Who are these Somalis?

That vile old racist who is polluting the Presidency let his freak flag fly in a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday:

via Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)

My friend Shelley Sherman posted this heartfelt riposte to Donald Trump's vilification of the Somali community in Minnesota on Facebook. Somalis are not faceless to her and they certainly are not "garbage."

I am angered and appalled at the remarks by the President with the backing of his administration, insulting Somalis in general and Rep Ilhan Omar in particular. 

I had the privilege of working with Ilhan Omar before she was elected to public office, at the University of Minnesota Extension. I know her history and her character. She is an amazing person, intelligent, brave, thoughtful and funny, someone who came to the US as a child and knows how to build bridges between cultures. 

I also worked with other Somalis, and heard their stories of having to leave their country due to war, about life in refugee camps, losing family, and finally being able to come to the US, and to Minnesota, which welcomed them.

The Somalis, like the Hmong from Laos, the Oromo, the Sudanese, the Mexicans, the Central and South Americans, the Cambodians and Vietnamese, came to Minnesota as refugees and have built lives there, attended school, learned English, worked hard and have become an important part of the fabric of the state. 

We benefit from their presence. They are found in many different professions, in private and public spaces. The majority of them are US citizens, through naturalization or birthright, and the President’s racist attack on them is an outrage; as is his use of ICE to threaten and abuse people, largely based on the color of their skin.

All over the country, organized people are learning how to push back against abuse of our neighbors. That work has become a measure of good citizenship for us all.

We cannot cower; Mangi does not

Too often, the best Americans -- the people who best embody the aspirations of this terrible, conflicted country -- are the relative newcomers rather than the old timers like me (a Mayflower descendant through and through.)

Adeel Mangi is a distinguished Pakistani-American New Jersey litigator, both in private practice and in pro bono civil rights cases. Joe Biden nominated him to an appellate court judgeship. At confirmation hearings, Mangi endured repeated, ignorant, and abusive interrogations from Republican senators. LawDork explains:

Mangi would have been the nation’s first Muslim American federal appeals court judge, and the attacks against him never stopped. After Republicans questioned him at his confirmation hearing largely with anti-Muslim guilt-by-association attacks, the opposition later expanded to include baseless claims of terrorism and anti-law enforcement connections. ...

Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer cut a deal with the Republican senators to give up on confirming Mangi and other appellate nominees in order to advance lower federal court Biden appointees. This may have been a necessary deal -- it's hard for outsiders to know. I'm not surprised by betrayal of Mangi by Joe Manchin; he's a preening popinjay masquerading for decades as a man of the people.

But it is hard to learn that two Democratic Senators who I worked in Nevada to elect dissented from Mangi's nomination. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen choosing to torpedo Mangi is really bad. 

What follows is my speculation; it is neither kind nor generous. 

Presumably Rosen was running scared in last fall's re-election bid; her status as a visibly Jewish leader in national politics presumably made it seem simple to sign on with the reactionary strain in Jewish politics in a state with few Jews, but some loud and well-funded right wing Jewish advocates. It looked an easy cave to the MAGAs. (As it turned out, she delegitimated her opponent early on and won easily.) Cortez Masto is gunning to rise in the Dem Senate leadership; sticking with and covering for her sister Nevada Senator made for a cheap date. So Mangi becomes a scalp claimed by Republican Islamophobes. The two Senators' choices sicken me.

Mangi has written a heartfelt public letter denouncing the process he, and by extension his faith, were put through. 

In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, spoke at the inauguration of a mosque in Washington, D.C. He said: “And I should like to assure you, my Islamic friends, that under the American Constitution, under American tradition, and in American hearts, this Center, this place of worship, is just as welcome as could be a similar edifice of any other religion. Indeed, America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have here your own church and worship according to your own conscience. This concept is indeed a part of America, and without that concept we would be something else than what we are.”... 

It was that vision of America that led me, 25 years ago, to make it my home. ... 

When my nomination then came before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I was prepared to answer any questions about my qualifications, philosophy, or legal issues. I received none.

Instead, I was asked questions about Israel, whether I supported Hamas, and whether I celebrated the anniversary of 9-11. Even more revealing, however, was the tone. The underlying premise appeared to be that because I am Muslim, surely I support terrorism and celebrate 9-11. When I made clear that all these claims are false — that I condemn the Hamas attacks and all forms of terrorism, and indeed that it was my city that was attacked on 9-11 — the next Republican Senators up just repeated their performative outrage. There were children in the audience. ...

... advertisements were run deeming me an antisemite, a radical, and a terrorist sympathizer. Horrifying images were published with the Hamas flag substituted for my eyes or interspersing my face with footage of the twin towers on fire. And all of this, even while major Jewish organizations across the country condemned these attacks, ranging from the National Council of Jewish Women to the Anti-Defamation League, and over a dozen more. One of the largest Jewish groups put it this way: “Adeel Mangi, was questioned aggressively on thin pretext about his views on Israel, terrorism, and antisemitism, turning these serious issues into a tool of partisan attack. … American Jewish Committee (AJC) has joined several U.S. Supreme Court briefs led by Mangi and find him to be an able jurist, a person of integrity, champion of pluralism, and adversary of discrimination against any group.”

...What can explain all of this? One commentator recounted my professional accomplishments and then observed: “But he also successfully fought efforts by two New Jersey communities to prevent the construction of mosques. He has served on the board of directors of the Muslim Bar Association and Muslims for Progressive Values. Clearly, he’s both an accomplished attorney and a proud representative of his religion. That’s what his Republican critics can’t tolerate. They will never accept someone who is so prominently associated with Islam.” 

Mangi is even less sparing of Rosen and Cortez Masto then I am. (And that's not very.)

Two allied Senators from a state far from the Third Circuit announced their opposition ostensibly based on the attacks claiming I am against law enforcement. I will not assume the worst possible motivation for their embrace of this attack. But to me that leaves two possibilities: that these Senators lack the wisdom to discern the truth, which exposes a catastrophic lack of judgment; or they used my nomination to court conservative voters in an election year, which exposes a catastrophic lack of principle. One reportedly made the decision based on fear of an attack ad—and apparently not for the first time.

He concludes:

Our country faces an incoming tsunami of bigotry, hatred, and discrimination. It targets Muslims, Arabs, Jews, Black people, the LGBTQ+ community, and many others. And it always pretends to be something other than what it is. These forces are fueled not only by their proponents, but equally by the collaboration and silence of the spineless. They can be defeated only by those who lead voters with courage, not those who sacrifice principles for votes. But courage can be found outside of politics. 

American Muslims are part of this nation’s fabric and will not cower. This campaign was intended to make it intolerable for Muslims proud of their identity to serve this nation. It will fail. Our Constitution forbids religious tests for any Office of the United States and American Muslims will cherish that fundamental American value, even if others apply it only selectively. And let me be clear: I will always be immensely proud of my faith as well as my pro bono legal work to challenge both denials of freedom of worship and the alleged killing of an incarcerated Black man. I have battled for justice, even if it meant there would be none for me.

... To return to President Eisenhower’s words, Americans must now look at the story of this nomination, and ask themselves: is this who we are now? For my children, I hope America one day lives up to President Eisenhower’s promise, even if not today. For my part, I entered this nomination process as a proud American and a proud Muslim. I exit it the same way, unbowed.

This is the spirit the country will need in the difficult times ahead.

A proud American

House Republicans thought to crush Michigan Representative Ihlan Omar. They voted, unanimously, to throw her off the Foreign Relations Committee. She had plenty to say about their bigotry, speaking on the floor of Congress.

"Is anyone surprised that I am being targeted? Is anyone surprised that I am somehow deemed unworthy to speak about American foreign policy? Or that they see me as a powerful voice that needs to be silenced? Frankly, it is expected because when you push power, power pushes back...

"Representation matters. Continuing to expand our ideas of who is American, and who can partake in the American experiment is a good thing. I am an American, an American ... I didn't come to Congress to be silent. ... my leadership and voice will not be diminished if I am not on this committee for one term. My voice will get louder and stronger and my leadership will be celebrated around the world ... Take your votes or not; I am here to stay and I am here to be a voice against harms around the world and to advocate for a better world."

It was interesting to hear on a podcast what "Never Trump" Republicans Charlie Sykes and Tim Miller had to say about Omar's statement. They assume she is some kind of anti-American radical and anti-Semite; like the Republicans who used to be their comrades, they can't imagine that she simply emerges from a worldwide culture where the United States is a known bully empire and the Jewish state of Israel is simply the oppressor of native Palestinians. (She's had to learn explain her understanding in a more nuanced way in office.) But the two Never Trumpers could hear Omar in this clip. Do listen up!

The Patriot Act is 20 years old

On October 26, 2001, President George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act, into law. (That's the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism [USA PATRIOT] Act of 2001" if you want to get formal about it.)

(Ashleigh Nushawg/Flickr)

According to the ACLU:

Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet. While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.

In those fraught days after 9/11, American Muslims saw the new law as a gun aimed straight at their community. They weren't wrong; hostile surveillance and harassment have been a constant in American Muslim life over the last two decades. The law too often has been understood as a license for various law enforcement agencies to participate in putting these vulnerable Americans on notice that they are different and perhaps dangerous.

CAIR (the Council on American–Islamic Relations) has served as a leading umbrella civil rights organization for many embattled Muslim communities for the last two decades, as well as participated in broader human rights coalitions. For the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Patriot Act, the group polled American Muslims about whether they still felt under siege:

• 63% of American Muslims say they believe American media coverage of Muslims has not become more accurate since 9/11

• 69% said they experienced one or more incidents of anti-Muslim bigotry or discrimination since 9/11

• 34% said anti-Muslim rhetoric after 9/11 had an impact on their mental health

nevertheless

• 63% say their mosques have engaged in more interfaith dialogue since 9/11

• 95% say they always or sometimes speak up in response to anti-Muslim remarks

• 181 American Muslims ran for office in 2020

More here.

CAIR concludes:

Overturning these unconstitutional policies, such as the disastrous watchlist system, is within reach if we work together, inshallah.

Updates: refugees and security panics

So President Biden has quickly listened to the howls of his constituents and turned around since last Friday, promising to increase the cap on refugee admissions. That little democratic pressure exercise went well; let's keep the pressure on to assist refugees and add pressure for humane solutions to what will be an ever-swelling migration crisis.

Meanwhile, perhaps we need to create another immigration allotment for persons -- outside the refugee and asylum categories -- who should be entitled to relatively easy entry to the U.S.: people who can no longer live in their own societies and countries because of U.S. military adventures.

Cycling rally in Kabul, Afghanistan, 2018, Wikipedia

Michael Walzer  offers a suggestion prompted by our impending departure from Afghanistan:

When we leave, we must bring with us to the U.S. all the men and women, and their families, who are vulnerable to persecution, imprisonment, or death because of our invasion—directly, because they collaborated with us, but also indirectly, because they agitated for democracy, organized unions, or established schools for girls under our cover. It doesn’t matter whether or not we intended to provide this cover, though I think many Americans who went to Afghanistan wanted to do exactly that. This is an absolute moral obligation.

Probably a large number of the men and women at risk will want to stay where they are and continue their political struggle; we should make sure they have the resources we can provide. But any people who want to leave, whatever their numbers, should be taken along with our troops and diplomats. We should be preparing to welcome them when they arrive and help them settle in the U.S.

• • •

In the early days of the post 9/11 panic, federal spooks and law enforcement, having been caught with their pants down by the jihadi attacks on New York and the Pentagon, ran wild and dangerous. In addition to instituting security theater at airports, they went on an entrapment binge, rounding up barely assimilated, often half-witted, young immigrant Muslims in what they called terror plots. The feds got credit for protecting us; the pathetic terrorists went to jail for long terms.

It's time to re-examine that binge. Rozina Ali offers a piercing, sympathetic account of the characters and imaginary terror "plots" that came out of that time.

... sweeping legislation and policy changes cleared the way for the authorities to surveil whole communities, monitoring even those who had no connection to terrorism. Prosecutors were now able to build cases from invasive intelligence-gathering tactics that would have been restricted earlier. The U.S. attorney general allowed law enforcement to deploy informants from the earliest stages of a terrorism investigation, contravening the established practice of waiting until there was reasonable indication of criminal activity; the Justice Department further relaxed restrictions in later years, permitting such use of informants even when assessing a potential case. In trials, the government presented evidence gathered by paid civilian informants who latched onto low-income, vulnerable and mentally challenged individuals, urged them toward a plot and, in several cases, even offered money and supplies to carry out bombings. 

... Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the government has imprisoned some 800 people on charges related to international terrorism, according to the Intercept database. But these numbers obscure a complicated reality. Many of these people were not found to have committed any acts of violence. Still, the government managed to achieve a high rate of conviction. Those accused of terrorism often pleaded guilty, usually because they were offered leniency in exchange for information, or because they knew they would almost certainly receive a longer sentence if they went to trial and were convicted. ...

Very much worth reading the whole story ...

In California, one federal judge has already tossed the case against Hamid Hayat of Lodi, a particularly egregious example of law enforcement inventing a threat that wasn't there. 

But hundreds of people remain locked up in federal prisons for thinly sourced accusations. Okay -- we were scared stupid for a season. But can we take a deep breath and look at freeing these people?

The Reformation: Islamophobia and a slavery past

It's usually my practice, when writing about books here, to hold off until I finish them. That seems a fair, even prudent, idea. But it doesn't feel necessary, or wise, to follow this course with Diarmaid MacCulloch's enormous 2004 volume The Reformation: A History. This book is erudite; and long. This book is wide-ranging; and long. The book is opinionated; and long. This book is held up as masterful historic writing; and long. This book is gripping to me; and long.

As I said, it's long. I am reading the audio edition, all 36 hours of it and can highly recommend it. As of today, I only have 18 more hours to go. Some familiarity with maps of Europe and major historical markers help; as I usually feel when reading sprawling histories, I don't quite have enough background to take everything in. But who does, besides MacCulloch? Interestingly and happily in a scholarly text, the narrator is a woman. The only stumbling block I've encountered is her high British pronunciations -- we Yanks sometimes render historical names and places quite differently in speech and it takes a moment to decode.

MacCulloch tells the story of the multiple facets and formations that arose from the splintering of western Christendom. There's the magisterial Reformation (roughly the denominational ancestors of what we call mainline Protestantism); the Tridentine Roman Catholic Reformation which was as thoroughgoing in its way as the breakaways; the Anglican Reformation which was a national horse of another color; and radical reformations -- Anabaptists, Hutterites, Unitarians, etc. -- which went off in their own directions.

What I am going to do as I read along is periodically share bits that leap out at me. I hope they seem interesting to others.

MacCulloch begins by insisting that the story of early modern Europe's religious upheaval cannot be appreciated without being aware that reformers and orthodox alike were scared near out of their wits.

The biggest fear for western Christendom around 1500 was the prospect that it might disappear altogether. ... By the 16th century that destiny lay with the Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman Sultans had created an Islamic empire-building enterprise designed for conquest. They advanced inexorably out of Asia Minor, completing their absorption of the Byzantine empire when they captured Constantinople in 1453, and for a decade from the late 1510s they hugely expanded their territories ...

While far away in north Germany in 1516-17 Luther brooded on his campaign against indulgences, the Sultan overran the territories of fellow Muslims in Egypt and Syria ...

Then it was the turn of the Latins... The Turks occupied and wrecked the royal [Hungarian] capital Buda, whose palace castle was a show piece of Renaissance art as spectacular as anything in Italy and home to one of Europe's most distinguished and up-to-date libraries. This was the first loss in the heartland of Latin Christendom: might the Turks overrun everything?

... In southeastern Europe, ... the Turks were a real and present source of terror to all ranks in society ... Popular suspicions grew that the nobility did not have their hearts in the task of defending Europe ...

The fear which this Islamic aggression engendered in Europe was an essential background to the Reformation, convincing many on both sides that God's anger was poised to strike down the Christian world, and so making it all the more essential to please God by affirming the right form of Christian belief against other Christians. ...

Living under threat of annihilation doesn't make humans better people, then or now. I have to wonder if a visceral fear of Islamic invasion, long more conventional in Europe than in the U.S. (at least before the 9/11 attacks), doesn't include a dim ancestral echo of the true clash of civilizations half a millennium ago.

Part of that clash was a flourishing trade in capture and sale of enslaved people -- a commerce which ran in a direction white residents of the western hemisphere may find unexpected:

Even when the activities of the Ottoman fleet were curbed after the battle of Lepanto in 1571, north African corsairs systematically raided the Mediterranean coast of Europe to acquire slave labour; in fact they ranged as far as Ireland and even Iceland, kidnapping men, women and children. Modern historians examining contemporary comment produce reliable estimates that Islamic raiders enslaved about a million western Christian Europeans between 1530 and 1640 ... Large areas of Mediterranean coastline were abandoned for safer inland regions, or their people lived in perpetual dread of what might appear on the horizon ...

The modern condemnation of buying and selling people is just that: "modern." We humans make structures of society which accord with our moral first principles. So these matter.

More to come about The Reformation.

Justice foully delayed -- but not denied forever

This case always stunk to high heaven. But Hamid Hayat had to serve 13 years in prison because the federal government and too many of his California neighbors were scared stupid after the 9/11 attacks.

A father and son, immigrant Pakistani agricultural workers from Lodi, visited their old country in 2003-2005. The federal government, desperate to find secret Muslim terrorists in our midst, accused both men on their return of having received military training. I described the case this way in May, 2006 and nothing that has come out since shows U.S. law enforcement as other than ignorant and racist.

Hayat "confessed" under FBI interrogation, after much prompting, saying that he had been to a terrorist camp in Pakistan. This "evidence" might seem more convincing if his father had not also "confessed" under interrogation that his son had attended a terrorist camp -- at a completely different location where "the training, including firearms practice, took place in an enormous, deep basement where trainees masked like 'Ninja turtles' practiced pole-vaults and executions with scimitars."

Unfortunately for Hamid Hayat, his jury never heard this version as his father was tried separately under a completely different theory about the location of the putative camp. The father's jury was unable to agree on a verdict.

Okay -- I wasn't there at this trial, I didn't hear it all -- but this case sure sounds like a prosecution for the thought crime of stupidly fantasizing about being an Islamic warrior. Dumb, yes -- but criminal? Not in my book. The evidence that this guy did anything but harbor silly ideas seems awfully thin.

With better attorneys and in different times, Hayat's defenders have never given up.

And now a federal judge has thrown the case she once presided over out of court. The government could appeal, but their "evidence" has been effectively rebutted by witnesses in Pakistan who saw both father and son every day of their visit.

Basim Elkarra, executive director of the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, also applauded the decision.

“After all these years, we never lost hope that Hamid’s wrongful conviction would be overturned,” Elkarra said. “At the time of Hamid’s case, the prosecution took advantage of anti-Muslim, post-9/11 bias to convict an innocent man. And this much-needed good news comes at a time when Islamophobia and bigotry as a whole is on the rise.”

One tough woman in one tough campaign

If you are wondering why Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is not intimidated to find herself at odds with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, this film is for you. She's seen her fill of old, entrenched, white liberal women who don't recognize their time may be coming to an end.

If you wonder how Congresswoman Omar bears up under racist bullying by Donald Trump and friends, this film is for you. She's survived plenty of vicious attempts to squelch her. Trump's demand she "go back" somewhere won't stop her. She has a community and a home.

If you are curious about the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party's hyper-participatory caucus nominating process, this is a great introduction to its potential. (Here's my commentary from a year when there was less obvious potential.)

If you have ever wondered what I mean on this blog when I declare someone running for office has become a "good candidate," Congresswoman Omar conducts a master class in meet, greet, and near-magical charisma in this film.

If you want an inspiring picture of a people-powered campaign that wins, this film is for you.

Time for Ilhan is available on Amazon Prime, iTunes, and Google Play.

Yes, it was a hate crime

Dr. Mohammad Abu-Salha, the father of the two murdered women:

We're not giving in; this is our country; we claim it.

The case of the angry white man who in 2015 killed three Muslim college students in Chapel Hill once again turned into a discussion of whether the murders were a "hate crime."

Craig Hicks pleaded guilty Wednesday to shooting three young Muslims in their Chapel Hill home, ending the 2015 case the district attorney called an act of “cold-blooded malice” driven by a gun fanatic’s hatred of his neighbors’ religion.

Hicks will serve a life sentence in prison without the possibility of parole for killing his neighbors: Deah Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister Razan Abu-Salha, 19.

Family members and lawyers connected to the case said Wednesday’s hearing corrects a 4-year-old narrative that mistakenly cast the murders as a parking dispute rather than a hate crime.

The News & Observer, Raleigh, NC

There are plenty of procedural and legal reasons, as well as possible bias reasons, why authorities don't want to call this or other offenses based in hate by the label "hate crime." The legal categories don't quite fit; Hicks would get the same sentence anyway. But a newly released tape from Deah Barakat's phone in which polite students tried to mollify their angry neighbor just before he shot them more than made the case. Here's how the prosecutor responded:

The "hate crime" label matters because it is society's way of acknowledging that racism, Islamophobia, homophobia and misogyny violate community values -- and no one should forget that. Calling a crime a "hate crime" sets a standard for law enforcement to be conscious that their job is to uphold and enforce inclusive justice for all.

It may seem just words, but naming hate crimes what they are is a significant way we announce that all of us us are in this together.

Study points toward a future we can work and hope for

The American Muslim Poll 2019 from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding has been getting some media attention, mostly because of the finding captured in this chart:

This seems to me an important piece of data -- but not really so surprising, merely showing that two communities under the gun in our white nationalist environment recognize affinities and also the location of likely allies. That is, U.S. Muslims and Jews aren't dumb.

But there's lots more to this poll and it seemed like a worthwhile project to comment on some aspects of it:

• I had a hard time locating my tribe in it. The section on methodology describes one of the groups polled as "self-identified Protestants (parsing out white Evangelicals)". Does that cohort include both white mainliners and Black churchgoers? They don't say. Was the sample size just too small to break out; if they had broken out Blacks from whites, would the findings been any different?
  
  In the data summaries, "Protestant" attitudes toward U.S. Muslims seem always to split right down the middle of the distribution between Islamophobia and affirmation of others as is illustrated in the chart above. A similar down-the-middle positioning shows in "Protestant" electoral inclinations and evaluation of the nation's direction. Might my tribe be deeply divided between white Republican nationalist and Democratic inclusivity wings whose attitudes wash out in these statistics? I wonder.

• Political party identification among Muslims shows fissures familiar in our society--except when it comes to age. As Muslims get older, they become more likely to vote Democratic, at least nowadays.

  As with the general public, party alignment varies by race in the Muslim community. White Muslims (25%) are more likely than Asian Muslims (9%) to vote Republican and about six times as likely to vote Republican as Black Muslims (4%). Uniquely, Muslims’ voting pattern diverges from the general public—as they age, the general population leans more Republican whereas Muslim Americans continue to identify as strongly Democratic.

• I found this surprising. Education in comparative religion succeeds in promoting interfaith respect.

  ... it is worth noting that knowing something about Islam is even more powerful a predictor of tolerance toward Muslims than knowing a Muslim personally, suggesting that knowledge of the faith helps dispel generalized tropes about the people even more than knowing one good individual member of that group, who can be dismissed as an exception or “one of the good ones.”

  Maybe interfaith education is more potent than I would have surmised.

• I'm not convinced that this observation is deeply supported in the data, but you got to love it. Participation in #Resistance breaks down barriers and begins healing.

  The majority of all three major racial groups know a Muslim, but Hispanic Americans (63%) are more likely to know Muslims than white Americans. Hispanic Americans (39%) are also more likely to have a close Muslim friend than white Americans (21%). It is important to note that Muslims and Hispanic Americans are both groups that are a target of the current administration’s divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric. Resistance movements that demand “No Ban, No Wall” may have helped bring these two groups together.

The report is highly readable and available online to anyone curious.

Stumbling toward liberty to find God

Turkish journalist and author Mustafa Akyol's Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty has three parts, all very valuable to an enquiring reader.

The first section -- The Beginnings -- is a highly readable, uncomplicated narrative of the intellectual history of Islam as the faith expanded beyond its Arabian peninsula origins and became a world empire. Akyol explicates a repeated conflict between two Islamic schools of thought, Rationalists and Traditionalists. The former believed that the faith of Muslims was compatible with individual liberty and free will, with objectivity and reason. The latter, who almost always had the support of the political authorities of their day, scorned such theological exploration, insisting on unchanging dogmatism and narrow constructions of the stories of the Prophet which served as glosses on the many subjects not addressed in the Qur'an. All of this is history remains controversial, but Akyol makes the contours of the ongoing struggle quite accessible to non-Muslim readers. (It's not as if historic Christianity has failed to familiarized people from a European tradition with perennial intramural theological and organizational quarrels.)

The second section -- The Modern Era -- traces how these currents played out in the last days of the Ottoman empire in the 19th century and on through its collapse in 1918. Unlike the rest of Islamic Asia, Africa and the Far East, the Ottoman heartland never fell under direct Western rule which afforded both its modernizers and it conservative clerics a freedom to make their own paths toward accommodation with western, Christian, European modernity. Modern Turkey's subsequent rulers continued a pattern of oscillation between military dictatorship, radical secularization, and, sometimes, a search for an Islamic liberalism.

Akyol published this book in 2011, a moment which proved a high water mark for the potential for such an Islamic liberalism. Recep Tayyip Erdogan seemed to be leading Turkey toward intellectual pluralism, democracy, and religious tolerance. In the years since, Erdogan has become one of Donald Trump's favorite autocrats, jailing thousands of opponents and remaking Turkey's political system to protect his power. In this book, Fethullah Gülen was a clerical educator cooperating with Erdogan; today it has been revealed that Erdogan tried to pay Trump's fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to kidnap Gülen from his refuge in Pennsylvania.

Despite the demise of the political space for a different Islam in Turkey, Akyol's third section -- Signposts on the Liberal Road -- remains an interesting catalogue of what Muslim reformers might seek to develop if they have the chance. He tries to lay out for non-technical readers the predicate in Muslim tradition and theology for a religion 1) emancipated from state power; 2) affirming human adulthood by admitting a "freedom to sin" while still condemning wrongdoing; and 3) even allowing for individual freedom of belief including what traditionalists would call criminal apostasy. He sums up with a bold affirmation:

Liberty is, you could ... say, what everyone needs to find God.

These days, Mustafa Akyol is a New York Times opinion writer -- and he's still making the same arguments to his co-religionists for the same evolution of religious understanding on the same basis. Just last month, he responded to the announcement that the Sultanate of Brunei interpreted Islamic law to require stoning of homosexuals with a column headed "The Sultan of Brunei Doesn’t Understand Modern Islam; The Ottoman Empire was more liberal." If you have any interest in humane Islam, I recommend it highly.

Allah's version

Jack Mills writes books about Scripture that are unlike anything else I know of. He treats the divine person as revealed in what believers hold as sacred writings as a literary character, a Someone with personality, temperament, virtues, and idiosyncrasies. In 1996, Miles applied his technique to the Lord God of the Hebrew bible in God: a biography, which was both an unlikely best seller and a Pulitzer Prize winner. His subsequent epilogue, Christ: a Crisis in the Life of God, seems to have been more controversial, no huge shock. I appreciated its resolute departure from the more vengeful strains of Christian atonement theology.

Last year Miles published his third volume of literary interpretation of the Abrahamic scriptures: God in the Qur'an (God in Three Classic Scriptures).

Miles certainly has the academic chops for his tripartite endeavor in scriptural exploration. He started out as a Jesuit seminarian attending Xavier University in the U.S., moved on to the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Hebrew University in Jerusalem and, finally, Harvard. He's been been an editor at the Doubleday publishing house, the executive editor at the University of California Press, and literary book review editor at the Los Angeles Times. Of late he's taught at UC Irvine and edited the Norton Anthology of World Religions. I should add that aside from the Norton volume, I've read them all in audiobook and highly recommend the medium for these exercises in imaginative erudition. You won't get every nuance by ear, but their breadth and audacity come through wonderfully.

I also have to warn readers of this blog post that I'm going to be quoting a lot; it will read more easily on a laptop screen than a phone.

Writing about Allah in the Qur'an, Miles confronts the difficult stumbling block that non-Muslim readers always meet: this scripture admits of no human author, narrator, or intermediary, being the direct speech of Allah via the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad. According to Islamic understanding, it cannot be translated from Arabic. He offers a work-around:

Over the centuries, the view most often taken of the Qur'an by Jews and Christians alike has been the view classically taken by Jews of the New Testament -- namely, "What's true is not new, and what's new is not true." Non-Muslims have disbelieved and dismissed what Muslims believe of the Qur'an -- namely, that it is God's last word to mankind, the crown of revelation, restoring what Jews and Christians had lost from or suppressed in their scriptures by oblivion or corruption.

My invitation here to Jews and Christians and the many others who disbelieve the bold Muslim claim is that, as a modest exercise in literary appreciation, they temporarily suspend their disbelief while together we attempt engagement with God as the central character of the Qur'an, and with the Qur'an as an elusively powerful work of literature.

My invitation to Muslims is that just as they might pray in a mosque on Friday but study its dome as students of architecture on a Tuesday, so they too might play along with this "Tuesday exercise," this literary engagement with just a few selections from the Qur'an read in conjunction with marching passages from the Bible.

As Miles tells it, what Allah is doing through the Qur'an is correcting known stories. Consequently, Allah has no need of linear narratives of episodes in creation history or of stimulating any narrative suspense or uncertainty.

In the Qur'an, when Allah instructs Muhammed about what His Prophet is to say about these biblical subjects, He is clearly speaking to someone who knows this subject matter already in a general way and needs only to have his understanding refreshed, corrected, or completed. ...

What Allah requires of mankind in the Qur'an is, above all, that they should acknowledge His divinity, submitting to him as the one and only God. The Arabic word ’islam means “submission”; the Arabic word muslim ... means one who has submitted. ... As the Qur’an understands religious history, Adam was a muslim in his time; Abraham was another muslim; Joseph a third; and so forth down past the muslim Christ to Muhammad. But a key part of the message of the Qur’an is that the never-changing message of ’islam has been lost or corrupted over the intervening aeons.

... Where the Qur’an coincides with the Bible, then, it unfolds not as a full retelling of the Bible story, as if that story had never been told before, but rather as a set of selective corrections and expansions of an already received account. Where more corrections is called for, Allah has more to say in the Qur’an.

Miles discusses at length the qur'anic account of Adam and Eve and then of humanity's expulsion from the garden of paradise. In Allah's telling, this behavior is not about humanity's permanent fall from a state of innocent grace, but simply the first instance of human disobedience to Allah which has teaches its own remedy.

... True, Adam and his wife [not named] must “descend” from the heavenly garden, but because they have promptly and plainly admitted and repented of their sin, merciful Allah does not condemn them to eternal punishment in hell. In the Qur’an, Adams does not blame his wife the way he does in Genesis. The two of them confess together, neither blaming the other, and neither attempts to blame Satan. Accepting their repentance as sincere, Allah simply precipitates them into earthly existence where, after living a normal human lifetime and dying at its end, they will await His Last Judgment as indeed will all their descendants. They have every prospect, in other words, of eventually ascending to the heavenly garden from which he has sent them down. In effect, he has forgiven them this first sin. True, they must pay a price, but as they begin the life that awaits them down on earth, He has given them a pardon and an immediate second chance.

.... we have all the power we need to resist [Satan’s] deceptions and stay on the “straight path.” If we do succumb, we know that just as Allah gave Adam and Eve their second chance, He will give us ours. Allah is like that: He can be counted on. He is not colorfully or dramatically unpredictable. He is not like you or me nor even, quite, like Yahweh. Agony awaits us if we defy Him, but He is on our side if we let Him be. ...

No wonder Allah is described as "the merciful, the compassionate" in Islamic usage.

This book concludes with a list of how Allah corrects and amends the Jewish and Christian scriptures:

that when God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise, He warned them that Satan would tempt them. (In the Bible, no such warning is given.)

that when they succumbed to temptation but then quickly repented, He forgave them and explained that after a lifetime on Earth, bearing only the trials and tribulations that ordinary human life entails, they could return to Paradise. (No such forgiveness or distant hope is proffered in the Bible.)

that when one of Adam’s sons slew the other, God condemned the murderer but coached him toward compassion by sending a raven whose scratching on the ground prompted the remorseful killer to bury his dead brother. (No such solicitous counsel is offered in the Bible.)

that when God sent a destructive flood, he warned those in its path beforehand and provided an ark on which, had they accepted Prophet Noah’s warning, they could all have floated to safety. (No such warning is given in the Bible.)

that when God chose Abraham as His prophet, he instructed him in monotheism before sending him against Abraham’s idolatrous father and his tribe. (In the Bible, God’s command to Abraham is peremptory and linked to fertility rather than to monotheism.)

that when God sent Moses to Pharaoh with the same prophetic message that He later conveyed to Muhammad, Pharaoh initially scoffed but in the end converted and accepted God as the only god. (In the Bible, God takes control of Pharaoh’s mind and bars the gate against any such conversion.)

that when God send Jesus as a prophet to the Jews and they sought to kill him, God rescued him and took him to Himself. (In the Bible, Jesus dies saying, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?")

Far be it for me to bash the Bible. The Bible is my scripture. The Qur’an is theirs. In writing this little italicized meditation, I hope only that by exercising your imagination this much, you may find it a little easier to trust the Muslim next door ...

That last remark demonstrates Miles' hope in this mind-stretching book. He's clearly appalled by contemporary European/American ignorance and distortions about the beliefs and civilization of our Muslim neighbors. Some of this volume comes off as a slightly heavy-handed apologia, for example in an exhaustive demonstration that Jewish and Christian sacred writings are no less blighted by celebrations of holy carnage as is the Islamic scripture.

Fortunately in this country we enjoy increasing resources for discovering that Islamophobia is unnecessary and just false. Our Muslim neighbors turn out to be quite ordinary humans, like the rest of us. Miles has made his contribution toward our evolution here; we can all do our part.

Judicial bias showing

Hoda Hawa of the Muslim Public Affairs Council writes:

Two Rulings Strengthen Perception of Anti-Muslim Bias in Supreme Court
Last Thursday, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled to delay the execution of Patrick Murphy, a Buddhist inmate in Texas, until his spiritual advisor could be present.

In March, SCOTUS rejected a similar appeal made from Domineque Ray, a Black Muslim inmate in Alabama also facing execution. Ray’s case was rejected for making the request “too late,” whereas Murphy’s request was given with less notice and accepted. This is a double standard. On the heels of last June’s SCOTUS ruling in favor of the Muslim Ban, the inconsistent rulings only strengthen the perception of an anti-Muslim bias in the Supreme Court.

... The Supreme Court is fundamentally a deliberative body made up of people with biases, ideological dispositions and juridical styles — a fact made clear during every confirmation proceeding, but perhaps made most apparent during Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. The integrity of our judicial system rests on the assumption that a judge’s beliefs and ideologies does not bear on the ability to consistently interpret the law. The Court’s decision in the Muslim Ban case and the flip between the Ray and Murphy cases are clear examples of how Justices’ personal and discriminatory biases can still generate inconsistent judicial rulings between cases. ...

Advocates do not usually call out judges by ascribing their decisions to simple, blind, prejudice. We like to think judges are ruling based on their understanding of law. Simply prudentially, lawyers who might have to argue before judges again don't want to break the illusion and get judicial backs up. But when the law turns ugly, there is no other recourse but to tell the truth and go to the consciences of the people.

US Muslims are far from the first repressed minority to have to call out a biased court. The Black civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s combined careful, strategic, legal advocacy with street heat such as the lunch counter sit-ins which demonstrated the injustice of "separate but equal" Jim Crow laws. The LGBT movement more than once responded to judicial bias with public kiss-ins to highlight where the real scandal was located.

With US courts packed with more and more Federalist Society judges who replicate and advance the prejudices of their Republican sponsors, it's likely that such extra-legal demands for recognition from unfavored groups will have to go side by side with legal advocacy to uphold the rights of minorities. US history says such protests can sway the judicial system, but there will be casualties along the way.

Working the system

My heart leaped yesterday as I scrolled through the usual collection of emails awaiting the electronic trashcan. (Does anyone find their email more satisfying than annoying?) Here was one to feel good about.

Since the awful day, 9/11/2001, I've kept myself on the alert list of the Council on American-Islamic Relations because I just want to know what's happening for a community so often under siege. Mostly I glance and dump, perhaps noting the latest mosque vandalism or verbal hate incident. But what I saw yesterday made me glad.

It was an announcement for the "fourth annual Muslim Day at the Capital" in Sacramento. This is one way communities come out of the shadows and take their place in our (small "d") democratic system: they meet the people who make the laws and insist they listen.

But what moved me was the legislative agenda for this year's MDAC. California Muslims intend to campaign for three measures:

• a bill to restore the right to vote to people on parole for a conviction of a felony.

• AB 392 which would narrow the circumstance in which is legal for police to shoot someone.

• and a new requirement that California high schools include a one semester Ethnic Studies course in their curriculum.

In choosing to highlight these bills, this community is placing itself solidly among the coalition of those working for change and more justice for all in the state -- and making friends who can be expected to be there if California Muslims need them -- as they too often do when subjected to ignorance and fear from their neighbors.

This is how the system works when it is working ... that is, it requires patient, repeated, sometimes tedious effort. And sometimes you win.

From a vigil for the victims of New Zealand mosque shootings

At the Lake Merritt Amphitheater in Oakland CA, Monday, March 18.

"By doing more, we honor the beloved of god that were lost."

It is not just Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib

I'm a dutiful skimmer of the DailyKos Elections Morning Digest which provides updates on weekdays about federal and state level contests all over the country. No, I can't say I take it all in. Could anyone? I am very grateful to the nerds who put it together.

Even skimming highlights emerging trends. Today I was reminded that Muslim women are making a dent in our small "d" democratic politics at all levels. This morning I ran across this about a local legislative special election in Pennsylvania:

... The Democrat is Movita Johnson-Harrell, a former victims' services supervisor at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, and the Republican is Navy veteran Michael Harvey. ... If she wins, Johnson-Harrell would become the first Muslim woman elected to the Pennsylvania state House.

In 2016, only about 12 Muslims, men and women, ran for office. Last year, fifty-five Muslim candidates won at various levels. Many of these were women (I haven't been able to turn up the exact gender breakdown). In the San Francisco Bay area, American Muslim women were elected to five local offices in San Ramon, Hayward, San Jose, West Contra Costa County, and Monte Sereno.

I care because breaking into the political process is how newcomer communities establish themselves within our ever-changing democracy. I care because I hope that having such visible leaders is at least a small counterweight to a President and political party that is demonizing a world religion; bullied children need to see other options. I care that these elected officials are women because their presence increases many Muslim women's opportunities to define themselves before often ignorant and suspicious neighbors. These elections are what our democratic process offers when it is working. Sometimes the system can be made to work for healing and justice -- let's keep it up.

For Black history month ...

Go along on this pilgrimage by U.S. Muslim leaders in 2018 through the sites of Alabama's civil rights struggle and martyrdoms.

In the short film, Nihad Awad of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) preaches to a local group:

Muslims of Alabama ... you are surrounded by legacies of oppression. What went wrong then could go wrong again. What's the difference? We were not there hundreds of years ago; we are here today.

Indeed.

Government rebuked over no fly list lawsuit

Rahinah Ibrahim, then a Stanford grad student, now a professor of architecture in her native Malaysia, was placed on a no fly/terrorist watch list in 2004. She was prevented from returning to her studies or even visiting the U.S. Her U.S. citizen daughter was also caught up in the ban. Federal lawyers fought tooth and nail against her lawsuit to challenge her designation.

Until 2014. At that point, an FBI agent told a judge in closed testimony that Ibrahim's exclusion was just a mistake. TechDirt shared some of the heavily redacted transcript:

Agent Kelley misunderstood the directions on the form and erroneously nominated Dr. Ibrahim to the TSA's no-fly list [redacted]. He did not intend to do so. This was a mistake, he admitted at trial. He intended to nominate her to the [very long redaction]. He checked the wrong boxes, filling out the form exactly the opposite way from the instructions on the form. He made this mistake even though the form stated, "It is recommended the subject NOT be entered into the following selected terrorist screening databases."

Oops.

Though the government gave up its defense of its no fly list mistake, Ibrahim remained excluded from the U.S. (possibly because of unproved allegations about her husband) and her attorneys were only partially compensated for the $3.6 million they'd spent preparing this complicated international case. Last Wednesday an appeals court said the government should be ordered to pay up.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in an 8-3 ruling, found that federal lawyers engaged in “scorched earth litigation” for nearly a decade against the former Stanford University graduate student, even though they knew she posed no threat.

“Once the government discovers that its litigation position is baseless, it may not continue to defend it,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, a Clinton appointee, wrote for the majority.

...Let's hope this brings us near the completion of this particular panicked government response to the 9/11 terrorists attacks. In the early '00s both politicians and federal spooks were scared stupid that additional horrors might be immanent and defended themselves from responsibility by trampling over vulnerable individuals. I wonder if federal judges confronted with an outright racist president, his thuggish Heimat Security Department, and a neo-Confederate Attorney General (now cast aside), are more alert to abuses that they tolerated for a decade under weak "national security" claims? Perhaps....Full disclosure: Erudite Partner and I were told at the San Francisco airport that we were on the no fly list in 2002. Through the ACLU, we sought disclosure about this secret list in a federal case that dragged on through 2006.

Photo via Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM)

Ilhan Omar is expected to be elected to Congress next Tuesday

This Somali-American Minnesota state legislator and refugee from Kenya will give the hallowed House of Representatives some new perspectives. Isn't that what so many people who've migrated here have brought to this country?

She explains why she runs for office:

“It is part of my Islamic teaching to make sure we are charitable,” Ms. Omar told me. “A huge part of the Islamic faith is that you can’t sleep with a full belly if your neighbors and those around you aren’t sleeping with a full belly.”

H/t to Wajahat Ali in the New York Times.

Who are we licensed to hate now?

The Supreme Court, in today's approval of President Trump's Muslim Ban, and in decisions over the last few weeks, is giving us prompts about who we are permitted, even urged and required, to hate.

During the campaign, Trump trumpeted the lie that "Islam hates us" and promised "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." The Supremes say sure: hatred toward 1.8 million Muslims worldwide is a fine, civil sentiment, however much obscuring bilge government lawyers may have spread over Trump's "animus."

Meanwhile, those same judges refused to apply elementary public accommodations standards -- the rule that if you run a public business you have to serve the public without discrimination -- to a Colorado baker with a religious objection to same sex marriages. You see, some Colorado human rights bureaucrat said something insensitive about right-wing Christian intolerance and that is impermissible "animus."

It's just fine to hate Muslims, but don't criticize bigoted forms of Christianity. Those are the rules for this Supreme Court. With a conservative majority of justices, things are likely to get worse, not better.***The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) writes in a very American way about how bigotry is embedded in our history -- and how such bigotry ends in shame.

The Supreme Court has permitted the slavery of African Americans, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, and today it permitted the banning of Muslims.

We know what America's history is. Together, we aspire toward something better.

The fight does not end today. We will continue even despite the Trump administration's bigotry and the Court's permission of it.

When the courts fail, they must hear from citizens in the streets and at the ballot box.