avari | haroon moghul

Can America and the Muslim World Be Friends? Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday, April 6th

I'll be speaking at the Alaska World Affairs Council on Friday, April 6th, in Anchorage, Alaska.  The topic: "Can America and the Muslim World Be Friends?"

The lecture will be held at the Anchorage Hilton Hotel.

Doors open at 11:30am and program begins at 12pm. RSVP to the Alaska World Affairs Council by Wednesday, 4th April by telephone 276–8038 or by email to info at alaskaworldaffairs dot org. 

$25 for members, $30 for nonmembers, $15 for coffee and dessert, and free for students with ID. 

I'll Go Close to Idaho, Then End Up in Alaska

If you're near Spokane/Pullman, Washington, or Moscow, Idaho, come through next Wednesday evening for a great conversation. I'll be speaking about how Islamophobia works and how to best counter the narratives of hate and ignorance that have done so much damage to our community and country. It's part of Islam Awareness Week at Washington State University.

When: 5:30pm-7pm
Where: Cub Auditorium, Room 210 (Junior Ballroom)
        Click here for location and campus map.

Soon, I'll post more information on subsequent gigs: I'll be speaking in Seattle on Thursday and Friday of next week (March 29th and 30th), explaining Shari'ah law past and present, and then I'll be speaking about America and the future of U.S.-Muslim World Relations in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday, April 6th, in the early afternoon. More info on those gigs to follow.  It'll be my adventure through the Pacific Northwest, and it would be great to meet folks on the other end of the country.

See Muslim Spain Like You Never Thought You Could

A Tour of Muslim Spain with Haroon Moghul: May 18 - 27, 2012

Friday, May 18th - Sunday, May 27th, 2012 There's so much to be proud of in Islamic history, but so little of who we were, what we accomplished, and how we changed the world is out there. Most of what we hear about Muslim history and culture is incomplete, misleading, or even untrue. I've designed a journey through Spain's Muslim past and present to show you our amazing history, up close and in person. It'll be a wonderful and unforgettable experience, with exclusive lectures and insights along the way, creating a nine-day experience you can't find anywhere else. You’ll learn uplifting facts about our history, spend your days and nights with a fun and diverse group of people, and make memories you won't soon forget. Dar El Salam Travel is proud to present the second annual Splendors of Spain Tour (follow this link for registration and pricing details.) Prepare to be enchanted by Spain’s breathtaking mountains, unbelievable mosques, luxurious palaces, and tremendous architecture. You’ll climb one of the world’s tallest minarets, built for a mosque where Christopher Columbus is now buried. It’s so high, it has ramps, not stairs--the muezzin had to ride a horse up! You’ll take a cruise down a river where long ago Muslims fought Vikings. You’ll lose yourself in the Grand Mosque’s endless columns. You’ll stroll through royal gardens inspired by the Qur’anic idea of paradise. Because what Spain’s Muslims built has to be seen to be believed.

This 9-day tour of Seville, Cordoba, and Granada, with side trips to Ronda, the Sierra Nevada, and Madinat az-Zahra, is offered through Dar El Salam Travel.  For more information, please contact Dar El Salam Travel.

Note: This trip is open to all, no matter who you are or where you live (visa regulations and the like apply; find out specifics from Dar El Salam Travel.)  

The trip is designed to reflect a positive, engaged, proactive Western Muslim identity--we're about Islamic history and culture, and seek to embrace and develop that identity through the places we go and the topics we talk about, but we don't demand any specific levels of religiosity or practice.  All are welcome, and last year's trip was incredibly ethnically, professionally, geographically and otherwise diverse, including folks from small children all the way up to retired couples.

 

Asra Nomani in The Daily Beast: Spy on White People

So, Asra Nomani writes an(other) embarrasing example of self-hatred for The Daily Beast, applauding law enforcement's apparent targeting of Muslims throughout the Greater New York City area.  Her essay is riddled with simple errors, clear misperceptions of how law and constitutionalism function, an inability to process profiling, and some faulty logic, perhaps the finest instance of which is here:

Indeed, just as we need to track the Colombian community for drug trafficking and the Ku Klux Klan for white extremists, I believe we should monitor the Muslim community because we sure don’t police ourselves enough.

The first part of her sentence, about Colombians, is actually right on (by her silly logic); the second part contradicts her own logic (she can call for profiling some Latinos, but she doesn't have the courage to apply her racializing logic to white America), and everything after "I believe" speaks to how little Asra actually knows anything about the Muslim community, as well as the several seconds of your life which you could have done something better with.  

For law enforcement to go after white extremism the way it seems to be going after Muslims (at least, with respect to the NYPD), they wouldn't be going after the KKK, as Asra suggests--unless Asra means to suggest that Muslim student organizations at Yale and UPenn are offshoots of al Qaeda.  Law enforcement would instead have to spy on as many white institutions (churches, civic clubs, student organizations, etc.) as they could.  

Because, of course, by Asra's article's painful logic, a person's whiteness is a sufficiently significant lead to get law enforcement to pay attention to him, just as a Muslim institution is, on the grounds of its Muslimness, a target of suspicion sufficient to merit law enforcement's full attention.  This is a point Amy Davidson made far more succinctly in an excellent post at The New Yorker:

There is a difference between chasing clues and treating Islam, in and of itself, as a lead. 

Does Asra mean to suggest we should be spying on white folks indiscriminately, because they, like the KKK, are white?  Should we spy on white Muslims twice, since they are white and Muslim, and so somehow become extremists that hate themselves.  I spoke about this issue on a far more relevant basis to Welton Gaddy of State of Belief Radio.

By the way, I'll be at Fordham's Manhattan campus today (Monday, March 5th), speaking about the long history of Islam and especially Islam in America.  It's free, and I'll try to make it fun, educational, and enlightening.  We'll be starting at 6pm at Fordham's South Lounge inside 113 West 60th Street, right off Columbus Circle in Manhattan.  The event ends at 8pm. 

 

Upcoming Talks in Washington State (Spokane and Seattle) and Alaska

At the end of March and in early April, I'll be on a speaking tour of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. I'll be posting more details as they become available, but I wanted to give everyone a heads up, in case you're in the area and want to come through--it would be great to see y'all.

On Wednesday, March 28, I'll be speaking at 5:30 PM in the Cub Auditorium on the campus of Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, very close to Spokane (and 20 miles from Idaho). The topic will be: Praying While Muslim.  The focus will be Islamophobia, its origins, strategies, and the best ways to challenge its discourse.

    Here's more information on Cub Auditorium, including campus maps.

On Thursday and Friday, March 29 and 30th, I may be speaking in Seattle and the greater Seattle area. Exact details will be posted as soon as I get them, so keep watching this blog. 

On Friday, April 6, I'll be speaking at the Alaska World Affairs Council in the early afternoon, in Anchorage, Alaska (see below for RSVP information):

"Can America and the Muslim World Be Friends?"         We commonly think of Islam and the West as opposing forces, and we even hear some  insist we live in a never-ending clash of civilizations.  But the West and the Muslim world have a long shared history, many common ideas, and, following the Arab Spring, the potential for a new relationship.  As we transition to a multipolar world, Muslims may be America's most unexpected allies.   -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Friday, 6th April 2012 - Anchorage Hilton Hotel - doors open at 11:30 and program begins at noon. RSVP to the Alaska World Affairs Council by Wednesday, 4th April by telephone 276–8038 or by email to [email protected]. $25 for members, $30 for nonmembers, $15 for coffee and dessert, and free for students with ID.

That night, Friday, April 6th, I'll be speaking to the Muslim community of Anchorage, Alaska, and I will post the location, exact timing, and topic as soon as possible. 

 

 

 

America, Meet the Muslims: A Free Lecture at #Fordham University in #NYC

If you're at or near Fordham University in Manhattan next Monday, join me for a discussion of Islam past and present, and an overview of American Muslims and our long history in the West.

What: America, Meet the Muslims (We've Been Here a While)
Where: South Lounge on Fordham University's Lincoln Center Campus (113 W 60th Street, Manhattan--off Columbus Avenue. The 59th St/Columbus Circle stop is just a block or two away).
When: Monday, March 5th, 6pm-8pm

Foreign Policy: The NYPD Makes Us Less Safe

Following on the amazingly strong reactions--that is, rebuttals and criticisms--that have taken place against the NYPD's actions, including prestigious institutions like Yale University and Columbia University, and articles in The New Yorker--I've written a piece for Foreign Policy, 'Stop the Reckless Spying on Muslims':

I've worked with Muslim students across the United States -- offering media training, leading workshops debunking common and pernicious myths about Muslim history, and giving lectures on Islamic law, Muslim identity, and the value of civic engagement. These students are bright, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and remarkably civic-minded. Targeting them is not merely offensive and contrary to American values and principles, but clueless. Don't take my word for it, either. The students on whom the NYPD is spying attend some of the highest-caliber universities in the world: Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and New York University, among others.

American Muslims are, in fact, the most accomplished and educated segment of the global population of 1.5 billion Muslims. Our successes are American successes, and they undeniable evidence of America's pluralism and promise. Restrictions on our rights fuel extremist arguments that Muslims will never be accepted as equals in the West. For those like me who have spent years trying to shrink the trust deficit, this is a tremendous setback.

 I've written more about this at Religion Dispatches (see also my Al Jazeera interview.)

Spying on Muslims in the US? Haroon Moghul on Al Jazeera English

Is spying on Muslims legal in the US? - Inside Story Americas - Al Jazeera English.

Me, Sahar Aziz (Prof of Law at Texas Wesleyan) and Sebastian Gorka of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies had a great discussion on Inside Story--but sadly not enough time to cover everything we wanted.  

Heads-Up: Shariah Law Teach-in, Me, SUNY Binghamton, Today

I'll be speaking today (Friday) at SUNY Binghamton, starting at 5 PM in Lecture Hall 10. The topic: “Is Sharia Law A Threat to America?”

The address: 4400 Vestal Pkwy East, Vestal, NY 13790
When: 5:00p-6:30pm, including time for Q&A 

On Saturday night, Imam Khalid Latif and Yale Chaplain Omer Bajwa will be speaking at another panel in the Binghamton/Johnson City area.  Details to come.   

Why Does the NYPD Spy on Muslims?

Because the logic of counter-terrorism forces them to:

[After the Sep 11 attacks] we generally bought into the Islam angle, and rather uncritically. And by following such monocausal logic to its end, too many specialists in relatively new fields like counter-radicalization concluded that Islam could also potentiallysolve the problem which it caused, creating a negative feedback loop that explains in metaphysical terms why the physical war on terror has no discernible end.

Think of it this way. There are close to 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. All, obviously, have Islam in common, speaking very broadly. But only a very, very small number of those have engaged in acts of murderous violence. We could on this basis instead look for what, other than Islam, explains such instances of murderous violence, as these acts are not exclusive to Islam (in the 1990s, for example, the Bosnian genocide and the brutal Russian assault on Chechnya.)

Instead, we stuck to the monocausal argument, trying to determine what kind of Islam might be at fault, again prioritizing religion over other causes, sustaining Bin Laden’s absurd claim that we (America and the West) were at war with Islam. [link]

My latest piece, for Religion Dispatches.