Omid Safi: August 2008 Archives

Darwish, like all great postcolonials, spoke out against multiple injustices, both the injustice of one's own community and the oppression forced on one.   He spoke against the infighting between Hamas and Fatah, calling it a "a public attempt at suicide in the streets" and again spoke against Hamas' takeover of Gaza.    Initially part of PLO, Darwish resigned after profound disagreements with Yasser Arafat.   When Arafat complained that Palestinians had been ungrateful towards him, Darwish shot back:  "Find yourself another people then." Like that other beacon of light from Palestine, Edward Said, Darwish was a thorn in the sight of both Israeli oppression and Palestinian corruption.

 And yet, not all injustices are equal.  Darwish always remembered the greater injustice, the larger context:  the 60 year occupation of Palestine by Israel, referred to by Palestinians as the Nakba, "the Catastrophe."   The world this year celebrated the 60^th anniversary of the founding of the modern nation-state of Israel, and how rarely did we stop to remember that the joyous founding of Israel for some was made possible through the violent exile of some 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homelands.    

This loss was personal for Darwish:  he was born in the village of Barweh, one of the 531 Palestinian villages razed to the ground and depopulated as part of the violent Zionist campaign to purge Palestine of its original inhabitants and replace them with Jewish settlers.   

It was Darwish who in 1988 wrote the Palestinians' Declaration of Independence.   Darwish's writings were one of the best ways of giving voice to this dispossession, this loss of land, life, identity, yet refused to give in to hopelessness and despair:

But we have an incurable malady: hope.
Hope in liberation and independence.
Hope in a normal life where we are neither heroes nor victims.

Hope that our children will go safely to their schools.
Hope that a pregnant woman will give birth to a living baby,
at the hospital, and not a dead child in front of a military checkpoint;

hope that our poets will see the beauty of the color red in roses
rather than in blood;

hope that this land will take up its original name:
the land of love and peace.
Thank you for carrying with us the burden of this hope.

Perhaps the greatest way of honoring this poet, this visionary, is to carry on this hope.   For many progressives worldwide, the Palestinian/Israeli tragedy remains an open wound, a symbol of the ongoing injustice that entails not only Palestinian suffering but also the very sullying of the Jewish hope for sovereignty, coming at the expense of another people.  

Moral outrage and righteous anger are easy, and not lacking in our age.   The question is:   can they be wed to a love for all, where love and justice go hand in hand, and we continue the "incurable malady of hope" that Darwish so tenderly wrote about.   In looking at the malady of the Palestinians, going on for three generations now, it would be easy to give into hate and despair.  Yet Darwish said to the Israeli paper Haaretz:   "I do not despair.    I am patient and am waiting for a profound revolution in the consciousness of the Israelis. The Arabs are ready to accept a strong Israel with nuclear arms - all it has to do is open the gates of its fortress and make peace."

One of the most tender poems of Darwish wove together his memories of childhood and his mother, in that lovely way in which the political and the personal illuminate each other:

I long for my mother's bread,

And my mother's coffee,

And her touch.

Childhood memories grow up in me

Day after day.

I must be worthy of my life

At the hour of my death

Worthy of the tears of my mother.

Whether this mother was his own mother, or the motherland of Palestine, Darwish lived such a worthy life.

Darwish's words have often been censored.   In 2000, the Israeli government shot down a plan to include some poetry from this national poet of Palestine in their curriculum.   Darwish astutely observed:   "The Israelis do not want to teach students that there is a love story between an Arab poet and this land...I just wish they'd read me to enjoy my poetry, not as a representative of the enemy."   

As I write these words, there is an ongoing debate about whether the Israelis will allow the body of Darwish to be buried in his beloved homeland.    For a people who have lived in exile and dispossession for 60 years, it is a bitter reminder that exile and dispossession continue even after death.   Yet here is a final reminder:  Jews, Muslims, and Christians, are all part of a shared legacy where God speaks to humanity in words, through words.    Words carry the message of God, words to rebuke, words to remind, and words to remind.    The age of revelation may have come to an end, but the age of inspired words carry on.   The forces of injustice may exile people in their life and death, but here is hoping that inspired words, like those of Darwish, continue to bring humanity together, and come up with a just solution to this acute moral and political crisis of our times.

The Obama Campaign, at it's best, has not been about Obama.

It's been about a mass movement, a coming together of long time activists and newcomers, who have dared to restore hope to politics, to dream that there is a place in the arena of politics for the good. That's what makes the character assassination and subsequent resignation of Mazen Asbahi from the Obama Campaign so hard to take, so bitter.  The lamentation has been heard from many of the leading voices in both the Muslim and the Arab community. (See here and here and here.) As it had been reported on this blog, Asbahi had been appointed by the Obama campaign as the designated contact with both the Arab and the Muslim populations, two distinct yet overlapping communities who have bore the brunt of post-9/11 xenophobia. It was a long-overdue yet important step to mirror earlier connections and indeed commitments from the Obama campaign to Jewish, Catholic, and evangelical communities.

Yet almost as soon as this began, it was over. Asbahi was forced to resign not due to anything he had done, not due to anything he had said, but because of an immediate and deliberate attack on him started by rightwing bloggers and picked up by the Wall Street Journal. At the center of their charge, this accusation: for a period of about two weeks Asbahi served on the board of a charity, Allied Assets Advisors Fund, that also featured an imam of a Chicago mosque who was connected to someone who may have been connected to someone who might have possibly been connected to...  you get the picture. The legal cases implicated in the above ended in a mistrial. Yet apparently we are no longer in the realm of innocent until proven guilty. We're no longer in the realm of fact, certainty, or law. It is the absurdity of playing the "Kevin Bacon" game with the wellbeing and representation of persecuted communities like Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans.

Any political campaign that would want to find a legitimate community contact person would want to find someone like Asbahi, someone who is rooted in a community, and is well-connected. And by the logic of the "Six Degrees" game made famous through the actor Kevin Bacon, yes, every Muslim can be tied to another Muslim who can be tied to another Muslim who can be tied to... someone found not guilty of a crime.  By that logic, can we also implicate Karen Hughes, who spoke before ISNA? How about Condi Rice who met with ISNA leadership? And how about John McCain's connections to John Hagee, of the maniacal "Christians United for Israel", with its support of right-wing Jewish settlers? Or to Rod Parsley, who talks about eradicating Islam? It is not hard to play Kevin Bacon, and end up with not suspected evil, but actual evil. Is this how we want to live?

The goal of the campaigns against Muslims and Arab-Americans is much more sinister. It is no less than the disenfranchisement and marginalization of Muslims and Arab-Americans from the political arena. The blog that led the charge against Asbahi also identifies other potentially "Islamist" organizations:

• The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)
• The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)
• The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC)
• The Muslim Student Association (MSA)
• The International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)

In other words, every single significant group representing Muslims in America. All are suspect, based on this paranoid criteria. 

The right-wing bloggers that targeted Asbahi also insinuated that since he had served in a leadership position in the Muslim Students Association, somehow he was a secret Salafi-Wahhabi. This is part of the problem of our age, where it is sufficient to repeat two words in the same sentence in lieu of proving a link. Had they actually studied Asbahi's faith, words, and deeds, they would have seen him a part of the subtle and beautiful community of the Nawawi Foundation, one of the leading lights of the American Muslim community. Yet we have seen how simply putting Iraq and 9/11 in the same sentence is sufficient to persuade significant portions of the American public. And now we have another casualty in this game of insinuation.

The real casualty is that these types of episodes are precisely what the Muslim-haters like Daniel Pipes count on, with their public and stated agenda of fighting against the participation of Muslims in civic life, a goal of engagement that Muslims like all other citizens re entitled to. This is their stated goal, after all:  "[The] increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims...will present true dangers to American Jews." The goal is to make sure that other Muslim activists, leaders, public intellectuals, and citizens retreat from the public space into a self-exile.   

We refuse to be part of this campaign of fear-mongering. To the right-wing bloggers and their emissaries of hate, we have to respond by saying that we will meet your hate with soul force, your ignorance with a will to educate, and your xenophobia with  a capacity to love.   And yet we cannot do it alone.   Here the Arab-American and Muslim-American community is in need of help, of alliance, of networking with others committed to the dignity of all, to make sure that there are no more innocents thrown under the bus.  And yes, even the most ardent supporters of Obama need to hold the Obama campaign responsible and ask that we go not gently into this abyss of fear-mongering.

The casualty is not just Mazen Asbahi and the next Mazen Asbahi.

The real casualty is the dream where politics can be an arena for the good.