Sulayman’s Stories

…Many people have the idea that once a limb is amputated the pain stops. That’s not true. Pain from damaged nerve tissue lasts for months, usually longer if a clean amputation is not done soon after the accident, which was always the case in Afghanistan, where painkillers were not always available. Add this to weeks of drugged discomfort, for patients were all but drowned in antibiotics in order to prevent tetanus and other infections caused by mine fragments.

Yet, despite the pain and a missing arm or foot, the patients in these wards looked healthy and normal. There was a vibrancy in their faces, a trace of humor even, and a total absence of embarrassment. “I have given my foot to Allah ,” said a twenty-seven-year-old man, who also had one eye and a burned, deformed hand. “Now I will continue my jihad in another way.” This man had a wife and three children. At first, I dismissed what he said as bravado meant to impress a foreigner. I found it impossible to believe that he really felt this emotion, that he truly accepted what happened to him. His eyes, however, evinced neither the rage of a fanatic, which would have accounted for his defiance, nor the shocked and sorrowful look of someone who was really depressed. If anything registered on his face when I spoke to him, it was bewilderment. He didn’t seem to understand why I thought he should be unhappy. He had lost an eye, a foot, and part of a hand– and that was that.

Soldiers of God
Robert D. Kaplan

quoted in Writing War. Read as part of a class assignment, but I plan on reading the whole thing afterwards

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People keep asking me what led me to study Islam. I keep telling the story a bit differently, depending on what memory or part of the story comes to mind first. What I never got to mention was this; I had read a passage in a novel that made me reconsider what I had accepted as facts in the world:

…
“But the thing is, boys don’t like girls who are too smart.”
Sarah’s eyebrows went up. “Is that so?”
“Well, that’s what everybody says…”
“Like who?”
“Like my mom.”
“Uh-huh. And she probably knows what she’s talking about.”
“I don’t know, Kelly admitted. “My mom only dates jerks, actually.”
“So she could be wrong?” Sarah asked, glancing up at Kelly as she tied her laces.
“I guess.”
“Well, in my experience, some men like smart women, and some don’t. It’s like everything else in the world.” She stood up. “You know about George Schaller?”
“Sure. He studied pandas.”
“Right. Pandas, and before that, snow leopards and lions and gorillas. He’s the most important animal researcher in the twentieth century-and you know how he works?”
Kelly shook her head.
“Before he goes into the field, George reads everything that’s ever been written about the animal he’s going to study. Popular books, newspaper accounts, scientific papers, everything. Then he goes out and observes the animal for himself. And you know what he usually finds?”
She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.
“That nearly everything that’s been written or said is wrong. Like the gorilla. George studied mountain gorillas ten years before Dian Fossey ever thought of it. And he found that what was believed about gorillas was exaggerated, or misunderstood, or just plain fantasy-like the idea that you couldn’t take women on gorilla expeditions, because the gorillas would rape them. Wrong. Everything… just… wrong.”
Sarah finished tying her boots and stood.
“So, Kelly, even at your young age, there’s something you might as well learn now. All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they tell you will be wrong.”
Kelly said nothing. She felt oddly disheartened to hear this.
“It’s a fact of life,” Sarah said. “Human beings are just stuffed full of misinformation. So it’s hard to know who to believe. I know how you feel.”
…

That’s a passage from The Lost World, by Michael Crichton. I read it when I was 11, and this lesson stayed in my mind for years. Eventually, with Americans going berserk with panic over Muslims, I somehow remembered this moral out of nowhere. I actually went to the library and tried finding books about Islam. In retrospect, nearly everything I learned about Islam and Muslims was exaggerated, or misunderstood, or just plain fantasy. It made it all the more frustrating to explain to people, since they refused to part with those notions.

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I watched The Road to Guantanamo. If you haven’t seen it yet, go do so. (Trailer) Right now. I mean it. Heck, I’ll even pay your cab fare and the price of a ticket.

The film centers on the “Tipton Three,” three British citizens of Pakistani descent who were arrested in Afghanistan, sent to Guantanamo, and later released. The actual three are in the film, narrating and remembering what happened, although much of the film is a dramatization with their narration of it. It starts off with them in Pakistan to attend a wedding in 2001, and told they could make a difference if they brought supplies into Afghanistan. Of course, they get stuck because of the war and wind up in US custody. They were sent to Guantanamo and tortured into admitting they were physically with Bin Laden years earlier, until the UK passport check proved they hadn’t even left the UK until a year after the video. The film is graphic in its recreation, and it will leave you horrified at the abuse: to me it was like reading Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, or watching a movie about the Holocaust. The Northern Alliance rounded up and killed lots of prisoners, and that’s mentioned. We all left the film feeling a bit shaken.

Interesting tidbit: After the film, I saw Shafiq Rasul, one of the main characters, on CNN. Wolf Blitzer’s first question was, What do you think of Osama Bin Laden? Shafiq was trying to say, I’m not a fan but what difference does that make? Wolf Blitzer dropped the ball on this interview, the interview was very unproductive and I didn’t learn anything new about Gitmo, which Thomas Friedman called “the anti-Statue of Liberty.”

I think this film highlighted some of the nasty stuff that went on in Guantanmo and seems to be building here. CAIR had an alert about some idiots fairly south who decided to buy a Quran, shoot it full of bullets, and throw it at a mosque, videotaping it and posting it online. It reminds me of the jerk who purposely threw the detainee’s Qurans into the waste area of the camp. Multiple times.

I disagree with Umar Lee on how innocent they were. Yeah, it was a foolish idea, and they said on CNN they regretted it. However, their treatment and the sheer barbarity of the entire thing made me walk out of the theater ashamed to be American. If you want to criticize that, go see it first.

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For class I was given the book The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in the Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff. It’s a very good book, perhaps the best thing I learned during the entire class while discussing the delicate balance between freedom and government power, civil liberties versus security and counter terrorism. While I had initially braced myself to disagree with him on such a dicey topic, I found his arguments astoundingly well-written. The author understands that democracies around the world were fighting terrorism long before 9/11. He knows his stuff, going into detail about the history of governments that faced internal and external threats, from Weimar Germany to Israel to America during the Civil War and second World War; and the threats they faced and their solutions and outcomes to curtailing rights. He gives numerous case studies and shows what democracies can learn from their examples; he reasons that German and Italian police succeeded in their campaign against the Baader Meinhof gang in the 1970s while their counterparts in Spain failed during the same years to eradicate the cells of Basque terrorists. Turning attention to Al Qaeda, it lays out a good detailed strategy for confronting them and others, while not destroying the democracy in the process.

The sheer diversity of his case studies enables Ignatieff to discredit any simple-minded approach to terrorism. He expounds on the history of civil liberties curtailment, and proposes solutions that don’t go too far towards one end at the exclusion of the other (e.g. allowing searches with warrants and putting expiration dates on laws such as the Patriot Act). His thesis should calm any reader; America is not under its worst threat of its lifetime; the rules haven’t changed all that much, etc.

Reading him is a bit like having a conversation with an eminently reasonable but convinced and powerfully convincing man.”–Anthony Lewis, New York Review of Books

Ignatieff is apparently no stranger to discussions on civil liberties and political ethics and terrorism. He’s Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and has written much on the subject before it. The book is 232 pages, but it flows quickly and is well-annotated. He draws a middle course of action between freedom and security. A good portion of his book concerns hypothetical situations, on a scale of increasing threats, from whether it’s OK to torture a suspect if there’s a ticking bomb hidden somewhere, to whether its OK to suspend rights if there’s a threat of nuclear terrorism, to why democracies can only be ethical if they act civilized. He’s so well-informed and willing to consider the implications of each side in his proposals, something Bush never seems to do. He warns democracies not to fall into the trap of “turning into nihilists in order to fight nihilistic enemies.” He argues quite well on the need for liberal democracies to have a moral response to terrorism, not to sink to their level. He’s quite opposed to Alan Dershowitz’s advocation of torture, and even cites the Israeli Supreme Court’s rejection of it in his argument.

I think it’s the sheer level-headedness of his ideas that impressed me. He admits it’s tempting to suspend civil rights under the sense of a crisis, but at the same time points out that the terrorists never have won in history; governments fell from within or due to other reasons. Perhaps it IS a good thing to have sneak-and-peak warrants, but only if there is judicial oversight, or allowing detentions, as long as there’s a system of review, sunset clauses in laws (ie expiration dates), and the ability to challenge things in court. In the end, he struck a balance between liberty and security. He actually convinced me to reconsider, moderating my opinions. If you are a politics major, or find the domestic “war on terror” to be a vital issue, you have to read this book. If I were President, I’d put him in charge of homeland security. It’s that good of a book.

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Too many things to post separately, so they are all in one posting.

Interview with Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki after his release from Yemeni prison

iPhoneIslam has some amazing programs for the iPhone, like a salat timer and moon phase viewer, as well as Arabic font and keyboard for iPhone.

The US Hall of Haters, those who seem tho do nothing but hate (their hatred is mostly aimed at Muslims)

Giuliani staffer said Americans need to “chase Muslims back to their caves.”

On youtube, Ex-priest-to-be back from Hajj

Umar Lee has some recent insights and articles lately. One nice quote:

” always find it interesting that with all the anti-Latino sentiment in America you will be hard -pressed to find any Latino who will not tell you where they are from and many Muslim immigrants routinely get defensive about being asked where they are from, especially men, and what does this say about the courage of many Muslim men?”

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The Siege was a movie released in 1998 starring Denzel Washington, Tony Shalhoub, Bruce Willis, and Annette Benning. It has the unusual distinction in that I thought it was a poor and unrealistic film when it was in theaters, but years later I realized how thoroughly chilling it was.

Here’s the plot (Spoiler alert) Imagine the US government sent a SEAL team to Afghanistan and managed to secretly capture Osama bin Laden. He’s safely hidden in US custody (like Hotel California), but nobody knows that, its Top Secret.

Suddenly, New York has a problem on its hands. Suicide bombers. Buses full of people are blown up, and an anonymous terrorist group makes one demand: “Release Him.” The implication is that it is the guy the US caught. But the government swears up and down they don’t know where he is, nor do they have him.

Meanwhile, the bombings in the city intensify, and more details emerge. It turns out that the US government actually armed and trained some of these terrorists years ago to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but then withdrew support suddenly, allowing most of them to be slaughtered. As a result, the survivors have 2 things: knowledge in subversive warfare like bombmaking, and a hatred of the US.

Denzel Washington plays an FBI agent trying to figure this whole situation all out. He’s there for the first bombing, and uncovers how this group got their motivation. It’s going to be very hard to break up, since the terrorist cells are compartmentalized, and stepping up their campaign to schools and theaters.

Suddenly, calamity strikes. The terrorists manage to take out basically the entire New York FBI branch with a car bomb. The city is put under martial law, with the US military in full control of the city and its resources. As a precaution, and to catch the terrorists, they arrest every Arab and Muslim male in New York City within a certain age range, and move them to a detention camp, not unlike what happened to the Japanese-Americans in World War II.

The actors were great for this movie. Denzel Washington is the FBI guy trying to do his job while upholding the Constitution and civil liberties, Bruce Willis is a cold monstrous pragmatist general. Tony Shaloub is the best, he plays an Arab-American FBI agent who’s caught in this whole thing on two sides; loyalty to his country, and rage at having his family detained at an interment camp for being Arab. Annette Benning has a role, albeit not as great as her others. Plotwise, however, it’s another story.

I gotta say a few things. The plot, as unrealistic as it is in some places, suddenly has a new effect after September 11, 2001. I HATE saying that, since the idea is so overused, but this one I really believe to be the case. Many Arab-Americans and Muslims protested this movie, understandably, since it had Arabs and Muslims as the bad guys. At the same time, it did portray innocent legal Arabs who love this country and still got arrested and interred as a group. That really doesn’t fix the problem, it’s like saying Tonto was a moderating character in all the Lone Ranger movies where the Indians were the bad guys. The film ostensibly wasn’t about anti-Arab sentiment, it was more about paranoia and hasty-decision making. On that note, it does a good job, Denzel fights for civil rights and justice. Still, I did think they had a very distorted image of what a terrorist would be, and what real Muslims do. Worse, the film connected Islamic activities, like reciting from the Holy Quran, the ritual wudu (washing before prayer), and the adhan (call to prayer), with terrorism. Also, once again, it had Palestinian bad guys, and even worse, it showed Arab immigrants, a college professor, and Arab-American auto mechanics in Brooklyn as terrorists. In 1998, Arabs and Muslims demonstrated in front of movie theaters showing the film, and after watching it, I wouldn’t blame them. As Jack Shaheen said in Reel Bad Arabs, Hollywood couldn’t get away with the same stereotypes if the plot was about Jewish extremists led by a terrorist rabbi.

Personally, after September 11, the thought of this film gave me chills. It was the kind of thing that people predicted would happen in a worst-case scenario. I had nightmares that I was arrested in NY just for being Muslim. Someone astutely pointed out that one of the bad guys in this movie, Bruce Willis, does exactly what Ariel Sharon has done recently in the West Bank; seal off the neighborhood, arrest all males in a specific age range, and put them in temporary concentration camps.

A film reviewer wrote this in May 2002: “Another thing to note is that this movie simply isn’t the same movie after September 11th. Which is remarkable of itself, because most movies about current events are made after the fact, rather than before.” Think of it as an alternate result to what happened after 9/11.

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The entrance to the Cave at Mount Hira, outside of Makkah. It’s a spot for Pilgrims to visit, and there appears to be a marking at the cave entrance, with the first ayats revealed from the Quran.

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