Tag: nora connor

The Poets of Srebrenica

Posted on by

by Janaki Challa

“Countless contradictory analyses have seen the light of day about the ensuing bloody events in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, on whose embarrassing convolutions there  is no need to dwell. Because it is clear that what is above all missing from all the explanations is the human being. Or — if we can put it that way — the poet. Because the poet doesn’t get lost here either, where death has become customary. More precisely: where death appears, there the poet must put up his tent.”–Balint Szombathy

Summer of 2010. The FIFA World Cup was underway, and it was the first time Serbia was represented as an autonomous nation in the tournament. Serbia finally won a victory against Germany, 1-0. I still remember the vivid image on the TV screen–the team flailing their arms and embracing in excitement [many boys sat around]. But at a Bosnian mosque in Connecticut that hot afternoon, the atmosphere wilted under an awning of grief.

2010 was also the year Serbia offered an “official apology” for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre—what many call genocide—an institutionalized ethnic cleansing of over 8000 Bosnian Muslims. If one Googles Srebrenica, most pictures that appear are graphic photographs of charred and disfigured corpses, and defunct buildings that were used as sites for concentration camps. There, journalists and civilians documented thousands of makeshift graves, which appear as squares of land tessellated and separated by wooden beams. Over 30,000 Bosnian women and children were forcefully removed from the area, legal proof that this military action by the Serbian government was “of genocidal intent.” In 2004, Theodor Meron, President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), said in an address at Potocari Memorial Cemetery that “by seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity.” Secretary General Kofi Annan called this massacre “the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War.” Continue Reading →

Northern Nigeria: Qur'anic Schooling and the Almajirai

Posted on by

by Alex Thurston

This is the second post in a series on Muslim education in Northern Nigeria. Read the first post here.

Muslims believe the Qur’an to be the word of God as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, a revelation that corrects and completes earlier Messages to Prophets such as Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Muslims throughout the ages have considered study of the Qur’an one of the greatest forms of religious devotion. Memorizing portions of the Qur’an is important for performing the required daily prayers and is relevant to various domains of religious life. Muslim scholars I knew in Kano often quoted the Qur’an in the course of conversations about law, politics, and other topics. Memorizing the Qur’an, beyond its applications in daily life, is also seen to have transformative spiritual value. The Prophet’s wife A’isha, when asked once after his death what he had been like, replied, “His nature was as the Qur’an.” Her statement testifies to the idea that the Qur’an can be embodied, or internalized, in human beings, and manifested as virtue and piety.

The central position of the Qur’an in the spiritual life of many Muslim communities helps explain why Muslim parents in Northern Nigeria and elsewhere send their children to Qur’anic schools. In the archetypal Qur’anic school, children under the supervision of a scholar and his older students first learn the Arabic alphabet, and then proceed to learn the Fatiha, the opening chapter of the Qur’an, before moving on to other chapters, often beginning with the short chapters at the end of the Qur’an (the Qur’an’s chapters are arranged roughly from longest to shortest). In Northern Nigeria as in some other West African Muslim communities, portions of the Qur’an are often written out on wooden slates; verses can be erased and replaced as students progress. The master and the older students check in with the students frequently to evaluate their progress and correct their mistakes, sometimes using corporal punishment as a deterrent for errors and perceived laziness. Depending on the school and the student, students may complete portions of varying lengths before they graduate. Continue Reading →

Northern Nigeria: Qur’anic Schooling and the Almajirai

Posted on by

by Alex Thurston

This is the second post in a series on Muslim education in Northern Nigeria. Read the first post here.

Muslims believe the Qur’an to be the word of God as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, a revelation that corrects and completes earlier Messages to Prophets such as Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Muslims throughout the ages have considered study of the Qur’an one of the greatest forms of religious devotion. Memorizing portions of the Qur’an is important for performing the required daily prayers and is relevant to various domains of religious life. Muslim scholars I knew in Kano often quoted the Qur’an in the course of conversations about law, politics, and other topics. Memorizing the Qur’an, beyond its applications in daily life, is also seen to have transformative spiritual value. The Prophet’s wife A’isha, when asked once after his death what he had been like, replied, “His nature was as the Qur’an.” Her statement testifies to the idea that the Qur’an can be embodied, or internalized, in human beings, and manifested as virtue and piety.

The central position of the Qur’an in the spiritual life of many Muslim communities helps explain why Muslim parents in Northern Nigeria and elsewhere send their children to Qur’anic schools. In the archetypal Qur’anic school, children under the supervision of a scholar and his older students first learn the Arabic alphabet, and then proceed to learn the Fatiha, the opening chapter of the Qur’an, before moving on to other chapters, often beginning with the short chapters at the end of the Qur’an (the Qur’an’s chapters are arranged roughly from longest to shortest). In Northern Nigeria as in some other West African Muslim communities, portions of the Qur’an are often written out on wooden slates; verses can be erased and replaced as students progress. The master and the older students check in with the students frequently to evaluate their progress and correct their mistakes, sometimes using corporal punishment as a deterrent for errors and perceived laziness. Depending on the school and the student, students may complete portions of varying lengths before they graduate. Continue Reading →

Rolling the Dice: The Orthodox Church's "Bet" on Putin

Posted on by

by Irina Papkova

The recent Russian elections have highlighted the complicated relationship between the Orthodox Church with both state and society. In December, prominent clergy expressed their dissatisfaction with the evidently fraudulent nature of the parliamentary election, and even patriarch Kirill made statements that could be interpreted as calling upon Putin to reform the system. Yet, by early January the patriarch had clearly declared in support of Putin, as a man who “labored like a galley slave” for the good of the country. By the time the presidential elections came along, it seemed that the Church had finally resolved the vacillations visible in December by unequivocally “betting on Putin.”

Is this really the case? And if so, why did it occur?    The response to the first question is an equivocal “yes” – the Moscow Patriarchate, which is the administrative apparatus of the Russian Orthodox Church, has indeed expressed support for Putin 3.0. Whether or not the rest of the Church – the individual bishops, the lower clergy and the parishioners – have internalized the Patriarchate’s position is not clear, and, in the absence of systematic polling conducted among this subset of the Russian population, will likely remain so.  Based on anecdotal evidence we may surmise that the Church is divided in its attitude towards the new/old Russian president. It remains then to answer the second question – why, instead of following the example of the Islamic establishment in Egypt, has the Patriarchate decided to oppose an incipient “Russian spring?” Continue Reading →

Rolling the Dice: The Orthodox Church’s “Bet” on Putin

Posted on by

by Irina Papkova

The recent Russian elections have highlighted the complicated relationship between the Orthodox Church with both state and society. In December, prominent clergy expressed their dissatisfaction with the evidently fraudulent nature of the parliamentary election, and even patriarch Kirill made statements that could be interpreted as calling upon Putin to reform the system. Yet, by early January the patriarch had clearly declared in support of Putin, as a man who “labored like a galley slave” for the good of the country. By the time the presidential elections came along, it seemed that the Church had finally resolved the vacillations visible in December by unequivocally “betting on Putin.”

Is this really the case? And if so, why did it occur?    The response to the first question is an equivocal “yes” – the Moscow Patriarchate, which is the administrative apparatus of the Russian Orthodox Church, has indeed expressed support for Putin 3.0. Whether or not the rest of the Church – the individual bishops, the lower clergy and the parishioners – have internalized the Patriarchate’s position is not clear, and, in the absence of systematic polling conducted among this subset of the Russian population, will likely remain so.  Based on anecdotal evidence we may surmise that the Church is divided in its attitude towards the new/old Russian president. It remains then to answer the second question – why, instead of following the example of the Islamic establishment in Egypt, has the Patriarchate decided to oppose an incipient “Russian spring?” Continue Reading →

The World Before Her: Making Indian Women

Posted on by

A review of The World Before Her, now showing in the Tribeca Film Festival.

by Natasha Raheja

 The opening sequence of director Nisha Pahuja’s documentary The World Before Her cuts sharply between salwar kameez and swimsuits, Marathi and English, Bombay and Aurangabad, stilettos and chappals, open hair and plaits, bhangra beats and nationalistic hymns, saffron and skin. At first glance, these images serve to contrast tradition and modernity. As the film proceeds, though, Pahuja seems to be weaving a more subtle story as she tracks the process of two different camps for young Indian women: the month long “beauty boot camp” for the twenty Miss India Pageant finalists, who are taught to walk, to speak, to dress, to display themselves for stage and cameras; and the Hindu nationalist Durga Vahini camp for adolescent girls, who are likewise trained but according to a quite different set of norms. The film asks, how are both paradigms in all of their glory equally dignifying and disempowering for the women they subsume?  Does modernity occur respectively or irrespective of tradition?

In its exploration of these questions, the film enters two ostensibly opposed worlds that culminate in beauty pageants and supermodels on the one hand and political rallies and powerful female purveyors of Hindutva (a concept meaning loosely “Hinduness” and championed by various Hindu nationalist organizations) on the other.  One set of women submit to botoxing, skin bleaching and instructions for losing weight and fitting into bikinis, while the other set, also upon command, run in fields in preparation for the full defense of their religion against foreigners, Christians and Muslims—by violence if necessary—and submit to vicious exhortations about the false promises of careers and feminism. The camps emerge as comparable institutionalized modes for the training and cultivating of young Indian women as competent subjects, despite the differences in how that subjecthood is defined. Continue Reading →

Education as Battleground: Schooling Muslims in Northern Nigeria

Posted on by

by Alex Thurston

This post is the first of a series on Muslim schooling in Northern Nigeria.

Steady acts of violence carried out by Northern Nigeria’s rebel movement Boko Haram, whose name is often translated in the press as “Western education is forbidden,” has put issues of Muslim education in the region into the international news. Coverage of these issues has intensified with Boko Haram’s recent campaign of torching government schools in Maiduguri, the movement’s home base.

Boko Haram’s targets range well beyond schools – indeed, it has focused more on assassinating state security personnel, politicians, and rival religious leaders than on burning down schools. But the anti-schools campaign raises a set of questions about Muslim schooling in Northern Nigeria: What kinds of schools exist? How has schooling in the region changed over time? And what attitudes do Northern Muslims hold toward these different schools? These questions are critical for understanding Boko Haram but also, if one moves beyond headline-grabbing violence, for grasping more broadly what it means to be Muslim in Northern Nigeria, one of the largest Muslim communities in the world.

Schools are some of the main institutions where religious knowledge is shaped and transmitted and where attitudes toward society are formed. Schooling often stands as a powerful – and fiercely contested – symbol for community values. For Boko Haram, Western-style education seems to stand in for a whole complex of issues, including the perceived political dominance, corruption, and failure of Nigeria’s Western-educated elites. Other Northern Nigerian Muslims see Western-style schools as a pathway to future success for their children and transformation for Nigeria. Still others see Qur’anic schooling as an absolute necessity for forming moral Muslim children. Yet others send their children to hybrid “Islamiyya” schools, where students spend part of their time on religious studies, and part on subjects like English, science, and mathematics. Then again, some Northern Nigerian Muslims place their children in multiple different kinds of schools. All of these choices reflect different viewpoints about the spiritual and material value of schooling. Continue Reading →

In the World Links: Lost & Found in Translation Edition

Posted on by

Nora Connor: In Poland, the Bhagavad Gita is now available in translation directly from Sanskrit to Polish, thanks to a “late-blooming” student’s doctoral dissertation. In Russia, an appeals court declines to ban the Gita as “extremist” religious literature. In time for Passover, check out the New American Haggadah, translated by Nathan Englander and edited by Jonathan Safran Foer… Continue Reading →

The Pope Has Left the Island

Posted on by

 

By Nora Connor

Pope Benedict completes his pilgrimage to Cuba today, having wrapped up his “pastoral” visit to Mexico, in which he tidily summarized that nation’s struggles with the drug war-industrial complex:

The pope also addressed Mexico’s struggle against violence on the plane trip here from Rome, where he blamed the “idolatry of money” for drawing young people into lives of crime. In a brief speech at the airport here, he also said he was praying for “those who suffer because of old and new rivalries, resentments and all forms of violence.”

And yet, the pope’s approach — framing Mexico’s violence as a personal moral failing — perfectly matches that of President Calderón, a devout Catholic. That message, experts say, will help shift the debate away from policy, and complaints about how the Calderón administration has managed the fight against drug cartels that has led to 50,000 deaths since late 2006.

In Cuba, things are a bit different, if only in the sense that more people have more things to say about the papal visit to the formerly atheist island nation. Continue Reading →

Weekly Links: In the World

Posted on by

Nora Connor: According to Salon’s Wajahat Ali, the conversion of Oliver Stone’s son Sean to Islam last week prompted a worldwide Muslim face-palm. Why, the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are wondering, can’t we get a convert with more upside? In a nod to one of Dave Chappelle’s best skits, Ali “reports” on the first worldwide celebrity religion draft, wherein the Muslims attempt to free themselves of Shaquille O’Neal and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. If you’re looking to boost your own profile, perhaps by adopting an African country as some sort of goodwill/school building/voice for the voiceless project, this handy chart will help you avoid stepping on any fellow-celebrity toes. Hint: South Africa is Oprah’s. Looks like Gabon, Chad and Equatorial Guinea are still up for grabs, though.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has identified something that “transcends cultures, regions and ethnicities”: Muslim hatred of Christians, with Nigeria as Exhibit A. Patrick Ryan of RD takes exception to her analysis and many of her facts. Human Rights Watch observes that ordinary citizens of all confessions are suffering in Northern Nigeria, caught between Boko Haram’s attacks and the indiscriminate reactions of Nigerian security forces (also: either HRW’s Eric Gutchuss actually said Nigerian security forces must scrumptiously adhere to the law, or VOA news needs a new copy editor). Meanwhile, other news of Nigeria suggests that there may indeed be a human characteristic that transcends cultures, regions and ethnicities, just not the one Hirsi Ali thinks. Former Halliburton/KBR executive Albert “Jack” Stanley, having been sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison (rather than the recommended seven) explained what led him to orchestrate $180 million in bribes to Nigerian government officials and $10.8 million in kickbacks to himself:

Albert “Jack” Stanley told a federal court on Thursday his decision to bribe Nigerian officials in order to win enormous construction contracts was fueled by “ambition, ego and alcohol.”

Continue Reading →