosing their allies; if and when China becomes dominant over the Middle East, what is to prevent a far larger, nearer hegemon from meddling far more severely in the internal affairs of those countries?  Right now, it is in China's reading of its own interest to help Iran and Pakistan, and smash the Uighurs.  In twenty years, the picture may be the opposite. 

The Muslim Naked in the Face of the Future, or Big Islam and Little Nation: Why Farah Pandith's Appoint Makes Such Sense

Our President's address to Russia, towards the tail-end of his visit to that place, it got me to thinking how often Obama goes "over the heads of" governments (or, more properly and with better manners, "through and beyond structured governance") and speaks directly to the people, conscious of his platform, reputation and perceived accessibility.  This is of course a massively populist gesture, a product of a conviction that everyday people's opinions matter enough that they can and should be directly spoken to.  Even in much of the Muslim world, huge parts of which are poor, fragile, or horribly governed, Obama made the choice of talking directly to Muslims as Muslims, as people with a common identity (at certain levels) who want to be heard and who need to be spoken to.  But this is also a gesture communicating a profound and stunning understanding of the implications of our collective human future, of the effects of the march of capital and capitalism, internet and other technologies and new forms of mass communications.  

Like this blog, or this very speculative post.  Will Muslims face a future where many of us are naked before economics, without the protection offered by mediating structures? (of which there are, broadly speaking, two types: Institutional and Socio-Cultural, or governance and armies and mores and traditional practices and standards.)