Aziz Poonawalla: November 2009 Archives

Today is the 146th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address - November 19th, 1963. Readers may be interested in this word cloud I generated of the text of the Address:

Here's the full transcript of the Gettysburg Address (the "Nicolay" copy).

[22:27-8] And proclaim the Pilgrimage among men: they will come to thee on foot and (mounted) on every kind of camel, lean on account of journeys through deep and distant mountain highways;

That they may witness the benefits (provided) for them, and celebrate the name of Allah, through the Days appointed, over the cattle which He has provided for them (for sacrifice): then eat ye thereof and feed the distressed ones in want."

The pilgrims are arriving in Saudi Arabia and the kingdom is gearing up in preparation. The official start of the month, Zilhajj (or Dul Hujjah) was yesterday according to both astronomical and calendrical reckoning, meaning that Yawm ul Arafat (the Day of Arafat) will be next Thursday (a week from today) and Eid ul Adha will be next Friday, November 27th.

Arab News has been running a series of fascinating "countdown to Hajj" articles that cover the preparations, including the tent city at Mina (which is visible from orbit) and replacing the kiswa (covering) for the Holy Kaaba. Their last entry in the series is a paean to how pilgrims' safety is the foremost concern of the Haj authorities:

The changes that have taken place around Mina and the Jamrat area in the past few years are astounding. Anyone who performed Haj 30 years ago or more can remember how calm and serene it was. The increase in the number of pilgrims in the intervening period changed everything. The area turned into one of the most congested parts of the pilgrimage, with the most accidents and the most deaths. Not so now.

(...) Points of entry into Mina are now controlled. No longer can private cars and taxis drive there; only registered buses have access. The massive five-level complex surrounding the Jamrat area for the stoning has been organized so that pedestrians can keep moving slowly but securely in a one-way system. At no point today will there be congestion or dangers. The development of the facilities - others include the provision of emergency medical services and volunteer guides to help pilgrims - is a remarkable improvement.

One of the big concerns this year is the swine flu - it's of course impossible to screen millions of pilgrims for swine flu and refuse them entry, so instead they will simply monitor pilgrims' health after arrival using infrared cameras to detect unusually high body temperature:

RIYADH: Assistant Deputy Minister of Health for Preventative Medicine Dr. Ziad Al-Memish said on Tuesday the Kingdom has implemented "comprehensive" programs to combat swine flu based on recommendations made during this past summer's summit of health ministers from the region held in Cairo.

(...) The measures include thermal-camera screening at Jeddah's King Abdulaziz International Airport, Madinah's Prince Muhammad bin Abdulaziz Airport and the seaports in Jeddah and Yanbu, and 91 health officials working around the clock at the Haj Terminal in Jeddah.

Health officials in the Kingdom have been saying for weeks that they are implementing the recommendations made by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control.

"We have worked out a mechanism with WHO to monitor swine flu among Haj pilgrims this year, Memish said.

"Pilgrims with high body temperatures will be quarantined for testing to "treat them accordingly," he added.

King Saud Hospital in Jeddah, the hospital closest to the Haj Terminal, will receive any suspected swine flu cases of pilgrims arriving in Jeddah by commercial flights.

The Kingdom is taking swine flu very seriously - otherwise Hajj would literally be an incubator for the pandemic as millions of pilgrims from every corner of the earth will congregate. It should be noted that in light of the pandemic, pilgrims who are old, young, infirm, or pregnant are discouraged from performing the Hajj this year.

I had pretty extensive coverage of hajj last year here at City of Brass, and also there's ongoing Hajj coverage at Talk Islam. Mubarak to all those who are making the pilgrimage this year!

It's time to once again cast your vote for the Islamsphere's best and brightest - the polls are now open in the 6th Anual Brass Crescent Awards for the Islamic Blogsphere!

This year we were a little delayed with the voting phase, partly because I had an unexpected trip in October and then partly because of the tragedy at Fort Hood, which rightly dominated the attention of the blogsphere as a whole, but the Islamsphere in particular.

However, we are now ready to go, and you can vote until Nov. 27th at the official site, BrassCrescent.org, so what are you waiting for?

The categories this year include two new ones- BEST RETIRED BLOG and BEST TWEETER - and they have fantastic nominees. So check it out and vote!

For more details and updates on the Awards, follow the BCA on twitter (@brasscrescent) or join the FaceBook page!

Also - if you're a UK resident, take note a this great promotion by altmuslim.com - an opportunity to score free tickets to the IMAX film "Journey to Mecca". But please don't forget to vote first!

There's a great ongoing series at Open Left which makes a data-driven analysis of voting patterns for all sorts of demographic groups to argue that overall, the GOP is in serious trouble over the long term. The ethnic demographic trends are pretty devastating by themselves, though a demographic trend is like the climate, not the weather - it's a long term global aggregate, but short-term local fluctuations can (and will) appear. As the authors note, "If Obama loses the White House in 2012 with 49% of the vote, this would still be consistent with the trends of the last 30 years."

What intrigues me howver is the religious demographic data. One of the pieces in the series noted that White Evangeliical Christians (WECs) have influence far beyond their numbers, which should be of concern to muslims since there's a strong correlation with WEC political resurgence and American wars upon muslim soil. Still, the influence of the WECs is diminishing, not only because of the resurgence of moderate liberalism in the wake of conservatisms' governing failures, but again due to simple demographic inevitability - as a proportion of the electorate, Christians are declining, whites are declining, and both groups are trending towards Democrats anyway. The WEC vote is a subset at the intersection of the White and the Christian vote and remains solidly opposed to Obama, liberalism, et al but is is essentially under siege. The WEC core is also the center of mass for knee-jerk Islamophobia (ex. the muslim smear), so this is on the whole a positive trend for muslim-Americans, something to keep in mind as we navigate these dark times of suspicion and distrust against us.

The analysis of the muslim vote however is the key - demonstrating just how volatile it can be over successive Presidential cycles, and how responsive it is to foreign policy as a whole:

The Muslim community showed very strong support for Democrats this year, and among Arab Muslims at least, a dramatic increasingly Democratic trend. The poll of Muslim voters was completed by randomly selecting names from a list of Muslim voters, so there could be a bias to it depending on how the list was generated. However, the results are in agreement with the Muslim subsample in the poll of Arab Americans, and the Bangladeshi and Pakistani subsamples in the Asian American poll. Another demographic slice of the Muslim American community, African Americans, is also strongly Democratic. The recent development of Muslim American political behavior has been described as occurring in three stages: first, debating whether to participate in elections at all prior to 2000; second, whether to increase political power by voting as a block prior to 2004; and third, a less organized but perhaps more involved participation prior to the 2008 elections. It has been a dramatic ten years, from the seeming betrayal by George Bush, who had strong Muslim support in 2000, to the 2008 campaigns where the Muslim label was used as a rhetorical bludgeon (a ploy which may have backfired), to the election of a man who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia and has family ties to Islam.

This is a good position to be in. The "three stages" should suggest to Obama and any Democratic successors that the muslim vote is not a reliably liberal bloc like the African American vote or the Jewish vote, but one that is responsive to policy decisions. Really, REALLY responsive! A good analogy would be the Cuban-American vote, which wields great influence because of its location in Uber Swing State Florida.

The question of whether there should even be a muslim bloc is an ongoing debate; I've been arguing for years that muslims need to maintain their political independence. My friend Ali Eteraz argued in the Guardian back in 2007 for a "muslim Left" which would serve as a counter to the so-called "Falwell muslims" (who are more a problem in Europe than in the US, but as the shootings at Fort Hood demonstrate, are something US muslims will increasingly have to face repercussions of). Ali lays out the general guidelines for such a political philosophy:

This Muslim left should [espouse] the following basic ideas, without being limited to them:

• separation of mosque and state;
• opposition to tyranny (even if the tyrant has liberal values);
• affirmance of republicanism or democracy;
• an ability to coherently demonstrate that the Muslim right represents merely one interpretation of Islam;
• a commitment to free speech and eagerness to defeat the Muslim right in the marketplace of ideas;
• commitment to religious individualism and opposition to left-collectivism, specifically Marxism;
• opposition to economic protectionism;
• opposing any and all calls for a "council of religious experts" that can oversee legislation (even if those experts are liberals); and
• affirming international law.

Muslim leftists will - it is a must - have to be able to articulate all of these in Islamic terms, in order to persuade the people who need to be convinced, ie Muslims. This means that a Muslim leftist will, naturally, also have facility in the Muslim traditions. The real-world paucity of individuals with such dual facility is indicative of how far behind Muslim leftism is currently.

The pragmatic problem here however is that there's no such concensus on any of these issues within the muslim community. Part of this is because of the lingering obsession with the "Ummah" which as I keep arguing is a concept with no genuine utility apart from symbolic resonance. For muslim americans to act as a political bloc, we would need to identify issues of relevance to ourselves as Americans, not according to policies which have really very little impact upon our daily lives (such as Israel and Palestine). We still have not, as a community, had that conversation about what we really want or care about (though the attack at Fort Hood have clarified some of our concerns). Most of our concrete political interests (like civil rights, health care reform, etc) are general ones that aren't specific to our muslim identity, which is why it is tempting to throw our lot in with the left, but I caution heavily against making such an alliance too rigidly. The GOP may be the most intense locus of Islamophobia now, but it's worth remembering that the Democrats have their xenophobes too, as the Dubai Ports World incident clearly showed. Further, the Left is overtly hostile to spiritual faith - the "Falwell Leftists" among them are implacably opposed to hijab, for example. Ironically the term "muslim Left" obfuscates these differences, leading outsiders to assume it is "centered on Western political liberalism" only clad in muslim garb.

This complexity of muslim issues and diversity is what led my friend Shahed, editor of altmuslim.com, to argue that there should not be any muslim bloc at all. While I agreed with his assertion that muslim voters are simply not going to embrace any political platform in lockstep, I had to take issue with his solution that we abandon the idea of a political identity altogether. The data from the Open Leftf analysis is clear, that there are core issues upon whihch the muslim community does on the whole respond to. Rather than try and create a framework as Ali proposes for social engineering that vote, or as Shahed proposes to simply throw that vote's potential power away, I think we need to start thinking about what broad principles and general issues we can agree on, and seek to harness that influence as so many other ethnic and religious groups before us have done. In doing so we better not just ourselves but our country as a whole.

The seizure of mosques and a skyscraper yesterday was ostensibly because the rental income from the skyscraper was being sent to a bank in Iran which is allegedly used by the Iranian government to fund its covert (and denied) nuclear program. This is illegal by federal law, but it's interesting to see a double standard at work with respect to other US companies that run afoul of that law:

(19 July 2004) The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has been investigating Halliburton since 2001 to determine whether it violated the ban on U.S. companies doing business with Iran. The OFAC referred the case to the Justice Department in early July 2004, prompting the subpoena from the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas. The subpoena requests Halliburton provide company documents pertaining to its business relationship with Iran.

Although federal law prohibits U.S. companies from trading with Iran, it does not forbid foreign subsidiaries from such business ties. Halliburton's Cayman Islands subsidiary sold $63 million worth of oil products to Iran in 2003. Earlier this year, the U.S. Senate tried to pass legislation prohibiting foreign subsidiaries of U.S. firms from trading with Iran, but the legislation was defeated, mostly along party lines.

As far as I recall, none of Haliburton's assets were seized by the Bush Administration back then.

I'm arguing here that we need more information to justify these actions. They may well be justified, but we must have transparency here or Obama's relationship with the muslim American community just died.