avari | haroon moghul

CAIR-NY's Annual Banquest: I Am Muslim, I Am American

Join CAIR-NY on Saturday, May 15th at our Annual Banquet, "I AM MUSLIM, I AM AMERICAN: Building Community, Serving Country," as we celebrate 13 years of civil rights advocacy, community organizing and media engagement.

WHAT: CAIR-NY Annual Banquet & Fundraiser
WHO: Featuring Dr. John Esposito, Imam Siraj Wahhaj, Haroon Moghul & Preacher Moss. Honoring Ibrahim Abdul-Matin & the New York Civic Participation Project.
WHEN: Saturday, May 15, 2010. Doors open 6:15 pm.
WHERE: Faculty House, Columbia University (64 Morningside Drive, near the corner of 116th and Morningside Drive)

Early Bird Registration: $65
After April 30: $75
Door Price: $85

SUPPORT CAIR-NY! BUY YOUR TICKET TODAY! www.cair-ny.org

Participate in the Most Comprehensive Hajj Survey Ever

Been to Hajj? Know someone who has?

Help my friend, Ali Hashmi, a graduate student at the Harvard Business School who is running the most comprehensive survey of Hajj ever conducted! His research explores the possibility of employing new technologies to improve the health, safety, security and comfort of pilgrims/Hajjis during Hajj.

Fill out his survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KCBY97K. I also ask fellow bloggers to feel free to repost and to send out to their lists.  This is a tremendously important project.

Allama Iqbal and How the Muslim World Feels About God

I'll be giving the sermon (khutbah) at Princeton University, for its first annual Religion Week, this Friday, April 23rd at 1:15p.m. Weather permitting, we'll be outside. (Then everyone will hear me, and I will be very tongue-tied.)

At 6:00pm that day, I will be delivering a talk I've been wanting to give for a while now.  Basically, that talk is on how understandings of Islam can empower or alienate Muslims, and how traumas and crisis, collectively and individually, push us away from or closer to God. Rather than a religious perspective as we sometimes narrowly define it, I'll be talking historically and philosophically.  Part of my talk will focus on 'Allama Iqbal's Shikwa (Complaint) as an instance of "anger with God" -- and what to make of that kind of emotion from an Islamic perspective.

The talk, titled: "Has God Abandoned the Muslim World? An Historical Perspective," will be at Princeton's Campus Club, the corner of Washington Road and Prospect Avenue.

I hope to see you all there.

Last Chance for Middle East Peace?

My most recent essay for Religion Dispatches reviews Last Chance, a policy work by David Gardner, a journalist for Financial Times:

Last Chance presents the history and consequences of past and recent American and Western foreign policy, focusing specifically on Egypt, the Levant, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But it is by now—or should be—more than obvious that the previous administration’s policies were one compounded disaster. Challenging a failed narrative isn’t good enough. And for anyone who does not understand the full complex of political and social challenges awaiting reengagement, one can turn elsewhere for the waterfall effect.

Islam and Radicalism

I'll be speaking this Wednesday, April 14th, at Union Theological Seminary, from 6-8pm.  The topic is the question of radicalization as it confronts Islam and Muslims.  The address is 3041 Broadway, right at the west side of 121st and Broadway (on Columbia campus, basically.) 

I'll be joining several other speakers, including Imam Khalid Latif of NYU.

This Friday, I'll be doing the khutbah and a second event (more info soon!) at Cornell, and the week after (4/23), doing the khutbah at Princeton followed by a lecture in the evening, insh'allah.  I'll have more info on that as soon as possible.

Poor Iran

Today comes news that the U.S. and Russia have signed a landmark weapons control treaty, trimming down their nuclear arsenals.  And rumors swirl that China will allow its currency to jump against the dollar.  In both cases, that speaks to improved relations between the U.S. and the two powers who do (and can) give Iran meaningful cover at the Security Council and in international affairs more generally.  Iran has put all its eggs in a confrontational basket, increasingly relying on its ability to paint itself into a pariah's corner, and seems not to realize that both China and Russia would dump Iran for a strategic benefit vis-a-vis the U.S., which is any way far more globally important and useful.  Other countries might talk about Iran's right to peaceful nuclear energy, but countries like Brazil and Turkey, though rising powers, aren't going to bat for Iran (and have no way to, even if they wanted to.)  Iran's regime has a very distorted notion of what constitutes power, and has drastically reduced its options for maneuver.  It is, since last June, just another step in the ongoing shrinking of Iran's footprint in the region (as against what Iran's influence in the region very easily - based on its population, resources, education, culture and cohesion - could be).

My Next Week

Jumu'ah khutbah at ICNYU.  April 9th. 

On Islam and radicalism.  April 14th.  6pm.  Union Theological Seminary, 121st Street and Broadway.