GOATMILK: An intellectual playground edited by Wajahat Ali

Great piece in The Guardian. Read it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/10/john-walker-lindh-american-taliban-father

MARIAM AZAM

I have been living away from home for the past four years. Post my recent completion of graduate school, broke and jobless, I moved back with my parents (no shame). For the time being, I’m trying my best to shift from my stimulating, fast-paced life in NYC to the hum drum and simple charms of suburbia. Most of my time is now spent catching up on the neighborhood elementary school girl drama via Manal, my 9 year old sister, and indulging on my mom’s much missed Hyderabadi cooking.

To make my adjustment to being back home more interesting, looks like I’ll soon be spending the first Ramadan in years with my family. Complete with ‘Family Ramadan Goals’. My dad convened my three sisters and I for an impromptu meeting this morning and proposed the idea. It was too cute to pass by.

This is what we came up with:

1)      Add khushoo in our prayers (beautify our prayers)

2)      Stop Ghibat (backbiting)

3)      And…make Ramadan fun for Manal

My dad also added that Manal, although typically enthusiastic about getting into her cute pullover hijab and glittery jani namaz to join the family for prayer, could get better about meeting the five dailies.

He then reminisced about his visits to the mosque as a young boy. Early morning, while it was still dark out, my dad would get up to walk down to the mosque for Fajr prayer, but scared silly of stray dogs that could be out (this is India and he was a kid) he would hurry up to walk aside his neighbor ‘booda nana’ (translation from urdu-‘old grandpa’-and, yes, this is how my dad literally references him). To add to it, ‘booda nana’ wasn’t really a friendly guy.

After prayer, my dad would take a trip to the nearby cemetery to visit the graves of his maternal ancestors. He added that one time he stopped by the grave of his mother’s so-and-so but scurried away after being spooked by the corpse in the neighboring grave which had risen enough from the ground to be partly visible. What happened to ‘6 feet under’ I wondered? I can’t explain exactly how, but apparently, the surfacing of the corpses had something to do with the overcrowding of the cemetery and nearby roadside construction.

My dad’s story got me thinking. He mentioned that he was around Manal’s age, or younger, when this happened. So, approximately 7 to 9 years old. I tried to imagine myself going through the same experience with religion that my dad did at such a young age. Fajr trips to the mosque with ‘booda nana’ where I feared for the safety of my life from stray, possibly rabid dogs, followed with trips to the cemetery with sneak peeks of corpses sounded somewhat dramatic. Not to mention, terrifying. Read the rest of this entry »

I Speak for Myself: American Women on Being Muslim (White Cloud Press, May 2011) is being received very positively in the media and is spurring dialogue that we feel is necessary and timely.  In this vein, we want to continue the conversation with a sequel called I Speak for Myself: American Men on Being Muslim.  The book will be published by White Cloud in 2012.

Each essay must be written by a practicing Muslim American man, born and/or predominantly raised in the U.S. We are looking for contributors between the ages of 22 and 45 who claim Islam as their faith.

Please write articulately about a personal aspect of your life with regards to being a Muslim American man.  The essay should express in some way how your Muslim-ness and American-ness affect your life.  This need not be overt but the essay should come from that perspective.

Essays should be no longer than 1500 words and will be edited for clarity.  All submissions may not be accepted, but every submission will be considered.  Please include name, age, DOB, full contact info, birthplace, ethnicity, sect of Islam, profession/field, and anything else about yourself that might be useful for us to know (short bios are fine).

This is a project that, Inshallah, will appear across a variety of platforms, both national and international.

Please send all queries about this project and/or entries via email to:  isfm786@gmail.com.

FOUR STARS: ****

5/17/11

The Tree of Life is maddening, exhilarating, gorgeous, ponderous, insightful, pretentious, epic, shallow, beautiful, and strange — essentially the apotheosis of Terrence Malick’s entire career. It will divide audiences like few films have in recent years.

The movie, which exists as a metaphysical meditation and a lyrical poem, focuses – at a microcosmic level – on the story of Jack, a jaded, middle aged man (played by Sean Penn) scarred by the memories of an oppressive upbringing by his father (Brad Pitt), as well as the untimely death of his younger brother.

Like all Malick movies, however, the plot is simply window dressing for the grand philosophical questions the director has been chasing for nearly four decades: the struggle between nature and grace, the duality of man, the meaning of life, and a sense of understanding and reconciliation amidst the chaos and suffering of it all.

While the film makes several missteps and is saddled with an inelegant conclusion, the sheer audacity and vision of a director willing to tackle these weighty metaphysical questions in such an unconventional, non-mainstream manner must be applauded.

The Tree of Life opens and closes with a shot of a beautiful, unearthly light that could very well represent the light of “God.” It then proceeds with a Biblical quote from Job, the prophet whose righteousness was tested through suffering. Would Job renounce God if He was to test him with calamity, or would he remain true and steadfast in his conviction?

The calamity in this case is the tragic death of Jack’s younger brother, who died in combat at the age 19 many years ago. Through several voiceovers – the primary dialogue in a movie that communicates mostly through images – we hear characters’ hushed prayers, laments and frustrated questions to an omnipresent (but distant) God.

In response to her son’s death, the mother asks and prays, “Why?”

Malick’s visual answer to her question is undoubtedly one of The Tree of Life’s most audacious and confounding sequences, itself a throwback to that other frustrating, brilliant visionary recluse, Stanley Kubrick, and his masterpiece 2001. The audience embarks on a gorgeous, wordless cinematic tour of the history of creation, from the majestic beauty of the cosmos to the violence of the Big Bang to the first stirrings of life in the primordial soup to dinosaurs walking the Earth to a small asteroid colliding with the planet.

The random death of one young man seems trivial when measured against the balance of time, space, evolution and the origin of life.

Yet, it is also a random act of violence, a fortuitous eruption, that somehow inspired the entirety of creation on Earth.

Malick, a deeply thoughtful director who studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, reflects on the interconnectedness and interdependence of all living things, no matter how miniscule or magnificent. The death of a brother lingers profoundly in the life of his emotionally damaged sibling just as the Big Bang reverberates throughout the cosmos, and a relatively small meteorite crash instigates a cataclysmic ripple of death for the dinosaurs.

This belabored, but nonetheless fascinating, rumination on the duality and interconnectedness of life is further engendered in Jack by his mother, played by an ethereal Jessica Chastain, who teaches her children that there are two ways through life: the way of grace or the way of nature. The former, personified by the mother, loves unconditionally and accepts suffering and humiliation, while the latter, personified by Pitt, seeks only to please itself, have others please it, and finds reasons to be unhappy despite being surrounded by blessings.

In his National Geographic segment, Malick visits this theme during the age of the CGI dinosaurs. A large dinosaur, upon witnessing a smaller, wounded animal, triumphantly and inexplicably plants his foot on its head. In the grand scheme of life, per Malick, nature’s brute strength and cruelty are embedded in our very DNA.

A majority of the film centers on Jack’s childhood relationship with his parents and two younger siblings.  Brad Pitt, with his tense, square jaw and simmering intensity, conveys an imposing  presence in the lives of the children as a bitter disciplinarian who values power and strength as a means to success. Read the rest of this entry »

Omar Ahmad

HUSSEIN RASHID and WAJAHAT ALI

Religion Dispatches

Last week we spoke of Osama Bin Laden, a man who represented no one and offered nothing but hate. How many other people died that day, their death unnoticed and unmarked?

This week, we lost a real Muslim leader, a man who offered hope, compassion, love, humor, and most importantly, friendship. Omar Ahmad, the Mayor of San Carlos, California, was a real American leader who was also Muslim. He represented more than himself; he was the voice of his community—a community comprised of all the people who came into contact with him. As mayor he had constituents; he was also a man who had many friends. We can only begin by listing the traits that made him a 21st-century Hemingway.

Omar Ahmed: Mayor of San Carlos; lover of fine cigars; spinner of great yarns; Silicon Valley entrepreneur; passionate aviator; mountain climber; cowboy boot aficionado; leader; visionary; friend.

Death did not take him today; instead, we prefer to say that he was just too much for life.

He would chide us that we should never speak of “Muslim” and “non Muslim.” He said, “I prefer ‘Neighbor.’”

Omar was quintessentially American. Born of immigrant parents from Pakistan, he helped to shape the technological world in which we live. He worked at high-level position at Grand Central (now Google Voice), Netscape, and Napster. He once said that when the order came to close Napster as a file sharing service, he was the one who had to “pull the plug.”

Despite his technological wizardry, he was firmly committed to building his community the old-fashioned way, by getting to know you. He says on his website, “If you ever have questions regarding who I am or what I believe, please feel free to ask me. It will be through open dialog that we will get to know each other!” He leveraged his good-natured spirit in politics, and was elected to the City Council of San Carlos, and from there, to the Mayor’s Office. In that position, he did what every American mayor does, he fought with the Firemen’s Union.

In all his activities, he remained committed to his faith. He helped nurture and train Muslim-American leadership. He was a behind-the-scenes mover, who used his vast entrepreneurial experience to make sure the next generation would be able to build real, lasting community relationships with our neighbors. We admired him, notbecause he was Muslim, but because being Muslim made him do admirable things.

When we think of Muslim-America, we think of Omar. There was no distinction for him between his faith and his country, and he sought to do right by both. When we think of role-models for our community, we think of Omar. He gave only what was best—and he gave it everyday for everyone, regardless of their color or religion.

But he was not bigger than life. Despite all his accomplishments, he was humble, grounded, full of conviction, congenial, and approachable. But his spirit, energy, relentless curiosity, and fierce intellect could not be anchored. What else can be said about a man who was an avatar of passion in gaudy cowboy boots?

He is a mensch to be remembered. In ten years, his passing will be remembered as the greatest loss to Muslim American leadership in 2011. He lived more in 46 years than most of us do in three lifetimes.

Most people leave us behind. He left us moving forward.